Posts

Yesterday I made an offhand comment about the long story of how I got started with Vim, so I figured I’d follow up today with that. That story takes us all the way back to 1999.

Usually I avoid post titles / headlines in the form of a question, but I’m genuinely curious: Have you found a good note-taking app that’s ultimately better than just plain text files in Markdown with Vim (optionally synced with Git)?

Looks like Vivaldi is the first to jump on Mastodon/the Twitter exodus as an opportunity to boost their other offerings. The company launched “Vivaldi Social” on November 15th, which is a Vivaldi-run instance of Mastodon tied in with their other offerings. From their post, “Vivaldi Social is a natural progression for us, given our existing reliable alternatives to Big Tech — a feature-rich and flexible browser with a built-in mail client, calendar, and feed reader....

Installed Fedora 37 today and it was a pretty smooth experience. No surprises there. One of the recommended applications (Apostrophe) looked interesting so I installed that and found it wouldn’t start. Poking a bit at the terminal I got a Python error that I chased down on google and tracked back to a missing package (webkit2gtk4.0). Once I installed that it ran just fine. Went to file a bug and found that I can’t log in with my Fedora Account Services (FAS) account because it had been associated with my Red Hat email....

One of the most disheartening things about the Musk takeover of Twitter is how his malignant narcissism is being treated as normal. Even sadder, celebrated, by a small but vocal contingent of people who are still inexplicably fans of a person who’d happily have them thrown into a wood chipper if it meant an extra profit - or just for fun. In a better world, Twitter’s employees would’ve locked arms and simply refused to take his orders. If Musk wanted someone fired, let him figure out how to get access to the systems to do so. Let him take personal responsibility for the consequences. See how long he can keep the site up solo.

Video content is here to stay. As a text-based person with a face for radio, I’ve come to grips with it. But that doesn’t mean video alone gets it done. If you’re producing video content, please also share a transcript of the video. I realize some people love video, and that’s fine - but it’s not that much harder to include a transcript and it’s much more inclusive and potentially more effective....

The surge of people joining Mastodon and the Fediverse the past few days has been inspiring. I’m optimistic about the potential for a better web, but experience keeps whispering in my ear. Right now, people are fired up and ready to try new things. They’re happy to sign up, post a few “toots” to Mastodon, and think about a better web where things are decentralized and users have more control of their destiny....

What do Docker, GitLab, and Red Hat have in common? Aside from various levels of participation in open source, they’ve all been punching bags over the past few years for non-paying users angry that they’ve taken some freebies off the table. When Docker had the temerity to introduce limits for free users pulling containers from DockerHub, or requiring a subscription for large business users, lots of people started complaining and/or looking for a free alternative....

After nearly nine years, I’m no longer at Red Hat. Feels weird to type that, but it’s true. I joined in August 2013 to work in the Open Source and Standards office (now OSPO) when the company was fewer than 6,000 people, Jim Whitehurst was CEO and everybody thought OpenStack was going to be the Next Big Thing™ up against public cloud. Nobody asked me “where do you see yourself in five years?...

At least once a week when I’m reading, or editing, copy related to work I’ll skim over something and realize that what I just read makes no sense. Sure, the words are used properly. The paragraph is composed of sentences that seem grammatically correct. But if you stop to think about what the copy is saying, it’s just three sentences in a trench coat pretending to be a coherent thought....