Since posterous is shutting down, I need to work out some new blogging platform. Le sigh This is a first attempt at using Octopress and Jekyll. The philosophy of the tools seems to mesh with my expectations, so it’s a promising start.

A couple of points that I wish to ponder in depth some more. Figure I’ll make a record of them now. Both thoughts need further research… Term limits for representatives/senators. Polls indicate that most Americans support this. However, I’m not so sure. People leaving congress to pursue lobbying jobs are a major part of the problem. As Lessig claims, public service is almost considered a “minor league” for lobbyists. Term limits would not help this situation, and might make it far worse.

minas.morgul.net is the hub of much of my digital life. It also provides services for quite a few friends, ranging from backup DNS to mailing lists and IRC. It lives in a datacenter 3000 miles away from where I live, with conditioned power, climate control, etc. It’s got redundant power supplies, RAID disks, remote console, and most of the other stuff you’d expect from a machine that’s supposed to be up and running non-stop.

I'm writing as a constituent to inquire about your position regarding H.R. 3261, the "Stop Online Piracy Act", and to encourage you to vigorously oppose this bill when it reaches the House floor. The Act has numerous problems and poses a major threat to the continued health of the Internet as a medium for open communication. The Act introduces technical and financial burdens that effectively impact every site that provides a mechanism for the publishing of user-generated content, while also eliminating judicial oversight.

Today my manager and I announced my upcoming departure from Mozilla. I’ve only worked there a short while, so this feels really abrupt to me, as I’m sure it does to the many Mozillians that I work with every day. Because ultimately the details of my departure and the various decisions leading up to it are private, and I don’t want to say anything that might be misconstrued or misinterpreted, I won’t get into that sort of thing here.

The Internet changed yesterday. Did you notice? If not, we did it right. Mozilla was one of hundreds of participants in World IPv6 Day, both “the largest experiment in Internet history” and “the nerdiest holiday ever”. Mozilla added IPv6 connectivity to the following sites: www.mozilla.org www.mozilla.com wiki.mozilla.org addons.mozilla.org In addition, we’ve been running IPv6 on our desktops, laptops, and other devices in our Mountain View, CA office for several months.

Somewhere along the lines recently, I took an interest in JavaScript programming. I wrote some bad JS code way way back in 1999 while working for a small, long gone ISP, but had spent very little time in it since. When I last wrote JS, there was no XHR, JSON, FireBug, JQuery, prototype.js, etc. Netscape was pushing some new “layers” thing that was supposed to be the basis of their DHTML implementation, and Microsoft was doing something completely different.

I announced to my manager a couple of weeks ago that I’d be leaving Yahoo! on March 3. Yesterday I informed the rest of my team. The final decision to leave has been surprisingly difficult, and still has me feeling very unsettled. I came to Yahoo! just over a year ago, after almost 10 years at my previous job. Leaving after such a short time is strange, especially since there is a whole lot of stuff left for me to learn and do.

It’s been a little too long since I kept the Debian Choqok packages as up to date as I’d like. This has lead to some issues, since bug #591100 really should have been fixed in time for squeeze. Then, when upstream stopped pushing their svn changes to gitorious and moved their actual development to kde.org’s local git hosting, all my branches got screwed up, leading to further delays. I think this is fully resolved at this point.

It’s amazing to ponder the fact that, when I look at any photograph taken over almost the past century, my grandfather existed somewhere on Earth in that same sliver of time. In any of the famous pictures from the Great Depression, the second World War, the Atomic Age of the 1950’s American Dream, and the Space Age of the 1960’s, Stuart Meyerhans was somewhere when that photo was taken, doing something, being someone.