Jesse Thompson
Systems Administrator and Keeper of the Arcane for Webformix, Wireless Internet Service Provider covering most of Central Oregon.
Anti-copyright, Free Information Exchange political activist and proselytizer. I rant in My Blog and argue with people on Slashdot regularly.
Second Life resident, where my character is a ninja fruit bat. Gamer-tag Happ MacDonald. Build and sell games, toys, and thousands of sound clip gestures in-game. Pester people. Film simple Machinema Videos.
I run Windows desktops, Debian Linux CLI-only servers (although I'm still responsible for a handful of FreeBSD and Windows servers to boot). Also I passionately hate all modern operating systems in favor of a hypothetical reference OS which describes where I think the state of the art really ought to be by now.
I first started learning Unix at Option 1 software in Prineville circa 1992. Installed my first *nix box in 2001 for Bend.com, dozens since.
I'm not sure what I'd like to learn more about these days, I want the wisdom to ask the right questions. I feel as though many of the paradigms the software industry have become accustomed to today have languished in obsolesce to the point where we collectively lack the vocabulary or the toolbox to even describe the problems we're actually trying to solve. In times gone by one person could breadboard a product in their own garage and that same person could design everything down to the end user's software interface. Today it's difficult to participate in two tiers of the same open source project simultaneously, as it inevitably involves negotiating both the vested software and social API's of up to a dozen groups of developers each with their own selfish commercial or political interests. This leads to endless bureaucratic complications of technologies which already have sufficiently steep learning curves, and quickly turns modest end-user requests into complete impasses.
That, and I guess it's just challenging for me to learn new things unless I am working alongside others who are utilizing the tech in practice. So being king of a small tech hill is murder on me. I feel like tech evolves and my understanding fails to keep pace.
I prefer Bash, Csh makes my noggin hurt ;D
My desktop is still Windows XP. In the past, I have preferred KDE over Gnome, but now they are neck and neck again in my shallow observations. I am not a fan of the Xwindows layer these desktops rely on at all, it tends to make me shout and profusely curse.
As of Dec 2009, I am hoping that Google Wave will blossom into all of the things promised by the I/O video. I've been following Epaper for 14 years so I'm glad it's seeing market exposure (though the DRM/political battles give me a migraine). I am glad to see connector standards such as USB and HDMI coalesce, and welcome the slow merging of television and monitor (at resolutions such as 1080p); netbook and smartphone; hotspot and cellular wireless; social network and multiplayer gaming. I am excited by most apolitical progress made in the fields of virtualization and distributed computing. And every time a company embraces a business model which utilizes the free-rider phenomenon to make profit while benefiting the long tail of a cheapskate public instead of fighting their own consumer base.
We live in an age where centralized control has lost all practicality whatsoever: whether it is technologically, artistically, or politically. Look to the Bittorrent protocol as an example of the power of distributed networking: instead of every individual adding load and strain onto the data distribution effort, each individual carries much of their own weight and thus actually adds net power to the swarm instead of subtracting it. Secure hashes of the data make it easy to ensure data integrity, and a small class of rules makes it hard for bad actors to DOS the swarm.
Each user's participation is vindicated via expenditure of time/effort instead of the debiting of currency. That is how you obtain value from so called “freeloaders” and turn net profit on a long tail of participation and viral marketing. Release centralized control and act as maestro instead of a puppeteer. It's the only approach that scales, and it's the secret sauce behind the successful proliferation of the bare wires of the infrastructure of the Internet itself.