Author: robla

I didn’t get a chance to publicly pontificate about Internet Archive while I was employed there. From March 2019 until very recently, I managed the Core Infrastructure team at Internet Archive.

I suppose I did take one notable opportunity to blog about it. I wrote a blog post for blog.archive.org titled “Two Thin Strands of Glass“, which was about the long outage we had due to a fiber cut. It happened the day before the manager of our operations team (and lead network engineer) Jonah Edwards and his spouse were planning to leave San Francisco for their new home address in Portland, Oregon. My role during the outage was to briefly be the remote hands at the colocation facility for our upstream connection the Internet the evening the site went out, and to reinforce the message Jonah was telling us: there is no situation so bad that a panicked response won’t make it worse. Thankfully, the team was really great at biding their time until the fiber repair was complete, and quickly restored service once the fiber connection was repaired.

I loved working with Internet Archive, and I wish the organization well. As a longtime Wikipedian, I’m looking forward to having better access to the books that show up in Wikipedia citations. The team that I managed (Internet Archive’s “Petabox” team) is an amazingly intelligent and capable group of people, and facilitated a lot of fantastic services (both directly, and indirectly though the larger staff). I learned a ton about how this scrappy non-profit provides such an important service to the world (over 50 Petabytes of storage!) with such a small budget.

As for what’s happening with me next: I’m not sure. There’s software I’ve been working on for the past few years that I’d like to make suitable for wider adoption. I’ll probably also return to working on electoral reform (e.g. re-engage in work on electowiki.org) and helping to ensure that what happened in 2016 doesn’t happen again.

Back in 1996, I wrote an article for The Perl Journal, which they published in the Volume 1, Issue 3 in Autumn 1996. There are several alternatives available for the article:

• A scan I made of my 1996 article “Perl, Politics, and Pairwise Voting: Perl as the Activist’s Friend” – I used CamScanner to make a quick scan of my paper copy, turned it into a PDF, and uploaded it to Dropbox.  Contains the cover of the magazine, plus my 8 page article.
• “Games, Diversions & Perl Culture – Best of the Perl Journal” published by O’Reilly Media – edited by Jon Orwant.  I’m honored that my article became a chapter in this book. Jon and the O’Reilly editors cleaned it up and made it look sharp.  But they ask that you pay for it.  My article is chapter 40.
• A foo.be mirror of the 1996 “Perl, Politics, and Pairwise Voting: Perl as the Activist’s Friend” article – This site appears to be an HTML mirror of The Perl Journal.  A couple of corrections for the eskimo.com URLs listed therein:
  • “The Condorcet’s Method Home Page” is still accessable at
    https://robla.net/1996/politics/condorcet.html
  • The Election Methods Mailing List – still going after 22 years:
    https://electorama.com/em

For years, I’ve wanted to have stable redistribution of this article, and a stable URL that I could refer to.  There have been many URLs over the years to refer to this, but nothing too stable.  Well, as of right now, there is a stable URL:

https://robla.net/1996/TPJ

….which, as of this writing, just redirects right back to this blog post.  That’s probably the URL I’ll redistribute from now on.

I managed to get into some wordy discussions with MikeMC over on Medium.  Here’s how it played out from my perspective:

• Oprah Winfrey gives an excellent speech at the Golden Globes (transcript).  This causes rampant speculation about Oprah for President 2020.
• A backlash ensues.  The backlash includes a lot of crappy discussion on a giant social network that irritates me, so I start writing my thoughts.  I leave the draft sitting around a while.
• Just around the time that it’s old news, I finally get around to publishing it on Medium:
  • robla (2018-02-14) – “A celebrity would be alright“
• That post got under the skin of a friend of mine, who posted this rebuttal:
  • MikeMC (2018-02-18) “A celebrity President would be the perfect acknowledgement of everything wrong with America right now, goddammit.”  In this post, MikeMC claims he’s going to offer a rebuttal to end all rebuttals (or as he puts it: “I’m fully gonna (metaphorically) kick him down the stairs in the most brutal fashion for the article he just wrote“
• I now feel up to the challenge to write a rebuttal both to MikeMC and to another author who takes a similar tone.  It takes me a while, but I finally publish the silly thing:
  • robla (2018-05-01) “Celebrity Democrats: ignore the haters“
• MikeMC feels compelled to offer a rebuttal to my rebuttal:
  • MikeMC (2018-06-09) “I won’t swear in this response….“

I don’t think either of us has convinced one another of anything, but still, that’s where we left things.  I still think Oprah would be a perfectly acceptable choice by Democrats in 2020.  Not my favorite choice, but still, a powerful strategic move.  MikeMC still thinks its a terrible idea.

I’m offering this summary only because I have something vaguely related that I’d like to share, and I’d like to refer back to this discussion.  I hope you enjoyed this summary.