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… Continue reading Voting Methods in The Perl Journal
Author: robla
Electoral theory wonk, activist, software developer, and engineering management nerd.
Debating Oprah
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… Continue reading Debating Oprah
Jimmy Carter, populism and Donald Trump
Jimmy and Rosilyn Carter, surprising the crowd by walking instead of riding in a limo (image from Carter Library via National Archives) In January 2016, before either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump had secured their nominations, I posted an article on Daily Kos titled “What Donald Trump and Jimmy Carter have in common”. Since Republicans… Continue reading Jimmy Carter, populism and Donald Trump
Western accent?
There’s a fantastic discussion of red state politics on the wellRED podcast interview of Sarah Smarsh by the three hosts of the show. At the 46:00 point in the podcast, the group discusses how they all deliberately chose not to lose their respective accents. Smarsh says as part of journalism school, she needed to learn… Continue reading Western accent?
2017 update
I've neglected this blog for a really long time, but it's not like I haven't been writing publicly. A few links to my post 2010 writing: medium: robla - a lot of my recent writing, which has skewed political. Sign of the times, I guess... DailyKos: robla - this has been where I've posted most… Continue reading 2017 update
New gig: Wikimedia Foundation
As of last week, I'm officially an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation. Here's the the official announcement of WMF hiring me. I've been working there as a contractor for the past couple of months, and it's been a great experience so far. I'm working with a lot of really smart people that I stand to… Continue reading New gig: Wikimedia Foundation
On Diaspora
There's been a lot of hubbub about Facebook's ongoing tone-deafness regarding privacy. As a result, there has also been a lot of hubbub about the Diaspora project, with both wildly optimistic projections of their success, as well as more skeptical assessments. I'm skeptical about Diaspora specifically, because it reminds me a lot of an effort… Continue reading On Diaspora
Pronouncing Eyjafjallajökull
I got curious if there was a pronunciation on Wikipedia of "Eyjafjallajökull", which of course there was. In the really helpful IPA alphabet, which is: "ˈɛɪjaˌfjatlaˌjœːkʏtl̥". I got about halfway through deciphering this when I gave up. Fortunately, there's a recording of a native speaker. Did you catch that? Me neither. Finally, looking on the… Continue reading Pronouncing Eyjafjallajökull
Doing the conferency talky thing
I didn't do much in the way of public speaking last year, but I'm starting to make up for it this year. Here's a few things I've got coming up: April 13 - Lighting talk at the Seattle Django Users Group - this will be about jsonwidget, which is shaping up nicely. I'm toying with… Continue reading Doing the conferency talky thing
Thoughts on dual licensing and contrib agreements
photo by kwc There's been a lot of chatter lately about dual licensing in open source and its much-maligned companion the contributor license agreement. Since my last two community management gigs involved dual licensing and CLAs, I have a few thoughts on the subject. These tools certainly make it harder to build a community. As… Continue reading Thoughts on dual licensing and contrib agreements
