The Virtual Neal McBurnett: nealmcb
- Web:
http://neal.mcburnett.org/ (you are here :-)
- LinkedIn: Neal McBurnett - for professional interests
- Keybase: @nealmcb - preferred secure platform for user-centric id, chat, teams, secure Git, payments etc.
- Academic: ORCID 0000-0001-8667-1830 for publications, contributions etc.
- GitHub: nealmcb for open source software contributions over the decades
- Twitter: @nealmcb
- Blog: Technology serving Community: Some newer stuff has gone here - posts on voting, etc. (And let's face it, this site looks its age....)
- Email: nealmcb at gmail.com
Formerly neal at bcn.boulder.co.us, nealmcb@avaya.com,
nealmcb@bell-labs.com, AKA nealmcb@lucent.com,
Neal.McBurnett@att.com, neal@dr.att.com, attmail!neal,
ihnp4!druhi!neal (1987), ucbvax!ihnss!druxj!neal (Dec 1981),
and I-don't-remember at Berkeley before that :-)
- Other networks:
FOAF
(Friend-Of-A-Friend - the open social network)
- Home: Boulder CO,
near Two-mile Canyon Creek.
Contents:
I'm an independent consultant in areas including computer security, election integrity, voting systems, and AI.
I'm working with Professor Poorvi Vora and colleagues on open source software to support more efficient Risk-Limiting Audits of elections.
I've taught Artificial Intelligence CSCI 3202 at the University of Colorado.
I served as vice-chair of the IEEE P1622 Standards Working Group on Voting Systems Electronic Data Interchange.
I've also consulted with the State of Colorado and Boulder County as part of the Colorado Risk-Limiting Audit project (CORLA),
helped organize conferences for the Election Verification Network (EVN) (see my bio there),
and serve on the board of the
Center for Election Science (CES).
I also spend lots of time volunteering for various organizations,
editing Wikipedia,
and working with open systems and free software like
ElectionAudits: audit elections with good statistical confidence,
and tools like
Ubuntu Linux (an alternative to Windows or Mac),
Google's Android mobile phone system,
the Firefox web browser,
the OpenOffice suite,
and
open standards from the
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
From 2001 to 2011 I worked at Internet2 on the
Internet2 Middleware
Initiative
and the annual
IDtrust Symposium series (formerly the PKI R&D Workshops).
Between June 1977 and July 2001
I worked for Bell Labs,
ending up as
a "distinguished member of technical staff" (really a software developer / systems analyst :-).
The
Bell System
("Ma Bell" - once the largest company in the world) slowly split up over 2 decades.
My division ended up
at Avaya, having
spun off in 2000 from
Lucent Technologies
which itself spun off of
AT&T in 1995, which
divested the Baby Bells in 1984 after calling our PBX division
American Bell for a year. AT&T jointly owned Bell Labs along with
Western Electric
when I was first hired. Wow.... But I think split-ups are
much better than the
anti-competitive mega-mergers that are all the rage!
During the summer of 1977 I worked as a summer
intern in Holmdel NJ, and summer of 1978 was at Murray Hill.
After a "One Year On Campus (OYOC) scholarship at Berkeley, all the
rest was in Westminster CO, except for a delightful 3-year stint in Portland OR.
I like keeping in touch with
Bell Labs Alums
My dad, Roe McBurnett Jr., was a humanist, singer, and a great proponent of
The Power In Positive Thinking. For many decades he was a patent lawyer and a champion golfer.
He died in 2022. His memoir, Pass the Pepper Please will be available soon.
My mom, Trish McBurnett, was an insatiably curious "jack of all trades",
organizer, singer, photographer, dancer, painter and Registered Nurse,
who loved crafts and has done extensive
genealogical research. She passed away in 2021. Her memoir, Moving Daze, will be available soon.
I've enjoyed many different activities:
- I initiated several very early election audits in Boulder and Colorado, and wrote
the free ElectionAudits
software package to support better election auditing. We used it
in
Boulder's historic audit of the 2008 election and for the first risk-limiting audit in Colorado in 2010, which paved the way for for Colorado
to mandate and conduct the
first state-wide risk-limiting election audits.
I've also been interested in
publicly verifiable random selection procedures
for important tasks related to governance and auditing since the '90's.
- Co-founder and still chair of the board of the
Boulder Community Network,
which for over a decade provided up-to-date information on the community via the World Wide Web,
and provided very early community access to the information on the Internet. Note that
BCN is mostly of historical / archival value now.
Here is a 1997 viewgraph presentation about BCN.
The Boulder Area Sustainability Information Network (BASIN) is a big part of BCN. Learn your Watershed Address. Mine is Two Mile Creek, Goose Creek, Boulder Creek, St. Vrain, South Platte, Platte, Missouri, Mississippi, Gulf of Mexico.
- I've made few thousand edits at Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia.
See
my user page there. Visit, and you'll be enticed to easily
make your own contributions.
- I'm an
Ubuntu Linux member
and participated mostly with the
Ubuntu Server Team
and the
Colorado Ubuntu Linux Team.
See
my Ubuntu wiki page and
my Launchpad page.
- A few of the talks I've given over the years.
- Former member of the
Boulder Public Library Commission and the
Energy Advisory Board.
- Citizens for Verifiable Voting
promotes voting methods that citizens can have confidence in.
We convinced Boulder County to avoid buying a paperless electronic voting
system in 2004. They thus avoided the need for costly
upgrades required by subsequent laws which required verifiable
paper records. We also got the Colorado legislature to pass a law
requiring audits of elections. Unfortunately
the system the county subsequently got doesn't
support audits well, is based on secret code,
and is too vulnerable to computer glitches and manipulation.
-
Approval Voting Home Page: approval voting
(vote for as many as you like) is the best
way to run single-winner elections. I've maintained the page since 1995, and also
gave a presentation for the League of Women Voters in 2017: youtube or see the slides or PDF.
- Full public
Disclosure of Software for Voting Systems
is the only path to software that voters can trust.
- I did an
Analysis of the PGP keyserver web of trust which inspired the
keyanalyze collaboration.
- I used to sing with
Planina - Songs of Eastern Europe - great asymmetric balkan
rhythms, tight harmonies, challenging ornaments....
- Neal's UU site -
A Story of Cosmic Evolution
and other materials for Unitarian Universalists and the
Unitarian Universalist Church of Boulder. See also the
Unitarian Universalist Wiki (UUWiki),
a collaborative site for UUs that I helped start.
- Here are some pictures of Comet Hale-Bopp
I took. Also my own little
Evening's Tour of the Universe
- In 1991 I put together a bit-mapped font using the ISO 8859-3
character encoding for Esperanto,
contrib/fonts/bdf/9x15-3.bdf,
which was part of the X11R5 contrib distribution. In 1985 I presented
and shared some code:
"
Ilaro por Esperantaj Redaktoroj
(Ilaro - a Toolkit for Esperanto Editors)"
at Interkibernetik '85 in Budapest, Hungary. For use with it I also distributed
esp-angla-vortoj.txt,
the first widely available almost-dictionary for Esperanto on the Internet.
- In 1995 I hosted the
Summit High School (NJ), class of 1975, 20-year Virtual Reunion.
- McBurnett on the Web has
information on McBurnett genealogy and pointers to other
McBurnett's out there.
It seems that McBurnett is an American name, not
in any Scottish or Irish records we've found.
- I wrote a program in perl (named "prtged" for the time being) that
prints really detailed ancestry timeline charts. For example, see
timelines for 387 of my direct ancestors on a single sheet of paper
(with details inevitably lost as you get further back in time):
400-year Ancestry chart for Neal McBurnett.
Note the scale of centuries at the bottom.
- I uncovered many tales, both honorable and sordid, of
my Spalding ancestors, dating back
to Perthshire, Scotland in the 1500's and Berwick in 1318.
And my mom scanned in a fascinating gold rush memoir by my
great-great-grandfather:
"Westward Ho - in '49": Memoirs of Captain Thomas S. Wylly.
He walked from St Louis to California, and returned via Nicaragua!
- My most hassle-free kayaking experience: after a water main break at Gilpin and Evans on 2004-08-19, I took Holly's kayak out of the garage, carried it to the bottom of the driveway, and "put in":
close-up photo,
context photo and
movie
- Inland Passage of Alaska Vacation
- a few whale and bear pictures from a lovely trip in July 1998.
- Your computer can contribute to solving humanity's problems.
I recommend
climateprediction.net (studying
global climate change) or
Folding@Home to put idle computer power to an excellent use,
supporting open, non-profit research into the fundamentals of life.
It's a pretty screensaver also - highly recommended.
- Neal's Questions
- some with answers, but perhaps just asking a good question can
be helpful....
- and, last and probably least :-) a bit of poetry, thanks to
Donna Davis' great class at LaForet. See
Lament of the Blue-Green Algae and
Some new Twinkle Twinkle verses. See also Hacking Computers, to the tune of "Waltzing Matilda".
Go Worldwatch!
Go GNU!
Go Internet Society!
Go IETF!
Go CPSR!
Go AFCN!
- No Software Patents:
patents on software increase the price of software,
cause computers to be less secure and less reliable and paradoxically
reduce innovation in the world of software. They give
big corporations tremendous and unfair leverage over small and
mid-sized businesses and individuals, thus affecting the
most innovative sectors of the economy, where most jobs are
created. And patents are being used to prevent the spread
of free software. See
No Software Patents
for why these statements are true, and what you can do to
help.
- The
EFF - Electronic Frontier Foundation
is non-profit civil liberties organization working in the
public interest to protect privacy, free expression, and
access to online resources and information. Joining them
is a great way to help out and stay in touch.
- Promote freedom of
digital speech.
Tell Congress to stop promoting efforts by publishers to
to use DRM to control how
you read, view, or listen to their works that you've bought.
Such restrictions are in violation of traditional "Fair Use".
-
What's Wrong With Copy Protection
outlines many other restrictions on fair use, creativity and
free speech (including lawsuits against people just because
they link to certain other web sites!) that are also a major
concern, such as the
Lawsuit about
DeCSS/DVD
and several provisions of the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
The
XKCD comic about DRM - the next generation suggests just what
the industry will want to do when people program turn own
coclear implants into ipods....
- Participate in the
Creative Commons if you want to download good
music you can play legally and often royalty-free, or if you
want to spread or sell your own
creations without seeing most of the revenue go to the middlemen.
Help lower the legal barriers to creativity. And read Stanford law
professor Lawrence Lessig's book
The Future of Ideas.
- Support
The League for Programming Freedom
fighting user-interface copyrights and software patents.
See also the
American Committee for Interoperable Systems.
- Environmentalism and Sustainability:
Zero Population Growth ||
The Boulder Environmental Center ||
PLAN-Boulder County ||
Energy: check out the
Rocky Mountain Institute ||
eating a vegan or
vegetarian diet.
- The Apollo Alliance
emphasizes how pursuit of energy independence is also good for jobs,
our economy, public health, national security and the environment.
- The Long Now Foundation
helps us focus on the long term rather than quarterly earnings
reports or daily "news" or minute-by-minute stock market
fluctuations. Think 10000 years... Very cool!
- The
Foundation for Ethics and Meaning
is a grass-roots movement. Its goal is
"to change the bottom line in American society so that
productivity or efficiency of corporations, legislation, or
social practices is no longer measured solely by the
degree to which they maximize wealth and power --
but rather also by the degree to which they tend to maximize our
capacity to sustain loving and caring relationships
and to be ethically, spiritually and ecologically sensitive"
-- Michael Lerner.
-
Colorado Green Party and the
Colorado Democratic Party
(we really need
Approval Voting so we can support
multiple options!)
- The anti-competitive and
abusive practices of Network Solutions/Verisign lead me to
suggest that you avoid them when looking for domain names or
SSL/TLS certificates.
- World standards bodies are considering redefining
time so it is no longer in sync with the rotation of the earth.
Specifically they are discussing the elimination of the leap
second in UTC, which keeps wall clock time in sync with the
irregular spinning of the earth. See
Leap Second Page
and the excellent
leap second bibliography for more information. I agree with
The case against UTC leap hours and think redefining UTC to
eliminate leap seconds is a bad idea. Use TAI if your system
doesn't deal gracefully with leap seconds.
- I strive for an
integral world view, looking at many perspectives
(All Quadrants, All Levels).
For example, see
Ken Wilber's view of the current world situation when you have some time....
-
Compassionate Communication, or Nonviolent Communication
- a refreshing language of compassion useful for self growth,
families, and activists.
- The Great Story
as told by award-winning science writer Connie Barlow and the
spiritually grounded Rev. Michael Dowd - inspiring
presentations based on the real History of the Universe, using
evocative beads.
- I AM Awakening movie - A
beautiful movie experience of how we are connected to the
epoch of evolution: the universe, the natural world and exponential
cultural and technological evolution. The movie itself is open for
further evolution as an open-source project. Unfortunately, the project
doesn't seem to be active and the domain has been taken over by advertisers.
- Individual growth and potential, using insights from folks like
Gay and Kathly Hendricks of the
Hendricks Institute, and
the great folks at the
Boulder Center for Conscious Living
-
Community Networks, including
BCN in Boulder,
Longmont Community Wireless Project,
Craigs List for Denver/Boulder,
CascadeLink in Portland
(see City Club Civic Networking presentation),
and K-12 activities like the famous
Boulder Valley School District.
-
Peacemaker Community - a global, multi-faith community, training,
empowering and connecting peacemakers around the world.
Includes the
Bearing Witness Journal and many other worthy organizations and
wise leaders.
- Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy and other scientifically-grounded methods
for helping people make their lives happier and dealing with
mental health problems. The book
Don't Shoot the Dog! The New Art of Teaching and Training by Karen Pryor
is a fun, practical introduction, whether you want to teach your dog
new tricks, or help yourself or your partner overcome bad habits.
- Physics,
Astronomy and
Archaeo-Astronomy,
Titan/Saturn exploration and
Mars rovers.
Check out the chance of Clear Dark Skies in Colorado tonight.
Explore the universe from radio waves to gamma waves
via SkyView, the
Internet's Virtual Telescope.
-
[PDF] The Science of Self-organization and Adaptivity by Francis Heylighen -
Very fundamental stuff - I think this joins evolutionary theory
in clarifying how we came to be. It leaves behind "Intelligent Design"
and other creationist approaches, which still have to explain how the
very complex intelligence/creator itself came to be.
- The Santa Fe Institute
is the birthplace of some profound ideas about complexity and chaos.
Swarm
is a great simulation system.
-
Artificial Life Online, and
The Live Artificial Life Page.
-
SETI,
the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, and
Anticryptography, AKA CETI, the science of creating a message
that can be easily deciphered, even by somebody (or something) who
has no prior knowledge of how the message is composed or what
information it contains.
- I love this thought-provoking
picture of earth in perspective
(a "pale blue dot"), taken by Voyager 1, with commentary on our place
in the universe by Carl Sagan. Part of a
family portrait of the solar system.
-
Esperanto, the international language, and other languages
and cultures.
Gxangalo
estas portalo en la mondon de Esperanto.
I've taught classes, but I'm not above laughing at some
linguistic humor....
- The ancient Chinese game of Go
is elegant and fascinating. After Deep Blue beat the world
champion chess player in 1997, Go remained the only significant board game in which
computers couldn't beat the best humans.
I'd been impressed with the challenge of
computer Go
since the 1970's, and in July of 2001, I wrote "I think it will
take decades before Go programs achieve mastery."
In fact, progress in AI accelerated, and it took 15 years until
AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol in 2016.
Let's see how my 2016 thoughts hold up over time....
See also Sensei's Library (e.g. Solving Go on small Boards) and GoBase - the online Go Encyclopedia.
-
Genetic Images by Ken Musgrave.
Another site, "International Interactive Genetic Art"' was
cool, but I can't find it any more. Viewers helped
interactively evolve pleasing art!
-
Patterns are the recurring solutions to the problems of design.
Patterns form languages, not unlike natural languages. Visit
the
PortlandPatternRepository to learn and share more about these ideas.
- Music, e.g. Folk Music
(
search for lyrics via Mudcat and DigiTrad), progressive music
(e.g. the
Women's Chorus of Boulder,
and Classical Music
(hear online MIDI files!).
- International
Folk Dancing and Music. In particular,
Planina - Songs of Eastern Europe, the
Boulder International Folk Dancers (BIFD), the
Village Arts Coalition,
and the
East European Folklife Center Balkan Music & Dance Camps.
"Think globally, dance locally"....
-
Bicycling and
hiking (and maps!).
-
Bird Watching
- Sundials - you can
even see a
sundial reader:
a real-time image of a sundial in Cambridge England, with software that
automatically calculates the current time by measuring the shadow.
- The Gigapxl project (1000
megapixel pictures of
world heritage sites)
is amazing: a camera that can do better than a hundred
simultaneous high-end digital cameras in a single shot. You
can see the sort of detail it would take binoculars to detect
live. One shot included the amuzing discovery that they were
watching
people people watching.
-
Timelines and Scales of Measure
- My
Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator type is INTP.
-
Genealogy and family history
- I'm a lot more interested in
parathyroid glands since
one of mine was found to be hyperactive, sucking the calcium out of my
bones. Recent advances in minimally-invasive surgery have made
removal of the hyperactive gland the clear choice,
but finding a surgeon experienced with this uncommon procedure
can be hard. I recommend
Dr Jim Norman.
- You can see a bunch of books I like, including a good selection of
Esperanto books,
at
my librarything.com page.
- My friend Holly Lewis was a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal in 1981 (Satineta, Arghakhanchi district), and I'm trying to find recent information on that village or her students.
- Internet Society -
for global cooperation and coordination of the Internet
- Internet
Engineering Task Force (IETF) - developing official technical
internet standards. An amazingly open and enlightened institution.
- I support truly open systems, where the spec itself is
democratically controlled, like the Internet, the WWW, and for
most purposes, Linux (see
Usenix
The Advanced Computing Systems Professional and Technical
Association)
-
Free Software Foundation (FSF)
- produces and freely distributes the complete integrated software
system named "GNU". Note that professional support is
available for free software. E.g. see
Cygnus Solutions.
- KGNU 88.5 FM Boulder, 1390 AM Denver - Community Radio,
and National Public Radio: KUNC 91.5 FM
- Advogato
- the free software developer's advocate. Cool testbed for work on
group trust metrics. See
my page there.
-
Unitarian Universalist Church of Boulder -
a warm and open UU community which shares common-sense
principles.
Addressing issues like
Civil Liberties and
Economic Globalization.
- In his page
The World Wide Web and the "Web of Life", the person who
invented the World Wide Web (Tim Berners-Lee) explains how its
philosophy, and that of the
Internet Engineering Task Force
is similar to the
Unitarian Universalist philosophy.
-
Humanism: ethical community without superstition
- Union of Concerned Scientists - good environmental credentials
- CPSR (Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility) and their
Community Networks Working Group
-
Give.ORG:
promoting informed giving and charitable integrity.
- City Club of Portland
-
Brown University Computer Science Department where I got to
work with the amazing
Andy van Dam
-
University of California, Berkeley - Computer Science Department
- PFLAG
- Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. I bet some of your friends are gay also.
- Final Exit Network and Compassion & Choices (formerly named the Hemlock Society and End-of-Life Choices), and the local chapter End of Life Choices - Boulder
- Death with Dignity - Good Life, Good Death
Email
-
Email FAQs (all you ever wanted to know about email!)
- Avoid Hotmail, AOL, Juno, and other services that try to lock you in
to nonstandard services. On the Internet I strongly
recommend using programs and services that stick to
IETF
standards like IMAP and POP because that allows you
to easily switch from one
service to another. This means using providers like Comcast,
Earthlink, Indra's Net, etc, but avoiding any proprietary
features. I also recommend not advertising the email address
that your ISP provides, and instead using the email service of
your choice, or buying your own domain name. That way, when
you consider chainging ISP's, you won't have to change your email
address at the same time.
FastMail.fm provides good
free basic email (IMAP) with advanced features for a price.
Get your own domain name from a reputable place like
000domains.com or DomainDirect.com,
and NOT the abusive monopolist
Network Solutions/Verisign or the sleazy, haughty godaddy folks
who may take your domain away without warning or good reason
(see nodaddy.com).
Or use an email forwarding address,
e.g. perhaps mail.com or bigfoot.com.
For some help on the process of moving from one to another, see
converting address books from AOL, Juno, etc to Eudora, Netscape, etc.
If you want to run your own Linux computer with its
own SMTP server, see Running a mail server on a dynamic address.
-
Think twice before sending email attachments -
especially Micro$oft Word attachments. You may reveal
information you consider private, spread viruses, the recipient may
not be able to read them, etc.
- Stop SPAM.
CAUCE: The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email
will tell you how to help.
- Don't enter your friend's email addresses into web pages,
even on sites like Evite, the New York Times, etc that you may
be willing to do business with,
since that can
sell them out to Trojan Marketeers. Just send the information
in an email directly to your friend.
Web
- A WikiWiki Web
is a cool way for a group to evolve a web site.
-
Wikipedia - the Free Encyclopedia, the world's most popular
and largest encyclopedia, is up-to-date, helpful and fascinating.
And you are
welcome to contribute.
- The
Web Authoring FAQ has
great advice on how to get started, and great advice
for experienced authors on how to make better web pages.
Another classic is
Essential Web Authoring Advice by Jukka Korpel.
- Please support the
Best Viewed With Any Browser campaign. Don't get lulled into
relying on the fancy features of specific browsers or even the latest
HTML standard - it just makes your pages less widely viewable.
- Check your web pages for valid HTML with tools like
W3C HTML Validation Service
or Doctor HTML.
- See
Setting up your browser for some good tips on how to
adjust your default browser text size, margins, etc.
-
PDF is a bad choice for most documents compared to
standard HTML or plain text.
- Good error handling for web sites, and especially 404 error
pages that point back to the offending referrer page, help improve
the web. See
how BCN's error pages work and consider doing something similar
on your site.
- Colorblindness affects hundreds of millions of people.
Web pages will not be easily accessible to these people if
they require the user to discriminate between certain colors.
Please pay attention to
Color Contrast. E.g. I'm red-green colorblind ("deutan"). Other
good resources are
Colors For The Colorblind and
Color Perception Issues.
- If you want free server certificates for SSL/TLS, you can get them
at CAcert, which is a grass-roots
CA. You can also get personal certificates for email and code signing.
And in the process you become part of the solution, and can help extend
their Web of Trust to others.
- Pay attention to web site usage via the best tool around:
Analog.
And it's free!
- The Halfbakery
is a fun communal database of ideas and inventions
- The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine can show you
much of the World Wide Web as it looked years ago. Find many
old pages that have gone away....
-
A collection of on-line conversions and calculators
- NetMind Free Services
-
Internet Tools by John December
- The Django web application framework is now the best way to create interactive web sites. It lets you use the excellent python language, and
is designed for security, speed and modularity. A good web hosting service
that I use for my blog is
Webfaction.
Disclaimer: if you sign up through that affiliation link I get a little bonus.
Free and Open Source Software (FOSS): Open Office, Linux, vs. Windows, Macintosh, and other platforms
- Open Office is a free
replacement for Microsoft Office, which works on Windows,
Macintosh, Linux, and other platforms. It reads and writes Microsoft
formats, as well as the
internationally standardized office formats
developed by OASIS and others.
You can create dynamic documents, analyse data, design
eye-catching presentations, produce dramatic illustrations,
and open up your databases. You can publish your work in
Portable Document Format (.pdf), without needing any additional software.
OpenOffice is the standard office suite for many corporations.
- Linux -
a free operating system, so you don't need to rely on that
overpriced, unreliable, proprietary, insecure Windoze stuff
that Micro$oft uses to illegally extend its monopoly power.
Linux runs on everything from an old 486 to Macs to PDAs to cellular
phones to hot new
multiprocessor Alphas. It is the OS of choice
for servers and developers and anyone who doesn't want
Microsoft to be in control of their desktop, e.g. because of their
lack of clue about security (e.g. when Microsoft warned the world
about the risks of macros in their Word software,
they distributed their White Paper as a executable file!)
- Why use Open Source Software or Free Software? Look at the Numbers! - very popular, growing
worldwide.
- For ordinary users who want to use Linux, the easiest way
to get acquainted is with
Ubuntu
or Knoppix.
Each of these is a bootable CD that can be used stand-alone for running
Linux software (word processing, spreadsheets, browsing,
etc.). It is also as an educational CD and a rescue system for
Linux or Windows. It is safe to try it out even for just 10 minutes
since it is not necessary to install anything on a hard disk.
-
The table of equivalents / replacements / analogs of Windows
software in Linux
- Data Portability
is doing good work to help us maintain meaningful and flexible
ownership of our data: "control over the profiles,
relationships, content and media we create and maintain,
regardless of what platform they are hosted on"
-
Simple End User Linux produces
lots of good information and software. They have great sites
to support use of Linux in
the schools and in
science also.
- I used to use Macs all the time, and enjoyed Elliotte's The Well Connected Macintosh. That is now
"Appleholics Anonymous" -- it looks like Elliotte
has moved on from macs as I have. Though my reasons had more to
do with the vigorous attacks from Apple on anyone with a compatible
"look and feel", which thankfully were rejected by the courts.
The closed nature of the MacOS was also big hurdle, and even now,
though the lowest layers of the operating system are open,
the windowing system and many other crucial layers of OS X are closed.
- Scripting languages for the Internet:
python is the latest and greatest.
- Java:
a revolutionary advance in programming languages and a new
software platform.
- Using different languages and character sets with computers can be
hard.
UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ for Unix/Linux is a great contribution.
-
Collaborative Networked Communication: MUDs as Systems Tools
At work I used to hang out (as the character "emergent") in a MOO that
provides a very nice "virtual watercooler" to keep me in touch
with my colleagues a thousand miles away.
- See Diversity University for
an example of a very constructive MOO dedicated to education
and non-profits. I used to hang out there as
NealMcB.
- The Briggle Blog
by Amber Briggle, a singer, massage therapist and fellow
Unitarian Universalist, is a delightful view of living abroad
in Enschede, the Netherlands.
- Joni Teter,
a mentor and Fullbright scholar on ecotourism, blogging on
Excellent Adventures in Egypt.
- Phil Weinstein - civic-minded
designer of beautiful web pages
- Roger V. Thomas
"paintings in glass". A wonderful artist and the best neighbor
I've ever had (along with Joann Thomas, Master Gardner et.al.).
- Mary Ann Schaefer
has delightful poetry and imagery on her site.
- Prentiss Riddle: a fellow
esperantist and nice guy.
And a
FOAF-savvy webmaster (Friend of a Friend):
FOAF info for Prentiss Riddle
- Jim Waterman Fascinating Friend
- Strider Benston -
a
Veteran of the Civil Rights Movement (AKA "Arkansas")
- Markus Günther Kuhn
Good info on standards, security, and much more.
- Amanda Birmingham - Humor,
TheBigPicture, web design, astronomy, bioinformatics - it's all there.
- Erik Max Francis -
a wealth of contributions and links on a broad range of topics:
science, language, essays, poetry, technology.
- Oliver McBryan on the forefront of bandwidth to the home.
- Dan Garlen Buddy from Summit High School, turned entrepreneur
- The Homeport Collective -
an intentional community.
- Geoffrey Landis, an old friend of the family who has gone on to fame in the worlds of science (e.g. Mars Pathfinder) and science fiction writing.
- David S. Goodsell a beautiful and thoughtful home page
- Gordon Irlam a real Unix/Web/freedom contributor
- Mel Haas an interesting colleague
-
Göran Öberg a great set of bookmarks
- A memorial to Sidney Lewis
GPG - GNU Privacy Guard (free version of PGP)
If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy. Don't shy away
from encrypting your email. You don't shy away from putting an envelope
around your postal mail, do you?
See
Thomas Jefferson: Crypto Rebel? for some excellent insight
into this All-American activity.
Use
GPG: GNU Privacy Guard,
a free and open replacement
the better-known and highly respected PGP - Pretty Good Privacy.
See Neal's PGP Keys for my keys, and
my biglumber.com entry for trust paths and related info.
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GCS/CC/S/O d-- s+: a+ C++$ US++$ PY++ P+ J++ L++$>+++ E++ W+++$ N+ o? K?
!w-- !O M V- PS++ PE-@ Y++ PGP+(++) t+ 5 !X !R- tv- b++ DI++ !D G
e+++>+++++$ h--- r+++
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
Neal McBurnett
Last modified: March 17, 2016
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