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Return of Fairytale Fridays and Sauerkraut Classes

18-Jul-13

This summer we have restarted the salon-style events here at Fairytale Farm – Fairytale Fridays. We’re also offering an array of classes every Saturday morning. Every Friday we’re holding a community-space event, free to attend. We’re drawing in musicians to play for us, giving garden tours peppered with urban farm wisdom, something artsy/craftsy and fun […]

The virtuous water cycle – updating an old analogy

29-May-13

When we talk about how code moves in the free/open source software ecosystem, we often use the upstream/downstream analogy. In this analogy, code flows from an upstream project downstream to the users and vendors. Users use. Vendors package and support. When anyone contributes their ideas (innovations) and code back to the project, it is said […]

Social support not private patrols

25-Feb-13

If you are concerned about how the City of Santa Cruz has stretched in to hiring private security teams to patrol public open spaces, email the City Council by tonight or show up at the Tuesday 26 February meeting. The Council is going to vote on actually legalizing their own practice, and extending it to […]

Fedora joins Google Code-In 2012

19-Nov-12

Google Code-In is the pre-college program for 13 to 17 year old students to earn prizes for completing tasks in various open source projects., This year will be the first year that the Fedora Project participates. We’re looking to build on many years success with Google Summer of Code, but the stakes here are higher. […]

Contributor agreements – the grass is browner

05-Nov-12

If you’ve been looking to implement a contributor license agreement (CLA), or your free/open source software project already has one, I wanted to let you know that the grass is greener on this side of the fence. As soon as you can, burn your CLA and never look back. I’ve had more than my fair […]

Response to ‘Meaning of “the only thing that could have happened”’

16-Jul-12

After I setup John D. Smith’s account on The Open Source Way wiki, I followed up to look at his website and discovered he is one of the authors (with Etienne Wenger and Nancy White) of “Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities”. This is a book out of the communities of practice milieu, and in […]

Fedora 17 packager metrics and why I care

20-Jun-12

I’m going to do something very dangerous – talk about specific raw, unanalyzed, and likely inaccurate statistics. But I don’t know how else to combine radical transparency with my work of tracking and analyzing community health. Does that mean someone is likely to read my posts and cherry-pick information that serves their own agenda? Perhaps. […]

Mailing list web interface magic

14-May-12

For a while now folks I know have been talking about how to reoutfit Mailman so it has a proper web front-end. The idea would be to provide additional features, make open source mailing lists friendly to web forum loving people, and keep hardcore email-only contributors able to participate in the same medium as free-wheeling […]

Mexican-style mocha – the Mexicano

30-Apr-12

This recipe builds on the cardamom coffee recipe I wrote about, not only instructions but also in how I came to discover the drink in the first place. As with much of my cooking, I go with inspiration based on experience and love of ingredients and preparation styles. I invent many dishes this way, but […]

Elderflower lemonade (cocktail)

27-Apr-12

My wife is a big fan of a St. Germaine and champagne cocktail. Recipes vary, ours is (dry) champagne, St. Germaine’s elderflower liquer, lemon (I’ve seen some use limoncello, but ick, give me real lemon anytime), and a lemon twist. Our local favorite cocktail houses serve it in a flute or wide (martini) cocktail glass. […]