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Happy Birthday America!
I wish to share two musical selections that speak to this anniversary of the United States of America. The first is an arrangement of “America The Beautiful” for wind ensemble, by Carmen Dragon, performed here by the US Army Band: I first performed this work in college in the University of Texas Longhorn Band. It…
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Should the software engineering profession pursue collective bargaining?
Greg Wilson, who has built a significant career in the field of software engineering, recently wrote a set of essays called “Sex and Drugs and Guns and Code” with the sub-title “a few things programmers should know about society to understand big tech, social media, and AI”. The essays cover a wide set of subjects,…
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How podcasting got its name
On June 24, 2026, Dave Winer pointed to a podcasting article in – wait for it – Glamour Magazine – and the South African version at that! Anyway, it gives a brief history of podcasting (mentioning Dave Winer and Adam Curry), but then says that Ben Hammersley coined the word “podcast”, and I felt that…
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Got an app supporting inbound/outbound RSS
Dave Winer recently posted asking developers working on apps supporting inbound/outbound RSS to send him a post on it, so here is my post. I created an web app in 2023 using rssCloud and supporting inbound and outbound RSS called myStatusTool. I have working instances of a Node implementation developed by me and a PHP implementation developed by Colin…
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Dealing with death
My family has had to deal with the death of a pet and the death of a friend recently. In the pet case, we put down one of our cats (cancer), she was 11 or 12 years old. The friend had a terminal cancer diagnosis and was successful in fighting it for a long time,…
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Managing memory usage for Node.js apps
When I moved my Node apps over to Opalstack, I was having some issues with the apps failing, getting a 502 error. My account has 1GB of RAM, and I saw my Feed News Archive app reaching 700-800 Mb before quitting. After some Claude sessions and good old fashioned searching, I found the –max-old-space-size parameter…
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Retirement Update – June 2026
I thought I was going to do this last month, but…..oh well, better late than never! I have been exercising more (which is a good thing), and did start some personal software projects (my Feed News Archive site is running nicely!). The other major effort over my first two months was to transition to a…
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Test – power user post
The slow death of the power user: There’s a certain kind of person who’s becoming extinct. You’ve probably met one. Maybe you are one. Someone who actually understood the tools they used. Someone who could sit down at an unfamiliar system, poke at it for twenty minutes, and have a working mental model of what…