Recently

I wrote a little yearly round-up over on Placemark. I’m not one for concrete resolutions or nostalgia, so on with the usual, a Recently.

Reading

I read Policing the Open Road on Rebecca’s suggestion. It’s an incredible book that I’ll probably re-read soon, because the central conflict that it sets out feels so thoroughly deadlocked, unresolvable, and important - the interplay between privacy, safety, police power, and freedom.

I don’t agree with all of it, but Jon McLoone’s explanatio of why Wolfram is not open source resonated strongly with me. Placemark, as I’ve said before, is not planning on being open source, though components of the application will be released. Some of my reasoning lines up with Wolfram’s pretty precisely. The central piece for me, I think, is just what the community means - where communities come from, how they agree on what they do, how they collect and disperse. Magical thinking around what constitutes community and how it operates is my biggest gripe about open source ideology in this day and age: too many people happily ignore the top-heaviness of some communities, or don’t think about where the direction, leadership, contributions, and standards come from.

Watching

Watch Vampire’s Kiss. That is all.

Expect to see in the new year: more, probably shorter, blog posts. More photos. And Placemark, out in the wild.