Memorandom FS-4702

Happy New Year!

Bob has Synergetics back up. His Fedora upgrade mashed the servlets enabling readers to file comments, an experiment netting mostly spam (mine were good). He's all for Chris running a mirror at SNEC, plus we're brainstorming around other experiments. Were we to serve Synergetics in Russian or Japanese, how much would get lost in translation? Should we do one in English (wry smile)?

I proposed a 45 minute talk at OSCON, but the short synopsis left organizers begging for more technical detail. I filed background info regarding Elastic Interval Geometry and some of our sphere packing studies (Watermans etc.), research undertaken with open source tools. Plus I'm doing a class at OGI that wires the concentric hierarchy to Python programming.

Coincidentally, python dot org itself has been down today. Fortunately, we have a lot of mirrors (I say "we" as one of the site's content administrators).

Not so fortunately, my collection of copyleft DVD clips for the bizmo jukebox is behind schedule. I can't yet promise OSCONers a sneak peak at a lot of cool geek channel clips, weaving Fuller Projections with TCP/IP networks, Neal Stephenson's 1996 article for Wired notwithstanding.

I also wanted to talk more about how our school's commitment to open source global data sharing is making a difference in universities, but the rank and file is slow to pick up on our syllabus. The Pentagon, in contrast, is the very model of responsiveness, not a headless chicken at all, and I'm quite pleased about that.

Anyway I'll be understanding if OSCON turns me down -- hey, there's always 2006. I haven't given up though, not by a long shot. Maybe the Pentagon Channel will have a cartoon feature for all those kids on base: Lt. Col. SpongeBob's Encounter with the Icosahedron or something. Plus Pentagon kids need programming skills. But do we start 'em out with Ada? I don't think so.

Followup (2005.3.7): OSCON accepted my talk proposal.