In yesterday’s post I mentioned that I was having trouble remembering the specifics of a talk from years ago.

Somewhat ironically, this was in the context of a conversation about chat apps where we touched on the usefulness (or not) of old chat logs. I was asked, “When do you find yourself going back to old chat logs?”

To find those specifics, I found myself going back to old chat logs!

Today I met with the creator of Quiet, a new chat app that doesn’t require a server. That is, it’s peer-to-peer and completely decentralized.

We quickly got into how much we appreciate how the Internet itself is decentralized and both want to keep it that way.

I started talking about Scott Bradner and his use of the word “anarchy” as a positive attribute of the Internet.

I struggled to explain what Scott was saying but later I dug up his article, The importance of restrained anarchy. Here are my favorite quotes:

We bought an erg, mostly for our daughter, but it took me a few days to get on it because I wasn’t sure if I’d set a new personal record. Here’s the data:

date    	piece	time	split	stroke rate
2022-07-12	2000m	9:33	2:23	26
2022-07-31	2000m	9:14	2:19	27
2022-08-06	2000m	8:57	2:14	26
2022-08-22	2000m	8:42	2:11	26

I had managed to shave off a few seconds each time. Could I keep this up? I wasn’t sure.

Today I was messing around with GitHub Actions for OpenDP.

I found an answer on Stack Overflow that got me unblocked. I ended up splitting up my single step into multiple steps so I could indicate that I’m ok with one of the steps failing with continue-on-error.

I’m reminded that I should check out the GitHub Actions advent calendar Ed Thomson made. I got a chance to meet him last year at FOSDEM. Lots to learn.

As of today I’m working 60% on Dataverse and 40% on OpenDP.

My role for Dataverse will continue to be software development, but in OpenDP I’ll focus on community management. My guess is that to some extent, I’ll work in both code and communities for both projects.

I’ve been known to give a talk or two about Dataverse, but I’m fairly new to OpenDP. The “DP” is short for differential privacy. According to opendp.org,

OpenDP is a community effort to build trustworthy, open-source software tools for statistical analysis of sensitive private data.

Today is #ShutDownSTEM (or #ShutDownAcademia) and I spent a little time attending two webinars and hanging out in a Slack channel called #fighting-antiblackness.

Someone linked to Police: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. It was funny and interesting but I kept thinking that I should be listening to what black people have to say. Thankfully, at the very end, he played a speech by Kimberly Jones, author of I’m Not Dying with You Tonight. I found a partial transcript online and cleaned it up. I recommend watching it first to get the emotional tone, but here’s what she had to say.

Inkscape 1.0 was released today. The release video is absolutely fantastic and captures the energy of the Inkscape community. The announcement does a great job of describing new features with animations throughout.

I eventually got a dev environment set up on my Mac and it was exciting to see the latest code running but I’m really not a C++ developer and haven’t found much time to contribute. I did make a few contributions to the new Inkscape Beginner’s Guide linked from the books section of the website. The source is Sphinx, which I’m familiar with from work.

Today I returned home after a long stay at McLean, a psychiatric hospital not far from Boston.

I now recognize that I was getting increasingly manic in the days leading up to my trip to the emergency room and subsequent hospitalization. People at work and in my personal life kept asking me what had gotten into me. I kept wondering why they were moving, talking, and thinking so slowly.

My “first break” (first mood episode) occurred on Thursday, March 5th. The night before I had only slept for an hour and the nights before that I hadn’t been sleeping well either. I had experienced sleep deprivation before when my children were babies, but nothing like this. Instead of sleeping I was in chat rooms or working away on what seemed like some great ideas. After the sun finally came up and I had some breakfast, I biked to work, taking more risks than I normally would, and stopped at the gym along the way.

This morning I was just starting my day when Oliver Bertuch, frequent Dataverse contributor and giver of gifts, pointed me to a test server making use of the OpenID Connect (OIDC) feature he added to Dataverse 4.19. As chronicled in today’s IRC log, I captured numerous screenshots in a GitHub issue and expressed a lot of enthusiasm over how this next generation repository technology really works! During my one on one with my boss I explained how this opens up a lot of possibilities and could solve a variety of issues. Thanks, Oliver!

Today I couldn’t remember some software I used 14 years ago to block IP addresses that are attacking your server in a denial of service (DoS) attack. I emailed a colleague and friend who was on the same team with me back then and he replied right away. Awesome.

It turns out I did remember the software that he still uses, which is called fail2ban. The one I forgot is called DenyHosts, which he no longer uses.