Peter Saint-Andre

stpeter's blog on jabber, technology, history, philosophy, language, music, et al.

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March 14, 2010

17:00
Greg Feirman has pointed out to me that Jeff Riggenbach’s recent article Yevgeny Zamyatin: Libertarian Novelist quotes a bit from my essay Zamyatin and Rand, which was originally published in the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (JARS) back in 2003. Excellent! The fact that scholars like Jeff Riggenbach are able to link to essays such [...]

March 13, 2010

23:16
It’s been a month since I’ve posted here. Sorry about that — I’ve been awfully busy in my work. Maybe after IETF 77 I’ll have a bit more time to write, but don’t hold your breath. :)

February 14, 2010

19:27
On Friday I learned that the Internet Engineering Task Force’s NomCom has selected me to serve a two-year term as Area Director (with Alexey Melnikov) of the Applications Area, beginning at IETF 77 in Anaheim this March. Being selected as Apps AD (and thereby a member of the IESG) is a great honor, and I [...]

January 31, 2010

21:26
A lot of people think that American politics, even American society, has become increasingly polarized in the last ten or twenty years, marked by a widening chasm of left vs. right, liberal vs. conservative, secular vs. religious, etc. On the surface, that’s true. But I think the deeper division is the elite vs. the people, [...]

January 24, 2010

11:17
I run Prosody as my personal XMPP server at stpeter.im, so last night I decided to take a look at its source code. It’s quite a pleasure to read! I might need to take a more serious look at the Lua programming language because it seems to encourage readable code (though I think the Prosody [...]

January 19, 2010

22:32
Here are some photos from today’s rally on the steps of the Colorado state capitol in opposition to the health care skulduggery in the District of Columbia, orchestrated by the good folks at the Independence Institute…

January 4, 2010

18:38
Today is the 11th anniversary of Jer’s first release of the jabberd server, which we commonly herald as the birthday of Jabber/XMPP technologies. All these years later, there’s still so much to do! Here’s what I’ll be focusing on in 2010: End-to-end encryption Finalizing Jingle-based file transfer Multi-user Jingle for voice conferencing and the like Distributing chat rooms across [...]

January 3, 2010

23:06
At my favorite library the other day I picked up Julie Rose’s recent translation of Les Misérables. As previously mentioned, to date I have read only the translation by Norman Denny, but I can envision over time reading most or all of the English translations — in part because translators can’t be trusted (I know, [...]

January 2, 2010

23:26
While uploading a new file to the Monadnock Press website just now (Leaves of Grass, if you’re curious), I realized that today’s date (2010-01-02) is palindromic. The next palindromic date will be 2011-11-02, after which we’ll have to wait until 2020-02-02. We’ll see if anyone notices, then… :)

December 30, 2009

20:06
Over the last two months I’ve managed to squeeze in a bit of publishing over at the Monadnock Press. In addition to my work on the text of Ayn Rand’s Anthem, I’ve also republished the following public-domain texts: The original version of The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. The Sonnets of Shakespeare The Jefferson Bible, which [...]

December 22, 2009

11:47
As I noted on the jdev list yesterday, someone at Wikipedia is actively working to delete entries about various software projects that supposedly fail Wikipedia’s “notability” test. Pages about some XMPP software projects have already been deleted (e.g., Coccinella) and it seems that others will be deleted in the near future (e.g., Exodus, Gajim, ejabberd). [...]

December 15, 2009

16:57
Today is Bill of Rights Day, so it’s an appropriate time to reflect on the first ten amendments to the Constitution… Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, [...]

December 9, 2009

14:30
I just posted at www.jabber.org about the impending migration of the jabber.org IM service. The current plan is to flip the switch next Monday (December 14th). Check out the post for all the details.

November 30, 2009

14:14
It was ten years ago yesterday that I made my first post to the jdev@jabber.org discussion list. Working on Jabber has been a lot of fun so far! And, no, we didn’t call it XMPP back then. :P

November 27, 2009

23:24
Back in 2006 I posted a series of entries about global warming: Overheated Conclusions, Hot Logic, and Taking a Look (indeed, at the time my views seemed positively shocking to some people, since I appeared to be in denial about the supposed consensus of the scientific community). Now it turns out that the academics (can [...]