/dev/dump

(Congressman Duncan Hunter is my Representative in the House.  Today I sent the letter below to him through the congressional email posting service (which verifies that I'm his constituent).  A copy is here for others to read.  I encourage everyone, especially those in districts with Republican congressional representation to write a similar letter and send it to their congressman via the site at house.gov -- you can look up your own representative on the same site.) Congressman Hunter, I have read your "position" statement with respect to the administrations "Zero Tolerance" treatment towards immigration, and the separation of families seeking asylum, and I am *most* dismayed by the position you have taken. I would encourage you to start by reading the full text of the following court order, which describes the reprehensible actions taken by the administration: https://t.co/adhGO6BDJR This is not hearsay, but legal findings by a US Court. Your claim t...

Over the past several weeks I've learned far more than I ever wanted to about the self publishing process.  I'm posting some of my findings here in the hopes that they may help others.  TLDR; If you're going with eBooks, and you should, consider using an author website to sell it "early", and once your book is finished publish it with Kindle Direct Publishing and Smashwords.  Keep the author website / store up even after, so you can maximize returns.  Price your eBook between $2.99 and $9.99. If you're going to go with Print, start with Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing first, unless you're only needing a small run of books printed only in the USA (in which case TheBookPatch.com looks good).  Once you're book is really done, and you're ready to branch out to see it available internationally and from other bookstores, publish it with Ingram Spark. Get and use your own ISBNs (From MyIdentifiers.com -- buy 10 at a time), and make sure you opt o...

(No, this is not about GitHub or Microsoft... lol.) Back in March (just a few months ago), I signed up on Leanpub to publish the NNG Reference Manual .  I was completely in the dark about how to go about self-publishing a book, and a community member pointed me at Leanpub. Leanpub charged $99 to set up, back in March, and offered a 90% (minus 50 cents) royalty rate.  On top of it they let me choose a price from free, or $0.99 to $99.  Buyers could choose within that range.  This looked great, although I was a bit hesitant to spend the $99 since there was no way to try their platform out. Note that at this time I was not interested (and am still not interested) in their authoring tools based on Markua.  I had excellent tooling already in Asciidoctor , plus a bunch of home-grown tools (that I've since further expanded upon) to markup and layout the book, plus previewing, etc. Everything was great, and I made sales ranging from $0.99 to $20.  Not a lo...

The developer crowds are swarming off of GitHub in the wake of today's announcement that Microsoft has agreed to purchase GH for $7.5B. I've already written why I think this acquisition is good for neither GitHub nor Microsoft.  I don't think it's good for anyone else either... but maybe at least it alerts us all to the dangers of having all our eggs in the same basket. At the moment my repositories will not  be moving.  The reason for this is quite simple -- while the masses race off of GitHub, desperate for another safe harbor, the panic that this has created is overwhelming alternative providers.  GitLab reported a 10X growth.  While this might be good for GitLab, its not good for people already on GitLab, as there was already quite a well understand performance concern around GitLab.com. At least in the short term, GitHub's load will decrease (at least once all the code repo exports are done), I think.  The other thing is that Microsoft h...

So apparently Microsoft wants to buy GitHub . This is a huge mistake for both companies, and would be tragic for pretty much everyone involved. GitHub has become the open source hosting site for code, and for a number of companies, it also hosts private repositories.  It's the place to be if you want your code to be found and used by other developers, and frankly, its so much of a de facto  standard for this purpose that many tools and services work better with GitHub. GitHub was founded on the back of Git, which was invented by Linus Torvalds to solve source code management woes for the Linux kernel. (Previously the kernel used an excellent tool called BitKeeper for this job, but some missteps by the owners of BitKeeper drove the Linux team away from it.  It looks like GitHub is making similar, albeit different, commercial missteps.) Microsoft already has their own product, Visual Studio Team Services , which competes with GitHub, but which frankly appeals most...