A favorite little command-line snippet:

| sort | uniq -c | sort -nr and then pipe the result to a pager or redirect to a file

For example, to see how many times people have logged in, in decreasing rank order:

last | awk '{ print $1 }' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | less

With three judiciously-placed folds, one need only make a single reasonably squared-off cut to turn even an odd-shaped piece of paper into square suitable for at least some origami projects.

Until recently, origami has been one of those things I dabbled in only very lightly. I might pick up a few sheets of origami paper and a how-to book and try one or two things, but it was
never anything I thought very much about or made much effort to work on. You know, just another crafts project for the kids, that sort of thing.

That is, until last fall.

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In retrospect … Michael Hart, Steve Jobs, Dennis Ritchie … we can totally be done for now, kthx.

I'm not in the news business, so I didn't have a template for Steve Jobs's obituary sitting on my computer, ready to go with just an update of the exact time and place and manner of his passing, with the optional timely addition of a line or two about the recent fortunes of the company he founded and led. His recent illness and resignation from Apple has turned thoughts in this direction, of course, but to now I've mostly wondered what his passing would mean for the company he founded. That remains to be seen.

But, waking up this morning to the news of his death, I'm anticipating there will be no small amount of that sort of commentary and more. So, I want to sit down for a few moments and collect my own thoughts on the occasion before I begin reading much more of what others have to say.

I came to the the free software movement as an adult, as a graduate student struggling to find ways to make the software we wanted to use in our research work. It is from that perspective that I now view much of the world of computing, personal or pervasive, and so I anticipate that some of the comments I'll see today will note, or even disparage, the locked-down nature of most of the devices Steve Jobs was associated with at Apple, from the first Mac on through to the latest iPhones, iPods, iMacs and Macbooks. The early Apple computers, the Apple I and most of the Apple II line, invited expansion and tinkering, as did some of the computers around the time of Jobs interregnum at Apple, but the trend at Apple under Jobs has been towards less nerdish tinkering with the computer-as-a-computer and more as a sealed magical (albeit stylish) box, black in all but (usually) color.

But what I remember, and most mourn, in the passing of Steve Jobs runs in the same vein as software freedom--an insanely great focus on the person using the computer. There were computers that people could use in their homes before Wozniak and Jobs brought the world the Apple I, but these were not clearly destined to be anything other than machines used by hobbyists with unique interests in computing for computing's sake. No one has had so long and so deep a committment to putting computing devices that anyone can use into the hands of so many ordinary people, and has had so much success doing so, as Steve Jobs had.

To the most die-hard of my fellow software freedom enthusiasts and electronic civil libertarians, freedom is first, and no computer is worth using unless the people who made it respect certain of your freedoms by allowing you, or your assigns, full access to use and change and share the software running on that computer. This approach is perhaps more natural for those who, like Richard Stallman, came into a world that had only a few computers, but who were amongst the select having almost unfettered access to those large, rare, expensive computers. Software freedom, for those who had computers, was a given, and only through the prospect of their loss did Stallman and those like him wake to the cause of protecting those freedoms.

Perhaps they took for granted their ability to make the choice, in the first place, to use a computer or not. The computer was there. Most of us, though, are not destined to study math or physics or, now, computer science at the world's great technical universities, to be ushered by grant-holding research faculty into the presence of rare and powerful machines. So, for us, the question of whether we even have the choice of using a computer or not comes first. You can't run software, free or not, on a computer you don't have, and unlike many in America today, I can remember a time before I ever saw a computer. Thanks to Steve Jobs, millions of people around the world have that opportunity who might not have had it. I only later came to understand that the microcomputers I saw or used early on, from Tandy/Radio Shack, from Commodore, from Texas Instruments, from Timex and Sinclair, owed a good deal to that first Apple computer, the Apple I. Even today, the Android smartphones and tablets that my fellow hackers root in order to run the software they want are available in large part because Jobs, through Apple, has helped wildly to expand the market for those sorts of devices.

For the last several years, I've made it a point of pride not to have purchased any Apple device, with my own money, for my own use. I work with many of them at my job, and have helped my wife buy a Macbook and have gotten iPods for the house, but when it comes to my personal use, I've tried in my own limited way to walk the walk, to support the ability to hack and to tinker and to explore the essence of these protean devices, rather than just to use (or be used by) them. So, I'm not posting to Facebook or tweeting my reflections from an iPhone or a Macbook, like so many undoubtedly are doing today. Understand well, then, that this is not the reflexive paean of a fanboy, but a somber attempt to mark the passing of an obviously influential figure, and to appreciate what he did, and to express some sympathy for the family and friends and co-workers who feel this loss more personally.

For many millions of us, now, the computer is there. The man who helped bring it to us, though, is there no longer.

Steve Jobs died yesterday. He was 56 years old.

It seems the "real names" controversy has been renewed with
Google's recent move to delete profiles on the basis that any
such profile does not carry the "real" name--as Google
understands the term--of the person using the profile.* Last I looked, they were working towards a slightly more
flexible position on the subject, but if my past experience with
the subject of "real" names is any guide, it will continue to
perpetuate a number of problems.

Because my "real" names do not--in various relatively minor but
still bureaucratically-challenging ways--neatly fit certain
conventions, I have been somewhat sensitized to the limits of
unimaginative and inflexible "use real names" policies for a
while now.

I don't know if or when I'll be able to craft a more complete
statement of the problems,* as I see them, but that's the beauty
of an open-ended medium like this--I can, in principle, always
write more about it later!

For now, then, just a bit of a marker to open the topic here,
and to start collecting a few links as I find (or re-find) them.

Yaakov's post from a little while back is what pushed me over
the edge into wanting to say a little something about all this:

http://miscellany.kovaya.com/2011/07/pseudonyms-vs-autonyms.html

The original twitlonger post about one avid Google user's
mishaps with Google deleting his profile has been removed, so in
lieu of that, this report:

http://zd.net/n0ns0K

Seeing Yaakov's discussion reminded me of some discussion from a
few years back, from the last time I was involved in an extended
conflict regarding the subject:

http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/RealName

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RiVer

http://www.communitywiki.org/en/UseRealNames

----

* I speak of the person and of the profile as distinct entities. There is a tendency in technical circles to conflate the two, to
refer to the attributes of a collection of bits as if they were
essential attributes of the person who uses the account. Such
sloppiness can lead to the sort of error in which, for example,
the actions of an interloper using an account through
illegitimate means become attributed to the legitimate account
holder. "I opened the email because it came from a friend of
mine" is just one trivial example. People are more than the sum
of their computer accounts. The idea, then, that they must have
but one "real" name extends this anti-humanistic conflation of
the person with the strictures of a technical system.

http://www.xkcd.com/864/

The way I put it to my kid when this came up a year or so back
was "The problem would be that all the *other* people would have
flying cars, too."

We then went on to talk about how adding another dimension to
collisions and traffic jams just wouldn't do.

One of these days I'm going to have to better document my much
less tidy, but much less fussy and much quicker way of folding
and wrap-tying plastic bags for re-use, but in the meantime,
I've got to give a nod to this effort:

http://lifehacker.com/5645822/fold-plastic-bags-like-flags-for-easy-storage

Here is Brian's shot of an example of my process, from one of
the very early Interlock lightning talks.

In addition to it being more tidy, I suspect the flag-fold is a
lot easier to undo. Tidiness and ease-of-deployment can both be
more important than how long it takes to compact the bag, so I
respect that approach.

Before too much more time passes, I wanted to follow up on our
mapping party almost two weeks ago in Mt. Hope Cemetery

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Hope_Cemetery,_Rochester

First off, thanks, justbill for kicking this off. His call to
do this, which went out Friday May 12 on the Interlock mailing
list, is just the sort of nudge I think we need to develop our
local cooperative efforts to improve the map for Rochester. WTG.

I was out to Mt. Hope for three stints: By myself early in the
morning, mostly to scope out routes for getting there in light
of the traffic impact expected from University of Rochester
graduation to the west, the Lilac Festival in Highland Park to
the west, and endemic construction season frustrations. Then I
was out again with my daughter prior to lunch. Both of these
were largely on foot, hitting my first very specific goal of
getting the location for Susan B. Anthony's gravesite. It was
my first visit to the gravesite, as well as my daughter's.

Then, in the afternoon, I met justbill on my way into the
cemetary. We compared plans, then justbill went off to map
several footpaths, while I went off on my last on-foot stint of
the day, to get a couple of more goals--first, to get the
location of Frederick Douglass's gravesite and then to map out
the glacial sinkhole pond. On the way back, justbill and I met
up briefly again in the northwest edge of the cemetery. He
continued on, and I paused at my car to transfer my traces from
my GPS to my netbook and then to inspect the traces and compare
them with earlier ones.

While I was doing that, justbill finished and took off. I
continued looking at my new traces and comparing them with
earlier ones. I finished that off, and started to drive around
to try to get complete traces for car-accessible areas.

As I was about to finish and head off, I met gadget on his way
in. So, I caught him up on how the day had gone so far and
discussed our plans for further mapping.

I've edited down my traces for the cemetery up to that point,
combined them into one file, and uploaded them:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/deejoe/traces/708483

I think we've got a really good start on getting the basics into
the map, even if not everything we've entered is being rendered
acceptably:

http://osm.org/go/ZdGxvEeV--

It occurred to me that a good model for doing our mapping might
be the famous Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris:

http://osm.org/go/0BOfW_vU--

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pere_Lachaise_Cemetery

Looking beyond Mt. Hope, I'm hoping to continue getting area
mappers in touch with each other--it's a lot of fun and a great
complement to sitting at a computer bashing away at the map and
trying to learn more about the process through a screen.

In that light, I talked with hal14450 a few times on Sunday,
even if he wasn't able to make it out, and of course he and I
have been talking off and on about mapping since Richard Weait's
visit to LUGOR April 16, 2009 and our subsequent introduction of
OSM to RCSi the following June 9.

We've had several good discussions at Interlock amongst others
doing mapping, including the usual suspects above, but also
berticus, who has done a bang-up job drawing in the Hungerford
Building and the Rochester Public Market, and Wayne, who has
been chipping away at rather conspicuous holes in the map east
of here, in Wayne County. I recently met John W. at the space,
too, but haven't had the chance to find out what he's been doing
with the map (or what his OSM username is). Earlier, at BarCamp, I met stuuf, and have taken a look at his
work for Brighton's Meridian Centre Park. And, way back, at one
of the release parties in Waterloo sponsored by the NY State
Ubuntu LoCo team

http://wiki.ubuntu.com/NewYorkTeam

tpost001 and I talked a good bit about the possibilities of
using OSM data on a GPS unit.

There are still many people with OSM accounts in the Rochester
area I haven't had a chance to meet, but I'm looking forward to
drawing more into our circle. On a final note, we have tie-ins with various of the geek
communities in town as noted above, but we've barely scratched
the surface involving local outdoor recreation enthusiasts,
transportation interests, environmentalists and ecologists, and
planners and developers. In that light, then, I'll just observe
that last week's City Newspaper was their Bike Issue:

http://www.rochestercitynewspaper.com/entertainment/guides/2010/05/2010-BIKE-...

which has a number or pointers towards groups with whom we might
have a natural overlap of interests.

Doing a little retrocomputing today, transferring some stuff from a beige
PowerMac via ZIP disk before the system is taken out of service. It's been
on stand-by for a while. Anyway, the nugget I thought might be of some interest, because these things
are easy to forget, is that the ZIP 100 disk still has a price on its clear
plastic case: $12.50.

I remember calculating the comparative unit prices of ZIPs vs 654MB CD-R
back when CD burners were new, but I had forgotten the specific numbers.

I noticed sometime over the last few months that Burger King on
Mt. Hope just north of Westfall and at least the two Bruegger's
at Goodman and Monroe and on Mt. Hope Ave advertized
availability of wifi. I finally took some time to try out the
Mt. Hope Bruegger's connectivity a week ago, after a morning
meeting over at Town House after which I wanted to get some
breakfast.

I was pleased to see that it worked in pretty straightforward
coffee-shop fashion. Obvious SSID, strong signal,
captive-portal gateway web page, no blocking of outgoing ports (unlike
the wifi at Ed Tech Day at Ithaca College last week). They have
a meeting room in one corner of the store, which offers some
possibilities IMO for small, local, let's-meet-at-a-coffeeshop
groups. The location never has seemed to hurt for business from
what I've seen, but the seating area usually seems to me
forlonly underused. While fast-food restaurant wifi isn't that big of a deal in
general these days, I welcome the addition of these options. Two independents, the Mt. Hope Diner and the Coffee Connection
on South Ave offer wifi not that far to one side or the other of
my commute, but Panera has been my go-to for food+wifi as far as
chains with local operations go. The problem for me has been
that none of their locations are near my normal work commute or
hackerspace commute routes. I sometimes find the coffeeshop-wifi experience helps me focus
on certain tasks. Now, with the Mt. Hope Bruegger's will
probably figure into my plans to stop for a "working
meal" between home and work. The Goodman/Monroe Bruegger's may
work for doing the same for trips between Interlock and home or
work.