This felt like a long short week. Mostly I was working on what will turn into a solution design for moving one of our enterprise research admin applications to the vendor's cloud - as things have worked out, I probably won't be taking on a full-time solution design role in the …

Easy to get out of new habits when they're interrupted by Easter.

This week was taken up with meetings and handover, mostly about research data management. I'm taking over our Institutional Underpinnings project and need to spend some time catching up on it next week.

And I finally finished debugging …

I got myself a gemini. Gemini is a protocol for serving hypertext, with emphasis on the 'text': it's more like Gopher than the web, with an emphasis on simplicity and privacy, and no inline links or images.

Although I'm certainly old enough, I didn't have much experience of the pre-web …

Copying a practice I've seen other bloggers do - and as an attempt to kickstart this one, and also remind myself that giving this domain a bit of an overhaul is something I want to do this year - I'm going to set aside a bit of time every Friday afternoon to …

One of the original promises of the net was that it would transcend territories, another part of John Perry Barlow’s declaration of independence which hasn’t worked out. I have a memory from the late 80s, when I was working for a small software company in Sydney, helping establish …

This is a blog version of my presentation for the GoGLAM miniconf at Linux.conf.au 2021 on Arkisto, a framework for describing and preserving research data assets with open source tools and standards.

I converted it from PowerPoint to Markdown with Peter Sefton's pptx_to_md tool (but had to bash …

I'm moving this blog and all the rest of *.mikelynch.org to a new host - things will be patchy and possibly broken for the next few days.

After skipping it last year (I did NaNoWriMo instead) I decided that I missed doing National Novel Generating Month and thought I'd do something relatively simple, based on Tom Phillips' A Humument, which I recently read for the first time. Phillips' project was created by drawing over the pages of …

A fun quality of Mastodon - a social communication platform I hang out on a bit too much - is that individual instantiations can fork its basic form and add odd twists which suit just that community. Oulipo.social notoriously bans that fifth Latin glyph which is most common in many linguistic …

Point 2 in this advice to new developers is

"Never use a plugin which you can't write yourself"

I think this is really bad advice, although his less extreme version -- that you should try to read and understand other people's libraries -- is actually good, and not really the same thing …