Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 9, 2008

But what I realized was that the whole WPA thing with my laptop added to the pile of “little problems I haven’t solved yet.&# After spending close to five hours on the X windows/driver problem I vented about last week. The problems I “solved&# by offloading the functions onto the web. I gave up.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 21, 2008

But as a long time lover of PostgreSQL, I couldn’t let this drop. There are several core modules with PostgreSQL problems in Drupal 6, so I might actually go back and work on those first, before I can think about tackling what’s wrong with install.php and PostgreSQL. So I’ve adopted it.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 9, 2007

I figured it was time to give my final assessment. Here are the good things: Even macs get weird sometimes, especially if they’ve been on for a long time. The only time I shut down this laptop is when I’m taking it somewhere, which is relatively rarely. I love apt-get/aptitude.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 27, 2008

I think of myself in these terms: I educate, facilitate, mediate, and problem-solve. I don’t implement much for them (although in a pinch, I’ll set something up, or fix a specific problem.) I myself wrote a custom CMS a long time ago that would be considered crap now, so I don’t blame them for that, but the charges???)

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 30, 2007

Not because I don’t want my blog to be better, it’s just that I don’t have the time right now. I figured it was a good time to think about and articulate mine. But my role in that context is much more around helping to solve specific problems, or educate in specific ways about technology options. {

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 24, 2008

I have had varied problems , from issues of software integration, video problems, wireless issues … The list is getting very long. What happened was I felt like I was wasting too much time on things that should be easy. On the Mac side, Apple controls the hardware, so there never is a problem with it.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MAY 21, 2007

And, for all of that time, the Macintosh has been my primary desktop. I’ve tried making Linux my primary desktop many times (5 at last count.) More recently (last time I tried this was back in 2004) it was not being able to sync with the palm treo I had at the time. This is the 6th, and last time I will do this.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 29, 2008

I haven’t spend enough time with Plone to really get a feel for it. It will take some time and effort to get a site up, but that’s standard for any website. It will probably take you less time than a generic HTML site will. { I’ll mention the other FOSS CMS systems in other posts.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

FEBRUARY 29, 2008

At this point, I still have to futz with the configs every time I start up, and it still isn’t right. I’m also trying to eat my own dog food and model good behavior for my 2 yo all the time. I think, actually, the problem is more about the nvidia drivers, but xrandr is very good to know about. And it’s hard.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 24, 2007

It’s the standard “if I have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.&# I wanted to figure out how to make my product solve every problem that my clients had – or, if I couldn’t, I wanted to figure out how to build/install/integrate something that could. . But, I was myopic anyway. you the picture.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 24, 2008

Other times it is more important to have an open API or an app that is properly designed for plug-ins or extensions. SQL is a bit fiddly at the best of times, and if we move past SaaS to DaaS (Data as a Service) it frees up a *lot* more time to share ideas on the functionality front. 3 Jon Biedermann 09.25.08

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 18, 2007

I think one of the problems here is that people see spreadsheets as *just* one component of an office suite. So someone like Sun think that they need to give equal time to making their PowerPoint clone and their Access clone. Phil: I agree – with time and effort, OO or any open source spreadsheet could out Excel Excel.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 12, 2008

There are multiple threads on multiple sites about problems with the iPhone 3G – clearly, some software fixes need to happen, and the faster they happen, the happier I’ll be. But driving down the highway, listening to my favorite Pandora stations is the best thing since sliced bread. comes out.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 10, 2006

Human beings use metaphors all the time to understand the world, and to frame it. " Software uses metaphors all the time as well. at 7:57 pm Interesting that you and Jamie are thinking similar things at the same time: [link] 2 Katrin 10.11.06 Metaphors are powerful in terms of the way we think about things.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 3, 2009

at 8:54 pm Most of the programming problems are misuse of the well documented abstract layers. at 4:26 pm Dave Keays wrote: Most of the programming problems are misuse of the well documented abstract layers. Python and security, but that might lead to a holy war. 3 Dave Keays 04.03.09 5 Steve McMahon 04.05.09 6 David Geilhufe 04.07.09

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 5, 2007

I spent lots of time reading the reviews (many of which were BAD), but we decided to plunk down the dough (lots of it) and go for it. Shell sessions are basically not doable, unless I am amazingly patient – the 4 second latency is definitely a problem in that case. It bounced back up a couple of times. We got Hughesnet.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 10, 2008

In many ways, we are focused on solving technology problems , or completing projects. In the last few months, I was involved in helping three organizations choose vendors for varied technology projects, and in the course of that time, I talked with almost a dozen technology vendors of one type or another.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 29, 2007

An older woman of color noted that a lot of the problems that open source developers were solving weren’t problems that communities faced. Which, of course, has been an issue for me for a long time – lack of open source alternatives in the "vertical" application spaces – case management, etc.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 24, 2006

First, the major problem is that there are, at this point, so many of them, and although many (most?) You basically have to either decide which site has your loyalty, and then stay with that one (or spend a lot of time importing and exporting and double/treble/quadruple bookmarking. Bookmarking saves me time, for sure.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

FEBRUARY 14, 2008

Setup of all three has a one time fee. The problem with Google Code is that it’s *explicitly* for small projects. This is not only cool from the perspective of the integration of two great open source web apps, but it also is a very interesting business model.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 17, 2007

Web Huddle – The only other one I can find that at this time offers the possibility of sharing a Linux desktop. Problem is, I’m not a nonprofit organization. We chose Persony because it had one of the simplest interfaces and had a one-time fee. Nonprofits are charged much lower rates (see comment below.)

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 11, 2008

You are dependent on your internet connection – which could be a problem for mission-critical applications. What you should do Make an assessment – will using this online tool really save money or time, or facilitate collaboration in ways that is not possible with local apps?

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 28, 2006

I don’t get paid to blog, so I don’t really want to spend my time doing that. They each have their good points and bad, strengths and reasons I use them (I use furl, for instance, to save pages I think might go away, or become paid content after a short time being free.) It’s just so … painful. That is so cool.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

DECEMBER 14, 2007

And of course, my problem here is that my background is in science, not marketing – so I find it impossible to look at data and not see its weak points. Here’s hoping that the next time around we get even more response! 3 Christopher Scott 12.17.07

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 9, 2007

First problem: Linux address books … suck. But the last time I tried Evolution, it was a horrible experience. I used to have this great system where I used the Mac Addressbook, which would nicely sync with my cell phone. It also integrated well with Mail.app and iChat. It was great. There are basically three options.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 14, 2013

It''s finally time to admit that our justice system is broken because it is based on the fears we are unwilling to acknowledge or accept. . Fear itself is not the problem. . . The problem is that fear has become the currency of our society. We are all afraid - that''s part of what makes us human beings.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

DECEMBER 17, 2007

I’m someone who has, since day one, tried my damnedest (and succeeded 96% of the time) to only say by email, or put up, what I would say in a room full of people. Maybe it’s time to go back to being a curmudgeon. { I happen to be someone who has had a relatively high online presence since before the web (remember Usenet?)

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 24, 2007

As I move out of doing implementation, and into more evaluation, planning and facilitation of technology change within organizations, I wanted to spend some time articulating what I have tried my best to practice when I’ve been in a place of providing technology support. All technology providers have to deal at some level with support.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 14, 2008

I seem to spend inordinate amounts of time responding to people (proprietary software vendors, to be specific) harping on the idea that “open source software is free&# is a myth , and blathering on about how it’s not really free, because you have to hire a geek to install it, and maintain it, and blah blah blah. Problem solved.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 8, 2007

They struggle mightily with software, no matter whether it’s free/open source or proprietary, shrink-wrapped or custom-built, on their desktops or web-hosted, which they generally spend extraordinary amounts of time and/or money on. Asking, before implementing a new technology – what problem is really attempting to be solved?

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 3, 2012

It's part of what is often called the "Reptilian Brain" because it's very primitive, and has been around for a long time. And, if you define the mind as what happens in the neocortex, it's true, fear is most definitely a mind-killer for good reason - we don't want to have to spend time thinking when being chased by a lion, tiger or bear.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 3, 2012

It's part of what is often called the "Reptilian Brain" because it's very primitive, and has been around for a long time. And, if you define the mind as what happens in the neocortex, it's true, fear is most definitely a mind-killer for good reason - we don't want to have to spend time thinking when being chased by a lion, tiger or bear.

Brain 100

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 19, 2006

So if you are a hardware geek, expect to pay MS every other time you get a new motherboard. So you’d still have the same problem. So if you are a hardware geek, expect to pay MS every other time you get a new motherboard Is this referring to activation? Get Ubuntu , and have done already. If so, this is FUD.

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