Yesterday was the Jewish Holy Day of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, a day of remembrance, repentance, confession and fasting. It is unique in that it is almost universally observed, even by the most secular of Jews for whom it might be the only day of the year that they attend a service.
Central to Yom Kippur is the Al Chet prayer where we are asked to consider the sins we have committed intentionally or unintentionally, what are our sins of commission and our sins of omission and what have we done inadvertently by doing nothing at all.
There is nothing new about Open Source. We might like to think that it is a concept introduced in the last 50 years but in fact the origins of sharing knowledge date back to some of the oldest recordings of written works.
Doing some reading recently I came across the following text translated from a compilation of the ethical teachings and maxims (Pirkei Avot) of the Rabbis (jewish teachers) written down almost 2000 years ago.
We live in a blame culture. We are always looking for someone to blame whenever a situation occurs. We are in control of so much of our lives and yet instead of taking control and changing what we can change we expect someone else to do it for us. The reality is that it isn't someone else's fault - it is mine. And when I say mine I mean yours.
Every time we face an issue instead of looking at someone else to blame we should be looking at ourselves and saying - it's all my fault.
This blog is in English and it will never be available in any other language as I just don't have the skills to translate it myself. I am definitely not going to install some plugin to add automated translations as I believe that will give a very poor translation.
You might decide to add that to your site but I always feel that offering up no translation is better than a bad translation. On many sites the language switcher does not even indicate that it is a machine translation and what kind of impression does a bad translation create for your readers. So it is something that I have never done on any site I have been involved with.
Walking down the street in a leafy suburb of a town in northern England I stumble across a large bunch of keys on the street. I don't know whose keys they are as there is no handy name tag or address but there is clearly a chance that they will open the lock of one of the doors in one of the houses on this street.
I can't resist the temptation to see which door these keys will unlock and what goodies I can find inside. I'm an inquisitive person, I'm not a thief looking for riches, I'm just a nosey person looking for the thrill of adventure and a good story to tell in the bar.
I am not a strong swimmer OR remotely fit and I thought I should do something about that. The venue for J and Beyond has a great swimming pool so encourage me to stop talking and get in that pool by sponsoring me, please.
I will be raising money for Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity (GOSHCC) in London by swimming 1km. That might not seem a lot to some of you but as I don't think I have swum more than 25 metres for over 20 years it's a heck of a long way for me.
It seems to be a universal truth that good, or even great, web hosts go bad.
Are you prepared for that? Do you have a disaster plan in place so that you can easily move to a new host? What happens if they stop replying to emails or tickets or worse still disappear from the net.
Don't put all your eggs in one basket.
For me open source is not just about the software it's about community and community is not just about people working together it's about sharing. And it's not just about sharing code, it should also be about sharing experiences, successes and failures.
The more open and transparent we are when we share the better for everyone. For me life isn't a competition it's an event and what better way to have a successful event than to learn and share from and with each other.
A little over 2 years ago I wrote a blog post about using a pen instead of the keyboard.
Today I am writing this blog post not with a pen, not with a keyboard, and almost without the use of a mouse.
A few weeks ago the nice people at Nuance sent me an evaluation copy of Dragon Dictate the Mac.
(This entire blog post, without manual corrections, is coming to you via Dragon Dictate.)
