Blogging Roller

Dave Johnson on social software, open source and Java

Above: a random selection of photos from my Flickr photo-stream.

Tuesday Oct 15, 2002

1993.

What was I doing in 1993? That the year that my short stint as an independent GIS consultant came to an end. In December 1992, my wife Andi and I returned from our year and a half in Jamaica where I had been working as a GRASS GIS consultant. We moved to my hometown Chapel Hill, NC and I was hoping that I could continue working there as an independent consultant.

Before I left Jamaica, I landed a contract with the Open GIS Foundation and the Univ. of California Berkeley to develop a X-Windows based raster editor for GRASS. I wanted to find more work like that, but I just didn't have the contacts needed to continue consulting on my own. By July 1993, I had accepted a great job with the GIS group at NYNEX Science and Technology (now part of Verizon) in White Plains, NY.

After writing this up, I was browsing the pages for Berkeley's REGIS program and learned some sad news. The kind person who I worked for at Berkeley and who offered me a job there back in 1993, Kenn Gardels, passed away in 1999 at the age of 44.

inluminent.com.

Mr. Inluminent certainly has a winning approach to the "is my blog hot or not" competition. I learned from my referrer logs that he enjoyed the sexy image that accompanied my Dave on Software post.

RSS broken for way too long.

There was a double-escaping problem in Roller's RSS feed that prevented all links and lots of other HTML from working in AmphetaDesk, Aggie, and probably other aggregators as well. For some odd reason, Radio handled it fine so I never noticed the problem. The problem is fixed now on this site, and in the upcoming Roller 0.9.6 release.