Prompted by a class I'm taking, I decided to try running Python from Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL; actually, WSL2 to be specific). Installing Python in Ubuntu on Windows was relatively easy, though I did run into a couple of little problems with running poetry. Bigger challenge: running graphical user interfaces (GUIs) from WSL. Here are some quick notes from my experience.

"Reacting to religious fanaticism and the challenges of advancing and sustaining a more equitable civilization, a global interfaith movement has sprung from the grassroots of religion and spirituality. InterfaithNews.Net (INN) seeks to chronicle this movement by focusing primarily on positive interfaith and religious news, events, and resources."

That was the mission of a little newsletter and website that Joel Beversluis and I started, with support from the North American Interfaith Network (NAIN) and the United Religions Initiative (URI), in 2002. Would that I could remember where he and I first met; perhaps at the URI North America summit of 2001 in Salt Lake City. Regardless, our time of collaboration was all too short.

Goal: setup PowerShell Core and .NET for development in Ubuntu running in Windows subsystem for Linux (WSL). And a few other tools.

Motivation: porting PowerShell scripts for .NET development on Linux, thus enabling more programmers to develop on a certain codebase and enabling use of Linux-based containers for continuous integration and testing.

Author Neal Stephenson, in his essay "In the Beginning... Was the Command Line," memorably compares our graphical user interfaces to Disney theme parks: "It seems as if a hell of a lot might be being glossed over, as if Disney World might be putting one over on us, and possibly getting away with all kinds of buried assumptions and muddled thinking. And this is precisely the same as what is lost in the transition from the command line interface to the GUI. (p52)

With new programmers whose experience has been entirely mediated through an

IDE like Visual Studio or Eclipse, I have sometimes wondered if they are understanding the "buried assumptions" and suffering from "muddled thinking" due to their lack of understanding of the basic command line operations that underlie the automation provided in the IDE. I still recall when I was that young developer, who had started with nothing but the command line, and realized that Visual Studio had crippled my ability to know how to build and test .NET Framework solutions (setting up an automated build process in Cruise Control helped cure me of that).

"Infrastructure as Code", or IaC if you prefer TLAs, is the practice of configuring infrastructure components in text files instead of clicking around in a user interface. Last year I wrote a few detailed articles on IaC with TeamCity (1, 2, 3). Today I want take a step back and briefly address the topic more broadly, particularly with respect to continuous integration (CI) and delivery (CD): the process of automating software compilation, testing, quality checks, packaging, deployment, and more.

‘Ed-Fi is open’: thus the Ed-Fi Alliance announced its transition from a proprietary license to the open source Apache License, version 2.0, in April, 2020 (FAQ). Moving to an open source license is a clear commitment to transparency: anyone can see the source code, and the user community knows that their right to use that code can never be revoked. But this change is about more than just words: as the list of contributions below demonstrates, embracing open source is also about participation.

In this second year of #edfiopensource we are asking ourselves – and the community – what comes next? What can we do, together, to unlock further innovation and deliver more tools that make use of student data in new, practical, and transformative ways?

Continue reading on wwww.ed-fi.org...

It looks like a beautiful morning in Austin, Texas, from the comfort of my feeder-facing position on the couch. Later in the afternoon I will get out and enjoy it on my afternoon walk with All Things Considered. As I write these lines a bully has been at work: a Yellow-Rumped Warbler (Myrtle) has been chasing the other birds away. Thankfully this greedy marauder was absent for most of the morning, as I read portions of Dr. J. Drew Lanham's The Home Place, Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature.

Are algorithms doomed to be racist and harmful, or is there a legitimate role for them in a just and equitable society?

Algorithms have been causing disproportionate harm to low- and middle-income individuals, especially people of color, since long before this current age of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Two cases in point: neighborhood redlining and credit scores. While residential redlining was a deliberately racist anti-black practice [1], FICO-based credit scoring does not appear to have been created from a racist motive. By amplifying and codifying existing inequities, however, the credit score can easily become another tool for racial oppression [2].

Still, with appropriate measures in place, and a bit of pragmatic optimism, perhaps we can find ways to achieve the scalability/impartiality goals of algorithms while upholding true equity and justice.

Advances in the availability and breadth of data over the past few decades have enabled the rapid and unregulated deployment of statistical algorithms that aim to predict and thereby influence the course of human behavior. Most are designed to promote the corporate bottom line, not the welfare of the people. Those that aim to promote the common good run the danger of straying into authoritarian suppression of freedoms. Regardless of intention, these algorithms often reinforce existing social inequities or present a double-edged sword, with potential for positive use weighed against potential for misuse.

Last month my manager asked me about changing our naming convention for the primary "source of truth" in source code management: from "master" to… well, anything but "master." I admit to initial hesitancy. I needed to think about it. After all, it seems like the name derives from the multimedia concept of a "master copy." It's not like the terribly-named "master-slave" software and hardware patterns. Or is it?