Birch Street Computing -

about me

John M is a Linux fan in Lowell, MA.

I work at at a company writing software. I fool around with Free and Open Source software for fun & profit.

I was big into Last.fm and you can still see some of what I listen to there. I can also be found using github and recently sourcehut as well as bitbucket (historically). I don't care for most popular social media sites. If I have an account on one or the other it's probably either old and unused or was created just for tinkering.

promo

Links to things I like, use, or otherwise feel is worth sharing. Things I'd like to see get more popular.

The descent of LXer?

Some time ago, I'm not really sure how long it was, I began to regularly read LXer.com, a linux news site. The stories were focused on linux and they tended to get interesting items before site like slashdot did. Pretty much every story was simply a link offsite. It went into my regular rotation of news sites and my rss reader.

At some point, things began to change. I noticed that there were more "editorials" posted to the site, and stories being written for the site that were not linked somewhere else. Fairly innocuous stuff, but it wasn't long until I noticed that an annoyingly large amount of these stories were little more than meandering political rants. I'm fairly certain that not every problem with the world is brought about via the U.S. Government colluding with Microsoft.

But that's kind of excusable, the linux community is a pretty diverse set of people, and everyone's entitled to their opinion. Besides, my internal crapfilter can deal with it. That is, as long as there's not too much. What's really been bugging me lately is that they've started posting press releases, a couple of which I couldn't figure out what they had to do with linux whatsoever. And the number of editorials seems to have grown by leaps and bounds.

I guess the overall purpose of my little rant is to state that I'm dissappointed that the overall quality of that site seems to have slipped. If I wanted a kooky semi-linux oriented site I already read slashdot. ;-)

Every blog page or article on this site is available under the CC-BY-SA license unless otherwise noted.