more snow than usual.
I am CTO emeritus (so to speak) of AllAfrica. I helped to found AllAfrica in 1999, and remain a board member. For six years, I worked mostly from the Washington DC office, building AllAfrica's technology infrastructure and platform, managing a wonderful group of folks, running AllAfrica's spin-out technology consulting division, and venue-hopping to advocate that everyone doing large-scale web development -- but particulary public- and civil-sector organizations -- use mainly Free and Open Source Software.
The software infrastructure that runs AllAfrica is mostly purpose-built. We rely extensively on Linux, Apache, Perl, mod_perl, HTML::Mason -- even some emacs Lisp in a few dark corners. The core platform that handles AllAfrica's content, commerce and user stuff has evolved into a generalized web middleware platform called XML::Comma.
During two election cycles in the United States I managed technology projects for political organizations. In 2001 and 2002, we constructed a new infra (inter-, intra-) structure for the Democratic National Committee. In 2004, we built a media-monitoring operation from the ground up for Media Matters for America.
Once upon a time I did lots of hardware development, mostly small (and experimental) networked devices like this bouncy ball with a computer embedded in it, and these computational tiles that communicate by ir and host a tiny java virtual machine. (Well, not really a java virtual machine, but a byte-code interpreter that could run much-munged class files.) And here are some mobile-code simulations that Nelson Minar and I did together.
If you're following links from around the web (or the blogosphere), you may also be looking for the mod_proxy header-manipulation patches I wrote long ago, or my same-day summary of the Eldred v Ashcroft supreme court oral argument.
The dog answers email to thelma at allafrica dot com. The car isn't mine, so I don't know its address.
kwindla at allafrica dot com
Last modified: Thu Aug 17 08:34:35 PST 2006