Portrait photo of Jon Jensen

Jon C. Jensen

I live in Provo, Utah and work with Internet-related projects: web applications, databases, scalability, system administration, and security, and in the past, ecommerce and Android app development. I’m a radio amateur (“ham”) with call sign KG7TXN.

I sometimes write on Somusing, the blog of my wife, Erin, and wrote a lot on the End Point blog when I worked there.

Other places to find me on the web: LinkedIn Twitter Facebook Instagram

My email address is jon@swelter.net — since 1999! You may encrypt messages to me using PGP/GnuPG with my current public keys (2019 ed25519 ECC key, 2012 4096-bit RSA key), which superseded my historical keys (1998 DSA key, 1994 RSA key).

A quotation

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It sometimes seems that we live as if we wondered when life was going to begin. It isn’t always clear just what we are waiting for, but some of us sometimes persist in waiting so long that life slips by—finding us still waiting for something that has been going on all the time.

There are fathers waiting for a better time to become acquainted with their sons—perhaps until other obligations are less demanding. But one of these days these sons are going to be grown and gone, and the best years for knowing them, for enjoying them, for teaching, and for understanding them, may also be gone. There are mothers who at their earliest convenience sincerely intend to become closer to their daughters—who are going to be more companionable. But time passes, distance widens, and children grow up and away. There are old friends who are going to enjoy each other a little more—but the years move on. There are husbands and wives who are going to be more understanding, more considerate. But time alone does not draw people closer. There are men who are going to give up bad habits; there are people who are going to eat more wisely; there are those who are going to live within their means—sometime soon. There are those who are going to take more interest in their government, be more active in service and civic activities. But when?

There is no reason to doubt all such good intentions—but when in the world are we going to begin to live as if we understood that this is life? This is our time, our day, our generation. Heaven and the hereafter will have its own opportunities and obligations. This is the life in which the work of this life is to be done. Today is as much a part of eternity as was any day a thousand years ago or as will be any day a thousand years hence. This is it—whether we are thrilled or disappointed, busy or bored! This is life—and it is passing. What are we waiting for?

—Richard L. Evans, Oct. 12, 1947, in Lloyd D. Newell, comp., Messages from Music and the Spoken Word (2003), 60–61

Travel notes

A map of the route my son & I took on our 2019 trip to Armenia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova: Jon and Seth itinerary in June 2019.

An interactive map of various churches we visited in north England in 2013, with links to our blog posts and photos about each: Churches in north England, 2013.

Work talks

Presentation slides from talks I have given at technical conferences and company-wide meetings are available.

Free software

I support free software and open source. Don’t be a sharecropper!

I am on GitHub as jonjensen and have contributed to projects including PostgreSQL, Interchange, DevCamps, and Bucardo. I also keep old miscellaneous scripts around.

Other free software I work most often with: awesome, alacritty, kitty, tmux, Screen, zsh, bash, Firefox, Chromium, Vim, Git, Rust, Go, Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, PostgreSQL, Linux (mostly Red Hat/CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian), Android, OpenBSD, OpenSSH, Apache httpd, nginx, Postfix, Dovecot, Pine (now Alpine), Signal, GnuPG, Standard Notes, Zulip, MediaWiki, VLC, rsync, ripgrep, mtr, and Nmap, just as a sampling. Thanks to all free software developers for your time and efforts!

Once upon a time I created some RPM packages of free software for use on Fedora Linux. The source RPMs may still prove useful for building on a newer version.

Human languages

Some Unicode things I keep handy:

Language family maps for reference:

My novice linguistics research: I wrote a paper for Linguistics 490 (senior seminar) taught by John Robertson, winter semester 1998 at Brigham Young University. It examines how Hebrew verb patterns (binyanim) may be semantically grouped using C.S. Peirce’s universal categories. The paper: Hebrew Verb Pattern Tendencies Clarified by Peirce’s Universal Categories (8.5″ x 11″). Reference chart: Roots in various binyanim chart (11″ x 17″).

Writing

Some of my free verse:

Many years ago, a tree fell on our car, so I wrote up the story to share.

Good causes

A few organizations I support:

Religion

Links about religion:

Johann Sebastian Bach composed some of my favorite music. See these freely redistributable Bach sheet music PDFs and the James Kibbie complete Bach organ works recordings. Mutopia collects freely usable music scores. Thanks to those who typeset the music and gave it away!

Hymns:

Liberty

Miscellany

mod.zayda.net is a collection of old Amiga-era music “modules”, including the whole U4ia and F8 collection by Jim Young, mostly created on his Amiga.

End communication.