Jon Jensen

I live in Provo, Utah and work at End Point Dev on various Internet-related projects: web applications, databases, e-commerce, scalability, system administration, and security, and occasionally, Android app development. I’m a radio amateur (“ham”) with call sign KG7TXN.

I write on the End Point blog and Somusing, blog of my wife, Erin.

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

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encrypt messages to me using PGP/GnuPG with my current public keys (2019 ed25519 ECC key, 2012 4096-bit RSA key), which superseded my historical keys (1998 DSA key, 1994 RSA key).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

…twentieth century institutions were caught in savage crossfire between uncritical lovers and unloving critics. On the one side, those who loved their institutions tended to smother them in an embrace of death, loving their rigidities more than their promise, shielding them from life-giving criticism. On the other side, there arose a breed of critics without love, skilled in demolition but untutored in the arts by which human institutions are nurtured and strengthened and made to flourish.

Between the two, the institutions perished.

…love without criticism brings stagnation, and criticism without love brings destruction.

… men must be discriminating appraisers of their society, knowing coolly and precisely what it is about the society that thwarts or limits them and therefore needs modification. And so must they be discriminating protectors of their institutions, preserving those features that nourish and strengthen them and make them more free. To fit themselves for such tasks, they must be sufficiently serious to study their institutions, sufficiently dedicated to become expert in the art of modifying them.

—John W. Gardner, http://www.patheos.com/blogs/kiwimormon/2015/04/uncritical-lovers-mormonisms-problem-children/

quotation #689 of collection of 823 · another random quotation

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.

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!

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.