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messages to me using PGP/GnuPG with my current public keys (2019 ed25519 ECC key, 2012 4096-bit RSA key), which superseded my historical keys (1998 DSA key, 1994 RSA key).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

[quotation #867 of collection of 885 · previous · next · another random quotation]

JFF: So there’s value in borrowing wisdom, but you do have to go out there and roll up your sleeves and be willing to try things and take positions. … one of the things that [Dr. David Schnarch] said to me was, take a position. Because sometimes with clients I would get stuck between, “It could be this or it could be that, and I don’t want to get it wrong.” And so he was saying, you are limiting your effectiveness by not asserting a choice. Take the risk of going with what you most think, because only if you take a position can you find out the flaws in your position. If you straddle, you never move. And so that’s very helpful. You take the position and if it’s right, you quickly can feel that it’s right. And if it’s wrong, it reveals itself to you, so you can self-correct and take a clear position or a better position.

JM: So I have to be willing to be wrong is what you’re saying?

JFF: That’s right. And that’s faith, and also humility. My ego is not as important as me sorting out what is true and best and I’m willing to be wrong in the effort to do it. That’s why perfectionism is a false positive. It’s like a false virtue because…

JM: Because there’s no progression in it.

—Jennifer Finlayson-Fife and Jody Moore, “Developing Spiritual Maturity”, 26 July 2021, https://finlayson-fife.com/blog/post/developing-spiritual-maturity/

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.