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encrypt messages to me using PGP/GnuPG with my current public keys (2019 ed25519 ECC key, 2012 4096-bit RSA key), which superseded my historical keys (1998 DSA key, 1994 RSA key).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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A novice asked the master: “In the east there is a great tree-structure that men call ’Corporate Headquarters’. It is bloated out of shape with vice-presidents and accountants. It issues a multitude of memos, each saying ’Go, Hence!’ or ’Go, Hither!’ and nobody knows what is meant. Every year new names are put onto the branches, but all to no avail. How can such an unnatural entity exist?”

The master replies: “You perceive this immense structure and are disturbed that it has no rational purpose. Can you not take amusement from its endless gyrations? Do you not enjoy the untroubled ease of programming beneath its sheltering branches? Why are you bothered by its uselessness?”

—Geoffrey James, “The Tao of Programming”

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:

I support the Institute for Justice, litigators for liberty. They fight bad policing, civil forfeiture, occupational licensing cartels, First Amendment infringement, eminent domain abuse, and educational choice limits.
Partners In Health does excellent, important work. Erin and I learned of it through the book Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder (see Erin’s review of it).
The Electronic Frontier Foundation works to preserve freedoms in the electronic world.

Religion

Links about religion:

I’m a Christian and an active member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also known as LDS and Mormon).
I maintain the website for alumni of the LDS Germany Leipzig/Dresden Mission. (See mission.net for other missions’ sites.)
Olivet prophecy harmony of different accounts in the New Testament (Matthew, Mark, Luke), Joseph Smith—Matthew, and Doctrine & Covenants section 45. See also the 2018 article “Hope deferred? Against the dogma of delay” by N.T. Wright, in Early Christianity, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 37–82.
Excerpts from The Voice of Warning and Instruction to All People by Parley P. Pratt, 1863 ed.
The King Follett Discourse by Joseph Smith

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:

When the Mists Have Cleared Away / Anna Herbert (text), Hans Henry Petersen (music)
Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott (alle 4 Strophen) / Martin Luther, 1529
Though in the Outward Church Below (all 7 verses) / John Newton (1725–1807)

Liberty

I favor limited government involvement in education, as does the Alliance for the Separation of School and State.
The classic 1987 article From Crossbows to Cryptography: Thwarting the State via Technology reminds us that the tools for defending (or infringing on!) freedom change over time.
There’s more to government than “left”, “right”, “Republican”, and “Democrat”. Take the World’s Smallest Political Quiz.

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.