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John Goerzen

http://twitter.com/jgoerzen


Areas of Expertise:
  • Linux
  • programming
  • software development
  • version control
  • git
  • darcs
  • Haskell
  • Python
  • shell
  • TCP/IP
  • networking
  • storage
  • consulting
  • speaking
  • programming
  • training
  • writing

Biography

John Goerzen is an American hacker and author. He has written a number of real-world Haskell libraries and applications, including the HDBC database interface, the ConfigFile configuration file interface, a podcast downloader, and various other libraries relating to networks, parsing, logging, and POSIX code. John has been a developer for the Debian GNU/Linux operating system project for over 10 years and maintains numerous Haskell libraries and code for Debian. He also served as President of Software in the Public Interest, Inc., the legal parent organization of Debian. John lives in rural Kansas with his wife and son, where he enjoys photography and geocaching.

Books

Real World Haskell Real World Haskell
by Bryan O'Sullivan , Donald Bruce Stewart , John Goerzen
November 2008
Print: $49.99
Ebook: $39.99
Bundle: $64.99
starstarstarstarstar (5)
(Read Reviews)

Blog

John's blog posts are hosted at:
http://changelog.complete.org/

Review: Google Voice

June 28 2009

I got my Google Voice invitation over the weekend, and thought I’d share a bit about what it does and how well it works. The Basics The idea about Google Voice (formerly GrandCentral, which Google acquired) is this: lots of us have more than one phone, and it would be nice to… read more

Tagging music… No, not like that

June 19 2009

I’m thinking it would be great to be able to assign arbitrary tags to my music, like I do to my photos. For instance, I might tag the finale to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony like this: symphony beethoven loud choir german I can’t figure out how to Google for this sort of feature… read more

Jacob and Music

June 17 2009

Jacob has been getting into music lately. He really likes our digital piano (an oldish 88-key Roland model, complete with integrated floppy drive). He likes playing it a bit, but he likes experimenting with it more. It has some features where it can generate a beat or an accompanying tune in… read more

Review: Roku SoundBridge Radio

June 11 2009

On the advice of several comments here, I bought a Roku SoundBridge Radio as a birthday gift for Terah. It arrived today, so here’s a first impressions review. The Hardware It’s very nice. A touch bigger than I expected, but still quite small. There’s a subwoofer aimed up at the back of it,… read more

More Bumps on the Music Player Quest

June 10 2009

So a few days ago, I wrote about my failure to find a good music player. Since then, I’ve made some discoveries. Amarok Version 1.4 can’t sort an iPod’s library by genre. Oh, and any version less than 2.x isn’t supported upstream anymore. Version 2 has mysteriously lost: the ability to see… read more

The Quest For A Decent Music Player

June 08 2009

So I have an iPod, and I have several PCs. I have the 60GB iPod, which is enough to hold my entire music collection. I want to have my music there, and on the PCs, and sync it all together: if I rate something 4 stars one place, rate it… read more

Buying a SoundBridge Radio

June 06 2009

A day or two ago, I asked for suggestions for a tabletop MP3 player. I got lots of good ideas — thanks! The two most common were the Roku SoundBridge Radio and the Nokia N800. I’ve ordered the SoundBridgeRadio. I spent some time looking over its website, and it really impressed… read more

Looking for tabletop MP3 player

June 03 2009

We’re looking for an MP3 player for our kitchen. Ideally, it would be a standalone device that can browse and play music from our server using Wifi. It should have its own speakers and a reasonably small footprint. If it has an FM tuner, that’s a plus too. I’ve tried searching,… read more

Free Software enforcing DRM?!

May 31 2009

So I just recently switched to KDE 4 (still using it with xmonad, of course) and I just now ran into my first really big annoyance. I just downloaded a PDF, and tried to copy and paste a bit of text from it. I used the selection tool, and Okular (KDE’s… read more

Review: In The Beginning. . . Was The Command Line

May 23 2009

A few dud universes can really clutter up your basement. - Neal Stephenson, “In The Beginning. . . was the Command Line” What a fun read. It’s about technology, sure, but more about culture. Neal takes a good look at operating systems, why we get emotionally involved with them, and why Windows… read more

Sleeping

May 22 2009

Two nights ago, Jacob had been really resisting going to bed, despite the fact that he was really, really sleepy. I walked in to his room and found him literally sleeping standing up. He was standing on the floor, with his head resting on the couch. I picked him up… read more

A Few Snippets of Jacob

May 13 2009

It’s been awhile since I posted some Jacob updates. He’s 2.5 years old now. So here we go! Here’s what I think A recent conversation after Jacob had been misbehaving. John: I think we should have some consequences for that. Terah: Do you think he should have time out? Jacob, eavesdropping: I THINK NOT! He managed… read more

We Are Plains People, And Our Music Has Tornadoes

April 27 2009

There’s little that scares Kansans more than a good tornado. And, truth be told, there’s little that excites us more than a good tornado, either. After all, we know it’s going to be good for a story. Here on the plains, it is easy to remember how powerful nature really is.… read more

Two Things I Don’t Understand About Facebook

April 14 2009

Item #1 Say you want to do something like take a quiz to tell you what Star Wars character you are, and have to result posted to your wall. It would make sense for Facebook to prompt you for authorization for the app to make a one-time post to your wall. But… read more

Flowers, Music, and Grandparents

April 12 2009

Flowers I’ve written a lot lately about my Grandma Klassen, who passed away this week. But I’m going to start this post about my Grandma Goerzen. She died when I was just an infant. I never knew her, but as the years pass, it seems that I remember her better and better. After… read more