working at the princeton university office of jstor over the next two weeks (ordinarily i am in ann arbor, mi), as one of the technical staff here is on paternity leave, leaving just one person to handle the ranch here. there are a lot of things that i will do while here: they are largely similar to what i do at the ann arbor office, but for the benefit of a different group of people, with a different set of wants and desires, proclivities and knowledge. that the two offices are in frequent communication (and i mean frequent, i'll warrant that one phone call or another is always open between the two locations during business hours) doesn't change that the two offices differ greatly.

does the location of a programmer, and the location of the audience of a programmer change what gets designed and implemented? does the OSS developer/documentarian/advocate differ region to region in culture and approach? it is a very connected community, does that stop it from being diverse? i think not...

jstor uses a lot of oss and oss-ish equipage:

• apache to serve the public and the staff in many different ways
• perl, natch, for some web stuff and lots of data processing
• modules of perl from all walks of module-hood
• packages of java from all walks of package-hood
• a glorious jobbie called TtH for latex to html

i don't think we are typical for a non-profit whose activity is completely on the internet... or perhaps we are? what non-profits are there, the activities of which are completely on the internet?