Oh, I still have this thing.  I need to use it more.

For that matter, I am like, way behind in reading blogs around the Internet.  Oh, dear.  And I don’t think that I am anywhere close to being able to actually take the time that’s necessary to catch up.  Moving into a house has taken up more time and money for the initial setup than I imagined it ever would.  Conceptually, it seems so simple: buy house, move stuff, done.  Of course, it never works that way.

I have my computer workstation setup, and usable, for the first time in almost (over?) a half a year.  Oh it’s nice to be back on zest.  Of course, I need to actually update all of the contents of its hard drive being that I haven’t used it in half a year, so I’m busy getting old stuff shoved onto BD-R discs in case I need to use the stuff at some future date and then I am going to wipe the system clean for the first time in probably two or three years and do a fully clean install of Ubuntu.  I am hoping that it will fix any of the lingering issues that I have with the sound system—I can’t believe that it’s 2010 and we still can’t do 5.1 channel surround correctly!  I have the 5 channels, but not the .1!  Well, I have the .1, but with next to no volume; it might as well not be transmitting any signal to the LFE channel for the subwoofer, because in order to hear the sub at all I have to make the other speakers painfully loud.

Perhaps the biggest thing I have missed about not being able to have a proper workstation setup is the chair.  No, the keyboard at a comfortable height, for which my wrists will (I hope!) be grateful.  Or maybe it’s the regular use of two monitors at the same time on the same system.  Hell, I don’t know what the biggest thing is.  Maybe it’s that I have a roomy system again.  Or maybe the fact that I can now get back into a groove where I can keep references on a screen while I am working with programming and so forth.  There’s nothing I hate more than having to refer to some silly reference and have to flip full-screen windows or virtual desktops to do it—that’s something that two monitors makes very easy, because then I can work in one and have reference information in another.  Too bad I don’t have room for three monitors, because I’d totally use all three of them.

I jokingly mentioned to a friend of mine on the phone today that I have four display ports on the back of my computer, and I have four monitors laying around, maybe I should try to use them all… but I know that (for the short time that I had 3 monitors, anyway) that it was a joy to use and improved my ability to work much like when I originally went from one monitor to two monitors.  I wonder, seriously: what’s the largest number of monitors that makes sense for productivity?

Well, anyway.  I have to wrap things up and get to bed.  It’s nice to type for a bit, though, even if I have not written frequently enough that it’s no longer likely that there’s anyone left to read it.

So, we have finally acquired a house. This is awesome. Though, we haven’t even had it for 24 hours and I have already put (accidentally!) a couple of holes in the wall, because when I changed the locks I accidentally put the screws for the catch plate in just ever-so-slightly crooked, and the design of the wall there did not give me much room for error. Damnit. Oh, well. We’ll fix that tomorrow, probably.

Tomorrow’s list: get one more lock set installed (we forgot a door—how did we do that‽) and start getting some of the minor things that we can do taken care of, such as replacing the ancient thermostat that is in there with a more accurate and efficient digital one which is programmable, fixing the stupid holes I made today, and trying to take an inventory of all the minor repairs that we are looking at having to do over the next year. Nothing there that is awful or time-critical, of course, but little annoying things, like a couple of the cracks that someone managed to put in the floor, replace various pieces of trim that have been broken, or fill in little holes here and there to even things out. Oh, and a toilet seat, three 9 volt batteries, and… something else I am forgetting.

Oh, well. Time for bed.

Well, aside from the fact that it is a language that is awfully convenient for writing Web-based applications, anyway? It is sometimes really annoying.

One of those situations where it is really annoying is when trying to do things that ought to be really simple. For example, when writing an accessor function for a boolean value, one would expect to be able to just do it, right? But because PHP isn’t anywhere close to a strongly, statically typed language, this is impossible to do simply. The programmer must be burdened with checking the types, or hope that the user will never make a mistake.

Some days I wonder why I’m not writing Web application software in C using SCGI…

Recently on a mailing list of which I am a member, the following comment was posted:

We pay cash at restaurants especially ones of certain
nationalities.

The context of this quote is a discussion on credit/debit card usage, and this statement came at the tail end of how care must be taken to ensure that one is not subjected to fraudulent charges (nevermind the fact that banks in the U.S. mostly do zero-liability these days). This has spawned a rather heated discussion, which apparently resulted in the person who made that comment leaving the mailing list.  The whole idea that we continue to change our behavior depending on the ethnicity of the person(s) we are around is nothing short of infuriating. It is like we fail to understand that qualities like honesty and trustworthiness are markers of an individual.

What does the above statement say? It says that the poster of that statement feels that he cannot trust “certain nationalities”. This person later made the claim that it was sad that people could find racism in nearly any remark—but the thing is, it is right there, not even hidden from view. It’s blatant.

Even worse, when the poster of the comment above was called out on it, most of the people on the mailing list jumped to this person’s aid to defend them. Honestly, I do not know what is worse: the fact that this person said this in the first place, or the fact that the majority of the mailing list’s members rallied up on the side of that person. Quite possibly, I think the latter, because that shows that we still have in society the notion that racism is somehow acceptable, and that the more veiled or subtle it is, the more okay and polite it is. I find that downright offensive.

It is certainly enough to make me consider dropping the mailing list and participation in the group altogether. It is difficult to be in a group when you cannot even look at its members—your peers—with respect, even if they are some of the smartest minds you know in a particular field. Why be part of it at all?

So for the past couple of weeks I have been doing work at a client’s place of business. This client—like many other small and medium-sized businesses—uses Windows on all of their desktop systems. They have a couple of server boxes that are running GNU/Linux servers, but they are not running GNU/Linux on the desktop at this point in time.

So, this is a pretty simple-sounding network, yes? It should be—it is just a handful of computer systems. However, there is a problem—a pretty large one, I think. There is very little in the way of either policy or convention on the network. Some users use their documents directory for storing their documents, others store their documents on their desktop, others somewhere differently altogether on the C drive, others on a network share in a public storage space. There are different versions of software on the various machines, more-or-less updated when someone thinks about it, I think.

This is a perfect scenario which shows why a business network should be centrally managed in some form. Note that I am not saying that each machine should be a bit-for-bit mirror image of the one next to it, though that is certainly a possibility. I think that people should be able to use their own choice of things like email client or Web browser software, because everyone is different. But when you have different client applications fulfilling a role on the individual workstations, you have to take a centralized approach to ensuring that things like the email is all backed up.

Furthermore, if you don’t take a centralized approach to backing up such data, it is very difficult to centralize the network storage. Think about adding a domain controller (that is Windows speak for a central server which handles authentication and authorization, as well as file and printer sharing and things like roaming profiles) to such a network. I expect that with multi-gigabyte mail files, things will be very slow at first—and that likely the only fix for them that is going to be viable in the long term is to centralize more infrastructure.

I am too tired to expand more on my thoughts on what I have learned and where it is heading, but the Reader’s Digest version of the point reads something like this: If you are a small to medium sized business, make sure that you have someone who is competent in both system and network administration, and make sure that they are a part of your business from day one. Like writing software, building up a technical infrastructure without careful thought and design is hazardous and comes with many hidden and unpredictable costs. It is best to head those things off right from the start; to delay only amplifies the cost of fixing the underlying problems and puts oneself in the position where fixing one issue can have a domino-like effect and create more new problems.

For my current situation, I think I am going to have to seriously re-think how this whole setup is done. What I do not yet know is how to quickly and efficiently bring things into shape. A bit of training and education may be required, and certainly the removal of a lot of unnecessarily-granted privileges on the workstations. That, too, should be something caught early-on: do not let every person in a business run with administrator privilege, unless they are an administrator (and even they should only run with administrator privilege when they are actually doing something that requires that privilege). If everyone is an administrator, there is little to no control on how things are done in a network, and it can get messy.

I have a lot more reading to do, as well.

Well, anyway, it is way past my bedtime.  Time for sleep.

Every now and again, I come back to looking at device drivers and driver-writing, and I wonder why there is not some common interface for device drivers. What would the world be like if we could write a device driver for Linux, and be able to use it on FreeBSD without modification? There was a project called the Uniform Driver Interface, which aimed to create a common specification (both API and ABI) for drivers such that they could be used portably between operating systems. In other words, a device manufacturer could create a device (say, a SATA chipset) once, and it could then be used by Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Haiku, Windows, OS X, or any other operating system that chose to implement the UDI specification (or, honestly, any generic, OS-independent driver specification).

The Free Software Foundation objected to UDI for various reasons. Mostly, I think, it was because they were afraid that people who are not them would choose to use drivers that were non-free. As I’ve written about before here, there are people who think that forcing people to use free software is somehow freedom—and I will not go into it in any great depth here, because I have done that in the past. Suffice it to say that forcing anything is not freedom; it cannot be freedom. So, the Free Software Foundation, I think, was really afraid that they would have to do more work to be able to stick to their own requirement of using 100% free software on their own computer systems. (And hey, Roy, if you’re reading—I’m not saying that the FSF is wrong, and I’m not putting myself in a position opposite of that of the FSF. I suspect you think so anyway, but hey, I just figured I would point that out.)

Even if the free software operating systems did not adopt the UDI specification, why didn’t proprietary operating systems? This is perhaps the most puzzling thing to me. It seems that in this event, none of the operating systems—free or proprietary—did what would have made sense. After all, even if only Apple and Microsoft adopted a common device driver specification, that would save a lot of time, effort, and improve user experience all the way around. Apple users would be able to use all the hardware that Microsoft users could use—and the inverse would also be true. The amount of time that device driver authors would have to spend writing and debugging driver code would go way down—free software driver authors would be able to write a driver once, for example, and all systems (including free software systems that chose to support the specification) would benefit.

I could see an objection of a driver specification that was binary-only. However, UDI was not—it mandated an ABI so that drivers that are built for a particular platform were binary-compatible with operating systems on the same platform, but it also mandated an API, so that drivers would be source compatible to any operating system that implemented the specification, on any platform. That by itself would seem to me to be positive motivation to hardware manufacturers to release the source code to drivers so that they can support operating systems that are on platforms that do not exist yet, or have not been considered (or have been considered to be nonviable or unsupported platforms).

So, I have to wonder why a common device driver specification was never implemented in various operating systems. It would seem to be a common sense thing, especially given that there are so many operating systems. It would make the coexistence of operating systems a lot easier, and it would promote choice. It might encourage bits of proprietary code on free software operating systems, but it would also enable people to drop the excuse that “free operating system x does not support device y”, and would as a result potentially increase the number of free software programs and operating systems in use, even if there is a minor cost in terms of certain drivers. And those drivers could always be replaced—a common driver specification would make it easier to understand the structure of drivers generally, and make it easier for lawful, clean-room reverse engineering to be done on those drivers.

Imagine, for example, if drivers for graphics cards, TV tuner cards, video and audio encoding/decoding cards, modems, storage chipsets, motherboard chipsets, USB chipsets, IEEE-1394 chipsets, graphics tablet devices, touch screens, debugging interfaces, network devices, and so forth were all written to a common specification, it would reduce the amount of code which needed testing. It would increase user choice in both hardware and operating systems—something which I still hold is quite likely the most valuable freedom we have. It would increase reliability, since the users of Windows, OS X, Linux, the various BSD systems, and other, not-so-mainstream operating systems would be able to run the same driver code and collectively supply debugging information and perform testing in a multitude of environments. It would increase security, because then common code that is well-known could be used on all platforms and not just the one it was written for. It would do for device drivers what POSIX has done for user-mode application software. I do not believe that I could be convinced that this would be anything other than a good thing.

Also, it could bring back old operating systems.  Imagine what life could be like, for example, if OS/2 had a “UDI driver” written for it, and it could then take advantage of newer drivers never intended for it. Or any other very old operating system which is no longer supported and could still be useful, for any of a number of reasons…

So back on this topic again today.  I am going to take a look at a few different statements here in this post, and then I’m going to go over them and explain why these statements are or are not correct.  Should you wish to verify any of my information, you’re more than welcome to do so—just make sure you actually know what you’re talking about before you call me “wrong” on this one, or I will absolutely ignore you.  I have other—and more important—things to do than put up with trolls who cannot do basic research (of course, this means that I expect that you know how to use Google and Wikipedia and will do so before writing your responses, but hey, I could be expecting too much).

“You can have freedom without choice.”

That someone could even come up with this one is just amazing to me. Note that this is not an exact quote, but it is the summary of Friday’s topic. For example, this summary comes from the idea that Canonical is bad for considering making mainstream non-free software available for Ubuntu based on user preferences. It does not matter who came up with it, of course, but the important thing is that it be called what it is: patently absurd. The ability to choose is a major part of what freedom—or liberty—is. If you cannot make a choice on a matter, then by definition you do not have freedom in the context of that matter. It is quite simple and self-explanatory. Canonical is seeking to increase freedom here, not take it away. Some people actually want to use non-free software; others may not want to use it, but aren’t aware of alternatives. The latter group of people should have our focus with regard to education (but then we should let them make the choice for themselves!).

Note that I am not one of these people: I would rather use free software because of the liberty it gives me that I have come to expect over the years. But I am not going to tell someone else that they are harming me because they would rather use non-free software that is familiar to them. All I can do is show them that there are free alternatives that exist. I cannot—and I will not—make them use it or make them feel bad for not using it. I may not like proprietary software for a variety of reasons, but I will defend people’s right to use it just as I will defend even a stupid person’s right to spew nonsense by way of speech or written word. In other words, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” or perhaps more appropriately, “I [may] disapprove of what [software you run], but I will defend to the death your right to [run] it.” Even I use a package or two that is proprietary in nature (though it is looking like I will not have to do so for much longer, given the efforts to replace these packages with equivalent free software).

It is worth it to note that by adding non-free software to Ubuntu, the free software that is already there does not change. The mere existence of non-free software within its repositories does not make Ubuntu somehow bad or evil. It would add choices that do not currently exist, and that one such as myself or yourself can certainly opt out of—I most likely would, for the most part, as I do not need to depend on non-free application software, and I only use non-free drivers if I have hardware where anything else is nonviable (and only until there are functional free software drivers). Did you know that Ubuntu has an option in the installer to only install free software? Can you say that for your favorite desktop operating system distribution, whatever that might be?

The response to this idea, then, is that without choice, there is very little—if any, really—freedom. The thing that gives us freedom with free software is that we are able to to download the source code, to review/audit it, to change it to fit our needs or fix a problem, and to share those changes. If we cannot do those things, then it is not free software; see the essential freedoms. But non-free software inside a distribution is not something that should not cause you great consternation even if you are among the most dedicated of freedom advocates, for if you are a true advocate of freedom then by definition you must respect a computer user’s freedom of choice. Remember that we choose to run free software because of the benefits it brings to us; we choose to improve upon free software for much the same reason. Eventually, I think that free software will once again become the norm for computer software, on merit alone, for no other reason than the development, release, and usage of free software is a highly practical solution for many things ranging from library code to application software to complete operating systems. It is worth noting that free content—which is similar in concept to free software, which itself is merely a specific application of freedom itself—also appears to making major headway towards becoming mainstream; it is doing so more quickly than free software is, but there is every reason to believe that free software will follow, for it is already.

An Example

Imagine that you are in a store, because you need some milk for dinner some night. You always get 1 gallon of 2%. But, the store has stopped carrying it, because more people buy whole milk and they were throwing away the 2% milk—demand was low, supply got to be too high, so they just stopped carrying it altogether. You leave the store and head to the next in the same town and you find the same thing there. You have a choice of stores to go to, and you have made the choice to go buy yourself some milk. But there is only one type of milk. You no longer have the choice to buy 2% where you are, and so effectively, your freedom to buy it has been taken away. (Of course, you can make 2% milk from whole milk (and make whole from 2% even, or even butter), but I suspect just as many people want to do that as want to write their own free software that they demand simply must exist, but doesn’t yet).

Now, the point here is that there is more than one freedom in play: the freedom of the store to stock (or not stock) various products, which affects your freedom as a consumer to buy the product you want. In the case of software, and choice, if the software you are running gives you all the choices you want, then it fits your needs. If it does not, then you are not going to be able to use it the way you want. Now you have two choices: you can do the work that it would take to make your desired choice possible, or you can use another system (free or proprietary) that will give you the choice that you want. Many people will choose the latter, especially if they are non-programmers. Though I’ve seen programmers also choose to use proprietary systems for something that they could themselves implement. That is their choice, of course. After all, if you really wanted 2% milk, you would have the same choice: make it yourself, or drive to the next town over which might have it available for you (assuming that there is some in stock and that the stores neighboring towns have not also decided to stop stocking 2% milk).

Ubuntu One: The Reason Behind This

This discussion came up because someone on identi.ca made the claim that Canonical is forcing proprietary software into Ubuntu by way of the Ubuntu One client software. I cannot even begin to state just how woefully incorrect this point of view is. First off: the only thing added to Ubuntu is the ability to connect to Ubuntu One, and the software that was added to Ubuntu do to that is licensed under Version 3 of the GNU General Public License. The claim made in response to that was that Ubuntu One is only partly free software, because the server is somewhere else and has not been released. As we shall soon see, that claim is nonsensical—it depends on an extremely naïve view of how software actually works in order to make sense, really.

So, first things first: Ubuntu One, which was added to Ubuntu 9.04, is not proprietary software. The proof rests in the fact that it GNU GPL v3.0, and we know a priori that software licensed under the GPL is free software, so we do not need to go further on that point.

Now, because the software in question added to Ubuntu is free software, we can read it. The essential freedoms granted to us by truly free software ensure this, and the GPLv3 is indeed a truly free software license because it grants those freedoms. Because we are able to study the software and see how it communicates with the server. Once we know how to communicate with the server, we can write that up and design a server that communicates exactly the same way. From there, it is just a matter of patching the sync dæmon that is in Ubuntu to talk to an arbitrary, Ubuntu One compatible server. To determine how to do that, one need only read the Python source code contained in the python-ubuntuone-storageprotocol and python-ubuntuone-client packages. If you do not know Python well, you might expect to spend several days doing that, but if it bothers you so tremendously that you are going to practically start a flame war over it, you may find it worth it to do so.

Of course, the other side to that is this: if you really want Ubuntu One to talk to an arbitrary server that runs free software, and you want that free software to be written, you can fund the effort to write the free software. Approach a proficient developer somewhere out there on the Internet and ask them how much they’d charge to write a server for Ubuntu One. You might not be able to afford the fund the project entirely, but if you get a number from someone, you can start a coordinated effort to raise the funds. If you are lucky enough to be able to fund the whole project, then do so: it is but one way that you can help provide something back to the community. This does not apply to just an implementation of the Ubuntu One protocol, it could apply to anything that you see that is missing and needs to be created. Or you could spend time learning what you need to learn to pick up the project yourself, if you care for the project that deeply. The most important attribute that a person can have in order to get started with development is motivation—James Westby reminded me of this a couple of years ago, something which I had forgotten.

Perceptions: Another (Possible) Reason

It was suggested to me that another possible reason that people would object to having non-free software inside an operating system distribution such as Ubuntu is that they are afraid that the proprietary options have higher quality, or offer superior features, or provide functionality that is not offered by any existing free software. Thus, they have this perception that by adding such non-free software into a distribution like Ubuntu, people will automatically use and prefer it over free software. This simply is not the case. Sure, some people will use iTunes if it is available on Ubuntu. Maybe many people would. I might even do so, if it were legally available for me to use that way and if it supports the purchase of DRM-free music. However, if there were a free software client for the iTunes store, I’d much prefer to use that. To my knowledge, however, there is no such thing that exists.

If there is not a free software alternative for a non-free component inside a distribution of software, if you are offended by that, then by all means, create a free software alternative for it! As mentioned above, you can start on such a project’s development, or you can look for people that would be interested in volunteering for it and coordinating them, or you can put up funds to pay developers to implement it. If you have money, this can be the easy part: find someone who is willing to accept payment for the service of implementing the free software alternative for whatever it is that someone else has funded, wrote, and released as proprietary software. It is not like free software is developed without cost (and if you think that it is, then you seriously do not understand what free software is or anything about the world of free software and have no standing to be getting mad when a company spends money writing software and does not release it as free software. You can try to write companies that write such software and ask them if they will give you any form of written specifications for the software, or an interface definition, or something along those lines. The worst thing that could happen is that you will be told “no”. And do so nicely, or they’ll be more inclined to tell you “bugger off” instead of simply “no”.

“Allowing users to choose proprietary software is anti-freedom.”

Nothing could be farther from the truth; it is the same, in fact, as the above statement that one can have freedom without choice. For example, if Ubuntu adopts iTunes and makes it so that you can “sudo aptitude install itunes” in the future, that is not a bad thing! How can it be—It contributes to the ability to choose, and thereby contributes to the freedom of the end-user. If you are a die-hard free software supporter and do not want to run non-free software on your system, then there is a very simple solution for you: simply don’t install it.  That is a valid solution to the problem. There are tools already available that can be run as a cron job and report on any non-free software that you might have accidentally (or even intentionally) installed. If you are worried about additional non-free software getting into Ubuntu, then help enhance those tools. Or write a GUI front-end for something like the virtual RMS program and work to get that included into Ubuntu as well, perhaps something that can run every time you login to the computer, or that runs as a persistent process that watches the package database on your distribution of choice for updates and then checks to see if newly installed software is non-free and alerts the user. Of course, it’d be most effective as an opt-in system, and not an opt-out one where it would just be annoying.

There is no way, then, that freedom is actually reduced in this way when another choice becomes available. If iTunes were to be included in the repositories (and I suspect it would be, like the restricted, universe and multiverse repositories, a separate opt-in repository; perhaps simply “proprietary” would be fitting), this does not reduce your ability to choose to run a free software media player and manager like Banshee, or Rhythmbox, or even AmaroK if you are so inclined to run that KDE stuff.

Once upon a time, FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) was the tool of Microsoft. We (the free software world) completely hated it when Microsoft would put out FUD, because we would then have to fight that FUD by way of explanation and demonstration. Well, some time ago, a subgroup of the free software world decided to start using FUD themselves—it was done with Mono, and it is being done now with just a survey asking people what sort of software they would like to see in Ubuntu. Now, those of us who are left who are advocates of liberty—both personal and societal—are stuck potentially fighting two battles. One with Microsoft’s FUD—such as the constant notion that you have to pay for software—and one with the “free software evangelists” FUD, who have even gone so far as to say that people should not use certain types of free software (the one who calls himself “The Open Sourcer” even still today tells people to remove certain truly free software from their systems). The truth is somewhere in the middle, between these two ends of the spectrum.

Conclusion

Back to the point at hand: to say that giving a person a choice is a constraint on that person’s freedom, that is doublespeak.; it is saying that “slavery is freedom,” albeit to a lesser degree than that very melodramatic extreme—it simply does not make sense. The concept just does not make sense unless the words that are used to express the concept are dramatically redefined to mean things vastly different from what standard English dictionaries define them to be. The only reason that one has to try to convince someone that additional choice is a constraint on freedom is to try to convince people of things that are not true; to install fear, uncertainty, and doubt into people. This is the sort of behavior that—no matter what community it originates from—is completely immoral, unethical, and absolutely unacceptable. It’s dishonest, and for those of you who know me personally, you know what I think of dishonesty.

I get awfully sick and tired of people sometimes.  Especially when people claim that they support one thing and yet make it quite clear that they really don’t.

Let’s get something straight, people:  Freedom is a lot more than just free software or choices.  Freedom is a concept that most people who have gotten on the “free software” bandwagon of late just don’t understand!  It is awfully frightening; even RMS feels that freedom cannot be had without choice—his writings of the past 20+ years make it clear that he feels that choice is key, and these people are calling him “leader” without even knowing what it is he is fighting for!

It seems that the "free software" crowd these days assumes that if you do not hang off of their every word, accept their every inconsistent argument, and bow to their ways of making every last line of code free and GPL’d, you are the inconsistent one (because you’re inconsistent with them).  Even more to the point, I am utterly sick of running into people who learned about “free software” bloody yesterday and are now going “Oh, you bad NVIDIA user, you’re evil, you’re wrong, you’re hurting me just by using NVIDIA.”  Sure, asshole.  I’ll remember that the next time I send data off to a project working on free drivers—I’m hurting you, yep.  So, then, why am I bothering to contribute my time, tell me?  And when people rant but then get offended when you tell them that they’re ranting and to hurry up and get to the point, and they get offended by that? What is that, anyway? "Oh, I’m so thin skinned I can’t even listen to you tell it like it is?" is that what that is? I don’t know.  In case you couldn’t tell by the category, this post is a rant. (though much larger than the rants that are possible on services like identi.ca).

I am going to guess that it is time for me to pick up my book on freedom and start working on it again.  The world needs to be reminded what freedom really is; far too many have too limited a view of what freedom is and only apply it to certain situations, certain circumstances, or certain things.  Or think it is some boundless fountain of infinite choice.  Where are the people that don’t sit at those two extremes‽

And in the meantime, I have to figure out, seriously, why I bother.  My clients want to move to free software stacks, and I am doing so for them over time (gasp! by using their proprietary software to study it, learn about it, and reproduce it—but I suppose that is “harming” the new generation of free software users, too, right?).

What am I missing here?  I don’t know.  I know this: It is late and I am cranky. Night.

It’s been quiet here on my blog lately.  We moved out of the apartment in Decatur, and then went to Toledo for Thanksgiving.  Then we got back from there, and began getting things setup here in the house in Dunwoody.  We’re staying with Leesa’s parents until we find a house.  This is, of course, not an ideal situation, but it works.

The server was down for a while because of the move, and then we had to wait for Comcast to do its thing and get us a new cable modem (why they don’t just let you move it from one place to the other is beyond me…).  And now, we’re making various tweaks to try to fix things up here while we’re here—a form of rent, I suppose.

Christmas was good.  Ben got lots of stuff, I got some PostgreSQL manuals in dead-tree form.  I’d like them in PDF on a Kindle DX, but with those being so awfully expensive… well, it’s better just to have something I can hold in my hand.

Anyway, there really isn’t all that much to write right now.  Many of my projects have stalled over the holiday, and they’ll be picking up again soon.  Libvfcgi is moving along slowly (no thanks to myself; I have barely had any time to work on it!) and there is one other person who is working on it at the moment and doing a quite excellent job.  I’d like to have 0.0.2 out soon, but we’ll see how that works.  First I have to get my new workstation setup so that I can work.  Off to try to work on the wireless network here!

So the server is running again, or so it is having me think.

Let’s see if we make it past another 24 hours without something strange going on…