The goal of the Free Software Movement is to enable people to understand, to learn from, to improve, to adapt, and to share the technology that increasingly runs every human life. That's what Eben Moglen said in his 23 February address at Harvard, as transcribed at Groklaw.
2004-02-28
2004-02-26
2004-02-22
New laptops
My old Pismo powerbook was slowly debilitating -- battery giving the ghost, cd/dvd drive dying, panel developing serious jaundice and also white spots. And there's no Java for Linux/PPC that works well enough to do my job on, and OS X isn't any too comfortable. But my laptop woes were nothing to those of Irina, whose laptop had always had the nasty tendency of running at one degree centigrade below the maximum temperature the CPU was prepared to allow, meaning that it shut down whenever you took the beast on your lap, or took it outside in the summer, or didn't keep it perched high up some support that allowed free airflow -- but the screen died, too, after only a year and a half of faithless and noisy (that b*****y fan) service. So we needed new laptops...
2004-02-21
Out of Time
By Lynn Abbey
To start with, Out of Time is part one, of three, but it doesn't say so anywhere that I could find. That's rather sneaky, because there are plenty people like me and Irina who never buy trilogies if they can help it. Trilogies nowadays are almost inevitably over-written, overly detailed, rather boring romps through enough plot for a novelette padded and stretched into three volumes.
2004-02-20
It's not really spring yet
But the weather is very nice, if cold, and I've got this packet of 'year-round-lettuce' that you can, supposedly, succesfully sow even in January... And the neighbour whose back garden borders on ours is already busy clearing away the debris of winter. And I'm beginning to feel the urge, too.
2004-02-16
2004-02-12
A dashed little comma
Can spoil four evenings. Now I know that I am not at peak form when working in the fumes of paint, and we have had painters in the house for three days (they did a beautiful job, and I heartily recommend them: Steenbruggen in Deventer) -- but, dash it, see if you can spot the mistake in this Makefile.am:
2004-02-11
Grunts
Mary Gentle
Time and again I try again to read something by Mary Gentle. Her Usenet persona is so engaging -- even though also a little bit tactless and clowning -- that I figure her books must be great. And others do think them great, definitely. So there must be good stuff in them.
What -- am I a hacker, or what?
There's this heading 'hacking' on Fading Memories, isn't it? Hacking, and not coding. But what's a hacker -- when it comes down to it? It's, perhaps, someone who's been sharing code against all odds for longer than he cares to remember, someone who has a sense of esthetic regarding code, even more than regarding ephemera like user interfaces. Perhaps a hacker is a coder who's just that little bit harder to herd.
Quick Service
P.G. Wodehouse
Another of those delightful standalone novels in the vein of Uneasy Money, even though written 23 years later, about a young, likeable man who meets a young, capable girl.
2004-02-09
Return of the lemon
Slightly less than a month ago, I made a begin with my first attempt at painting a lemon. Today I braced my self for the next chapter in the saga, by buying a tube of cadmium yellow lemon (azo) -- and, for good measure, a tube of dark naples yellow. Buying cool stuff is, after all, one of the main reasons for pursuing a hobby.
2004-02-06
Blogspammers stymied?
I hope so -- I noticed that blogspammers find the writeback enabled blogs with a simple automated google query (possibly even using Google's SOAP API, which is in itself a cool enough thing), and they query for 'writeback'. If that's so, I thought, why not throw a small spanner in the works, and change that particular string into something different. So, here's the first fencing-enabled blog...
2004-02-05
Some progress, at least
Progress with Krita has been slow, the past two weeks, considering that I've been at home nearly permanently. Still, I've been working on some things, and thinking about others.
2004-02-02
SCO -- and the Dutch Broadcasting Company (NOS)
Right, this is too silly for words. This morning the alarm clock radio woke me up with the NOS newsreading woman saying that "Deskundigen vermoeden dat Linux aanhangers iets met het MyDoom virus te maken hebben. SCO heeft een conflict met Linux." (Experts think that Linux adherents have something to do with the MyDoom virus. SCO has a conflict with Linux.) -- and today they declare SCO to be a 'software giant'...I've grabbed a screenshot before the story disappears:
Blog spamming
Gosh. That was quick -- despite the long chronology you can see to the left, Fading Memories the blog isn't really all that old. A few weeks. The backlog came from my other Fading Memories site, the Zope site. It happened now and then that someone tried to add spam comments, but I had moderation turned on, and nothing slithered past my watchful eye.
No hacking...
Hacking is just as much a necessity of life as breathing, writing or eating. But sometimes, it's impossible to go on working, even though you're all in the flow.
Cooking for fifteen
I like to cook; Irina likes to cook, and we both like having guests helping us eat what we cook. We're not too bad at it, I am a dab hand with a duck and a whiz with steak, and Irina is great with things like saracen stew or cheese souffle. But we seldom have more than two or three guests
De Weg der Historie
By J. Dek
After reading 1633 I suddenly realized that I, in fact, knew hardly a thing about Dutch history. It isn't taught in schools anymore, because history now has to be a fun thing children can relate to, about common people and their life. Nothing wrong with that; but the events that have created the nation I have to live in have some importance too. So, what does someone who needs a quick primer in his national history do?
Uneasy Money
Uneasy Money is a Wodehouse novel that I find myself returning to time and again. It is an early novel, written 1917, and therefore available from Project Gutenberg, and isn't part of any of the saga's Wodehouse is famous for.