Entries in Life

Dan Lyke pointed out this really great meditation on why one guy chose to go with Free Software rather than Micorosoft tools. (This is especially interesting to me today since a friend wrote to me today about free vs. proprietary software.) Maciej Ceglowski says:

The Microsoft recruiter wrote back, asking for pointers to people who are building search tools with MS products. Apparently most everybody she’s come across in the search engine world is working with open source tools. It’s very mysterious.

Dan has more thoughts, but I’ll just add mine here. I’m like Maciej Ceglowski: I love that I can just go fetch the tools I want to work with and begin building or playing around. No real worries about licensing (well, I’ve run into a technicality or two, but nothing big), no out-of-pocket expenses, and raving hordes of magnanimous co-developers.

Long term, what does this mean to the end user? If more developers find working with Open Source or Free Software tools, then more software will be created by people friendly to that type of licensing. They’ll be more likly to license their own software under freely-redistributable terms.

And, as time passes, the true viral nature of the GPL will show up. Most of the world’s software will be free.

Ha!

Mark Antony and Gaius Trebonius are in charge of the lines facing out, and although it was impossible to see and casualties were high, they did a good job of reinforcing our lines where necessary and weathering the assault. For the Gauls were effective at longer range: their javelins would often hit home and knock our soldiers off the rampart. But when they tried to get closer, many fell into the traps, and others succumbed to our heavy siege-spears when they got in range of the towers. They were bogged down by casualties. When the sun rose they saw they hadn’t breached our defenses anywhere, and they turned back. At this point Vercingetorix’s men weren’t even ready to attack – they had taken too long with implements they were clearly unaccustomed to. Seeing the relieving force had failed and unwilling to attempt an attack on one front, they turned back into the town.

• Norman Walsh, from whence come many good SGML and XML-type things, now has a weblog. And a .name domain. Includes great quotes in almost every entry.

• On Winterspeak, Zimran “Chicago school economics” Ahmed addresses some of the issues I ranted about in my little spiel on why I hate economics. I don’t think he reads my weblog, but it is rather serndipitous that he put his post up shortly after I did mine.

• The brou-ha-ha over SCO taking IBM to court for “stealing” their intellectual property and then threatening to sue Linus Torvalds ended humoursly — Novell put them in their place by pointing out that they don’t even own what they were suing over. The icing on the cake: Bruce Perens published information pointing to evidence in SCO’s own financial statements that SCO just collects the royalties for Novell.

• More evidence of foreign governments moving away from Microsoft dependence.

• I really need to add some sort of Wiki formatting into weblogger.el

• Bill Gates on spam: Please pass laws mandating ADV: headers. Gee. Why didn’t I think of that?

Since Jeff is in Indianapolis, I’ve got this from #perl:

<Skrewtape> What is indianapolis like

<Che_Fox> Smelly

<aevil> indianapolis is like a giant trailer park in the middle of nowhere…only bigger and built with stone

<aevil> it’s the only thing between the middle of ohio on the way to st. louis…don’t blink

Biella, anthropologist of the free(software) world, says that the never-ending battles over UNIX are what happen when this thing, is at once a commercial product, a tool, a teaching method, a techno-philosophical paradigm, a collective adventure, and cultural heritage…. A huge fascinating muck.

Personally, I’ve enjoyed every bit of this collective adventure, though most of mine has been after the lawesuit that produced 4.4BSD Lite.

Recently, I’ve avoided reading email and such at work and, of course, have been much more productive. The productivity extends to after-work hours, too. Just today, I’ve set up mon for the servers I have to monitor and set Jabber to IM me when I get mail.

In other news, I received a call today that put a bee in my bonnet. As a result, I’ll soon have this server set up to do email (and web) hosting for small businesses.

I finally figured out why I don’t like economics. Sure you can do some interesting things with economics, but the entire focus is to objectify human behavior.

Objectivity is something that we like to think is a good thing. And sometimes it is good. But, we should not be objective about people and their behavior, or we risk objectifying them.

Objectification is, essentially, de-humanization. When we reduce people to rational beings who act in their own best interest (as many armchair economists do), this is de-humanizing. The human experience is a subjective experience. Joe Gregario showed this recently as he described Mark and Dora’s wedding: Those are the facts. And if life was just composed of facts, then that would be all to tell of the wedding.

But, we aren’t rational actors. We’re stupid, clumsy, illogical, loving people. We may often act in ways that can be explained and understood rationally, but, then, just as often, we don’t. And this is a good thing. Because the essence of the subjective human experience is creativity.

Creativity does not exist in a completely rational world. It is often inconsistent with reason. If creativity were reasonable, it would be unexceptional, but the reason we love and reward it is because creativity is exceptional. Creativity allows us to do new things, it opens new doors, it forges new paths. Creativity is entirely subjective.

Economics cannot capture or explain the subjective essence of humanity. I’m sure many economists recognize this. But it seems that whenever I hear someone explaining the economic forces that produce this or that, they miss the entirely subjective nature of humanity. They’ve tried to reduce the essence of humanity to something that can be understood objectively, rationally. And they’ll end up failing.

(For more along this line of thinking, see Nicolai Berdyaev. He’s much better at explaining this stuff than me.)

Stuart Robinson says he uses free software almost exclusivly (as I mentioned I do). He has an “bizarre” analogy of non-programmer : free-software :: mute : free-speech.

Yesterday, I bought a bike rack and detachable child-seat for my bike. The bike rack is so I can ride to work without wearing a backpack and getting all sweaty. The child seat is for, of course, my children.

As soon as I brought it home, the kids turned off the movie they had rented and came out to take turns riding on the bike. I took them in turns (even my six year old weighs less than the rating for the seat) and we rode around the neighborhood and up and down Carrollton Avenue.

Today we were going to meet at the park and bike and have a picnic after I got off of work. Other circumstances intervened and I ended up taking only Basil on an eight-mile ride home from work. We rode down Camp street most of the way. I would normally just take the more trafficed Magazine, but I wanted to be extra cautious since I had Basil in tow.

And what a street! We rode through the beautiful Garden District. The houses along Camp are much nicer, the trees denser than along the more commercial Magazine. And we had a little supper at a restaurant and then rode home.

In hind-sight, taking Basil on such a long, bumpy ride on his first extended time out might not have been such a wise decision. He threw up shortly after he went to bed. Despite that, he had fun and will want to do it again. And his sisters want to try it, too!

What a weekend. Yesterday, I went to a “gathering” to remember my neighbor who succumbed to cancer last week. She didn’t want any memorials or wakes, so, instead, her friends, family, and neighbors gathered to remember.

Today, we went to another neighbor’s baptismal celebration. In between, I was up until 2 this morning adding auth-by-binding to xdb_ldap. A little cut-n-paste and stitching code does the job. I’ll submit the code tomorrow.