This story is perhaps *the* perfect illustration of why government should use only open source software. It’s also the perfect illustration of why the “lease not buy” model of software licensing is so completely broken.
And it involves a giant killer robot eating cars. (Ok, not really, but I imagine a talented journalist could turn it into that.)
It really is the perfect story in every way.
I’ve aquired a Palm T|X. It is very nice in many ways, but, for me, the best part about it is bluetooth. The ability to synchronize over a non-wired connection means that I will sync more often, thus immediately making this a more useful device than any Palm device I’ve ever had before. It meant that changes I make on my destop calendar, or my Palm calendar, are (almost) immediately available on the other – something that took days or weeks on previous Palm devices, due to the enormous inconvenience of dragging out a USB cable, untangling it from the other USB cables, and syncing.
Granted, it takes a lot longer to sync over bluetooth than over USB. This doesn’t actually bother me a lot, as I just sync when I’m not using the Palm. Also, due to the range of bluetooth, I don’t have to be tethered to the computer, so I can sync from another room when needed.
The 802.11 networking is very handy also, but, so far, is mostly a toy. Although I did use it *extensively* yesterday in troubleshooting web servers, so perhaps it’ll be more useful, in short bursts, over the long haul. I’ve got an ssh client installed on it, and have used that quite a bit. I was rather disappointed, and somewhat surprised, to not find any free IRC clients. There are several commercial ones, which is almost as surprising. Imagine charging for an IRC client. That’s kind of weird.
The last two cons that I’ve attended – ApacheCon and OSCon – I’ve hardly taken any photos. I’ve relied on the photographers more talented than I, or at least more shutter-happy than I, for my photographic memories. That seems to have worked out pretty well, but there’s something just more satisfying to having one’s own photos, even when they aren’t very good.
So I’ll try to take more photos this time around.
The suspense is killing me.
I tore my roof putting it back on when I got to work this morning. The Jeep dealer says it will be $712 for a new roof, and $462 to put it on. I guess I won’t be taking the roof on and off anymore until I can save up a LOT of money. 🙁
I found some places on teh intarweb that had roofs for around $300, and you put it on yourself. I’m not so sure I want to tackle something like that, but I’m also not sure I want to spend $1200 for a new roof. At that kind of cost, it might be more effective to trade it in for a newer Jeep.
You folks should buy more of my books, so I can afford a new roof.
The Perl lightning talks have been a staple of the Perl Conference, and, later, the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, for as long as I’ve been attending it. And YAPC, too, although I haven’t been to YAPC in many moons. They were somewhat different this year. Not hugely, but subtly.
MJD observed that, when he started them, the purpose was to get folks who would otherwise not give talks to give brief presentations in a low-stress environment. 5 minutes is enough to get a taste of public presenting, but not long enough to get too terribly intimidated.
Over the years, it became a bit of a sideshow, with elaborate presentations, complete with slides and sound effects. And of course MJD as the MC, complete with funny hat and gong. And so folks who wanted to give a five minute “here’s what I’m working on” or “here’s my cool idea” talk were overshadowed by the brilliant presentations by Audrey Tang and Andy Lester and the like. Also, talks lean towards the comic routine rather than the technical talk. Indeed, technical lightning talks tend to get heckled on IRC, and yawned through, waiting for the *real* lightning talks.
We started doing Lightning Talks at ApacheCon a few years back, and they have become part of our conference culture. We, too, tend to favor the entertainment talks rather than the technical talks. That’s fine, in that it draws a crowd, and folks hear interesting ideas, and it’s a great community event. But we need to remember what the initial purpose of lightning talks really is – to give folks a shot at the mic, if only for a few minutes.
Of course, I don’t run the lightning talks, so feel free to ignore me. 🙂
I find myself rather frustrated with the geek tendency to use “you should switch to …” as a proposed solution to problems.
“How do I get postfix to run header checks?” “Switch to Exim”
“How do I delete a line in vi?” “Switch to emacs”
“How do I install foo with Yast?” “If you were running Debian, you’d just have to use apt-get”
“I have this problem with svn” “You should switch to source safe”
“How do I get php installed on Apache on Windows” “Install Linux”
This is pretty much never the right solution. Yes, occasionally, it’s the right solution. But this is very infrequent. Folks have made decisions about what software they are using. Or, as frequently, that decision has been made for them, and they are not at liberty to change it. And it’s not really useful at that particular time for them to explain to you the rationale for that decision.
And, yes, I know, you’re trying to be helpful. But it’s not. Really.
Yeah, I’m being grumpy this evening. Sorry. I should go to bed …
Finally, I’ve moved all my cvs repositories to svn. Wow, I had a lot of garbage in there. A lot of it has now gone away, but there’s still a lot of stuff left that I don’t really want to delete, but probably will never look at again.
Actually, there is still one cvs repository, because it wasn’t in the same place as all the other ones. Hopefully it will also get migrated in the next day or two.
So, one more thing off of the to do list. At this rate, if I just don’t sleep for the next 6 months, I think I can catch up.
I’ll be in Sri Lanka for ApacheCon Asia in about two weeks. I’ll be doing an Apache Web Server tutorial, and another talk yet to be decided. I’m very excited about getting to go, and very excited that we’re finally doing an ApacheCon Asia.
Still a few travel details to be worked out …
Aaron came by last night and dropped off a t-shirt printed with the phrase that I say (type) 50 times a day. Thanks, Aaron. You rock. You’re so l337 I can hardly stand it.