ON AIR

I work at home. This poses problems, most of which are related to noise levels. I do quite a bit of recording, which requires that it be even more quiet than usual, but when the kids are home from school (this week is spring break) it frequently gets incredibly loud just during the normal course of the day.

A while back I expressed an interest in an ON AIR sign, like they have in radio stations, but most of them were rather more than I wanted to pay for something that was basically a toy. Yes, it’s work related, but it’s just as effective to yell out the door.

But my wife bought me one of the signs, and it just arrived today. It’s awesome.

I got the SLP 125 from OnAirSigns.com. There was a small mixup in shipping, so they eventually actually sent me a nicer one that I originally ordered.

And I’ve plugged it into an X10 outlet, so that I can turn it on and off with a remote control from my desk, which is especially nice when a call comes in unexpectedly, or when I just need to tell them to turn down the volume.

At the moment, it’s sitting on the mantle above the fireplace, but eventually we’re going to try to mount it somewhere a little less in the way. It’s pretty heavy, so we need to do more than just stick a nail in the wall.

On a related note, the customer support folks at OnAirSigns are awesome. It was one of those rare experiences where customer support was proactive, alerting me of a potential problem, and offering to upgrade my purchase to make up for my (very minor) inconvenience. I’m very impressed, and recommend them highly if you need any kind of lighted sign, whether with a standard message, or customized lettering.

Be careful what you start

I’ve committed a few patches over the last few weeks from a possible new contributor to the Apache HTTP Server documentation effort. Today I warned him that if he keeps it up, there’s a chance that someone will propose that he be given commit access, and you never know where that can lead.

It reminded me of a day just a short time ago (ok, 12 years … ) when someone committed a few initial patches from me. And look where it took me.

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

Joshua Slive

In September of 2000, I made my first commit to the Apache HTTP Server documentation. To be exact, it was on September 12th.

On September 8th, four days earlier, Joshua Slive made his first commit, and from that point went on to completely change the way that we did documentation. We had been editing HTML files. He converted everything to XML, and built a transformation process to convert them to XHTML, as well as a variety of other formats. This made the documentation more useful, but also much easier to write. And it made the translation process much easier. (No, it certainly wasn’t only Joshua that did this, but he took the helm at this time and made it happen, with the help of many others.)

Then, when he went to grad school, Joshua stopped being quite so active. His last commit was on March 12, 2008, nearly four years ago.

I mention all of this today because last night, according to Ohloh, four years to the week after Joshua stopped committing, I *finally* passed him, in total commits.

ohloh

Joshua, thanks for the work that you did. Any time you want to come back and pick up where you left off, we’d be delighted to have you.

Wool

As you may know, I participate in a project called SFShorts where we write Sci Fi in 140 characters or less. It’s a lot of fun.

A few weeks ago, a new member was added to our team, one Hugh Howey, who is an actual real-life science fiction author, not just a wannabe like me. This was very exciting, but I hadn’t actually read any of his stuff yet. At Elizabeth’s recommendation, I purchased Wool – all five parts – for my Kindle, and on my recent trip, I started reading it.

Wool is a post-apocalypse dystopian novel. Folks live in a subterranean silo, and the rules have to be pretty strict to keep things working smoothly in a completely sealed environment. This gives all sorts of plot opportunities. It is, in short, a gripping book, which I read all the way through and was left wanting more MORE MORE!!!

Hugh is a wonderful story teller. His characters are real people, not flat single-feature personalities, and you truly identify with folks – the good guys and the bad guys – in a way that many authors simply can’t achieve.

I will be buying everything Hugh writes, and pestering him to write more. You should too. This is really great stuff.

By the way, for those looking for good books for kids, I should mention that the language is a little on the salty side in Wool, so use your judgement here. Better yet, read it yourself first, and figure out what your kids can handle.

Biashara Street

Biashara Street
February 5, 2012
From WeekendWordsmith.com

Step away from the
odour of bodies and exhaust into a

chutney of cardamom
cinnamon
ginger
garlic

Sacks of
cashews overflow onto
floors covered with boxes,
cartons,
and more heaps of
burlap bags
full of jasmine rice,
basmati rice,
long brain brown rice
from exotic places I
dream of going, some day.

In this quarter mile of
dusty street
are gathered all the spices of the world,

from Sri Lanka,
Singapore,
and far-away San Francisco.

Tea, coffee and
cocoa pods
lend their aroma to the
general cacophony of smells,
discordant, but, somehow

a symphony in a thousand voices.

Knowing that school uniforms
are only a street or two over,

I stand and breathe deeply
of the cloves,
curry powder,
and saffron.

For the Weekend Wordsmith – Chutney

Moving Furniture

I work from home, and our house is not enormous. When I first started working at home, we put a desk into our bedroom, and got a shoji screen to partition the room into two rooms. It’s worked pretty well, but there are some drawbacks to the room layout. The room felt rather cramped, and because the desk was just a couple of inches too tall, we could no longer open the window any more.

I’ve been working that way for a little over two years now, and a few days ago we decided to try to rearrange.

The trouble is, with a lot of bulky furniture, and not much maneuvering space, it’s not something you really want to experiment with.

Open Source to the rescue. We downloaded Sweet Home 3D, from SourceForge, measured all of the furniture in the room, and then started moving it around.

Sweet Home 3D has a library of furniture items that you can resize to exactly the right dimensions. You put the outlets on the wall, as well as the pictures, so that you can see whether furniture will block outlets, and whether you’re going to have to rehang any of the paintings. You can position things in three dimensions, so you can set lamps on top of tables, or stack crates, and you can see all of this in a 3D model so you know what it’s going to look like.

rearranged_room
Rather than spending a few hours hurting our backs, we were able to position things exactly as we want them, and plan out how we were going to get things there with the minimal amount of effort.

So, my desk is no longer by the window. (Yes, I could see the squirrels, and they were, indeed, merry.) but also the room feels much more open, and we’re not always dodging one another when we walk around the room. The lighting is better, and best of all, I don’t hurt all over from having to move the furniture two or three times to get it right.

In addition to the built-in objects, Sweet Home has a community website where people can contribute their creations. I imported an office chair from the website, because the one that was built in didn’t look right. There’s also trees, cars, and people, if you want to make a model of your entire house and surrounding land.

downloadable_objects

You can even create a video walkthrough of your room by selecting places to stand, and what direction to look. The software does the rest, connecting the positions smoothly to create a view of the room.

You can see an example of this below – the desk isn’t quite right, and I couldn’t find a shoji screen, but the general layout is right.

So, over all, four thumbs up from the Bowen moving team. I start work today in my “new” office, and although there’s still a lot of stuff still to be put away, it’s nice to have it done with so easily.

Vandalism

Today we discovered that someone had vandalized our property. We have a small clearing down by the creek. Someone has cut down our tire swing (yes, definitely cut) and we found the tire in a little fort, across the property line, built out of the boards with which I built Z a fort on our property. Z’s fort is completely gone.

The fort has various things spray painted on it, including PENIUS in red spray paint, and “MW3 Rangers” which assures me that it was a boy that did it.

Additionally, they had pulled down several of the hand-carved handholds that I had affixed to two of the trees down there, and broken them into small pieces. The steps and handholds that were undamaged were nailed to trees across the property line with the remains of the nails.

I spent the entire morning in a rage.

It occurred to me a while ago that only an imbecile would steal something and then leave it in plain sight across the property line. This leads me to believe that it was NOT the neighbor’s boy, but was one of the other kids from across the creek that come across to play occasionally.

But, still, WHY would someone do this? Why would someone destroy things that I have worked to create. I’m angry. Z is angry too, as he has every right to be. It’s not that what was destroyed was expensive, or even that it took a very long time to do, but that I feel violated to have my things destroyed in my own back yard.

I went next door and spoke with my neighbor, asking if his son might shed some light on what happened, but it seems unlikely that he would be so dumb as to steal my stuff and then leave there where I could find it. He didn’t seem terribly concerned, which strikes me as rather odd. I would have thought that he’d be concerned about vandalism happening on his property.

I’ve retrieved the tire. I have not retrieved the wood, much of which is ruined by being painted. I’m still very angry.

I wrote a note, put it in a ziploc freezer bag, and nailed it to the fort, asking the perpetrators to be men and come speak with me about it. I neglected to correct their spelling.

IT at the University of Cincinnati

On Wednesday evening, I had the great privilege of being invited to the University of Cincinnati to attend the basketball game against Notre Dame, in the President’s box at the arena. In attendance, in addition to the President himself, were various people from, or connected with, the IT (Information Technology) program at the University of Cincinnati.

The IT program covers a broad range of computer technology related fields, and has specializations in networking, databases, programming, and various other areas. Students are exposed to a wide variety of computing platforms, so that they don’t get into a job interview situation and have to admit that they only have training on Microsoft products. Or only Linux products, for that matter. A breadth of experience is pure gold in an interview situation.

Hazem Said, the new head of that department, was my kind host at the game, and we talked about a variety of ways that Open Source can feature in an IT curriculum. I’m really excited about the kinds of things that are in the future for this program. We talked about having students participate in healthy, mature Open Source projects as part of their training. This would give them experience not only in software programming, but also in project management, cross-cultural communication, customer support, and marketing, among other things.

When I was in college – which wasn’t so very long ago – there were some computer classes, which were mostly programming, but nothing that covered the real discipline of Information Technology in the way that I saw on Wednesday. It gives me a great deal of hope for the next generation of IT professionals that come of this program, and other programs like it around the world.

By the way, if you’re ever invited to a basketball game by the head of a University department, do a little research, and don’t wear a shirt with the other team’s color. (Really, it was an honest mistake!)

Mayan calendar for Christmas

My parents gave me a Mayan calendar for Christmas. It’s beautiful, as this photo doesn’t really show, and we have it hanging right outside our bedroom.

Mayan calendar

I find that even this early in the year, I’m becoming frustrated by the numerous people spouting nonsense about the Mayan calendar. I can’t actually tell how many of them believe what they’re saying. I don’t expect any intelligent people *actually* think the world is going to end on December 21, but it’s important to realize that NEITHER DID THE MAYANS.

The Mayan calendar is cyclical. This shouldn’t be so hard to understand. Our modern calendar is cyclical. We have several cycles. The 365 day cycle we call a year, and then there’s the 4-year cycle in which we adjust the fact that a year isn’t actually 365 days long. Then there’s the cycle we call a century, and the one we call a millenium.

December 21, 2012, is the end of a Mayan millenium, so to speak. Nothing more or less. There was never any prediction of apocalypse stated or implied in any Mayan writing. That’s all just as much hollywood nonsense as the movies and books surrounding January 1, 2000 (remember those) and the panics surrounding the year 1000 (I don’t expect you remember those) and the year 1900. (Now I need to figure out where I read about those, and post a reference. Can’t find it right now. Probably in the wonderful history of the calendar book I have somewhere …)

Be wary of people trying to push particular dates for the end of the world. Chances are they’re either a nut job, or they’re trying to sell something.

Open Source and The Cloud

I had something of an epiphany in the shower this morning. I discovered that I actually agreed with Bradley Kuhn about something.

TLDR: Is “the cloud” a threat to Open Source? I stopped working on an Open Source calendaring project because of Google Calendars.

Several months ago I attended (part of) a talk by Bradley about how The Cloud (whatever that is) is a threat to Free Software. (Yes, I know what The Cloud is. Snarky remark in reference to all the different things The Cloud might mean to various people. See Simon Wardley’s wonderful talk about what the cloud is.)

His reasons struck me as so outside of my way of thinking about software that I ended up leaving the talk. Oh, also, Skippy wanted to go to lunch, and that sounded like a lot more fun. Nothing personal, Bradley. He was talking about how something like Google Calendar (actually his example was GMail, but hold on a minute) was a threat to Free Software because the code, even though it’s in Javascript and right there in front of you, can’t really be inspected (ie, you can’t learn from it) because it’s hugely obfuscated. Also, you can’t see the back end. So here’s a service you can use for “free”, but it’s not Free, because it’s in chains, metaphorically speaking.

Then, this morning, I was thinking about why people are involved in Free/Open Source software, but also why they stop being involved, and I realized something.

I used to have a web-based calendar thingy. It was written in Perl, and it was really very cool. In fact, it not only started my passion for Open Source (it was the first thing I ever had on CPAN, and it was the first software that I ever wrote which was featured in a book!) it also paid my mortgage for a few years. I used to write calendaring applications for the General Motors Desert Proving Grounds in Mesa, Arizona. Although that plant is long closed, their scheduling ran on my software. If you wanted to schedule a test on the dust track (tests a vehicles various rubber seals to make sure they keep out dust, as well as handling in those conditions) you used the web-based scheduling application, called D.U.S.T. (I forget what it stands for – Dusttrack Usage Scheduling Tool or something) and scheduled it. This worked better than grubby bits of paper, because it didn’t get lost, and you always could get to it without walking down the hallway.

Also, when I was at Databeam, back in the late 90s, I wrote a similar application for scheduling conference rooms (clever name: Conference Rooms). I went up to the front desk one day and stole the conference room scheduling book and hid it, forcing everyone to use the online scheduling app. Strangely, it worked, and I didn’t get fired.

Then, I got involved in a project called Reefknot, which was an implementation of various international calendaring standards, in Perl. That was humming along nicely. And I had a dozen different calendar modules on CPAN.

By the way, in case you don’t know, calendaring is hard. Sure, it looks easy, but then you get into things like “every other Monday at 10am, except during company vacations.” Or possibly “the last day of each month.” Think for a little while about how you’d implement that, and your brain will start to melt just a little. “every monday” suggests a simple solution, but as soon as you start having to deal with exceptions, things get very very complicated. And what with different length months and leap years … and don’t even get me started on time zones. *shudder*

Anyways, then something called Google Calendar came along. It worked with all of the various calendaring applications. It did the various calendaring specifications, including the long-elusive CalDav. We were all very excited in the calendaring community, but then an odd thing happened. People stopped working on calendaring stuff. Because, you know, it’s already done.

So, I stopped working on an Open Source project because there was an implementation in the cloud. (ie, online somewhere.)

So, was Bradley right? Did Google Calendar kill the Reefknot project specifically because it’s closed source? Yes, in a sense. I don’t believe, as the FSF does, that closed source is intrinsically immoral. But there’s a direct correlation between the projects I no longer work on, and great cloud based implementations of the same functionality, where I don’t have access to the source to participate.

Furthermore, as my interaction with software is increasingly via a browser, and not via running software on my own computer, I have less and less incentive – and ability – to tinker with those things.

Now, I’m weird, I still run several of my own servers. Granted, those servers are “in the cloud”, meaning that I have no idea where they are physically located. But I have root on them. I build software from source on them, and tinker with that source from time to time. I tinker with the source code of my blog, even though there’s a good blogging platform “in the cloud”, but I also have several blogs on Blogger, simply because it’s simple and I don’t want to monkey with it.

So, although I disagree with Bradley’s philosophically, I find that he may be completely right for more pragmatic reasons.

But at the same time, Open Source has a whole new rebirth of late, and there continue to be ever more exciting projects out there. I’m much more concerned about my kids, and what they will find to hack on. My son is a hacker. He likes to build stuff, take stuff apart, break it and fix it, figure out how it works. I don’t know if I’m doing an adequate job of encouraging this. I really need to get him a subscription to Make magazine. I wonder, however, when he gets a little older, if he’ll be interested in programming. I think he’d be really good at it, but it would be a great shame if the removal of applications to The Cloud also results in a lack of opportunities to hack on code.

The Margin Is Too Narrow