1. You can bring your work home with you and sit on the deck and sip iced tea while working on stuff.

2. When the power goes off in the building and everyone around you does a cry of despair, you can keep doing stuff.

3. You can sit on the couch, you can sit on a lawn chair, you can sit in your bed, you can sit at a desk, you can sit on the bus, you can sit on the plane, you can sit on the train, you can sit on the floor, you can sit beside a door, you can sit outside, you can sit inside, you can sit in the mall, you can sit in the hall....

It's nice to release things. Check the website for more details.

Reading this post on Bug Guilt Trips and this was super! But I have to add the following which account for almost all the bug/feature related emails I get:

• It would be more efficient if... (this is my personal favorite since it's almost never accompanied by any kind of explanation as to why the sender thinks it's more efficient or what conditions the existing code is inefficient in)

• You need feature x, otherwise no one will use <software>...

• It would be more user-friendly if...

• Everyone will want feature x...

• Your documentation is terrible...

The last one is totally true. But it's not because I'm a bad person--it's more because I'm pretty much a one-man band and I just don't have time to do everything, so some items suffer until enough people complain (or better yet--contribute).

With Lyntin, I think I've got a really decent user base that's pretty able considering that the documentation is fairly lacking. I wish they were a bit more communicative, but otherwise, it's perfect for my tastes. Easy to deal with, friendly, mature, not overly needy, and pretty supportive. It's one of those things that I think would be somewhat spoiled if I lowered the bar of entry to using Lyntin by making it all user-friendly and such. Who knows? The main important thing to keep in the back of everyone's mind is that Lyntin development is so totally not my day job and I'm more interested in a sophisticated framework than I am in a fancy user interface.

It took me 2 hours to install pure-ftpd on RedHat 7.1 (a couple of months ago). I ran into all kinds of RPM hell up the wazoo and then gave up and did a source install.

It took me 1 minute to install pure-ftpd on Debian 3.0 testing.

WINNER: DEBIAN!

I installed Oracle 8i (8.1.6) on Windows XP Professional and noticed that it worked fine after I installed it, but after I rebooted the OracleOraHome8TNSListener would come up fine but the OracleServicePORTDB (my oracle instance) service would try to come up, but wouldn't come up fully. Yeah--that's super vague. In the XP Services applet, it would show up as Starting as opposed to Started. There was an ORACLE and an ORADRIM process running, though. So I was puzzled.

Hunting through google search results wasn't helpful. Finally found a post that mentioned Oracle 8i works fine under Windows XP Professional but that you have to manually start the services.

So if you switch those services to Manual startup, and then write yourself a nice batch script like this:

net start oracleorahome8tnslistener
net start oracleserviceportdb

(fill in your instance service name for the second one)--then it works fine.

bluesock.org is (as of the time of this writing) a leased server hosted at rackspace.com and we've been there for a few years. They've been great and we've never had problems with them. Recently they informed us we needed to upgrade to RedHat 9.0 and it either involved a per-month rate increase or some finagling with the hardware and downtime. I decided this was as good a time as any to switch over to a different hosting service with Debian.

This will make the third Linux flavor that I'll have extensive administration experience with. The first two being RedHat (I've run many of the versions since 5.2) and Gentoo (which I've been running for a couple of years now). I ran Mandrake for a bit, but never really did anything with it. Same with Slackware. I toyed with Debian a couple of times, but never got past the installation.

It's all very exciting. Hopefully, everything will turn out just right.

There's something wonderful about releasing software. I think it's probably the relief associated with throwing it to the world and knowing that you're done with it. Of course, in this case, since it's another beta, that isn't entirely the case. Though I don't plan on touching it for a few days, at least.

Anyhow, more information at http://lyntin.sourceforge.net/.

Now I'm going to take a nap and get my clippers and go to a party because I get to sleep an extra hour tonight. Whee!

So I've been lurking on python-dev for almost a year now. I think it's been a year--might be more. I forget. My friend just sent his first post to python-dev. This is what he said:

I'd like to suggest "outer v" for this. The behavior could be to scan outward for the first definition of v. If the only outer-scope variable is at module-level, then the behavior would be the same as "global v". Or if everyone is comfortable enough re-using the keyword "global", then I also like "global v in f".

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.devel/54274

It was pretty exciting. So I asked him how he felt. To this he responded, "naked".

I know what my laptop is doing. It's compiling Xfree86. I figured I'd do an emerge rsync and an emerge -uD world yesterday. I let it run through the night and when I awoke this morning, it was still chugging through XFree86.

I must admit, it's really awe-inspiring thinking about how much code is involved and how long it takes to compile it. It makes one think seriously about the:

code  ->  compile  -> examine issues -> fix code
             ^                            |
             |                            |
              ------------<---------------

methodology. Fixing a bug that way on my laptop would take weeks. When I was in college, I would tutor CS 1 and CS 2. It was difficult to watch people do theme-and-variations programming with syntax "Maybe I should add a ; here?... Nope. How about an extra *?... Nope--that didn't work either. How about ( ) around this?... Nope..."

Then I would point out, "Um--this would never work. Remove that extra *."

And they would say, "Nope--that won't work because it segfaults." Then I would sit there and try to explain why the two things are completely different issues and all I'd get back would be vacant looks.

That seems like a tough place to be in.

I do a lot of Linux development and most of my projects involve Linux, GNU software, Python, PHP, Apache and a variety of other Open Source software components. Naturally, this whole SCO thing has been somewhat of a surprise and originally made me hesitant since it brought up a series of questions I didn't really know the answers to.

So this whole SCO thing has been a very nice learning experience for me. I imagine it's been a very nice learning experience for many other people as well. Things like, "How can an Open Source project prevent copyright violations?" and "What are the legal ramifications of using software that doesn't come with a warranty for possible legal issues?" are being explained in very public forums--things that pockets of the Open Source community have known for many years, but which may not have been as obvious to the rest of us.

As time has gone on and SCO continues to make press releases indicating that either they are incredibly intelligent and are playing some kind of really funky publicity game or that they have no clue what they're talking about and are learning alongside some of the rest of us, various members and groups of the Open Source community (which is so large in numbers and varied in philosophies, motivations, backgrounds, worldviews, religions, ethnic backgrounds, programming backgrounds, favorite colors, spoken language, geography, vocation and such we might as well say "people on planet Earth") have responded in an increasingly comprehensive manner.

The most comprehensive article on the topic is this response to Darl McBride's most recent open letter to the community. I would posit that any C*O/person who reads that article will no longer have doubts as to the extraordinary benefits of the Open Source development model as it applies to due diligence, copyright/patent/trademark laws, and freedom.

Where I once was hesitant about various aspects of the Open Source development model, I no longer have doubts that it is a valid model and will be around for many years to come regardless of who is poo-pooing it in the press this week.