I wrote a new O’Reilly blog entry that can be linked to in the sidebar. The entry talks about the nature of the hacker mindset and what makes hackers hack. I was not aware that there is already a book called the The Hacker Ethic. Oops. I thought the term sounded cool.

It looks like the snow is going now. Thank god. This snow has really been a pain. I am going to the Smoothwall Express launch do on saturday with Aq and I was hoping that the snow will not get in the way. It should be an interesting event. I do like Smoothwall, but this is probably because I have never seen anything else than IPTables really. I know Dick Morrell has been playing with M0n0wall – I should check it out really.

We are now onto the first review stage with the Manning book and I am working hard on the O’Reilly book. Things are progressing well and I am looking forward to getting most of the core content written. In book related news, I had the the Bruce Perens Open Source series Qt book arrive yesterday – I had checked out the pre-release previously and it is good. Well worth a look.

Last night I changed the Apache logging of this site so it will now provide a combined log with referrer information. I love this kind of log information – it is strange seeing all the weird and wonderful sites that seem to refer this one. I will be keeping my eyes peeled on this.

Something that you may have noticed now is the licensing for my blog entries has been set. Before it was all a little general, but I have now got round to settling on the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs license. You can basically copy my blog text as is, but not modify it (why would you need to?). You can also use these words of innane wisdom commercially if you so desired to. Lucky you. 😉

Yesterday it snowed. I am sure this is no revelation to many of you, but it didnt just snow, it decided to turn roads, doors, paths, cats and people into blocks of ice that were (a) not going anywhere, and (b) very pissed off.

This snow annoyed me in two ways. First, I left the house to go to the shop 5 mins down the road and saw that there was snow on my car. No problem I thought, but then when I attempted to open the door, it turned out that I pretty much needed a crowbar to open the thing. I was also treated to a good 20 mins of sat in my car, blower on full, trying to defrost it.

The second annoyance regarding the snow was the fact that last night was supposed to be a celebration. Not only was it Aq’s birthday bash, but Matt Revell has had his birthday recently and got engaged to boot. It was promising to be a great LUG meet; taxi’s were booked, beer was cold, and we were ready. As it turned out, Aq was stuck at work in brum due to the traffic (and did not leave until 11.30pm), Matt got home very late, and we had a measly four LUGgers turn up out of an expected 10 or so. Yes, the snow caused virtually everyone a problem. Did I say that I don’t like snow?

Anyway, it turned out to be a good LUG meeting as ever, and we had a lot of fun. The next LUG will be what last night should have been, and you will see the pictures to proove it in a few weeks.

So, what else has happened? Well, my Linux Format Blender competition has been announced on the Blender website. I think that this, in combination with my O’Reilly blog and the Linux Today article has caused the traffic to ramp up. Good job Angel III (our new server) is online now. 🙂

Yesterday I did a stack of proof reading, and fixed quite a few errors. Looks like we can go to the review process for my Manning book. I am now just working on another chapter, and continuing to write hacks for my O’Reilly book. Before I can do this today though, we need to pop to town and I need to endure the pleasure of getting my tax return handed in. You know, I love that, I really don’t.
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Eagle eyed regulars of this site may have noticed a distinct speed improvement this morning. The reason for this joyous occurence is that we have had a server upgrade. The previous machine was a creaky old P133 that was running this site, kryogenix.org and some others. Considering it was a pensioner in server years, it did a remarkable job. As much as I respect the previous server, it will now be bin fodder though, as this machine is much faster, and some parts of the site are considerably improved – such as Forge. Thanks go to Aq, Ron and Savvy for this.

Last night I watched Revolution OS again. I have not seen this since a LUG meet last year when the entire LUG piled into our living room to watch it. It is a good documentary that explains how free software and Linux came about and includes interviews with Linus, RMS, Bruce Perens, ESR, Brian Behlendorf and others. Good stuff.

LUG meet tonight, and I am taking a camera…

Oh, and I would like to pass on my congratulations to Content People founder, LUG layabout and good friend Matt Revell for getting engaged. 🙂

It seems that Linux Today have published a link to my Morality by obscurity that I posted. It looks like my O’Reilly blog entry has also got a fair few hits. Then again, I would expect anything on the O’Reilly site to get a lot of hits. 🙂

Thanks for some of the great comments on the recent ramble. It is great that people can spend a bit of time sharing their views on it. This is what I am really after – interesting discussion. It is interesting to see the difference in how morality is perceived, and also interesting to see how people are well aware of the morality of free software.

Got some chapters proofed today and did some other writing. I have also been listening to Snakenet Metal Radio all day. Very cool station. 🙂
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Well, my O’Reilly Blog has been set up, and I have posted my first entry here. To indicate when a new post has been made to this blog, I have put an RSS feed on this site to indicate new entries. You can see it at the bottom of the sidebar.

Lots of writing done today. Formatted some work and sent it on, and things are starting to cement now. I also got a confirmation of a Newsforge article that should be going online in a few days. It is all about Linux User Group (LUG) culture.

I am looking into buying a new PC. This is going to be my main studio PC, and I am budgeting around £500 for the box. I have already asked the LUG for comments, and I have a few ideas. The main thing I need really is a fast disk speed and plenty of processing power for VST plugins. When the machine is set up, I might give some Linux sequencing software a go – now ALSA is in 2.6 that is. 😉
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The SCO case is certainly heating up. This case has intrigued many a casual observer in the way there are few constants involved in SCO’s argument. Although SCO may feel they have legitimate IP concerns, they may have a difficult time proving that these claims are valid.

My father is a bit of a legal eagle and has a keen interest in law, and I thought I would run the case past him. I sent him this fairly comprehensive article about the case and asked for his comments. He replied with this:

Copyright the Law and its remedies?

Registering and protecting copyright is both complex and difficult, even for expert lawyers.

Any Court faced with a claim of infringement of copyright will look beyond the simple words etched in copyright statutes and those principles hitherto agreed in case authorities, but will also look closely at the behaviour of both the alleged owner of copyright and the alleged infringer of copyright.

(© John R Bacon 24th January 2004)

It is going to be interesting to see how this all pans out. What do you all think?

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I know, it is a random title for this blog entry, but I am running out of ideas. Expect them to get wackier. 🙂

Came back home today after visiting family. We have been away for quite a while, and I have been working on someone else’s Internet connection with no LAN, so sharing the connection involved unplugging my computer and letting them plug in. This limited my times of work, so I worked through the night. Back to normal now however.

My mammoth Blender series has come to its end in Linux Format and there is a competition to celebrate the series. There are some decent prizes up for grabs, so go buy a copy of the issue and get blending. I have let the folks on the Blender site know about this, so there should be a news story there soon.

While we are talking about Blender, I saw a pretty cool Subzero project with completed animation and animated armature rig. This is very cool stuff, and it is good to see some quality character modelling going on.

Tonight I have been fixing up some stuff on the site again. Just little tweaks here and there, and much of it behind these scenes. I am pleased with how the site is running, and it seems that I am getting a fair bit of traffic. I have plenty of ideas for things to add, but it is a case of hacking it in when I have time. You should notice some newer bits dripping onto the site over time.

Freedesktop seem to be doing really well. They have now got their xlibs released and although I am not 100% sure exactly how they differ from the xlibs on my system now, it is great that activie development is going on, and it might drag X into this century. I am determined to get 2.6, udev and hotplugging working this week.
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Desktop Linux is without a doubt the order of the day for 2004. Not only has 2.6 added some nifty new features, but Robert Love is doing some good work with Project Utopia. In his recent blog entry he shares with us how hot pluggable device support really is working out of the box. This is fantastic. When you combine this with the fact that Trolltech have signed up to the OSDL desktop initiative, this is looking promising.

Well, it seems that UnitedLinux is dead. After my ramble about this whole subject, it did not surprise me that this would happen. UnitedLinux simply could not continue with SCO on board, and with SCO refusing to budge, all that hard work has gone down the pan. Thanks again SCO. What is comforting to know however is that Novell, SuSE, Ximian, OSDL, HP, IBM and plenty of others are fully behind desktop Linux. I suspect that the OSDL initiative will bear fruit in this area.

It seems to me that recently a lot of the key gripes with Linux are finally getting fixed. Issues of hot pluggable devices and mountable disks are key reasons why Linux has not had the same kind of take up on the desktop that other OS’s have had.

Now these issues are getting fixed, I think the next major area is to fix bootup times. It is complete madness how 1001 services are booted up when a Linux box starts, and most users need to go in and shut these down. This is something that the distributors need to fix. The new breed of Linux user who does not want to know the technical ins and outs of the system simply won’t be able to do this, or won’t have the time to learn how to do it. Boot a basic system, and then let the user choose what gets loaded. The key is in getting the GUI in front of the users eyes as quickly as possible.

I have added a new ramble by the way called Morality by obscurity. Remember to comment on your thoughts!
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I am just reading into Debian backups at the moment. I had always suspected that it would be a case of doing a quick dpkg --get-selections > mybackup.txt and passing this file to dpkg somehow to do a backup. Oh no, it seems that --get-selections does not store version numbers in the file. Could this be a problem? Not sure yet, but I don’t think so unless you need specific application versions.

While browsing round some mailing lists I saw this post referring to making backups, and a nifty little program called cruft that can indicate all the crap left over on your system. Not a virtual dog competition as I had hoped. Bah. 🙂

Today we went into town and checked some guitars out. I saw a rather nice ESP LTD weird Warlock type thing. Nice guitar at about 800 nicker. I gave it a play through a Hughes and Kettner amp. Sounded quite meaty. Thanks go to Ross from the Music Center for that one. 🙂

By eck has our LUG been busy recently. I thought last month we had a record number of messages with 485 posts, but this month we have a LUGtastic 739 messages so far. We have also had some new members join up and the LUG is really on a roll at the moment. 🙂

Dan from the LUG posted this interesting link about the new device handling in 2.6; I have not given 2.6 a whirl yet, but I plan to very soon. Much of this work is getting done by Robert Love – Ximian monkey and kernel hacker. view his blog by the way, it is always an interesting read.

Just started reading The Elements Of Style by Strunk and White. This really is a great little book that shows you how to write better and command better use of the english language. I have been meaning to read up on this sort of thing for a while, and I am pleased that I have started now. I have also been reading some books on RSS and XML. XML is one of those things that most people seem to be confused about for the first quarter of the book, and then, in a moment of spiritual enlightenment, it all slots into place. I figured out XML quite a while ago when I was learning how to handle actions in KDE, but I have never really used it for anything that useful (other than my CV that is in XML and is translated with XSLT/Sablotron).

Two days ago, I contacted SCO. Maybe it was morbid curiosity or something, but I wanted to hear them tell me directly about their case. They did the usual thing of asking for my details so they could call me back, and as soon I said I was a Journalist (when they asked what I did for a living) I have had no response. Maybe I should tell double glazing salesmen this as well. 😛

Right, I am off to town with Sooz to go play on some guitars.
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