Happy New Years Eve. A quiet working day. Completed contract negotiations with a client, installed a new beta, upgraded a machine to RH 8.0.
Tuesday, 31 December, 2002
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Monthly Archives: December 2002
Monday, 30 December, 2002
An interesting article in the Washinton Post on the engineering challenges involved in weatherproofing Chernobyl for 100 years while decontamination efforts continue.
I don’t know if you bother to take time to read through the click-through EULAs, but the VFP 8 one has an interesting restriction that prevents redistribution of “Redistributables in any manner that would cause the Redistributables to become subject to any of the terms of an Excluded License. An “Excluded License” is any license that requires as a condition of use, modification and/or distribution of software subject to the Excluded License, that such software or other software combined and/or distributed with such software be (x) disclosed or distributed in source code form; (y) licensed for the purpose of making erivative worksl; or (z) redistrutable at no charge.”
IOW, you can’t give away a VFP app under an Open Source license, if you use any of their redistributables. That makes sense if they are trying to prevent sample code from entering into the freely-distributable zone, but I wonder if it is possible to generate an app that meets those conditions. IOW, you can’t include FoxPro.H, for example.
I’m pretty sure this is a new term in the license agreement, and yet another way Microsoft is attempting to stem the tide. Interesting, no?
Sunday, 29 December, 2002
Spent quite a bit of time with folks on Ed Leafe’s new ProLinux list trying to get Samba set up to serve a file share on my Linux workstation. After a few hours of tweaking, I managed to get the network card to refuse to start at all. Not exactly progress in the right direction.
On-again, off-again. Finally got an error message I could track down here, which lead me to conclude the “easy” way to configure my wireless card was not as reliable as the “hard” way. Of course, the hard way was, well, hard. I had to roll back to the previous kernel because the pre-made RPMs weren’t available for my latest kernel, and I didn’t have the source code installed, nor a clue on how to install it, on my current machine. So much to learn!
But the NIC is running again, and that was enough to get Samba up and running. Go figure!
Saturday, 28 December, 2002
Spent most of the day wrestling with contract terms. Blah.
Friday, 27 December, 2002
Saw “Two Towers” today. A lot more violence than the first, but more rough battle scenes and less drama or character build-up. Samwise shines.
Thursday, 26 December, 2002
Ow, am I sore. Spent two hours digging out the driveway. We got at least a foot of snow, perhaps more. Steve and Laura and I shovelled 4-6″ last evening, and possibly twice that this morning. Got to remember not to sit down too long.
Wednesday, 25 December, 2002
A few Christmas Eve pictures at: http://www.tedroche.com/Photos/Xmas2002/Index.htm
A wonderful poem praising the cowardice of lurkers.
Tuesday, 24 December, 2002
Merry Christmas Eve. A puttering morning and then travel and relatives. Ho, ho, ho!
I want to keep an eye on Subversion, as it may be the open-source successor to CVS.
Monday, 23 December, 2002
Mitch Kapor continues to get good press for his open-source project “Chandler,” a new PIM not due out for at least a year. I’m concerned that all the buzz will actually put a chill in the marketplace, which already has cool products like Evolution.
Sunday, 22 December, 2002
Vicious, nasty, funny and really well written: The Beast’s 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2002
Fun with the dogs: http://home.attbi.com/~tedroche/Photos/Xmas2002/Index.htm
Time Magazine’s “… of the Year” features a bunch of good articles: here and here and here.