• Revolution OS – A Review

    I’m watching the Spurs/Mavs game, so this may end up chock full of basketball metaphors. Last week, I watched Revolution OS. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a documentary about the birth and rise of the free software movement and Linux. The film is full of interviews of such open source/free software luminaries as Richard Stallman, Bruce Perens, Eric Reynolds, Linus Torvalds, Larry Augustin and others. It’s an amazing story, and done so well, and made so interesting that I think even non-geeks can understand it and be at least entertained by it.

    Why should you watch it? It’s a great example of geeks filling their own needs and everyone benefitting from it. It’s a story about the search for community, and real-world idealism. It’s a story about the extremes driving the middle, and how we can all affect change in our world. Yeah, it’s a big story, and I think the film did a great job giving an overview and providing an even-handed view of the players.

    Richard Stallman can be viewed as an extremist. He thinks all software should be free, and is decidedly anti-Intellectual Property. He’s an idealist. I can respect that, and I see the need for Richard and people like him. Without Richard, we may never have had the free software movement, all the great GNU software that drives a large percentage of the internet, and Linux may have never gotten off Linus’ hard drive and into the public imagination. His work on the GNU Project gave the Linux kernel something to run. The GNU Project provided the compiler for people to start porting other software to Linux. It just amazes me that things happened in the order they did. If Stallman had chosen to start on the kernel first, then Linux may never have happened.

    If you get a chance to watch it, please do. It’s informative and entertaining, and you’ll see what all the fuss is about. Heck, you may even jump on board and start using Linux yourself. Ok, maybe you won’t go that far, but you might start to see that there are alternatives to Windows, and that’s good enough for me.

  • Coming Attractions

    Oh so many things to tell you about and no time to do it. In order to be prepared for the hopeful avalanche of content this evening, you should all go watch Revolution OS before tonight so we can discuss it. And you might want to read up on mushrooms, bad bad art and good bad art, earthworms and their effect on small boys, love letters, and what you did this weekend. I will hopefully get around to writing about some or all of these topics this evening. Ok, at least one of them.

  • Do You Have a… ?

    This one’s from Jen:

    Heather, Kevin’s younger sister – note I didn’t say little – is starting to have multiple suitors. Max has met one, Jeremy, and has heard about the another one, Paul. Out of the blue, Max said to me, “Do you have a pa?” I said, “Pa? Yes, I have a dad, Grandpa Brian is my dad.” He said emphetically, “Paulllllll.” Then he said , “Jeremy.” I said, “oh, I don’t have a Paul or Jeremey, I have a Kevin. So, no, I don’t have a Paul. I just have your daddy. Paul and Jeremy want to date Heather. But I only date your daddy, Kevin.” It was a funny conversation. But I don’t know how much he got out of it.

  • Notes to Self

    1. When in meeting with Senior Vice President, find out that said VP is a VP before the meeting.

    2. JerkCity is really funny when you have a headache.

    3. It’s really hard to look cool when you have your leg propped up under your desk on an exercize, with an icebag and you’re leaning over trying to type. Oh, and it makes your ass hurt. Try not to do that again.

    4. Soul Coughing is so much more than Soundtrack to Mary. More bands should use stand-up bass. It sounds really really good in headphones.

    5. Someone needs to make a “Save to Blog” plug-in for jEdit.

    6. I don’t know how I lived before I found jEdit’s tag completion. It’s so hard to use anything else now.

    7. I need more Advil.

    8. Is it wrong to like Smallville? I know deep down that it’s cheesy. I know it’s corny. I can’t help it. I like the show.

    9. I need more ThinkGeek shirts. It’s an addiction, really.

    10. I must pick things up quickly. I can go back to code I wrote a month ago and see at least three things each time that I could have done better. Either that, or I was really really stupid and I’m just catching up.

    11. Doctor’s appointments are good motivation to get back on the FatWagon. I’m down five pounds in the last week and am back down to the weight I was the last time I saw him. The cool part is, I was only ever five pounds over the last time I saw him two months ago. My trainer says this is a good thing, to be able to maintain. Next on the maintain list? Sanity

    12. Jen wants a cheeseburger.

    13. I think I have frostbite on my knee now. But the inside parts don’t hurt as bad. The outside is all cold-stingy.

  • MRI Me, Baby

    My knee hurts still. It’s worse today than it was yesterday. I’m sitting here at work with ice on my knee trying to find a comfortable position to type in. I haven’t found one yet. Maybe if I move it this way… nope… this way? Nope, not that either. Maybe I should give up. Oh wait, I can’t. I have meetings this afternoon I can’t skip. I hope they don’t mind the grumpy tired me, because that’s what they’re getting. There will be no pleasantries when you ask me to squeeze 100 hours worth of work into 32. It can’t happen. Really, it can’t.

    I see the doctor on Friday. It’s not an orthopedist, but I’m hoping I can convince him just to order the MRI. I don’t want to schedule yet another doctor’s appointment, wait three more weeks, etc, when I could find out next week if I’m going to have to have surgery again. This is all so damned frustrating. I think you may not hear from me much in the next week or so. I haven’t been sleeping well; work is nuts (rhino-style, not acorns); this whole knee thing is pissing me off. So, anything I have to say would probably be less than edifying, uplifting, interesting or funny in any way.

    That, of course, is subject to change. Well, and Jen promised a big long post-Buffy essay that she said I could post here… if she does that, it’ll show up.

  • Happy Birthday

    Happy Birthday, sweetheart. How did she celebrate? She watched the finale of her favorite show (Buffy), went out to lunch, did a little shopping, ate some food, laughed and got some presents.

    Next year? We do something big. No, I mean it. Big, big, big, big… just you wait and see.

  • MTaste – And More?

    I read about mtaste a while ago, and thought it was an interesting idea. Unfortunately, I was really busy when it first came up and I promptly forgot all about it. Then, Mr. Frank wondered aloud about what the best way to implement it in a database, and that got me to thinking. How would I do it?

    Well, there are a couple ways to do it, but if you’re going to have a never-ending list of artists that people can vote on, then you need several tables. This also leaves it open to add things other than music to the list (which is what intrigues me about this all). As you can see, I design overly complex schemas. They’re way more fun than simple ones. Honestly, they’re sometimes hard to manage, but they’re a lot easier to extend and add to, especially in this case where you have an ever-growing list of ratings linked to an ever-changing/growing list of artists and genres. The item_types table could grow as well, to add authors, books, movies, actors, etc. I have some idea that you could use the ODP to cut down on the confusion of artist names, and to add to it (so you could end up basically rating ODP categories). Also, this is a first stab at this. I usually way overdo this in the first draft and then trim it down once I start building it. I think I’ll try to learn PHP and MySQL and actually build this (maybe using Movies instead, but you never know). With this schema, a lot of the logic will be held in application logic instead of the database, which I think could be mitigated some with secondary id’s and a simple API (so no one gets access to the db – just the API).

    Here’s the schema that comes to mind:

    users:

    • user\_id int primary key

    • user\_fname varchar(255)

    • user\_lname varchar(255)

    • user\_email varchar(255)

    • user\_zip varchar(24)

    user_taste::

    • user\_id int

    • item\_id int

    • rating int

    • timestamp int

    items:

    • item\_id int primary key

    • item\_type int

    item_types:

    • item\_type int primary key

    • type\_title varchar(255)

    • type\_desc text null

    • type\_public int

    • type\_table varchar(64)

    music_artists:

    • item\_id int

    • martist\_id int primary key

    • martist\_title varchar(255)

    • martist\_genre int

  • What Not To Do

    What do you do when you’re driving in a thunderstorm? Why, take pictures, of course!

  • New/Old Pics

    I put up a bunch of pictures today as well (been a busy boy, have I):