I can has cake?

Monday, the 18th, was the 15th anniversary of Debian GNU/Linux so in honor of the occasion I stopped by the supermarket and picked up a cake.
The woman in the bakery section asked "Is Debian a girl or a boy?"
We went with the blue icing.

Another Philly Icon gone

Robert Hazard, Philly Rock n Roll icon and all-around hero to a lot of Philly kids my age, died recently. He was 59. I can still recall driving around in the back of my brother's car with Pat and Pat, my two best buds at the time, when I was too young to drive but too old to be home on a Friday night. We would blast "Escalator of Life" and "Change Reaction" on the Pep Boys cassette deck duct-taped into the dash of my Mom's old Plymouth Valiant, cruising around the Deptford Mall parking lot. Somehow we thought loud music, an old four-door, and rude suggestions loudly made would impress the girls. Sometimes, we were right.
He'll be missed, he was a Philly original and the scene in the City of Brotherly love owes him a debt of gratitude, as does Cyndi Lauper for writing "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" :) .

Frist Post

First post to Wordpress on the new blog. I finally got tired of running multiple boxes 24x7 at the house, especially in the summertime without central air - the heat in the office was starting to get unbearable, as was the electric bill and the wife-annoyance factor.
I chose Rapid Xen and signed up for a VPS on a Debian server running as a Xen instance in their Chicago facility.
Excellent hosting provider so far (all of two days, so hey, not a lot to base it on). The sign-up was painless, I got an email the next day letting me know the server was up and running and giving me the IP address to go log in and get running.
All it took after that was a quick change in DNS and an apt-get to install the software, and here it is.
I suppose one of these days I'll cutomize the theme a little and make it a bit more "personal".

I'm officially turning into my Dad. I said the following to my daughter today: "Be careful you'll poke out your eye."
I probably turned into him a long time ago, but this is one of the first times I stopped and realized it.
Of course, it was good advice to give, even if the two year old probably didn't comprehend exactly what "poking out your eye" means, she stopped swinging around her belt.
And promptly started pelting me with Goldfish.

I can officially say it's been a loooong time since I used Windows. Out of habit I hit ctrl-alt-right arrow on the keyboard to switch to a different workspace, since I had just kicked off a long running job and wanted to open another ssh session to work on another project, and the screen on my laptop went sideways. It was early on a Sunday AM and I hadn't had a second cup of coffee, so I was a little more surprised and confused than I normally would be at such an event. I tried ctrl-alt-left arrow and it flipped it the other way. Ctrl-alt-down flipped it upside down, so I tried the only remaining combo: ctrl-alt-up, which made everything hunky-dory again.
Sigh.
I suppose if I am ever forced to use Windows Vespa I'm going to lose what's left of my mind.

You WILL respect my Authori-tay!

img_0065.jpg
Originally uploaded by djkntz

Hey what can I say, it's a cute pic. First B-day party at the house Saturday was a rousing success. More pics to come.

I decided last week to leave the current job and join Mediaguide as a Linux Admin. Slightly sucky commute, but cool people. Should make everyone in the family happier knowing I like what I'm doing for a living.

Long time no blog. Things are busy. Evie is going on 9 months old now and developing her own personality in leaps and bounds each day. She isn't talking per se but I swear when I walked in the door last week she looked up at me, waved, and said "hi da-da".
At least that's what it sounded like to me, and since she smiled and waved when she did it, I'll swear that's what happened until the day I die. :)
I also managed to get a certification under my belt - HP-UX CSA. When I look back at my 10 year or so career in IT it's simply amazing I never even sat for a certification exam. It was never a real priority for anyone I worked for - as long as I knew what I was doing and got the job done they didn't care.
Not possessing any certifications probably hurt when it came time to look for another job, but then again I've switched jobs just once in the last 6 years.
Maybe I could have made more money by hopping jobs once or twice within that time span, but the economy for IT in the Philly area pretty much sucked up until last year, and even now the pay range doesn't approach what I would have been making in Chicago right now. Besides, being happy and enjoying your place of work has a certain "priceless" quality.
We'll see what the near future brings with regards to that last statement.

Jeremy Allison, of SAMBA fame, has left Novell. This quote from him concerning the MS/Novell patent pledge sums up in a wonderfully succinct way the reason many people (myself included) are angry about the deal.

"Do you think that if we'd have found what we legally considered a clever way around the Microsoft EULA so we didn't have to pay for Microsoft licenses and had decided to ship, oh let's say, "Exchange Server" under this "legal hack" that Microsoft would be silent about it - or we should act aggr[i]eved when they change the EULA to stop us doing this?"

The GNU GPL is a license, an EULA no different than the one most folks click through without reading on Windows, Office, Acrobat, or any other piece of proprietary software. By accepting the license you agree to it's terms and conditions. Unfortunately, most people are so inured to the the actual text of a EULA after clicking through a bazillion such "accept" boxes in the course of their computing lives that violating the GPL seems no different that pirating Photoshop or Office.
Worse, some consider FOSS no different that Windows shareware without the nag screens. My boss said today that he doesn't know anyone that actually purchased an Office license for home use, and he seemed both amused by and proud of that statement. Proprietary software companies like Microsoft et. al. seem to build a certain amount of piracy into their pricing, assuming home users and small businesses will either buy one copy and use it on multiple desktops, or "borrow" a copy from a geek friend or friendly web site.
The "everybody does it and nobody gets hurt - look how much money Bill Gates is worth!" attitude this creates is, IMHO, the hardest thing to get past when trying to explain FOSS to people for the first time.
I can't remember how many times I've heard something along the lines of "But I didn't pay for (Office, Photoshop, random_program) either" when explaining what "this Linux thing" is to people.
It's something akin to a "Robin Hood" mentality, stealing from the big bad software companies.
With GPL/FOSS the tables are turned. The users must be diligent and prevent companies from stealing their software, not the (traditional) other way around. And companies that contribute to, package, and distribute FOSS must be especially careful not to even commit a perceived violation of the license, lest the user community vote with their digital feet. Even more important to these companies, as illustrated by Mr. Allison, is the developer community - and at least one prominent developer has voted.
Since the claimed focus of the MS/Novell deal is interoperability not patents, I would imagine SAMBA was a big part of that vision. Now that Jeremy Allison has left Novell, where does that leave them? I'm sure they have talented developers remaining in their employ, but do any of them have the same high profile within the SAMBA community?
Time will tell, but should GPLv3 come about with anything close to the currently proposed changes Novell may be forced to fork from the last released GPLv2 source of a lot of software, SAMBA included. This puts them right back where they started prior to the SUSE acquisition - on their own developing and maintaining an entire portfolio of software, trying to play catch-up with much larger development communities, be they free or proprietary. It's a battle they weren't winning then, and won't win in the future.

I got a new LCD monitor a week ago and I'm slowly getting used to it. 19 inch widescreen, with 1440x900 resolution. Takes some getting used to, especially since it doesn't have the screen real estate of the old dinosaur 21 in. CRT. Of course, it doesn't weigh 45 lbs. either, or take up the _entire_fucking_desk like the old HP. Did I mention is doesn't flicker on and off, or randomly resize it's display like my old monitor has for the last 3 months? ;)
This item is the last thing I need to get straight after switching monitors. My splash screen displays an "out of range" error on boot and shutdown. I don't reboot or turn it off very often so it's a minor annoyance, but still annoying. No numeric listing for 1440x900 in grub that I can find, so I guess I'll just fake it out with 1280x1024 for now?
Would be nice to see boot-up messages, I guess.

I guess this is only funny for Ubuntu users, or maybe closet Pokemon fiends.