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.

www.zenwalk.org - Welcome Windows users - Claus words - News debunks some of the myths about GNU/Linux for windows users, and explains why you should switch. :)

After struggling with this problem with my Epson CX4600 multifunction - blank pages, pages all one color (blue in my case) and generally feeling like I spent a lot of money for a card reader, I called Epson.
Good news, they are shipping me a replacement printer - a CX4800 - free of charge.
Apparently I'm not the only one to have this problem and they have stepped up to help out dissatified customers. I'm still pissed I got sold a piece of crap, and there's no guarantee the new model won't have the same problems, but at least I have one final avenue to travel before I have to buy a new printer. Maybe I'll at least get a few prints of the pictures from Evelyn's Christening party before it fails.

I've been going through the Instant Hacking : Learn how to program with Python page a little bit - never hurts to keep evolving the ol' skill set. I also got put in charge of maintaining all of the perl scripts left behind by a contractor at work. Not a big deal, but when it comes right down to it I'm not a programmer, I'm an admin.
Oughta look good on the resume, though.

Get Music Radar
I've added a new feature to the top of the blog - my Mugshot Music Radar -
It shows what I'm listening to right now, and takes you to my Mugshot home.

Evelyn Amelia dressed to go home

Evelyn Amelia dressed to go home
Originally uploaded by djkntz.

Jenn and I welcomed Evelyn Amelia into the world July 19, 2006. 9 lbs. 15 oz. of cuteness. Slowly adapting to the lack of sleep and have a dawning realization that I have to buy a family car.
Fascinating thought, that - we entered the hospital a couple and left a family.

My Last.fm top tracks chart: " "

I've gone and done the last.fm thing, so here's my "top tracks" chart.
The English Beat song I had to learn for a gig, hence 24 plays.
:)