Joseph Ferrare

09:21 pm: Cashing in on Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt
At last somebody is jumping on the bandwagon. The company Open Source Risk Management is offering indemnification for a price, according to this article: http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/04/19/HNlinuxgroup_1.html. For those of you who don't follow Linux that closely, a group that goes by the initials SCO is suing people in and around the Linux community because it says somebody stole their code and put it in Linux. Linux businesses have, according to SCO, since then been using this high-end code on free or near-free (compared to traditional Unix installations) Linux distributions to push Unix out of the market. So now these OSRM guys have checked the code, and are satisfied SCO has no case. They are also satisfied that since there is no case, they can charge people for protecting them against SCO should SCO take them to court. The thing is, it isn't really insurance as you or I might understand it. What they have done is contract with a bunch of lawyers who will represent people who buy this indemnification. So, you pays your money and you takes your chances -- even though you paid your money.
I would call this a sham, but in the end it increases confidence in Linux, and so it's a good thing. Better to pay OSRM money you don't have to than to pay SCO money you don't have to.
Better yet, send your favorite linux vendor (might I recommend http://www.slackware.com ?) some money and at least then you'll know you're giving it to somebody who is doing something to earn it.

06:21 am: Monday morning, back to work after a trip
I was reading about the possibility of a new linux documentation project over at http://www.groklaw.net, and am toying with the idea of joining in. I keep wanting to help out on something like this, because I use Linux and want to give a little back. Problem is, I can't program and don't have enough money to make a difference. But I can write, and I can edit.

They've decided to do it as a Wiki, which is something I'd really like some experience with. In my job at the Defense Information School, one of our goals is to be a best-practices, repository of all knowledge kind of place. I think a Wiki is a good entry point. I think that, if I can get it started, it could work. We could have news, links to interesting stuff, and other reasons to visit every day. Then we could have everybody contribute, maybe even almost on the sly, by having forums (fora?), then having somebody at the school comb through the forums and extract useful information. Then we reformat into a FAQ/best practices document and throw it back to the community for review/correction. No big pain to anybody in particular, big gain for everybody in general.

Hey, great news! Shauna Morse -- mpptexj@msn.com -- says I can get a great rate if I refinance my home. Not sure the Army would appreciate that, or the contractor they've got taking care of the place. But I should thank ol' Shauna. You should, too. Drop her a note.

New topic: my laptop I'm downloading Vector Linux, which I may put on my project laptop. I've got Slackware 9.1 on it now, with the 2.6.3 kernel, but it seems to be too much for the old dog. It's just a PIII 450, with 64 Meg of RAM. That's the problem, of course: not enough RAM. Hard drive is too slow, too. So I'm going to upgrade the RAM and see what happens. It's actually very useable if I stay in Fluxbox instead of one of the big desktop environments (KDE, Gnome). But I want it to be faster. Vector Linux is supposed to be faster than Slackware, even, though probably not enough to notice on my main machine. The good thing is that Vector is based on Slackware, so I don't have to learn a new system.

Well, gotta run. Didn't do a lot of PT while TDY to California, and my weight has gone way beyond acceptable. I've got a weigh-in and PT test in 10 days, and I'm going to do horribly. While I'm running I'm going to give some thought to what I want to do with this blog. Just wandering through my mind is useful in its own way -- writing helps me clear things up in my mind -- but a little focus wouldn't hurt, either.

06:12 pm: Log on
Decided to give up on the blog on my home page -- http://www.ferrare.net -- and just use this one instead. I'll use the home page as a family page, and keep the blog separate. Now sure how that'll work, but both are going nowhere as one page. Maybe having a handy-dandy blog client will make it easier.