January 2007 archive

Six Month Anniversary and Spam Milestone

“Moving to Freedom” is six months old! I haven’t made a huge amount of progress on my goal of moving to free software, but this blog has definitely helped keep my mind on it, and I think I’m going to make it eventually.

The writing of the blog takes a lot of time that could be spent on *doing* free software, but I like it. I’ve gone from craving thousands of readers and attention to just enjoying keeping this thing for what it is: a public journal of my thoughts and efforts on free software and related topics. And sometimes un-related topics.

So, thank you, to all my loyal readers. I hope to still be here in another six months. Let’s take a look at some visitor numbers from the first half year and …

Ray Kurzweil: Information should not be free?

Just getting started on Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near, and enjoying it so far, although this is a speed bump:

The biggest obstacle here is the understandable hesitation of publishers to make the electronic versions of their books available, given the devastating effect that illegal file sharing has had on the music-recording industry.

I thought the problem was more that the music industry doesn’t have a clue, and brought on their own decline by turning out mass-produced crap that surprisingly didn’t sell as well when more entertainment alternatives became available.

He goes on to discuss the growth of electronic readers:

The primary issue is going to be finding a secure means of making electronic information available. This is a fundamental concern for every level of our economy. Everything–including physical products, once nanotechnology-based manufacturing becomes a reality in about twenty years–is becoming

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Meet the New ‘Move Notes’, Same as the Old ‘Move Status’

I wasn’t really sure what to do with the “move status” page as originally started, so I’m trying something new.

As I start using GNU/Linux more, I still have some apprehension about being able to do all the things I was able to do in Windows, but now I’m seeing that I’ll get there. For a lot of things, it will just be a matter of the new way being different. Already with the Java stuff I’ve been playing with the past week, I can see it will be easier to let go of some Windows habits than I had feared. I’m actually enjoying using and learning about how Ubuntu and GNOME work rather than being frustrated at not knowing anything. (I’m still impatient though. There is so much more …

Caught in Google’s Web?

I’ve been reading Robert Cringely’s PBS.org column for many years now. I like the way he writes about technology, although many of his articles are more esoteric than I care to get in to (or am able to understand). I really enjoyed today’s piece on Google: “When Being a Verb is Not Enough: Google wants to be YOUR Internet.”

There is this:

Google loves secrecy. That they’ve been acquiring fiber assets hasn’t been a secret, but the sheer volume of these acquisitions HAS been. Why? One thought is that it kept down the price since people didn’t really know it was Google snatching up this stuff (they’ve done it under a number of different corporate names). But if price was the issue, then why hasn’t Google just bought the companies that own the fiber? It made no sense

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Arlo and Thoreau, Undying Adventure on a Neighborhood Walk

We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return– prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again–if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man–then you are ready for a walk.
–Henry David Thoreau, Walking
   http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/wlkng10.txt

Thanks to Jimmy Johnson for introducing me to that essay, in today’s Arlo and Janis. Arlo is one of three comics that I read every day. (The other two are Doonesbury and Zits.) I love the characters and the comic timing in Arlo. Follow the link — Janis’s response …

GNU/Miscellany

Even though it’s hard to set aside the urgent need for a backup plan, I dabbled a bit in Ubuntu tonight. One thing I had to do was set up an alias for ls -l. Having used HP-UX at work for years, my fingers want to type ll to get a “long” dir listing.

Searching for [ubuntu shell alias] found me a nice straight-forward explanation of how to set up aliases. I used to know a command in HP-UX for forcing your profile to reload (or your environment, or something like that — I’m afraid I’m going to be butchering a lot of technical concepts in this blog) and figured there must be something similar here. The ArsGeek page showed me that it is source .bashrc in this case.

I considered what to do with this information. …