community category archive

FSF Meeting in Boston (Part One)

Much after the fact, here are a few notes about my trip to Boston last month for the Free Software Foundation’s 2008 annual associate member meeting. This is part one. Maybe I’ll get part two up before another 6 weeks go by.

I like to travel, but I guess mainly with my wife. I didn’t like leaving her and our little baby girl behind. So while the outbound trip was pleasantly uneventful and I made it there with plenty of time to see the city, I felt a bit lonely walking around Boston Friday afternoon. I took some pictures which I’ll be posting here in the days/weeks/months ahead.

Stopped in at the FSF offices at 51 Franklin Street. One of my ears was plugged from the flight, making me …

Me and You and a GPG Key Named Boo

“Travellin’ and livin’ off the web…”

I have a GPG key, freshly created a couple of days ago. GPG is the GNU Privacy Guard, also known as GnuPG, used for encryption and digital signatures.

Many people include helpful comments about GPG encryption on a page with their public key and fingerprint. Instead of making similar remarks (which I don’t feel qualified to make), I’ll point to some examples: Karl Fogel, Peter S. May, and Henrik Lund Kramshoej.

I’ve read Karl’s page with interest in the past, and revisited it while preparing my own GPG key page. His comments have been influential in adding to my doubts about using the software and keys properly. I found Peter’s and Henrik’s pages recently in Google search results as I’ve been reading about the …

Doing the Samba with the Slug

This post cost me $20.

But only because I wanted to write it after donating to the NSLU2-Linux project so I could put my money where my keyboard is. It’s a token amount for the great work they’re doing and all the great resources they provide for free. But let’s back up for a moment…

I’ve written about my trouble getting network drives to work in GNU/Linux, and now I’m happy to report I’ve made some progress in that area. (I’m not sure how best to refer to this topic–in the Windows world we usually talk about “mapping a network drive”, but I suspect if it’s more common in Unix to refer to “mounting a remote drive.”)

As mentioned, I have this nifty little Linksys Network Storage Link for USB 2.0 …

How dumb can GNU/Linux users be?

Originally published in Free Software Magazine, 28 November 2006. This one picked up some diggs and I thought would make it to the front page with resulting praise, adulation, and scathing condemnation, but then it was cruelly buried. I suppose my provocative, attention-getting headline may have been frowned on. I paid the price and only got 0.15 seconds of fame instead of 15 minutes.

Question: How dumb can GNU/Linux users be?

Answer: As dumb as necessary.

Let’s rephrase: How technically sophisticated should GNU/Linux users have to be? How knowledgeable should any computer user have to be? The answer to that, of course, ranges from “very” to “not very.” We need to get past the name-calling of clueless newbie …