shortened epic blog post

I suppose this could be three (or four) posts, but I’m interested in all of these things right now, so why post later?

Punk and Openness

My punk “street cred” is arguable.  On one hand, I’m listening to music on Last.fm at current that has only been played 213 times.  Compare that to Bad Religion, which has been played 20,410,919 times or Justin Timberlake, which has been played 18,241,764.  (btw, how awesome is it that Bad Religion is more popular than JT?  Of course, BR has been at it quite a bit longer).  On the other hand, I drive a Saab 93 Convertible.  Not a new one, but new enough to be very unpunk.  Then again, I’ve been kicked out of a show.  That’s certainly cred worthy.  Ah, but there’s that whole works for “the man” thing.  I could go on with arguments for and against, but you can decide by looking at my Last.fm page.  I think it’s clear to say, either way, that I like punk music (and I’m considering hardcore as a sub-genre just to be clear).

In what ways are DIY punk and FOSS similar?  Well, both have been coopted by “the man” with people divided as to if this is good or bad.  Political punk gets a wider audience by selling out to corporate media.  I don’t like Anti-Flag’s latest album, but I don’t think their politics are necessarily hurt by being on a corporate label.  While I tend not to be a fan of corporate labels, the RIAA and DRM, I am very much a fan on Sun, Red Hat, IBM and other corporate players in the FOSS world.  Probably going to be posting about this more later…

UWSFC

I’m supposed to be going to the University of Wisconsin (Madison) Students for Free Culture meeting at 5:30, but I still haven’t heard from Chris Lay, their leader, about the location.  Chris is going to be helping with Open Everything Madison.  UPDATE: Alnisa Allgood informed me that it’s either at Sunlight or Sunroom Cafe.  Seems the e-mail on the list may have had a typo.  I’m not sure how I feel about eating at a place that uses Microsoft Office Live Small Business but at least they have a website.

Openness and Web Apps

Recently Richard Stallman called web apps stupid.  My gut reaction was this was ridiculous.  I’m currently writing on WordPress and streaming Last.fm.  I’ve also got Gmail going, online banking and travel planning.  I’ll have to post more about this later…

Other random things…

I will post a couple Drupal Camp Chicago pics to Flickr and facebook later.  My Intel webcam that we were going to throw out at work doesn’t seem to be picked up on Linux.  Maybe it is broken.  It certainly looks old.

Openness and waste

Looks like I’ll have to come back to this one.  Off to UWSFC meeting…

new blog title and what Linux needs to go to the next level

On the way back from Chicago this evening I thought a lot about openness.  I was asked recently what my ultimate goal is.  I think the answer is that I’d like for institutions with which I or my friends and family are affiliated don’t waste money on proprietary software.  Proprietary software can be good, even great software, but all software has bugs and security flaws.  Why not have the ability to fix them yourself?  As was recently ask at BarCampMilwaukee3 by another participant, “why pay for buggy software?”  Well, the answer may be that it’s the best, but I urge you to think about the total cost of ownership, and I don’t just mean for Windows Vista or Windows XP, but for staying in the Window paradigm.  I’m 25.  In 40 years, how much money will companies I work for spend on Microsoft?  If you gradually phase in FOSS alternatives, how much money can be saved?  How much more control will we have of our software, leading to increased productivity?  Switching is difficulty, but the switch is better done now than later.  To make that transition easier, I think Linux needs Photoshop and iTunes.  I don’t think either of these companies has anything to fear from Linux, but they both have something to fear from FOSS.  Legitimizing FOSS is putting one foot in the grave for these companies, at least on a software level.  However, even if Adobe did release Photoshop for Linux, it would be a long time before GIMP overtakes Photoshop.  In fact, moving to Linux could free up software dollars in budgets for more people to buy Adobe products.  Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Acrobat are industry standard software and are going nowhere soon. It’s hard to say what exactly would happen to Apple if it put iTunes on Linux.  In the short term, they could expect more iTunes sales.  Despite all the closed things Apple does, basing OS X off of BSD seems to have made a lot of folks in the FOSS community happy.  Apple also does some great things for FOSS with their support of Apache, MySQL and PHP.  And, of course, there’s the mutual enemy.  While I don’t see either happening any time soon, I do think that more software needs to make it to Linux for Linux to make the next step.

As for me, I’ve recently gotten an Ubuntu machine on our domain.  The next step is to be able to access domain resources.  That way, I’ll be able to be more productive while saving my employer some money on Microsoft licensing.

The point of all this rambling is, I changed the site name to better reflect the things I feel I should be talking about.

Google Reader…more to come later

I currently sit on 333 items to read in Google Reader.  Those of you that follow me on Twitter (douglasawh) know I’ve been struggling with how to not get overwhelmed in reading.  Specifically, I want to keep it below 1000 so that I can actually see how much I have to read.  Slashdot, in particular fills up the queue rather quickly.  Ok, so I just changed this (thinking while I write, which I often do).  Now I’ll just get the Linux articles on slashdot.  I do the same thing with Digg.  Now, the problem is, what about when there are interesting articles in other areas?  Well, I guess I’ll just have to trust FS Daily, the Open Solaris feed, Google at the top of Gmail and Twitter to keep me informed.  I think I’ll be ok.  The problem really is that I do Windows at work and I really am ready to be done with Windows.  I’m fighting what I want to learn for myself and what I feel I should be learning for work.  I’m certain that some learning is better than no learning though.

Ok, I was going to write about Drupal Camp Chicago and Open Everything Madison, but it’s time to bounce…

Open Everything Madison (OEM)

If you’re curious, check out: http://groups.google.com/group/oemad

There will be more details posted here as they come about

BarCampMilwaukee3 and some Vista issues

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this on here, but while I’m 100% Linux at home (not even in a virtual machine), my desktop at work is Vista.  I’m working on getting a tablet going with Ubuntu and I have an Ubuntu HP 6910p, but Vista is what I am using mostly.  At 4GB RAM, I don’t have much to complain about.  If I had this bad boy, I’d even have less to complain about.  It might work as a pretty good heater in the winter too.

So, I finally have a SATA hard drive.  This is going to be so sweet.  And, it’ll finally give me a chance to get rid of my last NTFS partition, which seems to be pretty flakey.

Ok, on to Vista issues.

1) Maybe this is an issue with XP too, but when I RDP to my machine the taskbar and my icons move to the other monitor.  It’s not that big of a deal, but it is annoying.  I use a VGA splitter and while the two splits are labeled 1 and 2, RDP defaults to 2.  I haven’t been able to find much online about it.  This guy fixed his problem, and it’s the closest I can find, but it’s not the problem I am having.

2) I have a Motion Computing tablet and this thing is a royal pain to upgrade to Vista.  It must be upgraded, not a fresh image.  The fresh image doesn’t have wireless drivers and the company doesn’t really support this model with Vista.  The only problem is our only employee with one of these has Vista (he has a 1700 rather than a 1600) and I can’t reproduce the problem in Vista or XP.  He is having delay issues on digitally signed e-mails in Outlook 2007.

Ok, since I tagged this mostly as variations of BarCampMilwaukee3, I should at least say a little something about it.  There’s a pre-party tomorrow night.  I won’t be there.  I will be there at 10am on Saturday morning and plan on staying until the end.  I’m sure there will be some down time for a blog post, if we don’t have wireless issues like we did at BarCampMadison2.  Also, at BCMad2, I went home since I basically live in Madison, meaning while I slept well, I missed out on some of the night craziness.  The Saturday of BCMad2, I went to the Dillinger Escape Plan show at The Loft on Washington with some friends.  Crazy show…even crazier than the last time I saw DEP, though that concert in Raleigh was a pretty crazy night, just not as much so during DEP’s set.  So, if you’re in Madison, Milwaukee, Chicago or the surrounding area, I highly encourage you to attend BarCampMilwaukee3.  I’ll be leading a discussion on pairing FOSS with proprietary, not because I like proprietary at all, but because that is the reality of the situation at current.

EDIT: I see that I mentioned the motion computing issue back in August.  Yep, still working on it.  I need a USB CD drive that gets along with motion computing.