Just heard that a friend of mine was commited to the
hospital due to a drug overdose. [Update: he died this
evening]
Not that he was a very close friend, but he has sort of hung
out with the same crowd of people
that I have for the last 10 years.This is the second person
that I knew well enough to call a friend to have fallen
victim to drug abuse, the first one dying due to it a couple
of years ago.

Looking at them now I can sort of see many similarities
between the two; low income, failed at school and
meeting a lot of dead ends with their careers. Wether the
drugs or problems came first for my two friends, I don’t
know, but I guess they lead into a evil circle where the
drug problems feed the social problems and vica versa.

Guess it doesn’t make me a very good person, but my
dominant feeling when thinking about my two friends is
not compassion for their problems, but more a relief that I
have myself escaped such problems and hardships in
my own life.

There is an fun discussion between RMS and the leader of the
Crystal Space project to be found here.
What makes it sort of funny is two things, the fact that the
CS guy simply doesn’t understand what RMS means by free
software at all in the beginning and not understanding why
RMS
don’t want to discuss OpenSource software and RMS on the
other hand is so completly ignorant of stuff like what a PS2
and DirectX is that that also causes some confusions.

As always RMS gets a lot of criticism on ‘popular’
discussions
sites for not being willing to compromise. Personally I have
big trouble by seeing why people hold up compromise as some
sort of higher ideal. Sometimes holding to a firm belief is
more appropriate,
unless you want to be a complete idiot who stands waving a
worthless compromise agreement while uttering words like
‘Peace in our time’

mathieu just put up a list of people he
would like to see elected to the GNOME Foundation board and
I think it is a good list. My first thought was to put up my
own list of candidates too, but starting with Matheiu list I
had a hard time deciding who to delete, I guess I have some
hard decisions to make before casting my vote :)

So I will instead just make some extra recomandations:

  • First of all I suggest altering the list so
    that Martin Baulig and Miguel de Icaza both
    gets on the board.

  • I also suggest adding Michael Meeks to the
    list.
    Michael has been one of the core Gnumeric hackers and is
    currently doing some great work on Bonobo. Michael is
    working for HelixCode and is located in England.

  • The third candidate I would like to see is Bertrand
    Guiheneuf
    a long time GNOME contributor (ObjC bindings
    and early incarnations of Evolution.) and founder of
    Henzai, a company which
    is making GNOME run on handhelds etc.

As mentioned I haven’t really decided who I am going to
remove from Matheiu original list to make room for these
candidates, but
I want to say that since all these alternative candiates are
coders, if you decide to add them your own ballot list, you
probably should replace some of the other coders. Currently
there are only two people on the list who aren’t primarly
coders and I think decreasing that percentage even more
would be a bad thing.

There is a term called ‘Fall depresion’ which is commonly used here in Norway to describe the often seen
phenomenon that people tend to get a little down when fall sets in and the hours where we have light is getting
fewer. I think I have been struck by ‘Fall depresion’ these last couple of weeks. It is not as much that I have been
depressed, but more like feeling like my battery is flat. The last two weeks have been very unproductive, I have
even watched a lot of television, something which I see as the biggest waste of time possible.

Yesterday I finally managed to shake it of and do something productive, the irony is that what made me shake out
of this period of inactivity was waching an episode of Ally McBeal. The comment that got me back on track was a
piece of advice one of the characters gave Ally, which wass along the lines ‘all the good ones are taken, so if you
want a good one you have to steal him’. Well, thinking about this I thought, hey that is a good point, so I called
a
girl I hadn’t spoken to in a while, but who I until now hadn’t wanted to invest to much energy into pursuing due to
she already having another involvement. Well, I think calling her was the smartest thing I have done in a while.

So back to my ‘fall depresion’ thing, well
there nothing better than a romantic interest to get your batteries recharged. The energies such things produce
enables you to get a lot of things done, including those related to work and hobbies. So my conclusive advice to
all the Advogato hackers, when you are feeling burnt out and need to get your work
stamina back on track, pick up the phone and call someone you are attracted too :)

Julian I still hang out at #linuxpower and
, and I was online quite a lot last week, but mostly
during Norwegian daytime due to being on an out of town work
assignment which left me unconnected in the evening. This
meant that most of my time online was early early in the
morning for you guys :). Nice to see that you have UTF-8
Suport in Gabber now,
hope it means the end of Gabber
chocking on å,ø,æ.

Important message to all Advogatoes, check out the music of
Norwegian band Briskeby it is really cool (and with
English lyrics :). You can try out their music with Gnapster
since I expect that for non-norwegians the album might not
be to easy to get hold of.

Okay, now I had it with Slashdot. I know most of you will
probably say ‘welcome latecomer,’ but what pushed me over
the
edge was the
posting of that story from the TurboLinux guy about just one
commerical distro in the future. No problem with the story
itself,
what made me really pissed of was the stupid RedHat attacks
the submitter had added to the post, comments which the
Slashdot editor had let pass.

And while I think it is wrong to fault Slashdot for stupid
shit being posted in the discussions, I feel that Slashdot
can very much be faulted when they post crap like that in
their headings.

So I hereby swear that unless I hear that Rob Malda
appologizes and calls it and editorial slip, I will stay
away from Slashdot and the bunch of degenerates that seems
to make up the Slashdot crowd these days.

HATE…..
I know I deserve it, but I got a bunch of error messages which I ignored thinking I clean them up at the end.
Well it seems I can’t, and since I now fixed the original cause of the error messages, I have to redo a lot of
my earlier stuff. Not that is will take me that many hours, but the work is bloody booring, which was the reason for
my rather lackluster ‘fix it later’ attitude in the first place.

On the cool front I have registered a new domain yesterday, and have started hacking on a proposal to send
of
to our favourite people in the world, the venture capitalists. Think I have a winning idea brewing and since I can’t
patent it, I guess I have to act on it instead :)

ErikLevy first of all I am your young and dynamic friend (I am not OLD :)

Secondly regarding the use of free software, as I sort of metioned in my previous statement, I think
that free software is such a powerful paradigm that it will force a change in the way business will be done from
here
on. So your point about 90% of people having used or using close sourced software is not valid in my view. An
example is (probably not the best one, but I am bloddy tired after being awake all night :) is how satelites and
cable broke the government television monopolies which dominated most of Europe until the
mid-eighties. Another example is how the internet is forcing a change upon the media industry at the
moment.

Or generally speaking, once in a while something happens that causes the rules which businesses has played
by for a long time to change, in my view the rise of the free software paradigm in the form of the (L)GPL is such a
change-enabler. (Change-enabler is one of those cool expressions I learned at Business School :)

Finally discovered where my MIPSB shares had gone to, they had been added to my etrade account, just not
to the portfolio view. So know my whopping 6 shares of Mips class B shares are shinning towards me since I
manually added them to my Portfolio. Think I will sell them as soon as the general market improves, only reason I
got them in the first place was the SGI spin-off. I try only to have shares in companies I personally like or believe
in
and MIPS is to big of an unknown factor to me. Think that of all the contenders in the processor market the
prospects MIPS isn’t the best.

A little unsure where I am going to invest the ‘fortune’ the sale of my MIPS share will make me, maybe VA Linux
is
a good buy at the moment or maybe even Big Blue.

ErikLevy since I have been working the graveyard shift now for two days my
mind
is too foggy
to properly contemplate your musings, so I might be arguing points you haven’t made :)

But I think that freedom is a very subjective matter and what is free and what is not a matter of interpretation. For
instance I think that the GPL is free’er than the BSD since it ensures the availability of the code and the basic
rights of usage. BSD advocates on the other had views freedom not with the concept of users as a plural concept,
but with the user as an individual and in such a regard the BSD license is freer.

Is freedom a natural right? That is a weird question, since ‘rights’ are all human made. There are no natural
rights as such, only opportunities. For instance the sanctity of human life is not a natural right, but a right that
modern society has created in order to protect it citizens. As soon as society as we know it falters this ‘right’ will
be worth zero like all other rights created by the current regime, unless they are adopted by the next regime
too.

Is free software the only moral way to develop software? Once again a subjective matter. People in the third
world might feel that proprietary software is immoral since it puts them at an even greater disadvantage to the
industrial world, while a developer might feel that open source software is immoral since it deprecates the
incomme
potential of his/her closed source software on which his/hers livelyhood is based.

Should all software be free? I consider myself a libertarian and think that people should be allowed to do what
they want. Yet again, no one man is an island, and I think that if the people around you exercise their opportunity
to choose to use what they want, they will choose free software, thereby making it very hard to survive making
anything but free software. There is usually a big difference between what you can theoreticaly do, and what you
will find is practically feasible.

I think the reason Free Software is so powerfull is that it will change the rules of conduct in the software
industry. Some people think that if all software is free then software developers will starve. Personally I find that
idea silly. The matter of fact is that people need new software to accomodate their needs, as long as that needs
exist money to develop that software will be forthcomming. The introduction of free software into the marketplace
doesn’t change the basic rules of supply and demand, it only changes the way that money is being generated.

So while free software probably will kill of a lot of software companies who doesn’t manage to adapt to a new
reality, it will not kill of software developing as a profession.

I am so tired!!! I am in the middle of an upgrade of an Oracle Applications production system and am soon finished
with 12 hours on the graveyard shift. But of course this evening it is back for another 12 hours. Only bright side is
that I do get some extra cash for this, which I definetly need in order to pay the bills from my trip to LWE in San
Jose last august.

In case someone wondered; No it isn’t cheap attending US tradeshows when you live in Norway. (Not that I regret
it though, had a lot of fun, even if Julian was cruel and refused to fix Norwegian character
support in Gabber :)