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
#gnome, 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 :)

Spent the last two days bughunting an installation of Oracle iMarketing, spending a lot of hours looking
through tables in a database hoping to find the misconfiguration that causes some damn ‘charsett is null’ error.
Due
to having to move on to another assignment I was left leaving it to Oracle support to do the last part of the bug
hunt. I have to admit, and I know this is sad and a sign of a empty life, that I am a bit curious to find out what was
causing it. :)

Seems like the Gtk-only vs. GNOME debate(flamewar) has died down, to be replaced by a ‘what
responsibility
do we have for the poor and homeless’ debate. My personal feelings on the subject is somewhat in a flux, ranging
from; everybody should be supplied with the basic things they need to survive, to a more pragmatic; there’s too
many humans anyway, lets spend the money on wildlife conservation instead.

Aaronl, I just saw your post to the Abisource developers
list regarding the two bugs that had resurfaced. It really suprises me a bit when someone who himself codes for
free software sends messages like that. Abiword is still pre-1.0 and making releases is the only sensible way for
a free software project do QA during development, and through the use of these releases get feedback
from people like yourself on what is broken so it can be fixed before the 1.0 release. If you feel that the current
Abiword maintainers don’t manage to keep the bug count low enough or make sure that your patches still does
what their are supposed to after the latests rewrites, then you should yourself help out to make sure things works
well. Personally IMHO that would be much better way to spend you time than your current Gtk-only crusade. Or
to
put in another way; the number of people who would be happy if feature X got added to Abiword is probably a LOT
larger than the number who will bother getting a Gtk-only Gnapster.

Wow, just watched Kids on
television. that was one disturbing movie. The cynic
attitude that the movie portrayed in those kids actually
scared me. Seeing movies like that makes me wonder if we
are
replaying history and our current times is a rerun of the
decay of the Roman empire.

Over to something completly different. My Mozilla
article seemed to be a success which is nice. Motivates
me somewhat into getting another article ready this weekend.