Random August News

Another month, another mod_virgule release. With this release, I’ve removed most of the remaining hard-coded, site-specific stuff. It’s now possible to build and install mod_virgule without having to edit the source code to insert the website’s name or the admin’s email address. I’ve moved all that to the site config file where it can be easily changed. There’s still one little clump of HTML used as the header on some internally generated pages that’s hard-coded. It’s getting really close to being usable for real-world websites but there’s still a lot left to do.

When I wasn’t working on mod_virgule, I noticed an interesting new blog. Anyone interested in reading about random Texas nature topics might find The Nature Writers of Texas blog fun. It contains nature writing from dozens of Texas authors including pieces originally published in newspapers, magazines, books.

And when I wasn’t working on mod_virgule or reading blogs this month, I was working on robot stuff. I’m still struggling to get the example files to compile properly for the New Micros Tini 2131 board. It seems the examples were developed by someone using a Windows variant of the GNU gcc tool chain and never tried out on anything else. They have a number of upper/lower case problems where a source file says #include “foo.h” but there is no file named foo.h. There is a file name Foo.h or FOO.H. I thought even Windows could distinguish between upper and lower case letters by now but apparently not. While correcting the case problems, I noticed some of the files had what appeared to be illegal characters in them; probably those old timey IBM graphic characters used as lines and boxes around comments or something. I’ve excised the weird characters and have now gotten down to what appear to be actual coding errors. I hope it won’t be too long now before I have some actual working code.

Richard Stallman Comes to Dallas

I heard RMS speak at the DFWUUG meeting last night. A lot of other people showed up too, in spite of the cold, wet weather. It’s the first time I’ve seen him in person and he was very much what I expected with a few exceptions. He told the story of the Free Software Foundation, the GNU GPL, and the GNU Operating System project. I got the impression that this was a talk he’d given many times before and much of it was almost word-for-word what you can read on the GNU and FSF web sites.

Overall he didn’t sound nearly as dogmatic as he is made out to be. He said the Open Source movement was not the enemy of the Free Software movement, just “the other political party within our community”. He made a point of saying that while the BSD license didn’t provide as much protection to the end user’s freedoms, it was a Free Software License. He also made a point of mentioning the KDE/QT disaster – noting that QT was now under GPL and the KDE system could be used within a Free Software based OS. He emphasised that Free Software was not about preventing businesses from making profit, just about prevent business from profiting at the expense of end user’s freedom.

He made the usual plea for people to use the correct terminology – use “Free Software” if you support Free Software. Use “Open Source” if you support Open Source. Pronounce GNU as “Guh-new”, not “new” or “Gee-In-You”. Pronounce Gnome as “Guh-gnome” (this one still bugs me – why make an acronym that forms a normal English word and then try to make people pronounce it incorrectly – I say it should be pronounced like it’s spelled. Oh well…)

Towards the end of the talk, RMS donned his famous Church of Emacs outfit including a black robe and disk platter halo.

After the talk there were the usual assortment of questions from the clueless:

Q: How can I make money if I can’t sell my software?

RMS: You can sell your software. The FSF is selling software and books today just outside this meeting room. Please buy some of it.

Q: How did X get its name?

RMS: I don’t know

Q: How many operating systems run within the GNU thing?

RMS: I’m sorry I have no idea what you mean by that.

Q: Is using VI a sin in the Church of Emacs?

RMS: In the Church of Emacs, using VI is a penance.

There were a few more volatile exchanges with someone who insisted he had the legal right to make non-free software and seemed upset that RMS wouldn’t approve of him doing this.

Okay, now the weird part. Why is it that Eccentric Geniuses like Stallman are always so, well, eccentric? He spent about 15 minutes prior to the talk sitting on the floor by the podium with his shoes off reading email on a laptop. All during the talk he drank iced tea (with no ice) from a large glass with two straws. Each time he neared the end of one glass of tea, a courier would rush forward with a replacement glass (each with no ice and two straws). He’d gone through three or four by the end of the talk. In fact, one of the questions he got during the Q&A was, “after all that Tea, do you need to go to the bathroom yet?”. He also would periodically stop talking and spend what seemed like a fairly large amount of time picking things out of his teeth or hair. He looks rather like a cave-man so this was fitting in an odd sort of way but it was clearly creeping-out a lot of people (though some seemed to find it really funny too).

Overall, an interesting evening.