Haecceity

Fitz wishes to know: Where are my socks?

John Robb asks a relatively obvious question that I’ve not seen elsewhere - was he hiding, or had he been stashed there by a third party in the hope of his being useful later in the game?
To me, it seems like it’s going to be an interesting question to answer, especially given how bad Saddam looks in the photos the Americans have released.
I wonder, however, how this capture will be seen by the iraqi-on-the-street - while I have no doubt that eventually their quality of life has to improve - they still have comparitively good natural resources which are in strong demand in the west - I also think that until the US stops treating them in the same way us Brits treated India and Africa in the 19th century, there will always be resistance and fighting. Because no nation likes being turned into a vassal state by a country with fundamentally alien cultural mores.

Hub claims that Fedora moving Abiword and Gnumeric from Core to Extras is sabotage. Now, either dict is lying to me, or else Hubert is confusing “sabotage” with “rationalisation”. People really need to realise that distributions deciding not to have something explicitly in their core is not sabotage, it’s not a personal attack and it’s certainly not because we want to hunt down all the authors and string them up by their toes.
Rather, distributions (unless they’re Debian, but that’s a different ballgame) must rationalise what they put into their core - there’re only so many CDs that you want to put out!
Also, realise that moving something to universe/extras/etc is not a comment on quality; it merely reflects that the distro has taken a decision based on a variety of factors and is now implementing that decision.
Yes, of course it hurts when your pride and joy doesn’t make the cut, but move on from that learn that the only responses possible are: (a) give up entirely (b) make your project so kick arse it becomes the default choice or (c) go and work on the other project to give that the benefit of your expertise. A and C are kinda similar, but with very different end results.
I personally think that this need to have reasonable defaults and not overwhelm the end user with more choices than anyone could ever plausibly want will be a very good thing.
I’ve always felt that the fact free software makes it so easy to make “just another text editor” means that all the best ideas and the talent is lost in this zoo of competing products, whilst rationalisation by distros may discourage this a little and encourage people to collaborate on making really great software.
Of course, it’s also one of free software’s greatest strengths, and I’d hate to lose that. But a healthy balance needs to be struck, and at the moment, I think we’re still too far to the proliferation of competing projects side.

np: JET - Move On

29 Seconds, and all with a standard SysV init. (We’re not doing anything that isn’t releasable for hoary.)

Hotplug still sucks.

This has to be the best part of leaving a sys-admin role. Deleting one’s self from the monitoring systems. No more nagios spam at 4am.
No more disk space low warnings while you’re trying to have a quiet beer. I could continue in this vein for quite a long time.

I’m spending most of this week catching up with old friends who I’ve just been too busy to see over the last months. I also seem to be spending most of the week hungover and bleary eyed, too.
I’m finding, though, that I’m still far more ”with it” than I was for the last months of my old job. I guess having a job that’s interesting, fun, and extremely challenging will do that!

Best. Blog. Ever.

So one of my esteemed friends and housemates has decided that he’s going to learn to cook. All well and good, you think, lots of meals cooked for me while he practises. Aside from a slight hitch…
He’s spurning the usual method of cooking, ie buying raw materials and applying heat, and is taking a whole new approach.
That’s right ladies and gentlemen, he’s learning to cook in Final Fantasy Online.

Thomas notes that it’s August, not Autumn. That is all.