Taciturn

So much has happened, and so few posts. Here's a snippet of my life.

The thing foremost in my mind regards acceptance of open standards and open source at my place of employment. The tricky thing is talking about this without getting my head in a vice for defamation or leaking information. Free speech? Nah.

I got a job there. Started working at the beginning of the school holidays, learned how things went on and had a pretty enjoyable time. Term started, got stressed, ranted, kept going. Had the opportunity to work on some interesting (ie. unix-like) servers. Made my mark and was apparently valued for something other than my ability to ask callers to "reboot then try again". Servers continued working, but I'd had my taste of high-stakes interesting work, wanted more, but there was none to be had. Went to linux.conf.au (LCA), got really excited about making changes for the better. Showing people the light, the new way.

Well, so much for that. Several times at LCA I mentioned that the first thing i'd do on my return was deploy OpenOffice.org across the college. LCA was in April, it's now August and OpenOffice.org hasn't even been before the big-wigs. I've not yet been asked to provide an example installation for people to evaluate, so it looks like it's either going to be evaluated purely on financial grounds (which for a private school is not as big of a drawcard as you'd think) or not at all.

I thought it'd be useful and community-spirited to distribute Ubuntu Linux CDs to students. That worked well until a student tried to use a live CD (probably not one I'd distributed, but that's immaterial) on a computer in the college and was unable to access the internet. On the occurrence of this he requested help considering we "supported" Ubuntu Linux (I did, but the college didn't), there was an incident involving various amounts of shit and fans, and Ubuntu CDs were banned.

There's some brilliant open source software out there and it keeps getting better. Though I know Linux machines are not the panacea they seem, they'd certainly make way for some more interesting challenges. I want the time to show that these things can be done, and that I can be the one driving them. When software isn't working the way people expect, I want to be able to find out exactly why, what I need to do to fix it, and I want the application to be fixed if it needs fixing. Give me all the so-called technical articles you like, nothing is a replacement for the source code. The freedom to be in control. The freedom to fix problems and not be some middleware between an irate user and an application that shares no secrets.

Back in the days of manning the #helpdesk channel on EnterTheGame IRC, I mused that I'd never be able to do helpdesk as a job. I think I was right — it's not what I should be doing.