Taciturn

Drink V, listen to The Perfect Drug. Referring to the version from halo 15, We're In This Together Now.

Without you everything falls apart.
Without you it's not as much fun to pick up the pieces.

I'm installing prelink at the suggestion of the Debian OpenOffice.org package. Reading up on it, it looks quite useful, especially for KDE users (which, for the record, I am not one). In a nutshell it makes programs start faster by prelinking the shared libraries. There are claims of speeding up KDE apps by 50%. Gentoo has a good Prelink HOWTO.

I've found some bugs in Mozilla Thunderbird. As of version 1.0.7 I suggest you don't use it for IMAP mail unless you configure it to save drafts to a local folder. The default is to save it to a folder on the IMAP server, but if sending your message fails and you are prompted to save a draft, regardless of your selection the mail will be deleted. I will report this bug shortly. I have a few bugs to report, I just have to make time to actually report them, but first I have to rewrite an email I lost.

OpenOffice.org 2 is out! This is really good news. Yesterday someone had the brilliant idea that because the only thing tying the family PC to a Windows OS is MS Office (mum uses it extensively for her work and needs complete compatability with .doc), I should consider using CrossOver Office on that machine. At US$39.95 it seems a bit expensive, but considering what is saved by not having to buy a Windows licence it's really quite reasonable.

I once stated that my machine would never run a Windows OS beyond Win2k. Now I say the same for the family PC.

If you come across someone who's not willing to use OpenOffice.org because "no-one else uses it", point out that they're free to provide the installer for it on a CD with the document they are sending to someone... or a link to the downloader. There's no good reason not to have OpenOffice.org installed if you do any office suite type work.

Tim pointed out how cool sshfs is. I agree.

Rusty Russell has written a beautiful paragraph. It's about copyright law, as is often the topic of his writings. I'll reproduce it here but you should read the full article, "Clinging to Constitutional Arguments". All emphasis, strikethroughs, and links are reproduced as in the original.

Imagine a scenario where a remote landowner says "with the invention of the internetcar, my area is more accessible. More people are trespassing on my land: that's stealing!". So our parliament passes a law which says rural landowners can out up fences on the approaches to their land (ie. beyond their actual borders), and shoot any unauthorized person who crosses them. Now, you have a small farm, and you need to use those same approaches to play DVDsaccess your land. And that's about where we are with anti-circumvention law today.

Support local small businesses. They'll support you in return. RMS put me on to an ideas page, though it refers to America it applies equally well to Australia.

I now have ridiculous amounts of RAM in both my iBook and desktop machine — both 1.5 GB. I justify it because of Linux's excellent memory management. Martin Pool wrote an article explaining Linux's memory management, titled "Why doesn't free memory go down". It's partly based on that article that I've invested so much money in RAM for my machines. With the Linux kernel, it makes sense.