Sleep has been avoiding me lately. It waits until I have given up on it and then gets me. It normally does so just before I have to get up. I lay awake last night watching my brain churning through increasingly bizarre thoughts. At some stage I was thinking about …
Reading
The pharmacist-turned-novelist John O’Grady adopted the pseudonym of Giovanni ‘Nino’ Culotta to write the story of an immigrant Italian journalist who comes to Sydney and writes about the people – and their version of English – he finds there. Nino’s true identity was only revealed two months after publication. It became a hit film in […]
Running my hand along the kitchen bench my fingers gripped momentarily on congealed sticky oil. I wiped my fingers on a towel and poured a glass of Roku Gin. Earlier today I booked a cheap hotel room in Colaba, Mumbai. Gregory Robert’s book came to mind and I thought …
With Australians trusting media platforms less than do people in just about every other country, why would you set about dismantling the one institution they trust the most? The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, our 86-year-old taxpayer-funded and constantly beleaguered public broadcaster, regularly tops surveys as one of the country’s few remaining […]
Date:
Friday September 28, 2018 - 9:00 am EDT to Sunday September 30, 2018 - 4:30 pm EDT
Location:
The
Day off work today. I took H to school and Winnie for a trail run. That’s what we call it now, apparently. My Garmin watch defined it for me.
It wasn’t a run because the hills were too steep. It wasn …
Emrys and I are mending a puncture… Well we did that, and moved some flooring downstairs. He has his uses. I was just showing him how this blog worked.
It’s now evening and I’m waiting for the roast to finish …
Permalink to this post This essay was originally published in November of 2017 as part of a series commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Zeran v. AOL case. Twenty years after it was first litigated in earnest, the U.S. Communications Decency Act’s Section 230 remains both obscure and vital. Section 230 nearly entirely eliminated the liability […]
Permalink to this post This essay was originally published in November of 2017 as part of a series commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Zeran v. AOL case. Twenty years after it was first litigated in earnest, the U.S. Communications Decency Act’s Section 230 remains both obscure and vital. Section 230 nearly entirely eliminated the liability […]
Don’t sit down – no long or in-depth story this time. Just a gentle reminder of the sort of shape a past life can sometimes take. For those who fled South Vietnam to escape the rule of the Vietnamese People’s Army, today’s Ho Chi Minh City will always be Saigon. No, it’s not a name […]
September: 8th and 9th Sep Deni Fest, Victoria VIC 28th Sep Dashville Skyline Festival Hunter Valley NSW 29th Sep Full Moon Dance QLD October: 4th Oct Gympie Film Festival QLD 19th Oct 5 Church Street Bellingen QLD 20th Oct Thumb Creek House Concert NSW 21st Oct Wingham Akoostik Festival NSW
[ A similar version of this blog post was cross-posted on Software Freedom Conservancy's blog. ]
In recent weeks, I've been involved with a complex internal discussion by a major software freedom project about a desire to take a stance on social justice issues other than software freedom. In the discussion, many different people came forward with various issues that matter to them, including vegetarianism, diversity, and speech censorship, wondering how that software freedom project should handle other social justices causes that are not software freedom. This week, (separate and fully unrelated) another project, called Lerna, publicly had a similar debate. The issues involved are challenging, and it deserves careful consideration regardless of how the issue is raised.
Hello there H, You asked for some money advice. Let’s be clear I am no financial advisor. I am barely financially literate. It’s true however that I put my beloved R to sleep at night regaling her with my financial equivalent of a shortsighted Don Quixote attacking windmills …
It has been almost a week since I had a run. I have had a busy week of work and home renovations, and I know that is an excuse. I will go for a run in about an hour. I’m dropping the boy off at a birthday party this …
[ A similar version was crossposted on Conservancy's blog. ]
Proprietary software has always been about a power relationship. Copyright and other legal systems give authors the power to decide what license to choose, and usually, they choose a license that favors themselves and takes rights and permissions away from others.
The so-called “Commons Clause” purposely confuses and conflates many issues. The initiative is backed by FOSSA, a company that sells materiel in the proprietary compliance industrial complex. This clause recently made news again since other parties have now adopted this same license.
Blood is amazing stuff, there is no end to it’s uses. The blood of pigs is the source for black pudding which is delightful. Milk is mostly blood, it’s just more convenient to suck it from a teat than stabbing your cow in the neck Maasai warrior style …
I was running around Coffs Harbour listening to Annie Lennox speak on an old Desert Island Disc programme yesterday. She talked about how music becomes an intrinsic part of the listener, or words to that effect. In fact she pointed out that words could not suffice to explain the depth …
Right, where were we? Back in the 80s, a bunch of pissed blokes ran some boats aground in Sydney Harbour, much to the consternation of the locals. Hooning around the Tasman in a tub’s nothing new, but this particular incident was deemed momentous enough that the city named a suburb after it. Ever been to […]
Yesterday, we lost an important member of the FLOSS community. Gervase Markham finally succumbed to his battle with cancer (specifically, metastatic adenoid cystic carcinoma).
I met Gerv in the early 2000s, after he'd already been diagnosed. He has always been very public about his illness. He was frank with all who knew him that his life expectancy was sadly well below average due to that illness. So, this outcome isn't a surprise nor a shock, but it is nevertheless sad and unfortunate for all who knew him.
In the aftermath of the ‘Super Saturday’ by-elections, the professional media types squeezed into their box seats on the ABC’s ‘flagship political discussion program ‘Insiders’ to discuss how the political commentariat (not looking at anyone) had got it so wrong, again. Despite the media spending a month telling people that the story […]
I am exceedingly lazy and my desire to retain knowledge of how my own blog works is dismal. For my own benefit I made a cheat sheet to remind me what I do when I feel like harking on about some crap on this site. I am edging towards doing …
Someone linked me to this blog by a boutique proprietary software company complaining about porting to GNU/Linux systems, in which David Power, co-founder of Hiri, says:
Unfortunately, the fundamentalist FOSS mentality we encountered on Reddit is still alive and well. Some Linux blogs and Podcasts simply won’t give us the time of day.
I just want to quickly share a few analogous quotes that show why that statement is an unwarranted and unfair statement about people's reasonably held beliefs. First, imagine if Hiri were not a proprietary software company, but a butcher. Here's how the quote would sound:
Unfortunately, the fundamentalist vegan mentality we encountered on Reddit is still alive and well. Some vegetarian blogs and Podcasts simply won’t give us the time of day.
UK July 22 West End Centre Aldershot July 23 ~recording London ~ July 24 Norden Farm Maidenhead July 25 Exeter Phoenix July 26 Emsworth Sports & Social Club, Emsworth July 27 Port Eliot Festival, St Germans, Cornwall July 28 Port Eliot Festival, St Germans, Cornwall July 29 Fishery Wharf Cafe Boxmoor Hemel Hempstead EUROPE August [...]
I took the motorbike (which I tend to think of as on loan from John Lee) up the road today. It flew like a Mongolian pony on the steppes. It was great. Winter days here are just perfect. The air is chilled and the sun flashing between the trees is …
If you're one of the people in the software freedom community who is attending O'Reilly's Open Source Software Convention (OSCON) next week here in Portland, you may have seen debate about O'Reilly and Associates (ORA)'s surreptitious Code of Conduct change (and quick revocation thereof) to name “political affiliation” as a protected class. If you're going to OSCON or plan to go to an OSCON or ORA event in the future, I suggest that you familiarize yourself with this issue and the political historical context in which these events of the last few days take place.