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Why do I feel like this? There appears to be no good reason. I feel like killing myself, there is no reason to be hanging around. For years I have used the spinning plates analogy to describe my life. Either I have too many plates up and spinning. I feel …

Awoke after a restless night with an aching back. Lay in bed from two in the morning. My mind tangentially racing around pointless circuits. Exasperated I made the decision to get up at dawn and run to Villeville and back. As the sun rose I fell asleep. At eight Suzy …

The Brisbane summer has been hot and humid. Clothes sticking to sweaty skin and fresh cut watermelon turning sour within ten minutes of leaving the fridge.

It started with the dog. She could not look at anyone and hung her head in shame, “Poor dog, you must have eaten something …

I suspect this information is of limited use because it's far too vague. I didn't even file it as a Debian bug because I don't think I have enough information here to report a bug. It's not dissimilar from the issues reported in Debian bug 663868, but the system in question doesn't have foo2zjs installed. So, I filed Debian Bug 774460.

I thought recently of a quote from a Sopranos' Season 1 episode, A Hit is a Hit, wherein Tony Soprano's neighbor proclaims for laughs at a party, Sometimes I think the only thing separating American business from the Mob is [EXPLETIVE] whacking somebody.

The line stuck with me in the decade and a half since I heard it. When I saw the episode in 1999, my career was basically just beginning, as I was just finishing graduate school and had just begun working for the FSF. I've often wondered over these years how close that quote — offered glibly to explore a complex literary theme — matches reality.

Thirteen years ago I missed out on being in this family pic. Next year I hope to complete my Nursing degree and a year after that I hope to complete a Post Grad year. Maybe then I can afford a …

Our quails have been rooting a fair bit. The girls are popping out eggs without a care. Unfortunately, they are rather unreliable at getting clucky. Luckily Speedy, like many bantams, loves to keep eggs warm.

Today Rodney found that she’d hatched one of the quail …

Recently, I was forwarded an email from an executive at a 501(c)(6) trade association. In answering a question about accepting small donations for an “Open Source” project through their organization, the Trade Association Executive responded Accepting [small] donations [from individuals] is possible, but [is] generally not a sustainable way to raise funds for a project based on our experience. It's extremely difficult … to raise any meaningful or reliable amounts.

I was aghast, but not surprised. The current Zeitgeist of the broader Open Source and Free Software community incubated his disturbing mindset. Our community suffers now from regular and active cooption by for-profit interests. The Trade Association Executive's fundraising claim — which probably even bears true in their subset of the community — shows the primary mechanism of cooption: encourage funding only from a few, big sources so they can slowly but surely dictate project policy.

I found a series of photo’s on an old back-up a few months ago. Which reminded me of my pal Simon. I’m going to post them here so that he can ask me to unpost it.

I am quite an annoying old friend.

After several weeks of intermittent failed attempts I finally managed to get root on my crapass phone.

“Getting root” has a different meanings here in Australia but in this case it refers to gaining full control of my telephone operating system. A bizarre idea when I stop and think about …

John Lee was a friend of mine who died of old age. I say old age but the hospital would tell you it was stroke. John would have told you it was because his body betrayed him.

After going for a run this morning I climbed down the 74 steps …

Time passes and I’ve removed another iteration of tregeagle.com, there is a hole in the shell and my thoughts keep running through.

Some Nerdy History

I don’t really remember when I first registered tregeagle.com. Sometime around 1999/2000, I think. I first hosted the website on …

[ I'm writing this last update to this post, which I posted at 15:55 US/Eastern on 2014-11-11, above the original post (and its other update), since the first text below is the most important message about this siutation. (Please note that I am merely a mundane GF member, and I don't speak for GF in any way.) ]

There is a lesson learned here, now that Groupon has (only after public admonishing from GNOME Foundation) decided to do what GNOME Foundation asked them for from the start. Specifically, I'd like to point out how it's all too common for for-profit companies to treat non-profit charities quite badly, even when the non-profit charity is involved in an endeavor that the for-profit company nominally “supports”.

Early this morning as I put my son on the train for a school excursion, I witnessed the propogation of pain. Nothing was meant by it, nobody intended any harm and the cruelty was imperceptible.

Children, parents and teachers all crowded on the platform waiting for the infrequent train. The …

As always, when something takes me a while to figure out, I try to post the generally useful technical information on my blog. For the new copyleft.org site, I've been trying to get all the pages branded properly with the header/footer. This was straightforward for ikiwiki (which hosts the main site), but I spent an hour searching around this morning for how to brand the GNU Mailman instance on lists.copyleft.org.

Ultimately, here's what I had to do to get everything branded, and I'm still not completely sure I found every spot. It seems that if someone wanted to make a useful patch to GNU Mailman, you could offer up a change that unifies the HTML templating and branding. In the meantime, at least for GNU Mailman 2.1.15 as found in Debian 7 (wheezy), here's what you have to do:

So here I am. I have some work to do. Something about a patient/client case study. I am supposed to use the clinical reasoning skills I have been taught. Sort of Sherlock Holmes the nurse. I will be presenting it later in the week. Motivation is an issue.

I …

Selena Larson wrote an article describing the Male Allies Plenary Panel at the Anita Borg Institute's Grace Hopper Celebration on Wednesday night. There is a video available of the panel (that's the youtube link, the links on Anita Borg Institute's website don't work with Free Software).

Historically, I used to write a blog post for each episode of the audcast, Free as in Freedom that Karen Sandler and I released. However, since I currently do my work on FaiF exclusively as a volunteer, I often found it difficult to budget time for a blog post about each show.

However, enough happened in between when Karen and I recorded FaiF 0x4E and when it was released earlier this week that I thought I'd comment on those events.

First, with regard to the direct content of the show, I've added some detail in the 0x4E show notes about additional research I did about various other non-software-related non-profit organizations that I mention in the show.

Years ago, I wrote a blog post about how I don't use Google Plus, Google Hangouts, Facebook, Twitter, Skype, LinkedIn or other proprietary network services. I talked in that post about how I'm under constant and immense social pressure to use these services. (It's often worse than the peer pressure one experiences as a teenager.)

I discovered a few months ago, however, that one form of this peer pressure was actually a product of nefarious practices by one of the vendors — namely Linked In. Today, I learned a lawsuit is now proceeding against Linked In on behalf of the users whose contacts were spammed repeatedly by Linked In's clandestine use of people's address books.

[ A version of this post originally appeared on the Google Open Source Blog, and was cross-posted on Conservancy's blog. ]

Software Freedom Conservancy, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit charity that serves as a home to Open Source and Free Software projects. Such is easily said, but in this post I'd like to discuss what that means in practice for an Open Source and Free Software project and why such projects need a non-profit home. In short, a non-profit home makes the lives of Free Software developers easier, because they have less work to do outside of their area of focus (i.e., software development and documentation).

I was just reading about the six conditions that Karl Rogers believes are required for therapeutic personality change. Skipping right over the obscene phrase, “therapeutic personality change” I would like to have-at-it with the second condition, which is not to say I don’t have problems with other aspects of …

[ This is a version of an essay that I originally published on Conservancy's blog ].

Eleven days ago, Conservancy announced Kallithea. Kallithea is a GPLv3'd system for hosting and managing Mercurial and Git repositories on one's own servers. As Conservancy mentioned in its announcement, Kallithea is indeed based on code released under GPLv3 by RhodeCode GmbH. Below, I describe why I was willing to participate in helping Conservancy become a non-profit home to an obvious fork (as this is the first time Conservancy ever welcomed a fork as a member project).

I don't often say good things about the USPTO, so I should take the opportunity: the trademark revocation hack to pressure the change of the name of the sports team called the Redskins was a legal hack in the same caliber as copyleft. Presumably Blackhorse deserves the credit for this hack, but the USPTO showed it was sound.

I've had my disagreements with Joyent's management of the Node.js project. In fact, I am generally auto-skeptical of any Open Source and/or Free Software project run by a for-profit company. However, I also like to give credit where credit is due.

Specifically, I'd like to congratulate Joyent for making the right decision today to remove one of the major barriers to entry for contribution to the Node.js project: its CLA. In an announcement today (see section labeled “Easier Contribution”, Joyent announced Joyent no longer requires contributors to sign the CLA and will (so it seems) accept contributions simply licensed under the MIT-permissive license. In short, Node.js is, as of today, an inbound=outbound project.