Freedom Dreams

So, I’ve never blogged about the results of the TeensOnLinux merger (with TeenLinux) vote. This is because, I was wrong in my assumption that most people in ToL wanted a merge, and I had nothing more to say about it. However, my former enemy cactaur (aka he was very vocally opposed to a merge) has written a very observant blog post about the situation we are currently in. (Apologies for taking all this time to reply to it.)

To be honest, I’m not even convinced that a merge would be as beneficial as I once thought. However, as cactaur rightly notes, the way we are currently so divided is certainly not good. He manages to some up very nicely what makes the two groups different – ToL doesn’t speak much about GNU/Linux, wheras TL does. This, he suggests, means tthat ToL and TL can work together with TL being an on-topic group and ToL being an off-topic group.

I would suggest going one step further, the two groups can be kept distinct, but should both gather as one community under one banner (ie. name). Cactaur’s argument for keeping the names distinct is that ToL has invested a lot of resources into the branding. Whilst this is the case, he misses the fact that TeenLinux, meanwhile has not got any realy investment in the name (apart from domain names of course), and, as far as I can tell, most people in TL aren’t that attatched to the name, it was simply chosen to be dilomatic during the merge between TeenLUG and TeenLinuxLounge.

So, my suggestion is this, we should both use the Teens on Linux name. How do we keep the two groups distinct? TL can become TeensOnLinux.Com and the current ToL can become TeensOnLinux.net (since it is more of an off-topic network). The current .org domain name can be a splash page, explaining the existence of the two groups. The IRC channels would similarily be renamed to the .com and .net names, with pointers in the topic to the other one (e.g. If you would prefer more on/off-topic chat, please see #teensonlinux.com/.net).

I would be interested in what others think of this idea. In my opinion, its a both nice and plausible compromise, and if we can go ahead with it, I feel it would help put an end to all the tension between groups.

So, unintended consequences. This is always an annoying thing, something you do or say just is misterpreted and causes something you don’t want. As a random example, two friends of mine were discussing, on Monday, when to have a meeting (of a Fairtrade group as it happens). A says “on Tuesday?”, B says “tommorow?” and A responds, “nah maybe on Wednesday instead”. Person B was simply trying to clarify, and proceeded to state as much, but person A went and choose Wednesday, consequntly clashing with another group!!! WTF!?!

So, another recent example of this would be Spore. I’m not going to debate the ethics of Spore in respect to software freedom, because that would take for ever. Instead, I’m thinking about people’s perception that spore is hinting at Intelligent design. Tihs is a tricky one, because I’m sure this wasn’t intended (but, you never know), but is rather hard to avoid – you have to have a designer in a simulation based game, because otherwise its not a game, just a simulation!

So, a final tangental topic. It would be the ultimate unintended consequence if a Physics[1] experiment destroyed the world, I am of course thinking of the LHC. Now the big thing here is that the chances of this actually happening are similar to an evil wizard killing us all (since both require large parts of our recent scientific understanding to be wrong). However, surely the LHC could have managed the story a bit better… or maybe they couldn’t – people do love a, sensationalist story, and people can understand End of the World much easier than actual science. The biggest irony about this whole thing is that if the LHC were to create a large black hole, it wouldn’t happen today “Switch on Day”, but in a month’s time when the first collisions happen, or maybe even later when the energy is increased.

So, to sum up, I hate conclusions.

[1] I always seem to do Physics with a capital P – should I? Am I just a Physics fanboy?

So yeah, I’m writing another blog post. Theres been a longer delay than normally between posts. Even once I decided to write this post there was a longer than normal delay to me actually getting it written (who knows how long before its actually published and you read this). If you haven’t guessed already, this is going to be another post of a collection of random things going through my mind, squashed to fit in under one title. Perhaps not the most elegant way of writing a blog post, but it works for me. And I don’t know if anyone will find it interesting, but at least I get to write some of my thoughts down (which I still haven’t got into the routine of doing properly).

My blog is now popular, but not in a good way. I have 2976 spam comments waiting for moderation, thats not good (…bloggers thats not good). And, I’ve not got round to installing a proper spam control mechanism yet, so I guess they will have to stay there. I could use akismet, but I don’t like it, because it is a third party service.

Then there’s my podcast. The last episode was later than usual, especially since neither of us are on holiday. We had to record over two seperate nights, which we have only done once before, but, we did do an interview. Also, its taken much longer than expected to sort out the sound issues(noise and echo). It looks now like we need to get a proper sound card, but they are sooooo expensive. £100 for a four input one, yeah, I can probably sort out the money, but it seems a lot to pay, before I even start thinking about microphones!! Anyone have any ideas?

Something I finally got round to doing recently is updating my facebook pic (I know, I know, it hates freedom…. or does it), from a not so flattering one, to a rather nice one. Perhaps I should finally get round to creating a hackergochi for myself; maybe with my head in a sock? (freedom socks related) – or would that look too silly?

The final thing thats been taking me a long time to achive is my goal of having my primary system fully free. At the momnt, the only thing that is stopping me is wireless card firmware,so hopefully in the next few days I will get round to ordering a nice atheros based card. The one I’m thinking of getting is supposed to have good range (and with three aerials on the back! I’m tempted to believe it), so hopefully this will sort out the annoying connection problem I have so often (apparently I’m the person that joins/leaves most in ##teenlinux). Ironically, I have just and only just worked out a way to get my internet to reconnect without a reboot (modprobe all three relevant modules and restart network manager, although I’m not sure if it’s just a fluke.

Actually, I lie when I say its the final thing, there is something else, but it deserves its own blog posts. (Although, this may be one of the times I say that and it never happens.)