OLPC is now working hard on their 9.1.0 release, and their roadmap is very clearly outlined. Well done to all the OLPC people for their ever-increasing efforts to keep external folks in the loop.

There are two items to which interested Fedora contributors should be paying particularly close attention.

First: Rebase 9.1.0 on Fedora 10. This is a big one. OLPC has made a strong commitment to move as much of their work as possible into Fedora packages upstream. At latest count, there are approximately 25 packages in the OLPC-4 repository that are forked from their F10 counterparts. We can use all the help we can get from the Fedora community to help bring these packages into mainline Fedora. Peter Robinson in particular has been a big help, but we can always use more. Remember: every hour an OLPC developer spends maintaining a forked package is an hour they cannot use to save the world.

Second: Run Fedora applications on the XO. This is another big one. Users all over the world love Sugar, but its limitations can be painful. Many users want to run Fedora applications that simply don't look good under Sugar. There are some good approaches to solving this problem -- replacing Matchbox with a tiled window manager, for instance -- but it's a problem that can use more eyes.

If you are interested in helping with either of these problems, leave a comment and find us at FUDCon.

It was a big movie weekend at the old Brown household. Let me start by giving a mini-review of a movie we actually watched in a theater.



Kelly has been wanting to see Four Christmases for a while now so we decided to head out to the Saturday matinee. The movie itself centers around Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon, a married, childless couple who want nothing more over the Christmas holidays than to escape the families (you can't spell 'families' without 'lies') over the holidays by jetting off to exotic locations for scuba diving and relaxation. Just to keep everyone from getting too upset about their absence they tell the families they are helping third world children, building schools, voluteering at clinics, that sort of thing.

I don't want to spoil the movie for you (everything I've said so far can be learned from watching the trailer) but I did want to share some interesting thoughts. This movie contained a fairly large well-known cast. In addition to the aforementioned main actors other Hollywood notables were featured including Robert DuVall, Sissy Spacek, Jon Voight and Kristin Chenoweth appeared as well as country musicians Dwight Yoakam (who I recogizned from Slingblade) and Tim McGraw who I couldn't have picked out of a police line-up (mostly because I don't list to country music).

Two very interested castings came in the form of Jon Favreau (director of Elf and Iron Man) as Vince Vaughn's extreme fighting brother (Jon hit the gym for this role and sported what I think are a lot of fake tattoos). The real bizarre person to make an appearance was number two worldwide ranked Donkey Kong player and star of King of Kong Steve Wiebe. Granted Steve didn't get any lines but it was strange for who I think is a non-union non-actor to be given a role in a union Hollywood movie. As it turns out the movie director, Seth Gordon, also directed King of Kong so the two had worked together perviously.

Overall I'd give this movie a 2 and-a-half out of five stars. Middle of the road picture. Well made but predictable in places, not to mention fraught with a few major continuity problems. If you are dying to see a movie, yeah, go ahead and catch it while you still can but if you, like me, are a fan of Christmas movies I'd wait until it rolled around via Netflix.

Next up: my new Blu-Ray player!!

I have joined the Bill Vinson's of the world and gone Blu-Ray. We also purchased a new 47 inch Sony Bravia HD TV but that's not the story here. The wickedly cool Blu-Ray player comes with built-in Netflix streaming capabilties! Very cool. We tested the Netflix streaming out and it works splendidly. What about the Roku player? The Roku player is heading for a life at the beach.

Work calls. Bye.

The biggest thing I’d change about my new job would be its hours. I’m really going to miss the opportunity to walk Hallie to school. It’s a special time between me and her that I have to give up if I need to be in RTP by 8 o’clock.

Since I won’t be starting the new job until next week (as I alluded to before), at least I have one more week to enjoy this special treat.

Thanks to my friend Aaron Fulkerson at MindTouch for adopting a penguin on my behalf. I will name him “Ike”.

I pity the fool who robs Crazy Fire. He’s lucky he didn’t get a beat-down from all the geeks who eat there.

I wouldn’t be surprised if his rap sheet mysteriously gained a few prior convictions.

The MT.Net reader knows I’m a political junkie. Some say its incurable. The year 2008 offered many fixes for my habit.

First off, America (and North Carolina!) elected Barack Obama to be its next president. What a breath of fresh air he promises to be! While he did disappoint me last summer, he still was better than the alternatives. I said a year before the general election that he’d get my vote and he did.

Obama spent much time in Raleigh. He dropped in to the Raleigh Times bar across the street where I worked just minutes after I had left for the day. I missed one rally but made it to another (being a vet has its privileges).

I also went to his rally in October, though I opted not to blog about it then. It was crowded and cold, but if I squinted I could make him out on stage. I was touched at the hope I saw in the eyes of an African American teenage girl and her mom, both witnessing Martin Luther King’s dream come to life.

There were other stories, like how I saw James Taylor play for free (and shook the man’s hand!) and how some humorless bureaucrat in Raleigh city government had it out for the Obama Signal.

I campaigned more actively for other candidates, including Grier Martin (N.C. House), Josh Stein (N.C. Senate), Janet Cowell (N.C. State Treasurer), and Al Swanstrom (N.C. House). In spite of my canvassing sweltering Cary neighborhoods and fighting off bitter old women (and rescuing car-crash victims) in Apex, Al narrowly lost his race. It was my only “defeat” of the election, made all the more painful because I’ve known Al for years.

Josh Stein and Grier Martin convinced me to stand in the cold, pouring rain as a poll greeter on the evening of Election Day. The highlights of that night were making friends with a wonderful Obama volunteer and having supper delivered when an Obama volunteer delivered sandwiches to us. Never has a simple turkey sandwich meant so much.

The whole family got involved for Janet Cowell’s campaign. My canvassing skills weren’t especially needed, so instead the whole family and I spent a few hours acting in her campaign commercial. As of this writing, you can still see it here (and the alternate here). And if you look closely, you can see us in them!

Election night was a magic night, though. Seeing the joy on people’s faces and hugging total strangers while we all watched history being made.

As for my own political career (or more accurately, the lack of it), I took a few steps toward that myself. More about that in an upcoming post.

Yes, all in all it was a great year for politics. At least for me!

Remember the trouble I had with filing my unemployment insurance claim? Tonight the N.C. ESC’s website is non-functional again.

Since I didn’t work last week (and won’t work this week as my start date has been moved back a week), I’m looking to spend my 30 seconds filling out the ESC’s five question form so I can get paid. Ain’t happening so far.

This is yet another troubling sign for North Carolina’s economy.

Here’s the error message I get (when I get an error message):

CICS.XFAPIN.1 error ‘800a0837′

(2103) The connect request failed. IP Address: 207.192.50.90, Port: 3020, Error description: Connection timed out

/include/login/gLoginCode.asp, line 74

Update 5 Jan 12:30 PM: WRAL has an update. Seems “too many people” were accessing the site. Also, I just successfully filed my claim. Looks like the site is still being hammered, though.

I’ve been kicked out of some of the best schools in the country, so I can’t say that my college career was in anyway stellar. But although it took me seven years to get my four year degree, I did manage to take away some important knowledge from the experience.

Part of that was an understanding of “Informal Fallacies of Logic“. When I was introduced to the Internet in 1984 on a VAX running Berkeley UNIX, it was first and foremost a text based experience. A lot of the action occurred on newsgroups, and thus I was exposed to the usual flamewars and hyperbole that one often finds there.

I knew of things like Godwin’s Law, but it wasn’t until I was introduced to informal fallacies that I had a way to formalize behavior that I saw on the Internet (and in “real” life as well). While Wikipedia as always has a definition, an “informal” fallacy is basically a statement that may be or seems to be true, but it is irrelevant or doesn’t support the argument being made.

What I didn’t realize is that, like the fnords, informal fallacies are everywhere. Once I had a method of formalizing them, they became much easier to see.

The reason I’ve been thinking about them today is that a gentleman named Dennis Byron has decided to take me to task for my post on The War for Open Source, first in the comments and then on his blog.

The point of the post was to state that the term “open source” has a certain meaning, defined by the OSI, and that the commercial software industry is trying to blur that meaning so that consumers won’t be able to tell the difference between truly open software and commercial software.

So, instead of attacking that argument, Mr. Byron decides to pull out some of my illustrative prose, find fault with it, and thus attempt to discredit me.

This is an informal fallacy known as a “Straw Man“. In a straw man fallacy, one “takes the original argument of his/her adversary and then offers a close imitation, or straw man, version of the original argument”. This argument, made of “straw” is much easier to defeat.

In the case of Mr. Byron, he attempts to find fault with my history of commercial software, which is funny since I never intended to write one.

And if anyone can tell me what the heck the “razor blades” are that the OpenNMS Group is selling, I’d love to know.

Having been on the road for a bit lately, I’ve seen my share of public restrooms. I’ve wondered why people have an aversion to touching paper towel dispensers. Its gotten to be such a concern that dispenser companies are creating ads around their products.

Its the people who don’t touch the towel dispenser that bother me. They’re the ones who aren’t washing their hands. Anyone who reaches for a paper towel likely already has clean hands.

We got home a little before 8 PM after a smooth trip from Virginia. Everyone seemed to enjoy the ride. Even Rocket didn’t complain much about being cooped up in the back of the car.

We borrowed a Thule roof-mount cargo container from Kelly’s parents to haul our stuff back. It worked very well! I think its great to have extra storage for the car when we need it and to be able to remove it when we don’t.

Speaking of cars, we may spend time tomorrow looking at cars. We may finally become a two-car family again. If we don’t find what we need right away, our neighbors have graciously agreed to let us borrow their extra car.

And for those who are wondering, I’m cooking up a post on my uncle’s funeral. I wrote a good bit of it last night but I don’t want to post it until I get it right. Perhaps sometime tomorrow it will appear.

My friend Tim told me about a music service called “Pandora“, which is an internet radio station that runs in a flash applet in a web browser.  You can suggest songs or artists, and vote songs up or down.  It uses the the Music Genome Project to categorize music, and to add similar music to your playlists.  It’s a pretty cool project.

However, I encountered problems when I ran it on my Asus Eee PC 900.  Pandora seems to run fine by itself, but it pauses and skips if you are browsing in another window.  I think it has to do with a combination of Firefox’s “AwesomeBar” and the Eee PC’s flash disk.

The Awesomebar is Firefox3’s new address bar that searches for matches among your bookmarks and the titles and URL’s from every web site you have visited recently. Since the Eee PC uses a solid state flash disk, disk writes are pretty slow. So when you are browsing, every time open a new page, Firefox 3 writes some stuff to its sqlite database of user history.  It then calls fflush(), which flushes all writes (not just its own) to the disk.  During this time, all browser activity halts until the writes are complete.  Other applications keep running fine, but the browser rendering stops — often “graying out”, turning back-and-white until it starts responding again.  The problem is, flash applets also pause, and that includes Pandora.

I considered a few solutions:

• Run the Pandora applet in a different browser, and use Firefox for browsing.
• Run the Pandora applet in a stand-alone flash player.
• Run the Pandora applet on my server, while I browse on the Eee PC.
• Run a different application for audio, like “audacious” (an xmms clone).

Combining a couple of these ideas, I wondered if I could run some sort of console-based streaming audio application on my server. It would be cool to hook up some speakers to bender and listen to internet radio.

It turns out that mplayer will do just that. For example:

mplayer http://wunc.org/about/listen.pls

And now we’re listening to our local NPR station!

Note - you’ll also want to install a utility to set the volume.  I use alsamixer.

Of course, this does not solve the original problem of Pandora pausing.  And there seems to be quite a frenzy on the Firefox bug tracker about flushing the history database.

But streaming audio from a headless server is a pretty neat idea, and one that may become a permanent fixture in my home office.

We’re heading home today after a few fun days with Kelly’s parents and the Naylors. Then it will be a typical weekend before everyone gets back to the school/work routine.

I may or may not be starting Monday at $WORK, depending on how far my paperwork has made it through the staffing office. I hope to find out sometime this weekend if I’m on or not yet. Something to look forward to, anyway!

I’ve never been much for industry awards or the opinions of the various trade rags. I mean, when NetInfoCommWeek decides to compare open source network management platforms, we are never included, even though most of the time a Google search on “open source network management” has OpenNMS as the first hit. This despite spending zero money on marketing.

I’m not sure I’d even want them to check out our software, since quite often it is more of a beauty contest, and the “amazing” test lab with nearly 25 devices doesn’t exactly lend itself to demonstrating the strengths of OpenNMS, which starts to shine in the 2000 to 20,000 device range.

But I am often delighted when people who actually eat, live and breathe network management mention OpenNMS favorably. For example, when TechTarget interviewed 1300+ users and asked them what was their preferred network management platform, OpenNMS came out ahead of OpenView and Tivoli. This was from the viewpoint of people who actually use the software, not overworked and deadline driven reporters.

Last week we got a mention on Doug McClure’s list of 2009 Predictions as a possible contender for a Business Service Management (BSM) Lite platform. That was pretty cool, considering that the whole project is bootstrapped and community driven.

Doug’s is an opinion I value (I first met him at barcampESM and since he is in Atlanta Jeff gets to seem him occasionally), and his mention of our project was rather humbling. And I didn’t even blink at the word “Lite” since OpenNMS has a long way to go before we can replace all of OpenView and all of Tivoli.

We started this project to build a sustainable, free and open replacement for the major commercial management platforms. So of course we started on the most basic functions: the need for discovery and an inventory database, monitoring, event management and data collection. As was seen in the TechTarget award, this is enough for many folks.

However, we’d definitely like to move into the area of BSM, especially as more and more companies start looking at the utility or Software as a Service (SaaS) model. No one at the executive level of the company cares about the bandwidth or errors running through a router; all they want to know is that the widgets are rolling of the assembly line.

Another area I’d love to explore is the idea of runbook automation. One company that is doing a lot in this area but you rarely hear of is IPSoft out of New York. They claim that they can resolve 56% of problems automatically. The idea of capturing and automating the knowledge of experienced network and system admins is exciting to me, and seems to play into the main ideas of BSM.

But for now, as we enter into what may be a difficult time for all businesses, we will focus on remaining profitable and our mission to “help customers, have fun, and make money”. It appears to be working, as we reached a nice milestone last week. Our first customer, who joined us in December of 2001, renewed their support for the seventh time. The fact that someone who saw value in our product and our services so long ago still does means more to me than any magazine or trade award could.

How bad is it to drink a glass or two of alcohol as a nursing parent? Let’s find out!

Imagine you were a 120 lb mom, breastfeeding a 12 lb 3 month old baby. How many beers would you have to drink in a row (so no time for the liver and kidneys to get rid of it) to get your baby as drunk in one subsequent nurture session (4 oz) as you would be after two 12 oz glasses of beer (with 5% alcohol content) yourself ?

Note: when you drink, after a short delay the level of alcohol in your breastmilk is the same as that in your blood.

For your calculations you are allowed to make some reasonable assumptions, like assuming the blood volume of the baby is 10% that of the mom, etc.

Also, according to the Oklahoma police department website, after two beers drank in immediate succession, the theoretical blood alcohol content (this varies often) for a 120 lb adult after 2 12 oz beers is .06 %. So the blood alcohol content of the baby should get to that level (not good considering baby livers, but let’s ignore that).

Answer will be here in a few days when I feel like doing some calculations. Feel free to beat me to it with comments.

I’m trying out some new gallery software: the NEXTGEN gallery plugin for Wordpress. Here is a gallery of photos from my uncle’s funeral.

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

1234...678►

In June of 2007, some friends had a dog they couldn’t keep anymore. Beagles weren’t meant to live in townhouses, and my place offered a lot for him. Plus it meant he didn’t go to the pound.

He’s a sweet dog, and he’s dumb as a sack of hammers. He’s picky about going outside in the rain or cold, he sometimes decides the carpet is easier to pee on than the grass, and he really doesn’t like to share his food.

For the last year and a half, I have fed, sheltered, and loved him. And for the most part, he has loved me. Sure, we’ve had to occasionally re-establish dominance (typical for the breed), but in general, He’s been mine, and I’m his.

Until SHE moved in.

Since Ursula moved in, it has become more and more obvious that I’m just the caretaker, and she’s his human. His great goal in life is to sleep at her feet when she’s working in the studio. He crys the great beagle cry when she won’t let him in. He sleep at her feet of the bed, and GOD FORBID actually listens to her sometimes.

Yesterday cemented it.

We pull into the driveway. I open the door so that the dogs can get out. I gett greeted by Brandon, the boarder collie. And Gir, the animal whom I have sheltered and fed and loved?

He CRIES, he WHINES, and he runs over to Ursula and PEES WITh JOY that she’s home. Jumping and whimpering and all kinds of loving HER, and ignoring ME.

The ingrate.

On the other hand, now SHE’S stuck with him…..

Originally published at sonney.com. You can comment here or there.

One of a dog’s strongest instincts is to seek out clean hands and promptly lick them.

“Isn’t it great to be back home, Home is where I wanna be…” - Simon & Garfunkle, “Keep the Customer Satisfied”

The trip up was uneventful, but the trip home? Not so much. After a long delay on the ground in Houghton, MI so they could de-ice the plane, we ended up stuck in Minneapolis, MN (MSP) last night, with a 6:30am flight home this morning.

Now, had it been me alone, past experience has shown that I’d have gotten the finger and “tough shit, there’s a bench in the corner, see you in the morning.” Instead, they gave us food vouchers, a hotel room in a swank place, and got our luggage on the same re-route as we took. Add to that the “luck of the Ursula” : she calls her best friend who lives up there, and the three of us ended up at Blackbird in downtown Minneapolis - owned by old friends of hers - instead of the hotel bar or just passing out in our room.

Good food, Good people, Good conversation, and it’s the best layover/missed flight ever.

If you happen to be in MSP, go to Blackbird. The appetizers are swank, the Walleye Po’Boy is delicious, and the desserts out of this world.

Sadly, we were too tired to stop by her publisher’s fondue party after dinner. (Next time we’re in the area, guys, I promise - and with better planning!)

Waking up at 4:30 Central sucked, but we snoozed most of the way to Detroit, got to our plane out in plenty of time, and had a whole row to ourselves on the flight to RDU. And now we’re home, showered, napped, pizza’ed, and just laying about watching TV.

Originally published at sonney.com. You can comment here or there.

If the rumors are true the new Mac mini will have a black top (to bring it in line with current Apple color codes), a "lip" much like the Time Capsule has, and a SATA optical drive that can be deleted and replaced with a second internal hard drive supporting RAID 1. That's kind of cool. If you need to install software or back data up to an optical disk you'll have to connect one via USB 2.0 or use Apple's Remote Disk from another Mac much the same way you would with the Macbook Air.

The so-called lid lip will hide the optical drive slot so it won't be obvious if the drive has been deleted or not. Kind of cool. I guess.

I need to replace my aging yet still running splendidly 1.5 Ghz G4 mini. A mini sporting internal RAID 1 would be a compelling replacement.

As we are all counting down to welcome in 2009, we should be reminded to wait just a second, to stop wishing our lives away.

At 7pm Eastern time (midnight UTC), the official international time-keeping standards body inserted a “leap second” into the normal stream of ordinary seconds.

This is done periodically to keep our standard clocks (UTC) in sync with “mean solar time”, which is based on the Earth’s position and rotation. If we did not do that, then Earth-related events such as midnight and noon would gradually shift to different times of the day (likewise, without leap days, the equinoxes and solstices would gradually shift through the year).

At home, I could witness this historic event in the logs of my Linux-based server, bender.

Dec 31 18:59:59 Clock: inserting leap second 23:59:60 UTC

How did YOU spend YOUR leap second?

Happy New Year to everyone. The year 2009 promises to be interesting, if nothing else.

I got back home around 5 PM yesterday: good time for the trip distance. I took over 100 pictures but haven’t had any time to do anything with them.

Today we hit the road for Kelly’s parents’ home for the next few days. In a spare moment I hope to post them (and burn a few promised CDs).

My family has been going to various animal shelters about three days a week for some time. Today my parents got a puppy. I want to call him Captain Kazumi, but I’m not sure the name will stick. He’s 10 weeks old. Sorry for the awful cell phone pic, btw. Also, Happy New Year.

We spent another Christmas in beautiful Park City, Utah.

I'm really getting to love virtual machines, except at work when the machines are blade servers running I-don't-know-what as a base OS connected to HP Blade Switches running who-the-F-programmed-this-train-wreck Layer 2 multipath chassis. Ugh. But that's another story for another time (and you can purchase IOS capable HP blade server switches and slide them right into the HP chassis. The new blade servers are configured in this way and they work splendidly. And they run IOS so you know how to do things like set up span ports without having to navigate some bizarre telenet command tree).

I digress. Yesterday at my favorite client on the Outer Banks I set up a new proxy server using wonderful free-as-in-speech Linux and it works spendidly. The company owner wanted to change the front desk Point of Sale computers into something more like a kiosk but he wanted the computers to remain able to visit "critcal" websites such as the Dare County government page so the employees could remain able find critical information about, say, evacuations of the island if a hurricane were knocking at the door.

This could have been accomplished using Content Adivor built into Internet Explorer (yes, the front desk machines run Winders.. sigh) but this approach would have required them maintain a list of "allowed" websites on each machine and adjust them as needed. In addition it would have done nothing to stop someone from installing another web browser (go Firefox!!) not to mention that Content Advisor is so easily bypassed it is just sad. But we're not talking about geeks running the front desk, mind you. These are retireees who do little more than contstantly do e-mail when they are supposed to be working and watching endless YouTube videos of their grandchildren.

So why not just set up a proxy server? I could block ports 80 and 443 outbound and allow only the proxy where I could build multiple levels of whitelists that would restrict users to specific websites. But there was a problem. The only machine that DID NOT run Windows was the office manager's Intel iMac. To complicate matters further that mac already ran a copy of Squidman that I use as a reverse SSH proxy to do remote support. Squidman is great but I'm not a fan of how the config files are maintained so I didn't want to go making that an unnesessarily complicated mess using Squidman to do all the proxying.

The solution was easy - install a new virtual machine using the already-existing VMware Fusion (which is currently running a XP virtual machine for reasons that I won't get into because it bothers me greatly). A quick download of the Debian netinstall ISO and a few clicks of the mouse and I had a fully functional, bare-bones Linux install. From there it was a simple 'apt-get install squid' (and ssh for remote login) and a vi of the /etc/squid/squid.conf and whitelist files and, poof, a fully functional proxy server was running.

Now it is time to find out if I squid supports the oddball color printer and assuming they do I'll have a print server running momentarily.

Linux as a server is just so darn easy to work with. True I could set up the print server on either a windows box or perhaps the Mac.. but why? Anything on Linux is so easily remotely supportable I can't see a reason not to set things up that way.

I am currently in Upper Peninsula Michigan, visiting Ursula’s Mom and Step-dad. I’ll be talking more about the anxiety and whatnot of “meeting the parents” in my next IntrepidMedia article. So you’ll have to wait for that.

Today, I’m going to talk about snow.

In the south, snow is an EVENT. It’s not something that happens with any regularity, it’s more something that is inflicted on us - we enjoy it as it falls, we rush to the store for bread, eggs, milk, and beer at the merest mention that snow will fall (and there is a collective embarrassment and bitching about this), and we’re disappointed when the snow doesn’t fall. Kids dream of snow days - and so do grown ups, even if we don’t get them.

Up here, snow is a way of life. It’s snowed every day we’ve been up here, including a blustery and windy band of snow that we, in our foolishness, attempted to walk two blocks in on Monday.

And it’s BEAUTIFUL. Heartrendingly, majestically beautiful. It is the kind of snow you see on TV or in post cards. As we were driving up to Copper Harbor yesterday, Ursula commented that “I’d love to paint this, but it’s so CLICHE” and it is and yet it’s the kind of winter wonderland you think of when the Christmas Carols are on.

Until you open the car door or step outside.

Ah yes, I forgot that with the snow comes the cold. The bitter, bitter bite of cold that seeps into your toes and under your hat as the wind finds every leak in your clothing, and the ice collects in the soles of your shoes. My mustache actually started to freeze up while we were out looking at Lake Superior yesterday. This is a sensation I will not forget.

But I think I could, if I wanted to, live up here. I’m not sure. It certainly feels like home.

Sadly, we return to NC today. I will miss looking out of an upstairs window into a white landscape with snowflakes dancing and whirling in the wind. I will miss the warmth of good food, good family, and good times. I will not miss the biting wind and angry chill.

We’re leaving before I start to get homesick. And before I start to hate the white, pure, sparkling snow.

Originally published at sonney.com. You can comment here or there.

In a few short hours 2008 will be history. To paraphrase Dickens, it wasn’t the best of times, and it wasn’t the worst of times.

For the OpenNMS project, it was a good year. We got a new stable release out and we had a great Dev-Jam in Atlanta.

For the OpenNMS Group, it was a decent year. Sales were up slightly (our usually robust fourth quarter was pretty flat this year), but we managed to start new work with a couple of very large telecom clients.

I traveled about 95,000 miles on airplanes, and visited 8 countries. I stayed 53 nights in Marriott hotels. Next year my goal is to hit Platinum status on American with exactly 50,001 miles and come nowhere close to Gold status at Marriott.

I love the new year. For me, 2009 stretches out like a clean slate, full of possibilities. And I for one am hoping it will be much, much better than the advanced reviews.

Here’s my heartfelt wish that you have had a marvelous 2008 and may the most that you wish for in 2009 be the least you receive.

In a few I’ll be joining my parents and brother for a road trip to South Carolina to my uncle’s funeral. Look for a post tonight (if I’m not too beat).

This guy Uncle Jay gives a clever recap of the year’s news stories.

Pretty clever!

(h/t Linda!)

I accepted the job offer today for the six-month contract with the Large Network Storage Company. Provided the paperwork gets done I’ll be heading off to work January 5th.

While it isn’t my dream job, necessarily, it does offer interesting challenges and opportunities for growth. And in this bleak job market, I’m happy to have found something (and so soon).

My friend Scott invited me out today for a ride on the Raleigh greenways. We rode from my house up to Optimist Park and back, covering over 19 miles in two and a half hours. Not all of that was riding, though, as we took a break at the Optimist end and stopped to talk to some people along the way.

It felt so good to be riding again! I’ve neglected my bike since I lost my downtown job and this was the first serious ride since. I’ve been wearing a stupid grin all day.

Imagine me getting into shape enough to ride in a charity ride like the MS 150 or Tour De Cure: two events I’ve only volunteered with but never ridden. I should be able to do one or the other in 2009, right?

Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be, that good policy does not equally enjoin it? . . . . .

In the execution of such a plan, nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave.

It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest. . . .

So likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.

It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation), facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation.

-- George Washington, Farewell Address 1796

My friend Tanner suggested that I am short-selling myself by not allowing others to add comments to my blog.

Since I started this blog as an experiment to familiarize myself with different types of content management software, it never occurred to me to open it up (in fact, I was surprised that anyone actually read it at all).  My initial installation was “locked down” to reduce the potential avenues for spam.

So today, I turned on comments.  It required a little bit of SQL tinkering to enable comments on past posts… I hope I did not mess anything up.

Let us know what you think.

The power was out at work this morning.  We have massive generators to keep the labs powered, but the offices were in the dark.  The whole building was filled with the beeping of dying UPS’s.

Uncle Arthur’s obituary ran in today’s The State in Columbia:

Arthur Manning Flowers Jr.
ANDREWS - Arthur Manning Flowers, Jr. died Monday, December 29, 2008, at Still Hopes Episcopal Retirement Community in West Columbia.

Mr. Flowers was born June 26, 1930, in Andrews, son of the late Arthur Manning Flowers and Mattie Lee Long Flowers. He graduated from the University of South Carolina in 1951, and served in the United States Air Force during the Korean conflict. After completing his service to his country, Mr. Flowers returned to Columbia and graduated from the University of South Carolina School of Law in 1958. Mr. Flowers practiced law in Georgetown for 38 years as a partner in the Moore, Flowers and Doar law firm (which merged in later years with the McNair Law Firm).

Mr. Flowers was a lifelong member of Trinity United Methodist Church in Andrews. Throughout his life, he faithfully served his God, his church, his family and his community.

Surviving are his wife of 54 years, Patricia Chestnut Flowers; his children, Arthur M. (Renee) Flowers III of Columbia, Lora Lee Flowers (Erik) Doerring of Columbia, and J. Andrew Flowers of Murrells Inlet; and his grandchildren, Molly Flowers of Columbia, Mary Beth Flowers of Aynor, Katie Doerring and Christopher Doerring of Columbia.

The family would like to extend their thanks to the Still Hopes family for their loving care of their husband, father and grandfather.

Services will be held at Trinity United Methodist Church, Andrews, at 11 a.m. December 31, 2008. Officiating will be Rev. Sandra Stevens Poirel. Burial will follow in the Andrews Memorial Cemetery.

Sign a guest book at www.mayerfuneralhome.com.

Memorials may be made to Trinity United Methodist Church, 205 S. Rosemary Ave., Andrews, SC 29510 or to Still Hopes Episcopal Retirement Community, 1 Still Hopes Drive, West Columbia, SC 29169.

The Andrews Chapel of Mayer Funeral Home is assisting the family.

This post was initially going to be entitled “</blog>” but Wordpress couldn’t make heads or tails of that, so here we go…

It’s been an amazing 4 1/2 years writing this blog.  It started as an experiment in personal branding and evolved into a few other things along the way.  Now it’s time to let some of those other things grow independently and try a few new things altogether.  Websites aren’t meant to be permanent anyway.

So I’m signing off at mattfrye.net.  The archives are available for reading and will be up for a few months anyway.  Feel free to browse and watch this space for updates on my new projects.

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

Just saw that Uncle Arthur appears on the Alzheimer’s Care page of the Still Hopes retirement home where he lived.

See what I mean when I say he was jovial? The man never lost his charm.

My Elliot shipmate Chuck McAllister sent me a notable email Friday. Chuck’s a South Carolina boy who made Alice Springs, Australia, his home when he retired from the Navy. Alice Springs is deep in the Outback, in case you didn’t know.

When it comes to wildlife Australia is like another planet. Even cleaning your grill becomes an adventure. Read on.

So I’m using my bbq this weekend… so I thought ill clean it up. I had known there were bees coming out from under the cover so I thought I’d kill them, obviously. Below is the bbq in question…

Now I know these bombs aren’t for bees and that but I thought I’ll suffocate/smoke them out. So here is the weapon of choice and delivery system…

I thought I was pretty smart. Designed to be easily manoeuvred under the cover of darkness.

I released the weapon of buzz destruction. OMG! The sound from under the cover was incredible!!! I ran away, only to return a few minutes later to see the death toll…

Talk about a mass grave.

I continued to remove the cover and to light the bbq to give it a clean when I noticed some fatty looking substance on the top of the side shelf thing….

Bit weird, I clean it before I put it away for winter and no way was there fat there so I begun to wonder…… NO….. It can’t be could it?

I slowly removed the rest of the cover only to find the HQ.

We think the queen flew away…. either that or a small child has wings and has been living in the hive coz that thing was huge!

Ever since I upgraded my site to Wordpress 2.7, the image uploader isn’t automatically resizing my uploaded images. All the uploader offers me is “Full Size.”

Anyone seen this?

Update: Fixed it. Looks like I didn’t have all the necessary GD plumbing in place.

This year I was fortunate enough to be able to bike to my job downtown. Just those 15 minutes of riding each way helped me drop weight, spoiled me, and got me into probably the best shape in my life. Not bad now that I’m less than a month away from being 40!

I did get a rude awakening in September when my lab tests showed an elevated cholesterol level. Since then I’ve been munching almonds and cutting back on carbohydrates. Another lab test in October didn’t show much improvement, so I began taking anti-cholesterol medicine, which then tripled my personal health insurance premium.

I get tested again next month. Hopefully things will have settled down. Until then I’ll keep doing what I’m doing.

One of the 2008 highlights I expected to write was relief that no one close to me died this year. Looks like I’ll have to revise that one as my Uncle Arthur passed away this morning at the age of 77.

We spent many summers at my aunt and uncle’s beach house in Garden City, SC. Arthur was always quick to tell a joke or to tousle our hair. He had suffered from Alzheimer’s for the past several years but could still tell a joke. He seemed in good spirits the last time I saw him.

We spent Christmas Day with my parents, during which I took a moment look at photographs. I found my eyes lingering on a picture of Uncle Arthur with my aunt.

He lived quite a full life. I’ll link to his obituary tomorrow.

We took a week off in August for vacation, initially with the hopes of getting back out to Orcas Island. When the frequent flyer tickets weren’t available for Seattle, we opted to travel closer to home. Thus it was a few days in the mountains and a few days at the beach.

The mountain in question was Gateway Mountain, outside of Old Fort, NC. After being welcomed with the traditional mountain greeting, we enjoyed getting our caricatures drawn, looking around Old Fort, or just enjoying the stunning view of a mountain sunset. We took a side trip to Chimney Rock, where my photo from the Rock is still featured on its Wikipedia page.

While the mountains were beautiful as always, the area was alarmingly dry. We swam in knee-deep water at Lake Lure. Honestly. Even four months later the area’s still in the grip of a terrible drought.

The second half of the trip was spent at Carolina Beach, at a condo found on Craigslist (as was our mountain cabin). The kids enjoyed the beach more, hands down. There’s just something about a hundred-miles-long sandbox that kids can relate to. While the weather didn’t always cooperate, we did have one or two great days. And meeting a UN staffer and his family vacationing from France provided an unexpected look at foreign cultures.

I still shake my head at how interesting a life like theirs must be. But its not necessarily better. While I’ve sometimes daydreamed about what it would be to live life like a rolling stone, I think my need for place outweighs it. At least for now.

"Please treate this issue as high priority one and do the needful."

No problemo.

Last night Kelly and I watched Man on Wire, the documentary about wirewalker Philippe Petit’s astounding high-wire stroll between the World Trade Center buildings in August 1974.

Though it was over thirty-five years ago, his feat is still astounding. Worth a watch!

I'm looking for a good RSS reader for my iPod Touch that will let me download and read protected friend entries from Livejournal. I've moved all the rest of my rss reading to google reader but it won't do authenticated feeds. Any suggestions?

Starting about the time that Bill Gates wrote his infamous Letter to Hobbyists, the commercial software industry has sought to control and restrict access to source code. Before that time, code wasn’t explicitly free, but it was often freely exchanged. The rise of the commercial software industry put an end to that.

When the modern open source software movement was formalized by Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond, the commercial software establishment pretty much ignored it. There was no way that useful software could be created for free. Then along came the Linux kernel, the GNU operating system and applications like the Apache web server, and suddenly open source software was not only useful, its adoption started growing phenomenally.

Since it is hard to say software isn’t useful when millions use it, the commercial software industry changed its tactics. A campaign of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt was started. Can you trust software made by a bunch of anonymous hippies? Who will support it? Who can you hold accountable?

In response came companies like Red Hat, who said “hey, I’ll support it, and I’ll give you better, more responsive service than you get from the commercial software guys.” Slowly, the FUD argument started to fade.

Now I’ve seen the next front on the war for open source. Commercial software companies are attacking the term itself. They are trying to say that commercial software and open source are actually the same thing, even though there is a huge difference between companies that garner most of their income from the support of software and those that earn most of their revenue from the sale of proprietary software licenses.

Words are important. One of my favorite philosophers, the late George Carlin, based much of his work on the examination of how words are used to control people. Take the invasion of Iraq by the United States. Following on the heels of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York, the US government sought to justify it by associating Iraq, even though not a single terrorist charged in the attacks was from Iraq and studies showed no link between Saddam Hussein and those terrorists. Yet in 2007 a Newsweek poll showed that 41% of Americans thought that Iraq was responsible, which was actually an increase of 5% from September 2004.

Now it is not the purpose of this post to start a debate about the war, but I wanted to demonstrate that if you say something enough times, even if it is false, people start to believe it. The commercial software companies know this.

For example, let me pick on Matt Asay (I could probably pick on Dave Rosenberg but I don’t read his blog). On December 22nd he ran a blog post with the paragraph:

Five years from now, I’m not even sure what it will mean to talk about “open source” and “commercial software” as if they are two separate and distinct things.

See, Matt works for an open core company that makes their money from selling commercial software licenses on top of a core piece of software that is published under an open source license [Note: see comments below - after researching it, it seems that Alfresco is not "open core" but neither is Alfresco Enterprise "open source"]. To drive value to his company he has to make the argument that while open source is good, it can’t produce value unless someone pays for it, thus there must be a commercial software component. I disagree.

He follows this up on Christmas Day with a post about an InfoWorld article on the future of open source:

Dave Rosenberg writes that 2009 will be the year when open source becomes paid software, but I think we’re already there. We’ve been there for at least two years, in fact. We just didn’t know it.

Once again the association that open source and commercial (paid) software are one and the same.

Now I have no doubt that commercial software companies will have to become more open. They’ll have to provide better and more free APIs and they will have to work hard to build communities around their products, but that doesn’t make them open source.

Finally, the next day Asay follows up with a very paternalistic post on the struggles that the data portability field is having on defining what is “open”. I say “paternalistic” because he comes across as if the whole topic is boring and beneath consideration.

See, we in open source have been through this (attribution/badgeware debate, anyone?), and we resolved it by throwing up our hands in despair and moving on.

Oddly enough, that was probably the right thing to do, as the only people that really care about such things are the vendors involved. Customers don’t care

I claim that customers don’t care because they don’t understand. It’s posts like Matt’s that really blur the lines between open source and commercial software. They didn’t care about Linux when no one used Linux, but suddenly less than a decade later Linux is doing well. Now as open source moves up the stack it’s the same situation. Once true free and open source software becomes a viable alternative it will cause customers to care.

But it’s comments like this that make the process take longer. I’ve helped build a business around OpenNMS, which remains 100% open source software, and as I try to explain the value to potential customers I can no longer rely on “it’s open source” to mean what it used to mean. We still get replies like “yes, it’s open source, so how much is the enterprise version?” It’s “free food” all over again.

Now some of my detractors will say that I just make up terms to suit me, and that my understanding of “open source” is not valid. I get mine from The Open Source Definition by the Open Software Initiative. If anyone says that it is not valid, I’d love to hear the reasons why. What I love about it is that it starts off with “Open source doesn’t just mean access to the source code” (emphasis mine). The commercial/open core/hybrid/shareware folks would love for people to believe that’s all it means.

I can’t say that I blame them. I’ve seen the power of open source in action and if I ran a commercial software company it would be in the best interests of my shareholders to leverage anything I could, including even the most tenuous association with it. But likewise it is in my best interests to point out how wrong they are.

I’m not going to have any effect on those companies, and I realize this. Heck, Matt has his bully pulpit on cnet and my three readers get to visit my rants on an old Dell server with donated bandwidth. But who I really want to reach are those that might consider buying these companies. As Matt says the clients don’t care about open source so the investors shouldn’t either. They need to judge the value of a commercial software company against other commercial software companies.

And they need to keep in mind that projects like OpenNMS are growing stronger every day. While our open core competition might have prettier interfaces and more features, we’re catching up. We’re also focusing directly on the needs of our community, and not the buzz-word du jour. How much value does a piece of commercial software have when we might be able to replace it in six months? Customers might not care about truly open source software in large numbers now, but I’m willing to bet they will. I’m wondering who’s betting they won’t?

It’s the time of year I list my highlights of the year. This year I will eschew limiting myself to ten, as it’s tough to pick and choose from so many happenings. I will rank them, more or less, though, as I think that’s important.

Look for the first installment sometime this weekend.

I’ve been told that an offer is on the way after all. It apparently is on the way to the staffing person, though the holiday probably got in the way. Still not fun being told that I’d be getting a call and then not calling. I thought I had been stood up or something.

With only days to go between now and my expected start date of Jan. 5th, there’s not a lot of time to prepare. But at least it looks as if I’ll have something for which to prepare!