Paw Prints: Writings of the maddog

Stuff

Aug 31, 2010 GMT

The late George Carlin once did a comedy routine about “stuff” and I sympathize with him entirely, but while his concept was that he had all his “stuff” in houses, in suitcases and in bureau drawers, I have most of my interesting “stuff” on disk drives.....Over six years ago I purchased a new IBM Thinkpad X31 laptop notebook. I intended on having it a long time, so I outfitted it with the maximum amount of memory that I could get (2 Gbytes), along with the largest disk, which at that time was 80 Gigabytes, and an extended warranty covering five years.About three years ago I started feeling a bit pinched for disk space, so I upgraded to a 160 Gbyte disk and thought that would...

Live Penguins

Aug 28, 2010 GMT

One of my readers, Corfy, commented to my last blog posting that he wished the Ohio Linux Fest would bring back “live penguins”, which inspired me to write this blog entry.Many years ago a company called "Magic Software" brought some live penguins to one of the first Linuxworlds. They got the penguins from an animal farm which had raised the penguins by hand from eggs, and used the penguins in television commercials. These penguins had never been "wild", but had spent their whole life in captivity, often under the bright lights of television cameras.These penguins had their own hotel room, with a plastic swimming pool, and newspapers put down on the floor so the...

When being Free costs Money

Aug 26, 2010 GMT

 The Ohio Linux Fest (OLF, September 10-12, Columbus Ohio) is a great regional conference that happens every year. An all-volunteer driven conference, the organizers work hard to present a great set of speakers and offer to the attendees the change to learn about Free Software, as well as partake in activities such as LPI exams, …. all at no admission fee. The most OLF asks is a “contribution” from people who want to be “supporters” of the conference, and for that “supporters” get a T-shirt, lunch, etc. There are additional Tutorials that have a "Professional" fee attached to them. And of course the organizers pass the hat for attendees to make...

Day One at LinuxCON: Open Cloud Mini-Summit - and Cannoli

Aug 09, 2010 GMT

 Sunday, August 8th, 2010 had three claims to fame. It was: One day after the 60th anniversary of my birthday, and I thank all the people that sent birthday greetings. It is nice to have so many friends who took the time to do this simple act.  Father's Day in Brazil, and I thank all those that sent me Father's Day greetings. As someone who has no children, they meant a lot to me.  The start of LinuxCON North America 2010, held at the Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts.  LinuxCON actually starts on Tuesday, August 10th, but is preceded by a series of Mini-Summits. Father's Day therefore started by getting up an an unusual hour to take a...

maddog celebrates his 60th birthday

Aug 07, 2010 GMT

 Today, August 7th, is the sixtieth anniversary of my birth. To mark this occasion I am going to inaugurate a project of my retirement called “maddog's mansion and marina of math, music, micro-computing, micro-brewing, micro-winery, micro-distillery and bait shop”, a nice place by the beach where I hope to house and inspire young people who wish to be involved with producing Free Software. Part of this “inspiration” of the students will be to ask various people that I have known over the years to come to “maddog's mansion” and give a talk on the topic of “Three things I have done right with my life, and the three things I have done wrong.” Since I can not in...

You Wave "Good-bye" and I Wave "Hello"

Aug 05, 2010 GMT

 A new blog posting from Google points to the fact that the highly touted “Wave” project has been terminated, and the general philosophy around this seems to be that “Wave” was a failure. I was one of the people who looked at Wave and tried to figure out how it fit into my daily life. I tried using it from time to time, but in my life I am “off the net” so frequently that the real-time and high-bandwidth aspects of Wave left me cold and feeling like a fish washed up on shore. The fact that Wave was not integrated into any other thing that Google was working on also made Wave painful for me, and created the decision point of whether I met up with people on email,...

Windows Too Unstable For Anything As Important As An Organ Concert: Debian Day (DebDay) talk in NYC

Jul 31, 2010 GMT

Some people know that I collect automated musical instruments. Player pianos, player organs, nickelodeons, and other mechanisms that use a roll of paper to control the playing of the instrument. This was a natural outcome of my fascination of controlling a piece of hardware with "logic" and "software", and my love of music. I have even developed a talk about how Free Software is like a player piano, and have given this talk several times over the course of the years, complete with illustrations and music played from my player piano and player reed organ collection. Many years ago I joined the Automatic Musical Instrument Collector's Association (AMICA) and I...