A fast for Bassel

Many of you who know me know that — how can I put this tactfully? — I’m a bit on the rotund side. More specifically, I’m a little short for weight; short by about, oh, at least a foot or so. I weigh about the same as most power forwards in the NBA but lack the height they have. You get the picture.

I bring this up because supporters of Bassel Khartabil (also known as Bassel Safadi), who have been working tirelessly to have him freed from a Syrian jail, have come up with a one-day fast for people to do to raise awareness of Bassel’s plight. I fasted on Friday and will do so each Friday going forward until Bassel is freed. It’s not hard: For me, I just get a gallon of purified water and drink that throughout the day (sorry, but I can’t not have water, my age being what it is and all that).

The schedule, if you want to participate, can be found here. Incidentally, I can’t seem to mark each subsequent Friday on the schedule for some reason, but I’ll be fasting anyway.

Al-Jazeera has done a very good piece on the fast, and on Bassel’s plight, here. In addition, Foreign Policy Magazine calls Bassel one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers in 2012.

A recap from the July blog item: On March 15, 2012, Bassel was detained in a wave of arrests in the Mazzeh district of Damascus, Syria. As I wrote back in July, Bassel is the project leader for an open source web software called Aiki Framework. He is well known in online technical communities as a dedicated volunteer to Creative Commons, Mozilla Firefox, Wikipedia, Open Clip Art Library, Fabricatorz, and Sharism.

Since Bassel’s arrest, his family has received no official explanation for his detention or information regarding his whereabouts. However, his family has recently learned from previous detainees at the security branch of Kafer Sousa, Damascus, that Bassel is being held at this location.

As updated on the Free Bassel site, “Bassel has been transferred from a civilian (Adra) to a Military Field Court, which denies him a lawyer and witnesses. This is bad. Please act now.”

Also, this from Amnesty International paints a bleak picture of Bassel’s current plight, but provides information about who to contact with messages to leaders to appeal for Bassel’s freedom.

Bassel contributes much to the FOSS paradigm. He’s one of us. Let’s get Bassel back home to his loved ones, and let’s get him coding again.

This blog, and all other blogs by Larry the Free Software Guy and Larry Cafiero, are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND license. In short, this license allows others to download this work and share it with others as long as they credit me as the author, but others can’t change it in any way or use it commercially.

(Larry Cafiero is one of the founders of the Lindependence Project and develops business software at Redwood Digital Research, a consultancy that provides FOSS solutions in the small business and home office environment.)

Walking away from the fray

I had written something about last week’s Richard Stallman-Jono Bacon dustup over the weekend, but then realized that it would just be more-of-the-same on a topic upon which too much attention was being spent.

The tl;dr version of what I wrote, and then deleted (you’re welcome), is this:

Richard Stallman — who is a great programmer and thinker, but who exhibited again why he’s not fit for a leadership role in anything — once again threw diplomacy and tact under the bus, even though he is, to a significant degree, right on the shopping lens issue. But shunning Ubuntu, at its core, flies in the face of freedom — people should be free to use whatever they want as an OS, even if it allows others to see what one is doing (though smarter folks would realize how bad this is).

Meanwhile, Jono Bacon — rather than doing the smart thing by ignoring Stallman’s blog post — drags out the tired Ubuntu policy of ad hominem response to any and all criticism, throwing in a FUD accusation for good measure, before — wait for it — offering what he considers an “olive branch.”

Yawn. Wake me up when Ubuntu decides to make the shopping lens issue an opt-in rather than an opt-out.

The best writing I’ve seen on this comes from Benjamin Kerensa in his blog here. So I’ll let Benjamin drive for now while I go take care of some more important things.

UPDATE: Jono Bacon writes an apology here.

This blog, and all other blogs by Larry the Free Software Guy, Larry the CrunchBang Guy and Larry Cafiero, are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND license. In short, this license allows others to download this work and share it with others as long as they credit me as the author, but others can’t change it in any way or use it commercially.

(Larry Cafiero is one of the founders of the Lindependence Project and develops business software at Redwood Digital Research, a consultancy that provides FOSS solutions in the small business and home office environment.)

Munich gets it right

The fact that the German city of Munich has been using their own version of Linux and Free/Open Source Software in its municipal day-to-day workings is not news. It’s also no secret that the city of Munich was also saving money in the bargain as well, as the Lord Mayor (yeah, they have those in Munich) reported to the council; a savings of around 4 million euros, by the Lord Mayor’s estimation, according to a March 2012 report.

The problem is that the Lord Mayor was a little off — about 6 million euros off, as a matter of fact.

An article in The H last week reported that the savings to the city of Munich, thanks to its home-grown LiMux Linux operating system and FOSS programs like OpenOffice, have saved with German city 10 million euros.

The article itself breaks down the savings very nicely, and I don’t want to get into the OpenOffice/LibreOffice debate here (though, arguably, they can use LibreOffice just as easily, in my opinion, and they’d be better off doing so).

But what it comes down to is this: If Linux and FOSS can save a city like Munich this much money, how much could it save the cash-strapped cities, counties — heck, even states and this nation — by implementing Linux and FOSS at various government levels? This is not a new question, and I know groups like Code for America get it.

Armed with this information from Munich, it’s probably a good time to ask this question at city council halls far and wide.

This blog, and all other blogs by Larry the Free Software Guy, Larry the CrunchBang Guy and Larry Cafiero, are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND license. In short, this license allows others to download this work and share it with others as long as they credit me as the author, but others can’t change it in any way or use it commercially.

(Larry Cafiero is one of the founders of the Lindependence Project and develops business software at Redwood Digital Research, a consultancy that provides FOSS solutions in the small business and home office environment.)

Sometimes the good guys win

If anyone asks, Ken Starks will tell you this is why you fight whatever misfortune life throws at you, no matter how difficult or heinous, while giving it everything you have and then some.

Because you might just end up prevailing.

Make no mistake: Ken still fights with some health issues. He still lives with his “scarlet letter” — his term, not mine — of having a PVC pipe in his throat and he’s still going to have to receive treatments in the near future that are going to cost into the thousands per, in order to keep ahead of the cancerous curve.

But the throat cancer, which was supposed to log him out for good, is now in remission.

So he lives to fight the good fight another day, and that means bringing technology, powered by Linux, to underprivileged kids in the Austin area thanks to his work with REGLUE.

It means that an eloquent and vocal supporter of Free/Open Source Software, silenced slightly by his previous surgery (his voice is a cross between Don Corleone and Animal on The Muppets, he says), continues to air his opinion, at full blast, on his well-written blog.

It means that one of the good guys — one of the white hats — won.

One more thing: It also means that he gets to go through another ordeal . . . I mean, another Houston Astros season next year. The Astros, now in the American League West, take on a new group of rivals next season, like the Oakland Athletics (and he’s welcome to come out here to California next season to see the Astros-A’s at the Coliseum).

I left Ken on a warm Friday morning in Houston to head back to California after the Giants-Astros series in August. I never told anyone, but I have to confess to having creeping doubts about whether I’d see him again.

Leave it to him to prove me wrong, and I can tell you how he’ll respond: He’ll just chalk it up to my being a liberal. Honest. Then we’ll laugh about that — the tree-hugging Californian and the rock-ribbed conservative Texan — and we’ll move on to the next FOSS issue we’ll be addressing together.

Thanks for getting the better of your disease, Ken. I know I speak for a multitude of folks who would echo that sentiment, and I know an army of folks who are glad you’re on our side in fighting proprietary software.

This blog, and all other blogs by Larry the Free Software Guy, Larry the CrunchBang Guy and Larry Cafiero, are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND license. In short, this license allows others to download this work and share it with others as long as they credit me as the author, but others can’t change it in any way or use it commercially.

(Larry Cafiero is one of the founders of the Lindependence Project and develops business software at Redwood Digital Research, a consultancy that provides FOSS solutions in the small business and home office environment.)

He likes it! Hey Linus!

Now to separate the get-off-my-lawners from those who need to get off the lawn . . .

Those who get the reference in the blog’s title can read on; those who don’t — and it’s generational, trust me — can watch here.

A few days ago on Google+, reported on later in a Muktware blog post, Linus Torvalds talked about his recent foray with KDE. Generally, he likes it, though his praise — stop me if you’ve heard this before — is still tempered by the things he finds he doesn’t like.

He likes the ability to configure things (who doesn’t?), despite the “odd and distracting default behavior” (behavior that, of course, can be changed). But then he goes on to give KDE a test run by fiddling with the desktop widgets.

According to the Muktware blog, Linus continues: “As a result, right now my terminal and web browser buttons look like a drunken fratboy has been messing with my desktop. I suspect I’ll turn them back to their boring upright position (because that’s how I roll – boring), but for now I’m mildly amused by the sheer whimsicality of it all.”

First things first: There are thousands, possibly millions, who “roll” a lot more boring than Linus, but let’s put that aside. What’s important is that, like when he tried Xfce, it gives those who are developing desktop environments a few minutes with the creator, for better or worse. Further, and more importantly, Linus’ example also shows that we don’t have to stick with one desktop/program/software forever.

In other words, from time to time, change is good.

This blog, and all other blogs by Larry the Free Software Guy, Larry the CrunchBang Guy and Larry Cafiero, are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND license. In short, this license allows others to download this work and share it with others as long as they credit me as the author, but others can’t change it in any way or use it commercially.

(Larry Cafiero is one of the founders of the Lindependence Project and develops business software at Redwood Digital Research, a consultancy that provides FOSS solutions in the small business and home office environment.)

Back to the future

[This item, slightly edited, is copied from an earlier submission to the Larry the CrunchBang Guy blog.]

Unbeknown to my daughter Mimi — and, sadly, I don’t think she reads what her Dad writes in this blog often enough (and if she does, well, consider the surprise spoiled) — she’s about to inherit yet another of Dad’s hand-me-down computers.

First things first: I currently use a ZaReason Alto 3880 laptop running CrunchBang 10 Statler, which is a remarkable machine that, sadly, ZaReason doesn’t make anymore — time and improvements march on, and ZaReason has advanced this laptop series to the current Alto 4330.

My daughter, conversely, has been using for the past few years my old ThinkPad R40, a very sturdy, utilitaran and well-traveled laptop judging by all the stickers on the cover.

Enter a new development: Steam and Valve are ramping up gaming in Linux, and the old R40 — great for her artwork and creating 8-bit music, which takes up most of her digital life — has, well, performance issues when it comes to the higher horsepower needed for games. Her interest in games goes beyond playing them, and with this in mind, I’d like for her to have the better hardware when pitching in on the projects she wants to explore.

Personally, I blame Gabe Newell for Mimi wanting newer hardware, but never mind. Also, for those of you keeping score at home, shelling out for a new ZaReason laptop is out of the question until, at least, Christmas (especially after last week’s $600 car repair which we will not discuss. Ever).

So after saving a ThinkPad T42 from recycling doom recently, I’ve put Waldorf on it — the CrunchBang-11-20121015-i686 version, which works flawlessly (with one caveat, mentioned below) — and I’ll hand down the ZaReason to Mimi.

Now, you go girl.

In the past in other blogs, I’ve said that I am a ThinkPad guy and I have always loved the form factor. That hasn’t changed, and though I’m turning over the keys to the sports car to my daughter and relegating myself to the station wagon, I feel at home with almost any model of ThinkPad.

So back to the hardware I love while looking to the future.

One more thing: There have been installation issues in the past with Waldorf — and, for some reason, it seems to be happening mostly (if not solely) on ThinkPads — where the installation will hang at the “detect disks” point. It came up again yesterday with this current install, and while there’s an extensive discussion involving solutions here, my solution was more simple and straightforward: Disable floppy in the BIOS.

This blog, and all other blogs by Larry the Free Software Guy, Larry the CrunchBang Guy and Larry Cafiero, are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND license. In short, this license allows others to download this work and share it with others as long as they credit me as the author, but others can’t change it in any way or use it commercially.

(Larry Cafiero is one of the founders of the Lindependence Project and develops business software at Redwood Digital Research, a consultancy that provides FOSS solutions in the small business and home office environment.)

Game on

Those who reguarly read this blog know that I’m not a gamer. Well into my sixth decade, my strong suit includes games that involve letters etched on wooden tiles, and my hand-eye coordination is limited to waving arm movements to accompany a full-throated, “Get off my lawn!”

Regardless, I do recognize the contributions that games make to the digital performance of hardware, and the subsequent technological advances to hardware. It’s a lot like the technological advances and developments in auto racing finding themselves worthy by automotive engineers to be included in passenger cars somewhere down the line.

So back in August when Gabe Newell said that Valve was going to bring Left 4 Dead 2 — which to me sounds like a final score: Left 4 Dead 2, Left advances (but never mind) — to Linux and called Windows 8 “a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space,” I would say that he would know.

According to a blog item by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes back in the summer, Kinglsey-Hughes writes that “Newell believes that the roadblock keeping gamers away from adopting Linux as their operating system of choice is a lack of games for the platform, so his company plans to bring a selection of titles — including the popular Left 4 Dead 2 — in an attempt to lure gamers to the free and open source platform.”

OK, I’m with you there, Gabe.

Fast forward to today: PC Gamer has a story about Steam — another gaming software company with a monosyllabic name — bringing Team Fortress 2 to Linux.

Is it me, or are we seeing a trend here?

This blog, and all other blogs by Larry the Free Software Guy, Larry the CrunchBang Guy and Larry Cafiero, are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND license. In short, this license allows others to download this work and share it with others as long as they credit me as the author, but others can’t change it in any way or use it commercially.

(Larry Cafiero is one of the founders of the Lindependence Project and develops business software at Redwood Digital Research, a consultancy that provides FOSS solutions in the small business and home office environment.)