Coffee|Code : Dan Scott

Most recently, the latest Software Freedom Law Show focuses on the subject of how to choose a license for your software project's documentation. The episode was a direct response to a dent I had sent to one of the hosts, Bradley Kuhn, suggesting the subject. I thought the Evergreen Documentation Interest Group might find it a useful treatment from two of the most knowledgeable folks in the free software licensing world. As a bonus, when I started listening to the episode today, I was pleased to hear Bradley lead in with a very positive mention of Evergreen. Many thanks, Bradley, both for the show and for the shout-out to Evergreen!

Also, back in July, I had the opportunity to travel to Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie to spend a few days locked in a room with my fellow Conifer propeller-heads (Art, Kevin, and Robin) to dump the Evergreen-related content of my brain out onto the table in preparation for my parental leave. As part of the visit, we joined in the Tangential Convergence crew to put together a podcast about Conifer and Evergreen in the standard Tangential Convergence style: having a few beer while sitting around a table in Dave Brodbeck's backyard. We ended up veering off onto other subjects rather quickly, but such is the nature of the show!

Addendum @ 20:44

1. In the SFLC podcast, Bradley was riffing about my role in Evergreen based on his memory of my FSOSS presentation from almost a year ago, so to set the record straight - I'm a relative newcomer to Evergreen, having joined the project in 2007 after Mike Rylander, Bill Erickson, and Jason Etheridge had already accomplished the miracle of delivering the first release of Evergreen to the public libraries of the state of Georgia.
2. Also, in the opening moments of the SFLC podcast, there's a mention of how Evergreen filled a gap in the free software universe (library systems); one should note that Koha tackled that gap a lot earlier (starting in 1999) and is also a thriving project today.

It's a running joke at the Linux Weekly News at the start of each year to predict that "this will be the year of Linux on the desktop". In our household, it's been Linux on the desktop for over ten years now.

A week or so ago, I received an email from the Linux Counter asking me to update the status of my account. I was a bit surprised to see that I had registered an account stating that I had a machine running Linux back in May 1999 - more than ten years ago! Then yesterday, while pawing through a box of miscellaneous computer crap (doesn't every geek have a few boxes of those?), I came across the receipt from CheapBytes for two CDs: Red Hat Linux 5.2, and Linux Mandrake 5.3 (Venus) dated February 23, 1999. It was a direct result of having run into Linux in 1998 at IBM when I was testing a port of DB2 to this previously relatively obscure (to me) operating system. Having cut my UNIX teeth earlier that year on AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, and SCO OpenServer, I was surprised at how capable it was on our relatively cheap testing hardware, and something in my brain clicked and sent me over the edge to learn more, more, more about this Linux thing. Shortly thereafter, I was submitting an order to CheapBytes from my work address.

I distinctly remember trying to get Red Hat 5.2 running on my IBM Aptiva at home, with no success, but the slightly more bleeding-edge Linux Mandrake handled my hardware without too much pain and actually produced a working XWindows interface. Glorious! I even managed to get Lilo to support dual-booting of Windows and Linux, so that I could geek out and then later Lynn could reboot and get some real work done. Or, I could play some serious games. Let's not get our priorities too screwed up. Somehow I managed not to fry our computer, despite rapidly entering the land of custom-compiled kernels and experimenting with different packages and RPMs from different distributions.

I ran Linux at work, as well, dealing with horrible things like Token Ring drivers in the early days (lots of custom kernels compiled there). I wrote manuals in gvim and built a documentation management system on a LADP (Linux, Apache, DB2, and PHP/Perl) platform. Figuring out solutions built on Linux often opened up much faster, cleaner ways of getting work done, and I never had a complaint about my productivity. A few days ago, I was listening to a Hacker Public Radio podcast in which many of the round table contributors mentioned that they couldn't run Linux or BSD at work because their machines were locked down, and I thought "How sad!"; these are clearly smart people and they should be able to select their own tools to get their jobs done. Imagine the fun that would follow if you hired a crew to renovate your house and then required them to use the set of tools that you had purchased at a discount store!

By 2001, whatever the current version of Linux Mandrake was was just running all the time on our home machine (I was a silver member of the Mandrake Club, oh yeah!). I wasn't playing many games anymore, although I did buy and play the Linux versions of Heroes of Might and Magic III and Soldier of Fortune and Alpha Centauri. I was even deeper into geekdom, doing some editing and writing for The Linux Documentation Project and minor hacking on projects like Wine (necessary for running Lotus Notes for work at IBM, you see) and PHP here and there. And when I wasn't monopolizing the machine, Lynn got tired of waiting for the system to reboot and she just jumped into Linux (using either Gnome or KDE, and cursing me only slightly when I switched the default desktop or upgraded and things moved around). So, we've been a primarily Linux-based family since 2001 I guess.

In 2004 or thereabouts we switched to Gentoo to try and avoid the upgrade "who moved my cheese?" hassles. The desktop layout stayed more stable, but the pain of having to recover after major configuration changes or blocking dependencies got tiresome and in 2007 we switched to Ubuntu and have been pretty happy with that ever since. Lynn had to jump back to Windows every once in a while when she started writing her thesis (curse those MS Office 2007 .docx files and layout changes between OpenOffice.org and MS Office) but otherwise, for us, Linux on the desktop has been part of our reality in some capacity for over ten years now - and almost a full-time reality for 8 years.

If you want to give it a shot, I would recommend Ubuntu as a good starting point for a general introduction to Linux. If you're one of my friends working in the film or audio industry (hello Ian!), Ubuntu Studio is a version of Ubuntu specialized for your needs.

When we moved to Sudbury, one of the draws was the wealth of trails available to us for hiking, biking, and cross country skiing. Between work and school and the arrival of Arik and Amber, however, it's somewhat rare for us to take advantage of those trails that are literally at our back door. This summer we got in a few good hikes, and picked some blueberries, but I had brought my mountain bike ride out for only one brief off-road spin. Well, until last week...

One fine sunny day, I headed out for what I thought was going to be another quick ride. Then I took a turn that I hadn't before, and started on a (for me) epic ride around Laurentian Lake. My neighbour / friend Markus had told me about this trail, but I didn't think I had the stamina or skills to pull it off. Our terrain is an incredible mix of glacier-hewn exposed granite, deep woods singletrack, and lakeside rides. This ride put all of those elements together; the following picture captures a rest break I took at the top of a rock outcropping about one-third of the way into the ride; it overlooks Lake Laurentian, a star-shaped lake about one kilometre behind our house:

After the intense rock climbing & descents (yes, at points I threw the bike over my shoulder and clambered up and down), the ride settled into a marshy trail, then smoothed into classic singletrack through a pine forest that provided welcome shade for this pale torso on an intensely sunny day for early September. After dipping close to the lake several times, a waterfront trail emerged and I managed to capture this rather spectacular shot from the other side of Lake Laurentian:

At this point, I was getting pretty fatigued (I had skipped lunch before the ride and had no food or drink with me - yeah, duh, it was going to be a short ride, remember?), so the Lake Laurentian Nature Chalet was a welcome sign that civilization (and crisp, cold, clean drinking water) wasn't that far off:

My bike looks pretty good resting up against the chalet's waterfront railing, doesn't it?

One more long climb brought me to the lookout:

Such beauty does come at a cost, unfortunately, at least for those who don't ride often enough. Luckily, I was able to pay the price in scrapes and bruises this time around! Following is a picture of my lightly scraped knee; my elbow took more damage (but I'll leave that to your imagination).

From the outlook, it was only another twenty minutes or so of familiar trails to get back home. All told, a great ride, and one that I hope to repeat--albeit with appropriate provisions, or a bottle of water at least--before the summer is out. Also, if you come to visit, you would be well-advised to bring your mountain bike. I'll be happy to show you around a few of our backyard trails!

(My apologies for the (lack of) picture quality; as was previously noted, I hadn't been planning on a long ride so I ended up putting my cell phone to work)