The Goldfish Chronicles

In case anybody has noticed my utter absence from blogs, open source etc; my latest excuse is that we’ve bought a house. Yes - in defiance of the Seattle housing market tanking, we’ve embraced debt after two debt-free years and are slowly moving into our new house. Major perks are a) a park within toddler walking distance, b) a tree-house, c) more room than the current apartment can offer and d) a garden.

Evenings are filled with packing and driving delicates up to the house. I’m looking forward to it all being over and falling into a deep sleep at the new place.

0.11.4 is released containing the reported fixes from Lars Kampen and Nils Kulk:

http://www.osjava.org/simple-jndi/changes-report.html#0_11_4

Maven upload request:

http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MAVENUPLOAD-2162

Download at:

http://www.osjava.org/simple-jndi/Download.html

Many thanks to Lars and Nils.

(Continuing with my free, and I’m sure much appreciated, service to Apache sponsors)

Google’s, Yahoo’s, Microsoft’s, HP’s, Covalent’s, IONA’s, Tetsuya’s, Two Sigma Investments’, Matt Mullenweg’s, AirPlus International’s bitch.

A random thought I had while attending the Floss Foundations summit was:

“What would an Affero Permissive License look like, and would it be GPL compatible?”

Namely, how would an AfPL differ from Badgeware or the BSD advertising clause. I’m thinking it would be something like adding this clause to the BSD:

“You must prominently reproduce to all users interacting with source or binary forms remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided to the user.”

Anyway - random useless thought of the day. Are we going to see the BSD advertising clause make a comeback?

“3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement: This product includes software developed by the University of California, Berkeley and its contributors. “

My third day down in Portland. Mostly here for the Foundations summit (now over) in which I wore a vague Apache hat and got to listen to some very interesting conversations. I skipped out on the last couple of hours of Sunday to pick up a doughnut at Voodoo Donut and spend far too much money at Powell’s (my first trip!). The happiest thing was finally finding the out of print “How the Whale became and other stories” by Ted Hughes. I’ve been looking for that for 5 years or more now (not very heavily to be fair, but still always asking for it at bookshops) and to see a couple of copies on the highest shelf in the kids section was delightful. Once I’d found someone to clamber up and get it down (oh to be a primate) I entered happiness mode.

This was probably a bad thing in hindsight as I then went to the scifi section and bought 8 books. Curse that happiness. First one of those I’ve started reading is the 4th in the Lost Fleet series. It reminds me of one of the Baen book series I’ve read, but smoother, and also of Heinlein juveniles but with more depth of story. I’m quite addicted and I’m sure it’ll take another 52 books for the lost fleet to get home. Or destroyed. Or find aliens. Or find out they are aliens. Or wake up because it was all a dream and Bobby is in fact fine.

Back to OSCON. I’m only here for the one day of OSCON. A bit frustrating in that lots of people are arriving today and tomorrow and at best I’ll wave and say “Bye”. Of course, that’ll stop them having to lie and say they understand that I’m choosing family and home over oss for a year. I wanted to leave halfway through the day in fact - traffic etc - but you can’t buy only one tutorial. You have to buy two. Curses. So I get to go to A/B testing and see what there is to learn. Then I get to drive through traffic. *grumble* And of course I was up bloody early to check out of the hotel and then make it in time for registration to make me late for the tutorial.

Happy thoughts. Whale.

Time to admit that I just read Brave New World for the first time. If my father has it in his collection, it must have lived on a different set of bookshelves from the rest of his golden/silver age sci fi. Fortunately my wife has it, but again it lived on a different shelf to its kin and it was only when packing books into boxes that I noticed it and thought ‘Hey, this is meant to be a bit good right?’.

And indeed it was. It’s one of those books that surprises you with how long ago it was written (1932) because it really doesn’t feel that old. Interestingly in the foreword the author comments on how he missed nuclear technology, but nowadays that doesn’t feel like much of a miss. Computers are the usual miss of books of this age, but here is where the quality shows - it assumes that things help with life and doesn’t spend time diving into them.

Story wise - it’s a utopian future in which problems are solved by making life stable and the human race stagnant. Pockets of aboriginal zoos exist, which provide a nice counter point and we experience the effect of each upon their inhabitants through the protagonists. The two sets of worlds makes it feel quite like Wells’ Time Machine, but without feeling as antiquated (of course that was published in 1895).

If anyone hasn’t read it (but you probably all have) - I recommend doing so.

And more pictures from my wife’s blog.