My computer room is a little bit emptier. Forrester, my 21164 (Alpha), after many years of service, just went into its retirement. I was going to retire holly as well, but I realized that I have some games on holly that, as of present, don't play nice with the beta versions of Linux I'm running on my laptop, so holly will stay up, for now. While packing up forrester, the KVM that tied holly and forrester together, and various other pieces of hardware, I also grabbed kryten and put it away. Unlike forrester, kryten was actually essentially dead -- it suffered a disk failure some time ago. My computer room feels a bit emptier.. although once I get holly packed up, and it's just torgo (my NFS server) left in here, I can try to think of a new use for the room. It might make a nice pseudo-greenhouse, if I can find a way to seal off the carpet so the moisture wouldn't ruin it. Alternatively, it could make for a smallish guest room.

The furor about Bitkeeper continues. Linus said some very stupid things, and shows that he really doesn't understand the problems. In response to Andrea's complaint that, by using bitkeeper for kernel things, the kernel developers who do are licence-required not to put any work towards version management software of any kind, limiting their freedom, Linus's response is that the only reason Andrea is pushing non-restrictive software like arch is that he's friends with the developers. Sure, Linus, dismiss the restrictive licenses as being religion. and watch while the businesses take advantage of your inability to see the big picture to continue to add bar after bar to your environment until your home is a prison. You already made a show out of not becoming bound by SCO's NDAs by refusing to get too close to their spurious claims, but then you happily give Larry McVoy power over what kind of software you can work on, and as the leader of one of the most important open source projects, you drag all the other kernel developers, more or less, in the same direction. Maybe bitkeeper really is the best thing since sliced meat .. er.. cheese (don't want to blaspheme in the church of veggie .. hehe), but it's commercial, and more restrictive than most commercial software too. It's time to start listening to all the people who are sending you you've messed up, and fix things, or eventually you'll be looking at a kernel fork.

I found that the Conan O'Brien show put up their Triumph the Insult Comic Dog videos for viewing. Cool! I do want to find a way to download them though -- these are streaming versions.

Chewing on it, I think that an analysis of the liberal and convervative convents could be big enough to be an entire section of my site (which I really need to sync with my development version sometime). It's a complex and interesting topic that I'd prefer doesn't get silently scooped into the archives of my BLOG.

Speaking of which, I'm currently chewing on how to improve the interface on this thing. Maybe a sidebar to the left would be nice... Only one person has made an account on my BLOG so far, and no comments have been made yet, apart from mine. I do like being able to leave comments for myself, but maybe the account-making process, with the email requirement, is a bit onerous. I could redesign it to drop it off in the user part of the database, and add a flag for 'approved' versus 'nonapproved'... that might be the way to go. If any of you out there have suggestions for how the BLOG could be better, featurewise or presentationwise, let me know.