Pawn to King Rook takes Bishop Promote Pawn to Queen Checkmate

The middle link is the interesting one, and pleases me immensely. The background is that Bitmover makes version control software called BitKeeper, and their software, while commercial, is highly regarded on Windows, Unix, and other platforms. Some years ago, they convinced Linus Torvalds to manage the kernel sources using their software, angering a number of people in the opensource community (the thought being that we should be using opensource software to manage our opensource OS). Unfortunately, despite numerous petitions and a lot of outcry, noone convinced Linus otherwise, even when BitKeeper incorporated an obnoxious clause in their license that noone involved in using their special dumbed-down version for the opensource community was allowed to be working on developing competing software. Apparently, one of these developers, who works in the Open Source Development Labs, kept on developing an open competitor, and because OSDL uses bitkeeper, Larry McVoy, who runs BitMover, decided to phase out the opensource version. Some people, largely the people who never were bothered about Linux development relying on closed-source products, are quite unhappy, but other people, like myself, see it as a cause for celebration. Finally (hopefully), Bitmover will not be used for Linux kernel development, and we won't have McVoy continuing to seduce people in the name of cooperation with big business. Sure, Big Business is welcome at the table of opensource, but like with IBM, it's by our rules. IBM is welcome because it plays nice, whereas I am quite happy to see Larry go, and wish it had happened earlier. If I drank regularly/for more than just the taste, tonight would be a time to go out and drink to celebrate.

I am again bothered by some friends from the atheist group in Columbus who, in what I see as a desire to be all *sensitive* and, well, frankly from my point of view, weasels, are now emphasizing themselves as being humanist. They become wed to the idea that there's no real difference between believing in deities so long as you're not oppressive/intolerant/whatever to science and the liberal ideal, and as that becomes their source of identity, they feel more and more free to develop some kind of a vague mysticism or spirituality. Stupid and disappointing. Maybe I'm wrong about these people.. I hope so.

Unrelated, my attention recently has been drawn to this group of conservative folk. This worries me -- while I understand that there are some cases where what they're fighting against is legitimate (e.g. the systematic hushing up of rightist voices on campus), most of what they're fighting is areas where they're pushing barbarism and pseudoscience.

The next version of my BLOG software is now as feature complete in all areas as the old one (well, people without accounts *ahem* cannot yet set their themes, but that's easy to add later). I will deploy it very soon, ready or not.

Oh, and in my first few days of playing with them, I have come to the conclusion that CivCTP2's interface totally sucks. They made a number of nice improvements to the game from CTP, but they ruined the interface. All the units are ugly, the game doesn't have a nice way to let you know that you're not building anything in a city (you need to go look around every turn), and the dialogs are poorly designed.