Independence day weekend was great. Brandi came to Chicago and we saw several fireworks displays from the parking lot of my hotel. I’ve been working on command line administration of apache, mySQL,and vsftp. This is what we do when we’re bored. We also read. Somehow we decided to refer to ourselves in the first person plural. That’s pretty strange. Bored…

I’ve got SuSE Linux 9.1 installed now and I must say, I love it. Very simple and everything (except my usb scanner) works, even samba print serving. I’d be happy to make copies of SuSE for interested persons. It’s perfectly legal under the GPL so just ask me.

This article describes the migration of public library computers to Linux. It has long bothered me that libraries, whose professional values and stated code of ethics clearly call for open source software, have been subverted by donations from the Gates Foundation into using a closed, proprietary platform. The foundation of the profession is open access and a commitment to fight the comodification of information and, by extension, information systems. Every library should be using open source software. See also the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative.

I saw this interesting article on Google technology this morning. It isn’t very detailed, but raises interesting questions and makes important points about Linux.

On related notes, I’m posting a link to the speech given by Bill Gates recently at UIUC as well as an excellent article written by RMS on word attachments. Brandi is here in Champaign for some library workshop so we get to hang out on campus again if only for a day.

I’ve posted the screenshots as well as more pictures of my job. Eric was working so hard tonight he almost missed attending the Bill Gates Show at Foellinger Auditorium. I lectured to the 315 class today about system administration in Windows 2000 Professional and Red Hat Linux 9. Maybe next semester we’ll use Fedora Core, the free successor to Red Hat Linux. Oh, the camera I bought at the Maxwell Street Market in Chicago is excellent. It’s a Canon EOS Rebel G (mine’s the black one). I love my Pentax K1000, but it sure is nice to have a quality light meter and flash. auto-wind is nice, too. I really wish we had space for a darkroom.

I went home for the weekend and had a great visit with family. It’s such a hike to Macomb and back. I spent all this week doing an inordinate amount of homework only to discover that not one bit of it was due this week. It’s kind of funny-usually I’d make the opposite mistake and not realize the homework was due until very late. Woo-hoo. If you live in CU you might find this interesting. The IMC. in cooperation with others want to build a citywide free, highspeed wireless network. See their website. A couple of people have expressed their misunderstanding of the current state of the Linux desktop so I’ve taken some screenshots that I’ll post on Tuesday that they may see it’s modernity.

The class I ga for, LIS315 (Changed to LIS 451) has reached a critical point where I need to be there for labs, which means I have to be in Champaign an extra day. This is not a happy development around my house. I’m having a good time at work, though. I’m writing a best practices primer for Redhat 9 and I recently built a very solid dhcp and caching dns server based on Redhat for Prairienet. I’m thinking of installing Linux on some of our public access workstations, also. Still, I’d rather be at home.

Read about the threat that trusted computing represents to your privacy and personal rights. Pretty stunning, really. The software you use will always belong to the company that created it and the things that you create with it also belong to the company. That’s a new take on inheritance.

Halloween! I’m trying to get more interested in my classes. For some reason, I just want to go play with Apache, mySQL, and python. I’d also like to be out the woods. This is one of the best times of the year to be in the woods in the midwest. Animals are very active preparing for winter, the underbrush and insects have mostly died, and the gray forboding skies leave one with an ominous feeling. I noticed the other day that UIUC runs on Linux as reported by Netcraft.