Time flies when you do something you enjoy

have been fairly pleased with my last weekend, which is now over. For a a change, I went out to a nice dinner last night and I also managed to relax as the workload is reduced (thank you, summertime). Yesterday, a journalist and author who appears in CNN, NBC and many other top-tier networks got in touch with me. We’ll see where it leads, but all in all, I am less worried about my future than I once used to be.

My worry is not associated with inability to work, but rather it’s about the possibility of no longer doing what I consider play (for a living!). My job at the University pays me over $40 a week for just 5-10 minutes of actual effort. It’s fantastic. How long will this last? We shall see.

For the time being, life treats me fairly well. I live a modest life, my spendings are minimal, but passion transcends and supersedes all else.

IGG had a long downtime last night (or so it seemed from here). More strangely, this morning, some content simply vanished. About 20 hours after I submitted a timely FSF-related item, the item is just gone. I don’t know if Digg had a massive error that led the Web site to restoring from backup. I checked their blog, I checked the front page, but there is nothing to indicate this.

I submitted a link to a video of Professor Moglen, which very quickly accumulated a lot of Diggs and at least one comment Why has it disappeared? Has Digg censored (as in “deleted”) this? If so, why did this happen after so many hours of the item being ‘live’? For the time being, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. I wish to see if more than just my own contributions was lost.

In any event, I have submitted the same story to Netscape, in case you are curious about the content which Digg had deleted (either deliberately or not)

Joe Wilcox, you should be ashamed of yourself.

Several days ago, I left a comment in his inherited Web site just to say that Microsoft hides some of its Vista weakness by secretly patching vulnerabilities. I even provided two links from very reliable source to support this. One of these sources was the Microsoft Blog at ZDNet. With further confirmations that this is true, I see no reason whatsoever why my comment should be removed. This leads to the suspicion that Microsoft Watch has turned from a professional Web site run by Mary Jo Foley into a Microsoft shilling dumpster. Several months ago, the site dropped its Windows server and had it replaced by Red Hat Linux. This is hypocritical, is it not?

It has become obvious (by admission) that many Microsoft employees visit the Web site and even comment without disclosure. I refuse to participate as much as I used to knowing that a site which once served me well has decided to lift and iron first and decide what is valid information and what is an inconvenient truth.

A couple of month ago, a colleague of mine from Netscape had a short interview on television. Since I haven’t posted in my blog in a while, I decided that I might as well drop this video here.

Henry explains in fairly simple terms what it is that we do in Netscape as Navigators (role has just been renamed “Scouts” to avoid confusion with the name of the Web browser).

Update: I’m not sure now if the video has been removed.

Update #2: It sure looks like the video was pulled. As an alternative video, here is the story of a top Digger.

NE of my hard drives died a horrible death yesterday. I am lucky to be able to even boot sporadically. It’s a physical error (it even makes funny noises). At the moment, I just use another PC of mine. Tomorrow I shall buy a new hard-drive and install a new GNU/Linux distribution. I was at first leaning towards PCLinuxOS 2007, but getting the ISO and burning it might take a little while. Ubuntu is almost a ‘default’ option nowadays. I used Ubuntu on 2 of my workstations in the past, but I prefer to go with a distribution that is KDE-oriented out of the box.

It seems like there is a busy weekend ahead. There are a lot of scripts and customisations running on my main box and they will need to be restored and tested. The experience will hopefully be a very educational one, but it will also mean not being involved in some of the forums and site which I routine participate in. Any ‘change in agenda’ (as in “unexpected event”) can be a fun one nonetheless. The next such thing will probably be my sister’s wedding in October.

My machine at an older office. It
ran Ubuntu Linux (see daily photolog)

Blogs and useless content aside, I think this screenshot I’ve just grabbed speaks for itself (click to enlarge).

N the face of it, measures are now being taken to ensure the environment gets treated better. For examples, disposal and recycling of machines will no longer be a pricey process, which therefore leads to encouragement of better practices. Good treatment of the environment does have a cost. It is a shame that greed remains the one and only enemy to proper preservation of Earth. Legistlation is needed in order to change this.

Happy surfing!