Apparently, "Luke" finds FreeBSD to be an embarrassment. I'm a bit late coming to the table with this, as it was posted in 2006, but he doesn't seem to have changed his opinion. I wish I'd known he was going to be at Ohio Linux Fest, I would have confronted him about this page of idiocy.

"Why is it idiocy?" you ask. Not because he's wrong about FreeBSD's packaging system being substandard. No, the FreeBSD community knows that better packing is something FreeBSD needs.

I suppose I should expect this kind of thing out of a company as deceptive as Verizon, but their latest round of advertising is so blatantly deceptive that I can't ignore it.

If you haven't seen the commercial, it involves a fellow working on his laptop, then suddenly getting frustrated and throwing it out the window because "it's broken, it has a virus". This is probably a scenario that Windows users have to deal with frequently.

Life has been so hectic that I almost forgot that Ohio LinuxFest is coming up mighty soon.

This is probably the premier Linux event on the east coast. Arguably, being so far from Silicon Valley, it's not difficult to be a premier Linux event out this-a-way, but I still say it's a prestigious title!

A couple of years ago, I presented at Ohio Linux.

Looks like EFYtimes can't find any high-quality programmers.

On August 19th, that site is apparently experiencing the slashdot effect. I went there based on a slashdot article, and I expect the site's problems are because a lot of other people are doing the same.

If you go to the link later, it's likely that the problem will have gone away. Here's what I saw:


Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80004005'


A while back I was surfing around, looking for some PostgreSQL wallpapers to make my computer better.

I was extremely disappointed at how few I found. I sat at my desk at work and wept quietly (mainly because the office is an open design, and loud sobbing is distracting to the other employees).

There's was recently a fairly heated discussion on the PostgreSQL advocacy mailing list. Generally, I don't feel that I've got anything useful to contribute to such discussions and tend to stay out of them, but for some reason, I decided to make a few comments regarding this one.

I didn't really have too much to contribute, just a few thoughts. But this guy apparently needs to switch to decaf.

If you're creating software, you're probably using some sort of database. It may be an SQL database, or something like XML or some other format, but it's likely a database of some kind.

I was thinking recently, and I figured I'd put my thoughts on the blog. I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who already understand what I'm about to write, and many who understand it better than I do.

How the mind works is fascinating.

I have this happen entirely too often. My reflexive assessment is that I'm a relatively smart person, but not a very innovative person.

For example, at Poul-Henning's talk yesterday, he made a comment on how foolish it is to use "round-robin" style dispatching for load balancing. He called it "queue" or FIFO, but they're all similar concepts -- the least recently used system is the next one up for use.

If I'm going to keep a blog, I obviously must write daily when I go to conferences ...

So here I am in the lovely city of Ottawa. I was up at 4:00 AM to get to the airport and fly to DC (because planes from Pittsburgh don't fly anywhere, they fly you to some other airport where you can get where you're going. It's virtually impossible to get anywhere from Pittsburgh without a connecting flight).

Anyway, I arrived unharmed (although a bit disheveled, I do dislike air travel) and got into the swing of things pretty quickly.

I'm going to BSDCan this year.

I'm pretty damn excited about it. I went the first year, and had so much fine that I wrote up this nonsense to preserve the memory of the trip.

BSDCan is a great time. You get to meet lots of knowledgeable technical people. The talks are enjoyable, entertaining, and informative. The beer is Canadian. Ottowa is a great city to visit. The cost is low compared to most other conferences.

I can't think of a good reason not to go.