The Windkey and the Lamplighter

I’ve just given up root on the one remote machine I still maintained on the Internet. It’s a somewhat sad feeling. But I’ve been paying $7N to Layered Tech every month for a rented machine, and I’m now going to pay only $N to DreamHost every month for about the same effective level of service.

A week after the transition, everything seems to be working pretty well. They’re running a less-effective mail filter than I did: I was catching 99.99% of spam with a false positive rate below my threshold of measurement. They’re catching 99% of spam with a 1% false positive rate. I may be able to build better tools for mail handling within the framework they provide.

Oh, but the URL for the feeds for this blog has changed. http://evenmere.org/blog/?feed=atom is the best feed URL. http://evenmere.org/blog/?feed=rss2 will also work. This will be the last post to the old feed.

Apple’s demonstrated a remarkably tin ear with respect to free software and their Touch platform. What are the basic freedoms that citizens ought to have with their devices?

1. Freedom to use the capabilities of the device for any purpose.
2. Freedom to study the workings of the device and modify it.
3. Freedom to inform others about the workings of the device, or about how to modify it.
4. Freedom to write programs for the device, and to keep those private or to release them to the public.

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In accordance with the recent announcement that “MIT to be tuition-free for families earning less than $75,000 a year,” I expect to hear that they’ll be building more quads in all dormitories. There’s no way most families will be willing to split up among MIT’s many singles and doubles. I do wonder how they’ll consider duration of marriages for consideration of age.

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Die loudly. I can hear the voice from the original reading of this. It works amazingly well, even matching the meter for most of the text.

Many have written about the effect that the works of Gary Gygax had on their lives. Cartoons like xkcd and Order of the Stick have expressed the feeling of the gaming community very clearly, more so than most texts I’ve seen. Steve Jackson’s words on the subject set me to thinking: what did Gygax bring to the hobby? I know what insight the boxed Basic Set gave to me:

Formal systems describe worlds, characters, and stories.

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What does this mean?

Is Tyrol the rock on which the Cylons will build their church? Will Apollo betray Six? How could he, when (from my position at the end of season 2) he’d likely kill her as soon as look at her.