Charles Stross has a good post today on why he, a science fiction author, uses Linux and its associated software rather than Windows and Office. Mostly centering around accessibility of information, it’s a worthwhile read on why vendor lock-in and its problems.
Found this today while reading FreeBSD Planet. While I actually find Java’s enums somewhat useful, I do agree that they are a bit wonky...
Why art thou cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God. (Psalm 42:5-6a ESV)
This is the great and glorious theme of D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ book Spiritual Depression, a collection of sermons delivered before Westminster Chapel dealing with depression in the Christian experience. With the pastoral heart of a true and loving shepherd, he unpacks various causes of depression, doubt, and inordinate fear in the life of the Christian and directs his hearers (and readers) continually back to Scripture and to the marvelous grace of their Savior as their sure anchor and the cure to their condition.
One of my projects this winter break (besides enjoying family and studying for my preliminary exams) has been working on a little program to scratch an itch in my backup setup for our home network. I wanted a way to transmit backup files (in the current case, gzip-compressed file system dumps) from a VM to the host machine without the overhead of opening up a full network file system or shell access.
Thus, I give you rstash version 0.1 (very alpha!). It has a server which provides a set of drop boxes into which other hosts can write files. It allows no read access and no access to anything outside the box directories, so it easily handles this case.
XML, as nice as it is for many things, is not so fun as a human-edited configuration language.
I just (today) switched my Jabber server from Openfire to jabberd 1.6. This enabled me to move Jabber services back to my leaner, meaner FreeBSD mail server VM without requiring Java and in general being somewhat slow. With this, though, I sacrificed the nice web-based configuration/control panel that OpenFire provides and had some configuration files to edit. Not a substantial problem — with documentation, I’m fairly comfortable with this process.