Hey, all the cool kids are doing it.

kkennedy@huginn:~$ history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
114 mutt
84 exit
53 ls
29 cd
28 less
27 emacs
16 su
16 python
15 gpg
13 man
kkennedy@huginn:~$ 

Long ago, I reviewed the various free software database-y apps, and made a decision to be more interested in PostgreSQL than MySQL. Don’t get me wrong…I have and do use MySQL when required, or when it’s just more readily available. But my own development, and the (very) minor code review of the actual dbms source, all focuses on PostgreSQL as my RDBMS.

Among all the flamewars on features, speed, security, and such, licensing has always been an issue between PostgreSQL and MySQL as well. *nerd alert; sorry* PostgreSQL uses the BSD license, which doesn’t require sharing of changes made to code that you distribute, but in practice, most people do just contribute back to the main tree. And they usually maintain their copyright, so the PostgreSQL source has many owners. MySQL has always used the GPL (good show), but they require contributors to the main distribution to to sign the copyright on their code over to MySQL’s corporation. That way, the code base has only one person (well, corporation) that is the copyright holder of the primary distribution. Which is clean, and some people like that. It also makes it easier to sell, though…which is what happened when Sun bought MySQL recently.

That’s not necessarily bad, but I don’t like this: MySQL reserves features for paying customers; open-source community up in arms. This bears watching to see how it plays out, but I see this as short-sighted. The Enterprise features will get FAR less testing that the primary codebase, it’ll be difficult to coordinate code that crosses the barrier, etc. It sounds like a good idea to pointy-headed business types; I don’t think it is. Just free the whole damn thing, and charge for support as you will, IMO. I think this could hurt MySQL some. It’ll take more missteps to move most folks, but this is a warning flag.

For me? I’m glad I’ve stuck with PostgreSQL over the years. It’s the bazaar, not the cathedral, and that’s where I like to be. It’s a powerful, advanced, free RDBMS, and I love it dearly.

Note: I just realized that the licensing hyperlink I used above kind of makes it appear that I’m bolding free, and contrasting that with MySQL or something. Absolutely not; MySQL was and is still free software, in fact under a license (GPLv2) that the GNU Foundation (target of the aforementioned link) invented. That wasn’t my intent with the link. I just like the GNU Foundation, hadn’t linked to them in awhile, and knew they had a list of Free Software licenses. That is all.

UPDATE (5/7): MySQL reverses decision on this. Good call.

Yesterday was another excellent podcast/book combo day, and it’s all Cory Doctorow, all the time. I’m listening to a podcast of his collaborative novella, “True Names” (co-written with Benjamin Rosenbaum)…it rocks!! I’m up to Part 6 or 7, (Ben and Cory take turns reading), and it’s quite excellent. Really out there…it’s a galaxy-spanning story of artificial intelligences competing for resources on multiple levels of reality; and a love story to boot! *grin*

And on the book front…can I have a “hell yeah”!!? Little Brother is out, and my copy is already in my hands, thanks to my
Amazon pre-order. I’m about halfway finished, and it is EXCELLENT. Neil Gaiman’s comments pretty much say it all, including “…But I’d recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I’ve read this year, and I’d want to get it into the hands of as many smart 13 year olds, male and female, as I can.”

But I might as well throw in my own thoughts, I suppose. *wink* It’s Orwell’s “1984” meets Stephenson’s “Cryptomomicon” meets the young adult stories I remember and loved like “The Three Investigators”. The near-future plot revolves around a group of high school students mistakenly held for military-style interrogation after a terrorist attack in San Francisco. When they’re freed, they discover that the Department of Homeland Security has used the event as an excuse for a massive surveillance crackdown in the Bay area, and they chronicle the resultant affect on civil liberties, freedom, and free speech. Then they fight back, with all the powers next-gen l33t hacker kids can muster. It’s fun, insightful, timely, and it’s Doctorow’s best work yet. It’s sold as “Young Adult” fiction, so don’t look in the SF section.

In addition, Cory’s standard Creative Commons freely-distributable etext will be available in the next few days (Cory’s on vacation right now), and the DRM-free audiobook is already available for purchase. Cory walks the walk, and it’s much appreciated. The ebook will grace my N770 along with all his other work as soon as it’s available.

Thanks to Cory and Ben for the great, great stories.

It’s mine!!

Get the audiobook….

Back from a fun vacation to Florida…pics to come. I spent very little time online, so I’m catching up on all that’s been going on. Also, I did take a bit of time to write out some blogpost drafts (longhand, no less…I actually prefer drafting that way), so I should have some more posts up soon.

For now, back to bed. Vacations are exhausting!! *grin*

Sweet mother of bagladies! Andy Baio at waxy.org has dumped a huge background post and online link to early builds of Milliways, the sequel to Infocom’s amazing The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game. H2G2 (as fans know it) was perhaps my favorite of the many Infocom games my high school roommate and I played….to excess. We played H2G2 until our eyes bled. We played H2G2 some weekends where we didn’t leave our room. Literally. Our RA was pissed…until we showed him the friggin’ babelfish puzzle.

Why, oh why was this not finished!!! ARRRRRGGHHH…

Thanks to BoingBoing for the link!

UPDATE: Ah, yummy drama in the comments at waxy. Long, long thread…love it!

Hurrah for Silicon Alley Insider: Time For Bank CEOs Like Wachovia’s Ken Thompson To Step Down — If CEOs get rewarded when companies like Washington Mutual, Citigroup (C), Wachovia, UBS, Merrill Lynch (MER), Morgan Stanley, GE (GE), Bear Stearns (BSC), et al, gamble and win–and, boy, do they get rewarded–then they should get punished when the same gambles lose.

Short, sweet, and to the point.

I enjoy reading Play This Thing, a indie game review/recommendation site, and a recent post was particularly interesting: Gimme Friction Baby. Kinda engrossing…I like it!

Very, very cool. I love software jujitsu, and this is it big-time. Google hasn’t yet made their accounts part of the OpenID framework, but someone’s gone and built an OpenID provider with Google App Engine! This makes Google accounts usable as OpenID logins now, via this site. Sweet. Way to leverage!

Thanks to Chris Messina for the tweet!

Finally getting around to implementing linkback functionality for my links…for links in new posts, I’ll test pingback, stop there if it works, and try trackback if pingback isn’t enabled. Thanks to Teli Adlam for a very clear tutorial on linkback (esp. ettiquette), and an URL to test against without being considered evil. Also to Mathieu Fenniak and Matt Croydon for the pingback and trackback libraries I’m using, respectively.

I’ll make my home-grown script available once…well, it’s completely working. *grin* Also a good opportunity to resurrect my source repository, in which I’m now using mercurial rather than subversion. Distributed version control rocks, folks. I’ll never go back to anything else (where I have a choice). I love me some subversion, don’t get me wrong…but mercurial makes version control even better.