Monochrome Mentality

I'm falling in line and participating in an internet meme. Go figure.

I’ve copied the questions from Danjiel Orsolic’s entry.

Q: What did you do in 2008 that you’d never done before?
A: Accidentally CC'ed a pro-gun "hurray" to a mailing list full of people who are mostly European and socialist leaning. There were some harsh backlashes from that, and I managed to root a few gun lovers from that list!

Q: Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for the next year?
A: I do not make New Year's Resolutions. One thing about my personal philosophy is that I don't want to be a slave to time. New Years is an excuse to party and get drunk, but realistically, it's no different than any other day. I try to learn something new every day, stretch myself a little bit more, and that's good enough. I make New Day's resolutions and sometimes I meet them!

Q: Did anyone close to you give birth?
A: Nope.

Q: Did anyone close to you die?
A: Nope.

Q: What countries/states did you visit?
A: Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, New York, New Jersey and New Hampshire.

Q: What would you like to have in 2009 that you lacked in 2008?
A: Freedom. Too vague? I'd like to think of time a lot less. Essentially, right now I think in terms of days and "morning", "afternoon" and "late". I'm also aware of "weekday", "payday" and "weekend". I'd say also "understanding of my wife". This might be unfair, since it gets deeper everyday and that has been true of 2008 too, but it will be deeper than it was in 2008, I'm sure. These two things together will hopefully come to a head in 2009 as we ditch our current lifestyle and fall into something that suits us much better. :)

Q: What was your biggest failure of the year ?
A: I can't think of anything specifically. I think perhaps I really have internalized that while "Learn from your mistakes" thing. I've had some really difficult times with my wife in 2008, and in some points felt really angry, inadequate and resentful. Yet at the same time, the foundation of our relationship let us move from this and we're stronger now than we were when we began. I can't call that a failure but I might have if you asked me at the time.

Q: What was your biggest achievement ?
A: I committed to move to New Hampshire as part of the Free State Project. I managed to convince my wife to. And Danjiel, when 20K other do. And Edison Franklin. I sat at a table for two days talking about the FSP and my ideology and felt GREAT doing it. Realistically, I think that got very few people "turned on" to liberty, but it was an extension of feeling confident in my ideology and it was VERY empowering.

Q: Did you suffer illness or injury?
A: No. I'm bulletproof and immune to pathogens. Didn't you know?

Q: What was the best thing you bought?
A: My Honda Element, Bluebeard.

Q: Whose behavior merited celebration?
A: Lauren Canario. Ian Freeman. Denis Goddard. Mark Edge. Russell Kanning. Kira Kanning. Kat Kanning. Jim Johnson. Dale Everett. A handful of people I know only by a single name, like AnarchoJesse and Puke. There's probably dozens more in New Hampshire spreading the ideas of freedom and non-aggression through non-cooperative means. Those people, I celebrate.

Of course, that's not to say they're the only people making waves and growing freedom, they're just the most visible ones to me.

Q: Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
A: Hans Reiser. Oddly, less because he killed his wife. I actually sent him a letter prior to him revealing the location of Nina's body. The letter was fine but the tone conveyed a sense of arrogance and... I'm not sure how to phrase that exactly. People hurt people, even gruesomely sometimes. I understand that. But there was a sense of refusal to accept responsibility for his actions and the impact of his actions on his children. I dunno, it was disturbing.

Q: Where did most of your money go?
A: To maintaining. Meh. I hate it. It'll stop soon enough. The lifestyle I live now isn't what I want and I'm finally going to break from that.

Q: What did you get really, really, really excited about?
A: The Free State Project. This was the main impetus of 2008 for me. A sub-moment was when my wife finally began getting excited about the move and community. Finally, we're going to begin a mobile lifestyle as full-time RVers, at least for a while. This and the implications of that have me very excited.

Q: What song will always remind you of 2008?
A: Aimee Allen's "Ron Paul Revolution". Much less that it was Ron Paul but there's so very little pro-liberty music. Most music is dominated by liberal fluff and there's some music that's counter-liberal. Seeing a well produced, catchy video with an attractive female in it... It made me feel that liberty might be going mainstream and that's a damn memorable thing.

Q: Compared to last year, are you:
* happier or sadder ? Happier, mostly. In general, I'm more of everything, but I'm usually happy.

* thinner or fatter ? Fatter.

* richer or poorer ? Richer. I've even made some more money.

Q: What do you wish you’d done more of ?
A: Goal setting. I know where I want to go sometimes but setting goals that I can reach to show me I'm getting there sometimes evokes positive feelings.

Q: What do you wish you’d done less of ?
A: Spending money on useless stuff.

Q: How did you spend Christmas ?
A: Watching TV.

Q: Did you fall in love in 2008?
A: Yep!

Q: How many one-night stands?
A: None.

Q: What was your favorite TV program ?
A: I watched the entire series "Firefly" on DVD. It's not new, but that ranks pretty high. I also watched all of "Dexter" and "Weeds" and both are awesome. I'm still in love with "House". I watched "Heroes" again this year. It makes me miss "The 4400" and that makes me mad.

Q: Did you make a friend with anyone that you didn’t know this time last year?
A: Yes, several.

Q: What was the best book you read?
A: "The Market for Liberty" by Morris and Linda Tannehill was the most personally impacting. "Elantris" by Brandon Sanderson was also very enjoyable to read and I think I have recommended "Healing Our World" by Dr. Mary Ruwart more than any other.

Q: What was your greatest musical discovery?
A: I'm starting to really dig Weezer. I've heard some trance that I actually purchased because I liked it so much.

Q: What did you want and get?
A: Most everything.

Q: What did you want and not get?
A: A working phone, powered by Free Software. Openmoko was a spectacular failure in my opinion. Those wounds still sting.

Q: What was your favorite film of this year?
A: Serenity. It's not new, but I saw it for the first time this year.

Q: What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
A: Nothing special at all. In fact, this was the first year I went the ENTIRE day without hearing "Happy Birthday" at all. I enjoyed that very much. I get a day older every day, and I dislike the pretense. I'm 24... I think. I really do forget sometime.

Q: What one thing would have made you year immeasurably more satisfying?
A: The abolishment of coercive force that people today call "Government". I don't take kindly to being threatened and made to feel afraid.

Q: How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2008?
A: Expanding. I don't care about what other people think in terms of fashion, but I made some changes to my personal appearance. I discovered that I like the color green in clothing, so a lot of my shirts have included green. I also finally took the plunge and shaved my head bald and it's absolutely amazing!

Q: What kept you sane?
A: Knowing it will keep getting better. That is, of course, assuming I was sane to start.

Q: Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
A: Summer Glau. She's hot and was plastered all over the TV with the Terminator series.

Q: What political issue stirred you the most?
A: All of them? I don't separate "politics" from day to day life. I think that kind of separation is used by aggressors to justify what they do (i.e. One man taking another man's money is "theft" unless you're "being political" in which case it's "taxes".) My particular issues at this point are an end to the Drug War. That's the biggest for me right now. Secondly would probably be an expansion of property ownership rights (i.e. anybody owning any property is acceptable including felons owning guns) and property protection rights (i.e. "Castle Laws"). Breaking down socio-sexual taboo is always on the list.

Q: Who did you miss?
A: Seton Williams, a friend who was killed a few years ago in a car accident. And my wife of course, but I know she'll keep coming home from work. :P

Q: Who was the best new person you met?
A: Pete Eyre probably tops the list. He's a pro-liberty, agorist and voluntaryist activism rockstar who has me in awe. I met Ian Freeman and Mark Edge, Lauren Canario and Russell Kanning earlier this year and they're awesome too.

Q: Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2008.
A: Every human being owns him- or herself. The initiation of force or fraud against other people is wrong. That's it.

It's a simple concept, but the life lesson I really take from that is how many "buts" and "though" and "what ifs" people have to pollute that simple concept. It's hard to put that into words though. This "there is nothing else" is so final and absolute and right.

Q: Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.
A: "Who needs stupid books. They are for petty crooks. And I will learn by studying the lessons in my dreams."

I just came across a great pictorial review of 2008, with what can be expected in 2009. There are some disturbing images in there, but that's the point. It also seems that this was his final blog entry. More importantly though, reflect.

I'm several days into this Windows trial and I'm actually beginning to get some strong feelings about the whole thing. First and foremost, Windows isn't evil, it's software. Whatever you might think about Microsoft is mostly irrelevant when discussing software. Hell, if you want to get really involved, I didn't purchase Windows Server 2008 Enterprise. I didn't purchase a product who's company purchased it. I downloaded the installer from Microsoft's site (They offer their entire OS for free for almost a year, legit.) and at 1.7GB I've cost Microsoft a little bit of money.

So, right now I'll hit on something I noticed about user interfaces, and less a discussion of them, more about how I regard them. On Windows, software uses different toolkits and often times there are visual differences. Windows Media Player looks different than Roxio. VirtualBox is different than Firefox.

On Linux, when KDE applications and Gnome applications don't mix well, it annoyed the hell out of me. I've always ranted about the dissimilarity, praised the day Qt added in a way to accept a Gnome theme. Lauded over gtk-qt-engine. I thought Windows' inconsistency would kill me.

It hasn't. In fact, I kind of like it.

I was having an internal dialog trying to figure out just why it is because I really am shocked by this. I've mentioned this as a pet peeve several times in the past, including one to LinuxInsider and it was in fact published. So this is a big, damn, deal.

The realization was, until yesterday, I looked at my PC as an appliance. It was something that I used to get something done. This appliance happened to have the features of just about everything. There's nothing wrong with this, but Windows doesn't do the same thing.

On Windows, the applications are each appliances, focused on doing one thing in a pleasing manner. If the application needs to look different to do that well, then so be it. The shift from "computer as appliance" to "applications as appliances", when done well, really meshes to make me enjoy using applications. I have to say that I really like Windows Photo Gallery. It's got all of the features that I like in a really basic photo manager. It's also got a shiny, dark theme that I like a lot and it's simple enough that I don't have to think about "managing photos". When I'm using it, I'm thinking about how good (or bad!) my photos are.

I'm REALLY looking for a Linux-side application that can hit Windows Photo Gallery on the head. I know that there are a ton of basic editing applications and simple managers, and a plethora of super-duper sophisticated solutions, but that balance is awesome. I'd love to leverage that on Linux.

Windows Server 2008 has something that's pretty neat and it deals with an area that I've never before thought about. Shutdown.

When running as the Administrator account, every time you hit "Restart" or "Shutdown" manually, a box pops up for you to enter the reason why the system is shutting down.



When you reboot due to upgrades, you're not prompted. I assume that it's possible to go back and look at the logs later but I've not confirmed this. There's an overwhelming amount of data in the Windows Server logging and information center and I didn't want to dig too deeply.

For a workstation or server, this is a neat feature. It would help me get a better overview of exactly what it is that brings my systems down. As a server administrator, uptime is important to me and my home desktops are run in a manner similar.

For the "average user" I can imagine this kind of prompt would quickly get annoying but I'd LOVE it and I know this is one feature that I've not seen in any desktop environment in Linux so far.

On the flip-side, I've got a complaint about Windows shutdowns too. They don't happen if you're restarting runaway processes. In specific, I was running VirtualBox (I'm noticing a theme... VirtualBox + Windows = Error) when starting a quickly after a shutdown and the VM froze. I then used the task manager to kill both VirtualBox and the VM process and it vanished like normal. Yet when I went to move or delete an ISO file that was mounted as a virtual CD drive within the VM, I got an "This file is in use" error. I then tried to do a shutdown (As Administrator - regular users can't do this by default. Awesome!) and it actually hung on "Shutting down services". After 3 minutes of seeing the blue-green screen, I physically reset the box.

I suppose it might be theoretically possible for Linux to be affected by the same thing, but I've never seen it. I was cringing to think how I'd feel if the runaway service has been my HTTP server and my remote server decided to lock up between "Break the internet connection" and "stop and restart power".

I'm going to call this one a strong win for Linux, this hits to the very stability of the system. I would, however, love to have the interactive shutdown log on Linux. I'll do some searching for something like it but as always, suggestions are always welcomed.

On the first full day with Windows Server 2008, I began installing software to take care of the day to day needs and time-killers I'm familiar with from Linux.

On Linux, I make heavy use of KVM virtualization. Since KVM isn't a part of Windows, I decided to try out the port of VirtualBox. It ran pretty well, except that on the first run of the software caused my USB mouse to be unresponsive. I promptly unplugged the mouse and reported the bug to VirtualBox.

Later on, I was running a virtual machine with about 1.5 GB of RAM when I began having a bout of BSODs. It was pretty consistent. Any time I ran the VM and started the World of Warcraft downloader, I'd get the BSOD. The error was akin to "LIRQ_GREATER_OR_LESS_THAN", I don't recall the specifics. When I Googled this error, I found several forums and complaints about this, mainly dealing with Vista.

The long and short of it is that this error frequently happens when attempting to address memory greater than the bitness handled by the OS. In this case, I was running Windows Server 2008 Enterprise x86 yet giving a decent amount of space to the VMs and then making the OS crap itself.

To correct this, I installed the x64 version of Windows. Now, I'm well aware that my current PC is an AMD64. All new PCs sold in the past three years or so have been AMD64. There is, however, still a ton of doubt and speculation about using x64. Will there be compatibility issues? Will the programs I want run on my system? My last experiences with Windows were in 32-bit land, and 64-bit applications had issues. I wanted to avoid this for my trek into RedmondOS so I used the x86 version.

There aren't any problems for me. In fact, in this regard, Windows is showing a strength. 64-bit applications run right alongside 32-bit apps. Windows solves this problem by isolating 32-bit apps into it's own emulation/compatibility layer, similar to the way the 32-bit Flash plugin is handled in Linux. I have to say honestly, I've not run into problems installing software on Windows because of bitness, but I have seen packages in the Debian repo that are "referred to but missing" because they exist on one arch but not another.

For this aspect, Windows actually win. I'd recommend that anybody else running Windows on a fresh install pick the version that suits their HARDWARE which almost always means "x64" today.

My wife's computer arrived today from Dell. This device has 4GB of RAM which means either she'll be running a 64-bit OS or be running into bitness issues. But know I'm prepared. :)

On the 28th of December, I announced my week long trial of Windows Server 2008 Enterprise, a departure from my daily use of Linux (including at work) for the past several years.

The very first difference I'd like to bring up is the system hardware itself. I currently run two PCs that are custom built by me and nearly identical, with the exception of the hard drive capacity. Both run a Gigabyte GA-965GM-S2, revision 1 motherboard with Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Processor and 4GB of DDR RAM. My home computer has an nVidia GeForce 7300 GS PCI-e card on a 17" Dell CRT monitor. My work PC is using the integrated Intel G965 chipset and is attached to a 22" BENQ wide screen TFT.

It's important to note that both systems use the same motherboard, and more specifically, the same BIOS, Gigabyte's F5. When I first put in the Windows Server 2008 installer, I immediately got a blue screen of death indicating to me that my BIOS was out-of-date and to contact the vendor for a newer one. The alleged culprit was non-compliance with ACPI.

I did manage to update both BIOSes. My home PC was updated with a formatted USB Key and my work by some complex juggling of LVM to make room for a FAT32 formatted bootable partition that the motherboard's flash utility could recognize. I owe a huge debt to these guys for clear and simple instructions on how to flash my BIOS in a non-standard way.

The biggest thing that strikes me about the Windows/Linux split is that Linux doesn't ever assume anything about hardware. Sure, it does assume that you're on the right architecture and that you have some way to give the PC information. It doesn't, however, expect you to have a certain BIOS version, a certain graphics card, a special TPM module or the like.

Linux developers learn to deal with the quirks of each system. The odds are that my system really WAS not compliant with ACPI but Linux never complained. It didn't deny me permission to install until it was.

This isn't entirely a win for Linux though. I have to wonder how much crappy code is in Linux dealing with exactly this kind of thing? How long has suspend/resume, for instance, been hindered by tossing the expectation that things will "work properly"? How many people might be dealing with hardware bugs, and complaining to Canonical (or their vendor of choice) when things don't wake from sleep when it's actually a crappy (as in, non-standard complaint) BIOS from a motherboard vendor?

Having a minimum required BIOS version is a new one for me, and this even before my first full day with Windows. This is really going to be interesting.

My wife is getting a new laptop next week as part of a computer purchasing program at her work. One of the conditions of this program, however, is that the computer must run Microsoft Office which means it must also run Windows.

So, my home is going to be sheltering a Windows Vista laptop, despite my protests. It stirred in me, however, a sense of curiosity. I stopped using Windows back when XP was still pretty new and other than poking at betas, I've not used Windows. Even at work, I can use Linux all day. My hacker desire to poke around at everything has been speaking up, and I've decided to poke at Windows.

But not Vista. Haven't you heard!? Vista sucks.

I'm going to give Windows Server 2008 a spin on my personal computer for the next week or so, full time. From what I understand, the separation of admin and user accounts by default as well as more fine-tuned user privileges management make it more secure than XP or Vista. The minimal setup allows me to reclaim CPU cycles that Vista munches on.

So, in the next week or so, I'll be trying to use my computer and relearn a whole new way of doing things. Just as new Linux users balk at the changes, I'm sure I will, and in the process I hope to learn a little bit more about what I use my computer for, what I depend on and what flexibilities I have.

If anyone has any suggestions for me while I do this, feel free to ask!

I've been very quiet these past few weeks and it's by no accident. I'll try to keep this brief, but with past performance as an indicator, I'll fail horribly. It's okay, expression is good.

My life is about to change in the next year. It's taken the perfect storm of my wife's job becoming less fulfilling, personal development of her self-esteem and confidence and a growing sense of purpose and adventure, but my wife is finally becoming an activist. More than that, she's finally gotten excited about or move to New Hampshire as part of the Free State Project! So excited, actually, that we're now planning to make the move in Spring of 2010.

She's also finding that this suburban, modern young, socially-upward lifestyle we live isn't as fulfilling as she dreamt as a child. Now that she's no longer using her career as the basis of her self-worth, she's questioning the other trappings of her life and has found that a stationary, mobile life doesn't suit her spirit.

We're very seriously considering purchasing an RV (Recreational Vehicle) this year and becoming "fulltimers". I won't go into depth on what this is or what it entails but in essence, we'll be buying a vehicle that we can live in with a good quality of life, lower costs of living and have a sense of freedom that we don't right now, entirely separate from the kind of "freedom from aggression-that-is-government" I usually write here.

Making this shift will take time, money and education. As such, I'm shifting some of my time into making money which means I'm doing less here. In a twisted way, it will all tie in - freedom, liberty, software and the fulltimer lifestyle. As usual, I'll be putting it here, but it will be less frequent, or if frequently, shorter. :) I'm sure my readers won't mind.

I had a strange experience today. I was made aware today of the heinous situation involving Jan Pawel Pietrzak and his wife Quiana. As you can see from the picture below (Credit to nydailynews.com), they were an interracial couple. He was white, she was black. Four active Marines (living at Camp Pendleton, near San Diego) kicked in the door to the Pietrazak home, bound and gagged the couple, cut off Quiana's clothing and proceeded to rape her with "an instrument" before murdering the couple execution-style.



The general chatter on the blogosphere was that this was a race-related killing. While this may or may not be true, the reported evidence is contradictory. Statements from the suspected killers said they "did it for the money" yet other reports indicate that nothing was missing from the home. Furthermore, the police reports seem to suggest that the decision to murder the couple was debated during the whole incident which probably wouldn't enter into the situation if it were simply over money.

This is disgusting in and of itself but what really alarms me is that I thought it was fake. I read the first report of this disgusting crime from a blog called Save Our Daughters which seemed to be lending support for the racial motivations in the crime but in that article was the comment "don't expect this to be on MSNBC or CNN like the other cases". I'm used to not hearing the entire news situation. It didn't make the mainstream media when Posse Comitatus was ended and soldiers were deployed within the United States to calm "domestic unrest", further ramping up the police state. The news media not touching a story because of their delicate (read: "Do what we say or we'll hurt you!") relationship with the government people doesn't surprise me in the least.

But why this case? Is it what some people suggest - that there's a bias towards interracial couples? Is it more what I think - that the government people are trying to control a public relations nightmare by showing killers (Calling it "war" doesn't make a murder any less a murder, like it or not) in the act of killing, where the victims are "good Americans" rather than the demonized "brown people" in the Middle East?

Whatever the reasons, the author (gem2001) was right. This wasn't touched by the mainstream media.

And that is where I had my "strange experience". I input the female victim's name into Google the first time as entered in that article (Quiana Faye Jenkins-Pietrzak) and got mostly blog entries. I then tried a slightly different (Quiana Pietrzak) version and found the San Diego NBC affiliate that covered the story. Unfortunately that was about it in terms of media sources I could trust. Even the second search returned mostly blog articles. It was then I actually found myself doubting the authenticity of the story. Surely the rape, torture and murder of interracial couple (during the Obama campaign, too!) would have made the news! In the back of my mind though, rationality is screaming at me. This is the internet world. I recall reading about Anna Nichole Smith's death before her body started cooling. I've actually used the term "old news" to refer to something I'd read about the day before.

But now I can't shake this weird sense of, despite seeing how deep the rabbit hole actually goes, feeling as if there might be a bunch more. How do you tell what's real and fake anymore, when the news coming through the television and radio is authored just as surely as the current bestseller for fiction is authored. News sites like Digg and Reddit help, but what if the news is something that covers a social taboo too? Digg tends to be composed of mostly liberals - would a government-suppressed news story about gun confiscation rise to the top of Digg?

The solution, then, is to become the media. Nothing else will do. Only when we take fact gathering and checking into our own hands can we be sure that newsworthy information gets out.

[Author's Note: This article was written about 10 minutes after Ian's arrest. This is due partly to the systems New Hampshire liberty-activists have in place to inform, organize and carry out activism events. Because the news was so fresh, it was a bit inaccurate. The title should be "93 days in prison for refusing to sit". This entry has been edited since it's original, though the original text is now in strikethrough. Thanks everyone who got this news out, Dugg it and cared about it!]

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal" says the Declaration of Independence, a document that asserted freedom and triggered a war. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal" is a concept taught in American schools as a fundamental truth that all people are deserving of respect and life and prosperity.

Why then is Ian Freeman in prison for the next 100 93 days? Because he refused to stand sit for his equal, another man, [when he ordered him to]. He refused to call him 'honor' and this upset the man calling himself "Judge".

Ian Freeman, host of the internationally syndicated radio show Free Talk Live and fellow Free State Project member appeared at court today in Keene, New Hampshire. As the owner of a property in Keene he has been charged with some sort of code violation for his tenants having a couch in the yard they rent from Ian. Several weeks ago a person claiming to be "an official" from "City of Keene" left a piece of paper demanding money and the removal of the couch.

Ian met with the so-called official to ask if any of his neighbors had actually complained about the couch and was told that a female neighbor had filed a complaint. When Ian asked to speak with her, he was told that wouldn't happen.

In the United States of America, there is a very basic right enshrined in the Constitution, the right to confront your accuser. I hold no reverence for this document - it's not anything I agree to or am party to - but supposedly the people calling themselves "government" have agreed to be bound by it.

Ian presented the court officials with a response. He was not against removing the couch - a responsible neighbor takes note of the complaints of his neighbor. He just wanted to talk with the woman who filed the complaint, to find out what offended her about how his property was, and he'd then remove it if it still bothered her. A very adult-like thing to do.

The court refused, and instead initiated a trial.

Today, Ian appeared at their trial and intended only on calling the damaged person making a complaint against him. He never got that far, it seems. In keeping with the doctrine of "all men created equal", Ian Freeman refused to stand for the man called "Judge" sit immediately after ordered to by the man calling himself "Judge". It would be considered rude to refuse a hand extended to you in greeting, yet this man called "Judge" did not greet Ian by standing. It should be noted that usual court decorum involves the person speaking to rise and speak. Instead, he decided that Ian's refusal to stand sit was somehow and offense, and then proceeded to instruct some other men to arrest him. They ushered him off to a separate room for the supposed "trial".

In addition to being able to confront your accuser, in America there's supposedly a right to a public trial. This is so the public can show outrage when the government people become overly aggressive and start hurting people. As is so common in New Hampshire, Ian did in fact have public support. Several liberty activists attended the government people's trial over this matter. Ian mentioned yesterday [MP3] that those attendees are a huge source of motivation and strength when confronting the aggressive government people, and today they made a very clear move to separate the public from the court railroading that would follow.

In this private back room, the man called "Judge" convicted Ian of three counts of "contempt of court" (why shouldn't an ethical person be contemptuous of men using violence and threats to tell other men what they're allowed to store their property?) and sentenced him to 90 days in prison with fines with an additional 10 days in the cage for refusal to give the government people some of his money.

Welcome to the United Socialist States of America. The government people own your property. They dictate to you what you can do on your own land. You no longer have to hurt someone to have the government people turn against and hurt you. You have no right to confront your accuser. There no longer need even be an accuser, no injured party. You have no right to a public trial. "We will use force against you" the government people are saying "if you don't obey us."

Indeed, it wasn't even "obeying" they reacted to. No, the aggression they commit was triggered by what they perceive as an insult or as the man calling himself "Judge" said for "making a mockery of this proceeding".

[For the latest news on this situation, including video of Ian's arrest and the buzz this is generating, check out http://93days.com/]

A friend of mine, a fellow voluntaryist and Linux users, has a problem.

He's a bit "old school" and is still in the "primary partition" mindset. For reasons he's not entirely certain of, other than he's told there is some advantage to it, he installs his systems onto his drives in four partitions. One, a Windows XP partition. The other a Linux /. A swap partition is in there followed by a /home partition.

The problem with this scheme can be told by anyone who's used it long enough, as I have. Partitions are small. Unused space on / is useless when /home is full or vice versa.

Luckily, my friend used this time to also begin complaining about his existing install of Arch Linux which has otherwise been working well for him. In fact, it's worked SO well that he managed to stay on it for several months which is amusing since he's the butt of a running joke about breaking every system he touches. The solution to the problem in his case was to finally buy the bigger SATA drive he's been desiring. This still leaves open the idea of how to migrate the data, the proper partitioning scheme and the like. The idea then, was for a friend and I to share our "wisdom" with him and convince him to use LVM and not fuss with Arch.

I know why my friend uses Arch, it's a good distro in many regards. I also know why he avoids Ubuntu. He doesn't have the experience to make his install of Ubuntu work for him, so he uses what works best for him by default. This is where I come in today, to help him out since I'm thrilled with my Ubuntu installs. My method is a bit different than most though, since I use the net install and build up.

Yesterday, as a challenge to myself and as a tutorial for him, I decided to setup a system for him, even mimicking how he'd be able to transfer his existing data onto a new minimal Intrepid system on LVM. To add to the fun, this system would also feature a clean install of Windows XP since, after all, he manages to break every system he touches and XP wasn't working right either. :P

Let me describe the drives first. He's got a 60GB drive in his system now and the new drive is a 640GB one. The tutorial will assume that (during the Windows install) the only drive in the computer is the new, blank 640GB drive. Once XP and Ubuntu are installed, he'll then install the second drive (the 60GB one). In KVM, installing drives takes about three seconds and I recognize in the real world it's a little harder. This process should work just fine with both drives installed, but for simplicity sake I didn't do it that way.

The first order of business is to install Windows XP onto the new, clean drive.



Create a new partition for C: of whatever size you want for the Windows install. In this example, I gave it about half of the small disk. As long as Windows fits on the partition, the size doesn't matter. I've left the remaining space unpartitioned and will leave that for the Ubuntu installer. I then proceed to put an NTFS filesystem on C: using the Quick format option. It then copies over files, reboots and then shows me the flying Windows logo of death. At this point, I know Windows boots up and since I'm not interested in having a working Windows install personally, I end the Windows meddling here with one brief exception to be touched on later. I then put in the Intrepid mini.ISO image and reboot.



Once the CD loads, enter "cli" on the line and press enter to begin the minimal install. At this point, I am assuming that a reader has some level of experience using Debian's installer, which is what the mini.ISO image is. It's not an X-based GUI but it's very easy to navigate. Left and right navigate menu options, tab jumps to the options below the menu or text input. The space key toggled "buttons" like drive selections seen later.

I walk through the install, picking my language (US English) and my keyboard layout (US) by pressing p-y-w and then enter 17 times. One caveat for American users. One of the questions the Ubuntu installer asks during the keyboard selection is "Do you have a" some character "key"? The answer is "No" 16 times if you want a standard keyboard layout, but one of the characters it shows is a double-quotation mark which a US keyboard DOES have, yet answering YES here defaults to a layout that most Americans aren't going to want.

The installer continues, detecting my networking settings automagically (because this version is KVM and because most networks are DHCP capable) and asks me to put in a hostname. A bit of explanation here.



Firstly, what the hell is a "fuggles"? You might ask?



Fuggles is a variety of hops, one of the main ingredients of beer. Other than advocating liberty, hacking on computers and embedded devices, I like brewing my own beer. All of my current systems are named after hop varieties (Saaz is my file server, and my wife's Linux Mint system is Cascade). So in this instance, the hostname is "fuggles". It's not some magical mystical Linux voodoo. Feel free to substitute "fuggle" for anything you want through this tutorial, since I use it later.

Continue with the installer a bit more and eventually you'll come to the partitioner. Since we're going to be doing things a bit better, none of the default options are suitable for our purposes. Go down and choose "manual".



You'll see the partition scheme that we created with Windows. Arrow down to the free space, press enter and choose to create a new partition and asked to size it. This is going to be the /boot partition. In this example, I picked 300MB for /boot which is enough for several smaller, customized kernels or two or three versions of fatter Ubuntu kernels. Most people don't bounce between kernels, and if they do, they already know how much space they'll need. ;)



The screen above asks you to select some options. The option that needs to be changed here is the mount point (highlighted). This is our /boot partition so we want to mount it to /boot. The filesystem type doesn't need to be changed. The reason we create a /boot partition itself is because GRUB doesn't support booting from JFS by default, so we need an Ext2/3 filesystem it can read and boot. Once in Linux, the JFS filesystem we'll create later mounts and boots without issues. Once you've set your mount point on this partition to /boot, arrow down to "Done setting up this partition.



Our /boot partition is done, and we're now shown our revised partitioning scheme. Arrow down again, selecting the FREE SPACE and press enter. We're going to want to create a primary partition here, using all of the remaining space. You'll be shown the options screen again.



Select the "Use as" option and press enter. You'll be given a list of options. Select "Physical volume for LVM" and press enter.



You'll be shown the options screen again, chose "Done setting up this partition".



You will be returned to the partitioner overview, which will show that you now have used all of the free space on your drive. You've got a Windows partition, a /boot and an LVM volume. You'll also see that a NEW option has appeared, "Configure the Logical Volume Manager". Select that and press enter



You'll be shown that you have one physical volume available (the LVM partition you just created). You'll also have an option to "Create volume group". Select that and press enter.



You will be asked to name the volume group. For simplicity sake, I use the hostname for my volume group. Below, you'll see "Fuggle". Again, this isn't voodoo and your volume group name doesn't have to match your hostname. Fedora (for instance) uses numeric Vol006545 strings which look intimidating - hostnames look nicer.



You'll be asked to select which physical volumes belong to this group. If you partitioning scheme is the same or similar, you'll see only the one available partition. Select that and continue.



You'll be returned to the Logical Volume manager, which will now show you have no available physical volumes, and show that you DO have a volume group. Is this terminology getting confusing yet?



Put very simply, hardware was once limited to 4 partitions per drive. Sometime along there, software hackers found a way to turn a single partition into MANY smaller partitions. This lets you make "chunks" of your drive without breaking the 4 partition hardware limit. Linux sees one drive with 4 partitions as 4 drives, each can be mounted. LVM lets Linux break a SINGLE "partition" into smaller partitions. The BSDs have done this for a while, and they call them "slices". It's the same concept. Let's create a logical volume or two and then we can discuss how logical volumes and volume groups relate.

Go ahead and click "Create logical volume". You'll be given only one option if you've followed this to the letter. Your option will be the name of whatever volume group you just created. Select that and press enter.



Logical volumes are functionally "partitions". What we're going to do right now is create a swap volume that works exactly the same way as a swap partition does, but has the flexibility afforded by LVM. Go ahead and call this volume "swap" and press enter. If you're asked to pick a size for the volume, give whatever level of swap you might want. There are several opinions on how much swap should be used depending on who you ask. I personally have 12GB of swap on my home computer which I know is complete overkill but I don't care. I never use ANY swap when I work since I tend to keep my system (with 4GB of RAM) under 1GB of memory use. If you're using all of your memory, swap becomes more important for you. Another things to consider is that suspend might use swap space. I'll leave that up to you, but my general suggestion is to use 2X RAM but it's not important enough for me to care much either way. The beauty of LVM is that you CAN resize this later if it's too much or too little.

Once you've created the swap volume, you'll be returned to the Logical Volume Manager. Here, you'll want to create another logical volume and call it root. Give this volume all of the remaining space.



Once you finish, you'll be asked to confirm your volume changes and it will look similar to this.



Confirming this will take you out of the Logical Volume Manager and you'll see your new logical volumes as part of the overall partition scheme, alongside your /boot and Windows partitions.



Move up to the volume titled swap and select it. You'll be taken to the options screen as if it were a regular partition (and for all intents now, it IS). Click the "Use as" option, select "swap space" and select the "Done setting up the partition" option.



Move up to the section titled root and press enter.



This is where the magic happens. :) In this options screen, there are two things to change and set. First, move up to the "Use as" section and change it to JFS. Secondly, change the "Mount point" option to /. You can select "Done setting up the partition" once you've done that.

Why are we using JFS? Firstly, JFS provides better disk performance in my experience. There are also benchmarks to suggest this. It isn't a blanket statement though. JFS isn't better in every arena, but it has been in mine. JFS excels with larger files such as movies or virtualized disks in KVM or VirtualBox. Additionally, JFS's journal is faster which results in less time in restoring after a corruption. There are no long waits where the ext3 filesystem forces a fsck. JFS checks the journal quickly (a second, perhaps two) and is done. Another very real benefit is partitioning time. As drives get bigger and bigger, it takes longer and longer to partition them using ext3. Partitioning a single, 1TB drive takes several minutes which isn't horrible but it's super slow compared to JFS. JFS formats a 1TB in about a second. In fact, it might be faster than that, the "Formatting partition" screen vanishes literally as fast as it appears, and it might actually be that message which takes longer than the partitioning. If you're still skeptical, try it out.

And for the most important question - Yes. It's stable. Damn stable. I've never had a JFS volume fail simply because it was JFS. In fact, only the ResierFS has done that on me though I hear XFS is sometimes as bad. For stability, I'd rank ext3 and JFS side by side for "top notch".



You'll see all your partitioning work in it's glory. If it's correct, forge ahead with "Finish partitioning and write changes to disk". Continue with the installer, everything else is "standard" from here on out.



At the GRUB stage, the Windows install was automagically detected. :)



Ubuntu and Windows both appear on the GRUB menu, and both are tested and working.

Boot into Ubuntu and login. Here, you'll begin installing software for your Ubuntu system. Everyone has their own choices at this point. Perhaps you'd rather use KDE or build Enlightenment. I personally prefer a minimal Gnome install, so I'll install the following packages with apt-get. Additionally, I installed GDM for a graphical greeter and usplash to make my bootup less ugly.



The first load of my Ubuntu system tosses an error. It seems, by default, some applet is installed on the Gnome panel that wasn't on the system. Pick "delete" here will remove that applet from the panel's settings and prevent this error in the future. It'll nag you eternally otherwise.



I should also note that the graphical distortions on the gnome panel are unique to KVM. These don't happen on any "real" system I've ever installed Intrepid on. I'm not sure if it's a host-side or a guest-side bug, but it's isolated to virtual machines.

At this point, I added the second drive, the older and smaller one that contains data. I ask you to suspend reason here just a LITTLE bit. The image shows a mounted /boot partition from the second drive. You'd be mounting (most likely) a /home partition instead of a boot partition but the process is the same.

Once you're in your Ubuntu system and you've got your old drive installed, mount it anywhere you want and copy the data from that drive to your new system. Get EVERYTHING you want to keep. Once your data is safely copied, unmount the old drive. In order to add that drive to the LVM system in the "simplest" way, you'll have to clear the partitions which will eliminate any data on it. Use whichever tools you like best. fdisk is a command line application, installed on the Ubuntu system by default. Some people prefer GUIs though, and as this is YOUR system, you make that call. :) An empty partition table is the simplest method in my opinion.



The image above shows the Gnome Disk Usage Analyzer. My / partition has 14GB as could be expected. The other, older drive has been unpartitioned and is installed in the PC.



The command "sudo pvcreate /dev/sdb" takes the unpartitioned second drive and prepares it for use in a LVM volume group. The second command, vgextend, adds that available space to the volume group. In this example, it's the "fuggles" volume group which contains my swap and / volumes.

When run with sudo, vgdisplay will tell you information about your volume groups. The important thing to see there is "Free PE / Size" which will list the space you have "in the pool" but not added to any filesystem. To add the available space to a filesystem, you issue the following command, adjusted to use the numbers displayed from you vgdisplay.

sudo lvextend -L+4095 /dev/mapper/fuggles-root

This command can also take various modifiers, like "lvextend -L+10G" to expand it by 10G. The second argument, /dev/mapper/fuggles-root, identifies the volume you want to add the space too. Because of the naming system that was setup, it's pretty easy to identify which volume does what. /dev/mapper/fuggles-swap would similarly expand your swap space.

There's only more step to go before you go on hacking your systems to your heart's content. That is to actually expand the filesystem to map this new space. On ext3, this process would be slightly more annoying because it would usually force an fsck on the next reboot. Luckily, JFS is better in this regard.

Issue the command "sudo mount -o remount,resize /"to extend the JFS filesystem to the new storage and you're done.



Gnome Disk Analyzer now reports more storage area on the same filesystem. You can now expand your storage or dynamically re-assign your existing storage as your needs and hardware change.

Barack Obama has been picked as the next President of the United States.

I'm neutral on this. If it wasn't spend-steal-and-kill Obama, it would have been spend-kill and steal McCain. Either way you slice it, the people of America (and indeed, all of the people around the world using the US Dollar in trade) will get an anal reaming. So while I'm personally upset over Obama's win, I know if McCain won, I'd be just as pissed.

Which brings me to my point. Were there any good choices here? John McCain is a fascist, advocating for the incestuous mix of business and government. Barack Obama is a socialist, intent on robbing wealth producing people and their children to "spread the wealth around". Even the third party candidates sucked. Bob Barr stood for the Libertarian Party but didn't have the non-aggression principle at the core of his message, sending confusion and uncertainty about what liberty stands for. Chuck Baldwin wants to impose a theocratic state upon people at the point of a gun if needed (as all of the candidates do, believing as they do in the ability for the government people to "solve problems"). Nader's primary focuses are on getting the government to regulate (which is a newspeak term for "hurt people if they don't do what I say") industry, tax more and further entrench government into the personal lives of people.

So, with a proverbial crap buffet, what are the options?

Firstly, there's the Free State Project. It's a movement of 20,000 liberty-loving activists to one place (New Hampshire) to get active for liberty and smaller, less intrusive government. My wife and I are both Free State Project participants planning on a permanent move to New Hampshire for this very reason. There's all kinds of activism happening. This election cycle saw 154 pro-liberty Granite Staters endorsed by the New Hampshire Liberty Alliance, an organization dedicated to pro-liberty voting and legislation. New Hampshire is the pro-liberty media capital of the world with Free Talk Live, Free Minds TV/Radio, Anarchy In Your Head, The Ridley Report, The Liberty Conspiracy and a vocal and growing pro-liberty population getting active in other media avenues. Activists in Keene and other places are engaging in civil disobedience while protesting taxes, government driver licensing, occupational regulation and the kangaroo court system.

Secondly, there is state-level secession. It's an avenue that very few people think about, and most don't want to. There's a bit historical fabrication taught in government schools, that secession causes wars. America's birth was out of secession. History uses the term "Revolution" but it wasn't. Specifically, a revolution is an overturning of an existing government, replacing it with a new. Secession is the disolvement of political connections between political organizations which is what the American colonists did with regard to the British Empire. Some will balk at the idea that secession causes wars, and point at the American Civil War yet those people show a distinct lack of history. It was the Confederate States of America firing upon Fort Sumner which officially sparked the War, not the secession of the various states. With the number of states today with conservative leaning populations and the country ruled by "the most liberal senator" and a liberal legislature, those people will steadily see the need for secession. Let it be put on the table as an option. Let it be talked about and considered.

Thirdly, there's what's being dubbed "personal secession". For those like myself of the voluntaryist persuasion, the very idea of government is repulsive. Our positions emphasize individualism and rejects deceptive collectivist concepts like "the greater good" (as if anybody could actually measure that). Likewise, voluntaryists reject nationalism - human beings matter, the nation that claims them does not. Nationalism is the root of callousness. Doubt it? Watch American news sometimes and notice how they'll almost always comment (say, after a plane crash) at the number of dead "plus four Americans" as if those 4 families are somehow more important than the other sons and daughters, husbands and wives. Likewise, it's contrary to the voluntaryist philosophy to advocate that people form a state and break away from a nation - we reject both concepts. What we recognize is contracts and consent. Since I was not a signer to the United States Constitution, and have sworn no oath to be bound by it, what does it matter to me except for words on paper? I did not agree to follow laws, so what force do they have over me other than the men with guns willing to hurt me for not doing so? My parents, not I, enrolled in Social Security so how and I bound to pay it? I am not. I am NOT. I AM NOT.

Personal secession is about standing on principle. I am against the murder of people, so I do not like war. Yet I still pay taxes which fund that war. I do not like the police aggression against non-violent drug users, yet I pay taxes to the state that is used to lock them in cages. These things sit uneasily with me. My option is to simply stop. Stop following the government people's orders. Stop paying for their murder engine and their indoctrination camps for children. Stop following their laws. In short, I'll simply live free.

Today, I am afraid of that. Those thugs with guns don't like people "stepping out of line" and they'll hurt me. But this won't be the case in New Hampshire! Already dozens upon dozens of liberty activists are refusing to cooperate. For now it's simple things, like filling a courtroom with pro-liberty supporters when someone is charged with a victimless crime and simply refusing to stand for the judge. We're all created equal right? If he's not standing for you, why would an equal stand for him? My fear falls away when activists like Lauren Canario and Kat Kanning stand on principle. My fear falls away when I think about the liberty potential of any area with thousands of liberty activists on the ground, mobilizing for freedom. The government thugs use violence against people I love today because of the Drug War. How might liberty activists clog that system if everyone charged with a simple drug possession "offense" merely took the damn case to trial? This is personal secession - living free. Simply that, living free.

If an oasis of liberty sprang up, would you visit it? If 20,000 liberty-loving activists moved to New Hampshire today, would you too move for more freedom? If you answered yes, please join the Free State Project. You're not committing to move today, next week or next year. What you're saying is IF 20,000 liberty-loving people made the move, you'd move too within 5 years. Do you like the idea, but think that moving is impossible or not the best way to achieve liberty? Consider signing up as a Friend of the Free State Project like Ron Paul. A friend of mine from Europe has come to see that liberty isn't growing where he's living. With the European Union a growing source of discontent he's decided to reach out to liberty-lovers outside of the US with Free Staters International. He himself is a signed member of the Free State Project so it's not "just" an "American thing".

Standing alone is scary. Standing with others is empowering, breeds a cycle of confidence boosting and standing in turn. I'll stand in New Hampshire. Will you stand with me?

It appears that I may have spoken too soon. Earlier this morning, Qt Extended 4.4.2 flash images for Neo 1973 and Neo Freerunner devices.

Interestingly, I noticed that download.openmoko.org also now had packages for the Neo 1973. Perhaps it was a buildhost issue, or perhaps I missed it but there are now images of the testing branch of 2008.09.

First off, 4.4.2 fixes several bugs. The first one that makes me very happy is that headphones now switch properly. Plugging in a set of headphones turns off the speakers on the device and routes audio exclusively to the headset or AUX line. This means for the first time, I'm able to listen to my podcasts without disturbing my co-workers! Score!

The "media player crashes upon resume" bug has been fixed. Resuming from suspend now works cleanly, even on paused audio. The playback resumes after phone call bug has been "touched" but not exactly corrected. Now, after a phone call, the media doesn't begin playing again, but it causes a soft freeze. The pause/play button is still responsive, but the audio doesn't playback and the timer isn't advancing.

GSM on the Freerunner is working. No bouncing, no disconnects. I tested incoming calls on the 1973 and there was still a very strong echo and the ringer didn't play. I have yet to test calls on the Freerunner using the latest Qt Extended image.

The SMS import issue seems to have also been corrected and the "missing" SMS from the FSO testing image has appeared in the list. Sweet!

So far, the Qt Extended 4.4.2 images seem to work very well. I'm actually so happy with it that I've, for the first time, been able to bring the Freerunner to work instead of the 1973. Additionally, I've added a custom wallpaper to my theme - a first and an indicator that things are getting better.

I've got both a Neo 1973 and a Neo Freerunner. I've had the latter for a while now, but it hasn't managed to work it's way into daily use for me. Why? A series of issues in one area or another than simply makes the device unusable for me.

My Neo devices are used as phones, media players and text message devices. If I can't make a call, the device isn't working. If I can't listen to Free Talk Live on my drives to and from work (I drive 55 miles each way, I need my podcast!) then I'm not happy.

And not happy I am!

Let's first give credit where credit is due. There are some issues that have existed for a while that are actually getting resolutions. The biggest of them recently was a fix to the echo bug that's upset our friends on the other line for months! Suspend and resume is working reliably in about 95% of the cases and this results is a MUCH improved battery life.

The last time I installed the ASU on Freerunner, the GSM connection kept "bouncing", that is connecting with T-Mobile and disconnecting. This is but one of the several GSM issues on the Freerunner itself, since other images (such as Qt Extended) simply don't register with the network at all. This has been the primary reason the Freerunner hasn't made it into my pocket as a dash down the stairs.

The Neo1973, however, connects to GSM reliably. This is good news, because it means it's even a candidate for use.

The official Openmoko repo (downloads.openmoko.org) doesn't build images for the 1973 anymore, which sucks. What this leaves me with is Qt Extended and the FSO images. I hear there are SHR images that don't provide the media player functionality I need and that Android is being ported right now. It also leaves me with Debian, which is an awesome thing in my eyes.

I tried installing Debian on my 1973 using the InstallDebian script and the Wiki instructions on Debian.org. I've got the various partitions created and Debian is installed, yet uBoot complains of a bad magic number, preventing me from booting Debian.

I then move to Qt Extended 4.4.1. This software stack offers probably the best combination of half-baked features of all of the images.

Calls are unreliable. If my wife calls me, the phone rings, but I can't answer it. For a while, I was relegated to outgoing calls only, until magically it began working on incoming calls... half the time.

The SMS system works for sending and receiving, but it never seems to realize when it's already seen a message. Imagine getting a text message, reading it, and then getting a second message and being prompted you've got two new messages. Okay, but that's not it. It's not that it simply "forgot" you've viewed the message. At some point in the process, it actually re-imported it, so viewing that second message shows 4 messages, two copies of each. Repeat this for every new incoming message and it gets old. Fast.

And then I turn to the media player. It works, it really does. Most of the time.

One of the most annoying things about this media player is not a bug but a design decision. I listen to podcasts that are 2 hours long, and I listen to it in two sessions - going to work and coming home from work. There is a pause button to pause playback. In the unfortunate chance that the battery dies or the media player crashes, there's no slider to find where I left off. Instead, I have to hold down a section on the screen to do a 2x fast forward (maybe it's faster than 2x, but not by much) until I get to that point. To make this more difficult, the same toolbar sometimes appears as the volume control and sometimes it's a control panel that has "Skip track, stop and pause" as options. The media player can play a file from start to finish, uninterrupted, but by god if you need to do something more advanced with it (like answer a phone call!) you're out of luck.

In that specific phone call scenario, it's a known bug that paused media player files resume playback after calls are disconnected. They don't STAY paused. That's okay though, because you know what happens to paused music? Let me tell you. :)

If you pause the media player, it goes into suspend monitoring mode. In a few seconds, the phone suspends to save power. It's a great thing, except that the media player crashes (or stops and closes) immediately upon resume. Couple this with the fast forward lack and you'll see why my post right now is so full of vitriol.

With that said, Qt Extended is the best option there is right now for my devices. I have very seriously considered selling them and just buying a "regular" phone because I'm rapidly growing tired of the hassle, yet I keep getting roped in by the prospect of things getting better. After all, some things ARE getting better!

In frustration, I then turned to the FSO Testing images. GSM works much better on those images. I can reliably call in and out all the time on the FSO images, but text messages seem to vanish into the ether on both legs of the trip. I get "unset" in front of all of the messages I send, and I receive nothing sent to me.

The media player on the FSO testing images is also pretty bad. It can play MP3 files but only after importing via a clunky file manager interface. If you import files you don't want, I haven't seen a clear way to delete them. Not a good thing, especially if the files cause the player to crash, which some do.

My podcasts play though which is all that really matter. The FSO media player even has a slider bar! When I first saw it, I was thrilled and tested it by sliding to the middle of the... CRASH.

Damn. :(

It's a fully repeatable crash that offers no information as to it's source.

Why am I bitching today? Well, it's simple. Lorn from Qt Software (Nokia) is currently whipping up new Qt Extended images based on the fairly new 4.4.2 source and the FSO Milestone 4 release is scheduled to happen today (thought past releases have been late but reasonably so). I'm complaining because I've got hope that things will change!

I really hope they do.

Below is an actual transcript of a chat I had with a friend via IRC. There are so many levels of "messed up" in this story that I'm not even sure I can write an article on it.

Me: Did you ever hear of the girl who was arrested for producing child pornography?
Friend: Nope.
Me: She took pictures of herself!
Me: LOL
Me: *rim-shot*
Me: http://www.newarkadvocate.com/article/20081008/NEWS01/810080302
Me: I mean, this article ended up in the paper. The fact that she's been arrested and put in a cage for taking pictures of herself is sick. So I figured there had to be a joke in there somewhere.

Sometimes when I discuss the free market, the ideas are sound, but less inventive people sometimes struggle to conceptualize how society would cope with the transition from what we have today to a society driven by voluntary interaction.

With corporations in existence, using the violent guns of government to protect greedy and negligent people from the impact of their actions, there is this great imbalance. Licensing laws today prevent people with skills, but little money, from starting and maintaining businesses to support themselves and their families.

When we cast off this horrible notion of government, people who had previously used violence to take the wealth from people would still have that wealth. How then, does the restrictions upon the poorer people correct themselves?

For one, skills take very little to manifest themselves when regulatory hurdles are removed. But what about the absolute poorest of the poor, those sleeping on bus benches because they have literally nothing but the clothes on their back?

Homesteading.

It's a topic that, even among the liberty-aware, isn't really talked about. The vast majority of us reject the idea of "public property". In our view, "public property" is owned by nobody, not "by everybody" as a lot of people like to think. The reason, simply, is that property ownership is an absolute. Only the person who owns something can control it. If you buy a watch, you as the owner may destroy it when you wish. Who then, has the ability to destroy "public property" when it no longer suits them? Nobody - it is unowned.

When the paradigm of force ends, that is, when people no longer accept that institutionalized forms of harming their neighbor are okay, all of this unowned land will then open up. Surely, some of the land will be taken by "big business", such as forests for loggers. On the flip side, nature enthusiasts will also "make grabs" to sustain wildlife preserves, property to use as tourist attractions.

But the very poor, they'll be able to stake their claim in the unused properties of today's government buildings. Perhaps the homeless in Washington DC will move from the park benches to the former IRS buildings. More realistically, some of the more inventive and resourceful of those will find some land out of the way and begin building their own dreams. Free of zoning and permitting fees, this becomes quite a feasible and realistic thing.

What? It will never happen, you say?

But it does. It even happens today, actually. For proof, let's turn to the story of Squirrel Man, David Csaky. David is one of those more "tragic" cases, born into poverty as a child in Los Angeles, David decided that rather than turning to the government for handouts, or relying forever on a chain of charities, he would stake out his own claim and build a home, even if the government people wouldn't accept that.

Not accept it they did!



Above is a picture of David's house. Most of us might take pity on him at first, that this poor man is living in a home made apartment, yet this is a home David built with his hands. This is David's home, his place of respite and solace. He owns it, and is intimately familiar with it.

And the government thugs want David out, they want the David's home destroyed they won't take no for an answer.

"I'm tired," David said. "I just want to be left alone. I'm not hurting anyone." As local government people plan to demolish David's home, which is built in a cluster of trees under a highway overpass, for the third time in three years, neighbors and fellow city residents tell tales that support David's claim of causing no harm.

"David's a unique character but a good neighbor. He's built this amazing treehouse in the middle of a city," said Janet Yoder. "I certainly believe he's not a threat of any kind to anyone." An owner of an apartment complex across the street from David's home, Yoder has a vested interest in the quality of the neighborhood.

Next to David's home sits Ross Laboratory, owned by Jim Ross who says of David ""He works hard, he's kind of become the neighborhood watchdog." Other neighbors credit David for helping keep crime down and he keeps the vacant lot clean.

None of that matters to employees of the Department of Transportation, who's employees would not even identify themselves for the article, as their violent act of eviction and home destruction would not be so acceptable if done outside the veil of "government authority", whatever that means.

The violence, destruction and apathy that government relies on is very real. For David, it's not a hypothetical, it literally means the difference between having a home and being homeless. Do you support that kind of violence? Do you support a society where adherence to rules (that when broken harm nobody) to more important than the lives destroyed in the process?

It's time to end this paradigm of stolen land, perpetual poverty and disregard for human well-being. It's time to abolish government. It's just too sick.

Sometimes I refer to government schools as "indoctrination camps". This sometimes pisses people off because they don't want to face the reality.

Normally, however, I'm "merely" referring to how those schools teach "sit down, shut up and raise your hand to speak" when the real world passes by if you obey those dictates.

Tonight though, I mean it. INDOCTRINATION.

In the same vein as the Bellamy Salute, inspired by the Christian SocialistFrancis Bellamy, and the Nazi salute give me the chills, so do two videos I saw today.



In the first, school children are singing about how "Obama's Gonna' Change It!". The "high production value" of the video might cause you to miss, some of the singing is taking place in what appears to be a public school. At the end of the video, it shows footage of German children singing to the leader they were told embodied "hope".



In the second, a line of students march in wearing uniform clothing, marching in step and chanting. When they speak, they say "Because of Obama, I'm inspired to be...". What they are saying is positive on the surface. People feeling inspired and empowered is a good thing. Watch it though. They're all the same. Uniform in clothing, in step, in voice, even in haircut. Conformity while discussing inspiration? Then it becomes clear. The young men then begin talking about Obama's policy (health care in specific) in which we all must be robbed to pay for everyone else. We're not individuals, this video says, we're all the same, all parts of a "greater" and Obama is above us. Rubbish, all. It's so sad. Those guys are proclaiming their goals. To be a carpenter or a chemical engineer, and yet all the while march and act in a display the subsumes the talented, productive and wealth producing individual to the fatigues-and-navy drone.

Lest someone think that I'm anti-Obama, I'm not.

John McMaverick McCain is being a bit more blatant with his message of subsuming the individual. He calls directly for people to put "country first". Put "country first" as he uses propaganda to continue the destruction of wealth and the slaughter of human lives across to globe (It's not just Iraq and Afghanistan, US troops are in over 150 nations, though not all killing at the same rate as the ones in Iraq.)

"Country first" as he votes to fire up the printing presses of the Federal Reserve and shrink the buying power of all holders of the Federal Reserve Note (Sometimes incorrectly called dollar), the majority in America using that currency all the time.

Not individuals, who have families to feed. Not individuals, who's skills and talents produce uncountable wealth and generate prosperity. Not individuals with rights and liberty. No, not individuals - country first.

Barack Obama and John McMaverick McCain are two sides of the same statist coin. The flavors don't matter, because the means are the same. Both want to wield the violence and coercion that is the state. Both want to use force to take lives and take wealth. Both are destructive, unethical and dangerous.

Don't take my word for it? Listen from "the man" himself as Barack Obama explains what governments (or in his word, nation-states) have - a monopoly on the use of violence.

I was chatting today with someone on Freenode and somewhere the chat turned from the Acer Aspire One to Linux "back then". Sometimes I like to remember the path that brought me to where I am today (especially considering that I'm a "Linux professional").

They (whomever they are) say that a picture is worth a thousand words, and while I might dispute that number, I don't dispute the idea.

Below are two screenshots. I've got a big binder that I've been stashing away Linux install ISOs in. Some are from my old Mac PowerPC days, some are from when x86 was a given and some are from the modern AMD64 era. Anyway, some of the "gems" from that binder upon brief inspection today was SimplyMepis 3.4 - a distro that has moved from Debian to Ubuntu and back to Debian in the time since then.

Also, there's Gentoo 2006.01, a distro that for it's time, was cutting edge (see this post on distros and innovation) and fresh and exciting.

Those two distros are running in kernel based virtual machines (KVM) with 640 MB of RAM. The irony there is that when I actually used those CDs to install, it was on a machine with 512 MB of RAM. Interesting that I can now allot resources to virtual machines in excess of what I used to run and still browse the web and conduct an IRC chat. In contrast with those two distros is the host machine's "About GNOME" which proudly displays the 2.24 version.

Enjoy the trip down memory lane.

I seldom get excited about web services. I like YouTube and Flickr and all of those great services, but I've always hated relying on other people for data integrity. If Flickr goes under, my images are gone. If their servers go down, same thing.

"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself" pretty much describes my computing philosophy. So when I found a service two days ago that knocked my socks off, it's a pretty "big" thing to me.

Let me first explain my need. I like creativity for the sake of creativity, but to be really exciting, something has to solve a problem I have.

I'm in a state of flux right now in how I view and use computers. The first computer I had purchased myself was a laptop which had a ton of problems. Because of those problems (namely, overheating and immediate power down) I essentially swore off laptops. Mobility was over-rated.



That philosophy guided my computing habits. I've been tethered to a desktop ever since. The systems have changed but the form factor hadn't.

When Openmoko's Neo products came out, I liked the idea of a Free Software powered phone, so I bought it. Having a tiny little computer to hack on began introducing me to new things. Rather than burning MP3 CD's for my Element, I downloaded podcasts and played them from the Neo. I began storing images on it and notes, video. In short, mobility became slightly less over-rated.

With the mobility bug still kicked in, and my current desktop coming on the year-and-a-half mark (still not a bad PC, Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM, almost 2 TB of disk space and a decent nVidia card) I've decided it's time to move on. The mobility bug kept biting though.

My decision to move on resulted in me deciding to purchase two netbooks and I've settled on the Acer Aspire One. My wife had been impressing upon me the desire for a laptop so she can play games in her comfortable chair. Another very real reason is that my apartment, while not small, is too small for the stuff we have. I've got these massive industrial tables my computer sites on, and eliminating those would free up a lot of space in my room and the same is true of my wife's room. My ever expanding brewery is a space hog.

We're going mobile. To make the transition more difficult, my wife has requested that her netbook be a Windows XP system for various reasons (biggest being work's high dependence on Windows). The way our desktops are set up right now has NFS shares of music, pictures and movies so that they're network transparent. This is important. My wife shouldn't have to do anything special to access and use her files. NFS allows this.

But how do you share files transparently between Windows and Linux? Samba sucks. Some people hold it up as a bastion of greatness, but it's always sucked in my experience. I don't particularly blame Samba either, I'm sure it's the Windows networking that actually sucks. Additionally, the home file server which contains all of this music is behind a rather slow (I work with GigE bandwidth, so a 3 meg connection is quite slow in my eyes) DSL connection which simply doesn't cut it for NFS shares. Add to this that NFS is insecure by itself, that NFS tunneling over ssh is not "transparent" for Windows and my file server becomes essentially useless for "the mobile world". What I need is a way to give myself and my wife access to our files anywhere we go, make that access transparent for her and ensure it works on Linux and Windows.

I found such a solution. It's Dropbox.

Dropbox is a service that offers 2GB of file storage and syncing for free. You can upgrade to 50GB for $9.99 a month or $99 a year. There are clients for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. Specifically for the Linux side, it's a Nautilus plug-in and userspace daemon. The basic idea behind the service is that all files in your dropbox directory are copied onto Dropbox's servers. Drop files into that directory and the changes are synced automatically. You're given access to your files on any computer running the Dropbox application as well as on any browser that handles sessions (which is all modern browsers) through their web panel.

Changes to your folder are pushed to any computer also running Dropbox and configured for your account. Here at work, I've got the newly installed Dropbox running and I now have access to some of my music and images just as transparently as the NFS/Samba server over yonder.

It's a bit nicer than a convoluted rsync setup. Only changes are pushed, limiting bandwidth consumption to their servers and to clients awaiting sync. To make it even more special, on the Dropbox forums it's pretty clear that each file is also hashed and if you're attempting to upload a file with a matching hash, the file is just copied server-side rather than uploaded. In this specific case, someone was trying to upload an Ubuntu ISO and to sync took about three seconds to be in his account and usable.

What Dropbox does for our mobile situation is allows both my wife and I to access our music transparently. I tend to download new music and ensure it's properly tagged, so new music and changes are then pushed to her. If she wants to blacklist songs, she can, and if a co-worker gives her a new song, it can be given to me to "process" without much shuffling. Because it's internet based, it's accessible anywhere and not dependent on my slow home DSL.

I've also suggested it here at work. We currently use GoDaddy's FileVault to co-ordinate with the designers who work from home. One of the issues we've had with that is integration. While it works with Internet Explorer, it's quite unusable with Firefox. Dropbox could solve this problem, allowing our company to share the files we use with our out-of-office employees regardless of the platform they're using. It would allow all the people to get instant updates (like when I hack on some of our internal web apps, for instance, and bump the version.) without even thinking. It's currently in evaluation here, hopefully it will take.

Dropbox provides binary packages for Fedora and Ubuntu, as well as source repositories for theoretical use on any Debian-based distro that can meet it's dependencies. Binaries exist for Ubuntu Gutsy and Hardy, both AMD64 and i386 and there is also a source tarball, though I'm not sure how well it works with other distros.

I'm quite thrilled with this, and as long as there aren't hangups between now and when I purchase my netbooks, they'll have made a missionary customer out of me.

Now all I need is a reliable, high-speed mobile internet connection and I'll be all set. I love how people are innovating and can meet my needs!

If I'm spamming syndicated readers, I truly apologize. This is a "I've just upgraded and things might be broken" post.

As regular visitors to my site may immediately notice, the theme has changed today. The menus on the sides are faulty too. I know this, please bear with me. I've just upgraded from a seven-point-four to a point-eight-four release.

I don't know exactly what was affected. I know that my old default theme is no longer compatible with my publishing system, so I've deactivated it. It's all good, there were some vestigial effects from my old theme which annoyed me and this will give me the chance to correct them. For one, the navigation in the photo gallery sucked. Also, the links vanished due to a white hover color and finally, I hate the font. I really have to figure out what actually happens on that. I love how my site looked in Epiphany on a business card install of Debian. Whatever font that is, I'll hunt it down and use it here. My site is Monochrome Mentality and it will go back to being monochromatic. I hope to correct all of these things within the next 48 hours depending on my mood, time and the ability to get back to theming. We'll see. I'm also going to be adding a new "feature" to the site which will allow me to fall deeper into the realm of digital packratism.

This is just a general "beware" note. The upgrade may have affected how the RSS and Atom feeds are handled so if I'm spamming syndicated readers, I'm sorry. It should calm down and the re-posts were due to the upgrade.

Most importantly, thanks for reading. I've been getting e-mails every now and then from people who like my opinions on one issue or another, and it's great to know. Thanks everyone.