Walk Alone

I’m very angry. F****** day. Had an argument with an Admin guy. Whole bloody team thinks they got the college gifted to them by their fathers - except for one guy - who’s cool enough that he deserves to be named - Amey (not bhim). Rest are a bunch of shitholes worth nothing.

………..OK…………..step back………….take a deep breath………let it out slowly………….So be it. No mercy. No remorse.

I’m waiting for just so long before I bore anyone reading this with a long rant against the whole damn managemnt of the events.

PS: Shitty day continues. Forgot an LPT socket in the college and called the wrong room in the college - the guy at the other end teaches me the manners I forgot in my anxiety. Oh well… time to let it all go. From tomorrow, we recover. Thats a mission.

A friend of mine believes that the different licenses used by M$, RH and other companies are just a play of words. That when you distribute OSs, its piracy regardless of their licenses, because you (or rather, the person who is taking it from you) are not buying it from the original vendors. He moves around with RHEL 3 - which he uses at home - and I believe thats piracy. RH allows non-commercial redistribution of RHEL, but with its logos removed. There are conflicts on whether RHEL is open source. Besides, I believe RH may allow its enterprise linux OSs to be spread once they are stripped of its trademarks and logos; but the installation of RHEL on multiple machines the way my friend is doing, by spreading his copy of RHEL may be construed as a violation of its license. As far as I know, the only way I can get a RHEL branded CD is by buying it from RH.

As for his opinion that GPL is crap - that the way I or other linux users spread linux is actually, truly a form of piracy no different from M$ piracy, I refer the nay-sayers to GPL, BSD license and MPL. Also the OSI site has a repository of different licenses which say the same basic thing - you are free to see the source and spread the software. So maybe you people will be informed on why copying linux is not piracy. And I don’t mean RHEL.

You may be wondering about the title - hackers? Its inspired by A Brief History of Hackerdom. The people I’m writing about exibhit a behaviour that is almost clannish or tribal - I think exclusivity would be a better word for it. The mechanics of their actions escape my comprehension. Perhaps its one of the reasons that I feel a need to apply a label to them. And what better way to do it than by calling them hackers?

BTW, these people in the Comp/IT streams seem less fired up about interacting with PCs than they should have been. I guess thats because I’m there to do it. Or maybe its the toaster syndrome.

Finally, the team is meshing together. But I still believe in my ‘cutting loose’ theory, based on modular architecture. I had planned to divide the team cleanly into three parts - software, presentations and hardware. Software people would develop the specialized stuff needed for some events. Presentation guys would do the flash stuff for quizzes and so on. And of course, the hardware guys would look after hardware. But then things are following their own course. The software guys are working almost on a freelancer basis. The presentation guys (I’m one) are gearing up. And the hardware guys (I’m here too!) pop up when needed. But still, we have started working as a coherent whole - you can see chaos, but its the chaos of a soccer midfield - all players know their jobs, its only their execution (which depends on several factors) which appears chaotic or random… you get what I mean, I’m sure.

Another thing is the website - our college runs gnu/linux. So the entire project is being ported into php/mysql. It will be fun. I can setup the linux and apache. The rest is trial and error.

Made some final improvements. Put the Archives in a drop-down box. and made the Archive Index page. That way the list of links won’t grow too long. Overall, its easy to navigate through the archives now. The Archive Index page could do with some artistic enhancement though. I’m going to move all of this to blosxom. And find a free host that gives ftp access with minimal ads. So I don’t know why I’m spending so much time on this.