SysAdmin/Amateur Radio/Free Software Advocate

My schedule has been a bit more relaxed around the home front, so I’m hoping to work on some docs for the upcoming Fedora 14 release. Here’s how the alpha version of the Release Notes looks so far: Fedora 14 Alpha release notes.

Fedora 14 is going to be interesting. There are a lot of incremental upgrades, I don’t see a lot for your average user in it yet other than a lot of upstream bug fixes and minor enhancements, but there are a lot of changes with engineering packages. For instance, there’s a lot of add-ons for the R programming language to really make Fedora the choice for people working with R. Also I found the addition of the ROOT system from CERN pretty interesting. I’ve not hacked around with the packages much, so I can’t say with much authority that it’s not very useful outside of particle physics, but who knows who will find a use for ROOT.

I don’t think I’ll be doing any direct commits this time around, but maybe this weekend I can take a stab at looking at some of the other upstream packages for addition to the Docs Beats.

Here’s a link to the OpenNMS docs I’ve been working on in parallel to the actual ones. Keep in mind, these are completely unofficial!

I still have to work on the site template and branding a wee bit, but hopefully I can do that this weekend or late next week. Of course, there’s the content too. Comments? Concerns? Things you’d like to see?

I’ve been working with the docs of the OpenNMS project for a few weeks now, when the place I have them is more mature, I’ll be sure to link.

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KD8ORQ. That’s me. After 17 years of trying, I got my ham license today.

What happened in those 17 years I tried to get it and didn’t? You see, whenever I’d try to take the test, something BAD would happen. Like REALLY bad. Like these things:

• Grandma Died
• Other Grandma Died
• Car broke down in a really remote place
• Oh, yeah, I lacked a mailing address for a while. Wasn’t homeless, just… it was complicated.
• Got robbed.

And that’s the TIP of the iceberg. I’d taken the test and failed once when I was 15 and it was just terrible moving forward.

Today, I just said to hell with it and took it.

And I made it home with no tragedy.

I’m no lawyer, but I’m going to do my best to translate Oracle’s lawsuit against Google on a section by section basis.

1. Delaware? California? We are omnipresent through a post office box somewhere. We have a customer in California, and Google is there too. It just so happens Delaware is a super friendly place to be for giant corporations and has beautiful snow at Christmas. Ever see White Christmas? Crap, that was Vermont.

2. Delaware? California? They are omnipresent through a post office box somewhere. We have a customer in California, and Oracle is there too. It just so happens Delaware is a super friendly place to be for giant corporations and has beautiful snow at Christmas. Ever see White Christmas? Crap, that was Vermont.

3. This lawsuit is about some ideas some engineering guys had and some marketing guys put a name on, but more importantly, some crap that got mailed to the USPTO as quickly as possible so we’re not the poor douchebags on the other side of this lawsuit.

4. Yup, Northern California.

5. Google does business here! Did we cover that one yet?

6. Business is SELLING THINGS,all over the place! which includes Northern California, where Google does business. Did we cover that one yet?

7. NORTHERN CALIFORNIA!

8. We’re Oracle, and in case you didn’t know, we’re awesome. I mean, like, REALLY awesome. Larry Ellison comes to the office every day by ejecting from a MiG for Christ’s sake. We bought some stuff from another company a while back, which means we own it, because that’s what happens when you buy stuff, it’s YOURS.

9. We got Java with all this fun stuff. We’d like to think it’s made of code and documentation, and some other stuff. Don’t ask us to clarify other stuff, the sentence just sounded better with three direct objects. Maybe the “materials” portion means a secret substance straight from the bowels of Mt. SGML given up by Tim Bray himself to turn XML into stack traces which when read aloud by Gosling impose super powers on those who hear the mesage. Maybe not. Point is, lots of people use this stuff. and it’s pretty cool. We think Java did all this stuff that’s never been done before, more on that after we take some time to again reflect on how badass we are in the next section.

10. To avoid being sued by douchebags, the guys at Sun filed some patents.

11. We own this stuff. All of it. Did I mention we give it away for free?

Here’s the important part:

Oracle’s Version of #12: So it’s all JAVA JAVA JAVA JAVA Dalvik, AMIRITE? These are all things Sun… err we did on phones first so long as you cryptographically signed your phone numbers before dialing and collected all your favorite pokemo… midlets. Hey! Google is just giving this crap away!

Google’s Probable Version of #12: So yeah, there’s a wee bit of stuff that looks like Java. It might even be Java. Sorta. There’s some words that look like Java, there’s some other stuff that is Java, the program on people’s computers that makes Android programs runs in Java (sorta). But Dalvik isn’t Java. It won’t run Java apps.

13. In case the pile of patents earlier weren’t sufficient, here’s some more light reading.

14. WE ARE SO MAD AT YOU GUYS! YOU TOOK OUR DUDES! And not just ANY dudes, CERTAIN DUDES WHO JUST SO HAPPENED TO WORK ON JAVA… BECAUSE YOU HATE US AND WANT TO TAKE OUR STUFF!

15. Google does business in Northern California.

16, 17, 18. There’s no Prior Art really.

19, 20, 21. There’s no Prior Art go away.

22, 23, 24. May have over extended ourselves here. Let me zip the patent up and send it to y…. wait, can’t without violating a law.

25, 26, 27. “No, really, we just made that one up COMPLETELY. You ever seen the Web Economy Bullshit Generator? Sun had one of those on a Ultra 1 they kept around for grins, except it mailed stuff straight to the USPTO and we were hoping lawyers would bite.” – Anonymous Former Sun Engineer

28, 29, 30. Did you notice the trend where not only Google are a bunch of bad people, but they’ve sullied the reputations of anyone who’s bought their products? I mean, they’re REALLY bad people, and you should be MAD. How are your feelings?

Ok, it gets really bad and I can’t go on. I REALLY can’t comment on “PRAYER FOR RELIEF” coming from Oracle on page 9.

It does end with them asking for the destruction of Android completely though. Fat chance, just ups the damages.

Did I mention all this stuff is free?