SubConf and ApacheCon

I'm about to head to the airport, leaving for Munich, Germany. SubConf is happening there this week. Last year, I gave a keynote; this year, I'm not giving any talks, but simply attending to work with the other Subversion committers. CollabNet, elego, and WANdisco have all pitched in to make my trip possible (thanks, guys!). Their businesses are built on Subversion, and getting committers together is a great way to make Subversion better, and grow their business.

I guess that I don't post enough about my hacking here, but Subversion has been occupying all my coding over the past year+. I'm working on rebuilding its "working copy library" -- the library that manages all those ".svn" subdirectories you see when using Subversion. There are several other people in the community that are working on this change, too. It is a huge amount of work, but will make Subversion much, much faster. The new library will appear in Subversion 1.7, which should be released early next year.

After SubConf, then I'm flying off to San Francisco. Going to see a bunch of people over the weekend, bar crawl on Halloween, and then spend next week at ApacheCon in Oakland. This is going to be a big event, as we're celebrating the ten year anniversary of the Apache Software Foundation. Huge milestone!

Posting about the Xbox again

For a couple years, I posted quite regularly to my Xbox blog. Then... nothing for pretty much the past three years.

Well. I've got my Xbox plugged in again. I've got the time. And I've been playing.

... so I started posting again. Go check it out, if you're a gamer.

OpenBSD and (oops!) NO threads

Wow.

I just found out that OpenBSD only has user-space threads.

User. Space.

This came up because stdout doesn't work quite right, apparently. My friend says that OpenBSD sets it to non-blocking. In general, non-blocking means "try to write to , and what isn't written... try it later." But every program I've ever seen assumes stdout is blocking, so in the OpenBSD environment the unwritten data will just get dropped on the floor. Answer: build as an unthreaded application so stdout will work appropriately. Are you kidding?

How can an operating system claim to be Modern, yet lack something as basic as kernel threads?

Insanity.

Google Books

There is an interesting furor that has been building over the past six months about the Google settlement with authors/publishers, which gives them the rights to digitize and make available books on the web. Then we have the Open Content Alliance that is "against" this process. They complain that it is giving Google some kind of monopoly over online books.

Google went through a long lawsuit and then paid a settlement to receive those rights. Why is the OCA is complaining? Why don't they just pay the same license? Why don't they just set up their own online book system?

Pah. That would be too easy. Instead, they want to complain and drag back the one company who is trying to advance online works.

They should step up, not hold back.

I Don't Believe in Obamacare

For a while now, I've been having issues with the idea of "Big Government" and it taking part in the health industry. There are lots of problems with health in the United States, but government bureaucracy is never a solution.

Consider the simple economic question of "how do we pay for this?" The answer has been various taxes on different entities. But that does not create value, it merely redistributes it. And any process of redistribution has overhead costs, and experience further tells us that government is quite inefficient doing this.

In short, we're simply talking about a productivity hit. Where is the additional value?

At a town hall meeting in Philadelphia, a woman had this to say:

I look at this health care plan and I see nothing that is about health or about care. What I see is a bureaucratic nightmare, senator. Medicaid is broke, Medicare is broke, Social Security is broke and you want us to believe that a government that can't even run a cash for clunkers program is going to run one-seventh of our U.S. economy? No sir, no.

She sums it up quite well. Our government has shown that it does not run programs well. The health industry is a huge part of our economy. I certainly do not trust it with the government.

I believe much of the problem in the health industry is in the supply chain. Huge markups exist at all points along the chain, and those costs are passed along to the insurance companies (not people!). Further, these supply chains and the resulting use and treatments are opaque, and (thus) resistant to careful analysis.

Many years ago, when I was not employed and had no health insurance, I was going to be billed $1500 by a hospital for a treatment. When the doctor found that I was uninsured, it was dropped to $1200. What does that tell us? There are costs in the chain of treatment that exist specifically to be paid by insurers. Rooting out inefficiencies like this would go a long ways to improving our health system today.

The Baen Free Library

A couple years ago, I was stranded at home with a broken ankle. Since I had just purchased my loft, and was only staying there a couple days a week (the rest of the time at a crashpad near work), I had no cable TV. Shoot... not even a TV. No internet either -- I was "borrowing" connectivity from a neighbor, though it was a crappy connection.

How to pass the time?

I figured reading a book would be good, but I certainly wasn't capable of getting myself to a bookstore. Then I recalled the Baen Free Library. I'd run into it, in some story about how publishing free content can actually help your business. Eric Flint wrote a page about why they are giving away books for free. The man gets it.

So... off I went. Through the crappy connection, I was able to get several books downloaded, and settled in to read them. One of those books was 1632, a story about a West Virginian town picked up, in whole, and thrown back in time and relocated to Germany. It is the first in a long series by Eric Flint. And it is really, really good.

And this is exactly why I say that Jim Baen gets it. After reading all the free books in the series, I went on to purchase another eight books or so. Baen Books made money where they otherwise would not have.

I have recently returned to the B.F.L. in a quest for books for my Kindle 2, which I got back in March. Yes, they offer their books in Kindle format. Lately, I've been reading the books from The Belisarious Series. The first four are available for free in the B.F.L., and the last two are free on Baen's Fifth Imperium website.

I'll end with a note that the B.F.L. is housed on webscription.net, which sells quite large number of books, and all available in Kindle format. There are even some books that Amazon doesn't provide in Kindle format (like the excellent Paladin of Shadows series by John Ringo).

[Update: Eric Flint wrote that web page, not Jim]

My Bacon Number

No, not the tasty pork product.

The actor...

I've just discovered that Wil Wheaton has a Bacon Number of One, after appearing with him in She's Having a Baby.

Back in 2004, I played poker with Wil after his keynote speech at ApacheCon in Vegas.

Thus... my Bacon Number is Two.