Score tied at one all
Earlier today, and after reading Joerg Jaspert's rant on Debian Planet being at times too off-topic for him, I felt compelled to send him private mail as I happen to disagree with that point. Unfortunately, he and I didn't get much further than repeating our positions once over.

Back now at the computer, I just saw MJ Ray's riposte which I happen to, no surprise here, agree fully with. To me, one of the nicer aspects of Debian Planet is how it, at least occassionally, brings out the other, non-computing side of fellow Debianers. That is clearly not a bug but a feature.

Coincidentally, while running errands this afternoon, I listened to Chicago Public Radio (one of the very few remaining stations worth turning on) which carried an interview with a U of Chicago law prof on the origin of the word 'echo room'. His thesis is that people self-select themselves more and more into virtual communities. The main point here that these communities are all non-overlapping, so people simply reinforce prior beliefs and opinions as the only feedback they get is from people who, by virtue of the pre-selected, are likely to hold views very similar to their own.

Getting back to the prior topic, having non-Debian posts on planet.debian.net allows us to break the 'echo' pattern at least a little bit.

/computers/www/blogging | permanent link

See you in Boston in July
Back from the morning run, I had an email from Jon maddog Hall stating that the abstract I had submitted for the USELINUX SIG session at the USENIX2004 conference has been accepted. Good news. Now I need to write the paper, a follow-up to the initial paper about Quantian from DSC 2003, and which will detail the openMosix extensions that have since gone into Quantian

/computers/linux/debian/quantix | permanent link