I am experienced, I sometimes need a little innocence. I've lived life in the computer sector, I know about all the injustices that happen there. For a long time, I was a well known figure in the PowerPC Linux community, and was at least figuratively the head of imaclinux.net. At least I did all the work, and had substantial control over the content.

The politics of technology are the anti-thesis of politics of the greater world—technology is about doing evil and politics are about doing good (or at least thinking you are doing good and at the same time screwing the world over).

The Free Software Days

Saying that is sort of a lie, or a misdomer. I'm damn proud to say I was actively involved in the free software movement, which undoubtly is one of the greatest advances of the 1990s—and pratically unnoticed by the public at large.

We did good things. While I never was a serious coder (I did write some scripts and hack a few different things to get it the way I wanted), I contributed through my documenting skills, and helped many people get started with Linux. Oh, and yes, I did a little kernel hacking—but I'd hardly call this coding—more looking at docs, kind of reading the code (any retard can under what switch and if-then statements are about).

Linux has done many good things. I loved the K Desktop Environment 1.x to pieces, and KDE 2+ are great—my machine is just kind of underpowered for it. I also loved blackbox—I remember those days with a transparent gmon (or whatever it was), the fast blackbox window manger. Oh, and dcop was fun little scripting language to command stuff around—much easier then accessing the Mac OS API directly or any other graphical OS for that matter (with the exception of AppleScript/Hypertalk—but those are total abstractions from the system, with limited power).

No I don't like GNOME, and a I really can't stand many of the GNOME developers. They were elitist free-software nuts, too worried about theoritical legal cases against non-free commerical software that linked against the qt library. Of course, then the qt library became LGPL and then Bruce Persens started to love it, and they looked like radical nuts, without a point.

Oh we can't mention the fun hanging out with the developers on IRC—like it or not, they were fun a crowd, and always had lots of cool goodies to play with. Unfortunetly, I could not code in C very well (I had a little experience—and could fix some [syntax/documented] bugs—but not write kernel code ;). So that was fustrating.

I'm sorry—I'm just not as smart as some of the developers around—I couldn't learn C on my own—although maybe now I could after taking Computer Science I. Well, maybe, a 101 class to kernel programming is a big jump.

I started to lose interest, when I found that I had learned almost anything that was useful—except for 'real' programming. I mean, I knew how to script in HyperTalk, AppleScript (sorta), the Bash shell (sorta—but far better then AppleScript), KDE's dcop (which in retrospect probably taught me some useful parts of the KDE API), HTML (that's a freaking markup language not scripting), and some other stuff. No hard core stuff—but basic flow control and calling lots of external libaries. I wasn't super happy with my limited knowledge—but I did some good stuff.

Did I mention that why I got involved in Linux? Don't laught—I'm serious—for a 10th grader mind—I was pissed at Apple for dropping support for my barely 2 year old 603ev Mac—with the Mac OS X. I happened to learn about Linux/PPC in the #macintosh channel I hung out—I happened to turn out that one of Ryan Meader's friends (of MacOSRumors.com fame), was Jason Haas (or was it Jon Carr?), a college student, at the University of Wisconsin. His way of making money was selling burned copies of this LinuxPPC operating system (and creating purty scripts to install it by).

I quickly had connections in the Linux world, and before I knew it, I downloaded it, and installed it—and quickly order the CD, so I could install it. Yeap, LinuxPPC R4—with it's broken glibc 1.99—god, that was bad. You don't understand what hell it made it for a newbie, who had never programmed to try to build software or use software built against a broken C library. But it worked—and I fell in love with that fabolous KDE, even if it was kind of screwed up with my distro.

By the way, LinuxPPC R5 was much better, but even better was when I went off the beaten path—and got into Debian. Debian is where you want to be, it's tools are increadibly useful (especially apt-get), and its much more sound around the corners. Yes, it's founders are also legal nuts too.

Face it—I'm a bigot, and damn proud of it (I'll keep repeating that until the cows come home, or whatever). I like my desktop with KDE, the Xpmac xserver (it's old and crappy—guess what—and the developers swear at me for using it and telling other to try it), the Bash shell, the Linux kernel (got to compile the latest developmental version—if it compiles—so I have the latest and neatest drivers around), the quik bootloader, the bash shell, and the whole nine yards. I like it, and that's what I prefer to use—use whatever makes you happy.

It's the same way with cars. Give me a Plymouth or a Dodge, and I'll be happy. Chevy: Like a Rock, Ford: Like a Fascist Lover. Or politics: Them Devilworshipers (hint: the party I belong to). Drive a pickup truck, your a liberal sissy (hey, I drive a Plymouth Sundance, but I'm a liberal sissy and a broke college student). I can't help it if I'm a pissant liberal—that's how many family raised me.

So how did I get away from Linux? Well, it was kind of part by accident, part by choice, part by bad grades, and part because I was sick and tired of it. By the end of 2000, I want something real and substantive for and OS—Linux has one of those "Rebuilding Linux Signs" plastered all over it. It never was quite done—stable software had lots of hooks to nowhere, and unstable stuff, was buggy.

From Linux to Politics

But other things changed. I cared less about the code of the OS and new software, and more about the politics of the OS. Who can avoid the politics of Linux, with crazies (okay, programmers) like Stallman (give me free software or death), Raymond (the gun and free software nut), and Persens.

And there was Slashdot. This was the bad old days—before all the kiddies took it over. Or maybe we were all just kiddies back then—I don't know which was more true. It used to be a great place for Linux news—then it started to become more and more political—especially with tech columnist Jon Katz (who happens to have a summer house in Washington County). While I probably resent being associated with him nowdays, I found his earlier articles were better—or at least more touching to a 17 year old.

Jon probably demostrated what a truly irrational world we live in—the world of zero tolarance (in our schools), among other things. Oh and all the stuff with the Telecom Reform Act, among other laws that seemed like they would close down on the wild west—which the Internet was slowly, but surely moving away from.

I like the wild west attitudes of many places. Civilized means it's a boring place, something that done, something with layers of bueraucracy, and with a cop on every corner, just waiting to screw you over. That's probably were my love for Partridge Run, driving around the hill towns, the Easy Rider movie, my almost uniquivical support for agriculture (something I held in contempt for my high school life—because I hated that bastard in the ag dept) and so much more comes from. Oh, that and I'm 20 years old. Oh, on the same token, my opposition to Tech Valley and the burn barrel bill probably comes from the same place.

Oh, and I got disengaged with Linux, when I got into a disagreement over iMacLinux, and when I kept getting into messes with the new ext3 filesystem. My grandfather had altimizers diease, and was very nutty at home. It was tought time for me. When he died, I totally uninstalled Linux, and procceeded to distance myself from computer work. I was reading/had been reading books left and rigth on politics, and was taking some classes related to PoliSci at HVCC. I liked that better.

My parents pushed me into this direction, partly because of my wonderful Physics grades (in the D range—I struggled with the math) and my similar Pre-Calc grades. But I got an A in Statistics and A in College Alegebra and Trig. But college was different—homework didn't have to be done any specific night—and when things got tough—I could just hop in my Plymouth Sundance and drive out to Partridge Run, and get away.

From Computers to All He Wanted Was To Be Free Website

Well, this all isn't totally true. While reading all this stuff, and lots of news, I got lots of ideas, and I liked to write. From 1997-early 2002, I mainted the Troop 89 website, which used all kinds of neat HTML stuff to display scouting stuff (like frames, javascript, and later SSI). In 2001, I started my own little webpage project—actually it was part of a Computer project for High School—not a personal page (that was forbidden for the class project), but one on free speech issues.

That grew into the Barry Goldwater libertarianism-conservatism site, which became my homepage—the 'goldsite', about the time I graduated, and started partying. It was great, it was in part a response to the Easy Rider movie I recently saw—which probably changed my life more then anything else.

Easy Rider is more then a movie, it's a social statement. It has the same themes that have recurred throughout history, it's a struggle of a young generation, trying to find there way. It's about different lifestyles, and the attempt to be free. It's about being non-conventional, a reject, yet being very cool, oh, and selling acid to make your way. It put the countryside and nature in a totally different perspective, a totally new cretique for me. It also was the perfect theme to replace the dingy gold colors on my site, plus I got tired of libertarianism, which I found to be a front to corporate interests.

I moved away from Computers, but my site moved to HVCC, and grew. I had 200 MB of H: for my homepage—so I could put anything that I darned pleased on it—no fear of wasting space. It was free to do this, oh, and they probably weren't going to be censoring my content.

Of course, there was one hitch: they don't have SSI there. Which turned out not to be a bad thing—they had something far better—PHP. So I used PHP to include in text on my pages. Then, there was a 'news' posting script, that grew in complexity and power. I kept adding features—to the point where a little bit of text + my own simple markup, made really nicely formated news pages.

Once I mastered taking data in over web forms and writing files (at first this was a cut and paste job—don't tell webservices this—probably very insecure), I did bigger and badder things. I really digged PHP—I wrote a program that made a webpage out of grabbed WP cartoons (in violation of probably many copyright laws—but it was fairly well hidden), along with other content.

It grew and grew. And so did the PHP code and vistors. Last fall, my site was by far the most viewed student homepage on campus—pretty darn cool. This figuring that I had never taken a computer class in college, at all.

This spring I ported much of my web code back to SSI and Perl/CGI, to put on my ISP's server, at least until to the fall. I learned the ins and outs of perl in about 3 weeks—not bad at all. Of course my PHP knowledge helped, as did Comp Sci I. It will probably lose some vistors, but I'm graduating from HVCC, I have no choice but to do this.

Perl is nothing short of great—a few lines of code, and you've done some pretty neat stuff. There are libaries like crazy, which make programming a snap. This is what I also loved about PHP so much. Perl's default libraries are somewhat less substainal then PHP (especially for date manuplication), but they are much better for other things. Oh, and Perl runs on my PowerBook Duo, quite well, I might add.

I feel better now. This story is sort of how it was in short, but some of the details are out of order, or just totally left out. Maybe I should go back to Linux—that was good stuff there—well maybe someday, especially when I own my own computer—something better then an old PowerBook Duo 230. I want a pickup truck, among other things before then though. I'll go for a rusty old Dodge Ram over a computer with lots of ram. ;)