OVERHEARD: BEER-WARE

As a developer of software code, I'm always grappling with issues of what licensing scheme to release my code under. (Thanks tort-lawyers!) Here's the latest candidate:

/*
 * ------------------------------------------
 * "THE BEER-WARE LICENSE" (Revision 42):
 * <phk@FreeBSD.ORG> wrote this file.
 * As long as you retain this notice you
 * can do whatever you want with this stuff.
 * If we meet some day, and you think
 * this stuff is worth it, you can buy
 * me a beer in return.   Poul-Henning Kamp
 * ------------------------------------------
 */

hat tip: Jesse

FOF

My good friend Steve recently started experimenting with the built in RSS reader in the Thunderbird Mail client and asked me to recommend some good feeds for him to subscribe to. I scanned through the list of feeds I check daily and culled a few I thought he'd be interested in. I left out poliblogs and milblogs on the assumption that he wouldn't be interested. (We are on opposite sides of the electoral divide.) For the record, I use and recommend the Sage feed reader extension for Firefox, although the beta of Onfolio 2.0 looks promising and works in both Firefox and Internet Explorer. Be forewarned, though, Onfolio is Windows only and requires the installation of .Net runtimes, which can be a hefty download. In case you are anything  like me and enjoy a daily digest of technofocused conversation sprinkled with topicality and philosophy, here's the list I sent Steve:

Slashdot: http://slashdot.org/index.rss
Ars Technica: http://arstechnica.com/news/rss2.0.rdf
my work blog: http://ksnet.unfpa.org/jake/devblog.nsf/stories.rss
my personal blog: http://gimleteyes.blogspot.com/atom.xml
Kathleen's blog: http://www.dirtyfez.com/rss.xml (former associate and current personal friend -she's a very good writer)
Jon Udell: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/rss.xml (smart guy, always has something clever to say)
Ned Batchelder: http://www.nedbatchelder.com/blog/rss.xml (former Loti, also smart & interesting)
Jeremy Zawodny: http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/rss2.xml (developer extraordinaire at Yahoo, big LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) advocate
Iraq the Model: http://feeds.feedburner.com/IraqTheModel (three brothers living in Iraq)
Gizmodo: http://www.gizmodo.net/index.xml (the gadget's weblog)
Mozillazine: http://mozillazine.org/contents.rdf
Mozillazine feedhouse: http://feedhouse.mozillazine.org/rss20.xml (clearinghouse for all Mozilla related blogs)

FOF = feed of feeds

THANKS

Sometimes I need to remind myself that I have a lot to be thankful for. Today is the seventh day of Chanukkah and Lorraine & I just returned from her sister's second son's bris. All went well and mother, child (not to mention father, grandparents and assorted aunts and uncles) are fine. Lorraine barrels along in to her ninth month and we excitedly anticipate our family's pending expansion by 50%. I am thankful for all of this, which was barely conceivable to me a little over a year ago. My two best friends, Manny and Chuck, also got married recently, making this a most auspicious year for the three of us. I continue to find happiness and intellectual stimulation in my chosen profession, which is all I can really ask for besides enough compensation to live on. My car works, my apartment has heat and my new laptop is in the mail.

Happy and healthy Holiday season and New Year to all. (Rather, Wendy, the only other known reader of this blog.)

P.S. Friedman gets it right for the first time in awhile (IMHO.)

OFFICE SPACE

For fans of Office Space. Here's the Bill Lumbergh sound board!

Hat tip: Paul Katcher