Today’s interview is with Angie Marshall. I think introductions here are pretty much uncalled for, so here we go:

• Who are you? What do you?

  Angie Marshall, Legal Assistant is my paying job, but I am a Farm wife, mother of 3, a knitter, a former quilter and a half-assed gardener. I have multiple knitting projects OTN currently, but most consistently, I knit socks.

• Merino or Blue Faced Leicester?

  Either is awesome, but I will admit a fondness for Merino.

• Lets talk about technology: What kind of technology do you use, and what’s the coolest thing that technology enables for you? What about your technology do you find frustrating?

  I use a palm centro for a phone, but alas, no interwebs connection from that. I like that it keeps my names/addresses/calendar at hand, but I am frustrated that i can’t create I have an iPod touch that 98% of the time I use to listen to inspirational speeches or podcasts or audio books. I have music on it, but… meh. I have Scrabble and Soduko applications on it and I love them. This iPod frustrates me because I cheaped out on it and didn’t get a big enough one so I am constantly juggling what gets put on it. I love my laptop, but wished the battery held more charge.

• Favorite book you’ve read in the last year? Runners up?

  Hanging my head in shame… the Twilight series. I listen to audiobooks mostly, but I did read those in real book form. I read for entertainment.

• Favorite Websites?

  Ravelry and Facebook.

• What do you think was the most important event of the last 15 years?

  The election of our current President.

• What do you think will be of the next 10?

  I look forward to our scientific minds developing a fuel source that doesn’t depend on foreign oil. I hope that we take the lessons learned from this last war and we return to a self-sufficiency mindset so that we never again make the mistake of sending our troups to war over oil. >

• One thing that you’re most looking forward to in the next year?

  Getting better control of my life, cutting back to a 4 day work week (affirming, affirming), vacation, knitting camp, fresh asparagas morel mushrooms

• One thing that you wish you could learn?

  Spanish, there is such a need for spanish speakers in all areas of employment. My French from long ago High School, just isn’t much help.

• Cats vs. Dogs?

  Cats in the house, Dogs outside. Nothing like a warm cat “spot” (or 2 or

  4. on a cold morning or a sick day.

• Where can we find more about you/your projects?

  Knit4Angine; The Grumpy Farmer but I don’t post much; perhaps this interview will goad me into posting a little more often.

The background:

• zonker on Selling vs. Shaming
• bkuhn on Denouncing vs. Advocating: In Defense of the Occasional Denouncement
• Various other conversations on identi.ca over the past few weeks.

In light of this debate I’ve been thinking about the role and manifestations of radicalism in the free software and open source world. I think a lot of people (unfairly, I think in many cases) equate dedication to the “Cause of Free Software,” as the refusal to use anything but free software, and the admonishment of those who do use “unpure” software. To my mind this is both unfair to Free Software as well as the radicals who work on free software projects and advocate for Free Software.

First, lets back up and talk about RMS¹. RMS is often held up as the straw man for “free software radicals.” RMS apparently (and I’d believe it) refuses to use software that isn’t free software. This is seen as being somewhat “monkish,” because doesn’t just involve using GNU/Linux on the desktop, but it also involves things like refusing to use the non-free software written for GNU/Linux, including Adobe’s Flash player, and various drivers. In short using the “free-only” stack of software is a somewhat archaic experience. The moderates say “who wants to use a computer which has been willfully broken because the software’s license is ideologically incompatible,” and the moderates come out looking rational and pragmatic.

Except that, as near as I can tell, while the refusal to use non-free software might be a bit traumatic for a new convert from the proprietary operating system world, for someone like RMS, it’s not a huge personal sacrifice. I don’t think I’m particularly “monkish” about my free software habits, and the only non-free software I use is the adobe flash player, and the non-open-source extensions to Sun’s Virtual Box. I’m pretty sure I don’t even need the binary blob stuff in the kernel. For me--and likely for RMS, and those of our ilk--sticking to the pure “free software” stuff works better and suits the way I enjoy working.²

In short, our ability to use free software exclusively, depends upon our habits and on the ways in which we use and interact with technology.

To my mind, the process by which the pragmatic approach to free software and open source radicalizes people like RMS, is terribly unproductive. While we can see that the moderates come away from this encounter looking more reasonable to the more conventional types in the software world, this is not a productive or useful discussion to entertain.

In any case I think there are a number of dimensions to the free software (and open source world,) that focusing on “how free your software” is distracts us from. Might it not be useful to think of a few other issues. They are, as follows:

1. Free software is about education, and ensuring that the users of technology can and do understand the implications of the technology that they use.

At least theoretically, one of the leading reasons why having “complete and corresponding source code” is so crucial to free software is that with the source code, users will be able to understand how their technology works.

Contemporary software is considerably more complex than the 70s vintage software that spurred the Free Software movement. Where one might have imagined being able to see, use, and helpfully modified an early version of a program like Emacs, today the source code for Emacs is eighty megabytes, to say nothing of the entire Linux Kernel. I think it’s absurd to suggest that “just looking at the source code” for a program will be educational in and of itself.

Having said that, I think free software can (and does) teach people a great deal about technology and software. People who use free software know more about technology. And it’s not just because people who are given to use free software are more computer literate, but rather using free software teaches people about technology. Arch Linux is a great example of this at a fairly high level, but I think there’s a way that Open Office Firefox plays a similar role for a more general audience.

2. There are a number of cases around free software where freedom--despite licensing choices--can be ambiguous. In these cases, particularly, it is important to think about the economics of software, not simply the state of the “ownership” of software.

I’m thinking about situations like the “re-licensing” such as that employed by MySQL AB/Sun/Oracle over the MySQL database. In these cases contributors assign copyright to the commercial owner of the software project on the condition that the code also be licensed under the terms of a license like the GPL. This way the owning copy has the ability to sell licenses to the project under terms that would be incompatible with the GPL. This includes adding proprietary features to the open source code that don’t get reincorporated into the mainline.

This “hybrid model” gives the company who owns the copyright a lot of power over the code base, that normal contributors simply don’t have. While this isn’t a tragedy, I think the current lack of certainty over the MySQL project should give people at least some pause before adopting this sort of business model.

While it might have once been possible to “judge a project by the license,” I think the issue of “Software Freedom” is in today’s world so much more complex, and I’m pretty sure that having some sort of economic understanding of the industry is crucial to figuring this out.

3. The success of free software may not be directly connected to the size of the userbase of free software

One thing that I think Zonker’s argument falls apart around is the idea that free software will only be successful if the entire world is using it. Wrong.

Lets take a project like Awesome. It’s a highly niche window manager for X11 that isn’t part of a Desktop Environment (e.g. GNOME/KDE/XFCE), and you have to know a thing or two about scripting and programing in order to get it to be usable. If there were much more than a thousand users in the world I’d be surprised. This accounts for a minuscule amount of the desktop window management market. Despite this, I think the Awesome project is wildly successful.

So what marks a successful free software project? A product that creates value in the world, by making people’s jobs easier and more efficient. A community that supports the developers and users of the software equally. Size helps for sure, particularly in that it disperses responsibility for the development of a project among a number of capable folks. However, the size of a projects userbase (or developer base) should not be the sole or even the most important quality by which we can judge success.

There are other issues which are important to think about and debate in the free software world. There are also some other instances where the “hard line” is over radicalized by a more moderate element, nevertheless I think this is a good place to stop for today, and I’m interested in getting some feedback from you all before I continue with this idea.

Onward and Upward!

When I want to install an application on a computer that I use, I open a terminal and type something to the effect of:

apt-get install rxvt-unicode

Which is a great little terminal emulator. I recommend it. Assuming I have a live interned connection, and the application I’m installing isn’t too large, a minute later or less I have whatever it is I asked for installed and ready to use (in most cases.)

Indeed this is the major feature of most Linux Distributions: their core technology and enterprise is to take all of the awesome software that’s out there (and there’s a lot of it,) and make it possible to install easily, to figure out what it depends on, and get it to compile safely and run on a whole host of machines. Although this isn’t the kind of thing that most people think when they’re choosing a distribution of Linux, one of the biggest differentiating features between distributions. But I digress.

I’ve written about package management here before, but to summarize:

1. We use package managers because many programs share dependencies, that we wouldn’t want to install twice or three times, but that we might not want to install by default with every installation of an operating system. Making sure that everything gets installed is important. This, is I think, a fairly unique-to-open-source problem, because in the proprietary system the dependencies are installed by default (as in there are more monolithic development environments, like .NET, Cocoa, and Java¹, and other older non-managed options).
2. One of the defining characteristics of open source software is the fact that it’s meant to be redistributed. Package management makes it easy to redistribute software, and provides real value for both the users of the operating system and for the upstream developers. Or so I’m lead to believe.

In the end, we’re back at the beginning where, you can install just about anything in the world if you know what the package is named, and the operating system will blithely keep everything up to date and maintained.²

While GNU/Linux systems get flack for not being as useable as proprietary operating systems, I see package management as this huge “killer feature” that open source systems have on top of proprietary system. We’ll never see something like apt-get for Windows not because it’s not good technology, but because it’s impossible to mange every component of the system and all of the software with a single tool.³

And then all these “App Store” things started popping up.

As I’ve thought about it, “App stores,” do the same thing for application delivery on non-GNU/* systems that package management does for open source systems. We’re seeing this sort of thing for various platforms from cell phones like the iPhone/Blackberry/Andriod to Inuit’s QuickBooks and even for more conventional platforms like Java.

Technically it’s a bit less interesting. App stores generally just receive and distribute compiled code,⁴ but from a social and user-centric perspective, the app store experience is really quite similar to the package management experience.

I’m surely not the only one to make this connection, but I’d be interesting to move past this and think about the kinds of technological progress that stem from this. App stores clearly provide value to users by making applications easier to find, and to developers who can spend less time distributing their software. Are there greater advancements to be made here? Is this always going to be platform specific, or might there be some other sort of curatorial mechanism that might add even more value in this space? And of course, how does Free Software persist and survive in this kind of environment?

I look forward to hearing from you.

A mostly technology-centric collection of links:

• Emacs starter configuration scripts. I can’t, for the life of me, recall why I went looking for this, but last week I ended up with a whole host of basic configuration files that people have published. I’ve thought about doing this for my own files, but I’ve not had it properly cleaned up and working in a non-embarrassing way in a while. Most of these are on github, which is a phenomena that could tolerate some investigation, but no matter. Here they are, linked to by screen name: ki, elq, jonshea, larrywright, defmacro (har, just got it), jmhodges, technomancy, markhepburn, and al3x. I’d love to collect more of these, so maybe comments or the cyborg wiki.

• Adjunct to that, a few more cool emacs and related links and points: First, paraedit which is a little tool which makes editing lisp easier, as well as an org-mode tip from Nathan Yergler about using org-rembmember with firefox and ubiquity. which might be of interest to some of you. I also have in the file [this link about yet another lisp dialect (yald?) called Lysp, but I don’t have much more than that. I, on the other hand will have more to say about this in the coming few weeks.

• My **friend Chris Fletcher discusses his experience with contemporary blogging services** in this post. I’m not sure. Right? I mean blogging is so different today than it was when I got into it. I remember when you handed FTP credentials to blogger so they could publish your blog with their system to your site. Surely people don’t do that anymore. One of the things that I noticed at Podcamp (more on that on another post) that, frankly horrified me a bit, was that there was a whole class of bloggers who wanted to do “this thing,” but they had no interest in running their own website or making that investment of time and energy.

  And maybe that’s what blogging has become. In a lot of ways doing a blog is something anyone can do pretty easily, and having a website is no longer a big part of participating in this discourse. While I’m a big fan of independence, and I don’t think the technological burden is that high. “Doing websites,” very much made me the geek I am today, so I’m not sure. Having said that, LiveJournal has never easily fit into a niche: It was blogging before there was blogging. It was social networking before we said that. It was subculture/niche before that became the thing. If I had more time in my life I’d figure out some way to study and capture that history.

• For all of you OS X Desktop User Interaction Geeks, there’s this thing that lets you hide unused windows baked into the window manager. I think. I have access to OS X, but I don’t really use it enough to give this a try. GNU Screen and lots (and lots) of Emacs buffers make it possible to keep a lot of irons on the fire without getting distracted.

• A **good example of a zshrc** file if that’s your thing. I think it’s my thing. Alas. I’ll write more about this once I get more used to it and figure some things out. Mostly, I’m finding that one can use it as a pure superset of bash without ill effect.

It’s been a while since I’ve written a status update, but I think I’ve been up to a few things which haven’t managed to work their way onto the site, so I think I’ll collect them all here, in a sort of “state of the tycho” report.

• I’ve gotten more into the shape note singing. I went to the New York State Sacred Harp Convention in Cambridge New York and had a blast. I’ve written here before about this, and I don’t know how much I can really add to that. I’m continuing to be impressed by all of the young people who are into Shape Note. A fair number younger than me (though not by much). It’s strange to have acquired another hobby that takes even more time that I don’t really feel like I have; however, it’s a blast, and I feel like it’s a good thing in my life.
• I’ve made a number of post collections" for the tychoish site), which provide an overview of posts on a number of subjects that aren’t generated by some sort of tagging system, nor are they comprehensive. Rather, they represent a hand picked collection of topics that I’ve covered in some depth and the posts that best exemplify these subject areas. I expect this list to grow and shift slightly, but for the moment we have:
  • Cooperative Economics
  • Lists
  • New Media and Blogging
  • Technology Futurism

I hope you find these archives useful. If you have a suggestion for another topic or theme, or additional posts that you think might work well in one of these posts, do feel free to touch base with me about this.

• The job. I’ve not written here a great deal about my job or my move in late June across the country. I figure I write a lot about work things most of the day anyway. Having said that, I know at least a couple c-workers (Hi M.G. & S.S.) and other work-related folks read this, so it’s no great secret. Some brief reflection:

  It’s going well. My team, such as it is, has sort of found a rhythm that works for us, our project progresses, and even though it always feels like I’ve written to the end of the subject matter at hand, there’s always seems to be something captivating “up next to write about.

  And I get to work with and write about free software stuff with a bunch of geeks. I’m learn stuff about writing all the time somehow, and while I think I probably work a bit too much (or so the cats seem to think) it’s going well.

• The Cyborg Institute is a project that I need to figure out how to do better. I think having it as a “blog” was the wrong thing to do, an I’m glad I’ve stopped doing that. I started it when I was in a much different place in so many of my projects. It was long before I started the job, I was writing about different things on the tychoish blog, and a million things. Now, things are different, and I need to figure out a better way of doing things. Having said that, things haven’t been completely dead… News forthcoming.

• We’re approaching the beginning of November, when I said in a previous post that I wanted to finish the novel I was working on by then. Well that didn’t happen. Not only did it not happen, but I didn’t even manage to finish the blasted scene that I’ve been working on for a while. Having said that, I have made progress (on that scene), and I have a passable plan for finishing the last of the novel. So that’s a good thing.

• I gave up the ghost on my somewhat aged “frankenbuntu” (eg. a quirky variant of Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty) installation on my laptop, and installed Arch Linux on the laptop. I’ve been remarkably pleased with this. There are quirks, but lord were there quirks on the old installation. I’m happy with the outcome, and I’ve basically switched to using this machine as my primary computer.

Here’s another interview for the interview series file. Enjoy!

• Who are you? What do you?

I’ve had lots of jobs, but at the moment I only have three: running a folk club, host= ing a radio show, and teaching ballad-singing at the Folk School. Two of these are volunteer jobs. I am also a 40/50-hour per week babysitter for my 2-year-old grandson and adult in charge at my house. I have recently acquired a sewing machine and a few art supplies, and got my concertina back from a friend who borrowed it; the projects, they will come.

Ongoing activities for years include folk dancing, especially Border Morris. I have been dancing, I reckon, for roughly 51 years. Singing, roughly 60; collecting songs maybe 53. Reading, since before I started school. (I read history, detective stories, and Kipling, mostly. I will also pick up= anything by Terry Pratchett, and have only been disappointed once there. I like Shakespeare, don’t care for Thomas Hardy or most poetry.)

Things I can do well enough to have made money at, either occasionally or on a regular basis: Drawing and painting. Sewing in a pants factory. General assistance in a doctor’s office. Singing. Belly-dancing. Salesclerk-type selling: candy, pictures and mirrors. Writing. Teaching mentally ill and/or learning disabled children. All these jobs have their ups and downs.

As for Intellectual stuff: I admire but do not have the temperament for heavy-duty intellectualism: teaching has made my natural instinct for pragmatism even stronger, and too much nitpicky defining and speculation becomes boring to= me fairly quickly. Also there is a heavy-handedness that goes with too muc= h categorizing; I like exceptions to rules.

• Jet Packs or Hovercars?

  They both sound like fun!

• Lets talk about technology: What kind of technology do you use, and what’s the coolest thing that technology enables for you? What about your technology do you find frustrating?

  I am a fairly backward person technology-wise: I’d say things like “the wheel” or maybe “cars” or “dishwashers” here. And I do like my computer. I also like binoculars. And shoes that actual ly fit your feet, that’s technology. Digital cameras have proved convenient but slightly disappointing: they don’t move fast enough. Cellphones are a mixed blessing too: they always need charging, and people expect you to HAVE one.

• Favorite song at the moment? Tune? Who are the runners up?

  Song, at the moment: Dick Gaughan singing “Fair Flooer of Northumberland” or Louis Killen singing “April Morning.” or Peter Bellamy singing “We Have Fed Our Sea,” or Pete Morton singing “Another Train.”

  Tune: “Orange in Bloom/Sherbourne Waltz,” and there are millions of runners-up. I like shapenote hymns when someone else is singing them, but am too much of an anarchist to like following dots myself. Plus I am rather surly about church, and all the praise-the-Lord-ing gets to me sometimes. There is no why; there usually isn’t, with what I like. I could come up with one if I tried, but I am not by na= ture very introspective.

• Favorite Website?

  Wikipedia, for one. YouTube. Gutenberg Press. Sky and Telescope. Amazon.

• What do you think was the most important event of the last 15 years?

  The ongoing growth of the Internet--a new Wild West. :D

• One thing that you’re most looking forward to in the next year?

  Reclaiming a few lost skills (see the first question)

• One thing that you wish you could learn?

  Gardening. Actually, I’m not sure “wish” is the correct word: if I want to know something I can get a fair start on doing it. But I do intend to try my hand at making a proper garden next spring.

• Doctor Who v. Red Dwarf?

  Dr. Who: mostly because I’ve never seen Red Dwarf but maybe once…

• Where can we find more about you/your projects?

  The Focal Point; The LiveJournal; Folk School, or by asking me!

I wrote a post for the Cyborg Institute several weeks ago about the idea of “Reusable Software”, and I’ve thought for a while that it deserved a bit more attention. The first time around, I concentrated a lot about the idea of reusable software in the context of the kinds of computing that people like you and me do on a day to day basis. I was trying to think about the way we interact with computers and how this has changed in the last 30 years (or so) and how we might expect for this to change soon.

Well that was the attempt at any rate. I’m not sure how close I got to that.

More recently, I’ve been thinking about the plight of reusable software in the context of “bigger scale” information technology. I’d say this fits into my larger series of technology futurism posts, except that this is very much a work of presentism. So be it.

To back up for a moment I think we can summarize the argument against reusable software, which boils down to a couple of points:

1. With widely reusable software, most of the people who use computers on a regular basis can pretty much avoid ever having to write software. While it’s probably true most people end up doing a very small amount of programming without realizing it, gone are the days when using a computer meant that you had to know how to program it. While more people can slip into using computers than ever before, the argument is that people aren’t as good at using computers because they don’t know how they work as well.

Arguably this trend is one of the harbingers of the singularity, but that’s an aside.

2. Widely reusable software is often less good software than the single-use, or single-purpose stuff. When software doesn’t need to be reused, it only needs to do the exact things you need it to do well and can be optimized, tuned, and designed to fit into a single person’s or organization’s work-flow. When developers know that they’re developing a reusable application, they have to take into account possible variances in the environments where it will be deployed, a host of possible supported and unsupported uses. They have to design a feature set for a normalized population, and the end result is simply lower quality software.

So with the above rattling around in my head, I’ve been asking:

• Are web applications, which are deployed centrally and often only on one machine (or a small cluster of machines), the beginning of a return to single use applications? Particularly since the specific economic goals of the sponsoring organization/company is often quite tightly coupled with the code itself?
• One of the leading reasons that people give for avoiding open source release is embarrassment at the code base. While many would argue that this is avoidance of one sort or another, and it might be, I think it’s probably also true more often than not. I’m interested in thinking about what the impact of the open source movement’s focus on source code has had on the development of single use code versus multi use code in the larger scope.
• What do we see people doing with web application frameworks in terms of code reuse? For starters, the frameworks themselves are all about code reuse and bout providing some basic tools to prevent developers from recreating the wheel over and over again. But then, the applications are (within some basic limitations) wildly different from each other and highly un-reusable.

Having said that, Rails/Django/Drupal sites suffer from poor performance in particularly high-volume situations for two reasons: Firstly, it’s possible to strangle yourself in database queries in the attempt to do something that you’d never do if you had to write the queries yourself. Secondly the frameworks are optimized to save developers time, rather than run blindingly fast on very little memory.

I suppose if I had the answers I wouldn’t be writing this here blog, but I think the questions are more interesting anyways, and besides, I bet you all know what I think about this stuff. Do be in touch with your questions and answers.

Onwards and Upwards!

As I said in “The Odd Cyborg Out,” I’m thinking of giving StumpWM a run. So I did some musing about tiling window managers, because I am who I am. Here goes,

So, like I said, I’ve been tinkering a very little with StumpWM, and I thought some background might be useful. For those of you who aren’t familiar, StumpWM is another tiling window manager, like my old standard Awesome, except Stump is written in Common Lisp, and is descended from different origins from Awesome. Here’s the history as I understand it.

The History of Tiling Window Managers

There was (and is,) this very minimalist tiling window manager called dwm which is written in less than 2000 lines of code, and is only configurable by modifying the original C code and then recompiling. It’s intentionally elitist, and targeted at a very high level of user. While this is ok, particularly given the niche that are likely to want to use tiling window managers, there were a lot of people who wanted very different things from dwm. In a familiar story to those of us who follow free software and open source development: lots of people started maintaining and sharing patch-sets for DWM. These added additional functionality like easier configuration tools, integration with menus, notification libraries, theeing support, API hooks, and the rest is history.

Fast-forwarding a bit, these patch-sets inspired a number of forks, clones, and children projects. DWM was great (so I hear) if you were into it, but I think the consensus is that even if you were geeky/dweeby enough for it, it required a lot of attention and work to get it to be really useable in a day-to-day sort of way. As a result we see things like Awesome, which began life as a fork of DWM with some configuration options, and has grown into it’s own project “in the tradition of dwm.” dwm is also a leading inpsiration for projects like Xmonad, which is a re-implementation of dwm in the Haskell programing language with some added features around extension and configuration options.

This default configuration problem is something of an issue in the tiling window manager space, that I might need to return to in a later post. In any case…

Stump, by contrast has nothing (really) to do with dwm, except that they take a similar sort of approach to the “window management” problem which is to say that window behavior in both are highly structured and efficient. They tiling windows to use the whole screen and focus on a user experience which is highly keyboard driven operation. Stump, like xmonad, is designed to use one language exclusively for both the core program, the configuration, and the extension of the environment.

And, as I touched on in my last post on the subject I’m kind of enamored with lisp, and it clicks in my head. I don’t think that I “chose wrong” with regards to Awesome, or that I’ve wasted a bunch of time with Awesome. Frankly, I think I’m pretty likely to remain involved with the project, but I think I’m a very different computer user--Cyborg--today than I was back then, and one of the things that I’ve discovered since I started using Awesome has been emacs and Lisp.

My History with Awesome

Lets talk a little bit more about Awesome though. Awesome is the thing that set me along the path to being a full-time GNU/Linux user. I found the tiling window manager paradigm the perfect thing that lets me concentrate on the parts of my projects that are important and not get hung up on the distractions of organizing windows, and all of the “mouse stuff” that took too much of my brain time. I started playing around in a VM on my old Macbook and I found that I just got things accomplished there somehow. And the more I played with things the more I got into it, and the rest is history.

When I finally gave up the mac, however, I realized that my flirtation with vim wasn’t going to cut it, and I sort of fell down the emacs rabbit hole, which makes sense--in retrospect--given my temperament and the kind of work that I do, but none the less here I am. While Awesome is something that I’m comfortable with and that has severed me quite well, there are a number of inspirations for my switch. Some of them have to do with Awesome itself, but most of them have to do with me:

• I want to learn Common Lisp. While I know that emacs' lisp, and Common Lisp aren’t the same there are similarities, and Lua was something that I’ve put up with and avoided a lot while using Awesome. Its not that Lua is hard, quite the opposite, it’s just that I don’t have much use for it in any other context, and while I know enough to make awesome really work for me, my configuration is incredibly boring.

  Not that I think Common Lisp is exactly the kind of thing that is going to be incredibly useful to me in my career in the future, but like I said: I like the way Lisp makes me think, and it’s a language that can be used for production-grade types of things, and it’s a standard, it’s not explained from a math-centric¹ perspective, and like I said reading lisp code makes sense to me. Go figure.

• There are several of quirks with Awesome which get to me:

• If you change your configuration, you have to restart the window manager. Which wouldn’t be a big problem except…

• When you restart, if you have a window that appears in more than one tag, the window only appears on one tag.

• The commands for awesome are by default pretty “vimmy,” and while my current config has been properly “emacsified,” you have to do a lot of ugliness to get emacs-style chords (e.g. “C-x C-r o a f” or Control-x, Control-R, followed by o, a, and f.) which I kind of like.)

• Because one of my primary environments is running a virtual machine (in Virtual Box) on an OS X host, I’ve run into some problems around using the Command/Windows/Mod4 key, and there’s no really good way to get around this in awesome.

So that’s my beef, along with the change in usage pattern that I talked about last time, which is probably the biggest single factor. I’m not terribly familiar with Stump yet, so I don’t have a lot to offer in terms of thoughts, but I’ve been tinkering in the laptop, and it fits my brain, which is rather nice. I’ll post more as I progress. For now I think I better cut this off.