Alternate titles for this post include, “Depending on When You Start Counting,” and “Happy New Year.”

I must confess that I don’t do holiday’s very well. It’s not that I’m a huge curmudgeon (though I probably am) or that I don’t like celebrations (though I don’t much.) More, I think it’s that I’m mostly a homebody, and given the option, will in most cases, choose to spend any given evening at home writing and hanging out with the cats. Furthermore, I’m generally of the opinion that formal excuses are not needed for spending time with your friends and family. Nevertheless there is a certain sort of cultural momentum around holidays like New Years, and its hard to avoid them entirely.

For many years, my annual cycle has largely been on the academic calendar. Indeed for a few years after I graduated formally, I still took a few classes, and was wrapped up in applying for graduate school and enough of my friends were still in school that I seemed to stay on the academic year. This year with, I noted the beginning of the academic year, mostly because for the first time, really the first time in a long time I wasn’t in school, I wasn’t trying to be in school, and that wasn’t a bad thing. I still have a lot of academic habits: the impulse to review and summarize my work about every four months, the way I stricture and organize my work is very reminiscent of a sort of academic way of looking at things. Shrug.

But it’s a new year, depending on when you start counting, and given what a ride 2009 was, it seems like a bit of reflection is in order. The most significant thing was the fact that I took a job half way across the country and moved in late June. This has lead to a number of interesting developments: I met a number of people in “real life” who had previously been on-line friends, I’ve learned a lot about my skills and abilities and myself as a writer, I’ve developed a circle of friends that delight me.

This isn’t to say that it was a stellar year. I spent six months not working (really,) and a lot of time unsure about what I was going to do for work, let alone “my career,” all my friends were in graduate school and most of them weren’t anywhere near where I was, and so forth.

But I kept, hacking away at various projects, kept thinking and writing about new things, and did my best to seize opportunities when they arose. And somehow it all worked out. In retrospect it’s all very weird, to think how monumental this year has been, and the ways that I’ve really pushed myself to do things that don’t seem very “me” like. In the end I’m pleased with where I am and where I’ve come.

But perhaps, more significantly, I’m excited to what the next year holds.

As it should be, I suppose. I hope you all are doing well in this regard and I look forward to talking with you throughout the year to come.

I fear I’ve been posting too many posts in the vein of “so here’s what I’m up to folks,” rather than you know writing about things that may be interesting to folks out there in Internet land. Nevertheless, here’s another slightly more technical post.

I’ve mentioned in passing a few times over the past few months that:

• I’ve been interested in shifting to Arch Linux. While I’ve been running Arch in a VM on my work desktop, I have been quite slow to move additional machines over to Arch. It’s not for lack of wanting, but I have a hard time disrupting something that works when it’s already working.
• Also on the software front, I’ve switched to using the Stump Window Manger, and while I’ve talked a bit about this on the blog, I’ve done virtually no reporting of my ongoing progress with this.
• I missed the days when I only had one computer and it went everywhere with me. While I like having all this computing possibility around, I’m moving around enough these days that it doesn’t make sense to be tied down to a desktop. I like sitting on the couch and writing, and I like being able to go off for a weekend and be able to work on the projects that I really need/want to work on. That’s hard when you have a desk and an “office.”

This post provides updates with regards to these subjects.

Moving to Arch Linux and StumpWM

A few weeks ago, I had this massive cascade of software issues. Mostly things were provoked by the switch to Stump. Basically, the issue was that Stump wasn’t embedded in all of the desktop frameworks that are so popular these days, there were a number of system resources that just didn’t work with the new Window Manager.

The thing was that my systems were running a terribly hacked up version of Ubuntu. I was running weird kernels, I’d mostly given up on the display managers, and the systems were just messy. So the problem wasn’t so much with Stump, as it was with the way that Ubuntu packages and manages certain aspects of the system inside of desktop functionality. I’m thinking specifically of the ways that networking and sound are managed by dbus. If that didn’t make sense to you, don’t worry.

Since the chief problem boiled down to “this system is too complex for me to be able to manage,” and it no longer became an effective use of my time to maintain the system as it was… I wiped everything and finally put Arch on the laptop.

And it went on smoothly, and everything worked. Arch is a tinkerers distribution, there’s no doubt about that. Since I did have Arch experience it wasn’t a terribly traumatic experience. It took a little while to figure out how to make Suspend and Resume work (i.e. for the laptop when the lid closes,) and manually managing network connections isn’t incredibly straightforward until you get the hang of it, but it all works now. And I couldn’t be happier

The Experience of StumpWM

This isn’t really a full report, but more a note to say that my brain has really adapted to Stump, and I’m quite happy with the experience. Stump doesn’t in and of itself increase the ways I’m able to be productive, but… I do think that I work more efficiently when using Stump.

There’s still a lot left to be done with regards to the tweaking of stump for me. I need to play some more with the MPD (music player) integration, and there are a number of other contributed Lisp packages that I really want to play with. Also, I finally figured out how the Key Binding Map works when I had gotten my basic keybidning needs taken care of and I haven’t touched it since then. Now I know how I use the system and I’m ready to tweak things again, but I haven’t gotten around to it.

Additional thoughts regarding Stump, from a more “objective” perspective: it is incredibly stable, and while it’s not blindingly lightweight, it lives in 20 megs of ram and that’s about it. I never need to restart the window manager or X anymore, and that’s kind of nice.

So in short, the Stump WM is a great thing and I need to write a bit more about the actual using of it. But first I need to do a little more tinkering. Because I’m like that.

The Consolidation of the Gear and Laptops

What a strange heading. In any case. I gave in and bought a new laptop, last week. I found a great deal on a used Lenovo x200 with great specs, and I thought that it would solve the majority of my issues with my existing technology.

First, it was considerably newer than the laptop I have been using for most of the past year: more RAM, dual core system, bigger and faster hard drive. Second, it had all of the qualities of the old laptop that I adored: it’s a 12" laptop which means very portable without making sacrifices, and it forgoes a trackpad for a “ThinkPad Nipple” for a mouse. Finally (and perhaps most importantly,) the screen resolution is 1200x800 (up from 1024×768) which makes it possible to comfortably tile two windows next to each-other at once. This is the same resolution as my 15" PowerBook G4 (and I think all of the 13 inch MacBooks). It’s a good size, and I was really aching for the increased screen space.

It turns out that all of these concerns were addressed fully with this new system. The screen is perfect, it’s peppy. it’s also nice to return to the modern computing world. I continue to be mightily impressed with the build quality, design, and functionality of IBM/Lenovo hardware.

My computer consolidation isn’t yet complete: my desktop hasn’t yet been backed up and converted to Arch, but it’s getting there. I’m also not quite sure what happens with the old laptop. I’m thinking of keeping it around as a spare, but if anyone has a need for a really awesome ThinkPad x41 they should be in touch.

Onward and Upward!

It’s been a while since I’ve written about what I’m working on, so I wanted to write up a little post on the subject. Just to keep myself honest.

• Last time I did this, I tried to promise myself that I’d get a draft the novel I’m working on done by the beginning of November in time for me to not do the NaNoWriMo project--as is my custom. That isn’t going to happen.

  I have, however, begun to stub out three files which will form the core of the remainder of the book. I have the very end of the biggest section of chapter eight, and then four more chapters. The plan is to write what feels more like four short stories with four or five adjoining little scenes. I’m not sure that this will seem all that different from the outside when I’m done, but I think this change in plan will make things easier to write.

  This project is one that I both adore, and am pretty pleased with (at least at the moment,) but I’m also keenly aware that I need to be done with it, and I need to move on, as it’s been in progress for more than a year, and none of my reasons for not finishing it yet are very good.

• I’ve been slowly working on a knitting project. A sweater knit at a fairly fine gauge, and incredibly plain. I’m happy with the project but I’ve pretty much given up entirely on Television watching, and as a result haven’t found a lot of time to do knitting on a regular basis. I knit during a meeting, and for a few moments here and there during a couple of social interludes, but haven’t really gotten into it. It’s going well, and I’ve got about 9 inches done of the body. 7 more till the armhole shaping begins.

• I’m continuing to do the contra dance and shape note things. I think the shape note experience has been helpful for the way that I understand and participate in music, and that’s a good thing indeed. I’ve picked up a few new contra dance things, though if a given week is busy, contra dancing tends to be the first thing to disappear. I’m okay with that. I’ve also taken to going for walks in the morning before work, rather than in the evening, which is, I think better for my mind during the day at work, and also for getting work done on projects in the evening.

• It seems like there’s always something else in the project of “getting your technology to work the way it ought to,” and as a result it seems like I always have something to hack upon. With my laptop running the right operating system, and doing so pretty well, the list of things to hack on have cleared up significantly. I have a desktop that I’m not using as well as I could. There’s always something else to work on with regards to my writing setup, though that’s mostly abated for the moment. I really need to find some better way to read RSS feeds. I have some hacking to do with regards to websites. There’s always something to work on, I suppose.

Oh, and I’m working a lot, but then that’s how it goes. The work projects are actually pretty fun, and they’re going well, so that’s good. If only there were more hours in the day.

Cheers!

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.

I’ve been talking with people recently about “what I’m working on,” and I’ve realized two things. First, that I’m beginning to get spread thin; and second, that I haven’t really used this blog as an effective tool to track these projects and facilitate ongoing work on these projects. So I’m going to write an “ongoing projects update.” So there.

While I don’t think there’s sense in making this a “weekly feature” I think taking the opportunity to check in with you all about my projects, to mention cool things that are going on with these projects.

1. The Novel

I’ve not managed to make this into the habit that I want it to be. Having totally missed my goal of finishing the draft in August, I’ve set a more tentative goal of getting it done in time for NaNoWriMo this year. I don’t know if I’ll do a NaNo project this year--probably not, I’m too contrary--but it seems like a good and doable goal.

What has me hung up at the moment, is I have a few scenes that I need to be written by a particular character that I’ve come to despise, not because he’s a bad character, I just find him frustrating to write. This is mostly interesting, insofar as I initially thought that he’d be the easy character to write in the story.

Despite this hang up, I’m really quite close to being done with this monster. Three or four more chapters, and some editing across the board. Not a huge deal. I just need to do it. That’s a lot of what this Labor Day weekend has been about.

2. This Blog

You’re all aware of this project, I trust. I’ve been able to keep up my “mostly daily” schedule for a long time now. Two or three years and counting. Since I’ve started the new job, and since my posting entries (if not actually writing them,) is a manual task (with Wordpress, I could queue things to Autopost). I’m not as good as I once was about getting entries posted in the morning as I would like to be. But it gets there.

Also, while I’m not cruising toward the A-List like I might have dreamed about when I was a teenager and getting started with this whole blogging thing, I’m actually pretty pleased with how this blog is going. Most entries evoke some sort of response that I see: on identi.ca, on facebook, or in comments. I get to have cool email conversations with you all. I’m pretty pleased. I’m still trying to figure out how to do a little better, because I think it’ll be awesome for all of us, if there are more voices and conversations going on, but I love blogging, and I’m really pleased with this project.

3. Cyborg Institute and Sygn System

This is the project that I’ve started with deepspawn, to create a distributed social networking and “user generated database engine.” Notes and other work related to this project are starting to come together on the Cyobrg Institute Wiki, and it’s something that I put a lot of work into a few weeks ago, but I haven’t really given it the kind of love in the past two weeks that its needed.

My list at the moment, for Sygn related projects is to do some reorganization of the wiki (the constant struggle), to announce and promote the xmpp muc for the sygn project (a chat room), to help people develop a basic reference implementation (and maybe learn some Python in the process?), and generate a few more use cases, to help folks understand the implications and possible utility of the project.

4. Cyborg Institute Systems Administration

One of my contentions about the future (of technology specifically, but I think it’s generalizable to some extent) is that as “previously scarce resources” like data connectivity, storage space, and software, become less scarce, the one thing that will continue to have concrete value is systems administration. Having people in the world who are really good at keeping larger systems running, at making sure all of the pieces talk to each-other, at making sure the people who need technological services have the right kind of service that they need. There’s real value in that.

And that’s a huge part of what the “Cyborg Institute” project is about. Sure there’s a lot of cyborg-related content and theorizing that I’m interested in working and developing, but really I can do that here on tychoish, what Cyborg Institute lets me (and you!) do is make this conversation much larger, it lets us work together and it allows me to help people do awesome things.

While the product of this work isn’t particularly visible, and I don’t really have the ability to say “I did X, Y, and Z for CI” this week, there are a lot of little things, and I think it’s definitely a worthwhile project.

5. `Critical Futures <http://criticalfutures.com>`_ `Relaunch <http://wiki.criticalfutures.com/>`_

This is definitely a Cyborg Institute project: it’s running on CI servers, we’re using CI tools, and I think the project--a collaborative fiction wiki--is very much one of these new technology-things that makes the whole “cyborg moment” so interesting.

I should point out that [brush][] is largely spearheading this. I’m just doing a bit here and there, and making sure the system runs well. I’m excited about this, and I’m glad that Critical Futures is going to get some love. There’ll be some other projects of mone--the novel, and so forth--on Critical Futures as well someday, but that’s down the road I think. Good to do something here, no?

6. Knitting

I think it’s a good day when you can be like “You know tycho, you should watch more TV.” my current knitting project is very much a “do it whilst watching television” kind of project, and I’d very much like to be able to create a space in my day(s) to get more work on this done.

That seems about good for now. What are you working on? :)

• Monday morning, before I left St. Louis, the trash truck or something took out the phone line behind the house. The phone line which carries the internet. Sigh. So while I’ve been driving and have been somewhat out of touch, by the nature of this whole process, the fact that the internet died didn’t help things. Sorry for the lack of posts.
• The midwest (particular the northern and parts that I’m most familiar) is, on the whole, incredibly boring to drive through. Not stunningly boring, but not that bad. By the time you get to eastern Ohio, however, things start to get interesting. The miles and miles of corn fields interspersed with the lone standing tree and occasional soybean crop--you know you’re in trouble when soybeans come as a refreshing change of pace--were replaced with rolling hills, mountains, and the like.

To make up for this, however, it did seem that they were doing a lot of construction/road repair for very little improvement. Parts of the eastern edge of the turnpike were actually pretty good: modern, pretty wide, in good repair; other parts, not so much.

Although, to be sure, heading east was much better than heading west. Better to get the bland out of the way first, and have something interesting at the end.

• I met Chris for the first time, in the flesh. Dude. This requires it’s own sublist:

1. I think the common perception is that things that happen in meatspace are somehow more authentic, and meaningful, and “real” than conversations that happen on line, and often I’d agree. While I’m certainly not complaining about the real-life experience, I do think that there are some distinct disadvantages:

   It’s hard to share links in meatspace, and so “hey I was reading this thing, here’s a link, and I thought that it was nifty and has implications for ____” becomes, not a stepping stone for another thought, but an exercise in “hell, I read something not that long ago and thought it seemed relevant.

   Chris and I tend to have these interleaved conversations where we’ll sort of drift through a few topics at once, and because at least in an ephemeral sort of way chats are logged, it’s hard to interrupt the other person, even if there are a couple of threads of quasi-related material on the table at once. Without the benefit of a running transcript you have to remember more and that’s weird, or at least it feels weird in this context. I’ll adjust I’m sure.

2. On the whole, he is (and the occasion was) pretty much what I expected. I’ve had this theory about “how people turn out to really be in reality versus how they seem online,” which is that after enough time (months/years) it’s pretty hard to maintain any sort of ruse or false facade. Sure, people lie, and people lie in real life, but those amount to little surprises. Big surprises? Unlikely. That held true.

   The cats have been reasonably cooperative. They’re sort of scared of the outside, and were made nervous by the whole experience. Thankfully their response was to cower/sleep in the carrier and not make a lot of noise. I’m leaving them with M.N. in Philadelphia for a night or two while I secure digs for us in New Jersey.

   M.N. and I will have a couple of opportunities this weekend to do shape note singing. Woot!

   It’s nice to know that summer, even early summer, isn’t quite as brutal everywhere as it is in St. Louis (or the other places where I’ve (semi)recently spent my summers: Kansas City, Nashville, and St. Louis of course.) Between that and the Wisconsin winter tolerance, which hasn’t yet worn off, I think I have a freakishly broad temperature tolerance.

   Eastern time is weird. Though, at least for a little while, I like it because it sort of means that my body doesn’t quite get that it’s daylight savings time. And there are very few things that I hate more than daylight savings time.

And I think, that’s all the news that’s fit to print.

Edited to add: I’m going to continue such musing regarding my current state over on my live journal which seems the more appropriate venue for this kind of blathering. Real post tomorrow. I swear.

Deep Breath.

I have news for you all which I hope will explain my absence for the past 10 or 15 days. Actually I’m surprised that it’s only been 10 or 15 days, as it feels so much longer. Anyway, enough suspense:

I’ve accepted a position with Linode to work on (primarily) a really cool technical writing project. You can see the announcement here.

This is really awesome because:

• It’s a job. Writing. About Linux, and Web Servers, and Free Software/Open Source.
• Linode rocks. I applied for the job somewhat before I bought a linode, and I’ve been nothing but pleased with the service which has worked flawlessly for me so far. The best part, is I think that Linode’s approach to technology, to using and developing technology, really fits in with the kinds of values and approaches that I hold.
• Did I mention it’s a writing job where I get to work with Linux and free software?
• It puts me on the east coast, near Philadelphia, where the largest concentration of my non-College friends are located, which has me unbelievably excited. I’ll be able to gossip and dance with M.N. more than once a year; I’ll be able to hang out and with my emergency-backup-big-sister (H.C.) more often; it’ll be feasible to hang out with Chris you know ever and more. I’m so psyched.
• Did I mention it’s a writing job where I get to work with Linux and free software?

The astute among you will thus, notice that:

• New job elsewhere means relocation. Which means.
• I’ve been busy doing all of the relocation things: packing, doing this and that’s, more packing, getting paperwork in order, even more packing, and so forth that I’ve not been really good at keeping on top of the blog. I have a couple of entries stashed, but my rhythm is all off kilter.
• The job announcement has my real name in it. I have an abandoned a post or two about the whole tycho/sam thing. I should perhaps restart it. I think what I really need is this highly mythologized about page that talks about tycho and sam in different voices.

The truth is, that while I don’t think my reasons for using “tycho garen” these days is the same as it was 2.5 or 3 years ago, but I really like what I’ve done with the whole tycho thing, and I can’t really imagine not using it.

• In a lot of ways, I think, writing this blog for so long is a lot of the reason why I was able to get this job, both because through the experience of writing about technology for the blog gave me the confidence/knowledge/skills that make this tech-writing thing I do possible, and also the blog I think served to demonstrate that I was for real.

This is related to another train of thought that I hope to follow up on in the next few months somewhere, but it strikes me that this, if anything is a marker of success that we’re not particularly prone to attending too. We notice successful blogs that get millions of visits a month and can support their authors on advertising revenue and invited speaking engagements. I think that I’ve achieved some kind of success here, and there are other kinds of success to be had. I want to think about what this means. But first I want to sit with this.

I’ll be in touch, and I look forward to continuing this blog in this “next part” of my journey.

Cheers!

I’m beginning to write this in the evening after a long day of system administration work. For birthday (though, really, it’s been on my todo list for a long time), I ordered and set up a server from these fine folks to serve as the technological hub of my activities. While I’ve been quite fond of those fine folks for quite a long time, there was a growing list of things that I always wished worked better with dreamhost, and it was finally starting to limit the kinds of projects I could undertake in. So I bit the bullet and went ahead and ordered the server and spent some time getting everything straightened out.

For some background: the server is just an instance running inside of a Xen hypervisor, which runs other servers together on the same hardware: this is good, I couldn’t really use a server that powerful all by my lonesome (and I wouldn’t want to have to pay for it all either). It’s also way more powerful that what I had before, and the vitalization allows me to act with impunity, because it’s as if I’m running my own server, really. I’ve been doing computer administration and web development for a long time, but I’ve never had to do anything like this so it’s been an experience to learn how DNS records really work, how all the different kinds of server applications work, how really cool the Apache web server really is. It’s a great learning experience, and I think it would be prudent (and potentially helpful for you) to reflect on the experience. So here are my notes on the adventure:

• I’ve been running Ubuntu on my personal/desktop machines since the great Linux switch, and I’ve been pretty pleased with it. Not totally wowed by it: it works, but my tendencies are toward the more minimal/lightweight systems. But more than anything, I’m really drawn to systems that just work more than I am to systems that work perfectly, and I’m pretty good at keeping systems working. In 5 years of OS X usage I installed an OS twice, and since I got things stable and running, the only installations I’ve done have been to put ubuntu on new machines.

  In any case, this server was a chance for me really explore debian stable (lenny), which I hadn’t ever done before. It’s so cool. It’s not sexy or daring or anything but in a server you don’t want that, and it just works. I think it probably also helps matters somewhat lenny was released only a few months ago, rather than nearly two years ago, but in any case I’m quite enamored of how well it works.

• Email is much more complicated than I think any of us really give it credit for. There’s all sorts of complicated mess with regards to how DNS servers identify mail servers to help fight spam, and then there’s all the filtering and sorting business, and even the “modern” email servers are a bit long in the tooth. I hope that it’s a “set it and forget about it” sort of thing, though to be truthful I just got it all running and set up initially, but there’s a lot of further setup to do, before I move it all around.

• I’m pretty proud of the fact that as i was going thought the set up process, I go to the point where it said “ok, now set up the FTP server, and I said ‘meh’ and moved around.” Turns out that I can do everything I need to do in terms of getting files onto the server with git/scp/ssh/rsync and FTP is just lame and old. Welcome to the new world, where file transfers are shorter, versioned, and more secure.

  This isn’t particularly new, I couldn’t tell you the last time I used FTP, but I think this represents both the utility in moving to a “real server,” and a larger shift in the way we think about webservers. FTP assumes that the main purpose of the webserver is to store and serve files. the ssh/rsync/git model assumes that your webserver exists to be “your computer in the sky.” Which it is. We interact with the computers on our desks in really complex ways; there’s no reason to interact with our computers in the sky by just copying files to and from it.

• I’m convinced that systems-administration work will increasingly be the “hard currency” (basis for exchange) for the networked computing age. It’s sort of onerous work, there are skills and knowledge that most people who need network service don’t have and don’t need to have, there are actual costs, the need is ongoing, and success is quantifiable.

  There’s definitely space here for people (like me, and others) to provide these kinds of services to people. Sort of “boutique” style. Clearly I have more to learn and more thinking to do on the subject, but it’s a start.

• Ejabberd is peculiar, and the Debian package is… less than ideal. I knew going in that there was a “web administration” interface which sounds cool until you realize that, it’s… not an administration panel as much as it is a sort of “web dashboard.” You still have to tweak the configuration file which is written in Erlang, and wow. That’s pain right there.

Having said that, it seems to work just fine, without much fussing, and I’m want the jabber-server to do a very limited set of things: host my own IM account and transports; host muc-chats (created by me); and that’s about it. I’m a bit worried that it might be a bit too heavy for this.

That’s about all. More to come, I’m sure.