A few days ago, I complained about the lack of an updated Software Wars map. I didn’t think I could do it; or, it didn’t even occur to me to do it. I had originally submitted the question as an “Ask Slashdot” question, hoping some able /. reader would decide to make one. The submission was quickly rejected, so I posted the same text to my blog.

But, of course, nobody reads my blog. No one could be prodded or inspired to create an updated map by my weak blogging skillz.

A couple days later, I figured – why don’t I try it? So I did it. I created a new Software Wars map.

"Software Wars"

Software Wars hasn’t been updated in well over two years. Since then, many things have happened: Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice 2.0 (with Base), PHP 5, MySQL 5, Apache2, and more – especially Novell’s Openxchange Server. The map has no mentions of Fedora, Ubuntu or even Google. In fact, serveral whole new fronts in the War are missing: “web services,” console gaming (XBox), search, and web advertising. The SCO mess has become more of an annoyance to keep an eye on, rather than a full-frontal assault, while Sun and SGI continue to fade. I emailed Andy Tai, who used to maintain Software Wars on a semi-regular basis, and never got a response. A lot has changed in two years. Surely, someone with more time and skill than me can take on the challenge of updating the Software Wars Map?

UPDATE: I eventually did it myself. Check out my Software Wars page.

Even with Republicans in control, trends are decidedly in favor of massive redistribution of wealth. Some great commentary by Patrick Chisholm. He succinctly covers what I’ve been saying for years.
He just spits all the facts out like a machine gun. And none of it is good news.

“Republican” is no longer synonymous with spending restraint, free markets, and other ideals of the political right. … During the first five years of President Bush’s presidency, nondefense discretionary spending (i.e., spending decided on an annual basis) rose 27.9 percent, far more than the 1.9 percent growth during President Clinton’s first five years … America’s workers will be forced to redistribute a larger and larger portion of their income to other Americans … In the early 1960s, transfer payments (entitlements and welfare) constituted less than a third of the federal government’s budget. Now they constitute almost 60 percent of the budget … Currently the federal government consumes about 20 percent of the GDP, which is another way of saying that about 20 percent of Americans’ income, on average, is paid in taxes to the federal government. According to the Government Accountability Office, that is on course to rise to 30 percent by 2040. Most of that 30 percent would be redistributed as payments to other Americans, rather than spent on standard government services like law enforcement, transportation, defense, national parks, or space exploration. …

This stuff, literally, keeps me up at night. I’ve got two small children. What kind of world will they grow up in? What will my generation have left them?

How do we get out of this mess? Is it even possible? If we don’t correct this, is our current path even sustainable? See, that the scary part. If we as a nation can’t muster the will to change the very bad direction we are going, and we can’t keep going in this direction without certain financial ruin for every American and several future generations of Americans, then what do we do? In this particular rock and a hard place, something will have to break.

And every single say I am baffled as to why a single person who claims to be “fiscally conservative” hasn’t burned their Republican Party membership card. The Republicans’ alleged support for any principals of “limited government” has been throroughly discredited, yet for some reason conservatives keep going back to get slapped around some more. The Republicans have had Congress under thier control for a decade, and the White House for five. They clearly have no intention to get thier financial house in order. Insincere lip service is all they care to offer. Enough of it. They have to go.

To go along with this story, the News & Observer had a piece today about how America’s personal savings rate has dipped into negative numbers, so we not only are we not saving money for our future, but we are spending more than we have today.

Mr. Chisholm’s commentary only discusses Federal spending. He doesn’t talk about where the money is coming from. Or, rather, where it’s not coming from. The national debt continues to grow unabated at a rate of 2.28 billion dollars a day. That’s not how much the government spends each day. That’s how much deeper into debt we as a nation go every day.

This country doesn’t save at all, and spends money like a drunken sailor. The trends points to us going ever deeper into debt, while also being obligated to spend much, much more money in wealth redistribution plans.

I’m telling you now, the trajectory we are on is not sustainable. This plan will not work. This road leads straight off the edge of a cliff. Something is going to give somewhere. And it won’t be pretty.

I wish I knew of something to do about it. I do know that supporting Republicans only makes the matter worse.

There is one truism about politics that is often repeated:

All politics is local.

Tip O’Neill said that.

I will have to add one more truism:
All politics is sleazy.

The News & Observer is reporting that Morrisville commissioners have given Lenovo tax breaks without public OK, and the law allows it. They will rubber stamp the deal in a public meeting tonight, but the deal was made in secret back in August — five months ago!

What’s the difference between “side-stepping” and lying? I’m not sure anymore:
It was not easy to keep the deal under wraps. At one point Town Manager John Whitson even felt compelled to suggest in an Oct. 5 e-mail message that town employees could sidestep questions about the offer by saying that they were “not aware” of any plans “that may or may not be related to this or any other potential economic development incentives proposal.”

That might not, technically, be a lie, in the Bill Clinton what-is-the-meaning-of-is sort of way. But it is definitely sleazy.

I equate lobbying with economic development incentives:

Lobbying
Corporations bribing politicians with corporate money
Economic Development Incentives
Politicians bribing corporations with taxpayer money
There’s a nice symmetry there, don’t you think? Politicians and corporations have thier hands in each other’s pockets, while both have their hands in the taxpayers’ wallets.

Sleazebags.

We needed to buy a coffee table. For years we had been using an old travel trunk as a coffee table, but we got rid of it. Right now we don’t have a coffee table.

The thought of going to various department or furniture stores to find a decent coffee table was not appealing. I did not want to drive to a single store more than I absolutely had to. We needed something inexpensive, plain and sturdy — something that can stand up to an assualt by two small children.

I searched for “coffee table” on Google.

Afterwards, I noticed that my searching behavior in this case was very different from my normal searching habits. Ninety-nine per cent of the time, the ads on search results pages are invisible to me. They just don’t register in my consciousness. But this time, I’m actually looking to spend actual money on an actual thing. When I searched for coffee tables, I didn’t even look at the normal, organic search results. I specifically sought out the sponsored links. I clicked on a few of them and browsed their available selection, and found a few tables from a couple different sites that matched what I was looking for. After, of course, letting my wife pick the final table, we were done.

For the record, AllCoffeeTables.Com is a good place to look when you need a coffee table. Good prices, good site, good selection. I’ll let you know if we have a problem with delivery or the actual product.

I should also point out, for advertisers, that paying the extra money to be listed above the search results rather than on the right is well worth it. I clicked on all the “above” links and only one or two “side” links.

Most times when I want to buy something online, I know where to go. Books or movies – Amazon.com. Computer stuff – TigerDirect.com (although I’m lucky enough to have a TigerDirect outlet about a mile from house, so I can save on shipping costs and delivery time.) Music – CDBaby.com (well, I haven’t bought anything from them yet, but they sell non-RIAA music, and that’s all I’m going to buy.)

But where does one go to buy a coffee table online? Hell if I knew. This may have been one the few times I’ve been on the Internet where I actually wanted to see ads.

Go figure.

My performance review coincided with the end of year, so it is easy to do some year-over-year comparisons.

Income for 2006

2005 Income
+ Merit Raise
- Higher Medical Witholding
- Higher Gasoline Prices
- Higher Natural Gas Prices
—————————–
Less than 2005 Income

With just a couple variables, you can see that my household will have less disposable income in 2006 than we did in 2005.

If you count the more general (and inevitable) price increases in food, clothes, and other household goods, then it is easy to see that my household will be working harder to make ends meet in 2006, in a noticable, non-trivial way.

Something is going to be cut.

And I know that I’m in better shape than most, so I’m not in a riotous mood yet. I’ve still got a number of notches left on my belt to tighten.

But for millions of households across America, I’m certain 2006 will represent a signficant decline in standard of living over 2005.

The only way to hide this problem is to fund the current standard of living on the credit cards, which we seem to be doing in record numbers, judging by the record consumer debt in America. This shell game won’t last.

I fiddled around with the system some more today. I’m still loving it.

I realized that the basic install didn’t give me mysql or apache.

A couple google searches pointed me to the Ubuntu Packages web site. It really, truly only took a few minutes to install devhelp, mysql, subversion, apache (w/ mod_php and mod_per), eclipse and a whole bunch of other things I use. I just needed to:

sudo apt-get install <package-name>

And not one dependency error in the bunch. I was told which packages would be added, updated, or deleted. One package, another IDE, needed to be deleted in order to install Eclipse. It was so very easy. The only thing I had to search for was the package name to use for mod_perl. It’s libapache2-mod-perl2. Once I found that, I was good to go.

I even intalled a few games I’ve never played before.

Why didn’t I do this earlier?

With Fedora, I would have already dropped to using tarballs of source code, make, make test, and make install. (Scribus, for example – rpm dependency hell, IIRC– just install from source on Fedora.) Not that I don’t mind installing from source, but the fact that I don’t have to is a testament to the distribution. Nice.

I reinstalled Linux on my primary home computer last night. I switched to Ubuntu from Fedora.

Overall, I’m fairly pleased.

With Fedora, I got tired of getting stuck in rpm dependency hell when I wanted to install something outside the norm. In order to get all the multimedia packages and some other software I wanted onto Fedora, I ended up defining some yum repositories that weren’t compatible with each other, and I totally hosed the ability to update packages. And Yumex was slow and ate up a lot of memory. (My system is getting a little long in the tooth.)

So I tried Ubuntu. All the Debian guys are always raving about apt-get this and apt-get that, so I thought I’d give it a try. The thing that pushed me into the decision was Automatix – an app to install and run after you install the Ubuntu OS. Automatix goes a step further and installs a ton of other stuff that you know you’re going to need: The latest java, neato firefox plugins, a bunch of multimedia stuff, a larger set of fonts, and various other goodies. When installing Fedora Core 4, that was a pretty irritating ordeal.

With Ubuntu, it’s clicky-clicky-clicky and your done. I was watching apple.com trailers just a couple hours after booting from the install CD. All my hardware was detected without issue. It even got my screen resolution right the first time, which Fedora didn’t.

It’s all Gnome-based, so after a small bit of tweaking, my normal activities are unchanged. A smooth transition, and hopefully I’ll never see an rpm again.

One minus: I still can’t watch Daily Show clips on ComedyCentral.com. Damn those propriety codecs!

One plus: Before I imported all my browser bookmarks, I decided to try once again to find a way to share (and remotely store) my bookmarks. This is kind of important to me because I work pretty heavily on two separate computers (one work, one home) and would find it convenient to have a common set of bookmarks between the two. I looked into del.icio.us again, but I never grokked it before, and I still don’t grok it. There’s an FTP bookmark synchronizer extension that I’ve tried, and I almost went with that again.

Luckily, I found AbstractMouse.com.

Abstract Mouse is a web site (and service) with a corresponding FireFox extension that integrates very nicely with the browser’s bookmark system. It’s almost transparent, but you can share folders with yourself (across multiple machines), with a defined set of friends, or globally. Very nice implementation.

w00t!

What I’m about to say is not a decision I arrived at lightly. This is a significant departure from my previous statements. I will anger a few associates with this announcement. I will be branded a turncoat. I will be sleeping with the enemy. I will be choosing the lesser of two evils.

Nevertheless, I am prepared to make a limited, one-time compromise in principle on two fronts:

  1. In 2006, I pledge to vote for the candidate, regardless of party affiliation, that pledges to introduce, immediately upon taking office, and vote for an impeachment inquiry of President Bush and to vote for at least two articles of impeachment:
    • Misleading the American people, the media, the international community and Congress with faulty intelligence in an attempt to garner support for an unjustified war, that has led to the death of over 2000 American soldiers.
    • Exceeding the power afforded his office by the Constitution, specifically by authorizing illegal spying on American citizens without a search warrant issued by a court of law.
    The only office I can vote for that has this power is North Carolina Congressional District 13, currently occupied by Democrat Brad Miller.

    In fact, Mr. Miller, by holding office, cannot get my vote with a mere pledge. Mr. Miller will need to act, not talk. Yes, all of Mr. Millers past sins and current party affiliation will be forgiven by me, and he will get my vote on November 7, 2006 — if he introduces the impeachment inquiry before Election Day.

  2. In 2006, I will donate $100 each to up to five serious candidates (preferably Libertarian, but any party will do) for any office in the U.S. House Of Representatives that, as a central point of thier campaign, pledges to introduce and vote for an impeachment inquiry of President Bush, and to vote for at least the two above articles of impeachment.
This is a difficult decision for me. I have been a libertarian as far back as I can remember, probably back to my early teens in the 80s. I never became a libertarian. This is what I’ve been all along.

Since I’ve been voting, I have uniformly voted Libertarian in all possible cases. I have never voted against a Libertarian candidate in any vote I have ever cast. In cases where there were no Libertarian candidates, I always voted against the incumbent. I’ve never voted for an incumbent, regardless of party. In the past few elections, I’ve given up entirely on voting for a Democrat or a Republican, convinced that it really doesn’t matter which party holds a particular office. A few times I’ve turned in a mostly empty ballot, where I only vote against some bonds or referendums.

I’m a partisan, and I’m certain the leaders of the both the Democratic and Republican parties are corrupt to the core, and have kept their positions of power only by subverting the democratic process.

In North Carolina, the Democrats and Republicans have effectively blocked any other political party, including the Libertarian Party, from running any candidates for public office across the state, so I couldn’t vote for a Libertarian even if I wanted to.

My inclination in this case would be to not vote at all, since I won’t be able to vote for someone who I think reprensents my interests. In fact, having a Democrat or a Republican in office would largely be working against my interests. However, I am prepared to make the seemingly contradictory move of supporting one of these candidates even while they work against my interests – if they at least pledge to work towards the impeachment of President Bush.

That is the compromise I am willing to make. That is how strongly I think a continued Bush administration will damage this country with its continued and blatant abuse of power.