Never look at thedailywtf.com then!

With a bit of luck we could be back in the days of sidetalkin!

I did read that - I meant rather that you should try getting another insurance company to cover you.

I'm not sure where you're located but here in the UK there are several options, thats ignoring household content policies which can often be used to cover phones.

Losing a phone once I can understand, but after the first time I'd be taking a lot more care where I put it!

If nothing else you should consider getting phone insurance - the premium won't be huge and if you lost phones as often as you suggest it practically pays for itself.

I had a similar progression:

Basic -> z80 assember -> DOS -> i386 assembly -> C -> Perl -> bash

These days I get oddly nostalgic about writing assembly under DOS (3.3ish), but mostly I'm pleased I started on a z80 which made the jump to i286/i386 assembly less painful than it would have been from a different starting point.

(Because zilog people were ex-intel I guess?)

Typo in the summary:

The reearcher believes that this renewable, environmentally friendly energy source could be deployed in coastal areas and could provide another addition to the green-tech roster

Obviously that should be "researcher"

And we could call that "unstable", right?

Actually launchpad for Debian would suck - we shouldn't have to sign up to a site to submit bug reports.

Almost certainly killer net - it was a two-parter.

I had vaguely good memories of watching it and bought the DVD - it wasn't as good as I remembered, but it does cover the confusion between "real" and "Just a game" well.

That reminds me of Killer Net, not a great film but it does cover the premise quite well.

I guess the old adage is true:

Swearing trumps proof.

To my mind the GPL is free. People can see the source, and providing they promise to make it available to others too they can use it themselves. Sure that's not free as in public-domain, and it forces people writing closed applications to rewrite existing code. But people writing closed applications aren't contributing to freedom in any meaningful sense.

If you want to argue about how FREE different licenses are then I will leave you to rant alone...

Oh well. As you wish. Keep your software locked up tight with the GPL all you want. You're missing out on some amazing developers work on your projects though.

Contrarily the reverse is also true.

I only contribute code to GPL'd software, and I'm not alone in that.

The unfortunate overloading of the term free has lead to more harm than good. To my mind the viral nature of the GPL is precisely what is good about it - but obviously other people dislike it.

Still each to their own. If you want public domain only, GPL-only, BSD-only, or closed-only you're free to make the choice yourself.

From my side I mostly find people complaining about GPL mean things like "I'm not free to use this code somebody else wrote in my commercial application". That might not be your angle, but there's always the option of mailing the author(s) and asking for permission to use chunks of code.

In the past I've let people use bits of my code, and my projects, in their applications because I don't see the harm..

I find your ideas intriguing and wish to subscribe to your newsletter ..

(Unless, of course, that newsletters are bad?)

As you say there are some downsides, but in general the idea of "compiling" things like blogs to static output is a good one. The canonical example of this taken to extrems would be Joey Hess's ikiwiki - wiki compiler.

There are many advantages - including a lack of overhead on fetching, a reduction of exposure for attacks, and less intensive spidering.

The downsides though are that you have to trigger a "rebuild" operation if you wish to incorporate comments, trackbacks, or other user-submitted updates.

Still for many people that trade-off is worthwhile, and I gain a lot from it myself. I can store my blog entries in a mercurial repository and type "make" to rebuild, and rsync it to the live location. All from my desktop.

And of course nothing precludes you from adding threading, or allowing a separate CGI script for doing searching - though once you start going down that route you lose the distinction between dynamic and static.

Indeed, I have the same cynical exploitation that most PHP based blogging solutions are security problems waiting to happen.

So I too wrote my own blogging system. It is different than many in the sense that it outputs a collection of entirely static HTML files.

I wrote a script that converts *.txt into a hierarchy of individual pages, rss feeds, and tags.

The software is simple and it is in use by myself and many others.

There is certainly a place for dynamic applications, but blogging is more often a write-only medium.