As you might have guessed, I have a lot of Linux-based T-shirts....a LOT of them. And I enjoy wearing those T-shirts. From time to time wearing the image of Tux encourages strangers who would normally never say anything to strike up a conversation. The number of security people at the airport...

There is the old adage that “customers are always right”, and while this is true 99.999% of the time, I have run into at least one situation where the customer was wrong..... It was in the late 1980s, and I was working for Digital Equipment Corporation. We had gone to a DECUS convention, where...

From time to time I advocate that every programmer learn at least one assembler language. Not that I would ever advocate writing in assembler language when a higher-level language would do, but because assembler allows you to see how the machine really works, and can help you understand other...

Project Cauã's goals are to create large numbers of private sector, entrepreneurial jobs as the owner and administrator of thin client/server systems and to make computing easier for end users of all types. Project Cauã would do this by having a trained, licensed, and bonded person taking care...

I was contacted recently by an organization called the Free Technology Academy (FTA), which offers Masters Level courses across the Internet on Free Technologies. They wanted me to do a video-taped lecture on “Perspectives On the Free Software Market”. I realized that you could parse that...

Recently I had forgotten what password I had used for a web site, and I politely asked them to reset the password so I could log in and change it. Instead the site sent me my old password, in clear-text through email. After I got over the shock of seeing the current password in my email I went...

Many years ago I was working for Digital Equipment Corporation as a software engineer in New Hampshire. The marketing people and product managers liked taking me to customer presentations because I could often take very technical subjects and explain them in terms the customers (and the...

Extreme Austin! - The Texas Linux Fest! Austin, Texas! Home to live music, great food, a world-class University (U of T), the longhorns and IBM's Linux Technology Center, it is a great place to have a Linux Fest, and that is what is happening on April 10th, 2010. For just one day the Linux...

Dear Ambassador Kirk, Recently it was reported in the Guardian, an on-line newspaper, that the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) is requesting that the United States Trade Representative put Indonesia, Brazil and India on the "Special 301 Watchlist" specifically because those...

Several times I have written about "Software Piracy", and I think a lot of my readers get a little tired of hearing about it, but something happened this week that started me thinking about Software Piracy again. Microsoft made Software Piracy Prevention a voluntary thing. Of course Microsoft...

Recently there has been a discussion on the Linux Professional Institute (LPI) mailing list about why LPI does not publish its own training materials to help students prepare for their tests. I started to answer in the mailing list, but instead I decided to answer here. LPI, of course, is a...

No, even though today is the day that the wonder-child of Apple shows off his latest marketing blitz, this blog is not about Steve Jobs and his DRM-laden tablet.Instead we are going to travel thousands of miles to the south-east and visit a man in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Marcelo Balisteri, of...

There has been a lot of discussion about HTC's Nexus One, also known as "The Google Phone". The discussions back and forth about whether it is an "iPhone Killer" are often heated, with issues of whether or not this feature or that feature is better than the iPhone. One feature that has not...

Today Cesar Brod, a friend of mine from Brazil, sent me a picture of some fireworks he saw on New Year's Day that had a picture of our favorite penguin on them. It was timely, since it was a year ago today that I wrote another blog entry about Tux and "Penguin Awareness Day" (January 20th) and...

In 1999 I was working for Digital Equipment Corporation's Unix group as a technical marketing manager, making a "six-figure salary". I had met Linus Torvalds in May of 1994, and had recognized Linux and Free Software as something whose time had come. While most of the world in 1994 thought of...