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My move to open-source

A bit more than a year, I realized that if I wanted to ever get in business, I had to come clean with my questionable software licensing practices. Back then, I was operating solely on Windows XP Pro and many other programs that were not acquired in the most legal of ways. Such practices being obviously very risky for anyone making a living out of working computers, I was faced with the decision of either changing everything and shift to a mostly open-source and free software suite or keep the software I was currently using but purchase licenses. I decided to take the harder but cheaper route.

I do not currently run a business, so I guess I could have kept my old habits for a few more years. However, the rationale for making the switch so early is that it takes a fair amount of time to become proficient with a certain program and learning to use one while running a business that depends on it at the same time is quite risky. This is the reason I did it well in advance so that I would not have to bother about server downtime because I am a noob with the Linux command line.

Do not get me wrong, I still need and use Windows XP (for which I have a license). The difference now is that it is in the form in a virtual machine that is only booted up when I need to do some testing on that platform. As for the windows Vista wave, I have completely missed it although it did get to do its share of damage from a distance. My relatives no longer come and ask me to fix their Vista because they have figured out I am in a different boat; that’s fine with me. As a matter of fact, I will most likely miss the Windows 7 wave as well, I’ll surely give it a try before the release candidate trial expires but I doubt very much it will convince me to let go of my *nixes and switch back to M$. The only thing that I use on a day to day basis that I had to pay a fair chunk of money for is Mac OS X. About a year ago, I had heard so many people professing the merits of this OS so I had to see for myself if it was worth all the hype. It turns out those people were right, OS X is well worth its price and at the same time, it made my switch to open-source considerably easier due to it being a Unix.

While I will debate a bit more about the merits of open-source in a different post, I will try enumerating all the programs that I had to get rid of or refrain from using as well as their replacement in order to make that switch to (almost) open-source. Here it goes.

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The teleportation test

Concepts pertaining to divinity or the supernatural have always been a peculiar philosophical problem and a major source of discord when subject to discussion. This, in my humble opinion, apart from the emotional arousal they often cause on their proponents, is caused by the fact that those concepts can by their nature only be proven, not disproven. Those who tend to have faith in such concepts have been capitalizing on this disparity forever, at the expense of their opponents, who are most of the time left with empiric arguments and human reasoning as their sole ammunition apart from unilateral proofs (or proofs that cannot disprove), which are in essence flawed tools. However, when the debate becomes stale, this type of proof nonetheless remains valuable as it can at least aid in the convincing of either party, or cause one to reformulate its argumentation. The only problems is that for supernatural phenomenon, most available methodologies for testing are empirical, therefore holding no value in the eyes of the believers, or are simply unrealisable due to the fact that they try to cause a supernatural concept to manifest itself through a rational medium.

While discussing of this problem with a few friends, I came to invent a test that in my view can prove there is a supernatural aspect to life, a certain metaphysical characteristic that differentiate between the inanimate and living, which I shall refer to as a soul. In short, this test, which I am about to describe, will aim at proving humans have a soul while having fair chances of being feasible at least in the far future. It relies on the technology of teleportation, which has been successfully applied to single particles, and, given the pace technology advances nowadays, is in the realm of feasibility.

The way teleportation works, or at least the type I am concerning myself with, is by first analysing and digitizing each and very atom that composes the entity to be teleported, thereby creating a digital representation of the entity or an exact copy of the state each and every particle was at the time of analysis. Once this digital version is acquired, it can be transferred at will through a communication system and can therefore be transfered at a different physical location; the received information describing the entity can be used to recreate it, atom by atom. Whether one or many copies are made is impertinent to this discussion, but what is important is that the original, in accordance with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (thus, the current laws of physics this teleportation mechanism is based onto) is destroyed in the sense that its next overall quantum state becomes uncertain rather than a consequence of its previous state. Actually, teleporting even the smallest object would be much more complex and intricate than this brief description, but for this exercise, this explanation is sufficient.

Now take Alice, a courageous lady that had volunteered herself to be the first candidate for teleportation trials on humans. Confident in the machine and the people operating it, she enters the digitizing chamber and gives a thumb up to the operator. At the press of a button, the machine then proceeds to measure the exact position of each and every atom Alice is made of, thereby creating a digital representation of Alice in its memory but also destroying the physical Alice in the process. At the other end of the teleportation system, say a couple hundred meters away, Alice’s relatives, who traveled there by foot, eagerly await the transfer of her information so that she can be recreated safe and sound.
Finally, the teleportation machine signals the process is complete and is successful, and the operator at this end proceeds to open the chamber. The actual test occurs at this point. If Alice walks out of the machine exactly as she was before, the test fails. For instance, it might be argued that Alice was only teleported physically, not spiritually; the debate is therefore intact. On the other hand, if Alice is found to lay inanimate at the bottom of the chamber and medical as well as technical authorities confirm that she is every bit as identical to her original self so that no bodily function has been harmed in any way, then there was a metaphysical property to life that could not be measured by physical means; it might not be a soul according to its everyday definition, but there nonetheless is something, which means the proponents of the supernatural nature of humans are at least partially right and that their opponents are totally wrong.

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v0.2a is live!

Finally. It took a lot more time than I expected but I got carried on in fixing bugs that I was finding along the way.

v0.2a brings many new things to the table but the most obvious to visitors are:

  • Comments
  • feeds (RSS and Atom)
  • Improved look

On the deployment side of things, I must admit it was a lot more complicated that I had originally planned. v0.1a was a breeze, but for this version, because I had to make changes to the database rather than creating it from scratch, I encountered a huge amount of faults due to changes in names, constraints, tables, etc.

Anyway, this is a great milestone, but there are many others pending in my personal trac. I guess thats what software is: projects with ever-growing room for improvement. If nothing breaks too badly, I’ll put this project aside for a few months and go invest my time in something else. In the meantime, if you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to post them or send me an e-mail.

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Cool things do not happen by accident

No they don’t, just the shitty ones do because you rarely go out looking for bad things to happen to you.

If you want something cool to happen (I am not talking of a car, promotion or fame here but about creative ambitions), you have to set the optimal conditions. It will most likely not trigger it automatically, but at least you will up the chances of it happening by a fair amount. Be at the right places, talk with the right people, get youself known by those that might be interested in what you do but above anything stay focused and devote your energies to it. You will most likely not suceed at first, but you will most often have a foot in the door. The biggest effort is removing yourself from that semi-comfortable materialistic life, the rest is easy because at that point, it starts being cool already.

If you want to dance profesionnally (not that I do) then staying in an office just for the sake of financial comfort is most likely not going to cut it. I do not advise on quitting a well paying job to pursue any dream (some are worth it though), but what I would do is retargeting all your motivation and energy towards your ambition; in other words, quit the job emotionally. Stop caring about promotions, about fame, do things you like and for youself and stop worrying about money, you only need so much to be comfortable as creativity is mostly free.

This guy found a job refurbishing an old particle accelerator. If you read his blog a bit, you will find that it did not happen by accident.

I just encounter too many people stating have ambitions of being this or doing that. Then, when I ask them if they are doing anything to make it happen, they just reply they are too tired, don’t want to risk too much over it, or that they are just too lazy. If you are too lazy then it is not an ambition, if you are too tired then you are not investing your time an energy in at the righ place and you are afraid of risk, the only thing you are actually putting at stake is money, which, when all things come to an end, is only worth somthing to your descendants.

Take it with a grain of salt, nothing is absolute and there are as many ways to achieve as many things as there are ways not to achieve anything. I just think some have a better chance at working than others; either way.