Brettia

Microsoft, I command you to weep. You hate Linux. You hate open source software. You hate it because it is an obstacle blocking you from making more money. You hate it because it is faster, stabler, better than any software you make. You wish it had never been born. But Linux is here to stay and no matter how much you try to avoid it, no matter how much you try to keep its name from being mentioned, no matter how many lawsuits and legal battles you start, publicly or privately, with RedHat and Mandrake and SuSE, you can never make it go away. And now you are worried. You have $46 billion in cash and cash-equivalents, but you don’t know what to do with it. You give some to shareholders. You invest some in stocks. But the rest just sits there, like it always has. Your stream of revenue hasn’t slowed to a trickle, but you know it will. You just don’t know when.

Now your programmers lie awake at night, dreaming up the next version of Windows, Longhorn. You codename it that because you’ve used up all the good ones on the countless unnecessary incremental releases of your products (which you made billions of dollars from). They call Longhorn a “bet-the-company” move. But you haven’t bet anything. No, it’s not a bet, it’s a robbery. Linux is robbing you of all you once had: credibility, users, and money. Now you’re desperate to get it back, and you throw all your chips on the table, pull out all the stops, give it everything you’ve got.
You think your staff of 50,000 will be able to pull it off. But Linux has a community of two million - and it’s growing. Microsoft’s clan of giants is outnumbered by Linux’s army of ants. The ants can win, outmaneuvering, outpacing the slow, lumbering giants. In the end, when all is said and done, the giants will fall, their size and cruelty catching up to them. The ants, the hard-working survivors, will go on forever after the conflict, and will fight off new threats with suprising ease because of their superiority.

Wow…I wrote that. A unique way to bash Microsoft, don’t you think? Yes, you say, but what’s wrong with Microsoft? Why do you hate Windows? I hate Windows because I have seen what a real operating system is. I have seen the true beauty of Linux, and Windows pales in comparison to it. Linux lacks the resource-hogging frills and happy interface of Windows, for its beauty comes from its superior design and strength at its core.

Now you think I’m some computer-obsessed freak. Well, you’re half right. I like technology because it’s something I’m good at working with. I have the mentality and logic for dealing with it. Normally, people like to do the things they’re good at. So I program, I install, I tinker. I do this because the manuals are too complex to make sense to anyone and because I’m a hands-on person. I need to be able to touch and work things to figure them out. This tinkering takes a long time, especially when doing it on a computer as obsolete as mine. That’s why I spend so much time on computers. Besides, one day I’ll come up with some great new concept or program and figure out how to sell it to people. Then I’ll be rich. Of course, that would be going against the whole idea of free software, but “free” does not always mean cost-free, but rather restriction-free.

If I’m only half computer-obsessed, what else do I do? All the normal kid things. I watch TV, I go to school, I hang out with friends (sometimes), I do homework. I don’t devote my entire life to computers, just a large portion of it.

Schedule (Weekdays):
6:30-7:15 Get ready for school, watch TV
7:15-7:40 Ride to school (bus), read
7:40-2:25 School
2:25-3:05 Ride home, read
3:05-4:00 Watch TV
4:00-5:30 Check bookmarked websites for updates
5:30-6:00 Tinker
6:00-6:45 Dinner
6:45-7:30 Tinker
7:30-9:00 Homework
9:00-9:30 Blog
9:30-6:30 Sleep
Notice that only about an hour of my day is spent tinkering. On the weekends, though, that might jump to six or seven hours, if I get sucked into something. It’s not like I have anything better to do.

This weekend was one of those weekends where I got sucked in. I got PartitionMagic 8 in the mail Friday so that I can partition my hard drive and run Linux and Windows at the same time (normally you have to uninstall one to use the other). Then I installed RedHat Linux 9 on the second partition (Windows is on the first) and booted to Linux. Finding my installation unsatisfactory for various reasons (too complicated to describe), I wiped the Linux partition and started over. I quickly went through several Linux installations of different distributions, from RedHat to Mandrake to Slackware. It took all of Saturday and the early hours of Sunday to get to what I have now: RedHat Linux 9 - Minimalist. Normally, RedHat comes installed with lots of useful software, but this can become more of a curse than a blessing when you want to build programs from source code and bypass RedHat’s package system of installing things.

With Linux installed, I used today to build and compile PHP, MySQL, and Apache so that I can run a development server from my computer. I’ve been having problems with a card trading PHP script that produces different results depending on who uses it for some reason. I wanted a test server so I could compare the results of running it on Linux to running it on Windows.

So I did that and it took a long time, but I got it all running (the script still doesn’t work - that’s my next project). And now I’m both frustrated and happy at the same time: happy that I could get it going, but frustrated that I couldn’t do it until after summer vacation had ended. If only I’d had two more weeks…