Not fun any more?

APLawrence.com - Resources for Unix and Linux Systems, Bloggers and the self-employed

Not fun any more?

Viruses, spam, the SCO lawsuit, and somebody trying to put a back door in the Linux kernel!

It's at least mildly depressing, isn't it? On top of all that, I had a bad day yesterday. What should have been a simple upgrade turned into eight hours of tension: unsuccessful upgrade, tape drive problems, and, after finally getting it all up and running, one forgotten but critical app that could not run on the new OS, so I had to undo most of what was done. Oh well, at least we got the room cleaned up, the cables straightened out, everything on KVM and a new hard drive installed. Oh, and found that the router's link to the lan was plugged to an old hub rather than one of the switches: that sure wasn't helping performance.

I've probably been working a bit too hard in general: you may have noticed that this site hasn't gotten as much attention as it should over the past few weeks - I've just been too busy. So maybe I'm just tired..

But I do think that the "bad guys" have taken a lot of the joy out of computers. I don't want to have to think about security every day, and I certainly don't need to see another Viagra email. The SCO suit, and the general abuse of patents, copyrights and all that worries me: DMCA, Patriot ACT, government coziness with large corporations and more. Is anything good happening?

Well sure. I love Mac OS X Panther, and although the plastic key cap for my Enter key broke in half and fell off (honest, it was cracked when I got it!), I still love my iBook. I have a copy of RedHat Linux 9 here I'm looking forward to installing and more than a few other things to play with and review. All I need is a little more spare time..