Entries from April 2003 ↓

I upgraded my laptop’s BIOS today. I wish I hadn’t. After the upgrade the bootloader believed that there wasn’t enough memory to load any operating system. I tried other bootloaders, and they all thought the same.

The IBM telephone support guy was helpful and clueful, which is unusual for someone in his type of job. Maybe IBM have a policy to not employ grumpy idiots. It would be good if some other IT companies would copy that idea.

I reinstalled the old bootloader.

If you need to find words based on approximate pronounciation, use Metaphone (or similar); don’t use Soundex.

The Soundex algorithm was invented before 1880 (yes, 1880). It worked well for what it was designed for: their database was a set of large boxes containing rolls of microfilm and/or paper cards.

Don’t use Soundex in the 21st century! We should have stopped using it in the 20th.

The NIOSC open day was interesting. The attendees were from a range of very different backgrounds, so it wasn’t easy to find the correct balance between tech-talk and lay-speak.

I presented the "Free Software is the Future" keynote address. Of course, I know nothing about the future. The title was something I said in 1996. The current worldwide Open Source buzz is confirming my predictions, although I hadn’t expected the bizarre name change.

Karen spent most of the day sitting at the combined Kasei and Belfast.pm table. This merged with the BLUG table, where Russell and
Scott had setup some demo machines that looked slightly impressive until Macinni put up a real exhibit beside them.

The Northern Ireland Open Source Community is having an open day on Wednesday 16 April, so I’m busy finishing some presentations for that.

After that I have to finish my tutorials for the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Oregon

Seven years ago was wonderful, and now is more so.