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**dequire** · Dec 29, 2011, 11:00 PM

Re: "The power of self-delusion" -- a blog post by Aptitude's developer

Very interesting read. I suspect many free software people DO feel that way. However, as he points out (even if indirectly) that most people get little gratification in their paid jobs as well...

What I took out of it as a whole is this: Life is short, find and do what makes you happy. If you happen to also get paid for it...well that's just a bonus. We're all on the same journey...we just take many different paths.

**woodsmoke** · Dec 29, 2011, 11:13 PM

Re: "The power of self-delusion" -- a blog post by Aptitude's developer

It could be a couple of things, but the "main thing" to me about any or all of the folks who "work on Linux"...is that, by and large they tend to work alone, as in.....alone.... two o'clock in the morning kind of alone but also physically separated by geography from other people doing similar work.

The "intelligentsia" pooh pooh and put down, "camaraderie" and the "slapping of the back" the raise of a toast of good cheer in a bar or just eating a burger with a buddy at McDees....

But, unfortunately for the intelligentsia....even they are prey to the alleles that make humans social animals.

I, personally, think that....the guy just wants to have a few people say face to face with him that he is a good ol' boy, that he is doing something of worth and to buy him a beer and some wings.

After all, he is sufficiently separated from the other people that he was considering composing ....

a letter....instead of saying it face to face.

just my thoughts, of little worth.

woodsmoke

**GreyGeek** · Dec 30, 2011, 09:59 AM

Re: "The power of self-delusion" -- a blog post by Aptitude's developer

What he wrote could be said about any work or hobby that one undertakes. It is not necessarily an outcome of working on Debian or FOSS. My wife and I volunteer for an organization that makes food available for free to needy people. Some people who come through the line to pick up stuff are so obese (easily over 350 lbs) they need powered chairs to get around. To sustain that weight they have to eat for four or five. I see some of them drive up in cars that are newer than my 10 year old Saturn 2L, and some live in homes that are more recent that my 33 year old domicile. I've met them in Walmart and HyVee pushing a cart loaded down with food. They wear the latest from Gap, have the latest doos, lots of bling, and put iPhones to their ears. No doubt they have wide screen HDTVs in their house fed by cable tv services. We continue to volunteer for the 50% or so who appear to be truly needy. America has the richest poor people in the world.

My son, who has a 6 year son and a 17 year old stepson, is finding out that "after the paid job and the kid, there isn't much time left over for writing code.". He is a much better coder than I and it's sad to see him being deprived of what he loves to do the most. Being a supervisor is good money, which is why he is doing it, but it is not what he likes. Been there, done that.

I suspect that Daniel was going through a blue mood when he wrote that. Anyone who remains on a perpetual high, or low, is mentally and/or physically ill. Mood cycles are normal. I disavow anything I've written while in a depressed mood.

Besides, even if he wasn't in a blue mood he is, for the most part, right.

Nothing most of us have done, are doing, or will do, will last, and if we are not careful we stand to lose much of what was done by people of renown years before. I am afraid that book/device burnings will be a fact of the future if we succumb to politically correct mind control. Much of what we have done will be forgotten before we ourselves die. We have moved away from tangible, LONG lasting goods and devices, like rock, paper, ink , metal and wood, and have adopted technologies which hardly last more than a decade. Our culture is driven by fads with half-lives shorter than jingle commercials. I have hundreds of 3.5" floppy disks which, if my USB floppy drive fails, won't be readable any more. Even if I can read the source, the code is written in Apple BASIC, Turbo Pascal, Fortran IV, PBuilder, Turbo C, etc..., for devices that no longer exist. My Zipdrive tapes are unreadable. My 5.25 floppies are in the dustbin of history. IOW, all the code I wrote for Apple ]['s, and 16 bit DOS is essentially unusable.

The Pyramids have lasted for 5,000 years and we can read what is on them. NASA can't read the Fortran code on its Apollo tapes any more because the hardware to read them isn't made anymore and the devices they own have failed. Our devices are becoming so small, microscopic in fact, and cannot be repaired, only replaced, that our present civilization will vanish within 100 years, and hardly leave a trace. What is considered art today will be indistinguishable from trash by archologists 1,000 years from now, if we survive that long. Consider the Internet. As an adjunct to the printed page it is/was cool. But replacing the printed page with the Internet has put our knowledge base at risk. It is said that nothing can be removed from the Internet. That is patently false. The "WayBack Machine", a.k.a. the "Internet Archive", was supposed to hold copies of the web pages of the world. It stopped functioning about 5 years ago because the task is so overwhelming and way too expensive for a single person or small group to do, and is fraught with IP and copyright threats. Besides, if Wikipedia has trouble getting donations to cover their costs, who would donate to look at a 10 year old web page? The number of broken links caused by pages being deleted, servers removed, etc..., especially during these economic hard times, is increasing exponentially. Even worse, you can now "buy" e-books from publishers who reserve the "right" to steal them back from you for any reason they want, without your permission. In the twinkling of an eye, a book you were reading is gone from your electronic library. Or, and app is disabled. The President now has the "right" to declare any individual, group or Internet site "terrorists" and get their servers taken down. The only electronic tools that have a chance of remaining around are those written under the GPL, and even those are threatened by proprietary thugs with no causative or creative history in their existence, merely because they can abuse the law to extort cash from their victims. But, what good are they if your Sony breaks down and the replacement can't boot Linux?

**dibl** · Dec 30, 2011, 12:45 PM

Re: "The power of self-delusion" -- a blog post by Aptitude's developer

Thanks for posting that Steve -- melancholy though it be, that is very thought-provoking. I suppose we've all hit a patch where we had the feeling "what the hell am I spending my time doing THIS for?".

Personally, after getting my B.Sc. degree in 1973, I spent 37 years just working for money, i.e. working a white collar job that paid well and allowed me to raise a family, which only required that I have a college degree to get hired in the first place. Defense contracts -- first as a government contracting officer for 12 years, then in industry as a contract manager, project manager, export licensing, company executive management, and other versions of the world's most boring work. It was just a job, and I never loved it. Although I did come to admire and enjoy working with some really talented engineers, and enjoyed the camaraderie of a team of high-performers developing interesting technology.

But, in my spare time I picked up a hobby in the mid-1990s that gave me great personal satisfaction. I consider my investment of time and energy in my family history research to be the most productive thing I've done in life (except perhaps for my 3 kids and their kids), and it's something that I can leave (in DVD form) for my posterity, which should be able to be preserved for a very long while after I'm not around to maintain it. Here's the web version of it -- over 2,000 HTML pages:

http://landofthebuckeye.net/

So, I understand very well how the hobby can turn out to be the "main thing" in life.

**de_koraco** · Dec 30, 2011, 01:12 PM

Re: "The power of self-delusion" -- a blog post by Aptitude's developer

Bah, aptitude probably gutted his install and he was feeling down.

**SteveRiley** · Dec 30, 2011, 02:37 PM

Re: "The power of self-delusion" -- a blog post by Aptitude's developer

Originally posted by de_koraco

Bah, aptitude probably gutted his install and he was feeling down.

I believe I've discovered why Aptitude seems to sometimes be so at odds with apt-get. Both utilities actually use the same list of repositories and update statuses now, which was not the case previously, so that criticism is no longer valid. Aptitude does not make a distinction between amd64 and i386 versions of packages, which can lead to installation errors if you don't take a moment and view the details of each package. Aptitude's dependency resolver is far more sophisticated than apt-get; you can configure it to analyze every conceivable choice of possible resolutions and pick the one you want. Or you can have Aptitude behave much like apt-get if you prefer. I've been using Aptitude exclusively to manage my Acer running Precise and, once I learned the tool's quirks, have come to enjoy it.

Originally posted by GreyGeek

America has the richest poor people in the world.

Your mini-rant reminded me, for some strange reason, of a rather bizarre collection of photographs from America's largest retailer. People's reaction to this site is like that of a cat to its litter box: simultaneously attracted to and repelled by

Originally posted by GreyGeek

Much of what we have done will be forgotten before we ourselves die. We have moved away from tangible, LONG lasting goods and devices, like rock, paper, ink , metal and wood, and have adopted technologies which hardly last more than a decade... won't be readable any more.

I riffed on this once during a presentation at TechEd New Zealand a few years ago. Can't recall now what triggered the idea in my mind, but I do remember taking an "aside" for about 15 minutes and engaging the crowd in a conversation. (I have a tendency to do this regularly during public speaking after I've gotten to know my audiences.) Few people seem aware of the implications of what you write, Jerry, and it's distressing. I sure wish there were a way for individual citizens to allocate where their tax dollars go. I'd send a good portion of mine to the Library of Congress -- which, despite the "of Congress" portion of its name, appears to take its charter seriously.

Originally posted by GreyGeek

Even worse, you can now "buy" e-books from publishers who reserve the "right" to steal them back from you for any reason they want, without your permission. In the twinkling of an eye, a book you were reading is gone from your electronic library.

Not necessarily. (I offer the preceding link purely as tool for aiding the preservation of knowledge stored in electronic formats, not as a mechanism for breaking the law.)

Originally posted by dibl

http://landofthebuckeye.net/

I remember perusing your site a while ago, Don. I see you have references to some family names from my history: Riley, LaHue, Gates (yes, I realize some of you will have something to say about that one. Go ahead!) My father has done some research, I'll show him your blog and perhaps he'll contribute his discoveries, including one not on your list: Shamhart.

**GreyGeek** · Dec 30, 2011, 02:46 PM

Re: "The power of self-delusion" -- a blog post by Aptitude's developer

Originally posted by dibl

.....
Here's the web version of it -- over 2,000 HTML pages:
http://landofthebuckeye.net/
...

My wife is the genealogist in my family and she took "Kreps" back to 1640 in Thume, Switzerland. I was suprised to see "Kreps" in your surname index. Are you claiming "Kreps" is part of your family tree? If so, we may be related!

I wonder if I should tell my wife? If I do she may drag out that family tree odt file that I put to rest last year after several years of agonizing with it. mmmm.....

Code:

Kreps
  Barbara Catharine b. 25 May 1859
  Daniel S. b. 17 Oct 1856
  Emma C. b. 27 Feb 1878
  Harry b. 11 Jan 1908
  James B. b. 23 Sep 1852, d. 23 Jan 1913
  M. E. Belle b. 28 Apr 1887
  Marie E. b. 30 Dec 1879
  Mary
  Mary M. b. 16 Sep 1909
  Olive Bell b. 3 Feb 1877
  Paul b. 7 Feb 1881, d. 23 Aug 1908
  Stover E. b. 30 Nov 1876
  William Earl b. 17 Oct 1885
  William Henry b. 25 Jun 1854, d. 31 Jan 1922
  William R. b. 8 Feb 1828, d. 20 Jul 1898

**dibl** · Dec 30, 2011, 03:21 PM

Re: "The power of self-delusion" -- a blog post by Aptitude's developer

Originally posted by GreyGeek

I was suprised to see "Kreps" in your surname index. Are you claiming "Kreps" is part of your family tree? If so, we may be related!

My genealogy database of about 80,000 individuals is comprised mostly (90+%) of people to whom I am related by blood or marriage, and their in-laws. In the case of the Kreps, I checked and found that William R. Kreps (1836 - 1898) married Susannah F. Stover, and Susannah's paternal grandmother, Susannah Price (wife of Emanuel Stover) was the sister of my ancestor Rev. Jacob Price. So, the descendants of Susannah Price, including the Kreps children of Susannah F. Stover, would be my kin. If you are from that clan, then you're my kin. Not that you're in my will, or anything ....

**GreyGeek** · Dec 30, 2011, 03:32 PM

Re: "The power of self-delusion" -- a blog post by Aptitude's developer

Originally posted by dibl

.....
If you are from that clan, then you're my kin. Not that you're in my will, or anything ....

I consulted my genealogist and she said that my clan arrived from the old country at the turn of the 20th century, too late to be a member of your clan, unless your clan came from Holland, around Sappemeer.

**dibl** · Dec 30, 2011, 03:43 PM

Re: "The power of self-delusion" -- a blog post by Aptitude's developer

Originally posted by GreyGeek

Originally posted by dibl

.....
If you are from that clan, then you're my kin. Not that you're in my will, or anything ....

I consulted my genealogist and she said that my clan arrived from the old country at the turn of the 20th century, too late to be a member of your clan, unless your clan came from Holland, around Sappemeer.

Nope. Although some of my ancestors (Hersheys and Stouffers) were Mennonites from Canton Bern, Switzerland, I have no Kreps ancestry that I know of.

@Steve, I know your folks were from Columbus -- I have kin there too (I was born there) -- your dad can e-mail me if he wants to share info or ask questions.

**de_koraco** · Dec 30, 2011, 04:52 PM

Re: "The power of self-delusion" -- a blog post by Aptitude's developer

Originally posted by SteveRiley

Aptitude's dependency resolver is far more sophisticated than apt-get;

Please god, don't let dpkg be managed by anything sophisticated!

**SteveRiley** · Dec 30, 2011, 05:13 PM

Re: "The power of self-delusion" -- a blog post by Aptitude's developer

From what I've observed so far, you can de-sophistify Aptitude if you enable the highlighted option below:

When you leave it disabled, Aptitude will churn through all possible actions (the number of which can be fairly high if recommended packages are included) and build a list of resolution options that you can step through. Press e to begin examining, and use the comma and period keys to move through the list.

If nothing else, it's interesting to see that there's more than one way to resolve dependencies, especially when PackageA depends on either PackageB or PackageC. Aptitude's UI lets you examine the effects of either one and you can choose your preference.

**dibl** · Dec 30, 2011, 05:24 PM

Re: "The power of self-delusion" -- a blog post by Aptitude's developer

Originally posted by de_koraco

Please god, don't let dpkg be managed by anything sophisticated!

Amen.

**woodsmoke** · Dec 30, 2011, 07:11 PM

Re: "The power of self-delusion" -- a blog post by Aptitude's developer

The site about Wal-Mart irritates me greatly.

I can go into Target and see the same kind of people and I can go into K-mart and see the same kind of people.

In our fair city I joke that I have developed four "nicknames" for the four Wal-marts.

One is the "butt-crack" Wal-mart, it has the same denizens shown in the pictures, and also is the only one with a continually cruising security car.

The second is the "social security Wal-Mart". It has an explosion of people when the Social Security cheques come in. It is also the smallest and most intimate which older folks like.

The third is the "schizophrenic Wal-Mart". It is near the middle of town and has not really ever "found it's audience" so it literally is re-designed every couple of years and was the first to have the "carousel" bag holders. It is actually the one that is most pleasant to me because the clothing section has a hardwood floor.

The fourth is the "short skirt and spike heels Wal-Mart". Very sophisticated. It has "kiosks" of displays of goods that the employees make, notice, EMPLOYEES, not management, to showcase stuff. The customers in it are mostly high end. The women are usually in "short business suit skirts" and do, indeed, usually wear high heels. The men are mostly in suits. It is also surrounded by a lot of very high end restaurants and a bunch of law firms. The housing is relatively new and grew up around the restaurants and business which grew up around the magnet of Wal-Mart.

So, again, the whole thing about those pictures says more about the people who make the website and where THEY live as opposed to "Wal-Mart" in and of itself.

woodsmoke

woodsmoke

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"The power of self-delusion" -- a blog post by Aptitude's developer

"The power of self-delusion" -- a blog post by Aptitude's developer

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