Adventures with Computers
Archive for March 2005
If the Spam Karma system was giving you a hard time when you tried to submit your insightful comments, then please try again — I’ve just lovered the overall strictness setting to “normal”.
It is now also possible to post comments through a proxy server — people using their laptop (or tablet PC…) at their university will probably appreciate this :-)
[...] if I’m a business relying on a specific piece of software to drive my business, and this piece of software that happens to be Free, how can and will I be sure that my business will be able to survive should the software maintainer choose to drop the development?
Sure, I’ve got the source code, and can continue development myself, but what if I don’t want to, or can’t (eg. I run a hairdressing salon, and now nothing of software development). I could employ some clever geek or a Free Software company and have them maintain and secure my software requirements, but somehow it all seems a bit backwards.
Sure you would have to employ a geek to look after your software if you know nothing about software — that applies to both open and closed source software.
The difference, I believe, is that with open source software you have a choice of what geek to employ. And you can even do this regardless of the status of the group of people behind the software.
I don’t think it’s backward, it’s just a matter of being in a better situation with open source than with closed source: if your vendor stops supporting your software you naturally have a problem. With open source software you have the right to continue developing the software, the right to install it on your next server, and so on.
For those who got here thinking that they would get to see the web statistics for my site: Go to the AWStats homepage and try the live demo instead. Read along below for an explaination of all this…
I was just checking my web statistics noticed that there has been no less than 2126 hits
on /awstats/awstats.pl — this month alone! The problem is that I no longer have my
statistics publicly available, so people get back a “404 — Not Found” page back. The
statistics was put offline because it took up quite a lot of my disk space quota, and because
people used the referrer statistics to find unprotected installations of PHP Shell.
So from now on a redirect (using the fantastic Apache mod_rewrite module) will be made to this post whenever someone tries to access the old AWStats installation.
I’ve been unpacking some more of my stuff — I can hardly find room for all my clothes!
My dad drove me here so we just stuffed the car with all my belongings. I did manage to throw away some things, but not nearly enough… I could have done a much better job of deciding what to bring to Switzerland, and what to throw out (or leave behind in Denmark). But at least it’s a kind of a luxury problem to have gotten too many things with me abroad! :-)
Today I took a small look at Zürich so that I will be able to find my way around when I start on the intensive German course on Monday. It turned out that I can take Tram Nr. 6 directly from the main train station to where the course will be held, so it couldn’t be any easier.
Yesterday Stéphanie and I went to the city hall to apply for a residence permit. It went without any problems, even though I didn’t have the required E111 form which (as far as I’ve understood…) explains that I’m covered by the Danish health insurence during my stay here in Switzerland.
As soon as I get my residence permit I will buy a GA (General-Abo). Every Swiss have such a subscription it seems. It’s expensive, but considering that I will be able to drive with all busses and trains in all of Switzerland it’s really a good deal. And then I’ll look just as cool as the real Swiss people when I show the GA upon inspection! :-)