[Sussex] Serial Numbers

[Geoff Teale]

On Tue, 2003-02-18 at 20:14, Nik Butler wrote:
> > do.  You missed out one thing: the serial numbers of the machines
> No , they were in the mail headers <grin>

Damn, you spotted them ;)

Seriously the level of detail is really a way to show the decline in my
level of interest in what I'm doing at work and the cultivation of my
interest in the act of programming for it's own sake and the exploration
of the mathematics of software rather than the crappy enforced
restriction of business development.  

It's also a good way of pointing out that I haven't been very much
devoted to any one OS since my days on Amiga's.  For me (that is, in my
personal life) an operating systems primary functions today are as
follows:

1. Provide a platform on which to program.
2. Fecth and Send mail
3. Provide a _good_enough_ web browser.
4. Provide some mechanism to play music.

Most other uses of a computer (fileserver, web server, mail server) or a
computer network are increasingly outside my sphere of interest (They
are aspects of programming I have to do, but less and less are they my
concern).   To my mind these are programs produced to fufill a certain
need that is not really of interest to me, the way they are coded
however _may_ do.

Outside of the workplace my programming is becomming less of a mechanism
for achieving a goal, but more a goal in it's self.  There is art in
process and beauty in an idea.

A couple of years ago, one big problem for me was that LINUX (or UNIX)
simply didn't offer a great deal of elegance in GUI programming compared
to BeOS - BeOS conversely didn't offer much in the way of worthwile
software for dealing with the day-to-day requirements of a PC.  

In those last couple of years however I have adapted to Linux while the
BeOS software position has only got worse, as I have moved ever towards
the hardware I have found my OOD biggotry less and less relevant and I
have learned to find the beauty in the simplicity of the UNIX design. 
Also in that period the freedom of software has become more and more
important to me.  In the last three months, when I was playing around
writing my own windowmanager(s) I was truely appreciative of having so
many examples to work from.  

I dunno what I'm getting at here.  

Signing off to hack...

-- 
Geoff Teale <tealeg at member.fsf.org>
Free Software Foundation