Thought Bricks

In a continuation of recent changes to open source businesses, SUSE has decided to go back to being a private company. SUSE’s foray as a public company was certainly not profitable for investors who bought in at the IPO (thankfully, not me) but represents a good deal for current shareholders. My experience with SUSE has been very positive. I used it to deploy some SAP HANA databases about ten years ago and it was a very nice distro with some interesting configuration and management tools.

I recently enabled Kernel Livepatch on my Ubuntu 22.04.3 desktop system. Livepatch is intended for systems that you don’t want to reboot. It’s completely overkill for a desktop that I can reboot whenever I need to but I wanted to understand it better. Kernel Livepatch is part of the Ubuntu Pro offering that is free for a limited number of systems - five systems currently. That seems like a pretty smart play by Ubuntu to differentiate their offering a little bit and get a premium service into the hands of more users who might then go on to buy a package later.

A passage that caught my eye today while flipping through Meditations: Forget everything else. Keep hold of this alone and remember it: Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see. The span we live is small - small as the corner of the earth in which we live it. Small as even the greatest renown, passed from mouth to mouth by short-lived stick figures, ignorant alike of themselves and those long dead.

I’ve written about HashiCorp before. They have some very nice infrastructure-as-code (IAC) tools that have many users around the world. These tools used to be open source, but that has now changed. Instead of following the Mozilla Public License v2.0, they are moving to the Business Source License (BUSL). It’s sort of of open sourcish but has made plenty of people mad. I can see the point if you have contributed to a project and a company takes the code away and puts it into a less open license.

I guess online meetings just aren’t good enough. Even Zoom is requiring people to go back to the office. You would think that Zoom would stick to remote work just to eat their own dogfood but I guess not. The bit in the article from an economics professor at Stanford is strange, especially from an economics professor. He says that “If you are paying for office space and high Bay Area salaries it makes sense to operate on a hybrid schedule.

I read a few days ago that Bram Moolenaar has passed away. I didn’t know him but I use his work almost everyday. Bram was the main author of vim which is an excellent and flexible text editor. A truly great piece of software. It is also remarkable that vim is charityware to raise money to help children in Uganda. He was very dedicated to this cause and made a big difference in peoples lives beyond software.

I haven’t used LXD much recently but it’s a very nice container and virtual machine management system. I’ve done a few things with it in the past and it works really well. I noticed the other day through some web browsing that Canonical was withdrawing LXD from the Linux Container project and would be developing it in-house. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. This piece in The Register outlines why that is.

I just sold an ancient but working iPhone 6 on eBay for $22.50. I got a new-to-me iPhone SE (2nd generation) to replace it for $89 from Gazelle, so my net to move from a phone first released in 2014 to one that was first released in 2020 was $67. My daily driver is an iPhone 14 but there isn’t much that I would miss by using the SE in that capacity.

I used to travel quite a bit for work. I’d been in the top tier of an airline frequent flier program for years. Until now. The pandemic changed my work travel habits indelibly. It really isn’t necessary to travel for work when most of the meetings you attend in person have somebody attending remotely. Why not spare yourself the hassle of travel and also attend remotely? I’m less into personal travel as well.

“We talkin’ about practice?”In the case of yoga, I guess that’s all you talk about. I’ve been getting into it this year and do a session every day on Apple Fitness+. They have some nice and easy slow flow sessions that work really well for me. Since it’s right there on my phone and the sessions are as little as ten minutes, there is no excuse not to. I don’t have a before and after measure for it, but I feel like it’s helped my flexibility and balance.