Archive for October 10th, 2006

Posted on October 10, 2006 - by jono

How to not get banned on Freenode

IRC is pretty important to my job. I spend all day, every day on it, talking to the community and working on various things.

Today I wanted to double check my /away was working, so I figured I would log on twice, join a random channel and test it. So, I logged on as jono and jono_ and then joined a random channel – I joined #asdfg.

Bad move. I got message saying I had been D-Lined. I was not sure what this mean’t but it clearly mean’t ahha! no IRC for you sucka!

Luckily, the awesome Ubuntu community came to my rescue and I almost immediately got an email from Melissa and a few seconds later David Symons called me and was trying to straighten it out with the Freenode admins. Thanks guys. Also thanks to Freenoder denny (an old flame from the Linux UK days) for helping too.

I cannot believe that there is a channel that can be accidentally joined by typing in a bunch of consecutive keys next to each other on a keyboard and it bans you. I could understand if I needed to join #q1gcyh75fdr5g6h7, but this is nuts.

I am currently awaiting a Freenode admin to wake up and un-ban me – I am now using an SSH tunnel to get at IRC. Would be nice if Freenode had network people awake during the day in my timezone to fix things like this.

So, whatever you do, never join #asdfg!

Posted on October 10, 2006 - by jono

The second garage revolution

As a child of the 80s and 90s, I often look back fondly at the computers back then. Commodore 64s, Spectrums, Amigas, Amstrads, Ataris, Acorns, and a raft of consoles all bring back memories of what many people refer to as the golden age of computing.

When you look back to this period of computing, it is interesting to note how homebrew much of it was. Many computers were available in both kit and pre-assembled form, and their creators were often very small companies housed in a garage or equally damp-ridden hovel that kept costs down. Also mixed into the recipe was rampant, bounding, steaming, virtually pornographic incompatibility. These computers we so incompatible that they barely knew the meaning of the word compatible.

When you look back, the level of success had by these homebrew hackers was pretty astonishing. Many of these early computers went on to massive popularity, and even the more esoteric examples had strong followings that eagerly mailed off their paychecks to get a whole 3MHz of bone-crunching computing power.

The point I am making here is that there are some pretty strong parallels between this golden age of computing and what is happening to Open Source. Here we have a collection of intelligent, motivated individuals who are turned-on by cool technology and take a pure and honest approach to their inventions. This applies to both the early computer hackers and today’s free software hackers. From garages around the world, people are doing awesomely cool things and redefining the rules in a market increasingly wrapped up by single large vendors. Back then, the early computer hackers battled the big computer corps, and today the same thing is happening in the software world as free software finds its place in the industry.

Interestingly, back then…the hackers won. They did shift units, they did make money, they did get recognition. Back then the people with the knowledge in their heads were successful. I think we can learn many things from what happened then, and it just goes to show that if you put the right people in front of a problem, you can tick all the boxes and be successful.