I was reading Mark Chu-Carroll’s why I won’t be at my high school reunion with considerable sadness and got to thinking about my own experience.

I went to school in ~10 different schools in 3 different continents. I only went to high school in the US for ~ 1 1/2 years, so my experience is limited. I was, however, a very socially inept 15 year old as a senior in high school, so I can claim some geek-in-high-school credit.

My first exposure to U.S. high school violence was in the second week of school. I was walking back from class when a typewriter shattered a window and flew across the walkway. Inside the classroom I saw several large boys attacking each other in a way I’d never seen before: they appeared to be trying to kill each other.

I’m no stranger to school fights. In Iran, even for a studious little boy like myself, fights are common place. I have no idea how many fights I had, but I’d guess maybe once a month. I probably saw at least one fight a day.

In England I had fewer fist fights. Maybe 4 or 5 in ~2 1/2 years.

I’ve seen far fewer fights in the U.S. The fights I have seen, however, have a sickening quality to them. The violent intent is incredible. Elsewhere the goal of the fight is to assert your superiority over the other person. Here it seems to be inflict terrible violence.

Back to Mark’s story: picturing a normal neighbourhood Iran, I can’t imagine a kid needlessly getting his fingers broken while others watched. I left when I was 12 so I may be mistaken, but I just can’t picture it. I don’t think it would fit the culture – someone would step in to stop it.

I can’t really see it happening in England either. I was there till I was 14 so I’m slightly better informed. I’m picturing my school. It just would not happen.

Let me clarify: in Iran I’ve seen grown men get into a fist fight over a taxi, and I’ve seen a crowd gather to egg them on.

I just can’t see the part, however, where one of the fighters, having clearly dominated the other, would start breaking fingers for fun while others watched. The watchers would stop watching – they’d step in.

…

My impression is that physical violence in school in the U.S. is less frequent but more serious than elsewhere. I can’t figure out why.

More than likely I’m mistaken. Let me know your impressions, particularly if you’ve gone to school in multiple countries / states.

Well that was impressive. Somehow I clicked through to a site called totalvirusscanc3 dot com that displayed a web page that mimicked the windows interface of a virus scanner very well, showed a ficticious but real looking virus scan proceeding, and attempted to save an executable on my computer.

Not only were the graphics and the animations dead on, but the site also somehow managed to prevent me from closing the browser tab in Chrome. Even clicking on the tab’s x button didn’t work. I killed the tab via Chrome’s Task Manager, but that killed the whole browser. Not sure how they did that, but I’m impressed.

There’s been a bit of discussion regarding the use of GPL vs. BSD style licenses triggered by Jacob Kaplan-Moss’s Twenty Questions About GPL and Zed Shaw’s Why I GPL. Interesting stuff, even made it to Slashdot. James Bennett has some intelligent things to say about it.

My 2 cents on this, mostly on Zed’s post. The gist of his argument seems to be that he wrote a very popular piece of software, but was denied recognition and financial benefit due to a conspiracy between the triumvirate of VCs, startup founders, and Al Qaeda, all enabled by an over-permissive license.

I absolutely agree with Zed that the choice of license is the author’s alone, and whoever doesn’t like it can take their ball and go home. Ripping on a project because of choice of license is indeed jerkish, although I don’t know if there was any such ripping in this case. Anyway, license choice belongs to the author, agreed.

Zed’s point on VC’s, however, starts to get murky: “I have no reason to give them unrestricted use of my software since they are only interested in turning my software into a hot IPO 2-5 years from now.” That’s … misguided. Infrastructure software has so very little to do with a company reaching IPO – it’s just not very connected. I’m not saying infrastructure software has no value – in fact it’s quite valuable – it’s just not what’s “turned into an IPO.”

Skipping to Zed’s fifth point: “I’ll always be an open source developer, but quite frankly, we’re dying off because the companies who use our software do not give back.” Huh. That’s another one that misses the mark for me. Open source software is more vibrant than ever, and most of the most interesting stuff seems to be coming from startups. Possibly the same ones Zed’s berating for using his software without giving back.

Anyway, open source is definitely not dying off.

So to Zed’s main point, about recognition and financial benefit from open sores software. It’s reasonable to expect to get consulting offers when your software becomes popular. Everybody I know who wrote reasonably popular open source software has gotten plenty of consulting offers. Hell, I even got a fair amount of offers related to my silly tcl-sql interface that had maybe 500 users back in the day.

So why didn’t Zed? He’s clearly a very smart and capable developer, and his software clearly is popular. So what’s the deal?

Well, it might be related to his reputation. Not related to his ability as a developer, not related to his choice of a BSD license.

His blog used to be called “Zed’s So Fucking Awesome”, and he was world renowned for his rants.

When you’re known more for your rants than for your software (perhaps unfairly), it should come as little surprise if you don’t have consulting offers lined up around the block. Rants scare people. “Fucking Awesome” and talk of how you can kick my scrawny ass because of your martial arts training scares people. Don’t get me wrong – it was very entertaining, and I certainly enjoyed reading his blog, but my very next thought was not to go recommend him for a consulting job. Hell, he might kick my ass if I looked at him wrong!

Now everyone seems to agree the Zed is in fact a wonderful human being when you meet him in person, and my email exchanges with him have been nothing short of extraordinary – he’s been ludicrously helpful. I’m saying, he’s probably a great guy to work with.

But that’s not the image he projected.

So, my point, after all these wasted words, is that Zed’s financial prospects are helped far more by his new blog and demeanor than by his choice of license. I’m not saying he shouldn’t be free to say what he wants – I actually really enjoyed his old blog – but I am saying he shouldn’t be surprised if it impacts his financial prospects.

Tonight I had my first experiencing with getting choked out – going unconcious from a Jiu Jitsu choke. The black belt was showing me how to do a triangle, and somewhere in the middle of saying “that’s tight” I went to sleep.

I’d always wondered what it felt like. Very surprising – it was a most pleasant experience. One minute I was in class, the next I was having a wonderful dream. I was talking to my brother about something, and out of nowhere Mark was asking if I was asleep. Of course I’m asleep, I thought, and tried to get back to dreaming. Then somebody else said “I think he’s out”, and I opened my eyes to find out I was still in class.

Apparently everybody reacts differently; my experience was quite nice. Scary to think the path from that pleasant dream to dead is not very long.

I hear complaining about the Windows/DOS command line window and how unusable it is, which is surprising considering how easy it is to make it usable. Here we go:

• Start a new cmd session. On Vista, click on the round windows icon at the bottom left of the screen and type “cmd” into the “Start Search” box. On XP, click Start->Run and type in cmd.
• Right click on the top cmd window area and select “Properties”
• Options: Enable “Quick Edit Mode” and “Insert Mode”
• Font: Size: 10 , Font: Lucida Console
• Layout: Window Size: Width: 100, Height: 50
• Click ok
• Select “Set properties for future windows”, click Ok.