Is it just me, or is this a great idea?

I ordered Debian 2.2 from CheapBytes awhile back, and it finally arrived yesterday (along with fresh versions of Red Hat and FreeBSD). I immediately installed it on my desktop computer, and I have to say, Debian’s installer has gotten much, much better. It’s still not as nice as the Mandrake installer, but there are other things I dislike about Mandrake, so that’s OK. The only problem I had in limited usage is that I wasn’t able to install the Netscape packages using dselect last night, either from the CDs or over the Internet. I expect to solve that problem tonight.

IBM has a great summary of the new features in version 2.4 of the Linux kernel. Some of the features are interesting, but overall, it isn’t particularly exciting to me.

Wired has an article about how it’s becoming more difficult for startups to hire people at low salaries with crappy benefits in exchange for potentially worthless stock options. All I can say is that it’s about time. Speaking only for myself, what matters most is quality of life at the company. I’m not willing to take a job that requires me to sit in a shoebox every day, spend my entire life at work, or deal with lots of stupid, pointless bureaucracy, it’s just not worth it.

Tim O’Reilly wrote a message to the Free Software Business mailing list today that everyone in open source or in the Web application world should read. In response to a thread discussing why open source (in this case, Linux) sucks for the consumer, Tim responded that open source has been an incredible boon to consumers. It provided all of the key components that allowed the Web to blossom as a platform for deploying applications. It is, to a certain degree, a tragedy that Linux has managed to grab nearly all of the public attention in the open source world. It’s a great project, but it’s not the only project out there, nor is it the most important, in my opinion.

I found a link to this rant about the misery of working in the IT industry over at Genehack. It’s great stuff. There are plenty of people working in programming who are just as bad as the “bad geeks” in IT that the author describes. (I do find more smallminded provincialism in IT than in programming, though.) When I interview a candidate, I really have only one thing in mind: is this person a good geek? I’ve been pretty successful so far.

The Evolutionary Psychology mailing list looks completely fascinating. I don’t imagine I have enough time to keep up with it, though. There have already been 558 messages posted to the list this month.

A federal judge has ruled that the Los Angeles Police Department can be sued under the RICO statute, which was initially created to allow the government to more harshly punish organized crime organizations. Of course, since RICO was instituted, the government has used it to abuse all sorts of people, whether they have ties to organized crime or not. It’s nice to see the legal equivalent of reductio ad absurdum at the expense of the corrupt LAPD.

Did I notice this morning that eGroups is now putting the ads they insert in email messages at the top of the message body instead of at the bottom?

Velocity is a templating system for Java servlets that’s part of the Apache Jakarta project. It’s patterned after WebMacro, which has fallen into disfavor due to license issues.