According to some input from my users, I've created the shlomif-tech community for my more technical (about software, computers, and possibly other realistic science) posts and ramblings. I, or a different future moderator, need to approve all posts, but everyone can comment.

From now on, this blog will be dedicated to less technical stuff. I hope to maintain a good signal-to-noise ratio here, by only blogging about events or thoughts I think may be of interest to the general readers, rather than only to me.

If you're interested in vim tips, software thoughts, solutions to software problems, etc. please subscribe to its RSS or Atom feeds. shlomif-tech will also be aggregated into my aggregated blog.

The old technical entries of this blog will remain here, though and will not be moved.

Yesterday I attended the first Israeli Ruby enthusiasts meeting. Despite many problems in its organisation - it was very successful. It was in the format of a barbeque in a villa in Hertzliyah, an informal chat, an informal introduction and then a round of some future expectations and planning. Since the meeting is currently hosted at Google Groups (%-)), and I'm subscribed there from my gmail.com account which I also dislike, here are my impressions and pieces of advice.

There's a lot of good advice in Rick Moen's "Recipe for a Succesful Linux User Group" and I suggest that people go over it, because while the Rubyers seem enthusiastic, they've made some classical mistakes.

My current x86 computer originally had 512 MB of RAM and has a hard-disk dedicated to Windows 98. However, recently I've been running Linux exclusively on it, and also added another 2 GB of RAM. Today, my father needed to access his old email, and so we needed to boot from Windows. I arranged a grub boot configuration for it and booted it. I upgraded the kernel to 2.6.20-rc5 so it came at the right time. Windows came up the logo was displayed, but eventually a text message like "Insufficient memory to run Windows" was displayed.

I tried to eliminate some problem - I cleared some space out of drive D (normally used for data), set the BIOS to boot the Windows disk, and tried again. Same problem. After discussing it with a friend and googling a bit, I found this page that says that win98 will "freak" if there is more than 2 GB of memory.

If Windows 98 cannot handle more than 2 GB of memory that's fine, but why does it have to freak with an incorrect error message. Can't it utilise only a subset of this memory? Well, I guess that if we'd like to run Windows on this machine again, we'll need to upgrade to Windows XP or whatever. Oh well.

I have a long weekend ahead of me due to Tish'ah Be'Av and one thing I'm planning to do is blogging. The first thing I'd like to blog about is my hardware wishlist.

First is memory. At the moment I have 512 MB, but with KDE, two Apache's, SpamAssassin, akregator, Amarok, and Firefox, it is no longer enough. So I'd like to upgrade it to 2 GB (or 2.something GB, witht the old memory units). A friend of mine is going to drive me to a hardware store in downtown Tel Aviv, and we're going to buy them there then. My board supports up to 4 GB of memory.

Next on my list is a flat screen. My screen at the moment is a 17"" MAG screen, that occupies too much space and plus has a large frame, which makes the image smaller. I'd like a nice 19" flat screen. This things don't cost too much, and at least I could put more stuff on my desktop without straining my eyes.

Another thing I'd like is a new hard disk. At the moment, I have two 80 GB hard disks, both of them quite full. With the new disk we can put all the largish video and audio files we have. I still don't know whether I'm going to get a SATA disk or an external USB disk.

Finally - the video card. At the moment, I have an Hang-vidia card, which I run without the 3-D drivers (so at least my computer will be stable). I'd like a card with some free-as-in-GPL 3-D drivers. I know that Intel cards have just that, but I'd like to see what will happen with the AMD and ATI merger, and whether it will cause the ATI proprietary drivers to be open-sourced too. In the meantime - no 3-D games for me on my Linux machine, but I still mostly only play PySol and some random puzzle games.

Oh and if you're going to tell me that the Nvidia drivers version 6666 or whatever works for you, and that I should use it - forget it. I have better things to do than to play with different versions of a huge and quirky binary blob. I want it free-as-in-speech and problem-free!

(For the record, I am making use of some high-quality binary-only software on my Linux machine (much less on my family's Windows' machine). But I think that binary kernel drivers are Evil, and do not wish to use them. Plus, I never depend on such software.)

I hope you did not feel too bad about my previous post to this journal, which was of somewhat political nature. So here's a more technical-philosophical post which is in essence an essay.

Continuing with the thread in Perl-IL that I started, about the shortage of P-Languages (and FOSS in general) programmers in Israel, and the fact that employers have become more picky in hiring them, and my "Thoughts about Whether to Become Independent" threads in Perl-IL and in Hackers-IL, I'd like to go one step further. (Read the entire threads - they contain many important insights).

During the Renaissance (and possibly previously in the middle ages or before) it was customary for nobles and royals to become patrons of artists and scholars - sponsor their food and housing and in exchange become better known for the creations of these creative people. Now here I propose that now, well into the information age, such a paradigm may resurface, or already resurfaced in a way.

What I'm talking about is giving patronage to open source hackers: programmers, essayists/article writers/bloggers, artists, translators, QA people - all falling under the umbrella of people who hack. This patronage can be given by "rich people": companies, wealthy entrepreneurs, a collective donation of sponsorship, or other sources like that. In turn, the developer can do what he normally does, while possibly crediting his benefactors. (Depending on the terms of benefactors).

Now let's take me as an example. Being a 21st-century Homo sapiens, I require some basic things such as food, housing, clothing, electricity and good hardware, software and Internet resources. Without these things I won't be able to produce anything of value. Now, what I like to do the most, and what I feel like I'm the best at is hacking on various digital creations on my free time. You can find the stuff I wrote on my homesite. The license for most of it is very liberal, usually even Public Domain, BSD-style or CC-Attribution (CC-by).

Now, before I continue let me just say that I'm very happy with my workplace. The conditions there are excellent, the people are very nice, and I'd recommend every Israeli tech-worker who's looking for a job to consider working for them. However, lately I've been feeling that doing my day job's work is a waste of time, as strange as it sounds. I feel that I'm much productive, helpful and as a result satisfied hacking on voluntary stuff.

Obviously, I still have to eat and stuff. Which is where Patronage kicks in. Why can't I get someone or some people to support me so I can continue to do what I like most of the time?

Having a patronage does not mean I'm going to stop trying to earn some money on my own. On my home site I have a page with several ways I can make money. Before I got a job, I made a substantial amount of money off gigs, like writing articles for online publications, proof-reading documents and books, or writing code. Now I also have several ideas for several projects that are both open source but also have a commercial potential, which I cannot work on.

If I get a patronage, I can still do these things, and possibly have a share of the money I receive for such things be payed back to my patron (or donated to a charity approved by him). This brings me to Self-Patronage where such gigs make me entirely self-supportive.

I'm not going to quit my job just yet, albeit I've certainly been happier without a job, and with a full time dedicated to hacktivity. I wonder who will want to hire me to do the random stuff I normally do. I tend to have the attention span of a child, and also work on several articles and essays simultaneously. I have many projects that I started and are in a usable state, and which I multiplex between them, and do bits of each every time.

I've already set up a donation page, but I'm not sure PayPal donations can be directly translated into Israeli currency. Most of what I have in my account now is for commissions, but it's a start. I also placed some Google ads on my site, but I have yet to reach the 100 dollars mark.

I do not claim to be the inventor of Patronage and Self-Patronage. It is well known that some developers collected donations to sponsor them for a year or even more. And increasingly we've seen many professional bloggers or self-employed open source developers. But it is something that any creative person should consider.