From that ugly ad you've seen all over the Internet lately. The scam behind it is documented here.

Source is apparently the Linux Caffe in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. What, did you think something that cool happens in the United States? Silly, silly!

Jack Wallen over at Tech Republic just posted 10 old-school Linux tools I refuse to let go of, and of course I have a warm place in my heart for anyone who puts the command line first (and he isn't even a programmer! - see #3 on his list). Anyway, this sounds like good meat for a fun meme, so what are the programs that will never be replaced on my menu?

As I see it, the point of this exercise is not to rant about your favorite programs, but to make fun of yourself for being so old-fashioned. And I'm deliberately picking different programs from Wallen, even though there's overlap (command line, nethack, man pages, and cron).

Emacs - Emacs, like Zen, is something you either get or you don't. I rave about Emacs on this blog all the time, so I won't bother to explain more here. I'll just say that ultimately, Emacs has something unique that appeals to me - personality.

dc - Isn't this hilarious? I have desktop calculator programs installed all the time. I never use them, because it's still faster to just dive to the console and bang out the dc line. I've gotten to where I actually think about math better when I'm writing it as a dc command. No, really, if I'm away from a digital device and doing math in my head, I've discovered that I mentally type the reverse polish notation - complete with the leading "dc -e!"

Shell tools (sed, grep, cut, etc.) - Important thing to know about me: I am the epitome of laziness. If I can do something with 15 keystrokes instead of 20, I'll do it that way. And the command line text editing tools are fun! Yes, I get more kick out of figuring out some wicked-clever for-loop solution with filters than I do actually solving the problem.

Angband - Like Nethack, Angband - in the console - is just the dungeon crawler grind that never goes away. I'll go off and play the latest 3D amazing impressive whiz-bang game, and when I'm done with it, I'm back to Angband again. I must be broken.

SoX - If 'dc' didn't cement my place as a dinosaur, this will do it. The 'play' command is still how I listen to MP3s. Hey, it gets the job done, takes up the least resources, and I wrote a jukebox script which auto-plays my music file library on shuffle. I can just turn it on with one command and go back to what I was doing - instant custom radio station.

Image Magick - This isn't so much an anachronism as it is the only solution for batch image processing. Remember, I'm lazy. I can't believe there are people out there who will wait for Gimp to start (and nobody uses anything but Gimp ever, right?) and load up an image just to do some monkey-task like resizing, cropping, or transcoding. What, does time grow on trees? But then I also like inventing bizarre toys in it.

Tcl/tk/wish - It's strange that I still use this. When I need a fast desktop GUI solution, whipping off a quick 'wish' (the windowing shell extension) script is still the easiest way I know. If it hadn't been for wish, I would have never gotten into Tcl. I actually hate Tcl.

Lynx - Before you laugh, my daily browsing is in Firefox. Instead, I find Lynx indispensable for a number of cases: (1) To quickly view a web page chock full o' stupid, where I don't want to have to turn off ads, Flash, Javascript, Java, images, CSS, and sound all at once, (2) To script - Did you know you can script Google queries and store the results in a text file, for instance?, (3) To view web pages when my desktop is otherwise occupied (such as a game running full-screen).

ANSI art - Not a program specifically, but still very old-school. The associated programs are tetraview, aaview, and the caca library. I do have a whole category on this blog devoted to it, after all.

less - Still the fastest way to view any text file stored on my own machine. 'Nuff said.

In the middle of our day-to-day Hobbit-like peaceful work in the FOSS tech field, we have all suddenly had a grenade fall in our lap. And this makes no sense.

First link: Obama enforces trade embargo against open source. Uh, apparently Sourceforge is required to block countries the US doesn't approve of from accessing its own site.

Great, we now have a panic attack with only a Ziff-Davis corporate mouthpiece to go on.

Next, Sourceforge itself clarifies the issue. It leaves Obama's name off of the matter. I was trying to picture Barry himself issuing a directive over the red phone, so it sounds more realistic if this was some US Department of Whatever issuing the notice.

Like any typical American, I have to turn to a UK news source to find out what's really going on. The Register puts things a bit differently, adding two new clues: (1) Sourceforge has for long already had a policy against countries (on the US Office of Foreign Assets Control sanction list) from uploading/downloading content. And (2) Google's open-source code repository has done the same thing.

Questions my fuzzy brain is grappling with at this point:

1. Since when are individual webmasters responsible for enforcing US foreign policy?
2. That's impossible anyway. It's called a proxy server, people.
3. You wouldn't even need a proxy. Sourceforge's site could simply be mirrored on a server in another country.
4. What's so special about open source software? I don't hear about shareware/freeware authors being required to do this.
5. My God, I've posted open source code on my site, too. So now I'm violating something if I don't block... whoever it is?
6. Everybody else who's posted open source code on the web is violating something, too? You've got a long list there! Like, going back to the first files posted to gopher directories on ARPANET.
7. Web pages are made of source code, by the way. "View source."
8. Wait, weren't we just booing China for doing this?
9. The US Secretary of State says "the free movement of information strengthens countries and economies." Wait, would complying with the US Office of Foreign Assets Control get me in trouble with the US Secretary of State? I'd rather not tick off Hilly.
10. Has anyone got a 27B/6?

Well, I certainly haven't gotten the memo on this. And until I see something that makes real-world sense, I am going to quietly sit here and assume that the whole world went crazy. Really, it's been that kind of a century so far.

UPDATE: A waaaay more complete coverage of this story here.

UPDATE: An even more definitive take, from somebody who's been a first-hand witness to software and export embargoes since 1984, can be found in the article Mr. Obama, Please Tear Down This Wall!

2/08/10: RESOLVED! SourceForge took it back. Anybody from any country can now access the site again, and just check an option box for "Export Control" to comply with cryptography export laws. I *knew* cooler heads will prevail!

Dear Idiot,

I've been getting a few of these from you, and, given the careful production you put into this, thought I'd try to drop a clue or three in your vicinity:

(1) You sought out my email address. No mean feat, as it's only posted in a couple of places on my website. It's posted as an image, which is a pretty strong indicator that I don't dig on unsolicited commercial email. I'd explain this point a little more fully, but time is short and we have far more of your stupidity to examine.

(2) Although you tirelessly sought out every nook and cranny of my website in order to discover an email address, you somehow failed to register that I, myself, do the work similar to what you do. What with a portfolio of my own posted, a link to a new-client-check-in on Rent-A-Coder, and dozens of blog posts about designing my own site, you'd have to have the intellect of a squashed cockroach to try to sell me web design services.

(3) Of all things, you're trying to sell me design in .NET/ .ASP. Now, can anyone see Idiot's mistake? Ah, yes, in the second row. A website about Free-and-Open-Source Software? Hosted on a Linux server? With an email address with the word "Linux" right in the string? With numerous posts about coding in Python and PHP? Yeah, that does raise a red flag, doesn't it?

Now, any other spam would just get the old ashcan without a second thought. Spam that made it obvious that it began its journey to me when somebody originally visited my site bears a wry moment's thought. However, attempting to sell me code written in the top two languages which, given the choice between coming in contact with them and having several of my limbs rot from leprosy and fall off, I'd pick the leprosy, merits eeeextra-special public mockery. You might as well have sent a Jehovah's Witness to knock on Richard Dawkins' door.

(4) And for the rest of the points, we'll just group them together here: "New Year's" was 20 days ago, having the word "mind" in your company name while removing all hope that you'd use one, (not shown) having a United States phone number and business locations in Atlanta, Georgia and Palm Beach, Florida, while displaying no comprehension of English, and (not shown) closing with the tagline "Follow us on Twitter for great free tips on Online Marketing!" when anybody who knew how to Twitter probably already knows more about online marketing than you do.

Good luck out there with your "business." If you still have one.

I'm going to attempt to answer the number-one most common technology question on the web, and hopefully do it so I can just link people here. Wish me luck, I'll need it!

The answer is different for everyone!

For me, I learn for learning's sake. Literally, I have never encountered a language or computing technology that I did not want to learn. I just started with my first computer, a Commodore VIC-20 in my teens, and was thrilled to find that it had BASIC and a BASIC manual. That was day one. Since then I've just snarfed up whatever I could find. So far that's: C, C++, assembly, Lisp, Tcl/Tk, Bash, Awk, Python, Javascript, Actionscript, PHP, SQL, POVRay (used for rendering 3D graphics), and I'm losing track from there.

Being pro-learning is the only skill you really need!

That's the most important thing. Knowing one language just isn't any good. Knowing five is a little better. They get easier as you go along; I'm at a point where I can go from a cold start to coding a simple application in just one week on virtually any language. I just have a passion for technology and soak up everything I can get my hands on, and worry how to turn it into money later!

There's no such thing as "bad learning."

In 20 years watching the field, I've become convinced that every skill eventually becomes marketable. I never thought that somebody could make money being a Wordpress theme designer, a Twitter background theme artist, making ringtones for mobile phones, or setting up eBay storefronts, but there are all thriving cottage industries right now. Who knows what five years from now will bring? Professional Digg commenters? RSS publishing services? Mobile phone address book organizers? I've learned to never say never.

OK, but what do I learn for a job?

Well, I'll take a stab at it; here's the languages that currently seem to be going somewhere jobwise:

Javascript and AJAX: Big, big, big right now. I don't know if there's a new Web 2.0 bubble lurking or not, but it seems like there's jobs flying around for anybody who can build an AJAX site. It's made out of Javascript and XML, with a side helping of HTML and CSS. All you need is a text editor and a web browser.

PHP: Especially on the OS-Commerce backend. Shopping cart apps, game sites (the kind with subscribers), all kinds of web-based commerce. PHP is one cruddy language - it's ugly and clunky - and it's a smash hit. On Linux, I install PHP and run scripts right from the command line, saving the output as HTML. Or you can get a cheap web host and test server apps live. Job search keyword is LAMP, for "Linux Apache MySQL PHP"

C/C++: Still the application standard. It is simply never going away. On Linux, gcc comes with the distro, and on Windows there's a nice free IDE called Bloodshed Software Dev C++, if my memory serves.

Flash: Still big. Get a good Flash game online, and the world will drown you in ad revenue. Webmasters are always out to hire a Flash webmonkey. Requires some understanding of graphic design work as well. On my site, I stump a lot for SWFTools and the swfc compiler, with a lot of demos in the Flash category. I also hear good things about HaXe, but haven't tried it.

Python/ Ruby/ Lisp: Not much on the job front, but it's so fun to learn and use for yourself, that any work you get out of it is a bonus. The high-end Silicon Valley start-up type places will be more likely to hire in this category.

What about specific jobs?

Video games on the computer usually revolve around C, C++, and the whole C family. If not C, then assembly. Web server-side development is mostly PHP, some Perl. Web browser-side development is Javascript, AJAX, and Flash, with a lot of markup languages (HTML, XHTML, CSS, XML). Desktop applications are a crap-shoot; maybe Python, maybe Ruby, maybe Java, who knows? System administrators need shell scripting skills, in Bash and Perl. Big business mainframes are still crunching along with COBOL, God help us all.

Why should you learn multiple languages?

Here's what I mean about all learning is good learning: Flash's Actionscript is basically Ecmascript, which is also what Javascript comes from. Once you learn Javascript, you already know most of Actionscript. Javascript is related to Java, which is derived from C, so there's a link there. PHP has a very C-like syntax, so once you learn C or C++, PHP will be almost subconsciously easy to learn. Python and Ruby both are related, in a round-about way, to Lisp. When you come to Lisp from the C-side of programming, your mind will be blown. Get a free Emacs install and a manual and lose your head for a couple of weeks on the built-in ELisp interpreter inside Emacs. Now when you come to Python, Ruby, and other languages related to them, they'll make more sense.

A language can help you even if you don't get hired to program in it.

Now I, myself, make most of my freelance living from writing and graphics, so I'm really not the one to ask about making a living purely from writing code. The best work I've gotten in code is Flash stuff. If you're familiar with my Flash category on this blog, you know that I have a whole Flash toolchain built out of open source, with POVRay for 3D graphics, Bash scripting (Linux command line) to assemble animations, and SWFTools to compile the Flash. And now I'm writing my own POVRay frontend in Python out of frustration with the other POVRay frontends out there - this is an example of how knowing a language helps me.

I have yet to this day get paid one penny for Python code - directly! But my own tools tend to be either Bash or Python, which helps me do the other things I get paid money for. For another example, I have a lot of Bash scripts I've written over the years to convert or handle different document formats, so that saves me time on my writing work.

What is the easiest to learn?

This question is wrong. If you're asking it, I'm sorry, but my advice is to forget about programming. There is no "easy." You learn or you do not learn.

Well, which one is the most fun?

That's pretty subjective. Answers will vary, but if you just want a toy to play with for your own uses, Python and Ruby are both widely considered "fun". BASIC used to be, but it's outdated now.

You seem to lean heavy towards open source systems. What about Windows and Mac?

Sorry, check the site - it's "Penguin Pete's" as in "Tux, the Linux penguin, the mascot of Linux!" Call me biased, but for learning programming you can't beat Linux. The system's free, the tutorials are free, the documentation is free. Linux is built for learning.

I don't like your answer!

Remember, I said this is the number-one most common technology question on the web! Really, I swear on my grandmother's grave, you are not the very first person to have asked! Here are some search links for the other 348 million answers:

• What programming language should I learn?
• What programming language should I learn first?
• What programming languages are used in game programming?
• What programming languages are in demand?
• What programming languages should i know?
• Which programming language to learn?
• Which programming language is best?
• Which programming language to start with?
• How do I learn programming?
• How do I get into programming?
• Where can I find programming tutorials?

Not only is today the New Year, it's also the first anniversary of my webcomic, Doomed to Obscurity. Since launching January 1st, 2009, it has now reached its 187th strip, thanks to my wonky "every odd-numbered day" posting schedule.

I've beefed up the strip's page, so it now includes an RSS feed, an archive, and a shoutbox, and also added a new reader's guide page.

It has so far only gotten one review at I Am Legend - that was a fair review for its time, but I'd be much more interested in seeing reviews after this last year, since it's now had enough progress to strut its stuff. It has also become a regular feature in The Linux Gazette. It's been added to various webcomic directories, including comicsweep.com, which is a rather nifty comic aggregator site launched this year. My practice of Tweeting every strip post on Twitter has gotten my feed added to this webcomic Twitter list.

Readers, this is a good time to provide some feedback in the comment section below. Any questions you have about the strip, I'll try to answer. Any comments, criticisms, or advice you'd have would be greatly appreciated. I hope someday for it to go big places, and of course, including the "produced entirely with free and open source software" line, it can carry the reputation of FOSS along with it.

And to the readers: Thank you all so much for your kind words and fan mail! It's wonderful and gratifying to know that even such a peculiar muse as mine can find people who identify with it. Here's to another year!

Syzygy, a word guaranteed to tickle the fancy of crossword puzzlers and Scrabble players, is defined in Wikipedia as "a kind of unity, especially through coordination or alignment, most commonly used in the astronomical and/or astrological sense."

And that's exactly what's happening right now, with the blue moon on New Year's Eve. The solar and lunar years have ground through the gears to end up in the same groove. Celestial clockwork is beautiful.

This is an occurrence so rare, it hasn't happened since 1990. And I'm kind of hoping that it's a good omen for new beginnings. Yes, it's silly and superstitious, but sometimes otherwise impossible things become true just because people expect them to.

Oh, yeah, and for Europe, Africa, and Asia, they're even getting a New Year's blue moon eclipse. An event so rare, we're going to have to bring back the Mayans just to write a new calendar to calculate it. More than you'll ever need to know about lunar eclipses at NASA's site.

Kinda fits in with the theme this year. Just random stuff. Waste time here.

Checking my incoming links, I see Facebook has discovered my post on the origins of Santa Claus. I have no idea how to follow this up, but then, Christmas is the time for re-running classics, isn't it?

Oh, and this is funny. I'm getting a ton of links from an Angband forum to my old (two-and-a-half-years-ago) blog post about Angband. Turns out some spammer bot copies paragraphs from blog posts to spam forums with, and the link is from somebody pointing it out.

And for my annual Christmas linklist:

Usually I link my favorite online games, but this year I just wasn't keeping up with that scene, so instead how about a linklist of my (currently and/or newly-discovered) favorite online reading? Something a little more engaging for burning the hours for those of us snowed in for the Holidays.

TV Tropes - This rates my vote for Website of the Year! An awesome Wiki of the things media is made of, from books to video games to webcomics. (My webcomic isn't listed there yet, hint hint. I actually observe tropes in the comic.) TV Tropes has become more of a go-to source than Wikipedia, since it covers those odd-ball animes, mangas, memes, Flash cartoons, YouTube poops, and other things that aren't notable enough for Wikipedia. Also, the community has 95% fewer twigs up their hinders.

The Book of Ratings - This guy is funny! And he has a great gig - make idiosyncratic lists of random things and rate them. Great cultural commentary. He's old-school, but hip-to-the-minute at the same time. And I'm linking him to try to prod him out of blog-retirement.

The Comics Curmudgeon - You've probably heard of him before, but here he is again, because he's just that damn awesome. He does to the newspaper comics community what I sort of do to the geek community, only with a tad more snark.

Zen Archery - There was exactly one thing I took with me when I left Las Vegas, and that's Joshua Ellis. His column in Las Vegas weeklies turned me onto his blog. He knows undercurrents of culture that aren't mapped, and he stings them like a scorpion made of cynicism.

Deadlicious - I can't even describe this site. It's the epitome of the heights a mere blog can reach. Just plow through it; it's a treasure-hunt of biker culture, comics, toys, curiosities, foreign film posters, bizarre folk art, vintage erotic literature, '50s pin-ups... It's a Boing-Boing for goths? No, that's not it.

The Agony Booth - A den of all evil media reviewed mercilessly. Compare to Television Without Pity.

Websnark - A rather long-winded blog that starts out being about webcomics, and branches out into online culture from there. Also possibly in retirement - why, oh why, do the classics stop?

The Moment of the Decade - Here, just in time to end the decade that nobody wanted. Lists, articles, and memories from the "Noughties." How fitting that every year in it had at least a double-zero.

And for a final hit from the Internet bong...

Faye Kane's Weblog EXTREMELY NSFW! - I mean it, don't let anybody catch you reading this! Rated X. X! X! X! A glance into the twisted, disturbed, incredibly filthy, and obviously manic-depressive mind of a misfit girl geek - who claims to have been homeless and living in a cave where she set up housekeeping through dumpster-diving and stealing electricity. If you dig deep, you find a "happy ending" (she apparently got "rescued"). Is the whole thing a hoax? If it is, it's a brilliant one. If not, it might stand as one of the most engrossing day-by-day pictures of mental illness (and genius) we'll ever have on the web. Really, it's a huge mystery, and if anybody has any enlightenment for us about exactly what this... thing... is, we're dying for your comment.

And now, for your moment of Christmas gift Zen...

Hands-down winner for the tackiest gift of 2009, my kids got this musical toothbrush holder. You know, because (a) we have too much bathroom counter space, (b) there's something wrong with keeping a toothbrush in the medicine cabinet, (c) teenagers still can't be trusted to brush their teeth yet without motivation, and (d) every act of the day, even the most mundane detail, needs music from old Disney films.

This thing plays You Can Fly. Loud. And it's touchy. Like, every time we added a gift under the tree or walked through the living room or thought too hard, we'd accidentally vibrate the box and it would start playing by itself, and play and play. It'd start up at night all by itself. This has been going on for a week. We open it today to discover the exact tacky useless brick we expected to find, and everybody was already set to jump on it and stomp it into happy, singing splinters.

This is the kind of thing you can't even donate to Toys For Tots with a clear conscience. I grew up as a ghetto kid myself, and even ghetto kids know singing kitch when they see it. Isn't there a blog somewhere where everybody can post their tackiest gift of the year? If not, we need one. We need to send the message that it's OK to say that not all gifts are dearly cherished, and you're not a flinty old Scrooge if you aren't absolutely delighted with every useless blob of plastic rabies people lob at you. Lots of people feel this away about stuff they get, even if we have to smile and pretend that it's just what we always wanted, and then put it up for grabs on Craigslist.

Merry Christmas 2009, and to all you penguins out there: Keep the word, chilly bird!