Woo-hoo! Tonight I set up a Subversion server. It is available for read-only access at svn://svn.frields.org. Eventually I will be migrating this to using Apache and mod_dav_svn, but that will come later. Too much recompiling and installing to do on my trusty RHL 9 server for this late at night.  :-)

On a whim I bought Anthony Minghella’s film of Charles Frazier’s Civil War romantic epic Cold Mountain. After the first viewing I have to admit I was a bit nonplussed. As I thought back over the film, though, I realized my disappointment was due in large part to its steadfast refusal, despite my overwhelming desire to the contrary, to be The English Patient, which is one of my all-time favorite films. (I’m embarrassed to say that Eleya and I did not manage to catch it in theaters, but I’ve watched my crummy first-edition Miramax DVD of the film probably fifteen times, and will be buying the new edition this week.)

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p>The more I thought about this film the more I realized what a great work it was on its own. The cinematography was gorgeous, the acting tremendous and nuanced, and the story multi-layered and touching. At this point, I can’t wait to watch it again with fresh eyes and enjoy it on its own terms.

It’s interesting to me that for you folks using Microsoft Windows, being able to “talk” to your office computer from home or on the road is a big deal. You buy all sorts of geegaws like “GoToMyPC” or “PCanywhere,” which gives you the ability to use your applications and documents from a remote computer. (I’ll be honest, I don’t know what Mac folks do, but would assume a similar situation… although with OS X, they are actually running a UNIX variant now.)

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p>But using Linux, not only have I always had all that functionality for free, but it’s drawing on 30-year old ideas from UNIX. The graphical interface we use is all about flexibility. It was designed in the 1970′s to allow you to separate the display from the computer doing the work, a good practice for which Windows was never designed. What’s more, I can do things like encrypt the transmission between my office computer and my home computer, without having to remember a lot of diddly switches, or anything other than my password at home. If I need to work on a document from home, I can either transfer it to work (securely, by the way), or work on it remotely in my office.

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p>So now you get to pay, what? Thirty, fifty, eighty dollars on top of the two hundred you’ve already spent on your operating system? No thanks, I’ll take my Linux system, for which I’ve paid absolutely ZERO. And before you start shouting “compatibility,” you should keep in mind what happened when I used my Linux laptop at work just this last week for a presentation I gave to a review board at work. Several people showed up with floppies in hand (PowerPoint files, of course), and I simply popped them into OpenOffice.org and the presentations ran flawlessly.

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p>Take that, Bill Gates!