Chad Perrin: SOB

Oh, how the memories come back to me.

Earlier today, I came across an rpg.net discussion about the history of WW/WoD flame wars. The people in that thread discuss various major flame wars in the history of the official White Wolf forums (primary among other venues). Most of what's discussed as "ancient history" is stuff that came late in the history of WW/WoD flame wars, from my perspective; I was one of the real old-timers (second wave, frankly, since I came along in '97, probably a couple years before they gave the chatrooms actual setting names rather than simply calling them things like Vampire Chat Room 1).

As I indicated in my reddit comment on the subject, mine was a name to conjure with in the WW forums for a while. I was one of the most vociferous after the forum software was significantly changed, and part of the crew of forum regulars who talked WW into actually fixing the new forums enough so they were usable again. I was also the guy who went head-to-head with Conrad Hubbard, the new Webslave at WW and the guy in charge of running the forums, ending with being the first person to ever be banned from the WW forums (as well as also being the third). The story behind that is long and sordid, and much detail is lost in the mists of time, though you can get a brief summary of it from my reddit comment if you're so inclined.

Aside from a short stint as John Galt, I was known as Reverend Renfield on the WW forums. One person had this (paraphrased and summarized from memory — the original was longer and more detailed) to say to me, about me, when I mentioned in passing I was taking classes in formal logic at college:

Nobody can argue against you and expect to come away unscathed. Even the people who agree with you all the time, like me, fear the day we get on your bad side. Now you're adding formal logic training to that. Stop it. You're already scary enough.

It was meant in good spirits, of course. The people who suffered my scrutiny surely deserved it — including, notably, Overbear Sunstreak (the name of his twinked-out Gurahl character) and Conrad Hubbard. Probably my most memorable exchange with Old Mother Hubbard involved me making a strong case for how the new "We'll ban you if you violate the terms of use!" rule was bullshit if there were no posted Terms of Use — culminating in my banning, which was immediately followed by an ex post facto justification by posting a Terms of Use on the site. Yes, really. I was banned for violation of a Term of Use that wasn't even known until immediately after I was banned.

I haven't been to the WW forums since . . . oh, probably since early 2002 at the latest, and the last couple times I was there it was just to check out some interesting post someone else suggested I should read. I'm sure things have changed since then.

Thems was the days.

I wonder if Uber ever built that Webpage shrine to my greatness, like he said he would.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is, among other things, the author of ZDNet's "Hardware 2.0" Weblog and a separate Weblog called The PC Doctor. Oddly enough, the Hardware 2.0 Weblog has become a platform for him to talk about all kinds of crap that has nothing to do with hardware — and when he does so, he has a tendency to annoy the crap out of me.

His approach is particularly annoying when he takes on the subject of Linux systems. The format of these posts can pretty much be boiled down to this simple formula:

I love Linux. I'm a friend of Linux. Really I am. I don't know shit about Linux, but I pretend to online. I claim to use it regularly, but I can't even perform the simplest tasks, because I'm a complete ignoramus. The fact I'm a complete ignoramus is the fault of Linux — because Linux is too hard for me. Today, I'm speaking specifically of this one problem I have where I can't do this one extremely simple thing with Linux-based systems that your technophobic luddite senile grandparent and your three year old niece can do easily. I will compare it unfavorably with MS Windows, but only by implication, because I know that if I actually described the MS Windows way of doing things you'd realize just how much easier it is to do this on a Linux-based system than on an MS Windows system.

This guy actually posted something on Monday about how installing software on Linux-based systems is too hard, because apparently he doesn't know how to launch programs, or something. Like, when he installs 7zip (which he describes as being very easy at the very beginning of the Hardware 2.0 post — notice the lack of hardware topic in this, by the way), he then wonders where it went. He seems incapable of typing, for instance, 7zip. Seriously.

He claims he has to use Google to figure out how to use it!

How long has he been using Linux? Two minutes? WTF?

No, he claims he's been using it for quite a while now, and uses it all the time. Somehow, though, it still never occurs to him that typing 7zip and hitting the Enter key might do something useful — unless he does that at Google, I guess.

Look at this. His willful ignorance and FUD peddling has gotten me all worked up, and I don't even like Linux-based systems that much. I just dislike them significantly less than I dislike MS Windows systems.

addendum: This isn't the first time I've written about AKH here. I just thought you might like to know.

This is a list of software I tend to use on a regular basis, and am glad to have available (or at least dislike less than alternatives). It's not a comprehensive list, of course, but it's a list of things I think are worth mentioning.

• FreeBSD: I made the switch from Debian GNU/Linux a few years ago for a number of reasons, including the decay of the Debian distribution. I was immediately impressed with the technical benefits FreeBSD offered that I'd been missing all those preceding years, without realizing it — such as increased software auditing capabilities and reliability, better software choices in FreeBSD Ports than in the official APT archives (at least for my tastes), easier system configuration, and better documentation outside of manpage coverage (which is still one of Debian's primary strengths). The feeling of enlightenment wasn't nearly as big as the switch from MS Windows to Linux distributions, but it was still significant. Add to that the fact that it's more thoroughly Copyfree licensed (with a BSD licensed kernel and default shell, among other things), and I'm quite happy.

• AHWM: This window manager is not currently being developed — but it doesn't really seem to need any additional development at the moment. It's excellent the way it is. Keyboard shortcut management is built in and amazingly easy to configure. Reliability is good. Recovery in case of glitches, without losing my work, is impressive (I've really abused it a bit). It fits my definition of a good GUI environment pretty much exactly; it enables me to do things quickly and easily without taking my hands away from "home row" on the keyboard, facilitating my productivity, and stays the hell out of my way. It's also extremely lightweight (the whole binary is under 150 KB, and RAM usage is significantly lower than rxvt's). It's also Copyfree licensed, via a license specific to AHWM. I keep telling myself I'm going to give wmii a serious try, as a possible replacement for AHWM, but I haven't been arsed to go to the effort since AHWM does so well for me.

• Vim: Need I say more? Seriously, this was the piece of software that really got me into the whole "Oh my God, this enhances my productivity so much it makes my head spin!" way of thinking, ultimately leading to other non-GUI, no-frills, gets out of my way, functionality over feature richness software discoveries. Of course, there are some things I'd like to improve on (including licensing), but options I've discovered such as nvi lack basic necessities (such as syntax highlighting) that I don't feel I can give up at this time. Maybe an eventual improvement of an existing tool would solve the problem, or a rewrite from scratch. I'll just add that to the queue, I guess. Ha ha. If I live past the Singularity, and go all "immortal transhuman", maybe I'll get around to it some day.

• Mutt: It's my current favorite mail user agent, and has been for some time. It's a huge productivity boost when dealing with email, as compared with previous tools I've used. There are some minor niggling annoyances in how it works, though. I haven't found anything better, yet, but I may eventually have to write something better. Yeah, right — immediately after I write all the rest of the software I'd like to have but that doesn't exist. I'll get right on that. Of course, there's the added incentive of wanting something that isn't GPLed for my MUA. Dammit.

• rxvt-unicode: People often seem to think XTerm is a small, lightweight program. Compared to the GIMP, this may be true. Even compared to bloated Desktop Environment integrated terminal emulators like GTerm and Konsole, there's definitely some truth in that. It's far from "light", though, by the estimation of those of us who've shopped around a bit. The impressively small rxvt, and some of its offshots (such as aterm, wterm, et cetera), represents something like the best available example of important functionality combined with minimal bloat, in my experience — as long as you don't need Unicode support. I eventually reached the point where I do need Unicode support, though, so I started using rxvt-unicode (aka "urxvt"). Of course, urxvt is also a lot more than just a Unicode-supporting fork of rxvt. It's actually a client/server terminal emulator model, which is ideal for my purposes — because I have so many terminal emulator instances open most of the time that having a daemon running in the background serving terminal emulator functionality for client instances actually offers me significant reduction in resource consumption, as compared with a separate rxvt process per instance.

• tmux: I recently replaced GNU Screen with this handy little tool. So far, it does everything I need it to do, and does it well. It's very similar to GNU Screen in terms of interface and capabilities, but it's Copyfree licensed (via the BSD license, specifically) and a much smaller program — both clear wins, in my estimation. The major immediate gotcha in making the transition is the fact that the command prefix is ^B instead of ^A by default. The reason for this change is actually a very good reason, of course; ^A is the command character used by most shells to move the cursor to the beginning of the line, and using it for the command prefix in your terminal multiplexer interferes with the ability to use it as the command character for moving the cursor to the beginning of the command line. The other basics are quite easy to find in the clear, concise manpage for tmux (including the tmux attach-session command used for reattaching a detached session).

• GnuPG: I'm not the world's biggest fan of its copyleft licensing, but its functionality is indispensable.

• OTR: Its LGPL distribution terms are better than pure GPL, but still suboptimal. Regardless, it's such a stellar piece of software that fills such an important need in my life that there's no way I'm passing it up at this point. I've even let it lock me into Pidgin use, as much as I dislike the program, because Pidgin's OTR support is so good. Some day, after I create my own Web browser, Vim clone, Mutt clone, GNU toolset replacement, OpenPGP implementation, and probably a dozen other things, I may have to extend CenterIM to properly support the OTR library for encrypted IMs.