Funk Babblings

Every six months for more than five years now, I've been buying the new release of OpenBSD. Yet I haven't actually installed one of those new releases in almost four years, and haven't actually used OpenBSD in over two years.

So why do I keep buying it? Mostly to support three major aspects. (Non-geeks may want to skip to the last one.)

1. Security - OpenBSD's approach to security is one that deserves attention and support. And since their security solutions often find their way out to the world beyond OpenBSD (OpenSSH being the most prominent example), supporting OpenBSD supports security on Linux and other systems.

2. Free Software Activism - With the popularization of binary-only Linux drivers and software, and the concurrent marginalization of the GNU Project, OpenBSD has become the foremost twister-of-arms in the struggle to get not only useful software under completely-free licenses but also the information necessary to run that software on today's hardware. This work on the part of the OpenBSD people benefits Linux people too. (See also #3 below.)

3. Music - How many operating systems include an original song with each release? Thanks to Ty Semaka, OpenBSD has been doing it for eight releases now, and each one has a different style - techno, industrial, lounge (Bond theme-ish), anthemic hard rock, folk balladry with two types of hip-hop mixed in, Pythonic, Johnny Cash-ish, and now Floydian. They started out as theme songs of a sort, but starting with OpenBSD 3.3's "Puff The Barbarian" they became allegorical commentaries on the political issues the project had been facing, usually related to their efforts related to #2 above. The latest song, for the upcoming OpenBSD 3.7 release, is "Wizard of OS", a Pink Floyd style commentary on closed-specification hardware with a chorus of "Ding dong the lawyer's dead / You're off to see the Wizard kid". (The comments alongside those lyrics help explain my #2 above too.) Presumably the Dark Side of the Moon sound is a nod to the idea of that album being used as a soundtrack to The Wizard of Oz.

But my favorite OpenBSD song remains the second one, OpenBSD 3.1's "Systemagic", with its vampire-slayer motif, goth-industrial sound, and verses like:

Cybersluts vit undead guts
Transyl-viral coffin muck
Penguin lurking under bed
Puffy hoompa on your head

Oh yeah, and if I ever need to set up a secure web server quickly, I always have the install CDs on hand, though for long-term maintainability I still prefer Debian.

Check out the pictures from the Freeway Bloggers Free Speech Day. Some are dumb or boring, but some are clever. Have any favorites?

By the way, why is it that so many on the right are so nationalistic? Do they think that the rest of the world is only there to be ignored or dominated? And are they the same people that went crazy over who won their high school football games? (Living two blocks from a high school football stadium tends to warp one's thoughts after a Friday night.)

1. I managed to miss the Cleveland date of the Warped Tour this year. Oops. Ah well, I can stand to save the money (about which I may have more to say later). The Columbus date is Aug 17, but (among other things) I'm planning to be at Pennsic then.

2. After they finish the Warped Tour, Bowling For Soup is apparently coming to Canton to play a September 11 show at the local former minor-league ballpark (which I didn't even known existed). This is really cool, but seems very weird to me; I feel like there's more to this story that I'm missing.

Update: BFS is the headlining act of a local radio station's "All American Music Weekend" day one.

3. I often tell people that the best thing about living in Canton (compared to Columbus, at least) is being only an hour from Cleveland. I was reminded of this when I saw the schedule for the Vote For Change Tour. At this writing, Bruce Springsteen, R.E.M., and John Fogerty are scheduled for five dates. One is in Cleveland (Oct 2), one is in Ann Arbor (Oct 3), and the rest are nowhere near Ohio. And the $25 tickets go toward fighting to defeat Bush.

And speaking of Springsteen, John Kerry's use of his song "No Surrender" at his acceptance speech last week was kind of interesting to me. It comes from the Born In The USA album, which of course was Springsteen's hugest album and got mounds of radio airplay. So much so that I never bothered to buy the album; I figured I'd already gotten sick of half of it being overplayed on the radio, plus the misplaced jingoism that surrounded the album turned me off. So I knew "No Surrender" only from the quiet acoustic version on the Live 1975-1985 album, and I've always loved the song even though I normally prefer rockers like "Cadillac Ranch". Well yesterday I finally bought Born In The USA, and I was amazed that "No Surrender" is a rocker there! So now I like the song even more. (The other non-hits on there are great too, though I still skip over the overly-anthemic title song.)

The second of two entries inspired by chronarchy's newfound anti-Republicanism

In the run-up to the Democratic primaries, I supported Howard Dean. One of the reasons I did goes back to a conversation I had with autumnfey a few years ago after she moved to Vermont. She had said that Vermont was deeply divided between the conservative farmers and the liberal hippies. So when Dean came along on the national scene, I figured that anyone who could get re-elected over and over again in a state divided like that had a pretty good chance of winning over people from both sides of a divided electorate nationally. I became more convinced of that the more research I did; in Vermont his critics included people on the left who thought he was too pro-business, and people on the right who thought he was too pro-environment. And even though some of his positions were to the right on mine, they were the kinds of things that would make many on the right take a closer look and possibly support him.

Yet early on, the press branded Dean a liberal. Strange, since most of his positions were to the right of many of his rivals, including John Kerry. This perception of Dean as a wacko liberal seems to have been fed by three factors:

• Many liberals gravitated to his campaign, despite being more idealogically aligned with Dennis Kucinich. Those liberals decided that Kucinich was too far left to be elected, and Dean was far enough to the right of Kucinich that he seemed electable (as I described above). (It also helped that Dean came out early on against Bush's policies, rather than trying to gain the support of people who like Bush's policies.) Since liberals liked Dean, the press concluded that Dean must be a liberal.
  
• He came out against the Iraq war when most of the country was in favor of it, making him *obviously* an antiwar liberal, even though he supported Gulf War I and Afghanistan. (Unlike Kucinich, he was not in favor of just pulling out of Iraq once we went in, but rather wanted to put more troops in, including getting many more countries to help out.)
  
• He was in favor of civil unions for gays, and had signed a first-in-the-country law enacting them in Vermont (after the Vermont Supreme Court said something needed to be done). *Such* a liberal thing to do. (However, unlike Kucinich he was not in favor of gay marriage.) This endeared him to the gay community, which made up a large portion of his early support.
  

(A side effect was that the Kucinich people resented Dean for being considered the liberal candidate when he really wasn't all that liberal.)

That's the way things stood a year ago. My how times have changed. Now more than half the country thinks Iraq just wasn't worth it, and even people on the right are saying we need to get out now. And now with gay marriage happening, more than half the country is in favor of either civil unions for gays or gay marriage; civil unions are on their way to acceptance, and the debate today is about gay marriage. The landscape under Dean has shifted to the left, putting his positions on these two issues slightly on the right of the debate, and Kucinich doesn't look quite as nutty as he used to.


BTW, the gay marriage thing gives me another reason to wonder why so many people like Orson Scott Card so much.