There’s a fine line between collecting and just not knowing when to throw stuff out. Sometime in the last few years I switched from the latter to the former – in the realm of vintage computer hardware, anyway. Because the OCD aspects of collecting kind of freak me out, I don’t get too organized about it. I like portable stuff; I like Apple stuff; I like stuff that’s cleverly designed. I like stuff I’ve actually used; I like getting stuff really cheap on eBay.

There are almost as many unix software packaging systems as there are flavors of unix – Debian’s APT, FreeBSD’s ports, Red Hat’s RPM, Gentoo’s portage, et al. Under OS X or Darwin, the two main contenders are DarwinPorts and Fink. I used Fink for a long time, but switched to DarwinPorts last year in one of my periodic retoolings, and found I liked it better. My reasons are intangible; my gut tells me that only one of these systems is going to be “the one,” and that it’s going to be DP. Mostly that just means I like the feel of it. It has fewer packages than Fink (2800 vs. about 5000), but seems to be gaining.

Does this Fox News opinion piece leave you slack-jawed and sputtering like it did me? Before you fire off that e-mail to James Prendergast explaining basics he seems not to grasp – like the difference between OpenOffice.org and OpenDocument, or the difference between monopoly control and competition, or how openness is in fact a “merit” just like price and software quality – read the response offered by Groklaw. It’s quite thorough. Also make sure you follow the link to background information on Prendergast’s Americans for Technology Leadership, “frequently described as a Microsoft front group.”

ITConversations has posted two more audio recordings from OSCON; Kim Polese’s From DIY to DIT and, today, Jeremy Zawodny’s Open Source at Yahoo!.

The shows will continue to trickle in, but I’ll stop posting about them now that ITConversations has the OSCON 2005 series page linked from their main navigation bar. Enjoy!

I’ve always wanted to like AppleScript more. Even though I’ve occasionally been paid to write AppleScript code, and always have a few little snippets gluing parts of my work environment together, I’ve never really gained facility with it. I’ve always summarized its flaws this way: It’s very easy to read for general sense, but damn hard to write. Sort of the inverse of Perl – which, probably not coincidentally, is the world’s most popular glue language. So while this characteristic of AppleScript may have been a conscious decision on the part of its designers, I’d argue it hasn’t served us all that well. (I’d also argue that Automator is a partial acknowledgement of those failings.) John Gruber of Daring Fireball sums it up nicely in his recent posting: