My Linux server has been my trusty friend and companion for about the last 12-13 years - with only a couple of down days to replace power supplies and perform system upgrades. A year ago, you would have been reading these pages on that same box. It's seen me through good times and bad. Rich and poor. Oh what times we've had. Any time - day or night; it was always there to greet me. And from there to reach out to the larger world. All of my thoughts and ideas have passed through it at one time or another.
But it's time to turn it off and pack it up to ship away. I've handed off the task of serving up web pages. I've handed off the task of receiving my daily spam. But the Linux box has still remained at the center of my world. It's my development workstation, where I try out all my new ideas and test them before I unleash them on you folks. It's also my gatekeeper, keeping the bad guys out; and the hub around which I built my wired household.
But something else happened in the last ten years. All of my favorite development tools have been rewritten to run on Windows. The whole LAMP stack (minus the 'L' for Linux). Apache, PHP, MySQL. Emacs. The GIMP. Even bash. That's all I need to create webapps. And I've even got awk and sed for when I need to get down and dirty.
So I can do all my web development from a PC running that horrible operating system from Redmond and not miss a beat. Any old laptop will work. At least it's enough to get me by until I can boot everything up again half a world away.
But the sadness slowly drifts over me. It's time to unplug.
Sigh...
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TechnoratiCalculating Engines. I have also declined several offers of great personal
advantage to myself. But, notwithstanding the sacrifice of these advantages
for the purpose of maturing an engine of almost intellectual power, and after
expending from my own private fortune a larger sum than the government of
England has spent on that machine, the execution of which it only commenced,
I have received neither an acknowledgement of my labors, not even the offer
of those honors or rewards which are allowed to fall within the reach of men
who devote themselves to purely scientific investigations...
If the work upon which I have bestowed so much time and thought were a mere
triumph over mechanical difficulties, or simply curious, or if the execution
of such engines were of doubtful practicability or utility, some justification
might be found for the course which has been taken; but I venture to assert
that no mathematician who has a reputation to lose will ever publicly express
an opinion that such a machine would be useless if made, and that no man
distinguished as a civil engineer will venture to declare the construction of
such machinery impracticable...
And at a period when the progress of physical science is obstructed by that
exhausting intellectual and manual labor, indispensable for its advancement,
which it is the object of the Analytical Engine to relieve, I think the
application of machinery in aid of the most complicated and abtruse
calculations can no longer be deemed unworthy of the attention of the country.
In fact, there is no reason why mental as well as bodily labor should not
be economized by the aid of machinery.
- Charles Babbage, Passage from the Life of a Philosopher
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