If you are reading this then it means you’re on the list of people I’d like to come to the Red House in Longstowe with me on Saturday the 10th April to help me lament my increasing age. If you are interested in coming, then please either email me, or leave me a note below so that I can gauge numbers. If the Red House can’t accomodate us, I’ll look into alternatives, so if you need anything particular then please also note it below so that I don’t go and book chinese only to find half the visitors don’t like it. Update: People seem to be moaning about longstowe being a drive away, so I’m considering Cambridge itself. Votes for where to eat please…

I feel that this morning, in the cold light of morning I ought to apologise to Joey for my previous posting. I will admit that I was sufficiently pissed off with the whole “Let’s abandon pragmatism in favour of purism” argument which I appear to have seen floating around that I lashed out at perhaps merely the most visible of the people who are in favour of dropping non-free from the archive and for that I apologise. However, the critical nub of the argument remains—There are users of Debian known to me (in fact, excluding developers, I’d say around 75% of the users known to me) who would probably consider dropping Debian in favour of a distribution more pragmatic in their approach to packaging were Debian to drop non-free. Indeed, with the news that it’s going to be hard to get non-free activated by default on Sarge installations, I’d say that we’re probably at risk of losing about a third of those people anyway. We certainly shouldn’t attempt to make the move to “non-free” not being part of Debian until we already have a working and proven replacement for it. Also, what do we do with ‘contrib’ if non-free goes away? There are plenty of contrib packages in use by my friends. Installing them would (in part) be harder without non-free. I for one would be most irritated at the loss of flashplugin-nonfree. After all, isn’t Debian really for the users? What use is a fantastically good distribution if there are people moving to other distros because they make it easier for them to get certain software packages? Either way, we’ll see how the GR comes out. I for one would be reconsidering whether Debian’s focus is correct, should a decision be made which (in my opinion) harms our users experience of the distribution.

Well, since Livejournal:nunfetishist‘s music quiz seemed to prove popular, I thought I’d finish one I started a while ago when Livejournal:gerald_duck was doing them.

Cut — The details
Mine is designed to test more than just your knowledge of music though. There are bonus points available for some trivia based on the quiz contents… After much thought I chose these ten tracks for distinctive intros. I guess for some of you they’ll be easy and for others it’ll be really quite hard. It’s a reasonable cross-section of my musical tastes. Points will be awarded as follows:

• One point for each correctly named track
• One point for each correctly named artist or group
• One point for naming the year that track three is from
• For tracks four, nine and ten:
  One point for naming the film they’re part of.
• For track nine:
  One point for working out the tenuous link between a recently topical recreational drug and the track.

That’s a total of 20 points for the tracks and five bonus points available for the extra bits. You can find the quiz here and it contains a README.txt file detailing the scoring above. I will update this post with results as they come in. Please mail them to terryquiz@digital-scurf.org.

Cut — The scores
Scores (ordered by score, then earliest in first) (Don’t be put off by nunfetishist’s score, he lives with me, he was bound to do well):

Who	Basic	Bonus	Distance on year	Score
Livejournal:nunfetishist	19	4	Spot on	23
Vince Sanders	8	1	Not attempted	9
Mike Beattie	4	2	Not attempted	6
Ben Dooks	6	0	Not attempted	6
Livejournal:gwendraith	4	1	Spot on	5
Peter Naulls	5	0	Not attempted	5
Livejournal:met24	4	0	Not attempted	4
Steve McIntyre	4	0	Not attempted	4
Livejournal:quinophex	2	1	Not attempted	3
Andrew Poole	2	1	Not attempted	3 Special mention to Andy for providing the full lyrics to track 9, from memory
Livejournal:ethelthefrog	2	0	8 years	2
Livejournal:kjaneway	2	0	Not attempted	2

Question score breakdown:

Track	Title	Artist
1	1	1
2	10	10
3	1	1
4	6	5
5	6	6
6	2	2
7	1	1
8	1	2
9	2	2
10	1	1
Bonus	Score
Film 4	4
Film 9	2
Film 10	2
3’s year	2
Tenuous link for 9	0

For those of you who are trying this past the closing date (which is past now ;-) the answers can be found here. Enjoy.

In the UK, the Government have a terrible track-record for choosing effective ways to spend their IT budget. Commonly they hire a company known as EDS. Now EDS don’t exactly have a good track-record for delivering projects on time, within budget, or even to spec; yet the UK Government continues to choose EDS over other companies for their IT projects. Recently the NHS started a project to sort out their email. EDS were chosen and proceeded to shout about it, wax lyrical about how good the system was going to be, and then failed to deliver on-time, within-budget, or to-spec. The NHS dropped them and ended up going with (I believe) Sun Microsystems’ Java Desktop. And now, EDS want to sue the NHS because they were dropped. Personally I think the UK government should go to court, in the UK, and demonstrate how utterly apalling EDS are, simultaneously countersuing EDS for all the money they’ve ever been given for failed projects, the interest on that money, and also damages, costs and general expenses. It’s time we found a way to wind up EDS and stop them fucking anyone else over. (As an aside, it’s also about time the UK Government learnt from their mistakes and actually stopped even considering EDS—they’re just too shit)