I believe in free software, just as I believe in the free market. Software, in its natural state, isn’t something that can be traded; it’s information, the basis of any economy. I would go so far as to say there is no such thing as a software “engineer”; engineers make things. What people who create software do is compile and refine knowledge—information about how to make machines perform a task, stated in a usable form.
More wealth can be created by applying this knowledge than by keeping it secret and selling it. Charging for and restricting the copying of software does make money for the people who write it, but at an equal cost to the people who create prosperity with it.
If those users share their knowledge instead, they create a market where anyone can compete to make the most of that software. When there is no technical or financial barrier to learning how a program works, the talent available to apply that information is dramatically better. This creates more value, improves competition, and encourages more sharing. In short, everyone wins. This is why I only use free software.
I write free software, too; that’s what this page is for. Despite the manifesto above, the programs here will probably not help you become more successful or productive. But they might make the rest of your life less annoying while you do so. Feel free to steal what you like.
I use Mercurial to manage my source code, and publish the official repositories at hg.red-bean.com. Tarballs, clone instructions, screenshots, and brief summaries of each program are available here:
The main principle of my work is simplicity: have little to configure and never do another program’s job. Write small tools that fit together and into the existing set. The best code is none at all; it’s fixing the other program’s bug instead of working around it. If you can’t fix that program, replace it with something you can. This is the other reason I use free software.
You can install most of these programs on Debian or Ubuntu with apt-get install
PACKAGE-NAME, with the exception of Mnemosyne, which is packaged as
mnemosyne-blog due to a naming conflict.
In addition to my own software, I am a Debian developer, which is a fancy way of saying that figure out how to install things and condense this knowledge into a “package” so that you don’t have to. I also triage bug reports, inform upstream developers about our best practices, and argue about how all these things should be done. The packages that I have integrated into Debian include:
You can get a more up-to-date list with additional info from the QA Team. I use Git to merge upstream code and my packaging, and push the repositories to git.debian.org.
I am occasionally active in other (upstream) projects, which currently include:
I’m 27 years old and look something like this. I’m bipolar, which has had a strong influence on my life (primarily in that I dropped out of college). I grew up in Connecticut, but have for the past couple of years lived in the Cambridge, MA area (currently Harvard Square). I am bisexual and identify as “queer”. My politics lean heavily to the left, and I consider myself a feminist. Apart from free software my main hobbies are cooking, film, and complaining about the chronic lack of funding for public transportation in the US. I work for the psychology department of a large research university. I’m a member of the local NPR station and a supporter of college radio (I have occasionally been known to DJ myself).
My main development machine is a ThinkPad T61, which is somewhat obsessively stickered. I run Debian, of course, but also OpenBSD when the mood strikes me. I use vile as my editor, because vim feels just as big and hairy as Emacs (I believe this is purely subjective, and think arguments about which editor is objectively better are absurd). My login shell is mksh, my terminal emulator is rxvt-unicode, my web browser is Conkeror, my window manager is (of course) aewm, and the only accoutrements on my desktop are one line of conky (which I do not like, but nothing else does the job) and a hidden yeahconsole. I spend most of my time looking at a GNU screen session.
I have several other online presences, most notably my blog. For real-time communication I use IRC, on the Foonetic and OFTC networks. I’m on a couple community-type (“social networking”) sites, including Twitter, Last.fm, LiveJournal, and del.icio.us, but not any of the more popular ones.
My email address is decklin@red-bean.com. Encrypted/signed mail is welcome if you think you have any reason to trust this public key.
I would like to thank the following people for inspiring my life in one way or another:
Copyright © 2008 Decklin Foster. Generated from Markdown with Pandoc. Hosting graciously provided (since 2000!) by the cooks. This URL is my OpenID.
