Yesterday I have received a letter from Matt Sullivan telling that he had finally finished his work on changing ASPseek's client API. This new API opens an opportunity to create other search frontends, and Matt is working on PHP frontend right now.

Previous client API that appeared in 1.2.8 was written by Ivan Gudym and allowed creation of Apache frontend. The problem with that API is it was tightly integrated with templates, so it was unable to go for output customization by other means that standard ASPseek templates. This API is designed to be more flexible.

I do not yet decided should we apply changes to current 1.2.9pre or branch 1.3 unstable series...

Spend a few hours helping to buy a home PC for my friend. We (well, he) have bought AMD Athlon XP 1600+ with Thermaltake Volcano III cooler, Gigabyte 7VTXE m/b, 256 Mb PC2100 DDR SDRAM, 40 Gb WD HDD (7200 RPM), GeForce MX400 (with 64 Mb of video RAM), floppy, DVD-ROM, a nice case, keyboard and a nice optical Logitech mouse (M-BD69). All of the above plus a nice Samsung 17" 757NF monitor is just a bit under $900, which seems a nice price to me. It was only two years ago when I has bought SocketA 700 MHz Athlon for whole lot of 247 bucks. Oh my!

Aside from that, nothing serious has happened today. Oh, I took a chance and wrote a letter to David C. Merrill, an LDP lead developer, asking to try ASPseek out for LDP. The sad thing is sysadmins are tend to be lazy and do not touch things that works (and I understand the reasons), and LDP have ht://Dig up-n-running.

Today I had to get up really earlier (at 7am, which is extremely early for me) in order to visit the hospital with my 1-year-old son. I was amazed by his braveness then a nurse punched his little finger in order to get some blood for the analysys. Only a small shout and a single teardrop. He's a real man!

When we visited a dermatologyst. He said that baby's disease is definitely rubella and it's almost over. The strange thing about rubella is it doesn't need any kind of medicine; it is time that heals.

free software parasites

Today I was though about free software parasites - people/companies who use free software (such as our aspseek), make money out of it, do not pay for support or contribute in any other way, but always ask (dumb) configuration/installation/unrelated questions etc. They are really like insects that lives on another creatures and use their blood etc. for a living.

I had several relations with "parasite" aspseek users and I'm always feeling bad after it. They are refusing to make even the smallest contribution possible - to put a note on the site that it is aspseek powered, with a link back to aspseek.org, but still they do require a lot of attention and asks you questions that are answered in the FAQ or manual, or that should be better be discussed in users mailing list.

I still don't know what to do with such parasites - either deny to help them, or try explaining that free software is not one-way street and can't live without its users' contribution, or ask them to pay for support if everything they understands and can talk about is money. Does anybody knows how to made something out of such parasites, or how to deal with them?..

Created an account at advogato. Surprisingly 'kir' login was available, so I'm the first Kir here ;) Hope some more informative news will follow.