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April 2008:
The science fiction novels that I have written as well as my non-fiction books are described in http://www.rattlesnake.com/rjc/.
Moreover I recommend the various
[You can find more detail about earlier changes in my my annotated listing.]
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The name Rattlesnake comes from Rattlesnake Mountain in Stockbridge, MA, where I grew up.
Of course, the people who first lived at Rattlesnake had a different name, but we don't know what it was.
The primary machine at this site, megalith.rattlesnake.com, is named after a `great rock' at Rattlesnake that was blasted out of the ground for a pipeline that feeds natural gas to much of New England. megalith runs Debian GNU/Linux (see below), a freely redistributable operating system and set of applications.
To learn more about open source, free software, see my short book Software Freedom: An Introduction.
Also, I enjoy public speaking and have created a page about me as a speaker. Here are some pictures of me.
I regularly fly my own airplane. My airplane does not have a particular name, just a tail number, N2593L. It is a Cessna 172, a single engine, four seat, high wing aircraft.
In his delightful, short novel, Great Work of Time John Crowley thanked me for my infectious enthusiasm for notions.
Several of these have now translated themselves into short essays on, among other issues, Secret, Anonymous Communications, as well as Words, Money, and Guns, not to mention Certainty Factors, beliefs that there are no Free Lunches.
Many years ago I read a fair number of the `great books' of the Western intellectual tradition: Homer, Plato, Aristotle, ... These had considerable influence on my life. However, I have often thought that `good books' have their place as well as great books. Books that may not survive the fall of civilizations, but are nonetheless worth reading.
The most important software on this machine is GNU Emacs, an extensible and customizable computing environment. (The source for Emacs is a large file. You might want to order a convenient CD-ROM instead of downloading it.)
Emacs which is now treated as a word, was originally an acronym standing for Extensible MACroS. However, macros have not been used since the 1970s; nowadays, people extend Emacs with Emacs Lisp, a simple, but powerful programming language.
Incidentally, I have written An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp, an elementary text for people who are not programmers. You can learn from this how to customize and extend your working environment.
Robert J. Chassell
Rattlesnake® Enterprises provides a variety of services, particularly writing and editing, but also training in the use of customized computational work environments, and custom software.
Before starting Rattlesnake Enterprises, I was a founding Director, Secretary/Treasurer and Chief Financial Officer of the Free Software Foundation, Inc.. FSF sponsors the GNU Project and is responsible for the way GNU/Linux was created and distributed.
My current plan is to recreate myself as a speaker on free software. This is a whole new world for me since I tend to be a non-social hermit. I lack all the customary story telling and promotional knowledge and experiences that speakers employ. My saving grace is that I actually know something about free software and can speak enthusiastically about it.
FSF creates and distributes software that you can use, copy, modify, and redistribute yourself.
It is sold in a competitive, free market. And, of course, under such competition, people are, paradoxically as it may appear, more cooperative than they are otherwise.
I have placed a great many free software URLs at my http://www.teak.cc site.
My favorite software distribution is Debian GNU/Linux but another good distribution is put out by Red Hat Software.
The FSF itself distributes a large amount of freely redistributable software through more than twenty sites for anonymous FTP. The sources include documentation.
Free software not only creates an environment in which people tend cooperate with each other, but it creates a competitive free market for software, not a partially monopolized one; hence the generally higher quality of free software compared to software whose distribution is partially restricted.
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