FOSS Hole

There has been some heated discussion on the Wikipedia Hans Reiser article. It’s about including a link to the ELER comic about Nina Reiser’s disappearance. Nobody there really seems to quite grok the strip.

Five months on and maybe this is a good time to explain that the strip isn’t about what a lot of people might think it’s about. It’s not actually about Nina Reiser’s disappearance, it’s more about the reactions to it. Immediately after the news hit, even with scant information provided mostly by sensationalist local media, there was widespread suspicion of Hans’ involvement. I doubt you’d find many people who didn’t have the thought cross their mind, however fleeting.

The strip doesn’t say what people think it does. Reiser isn’t showing any obvious signs of anxiety (no “umming” or “ermming”) and there are reasonable explanations for everything you see (Lime is used to speed up composting) yet commenters came from far and wide to complain about us suggesting what they thought we suggested.

As one clued-in commenter defended: “If you read accusations in to this comic, they are simply pouring out of the twisted depths of your own subconscious mind.”.

I’ve just deployed a slightly fancier shop app. It brings the basket logic away from PayPal and back into the site, only the checkout now goes to PayPal. This allows us to handle delivery costings a bit better, which we’re going to need for some new products we have planned.

Also, we now offer another delivery type: World Surface mail. This is far cheaper than Airmail but can takes a good few weeks. Worthwhile if you don’t need your order urgently. Good timing too because the delivery costs just went up (in-line with our postal service, Royal Mail).

We’ve now added two new t-shirt designs: Bruce Schneier and Che Stallman. Plus stickers of those and Knuth design.