Kevin Purdy

My friends laughed, but I still think he looks better
than a Window. Or even an Apple.

I love autumn, but I’m not a fan of Halloween. Sure, I dug the free candy and seeing my family all abuzz when I was a kid. But those simple joys are gone, and in their place are gouge-priced costumes, cheap-looking lawn inflatables and “parties” that confirm Hell is other people in “Sexy Cop” or “Dwight Schrute” costumes.

Yeah, I’m jaded, and maybe I just need a good party to be invited to, or a home to dish out candy from. Recently, however, I discovered one thing I could legitimately get excited about — pumpkin carving.

My parents always bought the pumpkins and spread the newspaper on the kitchen floor for my sister and I, but neither of us progressed much beyond the two triangles and half-moon mouth scheme — not that it mattered much. My friend Josh and his girlfriend, however, have an infectious enthusiasm for Oct. 31 and all its trappings, and managed to raise the gourd gashing ambitions in myself and my wife.

You just knew typing “Tux” and “pumpkin stencil” into Google would bring back hits, and while I was kind of amused to learn that stencils are an actual business for some artisans, the open source nature of my favorite penguin means that nobody can, or at least should, charge for his likeness. My wife chose the panda logo from the World Wildlife Fund for the same kind of mix of altruism and unbearable cuteness.

Basically, I’m really looking forward to showing up at next year’s party with my own roll of specialty pumpkin knives and three-level shade stencils of Buffalo’s skyline. Or, uh, Sexy Tux.

Colors I can never wear, but love to have on my desktop

Over at Lifehacker, I took a screenshot tour through installing the latest release from Ubuntu, 7.10, or “Gutsy Gibbon,” as it’s code-named. I plan to offer a few more comments here on what’s still missing from the most popular/buzz-worthy Linux distribution, but overall, I’m pretty satisfied.

The official release drops Thursday, and anybody can try out the system without touching a thing on their computer by downloading a “Live CD” at Ubuntu.com. Pop the CD in your drive, restart your computer and see what works, what doesn’t, and why Digg is always yakkin’ about the ‘buntu.

It might not generate the same kind of heat as the next OS X release, but for open source fans, it’s a twice-a-year scene, and it totally freaks us out.

How come the kid representing Linux has the unkempt hair?

To say the least, Microsoft’s varied efforts at stonewalling or segmenting the Linux market have gotten markedly different receptions in the U.S. and Europe.

Take, for example, this report in the Sept. 20 issue of The Economist, which summarizes the findings by a trial court for the European Union in upholding an antitrust ruling against Microsoft:

(The EU) argued, for instance, that withholding information that is needed for PCs and servers to work together constitutes an abuse of a dominant position if it keeps others from developing rival software for which there is potential consumer demand. In such cases, the information cannot be refused even if it is protected by intellectual-property rights, as Microsoft had argued.

In other words, because Microsoft’s utter domination of the business desktop market has led it to stonewall efforts by non-Microsoft server suppliers to play nice, the EU could force the Redmond giant to hand over the source code for Windows.

Over here in the U.S., it’s, well, different. The networking company Novell, which announced in November 2006 that it would partner with Microsoft to make its own Linux products play nice, is apparently glad it did so, to the tune of a 250% jump in business. [Link via /.]

[Novell director of marketing Justin Steinman] said part of its growth was directly related to the Microsoft deal, adding that Novell has billed more than US$100 million in business through its Microsoft relationship. He added that the growth was also due to the halo effect of the arrangement.

Sounds great for Novell. Note, however, that Microsoft agreed to give away a total of $240 million in vouchers for Novell-provided support as part of the deal, and Novell has cashed in 44 percent of them, according to Computer Business Review — coincidentally, that’s about $105 million.

Regardless of whose books the boost is recorded on, it’s interesting to see how Microsoft’s firm stance on “inter-operability” generates source code demands in Europe, but invoices in the U.S.