pointless

So I was picking up a box of tablets to help me sleep from the chemist last night. As expected, the box contains the "Contents may make you drowsy", but in this case, the pharmacist actually came out from the dispensary to warn me that they would make me drowsy. Well, yes. That's kind of the point of sleeping tablets, I'd have thought.

While I'm all in favour of disclaimers (I like to think of it as keeping other people's organs healthy, in case I might need a transplant in the future), there probably is a useful limit somewhere.

music saturday

Cam Butler (of Silver Ray) has his second album launch on Saturday evening at the Rob Roy. Supported by Tarantula and everybody's favourite pretty boys The Devestations.

a minor rant on the topic of open source

Have I mentioned that Open Source Software is a good thing? I do believe I might have mentioned this, in passing, on more than one or two occasions. I was reminded again this evening of another reason.

At work, we have a piece of commercial (closed source) software that we use for a small section of the functionality we offer our customers. I'd love to be able to replace it with an open source equivalent, but it's a highly specialised piece of software, and the open source stuff is nowhere near good enough. Anyway - I noticed tonight that the vendor of said software has been bought out by a larger competitor, who is killing the product. Sorry -- of course I meant they're "folding the features into their existing product" (cough cough). And of course the existing product is really only available on Windows, not on the platform we run (hint: Windows is a toy, and anyone who thinks that it's suitable for production use is beyond mental).

[update Oh - and I should probably also note that the old vendor's website is gone, and the acquiring company hasn't bothered putting up any of the stuff that used to be on it, like documentation, downloads, patches, help documents, or the like. Nice. I hope we don't ever need support.]

To make things more fun, the acquiring company has been on something of a spree lately, buying up all sorts of smaller companies in the same space, and killing the products off. Lovely. I'd imagine they're just getting big enough to make sure Microsoft buys them, rather than a competitor.

Anyway, viva la free software!

Here endeth the rant.