/*
 * based upon words (and melody) of Sunscreen song
 *
 * _Many_ people were involved in making this song.
 * The Biggest thanks go to Antony for lyrics and voice,
 * Heike for viola. The others include: little Marius,
 * Jacqueline, Bill, beer-drinking-LBWees (for wonderful
 * background sound). Hopefully, I did not forget
 * anybody...
 *
 *                                JaSan ;-) 2004
 *
 * Hear https://soundcloud.com/jasanitto/on-the-firewalls
 */

     On Firewalls
   ================
 
If I could offer you only one tip for the Internet,
firewalls would be it. The long-term benefits of
security have been proved by scientists, whereas
the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable
than my own meandering experience. I will dispense
this advice
now.

Enjoy the power and beauty of your operating system.
Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power
and beauty of your operating system until they've
been upgraded. But trust me, in 20 years, you'll
look back on archives of your work and recall in
a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay
before you and how fabulous the code really looked.
You are not as dumb as you imagine.

Don't worry about the future of Open Source. Or worry,
but know that worrying is as effective as trying to
make Microsoft change their marketing techniques by
showing that their software is non-compliant. The real
troubles in your life are apt to be things that never
crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you
at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday whilst you're standing
in the middle of some server room, trying to figure out
which one does DNS and which one runs email.

Run one application every day that scares you.

Scan for viruses.

Don't be reckless with other people's consoles. Don't
put up with people who are reckless with yours.

Fsck.

Don't waste your time on lusers. Sometimes you're ahead,
sometimes you're behind. The race is long and, in the end,
it's only with yourself.

Remember software you compile which works. Forget the
marketing hype. If you succeed in doing this, tell me
how.

Keep your old data. Throw away your old applications.

Discard spam.

Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do
with your cluster. The most interesting people I know
didn't know when they got up in the morning what they
wanted to do with their computers. Some of the most
interesting programmers I know still don't.

Get plenty of switches. Be kind to your cables. You'll
curse them when they're getting unreliable.

Maybe you'll write software, maybe you won't. Maybe
you'll post on newsgroups, maybe you won't. Maybe
you'll take part in flame wars, maybe you'll publish an
RFC on your 75th birthday.  Whatever you do, don't
congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself
either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody
else's.

Enjoy your laptop. Use it every way you can. Don't be
afraid of it or of what other people think of it. It's
the greatest investment you'll ever make.

Take your computer apart, even if you have nowhere to
do it but in your own living room.

Read the documentation, even if you can't understand it.

Do not read advertising copy. It will only make you
feel angry.

Sing: BSD and Linux together will make it through oh,
huh yeah Someday a spirit will take you and guide you
there I know you've been hurting, but i've been waiting
to be there for you And I'll be there, just helping you
out whenever I can 

Get to know your gurus. You never know when they'll be
gone for good. Be nice to your peers. They're your best
link to your past and the people most likely to stick
with you in the future.

Understand that languages come and go, but with a
precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge
the gaps in philosophy and coding style, because the
older you get, the more you need the programs you wrote
when you were young.

Code in Cobol once, but stop before it makes you hard.
Code in Visual Basic once, but stop before it makes you
soft. Debug.

Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will fall.
Processors will get faster, and disks will get bigger.
You, too, will get old. And when you do, you'll find in
your archives that when you were young, prices were
reasonable, processors were fast and disk drives were
big enough for your data.

Backup your data.

Don't expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have
the source code. Maybe you'll have a maintenance
contract. But you never know when either one might
become out of date.

Don't mess too much with your init scripts, or by the
time you get your machine to boot, you'll have
forgotten why you started it.

Be careful whose software you buy, but be patient with
those who maintain it. Working in support is a form of
purgatory. Producing the upgrade is a way of fishing
the code from the bit-bucket, wiping it off, commenting
out the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's
worth.

But trust me on the firewalls.


Sing: BSD and Linux together will make it through oh,
huh yeah Someday a spirit will take you and guide you
there I know you've been hurting, but i've been waiting
to be there for you And I'll be there, just helping you
out whenever I can 


      Software's free, software's free, software's free
      Software's free, software's free, so feel good,
      so feel good 

      Software is free ohh yea yeah 
      Oh Every ho yeah 
      Oh to feel good 
      Ohh to feel good 

      Join us now... ;-)