Technophile Monkey

I’m deleting my Facebook profile because Facebook, Inc. creates a very scary situation. And that’s even if you don’t use the privacy-abusing games on their platform.

What will happen when I’m no longer on Facebook? Will I disappear? Will my status messages be deleted when Facebook, Inc. deletes my profile, removing me from the memory (read: walls) of all my friends? Will there be people who refuse to communicate with me because I do not use Facebook?

What happens when those of you who stay there for now find your next social platform, after Facebook goes out of fashion? Will you invite me to it or will I be so far removed from your world by then you don’t consider me worthy?

My Facebook private messages. They are saved inside Facebook. I’m glad I never put anything inside that platform that I really need to save, but I might want a copy of my messages anyhow. There seems to be no easy way to do this other than giving some random stranger’s application read rights to your entire profile in order to pull a backup. And if I had anything private in my inbox, I’d be completely daft to do that.

As an aside: There’s a sort of workaround that uses a Firefox extension called Archive Facebook to pull a “dumb” HTML copy of your profile. It’s better than nothing, but getting this back into machine-readable form to import into e.g. an e-mail client is less than fun. And did I mention it’s taking several hours to do and takes thousands of requests to Facebook?

The alternative could be to register as Facebook developer and write your own application against the Facebook API to retrieve your data, but I’m not sure if most people would like to invest that much work.

But back to the sinister business. Why does Facebook, Inc. cling onto your personal data like that? Some people have analyzed why it’s so hard to get your own Facebook data back from the company. I’ll let you read their opinions directly instead of regurgitating them.

Anyhow, I’ll shoot my profile in the face now. Goodbye. It was sort of fun, but also sort of unnecessarily risky. I’ll jump back on the bandwagon when decentralized, encrypted, self-hosted, privacy-aware and standardized social network nodes come into fashion. Maybe next year sometime. I’ll surely get Diaspora’s source on September 15th and see if there’s anything I can help out with.

Until then you’ll have to read my idiotic mutterings on this blog and on IRCnet’s #linux, and you’ll have to get my photos at Flickr. Yeah, I know making people look in three different locations for one person is social suicide nowadays

If you feel all cheerful about killing yourself now (well, on Facebook), here’s the link to Facebook, Inc.’s account deletion request form.

It’s quite scary if a single company is not only in control of all delivery but also all storage of communications between people. Facebook, Inc. is turning into such a company. Yet they don’t have to abide by the same privacy laws that bind e.g. telecommunications companies like ISPs.

The Diaspora project is working on an alternative, decentralized social platform that gives control over your personal data back to you. I think that’s the right way to go. Even though you could argue social platforms like Facebook bring nothing new to the table (chat, instant messaging, photo sharing and blogging have existed long before Facebook came along), combining everything in one platform does have some advantages.

Diaspora sites can be hosted by yourself but then syndicated securely with other diaspora sites (seeds), so that each person not only controls where and how their data is stored, but also who can and who cannot see or receive it. If humanity needs such a social platform, this seems to be the right approach in my opinion.

So I’m pondering Facebook suicide, and erecting a Diaspora site as soon as it becomes usable, to see if it has the potential it seems to have.

Die Veränderungen in der Schweizerdeutschen Sprache aufzeichnen, ist doch auch ein schönes Hobby.

Ein meines Wissens neuer Import aus dem Hochdeutschen sind die Relativpronomen der/die/das. Im Alemannischen, oder wenigstens im Schweizerdeutschen, kannte man bis anhin nur das Relativpronomen “wo”. Ein Beispiel, das in meinen Augen richtig ist:

• Hochdeutsch: Der Mann, der mir die Brille verkauft hat.
• Schweizerdeutsch: Dr ma, wo miar d brilla verkauft hät.

Ich höre aber öfters von jungen Leuten solche Konstrukte: “I hola schnell min kolleg, der das besser kann”. Die übliche Formulierung wäre aber “I hola schnell min kolleg, wo das besser kann”. Ganz interessant war auch die Aussprache von “der”, es war effektiv “der”, wie im Hochdeutschen, nicht “dä”.

Dabei wird im Schweizerdeutschen das Geschlecht des Subjekts beim Relativpronomen überhaupt nicht unterschieden. Die Kollegin wäre auch eine gewesen, wo das besser kann. Die dem Hochdeutschen angeglichene Variante wäre aber sicher geschlechtsspezifisch herausgekommen: mini kollegin, dia das besser kann.

Schweizerdeutsch-Sprecher in der Leserschaft: Welche Relativpronomen benutzt ihr? Der/die/das oder wo?

Roman Haefeli recently released two very handy shell scripts that let you watch and record TV through Wilmaa. All you need is mplayer and rtmpdump and, voilà, TV with hardware-acceleration, without any of the annoying and slow Flash player crap that Wilmaa throws at you.

This allows even slow computers such as netbooks to smoothly play these TV streams full-screen.

Check it out at http://github.com/reduzent/watchwilmaa

The script is released under GNU GPLv2, if you fork the project on GitHub and send pull requests for your improvements, I’m sure Roman will merge them.

Caveat: It might only work from Switzerland for now, I don’t know which countries can get Wilmaa.

Eine interessante Häufung von Deutschismen, lustigerweise habe ich alle davon in den letzten fünf Tagen gehört:

• “Welles wotsch? Das mit hüenlifleisch?”
• “Und denn bini mittem fahrrad gange go…”
• “Jo, mittem rad voll in gehsteig…”
• “Fahruswiiskontrolle.”

Schweizerdeutsch hat für mich einen Teil seines Charmes deshalb, weil man so viele schöne frankophone Einflüsse findet. Diese scheinen aber jetzt Germanismen zu weichen, die es bis anhin in unserer Sprache nicht gab. Wer die vier “Fehler” in den Sätzen nicht erkennt, ist entweder jung oder muss sich schämen

Nice! They’re finally visiting Switzerland

Mongolian folk rock experts Altan Urag will be at the ISM, Rue de Lausanne 45-47, 1201, Geneva, playing a concert on Saturday, June 5. 2010, 20:00. If you don’t remember Altan Urag, they’re behind part of the Mongol soundtrack, for example, with songs like Xöx Tolboton. In Mongolia, I think they’ve already released six albums, but none of them seem to have made it to the European market. So Geneva will be a chance to buy the CD(s) and get autographs.

More info: http://www.wmasm.ch/1altanurag.php

And hot on the heels of that Osmos release for Linux, theck out the Humble Indie Bundle. The guys at Wolfire have created crazy package deals before, but this one is special: You get acclaimed indie titles Gish, World of Goo, Aquaria, Lugaru HD and Penumbra Overture, which all work on GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. You pay whatever you want, from $1 to any price at all. And a part of the income goes to the renowned charities Child’s Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

I already own Gish and World of Goo for GNU/Linux, but I’ll invest a few bucks to get the rest of those games. And it can’t hurt to have World of Goo twice, it makes a fantastic gift even for non-gamers

Update: It looks like Linux users donate twice as much for these games as Windows users. Go team!

Ambient atmospheric chillout game Osmos just received a Linux version.

And it’s a pretty good game, too. 2DBoy with World of Goo, Hemisphere with Osmos, let’s hope more indie developers join in on the OpenGL push (thanks to iPhone and iPad) and from there to Mac OS X and GNU/Linux.

In the last few years, we’ve seen many typical computer applications move to phones, tablets and other portable devices with little computing power. This was accompanied by a “geekification of the nation”. Fifteen years ago, talking to other people using a keyboard was perceived as odd and geeky. Today, instant messaging, SMS and social networks like Facebook are the norm. This is a socio-technological paradigm shift, with both technology and social norms advancing in lockstep.

Now among rumors of Apple purchasing ARM (a specialist in designing processors with low power consumption), Microsoft looking for someone to port their systems to ARM-based servers, Google rumored to be interested in developing ARM-based servers and the iPad, all Android phones and almost everything in the mobile sector running on ARM, we might be witnessing another technology shift.

Up to this point, Intel’s x86 architecture has remained unchallenged as the de-facto standard for personal computing. Even though the base architecture is outdated, it has managed to keep up with the market through a lot of patching and gaffa-taping of new features.

Yes, Intel had a brief moment of horror when AMD’s AMD64 instruction set extension became the king of mainstream 64-bit computing, but that is long forgotten — the instructions were absorbed into Intel’s chips as x86_64. But Intel has never faced a challenge like the ARM one, the battle for the low-voltage processor market. So far, they can’t compete, not with the x86 instruction set; Atom processors are far too inefficient for the small devices that the (social) masses would use.

I believe it is again both a social and a technological evolution that will change the market. Without customers queuing up for iPads and iPhones, the ARM market would still be smaller. And people buying iPads and iPhones are not generally the biggest geeks, they’re your average technology users, or not even interested in technology at all. They don’t care which instruction set their device understands, they just want it to run smoothly and for a very long time on a single battery charge.

This is a big opportunity for the Linux kernel. This kernel has been running on ARM chips (and PPC, and SPARC, and MIPS, and…) for years and years, something that Microsoft can’t accomplish with their Windows kernel. Linux powers the Android operating system, it can even run on an iPhone. Next to purely technological aspects, the Linux and Free Software communities are very quick at embracing new social technologies, unlike many large corporations. This again feeds back into the whole “hey, I wanna be able to tweet from the toilet” social phenomenon, and that drives the development of new, mobile and social Free Software.

Don’t ask me why, and I surely don’t claim that I can connect the dots any better than other people, but I think that ARM + Linux + social mobile stuff are the harbingers of a significant change in computing that will happen in the next decade.

The fact that even many large players like Microsoft and Apple are now supporting more open standards instead of their own proprietary sandboxes is another element to all this. Could it be that the market will be more fairly split among the competition? 25% Microsoft, 25% Apple, 25% Google and the rest split between Free Software solutions?

It’s a very pretty idea.

First watch the original:

Then try this improved version:

Fucking amazing. Brett Lee? You’re a genius.

Thanks: Ruben.