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.

If you think music sounds good from your PC audio outputs, you are wrong*.

Most PCs come with onboard audio circuits that, at best, sound weak. As if you’re listening to your music through balls of cotton in your ears while the neighbor’s kid is marching up and down your living room shaking a bowl full of glass shards in rhythm with the music.

But there’s a cheap way out of that. The Music Streamer by High Resolution Technologies. It’s an external USB sound interface with a very good D/A converter. This is a semi-audiophile device, several levels above consumer-grade stuff from e.g. Creative. Yet it costs only about the same as your average USB audio interface these days.

This isn’t made for 5.1 surround sound gaming, it only has two analog RCA (Cinch) outputs to hook up to your amp. Of course you can also play games in stereo on it and watch films. Both sounds crystal clear.

I’ve hooked mine up to my Synology NAS (it’s plug and play) and I’m running mpd on it, so now I can listen to my collection of FLAC audio without even switching on the PC, and I can remote control it from any Android phone, a web interface or dedicated clients like Ario or ncmpcpp.

Best purchase of the year! I’m yet again discovering new aspects of albums I’ve bought 15 years ago and have heard over a thousand times. This thing reveals more detail in my music than my CD player. It’s nearly the same sensation as I had going from shitty speakers to semi-audiophile shit.

I bought the small version for CHF 120.00 (around USD 120.00), but if your ears are good enough to hear it and your equipment is good enough to reproduce it, you can go up to USD 900.00 on one of the higher-end models.

(*Okay: If you’ve hooked up some external D/A converter via S/P-DIF or TOSLINK you can get as good or better quality. But then you wouldn’t be reading this, would you?)

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.

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.

Since I’m switching many machines from Ubuntu to Debian, I was wondering if I could just keep my home partition intact and simply install Debian “over” Ubuntu, or if that would cause major problems with application configuration files etc.

Here’s the good news: It’s absolutely no problem to sidegrade from Ubuntu 9.10 to Debian squeeze (testing). I chose to keep the /home partition unformatted int he installer, but formatted the / partition. When the system rebooted, I logged in and my entire desktop looked exactly the same as under Ubuntu. Even my GNOME settings were intact, down to the desktop background.

The only thing I had to do to tweak things was to install some software that doesn’t come by default with Debian, such as claws-mail, my favorite e-mail client. Other than that, it’s been extremely smooth sailing. I’m surprised, in a positive way.

So if you don’t want to follow Canonical’s rebranding of Ubuntu (which will happen with 10.04 later this month), give Debian squeeze a try. It’s fully community based, so if you think the Debian Project Leader is not acting in your best interest, you have more leverage than with Canonical to change things.

Alex Brown’s blog posting illustrates nicely how, after making many beautiful promises of fixing their broken MS-OOXML format, Microsoft still fails to deliver.

You may remember how Microsoft used every dirty trick in the book, including ballot-stuffing, to force this “standard” down ISOs throat two years ago. In the meantime, many defects, large and small, were reported and Microsoft agreed to fix them, which never happened. MS-OOXML is an unimplementable monstrosity of a specification (6000 pages long) even without these defects. But with them, the whole situation becomes impossible. And some of the defects discussed might not even be errors at all, but deliberate attempts to break compatibility — these tactics are not unusual for Microsoft.

In my opinion the only way to rectify this would be to pass maintenance of MS-OOXML into the hands of an independent governing body. That would be sort of unfair, though. Microsoft implements and force-feeds us a clearly broken standard and we point out the defects. But it’s not Microsoft that has to fix them, it’s us? That’s not the way it should go.

If ISO had only maintained a stronger position when MS-OOXML went up for standardization, we might have instead put all this effort into improving a truly open standard such as OpenDocument (ODF). Now the defects reviews and meetings about MS-OOXML tie up valuable expert resources in the standards committees.

Maybe stealing a lot of time and sowing frustration inside ECMA and ISO was the whole point of MS-OOXML? You think that’s cynical and naïve, but the way things are going at the moment, might this not actually be a welcome byproduct for Microsoft? While the standards bodies are stalled, MS makes sure their broken implementation of their own broken standard is the only one that catches on. And boom, total market domination for Microsoft, all the while looking as if they are just supporting an “open standard”.

Well played.

To round this off, a quote from Brown on Microsoft’s engineers’ inability to implement even their own standards:

It is also a worrying commentary on the standards-savvyness of the Office developers that the first amateur attempts of part-time outsiders find problems with documents which Redmond’s internal QA processes have missed.

The EU has had a policy called the European Interoperability Framework, which to some extent defines how to apply open standards in order to improve IT interoperability.

There are, however, a few large companies in the IT sector that do not like interoperability. They would much prefer if the world remains incompatible so that they can profit from their own vendor lock-in schemes. Under the lobbying of these companies, Microsoft is one of them, the EU is about to update and weaken the European Interoperability Framework and turn it into a toothless silly document that does nothing for interoperability. This would reverse the push for open standards in the EU to some extent.

If you are a EU citizen, write the commissioners handling this case that you would prefer if the EU would not bow to corporate bullying and would uphold its stance on open standards and Free Software.

Karsten Gerloff already reported on this nonsense in 2009, his article has more background.

After my return to Debian I thought I could let you know about some of the pitfalls for returning Ubuntu users.

This is in random order, but more or less how it occurred to me.

• I used Debian testing (Codename “squeeze”) 64-bit. The installation came from a USB stick generated using Unetbootin. Unetbootin and booting the Netinstall installer worked just fine.
• The netinstall installer is not graphical at all, it’s good old text menus. I didn’t mind much because I used to be able to navigate the goddamn Debian installer blindly back in my sysadmin days. I wouldn’t recommend this for new users, though. I hear there’s a graphical installer on the full Debian CD (instead of the netinstall disc), so you’re probably better off with that.
• After installation, the machine wouldn’t boot. GRUB had fucked things up and wouldn’t even launch. This can happen sometimes if you install a new version of GRUB 2 over an old GRUB 1. I had to boot the unetbootin stick into rescue mode and do grub-install /dev/sda and update-grub to get it to work.
• Once up, WLAN wasn’t working. This is due to the Realtek 8192SE chipset in my netbook, which isn’t part of the mainline kernel yet. I downloaded some driver source from Realtek, did apt-get install build-essential and got the kernel headers. Then I could compile the driver, load it and boom, I was on the wireless LAN. Does this in any way, shape or form work for the average user? No, it doesn’t. But on the upside, Ubuntu can’t handle this WLAN chipset either.
• I didn’t have any 3D acceleration (NVIDIA) yet, and Debian is very much against non-free software so they don’t include a proprietary driver manager like Ubuntu does. On Ubuntu, NVIDIA drivers are a one click thing. On Debian, I instead downloaded the binary NVIDIA proprietary driver installer from NVIDIA, entered a text shell, killed GDM and X, installed the driver, wrote out a default xorg.conf file using Xorg –config, changed the driver to nvidia and restarted GDM. This gave me 3D acceleration. Since the NVIDIA proprietary driver detects my screen’s DPI wrong, my fonts were all too large at this point. I couldn’t find a graphical way to configure this, so I just added this to xorg.conf:

# NVIDIA proprietary options
Option "UseEdidDpi" "FALSE"
Option "DPI" "100 x 100"

• Later I started on a quest to enable 3D window effects and all that Compiz eye candy. The official documentation says to install some compiz packages and then a simple compiz --replace would take care of things. This didn’t go down well on my system, no window manager comes up so I end up with X windows but without borders or decorations. I’ll have to investigate a bit more.
• Mounting my Samba-based file server’s shares didn’t work with smbfs/cifs. I usually want my Samba shares to look more or less like normal UNIX directories on my GNU/Linux machine, that’s why I normally mount them in using cifs/smbfs. I don’t want to use GNOME’s server browser and style of mounting, it’s different and breaks in a lot of situations that I’d prefer would work transparently. So I tried mounting things, using the exact same /etc/fstab as on my Ubuntu box. But on Debian I get “Operation not permitted.” Apparently the authors decided that normal users should never, not under any circumstances be able to mount CIFS filesystems, and Debian is now following these instructions. It’s sort of inconvenient to mount these shares as root. I’ll see if I get used to it.

To be fair to Debian, this is still a testing release. But the nature of the problems I had doesn’t make me very optimistic that they can be fixed automatically in a final release. Maybe the graphical installer would have taken care of some of them, I don’t know. I might try out.

This is not to say that I’m unhappy with Debian. It is a stable, free (in all senses), universal operating system. It works really well. It keeps my conscience white as a flower. It’s just not for everyone, and I hope some of the examples above show why.