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On the ride home today, I passed the same ad I pass every day: an ad for Android Apps. Google’s adver­tis­ing dom­i­nance of a mar­ket which Apple cre­ated. The papers (blogs) are full of com­plaints, and there’s been a def­i­nite mood shift. Before, peo­ple had a love/hate rela­tion­ship with Apple: they loved how awe­some the prod­ucts are, and did so in spite of the lim­i­ta­tions. Now that they’ve got­ten accli­mated to the prod­ucts, the awe­some­ness has worn off, and — as with all tech­nol­ogy — the longer it lives, the more peo­ple try to do with it, and thus the more con­strict­ing the lim­i­ta­tions seem. So the love fades, and all that’s left is the hate.

The rea­son is very sim­ple: Apple chose con­trol over open­ness, and they’re pay­ing for it. The exclu­sive deal with AT&T meant they were stuck using the absolute worst wire­less net­work, the shod­di­ness of which meant turn­ing off users. The App Store big brother turned off devel­op­ers and the tech saavy — the same thought lead­ers that Google catered (and I’d say still caters) to, the ones that went around switch­ing everyone’s default home page from Yahoo! a decade ago…

This post is pretty heavy on the pon­tif­i­cat­ing, but I’ll tie it back into GNOME at the end, I swear.

I’ve been think­ing quite a bit about pri­vacy lately. Most of the shiny things here on the inter­net are some type of ser­vice where you aban­don some degree of pri­vacy to an inter­me­di­ary in return for con­ve­nience or com­mu­nity: your blog, Facebook, Twitter, GMail, Amazon​.com, and Last​.fm take much of the ran­dom bits of your life and put them into corporate-owned data­bases so you can con­nect with friends, buy ran­dom things with­out mov­ing, or not have to edit the same silly pref­er­ences dialogs 50 times. OKCupid, Google Latitude and Mint do so with your pec­ca­dil­loes, your phys­i­cal loca­tion, and your finan­cial records.

There’s a cer­tain amount of trust involved in par­tic­i­pat­ing in all this: the trust that your infor­ma­tion is ulti­mately anony­mous or only sold to adver­tis­ers. Of course, Google logs what you’re look­ing for, and every­thing that’s made pub­lic, and it’s worth point­ing out that there’s really noth­ing pre­vent­ing an orga­ni­za­tion from col­lat­ing all this infor­ma­tion together, which is an end to most of what we call pri­vacy and the sense of free­dom that comes along with it. About the only excep­tion is med­ical records, which are pro­tected in the US by pri­vacy laws. My under­stand­ing is that it’s a crime to give unau­tho­rized peo­ple access to those records, but I’m a lit­tle shaky on what hap­pens after that pri­vacy has been breached — that is, once the bribed clerk has given out the records, are there laws to pre­vent the recip­i­ent from dis­trib­ut­ing them further?

Minutiae aside, there’s a larger, unasked ques­tion of the social cost for all this. Does the lack of pri­vacy man­i­fest as a mon­u­men­tal chill­ing effect? Does it turn out after all your activ­i­ties are cat­a­loged and recorded that you’re less free? Do you self-censor and live in fear of being dis­cov­ered, or (I’d say) fool­ishly assume that your pri­vacy is a tra­di­tional social norm that will con­tinue to be respected? Grab a green flag and march against the fact the only real pri­vacy you have is “the two inches inside your own head?”

Whatever the social cost of this new world will turn out to be, we’re liv­ing in it already, and peo­ple are going to have to fig­ure out how to make it com­pat­i­ble with the con­cept of a free soci­ety. Which is why I redesigned my blog to inte­grate the Lifestream word­press plu­gin and dis­play all of my publically-accessible activ­i­ties in one place: the music I’m lis­ten­ing to, the movies I’m watch­ing, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube. I’d actu­ally like it if I could put my Amazon​.com pur­chases on there like Facebook tried to do with­out ask­ing any­one. There’s noth­ing in any of these data­bases that a gov­ern­ment agency, cor­po­ra­tion, or part­ner couldn’t get their hands on if they wanted really to.

I promised I’d tie this back into GNOME at some point: pos­si­bly the most inter­est­ing thing about a project like Zeitgeist is that it puts that record of what you’re doing in a place where you can access it — it doesn’t solve the under­ly­ing con­flict, of course, but it does let you use it for your own purposes.

Getting on the ele­va­tor this morn­ing, it turned out I should have waited. Some woman was yelling at some­one on the ele­va­tor about how he should sup­port health-care, and some ran­dom­ness about the unnamed politi­cian who’s bumper sticker adorned his jacket was so ter­ri­ble and such.

She con­tin­ued to rant at him all the way up to my floor.

On the way out the ele­va­tor, I called back that scream­ing doesn’t solve any­thing, though after get­ting bet­ter caf­feinated, I wish I had told her to treat the man like a human being.

I went ahead and got the Adamo from Dell, so here’s my review of it, and what I did to set it up and get it work­ing the way I wanted.

Firstly, on the hard­ware: AC adapters is the weak point of this guy. For my old MacBook, I had three: one in my bag, one at home, one at the office. While it was a decent extra cost, it was one I under­took after I for­got my adapter a cou­ple times and had to go with­out for a while — some­thing that every­one with a lap­top deals with at some point.

This was par­tic­u­larly a pain since the one that Dell shipped with the lap­top died after the first charge — which meant another three days of being unable to use it after I received it. Not cool, Dell.

With the power sup­ply prob­lem fixed, I moved on to get­ting Linux on the thing. The thing ships with Windows 7, which I wanted to keep on there as an option, and there’s enough travel and sen­si­tive work stuff that I do on my lap­tops to jus­tify encrypt­ing the disk, which requires using the Ubuntu alter­na­tive installer. I also wanted to use LVM for my disks for when I start run­ning out of space and want to shrink the Windows partition.

The way to make this work is non-obvious, and it required two attempts to get going:

1. Resize the Windows par­ti­tion to some­thing less than the full disk. I chose to give it 100G, and allo­cate the rest for Linux. This works out of the box in the installer, which is nice.
2. Setup LVM on the remain­ing space next.
   • 200M for a /boot partition
   • 20G for swap (SSD disk means I assume that hit­ting swap is nowhere near as painful as it used to be)
   • The rest for a root partitiion.
3. Setup encrypted vol­umes on the LVM par­ti­tions you cre­ated for root and swap (not /boot). You want to encrypt your swap as well, because Linux isn’t going to zero-out your swap vol­ume when you shut­down, mak­ing it effec­tively an on-disk mem­ory dump of what­ever your appli­ca­tions were doing…

I tried set­ting up sin­gle root/swap par­ti­tions on top of a sin­gle large encrypted vol­ume, but Ubuntu aparently requires your /boot par­ti­tion be un-encrypted, so there wasn’t an obvi­ous way to boot it after doing so…

With that issue out of the way, the rest of the instal­la­tion went smoothly and things booted just fine. I’ll note that Windows 7 boots much faster than Ubuntu 9.10, but I’ve only actu­ally booted the thing from a POST onwards a few times in the last cou­ple weeks, so who cares? The time it takes to resume from sleep is much more impor­tant for a lap­top, honestly.

With every­thing installed, I used rsync to copy my doc­u­ments and such off my old lap­top. I had enough disk to rsync my music col­lec­tion off of my world book, so I went ahead and did that too, and I’ve writ­ten a sim­ple upstart con­fig that per­forms the rsync prop­erly when the net­work comes back:

#!/bin/bash
# Script to dispatch NetworkManager events
#
# Runs rsync when WiFi or ethernet is connected.

set -x

if [ -z "$1" ]; then
    echo "$0: called with no interface" 1>&2
    exit 1;
fi

# Fake ifupdown environment
export IFACE="$1"
export ACTION="$2"
export USERNAME="me"
export REMOTE_USERNAME="me"
export REMOTE_HOST="stuff.mine.nu"

case "$ACTION" in
    up)
	if [ "$IFACE" = "eth0" -o "$IFACE" = "wlan0" ]; then
		if [ -z "$(pidof rsync)" ]; then
			sudo -n -u $USERNAME rsync -a /home/$USERNAME/Music/* $REMOTE_USERNAME@$REMOTE_HOST:/shares/internal/MUSIC
		fi
	fi
	;;
esac

I used to try and just mount the drive via SSHfs/nautilus and play via Rhythmbox, but it would skip the first 30 sec­onds of the song, requir­ing man­ual inter­ven­tion every three minutes.

After that comes the cus­tom repos­i­to­ries I’m using to add a lit­tle snazz­i­ness and breakage:

ppa:ricotz/testing

Latest and great­est GNOME Shell

ppa:telepathy/ppa

Bleeding Edge Telepathy/Empathy (my at-work XMPP server man­ages to con­sis­tently crash Empathy)

ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa

Nightlies of Firefox 3.6

ppa:cmsj/lifesaver

Lifesaver screen­saver, search term “#fml”

ppa:chromium-daily/ppa

Chromium Web Browser nightly builds

It’s been said before, but a person’s first foray into free cul­ture of any type is often to scratch an itch. For me, my first Wikipedia edit was undo­ing van­dal­ism on the Hernando de Soto Polar page con­flat­ing him with the con­quis­ta­dor of the same name — replac­ing his actual birth date with 1500-something, etc.

It’s some­what dis­ap­point­ing that real Wikipedia van­dal­ism is as point­lessly child­ish as that…