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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.

I’m cur­rently writ­ing a plu­gin for an open-source tool that will let me use LDAP as a back­end store. Rather than let it become vapor­ware, I’ll just post a note about it and what it does once I’ve sub­mit­ted the patch.

In the mean­time, I’ll note that hav­ing a clearly defined stan­dard for nam­ing things is always a win. Whether it is a coher­ent scheme for your vari­ables or your sys­tems, it’s one less thing you need to think about. It allows those who are famil­iar with the envi­ron­ment to make assump­tions — it raises the bar of com­plex­ity you’re able to han­dle with­out mem­o­riza­tion, and frees up your inter­nal reg­is­ters for what is actu­ally going on, either in the code or net­work topology.

In that vein, I finally got around to look­ing up some exam­ples of Apps Hungarian for use in the afore­men­tioned project. As soon as I had fin­ished refac­tor­ing to use the new AHN names, the entire project seemed (some­how) much clearer:

for ( strCatalog, mpKeyValue ) in mpCatalogMpKeyValue:
    # You can guess what everything is here pretty easily

First and fore­most, any sub­con­scious uncer­tainty about what a vari­able is used for dis­ap­pears. It’s a pal­pa­ble weight off your shoul­ders when you’re long into a pars­ing loop and have a dozen vari­ables in use at mul­ti­ple lev­els at any one time. I’m one who prefers ver­bose lan­guages (think: C#). So if I can add the biggest win of that ver­bosity back into a lan­guage like Python sim­ply by being dis­ci­plined in how I name my vari­ables, it’s totally worth it.

Your net­work engi­neer orders four T1 lines from loca­tions in City A to a dat­a­cen­ter in City Z via a large telco. He leaves the week before these are to be dropped, and of course, does not doc­u­ment what he was doing or even keep copies of the contracts.

Either way, the lines are in the process of get­ting installed, and no one you have the con­tact with at the large telco can tell you the infor­ma­tion you need. The order man­ager “has no cross con­nect info”, and the sales sup­port engi­neer tells you to ask the order man­ager. Naturally, all the con­tracts and doc­u­ments restored from the e-mail back­ups sim­ply describe the datacenter’s address as the A-side loca­tion — with­out any of the specifics you’d need to order a cross con­nect from the datacenter.

Meanwhile, the installer is turned away from the Z-side loca­tion because they didn’t call ahead to sched­ule an appoint­ment. Call the Z-side build­ing man­ager and for­ward the infor­ma­tion required to get past secu­rity to large-telco. Large-telco tells you that mak­ing an appoint­ment in advance and pro­vid­ing the infor­ma­tion that secu­rity requires to get in is impos­si­ble. Somehow this location’s 6000 other pri­vate lines were installed through magic.

Moral of the story: However irri­tat­ing it is to trou­bleshoot some­thing through a reseller, it is far worse to get some­thing deliv­ered from a large telco.

Took me a cou­ple years and a cou­ple lap­tops, but I finally dropped one just good enough to shat­ter the LCD. AppleCare doesn’t cover broke-it-yourself phys­i­cal dam­age, only the deep cen­ter of the bath­tub curve, so it’s basi­cally point­less to drop the money on it.

Again, if you’re buy­ing a Mac, save your pen­nies and don’t bother buy­ing the Apple Care plan.

One of the best quotes evah:

Personally, before I did this test, I was cer­tain that LightTPD would win the race. Obviously, large soft­ware which is per­ceived bloated not nec­es­sar­ily is.
mod_php, LightTPD, FastCGI — What’s Fastest

Put that on a Times Square ticker.