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I’m now using Amplify and Posterous (and soon, possibly Tumblr) as a way to begin unifying the various blogs and microblogs I use. I often have 12 or more tabs open in a browser in order to monitor and respond to everything. I’m hoping to slim that down.With Yahoo shutting down service after service, I think I need to ensure that no non-paid service hosts all my data. I want to move to paid accounts with the services that are most important (and which accept such accounts), such as the StatusNet Cloud, WordPress.com and TypePad.And hopefully, I’ll take more time during the current unpaid downtime to build and develop my skills and understanding even more.Note to Amplify.com, Posterous.com, and Tumblr.com: you should keep an eye on Diaspora and similar projects. The day that Diaspora offers a client API, you should begin implementing it. And same for Friendika, GNU Social, and other, similar projects.
How to buy a Dell WITHOUT windows (via life one degree north, one-o-three degrees east)
A couple of years ago, I spent about two months trying to buy a Lenovo laptop without Windows and then waiting for my refund when they wouldn’t accomodate me. (To this day, I don’t recommend anyone attempt to do business directly with Lenovo. They could easily have told me up front that the system I saw on their site was no longer available.)
I have purchased Dell’s N-series a couple of times, (by entering www.dell.com/ubuntu to get there) and have noticed that they are nearly always months behind the comparable Windows machine in hardware specs. But this intrigues me. I think I will attempt the same thing next time I have the funds and the desire to buy a computer. Either that, or I’ll head directly over to System76.
And by the way, if Dell were at all serious about Linux, they would make sure that everything they make has certified Penguin-compatible hardware. That way, even those who pay the "Windows tax" have the option of replacing it with a privacy-respecting, freedom-preserving operating system. My nephew and I have Dell lappies that were bought at retail stores. Both have Broadcom BC-4312 wireless cards that only work when they feel like it (using either the open b43 driver or the company’s binary sta driver).
Quick Thoughts On Diaspora
Important: Diaspora is still very early in its development process. Everything I mention could change at any time. I’d encourage you to try it out, but don’t expect a lot at this time.
A quick background. Last Summer, a team of college students (recent grads?) kicked off a project to build a federated social networking site similar to Facebook or MySpace. At the time, there was a lot of grumbling about Facebook’s odious anti-privacy policies, so the group was able to raise a little money to help them get started.
There is an official alpha (that means very early-stage, as in it may eat your data or leak it to the world; links and URLs may change, page layouts and functionality may change, and so on) at http://joindiaspora.com/. I received an invitation last night, so I signed up.
First impression: If you’ve used Facebook, you know that it offers a grouping feature, to help you direct your posts to the appropriate "friends" and away from inappropriate ones. This is to keep your boss from seeing photos of you puking after a night of drinking. But Facebook’s feature is difficult to use, so much that no one I know uses it, and many people aren’t even aware of it. Diaspora’s “aspects” grouping feature is right up front and easy to use. It quite naturally invites you to partition your "friends" into such groups, while making it absolutely simple to send a post to all your aspects.
Federation and control of one’s own data are issues of major importance today. I recently found some of my former home addresses (and a couple where I’ve never been… Atlanta, for example) showed up in a simple web search. Since I’ve been online (1997), I’ve never posted that information anywhere. I’ve been careful not to make said information available to anyone without a legitimate need. But when I think about it, plenty of information is available on sites like Facebook.
Now, that does not make Facebook evil. What it does mean is that you and I need to be even more careful about what information we allow sites like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Bebo, Brightkite, Orkut, and LinkedIn to obtain and to store. Facebook’s “real names policy” is, of course, the most dangerous thing on the Internet today, when you couple it with making your hometown, educational information, and employment information absolutely public with no way to protect it. But LinkedIn and sites like Monster.com also have dangerous amounts of information about you and exist to spread that information far and wide (with some potential benefit to you, I must say). By the way, I agree with many of Phil Windley‘s ideas about moving toward a “personal data store,” which sites and vendors would access with your express permission in order to obtain identity and other personal information, including the idea of controls on said data that prevents a vendor from disseminating it without your knowledge and consent. I intend to write more about identity management and the need for our legal system to institute a control framework that returns control of our information to ourselves.
My impression is that Diaspora is being more careful about collection and dissemination of personal information. For example, if you search for my real name online, there are at least two people who show up. Diaspora asked for (but did not require) that name. Facebook won’t sign you up without that name. (Actually, my online name "lnxwalt" is, so far, a more unique identifier than my real name or even my SSN.) Diaspora allowed me to sign up under the name I use for online activities, which is a major plus.
But I must say, if they are serious about federation, they need to prioritize work to connect with sites using the OStatus protocol (primarily Identica and other StatusNet sites right now, but that may also enable read-only connection with Google Buzz) as well as the long-proven XMPP. I’d also suggest talking with the guys at Buddycloud about ways to interoperate with them. (Not that I’m saying the Buddycloud article is right. That’s a lot of talk for a group that appears not to have a desktop-compatible interface.) They need to be explicit about plugin APIs, client APIs, and protocol suites, even if they have to say "This may change in the future," because that’s how they can get people to develop add-ons that make the product better.
Talk to the guys at Elgg about ways to enable Diaspora and Elgg sites to interoperate. I realize you’re not PHP-focused, but if you make it easy for others to help and contribute, you may be surprised at what comes up.
It is important to understand that federation may require more than just your company / ideas to make happen. Go ahead and see about working with others who are also doing federated social networking.
I would like to encourage the Diaspora devs to think about these things. Also: usernames—we already have a webfinger to specify how usernames should look in a federated social network; don’t ignore others' hard-earned knowledge. Restructure usernames to be @username@host, and use that to enable pointing messages to different users (and direct messaging, too).
All in all, I’m impressed with Diaspora. My suggestions above are made in the hope of making it even better. If you’re not yet part of a Diaspora pod and you’re interested in helping the developers find bugs and needed functionality, take a look at this list of Diaspora pods.
September, 2010: Revisiting Mail Clients
I wrote about my switch to Claws-Mail about a year and a half ago. At the time, one of my major concerns with Thunderbird was their “only use one sending account” hangup. If you have a variety of business-related and personal accounts, you need to ensure that you don’t send out mail meant for one account through another one. T-bird made it a difficult process to set up, because you essentially had to go through the set-up process twice, and then link the incoming and outgoing accounts together.
Claws isn’t perfect either, so I occasionally look at another client. I recently decided to reinstall the OS on both partitions of my laptop. Since I’m using KDE (most of the time) and occasionally Xfce or Lxde, for my desktop environment, I thought I’d give Kontact a try. Kontact, if you haven’t seen it, integrates Kmail, the KDE addressbook, and a few other applications into one whole.
It didn’t make me set up filters, although the whole thing of creating an identity, then creating an e-mail account and assigning that account to that identity is beyond me. So set up wasn’t horribly difficult, and I wasn’t banging my head against the wall. Until I replied to an e-mail message from a friend and found my private, family-only address getting filled with mail enhancement spam (the friend’s computer was infected). It turns out that Kontact / Kmail generally uses the “default account” that is associated with the “default identity” for sending purposes. Changing the settings didn’t change this. Immediately, that took the whole KDE e-mail infrastructure off my list.
Past experience with Evolution meant I wasn’t even going to try it. (Incidentally, GNOME, when someone sends an error report, you really shouldn’t post their e-mail address online. I had to close the address I used with Evolution because of this.)
What is so hard about this? Here’s how it works: You have an e-mail address for work-related stuff. You have another one that you give to your friends and to your uncle Fred who likes to send you all the forwarded jokes and political stuff. You have another one that you give to certain family members who have shown that they are responsible. You read messages for that third address whenever they come in, while the other two may have varying waiting periods before you read their messages. The key to making this work is that you should never send a message from account 1 when you meant it to come from account 3.
So I immediately made sure Thunderbird was installed and started the account set-up process. Gmail, Hotmail, independent POP or IMAP, it didn’t matter. T-bird setup automatically did the right thing each time (with POP accounts, it asks you whether you want a single dumping ground or separate folders). One particular service uses non-standard ports, so I had to click “edit” and change that. I was also impressed that T-bird no longer needs an extension to let me accept various services’ changing security certificates.
Now, my next step was (finally) to restore some of my backed-up data. Then I installed Claws-Mail. When I launched, I had a surprise: I had copied my configuration, so it immediately had all my past messages and all my settings.
Claws-Mail doesn’t support sending HTML mail, whereas I’d rather have the capability there with a checkbox to turn it on or off for each message I send. (T-bird uses a per-account model: you choose to send HTML mail, and thereafter, every message you send from that account is in HTML.) I do like the speed and reliability of plain-text e-mail, however, so I am currently using the two side by side. (Three accounts in each client, with no overlap.) It also means that I can have a mail client open without having to accept delivery of every account’s messages. (And I also have four of those six accounts configured on my WebOS phone.)
Now, if only there was a “save to ODF” and “send as ODF” plugin, I’d be glad.
Introducing LibreOffice, A New Branch Off Of OpenOffice
The Document Foundation – The Document Foundation
Our mission is to facilitate the evolution of the OpenOffice.org Community into a new open, independent, and meritocratic organizational structure within the next few months. An independent Foundation is a better match to the values of our contributors, users, and supporters, and will enable a more effective, efficient, transparent, and inclusive Community. We will protect past investments by building on the solid achievements of our first decade, encourage wide participation in the Community, and co-ordinate activity across the Community.
The Document Foundation is producing LibreOffice as the next evolution in the OpenOffice.org story. There have been some rumblings for quite a while about Sun’s (now Oracle’s) outsize role in OpenOffice. Oracle, of course, is more energetic about its pursuit of higher earnings than Sun was. Some would argue that Oracle is less friendly toward freedom-preserving software (“free / open source software”), and point to its activities around OpenSolaris and Java as examples of this.
I don’t see LibreOffice as a backlash against Oracle, and I wouldn’t want it to be spun that way. It is time for such an important FPS (freedom-preserving software) application as OpenOffice to have a vendor-independent foundation at the helm. Whether Oracle, Sun, IBM, or even Microsoft was the vendor, I’d still believe this is a timely thing.
The current version of LibreOffice is marked as beta, not for daily, real-world use. Being that it is primarily just the most-current version of OpenOffice code with some changes to remove names and trademarks, it should be okay. Still, I don’t generally run beta software, and I’m not advising that anyone else does either.
This is an opportunity for a big forward step. I hope that Oracle will recognize this and that it will assist The Document Foundation with this project–in particular, by transferring any needed “IP” to the foundation and by committing OpenOffice.org to follow the lead of LibreOffice–so that both they and everyone else can share in the rewards of having an independent foundation in control.
In the meantime, let us continue to find those few use cases where OpenOffice is less suited for the task at hand than the leading proprietary office applications suite. We can then help the Document Foundation to prioritize those areas. The important thing about non-profit community foundations is that they require active participation by members of the community. I intend to be there. How about you?
Hat tip: Roy Schestowitz’ Techrights.org blog.
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It Starts: ORCL Charges $90 For ODF Plugin
There were many people who felt that Oracle’s Sun purchase would negatively affect OpenOffice.org and other open source and zero-price software products that Sun had made available. Others counseled patience, saying that we should not jump to conclusions. I agreed, although Oracle’s reputation preceded it.
So I was surprised yesterday to hear that the Sun/Oracle ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office was going paid. Now, you have to remember that the justification for the plugin has always been that there are some individuals and companies that are committed to Microsoft’s office products (as irritating and user-unfriendly as it is), but wanted to be able to receive and send ODF file formats. The plugin was an easy way to taste what was available outside of the msoffice world, a loss-leader that should lead to higher uptake of OpenOffice.org and StarOffice (soon to be rebranded Oracle Office, I’m sure).
Surely, I thought, someone at Oracle just isn’t understanding the use case for the plugin. At $90, there is zero chance I’m going to convince my friends and family members to give it a try, which means those individuals will continue to look at OpenOffice.org with the same suspicion they hold for ersatz “office” software such as Microsoft Works, the ThinkFree online office product, or that $30 office suite for sale at the local office products store. At $90, someone in a business will need to go through a formal request process to obtain this plugin. But that was before I really read the site.
This morning, I learned that the minimum quantity is 100 units at $90 apiece, and that there was an annual support fee on top of it (currently $19.80). Now, I would imagine that ORCL sales is going to pitch this to their corporate customers, and they didn’t want a zero-price version chewing away at their market from underneath. I also imagine that Oracle already realizes that the manager drones that decide such things are not going to agree to buy a plugin from Oracle for Microsoft office.
It seems entirely likely that this will allow ORCL to say “We gave it a fair shot, but there’s just no demand for it.” With that, Oracle could abandon the ODF-translation field, leaving it to the Microsoft-sponsored Clever Age plugins project and the not-so-interoperable built-in functionality in recent updates to MS Office.
As an aside, is it likely that something like this is coming to MySQL soon?
What does this say for the OpenOffice.org project? Obviously, no one knows yet. At least, no one outside of Oracle knows.
Net Neutrality Letter
This was my submission to the FCC regarding Net Neutrality. I found it again today and thought it might merit circulation. Even though it is too late to submit similar comments to the FCC, there are two senators and a representative who still need to see this.
In the beginning, entrepreneurs put banks of modems in their garages and started Internet service providers offering dial-up service. And it was good. And lo, the telephone industry offered dial up. And their competitors offered better service at lower prices, and everyone’s phone payment paid the costs of building the infrastructure.
Then came dark days, for someone in the FCC decided to allow the telephone and cable television industries to offer high-speed access, but they needn’t allow competing ISPs to sell high-speed access through those lines. And the cable companies raised their prices and offered inferior service. They interfered with their customers’ use of phone- and video-over-Internet services in order to promote their own, higher-priced offerings. They placed arbitrary limits on bandwidth use for supposedly “unlimited” access. The phone companies, meanwhile, continued to offer only a relatively slow-speed version of Internet access. And the FCC and Congress hemmed and hawed and did little to nothing about the injustices they saw.
And lo, a new ruler arose, and with him, the FCC began to discuss whether it should mandate “net neutrality” to prevent the abuses they had observed, and worse besides. And the telephone and cable television industries gave money to Congress and gained an inside track. And there arose a movement that sought to get the FCC and Congress to protect the interests of citizens.
And this is where we stand today. I ask you to impose net neutrality because the FCC erred in allowing wireline owners to offer access and service-consuming services to the public themselves. It should have been an arm’s length transaction with similar terms available to multiple qualified ISPs (and no throttling or interference by the cable or telephone company owning the “pipes” at all). Because of this mistake, there is no free market for many consumers.
In many areas, there is the cable company and there are a few surviving dial-up competitors. In other areas, there is a duopoly, where the cable company offers faster speeds at higher prices, and the telephone company offers moderate speeds at medium prices. When the only game in town decides to interfere with the Internet services you use (possibly to make your living), you are screwed.
I ask you, members of the Federal Communications Commission, to recognize that the Internet is not the property of any company. It is not something of no consequence that can be restricted or limited for company purposes without fundamentally harming the American economy and those of us who pay those companies for our access. I ask you to represent the interests of “We the people”, the ones you work for, and not solely the interests of a few large corporations.
And I remind you that I am a registered voter and will withhold my vote from candidates for federal office who do not support the American people through Net Neutrality.
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