My blog will move soon to a new URL and software. In fact, I've written my own static HTML based blog generator, wrapping around Atom for data storage.This is why the feed will also be only available in Atom format in the future - it works a lot better, and why support 2 formats?The most important feeds are:

• Full feed
• English language feed
• German language feed

The old URLs will be replaced by redirects anytime soon.If you notice anything being broken, please send me an email at the usual erich (AT) debian org address.

If you are (like I do) experiencing issues with Google Chrome, in particular when it comes to applications such as Google Maps, try using the --disable-accelerated-compositing option.For me, the issues started with version 6.0 and resulted in various pages hanging at random, in particular graphics-heavy sites such as maps. For one of my own sites, markers started disappearing on maps at certain zoom levels. Only when it also occurred on the main Google Maps I stopped looking for bugs in my own site and started focusing on the browser ...

Has anyone experience with using Google Apps?The server I'm currently using for my private email will be shut down soon, so I need to decide upon a future way of handling my personal email. I have low requirements, they key feature I need is a good spam filter; Google Apps can certainly provide this. Since I'm the single user, the free "standard" edition should be easily good enough.Obviously, since I don't have a reachable mail server myself anymore, I'd either have to rent a server just for my personal email, or use some hosted solution like Gmail, even if it is not open source.So, did you try it? Did you return to a different solution?

• Privacy issues of using Google
• Free service limitations (50 acounts, sufficient for me)
• Good spam filter
• Good Webmail
• High availability
• IMAP support (at least to some extend
• Android support - my next phone likely will be an Android device

Any points I'm missing? Email me: erich (a) debian orgUpdate: I have received a lot of feedback, much of which is very positive on Gmail/Google Apps for personal use.

Recently, Google started changing the web in some interesting ways. A lot by contributing code. It started with projects such as the Chrome web browser, which quickly achieved a market shares over 10%, which is more than Apple Safari and Opera together.And the good side, Chrome did not actually add "yet another incompatible platform", but by being closely related to Safari (or more precisely WebKit), it is not that different.Other stuff that belongs into this category is the Google Web Toolkit and the closure compiler (which essentially is a JavaScript code checker and optimizer).But recently, Google goes a step further. They started tackling internet file formats. First they proposed a new Video codec known as WebM or VP8. Now they extracted an image format out of this codec, known as WebP.There is some serious doubt on the quality, the images do appear to be a bit blurry and lose details. I concur with JPEG even being a bit better, despite the block artefacts. The blurry results of WebP are not really convincing.The h.264 based image looks best to me, but H.264 is patent-encumbered for all I know, so we might not see this new format in wide use until 2028. This already ruled out other image formats such as JBIG or FIF. Or look at audio formats: we're still using MP3 everywhere, because everyone tries to push another patent-encumbered audio format that the others are not going to adopt. So MP3 remains the only thing widely accepted (Ogg Vorbis is nice, but it looks as if companies such as Apple are not going to adopt it, probably because they have interest in other formats. Maybe the Ogg Vorbis support in Chrome will help here on the long run).In particular, why would you pay royalties for a tiny bit of image quality, given the constantly sinking prices of bandwidth? The H.264 patents may make a difference on video data, they probably won't pay of for still images.Given that WebM is sometimes claimed to be a simplified H.264 (minus the patent issues?), WebP probably is as good as we can get to the H.264 based quality without running into the same patent issues?But enough on the image data. There is one thing, I'd really like to see Google change on the web. The worst thing about the web is called JavaScript (or more accurately, ECMAScript). There is just so much wrong with this language that we really need to replace it ASAP.Some things that are wrong with JavaScript:

• The syntax is about as crazy as Perl, anything could be valid code.
• There a lot of syntax quirks and oddities. Try to test for a variable storing an Array ...
• It lacks any reasonable Standard Library - which is a key strength of modern languages such as Java, Python, C# - and which is why everbody is using one of the thousand JavaScript frameworks such as Dojo, Mojikit, Google Closure Library, Prototype, jQuery, MooTools, Yahoo UI Library, ...
• Due to the lack of standard functionality, the JavaScript development cost is a lot higher than needed, development time is bad for the triviality of most JavaScript tasks, and the file size is even worse than JPEG vs. WebP ...

So my biggest wishlist item of Google to contribute to the Web via Chrome and Firefox is a new web scripting language. As much as I love python, the whitespace syntax of Python doesn't work for the web (we need to be able to store complex statements in HTML attributes without newlines), so we'll have to look for something else. Maybe Ruby will work?

German RIAA-Equivalent GEMA still has not reached an agreement with YouTube. As a consequence, about half of the YouTube videos I get links for are not accessible because they contain a song that is managed by GEMA.Sorry, I will not buy a song that I can't preview this way.International music companies such as Universal Music Group, EMI and Sony Music definitely should rethink their cooperation with GEMA, they are harming their business.

I today deactivated my Facebook account. It was some effort, because I had developed some Facebook applications, and their page to reassign them to a different developer was broken (actually the whole application edit page was broken).I have always been a "responsible" user, keeping good control over my data, and usually just posting stuff that I'd tell anyone anyway. Facebook has also always been some kind of "marketing" tool for me, being able to support some friends by inviting people to go to their events etc.However, there are plenty of reasons to abstain from Facebook:

• They track you on millions of web pages via the like button. See earlier posts on how to block some of this tracking.
• They collect tons of data on you even when you do not join, by collecting data on you via your friends email accounts, phone books etc. For example it has been shown that, when one of your friends uses Facebook for iPhone, then Facebook already has collected your phone number.
• Facebook is flooding you with information that is entertaining at first, but actually quite useless. (e.g. who became 'friends' with whom). FBpurity is a good way to remove much of the trivially useless information.
• Facebook is a huge time sink if you are not responsible, e.g. refrain from using all the games, use FBpurity to filter our cruft etc.
• Facebook is giving you the impression of having lots of friends and of being social - while in fact, you are probably even spending less time with your actual friends than ever before.
• Facebook is a great tool - for mobbing. You can easily tell things to everybody except a certain person. Invite them all to a party, but hide it from the target until its over, then brag on how great the party was. And so on - and in fact, that is what happens to non-Facebook users already; this is the kind of social pressure that made Facebook so big.
• Facebook is a lot about bragging rights. Having the most friends, the coolest photos, the best links, the prettiest girls posting on your wall.

Facebook makes things easier, but also a lot more shallow. When someone took note and remembered your birthday, there was some effort involved that shows that they cared. With Facebook reminding people to greet, what is a birthday greeting on Facebook more than an automated message? It's about as personal as the annual christmas card by some large company. Face it: the "social" part of the "social web" is pretty shallow.As you can see above, I've been caring about these issues for some time; I post selectively, I filter much of the tracking, I don't use their games. With my Hiatus, I want to further improve, in particular

• use my spare time for useful projects instead of reading trivialities posted on Facebook. There is just so much tiny stuff that you could do with your time instead.
• spend more time with my true friends
• be more self-aware of my time use in general
• remind people that they know people outside of Facebook, too

Check out this web hack I just did: Drunken mode for your browserThis should work in Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and maybe even Internet Exploders (untested).This is a Bookmarklet; if you bookmark the link, you are supposed to be able to apply it to arbitrary web pages.Note: when reading this web page through a planet such as Planet Debian, the JavaScript will be filtered and therefore probably not work.

I use the following python script to choose a random background on login:

#!/usr/bin/python
import os, os.path, random, gconf
startdir="PUT YOUR FOLDER HERE"
gkey="/desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename"imgs=[]
for root, dirs, files in os.walk(startdir):
  for file in files:
    base, ext = os.path.splitext(file)
    if ext.lower() in [".jpg", ".png", ".svg"]:
      imgs.append(os.path.join(root, file))img = random.choice(imgs)gconf.client_get_default().set_string(gkey, img)

It's fairly simple, but shows the power of the python libraries. It "walks" the directory tree, collects all files of the given extensions, chooses one at random, then updates the gconf key for the Gnome background image.P.S. Yes, I know a couple of ways to do that in a shell script, too. However, then one I used failed with whitespace in file names, so I decided to rewrite it in a much more sane language ... the random involved was also a hack.

It looks a lot as if Facebook is closing up on third party developers. Seems like they've cherry picked the features they want to copy, and now are no longer interested in third parties anymore:

• They removed the "publisher" feature, which allowed applications to offer custom story forms. They said it wasn't used a lot - the reason was simple, they placed third party publishers in a tiny dropdown in the "attach" section, second class to their link sharing and even crappy 'gift' application. Of course: otherwise nobody would buy their birthday "gifts".
• They're removing the extra info boxes you could put into your profile. This is a key feature for two of my applications, which allowed people to publish a calendar feed in their profile.
• Places is aiming at killing FourSquare and similar on the long run.

Expect once-famous Facebook applications such as SuperPoke to disappear on the long run - their integration hooks have been pulled. The API gets more and more limited for the cash cow use case: games. And of course marketing. Oh, I forgot one type of "applications". The one that basically embeds you regular web page within a Facebook tab. Wow. That's technology!If it was really about the users, Facebook would seriously fight Facebook spam, worms and fraud. They still don't have that under control (and none of them used either of the removed features!). They do even less to prevent users from clicking on such bad links such as the Free iPad scam, which has been around for at least a week now. Or the famous "dislike button" scam. They could not spell much more clearly that they do not care about their users - they just want your data to sell more directed advertising to you. Forget about privacy, too!Now that all my three Facebook applications are pretty much dead, this comes with a good side for me: I've been considering to disable/suspend/kill my Facebook account for quite some time. But I wasn't sure if that would also kill my applications for their users. Now that they're dead anyway, there is not much keeping me anymore.

Another day, another story about #ukgov cuts and today it s the turn of libraries. When I turned on the TV at breakfast, they were discussing BBC: A novel idea: Take a look inside the library pub. There s also a discussion on the terrible BBC speak your branes site. People have quickly pointed out that the library pub is quite small (a few hundred books) and couldn t run without the support of the council library service (according to FranksCasket and msarahwickham), so it s not an obvious cost-cutter. I guess the most endangered are the mobile libraries, as the books could be delivered on request by parcel or courier services without skilled staff. North Somerset has already consulted on cutting the number of stops (the results will be published by 06 Sep 2010) so that might be happen anyway. The reply which made me smile the most was Have a better plan: put a pub in the library which, of course, the visionaries in Norwich have already done. Well, a cafe-bar in the same building as the Millennium Library, at least. Not quite Real Ale, but it s a start. Personally, I feel library IT should be in line for cuts before library branches (I really don t enjoy using the local council library catalogue and the Windows-based PC kiosk control system feels like an expensive nasty experience to me), but it s all connected. More flexible library IT like Koha, with its web-based user interfaces, common hardware and possibility of distributed cooperative support, could probably support microbranches better than some of the legacy systems.

Like one or two years ago, I got myself a free Dropbox account. I use it occasionally to exchange files with some friends. It does an excellent job at that. Basically, it works like any network folder. Except it is not within a local network, but over the internet.Dropbox serves me as an occasional replacement for both email and USB pen drive. Instead of sending a modified file by email or bringing around a dozen of photos on a USB stick, I just put them into the shared folder. This also very useful for files such as flyers, templates. They may easily grow to big to be sensibly sent by email.For all my use, a regular free Dropbox account is more than enough. As in, I have less than 1 GB in use, and I could easily free some of that space. You start at 2 GB, and can currently get up to 10 GB free (+250 MB for each referrer; if you use the link above you'll already start at 2.25 GB). But for my use, this is already a lot.Note that there are a couple of alternatives around. For Linux (only) there is Ubuntu One, and there is Zumo Drive and Box.net just to name a few. I havn't tried them, given that Dropbox works for me well enough.

It doesn't look like Facebook gets its clickjacking issues under control. The various so called "Facebook worms" keep on reappearing every couple of days on new pages. Users don't get the concept of a "hidden like button" causing these issues, and Facebook obviously doesn't want to shut down the "like" functionality, since it will make them the ultimate heavyweight on the advertising market: which other company can give you such detailed demographics as Facebook can for your web sites?So far there seem to be two protections available:

• The NoScript extension for Firefox includes Clickjacking warning
• Blocking the Facebook "like" functionality via web filters (which I recommend for privacy reasons anyway) including Firefox AdBlock (Note: Chrome/Safari/WebKit AdBlock just hides, doesn't block!) and Privoxy

Maybe the Antivirus companies should step up here, too - and on one hand, block the Like function to stop this worm from spreading, and on the other hand, prevent Facebook from spying on their users.It's already making the news that Facebook doesn't get these issues under control.

I've updated my BPM tap toy, which started behaving strangely since some GTK update. I've identified two issues, and it is working again now.The BPM tap toy is a tiny Python script to obtain a BPM estimation by tapping on your mouse or keyboard. In contrast to many other such applications it does give you an error estimation and will visualize your precision in tapping. This way, you can judge how precise the value is.I have some ideas to further increase precision while adding another useful visualization to judge the result quality.

The last weeks, I've occasionally been contributing to Wikipedia. I must say, Wikipedia is a really odd world of its own. Another thing I found quite surprising is the difference between the English and the German Wikipedia.Some things I noticed:

• Some information in Wikipedia is grossly inaccurate. Interestingly, this even applies to computer science topics as simple as database indexes.
• A lot of the time, you meet users that 'defend' 'their' pages to any changes, as if they were the sole expert on this subject
• There appear to be plenty of zealots^W users with their life focused on deleting things from Wikipedia they do not consider "notable". This goes as far as the German Wikipedia having an initative called "Improve, don't delete" or the "Article Rescue Squad" in English Wikipedia
• English Wikipedia suffers a lot from link spam, despite "nofollow". In 'hot' (commercially, not on Wikipedia) topics such as "knowledge management" (yes, the "knowledge management" article on Wikipedia is crap, despite Wikis often being called "knowledge management"), half of the edits are link spam and reversals. There also is a lot of bookspam and citation spam, resulting in badly written articles where half of the article is unsorted and only partially relevant literature. In German Wikipedia, this seems to be a lot less of an issue.
• In general, German Wikipedia seems to be a lot more patrolled against changes (in particular links), but often is both less complete and less accurate.

So on overall: keep away from Wikipedia contributors, they're all maniacs. And often, don't bother to read a Wikipedia article if you can get an appropriate textbook. The Wikipedia article will just try to sell you a dozen textbooks anyway; you'll also have to read them to check the validity.It is a pity, that despite its size and "eyeballs", Wikipedia so far seems to have not attracted much attention by actual "domain experts", but it seems that it is largely filled by bureocrats, zealots and promoters. (That don't have any real work to do?)There are many things wrong here, that have been pointed out by many others, too. I'm not going to rescue the Wikipedia world, either. And yes, I am aware that you can discuss in Wikipedia, too.

• Good articles get more contributions. Nobody cares for the black sheep. It probably gives just much more gratitude to turn a good article into an excellent one, than turning a bad one into an okay one.
• Wikipedia at the same time tries to be exhaustive and maintain a certain "notability". This ends in people creating articles (because they're missing) and others then deleting them (because they consider them "not notable"). This is very discouraging to users that might even be experts on that subject they have been adding. (See also "the rich get richer" in this blog rant)
• New articles get extra attention, and often are attacked quickly for either quality or notability (despite WP:IMPERFECT), while articles that have been bad for years are barely re-checked. The categories listing Articles that need expansion and Articles that need cleanup are getting out of control, at 58000+ articles for the latter. Articles "lacking sources" is at 340.000+ articles. That is 1 out of 10.
• In fact, Wikipedia even has 138 "cleanup categories". Did I mention it is run by bureocrats, not by domain experts?

I fear that Wikipedia will go the DMOZ road. There was a time that DMOZ was doing quite well. Nowadays, large parts of DMOZ are dead. For two main reasons: it's hard to get in, and the backlog is way too large. If you get into DMOZ for a larger category, you'll be faced with thousands of pending link submissions, where for a large part you don't feel qualified to judge on appropriateness or rewrite their description in a neural manner. I have the impression that the same is happening for Wikipedia: on one hand, users that join are often kicked badly for many of their first contributions and will just leave again. At the same time, many of the old articles are in desparate need for attention, but nobody of the established users is willing to spend the days of cleanup/rewriting needed to get the article into a useful shape again. And a new user will never dare to discard most of the existing article; they usually just add or modify single paragraphs to see what happens. So Wikipedia might be hitting some kind of barrier.Still, I have to admit that I frequently use Wikipedia to look up things. Usually because it just comes up first in Google. I then often follow links to better resources, such as MathWorld. And I wish, Google would have taken me there right away ...And don't assume I'd know how to run things better. I'd sure propose to spend more time at fixing existing articles instead of attacking new contributions that much (you'll lose contributors this way). But I also see the need for fighting spam (although you should also remove old spam ...). But I don't know if there is a solution that will actually attract domain experts to re-write all the badly written and inaccurate articles that don't have their personal zealot to patrol them.P.S. Sorry, no comments on my blog. This isn't Facebook. Instead of commenting on my blog, how about working on Wikipedias backlog instead?P.S. Another example is the German Wikipedia story surrounding Fefe's blog. Many here at the open source communities will know fefe for his work on Dietlibc, libowfat and similar highly respected open source projects. His blog has been famous for being high-quality in security, privacy topics, politics and media critics. Some of his fans (likely) started a Wikipedia page on his blog. There have been at least two huge discussions about deleting the Wikipedia page. "sock puppets" and all such things have been brought up, while Fefe himself was amused. The discussions around deleting the blogs page on Wikipedia made it all the way to the print newspapers. As I said, I'm not actually bringing up new critique on Wikipedia. It's an ongoing problem for years now.[Insert random Deletionism rant against Wikipedia]

Mark Zuckerberg apparently recently promised

we will add privacy controls that are much simpler to use.

Dear Facebook. I believe your users want more privacy, not just prettier controls. They don't want you to give away their data by default, track them across web sites (that embed the "Like" buttons) and auto-connect them to various things.In particular, they want opt-in, not opt-out. And they also don't want to be auto-opted in by you either. Make the defaults all opt-out!They don't want you to index and publish their data by default like if you were a paparazzi and they were a pop star. Sure, they'd like to be a pop star, but without the paparazzi stuff, you know.There is an essential difference between actually caring about privacy, and just making it look nice (which unfortunately is what Facebook currently does, pretend it's all fine, because you could turn it off, if you go to all the sites you don't want and turn it off on each single one ...).

In a surprise move Apple today announced a new product closely related to the behyped iPad. This move went completely unexpected with technology analysts, who were expecting a new iPhone dubbed "iPhone 4G" to be released next.The new product is called iPad mini, and features most of the iPad functionality in a lot smaller form factor, with extended battery life and without the overheating issues. It will focus on gamers, instead of the deprecated community of newspaper readers. The smaller form factor allows the users to bring the device along at any time.Get all the specifications of the new iPad mini here [www.apple.com]. There is also a special edition with voice-over-3G functionality [www.apple.com].Yes, I'm referring to the iPod touch and the iPhone. Just goofing around.

UPDATE: the bug is already fixed after a few hours, and only affected a minority of users (of a now deprecated, experimental option in the 'unstable' distribution, and only users that rebooted with the affected version).The sysvinit version that hit unstable today has a grave bug if you have been running "startpar" or maybe "shell" style parallel booting. Read this bug report, if you have been using these (they were not enabled by default, so unless you've been giving parallel boot a try before, you should be ok.)How to check if you are affected:

grep CONCURRENCY /etc/default/rcS

If this command says "startpar", then you ARE affected. If it says "shell" you MIGHT be affected. If you have not set CONCURRENCY or if it's "none" or "makefile", then you should be ok (according to the bug).The workaround is as simple: just put either "none" or "makefile" in there, these are the only two values that are still distinct.How to recover a broken system:

1. Boot recovery mode aka "single-user". At some point you should be asked for the root password. Login.
2. Run mount -o remount,rw / to enable write mode on your disk.
3. $EDITOR /etc/default/rcS and change the value of "CUNCURRENCY"
4. reboot

You should have a working system again.I can only confirm that changing "startpar" to "none" helped me. I havn't tried "makefile" yet, and "none" seemed more likely to fix things.

Since AdBlock in Chrome does not block, just hide (the same probably applies to Safari and other WebKit-based-browsers), here's a simple method to actually block Facebook Like tracking:Use a proxy.pac file, also known as Proxy auto-config. Then redirect Facebook Like to a blackhole or filtering proxy. I use privoxy, and this replaces Facebook Like embeds with an error message, which enables me to see which site uses Facebook like and that my filter is working.Here's the relevant excerpt of my proxy.pac file:

function FindProxyForURL(url, host)  
  var fblike = /https?:\/\/([^/]*)\.facebook\.com\/(plugins widgets)\/like.*/;
  if (fblike.test(url))  
    return "PROXY 127.0.0.1:8118";
   
  return "DIRECT";
 

Where "127.0.0.1:8118" is the proxy to use. If you use an unreachable proxy - I've seen 255.255.255.0:3421 used as blackhole server - then it should just time out as "unreachable". Or you use a proxy such as privoxy and block the URL there. Any proxy that refuses to serve the request will do.Note that you can add arbitrary domains and regexps to this filter, if you want to block additional sites, such as Google Analytics, that you do not want to be able to track your surfing behaviour.

Facebook recently launched the "Like" function, which basically can be embedded into arbitrary web sites. Naively, it does two things:

1. Provide a "Like" button for sharing the web site
2. Show you how many other users like the web site

Sounds good, doesn't it?But now reconsider: even when you don't use the "Like" function, facebook is in fact notified of which web sites you visit!.Encouraging you to "share" content with friends is the hanger for this function. This is what makes web masters install it on their sites: they expect to get some extra traffic from your friends, so they just add it.But whether you like it or not, it basically allows Facebook to track your complete web viewing habits. And it's the target web site that opts in, not the user! Combined with all the personal information Facebook already has on you, this is a major privacy concern. Combining this information might even be illegal in some countries (but probably not in the US where Facebook lives, privacy unfortunately has a low role here).The best workaround currently is to blacklist Facebooks "Like" function using some kind of AdBlock, for example using this element filter:

IFRAME[src^="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php"]

But in general, we should try to make this kind of data aggregation illegal without explicit consent and force Facebook to make this an opt-in feature. Political work needed here ...P.S.: Make sure to check if your AdBlock actually blocks and not just hides. As far as I can tell, WebKit Adblock, including Chromes, only hide ads. Firefoxs AdblockPlus seems to be more powerful.P.P.S.: yes I've read the claim that Facebook doesn't track. No wait, all they basically said was that they are not going to announce at F8 they will be selling web surfing behaviour based ads to their customers. They actually did NOT state (or guarantee) they will NOT use data mining on this data. Just that you probably will not be able to buy eyeballs based on rules such as "has visited/liked disney.com" ...P.P.P.S.: I've been told that facebook.com/widgets/like.php also needs to be blocked, since some sites use this URI scheme. And of course, Privoxy and similar privacy-increasing proxies are a useful addition, too.

Face it: technology fails. Sometimes. Sooner or later.Statistics are a nice way to fool people, because they can't interpret the numbers properly. And usually this is done to make things sound less risky than they really are. But it's just too easy to lie with numbers. Say, they risk of a major incident at a plant is less than 1% (per year). Sounds good, doesn't it? But if you have 100 plants, that means it will happen about once a year. Make that 1000. Or even more.There are currently around 440 nuclear reactors in use for electricity. Probably some more the IAEA doesn't know about. There are definitely extra reactors in various military vehicles including unmaintained russian submarines. So make that 500. So looking forward to the next 200 years, we want to make sure things are not likely to happen at a rate of 0.001%. Unless our atomic plants are way more than 99.999% secure, we're likely to see a major nuclear accident sooner or later.Which brings us to a totally differnt scale when we look at photovoltaics or wind power. There are just so many more of these plants, that you can bet on some of them failing completely every day. The good news about these plants is that their damage potential is just so much lower. They might be as much as thousandfold more likely to fail than a nuclear plant. And there are probably a thousand more, too. But even if we completely underestimate the risk they just don't do as much damage even in the worst case. Much unlike a nuclear meltdown or such an oil spill. I bet noone would have thought of oil drilling being this risky. After all, it has been done for years.So how is your risk assessment of nuclear power? Is it less risky than oil drilling?