Writings

I'm quite impressed by how agressively the Cannonical team is getting when it comes to cloud computing.  They're integrating eucalyptus into Ubuntu 9.10, which is open source software that lets you build your own "Amazon-like" cloud.  Eucalyptus even implements the same APIs so that all those hundreds of EC2 applications work with it.

But the Cannonical folks haven't stopped there.  They recently launched Ubuntuone, which is a storage cloud.  Anyone running Ubuntu 9.04 can sign up for an invite (I did last month, and just got mine yesterday).  This provides you with 2 GB of cloud storage for free, or 10 GB for a nominal fee.  The mechanics behind Ubuntuone is an applet that's running which synchronizes $HOME/Ubuntu One directory on changes.  It's not rocket science, but it is seemlessly integrated.

At 2 GB of free space, this isn't for keeping media in sync.  It will do a fair job with text documents, and I've started to put my ebooks and pdfs into it for easy reading wherever I am.  I'm also considering redoing my dot files sharing in this manner, though that will mean symlinking into the Ubuntuone directory, as it doesn't seem like you can share beyond it.

Another interesting feature is a "share with others" on those documents.  That opens this up to be a ghetto version of google docs, at least amongst Ubuntu users.  Again, while this is not rocket science, usability is a huge feature here, and the fact that it is so seemless starts to bring a lot of value to having a whole office on Ubuntu.

This is where I think Cannonical is making a really brilliant play.  Previously Linux on the Desktop was always about being interoperable with other people's stuff, as it was the edge case, and the value in running all Linux on the desktop was low.  With really useful, Linux only, services like Ubuntu One, there is now an incentive to get everyone there.  The Mac folks have been playing this game for years with all their zeroconf tools that work on a local network, and it definitely helped shore up offices of Mac users.

Kudos to Mark and the Ubuntu folks for thinking past just desktop clones and really starting to push cloud as a concept into Ubuntu across the board.  It makes me excited to be both a Linux and Ubuntu user, and I can't wait to see what they add to my platform of choice next.

I was just following up on an android article, and got this instead:

I laughed.

Last night Jim and I decided to take advantage of the evening and do the 7.5 mile stretch of wappingers creek that runs near my house.  There is only one put in, and one take out, between water falls, and it's a one way trip down stream, so you need to plan with 2 cars.

For those that haven't noticed, we've gotten nearly 10 inches of rain this month, so the river level is high, and thus pretty fast still.  There is only one section of this that I think you could call white water, which occurs about a mile in.  But it's in a wide part of the river and very straight, so you just don't let it turn you around.  The real challenges of the trip were the whirl pools, which there are many.  As we were in 14.5 ft boats, they are more susceptible to being turned around, which you want to avoid at all costs (my shoulder is going to be sore from a last minute recovery the one time I nearly got spun around).  There are also 2 low trees that you need to get your positioning right on (failure to do that on the first one got me a little wet, though not out of my boat), and one log jam that I had to just bump up into then muscle over a log to get back into the main flow.

Over the course of the trip we saw Malards, and Wood Ducks, adult and babies.  At one point we kicked up 40 or so wood ducklings that led us down the river for 2 miles until they finally figured out they could go to the shore to get out of our way.  It was pretty cool to see that flock of wood ducklings splash away in front of us. :)  We also managed to see a beaver swimming across, as well as a couple of great blue herrons hanging out in a large dead tree towards the end of the journey.  A beautiful site at sunset.

I only got my arm wet as I dodged under the first low tree, but Jim did manage to get fully out of his boat right before put out, as he got a little close to a tree that took him out.  Overall it was a great 2 hour evening boating adventure.  We'll definitely do it again, though it wouldn't hurt to let the water level go down just a bit so the tree dodging isn't so bad. :)

Wired has a great interview with the Federal Gov CIO, which actually dates back just prior to data.gov's launch.  It's definitely worth a read.

I firmly believe that this is the most important change that the current administration can make.  The Federal government did a tail spin into secrecy over the past couple of decades, and while I believe the previous administration took this to a new height, it seems like it was part of a trend that definitely predates them.  Secrecy breeds distrust in government, as well as bad decisions, as people don't have access to all the facts.

Sunlight is definitely the best disinfectant, and nothing has quite the same power of light as the whole of the internet gazing in.

John Hodgman was the headliner at the White House Correspondent's dinner last night, and the intertubes have his speech up already.  It's classic Hodgman, both humorous and meaningful.  Check it out on the 'tube.

Hours before the entire NY State Senate imploded into a bunch of whining 1st graders, the previous leadership pushed out something quite interesting: open.nysenate.gov.

To pursue its commitment to transparency and openness the New York State Senate is undertaking a cutting-edge program to not only release data, but help empower citizens and give back to the community. Under this program the New York Senate will, for the first time ever, give developers and other users direct access to its data through APIs and release its original software to the public. By placing the data and technological developments generated by the Senate in the public domain, the New York Senate hopes to invigorate, empower and engage citizens in policy creation and dialogue.

It remains unclear what will happen once squabble-gate ends, and we get a NY State government again, but hopefully a step into open like this is hard to step back from, especially if more people know about it.  So spread the good word, and cross your figures that we get some sort of government back some time this year.

<Note: thanks to Buffy Miller for giving me a much slicker solution here>

Often I want to post a PDF on a web page, but would like the cover of the PDF to be the clickable element.  This just makes things look slicker.  This can easily be done with the imagemagick set of commands.  Using imagemagick, you can select the page you want to convert out of the pdf (using the [] annotation), get the right size (using -resize) and format (based on file extension).  The following command does the conversion in a single go:

convert -resize 150 inputfile.pdf[0] outputfile.png

One of these days I'll get around to making a mediawiki extension that does that by default for pdf media attachments.

Via rc3.org I came across this blog post:

FAIL is over. Fail is dead. Because it marks a lack of human empathy, and signifies an absence of intellectual curiosity, it is an unacceptable response to creative efforts in our culture. "Fail!" is the cry of someone who doesn't create, doesn't ship, doesn't launch, who doesn't make things. And because these people don't make things, they don't understand the context of those who do. They can't understand that nobody is more self-critical or more aware of the shortcomings of a creation than the person or people who made it.

I really like the take.  It's way easier to be a critic than a creator, and people have found a winning strategy on the internet to just hate things, loudly, and cleverly.  It's a pretty easy pattern to use to get fame, but at the end of the day it often just discourages new creation.

If you think something is a fail, look harder.  Maybe it wasn't ever trying to do what you thought.  Maybe the things that make it interesting are values and capabilities you don't understand or even knew existed.  Maybe it has some real warts, but real gems as well.  An open mind and the benefit of the doubt leads to much more interesting discovery of information.

A long time ago I used the built in ftp support for emacs to be able to remotely edit files on another system.  This gave me all the convenience of a local editor (especially on slower links), with the ability to do edits right in place on other systems.  On whim I did a quick search to see if there was a way to do this over an encrypted session while trying to fix some php templates.

Low and behold, there is.  It only takes the following 2 lines in your .emacs file:

(require 'tramp)
(setq tramp-default-method "scp")

Then you just open /servername:directory.  Relative directories base off your home dir, absolute do what you would expect.  This is just far too handy, and I can't believe I've gone this long without knowing about it.

Thanks to the folks over at cocktail party physics, I finally now understand why soap actually works.  The blog post is really worth a gander, especially to think how much of your daily life is really complex chemistry at play.