michael’s thoughts

Today’s digest covers such exciting topics as Chicken of the VNC, Sequal Pro, Open Source GIS with MySQL and PostgreSQL, and the Khan Academy.

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I always intend to update this web site more frequently, but for short updates I tend to just post on Twitter or Facebook. And for longer updates I often start writing something and then get side tracked. So I’m going to try something different and start posting a periodic, perhaps weekly, digest.

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The Internet at the local Starbucks has been unavailable for a few weeks which has motivated me to find uses for my computer when I’m offline. It’s amazing how much of the utility of my laptop is dependent upon having access to an Internet connection.

In the spirit of making my computer useful when disconnected from the network, I’ve downloaded MacJournal to test out offline blogging. I haven’t used an offline blog composer in years so I’m curious to see if they’ve gotten better. Too soon to tell.

I was reading the anti-Facebook  privacy driven Internet zeitgeist around the new Diaspora project.  I’m not sold on the idea of Diaspora, a peer to peer solution for social networking.  I doubt it will have any more success than Freenet and other similar peer to peer projects which haven’t gained traction.

What is interesting to me is that Diaspora has managed to raise $171,866.00 in about a month on kickstarter.com.  That’s an incredible amount of money in the form of gift contributions, not investments.

For those not familiar, kickstarter is a site that allows teams and individuals to publish an idea for a creative endeavour and set a fundraising goal.  Site visitors then have the option to pledge donations and if the goal is met, the project is funded.  The funding is in the form of patronage not investment so the creators retain complete ownership of their work.

This is not the first site that I’ve seen with a similar model, but in browsing the list of projects it seems that a fair number are getting the funding they’re seeking.  If I were in the market to finance a short film, musical composition, or free software project I would definitely try their service.

I saw this statistic that 83% of Twitter accounts did not publish anything in December.  I don’t think that’s a reflection on Twitter’s value or popularity.  Personally I don’t publish much on Twitter but I do find it a great resource to keep my finger on the pulse of what’s going on in the sectors I care about.  By following publications and thought leaders I’m able to get a quick summary of what’s happening and find information I would otherwise not know about.  Most of the time I don’t have anything of my own to add.  That doesn’t mean that I don’t find value in the Twitter service, however.

I am taking a journalism class this semester as a way to ease back into the academic world and finish up my degree.  Part of the class is to stay on top of the news, which I am generally good about.  I listen to the BBC World Service, NPR, and have a subscription to The Economist.  But I do not read a daily newsprint newspaper.

I’m not overly excited about the idea of subscribing to a paper edition of The Washington Post or New York Times and I’m also not a big fan of reading the paper on a computer screen.  I was hoping this might be a good push to motivate me to pick up a Kindle.

Unfortunately from reading the reviews of the New York Times on Amazon’s Kindle store, it appears that the Kindle edition is abridged.  I could understand that some photographs and perhaps even charts wouldn’t translate well to the Kindle edition, but it turns out that they don’t even publish all of the stories in the Kindle edition.  That really disappoints me as I’m not going to buy a Kindle and pay the somewhat expensive monthly subscription charge for an abridged edition of the newspaper.

If they change that in the future I will be a customer, but for now I think I’ll stick with the web edition.

We are waiting for funding at work to buy licenses of Veritas NetBackup but in the mean time I was charged with finding a reasonable free open source backup solution.  Our environment is fairly typical with a mix of Linux and Windows clients with an LTO tape library attached to a Linux server.

From my research I really only found two candidates; Amanda and Bacula.  Unfortunately Amanda has always been a non-starter for me because of their insistence that it’s a bad idea to save more than one backup job to a given tape.  I have never encountered the SCSI resets which cause tape drives to arbitrarily rewind and no commercial software that I’ve seen shares this integrity concern and limitation.

So that left me with Bacula.  I had never used the software before but it wasn’t difficult to set up.  The mtx tools were able to communicate with my tape library and I was able to get backup jobs running in no time.  The job definition model is different from what I’m used to with Veritas or Legato, but it wasn’t hard to get up to speed.

The GUI for Bacula is fairly limited and does not support creating policies, adding or removing tape drives, or really anything other than running jobs and restoring files.  Everything else involves editing text configuration files and command-line tools.  Being a long-time UNIX person that isn’t a problem for me.

If you’re looking for a free and robust backup solution, Bacula may fit the bill.

I have been excited about the prospect of eInk readers for a long time.  Back in January of 2006 I wrote about looking forward to the Sony Reader but expressed that a tabloid sized version that would allow me to read periodicals is what I really want.  It looks like Amazon’s upcoming Kindle DX will finally realize that dream.

I’m a fan of books.  I read a fair amount and I like having a bookshelf of paper volumes.  I’m not sure that I would use an eInk reader to take the place of my paper novels.  The value for me in an eInk reader is in periodicals and PDFs of technical manuals.

I have a paper subscription to The Economist but there is no value to me in having piles of previous weeks issues laying around my house.  I wouldn’t mind switching that to an eInk version.  And as I wrote back in January 2006 I’d love to be able to get trade press such as Daily Variety delivered electronically.

I also download a lot of PDF manuals for various technical products.  I don’t like to print them out as it’s a waste of paper.  On the other hand, I am not thrilled with reading lengthy documents on an LCD or CRT screen.  The main reason I haven’t bought an e-reader so far is that they have not had good native support for PDF.  The Kindle DX does support PDF without having to convert the file which is a must-have feature for me.

I haven’t preordered a Kindle DX but if the user experience reviews are positive once it’s released I think I may purchase one.  The selection of periodicals available in the Kindle store is limited but I hope it will expand over time.  It really seems like an excellent platform for regional trade papers.  If I could get Variety and the Hollywood Reporter on the Kindle I’d consider renewing my subscriptions to those papers.  Digital delivery is the future of news.  At least for me.

I’ve been playing around with FriendFeed for the past week or two.  It does a lot of things better than Twitter.  Notably I am not limited to the 140 characters and it allows a conversation around a post.  The conversation piece is pretty key.

On the other hand, it doesn’t have quite as mature an API and the third party apps for FriendFeed can’t compete with the third party Twitter apps.  I have BuddyFeed on my iPhone but unfortunately the FriendFeed API does not allow modification of my subscriptions so I’m limited to reading what I’m already subscribed to.  With Twitter, I’ll often find a mention of someone new made in a tweet of someone I’m following and decide to follow that new person.  To do that with FriendFeed is overly difficult at the moment.

I have decided not to cross-post my Twitter content to FriendFeed.  This is an area where best practices have not yet emerged.  I think it’s best to keep the content separate.  They are different services.  I follow many of the same people on Twitter and FriendFeed and I don’t want to see duplicate content.  In fact I wish there were a way to filter out all content posted from Twitter that does not have a reply on FriendFeed.  Perhaps there is such an option, but I”ve not found it.

I have also configured my blog to post its updates to FriendFeed.  Apparently there is support for Disqus comment integration, although I can’t figure out how to turn that on.  Hopefully that will be coming soon.  I like the idea of a single conversation around an idea instead of having it fragmented across varoius sites.

I saw a story on Slashdot yesterday that linked to BBC coverage of the United Nations’ World Digital Library project.  I checked it out and it looks pretty cool.  In my brief browsing of the site I didn’t find anything that jumped out as “must look at” but I would have loved to have resources like this when I was in school taking world history classes and having to write papers.

The Internet is a great platform for commerce, entertainment, and communications but I’m glad that we haven’t lost the early intent to make scholarly resources available to anyone in the world.  I’m a huge fan of online library projects and while I don’t spend a lot of time browsing online libraries I love that so many primary source documents from the world’s great libraries have been made available, often for free, to any interested party.

That’s a wonderful democratization of information.