Place of Stuff

This is going to be a very non-specific post.  A thread I have been posting in over on LinuxQuestions.org has made me think – and you know what happens when I start thinking?  That’s right, I get sleepy.  And then I get writing.  This being the internet and bandwidth and server space being free or low cost, every day someone decides that they will start up the next killer website/forum/mailing list/IRC channel/blog.  This will be the <whatever> to end all <whatevers> and will bring in the clicks by the thousand.  These people get very excited and start to post links wherever they can find a suitable site.  And then what?

<as a fair man, this is only aimed at people who want to do something to bring in the public – starting any of these things as a personal project or somewhere their friends can hang out online means that these words do not apply>

Continue reading ‘So You Want to Start an Online Community…’ »

Having read a couple of posts from bloggers who, I believe, know what they are talking about, I am opting out of the new Google AdSense advertising.

The new ad system will give you, the reader, ads beased on where you go from here.  So if you read mainly technical posts across the web, you’ll start to see more and more technical ads.  If you are a new parent and want to look for baby things, you’ll start to see a lot more ads aimed at the new parent.  So far, it doesn’t seem so bad, does it?  I mean, targeted ads can’t be bad, right?  Thing is, what if you are looking for presents for the new baby of your friends?  Will you get incorrectly targeted ads for the next month until your browsing goes back to normal?  And, in an extreme case, the spouse is away for a while and you’re feeling lonely and need some “me” time…  Will your browsing be doged by ads which will proclaim what you’ve been doing as surely as if you’d admitted it?  And will those ads mean that perfectly normal sites will get tagged as undesirable by content filters?

Fact is, if I opt in I will be sending you a cookie and that cookie will follow you like the kid at school with a very big mouth.  And I don’t want to give up your privacy to anyone else.  Giving up your privacy to me is fine – simply knowing about this site gives me the right to come round your house and riffle through your wardrobe when you’re out, by the way.  But I don’t want to give your rights up to another company unless you want me to.

Will this mean I could potentially lose out on revenue?  Possibly.  But then losing out isn’t a big deal – the ads are there because I’m interested in what the ads show and it amuses me.  So far I’ve made nothing at all out of it and don’t give a monkeys.

Maybe, if enough bloggers follow this stance we can get Google to rethink what they’re doing.  I have no quarrel with Google, I use their products and will happily tell others about them, but I don’t like this method of advertising.

While doing my daily read through Atheist Revolution (read it, lots of things to think about), I spotted vjack’s post about Lijit.  “Oh ho”, thought I, “that looks interesting”.  So I popped over to the site, signed up, grabbed the plugin, installed the widget and removed my normal search bar.  See how much work I do on testing these things?

I haven’t gone into it in any detail yet, but if you need to search the site, you can use Lijit to do it.  So please give it a go and let me know whether you prefer it to the default search.  I notice that it uses Google (and displays Google Ads) so the algorithms and the like are sound.

I have seen a variety of stories around the web extolling the virtues of the new browser from Google: Google Chrome.  At the moment, it is still a beta available only for Windows and Mac, but it seems to be an, erm, internet browser I suppose.

To be perfectly honest and frank, I find it incredibly difficult to get excited about a web browser.  To me, the browser is a tool, not a way of life.  For comparison, go now and find a carpenter – I’ll wait.  Got one?  Good.  Now explain to your carpenter that there is a new hammer available.  Gauge the carpenter’s reaction.  Now contrast and compare with all the hoopla over Google’s offering.  Now decide who the hammer should be used on.

Gosh, I sound grumpy, don’t I?  The fact is that Chrome looks like a decent offering.  It has tabbed browsing, which we all should now expect.  It has a way to import your bookmarks from your existing browsers, again, we should all expect that.  It displays pages from the internet.  The best thing, in my opinion, is that it is very minimal and there is little that is not functional about it:

Chrome tab and menu bar - click for full pic

As you can see, it has a very clean look.  Unless Google decide to add masses of bolt ons, it should be a very useful browser indeed.  But they didn’t release it for Linux.  The bastards.  Many of Google’s apps have Linux counterparts – Picasa being one of them.  Now these aren’t direct ports, they usually have Wine embedded in them to make them work.  But not Chrome – Chrome can be beta tested by Windows and Mac users, but not Linux users.  This seems a little unfair to me.  After all, it is arguable that the only reason Internet Explorer was forced to improve and to offer tabbed browsing was down to the success of the Mozilla and Firefox browsers.  Even now, does anyone really care at all about Safari?

Luckily, innovation and awkwardness come naturally to the plucky programmers with an interest in Linux.  CodeWeavers have, again, stepped up to the mark.  With Crossover Chromium available for free (as in no cost) they have enabled us to use Chrome via the CodeWeavers Wine implementation.  Which means that I am able to download it and show you this (click the pic for full size):

Chrome on Debian Linux

In an ideal world, there would be no need for Wine, Cedega, Play on Linux or CodeWeavers to exist.  In an ideal world all apps would be available for all platforms.  In this world, though, they are needed and gratefully so.  It is the work of CodeWeavers and Wine that helps to break down the final barriers for a lot of people – those people who really need to run Microsoft applications but who want to also run Linux.

Anyway, to step down off my soapbox, Chrome (in it’s beta state) looks to be a useful addition to the current crop of browsers available.  It is one in a line of Google applications, along with GMail, Calendar, Talk, Docs, Video and the rest.

As those who know me will know, I tend to change distros a lot. One of the problems I have encountered with this is that you lose your internet browser bookmarks and tend to forget your passwords and this rapidly becomes a pain. One of the solutions to this is to use the Google Browser Sync Firefox addon.

The program itself (if we assume, as I did, that it works flawlessly) is a godsend. It saves your bookmark list to a Google server along with your passwords, your cookies and the tabs/windows you last looked at. It’s also configurable, in a very limited sense, so you don’t have to save everything. As I said, it’s useful if you reinstall a lot but even more so if you wish to keep things sync’d across multiple PCs. And, because it’s Google, you feel all safe and helped.

But. A couple of months ago I reinstalled a distro and reinstalled the addon and discovered that all my bookmarks had gone. My passwords appeared to have been saved and worked, but all my carefully gathered bookmarks had disappeared. It wasn’t a total loss – I’m a bit of a hoarder and tend to save things even after they cease to be useful, so it was a good time to clear out my bookmarks and start again. But it was perturbing and so I hit the search trail – Google, not unsurprisingly.

I discovered that I am not alone. On a Google discussion group, there is a thread called “Wrath of GBS” which is now legendary. There are some workarounds discussed but none of them worked for me. Which seems par for the course. Michael Parekh seems to have pretty much the same experience. Well, he seems to have been affected more than me. By the way, I am, of course, aware that Firefox provides a backup version of your bookmarks – but if you reinstall your entire OS, that isn’t any help.

It seems that Google have ceased work on the addon, beyond a few people looking at it as part of the famous “20% work” at Google. (see here and here for a wee bit more detail) If true, this is a huge shame – this would not have been so attractive to me without the Google name.

So, having lost everything again today, I am looking into alternatives. Foxmarks is certainly an option, but what I want is a unified bookmark and password synchroniser. I am, though, resigned to using two projects for this.

So, if you want to recommend Google Browser Sync, go ahead. But expect me to be right next to you shaking my head

I have just realised how much I don’t read pages I am linked to. I’ve been to The Internet Archive (aka the WayBack Machine) many times, mainly to get older pages of websites. Now I know that the pages can be used for so much more.

The Moving Image Archive has a huge number of public domain films. A large number of these are old black and white movies that you often hope will be shown, but never are. Cary Grant, with his “English” charm and wit is one of my favourite actors. The Moving Image archive has several of his films that are definitely worth watching. Charade with Audrey Hepburn is public domain because of “the failure to put the then required copyright notice in the released print.” Their loss is our gain

Texts brings together a number of projects to provide public domain textual works. Think Project Gutenberg, but bigger.

Audio gives us public domain audio works (duh). You have internet radio, music labels, speeches and science. Great idea.

Software is “designed to preserve and provide access to all kinds of rare or difficult to find, legally downloadable software titles and background information on those titles.” It’s shareware, freeware, demos and all sorts of things like that.

Education has a store of “educational content including coursework, study guides, exercises, and recorded lectures. It is meant for students, teachers, and self-learners at all levels.” Get reading and researching!

I haven’t been through these in any detail (except the films – I want some of those movies), but the aims are clearly laudable. This sort of thing is what the internet is ideal for. It brings together a source of information and entertainment that you couldn’t easily get otherwise. Go see it.