Nathan Howell

I updated my gutsy (7.10) server to hardy (8.04) recently, and ran across a few little problems that I wanted to post somewhere useful.

1. There are networking issues with the Ubuntu Xen kernel. You have to download a patched kernel, which is linked from this helpful howto. There are several bugs in launchpad about this.

2. Updating xen-utils-3.1 to 3.2 (and removing the 3.1 package) removes a needed symlink. It’s this bug.

3. Apparently a reboot is needed between installing xen-hypervisor-3.2 and xen-utils-3.2.

I like Ubuntu a lot, I really do, but it would be nice to have a release that actually worked with Xen for once.

Before I begin this, let me just say that I’m aware of the irony of saying this stuff in a blog post. Also, I never planned to post personal things like this here, but it’s important to me and it’s my site, so nyah.

Due to an eye injury, I spent the last ten days in Vancouver, BC having and recovering from surgery. I had to be careful of exertion, so the most activity I had was walking aimlessly around downtown. I spent a lot of time sitting in restaurants and coffee shops, and resting in my hotel room. I had no laptop with me, so I had no net access the whole time (I didn’t even miss it). That meant no Google Reader (where I’m subscribed to almost 300 feeds), no Twitter, no Friendfeed, no email, no TV torrents, nothing. Completely unexpectedly, I loved it.

Now that I’m back home with my own computer again, I find myself simply not doing the things I spent so much time on before. I question every action. Is this actually doing me any good? What’s the point of it? Is it getting me any closer to where I actually want my life to go?

It seems odd to me that a thing as small as ten days alone, without the net, has changed the way I think as much as it has. And I like the change, so now I have to keep it going somehow. Wish me luck.

So, Google has added “note sharing” to Reader. That’s fine and all, but I don’t really see the point. Why? Let’s look at what it offers:

1. Sharing links with a bookmarklet. This is what I already do with delicious. You can even add notes. Crazy.

2. Sharing thoughts not associated with a link. Let’s see, what could I use for that? Twitter. Or Friendfeed. Or Pownce (ok, so I don’t really use Pownce much).

Of course, this means my crap is spread around all over the place, but that’s what Friendfeed is for. Just go to my Friendfeed page and it’s all there. So thanks Google, I’m sure your Notes are very nice, but I doubt I’ll be using them (although I love Reader and use it every day).

The beta of the next Ubuntu release came out recently, so it’s time for me to upgrade. Usually I just dist-upgrade and keep going, but this time I’m starting fresh. I’ve got years of crap built up in my home directory and the system in general (I’ve been running Ubuntu since the first release in 2004, and I don’t think I’ve done a fresh install in all that time). Since I’m starting over anyway, I’m also giving the 64 bit version a shot. Here’s a semi-organized collection of impressions and issues:

First impression: it’s fast. Significantly faster than it was. There are several reasons for this:

• Fresh install.
• Gutsy install was old and had been dist-upgraded all the way from Warty.
• Was 32 bit, now 64 bit.
• Old PATA drive out, new SATA2 RAID1 in.

Second impression: memory usage sure goes up with a 64 bit install. Firefox 3 sits at around 1.1G now; before it was 500-700M. Of course, there’s a reason I put 4G of RAM in this machine.

Wacom

I have a Wacom Bamboo Fun tablet, which I had to get working myself in gutsy. I had expected the driver to be included in hardy, but it isn’t. Just silly. The stock kernel driver doesn’t handle the Bamboo Fun at all, and the wacomcpl utility is missing from the wacom-tools package. It doesn’t look like this will get fixed for hardy.

Freemind and Java

Freemind has been the most trouble so far, but it’s not hard to fix. First, it needs 32 bit java5 (talking about Freemind 0.8.1 here), so install the ia32-sun-java5-bin package. Then edit or create ~/.freemind/freemindrc and put these lines in it:

export PATH=/usr/lib/jvm/ia32-java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.14/bin:$PATH
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/ia32-java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.14
export LIBXCB_ALLOW_SLOPPY_LOCK=1

The first two make freemind (and only freemind) use that older 32 bit java (FAQ), and the last is a workaround for a java bug. Oh, and install the freemind 0.8.1 package from the freemind site; the version in the ubuntu repo is old.

Skype

Skype was surprisingly easy to get working. All I did was make sure I had the 32 bit libraries and qt4 installed, and then force installed the Ubuntu package from the Skype site and it worked (video and all). It doesn’t seem to support pulseaudio at all though, so I may have to use the pasuspender workaround. There’s more useful info in this forum post. I’m not sure about the getlibs script linked in the forum. I ran it and it said it didn’t do anything, but Skype still works.

Wine, Flash, and media

Wine works great (all I’ve been using it for is Portal and Half Life 2). The nspluginwrapper magic that makes flash work causes mildly annoying pauses when loading a web page with flash in it, but it works well enough. I’ve had no media problems so far, everything that played before still plays. Totem seems to finally work with the gstreamer backend. I’ve always had to switch to totem-xine to get all my video files to work, but not this time. I use mplayer most of the time anyway, but it’s nice to see gstreamer working so well. Of course, I installed the ubuntu-restricted-extras package, and a few others from Medibuntu.

Mouse buttons

How is this still a problem? My mouse has a thumb button (usually used as back in browsers). This is pretty common, I think. It also has a tilting mouse wheel. None of these things work by default. The buttons aren’t even recognized by X. They are not straightforward to get working. Why?

Wrapup

Overall, I’m really happy with how Ubuntu 8.04 is looking. Of course, I say that every release. Ubuntu has steadily improved, each release building on the last to make something better every time. A great sign of this progress is the timing of my upgrades. Early on, I’d just run the development version all the time, moving to it as soon as work on it started. There were always features and fixes that I wasn’t willing to wait months for. A few releases ago, I stopped doing that. I just didn’t see any need. Ubuntu was good enough already.

There’s been more talk of all-you-can-eat music plans lately. I think I’d pay for something like this only if I could get properly tagged (complete and accurate) files and my choice of unrestricted formats (I want high-quality FLAC). It also better be really convenient. As in, more convenient than torrent sites are now (there’s your benchmark, music companies). If I don’t get those things, what am I paying for?

There’s more to it, though. It would be really tricky to work a plan like this out properly. Who pays? Who gets paid, and how much? Is it fair to everyone? I don’t envy the people who are trying to figure it out.

Ok, and the week before.

Eben Moglen on Personal Data Control

This isn’t the first time I’ve listened to this speech, but this time it really clicked. Eben Moglen speaks so carefully and thoughtfully that listening to him is a real treat. I’m not even going to try to highlight his points and pick out quotes here. Everyone should go and listen to this talk.

Other random stuff:

• A new find: Spark on CBC. Seems like a good mix of tech stories and interviews and the whole show is interesting and engaging. There’s a blog where you can join in, and you can also download the unedited versions of interviews. There’s a wiki where you can jump in and contribute to the show.
• Billy Hoffman on Ajax Security. Scary security stuff. Reminds me of this panel about the darker parts of online marketing.
• Phil Windley and Jon Udell on Online Reputation Frameworks. This is important stuff to be thinking about. Online reputation can really follow you around: it most likely never disappears.
• The Linux Link Tech Show. What is there to say about this show? I hated its aimlessness at first, but they do get interesting guests, and there’s some bits of interesting conversation in between the long silences, technical problems, and background noises. The show is at least twice as long as it needs to be.
• The SciFi Guys is interesting, lots of scifi news discussion and great guests.

I’ve seen this story about 50% of all torrent downloads being TV shows on several sites now, and they all irritate me (while not being the least bit surprising) for one reason. They all say that “a billion TV shows are downloaded every year.” Really? Every year? For how many years? Surely it can’t be more than one or two at the most. Yeah, I’m picky, but this just jumped out at me for some reason. Things move fast in the tech world, and saying “every year” rather than “in the last year” seems sloppy.

I’ve been looking at using XFN, and the first thing I wanted to do was share (most of) my feed subscriptions. I don’t think XFN can do this very well, so I’m going to ramble meaninglessly about it for a little bit.

XFN describes relationships between people in generic, simple terms. This is good, since getting too specific would just lead to a ridiculously large list that nobody would actually use. A manageable set of carefully thought-out terms is the right way to go. However, there are a couple of things I’d like to be able to do that XFN doesn’t cover, and I’m wondering if it should.

1. Feed subscriptions. What’s the right word to describe those links? I haven’t met or even conversed with most of the people whose feeds I read every day, so none of the XFN values seem to fit. I like “fan” to describe this relationship, and it covers others too; I could use it to link to a band or author or book or TV show just as well as a person. But then, I’m not really a “fan” of many of the aggregation or news sites I follow. Is “follower” better? “reader”? Would we need both terms?

2. Indicating that a URL is a source for whatever I’m talking about is useful. Obviously, “source” makes sense for this one. This is just like those “via” links on news posts that indicate sources.

So are these sorts of relationships in scope for XFN? If XFN is about relationships between people, should it be capable of indicating relationships to things? Should XFN cover these things for convenience, or should there be another system for them? There are some ideas on the XFN wiki, but I don’t know what’s actually going on. Like I said, meaningless rambling.

I listen to a lot of audio during the week, much of it from The Conversations Network. Here are a few shows I found especially interesting this week.

Jeff Jonas on Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness

I didn’t expect to find this one so interesting (being based on casino security), but it turned out to be fascinating. Interesting similarities to this Rich Skrenta talk about Topix.

Main points:

• Put all your data in one place. New correlations and ways to analyse the data will emerge.
• With separate data spaces, you will miss important, valuable relations.
• Save queries (again, in the same space) and notify of changes and updates.
• Stored queries can connect to other queries.
• Stream data into the system and learn and fix errors (repair history) along the way.
• Sequence neutrality. End state is the same regardless of the order the data arrives.

Interesting quotes:

• “… when you dream, you’re doing deep recontextualization … to remedy some things you actually have to go offline for.”

Jon Udell interviews Stefano Mazzocchi

Mandating coherence and structure doesn’t work.

Main points:

• “Valid” means different things to different people and groups.
• Imposing structure in separate realms can and does work, but designing for interoperability between realms creates all kinds of new value.
• Just get all your data together and let structure emerge/evolve/develop.
• Don’t throw structure away, defer it until you really know what you need.
• RDF and graphs. I’ll admit right here that I don’t really understand these (yet :-)), but I may have to look into them more.
• Use peer pressure and self-interest to build interesting, valuable, open data sets. It’s the only way to make this stuff happen.

Interesting quotes:

• “There’s no such thing as quality of metadata.”
• “… there’s that perception that coherence is quality.”
• “Data first, instead of structure first.”
• “Just start off, and write down whatever you want, and then you can incrementally add structure to it, and make value out of the structure as you build.”
• “There’s a lot of structure in email, if you want, it just depends on what kind of structure you want to look at.”
• “A lot of the semantic web research was based on the big hypothesis that was ‘If whatever, then we could do this.’”
• “… when they show up, we can party.”
• “It’s clear now that it’s all about data and loose pieces connected together than it is about uber ontologies …”

Scott Kveton on OpenID

Nice overview of open web/social stuff like OpenID, OAuth and DiSo.

Main points:

• Keep things really simple to start. Just get basics working so we can build on them.
• The potential of OpenID endpoints for service discovery. I hadn’t thought about this, but it’s really obvious once you hear it.
• These technologies are actually great for big companies. They can make use of them without having to be the initiator and deal with the suspicion and other associated problems
• OpenID takes a big load off of developers by handling their whole authentication system for them.
• Interesting balance between design-by-committee and just-build-some-stuff with DataPortability and DiSo.
• Keep things loosely joined. Don’t depend on one tech for a task, make it all swappable.
• Being the repository for “master profiles” is valuable.
• Focus on people who already get it (to whatever degree), and build momentum. You can’t convince other people without that base.
• Building a personal reputation based on trust of opinions and knowledge is extremely valuable.
• Monetizing too early can be dangerously limiting. Tough balance.

Interesting quotes:

• “Simple usually wins in the long term.”
• “Help people discover new things.”

There’s definitely a theme there. Some other stuff:

• Jon Udell interviews Fernanda Viegas & Martin Wattenberg about Many Eyes, an interesting social data visualization project.
• Whedonesque reported that Joss Whedon would be on the GeeksOn podcast. And he was. I checked out a couple of other episodes as well, and it seems like a really interesting, well done podcast. I’ll keep listening.
• Chris Messina on DiSo is a nice introduction to the DiSo project.

I’ve never gotten interested in any of the big social sites. I mess around on Facebook now and then, but it never feels right to me. I think I’m allergic to having so much of my data so out of my control. Or maybe I feel like I don’t have enough control over how the site works. Seems to be about control, anyway.

I’ve been dreaming a bit about what I think I would use. I want a distributed social system (distributed? on the Internets? what a completely outrageous idea!). I want all of my data stored wherever I decide to put it. I want the software I use (also under my control) watching me to see who I talk to, how often, what about, etc. All that data (still under my control), is used to evolve a social network. All it’s really doing is showing me my activities in useful ways, but over time it would make things easier. My friends would be easy to find and keep track of, and I’d automatically see whatever online activities they share.

The internet is just a big people connector, so why go to just one site for all my people connections? Use the nature of the net and the power of my own hardware to connect with people, and share things, and meet new people, and all that good stuff. Use different services for whatever they’re best at. Sync them all back to my own archive/dashboard/home system. The value in the various social sites is in the ways they can connect people, and in the neat things they can tease out of the data they collect. Use them for that, but don’t let them have any real control or ownership over the bits of me I choose to share with them.

There are some interesting projects and smart people out there working on this sort of thing, or at least the beginnings of it. DiSo looks interesting, and they seem to have sensible goals: get something working, and reuse stuff that already works. Exactly the right way to go, I’d say.