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Showing posts from November, 2012

Internet of the Dead: the net’s collision course with death

When I think about it, we live on in our email addresses in some unknown server somewhere.     Sent to you by danny via Google Reader:     Internet of the Dead: the net’s collision course with death via Cory Doctorow's craphound.com by Cory Doctorow on 11/26/12 My latest Locus magazine column is "The Internet of the Dead," which discusses the collision course the Internet is on with death. It was inspired by my work to preserve the personal data of my old friend Erik "Possum Man" Stewart, who died unexpectedly and tragically in June: It was while I sat in Possum's room that I began to think about his computer. It was a homemade Franken-PC that sat under his desk, its wheezy fan making a racket like an ancient refrigerator. After I'd left Possum's house and headed back to the airport, I got to thinking about that computer. I strongly suspected that Possum would have copied over all the data of his life – all the e-mails and lis

Full systemd

I've been planning to switch from Arch initscripts and sysvinit to systemd. I finally downloaded the necessary packages and removed /etc/rc.conf entirely. I enabled the daemons in the rc.conf array. No issues except that the dnscrypt-proxy daemon is not starting. The status in systemctl is loaded but inactive (dead). Now I'm confused. I have internet connection but no dns. I temporarily removed the nohook option in dhcpcd.conf to let my ISP's dns handle the dns function.

My Thoughts On GNOME 3 Online Accounts

I like the idea that chat and email (and yes the social networks) are being handled (created, started, notifications) by the operating system or at least the desktop environment. Of course individual applications are also doing these things on their own (Zimbra client, Thunderbird). My surprise is that desktop environments are failing at this and Zimbra-Thunderbird are pushing forward. I am using GNOME 3.6.x now in Arch Linux. I guess the question in the users' mind is when will it be robust enough so the basic integration is persistent even after a point update. Obviously, the development doesn't stop but certainly you have to agree that all these effort should end with your product being used by most of your intended user community. My wariness stems from GNOME 3's inclination to break things which are previously working. Sometimes all it takes is to clean old configuration files and restart the application or session. Sometimes a re-installa

Evolution In GNOME 3.6.x

I am using Thunderbird instead of Evolution in GNOME 3.6 now. I like GNOME 3 but it breaks. It breaks some important stuff like email. There something wrong with it. I like that Evolution is simple but it breaks easily-like after one week of use. The official word is: The reported error was "GDBus.Error:org.gnome.OnlineAccounts.Error.NotAuthorized: Invalid password with username ` username@gmail.com ' (goa-error-quark, 0): Code: 401 - Unexpected response from server". I've tried deleting some Evolution files in .cache and .conf to no avail. I also tried re-installing and then some. Google tells me there were others before me having the same problem. So I added my name to the pile in launchpad. I'm glad that Evolution is faster now. Still I want it to work too. By the way, I'm typing this in Thunderbird

Nate Silver, Rock Star

Nate Silver predicted an Obama victory. He was ridiculed by pundits. Nate is correct and accurate enough to also predict the percentage difference of the two candidates. In 2008 he also gave his predictions and he was right 49 out of the 50 states in the union. This time he's 50/50. He embarassed the pundits and made them look like old wizards looking at crystal balls. Today mathematics triumph over punditry.

Barack Obama Wins Second Term 2012

After a hotly contested campaign, a super hurricane at the 11th hour, Barack Obama wins a second term of his Presidency. This image was tweeted after his acceptance speech. He's a man who loves his wife and daughters. He led the US economy and saved it from total crash.

US Elections 2012

Pundits are calling it too close to call. No one knows who will be the next President of the United States. My prediction is Obama in 2% over Romney. And the US economy figures will go up no matter who wins. Europe will continue to have problems with Greece and Spain.

Updated To GNOME 3.6 Arch Linux

Arch just released the GNOME 3.6 packages to general users (non-testers). I updated my system a week ago. (just posting it now) Like previous install of GNOME, I definitely want a change of icons. I got Faenza icons and icon themes installed and enabled them with gnome-tweak-tool. You might want to visit the gnome-extension website to turn on user-theme extension first. I saved an epiphany-app site for twitter (and facebook) as I use it often. Epiphany is a native GNOME browser with minimal resource usage. I can open it and never close it until I turn off the computer. I really want to hear arguments regarding security with this kind of use scenario. I tend to open it and not close it until the session is over. I wouldn't worry if its Firefox and working with Apparmor profile.