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I’ve actually touched this subject before on my blog. You may have noticed, you may not. Either way it concerns a point that deserves to be written in stone. My motivation for this resumption was a blog post on Ingeniøren http://ing.dk/artikel/90075. Quick recap: It’s about some down time Gmail had a while ago where people obviously lost access to their mails. In the comments people talk about backing up Gmail to simply secure the survival of their data.

Basically Google is taking over our lifes on the Internet through a varity of services. Mostly great services, no doubt. In the email sceneri for instance, it is my impression that the Gmail client has gained a significant share of the market by now. I could list a lot of useful, solid and innovating features in the client, but since there is too many and it wouldn’t serve a purpose to my later point, I won’t. Instead, I’ll discuss the questionable relationship between Google and the user of the Gmail service.

As far as I’m concerned, people tend to focus on how their emails are presented to them by their client, rather than how their emails are handled by the client (and the server for that matter). They’ll typically look for a simple, well-arranged and feature rich client that just does the job of presenting their mails. Gmail fits this description well and with it’s availability from any computer too, it makes it the obvious choice. However, since it’s crucial to the future existence of your emails which you read with your precious client, the data handling must be considered first priority. And unfortunately, even though you may think that by using Gmail, you’ll always have an online backup – guess what – you won’t.

Because while everything seems fine with Gmail’s idiot proof and user friendly approach with cocky dialog messages, etc., under the surface Gmail is just another commercial and evil machine. Once your emails start rolling into your newly created Gmail account, they’re in the hands of Google. You may own them and have exclusive rights to read them, but they’ll be stored by the machinery of Google.

“Okay, big deal.. So what if they store my emails? That just means that I won’t have to do it myself.”, you say. True, but take a look at these subsections from the Terms of Service site for Gmail.

(…)

4.4 You acknowledge and agree that if Google disables access to your account, you may be prevented from accessing the Services, your account details or any files or other content which is contained in your account.

4.5 You acknowledge and agree that while Google may not currently have set a fixed upper limit on the number of transmissions you may send or receive through the Services or on the amount of storage space used for the provision of any Service, such fixed upper limits may be set by Google at any time, at Google’s discretion.

(…)

13.3 (D) Google is transitioning to no longer providing the Services to users in the country in which you are resident or from which you use the service; or

13.3 (E) the provision of the Services to you by Google is, in Google’s opinion, no longer commercially viable.

(…)

This is some scary sh!t. It’s definitely a rough and inconstant way of handling your cherished data. Imagine if one day all of your emails were gone. Just gone! The probability of this happening is certainly small, but the above – worded by Google themselves – proves that it could.

As the keen reader may already have considered, an important perspective to mention is that Google actually isn’t the villain in this. Google do nothing wrong by taking control of the data we – one way or the other – caused on their servers. And when we create an account, we agree on these terms. We actually permit them to delete our emails if they want to. So what does that make us? I’ll bet you have an appropriately condescending noun to answer that question.

But there’s always risk of data loss and well, you have to put your mail in the hands of someone since you probably don’t have a bulletproof, fire/nuclear/missile secured and locked up server yourself.

I currently have three email accounts – one for school, a private one and the gmail – which I pull and sort with the Gmail client. It works fantastic with sorting, the spam filter and everything. And as I mentioned in the beginning, I haven’t been entirely unaware of this data handling before, so without getting too technical, I can say that I have arranged the necessary set of precautions for myself by backing up to my server with IMAP. I have many plans to improve my solution but till now, that’ll do. The problem is that if you really want to change from Gmail, you can’t. If people know a specific mail address and you’ve created accounts for stuff on the web with that account, you’ll still need it. The switch to something else can’t happen day-to-day.

You can never entirely eliminate the risk of losing your data. But you can diminish it, which you should definitely consider if you currently completely rely on Gmail.

Time for a good ol’ rant. Around Ubuntu, XP and Vista users I get way too many questions about why the crap I use Arch Linux. Why use it when I can get a perfectly fine operating system without working for it? The short explanation is, well it’s not perfectly fine and Arch just feels good. Strangely this “argument” doesn’t seem to satisfy the question, especially not when I sometimes sit in dirt to my knees with Arch and people gloatingly start offering me Ubuntu CDs. Urgh that’s annoying. I mean, don’t blame the operating system for my incompetence. Anyway, I’m sick of defending it. Mainly because I don’t have “the long explanation” nor that many arguments. My best one though – besides that it just feels good – concerns the peripheral of the Arch Philosophy, and that is what I’m going to discuss in this post.

To get things started, let’s begin with a few wise words from the Arch Wiki. Arch follows the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) philosophy, meaning http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/The_Arch_Way:

Arch Linux defines simplicity as a lightweight base structure without unnecessary additions, modifications, or complications, that allows an individual user to shape the system according to their own needs. In short; an elegant, minimalist approach.

And as the Arch wiki so truthfully explains the consequence of this http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Linux:

(…) Rather than tearing out unneeded and unwanted packages, Arch offers the power user the ability to build up from a minimal foundation without any defaults chosen for them. It is the user who decides what Arch Linux will be.

I know these two quotes are written by idealistic and incarnated Arch founders with only brainwash in their minds. After a year however on the highway of Arch I can only support it and say that it is indeed true.

Obvious proof shows itself in the size of the iso image of Arch on ~270MB. Compared to Ubuntu, the size of Arch is only one third of it (actually it has grown about a 100 MB since I started using it, which I don’t know what to think of. Guess it’s ok since they’ve actually included space invaders on the install CD).

But to grap hold on the philosophy and quotes again, an important term is bloat. Bloat in the software sense is when the software takes up “unnecessary” amounts of memory, CPU, etc. If we talk operating systems, bloat is often refered to as too much pre-installed software. Software that the developers pre-install because they think you’ll like it, and also because of the developer’s desperate efforts to make the software more user friendly. Sadly they overdo it too often.

Ubuntu is a victim of this phenomenon. Ubuntu is heavily bloated compared to Arch Linux. It’s not necessarily a bad thing though. The Linux community needs these kinds of distributions in order to attract new members who would be lost without pre-installed applications for browsing, mailing, text editing, instant messaging, etc. Not only wouldn’t they know which applications to look for, they wouldn’t even know how to install them.

Bloated distributions are crucial to the quest of spreading Linux. It lets you get comfortable with the environment and the applications in your own pace, and when you feel like it or the pre-installed software isn’t sufficient, you can advance yourself to install new software, configuring themes, look at compiz, etc. Eventually you get annoyed by little things like the network manager, compiz breakdowns, incompatibility, and you procede to learning the lonely terminal, driver installation, text file configuring and eventually kernel recompiling. When you get to this point, I guess you can consider yourself an experienced user, having fiddled around with the above, X, desktop environments, window managers and different options for your main applications. Most importantly the experienced user have hopefully gained insight on the fact that Ubuntu is… Wait for it… BLOATED!

This is where Arch Linux joins the party. Exactly for the reasons in the quotes above, the experienced Linux user is best off with a do-it-yourself and keep-it-simple distribution. You’ll want to get in complete control of your operating system by installing this kind of distribution and really get under the hood of Linux. The pieces of knowledge you acquired in Ubuntu get connected in Arch (just to keep using these two as examples). You get to understand how things work simply because you have to do every single thing yourself. Nothing works out of the box in Arch and I’m not afraid to admit it. My point is this: Considering the quality of a piece software (especially operating systems) it can only go two ways, up or down, and in this case the one DOES exclude the other. The quality of bloated software that “just works” out of the box, is user friendly, etc. can only go down. The quality of an operating system where you start from scratch and build up you system brick by brick can only go up. It can only get better and only you choose what kind of house you want to build.

Sure the learning curve is steeper, but once you get your DE/WM of choice, network, sound, graphics and other stuff you need working, you’re left with a stabile, clean system that only does what you need. You can always expand it – the point is that it will never do more than you ask it to. And this will inevitably reduce the errors and mysteries Ubuntu will challenge you with. Your use of your computer’s ressources are also reduced which can be a huge benefit on e.g. laptops.

Arch is indeed very flexible and the postulation, that it’s the user who decides what Arch will be, I can only support by telling that I currently use Arch on every single one of my four primary computers, that is two laptops, my desktop shuttle PC and even my server which both handles SSH, FTP, mail, Apache, MySQL, PHP and so on. Everything runs flawlessly. Your biggest problems with Arch will probably occur when you first install it on some new hardware you’re not entirely familiar with. After that, I’ve found that I rarely have problems.

I guess you’re wondering: “So, where’s Windows in all this?” You probably know that it normally turns my stomach to mention that sinful name on my blog. But in this case, Windows actually isn’t that bad. I won’t even start on Vista, but looking at the size of today’s computers, I don’t think that a basic XP install can be considered bloated. Without having insight to the internals of XP, I’m not afraid to say that it’s actually quite well proportioned after a fresh install. You’re obviously not given a lot of choice during the installation, but that’s an acceptable consequence of the user friendly, relatively clean install you get. Only a few things (like that terrible IE browser) besides the majority of your hardware are installed.

Finally, I know I can’t talk for everyone, and I admit that it’s an individual choice whether you place yourself at the bottom or the top of this bloat scale where heavily bloated software belongs at the top. To tell the truth, I haven’t found a Linux middle ground like I think XP is. I think new users are or should be forced to start at a high level of bloat in Linux. Else I fear that they’ll just get scared and run back to where they came from. But I have to say that I feel sorry for experienced Linux users who don’t use Arch or something similar. Maybe they just don’t care about ressources on or who has the control of their system. But they also don’t know what they’re missing, except maybe a lot of work in the beginning.

Rant over.

Once there was a yard. The yard was well known and by far the biggest in the area. If you were a dog and didn’t have anywhere to go, this yard would never hesitate to welcome you. When you looked at the yard from the unusually blue sky above you could see myriads of small, identical houses perfectly lined up one after another – each one with a little grass and a few flowers in the front. The only thing that broke the whole was an enormous gray building right in the middle with countless cylindrical chimneys sticking up. This building was the factory where everyone went to work day after day. It was the only payment for a dog house – board included – in the yard. Despite the fact that the citizens were more or less bound to the factory, they had food and privacy outside work hours. They were happy with their lifes.

The founder of the yard and also the factory was a big, rough bulldog called Max, short for Macrosoft. Max came from carpenter family and had since he could hold onto a hammer also worked as one. With this capacity Max had been in charge of gradually providing lodging for all the dogs who had come to the yard – willingly or unwillingly. Because of his self proclaimed heroic acts he felt entitled to rule the Dog Yard. He did, and as his first business as king, he started the building of a ten feet bulletproof wall around the yard to stop influence from other yards – or to establish a safety precaution as Max put it to the public. No one was allowed in or out without the permission of Max.

Max knew that the isolation wouldn’t stick if the citizens weren’t automatically provided with at least some information about the world outside the wall, and to accommodate this assumption he established a local newspaper called The Explorer. The Explorer was supposed to contain all kinds of relevant and interesting news to the yard. Citizens of the yard could even get it for free every Wednesday if they worked half an hour extra every day. To gather information for the paper Max established a team called The Explorers – with an “s” added. These were the only ones allowed in and out of the wall without the permission of Max. What only few knew was that The Explorers were told to report directly and exclusively to Max. Max would then process – select, sort and if necessary edit – the information and eventually pass it on to another team called The Word Processers who actually wrote the paper.

Everything went well for a long time and the dogs were happy. Especially about the progress of The Dog Yard compared to other yards which they weekly read about in the paper…

One day some of the dogs acquainted with a stray fox originally from the neighboor yard in which the citizens were mainly penguins. The fox seemed quite clever, informed of the world, sneaky, reliable and he was always on fire when speaking in public. The dogs used to listen intensely to him whenever he held a secret meeting in the basement of one of the houses. What confused the dogs was that the information from the fox often conflicted with the information in the paper.

Max was aware of this external source of information the dogs were provided with, but unfortunately he never caught it in action. And he didn’t know how it got inside the wall either. But as long as Max kept rejecting “the forbidden information” he didn’t feel threatened, rather confident about his position.

Another day a little puppy was born. The breed was Schnauzer and the name Doodle since his coat looked like one. Doodle turned out to have extremely well developed senses. Eyes like a hawk, ears like a bat, nose like a wolf. Because of his unusual skills, he quickly caught the attention of the other dogs. They steemed together, all amazed, and before Doodle was able to catch a frisbee he helped the other dogs find things. Whenever they missed something, a bone, a ball, a buddy, anything, they would ring a bell and Doodle would show up to find it almost immediately. The dogs were pleased, and Doodle – only a few months old – loved helping people out.

Doodle grew bigger and bigger, and as he did that he also grew more and more powerful. Soon he also delivered messages between the dogs. They hadn’t had a proper mailing system before. Firstly, letters weren’t allowed because of Max’s inclination for paranoia, and secondly, if you wanted to defy the law anyway you’d have to deliver the letter yourself, so what was the point.. Doodle however was this conscientious, little dog who remembered everything. Max would never suspect him for carrying dirty messages. And as long as he liked passing messages the dogs didn’t see no problem.

When Doodle turned four he was grown up and able to grasp the amount of power he possessed. By now he was indispensable to the hopelessly forgetfull dogs and he held messages, information and secrets for every single dog in the yard.

Max had at this time picked up on the utilizaiton of Doodle and eventually started worrying about his position as king of the Dog Yard. As the fear gradually got to his head he became increasingly desperate to find a solution. What messages were being passed around? Were they about Max? How much did Doodle actually know and could he be organizing a rebellion? Deep inside Max admitted that his methods were just a trifle doubtful, and if Doodle threw light on them, Max would be in serious trouble.

All of this turned out not to only be in Max’s head – even though Doodle’s intentions were a bit more noble at first. Doodle had been to a few meetings with the fox too and with his newly realized power he was determined to find the truth. So he went to Max, demanded access outside the wall and he wouldn’t leave before he got it. Max quickly developed a lump in his throat. Obviously he couldn’t let this happen, but fortunately an idea all of a sudden struck him as lightning. Following the old saying “keep your friends close and your enemies closer”, Max saw no other solution than allying himself with Doodle. So he did – subtle of course so Doodle wouldn’t notice his hidden intensions with the friendship. As a symbol of their pact Max gave Doodle a brand new collar made out of Chrome. This gave him outside priviledges and the title “Right hand of the King himself”. In return Max was ensured loyalty from Doodle.

Doodle almost ended as the equal of Max. The privacy and thereby a remotely free life in the old Dog Yard was no longer present. Max and Doodle ruled the dogs always pleasing themselves and their own needs first.

The dogs could only dream of the unknown life at the penguins that the fox once talked about…

So, today was the day the scientists at CERN were supposed to blow up the world. At least that’s what the media and some sceptical and dark people said. The scientists have created a monster that’ll suck us into a black hole. It’s obviously not true even though the popular machinery does look quite scary – and very cool.

More pictures here: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/08/the_large_hadron_collider.html. As the first comment on the site says: "This thing is going to kill us all." : ) Maybe it will some day.

To sum up the story, scientists at CERN has for years been building this 27 kilometer long particle accelerator called The Large Hadron Collider. The building of it finished recently finished and today they started and tried it for the first time. I don’t know much about the experiments they are able to perform with it, but it’s supposed to collide particles nearly at the speed of light. This should result in enormous energy generation, creating conditions like those just after the Big Band. A crucial moment in understanding the creation of the universe.

I find all of this really exciting and amazing. Stuff like this makes me want to be a physicist.

The blowing up thing also puts some interesting thoughts in my mind: What if the whole world were told that it was 100% sure that the earth would go under in a year? What would happen?

I think there’d be three different possibilities – one doesn’t exclude the other.

1. Everything would become chaos. Crime and anarchy would prevail. People would steal, ruin buildings, get guns and go on killing sprees. And it would be a self-fulfilling prophecy because people who didn’t want to resort to crime would have to, just to protect themselves. It would be pushing the famous idea of Charles Darwin about “Survival of the fittest” to an absurd and more than literal extend. Humanity would wipe itself out before nature.
2. Everyone would become determined to save humanity. Governments would organize massive education of people and use every available ressource on figuring out what to do. Someone unfamiliar with solidarity would fly away a couple of hundreds of the healthiest, smartest, prettiest and most popular species of homo sapiens, first of all to save themselves but also to ensure the survival of our kind. What a burden (bullsh!t). I bet someone would even take money to ensure someone else a life in space. Retards like the Beckhams would probably go. I can see the point in resorting to this last chance, but suspecting how corruptly and unfair it would happen, maybe it shouldn’t.
3. We’d all become hippies, drop out of school and quit work to sit around in circles, play guitar, smoke tobacco, grow hair and spread peace, love and harmony. Think about this one. I can’t even imagine what would happen and what it would mean globally, but I bet it would be a great last time on earth.

Yeah, I know, it’s been way too long since my last post, and I am indeed sorry for the delay. To excuse myself I can tell you that I’m working on a couple of entries. They should be done within the next few days, but again, don’t shoot me if they aren’t (like you care). In the meantime though I’d like to share the lyrics of a song I found stumbling upon this cool profile on flickr. The song is Empty by Ray Lamontagne and it is just beautiful. I wish I could write lyrics like that.

You can listen to it here:

And the lyrics:

she lifts her skirt up to her knees,
walks through the garden rows with her bare feet, laughing.
i never learned to count my blessings,
i choose instead to dwell in my disasters.
i walk on down a hill,
through grass, grown tall and brown
and still its hard somehow to let go of my pain.
on past the busted back of that old and rusted cadillac
that sinks into this field, collecting rain.
will i always feel this way?
so empty, so estranged

and of these cut- throat busted sunsets,
these cold and damp white mornings
i have grown weary.
if though my cracked and dusted dime-store lips
i spoke these words out loud would no one hear me?
lay your blouse across the chair,
let fall the flowers from your hair
and kiss me with that country mouth, so plain.
outside, the rain is tapping on the leaves,
to me it sounds like they're applauding us the the quiet love we made.
will i always feel this way?
so empty, so estranged

well i looked my demons in the eyes,
laid bare my chest, said do your best, destroy me.
you see, i've been to hell and back so many times,
i must admit you kind of bore me.
there's a lot of things that can kill a man,
there's a lot of ways to die,
listen, some already did that walked beside me.
there's alot of things i don't understand,
why so many people lie.
its the hurt i hide that fuels the fire inside me.
will i always feel this way?
so empty, so estranged

Enjoy!

As any admitted geek, my fingers regularly start itching for new hardware or gadgets. Even though I just bought some gear a few months ago I just have to get a new toy. I’m sure you’re familiar with the excited feeling of going online, order something, restlessly check the mailbox and finally receive that small slip of paper on which it says that your package has arrived and now is waiting for you at the local post office (that’s how it works in DK). Of course you immediately grap your bike, ride it like you’d never do in any other situation and race walk into the post office. That’s when you get stopped by the annoying queue slip that ensures fairness in the queue. The lady behind the desk repeatedly pushes the button to serve new costumers and move the queue along, and every time you optimistically check your little slip to see if it in some obscure way has changed to the next number. Anyway, you get the package home and you can’t wait to unwrap it. That’s when the hopeless tape assembly gets in your way, and of course you don’t have a scissor or a knife nearby. So you use whatever sharp features nature equipped you with, nails, teeth, evil laser eyes.. When you eventually make your way into the new toy, your struggles are rewarded with the lovely smell of new hardware.

I’ll bet the majority of geeks – or whatever you may call us – are addicted to this self-satisfying behavior. I know I am and when you combine that with my well-developed impulsiveness it easily becomes an expensive pleasure. But what can you do..

The reason for this babble is, well non-existent, but a few weeks ago I had my eyes set for an Eee pc 900. At the time I just had to have it. Fortunately what has the ability to stall my impulsiveness is bad online reviews. Since I was going to throw away about 2500 dkr I figured it would be 15 minutes well spent. I’m glad I did because the computer – which is the model with one 16 GB SSD – didn’t get a single good review concerning speed. Apparently the 16 GB SSD is painfully slow. I decided to wait till the 901 would be available in DK. It’s supposed to be radically improved. In fact, this very week we’ve just entered is the week the 901 should become availabe in DK. Yihaa, I thought Saturday. Saturday.

Yesterday (Sunday), I peacefully sat on my laptop browsing the source code of an RSS reader called Snownews. There was a few things that didn’t suit my needs – that’s another story. All of a sudden, poof!, a nasty, vertical, yellow line appears right in the golden section of my screen. Imagine one big pixel error that goes from the top of your screen to the bottom. I figured it was X putting an act on, so I restarted it. Nothing changed.. The line is apparently permanent, the screen “broken” (I can obviously still use it though) and my loyal companion through years now is showing its first sign of age. It’s really sad and here I was only thinking about that stupid 901.

All though I’m reluctant to do so, I may have to replace the old warrior. I probably can’t live with the screen and it’ll be too expensive to replace. I won’t throw it out. It can still be used dedicated, with an external monitor or something like that.

So what are my options? Well, fortunately my parents weren’t hesitant to offer me an almost new left over Dell, and I think I’m going to accept that. The Eee is once again out of the picture and I don’t really have the cash to buy a new full featured laptop. My demands of such are quite high so it wouldn’t be cheap, and since the Dell is right here in front of me, actually stronger and smaller, running Ubuntu right now, it’s just easier. It is uglier than my HP though : ).

That was my Sunday and since my last post I’m also back in Aalborg ready for tomorrow when school starts again.