There’s an interesting tension in democratic nations. For democracy to work there needs to be transparency. A lack of transparency leads to corruption via information asymmetry. Humans, being humans, tend to exploit this to bad ends. Sometimes they have noble intentions and sometimes they have evil intentions, but the results are the same - an abuse of power. Examples include testing drugs and diseases on African-Americans, testing drugs on military and CIA employees without their knowledge, or the lies about the US winning in Vietnam. However, nations have always needed to maintain a level of secrecy to preserve information asymmetry over other nations. It’s why Caesar of the Roman Empire invented his eponymous cypher. It’s why all countries have an equivalent of the NSA to protect their secrets and obtain the secrets of other nations. So we want our countries to keep secrets, but not the wrong kinds of secrets.

I had something of an obsession with preserving history. It’s why I am constantly using photography to document my life. (And was doing so back when we had to use expensive film) A few months ago I wrote about how emulation can help us preserve our culture when it comes to video games. We’re in a weird place right now in our culture - everything is digital. If there were to be some sort of catastrophic apocalypse, any aliens that came to Earth would think we stopped inventing stuff in the Industrial Revolution.  (Only a slight exaggeration) Even if we just look at humanity - if something were to wipe out technology (see many sci-fi stories including the manga/anime Nausicaa and Trigun) all the information we know - all the petabytes on the net would be inaccessible and lost forever.  But if we dial it back a bit and forget about those doomsday scenarios - it’s important to see that culture is informed by what came before it.  (Super heroes are just modern day greek gods, and so on)  It’s why the Library of Congress collects important works of culture for preservation.

I’ve been reading a lot about kde-telepathy and it seems to be the next evolution beyond Kopete.  So I decided to check it out in my Fedora Rawhide VM since that’s going to have the latest packages and telepathy is still in deep beta.  When I installed all the packages that seemed to be important, I got the following when I launched it from the alt-F2 menu.

I wrote this code a while back because a website that does the same thing seemed to miss my posts every other week.  So I figured I’d write my own in python to do the same thing to me.  Then I just put it into a cron job to automatically run it every Sunday.  I’m going to be posting the code on my GPL code page.  Here it is for you to see and for Google to index.  Just fill in the appropriate variables with the secret keys you get from each site’s API.

Ever since late Fedora 12 or, for sure, Fedora 13, Evolution has been annoying me.  I don’t know if it’s linked or coincidental, but it appears to have started getting buggy after I noticed it was using couchdb, a database that a lot of database people in the Linux world are getting all excited about.  Evolution is the Linux equivalent to Microsoft Office Outlook.  I switched to it a few years ago so that I could have tasks, email, and calenders in one spot.  In theory, it’s perfect - it syncs with Hotmail, Gmail, and Google Calendar.  I have all my todo items in there out to April of next year.  It supports GPG signing and encryption via integration with Gnome’s Seahorse keyring.  In practice, it has started taking forever to start a new email or enter a new task.  I click the button and then have to wait for a long time until the dialog pops up; if it pops up.  A lot of the time doing this causes the program to crash.  I’ve filed a bug via the auto-bug-filing program in Fedora.  There’s also a bug that doesn’t bother me as much where it keeps asking me to supply the password for my Hotmail account and not accepting it until the next time I restart the program.  So I decided that I’d wait and see if things improved with Gnome 2.32, included in Fedora 14.

Almost exactly 2 years ago I started micro-blogging. Back then I signed up for Twitter, Pownce, and Plurk accounts. One month later I concluded that I really liked Twitter and that Pownce and Plurk were annoying. A few days later I discovered Identi.ca - a FLOSS version of Twitter and decided I would send frivolous tweets to Twitter and tecnological dents to Identi.ca. Then, a little while later Pownce was taken off the net. So what has happened in the intervening years?

I previously blogged about cloud computing and, as you may remember, I am no fan.  Recently, while listening to The Command Line Podcast, I came across yet another reason to stay away from the cloud.  Cmdline mentions Bruce Schneier’s recent post on file deletion in the cloud.  Bruce’s main point is that you can be reasonably sure on your own computer that a file is gone when you’ve deleted it.  This is not the case with cloud computing.

While looking up driving directions on Google Maps from Barcelona, Spain to Madrid, Spain, I clicked the option for “walking” directions out of curiosity’s sake.  This is the quickest route they gave me for walking.  I don’t think that’s the most efficient way to go.  First of all, I can’t walk on water.  Second, why not go straight over land.  That appears to be a shorter route.  What makes this hilarious is the statement in yellow:  “Walking directions are in beta.  Use caution - This route may be missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths.”  Missing is, “We may send you walking over water.”

I don’t even remember what I was going to search for in Google, but here’s what came up when I typed “why”.

This is becoming a huge “sport” on the net - to see what Google gives you when you type something into the search.  It’s the first time I got something fun.

Saw this one day when I was in gmail (click on it to see it full-sized):