Ode to Saturday
O Saturday,
Day of Days,
Not like in the war,
But in offering up the Laze.
How shall I invest you?
In rest, or work, or play?
Or in seeking something greater?
Not right now, I've got all day...
Cyanogenmod Infuse 4G (Unofficial rom build)
[ROM][2.3.7]Compiled CM7 for Infuse - Updated 1/12/2012.
Some developers over at XDA have been working on porting Cyanogenmod 7 to the Samsung Infuse 4G. While there is not yet an official Cyanogenmod release, there is a working rom available at the link above. While I would have preferred to wait until the Infuse code is added to the official Galaxy S branch to set this up on my phone, the recent CarrierIQ news gave me sufficient motivation to go ahead with this rom.
The instructions in the linked thread have everything you need, including instructions on how to root. I used a different method to root my device when I first got it (installing a different kernel using Odin), which actually caused me a bit of trouble; after rooting I had reinstalled the stock kernel, which bootlocked my phone. It took me a while to realise this was the problem, but once I did I just reinstalled the community kernel and everything went smoothly from there.
So far my experience with this rom is quite good. I have found that Swype has been a bit crashy, so I've had to reinstall it a couple times, but other than that have experienced no bugs.
EDIT: The link was to a thread that was no longer being updated, so I changed it to an active one.
Free SSL certs with StartSSL
StartSSL™ Certificates & Public Key Infrastructure - How to Install.
I've always been frustrated by the fact that SSL certs for a website run in the $70/year and up range, which sets https (without having to deal with annoying untrusted certificate warnings and errors) beyond my limited, hobbyist budget. However, I recently heard about StartSSL offering free basic certs, so I set it up today.
After a bit of fiddling (the SSL way of doing things is new to me), it's all up and working! At first only Chromium was calling my site verified, Firefox wasn't giving a bad cert error but was not convinced of the site's authenticity, and Fennec & the Android browser were giving me unknown cert errors. It turned out I hadn't installed the chain certs (a new concept to me), but once I got those in, everything was golden.
Cyanogenmod (Android) on touchpad
I recently got an android phone (I'm using it to write this blog post, over an ssh tunnel no less) and the joy of all these great apps tempted me to try to install Cyanogenmod's Android port on the touchpad on the weekend. The process was very smooth, and it is working quite well. I got a couple of sleeps of death, but disabling the screen lock seems to have clearwd it up.
Vive les logiciels libres!
HP Touchpad running Ubuntu Linux!
We managed to get our hands on an HP touchpad in the fire sale, and I've been playing with getting Linux running on it. Here are a couple of videos of where it's at so far. About the only thing not working at this point is screen rotation, which I personally don't have the skills to implement. Hopefully the webos-internals crew will get it figured out soon.
A couple of key tools making it workable on the tablet are easyswipe for gestures and onboard for the onscreen keyboard. I had to build my own onboard keymap for the device. The desktop environment is LXDE, to keep things light and snappy.
For instructions on how to do this, check out this thread at precentral. The first post will get you into a basic Ubuntu environment, then my instructions on how to get to a nice desktop are down on page five of the thread.
Why I Love Free/Open Source Software (or, unity maildir indicator applet take 2)
EDIT: with Chris' consent, the script is now released under the WTFPL.
So this morning I wandered over here to my blog to post about ethics and software, specifically on the topic of why I appreciate Free Software and avoid Apple products, but I noticed this comment on a post about a script I had written (good thing I decided to look through my auto-filtered comment spam folder!). Chris Irwin had found the script, and made it better, implementing a feature I had not bothered to figure out how to do for myself, and posted the source.
This is the greatness of open software: find something that is almost what you need, but not quite, so change it! Share, and share alike!
I took a look at his code, and adopted it myself. And then I modified it more, to make it a little better still. Here's the latest version: maildir-indicator.py Chris licensed his changes under the GPL3, so the same license applies to this.
Antisocial Networking
Facebook. Everybody has it. Everybody uses it. It is worth billions. Google is trying to muscle in on its game with Google+. But exactly what does it do?
Honestly, it seems like the answer to that question is not much. It allows us to share photos. It allows us to keep up to date on what our friends are doing. It allows us to write blog posts, comment on friends' interactions, photos and posts. The thing is, we've had applications to do all of this for decades. Think about it: blogs, flickr and its ilk, message boards... facebook hasn't actually developed anything new here. Yes, now they're moving into voice & video chat, but again, that's nothing new. The only thing that facebook does that's new is to aggregate these activities together in one centralised, easy to use place. And they make a boatload of money by manipulating all that data we've entrusted to them to sell us stuff.
Now, my opinions on centralised, monolithic cloud apps are well known (short version: I think they're terrible for freedom, personal data ownership, and privacy). And yet I use facebook on a daily basis. But wouldn't it be nice if we could simply add the aggregating glue that facebook excels at on top of the technologies that already ran the social content before FB existed? I mean, build a facebook-like interface that would let us see and interact with friends blogs, photos, statuses, etc, but let the data stay on those distributed systems? So if you comment on a friend's blog post that shows up on your social feed, that comment gets pushed out to their actual blog, be it wordpress, blogger, drupal, or whaever other platform, instead locking everything in Facebook's own servers? It's kind of like an RSS aggregator, with the twist of pushing data out rather than just pulling it in.
I've been mulling this idea for a goodly while, and this week (since I wanted a vacation project) I started coding up a prototype. It's still in really early development, but it's gradually coming together, and is showing promise. I'll surely post more information in the coming days. Here are a few notes on what it does/will do:
- Aggregate social data from a number of sources (blogs, twitter, image feeds, etc). So far, I've got twitter and rss incoming
- Allow a Person (or friend) to not simply be linked to one such service, but many -- ie, Joe could have a blog, twitter feed, image feed, etc, all of which are attributed to a unified Person on the feed (this is implemented)
- Allow transparent replying to each of these feeds. This is without a doubt going to be the most difficult part, particularly to open up as many services as possible. I'm hoping to build this on OpenID as much as possible.
It actually seems pretty simple, doesn't it? I'd love to hear what others think of the idea. While I realise that it's unlikely that this will spark a revolution, I'm hoping it'll prove interesting at least to a certain community. If and wen I get it to a point where it's useful, I'll release the source and set it up as a public service.
If by any chance you have programming inclinations and would like to help out, drop me a line. I'm building it on python and django, so obviously familiarity with these technologies would help...
StopSpying.ca – Harper Gov’t Trying to Push Unethical Online Surveillence Measures
Go to stopspying.ca to sign the petition to have this legislation scrapped.
sshuttle – really, really simple ssh-based VPN
I discovered sshuttle today, which is a really simple VPN over SSH, which works on Linux, BSD and MacOS clients. It requires no set-up on the server, just an unprivileged ssh account and python. Once you've downloaded it, which is as simple as using apt-get (in a Debian-based OS) or a git command, all you need to do to tunnel all your traffic over SSH to a remote server is:
sshuttle --dns -vvr username@sshserver 0/0
And voila, instant security. I will definitely be using this when I'm on public wifi in the future.
Michael Geist – Web Surveillance Legislation Requires Study, Not Speed
Michael Geist - Web Surveillance Legislation Requires Study, Not Speed.
Michael Geist posted Friday about a new series of crime bills that the Harper Government are pushing through. Among these is a bill to force all Canadian ISPs to implement measures to intercept and examine the communications of their users, and will allow police access to these data without court oversight. This means that the police or other government security agencies will be able to access all of your communications (email, chat, Facebook use, and anything else you do online) without a warrant. It will also enable large-scale monitoring of all of our internet activities. An excerpt from the article:
Lawful access raises genuine privacy and free speech concerns, particularly given the fact that the government has never provided adequate evidence on the need for it, it has never been subject to committee review, and it would cost millions to implement yet there has been no disclosure on who would actually pay for it. Given these problems, it is not surprising that every privacy commissioner in Canada has signed a joint letter expressing their concerns.
Mr Harper, when every privacy commissioner in Canada (the 10 provincial and one federal commissioners) think your bill is broken, you probably need to take it back to the drawing board.