Running in the cloud. Maintained by: mhouston@deluxe-tech.co.uk
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This text is also on my New Blog but I feel it is important enough to keep here too. If you understand what the piece is about you will understand why!
BBC News carries a story about the proposed overhaul of the Data Protection Directive. The way this is being sold as a 'good thing' to the public is with the example that a youngster has pictures of them doing stupid things while drunk:"These rules are particularly aimed at young people as they are not always as aware as they could be about the consequence of putting photos and other information on social network websites, or about the various privacy settings available," said Matthew Newman. He noted that this could cause problems later if the users had no way of deleting embarrassing material when applying for jobs. However, he stressed that it would not give them the right to ask for material such as their police or medical records to be deleted. Although the existing directive already contains the principle of "data minimisation", Mr Newman said that the new law would reinforce the idea by declaring it "a right".This shows a terrifying and very SOPA/PIPA like misunderstanding of the way that the Internet works. There is much information on the net, not all of it true or of a good quality, but it should be up to the individual to filter what they pay heed to. The example give is particularly flawed as any such photo may very well have 'gone viral' if it was particularly amusing and would exist in any number of places. This is a bad law because it gives the uninformed the right to expect the impossible! The really dangerous thing however is it makes it look ok and normal to revise history for the most trivial of reasons. This will completley destroy peoples trust in the Internet as a store of knowlege and memories. Maybe this is what the people behind this legislation want? Here is the quote from George Orwells 1984. Luckily the Internet is still free enough that I could find an online copy of this work STILL copyrighted after more than sixty years to paste this from!
"Winston examined the four slips of paper which he had unrolled. Each contained a message of only one or two lines, in the abbreviated jargon — not actually Newspeak, but consisting largely of Newspeak words — which was used in the Ministry for internal purposes. They ran: times 17.3.84 bb speech malreported africa rectify times 19.12.83 forecasts 3 yp 4th quarter 83 misprints verify current issue times 14.2.84 miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling With a faint feeling of satisfaction Winston laid the fourth message aside. It was an intricate and responsible job and had better be dealt with last. The other three were routine matters, though the second one would probably mean some tedious wading through lists of figures. Winston dialled ’back numbers’ on the telescreen and called for the appro- priate issues of The Times, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes’ delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify. For example, it appeared from The Times of the seventeenth of March that Big Brother, in his speech of the previous day, had predicted that the South Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly be launched in North Africa. As it happened, the Eurasian Higher Command had launched its offensive in South India and left North Africa alone. It was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother’s speech, in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened. Or again, The Times of the nineteenth of December had published the official forecasts of the output of various classes of consumption goods in the fourth quarter of 1983, which was also the sixth quarter of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. Today’s issue contained a statement of the actual out- put, from which it appeared that the forecasts were in every instance grossly wrong. Winston’s job was to rectify the original figures by making them agree with the later ones. As for the third message, it referred to a very simple er- ror which could be set right in a couple of minutes. As short a time ago as February, the Ministry of Plenty had issued a promise (a ’categorical pledge’ were the official words) that there would be no reduction of the chocolate ration during 1984. Actually, as Winston was aware, the chocolate ration was to be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty at the end of the present week. All that was needed was to substitute for the original promise a warning that it would probably be necessary to reduce the ration at some time in April. As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of The Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames. What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the pneumatic tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of The Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead. "In the days of electronic storage of data no dictator would have to go to all this trouble. The fact that you can no longer rely on the internet to back up your own memory of what has happened is very disturbing. It looks like the EU is attempting to produce legislation that needs to be resisted alongside SOPA,PIPA and ACTA. Please spread the word. There is something fundamentally wrong about this. Establishing it is OK to revise the past just because someone did something they later regret is a very dangerous precedent. Just change that for you do something that you government regrets.
Been a bit busy over the last couple of months!
Firstly if you are after one of the Tux ties mentioned by David Hayward in the Linux section of Micro Mart then here they are.
You can buy them using Google Checkout and they will be sent as soon as possible by 1st class post. Just the thing for showing your support for the penguin!
Software freedom day over in Southend was a great success and ChemerLUG has now had two meetings under its belt over at Writte College
I have been giving my support to The Occupy London Stock Exchange Movement. It is now clear to anyone with half a brain that the current way the world is being run is unsustanable!
This is not just "prophets of doom", we are seeing the reality of Greece in financial ruin and other Euro countries not far behind. If you want to be more prepared for what is comming then I recommend that you take "The Crash Course" which is available for free at http://www.chrismartenson.com.
You can either watch the course online or download a DVD image so that you can view on your TV and perhaps make copies for less computer savy friends?
Everyone needs to be aware of this material, politicians won't level with you about the hard choices we are all going to gave to make, it is no vote winner!
Not long now to Software Freedom Day - see http://chelmerlug.org for full deatils. Only a little further a way is ChemerLugs first meeting at Writtle too.
Also I will be going to the FLOSS UK unconference 2011 on 8th October.
With the journalistic talents of Felicity Houston the rather wordy leaflet I produced vlast week is now a much slimmed down Poster. I want to get this put up around the local area to encourage people to join the LUG. What do people think? Good idea? Have other people tried similar?
The aim is to get people to discover Linux, maybe they tried it a few years ago but did not persevere, or are just living in a world where the only information they are usually exposed to is ads and media controled by large corporations who would rather you spent your hard earned cash on a shiny new computer with a bloated DRM crippled new OS.
Here is a leaflet I am planning to hand out at the Chelmsford Fling next Saturday.
I will be part of the Transition Chelmsford tent. Hope to see you thereOh dear has it really been that long since I had time to update my website?
Typing this on the train speeding towards Open Tech conference in London. More of this later...
The first meeting of ChelmerLUG was a success - mostly thanks to a great turnout from SOSLUG (many thanks).
If you live in the Chelmsford (Essex) area and are interested in joining a free software group that meets locally please drop me a line (email address above).
Sorted out the first meeting of ChemerLUG - a Linux and Android users group for Chelmsford, Essex. It is going to be at the Chelmsford Central Library upstairs from 9:30 to 11:30 ish on Saturday 14th May. Please let me know mhouston@deluxe-tech.co.uk if you are planning to attend.
There is also a IRC channel going at irc.lug.org.uk as #chemerlug.
Just point your choice of irc client there and join the #chelmerlug channel by typing
/join #chelmerlug
The main channel for the UK Linux SIG organisers is #linux.
The 4th of May is the "Day against DRM" - see
DRM is never in the consumers interest. You end up with getting something less than you would have done with a physical book or record. They tried copy protecting CDs a few years ago but consumer rejection put an end to it.
After a long fight it is now also possible to buy DRM free music downloads.For one thing you cannot resell (or give to a charity shop) things you have lost interest in. If DRM formats win there will be a whole generation of culture that is closed to second and subsequent hand consumers. Computers were designed to be tools for the sharing of human thought. DRM is a perversion of that concept.
It will also be a disaster for future historians if so much of 21st century culture is unreadable to them because of DRM restrictions.
My particular gripe is how all the DRM must be wasting countless megawatts of power. Complex DRM schemes take CPU power. This hits the end user in the pocket for their power bill and the humanity as a whole in contributing to Global Warming.
It's a few years old now but this talk by Cory Doctorow explains better than me some of the other pitfalls of tolerating such restrictions on our ability to use computers.
Ubuntu 11.04 is out today. In order to help share the love and spread the load here are the torrent files for the 64 bit desktop (most modern PCs) and 32 bit desktop (for netbooks and P4 systems and earlier).
These are the same files as I got from Ubuntu main site. When I went back to start the server variant downloads too the site was too busy. Hence giving you the chance to bittorrent using the files hosted here.
Going to be moving the main part of this site under the MoinMoin Wiki shortly. There are may great Wiki systems available as open source - the most famous public example of which is the Wiki Encyclopedia - WikiPedia. MoinMon was chosen for two reasons:
So what is the benefit of changing to a Wiki? Wikis are designed so make adding content to a site a lot easier. Instead of having to use messy looking HTML markup such as <h1>A heading<\h1> I can use a much simpler Wiki markup convention like == A Heading ==.
Hypertext links are even more convenient. Those strange looking WikiWords turn themselves into links to other pages in the same Wiki without any further effort needed by you, the user. It is the job of the Wiki software to turn this sort of markup into the HTML code that your web browser understands. If you use the 'View Source' option on your browser you will see that more and 'fancier' HTML is produced by the Wiki software than a human would have the patience to hand craft for page after page. Computers are so much faster than us! A humans job is to set the rules, to establish the patterns and for software to then apply those rules. The clever bit is knowing what to do when more than one set of conflicting rules needs to be applied!
If all this seems a bit elementary to you please bear in mind that we need to understand why we are taking the technology path we choose. If we just pick something because 'it looks sexy' or 'everyone else is using it' then we can easily become a slave to the technology choice we have made (or has often just been forced upon us by the ignorant) rather than its master. Computers are machines, they act as multipliers for our mental effort in the same way as a tractor can help a farmer to manage a much bigger field then he would be able to do by hand.
Knowing what is appropriate technology at what is not is the secret of success. For example if a website was to remain at just a few pages the investment in learning how to use anything more complex than a text editor and simple HTML markup would probably not be worthwhile.
Oh - and another quick word on running costs. This system has been up for a whole month now at a total cost of £8.02p. Anyone can afford a 'tick-over' foothold in the Internet for £2 a week!
Website now under the control of the Git version control system. This both gives the ability to keep experimental branches, copies in as many places as needed, and a complete history going back to the days of a single web page and a bunch of images.
Like the logo? It was done with 'The Gimp' using the Cool Metal 'Alpha to Logo' filter. The original was done some years ago when the same feature as part of 'Script Fu'. The old method asked for the text in an input box but with the Gimp 2.6.8 that is standard with Ubuntu 10.04 it is now possible to apply any of the logo transformations to text already in the image. Disclaimer: I am not a graphic designer. If The Gimp had been a commercial tool at a Photoshop type price I would not have even heard about it. The beauty of Open Source is that it allows people to use something even for a job that is 0.01% of its true capability.
Just knowing that the tools are there if you have a need for them is a great feeling. A standard Linux installation contains lots that most people will never use. But scratch the surface and you will probably find solutions to a lot of things you may need. Contrast that to what you really get with Windows unless you start spending a lot of extra money?
Have had my email set up to this little cloud box for some time now. Postfix and Dovecot combo with Thunderbird to read my mail. I am very pleasantly surprised just how responsive a server up 'in the cloud' can be for X11 traffic passed through ssh.
I thought I would have needed VNC or Nomachine NX but no, good old ssh -X seems just fine.
I also wonder how long I am going to be happy to relive the good ole days of the web by entering the HTML by hand :) It does give a very fast to load site though ;) And the HTML syntax coloring in vim makes it all pretty easy to get right.Not bothered to set up any anti-Spam yet. This is a new mail account, interested to chart just how fast the mindless spam builds up.
So far it has just been a couple of financial pishing attacks. Telling me my Co-operative bank statement is available when I don't even bank there and a 'worrying' email from Paypal that 'Access to your account has been limited' - that one got forwarded directly to spoof@paypal.com.
That would be a nice convention for all financial institutions to take up.
Running costs for my little cloud system so far:
| deluxe-tech-hub-1 | 10 GB DISK | 0.35 GB IN | 0.35 GB OUT | 11 Day(s) 16:45:07 | £2.87 |
Oh - and I get a free T-shirt if I give a plug to where this site is being hosted..
Now have email set up. I can be emailed at mhouston@deluxetech.co.uk.
I am still very pleased with interactive performance. I am running dovecot and postfix mail infrastructure and a Thunderbird mail client going through a ssh pipe. No complaints about usability of GUIs from the cloud.
The future I see is that people no longer need all the worry of running power guzzling fast computers at home once the Internet is fast enough. Several TB for local backups of things you own out on the net by all means but very low power consumption computers can be on the menu once the need to run Windows (locally at least) is out of the equation.
All those laptops and desktops that got sold with Vista would be much happier running Linux!
I know mine (an Acer Aspire 5920) breathed a sigh of relief when Vista got deleted. It was an early Vista system only 2GB of ram. Shortly after that manufacturers started taking the desperate step of selling even entry level laptops with 3GB of memory, just to give Vista that bit more leg room.
It is now happily running Fedora Core 14, including a full Android SDK, still just with 2GB of memory!
The idea is to build this up from the ground up. Sort of like an accelerated evolution of the web over the past 20 or so years.
As we have to be careful with money I have gone for the very smallest available virtual machine from Rackspace.
The performance is great so far, but then there is not much here yet is there?
The page you see here is just plain HTML entered directly with the venerable old 'vi' text editor. No fancy CSS style sheets (yet).
I am using my cloud system directly and it seems just as fast as doing the same thing locally.
Obviously entering things directly on a live web-server is not a state of affairs it is wise to carry on with for long.
My next planned stage is to involve git so I can work on the website locally and then just deploy changes as an when the world needs to see. The discipline of only having 10GB of space on this little cloud based system means I can work on my website even on my trusty Linux netbook.
The running meter that clicks over hour after hour with cloud computing could be the thing that gives programmers a long lost interest in avoiding software bloat.
Having expensive things where you don't keep track of the cost leads to a lack of appreciation.
To give the casual visitor some background in the meantime here is my public Linked-in profile.