Nethazard.net

I’ve updated identica-mode for Emacs and now has a way to connect to any laconica server, instead of just identi.ca.

To configure add this to your .emacs file, or your customizations file or your choice:

(setq laconica-server "myserver.com")


I’m working on publishing the git repository of the project. In the meantime you can download it here.

Popularity: 4% [?]

What would happen if your access to most of your online services were to be disabled? What would you loose?

I’ve been in situations where we have to decide either to run certain applications on our server, like E-mail, scheduling, project management, etc. Or use the ubiquitous, given-for-granted web services from huge companies with huge servers, like Google.

Most of the time, the decision is in favor of thrid party providers for such services, since the comodity of being just a few clicks away is huge. Also, it gives a good sensation of reliability. Except for Twitter, most web services are available 99.999% of the time.

Mako Hill and others at the Free Software Foundation have been warning about the posibility of depending so much on 3rd party services (information at http://autonomo.us) that you can be left out without data if the provider ceased to exist, killed the service or kick you out. They even have a wiki with a list of free software alternatives you can set up on your own machines to replace such services.

Well, the idea of finding Gmail or any other 3rd party software service unavailable is pretty much inconcievable. But what about your account being disabled without notice or reason?

That exact thing happened to me this past Friday.

I was using my Gmail as usual in the morning, I went for lunch, came back and tried to log in. I got a message saying: Sorry, your account has been disabled. I filled out the contact form for support and only got an auto reply message and no help at all. The whole weekend passed and the situation was the same.

My account being disabled, meant that I had no longer access to my emails, my calendars, my rss feeds, my news, my homepage with its widgets and tools, my documents, notes, videos, website traffic statistics and finally my adsense account.

All these things I used to rely on Google, for the reasons stated at the begginning of this post. Bad idea.

What saved me

Fortunately for me, I had backups. I was recently testing a desktop rss feed reader aKgregator, and exported all my rss feeds from google reader to my computer. Since I’ve always hated web interfaces to interact with my email, I always checked my emails through Thunderbird via POP3.

I only lost access to my calendar appointments, my startup page widgets and some unimportant documents at Google apps, since I always use OpenOffice for all my documents. My videos that were uploaded are on my backup files and I don’t use Picasa for my photo album,though I do use Flickr, but all my pictures are perfectly safe on my backup files too.

Getting it back

So the whole weekend passed without any notice from Google support team. On monday, I started writing this post and looking for somone else that had a similar experience.

I came across this post with the story of Nick Saber. Same situation where his google account was disabled without any notice, warning or reason. On the comments I found that Google did replied to his emails and sent him this link. I followed the link and filled in the form with the questions. Minutes later I had an email saying that my account was enabled again. No explanations, nothing.

So if I never came across this blog post and this link, I would’ve never gotten my google services account back.

Lessons learned

Even though I have my account back, my relationship with Google will never be the same. Gmail will never be my primary email address ever again. I’ll always check it though POP3 as it turned out to be great for me. I’ll only use the rest of the google services a a nice to have online access, but not as my primary source of these services.

I’ll be running my own services using free software on a machine I own from now on as much as its possible. I can never again rely on someone else’s computer services. Its not going to be as nice and comfortable, but it will be reliable and completely mine.

You should consider being in a situation like mine and not be left out in the cold when you get kicked out of a service without notice or reason, and without your data.

Not like the others… photo is creative commons by greenapplegrenade

Popularity: 4% [?]

Yesterday’s big news was that Google released their own “open source” browser called Google Chrome. They released only the binaries for Windows, and even thought they claim to be open source, I don’t see where I can get the source code yet.

But what really bothers me is the license agreements for Chrome:

11. Content license from you
11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

This means that if you publish a blog post, upload a photo or release a song or software, Google has the right to use it for whatever they want, royalty-free.

Photo Creative Commons by WeMeantDemocracy

So this makes Google more than a Big Brother, which only watches your every move. This one can commercialize what you do as well.

I advice you, as always, to read your license agreements when you install software, or better yet, use free software.

I’ll stick with Mozilla Firefox, which besides of a good licence, has major benefits for me with all its extensions. I can forgive a few crashes in exchange of openness and in keeping my data mine.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Identi.ca is a free software microblogging service, similar to Twitter, based on the Laconi.ca code base. I recently needed to update my status from Emacs, since its faster for me and easier. I’ve been using an an Emacs mode to update my Twitter account, but there was nothing to use for my Identi.ca account. And seeing there’s a Vim plugin, I thought someone, like me, needed an Emacs mode too.

So I forked the original twittering-mode to use it with the Identi.ca platform, using its Twitter compatible api.

System Requirements

• GNU Emacs 22
• Linux, Mac OS X, BSD or any Unix based OS (requires curl and wget)

Download

Download identica-mode

Installation

Put it in your Emacs elisp files directory (.emacs.d/ in Ubuntu)
Then add the following to your .emacs (or your preferred customizations file)

;;; Identi.ca mode
(require 'identica-mode)
(setq identica-username "yourusername")
(setq identica-password "yourpassword")


Use

To start identica mode type:
M-x twittering-mode
the buffer ‘*identica*’ will appear and you can see your friends timeline.

To refresh friends timeline
C-c C-f

To post an update of your status

C-c C-s
type your message in the minibuffer, and hit Enter. You will see ‘Success: Post’ in minibuffer.

Hope it can be of use for anyone using Emacs for almost everything, like I try to do, and would like to hear some feedback.

Popularity: 7% [?]

There are several services to host your project’s code on the web for free. But recently there’s been some outages on “very reliable” services like Gmail, Amazon and let’s not get started with Twitter. Also some service policies may bother you like Google code rejecting a lot of software licenses, and Facebook will never delete your data from their servers. You must start thinking on a better way to publish the code for a project of yours.

The Free Software Foundation published an article about the free project hosting alternatives Sourceforge, Google Code and Launchpad, and what the problems are for each. They recommend Savanah, the free software hosting for free or open source projects.

El artículo de la FSF esta disponible también en español

What’s nice about it is that if you don’t want to host your code on their servers, you can download the code and host it on your own.

But if hosting is not your main concern, I like the fact that, because its free software, it can rapidly respond to support requests.

The features of savanah are:

• Support for CVS, Subversion, GNU Arch, Git and Mercurial
• Integrated bug tracking system
• Mailing lists
• And downloads area with mirrors

This is the only service I know that provides support for so many version control systems and its completely free. Since I use Git, this is great because I no longer have to be on the non-free (nor as in beer, or as in freedom) Github anymore, and with the features a big player like Sourceforge has.

The matrix code image is provided by David Asch under Creative Commons

The Levitating,
Meditating, Flute-playing Gnu logo is a GNU GPL’ed image provided
by the Nevrax Design Team.

Popularity: 3% [?]

There’s been some reports on ISPs slowing down your Internet connection if you use BitTorrent or cutting your VoIP calls and many other nasty things.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has published a free software tool to check your connection for ISP’s bad behavior. It will spot IP packets which are forged or modified between clients, inform you, and give you copies of the modified packets.

Unfortunately for the non geeky users, there is no installer packages to easily install it on any Linux distribution, nor there is any GUI. Its a command line tool that you have to compile yourself. The project is hosted on sourceforge.net for you to grab if you’d like to make a package for it.

But anyway, its a great thing to have, if your ISP is messing with your traffic, you should know about it (and change ISP). I’ll be giving it a try soon, because I’m getting suspicious about this cable company in Monterrey city.

To run the tests, I recommend you to first use the wiki page. There’s a little guide to test different protocols.

Popularity: 3% [?]