April is the cruelest month

I should be studying now. I have an exam tomorrow. I also have homework due tomorrow, Get Carded’s Lifeapalaooza tomorrow, homework due Friday, a Linux installfest on Saturday, a project somewhere else out on the horizon, and who knows what else I’m forgetting. It’s been a busy week, and April is going to be a busy month as the spring semester comes to an end.

Oh yeah, and I get to pick my classes on Monday. Apparently my peers all get to pick their classes today or thereabouts, but since I don’t have as many credit hours as most of them, I can’t register for classes as early. It’s not fair, I know… or is it? It probably is. I can’t wait to catch up on my credits over the summer so I can register for next spring’s classes relatively early. Well, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.

Some of the blogs I read have open threads periodically (or all the damn time). I find them kind of annoying, probably because I don’t feel like I’d fit in in a discussion with the rest of the commenters. The World of Stuff, I think, is different. I think you’d all get along with each other, and I don’t often abdicate my responsibilities as a blogger by declaring open threads. The circumstances are extenuating this time. That accounting exam won’t take itself.

Oh, and The World of Stuff’s birthday is on April 6. Happy almost birthday, The World of Stuff!

Crystal blue persuasion

I’ve been an avowed Firefox user since 2004, and I intend to stay that way. But I feel constant pressure from all sides to adopt or at least try out Google Chrome as my browser. Reasons for trying it include that it’s fast and that it’s by Google. That’s about it.

First of all, I don’t get all the Google idolatry. It’s just as bad as the hype surrounding Apple’s products. (These two companies could make the bubonic plague trendy and popular.) Within days of Chrome’s release, it had accumulated more users than Opera had managed to scrounge up in 12 years. No, I don’t have a citation for that, but I remember reading it somewhere. In any case, Chrome is now the third-most popular browser out there.

I also don’t like the user interface. It probably does make sense to have the tabs above the address bar, but they shouldn’t be where the title of the window is supposed to be. An application’s look and feel should be consistent with that of the operating system on which it runs; anything else is the result of either ignorance or sheer arrogance. Firefox can fit right in with GNOME and other Linux environments.

Google Chrome now supports extensions, a feature that Firefox users had been asking for. I depend on a lot of extensions (currently about 30) to make my browsing more convenient, and I doubt that most of them have been implemented for Chrome. In particular, NoScript, which no web surfer (has anyone said that in the past ten years?) should be without, cannot currently be made to work on Chrome.

Finally, there are privacy issues. I use Google for searching the web, but I don’t want to trust one company with that and my browser, e-mail, news, RSS feeds, documents, photos, videos, DNS service, operating system, cell phone, voicemail, web hosting, instant messaging, social networking, electricity, advertising, stats tracking, and Internet connection. And that’s just what I could think of off the top of my head. It’s just too much for one business to potentially know about me.

Advantages of Chrome over Firefox include faster JavaScript performance and keeping separate processes for separate tabs, but Firefox developers are working on those features.

TinyOgg converts Flash-based videos to the patent-free Ogg format.

For my fellow Beatles fanatics: Charting the Beatles, a series of infographics relating to the Beatles’ music and career. (Via J-Walk Blog)

More fun uses of Google’s search suggestions: What boyfriends and girlfriends search for on Google. (waxy.org)

What to say, what not to say

Yeah, so I’ve been pretty busy. I know, I tend to start a lot of posts with that, but it is true. Sometimes I actually have (gasp) homework.

But in between homework sessions, there’s this little thing called life, and things do happen to me. Some of them are interesting or even blogworthy. Those things often end up here in the blog. Often, but not always.

As I get older and more people I know are aware of my blog, I feel that there are more things I can’t say.

“What?!” you ask. “You just wrote a five-part series detailing every waking hour you spent with your special friend Kate. You kissed and told. You even mentioned that you cried.”

Okay, first of all, crying is okay sometimes, especially if it’s one’s party and one wants to. Second of all, more things happened than I mentioned in my blog posts, either because I momentarily forgot about them (for example, Kate and I played some eight-ball at the student union one day—I forget which day it was, but I remember the TVs were all tuned to sports channels, which were announcing the news of Lane Kiffin‘s move to USC) or because they just aren’t things I want to share with the world. You know?

You’ve probably heard about bloggers who got fired from their jobs because of something they said on their blog. It’s kind of like that as well. I don’t want to say anything that will make me look bad to potential employers (although I think I kind of have already, though I won’t link to any examples for obvious reasons), and once I get a full-time job, I probably won’t mention it very much as a precaution. It might also be very boring as well.

Also, have a look at the archives for September 2003, won’t you? There are a lot of minutiae in there. I don’t bother too much with the little things about my day anymore. Maybe they no longer interest me, but I think it’s mainly because I just tend toward longer, less frequent blog posts. I guess I prefer them that way because I want each of them to have a lot of substance. I want them to really be good reading.

What brought this about? My friend Andy recently mentioned in his new blog that he admired my “ability to censor [my]self enough so that [my] blog is not just random thoughts” but also “to be open enough so that [my] blog is interesting.” My initial reaction was: He doesn’t know the half of it! Boy, do I ever censor myself. I probably censor myself more than not… whatever that means. Or something like that.

What really brought this about was that last night I had a dream that one of my female friends was smooching me. I wanted to talk about it with someone to try to see what it meant, but how best to go about that? I certainly wouldn’t mention it to the girl herself. (Creep-a-leepy.) And, of course, I ruled out the blog as well. (Sort of.) I ended up talking about it with Andy.

There are many reasons for me not to mention certain things here, but if they’re really interesting, I try to remove any sensitive details (see the previous paragraph for an example). A pretty good story is better than none at all, and you deserve a good story.

Here’s a handy chart showing How the Health Care Overhaul Could Affect You. (Via Lifehacker)

The Bouba/Kiki effect suggests that people might not attach sounds to shapes arbitrarily. Interesting stuff.

Failure Magazine (yes, really) presents a three-part series: Quirkiest Basketball Failures, Parts One, Two, and Three. Related: quirky football injuries.

The endgame

It’s March, and that means it’s time to start picking classes for next fall. People who plan to take classes over the summer also pick them during this time. This year, I am one of those people.

If I’m going to graduate next spring as planned, I’ll have to take summer classes to catch up. That means I won’t be able to do America with my friends, but there are few other downsides. I would be home for the rest of the summer. That’s how I spent the summer of 2008. It was kind of boring.

The College of Engineering requires its students to meet with an advisor before registering for classes. So, on Thursday, I made the most important advising visit of my college career: the one in which all of my remaining questions would be answered. I had come with a long list of questions about the classes I would have to take in order to graduate, many of which are high-level electives. The advisor answered them with ease, and now I have a list of summer and fall classes to sign up for, as well as an idea of what my spring schedule will be like.

I had been hoping to take an elective called Programming Using C over the summer, but the advisor said it wouldn’t count toward my degree because I had taken too many programming language classes previously (two of them, both Java classes). It’s kind of a shame because I’d really like to learn what is probably the most widely used and influential programming language ever, especially since another class I’ll be taking over the summer sort of requires it. I guess I’ll just have to try to do it myself.

I’d also really like to take an elective called Unix System Administration, but they haven’t offered it recently and aren’t doing so in the foreseeable future. This sucks because I think I’ve finally decided What I Want To Be When I Grow Up™: a Unix system administrator.

For a long time, I wanted to be a programmer, but I wasn’t exactly raking in the necessary experience. I’ve never done any real programming, like in a big “open source” project. The thought overwhelms me; there’s so much I don’t know that it’s hard to get started. I have a class now where we’re starting to develop a program collaboratively, but I can hardly get interested in it since I have so little experience with anything (and because it’s a program I’ll never use in real life). It seems more like a nightmare than a fun challenge. My fun challenges are dinky little scripts I hammer out from time to time. I can’t get paid to write those.

There are also ideological roadblocks. I believe in the ideals of free software, which state that people are essentially free to do whatever they wish with their software. This idea isn’t extremely popular in the corporate world, and I doubt I could get paid to write such software or even maintain it (one of my professors says that everyone who starts out in the software business is tasked not with writing new programs but instead with being a “software archaeologist”).

Meanwhile, my webmaster job has opened me up to the world of system administration. I’m in charge of web sites, which reside on servers, which need care and feeding. Now, it’s not actually my job to make sure that the servers are secure and up to date, but I don’t think I’d mind doing it. The thought of being in charge of a network of computers at some organization—a virtual catcher in the rye, if you will—kind of fascinates me. The servers at work run FreeBSD, which is basically similar to Ubuntu, the OS I use on my own computer, so I know my way around. Those and many other Unix-like operating systems are free-as-in-freedom software, and they’re widely used on web servers everywhere.

Interestingly, it was the summer of 2008 when I wrote, “I’ve decided that working on software would be pretty cool…. I don’t want to be a sysadmin.” People change.

I think that’s enough for now. The point is that I’m planning to bring my college studies to an end and that I’m thinking about what I want to do after that. It feels good to have some sort of idea.

I haven’t tried these out, but they may be worthwhile: tips for Reducing Junk Mail.

Here are some interesting maps made out of NASA’s topographic data: Reading the World in Braille. As a topographic anomaly, the garbage dump near my house gets a shout-out.

Tons of vintage ads arranged by category and decade: Vintage Ad Browser. (Via Lifehacker)

The server post

Well, spring break is history, and now it’s back to the grind. I’ve been meaning to mention this for a while, so here goes.

The weekend after Kate left, I experienced a strange emotion called “boredom.” I was thinking about how I was starting to rely increasingly on my external hard drive, and I was also thinking about how my sister and I both use said hard drive for backups. I was the keeper of the drive, so I could make a backup whenever I wanted, but my sister could only make a backup when I brought the hard drive to her. She had made her last backup in August.

On a whim, I decided to see if I could set up an SSH server on my computer so my sister could access the hard drive from her apartment. I figured it would be pretty simple because we both use Unix-like operating systems (yes, Mac OS X and Ubuntu are cousins). I installed the openssh-server package, and that was that. (Ubuntu’s wiki page was a good introduction.)

I made some tweaks to improve security, such as using a non-standard port (I know, security through obscurity is bad, but not if you also have better security) and disabling password-based authentication in favor of key files. SSH uses public and private keys, similar to PGP in the scheme I’ve described previously. Essentially, in order to log in, you have to have a copy of a key file that has been approved by the owner of the server. Your key itself can be encrypted, with a password used to decrypt it. This is useful because my sister doesn’t have to know my password to log in; she just has to know the password for her key.

Since my IP address changes from time to time, I decided to give my server a name that would be consistent and easier to remember. I signed up for a free account at DynDNS.com and got a subdomain of the form example.dyndns.org. (I won’t say what it actually is. Security through obscurity…) Then I installed and configured the ddclient package, which contacts DynDNS periodically to say, “Hey, I’m at IP address such-and-such. Point example.dyndns.org to it.” So, essentially, the subdomain becomes a synonym for my computer.

I didn’t realize how arcane all this stuff was until I was on the phone with my sister trying to get her to log in. She’s not dumb; I just had a hard time explaining how Unix command-line applications work in one marathon session. (Try doing it over the phone as well.) After about an hour, she had a key and was backing up her stuff on the external hard drive on my desk. Since then, we’ve performed another backup successfully. I’ll describe the backup scheme in a future post.

But that’s not all an SSH server is good for. Port forwarding makes a lot of fun things possible! Since setting up the server, I’ve used my computer as a web proxy, which might come in handy sometime. I’ve also installed a VNC server so I can view and control my desktop from other computers. Ubuntu’s wiki has some handy information on how to set up things like that. I could also cover them in a future post if you’re really interested (I can tell you are!).

It’s worth noting that if you’re using key-based authentication on your server and you want to use PuTTY to connect to it, you’ll have to convert your private key to PuTTY’s format.

For today’s first link, I’d like to showcase my friend and roommate Andy’s new blog, Seek the Sooth. For you polyglots, Andy is also blogging in Esperanto and Spanish! I’m looking forward to reading your posts, Andy, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

I should start using this video to help explain why I’m afraid of Google. (Via The Presurfer)

I’m too young to remember some of these, but you might find the article interesting: The Twelve Most Tarnished Brands in Tech.

School’s out forever

Whenever I come home from college, I easily fall back into the social life I had before I left. It’s mostly based around St. Elizabeth of Hungary Catholic Church, which I attended from the ages of 4 to 16, and the associated St. Elizabeth-St. Joseph Catholic School, which I attended for much of that time. My parents still go to the church and are friends with some of the parishioners, many of whom they know as my classmates’ parents. I’ve been kept in the loop about what’s going on at the church and school.

On Tuesday night, I was at my friend’s house when his mom came with bad news. The pastor had just announced at a meeting that this year would be the last for St. Elizabeth-St. Joseph Catholic School. The school’s home page now has nothing but a link to a letter by the the pastor. He explains how the archdiocese can no longer afford to subsidize the school, and with enrollment down 70% since the 2003-04 year, the school will be about $1.3 million in debt when it closes its doors for the last time.

Even though I’m now a cranky atheist who complains about everything, I can’t help but get sentimental. I was a student at St. Elizabeth of Hungary (as the school was known until recently) from kindergarten through eighth grade—formative years indeed. Many of my friends, including most of the people I spend time with when I’m home and some others I see less often, were my classmates at St. E’s. I contributed to the school’s time capsule that was to be opened this year. I spoke at our graduation. And it wasn’t that long ago; I started this web site while I was a student there.

I’ve been trying to dig up some news articles to get some more insight about the closing. The archdiocese has an article that provides some context. A local news station’s article (with an unrelated stock photo) interviewed some students’ parents, including a Mr. Chaiken, who blamed the closing on the church’s previous pastor:

“The previous priest that was here got rid of a long-time, popular principal,” Chaiken said. “She was here 25 years or more, everything was running great.”

…except that she was using the school’s money for her own purposes.

This was a big controversy a few years ago. The then-pastor accused the then-principal of using the school’s money for her own purposes, but neither of them would show the public that they were right. Parishioners and parents were left to pick sides based on their own prejudices and suspicions. They tore each other apart. Basically, it was a massive farce all around that could have easily been prevented if everyone hadn’t been such an idiot.

Anyway, the pastor turned out to be right, and the principal (who had quit by then) apologized in writing. Apparently some people still have their heads up their asses and think she didn’t do anything wrong even though she admitted to it. I wonder how many other parishioners are still living in this fantasy world of Mr. Chaiken’s. I suspect that most of them have long since taken their worshiping elsewhere.

As you might imagine, the damage had been done. Over the next few years, more and more parents pulled their kids out of the school. Then the economy went kablooie, accelerating the trend until the school became a shadow of its former self. Now we have the end of St. Elizabeth’s. The school has coexisted with the church for 49 years; without it, the church will never be the same.

So, you see, my rosy memories have been tarnished a bit. I was saddened to find out that the financial scandal had become a nail in the school’s coffin, but I hope this teaches everyone a lesson: honesty is the best policy. Without openness, there is drama, which can only lead to bad things.

In slightly better news, an environmental project at my university is in the running to win $5,000, and you can help. They’re in second place right now. All you have to do is sign up and use your three votes to help put Neutral Gator ahead. Voting ends on Monday.

Pictures of old photos being held up in the locations where they were taken: Looking at the Past. (Via J-Walk Blog)

And finally, a list: 16 Anti-Theft Gadgets and Designs to Deter Thieves. Wait, Nick Cannon writes about this stuff? (Via Wise Bread)

This is different

The UF police department shot a student last week. I was immediately reminded of this, which happened during my first month as a student. As you hopefully don’t remember, I took part in the ensuing protests, which I soon realized was an idiotic thing to do. Since then I’ve been wary of appearing to stand up for crazy jerks or people who just happen to have done crazy, jerky things.

The Sun and the Alligator have provided an overview of last week’s incident. To make a long story short, the student had been threatening people and was getting violent, so the police shot him in the head with an assault rifle after other attempts to subdue him failed. I’m not going to pass judgment on this one for fear of coming up on the wrong side of public opinion. I just hope it gets resolved before it can tarnish the value of my yet-to-be-earned degree.

I went in for an eye exam on Monday. I had been scheduled for one over the summer, but I missed it due to my trip to Europe, so I was overdue. The last time I went, the doctor said I was slightly farsighted and wrote me a prescription for glasses in case I felt I would need them. I knew my vision could only get worse, so I wasn’t looking forward to this visit.

Imagine my surprise when the doctor said that my farsightedness had corrected itself. Apparently that’s possible at my age. Another crisis averted… for now.

For your viewing pleasure, here’s the archetypal Academy Award-Winning movie trailer. (Via waxy.org)

I had no idea that our governor was such a jerk. Here’s how Charlie Crist deals with atheists. (Via Pharyngula)

Enter a number, and Number Gossip will tell you some fun facts about it. (Via J-Walk Blog)

I don’t get e-mail

After spending the weekend at my grandparents’ house to celebrate my mom’s birthday, I am home. Waiting for me here was a package my friend Natasha sent me for Christmas. It came back to her when she sent it the first time, so she sent it again, and it arrived a couple of weeks ago. She got me some cool Vancouver 2010 swag (a sweater and a planner), some of her favorite pens, and some notebooks reppin’ her college. It’s too bad that they came so late, but I’m glad they didn’t get lost in the mail.

Speaking of things getting lost in the mail, my current e-mail setup is not working, and I’m tired of it.

My personal e-mail account is one that I’ve been using for about 10 years now. Last year (actually, two years ago… jeez, it seems like last year), I had e-mail forwarding set up at my web host so that I could have a permanent and easy-to-remember address at my own domain name. That’s all fine and good, but my e-mail provider’s spam filters often bounce messages back to my web host, where they’re kept in a “spam quarantine” for me to view and delete.

By not checking my spam quarantine religiously, I’ve missed out on correspondence from long-lost relatives, notifications from web sites, e-mail newsletters, plane ticket receipts that I needed to print out, and more. My e-mail provider thinks all of this is spam (probably in part because it’s been forwarded through another server), and I don’t have control over their spam filters… even though I’m paying $20 a year for their service. It’s time for change.

I’d like to switch to an e-mail provider that meets the following requirements:

• I must be able to use my domain name with their service.
• Spam filtering must be very accurate, or I must be able to fine-tune it (or turn it off altogether).
• Must be cheaper than my current e-mail and forwarding costs of about $27 per year.
• Must have a POP server. (I prefer it to IMAP. I know, I’m a weirdo.)
• Not Google. (They already know what I search for; that’s enough for them.)
• Not Microsoft. (I’m basically against everything they stand for.)
• Not my ISP. (I travel back and forth between home and school, ISPs get swallowed up by bigger ISPs, etc.)

I’ve come across a service that fits all of these requirements: it’s Lavabit, which I think I had previously heard of (it used to be called Nerdshack). It was founded as a reaction to Google including targeted advertisements in Gmail. Or, as they put it on their history page, they “felt it was possible to create an e-mail service that was fast, reliable, feature rich and didn’t achieve profitability by prostituting its user base to marketers.” Their freedom-loving, no-nonsense philosophy is similar to my web host’s. I like it.

Other perks are that they have an SMTP server; allow SSL connections to their POP, IMAP, and SMTP servers, as well as their webmail interface; and encrypt your e-mail on their servers if you have a paid account. I would have to have a paid account; they said I would have to have a $16/year personal account or a business account if I wanted to use my own domain name with their service. It’s more than I’d like to pay, but it’s less than I’m paying now.

I’ve been researching them online, and there are some criticisms of their service. Some people claimed that their support was limited. I can live with that, I guess. I think the benefits outweigh the costs. Has anyone else used their service? I’d be interested in hearing what people think. Unless somebody has a better suggestion, I’ll probably sign up with Lavabit in a few days.

What do blind people see? The answer is more complicated than you might think, and there’s hope for people with certain types of blindness. (Via The Presurfer)

In the past, I’ve considered using Amazon’s online music store, but their downloader (which is required to get discounts on buying whole albums) is not free software. Now there’s pymazon, a free replacement, so I might reconsider.

Back in the day, Soviet scientists tried to domesticate foxes. After 10 generations, the foxes were not only completely docile but also had colorings not seen in the wild. Humans may have domesticated dogs just as quickly.

Freein’ them PCs

This week, I helped install antivirus and free software for students as part of Florida Free Culture‘s semiannual Free Your PC event. We got an unusual amount of journalistic attention and, despite that, an unusually low turnout.

We usually pick three consecutive days for Free Your PC, but there was a scheduling conflict, so we picked Monday, Tuesday, and today. On Tuesday, a guy who I think was from the Alligator asked Mark and me some questions about our club and what we were doing. (They haven’t published an article about us, but if they do, it will probably be tomorrow.) Today, my friend Roxy, a journalism student, came to interview some of our members for an assignment, and I think at least one other journalism student did as well.

Also, both Tuesday and today, a photographer from the university’s news bureau, which I had never heard of, came around to take lots of pictures of us helping out with people’s computers. He said that one of his photos would end up on their web site with an informative caption. He was also interested in the club; he spent some time checking out our swag and asking questions. And, sure enough, I’m in today’s photo of the day.

The first day is always the slowest because that’s when people see the event going on and make a mental note to bring their computers the next day. On Monday, I think we maybe got one person during the four hours that we were out there. Tuesday was better. I expected us to be slammed on Thursday due to that article that hasn’t been published yet, but it hadn’t been published yet. Also, it was very cold today, and it’s almost spring break. That could be why not as many people came out.

For this Free Your PC, I continued a tradition that I started last semester by making a CD of some of my favorite Creative Commons-licensed music. I think I burned 12 or 14 discs, and we gave out most of them. In case you’re interested, here are the track listings and download links for both CDs.

Well, it’s almost spring break. I’ll be home soon, and then I get a week to max ‘n’ relax.

Really amazing statistics in video form: The State of the Internet. (Via Lifehacker)

The New York Times has an article on how Restaurants Use Menu Psychology to Entice Diners Trick You Into Buying Tons of Crap Food That You Otherwise Wouldn’t Want. (Via Lifehacker)

Finally, more statistics and a vaguely spring-break-themed link: it’s an infographic that’s basically about how dumb we college students all are and how much money we’re wasting going to college.