Monotonous.org

When Google isn’t alienating us by pushing social experiments down our throats, and doing evil, they are often awesome. Nevertheless, I started thinking this month how I will take my Google Apps domain and start hosting it myself: mail, chat, calendar, contacts, etc.

Today they integrated Google Voice with Google Talk in GMail. I still don’t know how they are doing it, are they connecting to PSTN through XMPP? In any case, I feel all excited and giggly about it. Maybe I will keep my Google Apps account after all..

It’s always been another one of my personal technological gaps. How do I travel and remain reachable on my US number? I could spend months on end in Israel, and it’s always nice to have seamless access to my US number and voice mail. SIM cards are so cheap abroad, the phone numbers assigned to them are arbitrary, I should be able to punch them in to Google Voice and just have people reach me with my usual number (this feature is yet to come). In short, unify and clean up the mess that is telephony and voice mail. Hopefully, if all this magic is through XMPP, we will have sexy integration in Empathy as well.

So at this point, not only has this delayed my disengagement from Google, it has brought me a step closer to getting an Android phone (Apple, stay classy and ignore Google Voice).

This isn’t conclusive, I don’t welcome our new overlords with open hands. My trust is being eroded with age, I just need to hear another horror story about political repression or Google evil doing to decide on personally hosting encrypted everything. Even if it means I will have to spend a few years of my life setting up Asterisk.

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This might already exist, and I might just be uninformed. When I look for a backup tool that will do what I need, usually I get a scoff in the form of “rsync, dummy”. My computing equipment typically consists of a laptop that I use everywhere, and sometimes even at home, a headless computer at home that I use mostly for music and movies (with a projector), and several external hard drives with varying capacities.

These are my requirements for an awesome backup solution:

• When I connect to my home wireless network I want it to automatically start syncing and backing up data to the headless computer.
• I don’t want it to saturate the network or be too taxing on disk I/O, so that regular computing tasks could be resumed unhindered.
• I want it to be resumable, so if I leave the house while it was syncing some huge file, it will just continue where it left off when I get back home.
• A visual status indication of whether a sync is taking place. A way to pause it.
• I want it to have 3 different kinds of backup modes for 3 different types of data:

Home folder

Snapshot based backups, that allows me to easily roll back and view previous revisions of my home directory.

Media

Accumulative backup. See what new music, photos or videos I have on my laptop, and copy them to the backup storage. This mode never deletes media that existed in previous syncs. I should be able to download or create new media, and have it stored on the high capacity storage at home, and only carry with me the media that I am currently consuming (I really don’t want to clutter my laptop disk with The Godfather trilogy, but I might want to take it with me on a flight).

Virtual machines

I usually have a small collection of virtual machines on my laptop. They are by far the largest single type of data I have on my machine. Since they support virtual disk snapshots natively, I don’t really care for revisioning like the home folder, virtual machine disks could clobber older versions of themselves on the backup storage.

There are countless backup solutions (read: rsync wrappers) out there. Do any of them answer those needs in a user-friendly way?

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Off to GUADEC tomorrow! I feel relatively prepared, I shaved and packed 4 US-Europe plug adapters. If you forgot yours, don’t buy one, you could borrow.

I also prepared my talk. You should come, it’s on Wednesday at 11:15 AM in the Seville room. It’s going to be extremely nontechnical, but I hope you could follow. I don’t think a single acronym will be mentioned, although I don’t hold me to that. We will be discussing the software development process, design, things we take for granted every day, and door knobs.

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Do you know how sometimes there is something old at the back of your fridge that you are scared to take out because it probably smells super bad? And you know how it doesn’t get any better with time as you think “if it wasn’t nasty last month, it has to be nasty now!”.

That is sometimes how I feel about my blog, if last month I didn’t blog in a long time, today I didn’t blog in a really really long time! So I am probably officially not a blogger any more.

I still owe some obligatory posts, specifically about my day job, and about the fact that  and giving a prez there.

But now let’s talk about my new toy. Did I need it? Probably not. My T400 is a portable workstation that gives me everything I need. But every 2 years or so I decide to splurge on a new machine, and I am happy to say that I have become increasingly satisfied with my choices each time. My T400 refuses to die or become obsolete, it’s black unimpressive looks doesn’t allow it to get stolen. But it’s been 2 years!

I have been looking at the Thinkpad X series for a while, and debating whether the X201 was ergonomically large enough for full days of work. The X300/X301, priced north of 3k, always seemed obscenely expensive, but I was curious what made it so (is it the whale penis leather exterior?). It’s been lauded as Lenovo’s answer to the Macbook Air, but I have seen those in reality, they looked paper thin. The X301 does not look as miraculous, not even in the sales photos.

One day, while reading the interblogs, I came across a $1,700 discount for the X301. I impulsively clicked “checkout” (after clicking “add 2 year warranty” and “add to basket”). Then came my favorite part about ordering a Thinkpad: the weeks long wait for them to assemble it, ship it, get through customs, and hoping the UPS does not lose it in the back of a truck in rural Wisconsin. After this period, you are sure that the UPS guy is going to deliver pure joy to your doorstep, as this photo suggests:

It’s a pretty nice machine, everything I liked about my T400 in a reduced package. Large enough to work on, but extremely light. Is it worth the $3,000 price tag? No. $1,300? Yes.

My favorite feature is not the 128 GB solid state drive, it’s the fact that the earphone jack is on the side, and not in front like in the T400. The front jack just didn’t work for me, it was super awkward.

My biggest disappointed has been the fingerprint reader. It does not work on Linux, what’s up with that? Are we in 1995? I really looked forward to unlocking my GNOME key ring with my middle finger, that would be so cool.

OK, enough with this guilty materialistic blogging. Next post will either be about my upcoming GUADEC talk about universal design, my fun happy times working on Telepathy and friends, or Israel’s rapid decline from nationalist chauvinism to overt fascism.

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Haven’t blogged in a while. Sorry?

GUADEC 2010

I am going! And more importantly I am presenting. The title is Accessible by Universal Design: Why I love The iPhone. Did I provoke you yet? Hope so. In this talk I will show how smug designers with their high sense of aesthetic could be even better (and smugger). I am not racist, some of my best friends are designers.

Caribou

It will be in GNOME 3.0. I recently took over maintainership, which basically means cutting releases, making sure it’s translatable, accessible, packageable, and generally keeping up with the GNOME schedule. There seems to be a good amount of people interested in it, and there is even official funding for it in Spain, so we will be getting some good contributions in the near future.

iPhone Application

I have one in the app store. Before you accuse me of being a sellout and an Apple fanboy, let me just say that it was an interesting experience, and my motivation was mostly writing for something that everybody has (and it’s a real thrill). Took the better part of two weekends, Jenny and I are unveiling it in Megapolis in Baltimore this weekend, if you are in the area you should download it and give it a try. Future versions should have a lot more user-submitted content and work in other areas around the world. Maybe a Maemo and Android version too…

Work

It’s fun and interesting, hope to give an update on that once I actually have something to show.

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