bobpeers -> blog

I haven’t really embraced the whole data in the ‘cloud’ idea for a few reasons. Not least because:

• I don’t trust most companies to securely look after my data
• Even if I do trust them how can I be sure they won’t go bust and suddenly disappear with all my data

There is one area where I’ve ditched storing data locally and that’s email. I used to use Thunderbird to sync to my Fastmail account using IMAP but there’s a few reasons why I’ve ditched Thunderbird. Some are related to Thunderbird itself and some to my email provider.

• Thunderbird development seems to have stagnated, if you search for Thunderbird 3 on Google you find lots of questions asking what’s the release schedule with no firm answer
• It seems very heavy on system resources and performs sluggishly on my laptop. Everyone likes new features but not at the expense of performance and memory usage.
• It’s hard to justify running an entire application just for the purpose of reading my email
• I’ve been with my email provider for many years and trust them to look after my data
• The web interface provides more functionality that Thunderbird ever did. Improvements in web programming using JavaScrpt and AJAX have led to fast, functional sites
• In line with the above, the new browsers (Firefox 3, Google Chrome, Opera and to some extent Internet Explorer 8) have a vastly improved JavaScript performance making the interface very responsive

Having said that I’m still slightly nervous about only having an online copy of anything so maybe I should use something like IMAPsize to backup my data.

One of the great things about Linux is the sheer variety. Some are great for servers, some for netbooks and some are just there to fix problems.

A Windows computer I use recently died in a big way, it booted and seemed to be starting but then died with the infamous blue screen saying something about ‘Cannot boot from the disk’. Not having the original CD with me I was in a bit of a jam to fix it just from Windows.

Fortunately I have SystemRescueCd on a disc so I booted the computer from the CD to see what I could do.

I decided to start the X server (typing wizard to start) as I’ve never used it before so decided it might be easier with a GUI. A few seconds later I had a fast, responsive XFCE desktop with a bunch of tools to try. First up I used TestDisk to rewrite the mbr followed by GParted to rewrite the partition table.

Unfortunately none of this actually got the computer to start Windows so I decided it was time to replace the computer but not before I copied the important documents off the hard drive.

Back into Linux and I soon mounted the hard drive and inserted and mounted a flash drive. In no time I had found all the files and copied them off to the flash drive ready to copy over to the replacement computer.

Linux may not have fixed the underlying problem but at least it enabled me to get at the hard drive so I could copy off any files I wanted (while conveniently ignoring windows file permissions as a bonus!). It’s at times like this that I’m glad to have a bootable CD with me, or even better a bootable flash drive that will be my next test.

Yesterday my girlfriend was complaining that she wasn’t receiving mail from one of her friends, both of them use Hotmail and send many mails to each other so I couldn’t see a good reason for this.

On checking the ‘Blocked Senders’ (Options > Safe and blocked senders > Blocked senders) list in her account, sure enough I found that her friends address had somehow been added to the list. I simply removed the entry and, hey presto, problem gone.

It was only then that I realised that the ‘Delete’ and ‘Junk’ buttons are right next to each other and so it’s very easy to click the wrong one.

Plus there’s no warning when you click ‘Junk’ so it’s hard to know you’ve clicked the wrong button. Ideally they should be placed further apart to make this action harder to do by mistake.

After my many problems with my wireless router I can now see that my connection has stabilised. Using speedtest.net I can see that my download and upload bandwidths are now about 50Mb/s all the time now.

I should point out that my Internet connection has always been 50Mb/s and that has never been a problem but these chars prove that my wirelss connection is now not the bottleneck it once was as I’m saturating my bandwidth even over a wireless connection.

Here the download chart.

and the upload chart.

It seems everyone has an opinion on the Google Chrome OS announcement (me included!). In the past week I must have read 30-40 different articles or blogs on the subject.

Opinion seems very divided on whether it’s a serious threat to Microsoft Windows, no threat, or rather ironically, a threat to Linux.

I see it like this.

1. Google will have a very hard time getting any market share if they only look at netbooks. Of course I’d be naive to think that they don’t intend to attack the desktop at some point.
2. It will be even harder to get any traction on the desktop. Most people still expect to download some .exe file and just install it. The familiarity and enormous installed user base of Windows is a major hurdle to overcome.
3. If it’s locked down to work with Google Apps then am I any better off then being locked into Apple or Windows environments.
4. As for the comments that it further splits the Linux community I can’t really see the problem. I view diversity in the Linux world as a good thing and any work done by Google on instant-on system will undoubtedly feed through to the wider Linux ecosystem.
5. At the end of the day Google were forced into this position. They must know that who controls the desktop also controls (or heavily influences) the online world. Microsoft constantly try to make our online experience a Microsoft-only one by changing the default browser without asking and search to Live Search (or Bing). There’s no way Google can rely on a future where visitors are fed to their apps using Microsoft tools.

Despite the obstacles, from a purely technical point of view, I’m looking forward to see what they come up with. Google have masses of smart people and if they can make a full OS boot and connect to a network in, say 5 seconds, I for one will be very impressed.

It could just be me but I’m having lots of problem using Virtualbox 3 that was released on June 30th.

I already had Fedora 11 installed in a virtual machine but upon upgrading to Virtualbox 3 I could no longer boot then machine. It took about 5 attempts to reinstall fresh machine with various errors about my laptop not having the VT-x hardware virtualization support (not true), random freezes and some problem related to ext4 as shown here in this screenshot.

I’ve also tried to install Mandriva LinuxOne 2009.1. This seemed to install OK but upon rebooting it tried to check for updates and then just hung finally. After a hard reset it gave this error but at least all seems to OK now.

As I said I could just be unlucky but if this continues I’ll have to go back to an older version and wait until the problems are ironed out.