Geek Drivel

So much for the “you can’t prove evolution because no one can see it happen” argument.

This outburst makes me ashamed that I was born in Illinois. Obviously there are some people who still think “freedom of religion” only means that “everyone is free to practice my religion.”

I stumbled over an interesting article, from a couple years ago, on passwords. The most interesting part, to me, was a pair of statements buried in the text:

*Cuss words were very popular. Boy, there’s a lot of aggression out there.

*I was surprised about how many Christian-sounding — for example, “Ilovejesus” — log-on names were associated with the worst cuss words.

Just a thought, but if you’re really trying to live a clean life, try using a random password generator/database instead, or learn ways to remember random passwords.

We were on the road today, and stopped for breakfast/lunch. I got an apple juice, and was bemused to notice that the label claimed that it had a “new and improved taste!” Funny, it tasted just like apple juice to me.

I decided to try Firefox 3 today, because Firefox 2 takes well over five seconds to load on my new Eee system. Not a big deal most of the time, but when I’m scanning RSS news articles in Thunderbird and keep seeing articles I want to read, a five second delay for each one gets old pretty quickly.

My only concern was that some of my extensions probably wouldn’t work with it. I don’t use that many, but over the years I’ve collected ten that I keep active most of the time. Of those, NoScript and Secure Login are the only ones that I won’t live without. To make a long story short, it turns out that five of my extensions are already set up to work with it, including those two, so that’s not a problem.

As was promised, it’s faster loading — about 20% faster initially (less than four seconds on the Eee), and near-instantaneous when starting later instances while the original one is still active. But there are a lot of other nice little features that I’ve discovered in it. The full-screen mode has a larger usable area. It’s much more readable when you shrink the text — I can reduce it quite a bit and still read it easily. The security warnings are much more noticeable, and can be turned off on a per-site basis (like the ZFS-FUSE bug-reporting page, it doesn’t recognize the certificate issuer at present), and there are several other minor changes that I don’t presently recall (as well as the Easter egg in it).

All in all, I like it.

This was apparently an April Fool’s joke that I just saw for the first time. After I stopped laughing, I started thinking… it actually sounds like a good idea, at least to a point.

Just an interesting science article.

I was recently discussing the state of computers with a friend, and it occurred to me that there’s no obvious business case for Apple to make their Safari browser available for Windows.

It makes sense for them to have their own browser for the Mac, so that they’re not at the mercy of any other company for one, but what does a free browser for a competing OS get them — especially when essentially all the competition is free too? I don’t see the business sense behind it. They can’t hope to gain enough market share to become a de facto standard, which is the only way I see that they could gain any strategic advantage from it (as Microsoft did after they killed off Netscape).

“Curiouser and curiouser…”

Well, I’ve had this thing for four days now, and I’ve finally gotten it set up the way I wanted it.

The first thing I wanted to do was replace the Xandros Linux on it with Ubuntu, both because I wanted the same set of programs available to me as on my larger systems, and because the customized Xandros system was fairly limited. That proved to be easy to do, thanks to earlier Eee users with the same idea.

But even before I did that, I wanted to expand the RAM in the system, so that I wouldn’t have to use a swap-file (this is a flash-memory-based system, a swap file would eat through the internal flash memory card’s limited lifetime of writes far too quickly, as well as being a security hole). A little research showed that it could take a single 2GB memory module, and the specs for it, and a local electronics store supplied the module. (I probably paid more than I needed to for it, but not by too much). With the extra RAM, I was also able to put all of the OS’s temporary and log files in a RAM-disk instead of on the internal flash drive. It means that my log files are erased every time I reboot, but that’s a small price to pay.

The installation of the OS and several of my most-often-needed programs took up about 70% of my internal 4GB flash drive, leaving me a little over a gigabyte for personal data. Nowhere near enough space (at its most pared-down, my data measured 1.5GB), but I didn’t want to use the internal flash for personal and often-changing data anyway — not only would it eat through flash-memory lifetime, but I couldn’t easily move the data to my main system when I needed the extra processing power. Fortunately, the Eee supports SDHC memory cards (a newer type of SD memory card that can handle capacities greater than 2GB), so I picked up an ultra-fast 4GB one.

Then came the “interesting” part.

I absolutely must store some of my data in an encrypted form, especially on portable systems. I also must have maximum reliability, at least to the point of knowing immediately if any data is corrupted, which to me means using Sun’s Zettabyte File System (ZFS) — arguably the most advanced file system available to date, and unarguably the most advanced one available on Linux. But ZFS doesn’t support encryption (yet), so I had to do some experimenting.

In the end, I figured out a way to have TrueCrypt encrypt the entire card, and create a ZFS pool on the encrypted device. It wasn’t that difficult, but as it turns out, that was only part of the answer: I couldn’t mount the ZFS device as my home directory, for various reasons, so I ended up just moving a small number of data directories to it (including my ~/.mozilla and ~/.mozilla-thunderbird directories) and (re-)creating symlinks to them in the same script where I mount the encrypted device and import the ZFS pool.

It’s not perfect. The Eee turns off power to the SD card slot when it goes into suspend mode, force-disconnecting the encrypted drive, so I have to manually unmount it before letting the system sleep. But it’s a small price to pay for the multiple layers of security (from theft or loss, from silent data corruption, etcetera) that it gives me though.

Now I can get back to my work.

Interesting… Joel Spolsky (of Joel on Software fame) and Jeff Atwood (of the Coding Horror programming blog) are getting together to create a free programming Q&A site. Having done my fair share of Internet research on programming topics, I think it’s an excellent idea.

Here’s Joel’s announcement, and here’s Jeff’s.