The Power of Ideas

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The human mind is fascinating, for many reasons. Here’s just one example.

Until a few weeks ago, I thought that my purpose in life was eliminating problems. It went hand-in-hand with the idea of kaizen (as mentioned earlier on this blog). It’s not something I consciously thought about; it simply developed over the years, because that’s what I was doing every day, both in my current professional life as a software developer and in my previous one as an electronics technician.

That’s fine as far as it goes. There is a long and distinguished history of people who have spent their lives eliminating problems, and I felt honored to be part of that tradition. It gave my life meaning. While I was working on Project Badger, even if the problems I was solving only helped a few thousand people, they were problems that those people didn’t have the time, knowledge, and experience to solve on their own. I was contributing in a way that no one else could, and that felt good.

But there were two subtle and unrecognized flaws in that purpose. The first was simple enough, and obvious in retrospect: a lot of problems can’t be eliminated. They can only be dealt with individually, each time they come up. That’s a perpetual irritation to someone who practices the kaizen model of thinking.

The second was that I’m a completionist. I don’t consider something done until it’s all done. That’s a good thing in general, but when I’d subconsciously compare the number of problems that I’ve eliminated in my life with the total number of problems out there and see no appreciable progress, I’d feel depressed.

These two flaws might seem insignificant, and they really were once I realized them. But subconscious attitudes that have built up over a lifetime aren’t that easy to drag out where they can be dealt with — it took someone else pointing them out before I could see them at all.

Not coincidentally, that article also provided the seeds of a solution to them both. It was a simple mental adjustment: instead of eliminating (all) problems, my purpose was to deal with problems. I’m still free to practice kaizen and eliminate any problem where that’s possible, but if a problem can’t be eliminated, I’m allowed to deal with it without getting irritated that it can’t. And I now that I consciously see that I’m not supposed to solve all of the world’s problems, I don’t look for progress in that direction, and its lack doesn’t depress me.

Such a minor alteration, to such a small and simple thought — but it changes everything.

That’s why I say that the human mind is fascinating. That’s also why I consider having one to be so frustrating. But I guess it’s better than the alternative. 😉

“Are you ready for a wrist-mounted computer?”

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I don’t know whether this kind of thing will ever catch on. It’s neat and useful, and I’d buy it in a heartbeat — but so are dome houses, and most people look at them and say “that’s weird, Martha.” They might be a stepping-stone between today’s separate devices and neural-interface computers, but there would need to be a compelling reason to make them fashionable enough for your average person to wear one.

Ubuntu 9.04 Even Better

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I was all braced for a Herculean effort to get Ubuntu 9.04 working on my system, earlier this week, but as mentioned, I was disappointed: the upgrade worked almost flawlessly. But I did have one remaining problem with it (other than the encrypted home directory problem), and I was concerned by all the “cruft” that had accumulated from my various experiments in the last couple years, so I decided to do a full reinstall to clean it all out.

The gnucash package installed without a single problem this time. The system also starts up much faster now — the reinstall trimmed another (!) ten to fifteen seconds off of the boot time. The fresh install also gave me the new themes, which the upgrade didn’t, so it sports a new look now.

All in all, I’m even happier with this version than I was originally. 🙂

Vanity Surfing

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I just did a Google-search on my own name for the first time. Wow.

I have a fairly common last name, but a pretty rare first name — I’ve only met one other person with the same first name in my life — so I didn’t expect very many results. And in the grand scheme of things, I suppose that 50,800 hits isn’t really that many, but it was something of a surprise anyway.

I was happy to see that I ranked #7 on the first page of entries. Or rather, Project Badger does, which is curious because my name isn’t anywhere on its page, and I haven’t been publicly associated with the project for several years.

Out of curiosity, I went through the first 100 entries, and discovered people with my name in many different professions:

  • photographer
  • artist
  • lawyer
  • singer/songwriter
  • magician
  • dentist
  • marathon runner
  • physical therapist
  • martial artist
  • college basketball player
  • pastor
  • physical therapist
  • high-school football player
  • chiropractor
  • “senior technical account manager”
  • bowling champion
  • scientist

The magician had the most hits, apparently because he released a video that has a teaser on YouTube and a number of “torrents” (presumably of pirated copies).

I’ll have to take another look after I finish Project X, and see if that changes anything. 🙂

Ubuntu 9.04: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

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On Sunday evening, after a hard day’s work on Project X, I decided to poke around the Ubuntu web site a bit.

The new version wasn’t scheduled for release for another half-week, and I knew from experience that I wouldn’t be able to download it for several days after that, due to web site congestion. Last time, I tried to get it via the BitTorrent method, but apparently my ISP throttles torrents very heavily; it succeeded, but it took close to 24 hours to get the whole thing. I had some idea that grabbing a pre-release version instead might speed things up.

On the Ubuntu 9.04 page, I saw an interesting note: people with 8.10 already installed could use the update-manager -d command to upgrade. I figured that it was preliminary documentation that wouldn’t work until after the release, but I tried it anyway. Lo and behold, it worked! I closed the files I had open, made a quick backup, then let it rip. After about half an hour of downloading (at much higher speeds than I usually see), and 45 minutes of mumbling to itself, the system rebooted and it was ready!

Sort of.

I have a love/hate relationship with upgrades of any sort. I love to see what improvements have been made, but every upgrade (of anything) inevitably causes some kind of problem that I have to find a way to fix. This one was no exception.

9.04 shaved a good third off of the time it takes to boot this machine into Linux, from a minute and five seconds down to something like 43 seconds. The chronic (though visual-only) problems that plagued the title bars of windows, where they would get screwy colors or vanish altogether until I moved the mouse over them, seems to be gone. The new notification stuff is nicer too. But my encrypted home directory would no longer mount.

Irritating, but not completely unexpected — it had happened on previous upgrades, and 9.04 is supposed to have built-in encryption for the home directory that would obviate my work-arounds.

Except that it doesn’t. That was apparently removed late in the alphas, due to problems that people had encountered with it.

Well, no big deal, I can just set up the same system I had on 8.10 and earlier versions, using dm-crypt, right?

Wrong. For reasons I don’t understand, that method no longer works. I spent several hours trying to figure out what was going wrong, to no avail.

So what now? I could just use an unencrypted home directory like everybody else, but if the laptop ever got stolen, all my data would be available to the thief — unacceptable. Or I could set up a TrueCrypt-encrypted partition for my critical data and move everything else to the (now-unencrypted) home directory, but that would be inconvenient because I’d have to manually re-mount the drive after each reboot… not too high a price to pay for the boot-speed and other improvements, but I’d prefer a more automated solution. So I went hunting for a third option.

It seems that the encrypted home directory stuff that 9.04 was supposed to provide is based on a system called eCryptfs. I hadn’t heard of that one before; last time I took a serious look at encryption technology in Linux, Loop-AES was just giving way to dm-crypt.

eCryptfs seems to be superior to both of those. This page describes how to use it in detail, and it’s far simpler to set up than the dm-crypt solution I was using previously. The only bad part is that it doesn’t (presently) encrypt the home directory itself; instead it creates a Private directory under your existing home directory. Any data you want to have encrypted has to be stored in this Private directory (though through the magic of soft-links, it’s easy to make it look like it’s wherever you need it to be). I spent some time moving all my important data into the Private directory and making links, then tested it out every way I could think to… and it worked!

So, despite the rocky start, things seem to be working fine now. Unless something else comes up, I’m happy with this version.

UPDATE

I’ve discovered why the encrypted home directory was dropped from this version of Ubuntu, and it’s not due to problems. From this page…

[…] also changed in the Ubiquity installer is the home encryption support, which has been removed unless you pre-seed the option to Ubiquity. This option has been temporarily dropped since there is no encrypted SWAP support, which reduces the security benefit of an encrypted home directory.

In other words, it’s still there, but not immediately visible. Once they build in an encrypted swap system, it’ll be back.

(I don’t use a swap partition at all, since I’ve got 4GB of memory on this system, so that doesn’t affect me.)

“Can the Internet change your brain?”

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Whenever I see unproven fear-based reports like this one, I’m reminded of all the fear-inducing reports in my childhood. Comic books were warping our fragile little minds, so when I was six, my mother threw away a huge collection of Bugs Bunny comic books that I’d been given by our neighbors before I could read more than a handful of them (they were Bugs Bunny, fer cryin’ out loud!). Thankfully she was wise enough to ignore the later panics about TV, Dungeons & Dragons, Atari video games, and who knows what else.

So far as I know, all of those turned out to be bogus, with no more reality to them than the bogeyman. And some of them turned out to actually be backwards — video games have now been shown to improve a child’s mind in many ways. I suspect this one will eventually prove to be in the same category, though it will likely be twenty more years before anyone gets around to it.