Charles Curley's Weblog

A few changes to the gnome-gps program article. The substantive changes are:

• Better handling when the GPS receiver going AWOL, say from the user unplugging it.
• More and better error messages in the progress bar.

Wednesday I mentioned Dan Gillmor's observation about Apple's "centrally controlled computing ecosystem". Of course, Apple isn't the first to do this sort of thing. Microsoft wants to know when you swap out a motherboard, which is none of their business. Amazon has shown that it can yank books from the Kindle, by — ironically — yanking copies of 1984 and Animal Farm. Techno-illiterate and chair of the Senate Homeland Security committee Joe Lieberman wants to install a "kill switch" on the Internet. Oh, and create a new bureaucracy for his committee to oversee budgets and appointments.

Now Google joins the parade. It appears Google has built the ability to yank an application into its telephone OS, Android.

But Android is based on Linux. How long before someone writes a "kill switch killer"? And if someone did, would you put it on your phone?

Mac, no; Linux yes. (Wikipedia via Salon)

There are any number of arguments one can make for Linux. Technical superiority. Security. etc. But there is a much deeper one, which Slate's Dan Gillmor articulates as follows:

Apple is pushing computer users as fast as it can toward a centrally controlled computing ecosystem where it makes all the decisions about what native applications may be used on the devices it sells -- and takes a cut of every dollar that is spent inside that ecosystem. This is a direct repudiation of its own history, and more broadly that of the larger personal-computing ecosystem, where no one can stop anyone else from writing and distributing software that other people might want to use.

Steve Jobs says Apple is a curator, nothing more. This grossly understates the control. Jobs says Apple has "made mistakes" in being the police, judge, jury and executioner in its Disney-style world, and is working hard to perfect the system.

But this is a disconnect with reality. Central control, no matter how well-intentioned, is itself the problem, not the solution. The "enlightened dictator" is fiction. And dangerous.

"[A] direct repudiation of its own history…", indeed. Recall that the Apple II was an open system. The peripheral connectors were documented. The OS was well documented. Anyone could and did write software for the thing. Your correspondent ported Forth to it. Apple competed with S-100 bus computers, which were, if anything, even more open. What killed both of them off was time, technological growth, and the IBM PC, another very open product.

The first Macs were closed boxes. No expansion slots, and no choice in operating systems. The IBM PC competed rings around it, which Apple effectively admitted when they added NuBus expansion slots and later went to Intel's PCI bus.

The PC was so open that IBM lost control of the thing, and smaller, nimbler, more innovative companies out-competed IBM in a market IBM created. IBM's attempt at a command-and-control ecology, the PS2, failed so miserably that you can be forgiven for thinking that "PS2" stands for "Play Station 2".

It will be interesting to follow Mr. Gillmor's adventures. But I wonder if he will apply the lesson more broadly, from computer and software markets to whole economies.

Vuvuzela 2010 Logo.

Well, another contender for the coveted tile of "World's Most Useless Software Product". I've already describe the North Korean "Red Star" operating system as a major contender.

Comes now the Vuvuzela 2010 application for the iPhone, by maal4.nl. It puts the raucous sound of the plastic horn onto your iPhone, iPod or iPad. Just what you needed to annoy the <BLAT> out of everyone for several cubicles around.

The app cranks out about 90 decibels, compared to as much as 127 for the real thing. "But you can always hook your iPhone up to an amplifier," says co-designer Lyan van Furth, ever so helpfully.

Users grabbed only a few thousand copies before World Cup play started in South Africa. Since then, downloads have shot into the millions. And world fame has found the developers. Who may come to wish it hadn't.

Meanwhile, support for banning the vuvuzela at the World Cup is running more than nine to one.

This app is so mind-bogglingly stupid that maybe it will get iPhones banned. In which case it won't be such a useless product, will it?

I have just had an instructive exercise in disaster recovery involving Amanda.

I have been using amanda to back up, first to tape, now to virtual tape (hard drive), for years, and offsite backups for several years. However, I was running out of room on my main backup drive, a USB external drive. So I ordered three new one terabyte Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex drives, one for my main backup drive, and the other two for offsite use.

I like the drives. Being 2½" drives, they are powered from the host USB port. So no external power supply. They also fit in one's pocket, which makes it easy to transport them to one's offsite location. I also like the fact that they are SATA drives with adapters for various other interfaces, in this case USB. Should I ever want a faster interface, I can get an adapter cable (assuming Seagate still offers them…).

So far, so good. Unfortunately the main backup drive started going south five days ago. I tried various tricks to get it to straighten out and fly right, but to no avail. Today I finally gave up on it. It died during this morning's backups, leaving 12 GB on the holding disk. I have an unused 30 GB partition on each of the three new drives; I couldn't even fsck that.

I put the old main drive back in service. This involved creating a symlink called /media/backs to point to the real backup drive. That done, the actual drive in service is transparent to the offsite backup script. That completes the process I had begun with the symlink /media/offsite for the two (now four) offsite drives.

I had put the new main backup drive into service only a few days ago. So I had several days worth of backups on the offsite drives that weren't on the old main backup drive. I was able to copy those from the current offsite drive, e.g.:

cd /media/backs/amanda/DailySet1
cp -rp /media/offsite/myob/amanda/DailySet1/info .
cp -rp /media/offsite/myob/amanda/DailySet1/data .
for i in $(seq 1 4) ; do echo $i ; rm slot$i/* ; done
for i in $(seq 1 4) ; do echo $i ; cp -rp /media/offsite/myob/amanda/DailySet1/slot${i}/* slot${i} ; done

That done, several checks indicate that things are OK, including running amverify and amcheck. Now for the acid test: can I run amflush successfully?

This morning's backups were to slot 5. I should have checked: the tape status file, tapelist, had slot 5 marked as used before I ran amflush. I should have marked it as unused and recycled it. So for one complete dump cycle slot 5 will have old useless data in it. No great loss.

This morning's backup failed while writing a total backup to the virtual tape. Was all of that saved and successfully copied from the holding disk to the replacement virtual tape? The amflush report indicates that all of the dumps were successfully sent to tape, and amrecover was able to pull the complete dump. So, yes, amanda is robust enough to have its storage medium go south in the middle of a long backup and recover successfully.

If the holding area had also been on the backup disk, I would have lost this morning's backups entirely. In this case, that would be no great loss. I could have run amrmtape on the "tape" holding the failed backup, and amanda would have recovered. But this preserves a day's backups, adding to amanda's robustness.

Conclusions:

• Be prepared.
• This is another reason (aside from performance and drive longevity) to have your holding disk and virtual tapes on different drives.
• Use symlinks for replaceable components.
• Virtual tapes allow you to use standard tools like ls and du on your data.
• amanda is robust enough to have its storage medium go south in the middle of a long backup and recover successfully.
• Back up your backups. (Paranoids live longer.)
• Do your backups assiduously.
• Offsite backups aren't just for disaster recovery.

Requiescat in pace, Martin Gardner.

El Reg reminds us that Microsoft will stop allowing netbook manufacturers to load XP onto netbooks on October 22.

The same article tells us that Microsoft sells XP at $15 a pop and Windows 7 at $50. Let's see, I sell this netbook for $200 so it can retail at $400. So my cost of an operating system will go from 7.5% to 25% of my selling price. Yeah, right. Linux, anyone? Of course, Microsoft could drop the price for Windows 7. It's not like Microsoft has any marginal costs. But that's thinking entrepreneurally, not exactly a great Microsoft tradition. We will see.

Oh, and some of the comments on the Register article actually proved useful! It turns out that you can move a window up above the top of the screen with either ALT-mouse1 or ALT-F7. That will come in handy for those setup dialogs that don't fit on some netbook displays. But another commenter is correct: that should not be necessary.