Sometimes you just can't avoid beating a dead horse. I know that this rant doesn't really change anything.

A few days back the admin of one of the best online radios announced that they will be dropping the torrent downloads for the shows. For me this was bad news, since I've been getting a valuable service from them through the downloadable files. I understand their reasoning and I'm not complaining about it, I did voice my concern, but other than that, I'll survive.

What caught my eye was the clear separation between the people who liked the service and who disliked it. I can understand the people who support the service, because like me, they depend on the service for certain reasons. But the reasoning of some of the people who supported the discontinuation made me think. The service users were quickly labeled as freeloaders who wanted everything for free. There was some hinting that downloading the shows is related to stealing the music.

While the download service is free, it made me think why the people who download the files are labeled as freeloaders. Of course I can't speak for anyone else but myself, but the fact that the downloads are free doesn't change anything for me. I could have easily listened to the same shows online, but instead I chose to use the service provided and downloaded the show to a medium that I was able to listen when it suited me best. It's analogous to timeshifting, it allows me to listen to the show when it's more convenient to me.

The common argument for most music industry representatives is that making music should be related to work and the people behind the music should get paid for their hard work. I definitely agree with them. The problem for me is that the music I want to listen is rather marginal around here, so I can't just go to a store and buy the music I want. I could order the music online and pay for the costs of shipping the music here. While music industry has been in a stand still for quite some time they are starting to move to the right direction. There are some labels that already offer their releases as digital downloads. The problem here is that usually it's either crippled (DRM protected) or bad quality.

I wish there was a service that allowed me to pay a (reasonable) monthly fee and granted me access to the music I like. The service would have to allow me to download the files and play them in my car or where ever. I'd also love to see a feature that would allow me to tip the artist, just to make sure that at least some of the money heads their way too.

PS. Afterhours is offering a replacement service for the torrents, which serves the same purpose. On-Demand listening, but the problem for me is that it's still online.

Sometimes I wonder why I'm not a millionaire... I keep having these odd strokes of luck.

Today the HD on my laptop broke. And I had such a good plan for backups. It should have been foolproof. I meant to run incremental backups every so often and put the data in to external drives, which are mirrored. It turns out there was a flaw in my backup plan: I forgot to implement it. Yes, my HD broke down and I had absolutely no backups of my HD contents. Since it's not the first time I've seen a HD failure, I immediately started making a clone of the disk. I didn't want to waste time looking for individual files, since a clone of the disk contains all the data that is accessible on the broken disk anyway.

I decided to try with clonezilla, because it's intelligent enough to backup the data I need but still has a decent GUI to work through the command line options. After all, I don't clone disks daily.

After starting the clone, it tried to access the data and after a while I saw a message from kernel saying that the disk froze. I almost gave up hope when the partitions showed up on screen. I gasped for air when I finally realized what happened. Apparently the swap partition was the only thing that was lost! Feeling hopeful I left clonezilla to do it's job and headed out the door. Once I got back all of the data had been backed up.

At this point I already had a new drive so it was time to do the reverse and restore the backup, which was an uneventful 2 hours of waiting. Before rebooting I ran mkswap on the swap partition and rebooted.

The system is now back up and running.

It's not the first time I had problems with HDs, recently I've lost 3-4 HDs due to various failures. Only once I've lost data, but the lost data wasn't anything that couldn't be regenerated. Maybe it's not luck, maybe I'm a cat in a human form. Maybe I just always land on my feet... Time will tell.

It was bound to happen sooner or later. I've been hosting my own services at home for quite some time now. It has a lot of benefits, like being able to access all services when connections are down and so on. Lately I've been thinking about what would happen if I lost the internet connection for some time. Maybe I should stop thinking.

On Monday at 11:00 my DSL went down. At first I assumed that something was wrong with the connection and it would come back after a while. After some 30 minute wait I decided to call about the problem. Thats when the whole horror revealed itself. The provider was unable to find a contract for my DSL. I called the office and then it hit me.

When I changed companies in the beginning of this year, I had a discussion at the old company that I wanted to move the connection to the new company. The asked for the details and I provided them. And I made a mistake. I never verified that the connection was actually moved over. So what happened? The old company didn't actually move the connection over and now after 5 months they figured out that they had a DSL for someone that wasn't working there and closed it. Even though it was their mistake for not moving the line, I can still blame only myself for it all. I should have checked and double checked that it had been moved.

Yesterday I was able to set up a secondary host for e-mail and today I'm fixing the website, it's not fully functional but it will be enough until I get a proper connection. Luckily I have access to all sorts of resources so I'm able to set up things like this quite easily. I wouldn't be hosting stuff at home if I wasn't.

It's been a while since last update here. There has been quite a bit happening since then. I'm not sure how all of this fares to my life but I expect that things will get a positive turn.

The major thing is that I resigned my job in favor of a more Linux oriented job. As usual I'm not naming any companies or any details on my departure. But I'm expecting an increase on motivation to do things on my spare time.

In a way I'm seeing a busy December, I have various projects that absolutely need finishing during December. So unless I manage to ease the job somehow I'm going to be working through Xmas.

Next I need to find myself a new phone. My Motorola v3x is apparently breaking down. I'm still not quite sure what I want from a phone at this point, but it's pretty obvious that I need to write down what I want before I start looking for a replacement. There are way too many different phones out there and looking at them just makes you want more than you need.

So I finally got myself a GPS, which has been on my list of things to get for quite some time. I also made my first baby steps as a geocacher and surprisingly found a few caches.

Geocaching is a world wide treasure hunt that anyone can take part of. All you need is a GPS (or a very accurate map) and a adventurous mind. The actual process is simple: you locate a cache you wish to find, go to the coordinates of the cache, find it (duh!) and log your find.

The first time I heard about geocaching was back in 2002 or so and I've visited the idea of starting to find caches quite often since then. Last week I finally got myself to order a GPS. I took the cheapest bluetooth model I could find after making sure that it had an mini-B USB connector for the charger. In fact it turned out to be a re-branded Holux GPSlim 236, which was a good thing since I had my eyes set on the 240 model as an alternative.

So far learning a new hobby has been loads of fun as well as frustrating. It turns out that there are 3 ways to represent a WGS 84 coordinates. And with my luck I had 2 applications that both used different notations and neither of them was the one given to me. Not to mention that there are other coordinates than the WGS 84 datum. After learning about multiple standards and notations it became a bit easier to locate the caches, since now we were looking from the right place.

The trouble doesn't stop there. The GPS I bought has a SiRFstar III chipset. Since there is a small changes in the signal and you in a worst case scenario you can get multiple coordinates just by standing still, this chipset has a feature to improve accuracy. The way it is implemented causes problems in geocaching because you don't get as accurate information from the device. There is a way to turn the feature off, but in the process it's apparently quite easy to temporarily brick your device. Luckily the device can be unbricked by allowing the internal battery to drain so that the device does a hardware reset. I'll see tomorrow if I'm able to disable the feature without bricking the device again.

So, a seemingly simple hobby turned out as a mess.. Again! It's not all bad though, we spent a nice day outside looking for some more caches today. It's just the push we needed to get moving and going outside. I just keep wondering what other problems lie ahead.

I just finished watching the Inbox Zero talk on google video.

When I first heard about the talk I thought that it was a good idea. Now that I've actually seen the talk, I consider it even a better idea. The basic idea is to map all your mail in to actions.

Even though I've managed to dodge most of the caveats of e-mail management, I have a lot of work to do. The biggest problem for me is that I'm a packrat when it comes to my e-mail. I never discard my mail, I archive everything but spam. I have certain scheduled jobs that move the old mail out of my mailboxes in to archive so I'm not a lost cause when it comes to mailbox size.

Another thing that I need to start using more is a to do list. While watching that talk, I noticed that I tend to leave mails that need me to do something laying in my inbox. Usually those mails stay there until they rot.

All in all, even though the model doesn't fit all, it appears to fit me. I'll give it a shot and see if it really works.

You can find out more on the Inbox Zero website.

In general I don't make donations. When I make a donation I want to be sure that the donation actually goes to the purpose it was meant for. There are a lot of organizations that have caused me to think like this.

But there are things that can be donated because they usually go to a good use. I try to donate blood as often as I can (which is 3-4 times a year) because there aren't that many ways how blood can be abused.

And then there are the selfish donations. For some time now I've been trying to find a working Dell Wireless network card to donate to the people who work on the bcm43xx driver. The reason why I want to do this is that the support for this particular card is a bit buggy. The card works most of the time, but keeps freezing. Most of the freezes are small, about 1 sec long, but sometimes the card freezes for minutes. Even though the situation has improved quite a bit (the whole computer kept freezing) I'd love to give one of these cards to the developers to that they can make the support perfect.

I'm not the type of a guy that plans vacations. This year is different.

Some time ago a friend mentioned that they were attending Sensation White 2007. At the time i thought that it would be cool to attend, but i'd never be able to arrange everything in time and i didn't want to leave Anitta home alone.

2 weeks ago, we talked about the event and Erkka mentioned that they might have extra tickets. That turned out to be the final straw and i jumped aboard.

Now, 2 weeks later, my travel plans are complete and i've booked flights and hotels for the trip. There are still quite a few details to be worked out before the trip itself. So that said, i'll be in amsterdam from 4th of july to 11th of july. General plan at the moment is to have fun and meet some friends while i'm there.

Now i just have to find good white pants that fit well in a good rave.

Every now and then I see a post that talks about certain VCS, usually that VCS is something that the poster has discovered recently and is now discovering more useful features from the VCS. This is the time when the user is most valuable to the VCS communities. The user is valuable to the community from which (s)he left, because that community is able to learn what the users really wanted in their VCS. At the same time the community of the new VCS benefits because they can see what are the strong points of their VCS, what the users really think is useful. And in the end, it's useful to all the other VCS communities since it allows a glimpse in to the users minds and how to add features to their VCS to get more users to use.

This is all good. If you look at it reasonably it's always a win-win situation when a user changes to a different VCS.

If you put the objectivity aside, you can see how people get jealous. If someone likes a feature in some other VCS they are seen as a threat and either they get attacked or manipulated in to converting or simply both.

This all reminds me of the past desktop wars and editor wars. Of course both of these still are burning hot. Both of these wars (like with many wars) carry similar features. When a user switches over, both parties should try and find out why and work on improving that feature. It's a common good that way.

It's like the saying: 10 000 Flies can't be wrong. If 80% of the user base likes a certain feature, that feature is worth working on. If 10% likes a feature, it might be useful, but one should really think about investing time in to the feature. I'm not saying that you shouldn't implement the feature, just that the time invested to that feature is taken from some other feature. If you think that your time is well spent with that feature, for example, if it matches a set goal in that application, go for it! Don't go for feature bloat, you can't please everyone. Making a sensible plan and sticking to that plan (or reworking that plan) is a good thing.

In the end, we should all try and see what the people who selected some VCS saw in that VCS. Improve that feature, assuming it fits the goals, and make the world a better place.

As for me, I've picked Bazaar because it's straight forward. There are no magic commands to issue before the first checkout and the commands are reasonable. Sure it's slow and uses disk space, but the issues are being worked on. Speed is getting better all the time and the repository format is being worked on. I've used CVS and Subversion and tried quite a few others. And it's always the same thing, when ever I switch, there is a reason for it. I hardly ever switch to something just because someone recommends switching.

In the end, I should write more about the reasons why I don't like something. Not in the 'Bah! This sucks' way, but a constructive manner. It's hard to write that way, but usually it pays off.

.. Fruit flies like a banana.

So, it has been a month since my last post. I hate it when time goes by too fast and you don't get to look back and think what has happened. Sometimes it's good to reflect a bit on the past, it brings thing back to perspective.

I switched my OpenID provider to The South African XMPP Federation OpenID Server which allows me to log in to websites through jabber. On first thought it sounds like unreasonable thing to do, but if you consider the phising discussion it suddenly becomes more sane. It's one of the few methods that can circumvent phishing. I don't have a password for my openid account, but i do have a password (for now) for my jabber account.

While playing with the new OpenID provider, i noticed some bugs with Gajim (yes, i'll try and get bugs filed for those) and eventually noticed that there has been a new release of Telepathy-Gabble. This release fixes the bug that i've been seeing and it no longer crashes. This means that i can finally move back to Gossip-telepathy which is nice and clean. I just have to remember to close those bugs i filed earlier about the bugs.

I've also been upgrading firmwares for my phones. It's annoying how phones have turned in to computers that require updating. Phones are more painful to upgrade since usually you will loose all the data on the phone when you upgrade. I'm still waiting for good phone that runs linux and has a sane way of storing configuration and other data. At the moment there appears to be a good drive to new linux phones, but i don't want to buy a phone that lacks most of the features that i will be using in the future. At the moment linux phones are playing the same catch up game as linux did in on the desktop. Hopefully it will get there eventually and i'll get up switch to a sane phone with proper updating model.

As a side project i've been thinking about creating a blocklist for Adblock Plus that filters finnish sites. The problem is that the list of sites i visit is quite short. I'll have to see what comes out of all this.