Rubenerd

If you still use Google services regularly, it's worth noting they allow you do disable some of the tracking they perform. Browser plugins can help to block the rest.

Disable Web History

Most people I talk to don't realise Google records all the sites they visit through their searches. They bill it as a way to "tailor search results". The DuckDuckGo people call it "search bubbling". I deem it "unnecessary". Fortunately, Google lets you turn it off:

1. Log in, the go to history.google.com
2. Click the gear button on the right hand side
3. Choose “Settings”
4. Click “Pause”

To confirm, go back to history.google.com and notice the bright blue "Turn History On" button. Isn't it interesting that Google lets you turn web tracking on with one click, but it takes three clicks and loading a menu behind an untitled button to turn it off? ;)

It should be noted here that web history is merely being "paused". Whether Google can turn it back on, or can be compelled to, would be reason enough to logout when you want to use their search.

Adorable Hyouka detective image by こよる on Pixiv

Set DoubleClick tracking opt-out cookies

Google's advertising arms and subsidiaries track you across sites by default, but you can disable it with a cookie by visiting:

https://www.google.com/ads/preferences/html/opt-out.html

Google now even offer a plugin for Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer to store your desire not to be tracked. I haven't tested this, so I can't vouch for it.

https://www.google.com/ads/preferences/plugin/

In both cases, these opt-outs are stored in your browser, not your account. Therefore, to prevent this kind of tracking you need to have the opt-out cookie and/or plugin installed on every browser and on each computer/smartphone. Cumbersome, I know, but it's currently the only option Google allows us.

Browser extensions

To further prevent tracking, there are several different plugins you can use.

For Mozilla browsers, Gprivacy forces sites to respect the do-not-track header by sanitising links in search results. Any links that it modifies in your browser are shown with a green shield, and the original link with a red shield is included alongside it.

If you're not interested in maintaining a cookie whitelist with CS Lite Mod or Cookie Monster, the Beef Taco extension maintains opt-outs for hundreds of advertising networks, including Google. I've blogged about this before.

Done

As I've said with all cloud computing services, the key isn't to abstain from them, but to use them wisely. As Professor Frink would say, MMMMMMMM-HIVEN MAVEN!

I'd abstained from using the GUID partition tables (get it… tables?) on my ThinkPads after reading warnings on the Fedora mailing lists. Inadvertently I installed FreeBSD with GPT on my ThinkPad X40 this afternoon though, and it worked just fine!

The K-On! girls eating sushi © Kyoto Animation.

Fedora

From Pádraig Brady on the mailing lists in February:

In Fedora 16 we changed to using GPT as the default disklabel for new installs. In a few cases, mostly limited to Lenovo hardware, we found that some BIOS’s would not boot from GPT. We blacklisted Lenovo, falling back to msdos labels in order to solve this.

Thanks to Matthew Garrett we found that switching on the boot flag of the GPT’s protective MBR these BIOS’s would then boot from GPT. Matthew wrote a patch for parted to allow controlling this flag using the disk_set pmbr_boot command in parted. This is in parted-3.0-7

I can't find them right now (of course) but I also recall the release notes or installation guide for Fedora 16 and 17 detailing the use of nogpt and how Lenovo machines were blacklisted for using GPT.

So I avoided it, and used extended partitions to overcome the 4 partition limitations of MBR that we all remember.

FreeBSD

With the release of the 9.0 series, FreeBSD defaults to GPT instead of MBR. While installing, I explicitely created an MBR table instead of using GPT in the initial disk step of bsdinstall. Curiously, doing this resulted in a string of those notorious "gvfsdone() error=5" errors when I first booted. The same results occurred when I used gpart manually from the shell.

Just to see what would happen, I let bsdinstall create GPT partitions instead, and FreeBSD has since booted flawlessly. No joke!

Granted, this is with FreeBSD i386 on a 32bit Pentium M ThinkPad X40. My next experiment will be to use GPT with FreeBSD amd64 on my Core 2 Duo ThinkPad X61s.

I get nostalgia for the most random things. Case in point, I was on the Amazon Affiliate Associates Thingy website this morning, and I noticed their documentation still shows a screenshot of their classic site design. Will they replace it soon? Maybe. And when they do, I have this old one preserved here for posterity.

I think I may have a problem.

This is good news, right?

Image of Detective Oreki and Chitanda by 紫木れゆ on Pixiv

It didn’t used to be this way, Smithers

I've pointed out here before that Chrome didn't include Do Not Track, the HTML header that establishes a user's wish not to be tracked. I said it was unsurprising given Google is an advertising company, but it was still disappointing given how many people are using their browser.

(As an aside, the most common retort I read is that DNT won’t block all tracking, so it’s useless. If it was so useless, why was Google afraid of including it then?)

It wasn't all bad news though. When Apple, Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft were actively working towards a standard and implementing DNT in their browsers, Chrome users could install a plugin to do the job. I suppose, in the same way a user could install an ad blocker to hide Google's primary source of revenue. Again, you can empathise with Google's position.

To put this into context though

If you're worried about tracking, I'd question using a browser being pushed by an advertising company. Still, to Google's credit they've finally announced they're including Do Not Track header support in Chrome. I applaud them for this. Sincerely.

For some perspective however, Google's DoubleClick still requires users to store an opt-out cookie on their machine to prevent tracking. Plugins like Beef Taco can assist in keeping these persistent, or you can simply whitelist cookies only from sites and services you trust. Not logging into Google anymore has really helped with keeping their cookies off my machines!

I moved to Fedora as my desktop OS of choice largely because of yum, and some Red Hat Linux nostalgia. Pkgin and Pkgng on NetBSD and FreeBSD respectfully may be enough to win me back from just using it on the server!

Back when I fickly switched between FreeBSD then NetBSD for my file server at home, the systems were so appealing I wanted to try them on the desktop. If you go back to the Rubenerd.com archives from a few years back, you'll see all my posts about BSD desktops, getting Xfce working on them, and how much I enjoyed using them.

Leaving aside the issue of accelerated 3D graphics for now, the main issue with using the BSDs as desktop OSs is they tended to be heavily source-based. Binary packages were available, but generally speaking if you wanted current software and updates, you needed to use their respective port/package systems. Before the advent of freebsd-update, you also needed to rebuild the base system to upgrade it.

For small applications or the ones you'd typically run on a server, this was fine. Building Firefox or Xfce or KDE from sources each time they had an update would take hours, and was an incredibly tedious process. Sometimes they'd break, or a dependency wouldn't build, and you'd be stuck. It didn't make for a terribly pleasant desktop experience, especially when my Linux friends could enter yum update and be largely up to speed in minutes.

A NetBSD repo? You bet!

A lot has changed in the intervening years since I started using Linux again. Pkgng on FreeBSD and Pkgin on NetBSD offer repository-based binary package management systems akin to yum in the Red Hat world, or heaven forbid apt-get.

From the NetBSD pkgin site:

pkgin is aimed at being an apt / yum like tool for managing pkgsrc binary packages. It relies on pkg_summary(5) for installation, removal and upgrade of packages and associated dependencies, using a remote repository.

Many so-called GNU/Linux distributions provide a convenient way of searching, installing and upgrading software by using binary archives found on “repositories”. NetBSD, and more widely, all operating systems relying on pkgsrc have tools like pkg_add and pkg_delete, but those are unable to correctly handle binary upgrades, and sometimes even installation itself.

This is the purpose of pkgin, to provide the user a convenient way to handle binary packages, using the same working mechanisms than tools like apt-get.

And from the FreeBSD pkgng wiki page:

pkgng is built on top of libpkg, a new library to interface with package registration backends. It abstracts package management details such as registration, remote repositories, package creation, updating, etc.

pkgng is: a replacement for pkg_* tools, a tool to query/manage installed packages, a tool to deal with binary packages, a tool to upgrade/install packages from a remote repository and a library that provides all the package management in a safe way so one can write a new frontend.

I moved from FreeBSD to NetBSD on my file server here, and so far I've only played with pkgin, but I'm genuinely excited about both. A method to reliably and consistently upgrade binary packages was arguably the main reason I went to Linux.

I'll keep the penguin on at least one machine I own, but if these systems work well I may be on my way to using BSD on my laptops again, including maybe even this one! As much as I know about the Fedora ecosystem now, I'm still far more at home with BSD. /etc/rc.conf, securelevels, jails [sic], the 2-clause BSD licence!

I'll be playing with both after my latest round of assignments are handed in, and will report back ^_^

The only reason I used to care even slightly about Halloween were The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episodes. Now I have another reason. Can someone with visual talent please do a text filter as soon as possible? Kthxbye.

From the beautiful Clara Tse and Zerochan (you need to be logged in to view).

Links I saved onto Instapaper this month:

• How Japan Has Virtually Eliminated Shooting Deaths
  Atlantic Mobile

• Inside the U.S. Military’s Chemical-Weapons Tests
  The New Yorker

• PM Lee expresses ‘great sadness’ over Palmer’s resignation
  Yahoo! News Singapore

• What Happens Now That the War on Drugs Has Failed?
  New York Magazine

• The big (and increasing) difference between data and discovery
  The Planetary Society

I thought I'd tried every conceivable editor from the IBM E Editor to Vim and everything in between, but I'd never used SciTE before. #herpderp!

And you call yourself a hacker

SciTE is a simple, cross platform text editor with a tabbed interface, syntax highlighting for all the major suspects and a trippy icon. It also reads like "science" which is just too cool. It was originally developed by Neil Hodgson in 1998 to demonstrate the open source Scintilla editing library, but is now a fully featured application in its own right.

MacPorts has the latest version, and it's also available on the App Store. Fedora 17 had a fairly dated 2.x version in its repos, so I downloaded the latest and greatest 3.2.3 release and built it. The tarball also came with the latest version of Scintilla.

% sudo -s
# tar xzvf scite*tgz
# cd scintilla/gtk or scintilla/qt
# make
# cd ../../scite/gtk or /qt
# make
# make install
# exit

The output from make install. On Xfce it doesn't matter that it only installed a 48x48px icon in pixmaps, but this won't cut it on Gnome 3!

[root@nia]/usr/local/src/scite/gtk
# make install
install -m 755 -d /usr/bin /usr/share/scite
install -m 755 ../bin/SciTE /usr/bin
for files in ../src/*.properties ../doc/*.html ../doc/SciTEIco.png ../doc/PrintHi.png; 
do 
    install -m 644 $files /usr/share/scite; 
done
install -m 755 -d /usr/share/applications /usr/share/pixmaps
install -m 755 SciTE.desktop /usr/share/applications/SciTE.desktop
install -m 644 Sci48M.png /usr/share/pixmaps/Sci48M.png

Impressions

The beautiful, simple Geany IDE which I've been using for many years uses the same Scintilla library that SciTE does, and there is a bit of a family resemblance in the layout of the editing area.

On the Vim/Emacs continuum of kitchen-sinkness, SciTE falls more on the Vim side. The initial configuration is fairly sparse, and it's up to you to customise it the way you want. The first things I did were turning on line numbering and the status bar, which helpfully shows which column the cursor is in, and what type of newline is being employed (in my *nix case, LF). No doubt these can be customised.

User configuration is stored in various *properties files which you can conveniently access from the Options menu. I haven't had time to look into this so far.

In terms of usability, it employs all the same key shortcuts we're used to in other applications, such as CTRL+S for save. I'll admit in Geany I never have this problem, but in SciTE I keep reaching for that escape key to start hammering away my Vim shortcuts. Perhaps it's the minimalist interface ;).

Pushing onto my editor stack

For someone who otherwise likes minimalism and doesn't install things unless he really needs them, the last thing I need is another editor. On this ThinkPad right now I have Gvim, Geany, LaTeXila, NetBeans, JASSPA MicroEmacs, Torvald's me, Bluefish and Leafpad from Xfce. I've also been told to try Sublime Text, and I have Chocolat on my Mac. I'll commit to one eventually ^_^;;

Via this article on the American ZDNet. A shame, because I really was desperate to see why I'd be using Chrome OS in three years.

Forgive me for this post, I haven't written anything like this before!

So I was stressed from assignments. The subjects I have this semester combined have more workload than I had when I was working full time in a corporate office. I'd say almost double, as a conservative estimate. You can tell from the sudden drop off in the frequency of blog posts here!

Clara saw that I was stressed out, so she drew me Yuki and emailed it to me. A few days ago, she gave me the original in a little wooden frame to keep. She's sewn me plushie whales, snow bunnies and birds. She's held my hand, squeezed my arm and given me hugs. She's pretended to find my jokes hilarious! She's written me letters, typed me emails, and commuted from Hornsby to Bardwell Park to see me. She's shared udon with me, and long evening walks. She's gentle with me, loves me and respects me, no strings attached. At times, I wake up and can't believe it.

I can tell she's stressed now too, so I'm posting this here to say what a wonderful, talented, creative, smart, generous, considerate, cute, beautiful person she is. Regardless of whether she believes me or not, I'm the luckiest guy in the world.

I'm so excited to be spending my future with you, Clara. I love you.