Yesterday I found myself with some free time and still no nice bluetooth programs in my kde-4.5.2 setup. And since yesterday bluedevil-1.0 was released it sounded like good time to try it out and fix some ebuilds.

So if you go to the gentoo bugzilla and then navigate to bug #345239 you will find two “quick-and-dirty” ebuilds. But they work

So if you want bluetooth in your kde, check them out and if you have the skills and time improve the ebuilds.

I think the diaspora project is a fail, and judging from the messages posted around the web I am not the only one thinking this. However the idea of distributed social media is still very appealing to me. So here are just some things I am thinking about and who know maybe I (or somebody else) will eventually do something with it .

Public & Private streams

Most people using social media do not mind sharing certain information. Take for example sharing of news items, most people probably wouldn’t mind if others could “follow” them and also get the news. Or you could be a private person and only want to share data with your friends, or you could be a journalist wanting to share everything you post.

In my view these are two distinct things and should be treated as such. Private streams allow for pushing content, or some sort of publish-subscribe mechanism. While public streams are more suited to be served on a location and then pulled by anyone who wants it. One could even consider sharing a public stream as a static file (in for example json format) and just updating this as one posts something to the stream. Etag checking would then avoid unnecessary transfer and otherwise the webserver is just serving a static file which is cheap.

Private streams on the other hand would benefit from a publish-subscribe approach since that would require minimal data transfer and people would get the data as soon as it is available. However a side effect of the publish-subscribe mechanism is that the publishing peer has to keep track of send data (and is that really what you want?). However this could be simply solved by each peer keeping a list of last update (unix timestamp anyone) of all his peers and then do some communication once a peer comes online or when an update is posted and decide what to communicate.

Specify the communication not the implementation

Keeping the open spirit the communication should be specified and not the implementation. Many people do not want to (or can’t) run RoR however anything that can be implemented in RoR can also be implemented in an other language. When specifying the communication anyone can implement it, be it in RoR, php, C, asembly whatever…

Encryption

The whole idea of distributed social media is that you are in control of your data. So you probably do not want to send your (private) stuff in plain text over the internet. So it makes sense to use some sort of encryption to transfer the data. However that does not quaranty privacy. A lot of people do not have their own server running, and probably a lot of peers will be hosted on the same server. Now would you want the hosting company to be able to read all your private data? Of course not!

So the data should also be encrypted on your peer. GPG encryption could do this. That only on a host where you have your private key that you can decrypt the messages. Now I do understand that this brings certain complications. Then I would only be able to read messages on my laptop, in order to read (or send) messages on my phone I would need to copy my private key to my phone, which might not be what you want.

Another down side of this approach is that you can’t view or send messages when you are at someone else’s computer…
You could of course store your private key on the machine that hosts your peer instance but then anyone that could read your key (sysadmin or even more people due to a potential security bug) could get their hands on your private key, which is certainly not what you want.

Anyone else any idea’s on distributed social media?

Yesterday my good old HP Deskjet 5440 died on me But after almost 4 years of great service it was his time. I needed to print something so I went and bought a new printer. The shiny HP Deskjet 3050, it is a so called “All-in-one”… which basically means I can copy at home now Now the printer is equipped with wifi ( I did not really care about that but since it has wifi I will of course use it )

Installing the printer on my girlfriends windows machine was relatively straight forward, but I still do not uderstand why I would need a 50mb download for some printer drivers?

Installing on my laptop was also made easy thanks to hplip. However I could not print! My cups log had the following message:

/usr/libexec/cups/backend/hp failed

Which is not that clear at all. Enabling debug loglevel in cups did not make things any clearer. After a lot of googling I found someone suggesting to install avahi. Which indeed is the solution!

So now I am happily printing! And will not try to get scanning up and running

The last couple of days I have done some coding for Android. All my resentment towards java is coming back but getting some cool mobile app requires sacrifices! But I do not want to write about java today.

The problem I encountered when installing the Android SDK is that the some of the programs won’t run on non-multilib AMD64 installations. This is really annoying since I do not want to have 32bit libraries on my system (it is matter of principals!). But linux to the rescue! A simple multilib chroot allows me to compile and deploy my android apps!

Mounting (with bind) the source directory allows me to code in my normal env while compiling in the chroot. Which is not a big thing for me since I code in VIM but for IDE users this might be an advantage!

So for all native AMD64 users there is hope! But it would be better for the Android devs to fix the binaries!

In order to further comply to the Web 2.0 I now linked my twitter account to my blog (or vise versa). There now is a twitter widget (on the right) which shows my latest tweets. Don’t really know the use of this but it didn’t look to bad and follows the css rules pretty well. The other thing is that every time I blog (once every two months) this a tweet is send automatically.

Well I hope you are as excited as I am about this

P.s. The site also had a wordpress upgrade (finally on 3.x) and as a bonus I also upgraded the theme to a new version

This morning I was up rather early (well not that early but the others were still asleep ). So I decided to do a little coding and came up with a very simple Qt desktop client for facebook. Since it would of course be nice to have client sitting in your task bar showing new notifications, later this can be extended but for now that will do.

All this was created in a about an hour but would not have been possible without qfacebookconnect.

It is far from finished and no notifications are really visible yet but a nice start is made (not bad for 45 minutes coding). See the git repository of qbook if you want to take a peak, all paths are currently hard coded so you will need to do a little hacking, this is mainly because qfacebookconnect is not yet in portage so I can properly link to it.

Maybe next time when I am up early I will first fix an ebuild for that one

Since my old phone was sometimes shutting down without me telling it to shutdown or an empty battery forcing it to shutdown, I decided to get myself a new phone: the HTC Tattoo.

One of the things I missed on my Nokia N73 was the ability to sync pproperly with my linux enviroment, the tattoo runs android and syncs perfectly with google, wich in turn syncs nicely with other things. Of course the downside is that it syncs with google, but for now that is necessary evil.

So far I am pretty impressed, mobile e-mail, Facebook, flogging etc. All work like a charm. Even Eduroam, the WiFi used at the university works out of the box! That is not even the case on my laptop!

This message was of course written on my tattoo.

According to the statistics many of you use my bash.org rss feed. The traffic generated by this feed has grown over the last year and right now it is around 70% of the total traffic of this website (around 600MB a month).

Just out of principle this is a bit much for a RSS feed so I decided to move the feed to feedburner. Thanks to a .htaccess rule the feed is already forwarded. This means that current subscribers to the feed should not notice anything

Happy reading

Some time ago I learned about the foaf-project, I did like the project back then but I never took the time to write my own foaf.rdf. Well now it is created. Very basic but I hope it will be extended soon.

Since my recent social network activity the step to foaf was, in my eyes, also a logical one. But it does seem that a lot more people have facebook than foaf….

One of the nice things about foaf, if you are interested in semantic web stuff, is that it is in constant development there are discussions on the mailing list about how to structure the data etc or why things should change. This makes it a very dynamic project.

As you can see I do not yet have any foaf:knows elements in my foaf.rdf but lets hope that soon will change so a semantic network can span around me.

After having resisted for a long time last week I finally created a facebook account. I still prefer e-mail or instant messages (jabber!) but I have to admit it is a nice way to get in touch with a lot of people and to follow activity.

So now that I have sold my soul I decided to create an extra box on the blog with direct link to my various social network profiles. Just to make it look pretty!

So far I am active on 3 social networks:

• last.fm: I actually created my account in order to improve QtMPC, however it is now also coupled to my amarok and I upload the scrobble log from my ipod (with rockbox).
• linkedin: I created this to join the OpenStreetMap group.
• facebook: Now since a few days facebook.

Now I think that is (for now) enough to keep track of but it makes me wonder why there aren’t any good desktop apps to manage some of this. Like the facebook notification thingy at the bottom right. Why isn’t there a cool Qt app to just make this sit in the system tray? A well maybe a cool project for the upcoming semester