Category Archives: Privacy

Google Plus

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For the past few weeks, ever since it was closed to the majority of the public I’ve been toying around with Google Plus. At first I was hesitant to invest much energy in it because I got so burned with the boondoggle that was Google Wave. I immediately noticed that the user interface seemed oddly familiar, as it turns out one of the designers for Google Plus was an old Macintosh designer. Who couldn’t see that coming from miles away? The interface was clean, it didn’t have annoying Zynga games or any of the other dreck that Facebook has to contend with as part of it’s heritage of being a “College Kids Social Site”. Google Plus was something new.

After a time I started to think of Google Plus as a weapon Google designed and aimed directly at Facebook, as it seems that the two products are pretty much direct competitors to each other. I had this view for a few weeks until I saw a slide presentation that revealed that Google’s hubris was a lot larger than anyone had previously considered. Google doesn’t want to fight Facebook. Google wants to fight an entire computing paradigm. Currently the world is in the throes of migrating towards “thin clients” and “cloud services” and Google is angling to become the assumed foundation for that entire new world. There are balls, and then there are Google Balls. It’s not so much Facebook that Google Plus is fighting. It’s like an anonymous-but-incredibly-attractive man in a black leather jacket came into Facebook’s house and almost incidentally smothered Facebook with a giant pillow. You can see that he isn’t really holding the pillow but you can see that Facebook is struggling as if Googles entire weight was holding that pillow over Facebooks head. I’ve already left Facebook for nearly all intents and purposes. The only thing that Facebook retains that is still somewhat useful is their event subsystem, but I fully expect that one of the next steps that Google will take will be a new events system that leverages Google Calendar and Google Plus into a new product, maybe, called Google Events. Only time will tell on that one.

Using Google Plus is as I’ve said, a breath of fresh air. I love using it and I can’t really explain why that is. I think it’s because there are a lot of little things that all cluster together and when you add them up, Google Plus has some seriously powerful features. Instead of Facebook’s Like, you get a +1. At first this seemed rather like a feature-for-feature thing, until I noticed that every single item in a Google Search carried this shimmering (yes, it really shimmers) +1 button next to each item! So Google has found a way to instantly socialize search. Hah. Amongst all the other things, I learned by browsing the web that Google’s Picasa product, which quietly got a cloud-treatment called Web Picasa, that the service has a 1GB data storage cap, but that the cap only counts on files that are bigger than a certain very-large-value and that it’s unlimited storage just like it is on Facebook. Again, Hah. The best part of Google Plus, at least for me, is the Circles functionality. It’s very clean and very elegant. I have my Friends, my Family, Coworkers, Followers, Google+ New People… a circle for each of my social groups. I can control which Circle or set of Circles gets which updates right when I write the updates themselves. This is perfect for me as I’ve learned, in the crucible of Facebook, that sequestering certain individuals in my social life is essential. These people, in the past, have unilaterally demanded on censoring what I have to write, even if those things are my opinions and frankly are none of their business and if I were to be really picky, violate my First Amendment rights. With Google Plus I can make sure that they never see the things that would normally upset them and with one very elegant control choice, make sure that they will never have to be upset again by the things that I write. I marvel at this kind of structure that Google has provided people like me. Google Circles are a virtual representation of how I structure my life! There is Work Andy and Home Andy and Friend Andy and so many kinds of me, all configured specifically for that group. My friends wouldn’t recognize me at work, because I conduct myself far differently than I do anywhere else. Likewise my work acquaintances have never really met the real me. They are the Coworkers Circle, and that Google brought this to the forefront really appeals to me and gratifies me.

Google Plus has half of the keystone for get my full adoration. They submitted an iOS App for the iPhone and that was cleared by Apple and it sits on the second row on my home screen of my iPhone. The other half of the keystone will either make that iOS app they already have a Universal App, or come out with an app formatted for the iPad. Once that comes to pass there will be very little if any reason for me to ever return to Facebook. In many ways it’s almost an odd new competition between Google and Facebook. To see who can come out first with an iPad app. Facebook declared that an iPad is not a mobile device and so they were never going to make a Facebook app for the iPad. Then it was revealed on the web that Facebook did have an iPad app hidden in their iPhone app and once it was revealed Facebook did enough to show their hands as manipulative petulant assholes and immediately put the kibosh on that iPad app. It may not be ready and they may not want to release it because the app isn’t up to their standards, but that’s just a red herring. It would be such a deep coup if Google got it’s Google Plus iPad App approved before Facebook’s iPad app. It would be one more slap in the face to Facebook as Google actively ignores it and snuffs it out at the same time.

If you would like to join me on Google Plus, all you have to do is send me the email you would like to associate with Google Plus and I will send out an invite. I apparently have an inexhaustible supply of invites, so if you aren’t on Google Plus and you would like to see what all the hullabaloo is about, all you have to do is ask.

 

 

 

 

 

Saying Goodbye to Facebook

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Yesterday, July 19th, 2011 I said my final goodbyes to Facebook and announced my transition over to Google+. I went on Facebook and let everyone who could still see my wall, know that I was leaving that service for good and conducting all my sharing over on Google+. For me it was a matter of who built the better mousetrap. The services provided by Google+ far outweigh the headaches that I’d have to wade through to match on Facebook and I like the cleanliness of Google+ and the lack of baggage that comes with running a service that was at one point built for high school and college age kids to socialize on.

When I made my goodbye status updates on Facebook one of my friends who usually doesn’t say much brought up a valid point. His issue with Google+ is their privacy policy, which he took exception to. The policy is composed of jargon and legalese such as “non-exclusionary rights granted by the … for the perpetual use and non-exclusive publishing rights of the …” and so on and so forth. I am not about to make people who read these policies feel less of themselves by denigrating this legalese as so much meaningless and incomprehensible bibble-babble, but I’m not about to let something like that interfere with the path of my life and the things I want to do. Aren’t I running afoul of a policy that strips me of my rights for what I share and what I post online? Don’t I care about the things I write and the music I share and the photos I share? Doesn’t that bother me?

No. Not in one small bit does it bother me. My life is dull. What I have to share is free for the taking. Why should I license what I photograph, what I record, anything at all, when it comes down to it! What am I protecting? If I were to get all worked up I’d be protecting an endless and mindless stream of inconsequential doggerel and pablum. My social existence is important for me, and the message is important for the people in my life, but ownership of that material? It’s utter dreck. So what if someone comes along and licenses all my photography and lays claim to all that I have written. Someone comes along and asserts ownership over my blog? You are welcome to it! Much like Jazz, the crap that I create comes from an infinite source of unceasing malarkey. Grab as much of it as you want, I’ll just shovel up more. I’ve got a big shovel, boundless energy, and you’re just running garbage detail for me. Knock. Your. Socks. Off.

Really what it comes down to is none of these policies mean anything to people like me because we go ahead and live our lives. These policies exist for people who thrive on the minutiae of life. The only times these policies get dusted off and opened up is when someone tries to be a dick. Society gives us a shorthand when people are being dicks and so, in this social fabric, as long as the howler monkeys aren’t hooting and hollering too loudly the rest of us shrug and graze and go about our plain and dull lives. I haven’t heard anyone get bent about a privacy policy whatever from Google and even when I read the policy bibble-babble, I don’t really care. Non-exclusive, penultimate, pejorative, permissible, persimmons blah blah blah. It’s important to a very small subset of people and if it keeps them happy and shuts them up, why should I care? If the service disappears, so be it. It evaporates with all my writing and all my posted pictures? Uh, fine. I’ll just move on to something else. In the end I don’t care! I don’t care if I win, lose, or whatever. This sort of thing doesn’t interest me and life goes on.

And that brings me to another point, one more general than all the others. If everyone uncorked all these very dull and very blah-blah-blah policies and we all decided to dwell in the house of the righteous and mighty we’d quickly find ourselves so wrapped up in legal jargon and rules that we couldn’t do anything. Liability to perform a bowel movement? Nope. How about walking outside in the sunshine? Nope. Eating? Come on. I bet a legal eagle could find a series of policies that outlaw respiration! When you have this amount of text and only a very small segment of the population with enough interest to maintain consciousness when exposed to it, you end up with people who take others statements on-faith. We can’t process the endless stream of legal mumbo-jumbo, so we hire people who we pay and we trust to do it for us and give us a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Truth to be told, once we honor them enough to let them have a say, we forget all about what they said and get on with life! People tell us that we really should have lawyers look at things, and so we do. Not because we understand or actively even care about the lawyers but we understand that lawyers must be fed. Nobody told us why, and it doesn’t directly impact our lives to see to their proper feeding, so we write the right things, we post the right things and we look to the special creatures called lawyers and we look for a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. That’s as far as it goes, kids! Life goes on! Work has to be done! Those agreements and policies are great, they’re done, yes! They were seen by somebody? Yes! Those somebodies were happy? YES! Well, good… WHATEVER. We move on.

Life has to find a way to trudge forward. These policies are meat for lawyers. The only time when you need a lawyer is when people deviate from the Golden Rule. Society pressures each of us to not stray from the Golden Rule, so for a lot of this, once penned, will never see the light of day again. This brings up another point that has bothered me for a long time, and that is the fine-print monsters. There are agreements everywhere and there is fine-print everywhere, you can’t escape it. There is what is written and there is what is understood and the two aren’t necessarily bound together! When someone decides to be a dick, to play the fine-print game, then the lawyers click their mandibles together and there is a feeding frenzy — for the lawyers! For the people in the drama, there is the victim of the dick, the dick, and the fat happy lawyers moaning in ecstasy and having little orgasms when they hear “billable hours”. So afterwards, the victim of the dick and the dick part ways and the victim has learned a lesson. The victim of the dick never approaches the dick again. This used to be the end of it. The dicks never really had anything else to fear from the victim because they were just one little meaningless nobody in a sea of meaningless nobodies. That is, until social media and social networking came to town. Now the victims of the dick can hop up on a soap-box and write about their experiences to all the other potential victims of the dick and warn them. “Dick is here, he’s after you, avoid him.” and so the dick starves and dies because his prey was alerted that he was in the tall grass and fled. This creates a new series of regulatory controls between the victims of the dicks and the dicks. Now that each one of us can instantly publish and amplify our warning hoots to everyone else, the dicks are on the run, scampering left and right looking for victims and finding nothing but pounded earth from the millions of victims that have fled. This is the natural order of things now, and this is why it’s important to not be a dick. The minute you are branded a dick, you are effectively ostracized from society, you are given a Scarlet D to wear and everywhere you go tales of your dickishness proceed you!

So lets get back to where we started… leaving Facebook for Google+. Do I care about the privacy policy? No. Why am I not concerned? Because I value nothing that I create, I WANT TO SHARE IT and because I’m using these systems, isn’t it obvious that I want to GIVE IT AWAY!?! So someone comes along and takes it, well, that’s part of the point. If there is a dick in the tall grass, it might bring down a bit of the storm but it won’t stop the storm from coming and overwhelming it. Even if the dick starts to rampage, it’s now just a matter of pressing a button and walking away, effectively annihilating the dick.

In the end I don’t care. Life goes on. There are more important things to fret over, like whats for dinner tomorrow, did I see the tight little bubble-butt on that twinkie gym-bunny, what are my plans for labor day? These are the pressing things, not “Oooh, Google came in and asserted ownership of my LOLCATZ pics!” There is an order to things, and frankly, bubble-butts trump rampaging company-legalese-dicks. Life goes on.

Location, Location, Location!

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People are asking me what I think about the location-gate kerfuffle surrounding Apple. So, it seems an apropos topic to write about here. What exactly is/was Apple doing? It turns out the iPhone 4 was recording cellular tower geographic information and when iTunes backed up the device it also grabbed a file called consolidated.db, which contained latitude and longitude data. The clever and curious started to poke around this data and discovered that the iPhone had data that appeared to indicate where the phone had been and then they mapped the data to make the entire deal visual and accessible by many people who are already very skitterish about location.

Everyone had an immediate attack over this. Claims that Apple was spying on its customers, that it was an invasion of privacy. Claims ranging from the charming right down to the purest of malevolence on Apple’s behalf. Apple noticed the powder keg of negativity that the discovery of consolidated.db brought about and changed iOS to better protect users tender privacy concerns.

Yes, I suppose if you didn’t know the intent and found location data on your phone you might be concerned, but what is this mad rush to the absolute worst possibility? That Apple is spying on you, that it’s collecting location information to use against you? This is the claim of the lazy paranoid with too much time on their hands. What is the value of that data? If you were an international person of mystery and you had grave life-or-death secrets to protect then perhaps you’d have some ground to stand on, but last I checked the average iPhone-toting American leads a very tiny life, unremarkable to anyone at all, and even if it is divulging location, with all the location-based check-in services like FourSquare and Facebook, aren’t you already giving away the keys to your very dull and lame kingdom? I’ll be the first to admit that I fall right into this slot. My life is EXCEPTIONALLY DULL. I travel in circuits that are OBVIOUS and BORING. I’m like a ping-pong ball in a game played with robots that do the same thing every time. I bounce from home to work, from home to Meijers, from home to the comic book store. Boing Boing Boing. What am I protecting? Not a god-damned thing. That’s why I don’t have a problem with online advertisements, tracking cookies, my location leaking out around the edges, or any of that stuff. It’s mind-achingly dull! It runs right along with my feelings of people turning on the iSight camera on my iMac and SPYING ON ME. Knock your socks off! First, I’m not all that pleasant to look at, so that hurts you more than it hurts me, and secondly, what deep dark secrets will you uncover? Perhaps you’ll uncover my most coveted secret of all, that once I develop 5 o’clock shadow I can’t stop itching. There, I’ve saved you all the work and trouble. Dull, isn’t it? Yes. Exceedingly so.

So what is it that people are so worked up about? I think it has more to do with how people want to be seen than actually what is seen. They want to have grand lives full of drama and intrigue, not lives spent planning on how much sour cream to buy tonight to make that one dish come out better this time. It isn’t about what they are protecting, but the image that there is actually something to protect. We are all predictable, regular, non-exceptional, and above all else, magnificently dull creatures! Whatever really awesome specialness we do possess is almost always popping in and out of existence between our ears. Every once in a while we write something down and stuff it away, sometimes we even act on it, but when you take the long view of human behavior it’s more of a dull repetitive machine with little tremors of specialness in between great swaths of inexorably dull events.

So what of Apple’s Location-Gate? Get over yourselves. You aren’t that important. Your lives, frankly, aren’t that interesting. Accept it and move on to the next thing you feel the need to squawk and twitter about ineffectually.

Overcast

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While talking to several of my coworkers about the ways I organize my digital life it struck me that I have never detailed the what, the how, and the why. To me organization has set me free. There are only a few places where information is kept and so finding it is just a matter of checking a few places and almost always I can find, or remember, what I need.

Here at Western we have changed our email infrastructure to what is called “WebMail Plus” and I affectionately refer to by the initialism WMP. WMP runs on Zimbra servers out of our ISP in Ann Arbor Michigan and ever since the changeover I’ve never been very comfortable in the new system. I don’t like the web-based interface and I don’t like my email to stay in Ann Arbor for very long if I can help it. It’s purely a personal thing and I don’t expect everyone to have the same resistance to WMP as I have. There is a significant amount of history between me and WMP that goes quite a bit back.To that end, I store my email somewhere else and I store some files in other places as well, depending on where I’ll use them most of all.

Tools

I use these tools in order to better organize my digital world:

  1. Mail.app
    1. The native Mac Mail.app is set to pull in my WMP Mail over the IMAP protocol. This protocol allows me to select the Mail.app interface and bolt it on, covering up the less liked WMP Native website interface. Several key benefits to this are how I can configure all the aspects of Mail.app’s fonts to suit me and make it easier for me to read text. Mail.app also has a Bayesian Filter for identifying Junk Mail. I teach it what is and what isn’t Junk mail and it does a pretty kickass job identifying future Junk and getting it out of my way. The other feature of Mail.app that I have come to rely on is the “Redirect” command. This command allows me to effectively ‘resend’ an incoming email somewhere else as if it was always destined for that other address. This feature is a ‘killer feature’ when combined with other cloud services that I’ll write about further along in this post.
  2. iCal.app
    1. Just as much as I don’t like WMP when it comes to email, I also do not like it when it comes to Calendaring. I prefer to use iCal for my calendaring needs. Thanks to Zimbra’s adherence to standards I can have my cake and eat it too. WMP provides a CalDAV service which I can subscribe to using iCal. Not only can I have my local calendars off my home server subscribed on my iCal, but I can also have my WMP calendars as well.
  3. AddressBook.app
    1. As with iCal, the AddressBook.app application can subscribe to CardDAV Services that WMP provides. With all three in concert I have effectively replaced my need to use the native WMP interface and instead replaced it with a far more friendly Mac-based interface.
  4. Evernote
    1. Evernote is a cloud service that “remembers everything” and is only limited by the amount of information you send to your Evernote system, but not how much material you store there. Each free Evernote account comes with an “Evernote Email Address” that is private to the user and can be the destination of emails and when you do send an email to that address it is just like you have clipped the text directly into Evernote with a client. In this regard, the “Redirect” command and the “Evernote Email Address” are a match made in heaven.
  5. Toodledo
    1. Toodledo is an online cloud-based To Do List manager. There is a website that manages the Toodledo system very well and Toodledo provides a CalDAV compliant feed so I can subscribe my iCal client to my Toodledo task calendar and see everything, including my tasks, on one central iCal calendar. Toodledo also has its own “Toodledo Email Address” that inserts Redirected email into my task list. I can use a shorthand notation in the subject line to enrich the task so that when it is added to my Toodledo system it gets the appropriate context, date, time, and folder. Within Toodledo I have three contexts, Home, Work, and None. I have a gaggle of Folders such as “Email” and “Millennium” and “Personal” and the date system is very flexible. I can write an email to my Toodledo Email Address, set the subject as “Add Files to Folder @work #tomorrow =5pm *email” and the task is created with the body of the incoming email being the attached note of the task and the context is set to Work, the due-date set for 5/6/2011 (tomorrow), the due-time set to 5:00pm and the folder set for Email.
  6. Instapaper
    1. Instapaper also has a “Instapaper Email Address” and anything you send to that address gets queued up in your Instapaper queue. It’s really quite useful if you get a link in your Inbox and want to read it eventually, but not now.
  7. Dropbox
    1. Dropbox is a cloud-based file storage system that synchronizes a folder on every computer or device you use and a central folder stored in the cloud.

Tackling the Email Monster

I’m quite fond of achieving what I like to call Inbox Zero at least once a week, and usually on Friday afternoons. For me, email comes in and usually falls into a few neat categories. There are purely informational emails, such as notices from OIT and advisories about the University Trustees and other WMU news, then there are requests for me to do some sort of task, and then there are email discussions about some sort of running topic. I tackle an inbox that has gone out of control by starting with “low-hanging fruit”. I identify and pitch all the informational emails that I don’t need to note or keep storing. Some of this mail is merely meant to expose me to some news item or some event and after I appreciate the contents, they lose all durable value. For these messages I’ll either mark them as Junk or just delete them. The next level is to identify all the tasks-in-email and redirect them to my Toodledo account. Once they are redirected I delete those from my WMP account as well. All that is left, usually are discussions and “durable value” emails that contain something I really should remember. For the latter I redirect those to Evernote and delete them out of my Inbox. The rest are conversations and usually I won’t keep a lot of these floating around anyways. Once I send a reply the entire conversation is pretty well “backed up” in my Sent Items and so there is little point to keep old conversational emails that I don’t need anymore. Any emails that remain I look at and decide if they are conversations, tasks, or something I need to remember. I keep on whittling down on the pile until I run out of Inbox messages. Some people will note that I’m just playing a cup-game with my emails in Evernote. On Sunday I start organizing my Evernote into folders and let all that information build up there. Because Evernote is bottomless I don’t really care how much information I stuff into it since I can pretty much search text and folders to find anything I might need later on. Another hidden gem is that all of these services, Instapaper, Evernote, and Toodledo all have really great iOS apps for both iPhone and iPad, so I can manage everything on any device I like any time I like. I’ve been known to knock several emails out while waiting in line at the supermarket, or waiting for a movie to start at the cinema. Every bit helps and if you are vigilant you can whittle all your Inbox down to size and then get into a habit of keeping it that way.

Cloud Data Storage: Having Your Cake and Eating It Too

Another need I’ve found is to store data in an easily accessible way between many devices. I have an iPhone, and iPad, a MacBook, a iMac and a Mac Mini. There is always a need for me to keep a certain set of files available on each device. It makes life easier to have them conveniently located and every single machine having the right set of files no matter what. Dropbox suits this need very well. For run-of-the-mill data Dropbox can’t be beat for convenience sake. There is however a problem when it comes to security. Dropbox is secure, but they are vulnerable to search and seizure orders from the government and so they *can* break security on your files in order to comply with a government action. There are some files that I really would like to have available, but I really don’t want to risk having these files exposed. If I’m willing to sacrifice a bit of compatibility (really secure use of Dropbox precludes iOS devices) I have a way to secure files even from Dropbox itself, while still making use of their syncing services. Here’s how you do it. Dropbox is a free service and they kick in 2 gigabytes worth of storage. On a Mac open up Disk Utility, create an AES-256 encrypted sparsebundle disk image file and save it to your Dropbox. Put a nice long password on it and don’t save that password to your Mac’s Keychain system (that makes it really secure, because the password is just in your head) and then you can have your cake and eat it too. The disk image file can be mounted by any Mac computer, you have to type in your access password to mount it. Even if Dropbox were to ship the file to a third-party for analysis the file’s AES-256 encryption (at the moment) ensures that the data within the file is safe. The neat thing about a sparsebundle with Mac computers is that a sparsebundle can be assigned a maximum size, say one gigabyte, and if you only fill it with say 200 megabytes worth of data then the disk image itself isn’t one gigabyte, but instead right around 200 megabytes. The sparsebundle is a lot like a bellows, it expands to contain only the data it needs to. It has a capacity of whatever high-water-mark you’ve set it up for, but it’s efficient in that it only takes up what it’s contents need versus a standard disk image which is a monolithic file. Another neat part of sparsebundle images is that you can issue a rather straightforward CLI command to compact them if you’ve removed data from them. That command is:

“hdiutil compact image.sparsebundle”

So even if a sparsebundle were temporarily carrying a big bulge of data, you can get the storage back out of it by running this command. It’s quite neat and tidy. The only thing that would seal the deal is if the sparsebundles would automatically compact themselves on-the-fly, but even with this command you can still quite enjoy having your cake and eating it too. As it turns out, every removable device I own has an encrypted sparsebundle file stored on it. This is the best way that I know how to have the convenience of this sort of technology and the peace of mind to know that if you lose it, nobody but you can make sense of the contents.

I hope that this makes sense to you all. I’ve found this entire procedure to be quite effective and useful and makes organizing my life much simpler and less burdensome. Perhaps it can do the same for you! 🙂

P2 or Not P2

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Today has been an odd silly day. It started out with an odd fanciful notion to investigate WordPress.org and possibly host it on a Mac Mini. My design was to create a workplace blog, theme it with P2 and whip it out on my coworkers and see how it worked for them. It’s not really a Wiki, we have that, and the Wiki software we use is Apple’s own that comes with their Server OSes, but the blogging component leaves something to be desired.

I saw WordPress.com pushing P2, a theme that fits into WordPress.com or WordPress.org and enables Automattic, the company behind WordPress to communicate more efficiently. My interest was piqued.

So I started with that original idea, then my assistant reminded me that I have a huge monster HP 1U server that I never use and it has Ubuntu on it. I had a little Eureka moment and decided I could work with that. I downloaded the WordPress.org software and went over the installation manual. I got everything edited and in-place and looking nice in the terminal window but couldn’t get the wp-admin/install.php screen to appear so I could finish the WordPress.org installation. I futzed and putzed and figured out I was missing some things, like a different kind of PHP, as well as PHPmyadmin. Once I added all of those various bits I tried it again. No dice. I finally figured out that when I created the “wordpress” MySQL database and user that I botched up the name and host information and didn’t see it until I blundered my way into PHPmyadmin. With that tool I fixed the problem and then everything was fine. I installed JetPack Plug-in, which promptly exploded in my face. JetPack needs to chat back and forth between WordPress.com and whatever machine you are installing WordPress.org on. This server here is firewalled on the wire and can’t be seen by any outside-to-WMU system, so that put the kibosh on JetPack. I still wanted to try P2, so I installed it and it worked like a charm. Then I ran into the same headache I always run into with these systems: SMTP. Here at WMU there is a huge barrier to access any network services, especially SMTP. So how could a WordPress.org P2 blog ever really work right if the server it’s running on can’t ever send out email properly? Oh, I tried to be clever and I failed. I tried to forge a CA, I tried lots of hints to try to masquerade into smtp.gmail.com using TLS, and I tried sendmail and postfix. Bloody hell. I would rather eat glass than have to see sendmail.cf again. I’d rather massage the tongue of a rabid wolverine than futz with postfixes main.cf file again! I mashed my head up against that brick wall until I took a step back and asked myself why the hell I was going to these lengths for something so tangential.

So then it struck me, if we’re using WordPress.com for the heavy lifting for most of our content management, why couldn’t I just create a new blog for our workgroup, slap P2 on it and carry on? That had its own problems. In the beginning I set everything up with Western Express and set my “Gravatar” to be associated with my work email address of andy.mchugh@wmich.edu. All fine and good until you try to use that address anywhere else! WordPress is picky. So I logged into WordPress.com thinking I could change my accounts email address in WordPress, as it turns out, you can’t. You have to go to Gravatar and change it there. It’s not so much change as put in a new address, switch it to primary, then rip out the old address. A lot of work for something that was supposed to be easy. Blargh!

So I got everything switched around and freed my work email address then re-approached WordPress as if I was a new user. I logged in using my work address (which is the most appropriate address for this pursuit) and created an account. I got the automated email verification message and clicked on it. WordPress refused with the error: “Could not create user” and so I emailed support at WordPress for help. Still waiting to get some TLC from the support people as of the writing of this blog-post.

Along with all of this I’m wondering if P2 will be well received? Will my coworkers see this as one more silly thing that I’m making them all use? I’ve pounded Wiki use into their heads, I’ve done a lot of things behind the scenes that none of them see now but will that will also radically change their working lives (for the better I assure you) and then I sit and wonder. I wonder if P2 is a solution that could work for us? If it works for Automattic, shouldn’t it work for us as well? I’m on the fence on this. I’ve whipped out so much new technology on these people, will they accept another massive change to how they communicate or will I be facing open revolt? I see this idea of mine shaped this way:

A private group blog that everyone can log into anywhere they are in the world, obviating the need to use any kind of VPN system as WordPress.com is available ubiquitously. It would enable people to hold online communications, post instantly like Twitter, post without limit to text (unlike Twitter), include rich content such as YouTube embeds and such all the while managing the conversations and using categories and tags to track different sections of our communication infrastructure. I imagine using P2 as I would have maybe used Google Wave if it was matured properly and supported by Google and not killed in its infancy. That we’d use several big tags such as “Donors” and “Help Desk” along with a constellation of other tags and not have to struggle with email distribution lists and missing information and delayed communications, all of that could be eliminated. On the flip side of that argument is “This is one more thing that you are forcing on us and making us learn.” I’m struggling with how P2 could fit in with our lives and whether this is a valid pursuit or just so much “chasing after the shiny”.

There are several of my coworkers that I’m nearly certain would go stark raving mad if I whipped just one more thing out on them. I just can’t deny the allure of all of these services, WordPress, DropBox, 1Password, Evernote… that their ubiquity online and their omnipresence in the mobile computing sphere is terribly attractive to me. That a workforce that I deeply suspect will be forced to become more mobile and nimble almost demands that I continue this breathless rush towards the bleeding edge.

So what I really would like is to find anyone other than Automattic who found P2 to be useful. It would gratify me immensely to know that P2 was a ‘game-changer’ and serve also as confirmation that I am on the right path and that this whole charge towards shiny actually serves a true and honest business purpose beyond my wanderlust for novelty.

As always, I would really love people to comment, I’m looking for evaluations, opinions, you name it, every bit helps. I thank you all in advance. 🙂

Robin Hood's Barn

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Yesterday I attended a meeting with other like-minded individuals and this merry band of people got to discussing password management. There are a lot of different (and all equally valid) ways of managing your passwords and as I listened to some of these people describe their solutions it struck me, again, just how good I really do have it. I have to admit that once I switched over to 1Password and integrated it with Dropbox I’ve been spoiled rotten. The solution is such a perfect match that I stopped thinking about password management altogether, freeing me to concentrate on other things.

Then I heard about some of the things that my work peers have elected to do. One of them manages it with a password-protected Excel Spreadsheet and then uses Sysinternal’s SDELETE program to securely delete the file after he’s done using it. I sat there, stunned as I followed his description of the procedure that he has to follow and grinning-on-the-inside as others around the table brought up a series of criticisms of his procedure and pointing out pitfalls and the like. I sat back marvelling at 1Password, how I didn’t have to worry about any of this, and I discovered in that moment a hidden value to 1Password that just reinforces the perception of value that product has for me – I don’t have to think about this stuff anymore! It saves me time, brainpower, and attention-span. Just for that I couldn’t imagine not having 1Password in my digital life.

All along this meeting I heard comments peppered throughout that all had to do with a paranoid fear of security loss by taking advantage of cloud services. This isn’t the first time I’ve come across this, it was the central axis that featured prominently in my Webmail Plus v. Google argument that I so spectacularly lost so many moons ago. People fear the cloud. They fear what these companies will do with the data once it’s entrusted to their care. This has always mystified me and left me speechless. Now, don’t get me wrong here, I’m not saying that it’s wise to simply put 50,000 Social Security Numbers in a plaintext file and send them right up to Dropbox, hell, I wouldn’t do that with Amazon S3 service or any other provider for that matter. But what I would do, and perhaps this is what boggles my mind, that people don’t already do this, is encrypt the data using AES. With the data in this format, even if the file security is compromised, without the password, what they have is just as good as noise.

This is where 1Password is great, the central database file is encrypted using AES, so I can put it up on Dropbox and then access it from every device I use that can reach the Dropbox service! This has saved me innumerable hours and a world full of worry. Even if one site is compromised I don’t have to worry because each site has its own unique 16 character random password assigned to it and managed through 1Password. I don’t even care if a site forces me to regularly change my password, because every new password will be a random 16 character entry from the password generator that is already in 1Password. I can’t express how much time, energy, and attention-span I’ve been able to save with using this product. When something like 1Password is built, and built well, I can’t help but rave about it. Everyone should be using this software, it would make everyone so much more secure.