coresite.org

With the unveiling of Chrome, Google can definitely enjoy a very happy 10 year anniversary celebration.

I won’t get in to the usual ramble about how Google is becoming some evil empire.  It’s an easy solution to those who are uncomfortable by their presense online: don’t use their services.  No one is forcing you to use their most excellent services for email, or anything for that fact.  Plus you can also do things on your side, like NoScript or Cookie cleaners to stop the evil bad company from spying on you.  For me, they have the potential to do bad things, but so far they seem pretty even tempered.  Plus their stuff works.  Do you know how rare that is these days?!

I have to admit, Chrome so far is pretty awesome.  It’s insanely fast, primarily because of how they made it and the technologies they are using.  The import from Firefox was easily handled, and over all the experience is a very solid one.  I do like Firefox because of the addons it has, don’t get me wrong.  Firefox still will chug away simply BECAUSE of what it is.  But Chrome might be sneaking in for my Google-focused activities.

Aside from the simplicity of the interface, I have to say Chrome is a pretty solid first release.  Sure the negative posts are slowly surfacing on the blog scene, but let’s be honest here.  It’s really expressions of disappointment that Chrome can’t do X Y or Z.  I think that comes directly from people not seeing the web how Google does.  So we’re dealing with terminology and concepts that we might be holding on to the for the wrong reasons.  Ideas can be changed, but people are lazy too.  We may -need- to change our habits online -because- of the way we’ve been online.

This also makes me wonder what else Google has up their sleeves.  Do you remember their 411 service (1-800-GOOG-411)?  It was really a brilliant way to get data for speech-to-text work.  And jeez, think of the data metrics they have for working WITH browsing.  Either way, Chrome is a huge export to the PC Desktop.

Without being hasty, we’ll see how this fairs in a few months.  If Chrome starts to eat away at the Firefox growth in the browser market, and Google keeps updating Chrome regularly (ie. fixes + improvements) then we can look at whether those add ons or concepts really were so important to us to cry over.

Need I say more?

[ UPDATE: I found another bloke who wrote Create your own Mozilla Weave server that pretty much covers much of what I did below. It's definitely worth a read over! ]

I was reading my feeds as usual, and I came across a nifty idea in a post about Setting up Mozilla Weave on your Server. The article was great, but in my case I was running a slightly different environment. I didn’t have the one-click installation stuff, but the more lovely raw configuration files at my hands.

For background, Weave fulfills syncing of your Firefox information. That is to say bookmarks/cookies/history/tabs & personal data are encrypted and stored on the Mozilla lab servers. Google offered something called Google Browser Sync but they have recently decided to stop development and support of the project, and have since exported it to developers to continue. Weave is definitely picking up where GBS stopped.

Weave uses WebDAV to send information from your browser to their servers for storage. Again the information being sent is encrypted (over HTTPS), and stored encrypted. Weave allows you to effectively have the same Firefox information from a variety of locations where you have a Firefox installation at your disposal. This is where the power of the software comes in. Whether it be on my laptop or desktop, I have the same information in Firefox shared and synchronized.

Where Google Browser Sync sent its information to Google’s servers for safe keeping, Weave is using the Mozilla lab servers. So I got to thinking. With all this crying over privacy of your online stored data why not take a bit of that control in to my own hands? What choices does the average person have when it comes to backing up or securing this type of data ourselves? Google Has All My Data – How Do I Back It Up? has some excellent solutions in the comments. Be warned, much of the solutions are submitted in the comments by users so caveat emptor. Weave is leveraging Open Source technologies. That means power to the people. Or in this case, let’s store our Weave data locally on a machine we run and trust.

I run Apache on my primary machine under a Windows environment. I was using Apache to send files between machines (hint, I was lazy, hence a web server solution) in the house. It took all of 10 minutes to set up WebDAV and Weave. I’ll do my best to write this for “out of the box” Apache under Windows installation defaults.

Under the default httpd.conf file, we need to enable WebDAV. It’s as easy as using LoadModule.

LoadModule dav_module modules/mod_dav.so
LoadModule dav_fs_module modules/mod_dav_fs.so
LoadModule dav_lock_module modules/mod_dav_lock.so

If you are like me, I tend to test things are working, so I did a quick restart of Apache, and watched the error logs. Of course, we just enabled the module to handle WebDAV requests, and everything was running smoothly.

Next up is how we get our WebDAV storage sorted out. The code below is what I put in to my httpd.conf to allow the local directory c:\apache\uploads to work as my WebDAV repository.

 
DavLockDB "C:/apache/var/DavLock"
 
Alias /uploads "C:\apache\uploads"
 
<Directory "C:\apache\uploads">
    Dav On
 
    Order Allow,Deny
    Allow from all
 
	Options Indexes
 
    AuthType Basic
    AuthName "WebDAV Restricted"
    AuthUserFile "C:/apache/user.passwd"
    require valid-user
 
    # Allow universal read-access, but writes are restricted
    # to the admin user.
    <LimitExcept GET OPTIONS>
        require user weaveuser
    </LimitExcept>
</Directory>

A couple points here to remember. weaveuser is the user name I have set, it’s just a generic user name that I made up for this post. This would also require you to make the c:\apache\user.passwd file. You can do it like this:

htpasswd -c c:\apache\user.passwd weaveuser

Note! -C creates a new file! Remember that if you are using an existing password file or you will overwrite the file!

Then I entered in my password twice, and the file was generated.

A quick restart of Apache later, I went in to my Firefox Weave preferences and edited the server location to: http://127.0.0.1:8080/uploads/. I logged in with the user name and password I made, and Weave synced up perfectly! If you have a hosting provider who allows DAV access, you could also use that for your Weave storage.

I am one of the lucky beta testers for Dropbox, but I know there are other ‘online storage drive’ solutions on the web. Dropbox, by the way, is beyond awesome and a bit beyond the scope of this post. At any rate, I thought to myself if Dropbox can be seen as a local directory, why can’t I get Apache to see it in the same way?

Alias /uploads "C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\My Documents\My Dropbox"

I just changed the reference of c:\apache\uploads to be my Dropbox location on my local file system. A quick restart of Apache and all was well. With Firefox running, I hesitantly clicked on Weave to sync my settings. Success! Dropbox efficiently ran in the background storing all my Weave information there safely, and Apache ran just fine. Even if the connection drops between your machine and Dropbox’s servers, you can always fall back to storing your information on your local machine — perhaps by using a secondary directory as a ‘backup’. I was just using Dropbox as a “because I can” thing. Perhaps other remote storage drive solutions can do the same. The idea itself is quite fascinating.

Granted we’re still in a solution here that “omg who has my data”, but this does give you the option of storing your settings in an online way — and one that you have a bit more control over. For me, I suppose I like how I can use Weave in my own network environment, and still gain full benefit from its syncing abilities.

As the web expands in to more multi-device concepts, combined with the need for syncing your data/thoughts/ideas/bookmarks/whatever, this type of solution really opens up some truly neat opportunities. More importantly, this puts power and control in to your hands without compromising the underlying technologies you want to take advantage of.

Credit where it’s due. Mario for the first post I saw about using Weave in such a way, and Remco for his work with more detailed Apache configurations (including SSL). And of course the guys at Mozilla Labs for keeping Weave going.

You see it every day.  Those people, smiling with brilliantly white teeth, in perfectly designed living spaces.  Aluminum faced appliances, sleek chrome lights, complex relationships between imported stone from Japan and wood.  Furniture molded in to organic forms, homes striped of the old, and replaced with the new (and expensive!).  Everything has character, but almost always not what you would do.  Except you want it.  It makes you want to have it.

Continued on the web, you see an ocean of self improvement methods, how to get things done better, more efficiently.  GTD, tricks, apps, how tos, what not to dos, boosting productivity!  Glancing to the side of your screen you scan down a list of numbers.  10 easy steps, 20 hard to do things that will make your life better, 100 tricks to improve the world!  Win!  Better!  Faster!

Lifestyle porn, while not quite an openly talked about fetish, is all around us and we adore it.  Admit it, most people will have picked up a magazine at a local store, and browsed through the perfect world we’re supposed to want to be in.  They remark how wonderful such a place might be.  A condo that stretches as far as the eye can see, with billowing silk curtains welcoming in the beautiful sea breeze over your immaculate and perfectly designed living collection.  Or perhaps you review the hottest home trends, for a sensible lifestyle.  One where your kids are normal, and won’t make a mess on that hundred-dollar-a-yard fabric hand made by peasants fed only the purest forms of water and bread.  And what day would not be made perfect by a kitchen that could prepare meals for a small nation, brilliantly clean and spotless.

It’s not a question of me being cynical as I write this.  I am by nature a realistic person with distinctive views.  And I can admit I have a keen eye for style and presentation of things.  But let’s be real here, what are the _actual_ costs being spent on these magazines, or the (loss of) time (quality time with your family?) as you browse is probably more than you realize.

In a tangent, I admit I have geek-lust.  I’d love a new Apple MacBook.  It’s sexy, it’s something I wanted really badly, and I literally did drive to a local Apple Store to see it in person a few times prior to my order.  To me, that’s along the lines of Buyers Remorse at work.  I am a smart consumer, working towards a rather expensive investment of my money to an object I hope will fulfill a role I need.

I glanced through a friend’s magazine rack the other day, and I noticed that most of the same stuff was just recycled between issues.  Trends that would have required much effort were tossed aside by designers who apparently have transcended life itself.  Anything that is in the current issue is already old news.  Hell, search for the table that looks like it is spilled paint.  You know the one, it’s red, and has shown up on pretty much every site I’m on.

Is it merely that our hobby now is the research and obsession of a lifestyle we wish we had, but never really obtain because we’re too busy obsessing and researching it?

Why have you not started to listen to Ratatat ?

With the push of online content, especially in relation to video formats, there’s a time where you want to just sit on your couch and watch what you have downloaded.  If you’re like me, you may have an xbox 360 that sees a good amount of use, and eventually you’ve seen or heard that it can play movies streamed from your PC.

After some quick searches you probably have tried a variety of software packages that claim to do just that.  Run a bit of software on the PC, your xbox magically talks to the PC, and viola, you’re watching your favorite videos.  Yet the hilarity of the ‘ease of connection’ is usually marred by problems, or things that just don’t work.

I’ve had much trouble with streaming from my PC, specifically in relation to the encoded source files (DivX, AVIs).  I run a simple network, nothing complex or overly stupid.  Aside from the problems with other software packages, I fell victim to things like the dreaded continual buffering problem on the xbox.  Pausing, restarting, invalid media type, fast forwarding were just a handful of the issues I had.  Inconsistency of these things made it very frustrating.  Running back and forth between the TV and the PC, trying to diagnose these secretive communications. Google, Nero, VLC, all have solutions, but none of them really worked out for me.  Some folks have had wonderful success, but I was not one of those lucky few.  That is until I found a gem of streaming beauty.

Enter in TVersity, an entirely free solution for this media conundrum.  I downloaded the newest available version, installed it, set up my media folder with in the program, and well, I tentatively went to my xbox.

Verdict? Flawless victory.

This software is absolutely brilliant.  I mean, it just works, and that’s fantastic when you think about all the other kludge solutions, hacks or oddly developed software packages that are in this streaming genre.  TVersity did exactly what I wanted.  I can watch my media, pause, fast forward, resume multiple different videos, everything.  No buffering problems, hell no problems at all.  So what’s the catch I kept thinking to myself?

There is no catch.  TVersity works perfectly.  Finally, I have a working streaming solution, and it’s entirely free.  So hats off to the guys over at TVersity.  Give it a shot, and see how it works out.  The forums are abuzz with some problems here and there, but the developers are very quick to look in to it, and figure out a workable solution.  Very nice to see, and awesome software too!

Buddhism looks at reincarnation as a rebirth in the context of consciousness rather than the birth and death of the body.  It’s been nearly three (3) years since I have actively blogged.  I would say I am ‘back’ but then I never really left.  I just took things offline from a public standpoint.  And so, I present back to the web, the rebirth of coresite.org.  Let’s see where we end up on this new journey, shall we?