I previously wrote about security and privacy issues regarding changing from a desktop based way of working to a web based system. It’s absolutely not all that bad. In fact I am in favor of using web applications for work. There’s a lot of advantages and it creates loads of new possibilities, especially if you have limited resources. As a student without a stable income, Internet and it’s cloud applications can be a goldmine, not to mention the heaps of learning resources out there.

Just to mention a few of the tools I recently stumbled upon, I’ll start with Pixlr, a free to use application which mimics Photoshop and it’s functions. Sure, it’s very basic compared to Photoshop, but it seems to have all of the most common and useful functions which are needed for basic photo editing. It’s quite amazing that you can have access to a desent photo editing tool wherever you have access to Internet, for free and you don’t even need to create an account in order to use it.

Pixlr uses the Freemium model, articulated by venture capitalist Fred Wilson and later more deeply explored by Chris Andresson in his book Free: The Future of a Radical Price from 2009, which is essentially a free version and a paid premium version.
This leads me to another product which uses the same model; Evernote, the product which I’m using right now on my iPod Touch to write this post in. Evernote is a note taking tool to store and gather anything you need to remember. Thing that makes it stand out ftom the crowd is that you can access it basically anywhere. There’s a Mac OS X, Windows, iPhone OS, Android, Blackberry OS and Windows Mobile and WebOS client and if you can’t use one of those you can always access all your data from a web browser. The perfect memo pad if you ask me.

According to the founders of Evernote’s own podcast, their business model is to gain as many users as possible through the free version. If they can get only around 1 percent of those users to sign up for the premium version that’s enough. Did they succeed? They most certainly did. They created an amazing product with now more than 2 million users, and 1.5%(31 000) of those are using the premium version.

Another very useful tool I recently found is Etherpad. A document collaboration tool which lets anyone, whithout an account, create a document and after that anyone who is in possesion of the newly created URL to the document can join and start editing the document at the same time as the creator in real-time. Well, this is similar technology as Google Wave is using, but this one only focuses on the document editing and it does it, in my opinion, way better.

Some other useful web tools are, Kuler – a quite advanced color picker from adobe, 280 Slides – an alternative to PowerPoint and Keynote, Bespin – a editor for software code from Mozilla. Last but not the least all of the Google apps(Gmail, Docs, Reader, Calendar etc.), which of course is immensely useful and absolutely free (except the ads).

The future looks very bright looking at all the great RIAs(Rich Internet Applications) being developed and many times offered for free through the new “Free” economy. From another angle it could also be seen as very dark if we don’t solve the security and privacy issues which is getting increasingly more and more important as time goes by.

http://www.pixlr.com/

http://www.longtail.com (Free: The Future of a Radical Price)

http://www.evernote.com/

http://etherpad.com/

wave.google.com/

http://kuler.adobe.com/

https://bespin.mozilla.com/

http://www.google.com/apps/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Internet_application

What lies in the future of data management? Will all of our information eventually be handled by someone else? Email, essays, work related documents; will we lose control over our important data? Is this good or bad?

My answer is that ideally it is good, but of course nothing can reach an ideal state. With a good system based on security with regards to privacy, it would be very good, but this is still quite far away.

Most people have already lost control over their emails, and most of us have accepted this fact. I use mostly Google Mail for emailing, and I do feel a lot of concern over privacy and security issues regarding personal information which I sometimes carelessly put in my emails, but I always try to keep in mind that there is a possibility that everything I write can be viewed by anyone with access to Internet. Sure, Google provide TSL encrypted connections, but can I completely trust Google. Google is not my family nor even my friend, even if they try to make me think that. I believe that we should not completely trust anyone with our most personal information, and definitely not strangers.

I completely agree with the slogan from X-Files - “Trust no one”. These words, or rather policy should be a fundamental idea for all personal information on Internet. This is absolutely not the case of today’s Internet. In some places the policy is being followed to a certain extent, but in the majority of web sites and especially in more advanced web applications there’s not much regard to the “Trust no one”-policy.

Overall the web model is fundamentally flawed. For instance, JavaScript is in itself horribly broken and beyond repair according to John Graham-Cumming, programmer and co-founder of Electric Cloud, which he wrote in his blog post “JavaScript must die” earlier this year. Viruses can be downloaded and installed very easily to your computer through JavaScript by just visiting a web site, starting the harvest of your personal information and sending it away to various places all over the Internet where it can be sold to any paying customer. This should of course be unacceptable. Even SSL and TSL, which has been a haven of security and privacy, has recently been found to be flawed and open for exploitation, this will however probably be fixed soon, by the normally very thorough engineers behind this protocol.

When Internet is growing larger and getting more entwined with our daily life, we have to start getting more concerned about privacy and security issues. Internet is a place where everything can be accessed and reached by anyone, anywhere on Earth. Therefore, it is more crucial than ever to be concerned about these issues. Trust no one!

JavaScript must die – http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/09/javascript-must-die.html
A Security Vulnerability in SSL – http://www.grc.com/sn/sn-223.htm, http://www.twit.tv/sn223

Yesterday, September 30 , Google sent out 100 000 invites to people who had signed up for it. I didn’t get one.

I’ve been pretty excited over this new and refreshing way of reinventing email. I’m not sure if it’s entirely correct to call it email. It’s more like a combination of instant messaging, email and synchronized document editing. I do believe that eventually something like this will replace email, but for now the number one way of using it will be for collaborate work, for school and businesses. It is comparable to screen sharing but with the difference that many people can edit the same documents at the same time. Obviously, it also seems to be a lot faster than screen sharing.

I’m quite disappointing that I couldn’t get an invite, but I guess I have to be a good boy and patiently wait a while longer until it is released for the public, but of course if someone have an invitation laying around I would gladly accept it. ^^

Glasklart from Max Rudberg

I have to admit one thing – I’m a tweak geek. I really spend too much time tweaking the interface, performance etc. The problem is that I get bored very quickly, I’m constantly changing the background of my desktop. Anyway, I will deal with that problem later.

I love the power that Cydia for the iPhone gives a tweaker. The theme community and the material that’s out there and available through Cydia and Winterboard is huge and the quality of the themes are amazing! I thought I’d share two of my favorite themes. The first is Glasklart, which is Swedish for “Glass Clear” or a better translation would probably be “Crystal Clear”. The icons are completely transparent except for the logos which are always white. This theme looks great if you have a nice wallpaper with matching colors. Second is iElegance, which is a very complete theme that modifies most parts of the interface, from the music controller to the look of the clock app and the settings app.

iElegance from Rob Grohman

I just found some very nice tweaks through Cydia. There’s a mod called WeatherIcon which makes it possible to get live updates of the weather and get it displayed directly onto the icon, so there’s no need to open the app. Pretty cool I say! It’s also possible to get the icon of the clock app to show the time in real-time through a mod called LiveClock.

Well enough of this ultra ultra-geeky and actually pretty meaningless tech-talk for today. It’s pretty fun though, but I really should try to do something more productive with my time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jailbreak_%28iPhone%29
http://www.maxthemes.com/
http://modmyi.com/info/ielegance.php
http://www.saurik.com/id/1
http://www.saurik.com/id/9
http://blog.iphone-dev.org/

Finally it’s here, firmware 3.0. For some reason I’ve been quite excited about this update. Ever since I saw the keynote earlier this year, I’ve been having high expectations on this version. Probably because the long-awaited copy and paste function.

I got it installed yesterday on my iPod Touch. It’s not really that much different but it is indeed a nice change. It feels a bit more stable and also snappier. A couple of new features has been introduced, such as Cut, Copy & Paste, which is a very, very welcome change. It really took too long time for this feature to arrive. It’s really a very good and user-friendly implementation of such a function. Very fast and easy to use. Just double tap on the word you want to select. If you want to make a longer selection, just press in one of the corners of the selection and drag it out. It can’ really be easier and it leaves me with nothing else to wish for.

A search function, Spotlight, has also appeared, which is quite useful. I just wish it would be possible to search the web with the same function.

Overall, this is really the most satisfying upgrade of the iPhone version of OS X so far. I haven’t really encountered any bugs yet. So far, so good.

OS X 10.5 Leopard

I reinstalled OS X Leopard yesterday from an external usb connected hard drive. It’s been about one year ago since I installed Leopard for the first time. 1 year is a pretty long time for me when it comes to this issue. I probably didn’t need to do this, I guess it’s mostly a psychological thing for me, but it feels pretty good doing a clean install of my system. Everything worked quite good before, but after cleaning the system,  things seem to run a little bit smoother, at least that’s what I’d like to believe. ^^  When it comes to my computer I’m a total control freak! Anyway I thought I’d go through the process of how to do this.

Step 2 - Create the needed partition

1. You need a disk image(a dmg file of OS X Leopard).
2. Create a new partition on your external drive with preferably 8 GB of storage space. Do this by opening up disk utility. Select your disk and choose the Partition tab. Select the number of partitions you want to create. Click the Options button and choose GUID Partition Table in order to make it bootable. Change the size of the partition that you are going to put OS X on to 8 GB. Use the Mac OS Extended(Journaled) format and then click apply.
3. Now select the 8 GB partition that you just created and choose the Restore tab. The “Source” should be your OS X image
   

   Step 3 - Use Restore in order to put the OS X installation files on your hard drive

   file(dmg) and the “Destination” should be your 8 GB partition. Just drag-and-drop the partition from the left side into the Destination text box. Open up finder, locate your OS X image file and drag-and-drop it into the Source text box. Click Restore.

4. Be sure that you have everything backed up before you proceed.
5. Restart your computer. Press and hold the option(alt)-key immediately to start the boot manager. Now you should be able to see your internal hard drive to the left and your newly created OS X install partition to the right. Select the install partition and from now on it will just be as installing from a DVD.

I should note that if you have your external disks connected to a USB hub you might not be able to boot from it. I had this problem and it took me a while to figure it out. I have two 500 GB hard drives inside a case. They are acting as two seperate drives, not using RAID. So they are basically connected to a USB hub. Because of this configuration I could not get it to boot from this disk. I couldn’t see anything except my internal drive in the boot manager, really annoying problem. Well eventually I figured it out and I opened up the case and just disconnected one of the hard drives. I connected it again to my computer and now everything worked fine. I have no idea why it can’t boot when connected to a hub, and I’m really curious to find out.

I think it’s really nice having the OS X installation media on a partition on my hard disk. If something happens you will have fast access to it, you will have a backup of your Installation DVD, and you don’t have to use the your sensitive DVD original. Another big benefit is that it installs faster then from the DVD.

It’s Golden week. The period of the Japanese year containing the most national holidays. April 29th – Emperor Showa’s birthday, May 3rd Constitution Memorial Day, May 4th – Greenery Day and May 5th – Children’s Day. For our school this means that we have a break from the 29th of April until the 6th of May. Feels pretty good.

Unfortunately I don’t have any money to spend, so I can’t really do anything special. I also have to spend time moving from next week, which is always an unpleasant experience. My current place is way to far away from school. I have to commute about 2 hour and 30 minutes every which is not very healthy for the wallet. The place I move to will only be 30 min away with express train.

I have to many things and I will move to an even smaller room than I have now which means trouble for me. I hate the new economy! 8 months ago I had 16 m², then I had to move to this place which is 11 m² and now I will have 8m². I miss my first place, it really was the best!  I’ll get the keys to the new place tomorrow. Have to start moving things then.

Backup, backup, backup! One can never hear these words too much. The reality is that hard drives fail sometimes and sometimes they do it a lot. No one can get away from it, and if you have something that you don’t want to lose, you have to make a backup of it regularly, or preferably two or three backups if it’s very important.

There’s a couple of good solutions on OS X Leopard to solve this problem. The most commonly known is probably Time Machine, which is built-in feature in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Apple made a big thing out of this feature in their marketing before the release of Leopard. I haven’t actually tried it out, so I can’t really say anything of value about this. The idea behind it is that you constantly have a hard drive, dedicated only to Time Machine backup, connected to the system you want to backup. Time Machine will then automatically backup your system regularly and will save multiple copies of each document. If you delete something by mistake you can then go “back in time” to recover it. Seems like a very nice solution for a desktop computer.

I don’t really have any use for that kind of backup. First of all, I don’t want to dedicate a complete hard drive for just Time Machine, and secondly I can’t have a external hard drive connected to my computer all the time. That’s why I choose to use iBackup. It’s free for personal use, and quite cheap if you have a business. This is a very simple solution. It just backs up the folders and files on your system that you have selected. So initially you have to create a profile and decide what to back up and from then on you can just use the same profile every time you want to back up. You can also make a schedule, so the software does it automatically if you prefer that.

If you want to save space and don’t dedicate a hard drive just for backup, this is a very good and easy-to-use solution. If you just want to sit back and never want to bother you should use the built-in Time Machine.

There is also two other very popular backup softwares in the mac commuity. SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner. These softwares does essentially the same thing. They make a fully bootable system backup. So if something goes wrong you can just boot up from the backup drive instead. I have never used them so I’m not aware of the details. SuperDuper! costs $27.95 and Carbon Copy Cloner is free.

http://www.grapefruit.ch/iBackup/index.html
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/timemachine.html
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html
http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html

Yesterday I had my entrance cermony to my new school. I have been waiting a long time for this moment. I was really nervous before getting there. I feel really silly about getting as nervous as I did, but I usually feel like that about completely new things.

The fact that I’m going to start studying IT at college level in Japanese feels really weird and really worried about if I will be able to handle it or not. Next week it’s starting for real. Quite exciting!

CPU menu item

Some applications are too valuable to not be a part of your toolbox. I thought that I should write a few lines about my favorite apps that I love and use regularly.

The first one up is iStat Menus from iSlayer. This is the ultimate system monitoring software. It sits in your menubar and can show information about all sorts of things. For example the things I choose it to show me is, CPU load, network activity, hard drive info, RAM. It shows the activity of your system through color custimizable graphs or text. It has beautiful drop down menus with loads of information packed in. For example through the CPU drop down menu you can see in real time the top 5 processes that uses the most CPU for the moment. You can see how many processes is running and the uptime of your system. There’s also a link there to the activity monitor, and this is just for the CPU drop down menu.

It can also replace the date and time menu item, to a more customizable and beautiful looking one. You can there, through the drop down menu, choose to show the time in different time zones.

There is another application out there that is similar to this one, called MenuMeters and it’s from Raging Menac. This one is Open Source which I usually prefer, but it doesn’t look as good as iStat Menus, it’s less mac-like(sorry for the cliché) and if I remember right it doesn’t display as much information as iStat Menus does.

I really have a lot of use for this. It’s great to be able to see , in a very quick way, if the processor is working to much and which process is causing it. The network menu item is also very useful to be able to see if something is downloading for the moment and how much bandwidth it’s using.

This is truly a very solid piece of software that have never caused me any trouble. It runs very stable and only leaves a small print on your system resources.

http://islayer.com/apps/istatmenus/

http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/menumeters/index.html