encfs

WARNING The encryption of encfs is severly broken. Do not rely on it to keep anything secret.

So one can layer encfs on top of google-drive-ocamlfuse.

Here's how I set it up.

yum --enablerepo=epel install rlog-devel boost-devel
wget http://encfs.googlecode.com/files/encfs-1.7.4.tgz
tar zxvf encfs-1.7.4.tgz
cd encfs-1.7.4
./configure --prefix=/opt/encfs-1.7.4   \
        --with-boost-serialization=boost_serialization-mt \
        --with-boost-filesystem=boost_filesystem-mt

make all && sudo make install
sudo sh -c "echo /opt/encfs-1.7.4/lib >/etc/ld.so.conf.d/encfs-1.7.4.conf"  
sudo ldconfig 
for n in /opt/encfs-1.7.4/bin/encfs* ; do
    sudo ln -s $n /usr/local/bin 
done 

encfs ~/googledrive/Backup/Encoded ~/encfs

And now "all" I have to do is rsync -av /remote/pictures/ ~/encfs/Pictures/ --progress. And wait. A lot, given I'm getting roughly 12.43kB/s though this setup.

Backups in the cloud.

Given that 1TB of backup from Google is now 10$ a month, I had to look into doing cloud backups again.

Google doesn't have a native Linux client. So one has to use google-drive-ocamlfuse. Installing this on CentOS 6 is surprisingly complex. And Google Drive's auth mechanism is based around a web interface.

But once I got it working, it Just Worked. Or rather, I could copy small files to ~/googledrive, see them via the web interface, delete them there and they are now missing.

Of course you wouldn't leave unencrypted backups on Google's servers. I futzed around with gpg a bit, but maybe layering encfs on top of google-drive-ocamlfuse would be a better idea.

My experimetation was cut short by supper, and by the fact that uploading a 400MB file was very slow :-) (sent 418536429 bytes received 31 bytes 219416.23 bytes/sec aka 1.6 Mbit/S)

For the record, here is how I installed google-drive-ocamlfuse

yum install m4 libcurl-devel fuse-devel sqlite-devel zlib-devel \
    libzip-devel openssl-devel
curl -kL https://raw.github.com/hcarty/ocamlbrew/master/ocamlbrew-install \
    | env OCAMLBREW_FLAGS="-r" bash
source /home/fil/ocamlbrew/ocaml-4.01.0/etc/ocamlbrew.bashrc
opam init
eval `opam config env --root=/home/fil/ocamlbrew/ocaml-4.01.0/.opam`
opam install google-drive-ocamlfuse
sudo usermod -a -G fuse fil
google-drive-ocamlfuse 
google-drive-ocamlfuse ~/googledrive

The second to last command will open a browser to get an OAuth token. This means you need htmlview and a valid DISPLAY. The token is only good for 30 days. This is something that needs to be better automated.

How Google Jumped The Shark

I was going to call this "Year end round up" but I'm 2 months late. And there were far more important things going on last year.

Google jumped the shark.

It was the year they declared war on your private life. Here is a great quote from Google CEO Eric Schmidt "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." It is extremely startling that a man as smart as him doesn't realise everything that is wrong with that statement. Remember, this from a company who's mission statement used to be "Don't do evil." Of course, Schmidt is a rich straight male of european descent and has profited handsomely from that Invisible Knapsack he has.

And of course they chose the wrong side of the Nym Wars.

But for me, the real signal that Google No Longer Gets It was that they pulled the plug on Google Wave. This was the most exciting thing I've seen since... well since the web was won, I guess. Take email, IRC, Wikis and online forums. Remove all the elements of those that make them annoying. Then add in RSS feeds, images, spreadsheets, version control, real time simultaneous editing and more. Take AJAX, Comet and all that, then make something helluva useful out of it.

Weighing the border

Years ago Susan used some mapping software to plot a route from North Hatley to (I think) New Brunswick. This was back when software came from a CD-ROM, not a web server. The software routed her through the USA. She added (I suspect) Rimouski to her itinerary as a way of by-passing the USA. It still routed her through Maine. As I remember, she then contacted tech support, who said they'd fix it in the next release. Remember, this was back when software was burned on CD-ROMs so they couldn't just tweak something and have it available next morning.

Because really, what you want is to give a border crossing a very high weight, so the AI will give it a low priority. CD-ROMs might also make you think of a time when crossing a border consisted of answering "yes, $DESTINATION, no, no" to a surly border guard. Nowadays it requires passports, finger printing and the possibility that you get shot when you go to reach for your glove compartment. So whatever the weight used to be, multiply it by 5. Or you could have a user configuration "USA border guards scare the hell out of me."

All this makes me wonder if there's someone at Google Maps who's job is to evaluate the relative difficulty of crossing various borders, updating the system as foreign policy deteriorates.

What brought this back to mind is that I'm currently IN Shediac, New Brunswick.

In semi-related news: I've finally mastered wireless connection setup in CentOS. Delete ifcfg-eth1 (in both /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts AND /etc/sysconfig/networking/devices), run nm-connection-editor, let the wizard to its work. NetworkManager stores its config in ~/.gconf/system/networking/connections. The WEP key is stored somewhere else. Yes, the place I'm staying uses WEP, which takes less then a minute to crack but more then a minute for the owner to write down for you.

Google does it again

Impress me, that is. Look at this:

Not only do they flag recipe as a special search type, but they allow me to refine my search by ingredient, cooking time and calories. OK, that last one is stupid and the list of ingredients they do allow me to exclude/include are a bit short, it's still impressive.

While on the subject of Google, take a look at this:

See that subtle little blue bar above "Web"? What's more, they only waste 130 pixels before getting to search results.

Microsoft wastes 145 pixels, which is not bad considering how much more fluff they have.


And Yahoo! wastes 190 pixels. And has blinding blue links that I kinda, strangely enough.

Pixels are important. Everyone seems to have made the mistake of buying a wide screen LCD, vertical pixels are at a premium.

Nice one Google

I might complain about computers a bit. OK, maybe I complain about computers a lot. But last night something jumped out at me that is Just Right. I was trying to find details of a Western Digital hard drive. I'd forgotten that they have wdc.com, as opposed to to the completely unused wd.com. Anyway, I googled "western digital" and noticed the following:

YES! That is so useful, it makes you wonder why they didn't have it before. Or did they and I only just noticed.

Also works: Asus, CPAN, boardcom, youtube. (Woah, 'you' returns youtube. OK, maybe not so strange, considering who owns youtube.)

I wonder what it takes to get the site-search treatment, because the following don't work: Linux, Perl, Apple, Wacom.