Sat, 16 Jun 2007
I’ve thought S3 was pretty awesome sounding ever since it launched early last year. Sadly I haven’t managed to get it set up yet – it’s refusing to accept my credit card (which I’ve used to buy stuff from Amazon before), so I just get a NotSignedUp error and told “Your account is not signed up for the S3 service.” The webservices help has responded, but not managed to work out wtf’s going on yet.
One of the things I’d like to do with it is (the pretty obvious and staid) remote backup thing – though what I’m actually hoping for is more to get something more or less the same as the backup described in Greg Egan’s Distress, which is more or less: your laptop automatically backs itself up to the web somewhere, then when your laptop dies or gets stolen, you get a random new one, authorise it with your passcode or thumbprint or whatever, and it automatically recovers itself from the backups you’ve got on the web.
Oddly though none of the command line tools seem to quite do backup “right” (by my definition) – there’re some that encrypt, some that do an rsync equivalent, and none that I’ve seen compress, all of which seem like a requirement to me; and given the support for metadata pretty easy to actually handle.
It’d be even nicer if there were some other services with similar APIs (and cost structures!) so it wasn’t quite tying yourself to amazon so much, but until Google decide to release G-Drive or some other distributed thing happens, there’s not much to be done. Of course while amazon won’t even let me in, not much to be done…
Well, made it to Edinburgh, via a forty hour stopover in Singapore. Picked up a tie and kilt in the Debian tartan. Sadly Edinburgh in midsummer isn’t as warm as Singapore in summer, or even as Brisbane in winter, so there’s good odds my knees are going to be shaking as well as visible all to soon. Oh well, there’s reports that there might be scattered sunshine by Monday – fingers crossed.
The dak BOF’s been delayed until tomorrow (Saturday 3pm, Edinburgh localtime) so Andi and Steve can sit in. Bit weird having something that technical on Debian day, I guess, but hey, whatever. It’s scheduled for a 2hr session, but I’m hoping it’ll be pretty informal and hacky rather than slides and lecturing or whatever. I’m hoping people will arrive with some ideas on what cool things that dak ought to be handling, and we can spend the time actually making dak support as many of those things as possible. Some of the ideas I like are in the BOF proposal. It might also be worth having a look at the video (or audio) of Robert Collins’ talk (“…Release always?”) at the Debian miniconf at linux.conf.au earlier this year, particular related to some of the ideas about setting up separate GNOME or KDE or libstdc++ staging areas for getting major updates ready for unstable rather than mixing them all up in experimental. Anyway, feel free to plan on arriving or leaving anytime during the BOF, unstructured is just another word for freedom!
Yesterday I had a quick chat with Frans about getting debootstrap officially incorporated into the d-i subversion repo, so that it’s officially team maintained, and there’s a convenient central place for hacking on it. Given the recent discussion (while I was flying to debconf, in fact – how inconsiderate!) hopefully that’ll mean we’ll get a couple of cleanups there too.
Oh, also got informed that Eben Moglen will be giving a free lecture in Edinburgh on Tuesday after debconf (the 26th) courtesy of the Scottish Society for Computers and Law. Sounds interesting if you’re into the whole theory of law and the effects of modern technology thereon:
In this lecture, Professor Moglen considers how private legislation is replacing public law as the organising intellectual structure for software and the technology industries, with far-reaching social consequences and theoretical implications.
Not sure if he’ll arrive in time to drop by during DebConf proper or not.