Copies of my stuff

Google, Facebook, Twitter and others have a lot of content that I've
generated. I'm starting to have second thoughts about letting them
host it and sell it (me). Even assuming their privacy policy exactly
matches mine, their security may not always be perfect. They may get
hacked (or get a court order that they may or may not tell me about)
resulting in my data being used in ways I don't want it to be.
I'm starting to flirt with the idea of pulling all my content back and
hosting it myself on something like OwnCloud. At the very least, it's a
good idea to make a backup of my own data. I have no guarantee that
they will keep hosting content I've posted (think Napster and perhaps
myspace or maybe even my old employer CompuServe or that their
backups, distributed data centers and networks will prevent outages
(for example from operational error or wide-scale Internet distributed
denial of services (DDoS) attacks).
Here are links/procedures to do that for some of the services that
may have your data:

Google Takeout

Google makes the process easy: https://www.google.com/settings/takeout

Facebook

The Facebook also provides a download service:
https://www.facebook.com/help/131112897028467. They send you email
with links to download your stuff. I'm still waiting. Seems it's a
slow process (lower priority, larger job, more intentional
impediments?) than allowing me to quickly post what I'm eating for
lunch for all the world to see….

Twitter

In twitter settings, there is a link to request under stetting (web
interface) to request a download of all your tweets. Again, an
email link. Mine came back pretty fast. Still waiting for
Facebook….
I may update this post form time to time.
I would welcome comments or additions for popular services (but I will
favor ones I actually use…)

LASER Workshop Tag Cloud

Here is a word cloud of my notes from the

   Learning from Authoritative Security Experiment Results (LASER) 2013 workshop

Digital War Memorials

I the walked Gettysburg battlefield on the morning of the 150th anniversary of Pickets charge
(which was actually an orderly march across an open field into direct fire).
Big Roundtop, Gettysburg

It seems that 30 or 40 years on, a generation that fought a great battle feels the need
to erect monuments to their heroic efforts, lest succeeding generations forget their deeds.

This IEEE article is a sort of digital monument to the OSI wars:

   http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/osi-the-internet-that-wasnt

Maybe it's the failed history major in me.   Maybe it's the fact that my first job was
working for a company (CompuServe)  that was doing commercial packet switching
in 1972.   Maybe its the fact that I lived through the last half of the war and have met
some of principals (Vint Cerf), but I found this interesting.

There may be no imposing garnet Pennsylvania monument looming over the digital battlefield, but I somehow thing the legacy of "rough consensus and running code" will be far greater and longer lasting.

Cicadas in NoVa: imagine an entire forrest that sounds like a Star Trek TOS phaser set to overload.

Cicadas in NoVa:  imagine  an entire forrest that sounds like a Star Trek TOS phaser set to overload.

org·i·fy
tr.v. org·i·fied, org·i·fy·ing, org·i·fies
  1. To convert something to org-mode; to organize.
  [Late Latin orgificre, to make org-like : Latin orgificatus, orgish; see org- in Indo-European roots + Latin -ficre, -fy.]
  orgi·fi·cation (-f-kshn) n. orgi·fier n.

Examples
  * "The orgificaion of my .emacs file is complete"
  * "To orgify, or not to orgify, that is the question"

"Org-mode in Your Pocket Is a GNU-Shaped Devil" (repost)

Truer words were never spoken.  From Michael Hall:

Org-mode in Your Pocket Is a GNU-Shaped Devil

"With Emacs, you don’t just go “la la la … I’m gonna add org mode back and call it a day!” You think to yourself, “I love org mode. I wish there was an easy way to turn an e-mail message into a todo …” and the next thing you know you’re dealing with how to configure GNUS.

Then you think “All my calendar stuff is in Google calendar … how can I get it into my org mode agenda?” and that means you’re off reading this guy’s page and just getting angrier and angrier.

Then you go in the kitchen and make a drink, and while you’re making it and calming down you think to yourself, if I’m doing all this stuff in Emacs anyhow, what would it hurt to follow Twitter in Emacs?

Now you’re not drinking because you’re angry … you’re drinking because you wonder what happened to you and it makes you sad. But you’re drunk, so it seems like a perfectly good idea to build an entire Web site using nothing but Emacs because then you can get a LaTeX version of it for if the asteroids hit and their radiation destroys all HTML. And having decided to do that, part of you thinks about how glad you are you have org mode, so you can organize the lengthy process of making sure you never have to leave Emacs again."

Correlation or causation?

Edward Tufte: New ET Writings, Artworks & News