Now I’m in the situation where I want to go back to the desktop client. I’ve got a nice new computer with lots of RAM and lots of screen real estate. But I’m now slightly dismayed, because my wonderfully accessible chat logs are now no longer going to be “all” with my mail. I say “all” because before a certain point they weren’t, but from that point on, I was golden. Now, if I switch back, I’ll have all my logs to a certain point on my computer, then a bunch in “the cloud,” and then most of them on my desktop, and some in my browser, for when I’m away from my computer. Not ideal.

What I really want it some “neutral” location for my logs that both the Gmail client and my desktop application (currently Pidgin) will respect and send their logs to. I’ve got web space out there, so I’ve got a location, but how to make it work? One way I could think of is to run something like a Greasemonkey script which keeps track of what it’s sent over time (so when I come back to the computer it’s installed on, it sends the new conversations) and sends new conversations off periodically. So that could be done with Greasemonkey, or with a Firefox Plugin. A modification to Pidgin sounds relatively trivial to me at this point, at least compared to writing a Firefox plugin. In any case, I’m going to ponder this… Any thoughts on the matter, technical or otherwise, are welcome.

My issue was as follows: every time the program started up on GNOME session start, it would revert to an unfashionable theme that I didn’t want. The configuration showed that it was on the Glass theme, as I wanted, but it was clearly not. Every time I ran the program otherwise, it would successfully take on the appropriate theme.

Long story short, it turns out the issue is likely related to compiz not being fully started yet, so it defaults to its non-pretty theme. I first wrote a script that waits for compiz to start then runs, but the process “compiz” existing was not good enough. So I created a 3-line script to delay Gnome Do’s startup by 2 seconds, and it works:

#!/bin/bash
sleep 2
gnome-do

Heck, this could be a one-liner, but whatever. I actually tried to use GNOME’s built-in session manager to invoke the sleep, but it didn’t work out for me at first and I didn’t feel like trying again, so this works just fine.

In any case, I have two hard drives in this machine, and none of them were mounting automatically on my shiny new GNOME desktop. I thought it was a problem with NTFS, then with the gnome-volume-manager. I spent a bunch of time verifying I had the right drivers (ntfs-3g) and the latest software installed. Turns out I found my solution in an unlikely place: the Arch Linux wiki. Anywho, the fix was to change around some policy setting. A one-liner fix, as so many of them seem to be in the end. *sigh*

In order to make this experience even more exciting, I decided I’d try and use the same file and configurations to have HAL ignore /dev/sda1, which is my Acer recovery partition. I don’t particularly want to see that from Linux, and I certainly don’t want to mount it in case I accidentally end up doing something horrible to it. I came across this blog post, and adapted its instructions like so (for the file /etc/hal/fdi/policy/10-ntfs3g.fdi) by adding the following section:

<device>
<match key="block.device" string="/dev/sda1">
<merge key="volume.ignore" type="bool">true</merge>
</match>
</device>

Much to my surprise, it worked! (after I changed my bleary-eyed mistake of “/dev/hda” to “/dev/sda1″ ).

I probably should make a point of posting some more of these gems, and where I found their solutions. If it takes me more than 20 minutes to find them, it can’t be all that easy to find. In any case, I’d say this is a job well done!

It doesn’t matter if it’s open-sourced, if you have to use Google Toolkit to make anything decent, that’s “Google is here to define what can be done” for you.

Given the exhaustive list of services Google provides, I’d say this is actually a rather realistic path we’re trudging down. However, I feel like there is one force for freedom that will swoop in and save the day (and no, it’s not Richard Stallman). It’s open standards for data. If open formats exist and are used to the letter and the ability to export and import from Google services are provided, then things will ultimately find a balance. Sure, billions of people will still flock to their amazing services (myself included), but having that freedom to have your own data with you gives you more than just peace of mind. It gives you the ability, on a whim, to pick up and move to another service in a snap. Of course, I’m also aware that standards are often not followed to the letter. Just look at proprietary additions to HTML and CSS by different browsers and what Microsoft has been doing with ODF.

In any case, back to the ideal world where standards are followed. As an example, let’s say Google Calendar starts doing some freaky tracking of where you go and you don’t like it (clearly I’m starved for creativity). Even now, you can go in, export your calendars, and dump them into, say, Yahoo. Or perhaps iCal on your Mac, or some other Desktop application. The point is, that you are not one bit tied to Google’s services, except to the extent that you make yourself tied to them (with the exception of email, where addresses are particularly annoying to change).

And then you may say, “well what if no alternatives exist?” And I say, alternatives will exist. Always. Perhaps they’ll be a bit slow-coming. Perhaps they won’t be as shiny. But sure as hell they’ll exist. Because there will always be people out there, like Dion , that are watching the current web Giant(s) with a watchful eye. And that’s where the “power of community” (cliche, right?) comes into play. Google may have thousands (is it thousands?) of developers, but any given project, seen as an important enough need, can garner many, many talented developers to contribute to the cause.

So while it’s good to keep an eye out, I won’t be stressing too much about the future of the web. I’ll just keep my data safe, accessible, and ready to move on a moment’s notice.