Facebook Privacy Settings

 Identity and Privacy  No Responses »
Dec 072007
 

I’ve writ­ten in this blog before about Face­book’s pri­vacy issues, and the import­ance of mak­ing sure the pri­vacy set­tings in your Face­book pro­file match what you want to have hap­pen to your per­son­al data. Bri­an pos­ted on this same top­ic and has some good points and detailed instruc­tions; the com­ments are also worth reading.

I went and checked my set­tings and found they looked a little dif­fer­ent to what I remembered, so it’s prob­ably a good idea to check your set­tings on a reg­u­lar basis; as Face­book changes what they do they may change which options exist. And think about what you want, about that bal­ance between let­ting out enough inform­a­tion so old friends can find you again (as lots of people want) and mak­ing sure that not too much inform­a­tion gets out. I changed most of mine to “friends only” from the default “my net­works and friends”; maybe at some stage I’ll change some of them back again but for the time being I feel more com­fort­able this way. 

Canadian Copyright

 General  No Responses »
Dec 072007
 

It looks like the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment in Canada is plan­ning on chan­ging the copy­right law. If you’re con­cerned about the issue of copy­right, and par­tic­u­larly if you’re liv­ing in Canada and want to do some­thing about this issue, read the details on Michael Geist’s blog. He has a whole series on why he thinks the pro­posed new bill is not neces­sary (includ­ing items such as arrests being made under the cur­rent Copy­right Act, which would there­fore appear to give the police all the powers they need, and the need for more con­sulta­tion).

Hibernating Ubuntu

 Technology  2 Responses »
Dec 072007
 

I’ve had Ubuntu on my laptop for a while, and it nev­er hibern­ated. I’d do what looked like the right things, but it just did­n’t work. So a couple of days ago I decided I should try to track down the prob­lem. I was par­tially suc­cess­ful; hibern­at­ing a laptop prop­erly seems to be dif­fi­cult. Here’s what I did to track down (some of) the problem.

When it comes back after fail­ing to hibern­ate, the sys­tem politely tells you to check the help file for com­mon prob­lems. So you bring up the help file and it con­tains a defin­i­tion of hibern­ate, with no hints as to what might be going wrong, but a point­er to the Ubuntu sup­port for­ums as well as to laptop test­ing pages which sup­posedly con­tain ideas of what to try. The laptop test­ing page claims that hibern­ate works for the Toshiba Tecra M2 that I have, so that did­n’t help much.

Watch­ing closely the next time I tried hibern­at­ing revealed an error mes­sage flash­ing by about not enough swap space. Search­ing for this reveals that the swap space the installer gives you by default may not be enough to man­age hiberna­tion. You need the same size swap as RAM, which I did­n’t have. OK, out with the gpar­ted livecd to recon­fig­ure my par­ti­tions. For­tu­nately I had some spare unused room next to the swap par­ti­tion to grow it into. The next error mes­sage I saw flash­ing by on hibern­at­ing (read­ing it involved hibern­at­ing mul­tiple times, star­ing fix­edly at the right point in the screen, hop­ing that the last mes­sage I saw might be of some use; why can­’t these error mes­sages by default be put in a nice error dia­log box so I can actu­ally read them?) was that the sys­tem could­n’t find the swap space. Pok­ing around the Ubuntu sup­port for­um reveals that each time the machine is rebooted, the swap par­ti­tion gets a new UUID, thereby killing the con­fig files for any scripts that were set up to use the old one. More details here; fol­low­ing the steps in that post­ing finally made hibern­ate mostly work, albeit with a ton of error mes­sages about the USB device (the mouse, I pre­sume, since that’s the only USB device I have con­nec­ted) which I’m ignor­ing. The mostly refers to the fact that the sys­tem often won’t actu­ally come back to life after being in hiberna­tion until I hit the power but­ton and restart from scratch. I have yet to fig­ure out what’s going on there; any hints are welcome.

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