Open Source Law Student – Part 2

This is the second part of my free and open source law student project that I’ve conducted over the past year.  It picks up pretty much where part 1 left off, which you can read here.

Calendaring: Mozilla Sunbird and Google Calendar, Windows Live Mail with built in calendar. I tried switching entirely to Sunbird (and syncing it with Google Calendar) which I eventually got working satisfactorily. Sunbird is fine, but I still find the user interface used by Outlook 2007 to be far superior.  I truly wish that was not the case, however, as Outlook is a bloated jack of all trades, and insists on bizarrely storing everything in just one .pst file which is a disaster waiting to happen.  I readily accept that Outlook’s days are most definitely numbered.

Encryption – Around 12 months ago, I moved away from Steganos Safe on my Windows machines for the open source solution, TrueCrypt, which is far superior in my opinion. There are Mac and Linux versions available too, though I find it annoying that it doesn’t offer the ability to increase the size of an encrypted safe you have already created – a feature which Steganos Safe boasts. Although I tried the full partition encryption feature on a laptop, I mainly use encryption simply as a safe or vault for confidential data.

Although I eventually came to the conclusion that I cannot make an open source based solution work for me, it was more down to my esoteric computer needs rather than the software not being up to the job. To students making the switch from Windows to a distro of Linux, I would say the following:

Be prepared for the odd problem: I quite like Ubuntu and immediately felt at home within it. Getting one of my printers to work proved more difficult than I imagined but it’s perfectly doable – particularly with a little help from Google. There are plenty of very helpful Linux discussion boards and forums out there. Parts of the UI felt a little clunky, yet there were others which felt more streamlined and user-friendly than Windows. One thing that did bug me greatly in the early days was getting used to the ‘OK’ and ‘Cancel’ buttons being the opposite way round in Linux dialog boxes compared to Windows. It’s always the little things in life!

Ink-saving software not compatible: I like to run ink-saving software on my Windows machines which minimises the amount of ink used when printing: on XP I used Inksaver 2.0 while with Vista (and Windows 7) I’m running EcoPrint 2 Ink and Toner Saver. Both are excellent and have saved me a huge amount of money over the years. Of course, I’m not able to get either working with Linux even using a compatibility layer such as Wine (not that either EcoPrint or Inksaver is open source or free, either) but I’m not prepared to go without ink-saving software for long. On my LL.M I’ve had to do way too much printing for that to be an option.

While I’m on the subject of printing, I’ve long harboured a hatred for typical printer manufacturers and the way they have turned printer consumables into such a grossly lucrative aftermarket. While I’ve suffered with various HP, Epson and Lexmark models over the years (and a Citizen dot matrix if we’re being picky) Canon hardware is by far and away the best in my experience – both in terms of price and performance.

I currently have two printers set up: a regular Canon inkjet and a Canon multi-function machine, which is reserved mainly for scanning and copying. My regular inkjet, an aging Canon IP1500, was as cheap as chips to buy back in 2005 and even cheaper to run. I get unbranded cartridges from specialist online ink outlets which work out at just over £1 per cartridge. While their longevity might be slightly less than with official cartridges, it still represents a huge saving and a regular compatible cartridge lasted several weeks on my LL.M – or several months during regular use.  With my ink-saving software, too, I enjoy super-cheap printing – just as it should be.

While some users might be less than eager to shell out on ink saving software, it is very inexpensive and very quickly pays for itself – particularly if you ramp the saving percentage up.  As a general rule, I keep mine on 60% ink-saving - both on Inksaver and EcoPrint.

Abobe Products and Games

Another sticking point in my free and open source law student experiment has been the loss of Adobe products. I’m a heavy user of Adobe’s products – particularly Photoshop and Dreamweaver, and while I could use Gimp as an advanced image editor, for instance, I just don’t feel as comfortable using it and miss Adobe’s products. I even tried Nvu as a replacement for Dreamweaver, and while it might have cut it ten years ago, it certainly doesn’t today.  I also have some legacy PC games which I enjoy from time to time and while I guess I could try running them through Wine, it’s just too much hassle when I can run them natively in Windows. For me, the combined effect of these issues is just too great a hurdle to overcome and keep me firmly tied to Windows, at least for now.

Final thoughts

The average law student would be perfectly able to get along with just free software without sacrificing his or her grades and convenience. For the most part, a student running Linux and just free and open source solutions within that environment would be absolutely fine for the purposes of workload, file compatibility and so forth. Providing you don’t mind getting your hands a little dirty occasionally – such as installing a printer – it’s an entirely viable option. That said, if you have certain PC software that you can’t be without and don’t fancy your chances (or want the hassle of) running it in a compatibility layer, Linux might not be for you.  A more viable prospect, to my mind at least, would be to make use of the wealth of free proprietary and open source software available out there but run it within Windows.  As I found out, jumping lock, stock and barrel into the open source world is not quite as easy at it might seem.

Open Source Law Student

As I edge ever closer to the dreaded LLM territory, I’ve been giving increasing thought to an idea I had earlier this year re my computer needs on this course and whether using open source solutions is a viable option. Can a law student successfully get by with just free open source and cloud-based options and still turn in the multitude of essays and other work required? Would I really trust Open Office with my precious dissertation or, God help me, Google Docs? Is either option even man enough for the job? Given that the latter doesn’t even support the inclusion of footnotes, I think we can quickly answer that.

So as the world heads further and further down the path of the cloud computing paradigm, much has been made of whether the traditional desktop apps are already becoming obsolete. Opinions differ of course, though I think the consensus would fall on the side of ‘we’re not there yet’. Probably, not by a long shot.

I’m certainly very curious as to whether I can survive studying an LLM using just open source software, underpinned by a battery of online cloud-based services. I certainly don’t have the unwavering confidence to place all my eggs in the open source basket and will be dual booting with Vista. But that being the case, will I resist the temptation of resorting to the tried and tested commercial programs from Microsoft, Adobe and the rest? I think I can guess the answer but it still promises to be an interesting experiment. Albeit possibly a short one.

While I haven’t definitively decided on the programs and services I’ll be using, my proposed line-up looks something like this:

• OS: Ubuntu – Hardy Heron or Opensuse 11..... probably the former.
• Office Productivity: Open Office ...If I hate writer, there’s always Abiword I suppose .... :-\
• Email: Google’s Gmail – I’ve been using this since mid 2004 anyway!
• Calendaring: Google Calendar
• Web Browser: Firefox 3.x – again I’ve been using Firefox as my primary browser since early 2004!

Roll on September so we can get this party started. Or something like that! Sigh.

Gmail Outage: the ‘beginning of the end for Cloud Computing’

From the Financial Times 25.02.09:

Google's e-mail service, used by more than 100m people, suffered a global crash yesterday, raising concerns about the world's growing reliance on web services.

The Gmail failure lasted more than two hours from about 1.30am on the US west coast, hitting users in Europe and Asia  hardest as America slept.

The internet giant said its monitoring systems had alerted it that consumer and business accounts worldwide could not access e-mail and apologised for the inconvenience.

It is the worst failure to date for Gmail, a browser-based e-mail service that has been growing at a rate of 40 per cent a year by user numbers and gaining on its bigger rivals, Yahoo Mail and Microsoft's Hotmail.

...The crash is a blow to Google's ambitions for business e-mail and applications that it delivers over the internet. Users of its Google Apps Premier Edition, which charges $50 per account for services including Gmail, complained on support forums yesterday.

"It was difficult enough . . . convincing the rest of my company that this was a wise move [to Gmail] and the future for us. This will now make it very difficult to instill any sort of confidence," said one posting.

Heeeeere we go... how predictable was this?! While I was affected by the Gmail outage yesterday, my first reaction was principally one of surprise as Gmail is usually so reliable. In fact, I don’t remember the last time I was affected by a problem with it. I think it’s important to keep this outage in perspective, too: back in the old days of using POP3 mail (and boy, the painful memories come flooding back) the number of outages, unexplained glitches and other problems far outnumbered what we see today on almost any web-based email. Gmail is surely at the top of the pile as far as reliability is concerned – at least in my experience, though Gmail also seems best-of-breed anecdotally too.

Having a two hour outage is annoying, granted, but the fact it’s caused so much outrage is testament to the fact that cloud computing (at least as far as email is concerned) usually works so well. The conveniences of keeping your email in the cloud far outweigh any minor niggle that might pop up once in a blue moon. It’s also true that because Gmail supports IMAP, as well as the recently-added offline support via GoogleGears, problems like this could be mitigated somewhat for certain users.

Those paying for a subscription service, will obviously be more annoyed.  For the cloud computing paradigm to seriously take-off going forwards, these types of niggles clearly need to be further ironed-out.  For the majority of users, however, this disruption serves as a timely reminder that what they’re using is a FREE service which, 99.whatever percent of the time, is absolutely first rate. 

So is this a nail in the coffin for cloud computing or just an inevitable scaremongering exercise by the media? I think it’s almost certainly the latter.

Sarah Palin 'hacker' is Indicted

From vnunet.com 09/10/08:

The 20 year-old son of Democratic state legislator Mike Kernell has been indicted for hacking into the email account of Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

David Kernell was arrested after an FBI investigation into the incident in which the password of Palin's Yahoo account was changed and details of her emails posted online by an individual known as 'rubico'.

If found guilty, Kernell could face five years in prison and a fine of $250,000 (£145,000).

"Cyber-crime is the FBI's top criminal investigative priority," said Richard Lambert, special agent in charge, FBI Knoxville Field Division.

Kernell was released from court without bail but is banned from owning a computer and can only use the internet to check email and complete his class work.

This story has been well documented all over the net in the last few weeks and triggered a lot of debate about certain issues. First and foremost, of course, is the quite why someone like Sarah Palin was using Yahoo Mail in the first place, particularly for work purposes. Poor Sarah has taken a lot of flack recently and I guess the whole troopergate saga has left her with more pressing worries right now. 

On last week’s edition of the TWiT podcast, the security measures that Yahoo Mail have in place for forgotten password retrieval were debated with the consensus of opinion being that the current system was sorely inadequate. I couldn't agree more.  The method used by many other webmail providers requires, inter alia, a secondary email address to be registered when creating the account, allowing a forgotten password to be sent there. Yahoo use a different system whereby to reset the password, the 'user' needs to correctly answer 3 questions, the 'secret' answers to which were originally provided when creating the account. And the not-so-secret questions were: the account holder's Date of Birth, Zip Code and, a touch more tricky, ‘Where did you meet your spouse?’

That fact of the matter is that most high school kids with an ounce of intelligence and an internet connection could have done this; the email address was well known, as were the answers to the security questions to reset Palin’s password. Well, it took Kernell under an hour to gather all of the information from Wikipedia, Google and the US postal service website. In fact, it’s perhaps surprising why it wasn’t ‘hacked’ before.

Enough of the 'Hooey'

You know those moments you have when you hear someone say something that’s so ignorant, wrong and just plain stupid, you want to take them to one side and systematically explain to them everything that’s wrong with their statement? Come on, I know it isn’t just me who has these experiences! For one, I know that Lois in Family Guy has such a moment with her husband, Peter.

Well, I found an article that produced just this effect on me a couple of days ago. Cue John Naughton’s blurb published on the Guardian’s website:

[T]his hooey was conscientiously relayed by Cellan-Jones, who was too polite to ask why, if Vista is such a success, Ballmer is to unveil its successor, Windows 7, to the Microsoft developers' conference at the end of this month.

Oh John, just go back to sleep.

As if that wasn’t enough, he spurns out another corker trying to explain exactly what ‘cloud computing’ is:

The company's response to cloud computing - the provision of email, word-processing, spreadsheets and presentation software via the browser - is especially interesting.

Oh come on, John. Now you’re just being silly!