Becoming a Software Criminal

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Big companies like AT&T, Apple, and Microsoft encourage their users to break the rules, because they make unreasonable rules. Not only unreasonable, but hidden until it's too late. This post will describe two such cases.

I became an iPhone criminal when I started my trip to New Zealand. I had spent over $400 on my iPhone 3GS and wanted to use it on my trip. However, the iPhone is locked to AT&T, and you cannot use it with an overseas carrier without unlocking the phone. This reasonable usage required that I go outside the law to jailbreak then unlock the phone.

I became a Windows criminal when I switched to Mac, looking to move my legitamate Windows software to VMWare Fusion. This use is apparently prohibited by the Microsoft license agreement. And it's causing me problems right now because for some reason my Windows XP image is asking for activation, again. I did not know this, but if you buy a new PC with Windows on it, that copy of Windows is in some way tied to the physical computer: if you trash that PC and keep the hard-drive, and put it in a new PC, you are in violation of the Microsoft license. Or, in my case, if you trash the PC and attempt to run the hard-drive image in a virtual machine, you are in violation of the license.

And in both cases, because I've gone outside the law, it's more likely that I will continue to do so. In the iPhone case, I've installed Cydia, which is a gateway to all kinds of licit and illicit iPhone applications. So far I've only used it to unlock my phone and install some handy developer software (such as Mobile Terminal), but who knows? In the Windows case, I've had to hunt down an illegal, cracked copy of Windows even though I already have a legitimate copy. In the course of doing so, I've found a lot of other illegal software, and frankly I'm tempted to try some of it out. I haven't yet, but who knows?

I begin to understand the marijuana "gateway drug" argument more clearly. It's true: if you have to break the law to do something harmless (like smoke pot) then you are more likely to break the law to do something less harmless (like smoke crack). The one action puts you in closer proximity to the latter action.

In truth these are two examples of a much bigger problem: egregiously complex terms placed on an apparently simple transaction. You may think you're paying for one thing, but in truth you're getting much less, subject to incomprehensible restrictions. This is particularly a problem with loans, credit, and insurance, but increasingly electronic devices and software. There needs to be some legally imposed upper-limit on the complexity of terms! Complexity breeds disagreement, but even worse it shifts the balance of power to the party that understands the terms the best, which is usually the party that imposed the terms, which is the manufacturer or vendor. Ordinarily I would be in favor of letting the market sort this out, but I'm afraid this is a fundamental flaw in the market which is only now reaching fruition thanks to technology. Technology is making it possible to enforce these complex rules - the only reason it hasn't always been this way in every industry since the industrial revolution is that the cost of enforcement has been a limiting factor in all but a few contract types.

Running out of disk space in the age of the cheap terabyte - avoiding data clutter.

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Running out of space
Running out of drive space these days is like New Zealand running out of sheep. It's hard to believe it's even possible, but today I got a "running low on space" warning on my laptop. It's an upgraded 180G 7200rpm drive. I only had about 500MB free. What on earth was going on?

The first thing I did was empty the trash. That helped a little (I had almost 5,000 items in there). But I was still very low on space.

I needed to get some idea as to what was going on. So I fired up Terminal, ran du (including the du * -k | sort -nr variant), df, and wasn't really the wiser. I needed something visual. So I downloaded JDiskReport (actually I couldn't remember the name so I googled "visualize disk usage" which brought up a lifehacker.com article which reminded me of the project...) JDiskReport is a fantastic tool for seeing where your space has gone (and the guy who wrote it, Kars Lentzsh is a very talented Java Swing programmer as well.)

Turns out that, while I do have 70G of movies, and 14G of music (yes, a small amount but I actually own all of my music) the first surprise was Vmware Fusion: 16G of virtual machines! And really, I don't even use it all that much: I have an older XP image with IE 5.5 on it for testing. And an Ubuntu image for the same reason. Really, these should be 2G apiece, and one 10G image could be deleted. Easy fix.

The biggest surprise was my iMovie "events" folder: 30GB used. First, I have a lot of footage. Second, iMovie adds a lot of meta-data (in one case I had 1G of thumbnail data alone - for a one hour video). Third, raw video footage is very large. It is highly compressable, but compressing this stuff is not part of my workflow. I used iMovie to export a tiny version of a 1 hour video, then deleted the source files. The original was 4.8G. The exported video was 34MB! (It took about 10min to compress. I might also try using HandBrake to do the transcoding.) I can look forward to getting this down to around 200MB, I hope. But it will take time.

And then there are about 12G of photos floating around in various places.

How did this happen?

Cleaning the mess up is great, but if I don't figure out why it happened it's just going to happen again. Despite the increasing amount of storage, the tools I have to generate new data is increasing even faster. I have about 5 devices capable of producing photographs and video: two cameras, a flip video, my cell phone and a webcam. All of this new data is dutifully sync'd to my laptop (a process I wrote about earlier in an article on iPhoto), but then (apparently) the data just sits there, and problems like these arise.

Of course, this data shouldn't just sit there. It should be doing something useful, or it should get deleted. (The utility of data generally goes down over time. But that's ok because flickr, youtube, and facebook don't ever delete your data. It's their business to keep your data as informational as possible, so that's to your benefit.)

Should you have more photos on your hard-drive than on your favorite sharing service, or less? Most people would say more, I say less! Put the good photos on Flickr, and only keep the great ones locally. (Same with videos and youtube). If it's not good or great, it's deleted. Even if you decide to keep it your work isn't done - for example, you need to compress the video. (And you may want to compress the local photos you keep if you shoot RAW).

(Two unavoidable factors may keep more data on your pc than on the net in the short run. First, you may have a limited connection. This will make uploading even smaller files very slow. In the worst case, you're completely offline. Not much you can do there but wait, knowing that your data clutter is only temporary. Second, you may need to compose your story a bit, putting together the narrative and cleaning up the source data, and make decisions about what's good, what's great, and what's trash. That takes time! But being aware of all this work you're creating before hitting "Record" might make you more cautious. It might also inspire you to cull out your work before uploading to your PC!)

How much to keep? I don't know, but I do know that about 95% of my photos are pretty bad. So I'd say 4 photos and one very short video per event day are good, and half (or less) are great. That's about 40MB uploaded, 20MB (max) kept on the hard disk. That's still quite a lot to upload over a bad connection, but doable with reasonable broadband.