Cloud and vapours; Firefox 3.1b with Mozilla Weave

So after having the weird stuff with the Weave EULA clarified, and learning that my real, important password is in fact only used locally, I took the plunge and installed the beta version of Firefox 3.1 to be able to run Mozilla Weave. Weave is a somewhat nebulous concept at the present time (or so it seems to me), but the gist of it—the gist that matters to me—is that it allows for seamless synchronisation of browser data between different computers. To someone who uses at least three computers on a fairly regular basis (home desktop, work desktop, and laptop), it’s very nice to have access to the same data—something as trivial as having my bookmarks automatically synchronised feels very valuable. It’s distinctly pre-release software, but in my first week of running it I’ve encountered no problems yet, and it does make my life easier.

At the same time, it doesn’t sacrifice my ability to manage my data locally. One of the tag lines is that Weave brings Firefox to the Cloud, but crucially it doesn’t leave you with just the Cloud. Recently, the social bookmarking site Magnolia crashed hard, losing both production and backup data. Cloud computing becomes fog when it goes down, as someone said; I’ve feared this since I first came across Cloud solutions. This is not to say that I don’t want my data to be out there, accessible from whatever machine I use—au contraire—but I also want a copy of my own that I can backup, parse, port, and do what I want with. I don’t want a single point of failure—whether that point is myself, Magnolia, Mozilla Services, or even Google. This is why I prefer Tuffmail to GMail (it’s easy to automate imap syncs and LDAP dumps of the address books), Weave to social bookmarking sites… (Privacy is another issue, where I want even more control.)

On a side note, since Weave requires it I am, as mentioned, running Firefox 3.1, which is a beta version. I’m very happy with it. Firefox 3.0 has an unfortunate tendency to crash with the combination of extensions I run (my chief suspect is Firebug); I now run Firefox 3.1 beta with Firebug 1.4 alpha, and I’ve yet to see a crash. Additionally, Firefox 3.1 is famously faster than Firefox 3.0. There aren’t a lot of obvious new features—none that I care about—but then, I was already happy with the feature set. Firefox 3.1 takes a good thing and makes it work faster and more reliably.

Being a geek is time-consuming

I am no mathematician, but I do have a weakness for tidy sums, graphs, plots, and charts—visualising numerical data is cool, even when the knowledge domain is domestic or tedious. Today, I sat down to estimate my property value to prepare for applying for renter’s insurance. The obvious way to do so is to create a spreadsheet where I can itemise my property and list estimates of replacement cost. Then, I realised, I could sort the data more neatly by adding a category (so my Computers category contains items like Desktop computer, Laptop computer, Monitors, and Misc. peripherals; Sports equipment has Bicycle, Gis + rashguards; and so on).

Up to that point I was being pretty reasonable and focused—all this is information I need, or information to help me sort the data in order to get an overview and see what I’m missing (and avoid duplication). But then…then I realised that I wanted to find out the total value of each category. And once I discovered that OpenOffice.org has a Subtotals feature and I could do so, of course, I had to chart the data. (Actually, it may have been the other way around.) Now I have not only an estimate of what I own, but also a pretty pie chart that tells me that (in terms of replacement cost, not depreciated current value) about 25% of my property consists of books (!), 40% computers and peripherals, 8% clothes, and 9% furniture.

Of course, my values may be way off; I need to go over stuff again (and maybe get a second opinion). But seriously, this is the sort of thing I can get caught up in and suddenly realise that, hey, I should have cooked supper an hour ago…