My experiment with Insync

Some months ago, I decided to give the cloud a chance.  I have been very critical of cloud services because I know that major cloud service providers give you some free space in exchange of a bit of your soul.

Well, I may be exaggerating there, but they do capitalize on your information somehow and that, along with security concerns, kept me out of the cloud.

However, I decided that since I already own an Android phone, which connects me to Google drive, I could use the service to see how it worked.

Now, the idea of having cloud storage is to be able to synchronize my files and to be able to access them from my desktop, laptop, and phone. Connecting the desktop in my office would be great, too.

On Linux, one can use the console to do something like that.  However, since Google does not release a GUI client of Google Drive, I wanted to check a GUI version and the best one I found was Insync.

This is not a free service.  They offer you a 15 day trial and then, if you like what they do, you pay a plan and you can install the program in as many machines as you want.

So I tried out their service.

In my humble opinion, their program worked as a charm: the interface was intuitive, the synchronization of the single folder I selected was flawless, and the access from both Mageia and OpenMandriva was perfect from different machines. I was very impressed, but I was not considering to pay despite I found the pricing reasonable.  My problem was my own cloud aversion.

My initial thought was to uninstall the program once the trial period was over and move on with my life, once again forgetting about the cloud. However, something unexpected happened: after a week of using the program, I received an email from an Insync representative who identified herself as Janine. It was a short follow up message reminding me that, if I needed help, they were ready to support me.  One week later, she wrote another one reminding me of the end of the trial.

I must say that those emails were different from emails one regularly gets from a company.  They were professionally written but, besides being the most courteous messages I have received from a company in my life, they had this human flavor to them...

Even so, I did not upgrade.  I expected that to be the last I was going to hear from Insync, but I received one more email.  This one blew my mind.  It was Janine again offering more trial time or support if I did not upgrade on account of a problem or if the service failed meet my expectations.  If the problem was pricing, she also had an offer to cover for that.

With that email, this company made me feel like a valued customer.  I replied thanking for their awesome service and paid my Insync plus for consumers plan ($25).

Now I run the program from Mageia and OpenMandriva, both from desktop/laptops, and my "cloudophobia" is diminishing.  In fact, I have found the service very useful.

Maxthon, the New Browser on Linux Land

A while ago, a piece of news that stirred interest on the Linux community was the porting of Maxthon to Linux.

Maxthon is a browser.  I knew of its existence a while ago, when I learned that one of the kind readers of this blog used it to display one of my entries.

I visited Maxthon's main page, but was disappointed because the browser was (if a recall correctly) based on Internet Explorer and, as I had anticipated, did not support Linux.

So, I lost all interest on this browser altogether.

But then came the news that Maxthon now supports Linux.  Again, interest sparked and I visited the page again expecting only .deb packages for Ubuntu.

However, I was pleased to see that they also offered .rpm packages.  I accepted their EULA (Maxthon is NOT free software) and installed the .rpm to both my Mageia 3 desktop
and laptop.

The installation was simple and straight-forward.  I was almost ready to find out what a "cloud browser" is.

When I fired up Maxthon, a Chromium-reminiscent browser took the screen.  Yes, Maxthon looked extremely similar to Chromium.  In fact, it identifies itself as Chromium, not Maxthon, which is a problem because you cannot use certain services on the main page:  it says that you must have Maxthon to be able to use them (?!)

The browser claimed to be fast.  I did not see that speed until I registered a Maxthon passport account.   Once you do that, the browser rewards your activity, your completion of personal information, loading up of a picture, etc.

Maxthon for Linux running on Mageia 3 64 bits

To be honest, the idea of the the benefits of a cloud browser still eludes me.  Yet, I am glad to have another option for browsing the web.

Mind in the clouds

A Cloud withdrew from the Sky
Superior Glory be
But that Cloud and its Auxiliaries
Are forever lost to me

Was Emily Dickinson predicting Cloud Computing and saying no to it? :-P

The debate about the Cloud is beginning to fire up. Some enthusiasts claim that's the future and assert that control over your computer is a futile worry. Why caring about your OS or data if an angel somewhere up in the sky can manage those for you? Why complicating your existence with such bothers of computing? They perceive computer users as people who do not have any idea of what their OS version is, for whom the computer is useful as long as it works when you turn it on. These users have no idea of the format in which the documents they produce are stored. What's more: for them, any office suite will do.

Some of the thoughts above might be accurate. However, there are users who still have something that is very human: preferences. Yes, for the better or worse, they like their desktops to look one way or another; they cling to an office suite (more because of tradition than because of usability) and they do not trust services that charge you to buy a music file from them (especially if the seller keeps the file!). Call them recalcitrant if you may, but they prefer to stick to Yahoo Mail Classic regardless of how much longer it takes for them to attach a document to an email message.

Then we have those who are cautious and say, "But, what if the elastic cloud falls and does not bounce back up?" And which cloud can you access and which one is barred for you? Are all those clouds available for a vast megalopolis of Care Bears to jump upon freely? Will Microsoft's cloud reject Care Bears that do not flash bellies with a design in yellow, red, blue and green, as it's hinted by the behavior of their newly acquired Sky-pe?

I, for one, grow very suspicious of the Cloud. I plan to avoid it as much as I can. Yet, if one considers Web-based email as the lining of the Cloud, then I already failed at avoiding it. And the content of this blog is stored who knows where...probably in a friendly Google Cloud.

Where I work, we are about to export the database keeping the records of 4000+ people to the Cloud... And I welcomed the change because the native system was made to run only in Windows (XP). The Cloud-based one will let me use the database from Linux and Microsoft will not have any excuse to keep pushing the University to rent more stupid licenses.


Weather forecast: CLOUDY!

Still, I'll keep my personal files inside of my HD. Dropbox does not offer me more portability than a flash drive does. Because that's the entire point: once the file is in the Cloud, it's not yours any longer.