• I was using the native Windows wizard, instead of my regular and safer Picasa wizard, to transfer images from the XD card to the computer.
• And I chose to delete image files from the card option upon copying.
• I snapped pictures in too large a canvas size—both in dimension, as well as in terms of MBs.
• And last but not the least, I played music while the wizard transferred my pictures.

It has been a hard lesson learnt. I would never do any of these again during the course of the file transfer.

While there is no nirvana for corrupted JPEGs (tough luck if this happens to you), there are some neat tools to try and salvage uncorrupted, but lost or deleted files via ubuntu linux powered computer. (Many of these tools are also available to computers running Mac OS X, and Windows.) I was certain I could salvage my lost-in-transfer pictures, so I tried the following.

I have a media card reader in my desktop. I inserted the XD card into one of the slots. But I was soon stumped with the device ID for the inserted card. I am never be sure of the device IDs of various card slots. (Each one is auto-assigned by my system.) So, I had to run sudo fdisk -l (in Terminal) to list all mounted devices on my linux system. The XD card was assigned as sde0.

Next, I made a disk image of my XD card using a low level utility, dd, by running the following command:

dd if=/dev/sde0 of=myxdcard.img bs=512

The resulting disk image file—myxdcard.img, which is a sector by sector copy of the media card in byte blocks of 512—was saved in my home folder (~/).

Why image: I prefer making a copy of the disk image because it is much safer to experiment with the image file rather than on the disk (XD, in my case) directly.

My XD card primarily contained JPG (or JPEG) photos prior to deletion, and so to recover them I tried PhotoRec. Installed it first with the following command:

sudo apt-get install testdisk

And then by running this command:

photorec myxdcard.img

With the above, I was able to restore all my deleted photos from my XD card. (It is also possible to restore using foremost—an alternative solution to PhotoRec. Install by running sudo apt-get install foremost, and then by running the command: foremost myxdcard.img. Restored files are typically stored in a folder called output.)

No solution, however, exists for salvaging corrupt JPEG image files. If you know of a method, I am all ears.

One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control. It’s just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else’s web server, you’re defenceless [sic]. You’re putty in the hands of whoever developed that software.

— Richard M. Stallman

I’m trying to make sense of what he’s trying to say, while sweeping aside the gross generalization part. But first, a basic question: Didn’t “cloud” computing go live the moment networks came on? And aren’t web applications a result of manifestations, and implementations of some of those TCP/IP protocols that we started using as elements of the network, the internet, and later the web? And if you consider network a vital part of today’s computing, can you really do without it anymore?

For what it is worth, there may be a number of web applications that do not provide data-freedom, have no APIs, provide no support or connectivity via third party applications, and, provide no peek inside the code. But putting Gmail in the same bracket, in my humble opinion, is particularly a poor example. In fact Gmail’s induction into the web was remarkable, as it was understated.

Look at the way it tackled the email problem head-on. With its invite-only system during its initial year, Gmail developed a circle of trust—the good apples. When it had enough number of good apples, and had gained enough intelligence about Spam, it opened the system to everyone. This unique and participative ecosystem of good apples combined with Google’s collective intelligence is what gives Gmail an edge, and makes it a satisfying email service for the end-user, while silently killing Spam, and quietly stifling phishing.

Could you have such an ecosystem developed openly to tackle unique problems that dog the internet today? In theory, yes. The answer may just lie in distributed transient networks. But earning trust is hard, because trust needs a recognizable face. That’s how we humans are wired. So until we begin accepting decentralized nodes into our circles of social trust, we need a credible entity to take this mantle. Today Google offers that credible face. There are others too. Take for example, Automattic, which provides comment spam protection via its amazing closed source service, Akismet. These services do more good than they’re often credited with—when you weigh in benefits of a community filter versus code open to scrutiny.

In the end, it is about preservation of your data, not necessarily software—no matter which way it was created, modified, transmitted, or received. I would be really wary to use a web application service that does not offer me a way to back my stuff up without data loss.

If our data retains its fidelity on those closed web applications, be available to us whenever we want them be exported to another application or a service, then I reckon most of us probably wouldn’t have a problem with cloud computing.

And we haven’t even discussed the mobile angle yet. Any takers?

This offer comes in the wake of preparing me along with 100,000+ employees to brace for the imminent change—Windows Vista, and MS Office 2007, which roll onto our work notebooks within the next 3-12 months.

I have decided to take it, and hope that Microsoft delivers on its promise. This would enable me to exchange documents I create—between my Macbook and my Ubuntu running desktop—without loss of fidelity.

Update [22.8]: Here it is. I received the package yesterday.

The fun part, though, was the number of updates to it. SP1 (12.1.0) was 183MB, and then there was 12.1.1, which was ~160MB; and then just when I thought I was done, there was yet another update 12.1.2—another ~160MB. These updates are not for the faint internet connections!

Contrary to popular perception, I firmly believe that it is much easier to lose digital content for good than those good-old books. What does it take to destroy a book? A fire perhaps? And what does it take to destroy a digital creation? A mere keystroke. Think about it.

Digital documents are far more vulnerable to sustenance. I can think of a hundred ways by which documents I create today digitally can get destroyed; fire and the delete button are just two of those. It would be pathetic if proprietary document formats become part of that list.

Document Freedom hopes to address that. Why else do you think one of internet’s biggest literary repositories—Project Gutenberg—was conceived primarily in plain text?

I try to celebrate Document Freedom Day everyday with my actions—by saving copies of my work in open formats. You can too. In the end you’re only helping yourself, and helping those that are important to you.

How you can help: Educate your friends and family about the need to preserve digital content. Inform your colleagues, people and policy makers in your organization why proprietary formats suck. Tell them how you can never stop paying for your own content’s preservation; by getting stuck in version changes, and therefore are forced to keep upgrading to newer versions of proprietary content producing software—just to keep your content and information afloat. Encourage use of only those software that allow you and your organization to save content in open formats.

I do. So do many, many people embracing open-source for this very reason.

There may not be enough numbers in the real world at the moment, but isn’t this too early to see hordes of people jumping ship? Yes, numbers are important, but to get them, I think you’ll need time.

Freedom and Linux were left trailing for most of the last decade, and a good part of this, while proprietary systems like the Mac and Windows raced ahead. In addition, Freedom has had psychological setbacks in corporate minds of the likes of SCO lawsuits derailing adoption progress. Yet, it is remarkable to see operating systems like Ubuntu spring back and rejoin the progress curve.

We’ve only had a couple-of-years old operating system, which truly appreciates users’ freedom, and which is perfectly suitable for users with any skill level. LTS (long term service support) licenses that Ubuntu currently offers only reinforces the right kind of confidence in the corporate IT environment. For the home user, we need more visibility, and demonstration of ease of use—too many previous Linux versions have disappointed the optimist adopter, when compared with what has been commercially available. That Ubuntu stands a chance, needs a voice, which needs to be heard.

A lot of us, who have embraced freedom, are doing what we can—family, friends, community, our weblogs, and in our companies explaining the benefits of a system that is free as in freedom.

But more than being a fanatic about a specific operating system, I’m rather an active advocate of freedom of data. How can this happen in other commercial operating systems? If Macs and Windows of the world can truly allow the users to have their content transported (imported or exported) without loss of fidelity, and without being locked into applications, and/or other proprietary formats, then that would mark the arrival of a true levelling field in terms of freedom. Then, to me at least, it wouldn’t matter if I’d use a Mac, or a Windows or Linux, or any other.

My Digital Life explains in detail about the problem I experienced (see also the Trac and the Codex) and a (temporary) workaround—this worked for me, by the way. But if you’re not a fan of latin1 character set and associated latin1_swedish_ci collation, then I’d recommend this UTF-8 database converter plugin. Run once, it’s painless—this worked for me too, except for non-english characters (like if you used the caret ones natively in posts and or pages).

Remember to backup before you do any of these.

Obviously, software companies are going to be protective about their apps and their source. Fine. Most users don’t care about your black boxes. But, they will be mighty pissed if software is going to lock them down to use a particular version that has no portability to (any) other application.

The moment people begin thinking on the lines of data preservation, they will suddenly realize the lack of easy portability without degradation of quality of their content. This is a major, major pain in the ass. And this is — or ought to be — the topic of discussion.

Perhaps you find it particularly galling that I’m more or less saying that the reason they’re not going to do what Bray suggests - despite the fact that following Bray’s suggestion really would be cool for users and developers in all sorts of ways - is that it might cost them upgrade sales from users who have already paid for previous versions of Mac OS X. Such gall is one factor that drives people to open source platforms.

But there’s a flip side to this equation, which is that developing good software takes time and talent, and time and talent cost money. Some portion of the revenue from sales of Mac OS X goes back into funding development of future versions of Mac OS X.

Anil Dash came up with a phrase: intellectual dishonesty for smart guys deliberately misguiding people/sidetracking the real issues. John Gruber, I think, is doing just that. Jumping from freedom of data to writing in defense of software makers by citing their need for the revenue in order to put it back into their R&D cycle.

Nobody has a thing against paid software, but paid need not mean data locked-down. I mean come-on, look at the irony. You are paying for the software and yet, it does not give your data the freedom to port to another open format, if you wish to. That is like robbing and cheating. It may have worked until now, but will not in future, or atleast, should not.

Mark is on a roll with his exhaustive take on long term data preservation and about how migrating incessantly between formats tends to leave you with crap eventually.

Long-term data preservation is like long-term backup: a series of short-term formats, punctuated by a series of migrations.

This discussion, to me, has deep roots in the argument that the “my data is mine alone, even if the software I used to create it is licensed to me”. Why can’t software makers and company respect that and help us users achieve that?

Why do I avoid DRM? Because the entire point of DRM is to make migration impossible, to reduce the fidelity of your conversion to 0.

I may be a sucker to everything he writes, but what am I to do if everything he says really makes sense to me?