There is no such thing as privacy online. None. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

Facebook is telling you otherwise.

Announced recently, they have a new communications engine that smells a lot like the reviled Google Buzz – it merges email, SMS’s, wall posts, status updates, etc into one giant time sink. All of this is designed to keep you spending all your free time on Facebook, posting more and more of your personal life there. This in turn keeps the money presses at Facebook running. The more they know about you, what you do, who you know, where you shop, and when you’ll break up with your partner means the more they know about how to sell you to their advertisers.

Remember – when you are using Facebook, you are the product being sold.

Today, Oracle announced the general availability of Solaris 11 Express, which appears to have a build number somewhere in the 150’s. The last regular release of OpenSolaris (which is the new Solaris 11 Express) was dated 2009.06, and carried a build number of 111b. This should be leaps and bounds over that stable build – and since it’s been nearly a year and a half since the release, it damn well better be.

Currently, I’m upgrading my backup file server from b124 to b134 (the last of the OpenSolaris development releases), and then going from there to the new, shiny hotness of Solaris 11 Express. Once it’s up, I’ll pound on it for a few days, make sure it doesn’t kill me, and then move the main server up as well. Sometime in there, a bunch of new hardware will also show up (likely before this weekend), so I may have some new kit to play with as well as I bring the new OS online.

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If there was a problem with my backups, why didn’t it say so? “TimeMachine completed a verification” suggests to me that it’s verified the data, and it’s done with that task, not that the task failed. There’s no “for more information, click here”. Nothing. Just a “you need new backups, and we’re going to ignore the old ones you’d been using”. So glad I use my own backup scripts as well as TimeMachine.

I love using a local bank. After placing my NewEgg order last night for the computer bits, I got a phone call from a human at the bank – on a Sunday afternoon – about 20 minutes after the order was placed. She properly identified herself as a member of the Fraud Prevention department, gave me her name, and explained that she was concerned about the 4 transactions on the account in a short period of time. She had the exact numbers of each transaction, and asked me to verify the merchant.

It makes me feel better to know my bank is actually looking out for me. It’s what you get for not using a major national bank that only cares about profit, and not about customers.

After much hemming and hawing, I’ve finally put together an order to expand my storage array. I’d been getting uncomfortably close to filling it recently, mostly due to transcoding content for our new AppleTV, but 2.7 TB of usable space can’t hold a geek for long. So, I broke out the card, spent a large chunk of my remaining technology fund, and ordered 5 more hard drives.

When all is said and done, I’ll have 10 hard drives in the system – a mirrored boot array, and four pairs of large SATA disks in a single zpool. I’m sacrificing some of the size options I would have had by moving from a RAIDZ setup to mirrored pairs. This provides for more reliability, better recoverability, and a higher number of IOPS. Even with the tradeoff, I’ll still be doubling the space in the array, and it will be easier in future to upgrade everything.

I’ve finally taken the plunge and ordered a Nikon D7000. Adorama is good enough to take the order and ship when they get stock, unlike a lot of other online retailers. If you’re going to get one, find someone you like and use their reference links to shoot them some cash in these hard times. I used Ken Rockwell, mostly because I couldn’t think of anyone else, and Ken serves as a good guidepost along the route to camera discovery.

Ken gives really solid advice – as long as you keep in mind it’s his unvarnished, personal take on the situation. For example, if you don’t make a living taking/making/selling images, you are not a professional photographer. If you don’t know why you need the new, shiny camera, you don’t. The best way to get more high ISO performance is spend the cash on lenses. All of this, I get behind. He also does very thoughtful reviews of lenses and camera bodies, pulling out better numbers about how much you really get from VR II (hint: it’s not 4 stops). So, I’ll shoot him my cash when moving along from one body to another.

Bringing up Ken Rockwell, however, brings me to the dark side of the Internet. There is very, very, very little trustworthy content out there. People on forums who zoom in to %100 go on about how you should trust that the read noise at ISO 100 on the D7000 is so low, you should ALWAYS shoot at ISO 100, and boost in post processing. I can’t even begin to explain why that fails when looking at basic physics. To further the stupid, Rockwell says you should shoot in JPG, not RAW. He advises boosting the saturation and sharpness inside the camera, before the JPG has even been written out to card. He calls sensor self-cleaning useless, as it’s never helped him before.

Having shot JPG on a trip, out of necessity, I’ll never do it again. It’s hard to measure what I would have shot, had I been shooting RAW, but lacking any depth of dynamic range and tonal range made all the images wash out pretty badly. I was already up against my limits (ISO 1600 and f/1.4), and at those levels, JPG is stealing more and more. Having had to touch up 400 images of a weekend due to a particularly nasty bit of sensor dust, I’ll take a sensor that takes care of itself.

Just stay sane folks, and think for yourself.