The missing piece from my OwnCloud installation has been a secure connection over SSL, which means an encrypted session over the Web.

I finally figured out how to use the shared SSL certificate from my hosting provide, Hostgator. Here are the instructions for all Hostgator shared-hosting users who want an https:// connection to their site(s).

I set up the secure https:// connection in my browser bookmarks and in my WebDAV configuration. (Here's how to set up WebDAV for OwnCloud from the project's how-to pages.)

Now I'm a lot more confident in using OwnCloud as my own personal document/file access/sharing service knowing that my data isn't being sent in the clear.

I'm still playing with OwnCloud.

My big idea was running it on http://devio.us, since this excellent OpenBSD shell/webspace provider supports PHP and offers SSL connections (the latter of which will make me much more comfortable using OwnCloud).

However, it turns out that OwnCloud requires the PHP Zip extension (or is it Zip PHP extension?), and Devio.us doesn't offer it.

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I didn't think installing ownCloud would be so easy, but it was.

My continuing reliance on Google Docs, which is cheerfully offered up for free in exchange for Google's searching through your files and marketing to you based on what it finds, plus the plethora of similar privacy-sapping services, has me very interested in personal-cloud services such as ownCloud and the early-days Freedom Box project. The Freedom Box will happen eventually.

OwnCloud is here now, and while there is certainly a commercial component to the whole thing, it is basically a free software project with code that anybody can download and use.

And so I did.

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As much as I dislike his Gwibber social-networking application, I'm that much more of an unabashed fan of Ryan Paul's tech journalism for ArsTechnica, itself a bastion of high-quality reporting and writing.

While I think Paul's a little too close to Ubuntu to write about it objectively, he's just too good not to read.

A recent article, Two decades of productivity: Vim's 20th anniversary, shows Paul at his best:

Vim has been my editor of choice since 1998, about a year after I started using Linux as my main desktop operating system. I’ve used it to write several thousand articles and many, many lines of code. Although I’ve experimented with a lot of conventional modern text editors, I haven’t found any that match Vim’s efficiency. After using Vim nearly every day for so many years, I’m still discovering new features, capabilities, and useful behaviors that further improve my productivity.

Vim has aged well over the past 20 years. It’s not just a greybeard relic—the editor is still as compelling as ever and continues to attract new users. The learning curve is steep, but the productivity gains are well worth the effort.

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Just because I'm writing about how I'm editing these videos in OpenShot (including this one a few days ago), don't think that I'm some kind of video-editing expert.

I'm learning. And I'm excited about it. Beats the alternative, don't you think?

In the video I just cut today, from footage provided by L.A. Daily News reporter Susan Abram, I used OpenShot 1.4.0 in Debian Squeeze, I am refining the way I use multiple tracks to organize and edit the video.

First, here's the video itself (delivered by Brightcove):

Here's a screen-grab of my OpenShot window as it looked after the video was edited. Notice that I "name" the clips in the filenames. Once I gather the clips together, I watch all of them and label those I'm going to use.

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Here's a video I put together today with OpenShot 1.4.0 in Debian Squeeze (I've been using the OpenShot .deb package from the OpenShot Launchpad page to make sure I had the latest version):

It's of the new Muse School in Calabasas that Suzy Amis Cameron and husband James Cameron (yes, that James Cameron) created, and it contains a mix of video, audio and still images shot by Los Angeles Daily News staff photographer Dean Musgrove.

Once he brought me the raw footage and I saw that it featured children from the school singing a song, I knew I wanted to mix stills and video over the audio track.

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As I said in a recent entry, I don't consider myself a "GNOME user," though I find myself using GNOME all the time.

I guess that makes me ... a GNOME user. Since I run Debian Squeeze, that means the now-all-but-dead GNOME 2. Version 2.30.2, to be exact.

Though I've flirted with console e-mail in the form of Mutt and Pine, I came to the realization long ago that GUI mail clients are the thing for me. I've used Claws Mail, and I pretty much centered my mail-client universe on Thunderbird, running it on every platform I can.

But I have kept a fully configured Evolution mail client at the ready on my Debian laptop.

And lately I've been using it -- with IMAP so I can go back to Thunderbird at any time.

You know what? Evolution is pretty good. It's calendar integrates with Google Calendar. (And it that calendar is integrated into the app, unlike the plugin-based Sunbird/Lightning/Iceowl plugin that Thunderbird/Icedove uses and which doesn't work at all in the Debian Backports/Debian Mozilla APT Archive version of Icedove).

It looks great. I can actually understand how to configure it.

But as much as I'm liking this mail client, knowing that my future may very well be outside of GNOME, I'm keeping Thunderbird on the front-burner right next to Evolution.

I decided to give the OpenShot video editor for Linux another try.

Not entirely satisfied with my last effort in OpenShot, I wanted to try something else, and that something turned out to be Blender's Video Sequence Editor feature. That was a resounding failure. I had no idea how to do just about anything, and I find the Blender UI extremely uninviting.

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I had to generate a report today, one that included a bunch of PDF documents, and I finally figured out how to import PDFs into LibreOffice (with the help of LO's PDF Import extension, which still appears to have Oracle's fingerprints all over it, by the way).

Call it counterintuitive, but once you bring a PDF into LibreOffice, you edit it in LibreOffice Draw.

It's amazing. You can modify the text in the PDFs, move them around, bring in additional images, create text boxes and fill them.

Then you can export the whole thing as a multi-page PDF. Did that. Looks great.

Like the title says, LibreOffice Draw is my new favorite application. This week anyway.

Mozilla is already casting the enterprise market adrift with its stated wish to stop maintaining the Firefox 3.6.x series of the popular web browser in favor of charging through Firefox 4 right into version 5 and coming up on 6 and then who knows what.

Enterprises hate this. They need to build shoddy web-based applications against a browser, and if that browser changes, their apps will likely break.

Hence they need Firefox 3.6.x, if that's what they're building against, to stick around as long as possible.

No, no, NO, says Mozilla. We're in a development frenzy to catch Google Chrome, and we're upsetting the apple cart now for more goodness later.

The enterprise cares nothing for "goodness." It wants sameness, predictability and as little work as possible.

Can't say I blame them.

From a PR standpoint Mozilla is thumbing its nose at any enterprise users who decided to throw in with a browser that isn't Internet Explorer (and for large bases of users, switching browser allegiance isn't something that happens very often — and yes, they are where you, as an individual, were 10 years ago).

Despite all this, I still have updates coming to my remaining Firefox 3.6-running machines (of which there are more than a few, especially because there's not Firefox 4 or 5 for Macintosh PowerPC unless you count TenFourFox).

Yes, they all recently climbed to 3.6.19.

But if you can find the Mozilla Firefox 3.6 page, there is supposedly an end in sight for 3.6.x:

Firefox 3.6.x will be maintained with security and stability updates for a short amount of time. All users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to the latest version of Firefox.

If Mozilla wises up (and I hope they do), they'll continue patching Firefox 3.6.x for security issues for at least the next year if not two.

They don't seem ready or willing to do this, but I bet they're plenty able. Especially if they want to cement (and not rend) its relationship with enterprise users.