Rubénerd Blog :)

And so is my sanity!

21:19 Thursday update (Asia Pacific time)

Thank God it’s back up! Well actually I guess thanking the system admins would make more sense ;).

From my own brief experience with Jaiku it certainly seemed more reliable, but I still stick with Twitter. I guess it’s true what they say with all these social sites, you stay for the people not necessarily the service.

Plus Twitter just has that something that Pownce or Jaiku don’t have… can’t quite put my finger on it. Happy twittering everyone!

00:01 Friday update (Asia Pacific time)

Seems as though I spoke too soon:

I know I promised in a previous post that I would be discussing our recent trip to Sydney here and on my show. So now for something completely different: Nokia is buying Trolltech!

Trolltech is the trendy Norwegian company responsible for the Qt toolkit which is what my favourite desktop environment KDE is built upon, as well as other well known applications such as Google Earth and Skype. However the buyout probably had more to do with their efforts to use Qt on mobile phones. Nokia interested in mobile phones? Who would have thought?

Nokia claims they have purchased Trolltech to "accelerate it’s software strategy" by "facilitating application development for multiple platforms and devices" which is PR speak for "we wanted a new platform to write applications on and it was easier to buy one than create one ourselves " right? ;)

This deal has left me with a lot of questions. Will they keep the non-commercial version of Qt licenced under the GPL indefinitely? Will Nokia close the next release? If so, what will happen to KDE? Will the Harmony project have to be started again? Will Nokia be as committed to open source and free software as Trolltech was? Will being part of a larger company with different business goals inevitably hurt Trolltech and Qt? What will happen to the Green Phone?

Trolltech bought by Nokia, MySQL bought by Sun Microsystems… what is the world [of free and open source software] coming to?

It’s been just under a fortnight now since my sister, dad and I came back from our Sydney trip. Obviously the main reason for going was for mummy’s funeral, but we tried to do other things while we were there too.

I’ve taken stacks of photos and haven’t really organised any of them very well but I’m taking some time tomorrow to filter through them and get some up here and on my Flickr profile. I could shoehorn all of them onto one post, but for your sanity and mine I’ll be splitting them up.

I hate posts without any pictures. Here’s a photo I took of the legendary Oak and Hungry Jacks rest stop sign on the highway between Sydney and Taree.

I’ll also be doing another Rubenerd Show early this week, not sure if I should talk about mum or whether I’ve already said enough here. Either way, I have some cool stories and funny stuff to share, as I hope I always do! Cheers.

It’s amazing how much work, studies and other assorted whatnot accumulates when you disconnect yourself from the internets [sic].

Case in point: silly, unauthorised, supposed erection assisting or lottery winning, mismatched, bulk emails! When I returned from my family’s trip to Sydney for mummy’s funeral, this was the screen I was welcomed with:

The problem is, I used to be able to just hit the Clear button with Akismet, but lately it’s been generating so many false positives I have to comb through the pages to make sure legitimate comments haven’t been filtered out by accident. Of course I usually check comments every day so combing through a few dozen is no problem, but letting it accumulate like this is a real nightmare!

So just to let people know, if you’ve posted a comment and it hasn’t been approved yet, you can understand why it might take a while.

So much spam… so little time…
I can’t stand dry posts with just text you see!

I used to be under the impression that spambots just posted to everything they could get their hands on, but it seems they’re drawn to certain articles. Some of them clearly don’t make sense, especially the ones which attempt to hijack articles where I’ve talked about spam!

So just for interest’s sake (hope Mr. Interest is okay with me using him in this example) here are a microscopic selection of posts which seem to attract the most spam messages, with the titles copied verbatim.

20 Years Old Tomorrow

kidney disease symptons, manta equador, in karaoke odessa show tx, the villege, hollins univeristy, on line poker 7stud lo… uncertain Edmonton magic Bendix.regime aeronautic …

Credit Spam!

patin couffin, glamis dunes, lenguaje iconico, amalia carrara, joyland amusment park, making mirror telescope, dance robot, atv honda lowest motorcycle price, train calling all angels lyric, auto design nation shield usa, ach florida payment processing, xm satellite radio rating, bank cd mutual rate washington, bank cd mutual rate washington, conferencing phone service, dj hawaii wedding, addiction recovery trauma, adipex diet effects pill side, caroline beil, people doing stupid stuff, people doing stupid stuff, 3d home architect home design deluxe, book exodus moses, battery computer laptop notebook portable, cheap cheapest computer laptop notebook, goodnites pull ups, aol jason whitlock

Review of Cranky Geeks 081

Having a good credit history is crucial for anyone desiring a credit. Your credit history is based on credit reports that are meant to provide information on the borrower’s reliability. I have good credit history and I was approved for a great credit card offer at…

Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam…

That’s one thing I guess spam will always be: entertainment delivered right to my comments pages!

On Saturday the 29th of December 2007 some of our closest friends and dear family from all across Australia congregated at Woronora in Sydney, Australia for my mummy’s funeral. It was a beautiful service with lots of flowers, plenty of her favourite music playing and some sweet and heartfelt tributes from Ted and Margaret, my dad Rainer, Sharon, Megan and Lynn.

I can’t think of a single moment in my life where I have cried more or felt so much grief, but I also laughed and remembered all the great times we had together and enjoyed talking to so many people, some of whom I hadn’t seen in over a decade, about mummy and her incredible life.

I’ve already thanked everyone I could see while I was there, but I wanted for the record to make a note of it here. Thank you to everyone who attended, thank you to all the people in my fabulous family for helping to organise the celebration and thank you to all my friends from school and university, to my teachers (well, most of my teachers!) and to everyone here on my website and on Twitter for all your love, help and support during these long, trying 12 years. I couldn’t have done it without you guys.

I love you mummy.

In case you couldn’t make it to the funeral service, you can download the photo and PDF versions of the handout below. Unlike all the other original material in posts on this site, these are not released under a Creative Commons licence; the Schade and Ross families retain all copyrights.