Rubénerd!

Earlier today, the best university anime clubs in Australia (ahem) gathered at the Japan Foundation gallery for a sneak peak into some of the original art behind Neon Genesis Evangelion. Seeing the level of detail that goes into each frame, how all the different layers of colours and effects were added, it was an amazing experience.

We weren't permitted to take photos of the exhibits themselves unfortunately, but the few photos I got from the event are on my Anime@UTS Flickr gallery. I have some handsome club members, let me just say that!

There was merchandise (of course!), and I was lucky enough to snag a shitajiki (aka: pencil board) to frame on my wall, along with one for Clara.

A few million years ago, I celebrated her annual festivities by presenting her a virtual birthday crown made of grass. She's no longer grass, so instead have a four leaf clover! Why? Because you don't see them out all that often, but when you do they're special and lucky ^_^.

If that doesn't win the award for lamest birthday greeting she got today, I'll be thoroughly disappointed.

According to this article in Xconomy, Google's Eric Schmidt had this to say to people like me who dare to explore the privacy implications of Google Glass:

"Our goal is to make the world better. We’ll take the criticism along the way, but criticisms are inevitably from people who are afraid of change or who have not figured out that there will be an adaptation of society to it"

So they want to make the world better, by being patronising to people with legitimate privacy concerns.

This is disturbing trend, harking back to Scott McNealy in the 1990s. I blogged a few weeks ago about Robert Scoble crudly dismissing Om Malik's concerns about Facebook Home. Google have really honed their technique over the years, even by going as far as framing (hah!) the debate on Google Glass as whether you look more macho using it than a smartphone. Oh please.

The good news is: you can defeat this by simply continuing the discussion.

There are amazing, fun, enabling new technologies out there that will push the world forward in ways we can't entirely see or understand yet. It's exciting. It doesn't also mean we should sit down, shut up and lap it all up without also considering the broader implications.

As I always say, never trust those who tell you to stop thinking.

As a child of the 1990s and early 2000s, I grew up with multimedia CD-ROMs. For the time, they were amazing. When drives were counted in the tens or hundreds of megs, a 650MB CD-ROM with text, images, short video clips and sound were amazing. Or perhaps I was just an easily amazed child.

The medium was largely extinguished with the advent of fast internet access that facilitated free, widely available and constantly updated material that an optically-powered sneakernet could never hope to match.

It's that inflexibility that continues to fascinate me about the multimedia CD-ROM. With so much of the web being created, revised and lost on a daily (hourly... second?) basis, multimedia CD-ROMs are unashamedly frozen in time. While in the past this was a hindrance to wider adoption, today they can serve as time capsules into how the world was seen during the time they were made.

My favourite example: my DK World Atlas 1995 CD-ROM proudly states that "Singapore is the world's largest manufacturer of floppy disk drives". This is why I collect them!

Fast forward to the present

So, long story short, while waiting for some Indian takeaway to be prepared, my father and I inadvertently stumbled across a second hand music shop. While he was immediently drawn to the shelves and shelves of $1 CDs, I ran to a dusty shelf near the door that was chock full of old computer CD-ROM discs!

Within half an hour of rummaging, and for $10, I had these:

• Borland Delphi for Windows (did stuff in HS with this!)
• Cinemania 96
• DK Eyewitness History of the World, from 1995
• Encyclopaedia Britannica 98, International Edition
• Encarta 95
• Encarta 97 World Atlas, World English Edition
• Encarta 98 Deluxe
• Pinball Arcade, from 1998
• Red Hat Linux 9.0 Bible (3 CDs!)
• Starfleet Academy: Chekov’s Lost Missions (from 1998)

Once I've cleared out my dearth of assignments, I'll have to crank up my Windows NT 4.0 Workstation VM and explore some of these. ^_^

Don't you love headlines that can be answered so easily? From Infoworld, one of my favourite sources of whitepapers which I read for a hobby because I'm a nerd:

The Ponemon Institute's research study, entitled "The TCO of Software vs. Hardware-based Full Disk Encryption," claims to provide an answer. The study, conducted last year, polled more than 1,300 IT and IT security professionals in four countries -- the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan -- for detailed information about their use of and expectations for hardware-based full-disk encryption.

Perhaps its because I had a long day, but I reread that paragraph at least five times, and I kept seeing "Pokémon Institute".

The results, recently reanalyzed with new insights provided in a follow-up paper, showed that full-disk encryption came at a fair cost, in big part because of the time and labor involved in deploying it. But the perceived benefits for using full-disk encryption far outweighed those costs.

An interesting read, but nothing surprising. Whole drive encryption would have added tremendous computational overhead to already slow machines back in the day, but today there really aren't any good [technical] reasons for eschewing (gesundheit) it.

From an enterprise perspective, the biggest arguments I've heard against it have been those initial deployment costs, and the added potential complexity for data recovery. That's not a problem though, because everyone backs up. R-right?

Then there's the issue of vendor support, or lack thereof. Mac OS X, the BSDs and all major Linux distributions ship with whole drive encryption as a configuration option, but Microsoft's BitLocker is only offered on the non-consumer flavours of Vista, 7 and 8.

It's regrettable Microsoft places more importance on artificial product differentiation than the privacy of their home customers' data. No catching 'em all today.

Whenever you ask a question on a forum or answer site, invariably you'll be told to RTFM, to Google it, or have your intelligence questioned by someone hiding behind an anonymous pseudonym as they sit there in their home in their pyjamas with the Cheetos stains on them. Or whoever they are.

Oh sure, they'll provide reasons for these callous responses. They're tired of answering the same questions. There really are answers on Google if you try hard enough. If you haven't bothered to demonstrate you've done some research, why should they help you? Personally, none of these reasons justify being a rude douchebag, but that's just me.

Perhaps because I do perform searches, demonstrate research and ask politely, but I haven't had a reply like this in a long time. Instead, I have answers like these to contend with on a regular basis:

Why would you want to do such a thing?

This. In a nutshell. Is what's wrong with answer sites.

No matter what you're doing, there will always, always be people who either can't understand why you want to do something, or see it as an opportunity to be patronising. If they've never had to do something, clearly you shouldn't have to either!

A quick tip for people who answer questions on answer sites. Offer alternative suggestions for sure, but if your only contribution is a condescending why question, you haven't contributed anything. Congratulations, you're just as useless as those people who ask bad questions!

Remember my post earlier this week about Julia Gillard and Labor cutting university education spending in Australia? An excerpt from an article in The Age, retweeted by @Sebasu_tan on Twitter:

But [opposition leader] Mr Abbott said he would maintain the changes to university funding which the government announced earlier this month as a way of paying for the increased money that it wants to give to primary and secondary schools.

"I don’t think anyone should expect those cuts to be reversed," Mr Abbott said.

Surprising no one.

The Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, told Fairfax Media that Mr Abbott was locking children into "being left behind".

Rich.

Earlier this week, one of the most upstanding members of the Anime@UTS club had her birthday. She's made a habit of doing this every year.

As someone who recently experienced that surge of pain at the prospects of becoming older than one preferred to be, I could relate to her hesitation to celebrate. We'd all planned to do something for her anyway, but always the illustrious Event Organiser™ she figured out several fun activities during the day, including a high tea and a piping-hot gastronomically delectable Korean dinner.

(Gastronomy has to be one of the most unfortunate culinary terms ever bestowed upon the language).

Clara and I don't drink, but we still had a great time seeing all our friends who we've barely seen owing to exams, assignments and all the regular fun stuff we otherwise occupy our existences with. She'd scoff at such a notion, but the turnout was just a testament to all the people who think she's a great friend. So there!

#tipsbowlerhat

As for the photo? Apparently that's me in cat form (private account link). Nyan~ ^o^

From my girlfriend Clara's site:

I heard today that uni funding has been cut again [..] the gist is that the 10% discount on upfront payments of HECs will be scrapped, voluntary paying back of HECs loans will lose the 5% bonus and Student Start Up Scholarships must be repaid once the student starts working.

The constant political infighting, the watering down of the Mining Tax, this complete and utter contempt for university students and the future of the country (paying back "scholarships" is my favourite)... I regard this current Australian government as nothing but a joke at this stage.

But here's the truly depressing thing. Labor knows I would never vote for the conservative coalition under Tony Abbott, so they know for people like me they can get away with this. I've seen Labor MPs on Twitter defend the plan by saying Tony Abbott would be worse. What a platform.

Update

Great catch from by Alex Masso on Twitter, seen via Greens Senator Christine Milne:

senatormilne: RT @alexmasso: "I fervently believe in and will continue to advocate that increases be made in funding the university sector" - David Gonski

Every man and his dog is asking why PC shipments are going down (many of whom don't have as much assonance in their headings... or is that alliteration?) so I couldn't be silent any more!

It's reason season

Some (well okay, most) armchair analysts blame users dropping Windows 8 like a metro-riding hot potato. Others point to the iPad and the general move towards the cloud and virtualisation as reasons why people don't see the need for new hulking towers. The Gruber says sales of PC "trucks" are in decline as we all move to smaller, more efficient "cars".

I suspect a large part of the reason is far less exciting, and has more to do with corporate rather than consumer decisions.

Care to buy a second hand PC?

During the last economic downturn, companies delayed purchasing new machines. New machines translate to new licensing costs, training people, exhaustive compatibility testing. If you're being squeezed financially, it's understandable why you'd look at these expenses, and put them off.

In doing so, it's possible these companies realised they could continue using these machines productively. Extended support can be costly, but still far less than procuring new equipment they've since realised they don't really need. Besides, their employees probably use MacBooks and iPads at home anyway.

What we could be witnessing is the end of the 2-3 year corporate upgrade cycle, and the transition into something far more sustainable. It makes nothing but business sense, though you can understand why corporate IT providers are nervous. Perhaps there's something to this services-orientation stuff.

I'm only speaking from the inside perspective of two large companies, but I think there's a pattern here. Or I could just be entirely wrong; my haters would be the first to point out this possibility.

Which reminds me...

The word possibility looks like the word possum.

Picture of Hatsune Miku and that veritable ocean of windows by 7zu7 on Pixiv.