Rubénerd!

Allegedly it wasn't hot enough for us in Sydney! It was another scorcher today, it felt like stepping into a warming oven as I opened the front door. And to make matters worse, our central air conditioning died! As I type this, myself and our two little white fluffy animals that the vets assure as are dogs are camped out in my home office computer room thingy with a portable air conditioner set to stun. Marge, can you set the oven to cold?

What I was most peeved about though was earlier today the temperature hit 42 degrees Celsius (107.6 Fahrenheit), which from a DON'T PANIC perspective would have made a brilliant screenshot, and 107.6 sounds like a trippy radio station. Just saying.

In light of the proposed IPv6 Day on the 8th of June, I've been accused of being too short sighted with my scepticism for the standard. I'll discuss my severe privacy reservations about it tomorrow, for now I'm whinging about how we're being sold it.

oh my god no more addresses!!!1!!!oneone!

First of all, let me acknowledge that despite all the alarmist rhetoric which I usually take with a heavy pinch of salt (scaring people sells more newspapers), the pool of available address for IPv4 is running low. Take note of my wording, there are still huge blocks of unused addresses reserved for the firms and universities that were in cozy enough relationships to get them, many of which are using NAT now anyway, go figure!

I've read people demanding these companies and organisations surrender these addresses they're not using, but they really don't have any legal standing to do so, and I don't really see how that would do anything other than delay the inevitable. Technically it would only provide short to medium term relief, and from a business perspective such organisations spent a small fortune for them and likely see holding them as a competitive advantage, so they wouldn't be keen on surrendering them.

So we're back at square one. The networking industry has been nothing short of Nostradamean in the accuracy of their predictions of when exactly we'd be running out of addresses which hasn't helped their cause, but the final result is inevitable.

How we're being sold it

Now that I've got all that out of the way, I can discuss my first gripe with IPv6, or more accurately how we're being sold it. IPv6 has some nice features like IPSec being an integral part, but take a look at any article about the standard and its existence is justified by IPv4's limited address space. Appreciate that for a second, we're not being sold on IPv6's merits, but rather on the comparative crappiness of something we're using now.

Cocaine is a hell of a drug, but its way better than heroin! This may be true, but its a non sequiter. Water is better than heroin too, though probably just as addictive.

While we're talking about doomsday and computers, here's an obligatory picture of the creator of the universe with one.

What

I don't have the desire to learn the intimate details of dual stack implementations to cope with IPv4 and IPv6, but I've seen enough complicated flow charts to know that deploying IPv6 and IPv4 concurrently is messy and involves some pretty sophisticated routing gymnastics.

Yes its better than IPv4 (multicasting as standard sounds like it'll be to broadcasting what switches were to hubs! Hehe, remember hubs? I had a 5 port hub that for some reason port 3 didn't work on) but my argument, and some of the other sceptics on various newsgroups right now, is if we're going to invest all this time and money implementing this essentially from scratch, why not take the opportunity to implement something completely new and fundamentally better? Why compromise at all if they're going to be incompatible anyway?

The answer, in perhaps the most delicious case of irony I've encountered in a long time, is because IPv6 more established than anything else, and there's more support for it in major operating systems. Wait, hold on a second... aren't they the arguments people use to claim we should stick to IPv4?

But this standard is all we have!

The problem is... we have nothing else, and the exhaustion of IPv4 means we'll be shoehorned onto this new standard which we've rendered necessary by virtue of the fact there isn't anything else. There will be few protests, and the ones people file will be ignored in a cloud of address shortage panic. People will get scared that they won't be able to download porn anymore! What will they do!? What, this IPv6 thing fixes that? GREAT, get it implemented NOW! HURRY!!!

Potentially worse still, because there are so many addresses, that sense of urgency won't be realistically felt again, and we'll be stuck with it. Whoopie.

I tell you what, from a security and privacy perspective, intelligence organisations, the courts, black hats and behavioural marketers could not have played this any better. All that needs to happen now is for Hollywood to release a Y2Kish film and Norton to release some overpriced compliance checking software to cash in on people's fears like they did in 1999, and we'll be set! :D

I hope Google's IPv6 trial on the 8th of June goes well, because it will ensure the future viability of the net itself. That doesn't mean I'm looking forward to the future though.

My jittery paranoia will be reserved for tomorrow's post ;).

After two months of an uncharacteristically cool summer here in Sydney, the heat finally arrived to exact its revenge for being denied access for so long. I could have just said "it was flipping hot".

It was so hot, the bridge drooped at either end

When we first moved back to Sydney in winter after a 14 year on and off stint in Singapore, we were fully expecting to shiver our rear ends off. We were right, having grown up in a city that has 32 degree weather 365 days a year, temperatures lower than maybe 25 seem practically arctic. Well, for as long as there's still ice there. Ice rhymes with nice.

Anyway we were all excited when summer was around the corner and we could feel some normal weather... well, normal for us. As Einsten said, relativity is a bitch. He never said that. Turns out nature had other plans, and other than a few warm days, most of the summer has been surprisingly cool, especially at night.

I had a wax sculpture of Salvador Dali, but it melted.

Waking up this morning in a lake of my own sweat, I checked the forecast and discovered to my horror and surprise that we were in for a 40 degree day. Yikies!

Yikies is a contraction concatenation Constantinople portmanteau of yikes and owies. I'm thinking it could be a trend. But I digress.

In its infinite wisdom, Google is telling me that 40 degrees Celcius is 104 Fahrenheit. I tell you what my American friends and readers (and enemies), your measurement systems make no sense to me whatsoever, but 104 sure does sounds more evil than 40!

Whatever it was, it was hot. I just got my bike recently and wanted to go for a ride, but the sun was so harsh I could barely stand walking from the train station back to our house. It was so hot, a block of chocolate I'd left on my computer desk had turned into chocolate sauce. It was so hot, my ThinkPad nearly fried itself running Flash. It was so hot, the colour from my iTelephone case started rubbing off on my hand while I held it to take the photos you're seeing here while I was at Circular Quay station. It was so hot.

Not to belabour the point, but...

• I've lived in Adelaide, travelled to Dubai and been in inland Australia.

• I've sat outside at the Sepang Grand Prix in Malaysia in the middle of the day and without a roof over my head.

• I've made lasagne and stuck my head in the oven during what I later deemed to be a contraction concatenation Constantinople portmanteau combination of a lack of foresight, an equal lack of judgement, and a sudden bout of abject stupidity.

• I've poured boiling water from a kettle down my arm in what I later deemed to be a contraction concatenation Constantinople portmanteau combination of a lack of foresight, an equal lack of judgement, and a sudden bout of abject stupidity. I'm getting deja vu, all over again.

• I've shared an enclosed space with a PowerMac G5, a homebrew Athlon 64 tower and more recently a Mac Pro.

• I spent an afternoon with Ana Brusic in high school while I fixed her laptop.

• I've put my hand on a motorbike exhaust pipe.

And yet

And I still, still say today was hot. I mean really, really, REALLY hot. Even comparability so. That was supposed to be "comparatively" so, stupid autocorrect!If you were in The Australia today, I hope you kept cool. I'm already very cool, you see.

As an update, my fabulous sister Elke just came back from the convenience store down the street. That's none too interesting itself, however she informed me they play the radio at the aforementioned convenience store, and that the station's news reporter just mentioned that Sydney's power demands were ridiculously huge owing to every man and his dog running and air conditioner. No kidding! It may also explain why my screens keep flickering ever so slightly, and why the street lights in Earlwood and neighbouring Kingsgrove are completely out too. Eerie stuff.

After writing a post about George Harrison recently, I was alerted to this paragraph on the Here Comes The Sun Wikipedia article:

Astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan had wanted [Here Comes The Sun] to be included on the Voyager Golden Record, copies of which were attached to both spacecraft of the Voyager program to provide any entity that recovered them a representative sample of human civilization. Although The Beatles favoured the idea, EMI refused to release the rights and when the probes were launched in 1977 the song was not included.

[An EMI spokesman said the decision was due to their small schlongs].

Face, meet palm

And these morons wonder why we don't take them seriously when we try to discuss copyright reform? We need to ditch these glorified mobsters. We also need broader definitions of fair use: in this case so that a member of an alien species can play our music without a bunch of suits in comfy chairs on a tropical island somewhere giving them their personal approval.

I wonder if we were to launch a probe like this now whether the medium we'd encoded some of the cultural evidence of our entire civilisation would have to use some form of DRM. I mean you never know, them aliens might want to make illegal copies. We'd have to include far more specific instructions to decode the DRM than these though.

Sting asked if the Russians loved their children too. I'd be more interested to know if aliens love the Berne Convention.

The Social Network cleaned up at the Golden Globe awards, and people are... surprised? Upset? Angry? REALLY?

Awards schmawards

Now first it must be said, I don't usually accord award ceremonies with much of my attention, in real life or electronically on this here weblogging platform thingy. I could ramble on about how everything from the Academy Awards to the ARIAs are either rigged, biased, limited and/or flawed, or I could say that people who watch movies or listen to music based on how many awards they win are missing out.

Fact of the matter is, I just find them universally dull. A yawnfest, if you will. XYZ believes ABC was the best movie of the year because they slept with the director, producer or lead actors, got a big sack of cash and several incriminating photos were not used against them. Big whoop.

In this case however, I'm willing to make an exception. There's a joke about programming there, but its too late at night and I'm not feeling terribly witty.

You know what really Grinds My Gears?

First, it doesn't bother me in the slightest that The King's Speech (with its breathtaking acting and story) and Inception (which was such a serious mindf*ck that I couldn't get enough of it) didn't win the big awards. I don't crave the validation or need a stamp of approval by anyone else to thoroughly enjoy watching them, and certainly my opinion of them hasn't changed.

While we're on this subject, I've never understood why people who had no say in the production of a film (or album) take decisions against them so personally. If you liked it, who cares what other people think? But that's for another post!

No, what ticks me off is people are only talking about The Social Network's win in light of Inception's loss, when I believe there's something far dodgier going on, and we're all being played.

Follow the monies!

There's no doubt that these awards are worth something, and that bribing the judges is a small price to pay for the free advertising and future advantages your film will have over all others for that year. It's a profitable thing to do.

In this case though, The Social Network had very little to do with generating funds for box office tickets and DVDs, though I'm sure such perks are also nice in and of themselves as well. The real ticket, if you will, is Facebook's IPO.

Isn't it curious that all these rumours leak out that Goldman Sachs were to invest billions in Facebook, then this relatively mediocre movie is released and is awarded with so much acclaim? Me thinks someone wants the hype machine in overdrive for when those delicious shares go live and a small army of well connected people in the right places can print themselves reams of money.

Will you and I be able to procure some of those initial shares in Facebook? There's your answer!

Mr Con Jecture, please

It's Salt and Anna Chapman all over again, only in reverse. They expel a Russian spy from the US, then it generates far more news and press than it should, then low and behold Salt is released! Speaking of shameless, would you like to buy me a coffee to support the site? ;).

Movies started off as advertising machines with occasional product placements, then obsessive product placements... now the movies themselves are the advertisement. And its only going to get worse.

It's one thing to show me advertising on commercial television, but I've always figured if I watch product placements in a movie that I've parted money with to watch, I should get a discount or at least some free snacks. I like taking those little fruit platter trays you get at the supermarket and a toothpick and just having at it. Schweet.

So the iPhone is coming to Verizon? This is bigger news: The Google Chromium team have announced the impending removal of the H.264 codec from Chrome. Oh well, I never used it as my primary browser anyway.

Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.

I envy their convictions, but I see several glaring issues with this.

Being open by being closed

Leaving aside all the other glaring technical and legal shortcomings of WebM -- Google's proposed new video standard that's grounded in good intentions but alas falls short -- the main problem with it right now is it requires a Flash wrapper.

Google is claiming they're doing this for the sake of "open innovation"... by requiring Flash? Maybe they mean open because Flash is one of the most insecure pieces of junk online and they give open access to your machine by malicious users. Yeah, that must be it!

If we were to draw their line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, Google should be dropping the closed, proprietary Flash from Chrome [fixed] as well. They're not, and there's no way around this glaring fact. Well, maybe if you're a Fox News presenter you could figure out a way, like Glenn Beck no doubt will after this fiasco! But I digress.

The Google IO Factor

This was a comment left by Bob Andfeld on my post back in May 2010 about Google's support for Flash (Google supporting Flash doesn't make it open). My verbosity frustrates even me, he put it more eloquently and in less space than I ever could:

For a company such as Google that prides itself on being open and advertises its mobile platform as such, their support of closed Flash is absolutely baffling, yet enough people are willing to parade in their defense.

But it gets better! Say what you will about the open/closed nature of H.264, but at the last Google IO conference Eric Schmidt made the comment that the web should be about inclusion not exclusion, in reference to Apple's exclusion of Flash from their iDevices. And now, Google is excluding something.

I suppose that's no different than people like Paul Thurrott poking fun at Apple for not including cut and paste, then rushing to Microsoft's defence when they didn't ship the feature in Windows Phone 7. I suppose doing no evil doesn't include having double standards ;).

Knowledge is better than ignorance ~ Sergey Brin

I’m not one to dwell on conspiracy theories (unless they’re fun ones like the moon landing was fake, or Area 51 was actually where Chuck Norris had a house), but I’m beginning to entertain the notion that Google is hiding something, and its only becoming more obvious. Why would a company that prides itself on being open have such support for a plugin that is anything but, even going out of their way to demonstrate their mobile phone hardware with it at events? Are they in kahoots with Adobe?

There’s something more going on here, and we’re not being told about it. I reckon Shantanu wants a ride in Sergey and Larry’s private 767 with the hammocks, and Sergey and Larry want some free copies of Illustrator so they can redesign the Chrome logo to not look like the Windows XP logo that's been swirled once. Yeah, that must be it!

There's hope!

At this stage I'd triumphantly talk about my browser vendor since 2003, but Mozilla will probably side with Google on this. At this rate maybe I need to switch to Safari with FlashBlock! Nah, eLinks is where its at! :D

Needless to say, I'm glad I heeded no attention to the constant and increasingly vocal barrage of advice from people to move over to it. Ruben, move to Chrome! Hey Ruben, Chrome is cool, use it! Yo dawg, I heard you like Google tracking you...!

With all this gloom and doom talk, sometimes its worth remembering though what makes the web so strong and open in the first place. If a browser vendor starts to not make any sense, or do things we don't approve of or agree with, we can always just switch to something else and access the same internet as everyone else. Well, other than Internet Explorer, or Windows Internet Explorer Service Pack 1 Home Premium Edition or whatever they're calling it now :).

And from how this affects me personally, I use [flavour of the month] wrapped in Matroska from BitTorrent anyway. I mean, wait, no I don't. You didn't read that.

Quote from The Beehive:

Our leading bankers looted the state, plunged the world into deep recession, and cost us 8 million jobs. And now many of them stand by with sharpened knives and enhanced bonuses – also most willing to suggest how the salaries and jobs of others can be further cut. Think about the morality of that one.

No doubt on my mind, my American friends were robbed blind. And its happening around the world. I suppose they suspect the middle class are still too preoccupied fighting amongst themselves over who's a conservative or a progressive or any other convenient label to put up a fight against the real enemies here. And they're right.

Heck, I've got into enough trouble just saying I'm an atheist humanist greenie liberal with libertarian leanings. That's a lot of words.

I've continued to receive emails from people demanding an explanation as to why I've "deleted" them from my Facebook profile. In the interest of alleviating their fears, I'm writing this post.

Clear as mud

Firstly, I would like to make one thing clear. I like grilled cheese sandwiches. There, I admit it, its out in the open, nothing more needs to be said.

Except for this. To those who have frantically emailed me and analysed our friendship in great detail to attempt to find a reason, I did not delete you from Facebook.

I deleted my Facebook profile entirely!

It's people who get upset over a token gesture like why I don't have you on Facebook any more that was one of the reasons why I stopped using the service. It's like high school popularity contests all over again. I suspect more than a few people who never attempted to talk to me until my profile disappeared only wanted me there to boost their friendship numbers so they can outdo someone else or look cooler. You see, there's a direct correlation between how many "friends" you have and how socially secure and awesome you are.

The fact that:

• The site is a front for some very dodgy companies doing dodgy things in a dodgy way without regards to privacy (or even security, *cough* Firesheep *cough*)

• Mr. Zuckerberg is the personification of all that's wrong with my generation (with people like Matt Mullenweg being an example of good)

• I like grilled cheese sandwiches

• Ultimately I didn't dervive much value from the service, which is lame public relations speak for "I didn't use it!"

... are all auxiliary reasons. Well maybe not auxiliary, they're all a mesh of things that came together that left a bad taste in my mouth, along with the social aspect I described before. Bad mouth tastes have never happened with a grilled cheese sandwich. Except that one time the cheese had expired and I didn't notice. That was right royally rank.

Yes, I just used the word rank with alliteration

I may attempt to make another profile in the future under a complete alias and fill out the interests and hobby fields with complete BS, but for now I'm savouring not having to worry about that site any more. Its a tremendous relief :).

Is Oh Ess Two free as a name? I'm having a small obsession with OS/2 at the moment, will be the subject of a new post soon.

Because then the ink would spill everywhere I suppose.

As I was walking through Officeworks this afternoon trying to ascertain if they sold waffle irons with phones attached, it suddenly struck me that the free and open source community are missing out on something huge. Or I'm missing out on their discussion on this huge thing. I could have phrased that better.

Background

While I tend to life a third of my life in the super evil Apple world where Steve Jobs dictates to me what applications I can run in my Terminal and which exact machine I can buy, the other two thirds are spent in FreeBSD and my current Linux distribution of choice because FreeBSD just doesn't work on my ThinkPad "netbook" that well. Funny thing is, both Fedora and Debian refuse to suspend properly on it, but Gentoo derived distributions work flawlessly. Go figure.

In the case of FreeBSD and Linux, I can deeply respect the enormous effort and perseverance of advocates for open s/standards/drivers/. Closed binary blob drivers will probably be a fact of life for all of us for the foreseeable future, but the situation is certainly better than what it was a decade ago ago when I was in early high school and couldn't even use my crappy Winmodem in my Red Hat Linux partition, much to the delight of my computer teacher who was a Redmondite. Our school had a perfectly serviceable Notes installation, and instead of moving off it to something simpler, more affordable, more open and ultimately more secure, they became an Exchange shop. Well not a shop, a school. But the school did sell uniforms and books, which I suppose also made them a shop.

Getting back on topic, we have people who refuse to back down on their convictions for this general trend away from binary blob nonsense, even if I tend to think of myself as more of a pragmatist than an idealist.

Where was I going with this?

Oh yeah I remember now. Whether it comes to standards for office documents, communications or for graphics drivers, open is better and we all benefit, even us using super evil operating systems like Mac OS X.

However, there's still one area that is in desperate need for standardisation, and it has to do with jaffle irons. I should be able to put a standard piece of bread, a slice of cheese, a few pieces of onion and a ridiculous amount of avocado into any jaffle iron and have it make me a gosh darn jaffle! Who's with me? Yui totally is :).

The other thing...

The other thing is printer cartridges.

The other thing is printer cartridges. Yes I just said that, I wanted you to feel the full impact of this mofo of a statement. Yes, I said mofo. Apparently its a term cool people use, like The Game and Converse Shoes and Box Socials with their loud music and their wild hair and pocket octopuses. High five Larson :).

CUPS (developed in part by that super evil closed Apple Inc... hey, that's a pun) and other open printing systems have allowed free and open source access to printers without using closed, universally terrible software that printer manufacturers otherwise force upon hapless Windows and Mac users. That's great for controlling these ink to paper dispensing devices, but what about the ink itself?

RANDOM THOUGHT: With the exception of Apple and precious others, why do hardware makers always make terrible software!? Even Logitech which otherwise makes beautiful hardware that's fun to use can't make a .PreferecePane that doesn't crash on me or look like it was designed by Newt Gingrich. I have no idea why I said that guy's name, for some reason it was just the first one that came to mind. Like A Boss.

Every manufacturer has their own ink dispensing and delivery systems, their own little cartridges to store their precious fluids or toner powders, their own colour spaces, their own everything. Even different printers made by the same companies will have wildly different little tanks of the stuff. Photo cyan AND cyan? Really?!

Why can't we have a standardised colour space, standardised cartridges, standardised ink densities and chemical compositions, standardised packaging with clear instructions, and standardised cartridges? Yes I said that one twice, I was trying to make a point, get off my case!

Printers have cases

I know why such standardisation won't happen, and unless you're as daft as a ship (no wait, that's draft) you do too. It's because in the United States they spell it with a Z. That's right, we can't even standardise on the spelling of the word standardise! We can't even make up our minds on whether its "free software" or "open source software" or "free and open source software" or "free, libre and open source software" or "FOSS" or "F/OSS" or "FLOSS" or "FURIOUS THE MONKEY BOY" or or or... someone call me a cab, I'm off to the Apple shop.

Printers are the gateway drug, the one the dealers at HP Sauce, Lexfark, EPSOM SALTS and Canonball let you shoot up with at a very reasonable prices, so then later you come crawling back for inks that gram for gram are more expensive than saffron or palladium, and glorified paper with gloss on it that costs more per surface area of paper than the paper money you part with in order to possess it. The printers aren't the things making these companies money, its the ink and its the toner and its the paper and its the drugs, foo.

RANDOM THOUGHT: Isn't saffron spelt with only one F? The spell checker told me otherwise, but it doesn't look right. My spelling sucks.

Much like when people claim Google is an "open company" when their primary cash cow algorithm is the most closed, guarded secret since 11 secret herbs and spices, printer companies will not surrender to a standardised method of packaging and utilising ink. It's a fact of life, and frankly now I'm depressed imagining a world with such standardised ink vessels, because I know it won't happen.

I wonder if Mr Stallman or De Raadt have an opinion on this? They'd probably refuse to use such things outright. Torvalds and McKusick and Watson probably have no problems using them because a free version isn't available... and they want to be able to print things!

Update: Nero Dot The Matrix

Have they standardised on those printer ribbon things from dot matrix printers? When I was growing up we had an EPSOM SALTS dot matrix printer and it made really cool sounds. Before I started school I used to draw obscure pictures in KID PIX and get it to print just to see if I could make it play a tune, then refine the picture.

Turns out people had already done that, but I thought I was being super badarse at the time. Perhaps it explains much of my social awkwardness. No Laura I can't go to your birthday party, I'm making music with a dot matrix printer. Stupid nerdy childhood.

To those who auto-post their Tumblr to Twitter: DON'T! Or make it fit in 140 characters. I hate constantly reading truncated ... tweets! If this means putting titles on your Tumblr entries like bloggers figured out how to do ten years ago, so be it.

I've resorted to filtering out all tweets that include "...", but I worry I'm missing some of your important commentary, such as this.

Your Twitter friend :)
~ Ruben(erd)