Speaking of recent internet related fail, yesterday a few Twitter friends and I here in Adelaide were having speed and reliability related issues with our respective ISPs. What I thought was weird at the time was using a VPN to connect to my machine in Singapore and getting it to download websites for me and return them to my machine here in Adelaide was an order of magnitude faster than using my machine here in Adelaide to download websites directly!
You’d think transitioning back to university studies after working would mean I’d be learning more about so called "correct" programming techniques, but I’ve actually found the opposite is true! Apparently I’m also incapable of writing catchy titles for programming posts.
It’s killing me that I don’t remember where I heard this, but someone made the comment that many of us online are almost welcoming the demise of newspapers because we think they’re outdated dinosaurs, yet at the same time we complain about being overwhelmed by all the content streaming in from web feeds we subscribe to!
My relative subjective view of sluggishness/performance on a ThinkPad X40. Shorter bars are better.
UPDATE: This post should be considered hysterical… wait, sorry…. historical, because I’m fickle and decided to change it back to the Rubenerd Blog. When I saw all the names I’d have to update on all my profiles everywhere and all the people that linked to me, I dropped to the floor and hit my head on the side of the table as I did so. True story.
I guess at least I did get all my stuff merged here. It was painful.
Having been better for a couple of years compared to their less than stellar record in 2007, recent stability problems with Twitter have highlighted its vulnerability from a technical standpoint, though it’s not the problem I wanted to talk sweepingly about here.
Given the success I’ve had with sketching out ideas and concepts using diagrams, I thought I’d make one to think about sleeping problems. I think it just made the whole issue more confusing!
Not that I’m addicted and suffering from withdrawal symptoms or anything. Hope all the construction going on in our neighbourhood here hasn’t broken or damaged any phone cables. Anyone else in Mawson Lakes or other northern suburbs of Adelaide having internet trouble with The Node?
In an ironic twist, I can also see I made a critical mistake with my super detailed diagram too. I’ll pretend I did it on purpose for a reason so inspired I haven’t even thought of it yet.
Here’s an idea for a Google Reader feature that in my opinion is long overdue. If Reader attempts to fetch a web feed and it encounters a 301 permanent redirect to a legitimate new address it should update its own records in user accounts to point to the new address instead of still pinging the old one.
I ask for my own selfish reasons because as of now more people are still subscribed to my blog here through the old http://rubenerdshow.com/blog/feed/ address instead of http://rubenerd.com/feed/. Each request to the old URI takes more effort and bandwidth than the new one, and I’ve noticed items that appear in the new one instantly can sometimes take an hour or longer to appear in the old one. An automatic update would fix this.
Good idea?
Isn’t it great when you realise someone else shares one of your annoyances about something? I can’t quite explain why, perhaps it’s because in my case it makes me feel less naggy if I know I’m not the only one.
Andrew Barnett made a wish on Twitter this afternoon that upon reading it I jumped up on my chair, shouted "YES!" then fell off said chair and hit my head on the side of the table. Only a minor bruise, no short term memory damage, just a minor bruise.
wishes Google would exclude experts-exchange from ALL search results
Just as I really loathe it when people post links on Twitter to articles you have to register to view as I talked about back in March, I really loathe websites that allow their pages to be indexed by search engine spiders but then force you to pay to get to the answer to the question you asked. Worse still, they seem to appear in almost every technical search.
Experts-Exchange isn’t the only culprit here, but they’re probably the most infamous; heck they even warrant a section on Wikipedia. Even if they consistently had the answers to the questions I seem to want answered, just because of their search engine practises I wouldn’t want to support them by paying for their service.
In response to this, I pledge to donate five Australian dollars to the next website that helps me with my technical problems if they have a tip jar or similar service. I will chronicle the site here when I find it.
I reckon sometimes the best way to deal with negative actions is with positive actions.
I'm Ruben Schade, welcome to my labour of love mix of tech, anime, thoughts and nonsense from Singapore and Australia. Thanks for stopping by.
I'm also on Twitter, Flickr, Google Reader and lots more places.
