Rubenerd

Mac legend Brent Simmons writing “How We Work Together”:

To swim with the current these days is to use git. But I like Mercurial better — and I think Mercurial is to Macintosh as git is to Windows. That’s probably not fair or rational, but it doesn’t really matter, since both git and Mercurial are excellent systems.

I have similar sentiments. While I find Mercurial to be a far better fit personally, I made the switch to Git largely because most of my favourite projects now use it. Which is to say, they use Github.

I do have a couple of private hg repos on Bitbucket, but I’ll probably be making the switch to Git soon. A smarter person could juggle both systems, but I prefer just using the one. Heck I only just stopped using SVN for my personal projects last year, and CVS for my FreeBSD updates.

Good heavens, remember CVS? I may prefer Mercurial, but wow Git is a lovely warm cup of tea compared to that!

Follow up

A few people have informed me on Twitter that it’s spelled “git”, not “Git”. While technically true, it’s “Yahoo!” not “Yahoo” as well, but who spells it as such? I suppose including a whopping big logo with the correct spelling didn’t compensate for my use of capitalisation (^_~).

When Dave Winer introduced RSS 2.0, he included a number of new tags. One of which was author, which is designed for an email address:

<author>123@fakestreet.springfield (Ruben Schade)</author>

This probably made more sense back then than it does now. While it’d be lovely to contact the owner of a feed, it’s mostly just a huge spam target bullseye.

We have four options (probably more). We can use our regular email address here, and hope our increasingly sophisticated spam filters can handle the sudden and inevitable onslaught. We can pollute our metadata with a fake address, or defeat the purpose of the tag with a junk address we’ll probably never check.

A forth option is to take the RDF-spirited approach and import the Dublin Core namespace:

<rss version="2.0"
    xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">

With it, we get the lovely dc:creator tag which lets us do this:

<dc:creator>Ruben Schade</dc:creator>

There is some semantic impact to this; an author isn’t the same as a dc:creator. In some ways however, I think it’s superior. Author asserts a person is defined by their email address. dc:creator assumes an author’s unique identifier (if you will) is their name.

It probably comes down to personal preference above all else; I for one prefer the latter. To be fair though, I have an unusual name combination!

Software packages like WordPress have been doing this for years, and I’ve finally decided to implement it myself on the feeds I generate. I try to avoid importing namespaces in RSS 2.0 when I can, but this is a useful addition. Plus then I get all the extra Dublin Core goodies ^_^.

Photo taken by me of the Dublin skyline in 2010. Ireland is so beautiful!

Today’s science fun, from News.com:

But if a scientist can’t see it, touch it, analyze it, and alter it, then it isn’t real.

Droll, very droll!

While Chris did say this in jest, the jokes that are funniest are the ones with a kernel of truth. As unbelievable as it may seem, there really are people out there who think that’s all science is.

Obviously part of this stems from ignorance, but often I think it can be explained from childhood experience. I was fortunate to have some really wonderful, enthusiastic, engaging science teachers in high school. Science subjects were never my strongest, but they were the ones I found most interesting. Mr Napier, Mr Daloste and Mr Reilly were always more than happy to stay back to answer my trillions of questions and explain why my silly inventions I was always developing were not really practical!

For those who only ever got a string of boring tables to memorise, its easy to see how they could see the whole field as dull, purely deterministic and limited. And for others, science just doesn’t rock their boat. To each their own, but I think they’re missing out on some incredible stuff.

Image from the University of Cambridge site, though possibly from CERN given the filename.

After a brief hiatus (which you were all most likely relieved to receive), this is the fourth in my fabulous networking meme series, generated here. The first one was here, and the second one was here, and the third one was here. You’re welcome.

Clara has also released her traditional follow up ;).

It’s with a heavy, nostalgic heart that I bid farewell to the Camino web browser. According to the last blog post on the Camino site, it’s no longer being actively developed.

Camino was Mozilla done right on the Mac. It took the same Gecko rendering engine from Firefox, wrapped it in native Mac Cocoa instead of XUL, added keychain support, and a bunch of other useful Mac features. It had a quintessentially Aqua icon, and tastefully coloured toolbar buttons that dared to challenge the plain toolbars of Safari.

I loved Firefox on Windows and *nix, but was less than impressed with its performace on my iBook G3 with Panther and Tiger in the early 2000s. I made the switch, and only moved back to Firefox on my Macs a few years ago. I like having all my security and privacy extensions back in Firefox, but I still think the user experience in Camino is superior.

I wish all the developers the best in their newer, greener pastures in Safari, Firefox and Chrome development. And thank you.

A crazy evening with The Internet tonight. I can access most sites just fine, but the following just refuse to load. It’s almost as if a local CDN mirror is down.

• Twitter.com and all my Twitter clients
• Optus.com.au
• Optuszoo.com
• Apple iMessages

I’m just lucky I have Clara to act as a liaison officer for me! She’s pretty much relaying all my university group messages this evening.

From the now-defunct Mac:Intel wiki page:

18:41, 8 May 2008 Josh (Talk | contribs) deleted page Mac:Intel (content was: ‘The Intel Mac work for Firefox, Thunderbird, and Camino is done. All fixes are checked in. You can build for Intel Macs from the cvs trunk and any bra…’)

I’ll need to ask Clara if I can build Intel Mac versions of Mozilla software in one of hers, to try. For science.

Wikimedia Commons really is an amazing place, and I’m not just saying that because I’m a Wikimedia supporter and contributor! I can spend hours trawling through its archive of images and art.

In this case, while looking for some bread iconography with Clara (for a bad pun to insert into a group presentation), we came across an entire photographic series on bread making. Every step is there, from the initial ingredient mixing, to the dough kneading and shaping, to the baking and final presentation.

The bread the bakers are baking (how’s that for an inspired sentence) is houska, a style of Czech roll. I remember having one of these in Plzeň when we took a detour from Bavaria on our last Europe trip, and wanting to smuggle a huge bag of them home with me! The atmosphere of tucking into one of these freshly baked, warm rolls in a small café with my dad and sister while we looked outside at the snow… it had a lasting impression on me.

But back to the photos! I’m a home baker, and am always interested in seeing how others perform the craft. I’m fascinated by their mix of machinery and human touches; while you can automate the entire process and produce boring sandwich bread slices, in this process ultimately the humans still have the final say.

Thanks to Chmee2 for this great photographic series, you made my morning ^_^.

No, I’m not referring to dating Jekyll, I’m already taken. I’m also not referring to those fruits that oddly enough I don’t care for.

I couldn’t figure out why posts with a defined date weren’t appearing in my local Jekyll install. In the YAML matter, I’d written it as such:

date: "2005-01-24T12:00:36

Some more astute readers may already see the problem, but I was scratching my head late at night wondering why. Yes, it turns out you need to define the timezone.

date: "2005-01-24T12:00:36+1000

It makes sense. If my base is UTC, that time I defined above wouldn’t have happened yet, and I had configured Jekyll to not post items from the future. I mean, I’m not part of the USS Relativity’s crew or anything.

Now comes the task of editing my maintanence Perl script to add the appropriate timezones for thousands of entries, written in Singapore, Kuala Lumpuer, Adelaide and Sydney over the years. Fun times!

TL;DR, but here’s BoingBoing’s excerpt from a crazy new report from the “Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property”.

Additionally, software can be written that will allow only authorized users to open files containing valuable information. If an unauthorized person accesses the information, a range of actions might then occur. For example, the file could be rendered inaccessible and the unauthorized user’s computer could be locked down, with instructions on how to contact law enforcement to get the password needed to unlock the account. Such measures do not violate existing laws on the use of the Internet, yet they serve to blunt attacks and stabilize a cyber incident to provide both time and evidence for law enforcement to become involved.

Locking people out of their computers and requiring a call to access files isn’t new. More brazen malicious hackers have been performing ransomware attacks for years, ranging from simple fake password screens to encrypting files with a key that must be bought.

It seems breathtaking that an industry would find this to be acceptable behaviour, right?

There is precedent though. Certain operating systems require activation after a defined period of time, and failure to let your legitimately purchased copy of software phone home can lock you out of a system. The good news is failed product activations can be fixed by talking with an overworked call centre employee. Maybe.

This action by the entertainment industry is far more akin to ransomware, where they’re actively installing malicious software that must be removed with a key, and without the user’s knowledge. It’s a brazen attack against customers, and I’m unconvinced of their claim that it’s legal.

The consequences are terrifying, and speak to an industry run by people with either a breathtaking lack of understanding about how computers work, or an even scarier lack of empathy. Imagine if a false positive was made on a system at a hospital, or a nuclear facility, or on a computer someone needs access to urgently. What about people who’s livelihoods depend on their computers?

This is the worst kind of nonsense, and I hope it gets an arrow to the knee face before it sees the light of day. If it does ever get implemented, may it receive the same warm reception Sony’s rootkits did.

Photo above by [pasukaru76 on Flickr](https://secure.flickr.com/photos/pasukaru76/5580195276/), found through the same BoingBoing post.