Rubenerd

Beautiful… my heart skipped a beat _

Just using my Nikon D60, Nikkor 55-200mm f/4-5.6G and a rickety old tripod!

Aside from the technological significance of the DEC PDP11 computers, I'm also so thoroughly in love with their design, colours, fonts and advertising material.

Quintessentially 70s. I want that chair! The carpet! The red walls! A bank of dead PDP11s for hanging my clothes in, with a Mac Mini running an emulator inside it!

Scan by PanelswitchMan on Flickr.

Given a spam filter of mine recently past the dubious 6 millionth spam comment filtered, I've decided to do the unthinkable and disable comments entirely. Here's my logic!

It didn’t used to be this way Smithers…

Back in the bad old days of blogging, we didn't have comment systems. My first site was run off a simple Perl CGI script I wrote, but even as I moved to RapidWeaver I still didn't have blog comments. I got around the problem by running a Vanilla Forums install, and linking to my posts. It worked reasonably well.

When I moved to WordPress in 2005, I suddenly had blog comments. I liked that the barrier to entry was lower than a forum; users didn't need to register for an account to post a comment, so the upshot was more people left comments. Some posts I've written, such as font smoothing on Snow Leopard and the Canadian Hinton Train disaster have spawned entire discussions with disparate people around the world.

Like so many technologies though, it didn't take the douchebags long to realise they could wreck it for the rest of us. I can't tell exactly when it started getting out of control, but in the last few years the amount of blog spam has exploded here. My combination of TanTanNoodle's Simple Spam Filter and Automattic's Akismet do as best a job as they can to stop the onslaught, but at this stage I feel as though I'm trying to stop a waterfall by holding out a sheet of newspaper.

Some statistics

• Since 2008, TanTanNoodle’s SimpleSpamFilter reports that it’s blocked 6,131,412 comments. That’s right, more than 6 million spam comments. As I said on Twitter, this is absurd!

• Since 2005, Akismet reports that it has blocked 196,192 comments, missed 1,844, and had 22 false positives. The latter I suspect is optimistic, I’m sure plenty more legitimate ones have been lost.

• WordPress reports 3,336 legitimate blog comments.

That graphs shows why I’m not studying stats

So now I come to the inevitable question… is having comments on my blog worth it?

For the first time, I'm thinking not. With uni and family work consuming more of my time thesedays, I simply couldn't be bothered trawling through what's been caught in the hopes of finding a couple of legitimate comments. I'm tired of having my email inbox flooded with notifications of generic, bogus comments linking to dodgy websites.

Hosting sites with public facing interfaces are also harder to keep secure too, while I'm at it.

So what's the alternative? The more I think about it, the more I realise the alternative already exists, and people are using it. I get more comments from people on Twitter and the like than I ever got on my site here.

I'm also reminded of how blogging used to work, with trackbacks and the like. Before comment systems, if you wanted to comment on someone's post, you'd write a response post on your own blog and link back. Such was the promise of the early "blogosphere", a loose knit federation of writers with their own spaces. A bazaar rather than a cathedral, if you like.

So here we go!

I'm going to trial disabling the comment system on Rubenerd.com, and replacing the comment form with static, HTML links for those who want to post to Delicious, Twitter and so on, along with the permalink (URL) for this page for those who want to respond on their own blogs. Like it used to be :).

If it works for John Gruber and the like, I'm hoping it'll work for me. It'll reduce my workload, the load on my server, and the number of plugins I need to keep updated. We'll see.

My glorious friend and potential partner in crime Vadim has launched a blog. He's already beaten me in the number of new posts for this month, and we're only two days into it!

Love technology and anime (+some games like SSFIV:AE2012), thats what I’m mainly gonna blog about. I play the trumpet so you might see some music related stuff here too. Love swimming; hey you! yea you! Stop sitting at your computer all day and join me for a swim! Learning Japanese and very into japan, so that will be a very trendy topic on this blog as well ;)

He has quite the thing for Kenny, who wears as much orange as he does! Grab his RSS feed before I break your dam. No wait, that was Stan and Cartman.

A migraine today made me think. This is never a good sign!

After a surprising and welcome dearth of the ghastly things, I had another of the Family Migraines this afternoon. Both dad and mum suffer[ed] from them terribly, so my genetics didn't offer me any escape from either chromosome! My mum colourfully referred to hers as a vice slowly gripping and crushing her skull; my dad described the sensation of seeing a kaleidoscope across his eyes before finally blacking out. Mine could be best described as a kaleidoscope in a vice, surprising though it may seem.

Lying on my bed this afternoon with a cold compress on my forehead and several layers of quilts, I got to thinking about a lot of things. As is the case with insomnia, thinking when you have a headache is bad enough let alone when you have a migraine, so I attempted several things to calm my mind down. Concentrating on my breathing, making sure to take breaths deep down near the diaphragm rather than having my stomach rise and fall. Despite the freezing weather, I tend to have a fan gently blowing away from me next to the bed for whitenose (a necessity of growing up in an Asian city where whitenose is everywhere!), so once I got my breathing under control I focused on that.

Initially I was angry and scared that a precious day before exams and assignments are due was being wasted, but those five hours or so just lying there in a state of forced meditation calmed me down. It also helped to put my current worries into perspective a bit.

I realised worrying about whether recovering from a migraine was going to affect uni work… was utterly pointless. In fact beyond pointless, it was detrimental! If I was worried about the work I wasn't doing, that would only fuel the pain and prolong it. A vicious cycle of fail!

We've all had to endure different levels and types of worrying at some point in our lives. Some are more primal and necessary for survival in the here and now, some are existential. I worry that things back in Singapore change so fast than when I finally go back there I won't recognise it. That I'll finish my major only to discover my ideal career path needs something else. That I don't have someone to fall asleep next to. That coffee will be discovered to contain a long-term negative neurolytic agent that affects those who stare at LCDs in humid climates. That I'm lonely, and scared. That I'll be disappointing my young self who first stared at a blinking DOS cursor and tried to imagine all the things he could be with those machines. That my shy awkwardness will only get worse over time, not better. That I'm worrying too much, or not enough, or about the right things, or the wrong things. That The Bird might not be The Word.

I loathe the term "at the end of the day", but in this rare circumstance it fits. At the end of the day, if we're lucky enough to be able to lay our heads on pillows and dream, worrying doesn't accomplish anything. It's pointless to anything we want to do. In fact beyond pointless, it's detrimental. So there's no point doing it ^^.

It's just funny that I only remind myself of this when I have a migraine. Tomorrow, I'll probably forget again.

My previous Bitcoin post drew some ire from those saying it was a viable alternative to the broken financial system. From Slashdot:

“A fortnight ago the Bitcoin financial website Bitcoinica was hacked and the hacker stole $87,000 worth of Bitcoins. At the time the owner promised that all users would have their Bitcoins and US dollars returned in full, but one of the site developers has just confirmed that they have no database backups.

So the alternative is to run a deflationary currency off vulnerable servers without database backups. Ah but the existing banking system gambles with our money too, so it's fine!

Going through my backups this afternoon, I stumbled upon all the photos I took with my Sony Vaio PCG-C1VM laptop. It was one of the first laptops to include a built in webcam, and took horribly bad 320×240 images! Still, at the time it was my only digital camera, so I spent ages taking shots with it like the silly nerd I was.

According to the time stamp, this photo was taken on the 11th of July 2001. I think it was on our balcony at Highpoint in Singapore. Nostalgia!

The webs are all a-twitter this evening about Seagate buying out LaCie, the storage company perhaps best known for their premium Mac hard drives, and memory keys in the shape of keys. I can still remember flipping through the catalogues and gawking at those gorgeous bright yellow FireWire 400 drives: they could hold a whopping 8GB! Needless to say, another enduring brand that I grew up is slowly fading away.

Of course, the story is a little more complex than what is generally being reported; Seagate is buying a controlling stake in LaCie, and may buy the company outright with government approval. In light of Google and Motorola Mobility though, I doubt this will be too much of an issue.

Aside from giving me an excuse to get nostalgic again, I only mention this because I only just blogged about LaCie. Looks like I'll need Makise Kurisu's help… again!

An eyebrow-raising story just published on ZDNet Australia made me realise I'd never commented on Bitcoin here before!

The story

Written by Luke Hopewell less than an hour ago:

The ABC has caught one of its own trying to mine Bitcoins using its infrastructure.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) looked set to become a haven for Bitcoin virtual currency mining last year, after a so-called “miner” placed a piece of code in the production environment, which could have potentially netted to thousands of dollars. The ABC’s security systems, however, had other plans.

I thought Bitcoin was an interesting concept when it first came out, but I had reservations. I wasn't alone; while it clearly appealed to certain Libertarian minded people eager to escape the clutches of taxation and runaway government defecits that could devalue "real" money, there were those who claimed it would fail for the same reason every other online currency has. Such a discussion is beyond the scope of this post!

I like to say I’m a reformed Libertarian!

No, for me the concern was about energy. To introduce scarcity into a system of abundance, Bitcoins are manufactured through a computationally intensive and complex program. Referred to as "mining", people would be awarded at random for their efforts. Well no, people with more powerful and more expensive setups are statistically more likely to be awarded stuff, and those who can't afford them wouldn't. Libertarianism in a nutshell ;).

The problem for me is, while the Bitcoins mined with this program are virtual, their impact is real. Thousands of CPU hours burning real energy most likely produced from dirty fossil fuels created this stuff. If you're going to run a program on your computer 24/7, the least you could do would be to have it do something useful, like finding cures for diseases. If that doesn't rock your boat, spare the planet your extra energy use and put your machine on standby when not using it!

Which brings us back full circle to this article in ZDNet. This worker at the ABC, a government owned company and therefore owned by Australians like me, were using our computers and money to power them to generate Bitcoins for themselves. To me, that goes beyond what we'd normally describe as misuse of property.

I'll be interested to read the outcome of this investigation as more details emerge.

Keith Olbermann, Twitter:

If you’re not planning on overdoing it for your Mom today, overdo it for all the rest of us who would give anything to overdo it for ours

Hey Mummy, remember that Mother's Day I carried a tray of food into your bedroom loudly singing Dean Martin, and you threw a book at me in horror? Or the time you flipped an entire plate of mie goreng onto your head on our last holiday, only to have you say in a sheepish little voice "oh… shit!" Or the time we just sat at that Starbucks in Paragon giggling for hours on end while people around us tried to figure out why? Good times! :)

I love you Mummy. Being silly just isn't the same without you.