Happy Binary Day #12! Binary Day #02 was on the 1st10 of November, and our next one will be tomorrow.
It's rather humbling to think nobody will have this experience again for another thousand years. Not only that, those who do will most likely never have interfaced with a binary computer before, save for enthusiasts and curators of ancient computer museums. Binarytologists?
Made a few wishes out in the garden, in lieu of studying for that one minute.
Given it's Binary Day #102 as well as being the ultimate palindrome, I took a photo and reduced it to 2 bits of colour depth. The full sized version is here, if you're interested. I think it worked surprisingly well!
Happy 11:11 11/11/11 [AEDST]!
Not the sharpest Creative Commons licenced photo I could find, but the juxtaposition (I really hate that word) of those typically German buildings with the jet was too good to pass up!
Straight from the Book of Knowledge, having seen it trend on Twitter an hour ago.
Airbus announced on November 10, 2011, that the A340 program was terminated.
With the stubbornly high cost of fuel of late, I'm surprised the A340 wasn't cancelled earlier. The more economical, sleek twin engined Boeing 777 (and to a far lesser extent the A330) has been eating the A340's lunch for a long time now.
Despite having flown a lot, as far as I can remember I've only been on an A340 once, on a Lufthansa trip to Germany. Lufthansa to Germany, really? Who would have thunk it! It had four engines, but it didn't seem much noisier than other planes I'd flown on.
The thing that struck me when I used to observe planes at the public Changi observation area (I was an exciting teenager!) was just how long the A340 was; photos don't do it justice. Until recently, the later generation A340s were the longest civilian aircraft in the world, longer even than the venerable Boeing 747 that even non-aviation nuts can recognise.
Obviously Airbus is banking (sorry, bad pun) on the new double-decker A380 for its high capacity routes. What I'll be interested in is how they'll compete with Boeing on the long distance routes. As far as I can tell, the proposed A350 is more to compete with the Boeing 787 for ultra efficient medium-capacity travel. Will the A330 be getting an overhaul?
Just involuntarily updated my Firefox to 8.0. So far so good, though I may need to update my update regiment. Update my update… it's not good English to repeat the same word in the same sentence. Wait, just did it again.
One of the many cronjobs I have running on my headless super duper Swiss Army Knife FreeBSD server is a script to check software updates on Mozilla's servers. Whenever a new version of Firefox or Thunderbird is released, the script downloads the latest en_gb dmg. I can then go around to all the Macs in the house and install the update.
In Singapore I didn't bother, but with download quotas here and on an ISP that doesn't have unmetered content, it saves a small bundle of transfer which I can then blow on an anime episode. Don't worry, I didn't mean that. True story.
With the latest rapid-release cycle adopted by Mozilla, it seems this "solution" will become increasingly unworkable, and I'll just have the applications themselves download the updates.
As for the update itself, I'm liking the more native-looking widgets on Mac, and it still fits in just fine on my KDE Fedora machines despite being a GTK import. Which reminds me, Fedora 16 needs to be downloaded and installed as well.
I'd also read the horror stories about how Firefox was going to be "hostile" to plugins, but my laundry list of mostly security and privacy related whatsits are running just fine. The only change was the add-on selection screen, which allowed me to disable ones I don't need when Firefox relaunched. Unsurprisingly, I didn't uncheck anything.
For some fun, here are a small sample of posts dealing with Firefox over the years. With this new rapid-release cycle, I think the gap between 4.0 and 7.0 you can see below will become the norm not the exception!
It's just hearsay in the press for now, so let's not celebrate prematurely!
From a report in Wired:
In an abrupt about-face in its mobile software strategy, Adobe will soon cease developing its Flash Player plug-in for mobile browsers, according to an e-mail sent to Adobe partners on Tuesday evening.
I'll be waiting for official confirmation from Adobe on this before getting too excited. If a journalist receiving the email misinterpreted it or jumped the gun in a desperate attempt for a scoop, it wouldn't be the first time.
Still, if its true Adobe really is ceasing development of Flash plugins for mobile devices, it's absolutely fantastic news and hopefully signals the end of this whole sordid debate that has been raging for years.
"Sordid" sounds like a "soggy sword", which makes no sense. Unless they were made of cardboard, which makes even less sense. Why would you have a cardboard sword?
Apple of course famously didn't include Flash in its iDevices, and copped more heat for it even than folks like me who defended their decision on our blogs. Never mind that Adobe didn't have a working prototype for mobile Flash for years after the iPhone's release, or that half the user interactions weren't possible on capacitive touch screens, or that when it was finally released it worked poorly. As far as the tech press was concerned, this was just Apple being all control-freaky.
Control freaky. Super freak. Super freak. She's super freaky!
Still, that didn't stop the competition advertising their support for it in an attempt to differentiate their iClones, even when they predictably failed to deliver (surprise, surprise!). Google even went as far as to advertise their platform as being more free by including Flash, presumably employing the same reality distortion field that allowed them to claim Android was open source. Hey, they're not Apple, so it's okay!
If this story is true and Adobe are ending mobile Flash plugins, I have new found respect for them. I can haz Flash removed on the desktop too now? :D
As an addendum, I started putting Kyubey in all my posts about Flash; not entirely sure why, he just seemed to fit XD. Anyway, with the end of mobile Flash, we can presume it will cease to be included in Android soon, which means I may need to revert my Kyubey/Android icon too. Darn, more work to do!
This could count as a NaNoWriMo entry!
I had just finished my two university exams today and was blissfully making my way to Central. I was physically exhausted from a lack of sleep of late, and my brain was fried enough to feel as though it was starting to leak out my ears, but I felt nothing could ruin my good mood!
My fortunes only seemed to get better when I arrived at platform 23, and low and behold the train to take me home was waiting there for me, its open doors inviting me in from the gentle rain. It was one of the new air conditioned units our tax dollars had paid for, and though I was forced to stand in the corner, I nevertheless was glad to be out of the muggy air into some coolness.
The train doors closed on the train (surprising though it may seen) and we were soon plunged into dark surroundings as we entered the Airport and East Hills line tunnel taking us under the city.
The first few stops were relatively uneventful. We arrived at Green Square, then Mascot without a hitch, other than perhaps one young and seemingly distracted women who somehow managed to get her skirt caught on the handrail. As someone who spends far too much of his time using his phone when he should be paying attention to where he's walking and going, I could relate. I get my skirt caught on things all the time too, it's rather embarrassing to say the least.
Upon arriving at the International Airport stop, the fun started. Sitting at stations for a few minutes at a time is part of the commuter rail experience in Sydney sometimes, but we were all starting to get a little wary when we'd been sitting there, doors open, at the station for ten minutes.
As a few people started shifting in their seats and looking out the windows in earnest, the driver came onto the PA system an announced there was a "person running on the tracks in front of us" and that we had to wait. Another ten uneventful minutes past before we were told a "person had been injured on the tracks".
One could start to see the expressions change from irritation to worry on many of the passengers' faces. Was someone injured? Were we stopped because they had their foot caught or something equally painful?
After what seemed like an age, the announcer came on the PA again, this time changing his story completely and claiming "due to electrical problems we cannot proceed" and that "there is no power in the tunnel ahead of us". Leaving the carriage and walking to stretch my legs, I took a peek into the tunnel ahead of us which seemed illuminated enough, though I surmised the lighting and catenary systems were probably independent of one another.
After a few minutes shy of an hour, the driver came back onto the PA system to announce we were moving again, albeit cautiously and slowly! His explanation changed to "the signal systems are all dead due to a lightening strike at Wolli Creek station" and that we'd essentially crawling along the tunnel blind. Excitement most thrilling!
As we started to move, I picked myself off the floor where I had slunk down to after my feet began to protest and prepared for the slow trip home. We made it as far as one more stop (the Domestic Airport station) before stopping again for another half an hour! Most amusingly, the indicator boards started informing us we were at St James, a station several stops away in the opposite direction!
When we started moving again, we'd been in the tunnel for over an hour and a half. With a trainload of bored passengers it was inevitable many would turn to their phones for entertainment, and to inform relatives and friends they'd be late, causing the entire phone network to be brought to its knees. If phone networks had knees, presumably. I attempted tweeting, SMSing and watching The Bird is The Word on YouTube dozens of times before finally giving up.
We arrived at Kingsgrove around 2 hours after we'd entered the tunnel, and a special train had been arranged for us to take us back to Bexley North and Bardwell Park. By that stage, all the signs along the platforms informed other passengers to expect delays, with the City Service even being rerouted through Syndenham to avoid the Airport tunnel.
Tired and drenched in rain, I made the trek home, where I plopped down in front of my computer, fell asleep for a few short moments, then had dinner and wrote a blog post containing a great deal of overly verbose and long sentences. WHEW!
Twitter, SMSs and phone calls largely didn't work while I was stuck, but thanks to @Sebasu_tan, @hanezawakirika, @leehopkins, @intoyourheadpod and @elkee for the tweets while I was trapped… despite not being able to read them until I'd surfaced!
All things considered, the CityRail staff were extremely friendly and dealt with the situation pretty well, particuclarly when we arrived at Kingsgrove and weren't sure how to interpret all the conflicting service disruption warning signs. It also could have been a lot worse, we could have been stuck in an old S or R class train in that tunnel for two hours. In this muggy weather, in a tunnel, without air conditioning, what a frightful prospect!
In any event, I'm done regaling you with my First World Problems! Time for some tea.
Checking my junk mail account on Sunday, I was reminded of Google Buzz's impending demise. Enclosed for your consideration is a typically Rubenerd-esque longwinded story, complete with some more technical notes.
Clicking the link in my Gmail profile thing, I was directed to Google Takeout, a service that sounds like I'm taking a quantum physics hard drive out for dinner, but in fact is a service launched by the Data Liberation Front.
This is similar to what Pownce did in 2008 when they realised adding a few token features to a cloned version of Twitter wasn't panning out, and they decided to shut down. The difference here is that Google's Takeout worked, I tried exporting my Pownce profiles dozens of times before giving up. Oh well, everything I had there was just a reposted from Twitter anyway.
Choosing "Buzz" from their worryingly large list of options gave me a link to download my 25MB Buzz archive with 5,654 files.
I've poked gentle fun at Google a lot lately for their litany of discarded and failed social networks, but I'll miss Google Buzz. Not for it's initially terrible privacy concerns or because I used it directly, but for what it did diligently in the background archiving my content from around the web.
Perhaps you used it in the same way, but I had Google Buzz configured to repost all my Google Reader shared items, Friendfeed posts (remember that site?) and tweets, amongst other things. When accessing Gmail using POP (cue the IMAPers!), I realised these items were suddenly being flown to me, emailed if you will. By bees.
I set up a quick filter in my local honeycomb store that is Thunderbird, and suddenly I had a nice archive right here on my local machine of all my content from around the web. Pretty sweet stuff I must say.
This background nectar gathering service was probably not what Google had in mind when they launched it, but it was nevertheless useful, not to mention rather tasty. Oh well, back to subscribing to RSS feeds directly.
The ZIP archive downloaded from Google Takeout consists of all your Google Buzz posts as individual HTML files.
Don’t worry about the estimated file size, it’s completely wrong. The initial estimate was 25MB, but was actually only 11.1MiB. I downloaded it three times just to make sure.
If you use CookieMonster or an equivalent cookie whitelist because you’re a secure, private munchkin, don’t forget to temporarily enable googleapis.com as well as google.com or you’ll be stuck in an infinite redirect loop.
I like honey. Bzzz.
Laugh all you want, but as of the end of September, AOL still had 3.5 million subscribers to its dialup Internet access service […] And the decline from last year — about 630,000 subs — was AOL’s smallest Q3 shrinkage yet. ~ SplatF
I'm not laughing, I'm more interested in seeing how many of these people are still maintaining their accounts specifically for their email addresses. We kept our Pacific Internet account for years after we moved to SingTel Magix and SCV/StarHub specifically for this reason. With their dwindling profits and market share, maybe a premium email forwarding service might be a new source of revenue for them ;).
Someone actually took the time and care to remove Ami from that well known and widely circulated Megami image of the Toradora girls. Funnily enough, I'm okay with this arrangement!
Reminds me of Garfield minus Garfield, of which this is my current favourite.
Now this is just too cool for words: a Starbucks branch in Singapore made from railway sleepers.
Reclaimed railroad sleepers from around South-East Asia have been used to line this wall. Where will it live next?
The store also uses LEDs for lighting, which are far nicer than those florescent tubes that buzz and make everyone look terrible.
