Rubenerd

Doing before and after shots, but with the after shot first! Both photos were taken from the same spot at the front of the garage, almost exactly 24 hours apart. Amazing how much more room there is now, and all I had to do was break my back!

Dr Box, your name rocks

Unless you're some kind of miracle family with a Star Trek transporter beam and/or access to subspace, it's the same routine whenever people move. Boxes get packed and shipped to the new place, some of which get unpacked when you arrive, but most don't. Amiright?

When we moved back to Australia from Singapore last year, most of the boxes got put in the garage. Now that my exams are over, I decided to SHOCK HORROR start unpacking them. It also gave me a chance to throw away pointless junk we don't need, go through some of my late mum's posessions that I didn't have the strength to go through before, and storage stuff that didn't get unpacked was instead labelled and an inventory created. There are still lots of boxes down there, but I know what's in all of them, and related materials are all located near each other rather than just strewn everywhere!

It doesn't look like it from the photos, but I unpacked 39 more boxes in total, threw out almost half of it, and reorganised the remainder! Precious items like photo albums were placed in sealed plastic containers so we wouldn't lose them as we did so many in the Great Schade Family Brisbane Garage Flood of 1995.

All we need now are some more bookshelves upstairs and we'll finally have a home here instead of a giant storage locker. I've spent nearly my whole life surrounded by boxes, and I would very much like to rid myself of them!

Now if you'd excuse me, I unpacked and disposed of several boxes of leaky batteries, tins of paint and other fun corrosive materials and my hands are still itchy. Should have worn gloves. It also raises the question why such material was even packed, but that's a question I'll have to raise with the other family members.

NAB’s payments processing meltdowns were a “wake-up call” for the financial services community, […] said CGU Insurance Australia chief information officer (CIO) Ian Frew. ~ ZDNet Australia

Of all industries, financial services should be at the forefront of security and privacy of information, and if they're not they should be brutally beaten into submission until they are. I'm sorry, but this situation is abhorrent.

In a broader sense, why do businesses refuse to learn from others and only [promise to] implement security measures only after they've been bitten themselves? I'd hazard a guess that middle managers don't take it seriously until it's a PR issue. Heh, Sony.

The Simpsons have some classic ones, but this one just doesn't get old. Hate to be a driver on that street though. Or the guy who has to collect trolleys.

Open up your eyes and look around
It’s just an illusion – illusion – illusion.
Could it be that it’s just an illusion putting me back in all this confusion?
Could it be that it’s just an illusion now?
Could it be that it’s just an illusion putting me back in all this confusion?
Could it be that it’s just an illusion now?
Could it be a picture in my mind? Never sure exactly what I’ll find.

Sorry I couldn't resist, it's 80s music.

Anyway I had a point to this post, and it was regarding some photos I saw from HP today, that company that bought Palm and makes awesome calculators. Check that, used to make awesome calculators… one of my missions in life is to have a real HP-16C, not just use xcalc with the rpn option. Not to diss xcalc with the rpn option, that's still my primary calculation tool, has plety of retro awesomeness and does what I want it to.

But I digress

Isn't it amazing what some tapering can do to make a product look slimmer than it actually is? The laptop in the left of the photo above is from HP's press release of their new laptops, and the photo on the right is from their online store. Granted they're not exactly the same model, but every machine in this series employs the same half-height tapering, and by taking a photo of it from above, half the bulk of the case is hidden from view!

Apple and other manufacturers have long since played this visual trick with their laptops and phones, now it seems HP is realising the potential of doing so! I've seen people at uni with EliteBooks, they're absolute monsters, so anything to make them look less messive is probably a good thing… for sales ;).

Whatever the case (see what I did there?) my next portable machine will hopefully be the smallest thing I can get my hands on… that isn't a netbook. An X series ThinkPad or an 11 inch MacBook Air would be schweet.

A new press release from Virgin Australia says the company has "signed a landmark agreement which will enable them to establish a long-term alliance". Be afraid, be very very afraid?

For those who didn’t understand the heading, it was a play on the No Way BA/AA campaign, headed up by Richard Branson of all people! And while I’m in italics here, the photo above is of a Singapore Airlines 777-300 series plane taken by Juergen Lehle and uploaded to Wikipedia.

It was suspiciously pro-lawnmower ~ Marge Simpson

The points from the aforementioned press release:

Co-ordinate schedules between Singapore and Australia and beyond to provide seamless connections

I guess that could be useful, though a last resort option if I couldn't book SIA all the way. Hey, I just made a rhyme. Wouldn't it be great it made and rhyme… rhymed? But I digress.

Offer reciprocal frequent flyer programme benefits and lounge access;

My sister and I basically grew up in airport lounges. Well okay a bit of a stretch, but we lived all over the place and had to go between them constantly. We've been in them all, and SIA lounges are by and away the best. Well okay a bit of a stretch, but the point stands. I feel as though I've said that somewhere before.

The idea of cashing in on tons of SIA Solitaire points for domestic Virgin Australia flights would be appealing though, again provided I couldn't book SIA all the way.

Engage in joint sales, marketing and distribution activities.

Most people I talked to (all three of them) thought Virgin Blue's marketing was creative and edgy, but I found it face-palmingly embarrassing and hollow. A company advertising themselves with smiling faces and claiming to make the air fair by cramming seats even closer, charging for bottles of water and electronic checkin machines that failed more often than they worked for me came across as just a wee bit disingenuous. To be fair, Jetstar's advertisements with super hip young women in bikinis jumping around a beach shouting "thank you Jetstar!" — presumably after surviving their brush with a tightly packed, pressurised, cylindrical sardine tube — are perhaps even more insulting to the intelligence of their customers.

I guess the adage applies, you get what you pay for. What was the point in this? Oh yeah, I hope SIA's marketing isn't sent down this path!

None of that sounds too scary…

That's because I saved the first point for last. Put your tray tables up and assume the brace position by locking your arms under your legs or on the seat in front of you.

Codeshare on each other’s international and domestic flights;

This. Is. Horrifying.

Jokes about first world problems aside, if I buy a ticket for an SIA flight and board the plane to find it's Virgin Australia codesharing for them… I'd finally understand why airports have those metal detectors and radiation spewing, carcinogenic full body scanners. I would have a blunt nail file with me, and my resulting rage would not be a pretty sight.

Australian regulations make it difficult (AFAIK) for SIA to fly domestically in Australia so the market for Virgin Australia is there and understandable, but if Virgin Australia started flying to Singapore and replacing SIA flights on some of those routes, the last tiny part of me that still enjoys flying would die forever.

Not to beat around the bush on this, but as a customer there are few companies I hold in as high regard as SIA. They offer the best product, bar none. In the decades my old man flew with them, they only lost his luggage once, and he got a signed letter of apology from the CEO and full compensation. Conversely, he's only travelled with Virgin Atlantic a dozen times, had luggage lost twice, and never got anywhere with the phones. You do the maths.

It would be akin to IKEA doing a deal with Kmart for furniture, or Starbucks with Nescafe. Not that I'm biased, nor am I suggesting (for legal reasons) that Kmart or Virgin Australia or Nescafe are bad, just not my cup of tea. I hope they leave SIA alone, but histories of tie-ups like this are littered with failures, and those who don't learn from history are destined to repeat it, like an onboard entertainment system with the same three movies each flight.

Back in September 2009 I wrote about using Disk Utility to create encrypted volumes, and how to use Terminal.app to overcome Mac OS X's limitation of not allowing pasting of strong passphrases (Good encrypted disk images on Mac OS X). This afternoon, Arpawocky wrote a brilliant followup with his own recommendations and experience, and even donated a cup of coffee!

I'm sending my humble thank yous to Arpawocky, and encouraging you to read the comments section of the aformentioned post if you're serious about using Disk Utility encrypted volumes on Mac OS X with good passphrases.

SallehS: THEN & NOW – Picture of my wife Nori at the Esplanade taken in 1969 and 2011. The Fullerton Building and Anderson Bridge being the reference point.

I'm increasingly fascinated by images like this! I've started an urban history tag.

TiPb is reporting that Apple has hired MobileNotifier developer Peter Hajas. A well known figure in the jailbreaking community who has long shown Apple how notifications should be done, presumably he's been hired by Apple to… show them how notifications should be done. This has always been a serious weakness in the iOS UI, and I'm hoping he'll get them on the right track.

Meantime, the most critical and underreported aspect of this story was… his vest and jacket combination. And how I want them both. Actually, I could go for his glasses, shirt, tie, the whole ensemble. I want to look like that. Anybody want to lend me a hand?

This seemingly random comment from Sandrew Loset on an old blog post about Twitter sparked this post! I need to do more feedback entries like this :).

The quote is the moat

Twitter, Google, Facebook & PGE Smartmeters exist only to spy on you and sell your information to advertisers. They spy on every single thing you do, look at, click on and sell it.

They also will give the information to people who are suing you and to any agency that requests it. Don’t use them.

Get privacy software on your computer. Don’t be a tool for them anymore.

Clearly Sandrew noticed I was discussing Twitter and dropped in his cookie cutter response that had nothing to do with what I was talking about, but a comment is a comment nonetheless and I think he raises a good point! I know this because it's largely what I've been saying here for years, right down to the concerns regarding law enforcement.

% diff Sandrew Ruben

Where Sandrew Loset and I differ are on the pragmatic details. Sure the easy thing to do is to refrain from using any cloud services, but this is becoming an increasingly untenable position, particularly as more services move online and more of our applications are web based.

No, instead of abstaining from them outright, cloud services must be seen as tools like any other, and as such the key to using them effectively is to be smart. As I've repeatedly stated here over the years, don't use cloud services for confidential or private information, assume your material is always in the clear, and if you must store material of a sensitive nature, not only encrypt it but ensure only you know the keys.

This isn't limited to cloud computing, our internet enabled smartphones (and even regular phones) are tracked based on tower coordinates, and our computers can be traced with an IP address (this will only become easier with IPv6 and the inevitable decline of NAT). We sacrifice as much privacy online as we want for the extraordinary utility we derive from it. It's a continuum, and though I tend to place my pin closer to the privacy side, I still use Twitter publicly, I have Google accounts (though no longer for email) and a Facebook profile with a fake name and even faker details.

Sandrew reminds us to remain vigilant, which is a worthy lesson. That said, I advocate something cheekier. Don't be a tool for cloud services, make them a tool for you.

If you haven't seen yet, VMware just updated Fusion to 3.1.3. I can't see amongst the list improvements any mention of fixes for VMware Tools for Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0 Workstation that I half-jokingly blogged about, but installing just in case.

My previous attempts to install the VMware Tools in NT 4.0 resulted in BSoDs immediently after rebooting, but for some reason on my forth attempt it generated the same error in a modal dialogue box immediently before restarting.

Still no word on my forum post on the topic either. Guess the adage applies… you get what you pay for. Hey wait, I did pay for this!