Rubenerd

Have I missed anything? Feel free to correct :)

I was going to refrain from talking about this, I really was!

The Site

In February, Microsoft launched IE6 Countdown, a site that gauges worldwide use of the archaic browser and encourages users to upgrade to newer versions.

Its been covered to death by Tweeters, Twitterers or whatever it is we’re called, and many people have already voiced their opinions, which means I add a great deal of value by talking about it as well. Right? Don’t answer that.

The Pirates

From a statistical perspective its interesting to see which parts of the world have moved on from the curse that is IE6, and who’s sticking around. Presumably countries like China have higher usage owing to the fact pirated copies of Windows can’t be updated, or at least not easily enough to be done by average people.

It’s certainly an interesting philosophical and security debate, isn’t it? I’m all for free software when their developers adopt FOSS licences, but I’m not for commercial software piracy; theoretically Microsoft has every right to deny unpaid customers their services.

Or do they? See, this logic works in isolation, but when we’re all connected to the same network (Homer told me the Internet is on computers now) compromised machines affect all of us including, ironically, paid Microsoft customers. Botnet zombie Windows machines send most of the world’s spam, they clog our networks, and they further spread worms that would otherwise find themselves harder to propagate.

This IE6 Countdown site serves as much as a testament to the effects of piracy and corporate policy on security than a simple gauge of who’s using a creaky old web browser with giant toolbars.

The Browser

I sincerely applaud Microsoft for the IE6 Countdown website; people have been using this outdated software for far too long and if anyone can convince people to move off it (other than maybe Google!) it is Microsoft.

It rings a little hollow for me though. When they mention IE6 doesn’t adhere to web standards, the site glosses over the fact it was intentionally designed this way. After Microsoft won the first browser war, IE was left to stagnate. By stifling standards, they were able to stunt the growth of internet applications for half a decade, a convenient coincidence for a purveyor of desktop software.

Much like my American friends are supposed to believe GM are suddenly concerned with the environment only after they ran themselves into the ground with light trucks and SUVs, the site also fails to point out that it wasn’t until competing browsers started strong-arming Microsoft with increasing market share again did they start taking standards more seriously. Forgive some of us for being sceptical of their motives, and for thinking some of the language on their site is a little rich:

Its name was Internet Explorer 6. Now that we’re in 2011, in an era of modern web standards, it’s time to say goodbye.

This website is dedicated to watching Internet Explorer 6 usage drop to less than 1% worldwide, so more websites can choose to drop support for Internet Explorer 6, saving hours of work for web developers.

Uh huh

Finally, despite the assertions of otherwise smart people like Renai LeMay from Delimeter, IE9 still lags inexcusably behind in web standards, to say nothing of the previous versions after IE6, which leads me to my ultimate argument for the site: I believe it should be renamed from IE6 Countdown to IE Countdown. Make no mistake, we would still all benefit from IE not being used at all.

I last mentioned IE9 back in February 2011: Internet Explorer 9 relativity. The gist of that post in two sentences:

Progress is being made, but it still performs relatively poorly in standards tests and still feels like too little too late in my books. A company with Microsoft’s resources should have made this progress years ago.

Read it on The J-Walk Blog from Reuters, so it must be true!

Coffee… Coffee Coffee!

From the report itself, which J-Walk also quoted, which means this post may qualify for some serious Inception:

Young American adults have increased the amount of coffee they drink daily in 2011, after feeling better about their finances following the global economic crisis, a survey showed on Saturday.

Funny, I would have thought drinking coffee to cram for more exams to get into the fewer available jobs would be endemic of further financial difficulties and job problems. Go figure!

For what its worth, I started drinking coffee when I was 14, so I could stay awake during my mum's super early chemo sessions. I used to drink six cups a day, but I'm down to two now and no longer get serious caffeine headaches if I miss out. Ironically, I feel I have more energy as a result.

That reminds me!

Having only just wrote an entry about coffee, I noticed in my PayPal inbox that Roel247 donated a cup of coffee to me a few days ago! I wanted to thank him personally here for being so friendly :).

For those who don't know, Roel was one of my most loyal supporters of the Rubenerd Show back in the day and is one of the most genuinely nice people I've ever had the plesure of conversing with. One of these days I'll go to The Netherlands and meet him, this much is sure :).

I've ticked off another thing on my life to-do list: I saw WEIRD AL YANKOVIC!!!

More photos and obsessive talk tomorrow! In a nutshell to tide us over until then, he was absolutely mindblowing! WOW!

This post originally appeared on the Annexe, in a post series pointlessly documenting every train I took.

R16 from Wynyard to Bardwell Park

Cleanliness: Fair

Have you ever tried to pay for CityRail trains with coins? Got bitten by that ridiculous ten coin limit? Here’s how to game the system :)

Schadey talks about Schrapnel

We all have experience with emptying our wallets of schrapnel to pay for beverages from vending machines or museli from managers named Bevan. I knew a guy called Bevan in Singapore, he lived in Clementi. I always got weird looks whenever I arrived at that "heartland" station!

Wait, I’m supposed to be talking about Sydney trains! So we all have experience with getting rid of loose change with vending machines, but those sneaky CityRail ticket vending machines were designed with an arbitrary ten coin limit. This is particularly irritating given Australian coins are as massive as hockey pucks and a billion times heavier. Roughly speaking.

I had a brainstorming session with a guy from uni as to why this might be.

• They take a comparitave hit in fees despositing coins compared to banknotes and want to encourage the latter
• Coins are heavy!
• They want to discourage people from buying tickets so they can catch you out and fine you for a substantially larger amount.
• They’re cheapskates

You can get rid of schrapnel though!

The good news is, during a particularly dull train trip where I’d left my headphones at home, I calculated how we can get rid of as many low denomination coins as possible while still paying the fare in ten or less coins.

Getting rid of as many 50c coins as possible, with 10c change:

$1   50c 50c 50c 50c 50c 50c 50c 50c 50c
$2           50c 50c 50c 50c 50c 50c 50c

Getting rid of as many 20c pieces as possible:

$2 $1 $1     20c 20c 20c 20c 20c 20c 20c
$2 $2        20c 20c 20c 20c 20c 20c 20c

Getting rid of as many 10c pieces as possible:

$2 $2 50c 20c 20c    10c 10c 10c 10c 10c
$5 (banknote)            10c 10c 10c 10c
$2 $2 $1                 10c 10c 10c 10c
$2 $2 50c 50c            10c 10c 10c 10c
$2 $1 $1 $1              10c 10c 10c 10c
$2 $1 50c 50c 50c 50c    10c 10c 10c 10c
$1 $1 $1 $1 $1           10c 10c 10c 10c
$1 $1 $1 $1 50c 50c      10c 10c 10c 10c

Of course this isn’t an exhaustive list of combinations, but it gives you an idea. I also didn’t bother with combinations of 20c and 10c coins that give change, as it would defeat our stated purpose of getting rid of coins!

Unfortunately to get us under or on the ten coin limit we have no choice but to use some high value ones. Still, even with combinations that use lots of $2 coins we’re still getting rid of a lot of schrapnel as well.

Alternatives

• Take your coins to the bank and sort them into little bags. Wastes a lot of time, but will give you folding money to use instead
• For a cut of what you have, Woolies will also take your coins and give you folding money to use.
• Give your coins to charity and stop being so stingy
• Melt and cast your coins into a sword to ward off ticket inspectors

I’ve trained my old man well with regards to computer security, or at least brainwashed him sufficiently to not take claims of security at face value! From his new blog where he reviews Westpac:

Security is another concern — Westpac don’t use an external number generating dongle and only allow a simple low level 6 digit pin for on-line banking and 4 digit ATM pin — don’t know if that’s common but certainly doesn’t seem good especially for banking.

No kidding. In 2011 banks don't have an excuse for not providing a third factor authentication system, and enforcing low entropy passwords. He'll be contacting them later this week, I'll be interested to hear what they say.

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

The existence of this Linux distribution slipped completely under my radar until this morning. I am excite!

From GigaOM's OSTATIC:

The Mageia project announced the release of Alpha 2 of their inaugural version 1, expected June 1. Developers have made a clear statement that this release is only for developers and bug hunters. It is not for daily use, any kind of production environment, or review. Tsk, tsk, they should know better than that. Reviews are inevitable.

Why was the project started? From the Mageia site itself:

As you may have heard, the future of the Mandriva Linux distribution is unclear.

Most employees working on the distribution were laid off when Edge-IT was liquidated. We do not trust the plans of Mandriva SA anymore and we don’t think the company (or any company) is a safe host for such a project.

Many things have happened in the past 12 years. Some were very nice: the Mandriva Linux community is quite large, motivated and experienced, the distribution remains one of the most popular and an award-winning product, easy to use and innovative. Some other events did have some really bad consequences that made people not so confident in the viability of their favourite distribution.

People working on it just do not want to be dependent on the economic fluctuations and erratic, unexplained strategic moves of the company.

That last paragraph sounds like an OpenSUSE user talking about Novell! That reminds me, of all the Linux distributions I tried over the years, I thought SuSE's YaST was the best graphical installer and system configuration tool. And its German, which automatically made it full of awesomeness.

But I digress! I used Mandrake in the early 2000s, even still have the original carton, CDs and user manuals I bought from Challenger! I can sense another pointless nostalgia post coming. Anyway, it's good to see it'll still be living on in spirit :).

I've generally refrained from watching Q&A lately, but I'll definitely be getting the podcast this time around, as I also announced on The Twitters. The unrelated Battlefield trending topic tag along with Julia and Assange was a nice syncronicity ;)

I blogged about Chris Hitchens' appearance on Q&A in 2009.