Rubenerd

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

Nice evening, cool change after how hot it was again today!

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

T42 from Museum (last train leaving that station tonight, lucky!) to Bardwell Park

After two months of an uncharacteristically cool summer here in Sydney, the heat finally arrived to exact its revenge for being denied access for so long. I could have just said "it was flipping hot".

It was so hot, the bridge drooped at either end

When we first moved back to Sydney in winter after a 14 year on and off stint in Singapore, we were fully expecting to shiver our rear ends off. We were right, having grown up in a city that has 32 degree weather 365 days a year, temperatures lower than maybe 25 seem practically arctic. Well, for as long as there's still ice there. Ice rhymes with nice.

Anyway we were all excited when summer was around the corner and we could feel some normal weather… well, normal for us. As Einsten said, relativity is a bitch. He never said that. Turns out nature had other plans, and other than a few warm days, most of the summer has been surprisingly cool, especially at night.

I had a wax sculpture of Salvador Dali, but it melted.

Waking up this morning in a lake of my own sweat, I checked the forecast and discovered to my horror and surprise that we were in for a 40 degree day. Yikies!

Yikies is a contraction concatenation Constantinople portmanteau of yikes and owies. I'm thinking it could be a trend. But I digress.

In its infinite wisdom, Google is telling me that 40 degrees Celcius is 104 Fahrenheit. I tell you what my American friends and readers (and enemies), your measurement systems make no sense to me whatsoever, but 104 sure does sounds more evil than 40!

Whatever it was, it was hot. I just got my bike recently and wanted to go for a ride, but the sun was so harsh I could barely stand walking from the train station back to our house. It was so hot, a block of chocolate I'd left on my computer desk had turned into chocolate sauce. It was so hot, my ThinkPad nearly fried itself running Flash. It was so hot, the colour from my iTelephone case started rubbing off on my hand while I held it to take the photos you're seeing here while I was at Circular Quay station. It was so hot.

Not to belabour the point, but…

• I’ve lived in Adelaide, travelled to Dubai and been in inland Australia.

• I’ve sat outside at the Sepang Grand Prix in Malaysia in the middle of the day and without a roof over my head.

• I’ve made lasagne and stuck my head in the oven during what I later deemed to be a contraction concatenation Constantinople portmanteau combination of a lack of foresight, an equal lack of judgement, and a sudden bout of abject stupidity.

• I’ve poured boiling water from a kettle down my arm in what I later deemed to be a contraction concatenation Constantinople portmanteau combination of a lack of foresight, an equal lack of judgement, and a sudden bout of abject stupidity. I’m getting deja vu, all over again.

• I’ve shared an enclosed space with a PowerMac G5, a homebrew Athlon 64 tower and more recently a Mac Pro.

• I spent an afternoon with Ana Brusic in high school while I fixed her laptop.

• I’ve put my hand on a motorbike exhaust pipe.

And yet

And I still, still say today was hot. I mean really, really, REALLY hot. Even comparability so. That was supposed to be "comparatively" so, stupid autocorrect!If you were in The Australia today, I hope you kept cool. I'm already very cool, you see.

As an update, my fabulous sister Elke just came back from the convenience store down the street. That's none too interesting itself, however she informed me they play the radio at the aforementioned convenience store, and that the station's news reporter just mentioned that Sydney's power demands were ridiculously huge owing to every man and his dog running and air conditioner. No kidding! It may also explain why my screens keep flickering ever so slightly, and why the street lights in Earlwood and neighbouring Kingsgrove are completely out too. Eerie stuff.

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

nevver:

Fuck Photoshop

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

:D

In light of the proposed IPv6 Day on the 8th of June, I've been accused of being too short sighted with my scepticism for the standard. I'll discuss my severe privacy reservations about it tomorrow, for now I'm whinging about how we're being sold it.

oh my god no more addresses!!!1!!!oneone!

First of all, let me acknowledge that despite all the alarmist rhetoric which I usually take with a heavy pinch of salt (scaring people sells more newspapers), the pool of available address for IPv4 is running low. Take note of my wording, there are still huge blocks of unused addresses reserved for the firms and universities that were in cozy enough relationships to get them, many of which are using NAT now anyway, go figure!

I've read people demanding these companies and organisations surrender these addresses they're not using, but they really don't have any legal standing to do so, and I don't really see how that would do anything other than delay the inevitable. Technically it would only provide short to medium term relief, and from a business perspective such organisations spent a small fortune for them and likely see holding them as a competitive advantage, so they wouldn't be keen on surrendering them.

So we're back at square one. The networking industry has been nothing short of Nostradamean in the accuracy of their predictions of when exactly we'd be running out of addresses which hasn't helped their cause, but the final result is inevitable.

How we’re being sold it

Now that I've got all that out of the way, I can discuss my first gripe with IPv6, or more accurately how we're being sold it. IPv6 has some nice features like IPSec being an integral part, but take a look at any article about the standard and its existence is justified by IPv4's limited address space. Appreciate that for a second, we're not being sold on IPv6's merits, but rather on the comparative crappiness of something we're using now.

Cocaine is a hell of a drug, but its way better than heroin! This may be true, but its a non sequiter. Water is better than heroin too, though probably just as addictive.

While we're talking about doomsday and computers, here's an obligatory picture of the creator of the universe with one.

What

I don't have the desire to learn the intimate details of dual stack implementations to cope with IPv4 and IPv6, but I've seen enough complicated flow charts to know that deploying IPv6 and IPv4 concurrently is messy and involves some pretty sophisticated routing gymnastics.

Yes its better than IPv4 (multicasting as standard sounds like it'll be to broadcasting what switches were to hubs! Hehe, remember hubs? I had a 5 port hub that for some reason port 3 didn't work on) but my argument, and some of the other sceptics on various newsgroups right now, is if we're going to invest all this time and money implementing this essentially from scratch, why not take the opportunity to implement something completely new and fundamentally better? Why compromise at all if they're going to be incompatible anyway?

The answer, in perhaps the most delicious case of irony I've encountered in a long time, is because IPv6 more established than anything else, and there's more support for it in major operating systems. Wait, hold on a second… aren't they the arguments people use to claim we should stick to IPv4?

But this standard is all we have!

The problem is… we have nothing else, and the exhaustion of IPv4 means we'll be shoehorned onto this new standard which we've rendered necessary by virtue of the fact there isn't anything else. There will be few protests, and the ones people file will be ignored in a cloud of address shortage panic. People will get scared that they won't be able to download porn anymore! What will they do!? What, this IPv6 thing fixes that? GREAT, get it implemented NOW! HURRY!!!

Potentially worse still, because there are so many addresses, that sense of urgency won't be realistically felt again, and we'll be stuck with it. Whoopie.

I tell you what, from a security and privacy perspective, intelligence organisations, the courts, black hats and behavioural marketers could not have played this any better. All that needs to happen now is for Hollywood to release a Y2Kish film and Norton to release some overpriced compliance checking software to cash in on people's fears like they did in 1999, and we'll be set! :D

I hope Google's IPv6 trial on the 8th of June goes well, because it will ensure the future viability of the net itself. That doesn't mean I'm looking forward to the future though.

My jittery paranoia will be reserved for tomorrow's post ;).

Its a new month, so its time for a new pointless sidebar picture! This month we have Nozomu Itoshiki from Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei sporting a slightly more optimistic version of his catchphrase and primary hangup during the series. When one is dressed as fabulously as him, I doubt he has anything to worry about anyway. Shaft always has epic graphics :D.

The previous sidebar pictures are located, surprisingly enough, on the Sidebar Pictures page. I was going to call the page something completely different, like "Bird is the word" but I've resigned myself to the fact most people either don't like or don't get my sense of humour, so I'd spare the inevitable groans or questions for clarification ;).

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

picturingislam:

An Egyptian army soldier tried to stop anti-government protesters as they walked towards Tahrir Square in Cairo on Sunday.

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

nevver:

Train in Vain

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

NO KIDDING! :O