Rubenerd

Like so many other people I could spend my time here conflating Steve's condition with the potential shallow short term business implications for Apple (though their recent blockbuster performance would indicate everything is better than fine!), but just sent this instead.

Dear Steve,

Even with a similar recent family experience with health, I won’t pretend to relate with what you and your family are going through right now, particularly with a tasteless media circus chasing you.

Please don’t let them get to you. Stay strong, and get better in your own time, for yourself and your family. *manhug*

Peace, health and happiness,
Ruben :)

Sent from my iPhone

What he's going though is damned scary. I'm sure that won't stop a few tasteless jackarses making comments like this though.

Creative Commons photo of Steve by Macinate on Flickr.

Damn it, now RubyURL is gone too?

It was like giving Ruben URLs!

Back in 2007 when the URL shortening scene was first exploding alongside the growth of Twitter, I chose urlTea and RubyURL because the former was adorable, and the latter was written in Ruby and sounded like my name. Giving people a RubyURL was just too cool an opportunity to pass up.

Unfortunately, for the last several weeks RubyURL has returned the following 404 each time I attempt to access their page:

We’re sorry, but something went wrong.

We’ve been notified about this issue and we’ll take a look at it shortly

I suppose they didn't reference what time scale they were referring to when they said "shortly", although to their credit it is a terribly delicious pun.

Their Twitter account (@rubyurl) has also remained silent for over a year now.

Worrying out loud

Its another stark reminder that URL shortening services are a terrible, terrible idea: RubyURL has been having enough issues of late that I now count it alongside urlTea and parrots as no longer existing. For those who don't rememeber, urlTea disappeared in 2009 (Is it a final goodbye for urlTea?) and to this day displays a DreamHost page.

Archive.org's offer to backup URL shorting service databases is a nice idea (301 Works), but nobody has really been doing much with it and it doesn't escape the fact we're increasingly relying on these single points of failure. If anything, they should simply serve to highlight the fact URLs in their current form are no longer serving our needs. I wrote about this in 2009 (urlTea now tr.im, this stuff is scary).

The other issue I didn't discuss is the real threat obfuscation presents. Damn it, Disqus has completely ruined the term "discuss" for me. Unlike Disqus though, regular "discussions" can take place without loading any nasty client side Javascript which is gosh darn convenient. But I digress.

What was I saying? Oh yeah, obfuscation is being increasingly used to mask the locations of dodgy sites, to such an extent that a slew of sites are no longer allowing the poster child service TinyURL on pages hosted with them (Wikipedia: Sites blocking URL shorteners).

I think rejecting certain sites based on what they could be used for sounds an awful lot like the MPAA claiming VCRs and BitTorrent are evil, but url shortening services could certainly do more to help make their shortened links more transparent. Ironically, out of all the services out there, TinyURL is one of the few that lets you preview URLs before proceeding!

Anyway goodbye RubyURL. Glad I only ever used for some inane tweets, and nothing important. It's a shame, they were such a killer startup!

Wow, this post has so many links, none of which were shortened :).

This Stalin is giving it bad Marx in my torrent wessel. I stop now.

I was going mad trying to figure out why Image Capture.app wasn't saving any images from my scanner this afternoon. Turns out the destination drive I'd selected was completely out of of drive space. I would have appreciated at least some error or warning from either the Finder or Image Capture, but at least I figured it out eventually!

Passing this nugget of information on for what it may be worth if you're having/had/sandwich a similar issue.

Its Sunday, so its time for another terribly useless how-to post. When you have a Mac Pro and several home brew machines in the one room, it can get mighty toasty. How do you solve this problem?

Ruben, tell us your solution!

Well, its not really a solution because this method does not involved air conditioning, hence no refrigerant nor any condensed water that would have to be disposed of with a pipe of some description.

In Singapore I had a pot plant sitting directly next to the outdoor air conditioning unit so every time it was running, it watered the plant. The plant died from over-watering. Point is, it was a devilishly clever idea, or at least it seemed so at the time. It was, like, totally, like, recycling. Except there was no need for reverse cycle in Singapore because the weather was never anything but hot, all year round. Or around, because cycles are round. Wait, what?

Ruben, tell us your answer!

Finally, you're making sense. If your room is a trifle toasty in the evenings but its cool outside, its most likely because you've left a cake in the oven as much as it the fault of a few desktops. Hey come on, that was funny.

The solution, no wait, answer to this problem is to put a box fan against an open window that draws free cold air from outside into the room at high speed. Why wait for nature to give you a gentle breeze when you can do it much more powerfully and with far more noise?

With this box fan sitting on the floor, it was merely recirculating warm air around, but this way it draws cold air in and mixes it with the hot air, thereby creating a pleasant temperature that facilitates your friendly Rubenerd writer blogging something entirely pointless, like this.

Its déjà vu, all over again

Of course, this wasn't the first time I found a novel and incredibly sophisticated way of using box fans to solve heating problems: in November 2008 I wrote of a system that allows overheating laptops to perform more effectively when compiling large projects. I called it Ruben's sophisticated MacBook Pro cooling consulting solution.

Wow, I started this post talking about solutions, and here I am using the term again. You know what that is? Cleverness.

You see, back in 2008 Jim Kloss from the late Whole Wheat Radio was mocking companies that used the word solution in their name, because he claimed if a company wasn't solving something there was no point to them existing in the first place. I believe that was the reason why the banks failed. That's right, Jim predicted the current recession before any of you. That reminds me, he bought me a coffee here and I didn't finish writing an email to him, how slack!

Aw, its really nice in here right now. I just hope I don't generate a tornado with all these streams of hot and cold air mixing from various fans. That wouldn't happen… right?

Here's a question. How come maintain, maintained, maintaining and maintainable have an "ai" at the end, but maintenance just has an "e"? I'm constantly spelling it maintainence. Is it just so spell checkers can mock me each time I spell it wrong?

And before anyone says "because you don't say it that way", since when has the spelling of a word in English got in the way of its pronunciation? Sheesh, what a bunch of knights.

Our language is weird, I maintain.

I've been rudely taken to task for implying Windows is frustrating and a lot of work to maintain, so I will clarify what I meant!

Creative Commons photo by BinaryDreams on Flickr.

What he/she/it said

After over 3200 entries and 1000 comments, I can count the number of times I've had to delete someone's comment on one hand, but this was one of those times. I will address his crudely worded concerns however, and encourage him to comment on this post if he can tone down the uninspired, primary school insults ;).

The commenter took issue with this statement I made on my post about cleaning a Windows 7 laptop (A Windows 7 cleaning saga:

I told him that while it was possible for average users to keep Windows machines running smoothly and securely, its frustrating and a lot of work, ultimately for little gain.

I'll acknowledge firstly that the post in which I wrote that statement was incredibly biased and highly tongue in cheek, though I really do dislike Norton AntiVirus and their dodgy practices to scare their customers into giving them more money once their trial periods are over. That's really Not Cool.

That said, I stand by that comment about Windows.

Explanation sounds like expletive

As someone who grew up on Microsoft operating systems and only moved off Windows in the early 2000s (which was last decade now, how creepy is that!?) I've seen Microsoft's abject apathy towards the security of their systems gradually turn into well intentioned bumbling, then finally some progress. I acknowledge this.

Aside from its awful Aero user interface, my primary concern with Windows isn't that its not secure, but the fact that takes far too much work to keep it that way.

I know plenty of computer professionals who run Windows and write software for it. They take all the appropriate precautions for their privacy and security, they run the right software, they perform periodic maintenance and patching. Like the mechanic who's car is always kept at the peak of performance because they're competent enough to know what they're doing, its clear these folks love their computers and put the effort into keeping them running great.

Of course, in the real world…

The problem is, much like most people aren't mechanics and put up with random rattling sounds from their cars as long as they start, most people aren't computer professionals. Windows 7, for all its well intentioned security improvements, is still far, far too easy to corrupt and turn into a cesspool of crap in the hands of average users. Forgive the bad imagery, but it fits.

If you're "the computer guy/gal/robot" for your friends and family as I am, maybe this story sounds familiar: what starts out as simple fix ends up being a complete data backup and system reinstallation because of the terrifying horror of what you find. Mysterious toolbars in IE, icons on the desktop to applications that shouldn't be there, error after error after error, spyware up the wazoo, and maybe even a couple of tasty worms dutifully recording credit card numbers and responding to botnet requests. Its all so insidious the only way to be sure you've removed it all is to reformat and start clean.

Compare this to Macs and Linux machines that family members and friends have had installed and set up for them, and the story changes. In the hands of average computer users, they simply don't attract the level of crap Windows machines do. Of course I can only offer anecdotal evidence of this, but I've worked on hundreds of machines and this has been the case every single time.

But wait, it gets better

Ultimately what terrifies me isn't that I'm constantly working on compromised Windows machines owned by well meaning people, but that there are so many more out there that aren't being given any attention by people like you and me. And those machines are being used for email. And for internet banking. It quite literally sends chills down my spine.

Say what you will about the IT departments of various companies, but at least they have some input into the maintenance of their clients' Windows machines. For home users, Windows is the Wild West, and without a competent Sheriff keeping the peace, it can be a scary world in there. This is why I encourage people I know to get Macs, or to install Fedora or Ubuntu on their existing machines so at least I can be more assured of their privacy and security when I'm not there checking up on them every day.

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

Oh wow Le Rice! I used to be obsessed with this stuff in high school XD

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

They’re out of Farmer’s Union Iced Coffee!!!! Woolies, I am disappoint!