Rubenerd

Reading a blog post from the always fabulous Renai LeMay on Delimiter (Give Turnbull a break, he’s a funny bastard) got me thinking. Always a dangerous thing.

Creative Commons photo by Mushroom and Rooster on Flickr

Better learning late than never

I grew up in Singapore and Malaysia and have only recently started to take a keen interest in Australia's infocomm industry, and with politics here in general. I like using the word "keen" because it reminds me of Commander Keen which I still maintain was (and still is) the greatest side scrolling game of all time. Allegedly I'm weird however for preferring the classic episodes to the later isomorphic projection ones. But I digress.

Coming back to Australia, one of the characters I wasn't able to easily compartmentalise was a bloke by the name of Barnaby Joyce. Man, what a rogue senator. He's always such a rogue. He's like… a rogue guy who rogues with his rougeness.

I kid, the guy I really found difficult to place goes by the name of Malcolm Turnbull.

Here's a person who has actually worked in the real world for part of his life before becoming a politician so he has a grasp of what the general public go through as opposed to a secured cushy job in Canberra that's insulated from the real world. He has a semblance of IT knowledge. He takes the train and talks to regular people. He's still a politician through and through, but has a refreshing candour few others dare posses.

More surprising still was he was a Liberal, and that as a guy brought up in a Labor family I didn't feel guilty liking him. When Senator Conroy was first peddling the mandatory internet filter and Kevin Rudd was tacitly endorsing it, I came close to thinking I'd vote for the coalition under Turnbull's leadership. When he was ousted, many of us on Twitter pushed him to pull a Don Chipp and either start his own party, or run as an independent. I'd have voted for him.

As an aside, ultimately I supported The Greens again given Senator Ludlam's continued determination to call out Conroy for his filter and relative lack of IT knowledge. I was glad beyond belief there was a voice of reason and common sense in the senate through this debate, and a nice counterpoint to folks like Fielding who thinks humans use dinosaurs as land transport devices 6000 years ago. Everyone's entitled to their own beliefs, but this was a guy in a debating chamber of our government. Its downright scary.

Malcolm Turnbull’s 640KiB moment

Now we come to the point raised by Renai LeMay in his Delimeter article.

There’s been a fair degree of animosity directed at Shadow Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull over the past 24 hours over his claim that there is no evidence that Australians would benefit from higher speeds than available under ADSL2+ broadband.

Unfortunately this has only been the latest in a series of gaffs about internet connectivity from a man I thought knew better; it wasn't as if he even prefaced his remarks by saying "at present". Renai aptly compares this comment to Bill Gates claiming that you'd never need more than 640KiB of memory

One of the fundamental constants of IT — ironically enough — is progress. Moors Law (through various interpretations) is famous for predicting the power of integrated circuits would double every 18 months, and that existing power would halve in cost in the same time. I think the case can also be made for internet.

In 1997 when our family got dialup at home in Singapore, we were excited by how much material we could get through this tiny serial modem. We could get weather information, articles for school projects, news from back home in Australia, and even some shopping. Had someone told me back then we'd be watching 720p video over the internet at some point, I would have laughed! It would take too much bandwidth! It'd be too slow! I didn't have a supercomputer that could interpret and play such high resolution video! And why would I want to when I could go to a video store and buy a shiny new LaserDisc or VCD?

Heh heh, LaserDisc.

My point, and I do have one

The point is, we have absolutely no idea what we'll be using the internet for in the future, and its incredibly short sighted for Malcolm Turnbull to claim our current speeds are adequate and all we need.

Singapore, as a small densely populated island nation and a pioneer, continues to be one of the few countries in the World in which broadband Internet access is readily available to just about any would-be user anywhere in the country, with connectivity of over 99%.

Having grow up in Singapore in an ocean of cheap, fast, unmetered bandwidth I'd even make the case that Australia's third world communications infrastructure is ill equipped to meet our current needs let alone future use. That's partly due to the geographic size of the country which is nobody's fault other than Slartibartfast, but nevertheless Mr Turnbull's assertion that our needs are currently been served by ADSL2+ is flawed, let alone his pontifications about the future.

I love the word "pontifications", I've come close to changing the Thoughts category here to Pontifications. That'd be sweet.

The problem is, he has a responsibility to tow the party line, and the Liberal's relative lack of inititive and leadership in this NBN debate other than to claim everything should be privately funded for short term gain means he has to endorse this position, even if perhaps he feels differently.

For reasons unique to his character, Malcolm had an unusually large amount of political capital with more pragmatic folks, but I feel comments like these are starting to erode it. People who used to respect him on social networks such as Twitter now reguarly mock his positions. Its a shame.

Forgive the terrible telecommunications pun, but I'm confident he can recover from this if he makes an honest effort to reconnect with his tech savvy fans who seem baffled and dissolusioned with him lately. As Renai said, he's a cool bloke. The ball is in his court. Which I shudder to say, because I was never very good at tennis. I can't run fast enough.

Creative Commons credits (hey, alliteration)

• Photo of Malcom Turnbull at Media140 by Jason Ilagan
• Photo of IBM PC user from 1988 from the Bundesarchiv
• Photo of the Raffles Place Singtel Building by me :)

Exactamondo. When real video production tools start supporting it, and when its own patent issues are resolved, I really hope it can be used eventually. Until then, Google is asking us to adopt a codec that still has training wheels, exclusively.

So the iPhone is coming to Verizon? This is bigger news: The Google Chromium team have announced the impending removal of the H.264 codec from Chrome. Oh well, I never used it as my primary browser anyway.

Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.

I envy their convictions, but I see several glaring issues with this.

Being open by being closed

Leaving aside all the other glaring technical and legal shortcomings of WebM — Google's proposed new video standard that's grounded in good intentions but alas falls short — the main problem with it right now is it requires a Flash wrapper.

Google is claiming they're doing this for the sake of "open innovation"… by requiring Flash? Maybe they mean open because Flash is one of the most insecure pieces of junk online and they give open access to your machine by malicious users. Yeah, that must be it!

If we were to draw their line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, Google should be dropping the closed, proprietary Flash from Chrome [fixed] as well. They're not, and there's no way around this glaring fact. Well, maybe if you're a Fox News presenter you could figure out a way, like Glenn Beck no doubt will after this fiasco! But I digress.

The Google IO Factor

This was a comment left by Bob Andfeld on my post back in May 2010 about Google's support for Flash (Google supporting Flash doesn't make it open). My verbosity frustrates even me, he put it more eloquently and in less space than I ever could:

For a company such as Google that prides itself on being open and advertises its mobile platform as such, their support of closed Flash is absolutely baffling, yet enough people are willing to parade in their defense.

But it gets better! Say what you will about the open/closed nature of H.264, but at the last Google IO conference Eric Schmidt made the comment that the web should be about inclusion not exclusion, in reference to Apple's exclusion of Flash from their iDevices. And now, Google is excluding something.

I suppose that's no different than people like Paul Thurrott poking fun at Apple for not including cut and paste, then rushing to Microsoft's defence when they didn't ship the feature in Windows Phone 7. I suppose doing no evil doesn't include having double standards ;).

Knowledge is better than ignorance ~ Sergey Brin

I’m not one to dwell on conspiracy theories (unless they’re fun ones like the moon landing was fake, or Area 51 was actually where Chuck Norris had a house), but I’m beginning to entertain the notion that Google is hiding something, and its only becoming more obvious. Why would a company that prides itself on being open have such support for a plugin that is anything but, even going out of their way to demonstrate their mobile phone hardware with it at events? Are they in kahoots with Adobe?

There’s something more going on here, and we’re not being told about it. I reckon Shantanu wants a ride in Sergey and Larry’s private 767 with the hammocks, and Sergey and Larry want some free copies of Illustrator so they can redesign the Chrome logo to not look like the Windows XP logo that's been swirled once. Yeah, that must be it!

There’s hope!

At this stage I'd triumphantly talk about my browser vendor since 2003, but Mozilla will probably side with Google on this. At this rate maybe I need to switch to Safari with FlashBlock! Nah, eLinks is where its at! :D

Needless to say, I'm glad I heeded no attention to the constant and increasingly vocal barrage of advice from people to move over to it. Ruben, move to Chrome! Hey Ruben, Chrome is cool, use it! Yo dawg, I heard you like Google tracking you…!

With all this gloom and doom talk, sometimes its worth remembering though what makes the web so strong and open in the first place. If a browser vendor starts to not make any sense, or do things we don't approve of or agree with, we can always just switch to something else and access the same internet as everyone else. Well, other than Internet Explorer, or Windows Internet Explorer Service Pack 1 Home Premium Edition or whatever they're calling it now :).

And from how this affects me personally, I use [flavour of the month] wrapped in Matroska from BitTorrent anyway. I mean, wait, no I don't. You didn't read that.

Despite the frequent occurance of a certain digit this evening (and this morning) in certain timekeeping circles with 11:11 11/1/11, today wasn't so big for me because I write my dates the Singaporean way. I grew up with it, the other way looks weird ;).

11:11AM on the 11th of November 2011 will be more exciting.

This post was originally just a shoutout with a quick link, but now I'm using it to put any links I find.

Description

Sending my thoughts out to the victims of the Queensland floods as they continue their march through Brisbane now. I lived there for a couple of years in the mid 1990s growing up, and seeing the photos people are sending in on Twitter with the #qldfloods hashtag of the flood waters over South Bank and the Riverwalk… its pretty scary :O. Hope you're all keeping safe, or as best as you can.

Photo by @TrevyJames.

Links

• Premier’s Flood Relief Appeal
• ABC News 24, temporarily geo-unlocked
• ABC map of Brisbane suburbs at risk of flooding
• ABC Emergency QLD flood coverage
• ABC Qld Flood Crisis Map
• Bob Brown’s statement on the floods
• Brisbane City Council: Roads affected by flooding
• Courier Mail: Brisbane CBD power grid will be shut down from 07:00AM

I'd advise putting your donations through Bing Lee stores, they're using the tragedy to get people to like their pages on Facebook. Does that count as looting?

Alexei Oreskovi over at IT News Australia is asking:

Can the next hottest dotcoms live up to Wall Street’s expectations?

Certainly with regards to Facebook: nah. At least, not long term anyway. I'd stake my reputation as the most respected person on Rubenerd.com on it. None of the other writers here have anything on me.

That said, Wall Street doesn't need to worry about being profitable, they'll get a bailout if they screw up, right? Its corporate welfare which (unlike those super evil commies that want it for regular people) is totally okay! Not that I'm cynical or anything. Or cyclical, I don't have a bike yet.

Hotlinking images is a fact of life for most weblog author folks, but instead of just blocking sites that leech obscene amounts of bandwidth, this time I decided to have a little fun ^____^

Hotlink is a Malaysian telco, go figure

Each month I go through my server logs and find out all the new sites that are hotlinking my images. In other words, the sites that are requesting material on my servers without any links back to my site here. Leeches. Well, I hesitate to call them leeches, because those little creatures were extremely useful for medical applications and allegedly they're still used as such in some circumstances.

Technically I could just deny any requests from pages hosted outside my own URL (with the exception of RSS readers), but I figure as long as I don't exceed my monthly allocated bandwidth quota at my host, all is fine. I mean, people who stinge bandwidth are inconsiderate, but I suppose in the grand scheme of things they're not doing too much harm, unless they're really abusing it.

Not to be confused with Mr Brown

January 2011 has been going for less than two weeks, and already I have a site wasting more of my bandwidth than a guy accidentally tipping over an entire bag of coffee beans onto the floor. I saw that at Starbucks recently, and was horrified. Think of all those hundreds of cups of happiness that were just ruined! Damn!

In this case, its a video sharing site at http://www.mrbrownee70.com/ who's designers decided to take it upon themselves to use this adorable image for Greasemonkey.

Usually in these circumstances I either rename the file so the offending site has a broken image, but in this case I noticed they didn't specify and width and height anywhere, which allowed me to replace it with a huge banner instead!

It's like free advertising, but free! Well, that was a superfluous sentence ending. I've been doing that a lot lately. I've been eating quite regularly too, but that's not really unusual. I've made it a habit, you could say.

I uploaded the replacement image at 4:10PM, on Saturday the 10th of January 2011. Let's see how long it takes for them to update their page ;)

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

I remember errors like these ;)

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

kimpine:

Is Charlie awkward though? He seems like he’s prettymuch got it together. 

I’m neither, what does THAT mean? XD. Wish I had a SNES staff, that’d be schweet.

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

Streisand Effect. Sarah deleted this Twitter post shortly after the shootings. Now everyone is retweeting it and displaying the screenshots. #Fail.