Rubenerd

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

Epic. Mewtwo used to scare me ;)

People have already discussed this issue to death already, but Gillard's comments have been festering in my brain like a… thing that festers.

Julia Gillard is Uncle Fester?

I'm going to take a controversial stance here. When Julia Gillard billed the proposed compulsory internet filter in Australia as a "moral issue", she was right. The problem is, despite numerous campaigns by organisations like the EFA, the misinformed still believe that this filter will not only be effective, but is necessary to maintain moral hygiene.

I've always asserted that the latter is irrelevant because the former simply isn't true. Even if it were this deeply important issue and we were all in favour of curbing our civil liberties, technologically it wouldn't be effective. Anyone who's used the internet for more than five minutes knows this.

Right right right… the right is the bight. Bird bird bird… the bird is the word.

Now Conroy claims they don't intend to filter P2P or channels other than the regular tubes. Right there, he's not only admitting the shortcomings of his policies and that ultimately its going to be useless, but he exposes it for what it is: a token effort to appease the religious right.

Its a morale issue too… it makes me depressed

It is a moral issue Ms Gillard, its about treating the Australian public like adults, not sacrificing their rights, and not putting the country at a further disadvantage to the rest of the world technologically.

Political history has taught us that sacrificing rights is easy, winning them back is like trying to make diamonds by putting quartz under your bed. I did this for many years, and all I ended up with were a couple of heavy shoeboxes.

I suppose nothing has changed since August after all. Which is a right royal bummer.

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

thedailywhat:

Infographic of the Day: “The Cycle of Commenting” by Caldwell Tanner and Owen Parsons for CollegeHumor’s The Graphic Truth.

[collegehumor / blogwell.]

Ritsu: Know why we’re awesome?
Mio: We know Yui and Mugi?
Ritsu: BINGO!

Aside from being entirely pointless, this post serves to test if automagically posting certain entries from WordPress to Tumblr works. We'll see ;).

It is with a heavy heart and slight frustration that I bid farewell to another casualty of the short attention spanned intertubes and another aspect of my late childhood. Starting on the 1st of November, Bloglines will be no more. It will cease to exist, like a Parrot. Or a Boss.

It was a drizzly Singapore afternoon…

… in 2004 and I had just finished all my year 12 exams. I was feeling extactic and awesome, and suddently left with the realisation that I had all this spare time to fill for the first time in years. I decided to register for this site which claimed to be able to aggregate sites that I read all the time using RSS feeds, almost like having my own personalised newspaper, and to use it to check on podcasts, these great new things that let people easily broadcast their audible thoughts.

The things that initially drew me to Bloglines were its easy to navigate interface, and the fact I could check it from my brand new PowerMac G5 at home, and my workstation at Veritas. I didn’t need to syncronise clients or download feeds like a desktop email client, everything just worked! And it made sense, the data all came from online, so it made sense for it to stay there to make my life easier. I suppose thesedays one would use the cloud computing buzzword.

I discovered so many amazing new blogs from reading Bloglines, and I revelled in seeing what other people were reading. One of my best friends Jim Kloss up in Alaska had a Bloglines account, and many other wheatheads did.

Cloud goes up, cloud goes down

I don’t quite remember when it was, but as more and more people starting shipping over to Google Reader, I eventually realised that if I wanted to keep my conversations with people going, I had no choice but to move too. It was a shame, as far as I was concerned Google Reader looked more Web 2.0, but its interface was far poorer than Bloglines, and the beta version of the new Bloglines interface which I was a part of was fantastic. I also really like teal :).

While my friends from Canberra were here I took the opportunity to check my Bloglines account and saw the closure notice. I exported my OPML file, took a few screenshots, and bit farewell. I suppose that will always be the risk of using cloud software.

*hugs* Cheerio Bloglines, it was nice knowing you.

If you've ever attempted a download from the VMware website on your Mac, chances are you have some junk files you can delete in a folder called ".DownloadManager" If you're as obsessed as me, you'll want to delete it!

The delete is the bongly bong deng diggy diggy

You can use the Finder by clicking the "Go" menu, then "Go To Folder…" and entering in "~/.DownloadManager". Then you can safely delete the folder.

Alternatively, just use the Terminal:

% rm -r ~/.DownloadManager

Or for the paranoid:

% rm -irv ~/.DownloadManager

Or if you wanted to be really stupid and utterly superflous:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my $junk = '~/.DownloadManager';
system("rm -r $junk");
while (1) { print("The Bird is The Word!n"); }

One of these paragraphs is really important!

Unlike my computer desk, I like to keep my computer hard drives spotlessly organised, so when I find junk I delete it. In this case, I was going through my home directory and found a ton of unessisary files. What surprises me is… I don't ever remember using VMware's Download Manager at all. Maybe someone went into my brain and altered my memories. What a terrifying prospect.

Did you know there's a place in South Australia called Prospect? It's in Prospect. I assume its name was derived from the process of prospecting. Or maybe there was a prospective name, but it never materialised. You know if you spell materialised without the m, you don't get a name of a place in South Australia all. Coincidence? I think not. Wait, don't read too far into that previous sentence, however short it was.

As with all my posts, take my advice and use it at your own risk! I'm assuming the only side effect would be that if you did use VMware's Download Manager (whatever that is) and you were part way through a download, you may need to start again.

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

survivaltest:

aww

:)

For a while I trialled Fedora on my ThinkPad X40, but ultimately I had to give it up because the display wouldn't turn back on after going to sleep. It would be akin to me going to sleep, then waking up and not being able to open my eyes unless someone rebooted me which; I must admit; sounds awfully painful. But now it works with the Xfce Spin for some reason!

Here’s where it gets interesting

After installing a vanilla installation of Fedora 13 installation install with the installation installing things with the installation and installing stuff and all that, I realised I couldn't use it because the screen wouldn't come back on when the machine went to sleep. I'm used to almost never turning off laptops thesedays, my MacBook Pro has been running almost continuously since 2006! Needless to say, this bug was a problem.

On a hunch from a friendly Fedora user about how to fix this ACPI bug, I decided to give Fedora 13 another shot recently. Remembering how long Gnome 2 takes to load on this older hardware, I elected to use an Xfce spin. I used to use Xfce exclusively and I really like it, so it was like reliving nostalgia for Red Hat and my old favourite desktop :).

To my surprise!

The screen NOW turns on after going to sleep!

NetBSD includes minor updates in their ISOs so you can download the latest version without first installing the last current release and updating it. I'm fairly sure Fedora doesn't do that, but what else could explain how this happened? Perhaps Fedora installed a software update that fixed something, or maybe its a bug with ThinkPad X40 hardware in the main Gnome 2 spin of the OS, but I know for now stuff works and I'm happy. Which is great because Sabayon had trouble with my wireless card.

Now the only bug remaining with Fedora 13 to iron out is to figure out why the icons all look terrible. This happens in all GTK applications, Gnome or Xfce, and it only happened in 13. I can live with it, but its darn ugly. Its almost as if they're not being anti-aliased properly, on FreeBSD I noticed this sometims happened if you didn't have the latest Cairo or ImageMagick installed. But that could just be me.

Welcome to the Internetometer. The goal of this online game is to provide a scientifically accurate* measurement of how much you win at life.

I stumbled across the Internetometer early this morning which proports to gauge how much you win at life, as that description already demonstrated. If you'd like to give me An Internet, feel free to hit the link above. And feel free to add one to your site. I'm all for scientific research, and you should be too.