Rubenerd

The poor Japanese, can't they live but one month of their lives without having a new Prime Minister thrust upon them? Fortunately I have a solution that I'm confident would work out, and save taxpayer money.

Firstly…

I suppose at this point you expect me to make an anime reference, because Japan is where it comes from. Well firstly I'm shocked and appalled that you'd assume I'm so much of a crass simpleton that I'd see places not for what they are but with sweeping, overt generalisations based on one of their recognisable industries.

I mean, do you expect every post I write about Ireland to mention praties floating in Guinness, or every post that mentions Singapore has to mention teh tarik and PCK? Best in Singapore and JB, and some say Batam? Really?!

And secondly…

Now that we've got that out of the way… we all know Suzumiya Haruhi would make the best Prime Minister.

She has drive, an "unconventional" way of solving problems and getting what she wants, the uncanny ability to make those she despises very uncomfortable, and she created the universe so if anyone were to know what makes it tick, it'd be her. And if she should falter she'd be no more or less effective than any of the six previous post holders, and better still she could just change the universe back to what it was before (as she'd rumoured to be doing so her second series never ends up appearing).

Unfortunately, despite being God she couldn't be the Emperor because of her gender, though as PM she'd wield more legislative power anyway. She could also save the Diet billions over the course of her tenure by having Konata as one of her senior ministers because they'd both be voiced by the one person.

It's pure, unmitigated genius, feel free to let me know why I'm right. Come to think of it, maybe she should come to Australia given we have no good choices in either major party.

The First Japanese Suzumiya Cabinet…?

For those of you not reading the independent North Korean Economic Report site, its writer Curtis Melvin is reporting some fresh attacks against their systems that seem to have come from their namesake. And I thought I had tough critics.

A few months ago I wrote about two attempts to hack into my computer. The post is here if you are interested. Well, since then I have fended off no less than six attempts to break into my computer–including two attempts just today (three this week). One email containing a virus was ostensibly from a North Korea expert and the second email was intended to look like it came from the Korea Economic Institute (it even referenced an actual upcoming event of theirs). I know of several others who have been targeted and some who have even been infected so please be careful out there. Someone is still not playing nice.

No kidding.

For those of you not familiar with the site, North Korean Economy Watch is a fascinating blog on not just the economics of North Korea (that they glean facts about through watching it, I'm assuming) but also a ton more other stuff with plenty of photos, maps and links. I follow very few blogs like this, but only because ones of this calibre are so hard to find these days in an ocean of me-too gadget blogs with hundreds of writers. Really, how many more of those do we need!? But I digress.

I don’t come up with these terms

I haven't read into the finder details of the attack, but it seems like a case of spearfishing or "weaponised" email to use the latest security conference parlance. Instead of using botnets of readily infected Windows machines, some of the craftier malicious hackers are now targeting specific recipients by searching for vulnerabilities and exploring them to deliver their payload. In this case, some social engineering was employed to (attempt) to trick the North Korean Economy Watch folks by disguising the email as being from an agency they have a relationship with in order to lull them into a false sense of security so they'd lower their guard. Once you've done that, you can wreck havoc on their systems (or site accounts, or credit cards in other cases).

I'm relieved their site is okay, and that they practice due diligence when reading email; most people don't which is what terrifies me. No doubt we haven't heard the last of such attacks.

On an unrelated note, I have a sudden craving for kimchi, haven't had it in ages. Who's up for some?

By themselves these two interest rate stories about Australia and Canada wouldn't really be worth mentioning here, but when they appeared in my Twitter client together they made for an interesting contrast:

CBC News: Bank of Canada raises interest rate to 0.5% Read more:… http://bit.ly/cAB6Cx

SBS News: Reserve Bank of Australia keeps interest rates on hold at 4.5 per cent http://bit.ly/ag0E4B

WOW! I suppose I should move to Canada and buy an apartment, eh!

When registering for Wireless@SG a few years ago, I chose Qmax as my provider because they worked well with outlets supplied by SingTel and StarHub. Unfortunately, both Starbucks at Ion Orchard and the Coffee Bean at Bishan Junction 8 have inexplicably adopted M1 over SingTel, and Qmax is no longer listed as a provider.

My mum had a phone with M1, and the experience taught us to never use them for anything serious again. I suppose this is their way of seeking revenge :P.

Last year I picked up a second hand ThinkPad X40 for a ridiculously cheap price, and this afternoon I finally got around to adding more memory. In a Department of Obviousness exclusive, it made an already stunningly awesome machine ever better!

Default configuration

IBM originally sold the ThinkPad X40 with 512MiB of memory soldered onto the motherboard and an empty PC-2700 333MHz slot for upgrading.

Unfortunately IBM manufactured several distinct models of the X40 which have different memory ceilings; you can find out which one you have by looking at the IBM label on the underside of the case. Crucial.com advised me my 7290 supported a maximum 1GiB of extra memory, so I want to Sim Lim Square and was lucky enough to still find a shop selling it!

I went with a Kingston 1GiB module for SG$75 and it's been working great :).

Day to day performance

I couldn't really tell any difference in performance booting FreeBSD, but Fedora 12 was somewhat faster. The real difference came down in operation; with 512MiB of memory I could get to a pretty Gnome or Xfce desktop but as soon as I loaded up a few tabs in Firefox things would start slowing down. Looking now I have 13 tabs open and the machine is just as fast as when I booted it!

Last year I was disappointed that I couldn't try OpenSolaris on this machine because it didn't meet it's memory requirements, but I suppose now I could give that a shot too. Now that Oracle owns Sun now though, I'm less enthusiastic at that prospect.

The NeXTSTEP

I bought this X40 for cheap because I thought it'd be a nice little netbook with a keyboard that's actually usable, but I'm surprised at how much production work I'm now getting done on it!

In light of this, the next step is to upgrade Fedora to 13! Oh yeah and the hard drive. The only design problem with the X40 is it uses a 1.8 inch ZIF hard drive which means most magnetic and SLC solid state drives for it are either painfully expensive or simply unavailable.

The performance of the current hard drive is acceptable and it's still in excellent health considering it's age, but this post on gnuru.org about using a CF card intrigues me. Apparently read/write cycles in modern CF cards have been drastically improved from the mean old days, and it would be a great way to improve battery life and add even more performance.

I left a comment for posterity :).

Last year I bought a used ThinkPad X40 to use as a lightweight alternative to my heavy MacBook Pro. One of the best investments I’ve ever made, I LOVE this machine! And as Mario said here, the keyboard is so much better than a netbook, even if Dave Winer shot me down in flames for suggesting so on Scripting.com ;).

The original 40GB HDD still works in mine, but I’m intrigued about what performance improvement I’d get from using a CF card and a ZIF-CF adaptor. The general responsiveness of FreeBSD and Fedora are both fine, but booting is a bit slow and initial booting takes a while.

Thanks for your post, I’ll be checking this out :)

Had another one of those incapacitating headaches today. It would make a mockery of the ones my mum had to call it a migraine, but it was enough to knock me out for most of the day.

Panadol, a lie down, Tiger Balm and drawn curtains are the things I usually do, if you're reading this what headache remedies do you recommend?

In late April, my webhost SegPub informed me the specific webserver causing problems for my site and the sites of many other people was in the process of being fixed. It's now almost June and the problems are still persisiting for all of us, if the newsgroups are anything to go by.

Some small comments:

"Could you *please* keep us in the loop as things progress. The silence on this issue has added to the misery of having sites that are so often unreachable (certainly more than 0.5% of the month)."

"I have 2 site on Chewie and have had endless problems, not the least being NO response to any support ticket ( I’ve lost count how many I have sent). Hopefully things improve sooner rather than later."

"Alas, the problems seem to be persisting. Once again, [my site] is down, while all of my other SegPub-hosted sites are up."

"Same here, sites constantly go-slow or time out."

Peter wrote the best summary:

"Yes, I’m still seeing persistent slow response from [our server] too. This appears to have started around February 2010.

I opened a support ticket a month ago, sent a reminder after two weeks without a human response, then received the answer “In regards to the speed issues, we were having some issues with bots flooding [our server] with traffic at sporadic times of the day. We believe we’ve resolved this and you should be seeing the site load at acceptable speeds.”

I sent copies of my monitor reports, which show that performance is till poor when compared with a site on another host’s shared server.

I have just received a monitor report that the site on [the server] was down for three hours.

Altogether disappointing."

And as another cruel twist, this post has taken an hour to go live because the site keeps timing out whenever I hit the Publish button. I've decided to give them a couple more weeks before I start looking for alternatives to their service.

RootBSD look like a great FreeBSD VPS service, or for the greenie hippie in me there's always Green Geeks that Marco recommended here a while ago :). I tend to get a bit nervous with sites that oversell though, but I'll check them out.

It got up to 3.12MB/s a few minutes ago, but my screenshot reflexes weren't fast enough. Screenshot Reflexes sounds like a terrible spaghetti western.

Anyway the point is we don't even have one of those expensive, super duper, ultra high speed connections here. More importantly what we do download doesn't get counted towards a stupid monthly internet quota! Without download caps, the whole internet experience changes. There's no bean counting. You don't have to toss up whether to get that latest Cranky Geeks or skimp on getting just the CD release of a distro instead of a DVD.

It's sad the likes of Comcast are starting to adopt this Aussie approach to the net. Say goodbye to online video streaming.

My good Twitter friend Mary Wallace recently wrote a poignant post on the American oil spill. So much for their new corporate logo indeed.

So much for the ‘new’ logo, the earth-friendly ‘Beyond Petroleum’ public relations campaign of a few years ago, BP’s attempt to win over environmentally aware consumers, designed to show the company’s commitment to, get this, the environment and solar power […] BP is firmly an oil company. It is dodging responsibility for its epic, monumental, continuing spill and its degradation of the US coastline, AND its running our own sovereign law enforcement agencies.

As for their humanitarian efforts [or lack thereof], this part particularly broke my heart. He's a year younger than me:

One of the youngest workers on the rig, Shane Roshto, 22, is survived by his son and his wife, Natalie, who has filed a lawsuit against BP, Transocean and Halliburton. An inspiration to his friends, he wrote two dates — his wedding day and his son’s birthday — inside of his hard hat, referring to these dates when he was having a bad day.

[…] the oil rig company has already received $270 million in insurance money as a claim for the lost oil rig, none of which will go to cleanup or to compensate the families of the dead.

[…] BP sent its lawyers in within hours of the beginning of the spill to get the widows and residents of coastal Alabama to sign off any future lawsuit against BP, for a measly $5,000 per life.

As I said on her post, the part of this story that frustrates me the most is that a couple of safety valves could have prevented this entire disaster, but allegedly the small cost of having them fitted along the length of a pipe is just too expensive to justify.

If it weren’t for the fact people and the environment are suffering, I’d say BP deserves this for cutting corners. Alas, their greed and short sightedness must now be paid for by all of us. It makes me want to cry.