Rubenerd

Three random and entirely pointless error messages for your consideration.

The first, pictured above, is the eloquent Neal O'Carroll from the aaaaaaaah Into Your Head podcast letting people know his site hasn't gone off the deep end. I would never be caught making a grammar mistake or typo on my own site, and I'd certainly never instruct people to "click here" but then put the link somewhere else. Looking forward to that pie though, it's going to be schweet. Wonder if I can ask him to pick mine up from the Hairy Lemon?

The second error, pictured above, is Neal O'Carroll stalling my file transfer application. I thought his error message was overly cryptic and suspicious, and it turns out I was right. He clearly planted malware on the page so when I took a screenshot it attached itself to the file. It even survived processing and file conversion in The Gimp. He's a crafty one.

The second error, wait, third error, pictured above, is from TweetDeck while I'm using the public WiFi hotspot here. Don't panic!? That's easy enough for you to say, you're not addicted to Twitter through a Twitter client, you are the Twitter client! And who do you think you are, Douglas Adams?! Yeesh.

While waiting for my flight, I decided to skim the Adelaide Advertiser for something to do. The landslides in Rio warranted two columns, the Medvedev Obama nuclear weapons treaty ‎warranted one. By comparison, a detailed analysis of the size of AFL footballs took up an entire page, complete with a gigantic colour photograph.

I know the 'tiser isn't exactly the most reputable paper out there, but perhaps newspapers should be whinging less about the internet stealing their eyeballs and instead look at the quality of their own journalism, both push and pull factors are going on here. And Murdoch wants me to pay for such "journalism"?

For [sad face] family reasons I'll be zipping back to Singapore for a fortnight tomorrow. I booked a convoluted route that had the effect of reducing both the airfare and probably my sanity by half. It'll be Adelaide → Melbourne → Kuala Lumpur → Singapore.

The irony is, my sister flies to Melbourne quite often, and it takes her less time to get there from the Adelaide Airport than it does for me to get home from the airport using public transport. Adelaide Airport really needs one of these.

See you in two weeks Adelaide peeps. Hey, that almost rhymed.

Only Conan O'Brien could get away with posting an April Fool's joke when it's not April Fools. Well, either him or that @i2yh guy, he's pretty dodgy.

Morocco is about to power half of its energy grid with solar power thanks to its abundant year long sunshine according to this really interesting post from CleanTechnica. Why isn't Australia doing this?!

Morocco will invest $9 billion upfront to build 2 Gigawatts of solar power, distributed between 5 solar power plants, by 2020.

The 2 GW (2,000 Megawatts) is enough to supply 40% of the nation’s electricity to 32 million souls, who apparently have fairly modest energy needs.

This is a fantastic idea on so many levels; lower pollution output is the obvious one but the potential for entire new clean industries employing local people is huge. This is what short sighted governments either don't understand or don't care about because the effects would be felt after their current terms in office.

While the average Aussie uses far more electricity than the average Moroccan (the demand side of the equation that also need addressing with more efficient appliances), much of Australia basks under intense year long sunshine. Unfortunately Australia is also swimming in coal and has enough vested interests to make sure we keep digging it out of the ground and burning it.

I hate it when I answer my own questions :P.

Longer time readers of my blog here would have read my lamentations about the fall of really high quality personal blogs and the rise of homogeneous, interchangeable blog networks with hundreds of writers, so when I find an amazing personal blog I have to share it!

The Reinvigorated Programmer is written by Mike Taylor, an intensely fascinating 41 year old developer and palaeontologist, what a combination! He has a real flair for writing and an obvious passion for what he does which makes his posts even more enjoyable to read; as opposed to the posts I write here which are usually quite terrible. Admit it! :)

The bottom line here is that writing is an art. You can hack your way through to producing tolerable text without being an artist, just as an uninspired programmer can bash his way through to wiring together an uninspired web application. But just as it takes a Ken Thompson to invent and write UNIX, and a Dennis Ritchie to invent C and write the initial compiler, so it takes a Brian Kernighan to write The C Programming Language.

And it takes Mike Taylor to write The Reinvigorated Programmer. :) His blog covers programming ranging from classic and fully working BASIC applications for the Commodore VIC-20/VC-20 to C, Perl, Java and Ruby along with some of his other interests including (but not limited to) Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the latest Doctor Who. That reminds me, I need to check that out. I really liked Tennant, but people say the Eleventh Doctor is pretty good too.

As I've said about Jim Kloss, the lead developer and guru over at Whole Wheat Radio, if I turned out to be even half as interesting, intelligent and friendly as people like Mike Taylor I know my life would be set. People like Bill Gates and Larry Ellison aren't my heroes and idols, they're people like Mike.

By the way, the photo above is of Mike and his three sons sitting in front of… a whale skull. Amazing!

In a worrying trend, it seems Apple will be furthering Facebook integration this time with iTunes. MacRumours is hardly an impartial source on such matters, but that ratio above doesn't look too favourable.

Look, Apple, I love you man, but instead of all these gimmicky features that introduce serious privacy and security concerns for a website people won't be using in a few years, why not focus on making the software run smoother? I've been using iTunes since version 1 on Mac OS 9 and it keeps getting worse; it's the only software other than the Firefox 3.5 series that can frequently crash my Mac.

I understand you have two concurrent code bases to maintain and in that context it makes sense to keep using C++ and Carbon for this reason, but when you start to hear people complaining about using an iPhone because the otherwise easy to use iTunes software is bloated and slow, you know you have a problem.

I really, really hope you either have plans for a native Cocoa version or have one running in house along with these silly new features.

In an article ripe with brash generalisations and blatant misinformation, Senator Conroy has directly attacked the critics of the proposed mandatory Great Internet Filter of Australia in a posting to The Punch.

The heading of his piece states:

Conroy: Don’t believe the myths on the ISP filter

You mean the myths that it won't be an electronic Edsel and not a Titanic waste of taxpayers money? And what about this gem right in the second paragraph:

The Government has always maintained there is no silver bullet when it comes to cyber safety and we have never said ISP-level filtering alone would help fight child pornography or keep children safe online.

Then, prey tell, what is the point senator?

The irony that someone would defend their moves to push Australia's online civil liberties and free speech towards PRC and North Korean territory by publishing an article online is breathtaking. I have an idea sir, I find you ramblings offensive, can I have them filtered?

This isn't a technology related story, but then again Avatar had a lot of fancy CGI depicting floating mountain things and this is about something just as plausible in the real world. Emphasis added by me:

Hank Johnson, Georgia’s Congressman, stated during a committee meeting that the addition of more U.S. troops to the tiny island of Guam might cause the island to tip over and capsize. When the news first ran the story, many thought it might be an April Fools Day prank, but watching the video, all concerned were all business and Johnson was very seriously laying his case for the island.

As that senator said too Bill Maher in Religious: "you don't have to pass an IQ test to serve in government!". No kidding.

Personally, I don't know what is more scary: that someone with this level of intelligence can be elected into public office; that someone thinks islands are buoyant; or that someone thinks adding people to an island the size of Guam — even if the dang thing floated — would capsize it.

Evacuate Singapore, it’s screwed!

At 541km^2, Guam is only a fraction smaller than Singapore which manages to support just under five million people in 710.2km^2, and last time I checked it ain't sinking! That said, there is that joke in Malaysia that if Singaporeans keep building massively tall buildings and cramming more people into it eventually it'll drift away and sink. I suppose that's the difference, the Malaysians are kidding!

I hear Sarah Palin wants Hank Johnson on her ticket for the presidential elections of 2011 or whenever the are, you-betcha!

Damn straight.