Rubenerd

The folks running the Bus Eireann Deals Twitter account asked people this evening to trial their new alert system and provide feedback. This post is a response to said request.

Let me just start by saying I'm so thoroughly disjointedness disappointed (dang this Firefox spell checker is hopeless!) with their service I could harpoon an Attitude Chicken. Wait, Bob Geldof is Irish isn't he?

I tried three buses, read that three buses and the service couldn't even find them, let alone give me timetable or fare information:

• The 105 from Lorong Chuan to Scotts Road
• The 75 from Holland Village to Marina Centre
• The misleadingly titled Aeroline from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur

When we were in Ireland the weather was so bad we kept hearing how Bus Eireann were having to cancel services. We almost booked a bunch of trips with them, whew!

Heaven forbid this site ever start talking about things completely unrelated to tech (despite it absorbing my anime blog when I lost it ;_;) but this is big enough news to warrant a post here. Futurama is coming back!

The Fox network in the US has a breathtaking history of cancelling great shows, some people claim it's because they're evil but I rather thing they're incredible shrewd business folk. Better to cancel a show when people like it than let it drag on and fizzle out. Wait, they do The Simpsons don't they?

Anyway Futurama is coming back… I can see Zoidberg again! Only The Doctor from Star Trek Voyager is a more awesome doctor than Zoidberg.

Now they just need to start Wonderfalls (which I talked about in 2006) and Firefly again and we'll be in business. Or perhaps that wouldn't be such a good idea, I already have far too many distractions in my life at the moment. Heck, I'm still getting over the fact that guy from Baka to Test to Shōkanjū is a guy :P.

Having used both, while I do prefer Django for my own projects, Ruby on Rails has a fancier welcome page. Sorry, it had to be said :D.

If they were really smart they'd include a picture of Reinhardt the Awesome and some wicked jazz music, plenty of both to choose from! It'd probably quadruple the size of the framework tarball, but to borrow a phrase from my sister "it'd be SO worth it!" Am I right? Don't answer that.

More than ever before I’m asked why I haven’t moved to Chrome, as if it’s just the default option and anything else requires an immediate justification. Hey, it’s religion and atheism all over again! Anyway here’s a pretty table thingy showing why I still use The Firefox.

Browser	Firefox	Camino	Safari	Opera	Chrome
JavaScript whitelist	plugin	plugin	–	–	built in
Cookie whitelist	plugin	possible	–	–	built in
URL blacklist	plugin	yes [1]	yes [1]	built in	yes [1]
XSS, clickjacking block	plugin	–	–	–	–
Supercookie clearing	plugin	–	–	–	–
Debian cert blacklist	plugin	–	–	–	–
MD5 cert blocking	plugin	–	–	–	–
Sidebar tabs	plugin	–	plugin	built in	–
Mac	sort of [2]	yes	yes	yes	low priority [3]
FreeBSD	yes	–	–	yes	–

I’m not pretending this post isn’t biased in favour of Firefox, but as I said they’re the features I find important. If other browsers got similar functionality, I would consider using them. If you can see any mistakes in the table or have something to add, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll add/fix it :).

Footer note thingys

[1] I used to use the Firefox plugin, but now I just edit the system-wide hosts file which benefits any internet aware application.

[2] Firefox is a native, real Mac application (aka no XQuartz) but it uses XUL over Cocoa for parts of the interface and it really shows. It also doesn’t have anywhere near the integration (keychains, etc.) that Camino and Safari can boast.

[3] Chrome is a Windows app first, Linux and Mac app second.

So I'm trying to sleep but I can't, so I get out of bed and aimlessly wander around the house for half an hour; eventually I found myself drawn to the eerie glow of my laptop screen I forgot to turn off. For some reason I fired up OOo and started doodling this diagram, then went to pour a glass of water…

This diagram made sense when I made it half an hour ago in a tired, dazed stupor, but looking back at it now just before I head off to bed again I can't make sense of it. Oh well, night night.

Responding to Bacon5200's article The Moe Menace: A Matter of Degrees:

The issue that’s conflagrating the conflict isn’t so much that moe exists, it’s the concentration in which it occurs. Those pointing out that it has always existed are missing the forest for the trees. There is a huge divide between moe existing in a show, and moe drenching a show from head to toe. The latter is very much a recent phenomenon, worthy of criticism.

If you don't like the latter types of shows, don't watch them. Vote with your viewership and your wallet, that's all there is to it. #ThereIFixedIt.

Macslocum over at O'Reilly Answers is asking people to submit their favourite browser plugins and extensions. No prizes for guessing which one I chose!

First Macslocum's recommendations:

Firebug (Firefox) — I can’t believe this thing is free. It’s hands-down the best HTML/CSS testing tool I’ve ever used. It’s also incredibly handy when I can’t remember my own CSS naming conventions.

ClickToFlash (Safari) — This automatically disables any Flash-based elements. But unlike strict ad blockers, ClickToFlash gives you the option of activating Flash on a piece-by-piece basis. So if you want to watch a movie on a web page but you don’t want to see the Flash ads, just click the movie element and that Flash-based part of the page will load.

How about you? Which plugins/extensions do you use?

For what it's worth, I also highly recommend ClickToFlash to all my Mac friends using Safari, it improves performance and reliability so much it's as if you've just shoved an extra few gigs of memory into your system for free.

My predicable answer

Without a doubt it’d have to be NoScript for Firefox. The fact no other browser has such simple blocking and whitelisting for dynamic content and Javascript ensures I won’t be switching browsers anytime soon.

Frankly, given all the thousands of exploits using Javascript as a vector I’m surprised (and somewhat dismayed) it’s such an unusual extension.

[For some reason text fields on the O’Reilly Network always correct JavaScript as Javascript!]

As I've enumerated here many times, I can't use a browser without NoScript anymore, I feel as though I'm in a car without seat bealts, a war zone without a bulletproof vest or a conference without pants when I don't have it. How people think they can be responsible internet users without such software in 2010 baffles me more than… attending a conference without pants. I suppose some people wear business skirts, just not me, surprising though that may sound. Chuck Peddle wears pants, I can tell you that much. And he invented the 6502 for heaven's sake!

If you have an O'Reilly account, go over there now and voice your opinion. Tim O'Reilly, the good O'Reilly, not the sleazy news guy ;).

Relatedness

If you haven't seen my other posts on this subject, I also talk about my other favourite Firefox plugins in these posts: More Firefox extensions and Firefox extensions. I put way too much effort into those pages! Of all the extensions, most are security related.

This morning's intermittent Rubenerd outages were brought to you by Segment Publishing. They're still miles better than Servage was, though that isn't saying much.

Curiously, many of the outages over the last year have been around this time of day. I wonder if they do server maintenance around 00:00-02:00 Adelaide time, or whether it's due to increased loads given it's daylight in the US.

UPDATE: Іt's now 10:42 and pages are still taking many long minutes to render. Time to move web hosts again?

This latest Pointless Rubenerd Milestone blog post is so useless it should not be read by anyone. If you're just seeing this summary, leave it and move on. If you're subscribed in a blog reader and you can see the whole post, disregard it.

Now that's out of the way we can get down to bidness. Despite the sluggish performance issues that have been plaguing this site since the wee hours of the morning, I've finally been able to submit this post which, as I've said, is completely pointless but represents a milestone only reached three other times in the history of the site.

Still haven't got it yet? Even with the friggen enclosed picture? The post is 2666, which has the number 666 in it! Run away! Head for the hills and don't return! If you live in Singapore which has no hills other than these two tiny ones, jump into the ocean or cross over to Malaysia and head for the hills! AAAAAAAAA! Better still if you live in Adelaide, head to Hahndorf in the Hills and have some really awesome German food. :)

I know I've already said this on the WordPress 666 ID post, the 666th post and the 1666th post, but Elfen Lied scared the heck out of me.

And here's where it gets really scary. I hadn't blogged about Firefox extensions for several months, but I did this morning. When was one of the last times I did an in-depth review of a Firefox extension? The same day as post #1666. AAAAAAAAAAAAA!

Update

As I was typing up this post, I was so engrossed I forgot I'd started toasting some bread and it set off the smoke alarm! I was typing up how Elfen Lied scared me and atheist-humanist 666 mock-scared me and THAT happened, at the same friggen time! I jumped so hard out my computer chair I slammed my knees on the underside of the table! OWIES!!!

I just read this report on Somebody Think of the Children having just seen it commented on by Cameron Reilly on Twitter and shared by Alex in Google Reader. I'm speechless. Game over man, game over.

A ballot was held in the upper house on Tuesday to decide which minor party or independent senator would be appointed to a federal parliamentary committee on cyber-safety.

In a very close secret vote, Senator Fielding was awarded the job with 34 votes to Senator Ludlam’s 32.

For those not following Australian politics, Scott Ludlam is a senator with the progressive Greens party who's been one of the few to stand up and grill Senator Conroy about the proposed mandatory internet filters, and Senator Fielding is a senator with the ultra conservative and Orwellian-titled Family First.

Any already fleeting ideas that this would be a productive and useful committee have not only been shot down, but shoved into a rocket and hurled into the centre of the sun.

And to think this morning I was worrying about novelty gadgets being sold as ultra secure devices to people who don't know. If I had a graph showing my view on humanity, it would have taken a nosedive today.