Rubenerd

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

Had trouble sleeping, so took my D60 out in the middle of the night and swirled it around a bit. Don’t know why.

I just started downloading the all new FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE from the FreeBSD bittorrent tracker and so should you! I'm more excited by this release than Apple's Mac OS X Snow Leopard from a few months back!

Don't get me wrong, all this talk about Fedora lately hasn't swayed me from my true calling. Heck, even this very website is running on FreeBSD ^_^.

Are you fed up with constantly checking and deleting messages from your UniSA student email account because of the tiny quota? Turns out you can have your messages redirected to an outside account. I can breathe easier now!

From the UniSA email FAQ:

Students are able to redirect their email to either a University staff account, or to an external account by filling in the required details in the Email Redirection application located at:

https://my.unisa.edu.au/emailredirection

Further information regarding the application is located at:
Email Redirection Further Information

WARNING!

I'm being told by my solicitors I have to dispense with the following warning. By redirecting your university email the burden is on you to keep it secure and backed up. If you don't understand this, do not do it! Read the further information link above for more disclaimers.

Okay, back to the blog post

To make life easier for myself I went ahead and created a new email account with SegPub which I have gigabytes of space free on, then used the form above to redirect my student email to it instead. Now when I have lecturers email me PDFs showing the schematics of entire nuclear reactors it won't blow out my quota and prevent other messages from arriving!

There's also another benefit; by redirecting messages I no longer have to interface at all with the university's Microsoft Exchange services including the dreadful Microsoft Outlook Web Access which only works in Internet Explorer, as I discussed previously.

The IMAP problem

Inevitably the question arises: why didn't I just use IMAP and access my email remotely? I was asked by more than a few people on twitter, and by the technical support guy I called at UniSA.

My problem was I initially went ahead and configured Thunderbird (I upgraded from Mozilla/SeaMonkey Mail) for IMAP access, but unlike POP after I'd downloaded messages they stayed on the server. That's how it's supposed to work, but I wanted to archive local copies of my messages while deleting them from the university's servers, so I'd avoid maxing out my inbox like I was virtually every day before.

On a somewhat related note, I've been having no end of trouble with my university email and with general online student services since resuming full time studies. Perhaps I'm anomaly in the system.

It seems to be another example of an idea that everyone else seems to favour but I find worrying; even more jarring it's perhaps the first time I've really disagreed with Om Malik (of whom I'm a huge fan) about something! Allegedly some people over at Google are exploring the option of including the speed of pages as a metric for a site's PageRank.

The problem nobody (that I can find) seems to be discussing is the implications for net neutrality, or whatever fancy name people are calling that now.

The glorious, beautiful, elegant architecture of the internet lowered the barrier to entry for people like me to voice my opinions and publish my material (however silly it may be) in the same league as the Big Guys. In traditional media such as television and print, I would need a small fortune to write and distribute what I'm doing here on my blog.

I bring up finances because what Google is proposing could be the first step towards favouring companies that can afford fast, reliable servers with solid redundancy to deliver their content over people and smaller businesses without the financial means or technical know-how to do so.

It also raises some troubling scenarios. For one, what would happen if a website that's much faster than your own but had a similar existing PageRank started broadly duplicating your content, would it rank higher than your own site?

Speed may be convenient but it is not a replacement for valuable information, and Google is heading down a dangerous road if they decide to do this. Even though I don't use Bing for example, it's another example of why they need to exist, to keep Google on their toes.

I'd be really relieved to hear why I'm wrong and being overly paranoid, if you have some insights I'd love to hear them.

A few days ago @Zombie_Plan of ZombieSkittles fame asked his Twitter followers to dispense ideas for a blog post he could write about. Having suggested an idea to him that was promptly ignored, I decided I may as well write about it myself :).

You could be forgiven for not thinking about this because the devices in question are so ubiquitus and have become such an integral part of our lazy Western lives, but have you ever considered why remote controls have to be vertical? They all are, from the lowly air conditioner remote with half a dozen buttons to those combined entertainment system remotes with built in screens and enough buttons to control a nuclear reactor.

But why are they vertical? Were they originally designed in this way to help train people to use them by making it clear which direction they should be pointed? Was it to make it somewhat easier to use with only one hand, but was later abused by being so long and so fully crammed with buttons the benefits are no longer existent?

No ladies and gentleman I propose remote controls don't need to be vertical, they could be horizontal. Think about it, with the exception of the Wii which makes sparing use of buttons in place of motion, most gaming controllers are horizontal not vertical, and you could lay out buttons more logically on a horizontal plane than a vertical one. I know this is true because I read this post on a smart guy's blog and he agrees.

So whaddya think? Are horizontal remote controls a great idea, or the greatest idea? Be honest, I know you want to say it's brilliant and you want to give me trillions in venture capital for me to start manufacturing them and afford a private jet on the side with one of those fancy walk-in grilled cheese sandwich jaffle making whatsits with the anti-stick surfaces and those really super bright LEDs that tell you when it's finished cooking that you could blind a deer with from several hundred kilometres away. That'd be schweet.

Who's with me?

When did the profit motive become the only reason to do anything? When did that become the new patriotism?

~ Bill Maher

In other news, the photo above by Bbsrock on Wikipedia of Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins at the Atheist Alliance International conference in Burbank, California is the definition of awesomeness ^_^.

I'm socially awkward, anxious, terribly shy and I tend to obsess about obscure and unconventional things, but I was like that before I started blogging! That notwithstanding, Dave Winer has an excellent post on Scripting News about the stereotypes surrounding bloggers in Hollywood movies.

[State of Play was a] remake of a brilliant BBC series that was so bad, that portrayed the blogger in such a superficial and humiliating fashion, that I actually walked out in disgust. (A movie has to be very bad for me to walk out on it.)

I’d love to see a movie that captures the heroic spirit of blogging. Like all inspiration, it’s rare, but that’s why it’s worth making a movie about. The story of the nobility of blogging largely remains, imho, untold.

Here friggen here. It probably won't change for a long time though, unless people start developing clichés about Twitter users instead and bloggers are given a break. That could work.

By the way, I don't equate my pointless blog here with people out there doing real work and producing amazing citizen journalism and analysis, but we're all bloggers and I'm as frustrated as Dave sometimes with the way bloggers (and tech people in general) are portrayed in films.

On an unrelated note, I first posted about Dave Winer on my blog here in 2006 when I said he looked a bit like my dad in the above photo (Dave Winer versus Rainer Schade). Turns out they look nothing alike in the real world ;).

Hello Moto! While I love my iPhone to death ever since I got it in 2008 and think it's the single greatest electronic device I've ever owned (I'm serious, it's had that much of an impact on my life) I've been keeping a keen eye on the competition, and this Motorola Milestone is the first to come along that looks really tempting, and circumstances mean I could potentially get my hands on one as soon as month from now!

The Milestone is the European, GSM version of the American Verizon CDMA Droid that has been touted as the first true competition to come from anyone since the iPhone was launched. Unfortunately the Pre was an inadequately equipped vessel for the otherwise beautiful Palm WebOS and the G1 hardware was less than stellar, but if I'm to believe the reviewers the Milestone is sleek, fast, and integrates extremely well with Google's web offerings (which I suppose makes sense).

According to Geeky Gadgets the Milestone will be available in Germany starting this month, which means when my dad, sis and I go to Frankfurt and Munich for Christmas to see relatives I could potentially get one while I'm over there! Das is gut!

I must admit I've been really, really, tempted by the Android platform, even if it turns out its not as free and open as was originally implied. As I said, I love my iPhone, but I'm also a FreeBSD user as well as a Mac guy and I love tinkering with stuff. Who knows, if I were that masochistic I could carry two phones around with me, just as I've been known to sometimes carry two laptops with me :).

I kid, but I've actually got used to carrying around two phones since I started living some of the year in Australia to study and all my holidays back in Singapore. My iPhone always has the SIM card for the country I'm in, and my Palm Centro has the overseas SIM, that way I'm not raking up expensive roaming charges but I don't miss calls or messages from people who don't know where I am.

An iPhone and Motorola Milestone would be an amazing combination!

And here I was thinking it was going to be a story about Disney abusing copyright extensions.