Rubenerd

With Mozilla's recent blocking of Microsoft's vulnerable .NET plugin for Firefox on Windows I've mostly read positive comments from people on blogs, news sites, Twitter and so forth, but there are a few who it seems the move has rubbed the wrong way.

The most comment complaint seems to be that the Firefox crowd would be crying foul if Microsoft only made .NET available to Internet Explorer users. This of course a complete non sequiter, the fact stands that Microsoft deliberately installed a mandatory Firefox extension that could not be easily removed, and by doing so introduced a new vulnerability that lowered the security and privacy of Firefox. If Microsoft wanted Firefox users to use .NET, they would be more than welcome to provide it to users who wanted it, and make the case for it's installation.

The important thing to remember here is Microsoft desperately wants their .NET framework installed on as many of their client's machines as possible so they can start implementing sites using them and put pressure on others to do so, which will in turn help to solidify their platform in a fluid environment where more content and applications are moving towards being browser and OS agnostic. Microsoft knows even with 8.0 IE has all but lost the tech savvy and power user markets, so they figure specifically targeting and installing these plugins in Firefox will help to offset the flight from IE.

I first posted about this issue in May.

This originally appeared on the Annexe, back when I recorded daily puzzles.

This originally appeared on the Annexe, back when I recorded daily puzzles.

Despite working, studying and being geographically isolated from all my close friends and family (except for my sister!) I still look at all the work people like my dad do on one end of the scale, and people who literally have to spend an entire day walking to a well to get enough horrible muddy water just to bring back to their village to drink on the other side to think my problems are pretty trivial. Still, I reckon since 2007 my stress levels feel as though they've been doubling every few months which has resulted in a pretty steep curve!

The Guy Kawasaki over on AllTop linked to an article on DumbLittleMan.com written by a woman going by the name of Krizia entitled 10 Ways to Reduce Stress Without Spending a Dime.

I was instantly drawn to the article because I wanted to see how I could reduce stress without spending a currency of which I do not have access to. Turns out there are ten things you can do to reduce your stress without spending a unit of American currency. I'll talk about the first five to start off with.

1. Turn off the TV: This might sound obvious but watching the financial news channels all day long will only increase your stress level since they report on the latest downs in the stock market on a minute-by-minute base.

I almost never watch television any more unless it's on the computer, but I'm assuming computers and mobile phones would also fit into this. Funny thing is, I find a lighthearted and funny anime series or an episode of Colbert is just what the doctor ordered when I'm feeling stressed; I guess all such things are relative!

2. Go for a walk: This time of the year is so precious, especially if you live in an area with tons of trees. Take time to reconnect with Mother Nature and take time to escape from all the bad news.

I name this the Jerry Novak technique after my very good friend I met up with in Singapore last year and who really helped me out a lot when mummy died. I reckon walking around the park should be number 1, it does absolute wonders. I've read it's not a good idea to get excercise just before you sleep, but it does so much to clear my head before I sleep.

3. Call up a friend: Sometimes, just the fact of spending time with a friend over a cup of coffee or a walk can make a huge difference to the way you feel. Don’t underestimate the power of human contact and friendship when times are difficult.

People scoff when I tell them I use Twitter to keep in near constant contact with friends in far away places and locally without paying a fortune in international text messages. It might not be as good as talking directly, but sometimes some quick banter, a joke or a virtual smack on the back works great. :)

4. Take advantage of free events: Each city has a list of weekly free activities that are open to the public. Grab a newspaper and find out which ones might interest you and go out there and discover something new!

I'm a terribly shy, introverted person, and I think doing this would be incredibly painful to start off with, but would probably be fantastic to do. Now I just need to wrestle time from studying and work…

5. Hang out at your favorite bookstore: This is an activity I’ve always enjoyed so much. You can spend hours just browsing and looking at the latest books. Who knows, this might spark your creative juices!

I've done this since I was allowed to leave the house by myself as a kid, I even do it with friends. Great idea!

Part two coming tomorrow.

Barely had I finished that previous whimsical post about DOS nostalgia than something arrived in the mail that I just have to ramble on about here now too! I'll pretend it was intentional. Yeah, that works :).

In 1994 or 1995 after we'd had our original DOS machine for a while, my dad invested a small fortune upgrading it with a Creative Hex Speed CD-ROM drive and SoundBlaster card. By that point we'd long since upgraded from Windows 3.0 MME to Windows 3.1 which meant we could now finally run some of the Microsoft Home multimedia titles we'd been using at school and at my grandfather's place.

Since then I've long since moved over to the Mac and FreeBSD and don't run Windows any more, but I've been really impressed by how DOSBox has been able to cope under the stress of running Windows 3.1, then running these old CD-ROM titles! So far we have:

• Dangerous Creatures
• Dinosaurs
• Explorapedia: The World of People
• Explorapedia: The World of Nature
• Musical Instruments
• Oceans

It's surprising the company responsible for the tacky and clumsy Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 and Office 2007 interfaces were able to come up with such polished, cool software before. While the idea of the multimedia CD-ROM has long since been eclipsed by the web, these were fantastic products when they came out.

Anyway I can now add Dinosaurs to our collection (well look at that, I already did!) having picked it up on eBay for $8 including shipping!

I wasn't born when the DEC PDP-8 computer came out and was only a few months old when the Commodore 128D did with it's Zilog Z80 awesomeness, so the earliest nostalgic computer memories I have are of our old DOS machine from the early 90s. As I've said here many times before we ran DOS with PowerMenu and originally Windows 3.0 with Multimedia Extensions, then Windows 3.1.

In my spare time for the last couple of years I've been collecting legitimate copies of some of the software we used to have on that 486SX tower so I could recreate it in some form of virtual machine on my MacBook Pro or FreeBSD machines for silly, irrelevant, nostalgic purposes. So far I've found DOSBox has been the easiest, lightest and most portable solution to use, even if it is a little slower. I consider slower a feature though, makes it feel more authentic :).

In the same manner as our original DOS machine we dubbed the "Melbourne Computer" because my dad's job had us living there at the time we bought it, I have DOSBox set up to load PowerMenu upon booting, with our DOS apps available from the menus and Windows configured to launch if we want it. At the time this meant we didn't have too much of our precious 4.0MiB of RAM being used by Windows when we only wanted to run DOS apps like XTreeGold or WordPerfect, and games like Commander Keen, Lemmings and SimCity Classic! I was born in the 1980s, but I grew up in the 90s :).

Anyway I had a point for this post, but I long since lost sight of it and rambled on for a few paragraphs about silly nostalgia. Perhaps I'll get back to what I was supposed to be posting about some other time.

Comment I just overheard someone make in class:

Don’t trust Microsoft with their Azure or anything else for backing up your cloud data. They’ll Sidekick it!

Sidekicking actually makes for a really a good verb! Perhaps it could be extended to refer to any cloud data loss that hasn't been adequately backed up, or data lost on services people have developed an ill advised over-dependency on. Or false advertising and breach of contract regarding data integrity and security.

This originally appeared on the Annexe, back when I recorded daily puzzles.

There seems to be a theme developing here. In part one of my mid semester walk around the park photo set I had images of ducks and other aviary animal critter thingys, and in part two I had photos of plants that looked like breakfast cereals. True story.

Here we have some photos of flowers I thought were particularly pretty and all that. If anything these serve to show I have yet to master the art of composition, but at least they make nice desktop backgrounds :). You can also view the full Flickr gallery.

Two Twitter posts in a row? Sorry, it won't happen again!

There's a new grey area for Twitter accounts. Where as before I'd either see a real person/organisation/whatnot or a spam bot when clearing out my followers list, there are an increasing number of bots that's sole purpose is simply to look for keywords tweeted by people, and either repost them or automatically respond. Both have the consequence of sending me a tweet because they've used my @rubenerd handle, which when done enough times during the course of a day gets old fast.

A retweet from a real person is fantastic, it means people who otherwise wouldn't be following me can see what I'm posting, and it shows people are interested in what I'm saying. When a bot retweets me merely because they're trawling through current tweets searching for keywords though, its somewhat less fantastic. Grilled cheese sandwiches have cheese in them.

I positively loathe these arbitrary lists of the "types of Twitter users" that people seem overly compelled to produce with dull regularlity, but in this case I think it makes sense because we're dealing with a specific phenomena. So far these are the kinds of keywords bots I can identify:

Keyword bots as a service

These include bots that search for specific topics such as a location or a company and retweet them, so people interested in a topic can subscribe and check out who’s discussing it. While a great idea in theory, the same results can be achieved by using a dedicated search in clients such as TweetDeck that don’t also annoyingly ping the people who’s tweets have been reposted.

Keyword bots as marketing

This is spam, plain and simple. Every time I talk about web hosting to another Twitter user, I get a flurry of spam messages from bots that have detected my use of the phrase "web host". These result in a block and a report to @spam.

Keywords bots for… nothing!

These are retweets generated by bots based on the most arbitrary, pointless criteria. This afternoon I’ve been retweeted and had messages sent to me because bots searching for the phrases "mum", "how about that?", "isn’t it" and "wow" picked up tweets of mine. I guess these could be fun for a few people, but as the number of these increase and drown out messages from people who I care about, I’m getting closer to blocking them and reporting them to @spam too.

If you're a Twitter-er-er-er-er, what do you think of these Twitter bot whatsits? Are they harmless and I'm overreacting, or do they annoy you too?