Another SegPub outage this afternoon, this time lasting from around 14:32 to 14:52 South Australia time. Fortunately I wasn't using the domain for any of my afternoon classes like the last outage did.
This time I did a traceroute and checked the status of the site using a foreign server and recorded the results. I'm hoping this isn't becoming a regular occurrence, but I'm going to be keeping my own records of such events.
Nicole Loux on the Mozilla blog announced today a series of security fixes for Firefox which are now available for download, bringing their two current supported streams up to 3.5.3 and 3.0.14. If you use Firefox, you'll want to update yourself ASASP [sic].
Perhaps even bigger news (and I can't find the gosh darn link where I read this) is Mozilla might be officially retiring support for the Firefox 3.0.x series 30 days. For those of us holding back on upgrading to 3.5.x due to severe stability problems, we knew this day would come, but nonetheless it is disconcerting. As soon as I find out where I read this I'll post the link.
I'll be upgrading my machines to 3.0.14 and will continue to use it for as long as it's supported. I'm hoping by the time it comes to upgrade to the 3.5.x series it'll be more usable. If not, I might have to start looking for alternatives to my privacy and security plugins on other browsers. Might end up going back to zippy Camino on the Mac, not sure about FreeBSD and Debian.
Having been better for a couple of years compared to their less than stellar record in 2007, recent stability problems with Twitter have highlighted its vulnerability from a technical standpoint, though it's not the problem I wanted to talk sweepingly about here.
It occurred to me after reading that the free and open source Laconi.ca software powering Identi.ca had changed its name to StatusNet (for some reason) how great it would be to be able to sent Twitter @replies to people over there, and to be able to get replies back. Social networks are only as valuable as the people who use them, and for me nobody in my life excursively uses Identi.ca over Twitter, though that could change.
The problem with social networks like Twitter is that we're limited to having conversations with people using the same service, much like ICQ and Yahoo Messenger for example. The solution then was much the same as what Identi.ca is trying to do now with status services and microblogs: create a free and open alternative in the form of Jabber. Unfortunately while Jabber is used by a sufficiently large group of people it suffers from the same problems as many free and open source projects; while it is a viable alternative, aside from possibly being slightly more reliable and robust it doesn't offer any compelling reason for the vast majority of people to switch from what they're currently using, in this case Identi.ca to Twitter.
The other approach to fixing the problem with closed IM networks was kind of kludgy but was accepted because it worked in current reality: services such as Pidgin and Adium aggregated many disparate networks into one application. The same can be said with next-generation software such as TweetDeck now where you can import your Twitter, Facebook (and for some reason MySpace) contacts and track what they're doing. The problem with this approach is while such software gives the illusion we're all talking together, in reality I still can't reply to a Facebook message with a tweet from my Twitter account. The different networks are presented in the same way, but are entirely separate.
I used to be somewhat a free and open source zealot, but I've come to realise especially in the last few years that free and open source software is much less important than free and open standards, at least in my own opinion. People can create their own walled gardens and closed networks for their own reasons, but they should offer lifeboats in the form of accessible, open protocols and standards that others could write to. As we've seen with the WWW, standards that are implemented [properly] can be an extraordinary way to level the playing field and to allow small, independent services to compete with larger, more established ones.
It is for this reason though why I think we won't ever see direct collaboration between Twitter and Laconi.ca, or FriendFeed or other such services. I love Twitter and it forms a critical part of my life now that I could honestly not imagine not having any more (I really do mean that), but that doesn't mean it doesn't scare me just a little. Though to be fair, it scares me infinitely less than Facebook.
UPDATE: This post should be considered hysterical… wait, sorry…. historical, because I’m fickle and decided to change it back to the Rubenerd Blog. When I saw all the names I’d have to update on all my profiles everywhere and all the people that linked to me, I dropped to the floor and hit my head on the side of the table as I did so. True story.
I guess at least I did get all my stuff merged here. It was painful.
It is with great pride while I incessantly sneeze with spring hay fever that I announce the renaming of the Rubenerd Blog to:
The new name reflects the fact I was sick of the old name, that I folded so much other material from other sites of mine into this in the last few months, and that I've merged so many friggen metadata categories and other such nonsense into simpler categories that actually make sense. I thought it was a clever pun. Oh yeah, and I always sided with Jerry Seinfeld in thinking the word "blog" sounds like a condition with the nasal passages. Speaking of which, I have terrible hayfever, not sure whether I told you.
This is riveting news, I expect I'll be getting calls from major news outlets shortly. I hear Richard Quest wants to dedicate an entire Business Traveller episode to it, and Jim Kloss wants to book me for a speech at the Wheat Palace. I hope they're both willing to pay for my airfares to London and Talkeetna, I'll be blowing all my savings on a new laptop given my MacBook Pro from 2006 kicked the bucket. What did the bucket ever do to deserve such treatment?
Clever right? Right?
In other news, ZombieSkittles is changing the name of his blog to ZombieSkittles GmbH, and Neal O'Carroll is changing the IntoYourHead show to IntoYourHeadPodcast.com True stories.
Wait… you people make no sense!
I didn't think I was going to watch more Saki, but I needed a break from studying a bit this afternoon and I admit I was curious to see whether Saki (the namesake of the series, I wasn't personifying it!) did end up joining the mahjong club or not. Well okay I was pretty much certain she would given that it wouldn't make much sense to have a series named after a person who wasn't in it. I have to tell people I'm hilarious sometimes otherwise they'd forget.
In this episode we learn why Saki claimed she didn't like mahjong, it turns out playing it with her family gave the whole game bad associations. Like with me and Yiftiko, as far as I care the only person I could ever play that with was my mum. I'm assuming her family must have been pretty competitive and brutal for her to be put off it so severely, perhaps they started throwing tiles at her when she won or threatened to, or forced her to eat some of them. Yeah, that must be it.
Uh, you might want to get that checked out Nodoka.
Her Pink Nodokaness really shows her true form in this episode, after we've seen her introduction full of halos, aura and whatnot she comes off as a bit of a spoilt brat in this one. I mean come on, Saki sees her with wings in one scene! I theorised in the previous episode that she must have severe back problems due to the animators giving her such ridiculously large breasts, but perhaps they just make her irritable, in which case I can sympathise (without relating of course). When Saki is tricked into thinking she's playing for +-0 and she wins, Nodoka runs out crying at her defeat and later confides in Saki that it upsets her that someone who didn't really like mahjong beat someone like her who loved it. Humiliation She Wrote!
Hisa… what have you unleashed on the world!!??
Well Saki does some serious thinking and determines it wasn't the mahjong she hated, it was the fact that Ruben played it so much in high school and he still spells the game wrong sometimes much to the irriration of the computer spell checking whatsit. Oh, and she just had bad memories attached to it. When she has a discussion with her dad (her parents split up perhaps?) and does some thinking (hey, I just said that) she decided to join the club after all, even saying innocently that she looks forward to playing against Nodoka again. Zing!
And what's this? The club leader set this all up to fall into place the way it did from the beginning? She's obviously an intelligent and extremely scary person, or she takes credit for random occurances. I tried that once, but the resulting litigation wasn't worth the trouble. I made that up.
Nodoka, do you mind if I wear *pants* next time?
The fanservice was slightly easier to deal with compared to it in episode 01 even though it did seem to still have some… shall we say, "overly opportunistic" camera angles and especially Nodoka's and Saki's clothes do seem to be a bit over the top, especially when the seniors can dress normally. I know different grades have different colours and whatnot, but that seems to be a bit of a leap. I know, I know, it's Gonzo, I should expect it :P.
Hmm, these sparks can’t be good for the felt…
Gonzo made up for this though by still having all the intense electrical lightning effects whenever an epic mahjong move was made which is just awesome! I'm putting this tile down, take THAT! Noooo! Zap! POW! Kablam! Sugoi, no way! Impossible! The classic Batman would have been proud.
There are so many serious anime review sites out there with trillions of screenshots and detailed plot analysis that don't contain pointless anecdotes. POW! Zap! I decided not to do that.
Here's a puzzling philosophical question for all you folk who like a good philosophical puzzle to ponder and whatnot. For the sake of clarity I will contain the cleverishness in a block level element:
Is it still called a "shower" if the water falls backwards?
No.
Sometimes I worry that I'm too funny.
As a greenie, while electronic junk mail frustrates me, it's nothing compared to the frustration I feel when we get snail mail junk here, especially considering we have one of those "No Junk Mail" stickers. I'm starting to think I may have to be more specific. It's such a waste of resources considering very few people want them and often just throw such crap away away.
This latest piece of [expletive] junk mail disuses itself as a legitimate piece of business correspondence with a proper envelope and fake franked stamp. Upon opening though, its just a huge slab of loose leaf advertisements peddling everything from phone contracts to hit men (I presume). Despite not asking for it (opting in) and having a notice on my mailbox stating I did not want it (opting out) they gave it to me anyway.
I already have contracts with Telstra and Optus alas, but as for the rest I will not be purchasing goods from the following folk for supporting such a dodgy enterprise. I'm not linking to their sites so I don't inadvertently give them Google Juice, and I'm showing them in a cloud to make it look less icky. Thank you.
Appropriate photo of plate stacks by Egan Snow on The Wikipedias.
Linked lists are useful for replicating and extending the functionality of object arrays, but they can also be used to replicate other linear strings of data such as a stack. From my high school days as an Apprentice Perl Monk I got used to using push and pop with arrays and hashes; turns out they were functions for a form of stack.
As a crude Java implementation to demonstrate the concept, first I defined Stack and Node classes with constructors to accept a head and payload respectively. The Stack has a header Node. Each Node consists of a payload and the "next" Node.
public class Stack {
Node head;
public Stack(Object payload) {
if (payload)
head = new Node(payload);
}
private class Node {
Object payload;
Node next;
public Node(Object payload) {
this.payload = payload;
}
}
}
The basic push method for the stack pushes (really?!) objects onto the linked list. If there aren't any nodes, I assign the parameter to the head.
public void push(Object payload) {
Node newNode = new Node(payload);
if (head == null)
head = newNode;
else {
newNode.next = head;
head = newNode;
}
}
The pop method is even simpler, it returns the payload in the Node head, then assign head to the next Node, mimicking how a stack [of plates] would work.
public Object pop() {
Object toReturn = head.payload;
head = head.next;
return toReturn;
}
It's very late and I need to pop off to sleep, but tomorrow I'll be trying this out and applying it to some problems. If you can see a mistake or if you have a suggestion on how to make it better, I'd love to get your appreciated feedback :).