Rubenerd

Pardon the French, but it's now official if we didn't already suspect it: the people in charge of old media companies are… well, morons. According to Current.com (thanks to @Tarale for the link), Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton had this to say about the internet:

"I’m a guy who doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet," said Sony Pictures Entertainment chief executive officer Michael Lynton. "Period."

I was going to launch into my own detailed rebuttal discussing how the internet has reduced the barriers to entry for so many creative people and businesses around the world that could not have had their material published and sold before, but why do it when someone else has already said it better. From Slarabee in the comments section:

Of course he does see anything good coming from the internet. Information should only be for those that can afford to buy it, control it and use it to make more money and screw the masses.

If people like Mr Lynton are representing their way of thinking, traditional media companies are in an even more disastrous shape than I ever could have imagined.

Pardon the French again, but… what a jackarse!

As I said on the Whole Wheat Radio chat, I'm not particularly jazzed (ha!) about country but gosh darn I love bluegrass! The Cold Country concert starts Saturday 20:00 Alaskan, Sunday 12:00 Singapore, Sunday 13:30 Adelaide time. And as Jim has reiterated many times: free concert!

Useful Links

• Listen Hi-Fi
• Listen Med-Fi
• Listen Low-Fi
• Listen on website
• Concert photos and information

The verdicts are in!

This could very well have been one of my favourite concerts of all time, and I wasn't even there (so to speak!). My dad was even able to tune in back in Singapore and use the Apple TV to pipe the music to the surround sound system! In fact I'd say we had a great international turnout! This concert literally made my weekend! Thank you so much everyone!!!

Cold Country performing around the world!

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

21:30 – The reason why people hate the iPhone's keyboard is the reason why I love it; Riverdance keyboard typists; the fun of being a shy introvert; evening walks around Mawson Lakes; the Australian Bicentennial; childhood steam locomotive nostalgia; the New South Wales 3801 streamliner and the Victorian R761; and obsessively wearing out VHS tapes!

Recorded in Adelaide, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

UPDATE: For some reason reseating the alt key for the nine millionth time made it work again! Still haven’t got either the space bar or the cursor keys working properly, but I’m going to keep fiddling if there’s a chance I can get this working without having to buy a new one! Here’s hoping…

As if the lords were spiting me for talking in such glowing terms about how much I love my tiny Armada M300 subnotebook and think it's the ultimate budget-budget netbook, yesterday morning while sipping a cup of coffee I managed to pour a third of the cup onto the keyboard. Without a keyboard cover like my venerable MacBook Pro has, the liquid got under all the keys but fortunately didn't get much further than that.

Unplugging it, removing the battery and hard drive, leaving it to dry out and using a hair dryer with the heat turned off has saved it, but unfortunately the keyboard is a complete write-off. Despite exhaustively taking off the keys, cleaning them and replacing them back on the circuit board, the ALT key doesn't respond (a disaster for a FreeBSD guy), the space bar doesn't pop back up properly and all but the down cursor keys seem to have a mind of their own. It's heartbreaking that this beautiful little machine lasted from 2002 until now only to be damaged by a friggen cup of coffee!

Fortunately there seems to be plenty of people selling replacement keyboards for this model of notebook for around AU$70.00 including shipping, but it means the money I'd been putting aside to buy the discounted "David Francey Starter Kit" from David Francey's website and some prescription sunglasses (I've been told they can help prevent headaches during the day) will have to go towards that instead. Bummer.

Isn't it frustrating when instead of buying something new that you want or need you have to buy a replacement for something that was working fine before? I guess it's a life lesson in Murphey's Law, right?

On the plus side, the Intel Xeon stickers I picked up for a couple of bucks recently look smashing on it! Before this disaster happened I had one person comment in a coffee shop that they very much doubted a server CPU was in my old notebook, and that it was a great idea they'd be doing now too!

Demonstration from the Ghostery website

One of the extensions I added to my recent Mozilla Firefox extensions post that I hadn't talked about before is a privacy gem called Ghostery. Whenever you visit a website that has hidden web bugs (bugs as in spying not errors) to track your online behaviour, it briefly superimposes a translucent message in the top right corner of the window informing you of such. It also adds a cute little Pacman-like monster to your status bar that persistently identifies how many bugs are on the current page.

As was the case when I realised how many sites break when JavaScript is only selectively enabled with NoScript and when cookies are only selectively enabled with PermitCookies, it's been a real eye opener to see just how much snooping is happening on various sites I visit with this extension installed.

Some sites have nothing, others are perfectly harmless such as Whole Wheat Radio which only employs Google Analytics:

The current record for the most number of bugs on pages I frequent since installing this extension is Mashable which ranged from six to eight depending on the page. They look innocuous enough to me, but the number does seem a bit excessive:

As with much of security, the number of bugs on pages isn't necessarily an automatic indication of how trustworthy a site is, though I would propose it does indicate where the priorities of the web developer and/or the site owners are. What's more important to notice is what the bugs are.

My browsing habits haven't really changed since installing Ghostery, but as with all my other security and privacy extensions it's a part of my web defence kit which helps me identify material on sites so I can make informed decisions.

I didn't "reuse" this image from previous posts, I… "recycled" it!

Don't look now, but according to the Official Rubenerd Blog Counter depicted in the header of this Official Rubenerd Blog, this is post number 1666. If we afford ourselves a favourite trick of the Nostradameans (the fans of the "bad poet with a paranoid streak" as Penn Jillette put it) we can derive meaning from this figure by dropping the "1" therefore leaving ourselves with the number 666. Scary stuff! Now if only I can remember why this number is scary. Is it because there was 666 Rascals? Is it because it's a triangular number? Probably some myth thing right?

The last time this number appeared here was in early 2008 when we all witnessed the publishing of blog post number 666. Funny how these kinds of things come around full circle isn't it? I don't get it.

If you missed them, feel free to refer to the previous Rubenerd Fun Facts posts (part one, part two, part three, part four, part five). And as usual, feel free to take notes. Danke.

	Despite the name Swine Flu, most pigs still can’t fly.
	Due to a clerical typographic error in 2003, Neal O’Caroll was briefly mistaken for a cut of young beef.
	Industrial heat exchangers often can’t be returned for refunds.
	Permanent makers are made out of plastic so they are.
	NetBSD is the most commonly used operating system on fishing trawlers.
	Fun fact blog posts are up to 12x more useless even than blog posts talking about maximising conventional memory in DOS. Speaking of which…
	Acceptance by the general public is the Final Frontier.
	If moe-ness were a currency, Mikuru could buy her own reality given she can’t just dream it up like Haruhi.
	Western Digital hard drives are manufactured in the East.
	Anime figures make for expensive but cute paper holders.
	Despite the name, most vampires find it difficult to use TrueCrypt.
	Computers have to have their “Xeon” stickers removed in Scientology strongholds to avert fears of demonic possession.

Having used Clipmarks for a few months now I feel I can finally do a proper review of it. For those who don't know, Clipmarks uses a Firefox plugin to let you easily "clip" parts of a web page, then comment on them. Once you've submitted a clipping to your profile page you can then submit it to your own blog or to a slew of other sites. Other people can vote on your comments or leave some of their own, and if they're interested in your stream they can subscribe.

In a nutshell, the community is great and clipping parts of pages is very easy to do. For me Clipmarks has filled a nice niche between just bookmarking entire pages on Delicious, and commenting on stories in Google Reader.

Where I've had issues with Clipmarks is it's blog export feature. My idea was to use Clipmarks to generate the HTML for quotes I could easily import into my blog here and comment on instead of using <blockquote>. Unfortunately the code it generates and subsequently exports has several issues:

• It isn’t W3C XHTML 1.x compliant which breaks validation on pages here
• It uses tables and other inefficient presentation markup which results in a large mess of spaghetti code that’s an order of magnitude bigger than a simple <blockquote>
• Because it’s derived verbatim from what you’ve clipped, if the site you’ve clipped uses invalid markup this results in errors being cross pollinated as it were
• The default colour scheme looks acceptable in sites with light backgrounds with dark text, but not on the default colour scheme here

I think the problem isn't with Clipmarks, but how I tried to use it. While I was using it for text, Clipmarks can support any payload in it's container including images, Flash videos and the like. In this light, some of my criticisms above are moot.

For now I've worked around the problem by using Clipmarks to save text from pages, then simply import what I clipped here using <blockquote> tags. The result isn't reduced work which was what I wanted in the first place, but it still means others can comment on my clips over on their site.

With the exception of most country music, I've thoroughly enjoyed listening to music on Whole Wheat Radio when I can. I pretend it's primarily because I enjoy supporting independent musicians, but the main selfish reason is actually because I just like the music!

Of the artists I've heard and subsequently researched myself is David Francey, a Scottish musician who lives in Canada. Usually I'm not such at a loss for words to describe music (or wine, or coffee), but for some reason this was the best review I could give!

I know I tagged David’s artist page here ages ago, but having just heard him sing again I felt I needed to put something here. As I’ve eluded to previously here I’m not a music expert (and the irony isn’t lost on me that I’m saying this on a music site) and therefore don’t know what words I’m supposed to use to describe this art form, but I do know what I like and I love David Francey’s music. A frustratingly vague review I know, but just putting it out there :). –Ruben (talk/contribs) 23:41, May 14, 2009 (AKDT)

A few of his CDs are on my CD Baby wish list. When I get paid for my next project I might indulge in some, along with some delightfully offbeat hilarity in the form of Eric Schwartz. ^_^

ANZ and Westpac bank buildings on an appropriately drizzly day in central Adelaide, by Dodge 76 on Flickr

After reading the headline, I was expecting this news story from the ABC (Australia) to be about predatory lending,exploitation or other unwarranted behavior on the part of financial institutions. Alas no, it was a report on how people are becoming victims to people who steal their credit card information, not banks!

ABC News: Credit card fraud on the rise: report

By Online business reporter Michael Janda and staff

An industry report has identified a rise in the rate of internet and telephone credit card fraud.

Figures from the Australian Payments Clearing Association (APCA) show the credit card fraud rate was 45 cents per $1,000 in 2007, but in 2008 it had climbed to 53 cents.

Original Clipmark link

There were very good points regarding why banks themselves don't in fact do more to prevent fraud which I encourage you to look at if you're interested.

Several comments though were about using your credit card to shop online, but they were mostly limited to discussing virus protection. I usually just click the "Agree" link next to comments because people on the ABC News website are generally more eloquent and succinct than I am, but this time I figured an explanation was in order.

Kudos to people saying they were expecting the article to be about exorbitant credit interest rates, I did too!

As for the technical question, virus protection and firewalls are only a tiny part of the equation. Especially if you run Microsoft Windows you absolutely MUST keep your system current with patches and security fixes. Viruses, worms and trojan horses (three very different beasts) take advantage of weaknesses that often have already been fixed but that people haven’t bothered to guard against. Confiker is the latest example of this.

There’s also the issue of “social engineering” where instead of blindly sending messages out to millions of addresses, they watch your online activity so they can gather enough information about you to send you an email as a trusted person who you may let your guard down for.

If you use Mozilla Firefox (anyone still using Internet Explorer is dumb, sorry that’s just accepted fact now) the SSL Blacklist plugin from CodeFromThe70s.org helps guard you against suspicious “secure” web authorities, and the “BetterPrivacy” plugin (just Google it) helps guards against the next generation of malicious cookie spying. The weakest part of any system though is the USER, so just stay vigilant and remember if something is too good to be true it usually is. Like those misleading “low balance transfer” advertisements!

In retrospect I shouldn't have called Internet Explorer users dumb. Some casual computer users may still not know, other people like my dad wish they could change but can't because their company machines can't be altered.