Rubenerd

In March I posted a list of the security and privacy extensions and usability extensions I use with Firefox. Because of the positive feedback I thought I'd create an updated post merging the two and showing some more extensions I've picked up since then. This page will always be available under //rubenerd.com/firefox-extensions/.

What I like about most of these extensions is that they install unobtrusively in the statusbar and only inform you when action needs to be taken; not to mention peace of mind you get from knowing you're using a browser that's far more secure by default. In other words, you don't need to be a security nut to use and benefit from these!

Icon	Name	Description
	NoScript	Disables JavaScript on all pages except for those you explicitly authorise. This is the primary reason to use Firefox!
	BetterPrivacy	Protects from "super cookies" and Flash cookies that can be unscrupulously used to track you
	SSL Blacklist	Warns if SSL certificates are signed by a suspect certificate authority and/or with the vulnerable MD5 algorithm
	PermitCookies	Allows you to disable cookies in Firefox Preferences and only allow sites you trust
	Ghostery	Notifies you of invisible web elements such as web bugs that are designed to track your behaviour
	BlockSite	A simple, lightweight blacklist utility you populate with sites you want to block including elements on other pages that are hosted on said sites
	AdBlock Plus	Removes ads from pages rendering them faster; also blocks attacks that use maliciously malformed ads
	Greasemonkey	Lets you modify how pages work and look. I use it to hack Google Reader into something useful
	LORI	Tracks how long it takes for a site and its elements to load, useful for debugging your own pages
	FoxClocks	Adds any number of world clocks to either your status bar or your bookmarks bar
	FireFTP	Very slick Norton Commander-ish dual pane FTP/SFTP client that launches in it’s own tab
	TreeStyleTabs	A tree-style tab tar, akin to a folder tree. New tabs opened from links are automatically attached to current tab
	British English Dictionary	Let’s you spell colourful words your favourite way ^_^

Chicken wire!?

This is in response to Zombie Plan's aptly titled post called "I Post". I presume he's referring to electronic weblogs and not the philatelic kind, though that's not to say he doesn't engage in that activity as well.

I drink

coffee

I enjoy

typing rambling incessant nonsense

I hate

rudeness and narcissism

I support

the SOS brigade

I love

philosophising

I wish

I had a Farmers Union Iced Coffee

I believe

wearing matching socks is dull

I watch

anime and shows on my Mac not TV

I nerd

therefore I am

I swear

cloudy skies are more beautiful than clear ones

I read

English

I quote

The Blues Brothers. You want out of this parking lot?

I refer to

scientists

I spam

to spread anti-blog-advertising awareness

I live

in two places

I don’t

worry about being an introvert… too much

I caught

a koi pond fish on my iPhone

I am

shy in public

I turned

lids when so instructed

I have

never made it through Clannad

I adore

intelligence and shyness yet also tsundere-ness for some reason!

I would

jam with latin jazz bands, if I could play an instrument

I spend

Singapore dollars in Australia by mistake constantly

I drink

because I like German beer, not to get drunk

I geocache

and I’m dangerous!

I let

other people fix my washing machine

I have

never been to Saskatchewan

I work

and am thankful I can

I listen

with my ears

I obsess

about one particular song for weeks

I sometimes

blog about outdated software probably no one else cares about

I make

obscure edits to the Whole Wheat Radio wiki that probably don’t really help the actual mission but are fun

I tell

people I’m hilarious otherwise they wouldn’t realise it

I think

I exist, probably

I take

my coffee without sugar

I failed

at keeping these answers succinct

I don’t

create useless blog posts like this one

The all new FreeBSD 7.2 with the all new svelte Xfce 4.6.0 desktop running in VMware Fusion on my MacBook Pro.

If you love FreeBSD as much as me you probably already know about this, but FreeBSD 7.2 has officially been released. I'm really excited about all this good stuff, particularly point 2 shown below in the annoucement. Jails are another reason why I've stuck to FreeBSD instead of GNU/Linux, and now being able to assign mutiple addresses means they're even closer to a virtual machine alternative. Thinking about the possibilities is making my head spin! I'll be looking into it further and posting more about Jails sometime soon.

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE. This is the third release from the 7-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 7.1 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights:

• support for fully transparent use of superpages for application memory
• support for multiple IPv4 and IPv6 addresses for jails
• csup(1) now supports CVSMode to fetch a complete CVS repository
• Gnome updated to 2.26, KDE updated to 4.2.2
• sparc64 now supports UltraSparc-III processors

For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the online release notes and errata list, available at:

• http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/7.2R/relnotes.html
• http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/7.2R/errata.html

For more information about FreeBSD release engineering activities, please see http://www.FreeBSD.org/releng/.

I downloaded the FreeBSD 7.2 DVD image from Internode's mirror because our internet connection here is capped (yuck), but uploads aren't capped so I'll be setting up the torrent from the FreeBSD Bittorrent tracker so I can seed the heck out of it!

As I've said every time, I wish to thank all the people at the FreeBSD project for their tireless efforts. Combined, they continue to create and develop some of the most beautiful software in the world, and I consider it a honour that I'm allowed to use it. Congratulations everyone.

I seem to be having trouble with Google Reader this afternoon, it won't let me comment on stories (perhaps it's frustrated I haven't cooked a grilled cheese sandwich in a few days). So instead I'm posting the story summaries here and commenting on them with Clipmarky goodness!

Slashdot: Google To Air Chrome Ads On TV

Google plans on advertising with spots promoting its Chrome browser this weekend. Google Japan had already released a 30-second video promoting Chrome on YouTube, but the company will distribute that video through the Google TV Ads network this weekend as an experiment to see if it can drum up interest in Chrome. Google advertised their browser on the New York Times’ website on Wednesday.

I get the feeling the kind of people who would be technologically literate enough now to install software after watching a TV advertisement are the kind of people who are mostly watching shows online anyway not on TV.

Aside from the evening news on the ABC or SBS here in Australia or BBC World and CNN International in Singapore, I can't remember the last time I watched television. Or TV. TV or Television, both.

I seem to be having trouble with Google Reader this afternoon, it won't let me comment on stories (perhaps it's frustrated I haven't cooked a grilled cheese sandwich in a few days). So instead I'm posting the story summaries here and commenting on them with Clipmarky goodness!

RichardDawkins.net: Bloomington Rejects ‘You Can Be Good Without God'; Lawsuit Underway

Bloomington was first on the Indiana Atheist Bus Campaign’s list of places it hoped to run bus ads. However, the city has rejected our campaign’s slogan, ‘You Can Be Good Without God.’ This is deeply disappointing to our campaign’s members; we all love Bloomington and were very much hoping to run ads in our hometown along with many other cities.

Go to original Clipmark >

I have a hard time believing that faith in Gods is a nesissary precondition to being good. In fact, I'd wager more than a few grilled sandwiches that people who don't believe are often more moral because they're not just doing things for a divine reward or because they're afraid of the divine Hell punishment if they don't, they're moral because they they know it's the right thing to do.

Conversely, I have a hard time believing my religious friends who are moral, honest and caring people would regress into immoral, nasty people if religion disappeared, or that they're only friendly people because they're religious. It's an insult to their character.

What I find interesting is that Christianity uses the threat of everlasting Hell to scare people into believing, but Judaism doesn't: at least not in the same sense. When I was really studying religion a few years ago I was told that the closest the Jewish faith has to a Hell is "Gehenna" which is more akin to purgatory or a waiting area where wicked people are sent for a definite period of time, measured in months. Judaism also has what I would consider an enlightened, almost Buddhist philosophy that hell is also a mental state where the feelings of shame you have is the punishment itself. I don't believe in the Jewish faith as much as I don't believe in any other for the reasons I've stated many times here, but it's an interesting observation.

Now I really am going to Hell aren't I? ^_^

After I had decided to replace Arch Linux with the latest version of FreeBSD on my Armada M300 (reasons for another post), I decided during the partitioning stage to save 512MiB of space. Why? So that instead of relegating my DOS nostalgia to virtual machines on my MacBook Pro I could dual boot this subnotebook with it! Genius right? Don't answer that.

When I first bought Connectix Virtual PC (Wikipedia) for my first iMac back in the day it came with a fully licenced ISO disc image of IBM PC DOS 2000 which essentially was PC DOS 7 with Y2K and Euro character support, so this morning I burned a copy of it to disc and loaded it up!

Even 2002 era, 600MHz hardware with 320MiB of RAM is still ridiculously high for DOS so it loads instantly. I'm also pleasantly surprised by how much of it works right out of the box! The generic drivers for the CD-ROM let me access the optical drive in the docking station; the bundled MOUSE.COM detects and lets me use the touchpad; and the bundled HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE can assign high memory without any the problems I had when running PC DOS in VirtualBox. When I've had more time to play around with it (and when I swap in UMBPCI, Cute Mouse etc) I'll post my experiences here. Suffice to say preliminary results are extremely encouraging.

Before anyone comments here asking why, I decided not to use FreeDOS because their Windows 3.x support is still in the experimental stage and it's still has some issues with some old games. Even though we also still have a valid licence for MS-DOS 6.22 I also chose not to use it because PC DOS 7 has some really nice features that can save much more conventional memory, plus it comes with all the tools Microsoft omitted from MS-DOS 5 like the DOSSHELL and I prefer the IBM E Editor to MS-DOS EDIT. I'm also intrigued by REXX having never used it before.

I think it was my good friend Felix Tanjono who said on Twitter that no amount of virtualisation is good enough, sometimes you just have to go all the way and dual boot! I agree. There's something cool about being asked whether you want to boot PC DOS or FreeBSD… the first OS I used versus the latest. I'm a sucker for symbolic crap like that.

So what'd you do on your Sunday? ^_^

It seems the quantity of spam isn't the problem anymore!

When it comes to computer security, with the exception of certain operating systems produced by an obscure software company in Redmond, the weakest link in computer security is… us.

For the longest time I haven't worried about security when it comes to email, and I suspect most of us haven't. We don't open email attachments, we don't click on links embedded in spam messages; web email systems like Gmail even disable images unless we explicitly declare we want to see them. These systems work on a system of trust; if we trust where the messages come from, we eschew these precautions.

What's disconcerting is the rise in socially engineered attacks. These are emails (or instant messages, or Tweets, and so on) that instead of being sent in bulk are tailored to the person they're being sent to. In a similar manner to Trojan Horses these emails are written disguised as a message from a loved one, colleague or grilled cheese sandwich and are designed to pray on our trusting nature of said parties to deliver their malicious payloads, whether they be attachments or links to websites with malicious code or downloads.

ASIDE: To be fair this isn’t the only attack that leverage trust. Many email worms propagate by sending copies of themselves to people in the address books of a host’s infected machine. This is still on the surface an indiscriminate blanket attack though not real social engineering.

As of this afternoon I've now had three such emails sent to me: one person had the gall to masquerade as my dead mother. I've decided to assume this person saw my mum's name written here several times and thought they'd use it not realising she died young from a terminal condition.

But we're getting sidetracked. The point is these attacks are real and are happening. This turns the trust model we've been taught on it's head; indeed we should now suspect every message we receive. Verify the person sending it is who they claim to be by checking the email address and if necessary the entire header of the email itself given email addresses can be spoofed. Our language is like a finger print: if they're writing doesn't sound like them it may be cause for concern.

My Facebook inbox… another thing to check!

Is it any wonder people are giving up on email and are flocking to services like Facebook or Twitter? These platforms have their own risks too, but at least 95% of Facebook or Twitter accounts aren't spam!

ASIDE: Pre-empting any comments that statement may generate along the lines of "but Ruben, 95% of Twitter tweets ARE spam, or at least silly nonsense" I counter with: "be careful with that joke, it’s an antique!".

I guess the honeymoon period with email is long over, time to move on. Whatever happened to the idea that everyone has their own certificate they digitally sign messages with?

And this great flood swept away this artificial lake. It’s not there anymore!
Wait… that’s not funny!

John: I even got to [couchsurf] at the Swedish Embassy in Prague!
Audience: WOW!
Esther: Do you have a couch?
John: Well not really, I’m on tour you see!

Listen through the Whole Wheat Radio website or you can use the another stream. You might also want to contribute to the Tip Jar and buy some CDs.

Apparently my site summarised in one picture!

Another one of the great things about having your website hosted with SegPub is the Urchin Analytics package is provided and turned on by default. It's like Google Analytics on steroids and without the need for JavaScript. It's also light years ahead of Servage's crude listing of hits and referral pages.

ASIDE: This software does some cool stuff but one thing it does NOT do is log personally identifiable information. I’ve contacted the support team and confirmed this; if it did log such information I would turn it off.

Aside from merging my show and blog together nothing has really changed here, so it means I get a first real look at where my traffic is coming from and what the most popular content is for the first time!

According to the "Top Content" screen, the following are the most accessed parts of this site in descending order, with server only elements like robots.txt removed. After #9 the percentages suddenly drop to statistical insignificance.

Order	URI	Description
#1	/feed/	primary RSS feed
#2	/category/show/feed/	Rubenerd Show podcast feed
#3	/	the home page
#4	/category/anime/	anime related posts… wait what!?
#5	/comments/feed/	people subscribe to the comments?
#6	/category/show/	Rubenerd Show home
#7	/category/thoughts/	people like my rambling?
#8	/tag/whole-wheat-radio/	a Jim Kloss conspiracy
#9	/tag/twitdeck/	a clear misspelling!

While I long suspect as much, it's now confirmed more people read my blog through RSS readers than visit the site itself. I've finally reached the 21st century.

I reckon this picture is even more relevant to this post, but I'd already spent ages on that first picture. Such is life.

What really blew me away was the order of the categories: while I understand the placement of The Show, the Thoughts category is ahead of the primary Software and Internet ones which (at least I thought) were the reasons for this blog's existence!

What's more, the Anime category of all things is overwhelmingly the most popular. I'm really taken aback… I mean there are thousands of otaku online who dedicate their entire lives to reviewing each episode of every single anime produced in history in painstaking detail, and yet a couple of silly posts mostly talking about passing interests or that are merely tagged as anime because I used an anime desktop background on a screenshot get a #4 position. Wild!

Given I just talk about what I'm interested in at any given time while ignoring cohesion and the supposed number 1 rule of blogging (pick a speciality and just focus on it), perhaps it would be worthwhile to focus my efforts given these trends are what people want. Henceforth I will only discuss what Twitter clients Asahina Mikuru uses while she's posting her Thoughts on the Rubenerd Show while listening to Whole Wheat Radio, and the subsequent posts will only be available in RSS. I think.

Or alternatively I could just focus solely on discussing sandwiches of a grilled cheese nature here and that's it. Don't think the thought has never crossed my mind. Jaffles.

Having spent most of my life in apartment buildings or condominiums (or whatever they're called) in Singapore, coming back to Australia to study and living in a HOUSE has taken quite a lot of adjusting. Things like taking the garbage and recycling wheelie bins out to the curb instead of putting stuff down a chute, remembering to lock the doors properly because there ain't no security guards in a foyer, being responsible for taking care of a back yard… it's all strange and foreign for a Sheltered Expat Wealthy-Asian-City Slicker.

My sister's and my latest experience took place late this Thursday night when a cat followed us home and walked inside with us! It was extremely friendly and well groomed but it didn't have a collar so we weren't sure whether it had an owner or not. We didn't know what to do, the weather was so cold and damp outside we felt bad shutting it out, but at the same time we didn't know whether shutting the door and letting it stay overnight was the right thing to do because it could just have been exploring the neighbourhood.

I logged onto Twitter (yes dissenters, Twitter is so useless!) and got some advice from Neal, Frank and Dave and comments from Nurie, Sharon and Andrea. Peter also chimed in suggesting we eat the cat, but I had already supped on a grilled cheese sandwich so it wasn't to be. In a nutshell it's perfectly normal for cats to want to explore and are let out with pet doors installed and whatnot.

ASIDE: Ideally I would have linked to each person and their respective tweet above, but it’s almost 3am and I’m just too tired. Perhaps another time.

Still I was worried sick about this sweet little thing, so right up until now I stayed up with the door open in case it wanted to leave, which it eventually did. I walked outside to see it jump onto a car, spin around a few times, slide down the dew moistened windscreen and dart off into the distance.

I have to be up in a few hours! If the cat's still darting around near our house when I wake up, we'll let him back in then take him to the vet to see if he's been chipped (thanks Neal for that tip). Otherwise we might have to print some flyers and hand them out, or go door to door around the neighbourhood here and ask if anyone's missing a pet.

Hope it's okay, as I said it was a really nice little guy. Well, to be fair I'm not sure whether it was a guy or girl.