Rubenerd

Today's spam message which I picked up while combing through the spam folders for false positives is one which advertises a cheap source of computer software:

There is no cheaper source of original and perfectly working software.

Ciao! THE FINANCIAL CRISIS? Save your money!
Register and get a DISCOUNT of up to 90% for all our software!

-Buy, Download and Install right now!
-English, Deutsch, French, Italy, Spanish Version

[URI REMOVED]

All popular software for PC and MAC!

The Financial Crisis? Save Money!
We will send you a special code and you will receive a discount of up to 90% on all our softwares!

Save on your software purchasing programs at absolutely low prices. Huge selection of programs! All European languages versions of programs and applications! No trial or demo versions! Original soft only!

Purchasing software you can be sure you get perfectly working software, in case you are not satisfied, we offer money refund. Quick response and advice on how to install your software are guaranteed.

For what it's worth I did check out their site with NoScript safely turned on and cookies disabled and their site looks pretty swish, but unlike a bricks and mortar business what a website looks like tells you little about it's integrity. The fact they only made a few spelling mistakes on this message impressed me though!

Anyway onto their claim: I already know several "cheaper source[s]" for original, high quality and perfectly working computer software, and I reckon they're even cheaper still! the FreeBSD Ports System, NetBSD's pkgsrc, Arch Linux's AUR, Debian apt-get, Mac OS X and Darwin's MacPorts and Fink…

Couldn't help it, why just talk about spam when you can squeeze in some advocacy too while you're at it?

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

20:55 – Fun with dealing with broken corrupt backups, misleadingly labelled auto rent payments and my former webhost Servage now that I'm safely typing this from Segment Publishing!

Am particularly flustered and fast talking which saves on file download times for your convenience. Thank you.

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

This photo has nothing to do with this post whatsoever.

Hidey ho everyone, just a quick heads up. While I was able to get the redirects all working well from the old dedicated website to the new Rubenerd Show category here, the new RSS feed has the heading "Rubenerd Blog > Show" instead of "Rubenerd Show" which means if you're subscribed with iTunes or another client it might mess up your playlists.

I'm trying to find a way to edit WordPress's feed-rss2.php file to allow for different ones for each category so this will work. I've already hacked the theme to allow for separate content depending on categories so I'm hoping this isn't too much trouble. The new theme I'm working on and will be unveiling next month also does this really well.

I'll drink some Pepsi while I figure this out.

Sorry guys!

It's been a while since I filled in another of these LivingSocial Top Five lists I've grown so attached to, so this afternoon I created and filled in a new list entitled My Favourite Heathen Tomes!" I figure at best only a few billion people follow each of the major religions meaning the majority of the people on Earth will be going to Hell including me, so there's no point trying to work against it right? ^_^

• On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin
• The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins
• The Portable Atheist, Christopher Hitchens
• The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, Sam Harris
• The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster Bobby Henderson

I'm not quite sure why I find images like this so heartening. Perhaps it's because he looks like… a real human being. And there are many more where that came from.

The eerie thing is, no sooner had I viewed this picture on Flickr than The Scorpions "Wind of Change" started playing in iTunes. Synchronicity?

As a blogger there are many cool things Google Reader can display for you regarding your site's feed, one of which is a graph displaying the times of day posts are most often generated, such as my site above. The light blue bars represent items posted.

While I've known for a while I tend to prefer writing in the evenings (usually with a hot cup of tea to relax), I was surprised by the extent to which the numbers were skewed to the early evening, and again much later. According to the graph, my most productive blogging hours on average are 23:00 and 01:00! I knew I tended to write later, but… damn!

Now it's true that during the day I've got studying and work going on, plus other life distractions like getting rude phone calls from people in my high school expecting technical support for free even though they haven't spoken to me in months. With this in mind it's understandable I'd write later in the evening when the day is starting to wind down and there's less stuff going on. But… 01:00?

Then I started thinking that I tend to have the most thoughts, am the most mentally alert and (in a cruelly ironic way) by far the most awake in the late evening, and given the sleeping patterns of many of my uni friends this isn't an unusual situation! Since I started my new treatment these symptoms have been substantially reduced and I've been more easily able to sleep during regular hours, but I still find a disproportionate number of ideas and solutions to problems come to me really late at night.

I wonder if other programmers, or scientists, or musicians, or artists, or jaffle makers come up with some of their best creations late at night? I know both my parents certainly didn't in science and art respectively, at least to the best of my knowledge.

When I’m alone at night
Watching those re-runs of Dragnet
Catching those rays of electro-light
Love pulls at me like a magnet
When I’m alone at night

~~ Verse from "Alone at Night" by Michael Franks, my favourite singer/songwriter since I was a kid.

A few years ago when I was obsessed with lucid dreaming I kept a dream diary on my PDA next to my bed, nowadays I have a notes page on my iPhone dedicated to random sporadic thoughts I have during the night. If I created a blog post for each one, I could fill up a phone book. I exaggerate, but you get my point. I don't know what I would ever do with this stuff, but it seems a shame to let it go to waste, even if all I write down is "Athenian LCD columns" or "baking colour". What the heck do those mean?!

My dad has been learning about Buddhism for several years now and one technique they teach you is controlling the thoughts in your mind to achieve a state of mindfulness. They say the mind is constantly thinking about things not related to the task at hand, some of which can be useful for longer term problem solving, but it can also impede on your ability to finish a task. One such task is sleep: to sleep better they say you should attempt to bring long trains of thought under control and move them from your mind. Easier said than done I imagine!

Anyway it's getting close to 01:00 and I have a ton of stuff in the morning, perhaps it's time for sleep. Why even this blog post itself was merely a rambling brain dump… perhaps the reason why I tend to blog at such late hours of the night is because my brain is trying to rid itself of nonsense before I sleep! Hey, I could be onto something here.

Night night.

AdelaideNow is reporting that Twitter has a far lower retention rate of other sites such as Facebook or presumably GeoCities back in the late 1990s. So?

It really bugs me when people attempt to adopt old media principals such as ratings and retention rates and apply them to websites to draw the same conclusions. I’ve long since thought ratings for television shows were suspect, but online they make even less sense, if that’s possible.

For example, according to my server logs I have a retention rate of 33.3% which is in a similar league to Twitter. Therefore, I must be as successful as Twitter is, by golly gee whiz wow! When do I get my large swaths of venture capital?

Such ratings also don’t take into account how sites are used. For example Facebook may have a higher retention rate simply because people log in to check messages then leave again; the nature of Twitter is that you’re generally posting messages or not logging in at all. And who’s to say the 70% of people sticking with Facebook are better than the 40% or so of people who stick with Twitter? That’s the problem with quantitative and qualitative analysis, just doing one doesn’t tell you anything.

Even in spite of my own vested interests in the service as an avid user and fan when all other social networks have failed me in the past, I can confidently say Twitter is doing just fine.

Clipmarked from AdelaideNow:

MORE than 60 per cent of Twitter users have stopped using the micro-blogging service a month after joining, according to Nielsen Online research.

“Twitter has enjoyed a nice ride over the last few months, but it will not be able to sustain its meteoric rise without establishing a higher level of user loyalty,” said David Martin, Nielsen Online’s vice president for primary research.

Martin said that when Facebook and MySpace were emerging networks like Twitter their retention rates were twice as high and they now have retention rates of nearly 70 per cent.

Reclaiming my blog at Technorati with the new address. I like the way you don't have to include this link in your header information anymore, good move.

The last time I claimed a blog with Technorati was back in 2005 when I was 19. If you view my Technorati profile you can still see my profile picture that I haven't changed since then. Face is the same but my hair is certainly much longer!

Photo from the GE Global Research Blog

Reading an article Big Tom shared on Google Reader, I came across a post on the GE Global Research Blog regarding a breakthrough in material development that could lead to optical disks with a 500GB data capacity. One can only imagine how many jaffle recipes this could contain.

ASIDE: I was going to say I "stumbled" upon a post rather than "came across", but one Web 2.0 service has somehow ruined that phrase for me!

Reading further in, it appears the holographic technology that would make such large capacities possible is due to the data being stored in three dimensions by altering the reflectivity of certain areas of the disc. In traditional optical media such as CDs and DVDs the data is instead encoded as a series of pits or by causing areas to become transparent in the case of recordable media.

The potential uses for this technology are huge. The BBC reported a series of Hollywood movies could be stored instead of purchasing multiple BluRay discs, but that the market for such discs is uncertain. I guess it's natural to gravitate towards movies and audio when thinking about these technologies, but I'm far more interested in data storage, specifically data archiving.

It seems whenever a new optical recording technology has come along there’s a several year window of opportunity to be able to practically use blank discs to backup data before magnetic hard drives grow too large. With our first CD burner back in 1999 I was able to backup my internal 10GB drive onto 650MB discs without hassle. When we got our first DVD burner we could backup our internal 80GB drive onto 4.5GB disks without hassle. Before the DVD burner, backing up 80GBs worth of data onto CDs would have been a nightmare, just as backing up my current 4TB+ of data would be with DVDs now.

If this new optical technology were to come to pass and become commercially available, it would represent the largest real and percentage term jump in digital optical storage and would once again make backups practical. I could backup my drives without hassle. That is, until hard drive manufacturers develop 10, then 20, then 50, then 100 TB drives and we come crying back to the optical developers to come up with a new disc format to save us!

Unless Iomega comes up with a 10TB Zip disk. I miss my Parallel Port Zip drive and the stylish translucent USB 250MB drive I used with my first iMac. They used to make the cutest clicking noises… until the clicks started getting louder when they ate disks.

A Zip drive ate my homework once when I went to print it at school. I'm serious!