Rubenerd

So that I can reference what I use in future posts, I’ve already written a list of security and privacy extensions I use with Mozilla Firefox and commented that they’re the primary reasons I choose to use it over every other browser. Using a browser without those extensions (or equivalents) makes me feel naked and scared now! You can take that however you want.

I’ve installed far too many extensions over the years that I’ve later never used, but these are the usability ones that have stuck.

Adblock Plus

Absolutely essential, it reduces irritating distractions on pages and makes them render much faster because you’re downloading less stuff. Some people complain about Adblock Plus. I ask how many of them own a DVR which skips ads, or how many of them have a WC break or a snack instead of watching sponsors of a sports event. Enough said.

Greasemonkey

Greasemonkey ets you modify the appearance and function of individual sites and pages by clicking and automagically installing scripts from sites such as UserScripts and UserStyles. Once you have scripts installed, they work transparently and so fast you can’t tell they’re even there.

I started using this when I thought Google messed up Reader’s interface.

FireFTP

I mostly use the shell to quickly get sftp work done, but for tedious and repetitive tasks FireFTP makes it really simple. If you’re one of the few who haven’t tried it, it launches itself as a tab within Firefox and uses the split file manager metaphor like Norton Commander with the left pane showing your local drive and the right showing the remote server.

FireFTP is honestly polished enough to be a standalone application.

British English Dictionary

I find it curious that even if you explicitly download the "English (GB)" versions of Firefox, it still comes with the American spelling dictionary which battling with gets pretty old fast.

This extension is fairly old as far as extensions go, but it still works even in the lastest Firefox 3 builds. And besides, you could argue spelling doesn’t change as fast as builds of an open source project do. Wait, ignore what I just typed; that’s a Pandora’s box I would rather leave shut!

If you don’t like being scolded for not peppering your words with Zed, grab it!

FoxClocks

Adds a world clock to either your status bar or your bookmarks bar; I choose the latter.Insanely useful to have right in your browser where you’re most likely to be viewing things and conversing with people from other parts of the world.

For example, I can check just by looking at it what the time is in Singapore when I’m in Adelaide and vica versa, as well as the eastern Aussie states, the UK, Talkeetna, Toronto, Tokyo… I thought that was some clever alliteration.

LORI

The Life-of-request info extension adds a really useful monitor to your status bar that shows how many seconds, how much data and how many requests a page took to render. Supposed to be used for people who want to monitor the performance of their own websites, but I use it for everything!

For example, did you know a Whole Wheat Radio page heavy with images and other media renders faster than many commercial websites? Wonder if it’s faster than the RIAA or ARIA…

More Apple-esque themes

I discussed these late last year. In a nutshell, these themes make Firefox look much more Mac like. Firefox 3 was a huge improvement over version 2, but it still looks a bit kludgy.

Gnome Firefox 3 Theme

I use this theme for Firefox on my FreeBSD and Linux boxes. It replaces the default toolbar icons and styles with ones that match your other GTK+ applications. Fits really well with Xfce and window managers such as dwm or OpenBox where you’re using mostly GTK+ apps like RoxFiler and Gnumeric.

Because of some poorly formed intranet pages, I was only able to view them in Safari this morning for some reason. Because I already had that browser open I started opening several tabs and going to news sites etc. I clicked on one link and the above error message appeared after a few second long delay where the browser seemed to have completely crashed. Needless to say, it scared the heck out of me!

As a guy who usually uses Mozilla Firefox with more security plugins than ASIO or MI5, I’m used to strictly not having any dynamic content such as JavaScript, Flash, ChuckPeddle or even cookies load, execute or save data without my explicit permission: full stop, put the book down, have a cup of tea. The downside to doing this is a tiny percentage of pages break quite badly, but often adding them to your whitelist or temporarily allowing them in NoScript and the like will fix the problem.

People have told me I’m paranoid, but this little episode shows there really is value in doing this. If Adobe hadn’t included this check, personal information could have been transmitted to a third party. In fact, I used a web browser even as late as last year that didn’t include any of these security and privacy features, so for how long was I loading Flash files that could transmit information without my knowledge? I’d rather not think about it.

I talked about the Firefox privacy and security extensions I use in a previous post this month.

If you’re using my beloved Camino, as far as I know you can’t selectively add sites to a JavaScript whitelist, (hence my heavy hearted decision to move back to Firefox), but you can go into the Preferences pane and disable Flash. Don’t worry, if you go to a site like YouTube that needs it, you can always click the little Flash logo over the blocked content to view it.

(Original video has been taken down).

You’ll need to temporarily disable NoScript to view this video if you use it, and unfortunately it does need Flash. It will be worth it though, a soberingly hilarious video of Jon Stewart from The Daily Show reviewing CNBC [Wikipedia link].

I watched CNBC’s Squawk Box [Wikipedia link] a few times for economics homework a few years ago. It really was painful. Glad to know it wasn’t just me who thought these people were full of hot air, smoke, mirrors and other such whatnot.

The description from the video:

Daily Show: CNBC Gives Financial Advice
CNBC’s Rick Santelli is angry that those loser homeowners are going to get bailed out.

This post doesn’t validate as XHTML 1.0; I just copied the code they gave me. Perhaps one day I’ll figure out how to reformulate this to be standards compliant, but for now I figured the message was more important.

Viva Jon Stewart.

Investigative Reports with Bill Kurtis, a parody board game on South Park

Regular readers of my blog may have noticed that for a period of several weeks earlier this year each every single post I created had the name "Bill Kurtis" weaved into it somewhere. I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see if anyone would notice it and call me out on it.

Curiously, as far as I know only three people did, and one of those people was me when I was in a hazy, suggestible state having not slept for two nights and I didn’t realise I was reading my own blog. I guess most of you chalked it up to my regular pointless and largely irrelevant banter. Good times!

Some people say the US government… covered it up. I’m Bill Kurtis!

For those who don’t get the reference, Bill Kurtis was parodied on an earlier episode of South Park. In the show the boys are playing a conspiracy board game called "Investigative Reports with Bill Kurtis" where each turn they have the choice of covering up an event, or denying it. They then press the bust of Bill Kurtis in the centre of the board where a verdict is spoken by Bill Kurtis, with him introducing himself as Bill Kurtis at the end every time.

The South Park show title card thingy whatsit

After watching this episode you couldn’t walk into our house without being greeted by someone claiming to be Bill Kurtis! An inside joke that you would have had to watch that episode to get? Absolutely! But then again I really dislike it when I read dry blogs without anything spontaneous on them, and besides. Besides what? Exactly! (Another South Park reference).

It was fun while it lasted, but no more will any of my blog posts contain a declaration that I am Bill Kurtis, or that I’m not Bill Kurtis. Which is a relief, because I’m not Bill Kurtis.

On a somewhat related note, this post will be the first to use my newly created and ridiculously verbose tag seemed like a good idea at the time. I get the feeling I would have used this much more often on many other posts over the years had it been available! The far too long tag has already been used once.

I smell cooking onions. Is someone cooking onions?

It’s the kind of thing where I can hear Jom Kloss and Atuuschaaw cackling in the distance! It’s been another week since I haven’t been able to log into my Twitter account, I’m starting to feel so deprived I’ve started chewing on office furniture and climbing along ceilings.

ASIDE: Did I just call one of my Alaskan friends "Jom Kloss" above? That’s so unlike me, I never make grammar or spelling mistakes from typing too fast without reading things back, especially on a site like this.

I’m thinking it may be worth creating a separate Twitter account called RubenerdBackup or RubenerdDua or JimWasRight or ToddTyrtleHasCoolerNameThanMe to use when my normal account is experiencing technical glitches like this.

I love Twitter, it’s the only so called social network I’ve ever valued enough to use. MySpace and Facebook were passing flings and they creeped me out, but Twitter is so simple and I have so many friends on it. I don’t text message on my phone unless it’s to friends who don’t use Twitter.

I will advise on further developments. Till then, I’d better put nail polish remover on my furniture and perhaps spray some Teflon on the ceiling. I’d be a hilarious comedian if my jokes were funny.

My sister and I were having a lively discussion last evening over dinner about companies and industries that treat their customers poorly, and yet people still buy their products and services. In economic terms we colourfully refer to such markets and products as "inelastic", which in a nutshell means a change in price or quality doesn’t affect demand to the extent one would normally expect.

We were talking about commercial software companies (who will remain nameless!) who abuse their monopolies in certain areas by releasing sub-par, low quality and/or overpriced products who’s features such as licencing/key servers, back door monitoring software installations and thousand-digit long serial numbers serve only the interests of their producers and not the people who have little choice but to use their software.

We were trying to think of other private industries that can so brazenly abuse their customers and still get away with it. All we could come up with were oil companies, financial institutions, telephone companies, old media companies and airlines.

The funny thing is, my sister Elke isn’t doing economics like me at university, but she clearly has the intelligence and knowledge already to do it!

If you’ve been displaying the Scarlet A with pride on your website, I noticed recently that there’s a new so called "fancy version" with a metallic gradient you can use now instead of the previous solid colour. Looking at it on my site with mostly dark colours I think the previous one suited it better, but for the sake of something different I’ve switched. Hard hitting stuff!

For those I’ve lost, check out The OUT Campaign.

As for the devil smiling? Let’s just say I’m being realistic about my future prospects!

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s on The Daily Show in 2007

Unfortunately as much as I love Wikipedia and use it daily, I am finding their trigger happy approach to deleting articles (or should I say shooting articles?) before they can be thoroughly fleshed out because a select group of people question it’s notability is becoming difficult to cope with.

For example, this morning in class I was telling someone about "Manichaean paranoia", the very apt term Zbigniew Brzezinski coined when he appeared on The Daily Show a couple of years ago to describe the actions of George W. Bush. He defined it by saying Bush believed that because he was morally superior to the terrorists, it gave him permission to perform immoral acts. One could draw parallels here to Israel’s recent actions in the Gaza Strip too for example.

ASIDE: Crooks and Liars has the video of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s appearance on The Daily Show you can download and watch.

I had my machine open so I fired up Wikipedia and attempted to find the page I had remembered reading before… but it was completely gone. Bummer :-(.

I clearly don’t have an audience as big as Wikipedia’s, but I feel this article must be preserved. If anything else, by putting it here I can link back to it in the future instead of linking to Wikipedia.

Manichaean paranoia is a rhetorical phrase used in one television show by the American politician Zbigniew Brzezinski to describe the morals of the George W. Bush presidency. […]

In the The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Brzezinski "defines" the phrase thusly:

the notion that somehow or other he’s [former president George W. Bush] leading the forces of good against the empire of evil, the notion that somehow or other in that setting, the fact that we are morally superior justifies us committing immoral acts

and otherwise pleads to the audience’s education to accept this phrase as valid. [1]

The article then started to discuss how different religious people feel they have moral superiority over others and attempt to impose themselves, but while I think that’s true (with dangerous consequences) I don’t think that was really what Brzezinski was referring to. Perhaps the debate over this part of the article was what got it deleted.

In the meantime, feel free to use the term "Manichaean paranoia"… let’s get it out there!

Big Tom shared this article he found interesting from the BBC on Google Reader yesterday.

US nuclear relic found in bottle

A bottle discarded at a waste site in the north-western US contains the world’s oldest sample of bomb- grade plutonium, scientists say.

The headline would have really grabbed my attention by itself, but it’s spooky given that Singapore is also dealing with a dangerous war relic people just found recently:

World War 2 relic found at Clementi Ave 1 construction site

SINGAPORE: There was plenty of police and military activity around Clementi Avenue 1 and Commonwealth Avenue West on Tuesday. The cause for the alarm was an unexploded World War 2 relic.

Experts from the Singapore Armed Forces said it was a Japanese aerial bomb dating from the Second World War.

Unexploded Japanese relics, weapons grade plutonium in the US… and here I was thinking the oldest example of a dangerous weapon of this grade was a bottle of aged Johnny Walker. A single drop of that stuff can go through lead I’ve been told. It certainly tastes radioactive.

I’ll be sticking to coffee as my beverage of vice along with perhaps a glass of Barossa Valley [Wikipedia] red sometimes, thank you!