Rubenerd

Do you all remember that long winded rant post I wrote on Sunday where I was having so much trouble paying my phone bill with Optus that I gave up doing it online?

Well I was told by a person at the Optus shop today that as an iPhone user I was registered automagically with their Optus Zoo service and that they’d sent me a password to it. By logging into Optus Zoo, I can pay my bills online there instead. Brilliant I thought, so I rushed home and attempted to login to Optus Zoo.

What was it that Homer Simpson said when he was laughing at the never ending previews at the beginning of a movie he was watching? "I’m laughing! But it’s a laugh of impatience!"

I’d always been suspicious of the postal service in Australia; mailed items often arrived in bad condition, at the wrong address or often not at all. Since moving back to Adelaide part time for studying though I thought Australia Post had got much better, though perhaps its just as likely their South Australian department has more competent oversight perhaps?

Today though when I opened my mailbox here at 12 Robinson Street, Mawson Lakes, South Australia, I literally laughed out loud, much to the surprise of the people walking across the street. To use my sister’s terminology, this letter we received today could very well be the most epic failure of the Australian postal system for us.

As you can see from the photo, this letter had been delivered to the right street address, but it’s in a completely different city and completely different state, over 700 kilometres away! For illustrative purposes, here’s a map:

Now granted this probably resulted from the people in New Zealand (according to the post mark and stamp) not putting a post code on their correspondence for some reason, which means some poor sap working in one of the huge mail sorting facilities somewhere had to file this manually. With this in mind I reckon it’s highly likely that some letters would fall through the cracks, it’s a statistical certainty.

Still, one thinks that something as obvious as a state would have been pretty easy to file, and in fact should be the first criteria a letter is filed under. As I type this, it seems more likely to me some crappy software used by Australia Post had trouble reading everything but the street address perhaps. Or maybe the letter arrived from New Zealand here first, and because there was a street matching the one on the letter here it was sent locally. The former seems more likely.

It doesn’t instil much confidence in our postal system that a letter can appear in a completely different state and city to where it’s supposed to. The chilling question that results from this realisation is: how many letters have I supposed to have received have ended up in some poor sap’s mailbox in Victoria? Or Queensland? Or Tasmania? Or New South Wales? It’s a scary thought.

For what it’s worth though, the chuckle I got out of this letter this morning made my first classes easier to deal with. Now I just need to go to the Pooraka Post Office and hand it in. If I give it to the postal guys and say they sent it to the wrong state, would they resend it for free? Will I have to pay them to fix their mistake? It should be free, but experience with Federal businesses and authorities have taught me otherwise!

UPDATE: I just noticed… there IS a postcode on there! Is it in the wrong position?

I’ve been promising for a while to list all the extensions I use for Mozilla Firefox. Given I have a stack of homework to do and other chores and errands, it seems now is as good a time as any.

Each of these are reasons why I use Firefox over other browsers!

NoScript

If you’re only ever going to install one add on, make it this one. NoScript cops a lot of nonsense and flack from people for being tedious and a pain to use, but it really is very simple and with a few days of using it, it becomes second nature.

NoScript works as a whitelist by blocking all dynamic content on pages by default such as Flash and JavaScript, but when you go to a page you trust you click the NoScript icon and choose "Allow Site". You can even "Temporarily Allow" pages that you suspect aren’t working properly without JavaScript but that you don’t necessarily want to permanently add to your whitelist.

As for customising, I suggest disabling the "Show message about blocked scripts" because it’s a bit redundant. I also suggest removing the NoScript icon from your toolbar and accessing it from the status bar instead, it takes up less space and will be conveniently located next to other extensions with menus.

SSL Blacklist

This protects you for suspect root certificate authorities, and if you prefer not pinging their server every time you access a secure page, you can also download their database as a extension. As a bonus in the newest version it will also warn you if you’re accessing a site that uses the now vulnerable MD5 hash that I’ve talked about before, very cool.

BetterPrivacy

Protects you from so called Super Cookies such as Adobe Flash LSOs [Wikipedia link] which can be used to track you. Spooky stuff.

Cookie Monster

NoScript got me used to the idea of blocking everything by default and only allowing sites I trust to execute code. Cookie Monster is a lightweight extension that does the same thing for cookies.

Another such pair of extensions are CookieSafe and CS Lite, the latter of which I used to use for a while. They’re both extremely sophisticated but I found I never used any of their advanced features.

BlockSite

BlockSite is a simple, lightweight and very easy use blacklist utility which does what you think it does. The only thing I wish it did was allow you to right click (or CTRL click on Mac) a link and add the target site to your blacklist.

Adblock Plus (discussed on my usability Firefox extensions post) used to be able to block entire websites, but later versions removed this functionality for some reason: BlockSite fills this void nicely.

Suntec City and the Convention Centre from the Padang, taken with my D60. I will get around to uploading all these photos I took to Flickr… eventually!

Isn’t it always the case that we focus on the things we didn’t end up doing on a holiday instead of things we did end up doing? Or is that just me? Well after spending late December, January and most of February back in Singapore from Adelaide I can confidently say I got done less than 1% of what I wanted and needed to.

At least I had an excuse this time; I was out of action for weeks with… let’s use the word "uncomfortable" food poisoning and then a flu which the doc says I caught while my immune system was weakened when dealing with the first darn thing! Whooptie-do. As a result I spent most of my Singapore end of year holiday either in bed or curled up on my computer chair covered in blankets and a thermometer in my mouth. To be fair, I can think of worse situations, and I’m certainly glad it happened while I was on holiday instead of when I was studying, but it did bother me that as a result I couldn’t do anything.

ASIDE: The following two lists were literally transcribed from my own to do lists, but cleaned up a bit. As such, there are no links whatsoever, treat them as the seething masses they are!

Things he wanted and needed to do

Going down the list of things I needed and wanted to do that didn’t happen, I was supposed to go back to KL again and see Julee and the guys from RHB; upload all my photos taken with my new Nikon D60 on Flickr; meeting up with Kevin in Singapore to have a coffee, chat, philosophise and to help him out with his MacBook; renting a Segway and riding it around Sentosa just like Jackie Chan did earlier this year; do some more Nikkor lens window shopping with my dad; going to Harry’s at Clarke Quay to listen to some live jazz; getting Skype working with our gateway to talk to Felix; getting up early and going with my dad and sister for a walk around Sungei Bulloh Wetland Reserve and the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve; paying bills that were due back in Australia while I was in Singapore for the phones (whoops!); sorting through most of my late mum’s posessions; beating my dad and sister at Wii Golf and Wii Bowling again; looking at motor scooters; starting a public and light road transport advocacy blog (long shot, but I did get as far as creating a theme); finally get some prescription sunglasses; demo my alternative ideas for Whole Wheat Radio; looking for a cheaper version of my dad’s ultra wide angle Tokina lens to take back with me; throwing away stacks of old burned CDs that contain data I now have on multiple hard drives and dual layered DVDs; taking a budget airline to Cambodia and hiking through Siem Reap; eating more prata and teh tarik with my dad at 3am at Mr Prata; cleaning my bedroom in our apartment there; test all our old computer hardware and donate it to schools or figure out how to send them elsewhere in South-East Asia… wow I’m not even half way down my list yet. Sheesh.

The Singapore Flyer and the top of the Esplanade, also taken with my D60. I will be uploading these to Flickr, I’m determined!

Things he did get done

As for the things I did get done, most involved things at home because that’s where I was stuck for weeks on end! I managed to work around the restrictions on installing drivers on my dad’s work laptop by connecting his home office laser, photocopiers and photo printers to a second machine and accessing them over the network; I ripped our entire 3,200+ CD collection to our DIY media PC (THAT was a really good way to pass time!); I copied all my Rubenerd Shows over to the Internet Archive; converting my old Pentium MMX 200MHz desktop into a fancy firewall between our modem and router; upgrading my FreeBSD desktop I access through SSH in Adelaide to FreeBSD 7.1 Release; and a whole pile of other technical and non outdoor related things. I did manage to see my shrink and now a good friend, and go out a few times for dinner with my dad and sis too, just wish I had more time and was feeling well enough to have done them more.

The end is the best place for an ending

Ah well, I guess as I said before disappointment over what you didn’t and did get done on a holiday is natural to a certain extent. Now that it’s Monday the 2nd of March and I have class in 20 minutes (ugh), the volume of homework, assignments and tests will preoccupy my mind enough. And my sister doesn’t even have classes today, so she’s still fast asleep as I type this at the Boatdeck Cafe. Some people have all the luck.

Looking down my To Do list for Adelaide, I have about a dozen things that need to be done today, another dozen tomorrow, and a dozen on top of that for later this week at the latest. Can you get student secretaries? As in a secretary for a student? That’d be fantastic.

QuickTime Pro is a strange little application; I’ve been using it for many years and it still manages to catch me out in quirky ways!

This afternoon I was attempting to capture frames from a presentation using QuickTime Pro and importing them into The Gimp to process them. In a nutshell, the steps were:

1. Playing the movie to the frame I want to save a screenshot of
2. Clicking Export on the File menu
3. Selecting Movie to Picture from the Export drop down list
4. Clicking Save

Unfortunately when I tried to open the resulting image in The Gimp, it gave me the above error message, which I thought was strange given Preview.app was able to open it without any problems whatsoever.

It turns out the file type I was exporting wasn’t the same as I thought it was. Even though if you click the Options button in the Export dialog box and check that the type is indeed set to Photo – JPEG, the file you’re actually exporting is an Apple PICT file. Very weird.

The plot thickens though, because if you drop the .jpg extension from the image file and replace it with the default PICT .pct extension, The Gimp still can’t open it:

If you append .pict instead though, it can.

Lesson learned (and it only took an hour!): if you export images from QuickTime Pro, append the .pict extension because that’s the file you’re actually saving it as. For Unix-like applications it also seems to be more compatible than .pct.

As a final curious observation, ImageMagick from MacPorts, pkgsrc and from the FreeBSD Ports collection on my Armada M300 can convert images that end in both .pct and .pict that have been exported from QuickTime Pro.

I need a strong cup of coffee.

In September 2007 I posted a photo I took of a Singaporean magazine where they had spelt Bill O’Reilly’s name as Nill O’Reilly. I thought it was hilarious, and postulated that it was a Freudian Slip on the editor’s part. I also commented on the irony of positioning him in the magazine next to a panel talking about global warming which I said I was sure he denied was happening. This didn’t please someone who rudely told me to "Wise up" which I replied to. Whew!

Well the unintended saga continues! nicksmultiverse has posted another comment where he attacks my reply:

Leffy loon or no loon, you still tried to twist the actual point for this.

Bill believes in global warming.

Who gives a horse’s a** about who "misspelled" anyone’s name?

The fact is, GW is occurring at such speeds that are quite alarming. Enough about what/who caused it. Let’s do something about it. Put aside partisan politics and change the world.

In retrospect this reply was far too long, but I figure I may as well give him another thing to complain about.

I posted this photo because I thought it was funny, that was the point of posting this image, which I have explained to you twice now.

I didn’t want this image to degenerate into a tit-for-tat pedantic argument over wording (of all things), but if that’s what you want, instead of linking to the articles (which curiously didn’t satisfy your need for me to defend what I said) I’ll quote the pertinent sections.

From Fair.org: For example, O’Reilly often touts himself as a staunch environmentalist to prove his ideological evenhandedness. But then he rails that "the greens have strangled the California economy" (5/10/01), environmentalists are "distorting and oversimplifying some very powerful issues" (5/1/01), and his stance on climate change (3/29/01) is so qualified as to be practically a non-position: "I believe there is global warming. I mean, I know that’s controversial. For every scientist who says there is, there’s one that says there isn’t."

Too early in the decade for you? What about Media Matters in 2008: Responding to a viewer’s email about whether the current global warming "scare" is "natural" or "man-made," Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly asserted: "It’s all guesswork." Contrary to O’Reilly’s assertion, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded that the Earth is warming and human activity is very likely responsible for most of that warming.

Climate change is happening, and O’Reilly isn’t helping. Could I have more precisely worded what I originally wrote better? If I were writing a masters thesis, perhaps (see reason for posting photo above). At this point though a non-position is just as destructive to our environment as denial, and it certainly isn’t the "belief" which you claim it is.

If you’re going to ask me who gives an arse about how a major publication misspelled a name, I’d ask you who gives an arse about the exact wording on a guy’s lighthearted Flickr page. And if you’re going to call me out on being partisan, drop the "leftie loon". You make yourself look like a hypocrite on both counts.

In the meantime, chill out and have a laugh! We’re only on this planet for a limited amount of time, and negativity doesn’t help anyone. If you didn’t find the photo funny, just don’t post, it’s that simple mate.

I really hope that’s the end of this, but I get the feeling it won’t be. As I’ve said before, I try my best to assume good intentions online when it comes to comments, but if someone accuses me of doing something I haven’t, I will defend myself. I get the feeling I’ll need to learn to let some things slide though!

I’ve never been asked to write the lyrics to a song, nor have I been asked to rewrite the lyrics for existing songs by anybody. Given my changed lyrics for this Beach Boys song where I point out a mistake in their logic, I can understand why.

If everybody had an ocean
Across the USA

The whole country would sink
Into a giant bay

All the lines I’ve replaced
Have had the syllables wrong

A bushy bushy blond hairdo
Surfin USA

Lesson one of website design: never create sites that only work with JavaScript or Flash. ALWAYS provide alternatives if they’re not available.

Optus has sunk to a new low with me. Despite having much better coverage than Vodafone who I was with previously here in Australia, their 3G coverage still woefully bad outside the Adelaide CBD [Google Maps]. Coming from Singapore where I can even use my phone in most lifts I come across and onboard ferries between Singapore and Batam, Indonesia this definitely takes some time to adjust to when I come back here to study.

My latest adventure with Optus involves paying a bill online. I’ve never understood why companies go out of their way to make their online billing services so cumbersome, it’s so much cheaper for them to let their customers interface directly with their payment systems with their computer than paying somebody at one of their retail stores or over the phone to take payments. But I digress.

I went to Optus.com.au and clicked the conspicuous Pay a bill link. It took me to a secure page that fortunately doesn’t use MD5 and contains a few simple fields for credit card information and the amount owed. So far so good.

The problems started when I attempted to click some of the important information links in the page’s description. When I clicked on the Payments link which I was instructed to do to learn about their rich 1% credit card surcharge, I was told such a page doesn’t exist.

When I clicked the Privacy Collection Statement, nothing happened at all. As it turns out the hyperlink consisted of some JavaScript which NoScript in my Firefox browser had blocked. Why does a website need to use JavaScript to link to another page?

The most frustrating bug with the page though was its help system. When you click on any of the question mark links next to the form fields, you’re redirected to an explanation on another page. I didn’t know what they meant by a Card ID, so I clicked the question mark. Because it loaded another page in the same window, my 16 digit credit card number and my almost as huge 14 digit Customer Account Number were reset!

The fun didn’t end when I clicked the Pay Bill button though, for instead of processing my request I was tersely thrown back a 1990s era error page:

The question is, did my payment go through? I don’t want to enter my details again if I did because I’d be paying twice and from experience I know phone companies never give you money back they owe despite sending threatening letters to you when you reciprocate their lack of respect by not paying a bill.

We really need WiMax or city wide WiFi systems so we can get rid of these phone company peoples.

You can tell the internet is a wondrous thing when a person like Todd Tyrtle in Canada is able to refer me to an article in a newspaper in a different city in my own country concerning something I’d be interested in. I sometimes wonder if the first people developing the technology behind telephones had any idea something this seamless and global would come to pass. From Google Reader:

Shared by Todd: Looks like some good news for you, Ruben!

The Government’s plan to introduce mandatory internet censorship has effectively been scuttled by independent Senator Nick Xenophon. – The Sydney Morning Herald

It’s with this spirit of openness and celebration of the intertubes that I dutifully report that it seems the Great Australian Firewall proposed by Senator Conroy in the Senate is dead in the water now that Senator Nick Xenophon has ditched his previous support. Xenophon used to sit in the South Australian parliament where he advocated the removal of gambling machines from hotels and other anti-gambling legislation which I approved of, even though I decided to vote for the Greens. This latest defection means the Labor government has minority support on this firewall nonsense in the Senate, which means at least for the time being the legislation is dead in the water, if I understand the situation correctly.

Me standing in front of the Aussie Parliament House in Canberra in 2006!

This has really been a learning experience for me when it comes to politics. For those of you living outside of Australia, the two major political parties here are the Liberal and National coalition who are are the conservative, centre-right party and the Labor party who are centre-left and currently in charge under our new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. Our former Prime Minister John Howard was a Liberal party member who supported George W. Bush’s every decision including the Iraq invasion, leading to Australia’s derogatory nickname in Asia as the Deputy Sherrif to the US in this part of the world. managed to run huge government surpluses, but at the expense of sharp cuts to health and education. I voted against him as soon as I was old enough to.

All this said though, I was relieved that the Coalition had such strong numbers still in the Senate so that along with the Greens and the independents they could block this ridiculous firewall that was doomed to failure before it even started. Who would have thought the Greens and the conservatives would ever agree on something… certainly not me!

I guess what I mean to say is, don’t always support one party blindly; if they do something stupid you should call them out on it. I prefer Labor to the conservative Coalition obviously, but at the same time it shows that the major centre-left voice in Australian politics is also capable of doing stupid things. At the last election I was tempted to vote Labor, but I ended up voting Green again. At the next election I was definitely vote Green. The preferences system means the votes will probably end up going to Labor anyway, but it’s the message that counts.

Am I being naive thinking politicians actually care about my vote? Probably, but I’m still young and inexperienced enough to think I can make a difference. With age I’m sure this will change.

For some reason I find this photo really intriguing. Long forgotten grand ambitions and dreams? The promise of something better? The inevitable decline of human habitats and the subsequent reclamation by nature and the elements? Fuzzy economic idealism versus cold economic reality? There’s a story behind each building like this.

I’ve always been fascinated by abandoned buildings and urban exploring. Perhaps the next break I get I should look into taking my new D60 [Wikipedia link] and my sharp, fast and super lightweight 50mm f/1.8D [Wikipedia link] to places like this. My dad has a 50mm f/1.4 and it’s even AF-S which would obviously autofocus on the D60… he’s evil I tell you! Then again I like trying my skill at manually focusing on inanimate objects and scenes like this anyway.

The eerie thing is, this image was as abandoned on my hard drive as the building it depicts is in the non-digital world (that sounded less cheesy in my head). I don’t even know or remember how I found this image, it was in my drafts folder but a cursory search through my browser’s search history yielded no useful results. Perhaps one day I will cross paths with this image somewhere again.

Where is it? When was it taken? The Former Soviet Bloc? Eastern Europe perhaps? I guess it really could be anywhere. Even Singapore has a few abandoned towers if you look hard enough. Pretty easy to find a place like this in Kuala Lumpur or Bangkok, though KL has more dead construction site shells than abandoned buildings. In some ways they’re even eerier still.