Rubenerd

In the interests of disclosure, you may have noticed the old graphic I had on the side of the site here promoting FreeBSD and the KDE desktop has been replaced. I figured that while I really liked the KDE 3.5.x desktop, I don’t use the 4.x desktop on any of my current machines. Not sure whether that will change, I’m presuming it will, but for now I’m really happy with Xfce. The Xfce desktop is simple, lightweight, and fits all my GTK+ apps nicely.

In it’s place I’m using some Spread FreeBSD graphics which [surprisingly] link to http://www.spreadbsd.org/, a BSD server and desktop advocacy site as well as an advocacy site for the BSD licences themselves.

If you like FreeBSD or PC-BSD (the desktop) you can register for a free affiliate account too which will allow you to keep track of the number of visits your site has generated. You don’t get any money, just a warm fuzzy feeling that you’re helping to spread FreeBSD awareness and whatnot, even if (like me) you’re not Bill Kurtis.

Screenshot from Google Reader yesterday afternoon

Another quick but very warm thank you to everyone who’s been sending me emails and messages on Twitter and Google Reader regarding my latest and worst ever personal health problems. I’d emphasise though that given family history and what others have gone through, I’m relieved I can say that this has been the worst instead of something far more sinister. Did that make sense?

My symptoms are getting better; the lethargy and constant tiredness still exists but I can already feel the pain in my joins ebbing and I can feel myself becoming more alert; or as my dad says "more full of lerts". I had one really scary incident this afternoon when I coughed up enough blood out of the blue to scare the living daylights out of everyone, but fortunately a frantic phone call to my GP established that it was a "benign" result of the new medication trying to cure me of this nasty throat infection and that while that amount of blood was unusual wasn’t it unexpected.

Phew! One thinks I would have been warned of this potential side effect in advance though! Sheesh!

I still need to eat most foods in liquid form, am on several different antibiotics, cough medicines and other riff raff, and my temperature is still uncomfortably high after now two weeks of separate but overlapping problems, but today was easier than yesterday and fortunately I’ve largely been spared crushing headaches which has meant I’ve been able to still stay huddled at my computer and buried in books. I’ve been sitting up in bed and reading a lot. I mean, reading a lot.

I am starting to get sick of feeling sick though, I haven’t been able to work on finishing any of the pet projects I started over these holidays (using Haskell in X11, RubyCGI, WxPython, making Linux more BSD-ish, implementing some Whole Wheat Radio and uni intranet wiki ideas). Guess I should be really thankful this happened over the holidays instead of during a semester of studying, that would have been just awful!

Now if you’d excuse me I’m off to grab a glass of warm water and some more P.G. Wodehouse. If there’s any other author who can make you feel as good and happy even when you feel like crap, I don’t want to know. Well okay I admit I’ve been reading Mark Twain, Ogden Nash, Jeremy Clarkson, John Grisham and even an Alan Alda tome too ^_^. No Bill Kurtis though, because I’m not Bill Kurtis.

Lots of book reviews coming out when I’m back to 100% it seems!

The SSL Blacklist add-on warning screen after loading a page

If you’re a Mozilla Firefox user and you haven’t installed the SSL Blacklist add-on from CodeFromThe70s.org yet, you should absolutely go there right now and click the sslblacklist-4.0.30.xpi link. By installing this plugin you can help protect yourself from suspect SSL root certificate authorities, as well as make sure the sites you’re visiting are no longer using the demonstratively flawed MD5 hash algorithm.

ASIDE: I’d argue this plugin along with NoScript are the two greatest arguments for using Firefox. No other browser with these plugins are a match. I feel naked, cold and scared using anything else now.

MD5 is still probably safe, but the fact it has been shown to have problems should alert people running websites to move over to an SHA hash instead. If you find such a site, you absolutely want to let their admins know about it.

So far I’ve installed SSL Blacklist on my dad’s, sister’s and my machines and we’ve been warned the following sites are using MD5:

• Twitter
• Facebook (UPDATE: Are no longer using)
• Neopets

If we find any more we’ll add them to the list. Feel free to post a comment with links too. Be careful though, my spam filters block anything with more than three links so you may need to space them out. Cheers.

I had already disabled it obviously, but adding screenshot for posterity

Do you all remember the PC speaker (Wikipedia link)? That tiny, shrill little beep generating box hiding inside your computer before proper sound cards came along? I can distinctly remember the silly sounds the PC speaker in our 486SX desktop made whenever we played Commander Keen or whenever it was booted up and did a floppy drive seek. Them were the days I tell you. I’m not Bill Kurtis.

My little Armada M300 netbook is old enough to have a PC speaker, but because I use it as as a ultra budget netbook now I don’t like having FreeBSD beep at me whenever I finish [TAB]-ing to a directory or if I accidentally enter an invalid command… especially when I’m in a busy coffee shop. Beep beep slurp beep.

ASIDE: From researching this over the course of an afternoon, I couldn’t believe how many people in forums and news groups condescendingly told others who asked to just open their computers and unplug the PC speaker from their motherboards. Yeah, that’s an elegant solution available to everyone, thanks!

To disable the PC speaker on a FreeBSD machine you essentially have two options: you can disable the chirping device in the kernel itself, or a far simpler solution is just to mute it.

Kevin Kinsely on the FreeBSD mailing lists details the quick command:

% mixer speaker 0:0

As far as I can tell this setting is also preserved when you restart the machine, so there’s no need to put this line in any initialisation scripts or the like.

Ruud Jansen also suggested these commands to use in X11 for enabling and disabling those annoying beeps. So far I haven’t needed to use them, but passing them on for what they may be worth.

% xset b off
% xset b on

My avatar for my Twitter profile as of yesterday

With all the lunacy surrounding Senator Conroy’s hopelessly misguided crusade against the intertubes in Australia which even if we were to ignore the social implications it still technologically wouldn’t ever work… we’re now reminded that our friendly neighbours over to the east in New Zealand are also having to deal with nonsense. Simply replace "failed before it even starts filter" with "guilty when accused".

It really is blood chillingly scary stuff.

From the Creative Freedom New Zealand site:

Join The New Zealand Internet Blackout to protest against the Guilt Upon Accusation law ‘Section 92A’ that calls for internet disconnection based on accusations of copyright infringement without a trial and without any evidence held up to court scrutiny. This is due to come into effect on February 28th unless immediate action is taken by the National Party.

I think what really gets to me with all this nonsense is the thought that some law makers in Australia and now New Zealand have obviously heard these ideas and written up legislation and proposals which means… they thought they were good ideas.

Normally I like to think of myself as a [mostly] rational person, but it’s hard to be cool and level headed when nonsense like this comes up. I’m already not feeling very well, and this just makes me feel worse.

I know one of the so called golden rules of blogging is that for no reason whatsoever should you ever create a blog post that merely describes why you haven’t created blog posts for a specified period of time. Bullhonkey.

Turns out the medication and treatment to deal with my bout of food poisoning last week fixed the problem, but in my weakened state I contracted something else entirely. After feeling like I was starting to get better, in the last 48 hours my throat has been so sore all I’ve been able to eat is strained luke warm broth, multivitamins and water; the doc gave me some steroid treatment to ease the inflammation and another type of antibiotic to bring it under control.

I’ve jokingly said I’m just like my good buddy Felix Tanjono and am always tired, but with this weird thing I’ve been even more tired than usual, probably because I haven’t really been sleeping or eating well.

I have lots of great ideas for blog topics swimming around my head, but it’s been somewhat of an ordeal typing out just this one! I’ll see you all when I’m back on Earth again as it were. Thanks ^_^.

As I sit here at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf at Forum on Orchard Road I can’t help but see this confusing mob obsession with flowers and boxes of chocolate I see on people walking past.

Is there some sort of special occasion today? Did they finally fix that awful Ion Orchard mess and get the station working properly again as a result? Heck if that’s what it is I’m all for celebrating too!

I might go to Kinokuniya and treat myself to a new legal thriller novel. Has the latest John Grisham come out in paperback form yet? That’d be sweet. I’d buy another Jeremy Clarkson but I’ve read five of his books in a row so far and need a change. Steven King even has a new one out now too right?

Actually you know what? I might get comfortable on the couch downstairs ans dust off my mum’s copy of the gigantic (in weight, size and hilarity) PG Wodehouse Bertie Wooster anthology and read about his shenanigans with Gussie Finknottle and whatnot. Newts! Sounds like fun.

Happy 14th February, whatever it is.

As you can tell from his link prominently displayed on my blogroll here and on my public OPML feeds and such, I'm an avid reader of Jonathan Schwartz's weblog over at Sun Microsystems.

I don't own any Sun hardware (an issue of price not choice, I'd love to get my hands on a Sun x64 or SPARC Workstation!); I generally prefer using scripting languages to Java; while I've dappled in OpenSolaris I'm still at heart a FreeBSD guy, but I find most of what he says to be interesting and unconventional. It's rare for a CEO of a company to be so forthcoming, blunt and willing to accept comments.

ASIDE: It was Jonathan Schwartz and my cousin James Ross of Beginning Algorithms fame who inspired me back at the end of 2004 to try having long hair in the hopes I would look as cool with a ponytail and glasses as they do. As of 2009 my hair is finally long enough, but doesn’t suit me. Maybe I don’t have the right face… but that said, I had to try to find out!

I really do like Sun's desktops, they seem to be the only company other than Apple with their Mac Pro that takes the extra care and effort to design clean and organised machines internally:

But I digress. Again!

I meant to quote his Barack Obama post from November last year just because I thought it was the best one I read after Obama's victory, but it got lost in the oceans of draft posts and should-have-done things. My life now seems to be filling up with two of such things for each thing I finish.

Change Has Come to America

On behalf of Sun Microsystems, I would like to offer my sincerest congratulations to President elect Barack Obama. What an extraordinary accomplishment.

I would also like to extend my congratulations to his web team for having chosen MySQL as the platform behind their election web site, BarackObama.com.

Lest many of you get your hopes up, we cannot guarantee the White House to all MySQL users.

I'm pleased he clarified his position in that last line, though I admit to being disappointed I can't be politically accommodated! I'll forgive him though because, just like Atuuschaaw, he and I share the Germanic "sch" in our names. And because all three of us aren't Bill Kurtis.

Stuff the 14th of February being Valentine’s day, tomorrow is day for Unix geeks in Asia Pacific to celebrate because this happens to be the day that is represented in Unix time systems as 1234567890. In the US (and I believe Europe), 1234567890 will be happening on the 13th of February… there’s something sinisterly poetic about that :).

If you like Bill Kurtis and don’t know (I’m not Bill Kurtis), Unix and Unix-like systems such as GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X store dates as a sequential series of numerals representing the number of seconds since the 1st of January 1970. There are caveats to this explanation, but that’s the gist of it.

There’s a problem though: because these numbers were traditionally expressed as 32 bit integers, in 2032 we’ll run out of dates we can keep track of. This problem would manifest itself In the same way for the same reasons as the Y2K bug.

ASIDE: As far as I know the BSDs now uses 64 bit time as does most GNU/Linux distributions, but don’t quote me on that.

In the meantime, Happy 1234567890 everybody! I’m going to be celebrating by staying at home and painfully coughing loudly while I have difficulty breathing, holding food down and my sinuses continue to flare up and down. Will be having lots of soup though and will be watching some silly anime shows and Warner Brothers cartoons from sixty years ago, exciting and enjoyable stuff I can tell you!

I wonder what would happen if Elmer Fudd and Daffy Duck met Suzumiya Haruhi in some time matrix thing? If they can make a Flintstones and Jetsons crossover movie, why not that? ^_^. Can you believe some people actually liked the cheesy Disney characters better than the sarcastic, hilarious Warner Brother’s Merry Melodies chaps?

If you didn’t see, I just posted another entry where I link to Duck Amock, a Daffy Duck cartoon that also happens to be the single greatest cartoon of all time.

Did I say Happy 1234567890 already? Happy 1234567890 everybody!

You can also view this directly on YouTube if you prefer.

I remember watching Duck Amock before I even started primary school and I thought it was hilarious! My edge-uma-cation may have changed since then, but I still consider this the greatest cartoon of all time. Robin Hood Daffy would definitely be number two, even though none of them contain Bill Kurtis.

Buster!

Update 2019: The original video is, perhaps unsurprisingly, no longer available. I've deleted the HTML object.