Rubenerd

As of February 2009, page 145 is one of the last ones!

Checking, correcting and validating malformed (or in most cases typo filled) XHTML code is a very useful thing to do when you're sick because it takes almost no brains whatsoever to do and it keeps you occupied instead of watching daytime television.

I can now say with 99.95% certainty (my solicitor advises me against ever being 100% certain) that every friggen page and post on this blog is valid XHTML 1.0 Strict. Sheesh.

Tentatively every page and post is valid XHTML 1.1 as well with two caveats

1. I don’t have an XML declaration in the first line of the source so I don’t trip Internet Explorer’s Quirks Mode
2. Pages are still being served with the text/html mime type instead of the technically correct application/xhtml+xml, again for compatibility with even the latest versions of Internet Explorer such as 7 and 8 Beta.

Both of these could be handled and adjusted on the web server so that depending on what browser the client is accessing your site from you could dynamically add declarations and change mime types on the fly (I believe that's the W3C recommendation with XHTML 1.1) but it seems like a bit too much trouble to deal with now. I'll be keeping my eye on this though.

Obligatory Microsoft rant

Microsoft was sued by the European Union because they felt they were being anti-competitive by bundling Internet Explorer.

While I believe that suit did have some merit, the really should have gone after Microsoft's appalling standards record instead. They've been responsible for untold amounts of damage by keeping back the progress of the internet and have caused frustration and head butting on walls by programmers and web designers.

What a mess!

My computer could tell I was half asleep this afternoon and needed an energy boost, so upon plugging in my iPhone it presented me with the above error message. Yikes! Fortunately all I had to do was unplug it and plug it back in again and it worked fine, as if it knew I'm not Bill Kurtis.

Reminds me of this scary message I got back in April last year for my 5G iPod.

It's amazing how a well structured and sufficiently evil looking error message with a scary red exclamation mark stop sign icon can make your heart skip a beat, or perhaps that's just me. There's a joke in there about dating, hearts skipping beats and computer error messages in there somewhere, but it's just not coming to me.

Want to go on a date with me? What do you mean "access denied"? Bummer ^_^.

Taken from the feedback page of an ABC Australia opinion piece

I'm certainly not suggesting that the posts I write here are free of spelling mistakes, but I've seen this word written this way enough times by enough people in blogs, comment threads and forums that I feel I need to say something.

ASIDE: And no I’m not taking about people saying they keep "loosing" their "lose" cables! Though that’s something I could easily rant on for hours about too!

Ridiculous is spelt "ridiculous", not "rediculous". Spelling ridiculous as rediculous just makes you look… well, you know where I'm going with this.

I'm not Bill Kurtis.

It still doesn't work… it still doesn't work… it still doesn't work…

I've heard it said by many programmers I respect that you spend 10% of your time coding, 90% debugging. I would argue it's closer to 5% coding, 95% debugging, but the point stands. It also stands true that the more tired you get, the less obvious basic mistakes appear to be.

Case in point, this evening I decided to update my MacPorts collection on my iBook and install Gnumeric (I've so far only switched to pkgsrc on my MacBook Pro). For the life of me I couldn't figure out why this single line wasn't working:

% sudo port -v selfupdate && \
port -v install gnumeric

If you've worked in UNIX for more than 5 seconds you'd be able to tell me in an instant what I did wrong, but for the last 10 minutes I just couldn't figure it out. It was driving me crazy! When I did I promptly hit my forehead on the table causing a glass of cold water I had placed on it to jiggle its way off the table and with an almighty crash land in a million pieces on the floor.

ASIDE: That glass thing didn’t really happen, but doesn’t it sound like something that could?

Lesson learned, don't do any programming, scripting or shell work when you're half asleep or not feeling well. You just don't get much done!

As for the mistake, I only used one sudo command. Using && doesn't carry over the higher user privileges! Simple, obvious, glaring mistake that was staring me in the face the entire time and I couldn't see it.

I had completely forgotten about this post I created on the 25th of October 2006, back when we were living in Kuala Lumpur, but reading it back made me smile. It was a link to an automatically updating countdown for the number of days until George W. Bush was out of office. Seems he's all done now!

Designed by georgedorn and provided by Positronic Design.
Grab your own copy here.

The 25th of October 2006 means that counter would have read 817 days back then. To quote a Bush fan, By Golly, Gee Whiz! Now the question becomes, I wonder what the world will be like in another 817 days?

Aww shucks :(

While I prefer to use Firefox and Camino on my MacBook Pro and iBook G3, my sister still prefers Safari on her pretty white MacBook because she says its faster and looks better. I'm under the impression Sharon in Singapore uses all three in different capacities too (I think!). Each to their own, right? ^_^

Well this morning I finally got around to installing a new hard drive in her MacBook and installed Mac OS X Leopard fresh for her. While searching for the usual plugins she uses for Safari I came across one that looked so interesting and useful I was about ready to go onto my own Macs and install it myself: GlimmerBlocker.

GlimmerBlocker is an advertisement filtering system that uses a proxy server on your Mac, which means it filters ads on every application you launch (very cool) and as a bonus it doesn't need to hack anything to work (it's not a haxie to use the Mac lingo).

While it seemed like a great idea, upon installing it on Elke's MacBook and my MacBook Pro (my iBook couldn't use it because it has Mac OS X Tiger), the internet connections on each machine failed and we were presented with the cryptic error message shown above upon entering our System Preferences screens.

As it turns out, when the application activated itself it changed the proxy settings on the machines automatically, so when it failed it blocked any internet network requests. By doing so, it seems it also blocked its own attempts to connect to its own server to download the appropriate files. A Catch 22 perhaps? I'm not Bill Kurtis.

The only way to get internet back on our Macs was to uninstall this plugin and restart Mac OS X. Fortunately the GlimmerBlocker folks had good instructions on how to do so on their Trac wiki.

It's a shame, the premise for GlimmerBlocker was intruiging and the features looked promising. Perhaps the next release will work, but I'm somewhat nervous about trying again considering it failed so verbosely on two seperate machines.

Thank you to all you fabulous folks for your supportive words on Twitter, Google Reader, in email and in the comment fields here. I've still got a dreadful head cold and a high temperature today, but I don't feel like I'm going to be sick and I feel SO much better! I mean 10,000% better!

I know I said this before, but in a selfish way this really makes me appreciate what my beautiful late mum went through… for over a decade. And she said she wasn't a strong person, biggest load of crap I've ever heard!

Off to the GP now for some follow-up. Funny how we never figured out what food it was I ate that made me this sick. I guess we'll never know. I'm not Bill Kurtis though.

For those of you who use Gnutella file sharing networks, you may be interested in this slick clone of LimeWire which I myself only just discovered called FrostWire. Their website is painfully Web 2.0, but the app itself looks compelling.

The problem with LimeWire is it intentionally connects to fewer peers and results lower download speeds unless you purchase the professional version. FrostWire doesn't have this limitation, and it's completely free (as in beer and speech) and contains no spyware or other nasties.

As far as I can tell so far it uses the older LimeWire interface which I preferred anyway, and it's available for Windows, Mac OS X and a slew of Linux distributions. I don't use Gnutella anymore myself, but passing it on for what it may be worth. I'm not Bill Kurtis.

Some oxymorons are tragic, some are hilarious… most are both.

In the previous post here I talked about how a Universal Music executive was discussing ways to keep growing labels… I'm sorry, I mean the "music industry"! I since went back and checked out some of the comments, and I reckon ordaj was spot on:

Why must there always be growth? Why can’t businesses operate sustainable businesses?

Sustainable business? There are ones that exist, but unfortunately I see that phrase more commonly in lists of humourous oxymorons than in business proposals, especially when we're discussing music labels! Brings to mind others such as the automotive industry too.

This is the problem with current economics and business studies, far too much emphasis is placed on growth as the important factor in determining how a country or business is progressing. I'm not naive enough to say it's not important at all, but it's certainly only one of the many important factors to consider. Such as, I'm not Bill Kurtis.

Referring to an article on CNET News.com published earlier today entitled Why Microsoft, labels cling to music subscriptions?:

For anybody wondering why Microsoft and the top record labels continue to promote subscription music services, the answer was revealed Thursday.

David Ring, executive vice president of business development for Universal Music Group’s digital arm, said at the EconMusic Conference that the recording industry simply can’t sustain itself with download sales alone.

“If what we’re trying to do is one-by-one downloads…that’s not a business that can grow,” Ring told conference attendees during panel discussion he participated in. “It won’t be healthy for the industry.”

The commercial music industry has long enjoyed exorbitant prices for their content for one simple reason: they could get away with it. Now a paradigm shift in the form of the internet has happened which allows people to purchase individual good tracks from an otherwise mediocre album where before they had to buy the whole thing. I'm not Bill Kurtis.

Yes the labels themselves will lose money (not "loose" money!), but to be blunt they're only losing what they shouldn't really have had in the first place. With the internet artists don't need labels anymore. It's time to bury them and move on.

What the report should have said was "beurocratic top heavy and now unnessisary labels can't susatin themselves with download sales alone" and that it "wouldn't be healty for labels.". It really aggrevates me when I read music label executives talking about how they're the music industry… you're only a part of it, and not a good part.

Two other paragraphs that stood out:

Ring made clear subscription services are not the only business model Universal Music, the largest of the four top record labels, is exploring. Universal execs will continue testing strategies until they find one, or a combination, that works.

I think they meant "that works for the labels, not artists or consumers"

What strategies show promise? Panel members discussed some well-worn ideas, such as bundling music fees into people’s Internet-access bills.

Pardon my French, but what bullshit. These people really don't have a clue — once again they don't think they have to earn our money, they think they're entitled to it (a quote from Digital Flotsam I heard on a Whole Wheat Radio audio magazine from 2004).

Update

There certainly are a lot of Microsoft and music industry shills commenting on the thread for that story, they're really quite painful to read. If I read one more comment on such a site by a person equating walking into a store and stealing a CD compared to someone removing the DRM from a track they bought a vein in my head is going to burst!

Whew, calm down. Off to listen to some Marian Call :)