Rubenerd

Food poising is not fun in the slightest, but fortunately by using a combination of soothing music and Tiger Balm my headache as of a few hours ago is completely gone. Mary Wallace and my GP suggested I eat bread, rice, apples and toast of which I'm eating right now. Provided I don't get out of this computer chair and don't eat too quickly I think I'll be fine.

With that in mind, I thought I'd share another quote, this time from the FreeBSD forums:

the daemon you know is better than the penguin you don’t.
~ danger@

He's referring of course to BSD (the daemon) and Linux (the pengiun).

Reminds me of another similar quote by someone who I can't recall right now who said [paraphrasing] the best programming language for a job is the programming language you're best at and enjoy.

I've been learning a new programming language and a new OS to keep my mind sharp while I'm on holidays, you'll see the reviews of these in upcoming days. Ironically I started learning these because I thought I needed to broaden my horizons and get out of my FreeBSD, Mac, Ruby and Perl comfort zone. Those two quotes above pretty much shoot that down in flames don't they? I don't mind though, I still find them fascinating.

Without sounding too cheesy, I love learning new things, or using old things in new ways. It's one of the greatest pleasures in life.

Tweet from marywallace from Schizo America, one of the nicest people I follow on Twitter:

Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.” — Robert A. Heinlein

Truer words were never spoken… except maybe the Golden Rule and the obligatory "Ruben isn't Bill Kurtis" ^_^.

If only more people on the internet had profile pages on their blogs like this:

I am an early adopter, a mom, a writer, a video producer, an avid reader, self taught on a lot of software, a progressive, and I’m worried that my country seems to forget its noble aspirations and its humanity.

I see social justice issues, problems of poverty and inequality and prejudice, and I imagine new solutions, ideas quilted from what I’ve read and heard and seen. I use "found media", clippings from old paradigm forms of communication (magazines, newspapers, shopping catalogs) and new paradigm methods of communication (internet blogs, online news articles, twitters/plurks).

I think the internet, with its ability to connect people irrespective of borders, is our great hope for a world of mutual consideration and peace.

Well isn't that just great, I think I might have food poisoning. I could list the symptoms, but they're not pretty and I think some of the worst I've ever had. I'm sitting upright and sipping water slowly so I'm doing a bit better now.

I'm confused though, according to Wikipedia you're not supposed to eat acidic or fatty food, but on About.com they list Apple as something good. I trust Wikipedia and About.com on computer software and such, but perhaps this is case where I give them a pass!

I'll be waddling down to the GPs office soon, fortunately Shaw House is close to our place. I don't think I could survive a taxi or motorbike trip! In the meantime I'll attempt to occupy myself by working on my W3C compliance… if I busy myself it puts it out of my head. Fortunately I don't have a headache.

My mum had these symptoms from her chemotherapy for… 12 years. I've had this less than 12 hours and I'm already winging on blog posts. Mustn't have got that gene.

UPDATE: Doc says it’s food poisoning, bummer. Fortunately he said I did all the right things. Will be going back on Monday for another checkup. This is called fun!

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

20:45 – Terribly good jokes told by people who can't tell jokes; Barack Obama's inauguration on TV; relieved farewell to Dubbya; more relieved Sarah Palin didn't win than Barack did; silly thing John McCain said; the American founding fathers; Thomas Jefferson on church and state; getting a Nikon D60 for Christmas; pixel density is more important then megapixels; my old FinePix S9600; how bridge cameras compare to real single lens reflex (SLR) cameras; realising shows shouldn't be recorded at 2am; an exciting new hobby and discovering green tea is… green tea!

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

Browsing a website this afternoon I saw the advertisement shown above. For those using text browsers, the banner reads "Hosting for people who build websites".

In other news, Volkswagon would like to announce they make cars for people who drive, Sakai Sushi is for people who eat fish, and my blog is for people to read so that they know I'm not Bill Kurtis.

I guess their slogan is still better than any of the banks here in Singapore or Australia ^_^.

————————–
THIS MESSAGE HAS BEEN SCANNED WITH SUPER AWESOME VIRUS SCANNER 2009. IT WILL SELF DESTRUCT IF DELETED.

My feedback regarding the latest episode of Security Now:

To whomever Gibsons and Laportes this may concern,

I'm not Bill Kurtis.

I thought I'd just throw a message over to you guys to clarify one point that was raised on Security Now Episode 181 "Crypto Rehash".

Steve, you commented that you failed to see the point of putting MD5 or SHA hashes on websites that offered downloads given that if a website was compromised the hash could easily be changed as well. I must admit I had never thought of it that way myself either; I had a hearty chuckle on the train along with you guys much to the bewilderment of my fellow commuters!

I would comment though that I was under the impression that hashes under download links are not provided for the purposes of verifying a file hasn't been tampered with for security reasons, but was instead provided so you could verify that the downloaded file had been received intact. As a FreeBSD user I download ISO images and regularly use the hashes to verify that the finished download wasn't corrupted while downloading before I burn a coaster with one. Not sure if this is really necessary, but it has alerted me to a couple of failed downloads in the past.

Thanks for the great show and all the effort and preparation you put into each one.

Most humbly and securely yours,
Ruben Schade in A Little Street in Singapore

STEWIE: All right Brian, I’m going to go up to the upper level and run this wire down through the wall. Grab your walkie, I’ll call you when I get up there.

BRIAN: Okay.

STEWIE: Brian, pick up. Over.

BRIAN: What?

STEWIE: Brian, please say over when you’ve finished talking. Over.

BRIAN: What? Over.

STEWIE: Do you see the wire yet? Over.

BRIAN: No.

STEWIE: No… what? Over.

BRIAN: No! Over.

STEWIE: Okay I’m going to start feeding it through. Over.

BRIAN: Wait, if you haven’t started feeding it why did you ask me if I could see it?

STEWIE: Didn’t copy that. Over.

BRIAN: I said why did you ask me if I could see it If you haven’t started feeding it? Over.

STEWIE: Okay that’s better I can hear you now. Over. Do you see it yet? Over.

BRIAN: You know, you’re a jackarse! For the record I don’t want to hang out with you anymore when this is over.

STEWIE: When this is what Brian? Over.

BRIAN: I said I don’t want to hang out with you anymore when this is over.

STEWIE: When this is what? You’ve got to finish your sentence. Over.

BRIAN: That’s it! My sentence is over!

STEWIE: Your sentence is what Brian? Over.

BRIAN: My sentence is… wait I have to say over even if the sentence ends with the word over?

STEWIE: Ends with the word what Brian? Over.

BRIAN: Oh I see the wire.

STEWIE: Do you see the wire what? Over.

BRIAN: OVER!!!

STEWIE: Don’t get angry Brian, Ruben is saying he’s isn’t Bill Kurtis.

I was under the impression that newer web standards emphasised the separation of content from presentation markup. This was the reason for the creation of CSS and relegating the humble table back to displaying… tabular data.

I've been an unabashed and unapologetic supporter of the web standards themselves, even if in the past my interpretations of them weren't exactly correct ;-). I'm attempting to correct this though because I see real value in everyone being on the same page on net as it were. That was a really clever and entirely unintended pun. I'm not Bill Kurtis.

What concerns me though is the removal of the value attribute from the humble ordered list element. This attribute is vital for generating non-contiguous but ordered lists of items, or where selected items share the same value, such as this example of ranking some of the cities I grew up living in based on the amount of time I spent there:

<ol>
<li value="1">Singapore</li>
<li value="2">Melbourne, Victoria, Australia</li>
<li value="3">Adelaide, South Australia, Australia</li>
<li value="4">Brisbane, Queensland, Australia</li>
<li value="4">Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia</li>
<li value="6">Sydney, New South Wales, Australia</li>
<li value="0">Orion’s Belt, Far Far Away!</li>
</ol>

According to the W3Schools list element article, the value attribute was deprecated by the W3C for use in XHTML because you can "use styles instead". There's just one problem with this line of reasoning: The value of a list item is NOT a style attribute, it's DATA.

By removing this so called "presentation information" we're also removing an integral part of the information itself which is absolutely unacceptable.

If we were to take what they were saying as Gospel and represented these values in CSS (it is possible), then we rendered our now standards compliant document using another browser that didn't support CSS, we would be presented with a list without this data.

I urge the W3C (in my very limited capacity!) to seriously reconsider the omission of this attribute in their specifications.

One of the final pieces of the puzzle (to use a worn out cliche that long since overstayed it's welcome) of moving web servers is making sure that the code in the blog posts here and for the show are valid XHTML (I had kept this in mind for several years, but I have made mistakes that need correcting). This is important for several reasons which I won't bore you with here, suffice to say it has to do with moving over to a new server with a new theme, possible assignment marks and with some XML software I'm writing.

For those who are staring at me with blank faces right now (even more than usual I mean), XHTML is a reformulation of HTML into strict XML instead of the more lenient SGML. Alphabet soup sentences aside, pragmatically this means you can pass your web pages through a XML parser which allows you to do some really cool things like converting pages into other file formats, extract data more easily, use microformats to generate feeds, and so on. The theory also is because XML is stricter than SGML, pages written in XHTML are more "correct" and should be easier for browsers to render.

ASIDE: You can tell if a page has been optimised for an XHTML standard by looking at the head of the source code for a page for a DOCTYPE definition.

The current standards are XHTML 1.0 Frameset, XHTML 1.0 Transitional and XHTML 1.0 Strict (which is what I currently use). XHTML 1.1 also exists, but has seen limited adoption given Internet Explorer 6’s hostility towards the required xml version declaration which triggers it’s quirks mode which isn’t what we want!

There seems to be a huge difference of opinion between people who see the value of validating web pages with a XHTML W3C specification, and those who say it's a waste of time and more of a hindrance to the web than an assistance.

I'm firmly in the first camp, but that's not to say I approve of everything the W3C is doing with their specs. Unfortunately the way I see it, for every three steps forward they make, they take one step backwards. This means they're definitely heading in the right direction and making progress (albeit at a snail's pace), but they're shedding some useful stuff along the way in their absolute rigid pursuit of code purity and correctness. Iframe elements and ordered lists come to mind, but I'll save them for another post where I can elaborate further.

As of the 5th of February 2009 the home page of this blog is valid XHTML 1.0 Strict, but there's still lots of work to be done for individual posts. A lot of this can be done automatically with a few Perl scripts I've hacked together, but a few tags that will need replacement can really only be taken care of by a human looking at it and making the correct substitutions. At least I feel I'm making progress.

XHTML sounds like an isotonic energy drink. It doesn't sound like Bill Kurtis, which is useful because I'm not Bill Kurtis.

The incredibly witty British actor and now Twitter user Steven Fry for whom I and my whole extended family have always had plenty of time for, and even more time for, asked a question on Twitter today regarding Creative Commons.

"What is your view of Creative Commons licences"?
(original tweet)

Let's just say I tried my best, but I still have much to learn. What was it my grandfather on my mum's side always said? "Ruben, you tried your best, but you still have much to learn".

@stephenfry My view of Creative Commons licences is generally through a computer screen sir.
(original tweet)

Must start watching more British television again, in particular British comedy. Absolutely the best in the world, and don't let anyone else ever tell you otherwise! Don't let people tell you I'm Bill Kurtis either, because I'm not Bill Kurtis.