Rubenerd

Jimmy Wales motivational poster by Autistic Psycho on Flickr.

Ever since Wikipedia and its earlier incarnations started, there has been controversy in the academic community as to the reliability of its articles and whether or not it's appropriate to cite in assignments, much as every new medium throughout history has been questioned by those using the previous ones. Sure Wikipedia has its fair share of factual inaccuracies resulting from mistakes (and malice), but then again studies like this show that competing encyclopædic works aren't exactly gold standards themselves.

The University of South Australia (where I study for half the year) has an official policy regarding Wikipedia that states if you cite it as a reference, marks will be deducted.

ASIDE: I’ve been told this is not true, it is not de jure "official policy", though it is de facto.

I'm not sure whether it's because socially I'm a quiet person so I feel as though I need other outlets to be rebellious, but because of this policy I include Wikipedia as a reference in every research assignment I do. With each citation I refer the reader to a page in the appendix corroborating each fact I gleaned from the Wikipedia page with further references to prove the authenticity of the facts and claims, along with an explanation.

Could I just include the references I used to corroborate the Wikipedia page I cited instead of citing Wikipedia in the first place? Of course I could, but that's not the point. The point is to address what I see as the unfair negative bias the education community seems to have with user generated content. I figure for every hundred people who read my Wikipedia appendix explanations, perhaps one or two will take to heart what I've said and start taking it more seriously. I guess I'm still young and naive in that way, even though I'm not Bill Kurtis.

Have I ever lost marks for doing this? Only once out of tens of assignments, and that one penalty was later rescinded on appeal. I reckon that's a pretty good record.

LEGAL NOTICE: My electronic solicitor has advised me to disclose that I cannot and will not be held responsible for those who decide to follow my advice and fail an important assignment! By reading this message, you agree with this. Arigato, arigato gozaimasu.

Another quickie to serve as much as a reminder for me as a how-to post.

If you've configured the SFTP daemon on your target system to use a non-standard port as part of your security precaution mix, you can't pass this port number by appending a colon and the port to the address. Instead, use the SFTP options flag to declare the port:

% sftp -oPort [PORT] (USER@)[ADDRESS]

For example, to connect as user NotBillKurtis to a local 192.168.1.128 server on port 50000 you would enter:

% sftp -oPort 50000 NotBillKurtis@192.168.1.128

This is another post that’s been sitting in my Drafts folder since the 27th of November 2007. In trying to clean out this backlog I’m finishing and publishing these posts now, even if this particular story is somewhat outdated and I was much cockier back then than I am now! Cheers ^_^

Ed Bott on ZDNet has listed a set of optimisations you can perform to make Windows Vista boot faster. It seems even fewer and fewer people are impressed with this OS, and the fact the inferior experience starts even before it starts is ominous to say the least.

I was in a down mood this afternoon given my mum's latest poor medical test results, so I decided to break loose and post some flamebait!

rubenschade@ — FreeBSD Flamebait

My 1.3GHz Athlon machine with 256MB of RAM, FreeBSD 6.2 and a fully decked out KDE desktop boots up significantly faster than Vista on every brand new state of the art machine I’ve tried, and I’d argue I’m just as (if not more) productive on it.

Saying Windows Vista doesn’t take as long to boot is like saying that a snail is faster than an amoeba. It’s probably true, but it’s a pointless statement.

ASIDE: FreeBSD+KDE also boots up almost twice as fast as Debian GNU/Linux+KDE too wink

I was excited that it didn't take too long for someone to reply after all, though I was disappointed by it's crudeness. I was hoping for something more astroturfy!

done@ — Thank Dog!

The pathetic Linux zealot has arrived.

I thought we’d have to wait longer.. but thank Dog – here he is!

When Linux runs programs people NEED TO WORK is when it will become a mainstream OS.. until then, it’s a fun curiosity..

An ad hominum attack, followed by an fundamental mistake a quick glance over at Wikipedia would have prevented? I was all ready to pen my smiley face response but a few generous souls beat me to it.

bmerc@ — Hey clueless…

If you’re gonna trash talk someone for driving a Ford, take the time to make sure they’re not actually in a Chevy before you open your yap.

BSD is not Linux. The fact that you don’t know this tells me everything I need to know about your knowledge of Linux and OSes in general.

zaine_ridling@ — I can vouch for that

FreeBSD is amazingly fast. Even on my 5-year old machine, it boots in 12 seconds, twice as fast as any Linux distro I’ve installed in the past 18 months.

In retrospect it probably wasn't a good idea to post about FreeBSD on a Windows blog, but I reckon it's important to let people know sometimes that a particular piece of software isn't the be-all end-all. Sure Vista can be made to boot faster… but it's still akin to rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. Or claiming that I'm Bill Kurtis, which isn't true.

I got a kick out of these tounge in cheek Motivational Posters that take at jab at Debian GNU/Linux for their embarrassingly severe low entropy security hole in their implementation of OpenSSH in May 2008.

I remember seeing some funny FreeBSD Motivational Posters at some point recently too that asseted that FreeBSD users are reliable but boring (I'm a FreeBSD guy of course!), but for the life of me I can't remember where. You'll all be the first to know when I do, even though I'm not Bill Kurtis.

I feel as though I could start a blog dedicated to the science of sleep — I sure talk about it enough here. Perhaps this topic is worthy of a new category even?

This morning I'm having the exact opposite problem to what I normally have: I'm too awake. Last night I went to sleep around 20:00 which is extraordinary early for me, but it unfortunately had the same result it always has: it made me bolt out of bed around 03:00 ready to start a new day! It's 03:40 already and I've had a shower, a bite to eat and tacked a small programming problem that's been gnawing at me for the last few days, and I'm still wide awake.

The ironic thing is, for most of my life I'm tired. Virtually any time of day, if you give me a comfortable pillow to rest my head on, I will doze off. The only time of the day I have trouble sleeping is… late at night. It's as if I'm a nocturnal creature by nature and trying to force a sleeping pattern that's the opposite to that is unnatural and doesn't work. Some people my age are nocturnal because with all the booze filled partying late at night they've conditioned themselves for it, but for me it seemed to happen organically with all my regular day-to-day tasks.

I'd say other than deciding what to do when I finish university and whether I'll finish all my studies in Adelaide after all, figuring out how to sleep properly is currently the biggest problem I'm facing. Nobody should feel tired 100% of the time during the day and only a low percentage at night… at least I don't think they should.

I'm going to figure out how to sleep one of these nights if I have to stay awake all night to do it! I'm not Bill Kurtis.

For those of you who use WordPress, you're probably used to using Akismet for your spam blocking needs. While I've found it to be a useful way to block the torrents of comment spam I get on a daily basis, it certainly isn't perfect. The problem is, aside from simply tagging comments as spam, there really isn't any way you can customise or fine tune Akismet to block the specific types of spam you receive.

ASIDE: For some reason, my blog elicits spam that advertises suspect banking services and pharmaceuticals. Spammers apparently think I’m a terribly depressed person who needs contraception and a bulletproof offshore bank account to store my millions of dollars of embezzled funds. Hey, one out of three isn’t bad I guess!

Enter the TanTanNoodles Simple Spam Filter. This tiny plugin does two critical things that Akismet doesn't: blocking comments with multiple links which spammers universally use to pedal their advertisements, and defining keyword filters. In this way the Simple Spam Filter doesn't replace Akismet, it complements it by taking care of obvious spam messages before Akismet even has to deal with it.

While blocking comments with multiple links is useful, it's the flexible keyword filter that's the killer feature. On the simple, easy to understand configuration screen you're presented with a text box to add keywords to, along with a list of suggested keywords from messages currently in your spam queue. You can add them to your custom filter by simply clicking them, too easy!

Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam…

One final whipped cream feature which tops off the simple chocolate fudgy goodness of a plugin is the ability to present a user with a reCAPTCHA if someone is suspected of submitting a spam comment. I haven't enabled it myself because the keywords I've assigned it to filter wouldn't be ones that a person who's comments I approve of would use, but the fact it's there is very compelling.

Since installing this plugin on Saturday (two days ago now) it has automatically rejected 1913 comments, more than Akismet ever did. I've also had no spam comments make their way to my legitimate comment moderation queue which when working by itself Akismet let slip quite regularly.

I'm completely sold. If you're using WordPress and only intend on using one other plugin other than Akismet, make it this one.

An uncharacteristically short how-to post from me. It's probably because I'm not Bill Kurtis.

Burning a typical ISO image to CD, using the standard /dev/acd0 CD drive device and where johncleese.iso is (surprisingly) the name of the image to burn:

# burncd -f /dev/acd0 data [johncleese.iso] fixate
% echo Ruben is not Bill Kurtis

The FreeBSD Handbook has more details.

Really? Where to? Haw haw haw!

Taken outside the service lift with my iPhone this morning. I'm not Bill Kurtis.

Screenshot of Windows 7. Hehe, wait a minute…

Don't read too much into the heading for this post and assume that the Mac and FreeBSD guy all of a sudden thinks Windows Vista is peachy. I'm not defending the security record of Windows, I'm arguing against the assertion that fewer UAC dialog boxes will result in less security. I feel as though I'm beating a dead horse with this issue, but it keeps coming up.

Ina Fried over on CNET News.com has written an article titled Windows 7 less annoying, but also less secure? where she reports that Windows 7 will be displaying fewer of those irritating UAC warning dialog boxes whenever a user tries to do something:

Microsoft’s efforts to make Windows 7 less annoying than Vista may also be making it less secure than its predecessor.

With Windows Vista, the operating system popped up a warning any time a major change was being made to the system, whether by the OS or by a third-party application. With Windows 7, users can choose how often to be notified, with the current default set to notify only when a third-party application is making a change.

The assertion here is that UAC security dialog boxes somehow make computers more secure, and that the removal of some situations where these messages would appear therefore makes Windows 7 less secure.

The [primary] problem with this line of reasoning is that UAC security dialog boxes don't improve security to start with. All they do is train users to click the Allow button as a reflex. On Mac OS X and free software desktops such as the ones on GNU/Linux or FreeBSD, before any destructive or hardware based changes can be made, most of the time it results in a dialog box prompting the user for their password, or for a root users password. This seems to be a far more sensible way to go.

To quote a post I wrote back in May 2007 when I was rebutting another CNET article that claimed the Mac versus PC advertisement for Vista was inaccurate:

Irritating pop up messages that appear so often that people just get used to hitting "Allow" without reading what they say is no argument for security. The advertisement in question is not saying that Windows computers are too secure, the advertisement is saying that because Windows computers have so many security problems, Microsoft had to take drastic action. The result was a poorly implemented warning system that did everything to irritate end users and nothing to improve security.

Reducing the number of situations where these messages would appear in Windows 7 won't reduce security. Microsoft has made a lot of really bad moves with regards to security of their products, but reducing the verbosity of this flawed system isn't one of them. I'm not Bill Kurtis.

Just updated my iPhone to 2.2.1, even though I'm not Bill Kurtis. Can't say I can see any difference given I never sent any phone emails, but if it's free… ^_^