Rubenerd

The BBC is reporting Microsoft's opinion of their latest web browser offering: Internet Exporer 8:

Microsoft has stepped up the battle to win back users with the latest release of its Internet Explorer browser.

The US software giant says IE 8 is faster, easier to use and more secure than its competitors.

“We have made IE 8 the best browser for the way people really do use the web,” said Microsoft’s Amy Barzdukas.

At the end of last year, data from Net Applications showed the software giant’s market share dropped below 70% for the first time in eight years to 68%.

I reiterate this one Bruce Schneier quote I've been saying here for years: security isn't claimed, it's proved. Internet Explorer 8 might be easer to use than 7 (and here's hoping the interface isn't as messed up too, for people who have no choice), but real world performance once it's released will be the real test of its security.

Microsoft has a history of delivering the aforementioned claims, but not the results. This is slowly changing, but they've got a very, very steep climb ahead. I'm not Bill Kurtis.

The story was summarised by the BBC in their RSS feed this morning as a question addressed for people who had jumped ship:

Will Microsoft’s new browser help persuade users who have flocked to other alternatives come back to Internet Explorer?

A few perhaps, but certainly not me or anyone I advise.

Writing about the recent Frome by-election in South Australia made me remember the lower house state elections back in 2006 when I voted for Mark Parnell of the South Australian Greens. To date he's been the only politician aside from Bob Brown who has ever returned a message I sent to them. The again, I suspect many members of parliament don't use those blasted email intertube things :).

Hello Mr Parnell, congratulations to you and The Greens South Australia on your won seat following the March election!

I voted for the Greens because I’m a firm supporter of the principals of your party and am very pleased The Greens now have a voice in South Australian politics. You’ve all done an amazing job and I look foward to hearing about how The Greens are changing South Australia for the better in this term and in the future.

Yours Most Pleased,
Ruben Schade

His reply, less than a few hours later:

Thanks very much Ruben. I was sworn in today – so now it’s down to business.
Cheers,
Mark

Mark Parnell
Greens SA Member of Legislative Council

I really admire Mark, being the lone Green in the state must get pretty intimidating! I appreciate his sense of humour; his down to earth approach to interviews and voting; and surprising lack of hot air when discussing issues. We need more people like him.

Not to mention his website is pretty slick!

Port Pirie Railway Station Museum, by User:Tirin

Less than a week after claiming victory, the South Australian state Liberal party has conceded defeat in the by-election for the electoral seat of Frome (Wikipedia link). Instead the seat has gone to independent Geoff Brock, the former Port Pirie mayor with 51.7% of the vote. You can read more if you're interested at the Adelade Now website. Having mixed feeling about it.

ASIDE: For those who don’t know, Adelaide is in South Australia, and the "Liberal" party are the conservatives/Tories that run against the left leaning Labor party, whom I consider the infinitely lesser of two evils… but still not quite with it!

I voted for the Greens in the state and federal elections (Australia's third largest political party), but I also think a healthy mix of independents who won't just automatically vote on party lines are critical to a well functioning government. If I read the above article correctly he's Labor leaning though, which means we might be able to expect where his votes will be going.

In other news, Mark Parnell is still the smartest guy in South Australian politics.

Photo by zipped06 on Flickr of Singapore last night (CNYE). Literally the only time of the year when none of the lights are on in the office towers!

The only times when Singapore and Australia have public holidays at the same time is generally if they're Christian or British holidays. In this case though Chinese New Year and Australia Day fall on the same day, so I could call my grandfather in Firefly in rural New South Wales and say hello during the day. It's nice when the moon decides to usher in a new lunar new year on Australia day, how decent of it!

Chinese New Year is of course the biggest holiday in Singapore. We have Christmas, Hari Raya, Deepavali and Vesak days off for the respective faiths here, but the two day Chinese New Year holiday is the time when Singapore feels the most like a Western country around Christmas. The roads are practically deserted; the hugely crowded Orchard Road shopping precinct can be navigated on foot with ease; you can get a table at a Starbucks or a prata shop with little to no trouble whatsoever; there are no queues to ATMs; you can get a seat on the MRT trains… yes, you can actually get a seat! Wild!

It's particulary eerie today given that it's extremely overcast, and very few people are walking around. It's the middle of the day and it's dark in this otherwise tropical country, and here I am sitting in a coffee shop typing this and half the tables are deserted. If I were to sit here during a regular Monday lunch hour, it would be packed with lots of people chatting loudly.

zipped06 on Flickr has taken some amazing photos of the River Festival last night if you're interested, such as the one below. I wish I had been able to go!

This year of course is the year of the Ox for those not keeping track at home. I'm not into zodiacs personally (Western or Eastern), but if it's your cup of tea here's what you can expect:

The Ox (牛) is one of the 12-year cycle of animals which appear in the Chinese zodiac related to the Chinese calendar. The Year of the Ox is denoted by the earthly branch character 丑.

The Ox is the sign of prosperity through fortitude and hard work. This powerful sign is a born leader, being quite dependable and possessing an innate ability to achieve great things. As one might guess, such people are dependable, calm, and modest. Like their animal namesake, the Ox is unswervingly patient, tireless in their work, and capable of enduring any amount of hardship without complaint.

Me standing in front of Parliament House in Canberra in 2006

Of course we must also not forget that today is also Australia day, the day the First Fleet from Britain arrived on the Australian mainland in 1788. It's a somewhat conflicting day for while the Australian society I was born into was born on that day, it also marked the beginning of the marginalisation of the Abroriginal peoples of Australia who still have not recovered.

I guess it would be more constructive to say Australia Day (Wikipedia link) is more about thinking about where we've come from, and thinking about where we would like to go, rather than celebrating a specific event. Or that could just be me. I'm not Bill Kurtis.

Gong Xi Fa Cai and Happy Australia Day all!

Whole Wheat Radio's Last.fm profile viewed when I was logged in this afternoon

In response to my post where I talked about passing 10,000 plays on Last.fm, Jim Kloss directed me to the Whole Wheat Radio Last.fm profile page. Our calculated musical compatibility is "HIGH".

In one word: I approve! And it definitely is interesting to check out the trends.

I'm surprised though that it's saying that the aforementioned artists are the only ones we have in common… unless they're the artists we have in common that I've played the most. I'm surprised Marian Call isn't listed there for example.

Wait, I just read it again, it says music we have in common "includes". I should learn to read things before making myself look silly… or at least more silly than I usually do. I'm not Bill Kurtis.

On Monday I posted a discussion I had with someone on Twitter who was adamant that everyone was wrong and that George W Bush would be remembered favourably by people… and he was serious! Upon receiving a tweet from me where I contradicted his assertion, he made a comparison between Bush and Nixon.

Not knowing much about historical American politics I didn't know if this comparison was apt, so I asked some folks about their opinions and got responses here, in email and in Google Reader. Let's just say I wasn't surprised by the responses!

Alex wins the grand prize. I had forgotten how terrible Bush Jr had been for environmental causes too; here in the world outside the US the media seemed to have focused more on his… how do I put this delicately?… less than successful international relations. Alex's comment about the "perception of western people" was especially spot on.

Yeah it’s true, Nixon was a pretty decent president but Bush is viewed in a negative light for much better reasons. My brother came up with a list of over 45 reasonably sized screw ups like messing up the Environmental Protection Agency, Hurricane Katrina, a bunch having to do with Iraq.. basically he is oblivious to the irreparable damage he’s done not only to the American economy, the American society, the global society, the Eco-systems around the world and the perception of western people in general.

He’s been a disgrace to us all and the only people who approve of him compose the lower idiotic wrung of society here in America. They kind of people who whole-heartedly believe his meaningless rhetoric and feel an obligation toward supporting the neo-conservative republican party.

I’ve lived in Illinois for all of my life and I have maybe met 3 people who approve of his actions. So yes – history will judge him as an obtuse, unqualified disgrace of a president who got to where he was with corporate contributions and a mutually beneficial relationships with the wealthy, power-hungry, apathetic kind of people who are destroying our planet.

Amen.

Thank you to everyone for your emails and comments, I'd like to think I've learned something today! I didn't learn that Bush won't be remembered favourably though… I knew that already. Did I mention I'm relieved beyond belief he isn't in charge anymore? I'm not Bill Kurtis.

My iPhone with the original screen cover and my Palm Centro phone next to my original iPods.

I love my 16GiB iPhone 3G. it's the single greatest gadget I've ever used. I know as a supporter of free and open source software and open standards I'm not really supposed to like it, but it's just gorgeous and a real pleasure to use. The entire experience is fantastic.

This patent Apple has been rewarded scares me though. We need competition to keep Apple on their toes, and this will only hamper such efforts by scaring away potential competitors. I guess that's the whole point though right?

Before I was an iPhone guy I was a Palm guy; aside from Apple I think Palm have been the only folks who could design a usable mobile phone interface. I still have a Palm Centro I carry around with me too to put my Australian SIM card in when I'm in Singapore, or vica versa. I can't help but think Palm's design of a touch screen device with icons representing different applications taking up the whole home screen was done before Apple for some reason… say a decade before Apple?

I'm not Bill Kurtis.

Without realising it, over the weekend I passed 10,000 plays on my Last.fm profile. That's nothing compared to my sister who's up to 11,119 plays or my dad who's up to 33,154 plays but it's a start!

Let it be known that Rod Picott and The Renovators are independent musicians whom I discovered on Whole Wheat Radio; that Michael Franks is the greatest singer/songwriter of all time; that Paul McCartney is artificially high given I accidently played Dance Tonight on a loop while out of the house; and The Trashmen are at number 2 simply because I've intentionally played Surfin Bird over 470 times. Bird bird bird, the bird is the word. Thank you.

Now I just need to work on a less cheesy profile description. My Whole Wheat one is much better. I'm not Bill Kurtis.

Hello hello, I was born in Sydney and spent the first few years of my life in Australia, but grew up in Singapore and consider it home. I’m now studying in Adelaide Australia but I return to Singapore for holidays and such. Hope to move back permanently to start my own consulting bidness with a high school friend.

I enjoy jazzy music, computer programming, tinkering with unconventional operating systems and software, amateur SLR photography, drinking exotic coffee and tea, aviation, museums, economics, architecture, evolution and humanism, figuring out how things work, reading non fiction books for hours on end, nature hiking and doing all of the above at a good coffee shop… except for that last one!

I’m very quiet and reserved in public, but certainly not online :)

If this post elicits from you response x, where x is the response shown above:

1. I am pleased you found it so silly and therefore entertaining! Or…
2. To be truthful I’m not surprised! Or…
3. I’m shocked beyond belief and I’ll be checking to make sure you’re not trying to distract me while your partner steals my mobile phone.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you've been reading my blog in any great detail over the past twenty years, I would first question your memory given the posts on this site only stretch back as far as 2004.While I am humbled and flattered that you would admit to me that your loyalty stretches back some two decades, I must point out that for you to have been reading my blog for twenty years, you would have had to start reading posts since 1989 which presents a perplexing problems as said year falls a full fourteen years before anything I've ever written here existed. And while I was using a computer in 1989 at the age of three, I hardly knew what I was doing and could barely read, let alone electronically construct prose. Unless "dajsdfhcaewiucvb" counts. Or deltree C:\. Whoops.

But I digress… as I tend to do infrequently do here and in regular conversation. See, I did it again. Ridiculous. Today we celebrate yet another ridiculous and overrated phenomena known as a pointless milestone. With the publishing of this post, the Rubenerd Blog will feature exactly 1,111 posts.

ASIDE: Who decided that infrequently and inflammable essentially mean the same thing as their non in- appended component words? Should I start saying I inpodcast? English really is a silly language!

Let us deconstruct this interesting number down for a second and make a few observations.

1. If spelled out, the number one thousand, one hundred and eleven is the only number which contains the world "one" in every single word. Go ahead, try looking for others.

2. 1111 has the same four numbers in succession without interruptions, unless you use commas to visually aid people in reading the number in the case of 1,111 or 1'111 or 1sandwich111.

3. 1111 in decimal base 10 is 1111, surprising though it may seem. 1111 in binary base 2 is only 15, a far less impressive number.

4. 1111 is the simplest four digit number to write, besides 0000 which isn't even really there because it's nothing.

5. The addition problem 1+1+1+1 is one of the few sums that even the most uneducated primary school student and the above-average intelligence politician can perform.

6. 1111 does not contain the number 11 twice, rather the number 111 preceded or followed by 1.

Don't worry though, for if I have bored you to tears, panic, rage or a perplexing combination of all three, you can take a small measure of comfort knowing that the next time I could conceivably create a long winded and pointless post such as this one with little merit or value to any society let alone our own, it would have to be post 11111, a full 10000 posts ahead of this one. Given a fortune teller told me I would be hit by a bus later this year, it is doubtful I will ever reach that number.

Thank you, and have a pleasant morning. I'm not Bill Kurtis.

Archive Utility having trouble with a malformed/damaged tar file

Okay enough political nonsense, back to writing about technology and software!

Unlike zip or proprietary rar files, in true "do one thing and do it well" Unix style, most Unix-like file compressors (such as bzip2, rzip or gzip) only compress one file at a time. An intermediate container format is needed if multiple files in one compressed archive are needed, the most common of which is the Tape Archive file/tarball or tar.

Mac OS X's Archive Utility (which you invoke from the Finder) has native support for tar, but I'm surprised by the number of times I see the error message above after double clicking and attempting to open one. Usually this is a result of a malformed or broken tar file, but the nature of tar files is that generally some files can be salvaged. The Finder refuses to do this, which worries me. How many GUI proficient Mac users throw away tar files that they could salvage at least some files out of?

The solution is a quick trip to the Terminal and using the cd command (same way as DOS) to navigate to the folder where the tar file you're having trouble with is located. Then enter:

% tar xvf [FILENAME].tar

In a nutshell, xvf tells tar to verbosely display files as they're extracted. In this circumstance this is very useful!

You'll see a stream of filenames fill up your window, followed by a message similar to the following if you're tar file was corrupted.

[…]tar: End of archive volume 1 reached
[FILENAME].tar: Unexpected EOF on archive file

While you some of your files may have been extracted, clearly in this case you've received a poorly formed tar file. If possible, you should attempt to download it again from where you got it, or if you made it yourself try to find a backup.