Rubenerd

Screenshot of my short lived, MacBook Pro FreeBSD Xfce desktop

If you ever needed some sort of proof that comment systems on blogs are worth keeping, then check out John Whendy's comment on my FreeBSD 7.1 release post from last week.

In it he referenced a previous post I made from all the way back in October last year about my failed attempts to boot FreeBSD along with Windows and Mac OS X on my MacBook Pro, then took the opportunity to painstakingly detail how he managed to get it working on his own Apple hardware right down to the commands. Wow.

Comment systems that attract even 99.95% of comments as spam or rude insults on family related posts are worth the extra maintenance and thicker skin for comments like the one John left. I've become much more cynical since my mum moved on far too early, but this kind of thing restores my faith in humanity again, even if just for a short while :)

Now all we need to do is somehow adjust that ratio to a more favourable level so we have more John comments, and more Jim Kloss comments, and more Atuuschaaw comments, and more Roel comments, and more Neal comments, and more Sharon comments, and more Mary Wallace comments, and more Nick Hodge comments, and more Felix Tanjono comments, and more Little Sue comments… I could go on… and less comments on why I look like a girl or a "faggot" or whether or not I need comprehensive insurance plans from companies headquartered in Barbados.

It's official folks, the Hong Kong Post Office certificate registrar uses the secure SHA1 hash algorithm not the now-vulnerable MD5. Security Now in-joke :-)

For what it's worth, the official title for the Hong Kong government is sure a mouthful isn't it? And here I was thinking the various Australian government departments had unnecessarily long and complicated names!

Some of my own Optus spam from when I was in Australia

According to a story released just hours ago from the Adelaide Now website, Optus has been fined AU$110,000 for sending text message spam which was sent from a misleading phone number.

From the report:

The fine is the second biggest penalty imposed for a breach of Australia’s anti-spam laws.

The messages promoted the OptusZoo entertainment service to customer mobile phones and used the sender identification 966.

Optus assumed recipients would make the connection between 966 on a mobile phone keypad, and the word “ZOO” which can also be spelt out using the three numbers, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) said.

“However, this was not considered sufficient identification, as ‘966’ could be used to represent any number of permutations on a telephone keypad,” ACMA chairman Chris Chapman said in a statement.

Somehow their reasoning that everyone would know what that number means does sound just a little fishy. It sounds like a classic case of intentional obfuscation, then denial to me. It seems hard to believe that someone could really think a three digit number could translate using a keypad into "Zoo" which we're supposed to associate with one of their products.

If the numbers when entered into a phone magically spelt the word "Optus" I'd perhaps be marginally more forgiving… but "Zoo"? How many Optus customers are even aware that they're using that service?

Optus is of course Australia's number 2 telecommunications company behind Telstra. Writing this from Singapore is ironic given Singapore Telecom owns Optus. Budda boom.

Garfield has the right idea… again…

Another night, another case of insomnia. In this case it's 03:00 and I'm still not only wide awake, but clearly possessing the energy needed in order to not only climb out of bed, but to sit myself in front of a computer, take that inital blast of blazing light as I turn the monitor on, and start typing a blog post.

It's funny that more often than not for me I don't have trouble sleeping when I have a huge problem or obstacle to overcome in life, but rather when I have hundreds of smaller problems. They seem to build up exponentially at times to the point where I can be propped up in bed and my thoughts are running together faster than a relay team. Sorry for the crappy comparison, but you try to be witty at 03:04.

Why has my bank said the rent has been paid but my landlord says it hasn't? Why hasn't that package from Japan arrived yet? Do I want to live permanently here or back in Australia? Would super capacitors run hotter and therefore need more cooling than a traditional battery? Why am I always so nervous? How could there be plants at the centre of the earth according to the "Journey to the Centre of the Earth" movie if there's no sunlight? Where are my keys? Should I give up on this long hair experiment and have it all cut off when it's taken over 4 years to get this far? Is OpenBSD really that much slower than FreeBSD and NetBSD in real life even if benchmarks say that is in certain circumstances? Why do I still expect to see mummy at some point?

Is that it? I hope so. Why do I want to learn German, Dutch, Swedish and Japanese of all things? German makes sense, my dad and half my family are, and Dutch might be somewhat similar to German, but why Swedish and Japanese? Why does mess accumulate so fast? If the bed frame I'm sleeping on broke at an angle, would I slide off the bed, crash through the window behind me and fall 7 floors? Does my medical insurance cover falling out of my bed… from 7 floors up? Why do I worry about worrying as much as I worry about the problems themselves? Who decided that toothpaste should be minty in flavour and that mints are fresh? Why do I worry about not having too much of a social life if I prefer that lifestyle? Why is concentrating on your breathing in order to drown out distractions so simple in principal but so hard to actually do?

Can you order home delivered sleep? You know what, that generated too many negative images, had I been more awake I would have been alert to that before I had typed it. I would have also realised that I could have just as easily used the backspace key and deleted that line instead of trying to explain why normally I wouldn't have written such stuff here.

Not sure if this is helping me sleep or not. Perhaps I should dust off an old copy of Learning Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 and read it. Ah no, alas with me boredom doesn't make me tired, it just makes me feel bored. Perhaps a silly anime series? Nah, I don't have the energy to laugh, and I'd have to read subtitles. Quick walk around the block? Nah, I'm too tired. Aha, problem solved.

I will get the hang of this sleeping business eventually, I might lose some sleep over trying to figure it out though.

When I initially moved back over to Firefox on my Mac so I could use Greasemonkey to make Google Reader usable again, I had no idea that in a matter of weeks I would become a Firefox addict again. Not necessarily because of the interface (on Mac the Firefox 3.0 interface is quite clumsy and certainly not as streamlined as Camino or Safari), it's because of the extensions.

For example, yesterday CNET announced that Google's Chrome browser would be made available for Mac OS X and Linux at some point in the next 100 years:

Showing signs that it’s working to meet requests for new developments to its Chrome browser, Google on Friday said it hopes to release versions for Mac OS X and Linux by the first half of the year, and it released a new version Wednesday that paves the way for the most requested feature: extensions.

While I was impressed initially with the Windows version as I wrote about last year, I soon yawned and moved back to Firefox. As someone who used to use KDE constantly I appreciated the fact that WebKit was being so well endorsed by being used by another vendor's browser, but I couldn't really see the market it was attempting to fill other than perhaps the idea that each tab is a separate process.

The fact such a large web company is also producing it does scare me a little too.

But back to extensions, now that I've read a few reports that Chrome will include extension abilities I'm somewhat appeased, but what I'm more immediately concerned about are the extensions themselves. While I value a few themes which make Firefox look more Mac like, I've become so used to using a handful of security extensions that moving to a browser that doesn't either have similar built-in functionality or the ability to extend the browser to do the same thing would make me feel unsafe using the web.

This is probably more paranoia than anything else, but I've become so used to blocking all the JavaScript, suspect advertisements and cookies loaded on a page and keeping meticulous whitelists that the alternative of allowing essentially a free-for-all scares me. Which is ironic, because less than a year ago I didn't have problems with this at all. I'd also miss the ability I have now to scrub URLs to remove unnecessary redirects, and being able to check whether or not secured certificates are using MD5 or not, or whether super cookies are active… the list goes on. This will be the topic of an upcoming post.

Who knows, perhaps Chrome will finally release versions for other OSs and allow extensions which will generate enough interest as to create replacement extensions for their equivalents for Firefox. Unfortunately this will take time, and to be honest I think Firefox and Chrome target two different groups of people, the latter of which perhaps aren't as security obsessed. I guess time will tell.

Ladies, gentlemen and everybody else, I have an announcement to make.

If anyone — and I do mean anyone — sends me an email, a text message, a Twitter reply or a Twitter direct message, a blog comment, a discussion point on a wiki, a reply on a forum, a message attached to a carrier pigeon or a smoke signal and assumes that because I'm under the age of thirty that I would appreciate the inclusion of the misused and abused acronym "lol", it will no longer be responded to with irritation… it will generate no reply whatsoever.

I don't care if you're a close friend or family member, or if you're house is burning down, or whether you're a close friend or family member who's house is burning down, you will not get any reply. Zippo. Zero. Zilch. Zbignew Brezinsky. That reminds me, I need to review his latest book at some point. In one word: eye opening.

ASIDE: Come to think of it why you would be sending me a "lol" message if you’re house was burning down is beyond me. "hey rubz my house is totally burning down lol". You evil insurance scamming person with little to no grasp of the English language!

Still, don't try to change the subject. As I was saying before you rudely interrupted me by talking about your house and Zbignew Brezinsky's latest book, if you sendeth me the cursed "lol" you will not receiveth any communique from moi… no exceptions!

Thank you, and good evening.

Waiting for that email folks… any email at all!

I'm typing this post with a sense of dissapointment and frustration which is never a good mindset to talk rationally about a subject, but in this case I feel it's nessisary to plow ahead.

I have now sent FIVE emails to Ourmedia over this last fortnight and I haven't got anything back at all, not even boilerplate.

For those not aware what's going on, Ourmedia is an Internet Archive backed media hosting site which for some reason several weeks ago stopped letting me log in or even display my member page. Curiously my Ourmedia blog and Ourmedia links pages are all still there, and if you browse the Internet Archives you can see all my content. As far as Ourmedia goes though, it's as if I'm half dead, half not. They think I'm the living dead.

ASIDE: Does Ourmedia think I’m a vampire?

Given I'm moving webhosts because my current one is going under, I was really desperate to get my Rubenerd Show podcast episodes over to their site, and I still am. I also really want to start recording new ones again sometime soon!

It's a crying shame given Ourmedia is non profit (I'm not going to put my audio material on a commercial site), has a great community, is specifically designed for a remix Creative Commons culture and I'm a huge fan of JD Lasica (the founder)… but I'm starting to think the support guys are just ignoring me.

Given this situation I may have no choice but to eliminate the middle man and start hosting files on the Internet Archives directly instead. As I said above I don't want to miss out on the community and my friends on Ourmedia, but I'm left with no other options.

In the meantime Ourmedia folks, if you'd be able to check my account, see why it's innaccessible and fix it, I'd love to come back. Unfortunately I don't think I can wait much longer.

The ball is in your court Ourmedia.

Sent from my iPhone

I'm getting jittery without it… I haven't posted a Tweet to my Twitter profile in just under two weeks now!

Curiously I don't think I fell for any of the recent Twitter phishing exploits, just one day my Twitter account stopped accepting my password. And another curious thing; monitoring my own Twitter profile page I've noticed that nobody has sent any fake messages.

Could this be a problem with Twitter instead of a hack or something similar? I can hear you laughing from Alaska Jim! "Dang that Aussie kid and his Twitter crap!"

Twitter (and I guess FriendFeed) are nothing like the MySpace and Facebook sites out there! They're good gosh darn it! They just need a working password that's all…

…and all it got from me was this lousy photo of a Rick James album. The girl's a super freak, super freak. That girl's alright. She's alright. She's a super freak, super freak, she's super freaky now.

Super freak.

Another day, another problem fixing my dad's Windows XP Tablet PC. Why does it have to be such a struggle? I guess they have to keep it complicated to keep consultants paid right?

Today's Windows error appeared when I attempted to install my dad's copy of Office 2000. His company still uses Windows 2000 and Office 2000 so he figured he might as well make at least the office suite the same, plus he doesn't need the extra features of XP, 2003, 2007 or whatever version they're up to now. In fact he could easily tolerate Office 97!

It seems Windows XP with Service Pack 3 doesn't like it though; whenever I try to install it from either the traditional SETUP.EXE executable or INSTALL.MSI, I'm presented with an error that claims I don't have the right version of the Windows Installer installed. Yes, I need an installer to launch an installer. It would be hilarous if he didn't desperately need this machine working again soon. I even tried installing it from the Command Prompt and the same error appears.

D:\MSIEXEC -I INSTALL.MSI

The thing is, he does have Windows Installer 3.1 installed which as far as I know is the latest version. Plus, this is Office 2000 we're taking about, the only way this system could have a version of Windows Installer that was older than Office 2000 was if he was running a version of Windows that was older than Office 2000. Or at least that would be the logical thing to assume, let's not even get started with the .NET framework and how you can never be sure what version of that a person has installed in advance. What a royal mess.

ASIDE: What was wrong with darned SETUP.EXE files? Only Microsoft could come up with a system that required you to install an application to install an application!

Well okay I concede as a FreeBSD guy I generally need to install the ports system to install a application, but the point is the ports system will download and install applications for you, you don’t need to have it installed and have the correct version before you can run an entirely separate installer that does the same job that a dedicated, stand alone installer did before.

They really need to go back to Windows NT 3.51 and start again. Windows NT 3.51 was kinda cool, plus it had the clean and simple Windows 3.x interface.

Stuff it all, perhaps it's time to teach my dad how to use Gnumeric and Abiword… or failing those even OpenOffice.org, or perhaps even IBM Lotus Symphony. They're compatible with Microsoft Office 2000 file formats.