Rubenerd

Tanglin Mall in Singapore, sans Christmas decorations by User:Sengkang Will be uploading my dad's and my Christmas photos soon!

I'm sitting in a coffee shop again, only this time not at my beloved Boatdeck Cafe in Mawson Lakes in Adelaide in South Australia in Australia in Asia Pacific in Earth in the Solar System in the Milky Way galaxy, but rather the Starbucks at Tanglin Mall. Sitting here on a Sunday morning you could be forgiven for thinking you're in Australia, or the US, or Canada, or the UK here there are so many ang mohs here!

Little tip, you can always tell the ang moh (literally means "red head" in Hokkien, used in the past as a somewhat derogatory term) tourists from the people who've lived here by what they're wearing and how much they're sweating!

Anyway back to better things, having been back in Singapore for just over a week now I've been dealing with this web hosting disaster. Wait, that's not a better thing at all, it's quite awful! As a result of my web host being blocked on my own internet connection at home it's been painfully hard to create and upload new posts which has been a real shame. I think the problem is I thought I may as well clean out the databases that have accumulated large amounts of junk since I started using them five years ago, as well as moving over some of my media files to Ourmedia and changing the URL to something more logical. Perhaps I'm biting off far more than I can chew.

ASIDE: Ever since I was a little kid I’ve had problems with my jaw bone and chewing, that’s why I eat so slowly… and find it even harder to chew that which I have bitten to much off of. When I was a kid I thought it was normal to feel pain whenever you closed your mouth! Ah those were the days, right?

I've really missed writing these rambling nonsensical posts, they were so enjoyable to do in the past. Here at the Starbucks using their free Wireless@SG internet connection I'm having no trouble accessing my site; very refreshing after dealing with proxy servers at home just so I can upload a file or browse my comments pages! SingTel seems to think that my web host is still reputable. Or perhaps they just don't know.

Back to business though, it continually stuns me how rapidly Singapore is developing and changing. Every time I leave here and come back after only a few months things have changed. For example, there's now a 50+ floor new apartment building nearing completion outside my bedroom window that wasn't there before. Really! The post office opposite Tanglin Mall which I can see through the floor to ceiling glass here as I type this is now a Friven and Co which also houses a fantastic gourmet Swiss deli which my German father wholeheartedly approves of! Half the computer shops in Sim Lim Square have changed and rearranged themselves.

My aforementioned father for his birthday on the 2nd bought himself a Nikon D90 DSLR of which I am insanely jealous of.

ASIDE: I’m sorry I have to rudely interrupt myself here. Does that above sentence make grammatical sense? I would be jealous of my dad for having a fantastic new camera not jealous of the camera itself… would I? Four years since high school english classes and I can already tell my standards are slipping. I blame it on C++, Perl, Ruby, Objective C and Chuck Peddle.

Where was I? Oh yeah, the camera. Yes he has a new Nikon D90 and a slew of new lenses including an ultra wide angle which can see so far in either direction the camera may as well have eyes in the back of it's head! Or lenses in the back of the camera as it were. As a result of having this new optical device we've been on several photographic expeditions around Singapore taking photos of the Christmas decorations at night and during the day, as well as some nature shots. I've been using my venerable FinePix S9600 bridge camera and the super macro capabilities of the attached lens to show up my dad's D90 up as he currently doesn't have a lens that matches it, but let's just say his night photography shots are somewhat better!

I purposely chose photo sizes that make my S9600 appear bigger and more impressive than my dad's D90. I'm not biased, I'm just… selective!

My FinePix S9600 can take stunning night photos even when set on a low ISO setting, but I tend to tremble a lot so I need to use a a tripod. The Nikon D90 can take stunning night photos even if you swing the camera and intentionally move it around! Just for fun he took several photos at night of the Christmas lights and sneezed as he pressed the shutter button. Photo came out perfectly. What a show off.

Did I mention I'm jealous?

My dad, sis and I have been to restaurants I want to review here and post photos of, we've seen Segways zipping around the street… eventually when all this web hosting nonsense has sorted itself out I'd love to post all this stuff. It's amazing, I've only been posting every other day now instead of several times a day, and the material is piling up faster than snow. Which given Singapore is in the tropics it isn't much of an accomplishment, but notice I didn't specify where the snow was. Ha, I'm too clever for you!

Until next time, have a good one :). Did I mention things keep changing here?

For those of you who are also using the "Google Reader (12/05/2008) Tweaks" Greasemonkey script that makes Google Reader usable again, you may have noticed Google tweaked the interface just enough to break it. It's as if the Reader folks want you to like the new interface regardless! I hope they don't make this a habit.

Fortunately trashrockx has updated the script to remove Blazing White again. Uninstall your current version and update if this has affected you. Don't worry about the date in the name of the script still referring to the 5th of this month, it is an updated script.

Clearly from looking above I have a lot of reading ahead of me. And I'm supposed to be spending this weekend and next week moving gigabytes of accumulated files. Let's see what Atuu says about Wal-Mart first though. We don't have Wal-Mart in Australia or Singapore, what are they? Do they sell pre fabricated house sidings and stuff? Walls? And I was under the impression there were only a limited number of walls you could fabricate depending on what materials they're made out of.

Promotional image from the Starbucks Singapore Christmas page

Given my blog has been under siege over the last week with code injections and having my webhost blocked by several ISPs because of the fact they host some less than reputable characters' scamming and spamming sites, my writing spree that was so instrumental in allowing me to maintain my sanity during exams and bad news worldwide has been abruptly stopped.

For this reason I decided this Friday evening as I drink my Starbucks Toffee Nut Latte which you can only get at Christmas, I thought I'd break another blogging rule that states you shouldn't abruptly interrupt a post dry spell by creating a pointless entry that really has no merit or that can't really stand on it's own.

By using a proxy server. To access my own site. What a rip.

I'm working through the transition to my new webhosts as we speak, and it's surprisingly difficult but not because it's complicated, rather it's ridiculously time consuming. I'll definitely be looking back at this and laughing.

"Christmas 2009 you ask? Well, I worked on moving webhosts and changing over 2 gigabytes of data because my old webhost stopped screening the sites they host for illegal activity and as a result my current sites crumbled! You?"

I wonder if P.G. Wodehouse had these kind of problems with his blog and webhosts. Wooster would have just had Jeeves sort it out for him no doubt.

I can't say I ever thought I'd be using Perl as a last resort emergency security tool. Sheesh Servage, get your act together.

My first few days back in Singapore have been eventful to say the least. I could have said they were uneventful, but that would have been inaccurate and would also have contradicted what I just wrote. And the last thing I want to do here is look ridiculous. Well, any more ridiculous than I look now walking down from my apartment building to Orchard Road while I type this post on my iPhone.

ASIDE: I used to mock people who spent more time looking at their phones than paying attention to where they were walking; now with this ridiculously useful iPhone I’m guilty of the exact same behaviour. Walking into light poles seems to be my divine punishment for this hypocricy.

Yes back to eventfulness, since coming back here last Saturday morning, I've had my first major problems with online hacking of my sites, to a degree I never thought possible. So far RubenerdShow.com and the associated subdirectories such as this blog have been the victim of 12 code injection attacks as a result of poor security standards on my webhost. I dislike it when people shift the blame onto others, but all my permissions are set perfectly and the attacks are coming from within my host's IP range, so it's a matter of lax internal security due to what I suspect is poorly enforced group permissions.

As Bruce Schneier said in his Secrets and Lies tome which I admit I've read more than three times, internal threats are often more dangerous than external ones, though they often get placed second in priority. I am a huge fan of Bruce Schneier, I even wrote about the Bruce Schneier Facts website back in 2006. Very fun distraction when all this nasty stuff is going on!

For Servage this isn't new; a quick Google search for Servage Hack returns thousands of results. Even Flickr has a couple of screenshots by people showing their sites and even the Servage host site itself being hacked.

Perhaps as a result of this or because Servage has also been caught hosting hundreds of spam and credit card fraud sites, the StarHub ISP here in Singapore has seemed to start blocking all Servage hosted material. As I sit here at Starbucks now in Tanglin Mall it seems SingTel haven't filtered it, but given Singaporean ISP's general low tolerance when it comes to abuse of their systems I worry they may be next.

ASIDE: For those interested in the attacks themselves, it seems shady Servage users have been inserting javascript into the first line of my index.php files and modifying my .htacess files to redirect to other sites. This despite all my permissions being set to allow myself to read and write, but others in the group to only read. I don’t know what else I can do to block these changes.

I’ve written a trivial Perl script to check the modification dates of every file on the server, and if it doesn’t match a list of predetermined values it deletes the hacked/modified file and restores it, then logs the change. This seems to have stopped all the attacks but it really is a clumsy measure. Servage need to get their act together, because it’s not just me this is affecting.

Suffice to say, I am already in the process of moving over all my material to Segment Publishing hosting and Ourmedia instead of using Servage as well. I had kept Segpub for use only for my university blog, but they've proven themselves for their stellar reliability and great service. They do cost more than Servage, but as I've learned from this experience cost shouldn't be the primary consideration. As a student I do have a stretched budget, but if I have to pay a few dollars extra a month for peace of mind, a server running FreeBSD and my own dedicated IP address that I don't have to share with hundreds of other sites — some of which engage in criminal activities — I think it's worth it.

Segpub Christmas cheer!

What frustrates me is that it's my own home ISP StarHub that has blocked Servage, which means I have to use a proxy to access my own site. I'll be doing some serious cleaning up of my MySQL tables and I'll be exporting them hopefully today or tomorrow.

Interestingly enough, this blog and all the images used within are quite small. Exporting gigabytes worth of Rubenerd Shows recorded since 2005 and re-uploading them to Ourmedia will be a painfully slow process, but I think it will pay for itself pretty quickly.

Will be keeping you up to date, and thank you everyone for your patience. Because of the difficulty I'm having right now accessing this site, if you want to leave comments you may want to just email me instead.

What a great thing to be dealing with over my preciously short Christmas holiday break. Though I guess had this happened during an exam period it would have been much more disastrous to deal with. Bummer though.

This is a shorter message because I don't have much time here. It seems the reason why I haven't been able to access my blog and Servage.net over the last few days here at home hasn't been because my site is offline or down, but it seems that my webhost (and all the sites they host) is being blocked for some Singapore Starhub internet customers.

I am accessing my site now through a proxy. Google Reader seems unaffected.

This is extremely serious. I have long suspected Servage has been hosting some less than reputable sites, and with the latest code injection attacks which have been happening on my blog since Sunday on my site and on dozens of other Servage customer's sites, I suspect Starhub have taken action against them.

I will be moving all my Rubenerd Shows which collectively account for around 92% of my bandwidth onto Ourmedia, and I'll be moving my remaining sites over to Segpub (FreeBSD webhost in Australia with dedicated IP addresses, SFTP and SSH) once and for all. Perhaps this is the final wakeup call I needed to get my arse into gear and make the transition!

Servage were ultra affordable back when I thought the internet was a nice toy, but they're lack of adequate checks on what they host and these security lapses have made me lose what little shred of confidence I had in them. I don't approve of Starhub's move to block all sites hosted by them, but I can at least see their reasoning, and can somewhat understand.

Stay tuned for further developments. This will no doubt be taking me this next week to do. What are you doing for your holidays?

While checking my Facebook inbox, I noticed that Todd in Toronto from the Talking Stick show had invited me to install the Political Compass application. These days I prefer not to add anything else to my Facebook profile, but I discovered that they have a general website too.

The Political Compass asks you six quick pages of questions with four options ranging from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree for each. The questions range from religious freedom, economic structure, governance, the environment and social issues. Once you've answered the questions it plots where you stand on their Political Compass which addresses the problem of the flat left-right scale only including economic views. Instead of left and right for extreme communism and extreme capitalism, they also include a top and bottom for authoritarian to libertarian. From their test page:

That deals with economics, but the social dimension is also important in politics. That’s the one that the mere left-right scale doesn’t adequately address. So we’ve added one, ranging in positions from extreme authoritarian to extreme libertarian.

According to the Political Compass, I am in the left wing libertarian quadrant. My Economic Left/Right score is -3.38 (mildly left wing), my Social Libertarian/Authoritarian score is -6.05 (mid range libertarian).

I answered that companies sometimes need regulation to stay honest; religion isn't required for morals and should be kept out of government; education and healthcare should be free for all; unemployment assistance should be provided but that the government should be stricter about requirements; laws introduced to combat terrorism have gone too far; and that what consenting adults do in the bedroom and in weddings is no business of the state. I answered that free trade is generally a good thing but that companies should be held accountable when they're caught abusing people in developing countries; that patriotism is largely irrelevant these days; and that racism and sexism are fundamentally wrong.

The only thing that disappointed me about the questions was that there weren't enough about the environment. For example, I would have loved to answer that new public transport lines are more important than new express ways; that old buildings should be preserved; that high speed rail is more desirable than new airports; that tax breaks should be given to businesses that are environmentally concious; and so forth. I wonder how my position on the compass would change if these were taken into consideration? I suspect it would make me marginally less libertarian.

The folks at Whole Wheat Radio have really been the only people I've discussed politics with in any great detail… I hope I did okay! I'm thinking I might do this test every year or so because as a younger person I tend to change my mind about things a lot. For example in high school economics I had a teacher who was 110% for free trade, and while I think it's still a good idea I feel as though I'm more realistic about it now, and understand some of the shortcomings.

If you've taken the test too, feel free to post the scores you got too! We could have a Rubenerd Blog political compass with the views of several people shown on the one graph :)

And once again an anime character perfectly summarises the mood of the post. Even if including them does violate one of the blogging rules I talked about below.

I've been back in Singapore for over a day now but I haven't written any posts since the day before I left Adelaide. For those who have been enjoying my several month long posting streak, sorry to let you down! I'm going to break one of the first laws of blogging here and dedicated a post to why I have had this gap.

ASIDE: I figure I’ve already thoroughly broken the laws that state you’re supposed to stay on topic and have a site with a light background with dark text that uses the Georgia font for headings and a logo with gloss on it, so one more won’t hurt.

Unfortunately I've developed quite a bad cold suspiciously well timed to my arrival back here. So far I've counted sore bones and joints, glands along the sides of my jaw and in my throat are swollen, sore throat, blocked ears and nose, really bad headaches, coughing, an irrational desire to listen to ridiculously long loops of only Dean Martin, Rod Picott and Jack Johnson music turned down low in the background while eating nothing but mandarins and German pretzels… typical symptoms.

I'm entertaining the notion that it is some sort of Australian Federal Government immigration conspiracy. They didn't want me returning to Singapore for the next few months because they'd prefer I spend the money in Australia. It makes perfect sense; while I was in Adelaide I was walking through Rundle Mall buying Aussie gifts, here in Singapore I can barely get out of my chair to have my usual obsessive four showers a day. It's worked.

Is that my temperature or my tax file number?

ASIDE: Just over two hours have passed since I wrote the first part of this post and I think the joints in my fingers have stopped burning enough to keep typing. I need a scribe. A scribe would just be bril.

Continuing this train of conciousness…

If what I think I was writing is correct, I'm thinking I may have to go to the Australian High Commission here and ask for some antidote. Why are the British Council and High Commission, the Aussie High Commission and the American Embassy right next to each other, but the Canadian High Commission is somewhere else?

Makes as much sense as the underlying premise of the first part of this post.

ASIDE: Okay another half an hour has passed. Writing this post was probably not the smartest thing to do. Then again leaving your battery in your electric razor so it buzzed in your check-in luggage and scared airport security wasn’t a smart thing to do either. Not that I’ve ever done that… twice… and once with an electric toothbrush. They weren’t even that good.

Continuing this train of conciousness…

What astounds me is that my beautiful late mum was able to endure over 12 years of chemotherapy which gave her symptoms that were infinitely worse than any of the silly stuff I'm complaining about, and yet she put up with it and lived… for 12 f-ing years. It absolutely boggles the mind, though it does show how much she cared for us that she would go through all of that just so (her words) she could see us grow up and allow us to have memories of her. Bummer, now I'm choking up a bit for another reason.

I think I need some cream of chicken soup, a nice thick blanket and a book of cliches. Or maybe some Mark Twain reading. No, some Dr Karl Kruszelnicki reading. Yeah, that'll all straighten me out.

If I've unwittingly made even more spelling and grammar mistakes than I usually do here, forgive me. Perhaps at some point I'll come back here and delete half of this post. I think I even talked about shopping trolleys here at one point; I mean what do shopping trolleys have to do with having a cold? Wait, did I talk about shopping trolleys? I know I talked about magazine subscriptions and electric toothbrushes.

I like electric toothbrushes, they tickle. Unlike blog posts which take (checking…) over three hours to type. You know what? I need a scribe.

Now if you'd excuse me, I'm about to apply several thousand eye drops and drop my burning finger joints into an ice bath. Preferably with my fingers and hands still attached.

You may remember this photo from a post back in 2006 :)

We'll be leaving Adelaide for Singapore for the Christmas holidays and for the first few months of 2009 first thing tomorrow morning. At the last minute our flight was cancelled so we're flying via Bali, landing at Changi Airport around midnight. I'm going to miss the Boatdeck Cafe, my Aussie friends, cooler weather, the wide open spaces, open debates on television, fantastic food; but I am looking forward to seeing my Singapore friends, eating roti prata and drinking teh tarik at 3am, the guys at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf at Forum and the Starbucks at Millennia Walk and Suntec City, computers at Funan Centre and Sim Lim Square, the pretty night lights… and spending evenings with my dad talking and laughing at Max Brenners.

See you on the other side!

The Boatdeck Cafe in Mawson Lakes, taken this morning

As far as I know I haven't done a rambling post like this for several months which I'm sure you were all very relieved about. Not any more!

Yes I'm sitting at the Boatdeck Cafe with a ridiculously large cup of coffee and several ideas churning through my head which I just can't separate out logically when I'm having such a buzz. Think of it this way, in your blog aggregator or on the website you're reading several condensed posts in one. It's as if a regular post is a normal strength coffee, and this post is a triple or quadruple shot espresso targeting your eyes and brain. Should I be putting a health warning on this? For that matter should I be putting warnings on everything here?

Today is the last full day both my sister and I are having here in Adelaide before we go back to Singapore for the summer holidays. Though technically Singapore is in the Northern Hemisphere by a couple of degrees so it would be the winter holidays over there, but the last time I checked, a year round tropical climate with only artificial indoor snow really doesn't count as winter. It doesn't count as winter here in Australia either but that's because we're like Brazil and South Africa, we're too cool to play by the Northern Hemisphere's rules. Well actually too hot to play by the rules, because we'd only be cool in winter, which of course isn't happening.

We have so much to do, but fortunately the most difficult things have already been taken care of. My father is a person who works much better under pressure; that's a politically correct way of saying he leaves things until the last minute! My late mum was the exact opposite, she had to have her bags packed and next to the door a full week before any trip. I'm somewhere in the middle; I hate frantically dashing around when I've forgotten to do something in my preparations, but it's inevitable that some does end up happening.

ASIDE: Like accidently pouring too much shampoo in the shower and it gets on the floor and then you slip on it and hit your head on the roughly cut masonry wall. Fortunately it hasn’t affected anything serious like my short term memory.

Onto other matters, given it's my sister's and my last day in Adelaide we're celebrating in different ways. It's 10:25AM and I've been up for many hours already, have had coffee and gone on a walk around Mawson Lakes which is a really, really good thing to do first thing. The benefit is by exercising a little, I only absorb 95% of the kilojoules from the gigantic Betty Blue Sea of Espresso instead of 100% which I'm positive will do wonders for my health and well being.

I was positive "well being" was one word, but for some reason the spell checker doesn't like it. Then again this spell checker doesn't like "colour", "customise", "flavour" or "Schade" either, so what would it know? Wow, look at all those red underlined words.

The Boatdeck Cafe in Mawson Lakes, taken this morning

As I typed that last line, a little kid and her mum were walking out of the cafe as the kid was exclaiming she wanted to pay! She wanted to pay! It's just as my parents told me, you desperately want to grow up and be mature as a child until you do actually grow up and realise how much better you had it before. It's a bit cruel when you think about it!

ASIDE: It was also cruel when I accidentally poured too much shampoo in the shower and it got on the floor and then I slipped on it and hit my head on the roughly cut masonry wall. Fortunately it hasn’t affected anything serious like my short term memory.

I've noticed one thing about living in Australia that's very different from living in Singapore, and it's related to habits. One thing I've noticed is common with people in Singapore is that guys tend to take their wallet out and put it on the table, usually with their mobile phone on top into a nice expensive please-steal-this sandwich. I admit I started doing this too though because it makes sitting down so much more comfortable! Here though I'm a bit more wary of doing this, but then again I might have been affected by slipping in the shower and hitting my head. Fortunately it hasn't affected anything serious.

I have so much to do today, but instead I'm filling out a disjointed, rambling blog post that is discussing virtually nothing that I had originally intended it to. In other words, it has been a complete success!

Because the one thing I try to do here and on my show is I strive for professionalisn. Did I just misspell "professionalism"? How deliciously ironic! Ironic sounds like a brand of iodised hair tonic. Why you would buy ionised hair tonic I have no idea. I'm sure a shampoo company could market it as a special, extra super duper healthy alternative with no evidence to support it, but then again they never do need evidence do they? Shampoo… now where have I written about that before?

Good morning everyone :).

While doing some research into the pork food scare in Ireland (a country which coincidently is mostly located on an Ireland, sorry an island, isn't that neat?), in a flurry of keystrokes I unwittingly typed "prok" instead of "prok" instead of "pork" into Wikipedia. Forgive me, I mistyped it in the previous sentence too. I'd be a great comedian if I could form and deliver cohesive jokes.

Upon entering this incorrect information and hitting Return, I was presented not with a page discussing a healthier alternative to beef and other four letter meats (the singular version of which also being a culinary four letter word), but rather an information page on a specific region of Nepal.

Prok is a Village Development Committee in Gorkha District in the Gandaki Zone of northern-central Nepal. At the time of the 1991 Nepal census it had a population of 739 and had 219 houses in the village.

"Nepal Census 2001". Nepal’s Village Development Committees. Digital Himalaya. Retrieved on 2008-08-31.

Living in Singapore for so long I always wanted to fly a few short hours to Nepal and just explore; I had more than one conversation with my mum about going there and to Kashmir if ever the fighting there were to calm down at some point in the latter.

And as for referencing pork and Prok in a post which could easily have been explained only in one line instead of six paragraphs, on my blog which is supposed to be about software and the intertubes? I say: you're welcome. Thank you, and goodnight.