Rubenerd

Oh… CRAP!

A lot of the time when I create a blog post it's not an instantaneous event; often I let it stew for a while in the Drafts folder before I submit it. By doing this, I feel I can approach issues more objectively and can write better guides because I have more time to think. Unfortunately some of the posts I create using this system never get published; I have well over a hundred of such half baked posts sitting in my Drafts folder… and I assume all but the most casual bloggers are in the same boat.

Unfortunately it's not so easy to simply go back at a later date and finish these forgotten posts if you want to maintain a certain level of integrity. If the post was about a current event or if it was a prediction, you could theoretically finish it at a much later date and submit it with the original time stamp, but that strikes me as being dishonest.

How-to posts are somewhat immune from time delays because if an idea was useful before, it may still be useful later. If the post was regarding a bug or older software though it may simply not be relevant anymore, but then again the same could be said for other how-to posts that a person actually went ahead and submitted.

Depending on how you look at it, opinion pieces (such as this nonsensical post you're reading now) could in fact end up better if they're left to sit for a while for the reason I gave at the top. I think opinions in their nature are immune to time perhaps not in their views (such as opinions of slavery) but as a way to document how people thought before and since. I've drastically changed my opinions and views since starting this iteration of this blog in early 2006 which makes reading these older posts that much more fun. If you return to edit a post that you left for a long time though, you may find your views have changed, and if you submitted that post with the original time stamp, you're not being honest.

I'm sure he has a point in here somewhere…

In perhaps a hypocritical way, I have no problem with integrating complete posts from other blogs into another one complete with the original time stamps, because people have read and seen them before and you know you're being genuine. I've been doing this myself with posts from my earlier blogs such as my RapidWeaver blog and my Perl blog, and at some point I hope to have all my old material on here… once I find them from my backups! What I am careful to do though is to mark these posts clearly as being from other sites of mine, rather than trying to pass them off as material from the same maintained site.

If you really had no life you could use this loophole to generate page after page of falsified posts with fake timestamps to make it look as though you'd been blogging for much longer than you really have, but I suspect people who had been active on the net at that time period could pretty easily pick inconsistencies (for example, I've seen a blogger who claimed to have been writing about the MacBook Pro since 2004. The MacBook Pro came out in 2006).

I know plenty of people who claim the internet can't be trusted because there are so many fake people, but as with any publishing system, I believe people judge your site for integrity and honesty, and choose to read it as a result. Astroturfers (Wikipedia explanation) are generally hung from the highest tree and ridiculed to death when they're discovered, and word travels fast!

I guess what I meant to say in this post was that I have far too many draft posts and no real idea what to do with them. As I do with posts I import, perhaps the solution to this problem is not to finish and publish old posts with the original time stamp, but to post them with a current time stamp and preface them with a clear explanation.

I value honesty online, perhaps that makes me old fashioned. If so, I'd best be off to listen to my Rat Pack CDs, no my Rat Pack LPs, while I clean my monocle, have a cup of tea and choose which sleeveless vest to wear under my dark grey pinstriped suit, I say, what ho.

A few weeks ago I wrote that while I was keeping my profile active with links so people could find me still, I had decided to give up on Facebook. I was worried that Facebook had just turned into high school and MySpace 2.0, and I was genuinely creeped out by their underhanded advertising tactics. Well according to Wired news ("Koobface" Virus Attacks Facebook), it seems there's another nail to put in it's coffin:

Koobface, which already made the rounds on MySpace, is now worming its way through Facebook. The Koobface virus uses Facebook’s private messaging system to infect computers via a shared video.

Unsuspecting users will see a video link (shared by an infected friend) with the message, “You look just awesome in this new movie.” Click the link will lead you to an outside site where you’re told that you need to download a Flash update, which is actually a virus file. Once the virus is installed, it will try to grab sensitive data off your PC, like credit card numbers.

In a way this a very old virus; it operates much like mass-mailing worms that used to infest Usenet and e-mail lists. But it’s proving an effective tactic on social networks where private messages from friends seem more trustworthy than traditional e-mail, which even the most neophyte web users have come to distrust.

For the time being traditional preventative measures will protect you, ironic considering Facebook was supposed to be the closed, safer alternative in the first place:

The virus watchdog blog for McAfee labs reports that Facebook is aware of the Koobface attack and is already working to remove the spammed links from its system. But with dozens of Koobface variants known to exist, McAfee warns that “the situation is likely to get worse before it gets better.”

In the mean time, the best way to avoid Koobface is to adhere to the tried and true rule of internet safety: never open unexpected e-mail attachments, videos or other links, even if they are from someone you know.

The Mikuru beam… it's not working… again!

Sitting on a Mac with Mac OS X Leopard, FreeBSD and NetBSD I haven't been affected by this, but it does make me even more wary than I was before with dealing with this site. The time when Facebook was a clean and safe alternative to the other major social network sites such as MySpace and Friendster has definitely passed.

I'm really starting to think this kind of thing is the inevitable (and unavoidable) endgame of heavy, generic closed social networks like these. I had a Friendster profile, I had a MySpace profile, I have a Facebook profile… and it's happened to all three. Perhaps I'll just stick to niche services like coffee enthusiast networks and Richard Dawkins' atheist support network! But those are for other posts.

It's also why I'm really, really relieved that Twitter rejected the latest takeover offer from Facebook. I don't know what I would have done with myself had that deal gone through and Facebook owned my Twitter profile. We have spam problems on Twitter, but its manageable and I have some really great friends on it. And it's just not… sleazy? I don't like the word sleazy because it has so much extra baggage, but I can't think of a more apt term at ten past three in the morning!

Google Reader's new interface

So I was casually paroosing my unread Google Reader items this evening. Upon eagerly clicking my much beloved rationality folder, the screen refreshed and the interface changed to an entirely new style, as you can see above.

With a few frantic mouse clicks I was over at my subscription to the official Google Reader team's blog to see if this change had been announced. According to their latest post, square is the new round:

On the Reader team, we know that the old adage “change is good” isn’t always true. Sometimes, change is just change. In this case, we hope that these decisions both improve your Reader experience today, and pave the way for additional improvements down the line.

Do we like Google Reader's makeover? I can't speak for you guys obviously (if I did it would involve a great stretch and not caring whether or not I was being disingenuous!) but as for myself I'm somewhat underwhelmed, for the same reasons why I was somewhat underwhelmed with Google's Gmail interface upgrade.

I am certainly not an authority on interface design, and I don't know enough about their backend to gauge the technical necessity of such changes (such as del.icio.us having to change their interface after their much publicised transition to PHP), but these refreshed interfaces seem more like change for the sake of change than anything constructive.

I love the new interface, the colours really make the different sections stand out! Oh wait, that’s the old one? Whoa… that’s a regression.

~ My sister Elke

I do welcome the ability to collapse parts of the navigation sidebar, but as with Gmail I feel the removal of their trademark light green and blue colours to delimitate different parts of the interface is a huge step backwards. I thought the use of these colours in the past was a stroke of pure genius: they were low key and unobtrusive, and they separated content from navigation extremely well.

These colours also acted as a consistent cross-application visual branding cue; when you saw those colours you knew you were using a Google service.

The elegant, distinctive old interface and the generic new interface (from the Google Reader team's blog)

I don't know why web companies are all of a sudden so petrified of using colour. As we saw with CNET America's revamping earlier this year, Google seems to think colour is somehow undesirable. In this case, they've replaced their trademark colours dull grey-blue shaded highlights; pale, almost invisible pixel-width lines; and heavy black text culminating in one generic wash of Blazing White™.

Conclusions

Ever since I became a Gmail user back in 2004 when a friend of mine from high school sent me an invitation, I've held Google in the same high regard as Apple and the Xfce folks when it comes to user interfaces. When I hear Google is working on a new web application, I'm always eager to try it out because I know it will be slicker and easier to use than anything else on the market. I'm worried about this latest direction they're taking their interfaces though.

I will keep using Google Reader because it's simply the best feed aggregator out there, but I do hope they allow a skinning feature similar to Gmail… so as I did in Gmail I can revert back to the original interface.

A great example of how you can use Google Maps to represent information in a far more interesting way than simply presenting a dry list of locations. The Adelaide Advertiser has plotted a map of Christmas light displays around the metro area of Adelaide.

ASIDE: It makes far more sense for The Adelaide Advertiser to plot maps of Christmas light displays in Adelaide than if The Adelaide Advertiser plotted a map of Christmas light displays around Northern Siberia. I’m just saying.

You can view the full Google Map here.

On Tuesday I talked about how I had no idea what the TNT Express tracking page was telling me (Late Linehaul Frt Delayed and other observations). I wasn't sure whether it was telling me my parcel was delayed, or whether they were relaying instructions on how to bake a cheesecake.

Checking the status again one last time before deleting the bookmark this afternoon, it seems when I answered the door on Wednesday to sign for the parcel, the guy had already filled out the card to slip under the door to say that I wasn't home and that he tried to deliver! At least that what it looks like from this table, I'm no shipping expert. I can't bake a very good cheesecake either.

Status	Date	Time	Depot
Electronically Lodged	01/12/2008	08:22:37	Sydney Mas. PRI
Collected-Cust Premises (CIT)	01/12/2008	14:21:14	Sydney Mas. PRI
Received in Depot	01/12/2008	19:35:16	Sydney Mas. PRI
Paperwork Printed at Depot	02/12/2008	03:04:19	Adelaide PRI
Late Linehaul Frt Delayed	02/12/2008	11:14:14	Adelaide PRI
On Board For Delivery-Full	03/12/2008	06:45:54	Adelaide PRI
Residential Delivery Activity	03/12/2008	10:53:46	Adelaide PRI
Card Left Not Home	03/12/2008	10:53:46	Adelaide PRI
Residential Delivery Activity	03/12/2008	10:54:16	Adelaide PRI
Delivered in Full	03/12/2008	10:54:16	Adelaide PRI

Another day goes by, another group of people have a negative opinion of the Great Australian Firewall that Senator Conroy is so desperate to implement. It's got to the stage where even the American Slashdot website has an article almost every other day about it.

This afternoon, chief operating officer Greg Winn of Australia's largest telco Telstra has compared attempts to filter the internet to boiling the ocean. According to the IT section of the Australian newspaper:

“My view on that is that’s like trying to boil the ocean … to think that you’re going to be able to centrally filter everything, I think that’s a pipe dream,” Mr Winn told reporters and analysts yesterday.

Child protection agencies have welcomed the Government’s move to filter the internet but civil libetarians, ISPs and the technical community have rallied against it for various reasons.

Mr Winn agreed with broad comments from the ISP community that internet filtering would make surfing the web a slower process.

“The one thing I do know is that once you start filtering, then you’re going to add latency no matter what,” he said.

And it seems when asked, Senator Conroy babbled on incessantly in Parliament in a typical attempt to avoid the question. This would be hilarious if it weren't so tragic.

Meanwhile, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy came under fire this week for failing to reveal details of the trial.

During question time on Wednesday Senator Conroy was asked how many participants would ISPs have to enlist for the live trials to be credible.

South Australian Liberal MP Cory Bernardi also asked if the results of the trials would be independently verified.

Senator Conroy couldn’t provide answers to both questions within the two-minute timeframe provided.

Singapore photo by User:Majush on Wikipedia

This is yet another example of why growing up in multiple countries and cities stuffs you up as an adult. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't have traded living in different places for anything in the world because it really opened my eyes and allowed me to expand my views of the world outside Australia, but it wasn't all a free lunch. Like having prata and teh tarik at 3am. Where was I going with this?

Today's example is the XML language attribute which the relative XHTML standards demand. I could just define the xml:lang and lang tags in the html element as "en" for English. The problem is English is so generic these days as to be next to useless. I use the original English spelling instead of American spelling for most words given I'm an Aussie, but I also use more than a few Singaporean colloquialisms. Aiyo. For this reason using "en-au" probably wouldn't be completely accurate, but "en-sg" would be even less accurate. "en-gb" would reflect the spelling, but then there's the problem that Google might index my page as one originating from the UK.

Do Austrians who have since moved to Switzerland or Germany have this problem? Or Germans who have since moved to Austria or Switzerland have this problem? Or do Schweizerdeutsch speakers who have since moved to Germany or Austria have this problem?

Perhaps I should just set my language to Klingon and be done with it.

Still not quite there yet…

I haven't talked about this issue for at least several days, so an update is definitely in order. It's not that I'm obsessive, more that I tend to obsess about things. Wait, I did talk about this recently after all. Never mind my ramblings. I never do.

With all my squawking and ruffled feathers over Apple's decision to drop the FireWire 400 ports from their MacBook and MacBook Pro notebook computers, and with my last post talking about why I would love to get a new workhorse to complement my existing small laptop, I've been giving some thought to what Apple would have to release before I would think of upgrading. The thing is, shortly after their latest announcement I was all ready to start planning my next machine, but the more I learn about these the more I'm left thinking I might stick with my original generation early 2006 15 inch MacBook Pro I'm using now for the foreseeable future.

As I said previously, I'd love to get a 17 inch MacBook Pro, but realistically this isn't an option because of the prohibitive price. Unfortunately while faster, the new 15 inch MacBook Pro is simply not attractive enough to upgrade to yet. These are some ideas that I reckon would make a killer MacBook Pro:

0. Quad core processor

My current processor is a 32 bit 2.0GHz Intel Core Duo so really anything would be a great upgrade. What would be great is a quad core Core 2 Duo option which I can turn the cores on and off on easily within OS X using the Processor prefpane. Because I’d be using it mostly as a portable desktop replacement rather than a laptop, the battery life hit would be less important. At the very least a quad core version should be an option, especially considering Snow Leopard’s supposed improved SMB support.

1. Higher physical RAM ceiling

This is the biggest bottleneck with my current system for video encoding and compiling giant projects, it can only support 2.0GiB. The new machines can tentatively support 6.0GiB, but there shouldn’t be any reason why they can’t support 8.0GiB or more. I certainly wouldn’t need that much right now, but I’d like to have the peace of mind that I could add more in the future. I maxed out my current machine way too fast.

2. A higher resolution display with a matte option

The 17 inch MacBook Pro went from having a resolution of 1680×1050 to 1920×1200, but the 15 inch MacBook Pro still only has 1440×900 which is roughly what the line has had since even the PowerBook G4 days. They’re clearly capable of bumping that up. And Apple, please listen to your customers… we want a matte screen option! Please, please, pretty please?

3. More FireWire and USB ports

I know they were both driven by a common bus in the older MacBook Pro, but only having one FireWire 800 port in the new MacBook Pro is a bit measly, and only two USBs is also silly for a so called "pro" machine. It was a bad idea moving the optical drive to the side again because now we have less space. Probably too late to make any changes structurally, but perhaps a few small ribbon cables leading to the other side so we can have a few more ports? I’m fed up with daisy chaining and using hubs.

4. A bundled grilled cheese sandwich maker

Each new MacBook Pro should come with a special extra metal plate so when you’re computer is running hot, you can sit it on top of a cheese sandwich to make a grilled cheese sandwich. This is an absolute no brainer.

5. Blu-Ray burner

Frankly I don’t care about playing Blu-Ray movies, but I would love to burn some backup discs. If Psystar can ship a hackintosh with a Blu-Ray burner, there’s no reason Apple technically can’t.

The best CNET blog you may or may not be reading

Given I've been unabashedly brown nosing and sucking up to tech writers of late, I figure doing it again won't sink me any further. Besides, talking about interesting people in a positive way is such a refreshing thing to do after sadly discussing all the nonsense going on around the world right now. I could get used to doing this!

I am well and truly addicted to a ton of CNET News and ZDNet Australia material; I am subscribed to no less than 12 of their feeds. The real gems aren't in their general homepage feeds though, but rather in the individual feeds of some of their writers, some of which I hope to talk about more in the future.

My favourite CNET writer by far though is Gordon Haff who writes the Pervasive Datacenter blog, buried an unceremonious 32 links down on CNET's News and Tech Blogs page. He discusses enterprise systems as well as free and open source software on the desktop and server, alongside some well thought out opinion pieces and some general how-tos he's picked up (in other words, the exact material I'd be talking about right here on my blog if I stayed focused rather than deviating into an assortment of other topics all the time!).

If you have a feed reader set up and ready to go, you can subscribe to his RSS feed here. He's also provided links for Google Reader and My Yahoo!.

Some of my favourite articles of his in the last few weeks where he's hit the issues right on the head:

• Simplify Creative Commons, don’t tweak it (yes!)
• Are netbooks real? (funny how we arrive at different conclusions)
• The more global Fujitsu and the followup One NEC: It’s a start
• The license wars are over
• Will Linux ever be a mainstream desktop play?
• The identity 2.0 conundrum (I can really relate!)

In October 2007 I wrote a brief post on James Watson's assertion that Africans suffer from economic and social problems because they're somehow genetically inferior. I believe I used the term "codswhallop". Well this afternoon I received an email telling me someone else had commented on it.

Black Africans are inferior because of their forefathers who disrespected God.

~ Pavel

I was going to reply with a video of myself rolling on the floor roaring with laughter, but I didn't have time to encode and upload the media to YouTube, so I let the ever so eloquent Stewie Griffin from Family Guy do the talking for me.

Hilarious! Makes me sad I don’t have much time to talk to you.

I continue to defend comment systems on internet media against the growing public backlash because I still receive (and read) far more constructive, useful, entertaining and friendly replies than I do negative ones. And besides, the negative ones have such ripe comedic value.