Rubenerd

UPDATE: If you read this blog using an RSS reader you wouldn’t have seen, but Dale actually posted a comment! You can reach him at his aptly-named blog Defending Scoundrels

Browsing the Electronic Frontiers Australia website this afternoon, I noticed that Dale Clapperton appeared on The Morning Show on the 29th of October. I completely missed it, but fortunately they have a video. Sorry about it being in Flash.

EFA’s Chair, Dale Clapperton, was interviewed on Channel 7’s [Morning Show] program on 29th October about the government’s proposed mandatory filtering policy. A phone-in survey on the program revealed that 80% of respondents were opposed to the censorship plan.

Given the severity of the issue, I just wish he could have appeared on the show for longer.

(Original video was made private).

"A Swindon based 63 service" by The Oxford Bus Page

It's official, October 2008 has been the best month for the Rubenerd Blog since August 2006. In total 63 posts have been submitted compared to 23 posts last month and 37 the month before last. Realistically many of these have been long and involved but many more have been silly posts with less than three lines. Still, that's 63 random thoughts and ideas which isn't as high as the ridiculous 110 I made back in August 2006 but it's close.

In a kind of ironic twist, it seems that the more work and studying I need to do, the more material appears here. I think connecting my mind to a keyboard and letting all the ideas flow is a fantastic coping mechanism. It also allows me to keep my mind alert when I take breaks instead of being a passive consumer like I would be if I just watched TV.

ASIDE: For some reason I think this post will be getting the "pointless milestone" tag. The question is, how can I pull off putting a picture from an anime series on here too so I can use the "pointlessly fun anime reference" tag as well. These are the thoughts that keep me up at night. That and coffee. That made no sense.

Given I'm posting so many entries from my iPhone now as well, I think the next logical step in the evolution of this long winded and overly verbose trail of consciousness is to include some form of location metadata into each post. In this way I could see just how many words I have typed while I was sitting at the Boatdeck Cafe in Mawson Lakes or the huge Starbucks with lots of comfortable lounge chairs in Millennia Walk in Singapore. I have a sneaking suspicion they might be where most of this stuff gets done!

ASIDE: Millennia Walk was just across from where the Singapore Formula 1 night race was held. It’s a really bizzare building with gigantic pyramid like skylights that stretch above the main shopping area by several whole floors. I did work for people around Suntec City and Millennia Walk after I finished high school in 2004.

Millennia Walk, Singapore by williamcho

The place of the Rubenerd Show I think is also starting to evolve again. Previously I would speak everything I was thinking into that show, now it's much more of a spur of the moment type of project which I hope will improve the quality. I wish I had the self confidence that Frank Nora has by being able to speak into a voice recorder as I walk down the street with people staring at me the whole time… perhaps at some point I'll get to that stage.

At some point I would also like… ney LOVE, to be able to finally move all this material onto the content management system I wrote myself in Ruby (without Rails… it bothers me how people assume it must use it if it's a Ruby web app) earlier this year too. Perhaps after the exams and this latest project I'm doing for a client I'll take a solid week off to do that.

I'm fed up with all these constant WordPress updates; it is a great blogging system if you want millions of bells and whistles but don't want to do any programming yourself, but it's incredibly top heavy for what I want to do here. Not only that, but it's written in PHP. As a guy who also loves Perl, I have nothing against PHP, it's just Ruby is so much more Smalltalk like and is so elegant. Ruby code can be syntax-highlighted and printed onto posters it looks so nice. Yukihiro Matsumoto knew what he was doing!

ASIDE: My beautiful late mum thought that Yukihiro Matsumoto was cute.

I'd love to learn though how to better integrate MediaWiki with Ruby applications though, I love MediaWiki and I'd love to start using it again for my own projects. For a while I was a maintainer of an intranet wiki system and I wrote a lot of Ruby scripts that PHP would call using system calls, but it wasn't very elegant. If I could figure out how to better integrate them, I could write so many scripts for Whole Wheat Radio to do trippy things Jim would have to start blocking my IP address because I'd be using all WWR's idle CPU power. Wouldn't that be fantastic?

BRAINWAVE: Wouldn’t it be great to be able to use the same user database for my Ruby CMS and MediaWiki? Then I could leave my CMS for the blogging portion, and use MediaWiki for the Wiki side, but the users would be consistant. I’m so smart it’s scary sometimes. Okay, I’m more scary than smart.

Well that post started constructively and quickly deteriorated into rambling quickly… sorry about that. 63 posts though. Like the way I got back on topic again by referencing what I was supposed to be discussing? That's called "skill" and it's not something you can learn at any fancy tertiary educational institution.

UDPATE: I noticed that I forgot to index the PNG in the topic heading, meaning it was a whopping 112KiB! It’s now a more respectable 28KiB. Sorry about that.

For some reason I get the feeling I'll be blogging and talking about this ridiculous plan the Australian Federal Government has to censor the internet for a while to come. After all, it's worked so successfully overseas without people finding ways to bypass it, and it hasn't caused any negative publicity for the countries overseas either!

With this in mind I've created a new topic heading for such posts in similar style to the MacBook FireWire debacle. In this one it's a picture of the Aussie flag in the background with the protagonist wielding a sword from Shakugan no Shana whom I know — to use the politically correct phrase — would kick the crap out of anyone who espouses such nonsense! Plus she looks like a warrior defending our digital rights too.

ASIDE: I’ve mentioned this on my anime blog many times before, but just for the hell of it: has anyone noticed the number of powerful, strong female characters are at an all time high, whilst the majority of the guys are wimpy?

I've also changed my profile picture on Twitter, and just as with the topic heading above the mouth has been covered up. I'm certainly by no means as photogenic as Shana, but I did try my best. If you use Twitter, don't forget to follow the EFA's Twitter feed @efa_oz and use the #nocleanfeed hash tag after each tweet on the subject.

My Twitter icon, along with some other outraged Adelaideians. That is the collective noun for Adelaide peoples right?

And some other fine folks on the east coast:

If you have a website don't forget to also link to NoCleanFeed.com and use their Say no to censorship badges to spread the word.

I'm sorry, I just couldn't help myself posting a screenshot of this Finder window this afternoon. Could you imagine transferring that much data through USB 2.0? Yuk!

I guess their argument would be that I'm a MacBook Pro user and not the target market for the MacBook. It's a shame because I've always wanted to return to a souped up desktop and a smaller, more lightweight notebook computer combo again at some point, just like I used to have with my PowerMac G5 and my iBook G3.

I think I'll be sticking with MacBook Pros now. Well look at that, their tactic worked!

But Finder… I don't have any other applications open!

One of the things I can appreciate about learning how to use FreeBSD is that a lot of the knowledge can can also be used to work more productively in Mac OS X too because the commands are either identical or very similar. In many ways OS X and BSD are more similar than BSD and GNU/Linux.

One such function that Mac OS X shares with BSD is the umount command (Darwin man page, FreeBSD man page) which you can use to unmount drives that the Finder refuses to because it claims the drive is in use. Once you unmount a drive, you can safely unplug it.

To unmount a drive so you can eject it when the Finder refuses, launch Terminal.app from the /Applications/Utilities/ folder, then enter the following command including the quotation marks. Replace [DRIVE LABEL] with the name of the drive as you see it on your desktop including any spaces.

% umount "/Volumes/[DRIVE LABEL]"

If umount also refuses to eject the drive, there's a pretty good chance there still is an application using a resource on the drive. If you're positive you have no open files open on that drive and you're in a hurry, you can forcibly eject by using the -f option.

% umount -f "/Volumes/[NAME OF DRIVE]"

Take care when forcibly unmounting volumes!

If the Finder and umount refuse to unmount and eject a drive, they generally have a good reason. Attempt to close all open applications that could feasibly be using any data on the drive the attempt ejecting first.

You should only forcibly unmount a volume as an absolute last resort.

Troubleshooting

If you attempt to use umount and you get a "not currently mounted" error, then the name that Finder shows for the drive might not be the same name Mac OS X mounted it with. To check your drive volume names, fire up the Terminal again, then enter ls /Volumes/

Google Reader is wildly convenient on the iPhone, but is also one of the sites that crashes the most. Might be sticking with the desktop version for now.

Those who read this blog will know that despite my initial skepticism, I finally bit the bullet and bought an iPhone 3G in September. Looking back at it now, it may have been one of the best decisions I've ever made; it really is a phenomenal device. Other phones may have more features, or have features with higher specifications, but none I have ever used even remotely come close to the iPhone in usability.

With such constant glowing reviews, you might be under the mistaken impression that I think the iPhone is absolutely perfect and that I am now a blubbering fanboy. The fact is I have been taking notes whenever something has irritated me with it in the hopes I could create a post taking about the iPhone's shortcomings and how it could be improved.

After a month, I feel it's time to let 'em rip, all one of them. And here it is: the MobileSafari web browser officially blows. It is the most crash prone, error riddled piece of s… oftware I've used in recent memory. It's a shame because no other applications have been able to crash this iPhone, and a serious shortcoming considering it was billed as a phone, music player and an internet communications device.

It's a shame, WebKit itself rocks.

Typically the scenario plays itself out like this: I'll browse to a web page, scroll down leisurely, perhaps pinch and wipe around a bit to increase or decrease the size of elements. Boom, crash, back to the home screen. It doesn't crash every single time, but I'd wager it crashes once for every time it works properly twice. A 33.3% reliability rate is hardly a glowing record.

Different activities seems to exacerbate the problem. If I enter any information into a field on a web form barring simple login screens, it will crash. If I scroll down a page too fast, it crashes. If I click a link, then click another link before the page finishes loading, it crashes. Generally the problem can be partially alleviated by restarting the phone every few days and making sure I don't have more than a few tabs open at any one time, but it's by no means a quick fix.

What I find interesting is that for every person on a web forum or blog post comment feed that complains about MobileSafari reliability, there are two or three that claim to have no problems at all with it. Here's hoping the next software update fixes this for everyone; I'd love to be able to use MobileSafari carefree on this phone. WebKit is still one of the best rendering engines.

Stay tuned for my real world scenario review of the iPhone that I compiled last week but still need to clean up. It really shows how you can use this thing to take over your life and how fantastic that is… provided you stick to applications other than MobileSafari for most of the time :).

Sent from my iPhone.

As I've explained before, because of the way WordPress handles elements the ID of a post doesn't correspond with the number of the post. For example, this post has an ID of 2431 despite it being the 912nd post. You can see the disparity by looking at the header of this site itself and seeing the post count in brackets next to the All Posts link.

What I didn't expect was that given this post is 912, the previous post was 911. In said post I was talking about ominous and overarching internet censorship in Australia that would put us in the same league as China, North Korea and Iran. Coincidence? Synchronicity? Chuck Peddle?

I am my father's son though: when I think of 911 this is still the first thing that comes to mind.

"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"
"Who watches the watchmen?"

- Juvenal, Satires, VI, 347

Sometimes you question the motives behind certain politicians decisions; sometimes you question their sanity; sometimes you question whether they in fact have any form of brain material in their heads at all; or more often than not it's a combination of all three.

Steven Conroy is Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy in the Australian Federal Government who seems to think that not only a blanket filter on the entire internet in Australia would not only be feasible and technically possible (a little hint sir, it isn't), but that it's a good idea. If his plans go forward, Australia will have the most restricted online media in the Western world.

To re-use a phrase I originally wrote on a Sarah Palin post, the fact that some people think this is a good idea is blood chillingly scary, as well as head-smashing-on-a-table stupid.

The Australian Federal Government is pushing forward with a plan to force Internet Service Providers [ISPs] to censor the Internet for all Australians. This plan will waste tens of millions of taxpayer dollars and slow down Internet access.

Despite being almost universally condemned by the public, ISPs, State Governments, Media and censorship experts, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy is determined to force this filter into your home.

NoCleanFeed.com has been set up to inform people on why censorship should not happen to our precious intertubes. They also have ways you can help the cause, and a donation button for the Electronic Frontiers Australia organisation, the Australian equivalent to the EFF in the States.

What's most ridiculous about this whole boneheaded proposal is not only will it slow down Australia's already sub-par internet speeds, it will block legitimate sites by generating false positives and I fear will set a dangerous precedent that the Government knows best what people should and should not have access to online.

Even if such a system came into effect, creating an internet system similar to Iran, China and North Korea could and would be easily circumvented by people who wanted to get access to the full internet. Just like DRM, this internet filter would only hurt legitimate users.

The Freedom-proof Fence, Great Barrier Firewall, Firewall Australia, Great Firewall Reef or the Great Australian Firewall should and MUST not go forward. If you're in Australia, contact your local member for parliament.

"Mawson Interchange in Adelaide next to our house. Taken by Ian Threlfall

It's come time for another blog post to be submitted from my iPhone instead of my laptop. What can I say, my back says my MacBook Pro is a great machine but not exactly the lightest thing to be carrying around constantly. I think most of the time it's just fine, but it's nice to just carry an iPhone sometimes.

As I sit here at the Mawson Interchange train station whatsit I can see from the LED display that the train is arriving in 4 minutes. Problem is, that's what it said 5 minutes ago. I'm not one to judge the accuracy of public transport message boards, but I'm judging this one to be inaccurate. Either that or somehow that display exists outside our regular space-time continuum and its some sort of time traveling notice board. One can't help but think that the money used to buy a time traveling public transport notification display could have been put towards actually buying more trains to improve frequency times so such intentionally misleading displays would not be necessary in the first place.

ASIDE: Is that how you spell continuum? The iPhone dictionary says so, but it doesn’t look right to me. Not that I’m questioning my almighty iPhone mind!

The fact is, given I spent most of my life in Singapore (okay most of my life I can remember, I lived in Sydney and Melbourne before I was five but I certainly don't remember it!) the whole concept of public transport timetables is completely foreign. In Singapore the buses, MRT and LRT systems don't use predetermined times, they go by frequency. For example, if you stand at the Dhoby Ghaut MRT station you're told on the screens that the trains come every two to three minutes.

Of course this system isn't perfect, but the difference is over there they have enough confidence in their fleet sizes to pull off frequency rather than timetable timings. The ironic thing is quite often here (and most of the rest of Australia) timetables aren't even a reliable guide anyway, most trains and buses run late every time anyway. I'm reminded of Captain Jack Sparrow's line in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie: "The code is more of a guideline than actual rules!"

Want to battle climate change, reduce dependency on foreign energy, revitalise neighbourhoods and CBDs, clean up the air, dedicate more space to parkland, reduce stress on commuters, let people keep more of their money, increase aura and pride in communities and make sense… stop building expressways and artery roads, and build better public transport systems! Especially in times of economic uncertainty, public projects like this that keep people employed just make sense!

Punggol MRT station in Singapore, taken from my Flickr profile

Sent from my iPhone

It's official, the first images and details of Microsoft's up and coming Windows 7 operating system have been released to the press. The always interesting PC Pro in the UK has the inside scoop:

Microsoft has released the first pre-beta code of Windows 7, writes Barry Collins at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles.

The next-generation operating system includes a bevy of new features, including a revamped Windows desktop, support for multitouch, USB drive encryption and improved boot times and performance.

While all this does sound promising for people still using Windows, the preliminary screenshot definitely failed to impress. I'm hoping that Microsoft's history of refining and modifying the interface to the point where it barely resembles the betas repeats itself, because this is just awful:

Screenshot of the first preview of Windows 7

Not only that, but I feel as though they've blatantly and unabashedly ripped off my beloved K Desktop Environment. The panel is pixel-for-pixel the same size. The layout is the same. The widgets look the same. Though for what it's worth, you've got to hand it to them for taking such a gorgeous interface and making it look terrible!

I think it does make a strong statement though that a software company that has been so desperate to label free and open source software as a movement that largely can't be taken seriously, then turns around and attempts to emulate the fruits borne from such projects.

Screenshot of the current release of the KDE Unix (Linux, FreeBSD etc) desktop

I continually find it amazing how Microsoft's user interface standards have so dramatically slipped over the years. Our first home computer came loaded with Windows 3.0 with Multimedia Extensions which we later upgraded to 3.1. It was by no means perfect, but I'd argue in many ways it was superior to anything outside Amiga Workbench at the time. Windows 95 was clean and organised and personally I thought it was much slicker than System 7.x and all the other classic Mac OS's. Windows 98 was marginally worse, XP's cheap graphics looked childish, and Vista of course was an abomination.

With the bar now set so low, let's hope for the sake of people who still must use Windows that this latest version gets some serious cosmetic changes before it ships in 2049.

Windows 3.1 in all it's glory!