Rubenerd

My dad and I at Brotzeit at Vivo city for my 22nd!

I’ve turned the big Two Two
Just don’t expect me to wear one!

Hey come on, it’s the only time in my life when I’ll be able to say that!

– Ruben Schade to his father, Singapore 2008

Thank you to all the fabulous people who have emailed me and Twittered birthday wishes!

I also want to wish Frank Edward Nora's baby The Overnightscape a happy birthday too, which happens to fall on this exact same day… synchronicity! If you didn't read about it, he overhauled its logo recently too in celebration!

With my birthday in less than a day, my dad gave me his credit card to buy some music from CDBaby with the Whole Wheat Radio affiliate links. I didn't have to pay for the CDs, he gets to give me something I like without having to work too hard, we both win. Plus it makes at least a small dent in my music to explore list!

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The best thing about buying from CDBaby though is the email receipt they send you afterwards :-).

Ruben –
Thanks for your order with CD Baby!

Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved “Bon Voyage!” to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Monday, March 24th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as “Customer of the Year.” We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Sigh…
Derek Sivers, president, CD Baby

Nothing more to say. Fortunately the admitted it and changed their policies. Wait, that was something else to say wasn't it? I guess I've never been very good at reining in verbosity.

If you haven't noticed by now, the visual sorcerer Frank Edward Nora has changed a critical graphical element on two of his online endeavours:

The Overnightscape

The original and best New Time Radio show has got a makeover in the form of a very swish new logo with a crescent moon:

ONS on Twitter

Frank’s profile picture is of his former self from several years ago. We have the same hair!

While reading a fascinating interview with senior contributors about the improvements in FreeBSD 7.0 at the OnLamp BSD Dev Centre, I couldn't help but notice a certain problem with the page:

Can you see it? I'll give you a hint: it starts with an "A" and ends in a "dobe"! Yes, Adobe is advertising their Flex framework, on a website dedicated to an operating system they refuse to support!

Just for more fun, if you click on their advertisement on your trustworthy FreeBSD box as I did, you're told you need to download Adobe Flash. Clicking on that link takes you to a page where they tell you that "We are unable to locate a Web player that matches your platform and browser".

Little hint Adobe, don't advertise your products to people who can't use them, even if they wanted to.

“It could feel as overwhelming as standing in a room with too many masterpieces”

On Monday morning at 07:01 here in Singapore I wasn't tucked in bed asleep, I was plugged into the computer listening to Ed Craver reading some of his brilliant prose and works on Whole Wheat Radio!

Ed Craver and Esther Golton at the Wheat Palace in Talkeetna, Alaska, USA

I was expecting to type up a short review of Mr Craver's readings shortly after hearing them, but as I sit here listening to how much Esther Golton would love to grow lots and lots of sweet corn, I'm absolutely, completely speechless. It's as though anything I attempt to put into words here would be hopelessly insufficient, if that makes any sense at all. I've rewritten this entire post now well over a dozen times, and it still seems inadequate!

Mr Craver took us to the rich farming land in Alaska, to his Island with his livestock, even to a sticky situation he found himself in involving a gigantic boar and a certain sensitive operation! The imagery he conjured up with his brilliant grasp of language was intoxicating and transported me right to frigid Alaskan winters as I sat on my balcony on the seventh floor of our apartment block in hot, humid downtown Singapore.

Ed Craver and Esther Golton on the other side of the world on an early Monday morning

As a young man who grew up entirely in cities around Australia and Asia, Mr Craver's stories of farm life and living out in one of the most isolated places on earth particularly touched me, and his wicked and witty sense of humour literally had my laughing out loud, much to the dismay of my sister trying to sleep in the room next door!

And to top it off, we had Esther singing Shadu during intermission… what's the technical musical term I'm looking for again? Oh yeah… YAY!

I'm hoping Jimbob will upload this as an audio magazine so that if you couldn't catch the performace you can listen later. Heck I want to be able to hear it again myself!

ASIDE: Corn corn! Sweet corn! I’d grow lots of corn!
Corn corn! Sweet corn! All I’d grow is corn!

So there ends my hopelessly inadequate review of Ed Craver Live at the Wheat Palace with Esther Golton. Thank you guys, you were brilliant and made a usually dull and depressing Monday morning into the high of my week! Cheers :-D

If implementing a standard leads to an unavoidable security hole, should you follow it?

Pun intended of course! I always look forward to important days of the year for two principal reasons: we get days off work and studies, and the major web portals and search engines put up decorations. Come on, admit it, you feel the exact same way.

This year, Ask.com definitely has the best Easter decorations for a search engine. Very cute.

On a sadder note, this was the first Easter holiday I had without my mum around; I get the feeling I'll be framing a lot of celebrations this year with that mentality. At least it gets me a break from people who say you can't be an Atheist and celebrate religious holidays in a secular way :-).

For some reason this evening while searching for information about how to grate cheese using only rubber bands MacGyver style (or maybe while I was searching for SQlite information for Ruby, I don't remember) a random message box popped up:

Given I'm on FreeBSD (they didn't even check whether their victim was running Windows?!), just for a laugh I decided to click OK and see what they showed!

I was expecting the usual silly looking website with affiliate links for piles of overpriced and unnecessary security software, but instead a new fake web software screen appeared, complete with animated progress bars and an evolving list of "infections" that the "software" had "detected". When it was done another fake message appeared which linked to an executable file to download, presumably containing spyware or a virus. Taking a look at the source on the page itself, each button triggered the same JavaScript download function.

ASIDE: The JavaScript code took up more space than any of the HTML. I’ve never seen that before, quite eye opening. Scams like this need more 1337 programming skills than I thought. And all the more reason to disable JavaScript except for trusted sites!

I must say, despite the fact the Windows logo is different in four different places and the grammar is terrible, the animations and fake scan results are pretty well done. For most savvy and intermediate computer users the flaws would be pretty obvious and they'd probably laugh them off, but the scary thing is I'm sure there are plenty of people who would find this whole shameless charade convincing. Just like all these hoaxes, they seem to target this group; heck if they can net one person out of a few thousand, the whole exercise has been… how does Richard Quest put it… profitable.

Malware distributor, I stick my tongue out at thee!

For what it's worth though, and on the bright side, it was really hilarious seeing this whole thing act itself out… in KDE on a FreeBSD machine where the windows look completely different, the colours don't match, the fonts aren't even the same and the .exe file it tried to download to the machine wouldn't have been able to run itself even if it did make it to the hard drive to start off with!

Sorry guys, there's no Microsoft Windows code to exploit on this machine!

Sometimes you find a webapp on the intertubes that's so useful you'd be charged for criminally negligent conduct if you didn't tell other people about it. As far as I understand it.

In this case it's Texterity's FreeSVG service which takes PDFs you upload, breaks them down into their individual components (including text, images, fonts and vector drawings), converts it all into an SVG file, bundles all the material into a zip file, then emails you a 48 hour link to fetch it. Very, very nice.

From their site:

FreeSVG is provided by Texterity to encourage the use of SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) on the web and enable free, highly functional conversion of PDF documents into fully accessible and navigable SVG.

SVG is an industry standard, W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) specification describing text and graphics in XML. To learn more about SVG visit the W3C site at http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/.

Now obviously for security reasons you'd definitely not want to use this service for confidential or sensitive information, but for general use it's a fantastic solution, and has saved my arse many times!