Rubenerd

There's an interesting article kdawson brought up over on Slashdot about the future of Wikipedia and it's seemingly conflicting ideas. From the summary:

“It can either strive to encompass every aspect of human knowledge, no matter how trivial; or it can adopt a more stringent editorial policy and ban articles on trivial subjects, in the hope that this will enhance its reputation as a trustworthy and credible reference source. These two conflicting visions are at the heart of a bitter struggle inside Wikipedia between inclusionists, who believe that applying strict editorial criteria will dampen contributors’ enthusiasm for the project, and deletionists who argue that Wikipedia should be more cautious and selective about its entries.”

I edit a few articles now and then on Wikipedia but for the most part I'm a fanatical reader; the first place I turn to when I'm researching anything is Wikipedia. Certainly it's not the definitive word, and I'm not treating it as such, but it's just so doggone useful for filling in the initial blanks.

The idea that there are people on Wikipedia who are judging the notability of articles and deleting them outright has always troubled me though because of the shaky foundation the idea of "notability" is based on. Aside from the fact we cannot even agree on a precise definition of notability in the first place, to me it makes far too many assumptions about subjects and material which in a global context with people connecting and editing from around the world is… iffy.

The other problem I see with this is that the idea of "notability" is incredibly short sighted. I wish I could claim to be the first person to have thought of it but someone on Slashdot beat me to it: imagine Vincent Van Gough. While he was alive he made very little money at all and frankly wasn't known by many people; if Wikipedia existed back in these times he would not have warranted an article because of a lack of notability. His works now fetch millions. Imagine how fascinating it would then be to look at an article about him written when he was still relatively unknown.

I'm not saying Wikipedia should turn into a living, adapting time capsule where in fifty years we can read about what a particular pet ate for lunch on its third birthday, but I think we should be very, very careful about deleting articles just because the moderator at the time deems it not to be "notable". We risk destroying a part of our culture now that future generations might find fascinating; heck Wikipedia could even be one of those technologies that save us from the digital dark age!

Or maybe it's because they deleted my New Time Radio and Audio Magazine articles and I'm bitter :-).

It's interesting how some people really don't like admitting that they have problems, and those same people get angry when other people do admit their problems, especially medical. For some reason they get angry because they think that by admitting problems you're:

• Not being a strong person, or a "man" or a "strong woman"
• Showing off in some strange way
• Looking for attention
• Just trying to get someone to feel sorry for you
• Using some form of emotional blackmail to get them to do something for you
• Hoping they’ll make you a bento lunch with sachertorte for desert… mmm sachertorte.

It's really quite a tragic state of affairs when you know they'll always be those who will look at you with scorn when you're trying to cope with problems in your own way.

I'm not one of those people! I've just come out of my latest deep blue funk (sounds much more poetic than "down cycle"!), the first substantial one since my mum died last year. A lot of problems which had been building up since that happened seemed to reach a climax last week, and my brain just went into standby mode. As anyone who has this damning condition knows, there's really no way to describe it other than to use a string of inadequate words: pain, anger, depression, helplessness… it's not good whatever it is.

Seems it wasn't just my MacBook Pro that was having trouble charging this week!

I'm still feeling a bit exhausted, but it's good to be back to planet earth again. I have to start learning C++ again this next semester, my glorious exploration of Smalltalk, Objective-C and Ruby will have to be put on standby itself. Which is a shame, because I could really use some help with my small talk :-)

No such thing as proof, else faith would not be needed.
- SkyDaddy

You're honour, my client had his car stolen by the defendant. I have no proof, but you can have faith that he's telling the truth! Why? Because I've been told after an unspecified number of years we'll have evidence!

Case dismissed ;-)

Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam…

Having had websites for a while now I've definitely seen an evolution in spam. If you don't believe in evolution, that's okay: I don't believe in gravity. After all, it's just a theory right?

At first spam bots harvested email addresses from search engine indexes of web pages, then when the concept of posting comment on blogs started reaching critical mass spam bots started pumping spam through those… I can guarantee it won't be long before most of the traffic on the internet will be junk spam messages, not just the majority of email.

ASIDE: The cynic in me says that most of the material on the internet is pretty much junk anyway, and the self depreciating side of me says that this website in particular is not doing much to lift these seemingly low standards!

It seems to me though that blog spam in itself is evolving though. I used the word "though" twice in that sentence. When previously they mostly consisted of masses of links to get more Google juice, now they seem to be latching on web feeds that blog software exports and creating more and more junk blogs with this plagiarised information. Some of them try to pass themselves off as legitimate by creating faux introductions that go along the lines of "Hey I found this blog entry and it's really interesting, here's a summary!".

I noticed this phenomenon (I've never been able to say that word without ending up saying phenomenon -menon -menon… -menon) recently when I started getting hits from this somewhat creepy blog called "Blogslog Golf" that just posted a large chunk from my article about Boohoo paraphernalia:

I can only theorise they're doing this to get trackback and increase their rankings on Google, or as a way to add content en masse to their site to make it appear more legitimate for advertising. It fills me with so much anger: I mean, why didn't I think of that? :P

Instead of a not so stylish Designed for Windows sticker I've been looking for a Powered by FreeBSD or Powered by BSD or Daemon Powered or something to that nature to put next to the Intel Inside sticker on my new built PC.

If you can't wait for the FreeBSD Mall beastie sticker to arrive, there are quite a lot of good little graphics floating around that you could theoretically print onto photo sticker paper :)

No prizes for guessing my favourite one!

If you're like any reasonable person who's genuinely scared of the idea of Microsoft purchasing Yahoo, show everyone your position by buying some Boohoo paraphernalia!

If I actually had some spare cash after buying a new motherboard which ended up being faulty anyway I'd grab myself a mug and a golf shirt. If I didn't buy the golf shirt, I'd probably have enough money to play a round of golf. Hah, not in Singapore! And if I didn't buy the mug, I'd probably have enough money for a Starbucks Caramel Macchiato. In Singapore. I just realised the photo I uploaded was the white shirt, not the polo shirt. Wait, golf shirt. Now I'm confused. Boohoo! Don't you hate paragraphs full of disjointed sentences? I do. Boohoo!

As I mentioned in a recent post, I've assembled another computer recently for number crunching and compiling applications for other machines and for university projects. Given these needs, I figured I'd buy a motherboard with simple onboard graphics and use the money I saved to buy more RAM. After all, I won't be playing any games on here (save for some terribly addictive little KDE games!) or encoding video. In fact it's quite feasible to think sometimes I wouldn't even interface with it directly at all, but rather just send it tasks remotely from my MacBook Pro through SFTP or NFS, or check up on it with SSH or TLA.

Anyway life story aside, I finally settled on the Intel "Executive Series" DQ35JO board with the Intel Core 2 Duo 8400 3.0GHz CPU and two sticks of 1.0GB Kingston HyperX low latency PC2-6400 RAM.

Problem is, it's as reliable as I am… without coffee! The order of events:

1. Once booted into FreeBSD it works beautifully
2. After a random unspecified amount of time, all processes on the machine visibly slow to a crawl
3. Eventually it stops responding to all keyboard and mouse input and has to be physically turned off
4. After waiting a few seconds and powering it back up, the display refuses to come back on
5. 10-15 seconds pass, the motherboard reboots itself
6. After another random unspecified amount of time ranging sometimes from 5 minutes to 5 hours it can be turned back on again with the video output.
7. Lather, rinse, repeat

It's downright maddening. I've flashed the BIOS to a newer version, I've stood in a circle around a campfire chanting various lines, I've stood on one leg while singing Majulah Singapura and Advance Australia Fair backwards… nothing seems to make any difference. What bothers me most though is the randomness, at least if it failed and worked again predictably it would be easier to figure out what's going on.

For now I guess it's back to the store. Fortunately I bought the parts from Skylet and Cybermind at SLS which both have 7 day on the spot replacements in addition to the warranties.

I'm sure it's just an inevitable manufacturing defect which statistically is bound to happen when you buy electronic components, but it's still disheartening. While it was working, this computer was the fastest and most responsive system I've ever used, period! Not to mention the time it took to compile kdebase from FreeBSD ports… wow I've never seen the compiler notices fly by so quickly!

More as the story develops.

I can recite the names of over a dozen American presidential candidates. Not because I'm that interested in American politics, but because I've been added by them on Twitter more times than I can count!

Political jokes aside, I've been added now by so many Twitter bots, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. The thing that bugs me most about it though is the fact this is happening despite the location parameter that's on my profile: I've said I'm in Singapore! How hard would it be for a person writing these bots to push their favoured political candidates to ignore people who aren't living in the United States? Unless they just don't care and are just using the shotgun approach. Insert witty pun joke about gun control here.

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in Sydney attempting to bring up with George W. Bush the issue of American presidential candidates spamming Australians on Twitter, with seemingly little success.

Now that I'm using Twhirl as my desktop Twitter aggregator on my Mac (which shows private messages) I'm thinking of just creating a smart email folder that any Twitter messages get marked as read and filtered into. When I have to sort through thirty or so messages a day from Mark Huckabee, Ron Paul, John McCain and Chris Dodd I think it's stopped being funny.

Actually nah, it's still pretty funny :).

It's come time once again to pay tribute to yet another useless Rubenerd Blog milestone, the posting of the wicked, super evil 666th post!

Of course if you were reading this weblog almost one year ago to this day (how very eerie), you would have seen that I already celebrated what I thought at the time to be the publishing of the 666th post with this very silly graphic from Elfen Lied, one of the scariest anime series' I'd ever seen. Come to think of it I never finished watching it for that very reason.

Anyway I realised in another useless Rubenerd Blog milestone post in November last year that WordPress assigns values to all uploaded media not just weblog entries, meaning that the initial 666th post celebration wasn't actually the 666th post.

So unlike that impostor post, this one is actually the 666th Rubenerd Blog post… even though the internal post ID is 1064. Have I confused you yet?

While I love Apple computers and use my MacBook Pro probably more than any other machine I own, I also love putting together machines myself for eight critical reasons:

1. It’s cheaper
2. I choose everything, no need for compromises
3. I don’t ever have to pay the Microsoft tax
4. Microsoft doesn’t get any money with bundled Windows
5. I’m not supporting Microsoft
6. I can install FreeBSD or NetBSD from the beginning
7. Much easier to upgrade
8. I don’t give any money to Microsoft

The latest machine I've put together is assembled in a slimline MicroATX tower case to make it easier to take to Adelaide when I go back to study, plus it takes up much less space on my already critically full desk.

The downside is because it's so slim, the PCI and PCI express slots are only half the width. Doing a bit of research it seems for this machine at least I'll be limited to using "half height" or "low profile" cards. They certainly do look strange!

It's less of a concern for this machine because I'm using it primarily for raw number crunching and compiling large amounts of crap, so I'm just using the onboard graphics. Plus, the board has inbuilt FireWire 400 ports, gigabit ethernet and a generous number of USBs… I'll probably need another gigabit ethernet port before anything else.

Anyone know where you can get a low profile PCI express gigabit ethernet card? ;-)