Twitter madness...

Yesterday I decided to start doing something with twitter, all it took was replying to a pownce post from four20 all then the madness ensued. I don't quite know how to explain it but as a somewhat unknown person on the internet to get a heap of followers one after the other, most of whom I regularly frequent their blogs is quite a humbling experience.
So this short entry is just to thank four20 for finally showing me the value and usefulness of Twitter. There is a LOT of tech news that gets broadcast on Twitter that doesn't make it into the headlines of the sites I usually browse and also a lot of ideas that get floated about. It's also a great place to find interesting and informative links. I think it's fair to say that I'm blown away by it, however I think it could get a little addictive as it's kind of like a big IRC chat room. And as some of you know I am a huge fan of IRC.
Yes I think Twitter is amazing and, yes I admit I was slow on getting into it, but I'm damn glad I finally got around to paying it some attention. Oh and by the way, @JasaonCalacanis wants the world to see his dogs... and I have to admit they are pretty cute.
So have a look here: Flickr.com

The quote of the day surely has to belong to MikeonTV with this gem:
"IM IN UR TWITZ, FOLLOWING UR DOINGS"

Digg, it's all about the comments.

More often than not, when I am browsing through Digg I usually read the comments before the article and mostly find the user comments far more entertaining and sometimes more informative than the actual article. Today is no exception.
In an article that hit the front page today called, “If Microsoft invented Linux...” - Submitted by sourceholder.
I was highly amused by a retort to this comment by daxsymbiont:

there's no bloat in windows.
windows is where linux wants to be.
when linux does something that windows did in 1995 "OMG LOOK AT THIS MASTERPIECE OF TECHNOLOGY!".
when windows does something new "again bloat".
bury it, cause it's true.

And before you ask, yes I did bury that comment not because it's true but because I believe it is false....bullshit actually.... But that would be a whole other blog post.

dcollins replied with:

If what you are saying is true, I better call google and alert them they are running their servers on 10yo technology.

Which in turn led to my favorite comment of the day by Nicksname1:

dcollins> Yeah Google are you there?
GOOG411> Yes how may I help you
dcollins> Hey daxsymbiont says you guys are running on old 10 yo technology and you should get Windows because it's bloated with features
GOOG411> You tell daxsymbiont to go fuck himself!

Maybe it's my warped sense of humour or the fact that I had didn't get much sleep last night but this comment wins the gold for today. Also at the top of the comments is the biggest list of spoiler comments I have seen. This story was yet another one that I, and probably many others have dugg for the comments rather than the article.
Oh by the way, what would it look like if Microsoft invented linux??



I encourage you to have a read of the digg page and comments here: http://digg.com/linux_unix/If_Microsoft_Invented_Linux

I should point out that I did not submit this article, nor do I know the submitter. I am not asking for diggs on this story either, although not that it matters, it seems to have done pretty well for itself.

Yer Old

I've never really thought seriously about getting old. I have always thought of myself as getting older but not once had I sat back and thought, "Shite, your getting old....". Well now I have, albeit a rather drunken thought but still, it remained with me throughout one of my all day hangovers.

I'm not sure what triggered it, but as I was being driven around town by some girl I hadn't met before and unlikely to meet ever again (my friend was in the front passenger seat) something in my head clicked over. It also should be noted that my friend and the two girls in the car were a few years younger than me, I'm guessing early twenties?? I didn't have a clue what the girl sitting next to me in the back seat was babbling about, nor the one in the front. Something about somebody's boyfriend being a prick, someone's boyfriends mother being a cow and something else about another one of their friends being a bitch... heh... I'm just guessing there on the last one... but it's a pretty safe bet. Now it should be said that I had no real interest in getting to know either of these two, I am sure they are great people and I wish them all the best. It's just that everyone at my friend's house had fallen asleep and me being a geek and not used to going to sleep before 2:00-3:30am was wide awake... and not nearly drunk enough to call it a night.

We pulled up out the front some seemingly random house but unfortunately the alcohol had ran out and the party had drifted on to the pub. Which was a pity because I was just about to have a good drunken discussion with one of the dudes out the front. Ahhh... not to be, "Hey man, we're going!" came a yell from the car. So we then drove around some more bitching about this and that, I contributed as best I could trying to find some common ground. This continued until quite late.... I think it was half five by the time I shut my eyes. I remember watching a skate video and seeing light creep through the window but there are a couple of lost hours in there.

I have to say that it's not that I didn't enjoy the night, I had a ball. It's just that it reminded me of what me and friends used to do...."Back in the day".
....WAIT....
There it is. That's what made me feel old. Back in the day.
Back in the day to me was doing whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. No thinking about consequences or responsibilities, whatever happens happens and whatever doesn't doesn't.

These days I have to make time for myself to go out and do random things and see if my mates can get a "night" pass to do the same. Everyone is having kids and starting to get there family life in order or established. I congratulate them and respect them highly for that and it has brought out a side in some of them that I have rarely seen in them and I like it.

I guess stepping out of a long relationship has left me with something I'm not used to.... freedom. The freedom to do whatever I want whenever I want, whatever happens happens and whatever doesn't doesn't. All with a few more restrictions than "Back in the day" of course...

Which finally brings me to my point, I'm pretty sure no one reads this blog anyway so I'm not sorry at all for the length of my posts. And if somebody does read this, please leave a comment about when you have felt "old".

The whole point of this post is that on the 9th of March it's "Get over it day". Damn good timing if I do say. Get over it you cynical old bastard, live it up.

Get Over It Day [mahalo.com]

Bigpond Wireless Broadband - It's what you use when you have to.

First off, Bigpond: You give me the shits.
I don't have a problem with their services at all. I love the fact that they appear to like open source software and provide unmetered downloads that are based on user requests. I mean hell, I can request a full linux distro dvd download and a day later I get a nice email stating that it is available for download in the unmetered File Download section. They also allow TWIT netcasts, all of the Revision3 IPTV releases basically anything that falls under the Creative Commons or open source category.

Recently Bigpond even decided to add a Ubuntu repository into the unmetered category as well (no multiverse repository but I can live without that), in fact that is one of the main reasons I have moved from other distro's to Ubuntu. Bigpond Office is also worth a mention here also.... although I have never used it. I'm guessing it's a little like the online Google office services with word processing, spreadsheet and presentaition applications and a whopping 250MB storage. I'm not taking the piss here 250MB should be enough for most casual users to store their online generated material.

I also don't really mind waiting a couple of hours for their customer service phone representatives to take me off of hold and actually address my internet connection problems. I usually have it sorted out by the time they get to me anyway, it must the hold music that kicks my brain into gear. When I do finally get to talk to someone there is always something else I want to ask about them anyway so it's never a wasted call.

My biggest gripe with Bigpond is their Wireless Broadband service. Until recently we were paying around $160 for a 550kbps to a "supposed" 1.5Mbps connection with a 3GB data cap with excess usage charged at $0.15 per MB. The speed has since been bumped up to 550kbps - 3.0Mbps and the price dropped to $114 with a 3GB data cap with excess usage RAISED to $0.30 per MB. WTF??

!STOP THE FREAKING BUS!

Hmm.... let's think about this for a second. They increase the speed, increase the excess usage charge, drop the price and leave the data cap the same?? I couldn't give a crap how much faster the connection is if we can still only get the same amount of content. Sure the monthly price drop was nice but why the hell wouldn't they increase the data cap? Why the hell did they double the excess usage charge?? An why the hell is the highest data cap plan at 3 gig?? Why all of this when they have inevitably halved the time we can reach our data cap and then double the penalty for exceeding it? I can only think of one reason.... $$$.

As the internet is growing up, the data requirement to browse different sites is increasing. Flash videos for example are everywhere and some sites still insist on making their whole site to run off of flash. I don't have a problem with flash I think it's a great delivery medium for static audio and video streaming. Web 2.0 has brought a lot of cool technologies to how we view the net and the integration of mixed media draws a lot of bandwidth. For a perfect example bigpond should look at their own site, it's big, bloated and uses a fair amount of bandwidth to render itself into a browser. Thankfully the bigpond site is unmetered for bigpond users or it would be easy enough to blow the data cap by just trying to go through the site to look at my mail through the webmail client.

And so to Bigpond I say this:
At the very least jst give us 5 gig for the same price and keep your lousy $0.30 per MB excess usage going and I'll be happy.... Oh and you can even drop our maximum speed back to 550kbps - 1.5Mbps.
Thanks.

Oh and as a side note to the last Bigpond customer service representative I spoke to:
No, I do not believe you are Australian or in Australia even though you swore black and blue that you were. Melbourne is NOT the capital city of New South Wales and New South Wales is nowhere near my hometown you friggin' douchebag! And no, I do not live closer than 7 k's from a telephone exchange.... I think I would know as I happen to live here. Do some research before you get all frothy at the mouth and listen to someone who knows where they live instead of using your fingers trying to count. Christ, I'll even send you a goddamn map if you like....

*EDIT*
Okay, so my research was flawed. I was Informed that the excess data charge has not gone up to $0.30, it remains at $0.15 per MB. For some reason (thankfully) our plan has kept the excess data charge locked in at the original rate.
Oh, I decided to tone this post down a bit.... I'm not so annoyed now I've had a chance to vent.

A lazy man's promise.

Hmm... I haven't been here in a while. A lot has happened since I lasted posted something here and I've been too lazy to express my opinion on it and basically I forgot about it. For those of you that know me, you know that I usually don't have a terrible lot to say.... well unless I've had a couple of beers. I guess it's not that I don't have much to say it's just that I probably think too much. Lately though there has been a lot of interesting things happening in the world and especially on the net. And since most of my time these days is spent staring at a blinking cursor of scrounging the net for news, I could probably afford to put a bit more effort into this blog. One day soon I'll move my rants from my home server over to here but I think it best to remove some of the profanity and bring a little order to them first. So that is a lazy man's promise.... I'll do something soon :)
Until then, I found this Techdirt article about a possible merger between Yahoo! and AOL highly amusing (If not only for the feces comparison):
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080211/015628216.shtml

Oh I came across this as well, it's probably as old as the internet itself but I found it funny.

web site analysis

Ubuntu vs. Kubuntu

First off, I should say that it took me a long time to use Ubuntu, I was already running couple of Debian servers and was quite happy with my OpenSUSE and Fedora Core development boxes. Why would I want to run another Debian based distro? The answer is clear now as Ubuntu has become so popular, there are a lot more people running it which means that there are a lot more people putting time into developing apps and libraries for it. Also there is a lot less "dependancy hell" going on these days, as package manager developers (in my opinion) have been pushed into making sure that most packages are installed with all of their dependencies without having to spend half an hour tracking down different libraries. I think that that software developers have begun treating the typical new linux user with kid gloves so as not to deter them from giving up and going back to Windows or whatever operating system they were using before. Although none of the above is Ubuntu specific it just seems that the Ubuntu developers have got it right.

For a long time I was a Gnome fan, I disliked KDE's silly little dragon and overstuffed application tree. These days though both of the desktop environments applications work to play relatively nicely with each other. But I thought I would have a look at Kubuntu just to see how KDE would go instead of Gnome. I had initially thought that it would be a little slower but I was quite surprised to find that the KDE desktop loaded a lot quicker than Gnome.

After going through the usual pains setting up my nvidia card for dual screen display, I have an older 17 inch monitor that only works properly when the driver is set for the same model but using the 15 inch driver (Philips 107s is actually my monitor, but using the 105s driver). I wanted to see if I could set up X without editing the xorg.conf file manually and I was surprised that I was able to do it without a hitch. It did need a bit of editing but that was just me being pedantic and could have been used perfectly without me fiddling with it.

The second thing that I noticed is that dolphin is the default file manager, what??? I was a little disgruntled by this but I thought that I would persevere with it to see how it went. It took a bit of getting used to and I went through a lot of, "Why they did the do that for?" and "Where the hell is ....". But after my initial "It's different, I don't like it" phase I settled down to customise it and I'm quite happy with it. However I still wish it had a terminal integrated into it somehow.

I started installing a few apps via a terminal and then I though I should really try out adept and see how that goes. It looked pretty decent and functioned well, was easy to use and hard to stuff anything up, but i still prefer to work in a terminal and wasn't in the mood to search around a gui when sudo apt-get install is so much easier especially because of tab completion at the command line. The good thing is that adept is simple and easy to use, so newcomers to linux shoudn't feel too much discomfort poking around and having a look at what software is available. It is no better nor worse than synaptic in my opinion.

And so, After installing all of my usual apps and development libraries I've come to the conclusion that as far as usability goes, for me they are both at the same level now. I have started to pay a lot more interest in KDE now, I'm looking forward to the final release of KDE 4. All of that aside i'm still most productive using fluxbox and vim or jed.

Social Networking

I originally joined facebook because I was concerned about the public availability of personal information. It is a bit disconcerting to see your name up there for everybody to see and find out personal information with just a few mouse clicks. How far does this information travel and who looks at it?
A couple of weeks ago I decided to bite the bullet and see who uses facebook, and what information people were willing to put out about themselves. At this point in time I should explain that I am studying in information security and my intentions were to see how social networking sites such as facebook dealt with the mass of personal information stored about its users. Unfortunately my research was put to an halt when I started having a look around at a few of the profiles, people I know, people I used to know, and sadly people I had neglected to continue to know. People do tend to drift apart and communication wanes after a time I guess but it good to see what they are doing with themselves after all of these years.
But anyway back on topic.... ID thieves and spammers can have a field day on facebook, well actually they probably have been ever since it's release. When one considers what an ID fraudster requires to build character profile on a potential victim, for example your full name, date of birth, phone numbers, email addresses and photos. Everything they need or could ask for is right there in front of them in your profile. Add all of that together along with the fact that you can let people know what your physical movements are (travel, attending events, meeting places with friends etc.) and what you actually look like..... well I'll leave that up to your level of paranoia.
Fortunately facebook is particularly good when it comes to protecting private information but unfortunately it is up to the user to enable a few of the features and to be aware of what personal information they are posting. Common sense will hardly prevail here as you view your friends profiles and feel obliged to enter as much information about yourself as you can. What makes it harder is the fact that the friend search feature encourages you to search for old school friends, people from the same hometown as you and so on. Not that there should be anything wrong with revealing this information it's just there are people (scammers, spammers, ID thieves) searching through social network sites for easily obtainable information to harvest.
Stay safe and think about what information you choose to make public, if you wouldn't walk up to a stranger on the street and tell them something about yourself then don't post it on the internet.

…in this brave new world where tons of people are looking to mine our information and monetize whatever they can get their hands on, we stand to become nothing more than “contact information” rather than good business connections or friends.

-Tish Grier http://spap-oop.blogspot.com/2007/09/perils-of-social-networking-pt-2.html