Blag

Some moron with a jackhammer managed to cut through 400mm of concrete, straight through fibre optics and copper cables, knocking out internet, telephones, and mobile connectivity for thousands in the CBD. The repair bill is estimated to be $1,000,000 + probable compensation for homeowners and businesses. It will take over a week to pull and re-splice new fibre, and then longer to re-patch 10, 000 copper pairs.

http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/318725/thousands_lose_phone_internet_services_sydney_cbd

http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/cables-cut-cbd-phone-and-internet-services-lost-20090916-fq4h.html

But that got me thinking – all the western countries are all hyped up over the threat of terrorism. We have extra tight security at airports (or none, in some cases -.- ), anti-terrorism laws, warning speakers installed in the city, ASIO/FBI/M1X bla bla bla.

But what’s to stop a terrorist wreaking havoc just by taking an axe to a few telecommunications and power cables? Last time I checked, the telecomms ducts could be accessed relatively easily by a single person with a screw driver, nor are any of the vital cables physically shielded or hardened in any way.

I could cut internet and phone access to the (North Ryde) Business Park down the road from my house, just from being over-enthusiastic with a backhoe and digging a 50cm hole in my front yard.

Poof! There goes the 10G metro fibre rings. Goodbye, thousands of copper pairs. *Throws rope across street* Sayonara Telstra, Optus and Foxtel HFC networks. There’s so much fibre/hfc/copper running through my street it’s not funny.

If I remember correctly a similar case happened in the US to AT&Ts network. A disgruntled employee came along one night, lifted the hatch to a fibre duct, and went snippety-snip. Half the city lost internet access, phones stopped working and 911 calls disappeared into a black hole.

Sure, I’d get screwed by the AFP because willfully tampering with telecommunications is a federal offense but hey, I get my share of the limelight in the media! Now what was the number for Kennard’s Hire again…

GG to these asstards for making everyone’s lives better: http://www.itnews.com.au/News/155993,parking-rangers-add-to-telstra-outage-woes.aspx

And now, put your hands together for everyone’s favourite ISP!

Dodo, Dodo, Internet that flies,

For nine-ninety cheap a month,

Connect yourself with Dodo!

And they’re back! Not content with being one of the most complained about ISPs in Australia, or offering the most ridiculous plans and outrageous terms & conditions, comes Dodo Electricity & Gas!

Dodo Electricity & Gas

For when your electricity and gas supplies just ‘aint unreliable enough. Do you want:

• Minimum 4 outages per fortnight?
• Brownouts if you consume excessive electricity?
• Low gas pressure?
• Restrictive on-peak and off-peak hours?
• Patented FairConsumption* policy?
• Blackouts when your grandma on life support comes over to visit?

Well you’re in luck, as here comes Dodo to the rescue.

Ok, well not really. They haven’t started offering those plans yet, but it’s a scary thought. And yes I am aware they have a PDF available listing the supplies and rates in Victoria. But it IS fun to pile shit on Dodo – not like it’s undeserved anyway.

*Excessive use of Dodo gas and electricity resources is a breach of the FairConsumption policy. Dodo is a reseller of AGL (natural gas) and Energy Australia (electricity). Excessive use is defined as 1. Electricity or Gas consumption of more than 5kWh or 150kJ per day 2. Use of more than 750W of electricity between the hours of 1 am and 6:30am 3. Using Dodo gas for barbecues or hot water boilers. Dodo Electricity & Gas is for residential use only. Customers who use Dodo Electricity & Gas for business purposes may be asked to purchase a private generator and LPG tank at the customers expense. Dodo will try to meet a 65% availability for electricity and natural gas services, but blackouts and supply loss are not guaranteed.

*yawn*

Yet another post with no discernible topic – perhaps it’s like a mini twitter? Ginormic pile of random comments, tid bits and news…

Begin early morning 1:37AM ramble:

(Actually, am testing something at the moment, but decided I may as well make an effort to fill this post with something remotely amusing… better than all the RSS readers getting a bunch of white space).

I hate being throttled. -.-

Especially midway through working on a website update, and the back end is so packed with AJAX and PHP it’s not funny.  I think he who pays the internet bill would be very annoyed if I purchased a 2GB data block (2GB being the lowest denomination available for $5) at 1AM, given the rollover time is 2AM…

I must say, I am disgusted yet curiously attracted to the movie Bruno… can’t wait for the DVD to come out. Did I say DVD? I meant torrent. Not that I would do something as dastardly as pirate a movie.

And yes, I’ll finish off the finding the perfect browser series soon. Opera and Google seem to be pushing out updates for their browsers on a bi-weekly basis now. That’s a good thing I suppose, but annoying as I constantly have to re-evaluate each browser in light of the updates.

End ramble.

Random news:

The International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg has announced that they’ve discovered two previously unknown compositions by Mozart. Yay! I can’t wait to hear more classical music… http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25827706-401,00.html

MSN Messenger turns 10! Now in its latest re-incarnation as Windows Live Messenger, latest stats have active users at 330 million, and 10 billion messages sent per day. 10 years on, and MSN still has 80% market share, followed by Skype and Yahoo! (NB: Stats are buoyed up somewhat, as MSN and Yahoo signed an agreement back in 2005 to consolidate their chat networks).

Windows 7 is RTM. Can’t wait for the official launch on October 22nd – no more crappy 32-bit limitations of XP (namely max 4GB of RAM, and 2GB RAM allocated max to each application). Anyone wanna buy 4GB of DDR2 4-4-4-12 overclocking ram incidentally?

Aside: WOO! Unthrottled right at this very moment, as I’m typing this now

Queensland cops plan to go war driving around the state, looking for people with unsecured wireless networks, handing out informational leaflets and holding demonstrations to teach people how to secure their home networks. Props to them I suppose…

Yet another aside: Why do I keep running out of hard disk capacity? I’ve already got 3x 250GB, 1x 750GB and 2x 1TB in my main computer.

Bleurgh. Bored and hungry. Would be asleep now, if I wasn’t staying awake to take a final dose of meds.

Hmm, so I overhauled the main website, fixed the 101 bugs and it’s now reasonably professional looking. Now to integrate this blog into the main website, instead of having it as a separate mini-site. Don’t want to think of the damage it would to to my existing SEO efforts or Google Page Rank.

*yawn #2*

Off to play flash games.

Ta.

a.k.a 32-Bit Web Browser Review

And now for a short detour in the multi-part series, onto the most extensive post I have written to date.

A few months back, I was searching for Firefox on Major Geeks (file download mirror that’s unmetered on my ISP) and came across a… let’s say, unique browser – 32-Bit Web Browser, developed by a small company called Electrasoft.

Click here to visit Electrasoft’s home page, and here for the product information page.

Seeing as I was auditioning browsers anyway, I downloaded 32-Bit Web Browser and installed it in a virtual machine to try out. The results made me cry

I didn’t even bother benchmarking it; instead, I shall endeavour to give the application a virtual anal tearing, point out it’s numerous (understatement of the year there) flaws, and why its author is a charlatan who is scamming money off unsuspecting parent and senior types who don’t know any better. Let’s just say I would rather use Lynx or Dillo, than go anywhere near 32-Bit Web Browser with a 15 foot barge pole, so to speak.

This will be a long and intensive post, so click to read more.

(There’s more text at the end, it’s not all images!)

Read the rest of this entry »

There are only a few browsers even worthy of consideration at the moment – due to lack of support, infrequent updates, security holes, performance issues etc, I’ve decided to ignore all other browsers except for the main five. Legacy browsers (e.g. Firefox 2.0, IE7, Safari 3, Netscape were excluded), and the latest versions and betas available at time of testing were used.The versions I tested were:

• Google Chrome 2.0.172.33
• Google Chrome Beta 3.0.193.0
• Opera 9.64
• Opera 10 Beta Build 1631
• Safari 4.0.2
• Firefox 3.0.11
• Firefox 3.5
• Internet Explorer 8

Aside:  FYI, I’ve long since lost all traces of browser loyalty – they’ve already wasted enough of my time and sanity for me to even bother blowing the X browser horn.

I don’t really believe in browser benchmarks – the only real way to test browsers out is to use them for a few days and monitor their performance and system resource usage.  The SunSpider and V8 “industry standard” benchmarks are utter crap – every tech blog, journal and media portal seem to toss their figures around willy nilly, yet fail to realise that both benchmarks are BIASED and UNFAIR when used to compare competing browsers. They were designed to test performance of different builds, updates, improvements and so on, not the performance of a completely different competitors product. SunSpider was developed by WebKit (the basis of Safari) as an internal benchmark, as was V8 for Google Chrome. The only “un-biased” benchmark currently available is ACID 3, but even that doesn’t really simulate real world usage.

So, I gathered 301 different websites – each laced with images, Javascript, Java applets, Flash, Shockwave, Silverlight, pop-ups and AJAX and loaded them in each browser to check for memory leaks, abnormal CPU usage and disk I/O. I then tried using each browser with 30 tabs open for a day or two each, to see how they performed over time. As a test of each browsers tagging, history and bookmark searching capabilities, I also imported my 8MB bookmarks.html (where possible).

Each browser was setup to a “usable” state – i.e. pop-up and adblocking enabled if available, dangerous javascript options disabled. All other options were left at default, as settings shouldn’t need tweaking out of the box for a browser to be usable.

Test system specs were:

• Overclocked  Intel Core 2 Quad 2.4ghz @ 2.95Ghz
• 4GB 4-4-4-12 DDR2
• 3x 250GB WD2500KS SATA Hard Disks in a RAID0 Array (used as system disk)
• Nvidia GeForce 7600GT
• Windows XP Professional SP3 32-Bit with latest patches as of 13/7/09 applied
• Norton Internet Security 2008 16.5

So by no means a slouch. Keep in mind the average PC will NOT be anywhere near as powerful.

More to come in following posts…

I am a whore for the internets. If I had the money, I’d have interwebs pipes as extensive as Paris’s sewer system connected to my house so I could stream HD videos and torrent all day, at 40Gbps via multiple redundant upstream backbone networks. Unfortunately, bandwidth costs about ~$250 per Mbit unmetered delivered via fibre, so that’s an $12,000,000 internet bill per month. Then add on installation costs of laying fibre from the nearest access point to my doorstep, priced at ~$200 per metre in suburban areas (of which 98% of that costs is for the trenchworks and council approvals), a Cisco ONS 15454 SONET backplane to terminate the Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexed fibres, with a price heading into the 6 figure range and my plan doesn’t look quite so rosy anymore…

Regardless, the web browser is still the weapon of choice when it comes to surfing the web. Interestingly enough, picking the right web browser has been a long and gruelling process for me (no really!). I have rather peculiar web browsing habits, some of which entail -

• Bookmarking and tagging any website that is remotely interesting, or possibly useful in the future – my bookmarks.html is so large that some browsers can not import it, and scrolling to the bottom of the list takes ~ 5-6 minutes.
• Looks interesting? *click* *open in new tab* – after only about 20-30 minutes, I’ll typically have 25-30 tabs open. After a day of browsing, it’s usually around the 120-140 mark. Just wait until I start opening new windows as well…
• Constantly opening and closing browsers, so the ability to “save all” tabs and “open all tabs” is VERY important
• And as a consequence of the above reason – a high performance core that can search through 8MB of bookmarks and tags, 180 days of history and handle a 800MB cache

I mentioned long and gruelling – up until now, not a single browser available was suitable, each having their own crippling flaws and perclivites. But now, with the latest wave of browser updates/releases/betas, that’s all beginning to change. Hooray, no more:

• Blue Screens of Death (BSOD) – yup, a *certain* browser forced me to reboot my PC constantly
• Massive memory leaks that would make windows page its own kernel to disk in an effort to free up RAM
• Disk thrashing as browsers try to re-open 120 tabs from the cache
• Constant tri-daily browser crashes
• Awful laggy performance worthy of sandpapering your face

Well, I compiled a list of 301 tabs of pages packed with images, Javascript, Java applets, Flash, Shockwave, Silverlight, pop-ups and AJAX and unleashed them on all the browsers I could get my hands on. The results may surprise you…

More to come in the following posts.

(By the way, I do realise my web browser usage is NOT in anyway representative of most users, but the debilitating flaws in some browsers would still affect the average granny, logging into her ISP e-mail once a week to check for messages from the kids).

Bleurgh. As you may or may not know, I hate social networking with a passion.

(I think I posted on this a while ago. Did I? Yes I did. I did so here!)

It eats into people’s lives, cutting them off from reality, breaking up relationships, running up huge phone and Internet bills and so on, not to mention the fact that once it’s posted, it’s out there for the world to see. Now throw in online predators, e-mail harvesting by SPAM bots, the 101 trojans and phishing scams that seem to plague Facebook and MySpace and you might begin to understand why people might be better off without it.

Actually, as a side note, I read in a user survey that there is actually a demographic rift between MySpace and Facebook users. (Damnit, lost that URL ) Apparently, all the educated White people are moving to Facebook, whereas MySpace has now become a trashy ghetto. Where that leaves the Asian, European and Middle Eastern people, I’m not quite sure. Well, I do have SOME idea – Asians have their own non-English forums and Web 2.0 SN websites, Europeans have their own ripoffs of Facebook written in gobbledygook, and the Internet is the tool of the devil used to disseminate vile pornography (according to the crackpot clerics anyway) so that leaves out most of the Middle East. And yes, I hate political correctness. And no, I will not make any attempt to censor myself, not for the sake of sheltered children nor radical far left Christians nutters either.

Side Note #2 – I hate you Fred Nile. You too, Stephen Conroy. May you rot in hell for eternity Fred Phelps.

Back on topic though. The idea of social networking DOES make sense, if you ignore the ego-flapping wars of “who has more friends on Facebook” and “I have more followers than you on Twitter”.

Speaking of Twitter – ce qui donne?

What’s the point of Twitter? According to it’s home page:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Of everyone I’ve asked (about 9), no one seems to comprehend the purpose of its existence. Of all the Twitter accounts I’ve ever looked at, all but 2 were utterly boring.

“OMG woke up and it was raining”

“my dog shit the carpet againz”

“lol, gonan go eat brekky now”

“Awesome, saw a new ad for Hershey’s ice cream”

lolwut? Stream of consciousness brain feeds delivered straight to the web? Most of the tweets I’ve seen aren’t even properly formed sentences. My mind is boggled – how can people be hooked onto such mindless jibber-jabber? Twitter IS mainly used by our Yankee counterparts, so that does explain it’s popularity…

The concept of micro-blogging does seem intriguing though – handy for when you can’t be bothered writing out a full article, or when you’ve got a funny video/pic to share.

*grumble grumble* #rant# <anger> RAWR! </anger>

Sigh… I need to get a Facebook for uni…

May as well start now. (Or however long I can procrastinate it.) *accepts invitation to join the dark side*

I’ve avoided commenting on mainstream news/popular internet stories in the past, given that the media + millions of bloggers around the world cover it in enough depth to submerge the Empire State Building.

But someone’s gotta do something about Stephen Conroy. My suggestions -

• Set fire to him
• Roll him up in carpet and throw him off the Sydney Harbour Bridge
• Impale him on top of the AMP tower
• Pour paint stripper on his car
• Drowning in tubs of creme caramel
• Force him to read George Orwell’s 1984 until he admits he is doubleplus ungood
• Leave a dead cow on his doorstep
• Leave a dead cow on his bed
• Substitute him with a dead cow (marked improvement, eh?)
• Stab him repeatedly in the left eye
• Public execution by network cable whipping
• Locking him in a shipping container and feeding his senses with a filtered reality
• Spanking delivered by Mr Rudd himself? *slap* Bad minister! *slap*
• Feed him to EFA’s or GetUp’s army of pit bull terriers (ok, well they don’t really have attack dogs)

Sniper assassination just seems too dull.

Have I left anything out?

Speaking of which, GetUp is about to start a national T.V. campaign to protest Conroy’s clean feed.

I looked in the Firefox Help > About menu and guess what I saw?

Firefox raped by Thaksin Shinawat!

As it turns out, the maintainer of the Noia Extreme theme is a Thai. Noia, being one of the Top 10 themes on Mozilla’s extension’s website obviously drew quite a lot of negative attention over it. Yet it still hasn’t been fixed, and users are posting “fixed” or “reverted” versions for those who don’t ish to have their favourite browser adorned by some Botox injecting middle aged Thai man.

I, as with most people consider this adware/political propaganda. Yes, as the author of the Firefox theme he can do whatever he wishes, but a more appropriate manner of expressing his views might have been a link on the theme’s download page, or a tab that opens with related information the first time the theme is used. I don’t see the point of that image actually – clicking on it doesn’t provide any information, or open a new page/tab.

Hopefully the Noia Firefox logo will be restored soon… or I might install the IE7 theme for Firefox in protest

Chop chop! Faster faster!

Internode’s been shipping the new Billion 7401BGP R3s (which replaced the Billion 7401VGP-M) for a few weeks now, but they still haven’t updated their website, support section, or the FTP mirror (firmware, user manual, settings). Kinda annoying, as they ship with the 5.53.s5.rc8 firmware yet the latest is 5.53.s5.rc11 I think, but even Billion hasn’t listed the model on their website yet, as it’s so new.

Speaking of which, what should I do with my Netcomm NB5Plus4 and my Acer 56k modem while I’m at it? Thermite? Keep for spares? Throw it out?

Seeing as I’ve been getting a lot of hits from Whirlpool users, for all you those who have ended up here looking for the firmware updates, or help with Bit Torrent and/or NAT, try sending a Whim to Quentin (Rep for Billion/Minitar). His profile is at: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-user.cfm?id=87096

Related: Billion 7401VGP R3 (http://oztecheducate.org/WP/?p=155), Netcomm NB5Plus4 (http://oztecheducate.org/WP/?p=79)

Edit: Updated with correct firmware revisions

+1 Symantec

Quite a few months ago, I got a free copy of Norton Internet Security 2009 complimentary of Symantec for beta testin NIS09 and Norton Safe Web Beta when it was released. Now that my 2008 license is running out, I decided to use the provided product key, and after a chat with an analyst, it turns out I got a 3-PC 1 year license worth ~ $98 free. I thought it would have been a 90 day license, or 1 computer only, but who am I to complain? I like free goods… *big grin*

Speaking of which, time for some shameless plugging, just because I feel obliged to. I must confess though, I completely forgot about my free product key and spent quite a while shopping around for the cheapest places. And here’s what I found -

You can get Norton Internet Security or Norton 360 v2.0 dirt cheap by:

• $79 for NIS09 or $96 for N360v2 at Big W, which is $20 below the average competitor store’s retail price (valid till 14 Jan 09)
• Buy any retail pack of 2PC + SNR, 3PC or 5PC license of NIS09 or N360v2 and get $20, $30 or $40 cash back (depending on product)
• Buy online at the Symantec store and get an instant discount of ~$10 on some products
• Buy from any online computer stores, which normally sell Symantec products way below the RRP (sorry, no cash back though )

Haha, am I starting to sound like a salesman yet?

Time for all the frugal, miserly, el-cheapo diehards (damn, whats the name of that guy in the Christmas story?) to rejoice!

Cheap deals selection for the bored geek:

• $9 TP-Link 5dbi Wifi Antennas
• 50% off Scanpan cookware at Myer
• $79 Norton Internet Security 2009 @ Big W + Further $20 cash back!
• $96 Norton 360 v2.0
• $12 24x 375ml Crate of Coke/Diet Coke/Zero/Fanta/Sprite
• $12 250psi Air Compressor @ Big W and K-Mart
• $0.05 Pack of 5x 64 page exercise books at most stores
• 25% Cash back on Microsoft Hardware
• $11 8GB USB Flash Drives
• $20/30/40 cash back on Symantec software
• $7 Cadbury Chocolate Fondue Sets
• $17 50-pack AA batteries
• $29 Wireless-g USB Adaptors
• $22 Verbatim Spindle 50 DVD+R at Dick Smith Electronics
• 25% off TV Antennas at Dick Smith Electronics
• $29 Ex-demo printers
• $179 Western Digital Essentials 1TB External HDD USB2.0
• $0.89 32 pack Sparklers
• $40 Car (Auto) 12V to 240VAC Inverter 150W
• $39 DVD Player
• CD/DVDs from $2+ at JB Hifi
• $105 Billion 7402VGO ADSL2+ VPN Modem/Router at JMG Technology

Of course, there’s the usual boring stationery/clothing/furniture sales on as well.