February 2009 Archives

Today I noticed that the "New items from friends" email I get from Flickr each day contained a curious header:

X-TunaBlaster: deployed

I assume this is something internal to Flickr and am mildly concerned about their deployment of some system that would wantonly blast tuna from the waters.

I like tuna. They're high on the food chain, and convert small fish into one large fish so they can be easily fished, and canned. Canned tuna is great for pasta. Wikipedia also tells us:

Many tuna species associate with dolphins, swimming alongside them. These include yellowfin tuna in the eastern Pacific Ocean, but not albacore or skipjack. The reason for the association is believed to be the avoidance of dolphins by sharks, which are predators of tuna. Swimming near dolphins reduces the likelihood of the tuna being attacked by a shark.

They're smart enough to avoid sharks, just so they can end up in cans. For us.
Conclusion: tuna is awesome.

So why is Flickr blasting tuna?!

I searched on Google, and found this photo of John deploying the tuna blaster.



Further digging via the tunablaster tag, revealed another mysterious clue:



And finally, I landed on a Google Base entry for Tuna Blaster.

Thus far all I can establish is that John Allspaw has an insidious plan to blast tuna from our oceans. But for what purpose?

On a semi-related note, despite his tuna murdering tendencies, John does produce some useful stuff, including some neato system visualisations.

Playing around with the new Safari 4 beta and am impressed with the Top Sites feature.

Top Sites tracks your 12 most visited sites and surfaces them as a single page. For extra brownie points it also loads each of those sites so if you click through to the full size of the screenshot below you'll see that the default "yahoo.com" panel actually loads the Yahoo!7 (Australia) front page. And as I was logged into Flickr, the "flickr.com" panel shows my actual Flickr frontpage. If one was crazy enough to browse with a full-size 1920x1200 Safari the headlines on various News front pages actually become legible. :)

Full search of your browsing history, including text within browsed pages is pretty nifty too.

Unfortunately for Apple, I'm not going to be switching full-time to Safari any time soon. My Firefox setup is too comfortable, and Safari is no more secure than Firefox or IE.

My attention was drawn to the gfail tonight and this article from The Guardian in particular.

Within minutes of the Gmail downtime unfolding, I was sent a very pertinent message on Twitter speculating on the cost of the problem:

"Let's count the cost: 25m users, 33% affected; average of $50 per hour lost productivity = $415m per hour economic cost..."

See: <title>

Needless to say I expected more of The Guardian.

Do they exist?

I'm talking Windows clients here.

In searching for a suitable desktop client I started off with a few requirements. Ideally, the app would post to Twitter & Facebook, and load statuses from both. The only app that I could find that did that was Digsby but I really didn't want an IM client as well. I cut short my requirements to just reading & writing Twitter and ended up with Spaz.

I used Spaz for a few weeks as it seemed adequate but as my development work now requires the running of another VM on this laptop memory is becoming a little precious (even though I have 4GB). I noticed Spaz using 80MB. I have uninstalled Spaz.

I thought it might be due to Spaz' use of Adobe Air so I tried Witty which uses the WPF. That chewed up 64MB before I even entered my Twitter credentials. Uninstall.

Despite its Air-ness, I gave Twhirl a bash as it seems popular. 54MB before login. Uninstall.

Finally, I have settled on the aptly named Bitter. How could one resist a social app hosted on bitterware.com? Its doing a much better job, using about 18MB. My only gripe now is the false advertising - it is giving me less reason to be bitter.

Update: as TweetDeck also appears to be popular I tried it out. 67MB startup. Uninstalled.

Coming soon, a special moment in Unixtime. The Unix epoch is the time 00:00:00 UTC on January 1, 1970.

Therefore, 1234567890 shall be the following times:

[gumby@fatso ~]$ TZ=Australia/Sydney date -r 1234567890
Sat Feb 14 10:31:30 EST 2009

[gumby@fatso ~]$ TZ=GMT date -r 1234567890
Fri Feb 13 23:31:30 GMT 2009

Which perhaps shall be a fortuitous day for geeks seeking romance in Australia. And maybe a day of caution for systems administrators west of the international date line... :)

I went to sell some stuff on eBay today, for the first time in almost a year. Curiously my attempts to create a listing were intercepted by a page explaining that "eBay doesn't recognise your computer". As a techie I presume this means I didn't have a cookie they were expecting, even though I had just logged in.

To get the right credentials you're required to enter a PIN which will be sent to you via an automated voice message. This can be sent to the phone number already in your eBay account profile, or to a new number. Entering a new number requires the correct answer to your secret question. It wouldn't accept my mobile number.

An automated process then calls the nominated number and it was quite strange as it does not say anything until you say something. I sat there in silence for a few seconds before attempting a "hello?", as I had expected it to just blurt out the required PIN. It asks if you had expected to receive the call. I pressed 1 (yes), and it goes into an endless loop of "Your PIN is xxxx".

I'm not really whether this adds much in the way of security. Its a barrier presented only to sellers - I could apparently bid on items without the same credentials. I guess it aims to mitigate the risk of stolen accounts being used to perpetrate fraudulent sales of high value items like laptops.

The situation would be that either your username & password have been compromised, in which case I'd hazard a guess that your secret question & answer have probably also been stolen (via phishing, and maybe re-used answers from other sites). Or, someone's driving your PC, maybe through malware, or maybe you left yourself logged in at an internet cafe or other shared PC.

Now given that the act of listing an item results in an email being sent to your account I question what the phone check adds. You can buy a VoIP number online easily so a phone number doesn't provide any link to a real person (either financially, or physically). So a fraudster can, with your secret answer, change your profile phone number and sell stuff as you.

So it boils down to whether your secret question & answer have been compromised, in which case why not just ask for the secret answer and save the phone hassle?

This is a genuine question, I think I must be missing something in this process.

Or maybe to put it another way, Telstra, Optus and AAPT suck?

As I'm working from home full-time I've been listening to loads of internet radio. Had a look at my traffic statistics today and listening to a 128kbps stream for most of today has sucked down over 500MB. The beauty of being on iiNet is that this traffic does not count towards my download quota.

Sure, Bigpond has unmetered music @ Bigpond Music but its just a lame excuse to make you buy tunes. Optus, well I don't know what they hell they're doing anymore.

On Optus, Stephen pointed out that recently when accessing various Akamai hosted content he's been sent off to US Akamai clusters despite Optus hosting their own. This got us onto a discussion about CDNs in general, and how the Gang of Four's non-peering attitude may well bite them as more CDNs become sizable and host down under.

Back in August(?) Limelight established their presence in Sydney. It appears that they're peering @ PIPE now (according to my own experience as an iiNet customer) so most of the Tier 2 ISPs should pick that up for "free". What do the Gang of Four get? They get a scenic route to Singapore and the US. I wonder if this may actually result in a noticeable difference in web browsing speed of GoF customers vs the rest? It would be amusing if the largest networks in the country also become known for being the slowest.

Back to my original point - if you are shopping around for an ISP, also consider the fine folks over at Internode who also provide unmetered access to radio streams, games, and other tidbits.

On 9th January 2009, Nomitor Pty Ltd was born. The broad goal is to provide tools to help improve web performance. There's nothing on the site yet, other than a small personal joke for those who know us.

The timing of it is kinda eery. 8th Jan 2001, I started working in my first ever full-time job at Yahoo! Australia & NZ (amusingly, as the abbreviation would suggest, relatively little attention was paid to the New Zealand market :). 8 years and 1 day later, my next adventure would begin.

Progress so far has felt a little slow as we investigated various technology options, architecture, and considered the non-technical aspects of the business such as costs, competition, and pricing models. The thing that makes me relatively confident that we can succeed is that aside from technical experience we are also genuinely interested in the non-technical aspects of managing a business, and have the personal funding to be able to commit to doing this for the foreseeable future. At the same time we're rational enough to recognise the need to regularly review our progress and determine whether we have a viable business. Time will tell whether we're able to stay objective about this. :)

This week we got started on some code and it has been invigorating. For the past month I've been playing around 2 hours of Team Fortress 2 every night but having been stuck into some code I've skipped that the last 2 days. The pleasure arising from a determination to beat on a problem until its solved is something I haven't felt for at least a couple of years. Back in my Uni days I would work through til 5am the day an assignment was due, crash for a few hours, wake up and continue coding until the 5pm deadline. There's a certain satisfaction in having that singular focus. I kind of want to stay up late and just hammer out whatever I'm working on but know that it wouldn't be sustainable. I guess that's a sure sign that I'm getting old. :)

It probably doesn't hurt that we're using Ruby either, as its a completely new language to me. I really love to learn, and the past few years have been mostly learning on the non-technical front as I had been reading more management and business oriented literature.