blog.binary.io

I've finally arrived in San Francisco after a 27 hour journey from Brisbane via Taipei, Taiwan. Initial impressions of San Francisco are extremely positive: it seems to sport a very unique culture and diverse ideologies. It reminds me of Melbourne a bit (albeit, with more homeless people), from the little I've seen.

My trip was fairly smooth; only delay I experienced was in Taipei (but atleast they had free wireless internet). I am very surprised by the mac-to-pc ratio I've seen throughout the airports: Apple is kicking some serious butt. The count is 5 for PC and 9 for Mac. Interesting figures, but why? Maybe travellers are sophisticated enough to realise Macs' potential? Maybe Apple's market share is far bigger than reported? Maybe they're all going to WWDC!

I should be blogging a bit more once I get settled and WWDC begins.

Everyone knows I like to complain about (most) social networking websites, so I find the latest JoyOfTech to be just awesome.

Joy of Tech awesomeness.

I was recently introduced to RedBubble.com, and I absolutely love it. Whilst being ridiculously addictive, it inspires creativity and innovation in me.

My RedBubble profile only has half-decent work (or my better work ) on it and there are no personal photos on there (I will upload these to Flickr at some stage; wooohooo, Microsoft is no longer taking over Yahoo/Flickr). I shall endeavour to update my personal details and upload some more photos shortly, so stay tuned.

I've also bought a variety of t-shirts from RedBubble, but I'll wait until I have them before I blog about them.

If you have some time to kill, please take a look at my profile and RedBubble; and buy some of my work!

Just a rant about my home town. So, here goes.

My MacBook should arrive early next week (hopefully tomorrow, but its a public holiday so I doubt it). Unfortunately, since I won't be home to sign for it, I have two options:

1. Take some time off work and rearrange redelivery, once I receive the consignment notice; or


2. Arrange to pick up my package from the easily accessible depot (note my sarcasm!) which is located at the airport.

So, I have googled to find TNT's depot address, which happens to be on Acacia Street. Wonderful; I should have no problems! Except for the fact that there's two Acacia Streets within two neighbouring suburbs. This seems ridiculously stupid to me. Anyway, here's the proof courtesy of Google.

Just a quick entry to say that I've setup my gibberblog.com, .net, .org domains to redirect to blog.binary.io. I bought these domains a while ago and forgot to set them up for redirection when I setup this blog. I registered gibberblog.com, .net and .org because they were available and I used to host a blog on thegibberish.org; so they essentially have sentimental value.

I sometimes write small command line utilities that require a password. They are usually written in C++ for portability to other operating systems. Keep in mind that these snippets are only a "it-compiles-for-me" release, so don't hold me responsible for bugs you encounter.

In Xcode 3 (Mac OS X 10.5), I use the following code.

#include <pwd.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdio.h>

static char * password;

int main (int argc, char * const argv[])
{
password = getpass("Enter Password: ");
printf("Password: %s\n", password);

return 0;
}

In Visual Studio 2003 and Bloodshed Dev-C++ (Windows XP SP2), I use the following code.

My use of social networking websites is very selective. Whilst I generally do sign up to a lot of networks, it is only to view my friends' profiles. Privacy is a big issue that I see with a lot of social networking websites; not just who can access my data (by looking at my profile), but who actually controls the data. Facebook is a great example of this: the original venture capitalists have ties to US government agencies. Even Microsoft has it's finger in the pie. Can anyone say 1984? Watch this youtube video or read this wikipedia article.

However, I am not entirely against social networks: I do have a Last.FM account to which I scrobble my music tastes; I do have a Twitter account for micro-blogging; I do have a Flickr account which I have a few photos on and plan to use more. I use these websites because they provide useful services. What does Facebook provide? Sure, its fun to throw virtual sheep at people but is that worth lots of spam, stalkers and a bucket load of privacy invasion?

I love cloud services (and I am not talking about social networking) like Google Apps and Amazon Web Services because they simplify maintenance of services you'd otherwise have to deploy and maintain yourself.

Take Google Apps for example; it offers email, a calendar and office productivity apps. Email is of great importance to me as it is my lifeline to communication on the internet. I have run my own mail server in the past, but whenever it would go down (due to my host's maintenance schedule or an outage) I would potentially miss some emails. Delegating this service to Google Apps means that I can be sure that my email (using my own domain) is always up. Sure, the other apps that Google offers are useful but email is the primary reason I have Google Apps.

I have only recently signed up for the Amazon S3 service. It provides me with very cheap storage that I use as a personal (& secure) "web disk," as well as a mirror site for images I'll be posting on my blog. I had previously setup a WebDAV over HTTPS storage solution on one of my VPS servers, but this is susceptible to downtime and data loss as it is reliant on my hosting provider. The only catch to Amazon S3 is that you need to keep a close eye on it's usage in case you get slashdotted or something: you pay in unit amounts (at very cheap rates, but it all adds up) for bandwidth, http requests and storage (of course).

This blog, however, is hosted on one of my VPS servers. Why? Because it gives me very granular control over it's appearance and operation. I do not mind if it goes down, as it is not a business critical application and is regularly backed up to my Amazon S3 account.

The one cloud service I'd like to see is DNS Server hosting which offers as much flexibility as hosting your own server. I currently have two DNS servers (one as primary and the other as secondary) on two separate VPS servers. Whilst there is a level of redundancy, there is additional administrative overhead and is still vulnerable to downtime. Considering all my services need DNS (to resolve domains to their actual location), it is pretty important.

Who/what the heck am I? If you're asking yourself that, then here is your answer.

I am a computer geek.
A Sci-Fi nerd (be it borg, cylons, goa'uld, vampires, witches or robots, I love it).
A television couch potato (without the television or the couch!).
A mac addict and evangelist.
A programmer.
An Australian.


Now we have that out of the way, you must be wondering what is this website; why did I create this blog?

This web log is where I (will) post my rants (that would be Microsoft) and raves (...and that would be Apple). I intend to focus on programming topics, the internet and a few other things.

As I will be attending WWDC 2008 this year, you will probably see some coverage of that.