CrazyCode

I can protect myself from the Internet

Tim Groeneveld — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 08:49:08 +0000

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The Great Australian Blackout. Internet Censorship is a very, very bad thing. The fact that the Australian Leadership seems to be working so hard to tell us what we can and can not view is somewhat alarming to myself.

Epistemology is a branch of philosophy that is concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge. Basically, it is the notion that “knowledge must be based on knowledge”. The ability for humans to learn relevant facts and acquire an understanding of the way that knowledge is created is a very powerful asset to attain.

The French philosopher Michel Foucault created the concept of Power-knowledge.

Power is based on knowledge and makes use of knowledge; on the other hand, power reproduces knowledge by shaping it in accordance with its anonymous intentions. Power (re-) creates its own fields of exercise through knowledge.

It’s a scary thought that any body – let alone a government body would work so hard as to ensure that anyone did not have access to any human knowledge. Sure, the Australian government is saying that the Internet filter that they are putting in place is “just” going to be used to stop content that is already illegal. Well, thanks for the kind words.

We all know that once a law is put in place, it can sometimes take years to remove or modify laws that limit their citizens ability to create and perform tasks that could be beneficial to either themselves or their citizens. I am scared that once a filter has been put into place to allow the government to block other beneficial websites. Will the Australian Government go down the path of the Italians and one day force us to not visit The Pirate Bay? It’s possible. The justification that the famous torrent site is a haven for movie and music pirates sounds good when you first hear it, but what about all the other content on the site that is not protected by copyright laws? What about music that has been licensed under something like the Creative Commons or a technical reference manual for an open source product that is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License?

What will stop the Liberals in the future from blocking anti-Liberal blogs? Who will know when every site complaining about a block – has itself – been blocked?

Thanks for the offer Mr. Rudd and Mr. Conroy, but I can protect myself from all the nasty porn sites that are on the internet. I do have Firefox, and I do know where that blue “X” is on the top of my browser’s window border on both Linux, Windows and OS X.

Government warnings push people to download Firefox

Tim Groeneveld — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 23:03:59 +0000

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After warnings coming from the German government, French government and the Australian Government, it seems that the guys from the Mozilla Blog of Metrics have seen a massive increase in people wanting to download Firefox. 300,000 people in a four day period more then expected! All this with no advertising, let’s not forget!

What has been the impact on Firefox and the Mozilla community? Looking at the chart below, we can see that over the past few days there has been a huge increase in the number of Firefox downloads from IE users in Germany.

See the whole post here! »

Old code just doesn’t seem to work on PHP 5.3

Tim Groeneveld — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:48:30 +0000

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Someone came to me yesterday and asked me to have a quick look at his PHP, because his autoloaders were no longer working after he upgraded to PHP 5.3. Here is an example of what he had:

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echo 'PHP Version: ' . phpversion() . '
';

function __autoload($classname)
{
echo 'Loading class: ' . $classname . '
';
eval("class $classname {
function __construct()
{
echo '$classname';
}
}");
}

$foo = new Foo();
?>

Now, the only reason (after 30 minutes of staring through almost 15 files) why his code was not working was because he was using short tags. As soon as the first line was changed to:

everything magically just started working once again.

So let this be a reminder: when php.ini tells you that something is going to be deprecated, please, pretty please don’t go and ignore it!

Every man needs his beast

Tim Groeneveld — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:21:18 +0000

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Shortly after moving to Sydney, one of the first major investments that I made (even before buying a bed. No, seriously) was my computer. Being a code monkey for fun and money means that the right tools for the trade are required, and seeing as anything that I bought I would have for atleast two and a half years, I wanted to make sure that any machine that I bought was both powerfull to last the distance, and as future proof as possible.

The Specifications:

Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT-UD5P
AMD Phenom II AM3 955 (3.2Ghz Quad Core)
8GB of DDR3 RAM
nVidia 9600GT 512MB
500GB System drive [for Linux]
6TB of disk space, thanks to Adaptec’s 3805 SATA RAID card (6*1.5TB-(2*1.5TB)) == 6TB [RAID 6]
C-Master COSMOS S case
2 x 18″ ASUS Widescreen LCD Screens

All round it is a very decent machine indeed. The motherboard is amazing, providing inputs that I didn’t even know existed (sarcasm!) like PS/2 keyboard and mouse.

I can protect myself from the Internet

A problem shared is a problem sorted

Tim Groeneveld — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 12:31:03 +0000

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I’m tired of working to make a few people rich whilst I’m struggling day to day. I’m tired of Spain, I’m tired of low wages and long hours. I’m tired of tourists, bloody tourists everywhere. I’m tired of the heat and the rising cost of living. I’m tired of the free market and capitalism and the banking system we all work so hard to support. I’m tired of the life of the many being dictated by the few. I’m tired of greedy selfish politicians and their self-interests. I’m sick of war, recession, poverty. I’m tired of how badly the human race gets along. I’m tired of market forces dictating the direction of the human race. I’m tired of our so-called “democracies”. I’m tired of celebrity culture and reality TV. I’m tired of racism and bigots and intolerance. I’m tired of so many things.

From edgray on Webmaster-Talk

I can protect myself from the Internet

CrazyCode (and up all night…)

Tim Groeneveld — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 09:55:28 +0000

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All over the Internet, a new blog pops up almost every other second; yet only few will survive. So why am I starting CrazyCode? CrazyCode will be the place for talking about development on the Internet. CrazyCode will be the place where discussion of basically anything computer-related will be allowed by the editors. It does not matter if it’s a rant about the lack of a particular application, or how to improve the PageRank of your website, the basic rule is if it’s about computers – it’s on this site. The only exception might be Microsoft software!

The aim is to be a group of fun loving computer/internet nerds. We won’t just corner ourselves into one way discussions, the aim is for us to be interactive with the comunity we want to build here.

You have taken the first step, you have read our introductory post. Now, please, follow us as we take the next steps to being a vibrant and active comunity.

Welcome to CrazyCode.