Simon Rumble’s blog

Wow, the postbox outside Central Station gets fast delivery. I popped the DVD we watched on Saturday night into its Quickflix envelope and dropped it into the postbox yesterday. Quickflix have just emailed me saying they received it. Wow!

The film itself was Blood Simple, the Coen brothers' first film, which I've been trying to get for years. Brilliant film, with many of their hallmarks already in there, including the fat private dick driving a Volkswagon Beetle that popped up in The Big Lebowski.

We also went along to see Erskineville Stories on Saturday night. Shown on a big screen in Erskineville Park, it featured a bunch of old timers telling their stories about Erskineville. It's one of my favourite parts of Sydney, and we would have bought a house there if the prices hadn't been so ridiculous. The stories were great, with lots of humour and interesting tales of this suburbs' past as working class housing.

My grandmother was born in the slums of Forest Lodge and grey up in slummy Annandale, now two of Sydney's more expensive inner city suburbs. I always enjoyed hearing her stories of growing up through the Depression, with periodic epidemics, crowded housing and grinding poverty. As soon as she and my grandfather were able, they moved to the then-outskirts of Sydney to the garden suburb of Concord West. Last year we sold her house for nearly a million dollars!

So the latest Internet Explorer is out and, like any good web developer, I've downloaded it and thrown the sites I manage at it. The results aren't good, and I'm very pleased by that.

IE8 was originally planned to emulate the broken IE7 rendering engine by default, with standards-compliant sites required to use a dodgy, non-standard hack to actually render using the new, standards-based engine. This met with howls of protest from the community of developers trying to get standards to actually work. Fortunately, the IE team listened to the feedback and reversed the decision. So now, out of the box, IE8 will render in standards mode, and sites with broken markup will have to use the dodgy hack to force IE7 rendering. Brilliant!

This decision will break the web, which is excellent. All those shonky hacks used to make IE work will stop working, and the enormous market power as the vast majority of browsers are upgraded to IE8 will force web developers to actually do something, and acknowledge that they haven't been doing things right. If you're lucky and using some kind of templating, the fix will be very easy. If you're not using templating, it could be quite painful. But it means the next redesign will do things right!

For sites I've built from scratch, the results are exactly as expected. My home page renders perfectly, as it did in IE7, Firefox, Safari, Opera, lynx, links and probably any other browser.

For sites I've inherited, the results aren't so good. The site I support for my main job breaks very badly. The shonky sIFR Flash+JavaScript font rendering breaks completely, the top navigation looks funny and doesn't work, some of the style cascading is strange. It'll be easy to fix, just tweaking the base template to have the IE7 mode forced.

We're planning a redesign, as is pretty usual with these types of projects, and I plan to consolidate the ridiculous proliferation of styles. The new design will follow the standards and use the bare minimum of hacks to get it mostly working in IE7. It should work just fine in IE8. Yay!

Hopefully Microsoft will automatically upgrade most users once IE8 is released, as has happened with IE6. That enormous market power will finally be put to some good use. There will be pain, but it will be pain that makes the world a better place. How novel to be praising Microsoft!

Those of you who know my views on religion, and organized religion in particular, might be surprised to learn one of my idols is a Catholic priest. Father Jack Hackett has always been a role model for me, someone whose virtues present something of an inspiration. His religious teachings ("that would be an ecumenical matter") are both profound and point us to the unknowable.

In this vein, I would have loved to join the throngs of Teds, Dougals, Jacks, Mrs Doyles and Lovely Lovely Girls at Ted Fest on Craggy Island recently. What a fantastic idea!

In the same vein, I'd love to go to Lebowski Fest at some point, although I'm not too keen on visiting the US these days given the rudeness of their security apparatus.

I've banked with St George for many many years, and they've long been pretty ahead of the pack with technology in Australia. I got a letter the other day indicating that they were bringing in some new "Secure Code" system, which sounded like two factor authentication to me.

Looking at their site, it seems they are indeed bringing in such a system. For risky transactions (and I'm sure they can raise and lower the bar at will) they'll send a code to your mobile or landline phone, which you need to type into the application to complete the transaction.

It's interesting to see financial companies finally getting onto the two factor authentication bandwagon. The point is that you need to present something you know and something you have without massively inconveniencing your customers. The mobile or landline seems to me like a pretty good balance between security and convenience.

I notice that Paypal now uses some kind of security token that looks a lot like the RSA tokens people carry around for VPN access in a lot of companies. I wonder how long it'll be before we're all carrying around a clutch of these things?

Now I'm thinking about implementing an sms-based two factor system on my own server. Wonder if there's any software for doing that?

We've had a very busy weekend getting all the bits we need for our bathroom renovation. The whole bathroom is getting gutted today, so we had to get a bath, toilet, vanity, cupboard and all the bits. We got the tiles the previous weekend. Lots of driving around, but we found everything we needed at pretty reasonable prices, I thought. The built-in cupboards we had installed last weekend also mean we don't need our freestanding storage stuff any more.

This means there'll be a bunch of stuff going onto freecycle. So if you're after a bath, toilet base, chest of drawers or bedside table with drawers, let me know and I won't put it on freecycle.

This is one of those things that's obvious once you know it, but solves a real problem beforehand. You're using firefox with autocomplete switched on. You make a mistake filling out a form once, and find that forever onwards the mistake exists in your autocomplete list. Let's say it's a phone number, and you mistyped it. You could very easily select the wrong autocomplete entry.

Now this is cool. Select the autocomplete entry with the up/down arrows on your keyboard. Press the "Delete" key. The erroneous autocomplete entry is gone forever.

So simple, but so handy. Not something you would necessarily find without being prompted. My thanks to the tester with the mostest, Brad, for showing me that one.

Wow Ricoh really take the cake here. My work has some Ricoh photocopiers with an excellent feature, you can use them as scanners. Great feature. Lousy user interface.

Once you're scanned your page, you go back to your desk to load it up. You can download it in PDF or TIFF, but only after you've worked out you need to click the "Properties" icon first. The inscrutible interface gets much, much worse though.

To delete your file from the server, you have to tick the checkbox for your file, then click the big "Delete" button. You then get this screen:

You might think selecting the file name (which, of course, is a randomly chosen file name, and you get no indication of what the file name represents) and clicking [Remove] might delete the file? No, you're actually going through another selection step and removing it from the selection. You need to click "Delete File" after selecting (again) your file. Gah!

An important threshold has been passed. 1 terabyte of external storage is under $300 at a mainstream vendor. Wow!

I could get all old fogie and reminisce about the old days, our first 10 megabyte hard drive for the TRS-80. But we woz happy, and all that.

But I won't. What this means is that storage size is now just insane. If you had important data on one of these, how the hell could you safely keep it backed up? On the other hand, it removes one barrier about moving my MythTV system to high definition...

My uncle is putting built-in cupboards in our bedroom. There's a phone jack in the bedroom, right in the way of where he's building cupboards. He asked me if I wanted the phone jack, and I said no, so he ripped the sucker out. Internet dies. Phone in kitchen still working. WTF?

Turns out the telephone cabling is rather ridiculous. The cable comes in at the front of the house, runs to the kitchen, then runs back to the bedroom and is linked from there to the front room, where the ADSL modem is. Insanity!

Hopefully will get some cabling done this weekend. Central splitter, shorten the phone cabling to just hook to the front room and use the VOIP port of the modem to link to the kitchen phone. Will pull Cat6 through the house.

I've found a very reasonably priced cabling gear shop just around the corner. How convenient!

I signed up to Quickflix recently on their free trial. The service is good, but I don't think we get through enough movies to make keeping it worthwhile.

However, one of the movies we got was Children of Men. I remember reading rave reviews of this when it first came out and had long meant to catch it, but hadn't got around to it. Now I see why the reviews were so positive. It's a brilliant film.

Sci-fi has to balance an interesting premise with a well-told story. Far too often, a great premise isn't enough to hold your attention without good storytelling (I'm looking at you, Philip K Dick). This film gets the balance about perfect, with a really interesting premise and a masterful texture. The story itself is suspenseful enough to keep you hooked.

The most exciting part of this film was its textures, the background of a decaying society and dark forces swirling. I've always been a fan of distopian near-future, and there are plenty of elements of Max Headroom and Mad Max in this movie, along with some modern twists of refugees to accompany the societal collapse.

Loved this film and if you haven't seen it, I'd strongly recommend you get it out and watch it.