Rubénerd!

Remember a fortnight ago when I couldn't access Twitter through our TPG home internet connection?

Unfortunately it's become a persistent problem. Each night around 19:00, Twitter suddenly stops responding. I can still ping and perform traceroutes, but neither my sister or I can use Twitter using our TPG connection on our phones or computers.

This evening, I was reassured (for want of a better word) to see people commenting about the issue on Whirlpool. Clearly this is affecting a large number of their customers, not just a few people in Hornsby.

Here's hoping they get on top of this quickly. Hey, crazier things have happened.

For those observant readers out there, you may have noticed our beloved Rubi site mascot is now sporting her cute new winter seifuku! It may be Japan in winter... wait, that was incorrect in all the ways. I'll try that bit again.

It may be summer in her native Hokkaido, but its the dead of winter in Australia now, and we thought her cheongsam would have been a little chilly.

Clara has really outdone herself this time in the detail. From Rubi's unmatching thigh highs with bows and frills (matching legwear is the spawn of Satan) to the cute puffball on her scarf and her hair clips, I couldn't be happier with her work d(^_^)b.

As it stands (and Rubi is!), Clara also has a new mascot for her weblog over at Kirinyan.net. I won't spoil the surprise, you'll just have to see for yourself. Suffice to say, its the closest she's ever come to drawing something that's as cute as her, and it even has a matching scarf!

You can read about Clara's artistic process over on her blog. As someone who can't draw anything, I found it fascinating. Thank you Clara :).

Last year we were informed Twitter were deprecating their 1.0 API, with plans to remove it entirely. A few days ago, this happened.

Fellow Sydneysider and friendly guy Gavin Costello reblogged some details about the apps that have broken for him. So far, I've been able to avoid issues entirely with iOS, though that's most likely due to only using TweetBot as an avenue for tweets on it.

What makes me sad is all we've lost. See that orange RSS icon in the Camino address bar above? Among perhaps more positive chances such as OAuth and SSL being mandated, we lost RSS, Atom and my beloved simple JSON query.

When I first started using Twitter in 2007, I was able to subscribe to people's Twitter streams just as I would a blog or other news service with a web feed. Today, one has to be authenticated to even view public information.

I'll be blunt; this makes me worry about the future viability of the platform. Companies that do this rarely revert, and eventually fade into irrelevance. It's shocking to me the team at Twitter are either blissfully unaware of this, or choose to ignore it. They'll pay the price when people slowly move from it, and we'll pay when we lose this once wonderful service.

Such is the circle of web life.

Back in January, Jeremy from Singapore gifted me a Princess of the Crystal anime fig from my Amazon Wishlist. I was blown away by his generosity, and couldn't wait to display her on my shelf. Mawaru Penguindrum was one of my favourite series in quite a while, and her character was beyond awesome.

Unfortunately, according to My Figure Collection and other sources, Good Smile Company ran into issues with the fig, and had to delay shipping numerous times. First we were told I'd be getting her in April, then May. Jeremy and I held out, but I saw numerous comments from people who'd given up and asked for refunds.

Fast foward to today. After our morning café trip, Clara and were greeted by a gigantic shipping box. It'd been so long, and we order so much stuff from overseas, we honestly couldn't remember what it could be.

It's a tired cliché, but the wait was worth it. She's not my biggest fig in terms of scale, but she's definitely the biggest and heaviest! From her signature hat (thank you Seb!) to her billowing black and red skirt, she's certainly one of the prettiest and most detailed figs in my collection. The most pressing concern is where abouts we can fit her!

My camera has quite the backlog of images, so stay tuned for a more detailed review with photos soon. I'm so happy (and relieved!) to finally have her. Thank you Jeremy for your generosity and patience, and to Clara for her photographic skills :).

Without too much time before WWDC 2013 begins in San Francisco, I figured this was the last time I could pontificate and hypothesise about the potential future of the Mac Pro. Nobody has talked about this, so it's a perfect opportunity.

They're gorgeously functional machines

The Mac Pro is an interesting odd man out in Apple's lineup. In an ocean of iPads and iPhones and iMacs and Mac Minis with their consumer hardware and enclosed batteries, the Mac Pro practically begs to be tinkered with, upgraded and extended.

I mean this literally. As I blogged extensively about in 2012, I've build dozens of PCs in my time, and NO case I've ever purchased, seen and/or used match the pleasure of upgrading a Mac Pro. There are no messy cables, no awkward catches or screws. The hard drives mount on sleds, the RAM and Xeon CPUs rest on daughter cards that just slide in and out.

It's a thoroughly Apple machine, with every last detail teased out and perfected. Competitors and Apple detractors scoff and such user expeirence detail, but it really comes through in their products. Apple cares, and few others do, it's as simple as that.

Or at least, it used to be that simple

Problem as, as many nerds have lamented over the last few years, the Mac Pro has been sorely neglected. Intel's Xeon architectures have continued to advance in leaps and bounds, and the Mac Pro has stood behind, watching the future fade into the distance.

From podcasts to blogs, I've heard several theories as to why this is. The current Xeon platform can't easily transfer dual Thunderbolt/DisplayPort interfaces on PCI Express. Apple were concerned about releasing a machine capable of driving a retina display. To say nothing of the problem with bare fans that prevented their manufacture and distribution in Europe of late.

Then last year, in a phrase that has received more scrutiny by the Mac tech nerd press than anything in a long time, Tim Cook announced there "would be something" for us fans of the Mac Pro this year. Not that there would be a new Mac Pro, but that we'd be delighted by what they have in store for us.

I share similar jitters with my fellow Macheads.

Unapologetic win

My MacBook Air is my sleek little starship I take around with me, but my Mac Pro is my space station. No more masses of enclosures, cables and power bricks everywhere, just a single monster tower with all my hard drives and data, and a gigabit Ethernet cable to talk to it.

I like the analogy of a space station. It doesn't need to be nimble, small or sleek, because it's just sitting there being full of awesome. The little starships in my family fly around the place with us, then return home to dock with the Mac Pro to back up their data, transfer downloaded podcasts and other media.

Assuming Apple replaces the Mac Pro with something at the Moscone Centre today, I can only hope they maintain what's so wonderful about this machine for their power users, scientists, media editors, developers, tinkerers and data hoarders (ahem). It's an unapologetic UNIX workstation that can swallow all the drives and tasks we throw at it, executed with the hardware design and elegance only Apple bothers with.

I suppose we'll soon see what they have in mind. Mind open Ruben, mind open!

Mac legend Brent Simmons writing "How We Work Together":

To swim with the current these days is to use git. But I like Mercurial better — and I think Mercurial is to Macintosh as git is to Windows. That’s probably not fair or rational, but it doesn’t really matter, since both git and Mercurial are excellent systems.

I have similar sentiments. While I find Mercurial to be a far better fit personally, I made the switch to Git largely because most of my favourite projects now use it. Which is to say, they use Github.

I do have a couple of private hg repos on Bitbucket, but I'll probably be making the switch to Git soon. A smarter person could juggle both systems, but I prefer just using the one. Heck I only just stopped using SVN for my personal projects last year, and CVS for my FreeBSD updates.

Good heavens, remember CVS? I may prefer Mercurial, but wow Git is a lovely warm cup of tea compared to that!

When Dave Winer introduced RSS 2.0, he included a number of new tags. One of which was author, which is designed for an email address:

<author>123@fakestreet.springfield (Ruben Schade)</author>

This probably made more sense back then than it does now. While it'd be lovely to contact the owner of a feed, it's mostly just a huge spam target bullseye.

We have four options (probably more). We can use our regular email address here, and hope our increasingly sophisticated spam filters can handle the sudden and inevitable onslaught. We can pollute our metadata with a fake address, or defeat the purpose of the tag with a junk address we'll probably never check.

A forth option is to take the RDF-spirited approach and import the Dublin Core namespace:

<rss version="2.0" 
    xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">

With it, we get the lovely dc:creator tag which lets us do this:

<dc:creator>Ruben Schade</dc:creator>

There is some semantic impact to this; an author isn't the same as a dc:creator. In some ways however, I think it's superior. Author asserts a person is defined by their email address. dc:creator assumes an author's unique identifier (if you will) is their name.

It probably comes down to personal preference above all else; I for one prefer the latter. To be fair though, I have an unusual name combination!

Software packages like WordPress have been doing this for years, and I've finally decided to implement it myself on the feeds I generate. I try to avoid importing namespaces in RSS 2.0 when I can, but this is a useful addition. Plus then I get all the extra Dublin Core goodies ^_^.

Photo taken by me of the Dublin skyline in 2010. Ireland is so beautiful!

Today's science fun, from News.com:

But if a scientist can't see it, touch it, analyze it, and alter it, then it isn't real.

Droll, very droll!

While Chris did say this in jest, the jokes that are funniest are the ones with a kernel of truth. As unbelievable as it may seem, there really are people out there who think that's all science is.

Obviously part of this stems from ignorance, but often I think it can be explained from childhood experience. I was fortunate to have some really wonderful, enthusiastic, engaging science teachers in high school. Science subjects were never my strongest, but they were the ones I found most interesting. Mr Napier, Mr Daloste and Mr Reilly were always more than happy to stay back to answer my trillions of questions and explain why my silly inventions I was always developing were not really practical!

For those who only ever got a string of boring tables to memorise, its easy to see how they could see the whole field as dull, purely deterministic and limited. And for others, science just doesn't rock their boat. To each their own, but I think they're missing out on some incredible stuff.

Image from the University of Cambridge site, though possibly from CERN given the filename.

After a brief hiatus (which you were all most likely relieved to receive), this is the fourth in my fabulous networking meme series, generated here. The first one was here, and the second one was here, and the third one was here. You're welcome.

Clara has also released her traditional follow up ;)

It's with a heavy, nostalgic heart that I bid farewell to the Camino web browser. According to the last blog post on the Camino site, it's no longer being actively developed.

Camino was Mozilla done right on the Mac. It took the same Gecko rendering engine from Firefox, wrapped it in native Mac Cocoa instead of XUL, added keychain support, and a bunch of other useful Mac features. It had a quintessentially Aqua icon, and tastefully coloured toolbar buttons that dared to challenge the plain toolbars of Safari.

I loved Firefox on Windows and *nix, but was less than impressed with its performace on my iBook G3 with Panther and Tiger in the early 2000s. I made the switch, and only moved back to Firefox on my Macs a few years ago. I like having all my security and privacy extensions back in Firefox, but I still think the user experience in Camino is superior.

I wish all the developers the best in their newer, greener pastures in Safari, Firefox and Chrome development. And thank you.