Rubénerd Blog :)

If you’re interested in the goings on of Intel over on Twitter there are no less than four accounts going that you can follow and receive updates on (descriptions were provided from their respective pages):

@IDF

Sharing the latest news from Intel Developer Forum, and following interesting folks for no sinister purpose.

@IntelSoftware

Intel has software?!

@IntelBlogs

Twitterfeed for blogs.intel.com, maintained by @annierodkins. Also following interesting folks for no sinister purpose.

@pulseofintel

Hungry for Intel people. Nom nom nom!
Links to other interesting Intel people on Twitter

If you follow them for something fun and interesting to read, you’ll pick up on Twittered links that link to breaktaking images such as these:

Processors on an Intel 45nm Hafnium-based High-k Metal Gate ”Penryn” wafer. Using an entirely new transistor formula, the new processors incorporate 410 million transistors for each dual core chip, and 820 million for each quad core chip.

The original Intel Pentium Processor only had 3.1 million transistors.

– Penryn and toothpick by Intel Photos

I’ll be elaborating more on what I mean by this on the Rubenerd Show, stay tuned. Get it? Stay tuned? It’s an internet radio show? A podcast? Stay… tuned? Hey, I thought it was funny.

For some reason, I’ve always found it harder than most people to suspend disbelief in stories, games and the like. If I read, hear or see something that’s impossible, stupid or unreasonable… it frustrates the hell out of me.

Suspension of disbelief refers to the willingness of a person to accept as true the premises of a work of fiction, even if they are fantastic or impossible.
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief

Case in point, I was browsing a game website to see if anyone had more information about Knetwalk when I saw a screenshot from one of those now infamous Dead or Alive games:

I ask you this right now: why on Earth is she wearing a denim bra, with pockets sewn on it? It makes absolutely… no… friggen… sense! I’ve heard from so many girls about how uncomfortable these contraptions are, so why would you make one out of denim? And put pockets on it? What could you put in those pockets? A mobile phone? An Objective-C Pocket Reference book? I think not!

The suspension of disbelief that I’m apparently supposed to have with this game (ridiculously over-the-top buff men and tiny adolescent girls fighting on equal terms in ridiculous locations with gravity defying moves and super human injury sustaining abilities) is tenuous and irreconcilable enough in my mind as it is even without this blatant pandering to obsessive game players!

And here’s another example from the same game: why would someone in supposedly frigid weather be wearing a heavy, wooly jacket… with a miniskirt? What’s next, are we to believe in summer she walks down a boardwalk in a t-shirt and snow pants? Snow pants!?

It’s cold, good thing I’m rugged up all over!

This makes absolutely… no… sense! Rarely is the question asked: when did computer games become so ridiculous? And I’m absolutely positive there are far more examples than this!

And while we’re talking about O’Reilly Pocket Reference books; don’t get me wrong I think they’re the greatest thing to happen to the computer reference book world and I can claim to own no less than 14 such tomes; but since when is a book which measures 18 by 11 centimetres pocket sized?

A Pocket Reference?

The Rubenerd Blog, always presenting important facts and issues relevant to consumer technology and computer software.

Big shout out to everyone at Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation for reaching 10 million articles! The record breaking entry was an article on English artist Nicholas Hilliard written in Hungarian. Hungarian of course being the language native to a country called Hungary. Sometimes I surprise even myself.

I wonder what ol’ Nick who died in 1619 would think about being the 10 millionth article in a collaborative online encyclopaedia powered by electronic computers connected through a globally spanning network… makes you think.

As you may have gathered from reading previous posts, I’m a Mac OS X user on laptops and a hopeless FreeBSD fanboy on desktops. Therefore it probably wouldn’t surprise you to find out I’m not a fan of Internet Explorer, or Windows Internet Explorer, or Chuck Norris Explorer or whatever they’re calling it at the moment.

Why though? Is it the fact that it successfully and demonstrably held back innovation on the intertubes for so many years? Is it the silly user interface in version 7 which I get calls from people constantly asking me how they get to the menu bar? Is it the fact their CSS support is so patchy and inconsistent it makes a part of my work even more difficult than it has to be? Is it because it was bundled with a monopolistic operating system? Is it because the e logo just looks plain silly?

No. It’s for one simple fact: Internet Explorer doesn’t support the <q> tag!

Look at that browser Jean Luc, it doesn’t support my existence!

You could be forgiven for not knowing about this tiny little tag; it was included by the W3C back in the HTML 4.0 specification in 1997 to delimitate small inline quotations which are not large enough to justify the use of a block level element, but current versions of IE are the only browsers even in 2008 not to support it, despite every other game in town having no trouble with them.

For example, one of the sentences below is enclosed in <q> tags. If you’re using Internet Explorer they will look exactly the same:

Ruben Schade is an incredibly smart, devilishly attractive and very self deluded person.

Ruben Schade is an incredibly smart, devilishly attractive and very self deluded person.

But why is the lack of support for a seemingly insignificant and easily replaceable tag my number one gripe with Internet Explorer? Because of its stupefying simplicity! How difficult would it have been for Microsoft to have added full support for such a simple tag? It’s mind blowing!

<q>This is an inline quote, complete with CSS support!</q>

<span class="quote">Here's another inline quote, but with support for IE </span>

I guess until Internet Explorer 12 comes out some time after 2095, I’ll have to stick with using the latter example above. What a mess!

FOOTNOTE: For what it’s worth, Opera, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape Navigator (rest in peace), Apple’s Safari, KDE’s Konqueror and even zippy little dillo, links and lynx support the <q> tag. Obviously it’s not hard!

Further Reading

• HTML 4.0 specification: BLOCKQUOTE and Q elements
• W3Schools: The Q Tag
• About.com: What is the Q Tag and Why Should We Use It?
• A List Apart: Long Live the Q Tag!
• Internet Explorer Team Blog: Rowan points out lack of support for the simple tag!

Afterword: After posting this entry thinking nobody would really read it, I received comments from five fantastic people who have all made me rethink this issue from the ground up… not to mention make me wish I had spent more time on this post in the first place!

You can read my gigantic reponse along with these comments (surprisingly!) in the comments section. Thank everyone for your help and feedback, you’ve all really helped a lot.

Isn’t the internet an amazing place? All this open dialogue with people from around the world, I’m loving it!

It seems there’s a growing number of people who aren’t impressed with the term podcast for one reason or another. From what I’ve been able to gather, these are the most common reasons why (feel free to post a comment below to add to the list):

Techy reasons

• It implies you need an Apple iPod to listen to them
• They’re not "casting" because XML is a client pull system, not a server push system!
• You can’t immedietly figure out what it is when hearing the term the first time
• It’s a techy, short sighted term with no longevity

The "don’t want to be associated with these" reasons

• It describes horrible shows like Dawn and Drew
• Podcasts have become too commercial
• Antonym to above: podcasts are amateur and silly, nobody takes them seriously and therefore they have no business potential
• The whole field is dominated by a few large egos

For what it’s worth, I really don’t agree with some of these points, and I’m honestly apathetic with regards to most of the others, I’m just playing devil’s advocate here.

Someone looks jealous!

In response to this, a veratable splattering of adhoc words combined to create podcast-free alternative names have been created:

• Frank Edward Nora coined the term New Time Radio even before podcasting took off and he continues to use it as an alternative
• Jimbob Kloss from Whole Wheat Radio refers to them as audio magazines, very catchy!
• Leo Laporte infamously decided to refer to them as netcasts, which other than the iPod mixup really doen’t solve any of the tech issues at all!

I’m sure a quick Google search would reveal even more such terms.

Which brings me to the Rubenerd Show. I’ve decided I’m going to distance myself from this issue once and for all by calling these shows exactly what they are:

That said, I’ll probably keep using the term podcast interchangably with it though, it’s the accepted term that everyone seems to have settled on and agreed to, and I’m fed up with explaining other new terms to people. Perhaps with time the accepted term will change, in which case I’ll change too. After all, language is an evolving beast that changes as we do, right?

To make life easier I’m changing a lot of the plumbing behind the Show, my blog and my consulting and uni notes blogs over the next few weeks to integrate them, so I only have one site to maintain instead of four. With all the stuff going on in my life right now, keeping all this stuff up to date and seperate is not really workable!

So therefore vis a vis ergo wysiwyg I’ll be archiving and closing the forum soon :-(. If you’d like to post comments about a show (or absolutely any damned thing you want!) please click the Post Comment link at the bottom of the latest show. If you’ve had an approved comment once before it should automatically be posted without the waiting period.

Thanks everyone for your listenership! Listenership is a word right?

The useless Rubenerd 22nd birthday episode!

A full show will be done by the end of the week, but I wanted to do a show on my birthday. Cool timezone checking site, blog post about the big two two, camera phones, purchasing music from Whole Wheat Radio, birthday lunch at Brotzeit, UPS shipping, FreeBSD and a convenient apple juice handle.

Featuring Elke Schade as a Kmart announcer.

AFTERWARD: I noticed after uploading that the music is a bit too loud compared to my voice for the first 10 minutes or so. I will remember to check my levels more carefully next time!

Download MP3 to listen ↓ 23:03, 10.6MiB

You can also stream this episode and view its Internet Archive page.

My dad and I at Brotzeit at Vivo city for my 22nd!

I’ve turned the big Two Two
Just don’t expect me to wear one!

Hey come on, it’s the only time in my life when I’ll be able to say that!
- Ruben Schade to his father, Singapore 2008

Thank you to all the fabulous people who have emailed me and Twittered birthday wishes!

I also want to wish Frank Edward Nora’s baby The Overnightscape a happy birthday too, which happens to fall on this exact same day… synchronicity! If you didn’t read about it, he overhauled its logo recently too in celebration!

With it being my birthday and all (I’ll hopefully post and podcast about that later today) I’m really looking forward to receiving my latest batch of Whole Wheat Radio CDBaby music from the intertubes, which according to the UPS package tracking service is ready for delivery!

It’s certainly interesting seeing where my little CD bundle has been in the last few days; it’s travelled to places around this planet I’ve never been to before! Ideas of “boldly going where no internet goods I’ve purchased have gone before” come to mind :-)

Package Progress
Location	Date	Local Time	Description
SINGAPORE, SG	27/03/1008	9:38	OUT FOR DELIVERY
CHANGI, SG	27/03/1008	6:30	ARRIVAL SCAN
PAMPANGA, PH	27/03/1008	3:21	DEPARTURE SCAN
	27/03/1008	1:32	LATE AEROPLANE
CHEK LAP KOK, HK	27/03/1008	0:24	DEPARTURE SCAN
	26/03/1008	19:44	HUB SCAN
	26/03/1008	16:22	ARRIVAL SCAN
	26/03/1008	14:40	ARRIVAL SCAN
ANCHORAGE, AK, US	25/03/1008	10:41	DEPARTURE SCAN
	25/03/1008	6:00	ARRIVAL SCAN
ONTARIO, CA, US	25/03/1008	1:53	DEPARTURE SCAN
	24/03/1008	23:06	ARRIVAL SCAN
PORTLAND, OR, US	24/03/1008	10:57	DEPARTURE SCAN
	24/03/1008	19:55	ORIGIN SCAN
	24/03/1008	17:28	COLLECTION SCAN
US	24/03/1008	9:10	BILLING INFO RECEIVED

With my birthday in less than a day, my dad gave me his credit card to buy some music from CDBaby with the Whole Wheat Radio affiliate links. I didn’t have to pay for the CDs, he gets to give me something I like without having to work too hard, we both win. Plus it makes at least a small dent in my music to explore list!

The best thing about buying from CDBaby though is the email receipt they send you afterwards :-).

Ruben -
Thanks for your order with CD Baby!

Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved “Bon Voyage!” to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Monday, March 24th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as “Customer of the Year.” We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Sigh…
Derek Sivers, president, CD Baby