Rubénerd :)

After many longs months of hard work, Mozilla Firefox 3.5 is now available for download for Windows, Mac and Linux, and I assume the tireless and generous folks over in the ports system will have it for FreeBSD users soon too. Kudos to the entire Mozilla team for all their efforts and for delivering such a great product. I’ve been using various release candidates and beta versions of 3.5 for several months now and have been impressed.

While I’ve drifted over to Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome a few times and while I encourage other Mac users to use Camino if they’re not technically inclined, Firefox and it’s numerous security and privacy extensions continue to be the preferred glasses I view the internet with along with Opera.

Randy Jensen on Twitter posted a comment that may be useful for Windows users if you find Mozilla’s servers too slow during this peak download time:

In case your having trouble getting Firefox 3.5 from Mozilla’s servers, try FileHippo http://bit.ly/19yb15

In response to Dave Winer a few days ago I discussed having an associated external URL with each tweet was on the top of my wishlist for Twitter features. It turns out I was too hasty in posting that idea, I have an even better idea for a Twitter feature: filters.

One of the reasons I don’t like Facebook’s new "life stream" feature is because they assume I care what all my friends are doing constantly. To me, Facebook is a glorified phonebook. With Twitter, I follow people precisely because I’m interested in what they’re doing and saying.

The thing is I have a ton of warm, friendly people on Twitter I follow now, but if I read one more cringe-worthy Bible quote, or another story about swine flu (or H1N1 as everyone here in Singapore calls it) I might spontaneously combust; something I’m not sure my medical insurance covers. It works both ways too, I’m sure plenty of people follow me despite my incessant Apple and FreeBSD related tweets!

In the meantime I may need to start looking for a different Twitter client. I moved from Twhirl to TweetDeck back in late 2008 and never looked back: it turns my widescreen 23″ monitor into something better than CNN, IRC and SMS (loving the TLAs) combined, but the filtering features are far too basic and aren’t static between sessions.

UPDATE: HP also sell a clone of the 15C which was their scientific calculator instead of this financial one. Unfortunately it’s over AU$36.00 which is far more than I’d like to spend. Both have RPN and the retro HP interface which is all I care about right now :)

While I am an extraordinarily happy iTelephone owner, I always thought the argument that the application store was the sticky-ist feature keeping people on the platform instead of using other devices like the Palm Pre was.. misguided. While I do use many applications on my iTelephone, if it turned out I liked the Palm Pre or an Android phone better I wouldn’t hesitate to move over.

Because I have bought and downloaded the single greatest mobile phone application for my iTelephone of all time. This one application is so overwhelmingly, awe inspiringly amazing that it alone could keep me as an iTelephone user for the forseable future.

I am talking of course about the official HP 12c Programmers Calculator application which was just released. It’s a faithful reproduction of the original with it’s reverse polish notation goodness and the same retro buttons and interface.

At AU$17.99 it’s not cheap as far as iTelephone applications go, but it’s still far cheaper than picking up a second hand 12C on eBay and given I always have my iTelephone with me it makes it even more convenient. Goodbye default Calculator!

If you don’t know what the HP 12C is, check out Wikipedia. In a nutshell, it was one of a series of sophisticated pocket calculators that HP sold in the 1980s but then stopped manufacturing. They’re collectors items.

Now I just need to figure out how to hide the stock Calculator application so I can put the 12C in it’s place :).

I remember reading somewhere that one of the rules of blogging is you’re not supposed to explain absences. Apparently people hate them and they detract from the topic you’re blog is supposed to be about.

It’s been a couple of extremely busy days, but I’m back on the blogging and podcasting scene again. Thank you.

And by the way, does anyone find it somewhat hilarious that people write books about successful blogging? Does that say more about the author than perhaps they intended?

Thanks to Yohanes Budiyanto for the Singapore night photo. I’ll have to take my 35mm lens out tomorrow night to try and top it!

This philosophy post is so philosophical, you may very well go insane thinking about it. You’ve been warned.

How many grilled cheese sandwiches could a grilled cheese sandwich grill if a grilled cheese sandwich could grill grilled cheese sandwiches?

Or the uniquely Australian version:

How many toasted jaffles could a toasted jaffle toast if toasted jaffles could toast toasted jaffles?

Or the uniquely Singaporean/Malaysian version, which doesn’t work quite as well:

How many teh tariks could a teh tarik tarik if a teh tarik could tarik teh tariks?

I spend my Saturday evenings blogging in Starbucks coffee shops in Singapore, and at the Boatdeck Cafe when I’m in Adelaide. This makes me hard core, in case you didn’t know.

A few months ago I lampooned WordPress for it’s need to have the term "category" appear within every category URL. It appears I’m not the only one who found this irritating.

For me I wanted to merge all my disparate nonsense blogs into one meta nonsense blog (Rubenerd.com) which would be easier to maintain, then use categories with their own CSS to make them still appear separate. A shrewd, devilish cunning plan worthy of Baldric himself, but alas having the term "category" in all the URis spoilt the illusion.

Original blogs	Ideal new sub-URI	WordPress illusion screwup
Rubenerd Show	rubenerd.com/show/	rubenerd.com/category/show/
Fun Facts	rubenerd.com/nonsense/	rubenerd.com/category/nonsense/
Intranet	rubenerd.com/anime/	rubenerd.com/category/anime/
Studies	rubenerd.com/studies/	rubenerd.com/category/studies/

Fortunately having played with and been disappointed by so many plugins in the past, I’ve finally found one that works so beautifully I’m thinking of sending the writer a grilled cheese sandwich: the adeptly-titled WP No Category Base. Not only does it work right out of the box, but it also redirects your previous category permalinks which means you don’t need to mess with .htaccess files. A beautiful, elegant solution!

As the name suggests this plugin will completely remove the mandatory "Category Base" from your category permalinks ( e.g. "myblog.com/category/my-category/" to "myblog.com/my-category/".

The plugin requires no setup or modifying core wordpress files and will not break any links.

Now I can finally start to import all my other posts. Apparently the anime category gets the most hits here anyway despite it having nothing of value in it! Crazy, grilled cheese sandwich stuff.

I’ve already figured out how to exclude certain categories from certain places so they act like separate sites with their own styles and whatnot, now I just need to work out the feeds. I know WordPress allows you to generate separate RSS and Atom feeds for different categories, but how do I customise them? For example, add iTunes information to the Rubenerd Show category feed, but not any others.

If I spent as much time blogging and talking about interesting topics on my blog and podcast as I did blogging and talking about blogging and talking, I’d get much more blogging and talking done on my blog and podcast. Wait, what?

• Singapore Twitterers List
  (tags: twitter singapore)
• Paul's complete guide to installing OSX Leopard on your MSI Wind / Advent 4211 – Netbooks @ MoDaCo
  (tags: software hardware howto osx netbook leopard)

Another bomb rocked Baghdad yesterday killing 69 people; Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson, two of the biggest names in entertainment passed on; and Belgian singer Hilde Rens (Yasmine was her stage name) suddenly took her own life. Twitter was awash with discussions over all of them.

Don’t know what more I could contribute to the discussions other than to say they were all too young. One thing is for certain, the world is going to be a very different place without them.

As for Michael in particular, I may not have admired the guy but as a kid from the 1980s I grew up hearing his music. To me, hearing one of his songs propelled me to my life before I moved to Singapore when I was little, particularly when we still lived in Melbourne and my life was completely different. It was quite jarring to hear that he’d just left so suddenly.

Someone on Twitter mentioned that the 80s have officially now died.

Dave Winer asked us what our most desired feature for Twitter was. My thoughts haven’t changed since early last year:

I’ve found virtually every tweet is a comment with a hyperlink. This limits the number of characters for the comment and forces us to use URL shortners. "URL shortner" sounds like a cake. So my most desired feature would be to have a separate field for the link to “associate” with each tweet. We could do away with URL shortners entirely (no more obscurity and middlemen that could potentially break), and we’d have the full 140 characters to comment.

Given I live in two different places my other wish would be allowing us to define a timezone override for individual tweets when we’re outside our defined timezone in our profile.

I’d also love for Twitter to make me trillions of dollars, to find cures for all diseases, to usher in world peace and to get me an introverted girlfriend, but I guess we all have to prioritise :).

Here’s another Rubenerd Fun Fact for all you rabid Official Rubenerd Fun Fact fans. I know you’re out there, I can hear you breathing. Oh wait, that’s me.

Very few people are aware of this fact.

Thank you.