defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -1

I’m on tethered internet so I can’t (and don’t feel compelled) to download iTunes 10, so I can’t check if this works or not. If it makes your Mac explode, don’t come to me for a replacement. I would replace it for you, but I’ve got a lot to do right now you see.

Straight from the source:

Chen_no_Striker: Today is the day that Endless Eight ended in the Haruhi World? I never knew that.

To keep with all the moral outrage people had about that whole debacle I claimed I hated it too, but to tell the truth… it was kinda fun. I suppose I really am weird ;).

iPod shuffle

Don’t get me wrong, I adore Apple products because they’re the only consumer electronics company that can design things (and yes that includes B&O!) but only Apple could remove buttons from something, make an advertising campaign out of it, then put the same buttons back and advertise it as a feature ;).

iPod nano

A very interesting change having a touch screen, but I wonder what impact it will have on usability, especially when you’re walking around with your hand in your pocket. The ClickWheel was such a boon because you could operate it without looking, and you could memorise the order of the menus.

It also lost the ability to play video (which they heavily advertised in previous versions) and it no longer has a built in camera. In many ways its like the transition from the iPod Mini to the nano, they’re two completely different devices. It’s basically a slightly larger iPod shuffle with a screen.

iPod touch

There are lots of people who can’t justify buying an iPhone 4 and an expensive new phone plan, and I know if I was one of them I’d be really considering getting one of these now that it has the "retina display" too. I mean I look at the screen on my iTelephone and look at every single other phone on the market and I feel like someone has rubbed grit into my eyes, or my glasses are really dirty!

Apple TV

It has an A4 chip which I think we were all expecting. They were able to keep the interface true to the original though. Unfortunately, I must be one of the few people in the universe who doesn’t like black or think its cool, so the new colour is a bit of a shame. Oh well, I’m weird.

iTunes

For a brief moment in Leopard, iTunes looked like a Mac native application with a consistent interface. Now it looks different again, and I strongly doubt they’ve made it a Cocoa application either. Honestly, iTunes is the easiest application to use to organise lots of music (as the name suggests!) but it’s also the most unstable, unreliable application Apple ships. People were asking about 64 bit, but that won’t happen until it’s rewritten in Cocoa owing to Carbon’s 32 bit limitation.

I suppose they don’t want to do an Objective-C rewrite because they have so much invested in the current codebase, and they still want to make it reasonably portable for Windows users. Bummer.

Ping

The new iTunes music social network thing. As someone who’s worked as a network administrator, I shudder a bit at their choice of name. Oh well, if people use it and like it. I prefer the Whole Wheat Radio model, personally.

Conclusion

Some interesting changes, and its good to see Apple can still deliver stuff. I won’t be getting any of it though. I mean, my iTelephone 4 has an iPod in it ;).

Rather than working on all the stuff I’m supposed to do this week, I spent half an hour drawing a diagram, then removing the titles. This was more fun. Diagrams are fun ^^. That is all.

You know what’s interesting? Tethered internet. Here’s a long story to read if you have nothing better to do.

Well, with an introduction like that!

For those interested, our house this morning just had the phone line connected, which means we can finally have ADSL provisioned. At least, given the state of Aussie telcos and ISPs we can never be too sure, but there you have it. So there are just nine more things to sort out before the end of the week. Easy!

Anyway during this time I’ve been using the tethered internet connection on my brand new, shiny iTelephone 4 which, ironically, I haven’t been able to change the signal reception on no matter how I hold it. I plug it into the Mac, enable Tethering on the phone, and let her rip. Well, not literally, I had to sign up to another contract with Optus to get it so I don’t want to cause it any damage.

The house reception issue

While certainly better than the reception we had at our family’s friend’s house in Normanhurst (the poor chaps), mobile phone reception at our new house here is also patchy at best. I’m a computer science student not an engineer, but I find it fascinating that a few centimetres of plasterboard can have such a dramatic effect on mobile performance, in some cases even making the difference between getting 2G and 3G reception. And it gets stranger, our kitchen area is an absolute dead zone, but the loungeroom which is separated from it without any walls at all gets several bars of 3G.

It’s unfair to compare the gargantuan task of blanketing a country the size of Australia with decent phone reception with Singapore’s compact, high density size and population, but the difference is amazing. I get 3G reception in lifts and emergency stairwells in Singapore, back here in Australia I can be walking in broad daylight and have a dropped call. Wait, I don’t walk in broad daylight, the sun is evil, but you get my point.

Mmmm, pointy

Have you ever wondered why pencils are needed to be so sharp? I mean, the first thing you think of when you see a fragile, thin substance such as paper is lets put something really sharp up against it! Unless when people say "sharp" they’re referring to intelligence, in which case I’m nervous that intelligent pencils could jump out and stab me. I mean, they’re sharp!

Our first television at home was a Grundig, but we replaced it with a Sharp when the dial failed on it. I often wondered what it must be like to live in a country where to export your products you would need to name your companies in a foreign language. I wonder if businesses in the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland, oh heck the English speaking world, would be so successful internationally if they had to all be named in Africaans. The Dutch and South Africans would have all the huge conglomerates then, and we’d be bailing them out instead.

Consuming sounds like comestible. Wait, no it doesn’t

While we’re on the subject of malfunctioning robots (just keep taking pictures!) have you ever wondered why the sky is blue? I know it has to do with refraction of light, but that explains how it is blue. I’m not sure where I read that, but its been consuming my thoughts for weeks.

Thoughts that burrow into your head and refuse to budge like that are the closest thing we can come to Inception without using a team of architects, designers, pharmacists and a trippy thought connection machine that would make any Vulcan shake his or her head. Have you ever noticed how few female Vulcans there were on any Star Trek? And T’Pel doesn’t count. Well okay she probably can count, otherwise she wouldn’t be terribly smart.

I wonder if she was sharp.

That Sharp television we had was a strange beast. At times the picture would jump to the side and start jiggling around with flashes of primary colour and snow. No wait that wasn’t that Sharp TV, that was my first computer monitor. The only high tech solution was to give it a small but firm smack on the side a few times. It would lurch, then correct itself.

Isn’t it interesting how acronyms mean different things in different places? That computer monitor was an SPC brand from Taiwan, which in Singapore is also the acronym for an oil company, and in Australia they tin peaches.

Millions of peaches. Peaches for me. Millions of peaches.

Its so quiet here at night

Slumbers.

UPDATE: I thought I hit the Publish button last night, but I hit Draft instead. I have since corrected this obviously terrible mistake, though probably the difference was minor to the overall value of this site.

More history you don’t care about

When I left high school in 2005, my first proper job was to write Perl scripts for possibly the friendliness boss I’ve ever had. He absolutely loved the language, and his enthusiasm rubbed off on me! I learned to LOVE CPAN and though I never did submit any of my own ACME modules I sure created lots of them! If I were learning the language today, I’d write one that just prints The Bird is The Word until the hapless user types Papa Ooom Maw Maw Maw. ACME::Trashmen, I can just see it now!

Anyway after that I started part one of my studies and was inundated with Java. I use the word inundated because it did feel like a flood! I could understand what was going on and appreciated how the language was in some ways self documenting, but the huge, narly long lines of camel case drove me batty. Features like linked lists and generics<T> seemed nice, but felt more like a tacked on after thought in an attempt to look more like C#, a language I did in high school when I was a .net guy and didn’t really care for.

Then my mum really went south and programming took a back seat to amateur nursing. Then when she left I went through what I’ve retroactively dubbed The Ruben Troubles. But enough about that.

Yukihiro Matsumoto is really cute

Around that time while I was taking a break from university for aforementioned family reasons, I picked up the second edition of the pickaxe book and fell in love. Ruby was like Perl but was so schweet… to the point where I was thinking "this can’t be healthy!" If you’d been reading my blog for a while you would have read that I came this close to implementing my site in Rails at the time.

I don’t quite know why, but as if my brain is terrified of becoming specialised (and therefore successful) despite really liking Ruby I kept tinkering around with Python as well, and eventually grew to like it more. Despite the terrible design of my site here and the fact I like to ramble on continuously without not so much as one cohesive thought or succinct statement, I’m a huge fan of minimalism and Python is such a clean language. Not only that, it uses the white space for something! I mean, we all indent our code, it makes SO MUCH SENSE to USE it! Ruby still needs end statements or braces just like C and Basic, what’s up with that!?

Oh yeah now I remember why I got into Python: Django. Django is one of the nicest frameworks I’ve ever used. We just clicked. I really tried to like Rails and did my fair share of work with it, but we didn’t click. Despite what some mathematicians and computer scientists say, I think programming is a deeply personal thing, and sometimes things just click, and sometimes they don’t. I’ve done equal amounts of work in Ruby and Python (and WAY MORE in Perl and Java, groan!) and it just makes more sense to me.

This heading is just as useless as the other two

Ruby has some very beautiful language constructs (the iteration block is so friggen elegant and nice I want to give it a huge hug), but an equivalent Python application will [often] be smaller, a boon for people like me who do most of their development hunched over a small ThinkPad at a coffee shop or an Apple computer that has a screen that sacrifices vertical space to make it wider.

Nonetheless, for its lucrative advertising potential (RUBEN DOES RUBY!) and to shut you all up (Ruben… why don’t you do Ruby? Hey Ruben, do Ruby! Hey Ruben, Python isn’t for you, Ruby is! Hey Ruben, your name is a total fit! Ruben, where did I leave my keys?) I’ve decided to give it another shot and submit my next assignment in it instead of Python. Who knows, it’d be great to do some RubyCocoa stuff :).

#!/usr/pkg/env ruby -w

class MugiChan
  def to_s
    return "Can Yui have this guitar cheaper?"
  end
end

if __FILE__ == $PROGRAM_NAME
  waifu = Mugichan.new
  puts waifu
end

Sent from my iPhone
(one of these days I’ll get rid of this thing)

We’ll have internet at our new address by early September. Until then, these people write more interesting blogs anyway.

Peace, health, happiness and all that,
Ruben

With the Australian federal elections less than a week away, I decided to plot on a handy table the positions of the leading two parties and their leaders that matter to me. This way I can make a more informed decision, and ultimately help others.

By my definition, plan is shorthand for comprehensive plan. This means they’ve made them public, debated them and have a clear direction backed up with these trifling things called "facts". If they do have a good plan but it contradicts something else they stand for, I reduce it to a nah.

Candidate for Prime Minister	Julia Gillard	Tony Abbott
Political party	Labor	The Coalition
Position (officially)	Centre left	Centre right
Position (probably)	Centre right	Far right
What to do	Nothing!	Go backwards!
Grown up immigration position	Nah	Nah
Plan for IT, communications	Nah	Nah
Plan for public transport	Nah	Nah
Plan for higher education	Nah	Nah
Plan for environment, energy	Nah	Science-what?
Supports equal marriage rights	Nah	Nah
Represent us well globally	Nah	Nah
No juvenile attack attacks	Nah	Nah
Returned any of my emails	Nah	Nah
Has double letters in name	Yup	Yup
Stepped over	Rudd	Turnbull
Would make a good laksa	Maybe?	What’s Asia?

I’ll be voting for the Greens, but I must be frank and admit it’s mostly because the two biggest parties are such a joke now. I watched two of their debates. I’ve been watching the news. If I hear one more mention of so-called "boat people", I’ll scream.

Ideally I’d like Labor to get back in, but with a much reduced mandate to govern. Let them know we’re not happy with their performance, and we only kept them in because they scare us less than someone who’d like to set women’s causes and progress back 50 years.

Then again that’s just me. This whole mandatory internet filter talk made me come this close to voting for Liberal for the first time, no joke! Eh, I’m depressed, I’m off for a coffee. Wait, I’m already at a coffee shop. Time for another one then.

Don’t read this post. I’m serious.

Over the last few days there has been a distinct lack of communiqués owing to the fact we’re moving house (again) and don’t have a stable source of The Internets yet. Still, I take what I can get, so in this post I’ll be doing something worthwhile by addressing several things in one. Call it value for money.

The apology

This was originally going to be in a separate post, but I stuck it here instead. It should have gone in the bin.

Forgive the distinct lack of communiqués these last few days, we still haven’t moved into our new house yet and where we’re staying now has unreliable internet access and virtually no Telstra or Optus phone coverage, despite being an hour-long train ride from the Sydney CBD! That was a really long sentence.

As an addendum to this apology, I’d also like to apologise for the apology. For a post that was supposed to break the radio silence (as it were), it turned out to add nothing of value whatsoever. I might file this under nonsense, just because it’s that pointless. Thank you.

The nerds in bed thing

I got a direct message on Twitter this morning from someone (who will remain anonymous) asking a very pointed question. I won’t quote it here, but suffice to say it had something to do with what nerds want in bed.

I said sleep. Honestly, moving again these last couple of weeks has run me down like a Tangara. See, I’m getting used to the Sydney lingo and am even using it in examples. I get the feeling I didn’t help much.

In related news, I also got some DMs from someone saying some nice things about me for a change. All of it of course completely untrue, but flattery is flattery ;).

This is a subtitle

And this is a sentence. I think. Do strings of words need adjectives, verbs and nouns to be considered a sentence and not just a fragment? Perhaps I need to ask the Diskeeper guys and gals.

The nice photo

The photo shown above was the Wikipedia photo of the day on Wikipedia, shown today because it was Wikipedia’s photo of the day on Wikipedia. It’s a photo because it was featured on the photo of the day on Wikipedia, which was on Wikipedia, taken by Muhammad Mahdi Karim.

A panoramic view of Moshi, the capital of the Kilimanjaro Region of Tanzania situated on the lower slopes of Mt Kilimanjaro, the tallest mountain in Africa (seen in background). Moshi is home to the Chaga and Maasai tribes and lies on the road connecting Arusha and Mombasa, Kenya.

Of course my old man has been to Africa on several different business trips, but I’ve never been. Would love to go to Tanzania.

In celebration of Singapore’s birthday, I uploaded a couple more photos I took just before we left for the last time in July.

The last photo, I liked because of the contrast between old and new, and the first I liked for the colours and the contrast between the tropical looking trees and the buildings behind them. I described them in reverse order because I’m being all unconventional and edgy, you see.

My old teachers in high school would have wanted me to use the term "juxtaposed!" to describe pictures like this, but I resisted!

Happy birthday Singapore, have a kopi-o and kaya toast on me.