Rubénerd Blog :)

My premininary experience with Snow Leopard after getting around to installing has been amazing. It’s most probably also to do with the fact I did a clean install which always helps, but all the applications load instantly or with only one dock bounce even on this 2006 era first generation MacBook Pro! Obviously compiling huge projects or editing video won’t be much faster, but if the machine is feeling this much more responsive I might be able to keep using it for even longer which my wallet will love.

There are also lots of tiny little non-performance related things. When you click the hide toolbar button in the Finder it does a quick animation, and the toolbar itself is spaced out more neatly. When I have my external monitor attached the open windows on it are easier to resize to fit the full height without going over. When you open folders in the Finder using column view they show an open icon. The Homebrew theme in the Terminal uses blue as a selection colour. I’m sure I’ll find more such things.

So far the only bad things I’ve come across is hard drives aren’t shown by default on the Desktop but a quick visit to the Finder Preferences screen can fix that. Also, for some reason the fonts look dreadful and the Appearance preference pane no longer has a drop down menu to select the degree of font smoothing. A visit to the Terminal will fix this, but it’s weird they’d do that.

Now it’s time to put the Dock back on the side and install my applications. Speaking of which I need a cup of coffee. Why doesn’t Snow Leopard do THAT for me still I ask?

I’m typing this post as we speak on my second hand IBM ThinkPad X40 and I have to say I’m thrilled with it! While obviously larger in dimensions than a netbook, I just can’t get over how light it is. I put it in my bag I usually haul my 15 inch MacBook Pro in along with my folder of study papers and as I carried it to the Boatdeck for my morning cup of coffee the bag felt like there was only the folder in it!

The machine currently has Windows XP Professional installed and even has the genuine OEM licence sticker on it. Given I’m not sure how much Windows software I’ll need to run for my studies in the future I’ve decided to shrink the Windows partition and put FreeBSD on it with a boot menu.

The main thing I was worried about was the tiny 1.8″ ZIF PATA hard drive, I had read plenty of stories by people claiming the 4800RPM drive is noisy and has slow seek times but it booted XP pretty quickly and loading applications didn’t seem to take too long at all. Given this is a second hand machine I will be running SpinRite on the drive before I put any data onto it to triple check that it’s functioning properly.

Even if the internal drive turns out to be working flawlessly, once I’ve got a bit more money I will be looking into a replacement if only to protect myself against errors that I can’t see right now. 1.8″ ZIF PATA drives are uncommon but not too difficult to find, 60GB Samsung drives seem to be going for around $80. Another option is Amazon.com stocks 1.8″ ZIF PATA 16GB SLC drives for US$140 which is way too steep for my budget but could be something I get in the distant future if I still have this machine.

As for the other features, I’ve been using it lightly for half an hour and the bundled battery still reports a 90% charge which is pleasantly surprising! I was also able to connect to our WPA2 secured AirPort WiFi network at home without any problems, the next thing to test will be whether it can use my university’s VPN.

I don’t intend to spend much money on this machine but I did pick up a few replacement mouse stick caps for a couple of bucks, and a 12.1″ screen protector for another few bucks at the Mawson Lakes Apple shop of all places.

I got me a ThinkPad netbook! Boo yah!

While I’m hopelessly sucking up to sites and people by giving favourable reviews (they’re so much nicer to write than negative reviews!), Dana Gardner (yes, the same Dana I talked about recently) unveiled his new BriefingsDirect podcast website design this evening Adelaide and Singapore time. I like it, it’s classy and fresh. Freshly classy if you will.

The new design features a darker background with a solid header colour and a white centre. Where have I seen a recent site redesign like that before? I guess its what they always say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Yes, I’m implying a big shot like Dana is a not only a regular reader of my site here but that he was so impressed by my stunning design skills that he copied it. Yeah, that’ll work!

BriefingsDirect is described as an "Analyst moderated enterprise IT podcast". I admit I’m a bit behind in the more recent episodes, but they’re fascinating and well worth a listen. I especially enjoyed the episode in late May about WebKit and how web developers are adapting to mobile platforms. A lot of the topics Dana and his guests talk about I’m studying as we speak, so aside from being interesting they’re also immediately useful :).

I first heard Dana talk back when I subscribed to the IT Conversations iteration of The Gillmor Gang in 2004.

Well ladies and gentleman I am typing this blog post from my brand new custom Unicomp SpaceSaver buckling spring computer keyboard! Though it may look like a regular keyboard, it’s as far from a modern keyboard inside as you could possibly get. From Wikipedia’s article on the IBM Model M which this keyboard traces it’s ancestry to:

[...] Model M keyboards have been prized by computer enthusiasts and heavy typists because of the tactile and auditory feedback resulting from a keystroke.

The Model M is also regarded as an extremely durable piece of hardware. Many units manufactured since the mid 1980s are still in use today, while the computers and monitors of the day are obsolete. Unicomp, which now owns the rights to the design, now sells the keyboards. Recently, the keyboards have made a comeback amongst writers and computer techs.

Let me just say right up front this keyboard feels absolutely amazing! It’s almost impossible to describe, but typing on regular keyboards now makes me feeling like I’m pressing on a squishy pizza. It’s so responsive; each key is registered and makes a clicking sound when a button is pressed down, not when the key snaps back up again. It doesn’t sound like that would make a big difference, but it does. It’s like the difference between sleeping on a hardwood floor or a mattress.

The other benefit being a bucking spring type keyboard is it makes such a satisfyingly loud noise! What I type on this thing may not have been any different to what I was entering on my MacBook Pro’s internal keyboard, but it sounds like real work is being done. This thing is louder than all outdoors; might need to start closing my bedroom door here while I work or using the study in our house in Adelaide instead of the dining room to prevent my dad and sister going absolutely crazy!

I got the SpaceSaver model instead of the full sized Customizer which means the keys are full size but the bezel around the case is much thinner. This means I’ll be able to put it more easily in luggage when I’m flying from Adelaide to Singapore and back.

I was tempted to get the retro beige colour like our IBM machine from the late 1980s at home, but ended up getting the grey and black model so it matched my other computer hardware better. According to the pictures the colour and style looked just like a Commodore 16, and looking at them side by side now here I can confirm it’s true! It’s like I’m using a slimmer, buckling spring Commodore 16 with a numeric keypad to code into my MacBook Pro, brilliant!

Another great feature is just how easy it is to remove the keys and place them back again. One of the first things I did was to swap the Windows (Command key on the Mac) and Alt keys around then change my keyboard mappings in System Preferences to match the layout of a regular Mac keyboard. According to this reviewer it’s possible to remove the offensive Windows logo entirely and order some custom Mac keys from Unicomp you can stick in their place. Might look into that.

I just don’t know how to articulate what a sheer delight it is to type on this keyboard, it is absolutely amazing. The only scary thing now is, I may never want to type on anything else ever again! And I may be killed for making too much noise. What’s the point of having a buckling spring keyboard without making noise though I ask you?

If you want to grab a Unicomp bucking spring keyboard made to the same specifications as the original IBM Model M, rush over to their website and place and order. I am satisfied beyond words with their sales support and their products!

I will be taking more photos of it and putting them in my Flickr Unicomp SpaceSaver gallery you can check out if you’re interested.

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 :).

When you use lightweight window managers such as Openbox in lieu of desktop environments, you’re free to choose everything yourself including applications to draw desktop backgrounds. I’ve happily used hsetroot for a while now, but decided this time to give Nitogen a try.

As well as being a stable gas with five electrons in its outer shell (I loved chemistry in high school, and my dad is a chemist!), Nitrogen is a desktop background setter that lets you choose images using a slick, simple graphical window. You populate the list of images by passing it the name of a folder when you launch it, then choose which image you want and whether you want it scaled, centred, tiled or fitted to your screen. You can also define the background colour if your image doesn’t fill the entire screen.

While I am used to using the shell to change background images, I have to say it is nice having a window to do it, and if you use GTK apps like Firefox, the Gimp, Inkscape, Gnumeric and the like and you have a GTK theme defined, it fits into your desktop beautifully. It’s requires a few extra dependencies given it’s a graphical app, but (in keeping with Openbox philosophy!) it’s still very lightweight and uses few system resources when running.

If you use Openbox (as in the image above) by launching an openbox-session on FreeBSD, Linux and the like, you can tell it to load your Nitrogen background on launch by opening this file in your favourite text editor which of course would be Vim not Emacs:

% vim ~/.config/openbox/autostart.sh

… and append the following lines, before you load any panels or widgets so ones that support pseudo-transparency can generate their backgrounds properly.

nitrogen --restore &
echo "Grilled cheese sandwich" &

Personally I’ll be sticking with hsetroot for now simply because I don’t really need the graphical screen (and it’s extra dependencies). As I said though, I found the interface slick and easy to use and would encourage people to try it out (especially if they’re afraid of the shell like so many Linux and BSD newbies are!). With Nitrogen and apps like the Openbox Configuration Manager, Openbox becomes closer to being a general use desktop everybody can use and enjoy.

Nitrogen is available from the FreeBSD ports collection.

Midnight Commander on a FreeBSD machine running in an SSH session on my Mac

Perhaps it’s because the first computer I ever used had DOS on it, but ever since I started using it in late 2005 I absolutely adore the Midnight Commander and use it almost exclusively to deal with file management tasks on my Macs and FreeBSD machines. If you’ve never used it before, you’re missing out on a treat.

Midnight Commander is a text based, "orthodox" file maneger that adopts the interface of the venerable Norton Commander (Wikipedia) on DOS. The screen is split into two panes for showing the contents of folders, along with a menu bar, a shortcut key help pane at the bottom and a prompt you can use to enter regular shell commands, view their results and return. I often joke that last feature means you often never have to leave!

As Norton Commander did in DOS, Midnight Commander can be used to easily create and modify your file system without having to use Unix commands with possibly confusing arrays of options. If you’re like me you already know how to create folders and symbolic links, move files, change permissions, rename folders and so forth, but as the existence of numerous graphical file managers attests to, sometimes it’s just easier for larger projects and tasks to let a program do it for you.

Midnight Commander Light > in urxvt > in Openbox > on FreeBSD!

Regardless of whether you choose to use the original Midnight Commander or Midnight Commander Light they’re also a cinch to configure via easy to use dialog boxes under the Options menu, no need to edit text files then relaunch the applications! Things that can be customised include the view (between horizontal or vertical panes), colour schemes, file highlighting and audible alerts. They also contain a slew of other features such as virtual filesystems which I admit I haven’t even tried yet!

Most people who use Unix-like operating systems probably already are well aware of Midnight Commander, but for those of you just giving Linux, FreeBSD and so forth a try, you might want to look into it. The fact you don’t need to launch an X11 graphical environment to do file management tasks is a huge plus, and you can even use it to easily maintain systems remotely through a secure shell. Very cool.

Midnight Commander is available from NetBSD’s pkgsrc under /sysutils, the FreeBSD ports system under /misc and Mac OS X’s MacPorts under /sysutils amongst others.

This morning I decided to give Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 from Mozilla Labs a try.

I’m really interested in a lot of what they’re doing, including their development of HTML 5 support for <audio> and <video> elements and closer CSS 2.1 support including text shadows. I haven’t tested the former, but the latter is definitely working; not sure whether I’d ever use such shadows on my own pages but it’s good to see Firefox catching up to Safari/WebKit, Opera and Konqueror/KHTML in this regard.

According to the development page, another feature is vastly improved JavaScript support which should be most noticeable in Ajax applications. I’m old fashioned and am of the opinion most Ajax online is poorly executed (plus I dislike it when sites only work with JavaScript enabled) but to be fair Gmail and Google Maps did seem quicker and the interfaces worked more smoothly; that said I don’t have any hard numbers so this could all just be attributable to a placebo effect.

Mac users like me will be pleased to note some quite significant cosmetic changes which make Firefox look more Mac-like. Context menus now finally match Mac OS X Leopard’s rounded corners, the bookmark bar has a much more subdued gradient which looks classier and the toolbar itself takes up less screen real estate.

Given I use so many extensions I admit I was worried how many of them would break in the beta; to my relief only two were, and neither are security related. SSL Blacklist (now my favourite extension alongside NoScript) in the version I had was incompatible, but updating to version 4.0.31 and the SSL Blacklist Local Database 1.0.7 fixed this. Clipmarks reports to be compatible, but alas doesn’t work for me at all.

Compatible with 3.5b4	Not compatible with 3.5b4
Adblock Plus 1.0.2 BetterPrivacy 1.29 British English Dictionary 1.19 DownThemAll! 1.1.3 FireFTP 1.0.4 FoxClocks 2.5.33 Ghostery 1.4.0 NoScript 1.9.2.8 Permit Cookies 0.6.2 SSL Blacklist 4.0.31 SSL Blacklist Local D’Base 1.0.7 Tree Style Tab 0.7.2009051501	Clipmarks 3.5.1 Greasemonkey 0.8.20090123.1 LORI 0.2.0.20080521

I look forward to the final release, as usual the Mozilla folks are doing a fantastic job.

I must admit when I first heard of Wolfram Alpha I shrugged and relegated it to the same area of my brain as Citizendium, a novel idea but one that probably doesn’t do much more than other current sites already do to be worth the effort. I was way off base; having since played with it for a couple of hours I have to say I’m impressed by what I’ve see so far and it’s potential, even if right now some queries might only get limited results.

Ever since I was a kid I’ve been obsessed with cartography (my favourite book growing up was an early 1980s atlas) so my exploration of Wolfram Alpha has so far been mostly geographic, political and economic type searches. By entering a query containing a series of countries, cities and the like you can get a very clean, professionally presented comparison. While the maps themselves are a bit crude, the information is all there on the page, and other tables containing data such as age distribution can be toggled with links.

At least for me it’s been fascinating, and a bit scary, to compare parcels of the world that are so wildly different not for any geographic reasons necessarily, but just because of politics. For example, Singapore is less than 2 kilometres away from Malaysia across the straits of Johor and have a shared heritage but they may as well be on different planets! Doing a search for Israel, West Bank is an eye opener. Israel, Gaza Strip is shocking. @Tekhelet on Twitter warned me not to trust "leftist [P]alestinian sympathisers who distort facts to make [Israel] look bad." which I’d lend credence to if the pages were generated from one or two sources, but the over thirty separate, independent ones you can find out by clicking the Source Information link speak for themselves. And even if it weren’t entirely true, people are still suffering. Anyway we’re going on a tangent now aren’t we?

Then there are searches that expose similarities, for example Australia and Canada have very similar Gini coefficients, even if the site does call them Gini Indexes! I’m old fashioned you see.

Even though it is possible to mix and match cities, states and countries, it seems there’s still insufficient data to do them well. For example, if you were to compare the population densities of Japan and Singapore you’d see Singapore’s density is an order of magnitude higher, but I’d wager more than a few grilled cheese sandwiches the numbers would be reversed if we compared Singapore to Tokyo.

While we’re talking about cities, what I appreciate is being able to see local times and being able to calculate differences between places and the rough travel time. For example, to fly to Anchorage from Adelaide would take… a while! I guess it would have made more sense to go via Singapore.

Lots of disjointed, rapid-fire observations, and I’m sure to be making plenty more: as I said on Twitter, I’m a junkie for this kind of stuff!

Demonstration from the Ghostery website

One of the extensions I added to my recent Mozilla Firefox extensions post that I hadn’t talked about before is a privacy gem called Ghostery. Whenever you visit a website that has hidden web bugs (bugs as in spying not errors) to track your online behaviour, it briefly superimposes a translucent message in the top right corner of the window informing you of such. It also adds a cute little Pacman-like monster to your status bar that persistently identifies how many bugs are on the current page.

As was the case when I realised how many sites break when JavaScript is only selectively enabled with NoScript and when cookies are only selectively enabled with PermitCookies, it’s been a real eye opener to see just how much snooping is happening on various sites I visit with this extension installed.

Some sites have nothing, others are perfectly harmless such as Whole Wheat Radio which only employs Google Analytics:

The current record for the most number of bugs on pages I frequent since installing this extension is Mashable which ranged from six to eight depending on the page. They look innocuous enough to me, but the number does seem a bit excessive:

As with much of security, the number of bugs on pages isn’t necessarily an automatic indication of how trustworthy a site is, though I would propose it does indicate where the priorities of the web developer and/or the site owners are. What’s more important to notice is what the bugs are.

My browsing habits haven’t really changed since installing Ghostery, but as with all my other security and privacy extensions it’s a part of my web defence kit which helps me identify material on sites so I can make informed decisions.