Rubénerd Blog :)

Beware the wrath of Dave, poke fun at his netbook and he’ll just crassly assume you’re a spineless puppet of Apple folk because they’re naturally the only ones who are uninspired by flimsy designs. I resemble [sic] his remarks… for one thing not all Apple fans are boys ;).

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I’m socially awkward, anxious, terribly shy and I tend to obsess about obscure and unconventional things, but I was like that before I started blogging! That notwithstanding, Dave Winer has an excellent post on Scripting News about the stereotypes surrounding bloggers in Hollywood movies.

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I got a shock this morning when somehow I stumbled across the Radio UserLand website while looking for documentation on RSS implementations:

Radio UserLand service closing
UserLand has decided to close the Radio UserLand and Salon Radio services as of December 31, 2009.
Please read the announcement for details of the closure.

Contained on said announcement page:

UserLand has decided to close the Radio UserLand and Salon Radio services as of December 31, 2009.

You can continue to use your Radio weblog hosted with UserLand until the end of the year.

If you plan on continuing to use Radio to publish your blog, we would recommend that you look for an alternative web host if your weblog is being published to a UserLand server. You can use the FTP option [1] in Radio to publish to your own server.

Ironically echoing the sentiment of the slogan of Dave Winer’s blog ("It’s even worse than it appears"), not only will their hosted software go offline, but if you’ve used their system to maintain comments they’ll all be deleted too. Blood chilling stuff.

The closure of Radio will also mean that the UserLand-hosted comments, trackbacks and stats tracking will be unavailable after the shutdown date.

The end of an era. I remember back when I was in high school in Singapore listening to the podcasts made by the IT Conversations team from the PopTech 2004 conference where people were discussing what blogging software they used. Radio wasn’t mention too many times, but it was the topic of a few discussions. I remember deciding not to use it simply because at the time I couldn’t justify the price when budget webhosts with a free software platform existed.

Nostalgia aside, this is also another in a long line of stark reminders that hosting material outside your own sphere of influence and control puts you at the complete mercy of those who run such services. Despite all the cool cats long since moving over to services like Vox and Squarespace and the like, I continue to blog on my own webhosting account primary because of the control I have over my own material. It may not be any more or less reliable, but ultimately I have the final say in what happens.

I think the idea of cloud computing is an interesting (if overhyped) concept, but the primary issue that I’ve heard virtually nobody discuss is the issue of trust. I’m 23 so theoretically I should be eating all this stuff right up and moving off my own site and local software to instead live entirely on social networks and web based apps, but at this stage I don’t trust anyone enough to do it.

I’ll come right out and say it: the cloud scares me. And closures like Radio UserLand only serve to cause me further anxiety.

When I read blog posts like this one by Dave Winer where he refers to budget computers as craptops it stuns me just how far we’ve come. I imagine a person from 20 years ago would kill to get their hands on a computer with the CPU power of a current craptop. Of course as Pirelli has been telling us for 30 years power is nothing without control, and the craptops of which he speaks do come with Vista. Put 7 (or even better XP or a FLOSS system) on them and they’re a bit better, but the kind of people who buy such machines probably don’t know this. But that’s for another post.

What I find interesting about all these articles about how netbooks and budget machines are making basic computing cheaper for the masses is that people continue to completely ignore the second hand computer market in their analysis. Sure netbooks are probably a bit ligher and smaller than an older laptop for the same price, but that’s not to say you can’t find yesterday’s svelte executive lightweight subnotebook that has premium build quality, a keyboard that’s actually usable and great battery life for less than a bargain basement dinky new machine now, while probably still being able to perform all the same tasks.

I admit as with buying a used car, when you buy a second hand computer you don’t know how the previous owner treated it and whether or not said hardware is in good condition. Leaving aside refurbished computers that often do have a limited warranty, it comes down to how much homework you’re willing to do on sellers and hardware.

I’ve bought several second hand computers for myself (latest is a ThinkPad X40 pictured above) and friends over the last few years and the only problems I’ve had have been related to dying hard drives which I always upgrade to higher capacity or SSD units anyway. Even if you do have to replace a defective part, often they’re cheaper because the hardware is older, and you’re still better off.

I adore my 2006 MacBook Pro and when I finally get around to replacing it I will be buying a brand new machine; I think if you intend a machine to be your primary workhorse it makes sense to spend the extra money. For netbooks though that you use at coffee shops or that desktop you have in the corner downloading anime torrents (not that I do that, just an example you understand), I don’t see any reason why a second hand computer that was fantastic and expensive yesterday won’t do the job as well or better than a craptop from today. In many cases it may even work better.

Just sayin’!

Very well put.

clipped from www.scripting.com

I made enough money in the late 80s to realize what wealth buys — distance. Then it took a few years to learn that distance is not what I wanted, in fact I don’t think it’s human to crave distance. People are built to want to be among others, at least I was.

I bought a house with a 750 foot driveway in the middle of the woods. My neighbors built houses the size of high schools. You couldn’t walk anywhere.

Now I live among humanity, much more modestly and I’m happier.

What ever happened to the different images that Dave Winer would put on the top of Scripting News each year? Check out his archive for 2004 for example, then look at his current site. It looked so much better before!

The Jack Tramiel Commodore 64 anniversary episode!

ACT ONE: Too much stuff and not enough time, evil overcast-ness, shipping eBay goods overseas, Synclair ZX Spectrums and Commodore 64s, five times at the Singapore Post centre, duty is a bum, Asian obsession with cool gadgets, efficiency escaping snail mail, Bureau of Oversight.

ACT TWO: Using the Griffin iMic and the LAME encoder, hope it makes the show sound better :)

ACT THREE: Celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Commodore 64, old video clip from the Computer Chronicles, wanting to meet Jack Tramiel and Woz, boardroom stupidity, Schade family IBM machines, Gary Kildall.

ACT FOUR: Smart Singaporean bus stops, tracking buses with GPS, big brother-ism, live twitter posts from Dave Wares, Dave Winer, Leo Laporte and Robert J. Berger.

Download MP3 to listen ↓ 34:41, 19.1MiB

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

Reading Dave Winer rant on about how silly the new startup Mahalo is, I decided to give it a shot. Less than a minute into my exploration you can colour me even more unimpressed. Not just because the theory behind it is iffy, but simply because their results suck!

I’ll explain why, with some sidebar images of actual results from their site.

Konqueror doesn’t have a search result page, and doesn’t even have any Related Result Pages. Ironically they use the results from Google to hide the fact they returned nothing themselves.

I guess it is a fairly obscure search. I’ll try FreeBSD next.

Konqueror results from Google: About 7,620,000

If you haven’t heard of Mahalo (and let’s face they’ve focused their marketing efforts only on the US) it’s a new human edited web directory based not on categories of links but on search terms. Essentially it’s the same thing as Dmoz and what Yahoo! used to be and uses the same human element. You know, the way we used to do it before we realised how much more efficient computers are at gathering and organising large volumes of information.

FreeBSD doesn’t have a search result page, and doesn’t even have any Related Result Pages. Ironically as before they use results from Google.

I guess being a critical engine that powers millions of websites and servers across the planet isn’t enough to warrant a search result page. Let’s try something more generic next… what about Singapore?

FreeBSD results from Google: About 39,200,000

I’ve got to hand it to them for taking on the gargantuan task of creating a search engine where every single search query you could conceive has already been thought of already and has had a page of links created for it, not to mention the equally daunting task of making sure each of these billions of pages are kept up to date and relevant in a world where information is updated and changed every minute.

Okay we’re getting a bit back this time, but it’s only silly tourist information! What about at least an infomation bar or economic data or something?

I guess being an Alpha World City isn’t enough to warrant a dedicated search result page either. Okay fine, what about Australia? It’s bigger and more well known…

Singapore results from Google: About 224,000,000

To me it’s a nirvana like ideal: as humans we know what we want and need so therefore as humans we are the most capable of fulfilling those needs and wants. The reality as I see it though is that it’s an unrealisable fantasy to think we could ever match computers in this field. Heck, that’s one of the reasons why we invented computers in the first place: to take care of these repetitive tasks for us accurately and quickly isn’t it?

Okay now we’re really being silly. As with Singapore we’re given links to Related Pages which give us tourist information and an article about Horse Flu, but still nothing actually useful about the country itself. Nothing.

To see where they place their priorities, let’s see what their results for Paris Hilton after this.

Australia results from Google: About 391,000,000

Don’t get me wrong, I think search engines still have a long way to go in terms of usability and search result relevance, but I surely don’t think the answer is to give up on computers and do it ourselves.

So the truth comes out. They have no pages for Singapore, Konqueror, FreeBSD or Australia, but they have thorough, detailed and comprehensive search result page for Paris Hilton.

Paris Hilton results from Google: About 38,900,000

So let’s look at these results. Despite the fact Singapore and Australia are both more popular than Paris Hilton by a factor of 10 and that FreeBSD and Konqueror are no lightweights themselves in Google, none of them other than Paris Hilton had a dedicated Mahalo page.

Now I understand that generating billions of pages and keeping them all up to date and relevant is a huge undertaking, so therefore it’s only natural to expect there to be less results for queries than Google; and it is true that not all of Google’s results are relevant themselves, but come on this is ridiculous.

I think that last search result says it all! Google has absolutely nothing to worry about as far as Mahalo is concerned.

Dave Winer over at Scripting News has suggested an addition to this Twitter micro blogging phenomenon: Twittergrams! The idea is to record messages with a limited number of words which would be the natural progression we saw from blogs to podcasting. I posted a response on my Twitter page, or you can listen here.

I think micropodcasting sounds sexier though. And what’s there to stop us in the future making micro videocasts? You could be at a restaurant and do a quick food review on your camera phone, or record a quick message out the front of the Merlion in Singapore or the Eiffel tower, a modern day video Twitter “wish you were here” message.

Once again, I think Dave has really stumbled upon something interesting here. Not that he’s ever taken the time to reply to anything I’ve ever said ;-).

If you don’t really follow many internet trends, Twitter and Jaiku are two painfully hip services that allow you to post exactly what you’re doing and where you’re located at any given time. It’s a very simple formula that seems to be all the rage at the moment, and I admit I’m hooked!

I learned about Twitter from my very smart friend Feeeeeeeeeeeelix and have been using it for about a month. I think the mix of a clean and easy to read homepage mixed with the Twitterrific for Mac client I reviewed yesterday makes it a very nice distraction, plus I’ve been added by some interesting people and can keep up to date with their shenanigans.

My Twitter profile page

Anyway reading Scripting News this morning and looking through my unread tweets I read that Dave Winer has got himself a Jaiku account. At first I rolled my eyes at the prospect of another website that I thought obviously was just riding the wave and shamelessly copying, but while the two services have a similar basic premise (aka: post what you’re doing) they have radically different features, and I consider my initial position officially debunked!

From what I can tell Jaiku seems to be an aggregator for Web 2.0 goodness as well, so whenever one of my RSS/Atom/KitchenSink feeds is updated somewhere (post a comment on my blog, post a new show, upload a photo or bookmark something) it will be posted on my Jaiku page. Ironically I can even use this feature to subscribe to my Twitter account, continue to post on it and have my tweets routed to Jaiku as well, until I can decide which to use full time. Argh!

The other advantage of Jaiku is the commenting feature, with one click you can view all the comments for a particular post. I posted two messages and had half a dozen replies to each within an hour, crazy!

My Jaiku profile page

Who needs MySpace when you have these slick services I ask you now? Really makes me think though how dependent I really am on Web 2.0 stuff, and it seemed to happen so gradually I didn’t see it coming, crazy!

Seem to have said “crazy” a lot on this post. Crazy.