Rubénerd!

Having moved from the Mozilla Application Suite to Phoenix 0.2 in the mean old days, I'm giving SeaMonkey a try and am really liking it.

Sea-what?

Aside from those on Twitter who asked me why would you do that lol!111!!eleventy!, many didn't seem to know what SeaMonkey was. As well as an adorable aquatic critter, SeaMonkey is a web browser, email client, html editor, address book, IRC client, newsgroup client, RSS aggregator, positron accelerator, coffee machine and working implementation of the Haber Process. Believe it.

SeaMonkey is the community driven continuation of the Mozilla Application Suite which Mozilla originally spun off Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox and Thunderbird from. The Mozilla Application Suite in turn was based off the original Netscape Communicator, the dominant WWW client software for much of the late 1990s.

SeaMonkey Mail

I've been a heavy Thunderbird user for years, predominantly because it allowed me to easily import my existing Mozilla data at the time. Unfortunately, I've haven't liked some of the changes in the 3.x series. The new tab UI feels inconsistent and confusing. I preferred the old way of searching which quickly returned results in the same view, and without expensive indexes being constantly built. And so on.

SeaMonkey Mail reminds me of the Thunderbird 2.x series, which in my opinion was the best graphical email client since that one that was bundled with Cooee (whatever that was called) and the older versions of Eudora. It detected my Thunderbird user data, and had all my accounts and gigs of messages imported in a few short minutes. Understandable given they largely share a common codebase, but still impressive.

I've added all my email accounts from Thunderbird and [[re-]al]pine, subscribed to all my newsgroups from Pan, and have even replaced the now unusable (in my opinion) Google Reader with it for web feeds and whatnot. Four applications in one! ^^

SeaMonkey Navigator

Given I'm using SeaMonkey for my mail, I figured I'd try using it as my browser in place of Firefox as well. The current 2.5 release is based off Firefox 8.0, and as such supports the same HTML5 and CSS3 goodies.

I was impressed at how many of my critical Firefox extensions like NoScript, Ghostery and Simple Clocks work flawlessly in SeaMonkey. Unfortunately, Tree Style Tab doesn't, and currently I haven't been able to find an available replacement extension that puts my tabs on the side, ala Opera. For someone who has dozens of online docs open at a time, this is really important! I have a newsgroup thread and a post on mozillaZine about it, we'll see if anyone can help out.

Functionally, I've noticed no difference using SeaMonkey Navigator over Firefox other than perhaps in memory usage. SeaMonkey uses less memory than Firefox and Thunderbird combines, which again I suppose makes sense.

What are we up to now? Five applications in one! ^^

Conclusions

Over all (is what people wear on farms) I'm surprised by how quick I've taken to this software.

The minimalist in me likes that I've replaced two icons with one in my dock. I like that with a CMD-1 I can get to a browser, and CMD-2 I can read practically all my internet communications in one window. It even comes with the "Modern" theme from the old days, which contains so much retro win I have it set as my default theme for now.

I'll be keeping Firefox for now just in case, but I haven't launched it since last Thursday.

Heartfelt thanks to Philip Chee, Karsten Düsterloh, Jens Hatlak, Robert Kaiser, Ian Neal, Neil Rashbrook, Andrew Schultz, Justin Wood, and all the others in the SeaMonkey community for your tireless efforts :).

Honestly, who cares about the Australia Network? I didn't even know it existed until a few weeks back. ~ Renai LeMay, of Delimiter

In the words of Daniel Eran Dilger, I do, and here's why.

The Obligatory Nostalgia Trip

The year was 1998 and we had just settled into our English class. Our teacher turned on the television and we began taking notes from the latest episode of Behind the News, an ABC production billed as rendering the news more interesting and understandable for kids. Unlike most of our peers however, we were six thousand kilometres away and watching the programme on the Australia Network, a cable TV station offered in the same SCV package as Deutche Welle and BBC World. Well okay it was called Australia Television back then, but the point stands.

My sister and I moved to Singapore in the mid 1990s when my father's business had us transferred. My mother had also been diagnosed with cancer at the time, and Singapore's medical facilites were above and beyond anything she could have received in Australia, so the timing was nothing short of miraculous.

In a story familiar to most of the tens of thousands of Australian expats living in Singapore, when we first arrived we were desperate to cling to anything that reminded us of home. Before Cold Storage began to sell Vegemite and Tim Tams, we had relatives post us the stuff. We ate spag bowl and sausage rolls perhaps even more than we did back home! And we got the Australia Network on cable. Years later when we found ourselves in Malaysia for a two year stint, we did again.

The old ABC News theme was better

More than "just" a rebroadcast of the ABC (as some Australian Twitterati seem to suggest it is), the Australia Network was a glimpse at home. We were able to watch news in novelty Australian accents, sports the rest of the world didn't care about (well okay we didn't, but they were there!), and all those comedies and dramas that would result in a blank face at a video store or rental place if you asked for them. During huge events like election seasons and natural disasters, their live coverage was invaluable.

In a capacity scant few Australians here realise, the Australia Network also served as a more realisitic and positive representation of Australia as compared to wave after wave of embarrasing, cliché tourism campaigns. Several Singaporeans I knew ended up studying in Australia in part because their parents watched the channel and appreciated what they saw, and many more travelled here after the myths had been dispelled that we all just hang around desert creeks in our tattered togs. One Indian friend of mine even became obsessed with The Castle!

Perhaps the need for such a station has dimished somewhat since the advent of reliable video streaming, torrents (being realistic here) and online versions of Australian newspapers, but the Australia Network is still a custodian of Australian culture in Asia, and I'd argue still plays a vital role in linking Australians overseas with their birth country.

Incidently, this was part of the reason I publically heaved a sigh of relief when Sky lost the tender to the ABC again. If they'd started broadcasting some of the commercial TV we have here, I'd be even more embarrased than those times John Howard came to Singapore and didn't even bother learning to pronounce certain words. It's a mer-lion, not a merl-eee-on, and Asia is import you trollfaced dope! But I digress.

Now all I need is a Singapore Network for here. I stream Class 95 and have my Phua Chu Kang VCDs, but not the same is it. A MediaCorp Singapore Network channel with a mix of Channel 5, 8 and CNA where I can get my Jack Neo, Gurmit Singh, Moses Lim fix would be much appreciated ^^. This reminds me of a story...

WordPress 3.3 continues the mad march to add more features, fueling further desire in me to move to something else.

Insert old man voice here!

When I first started using WordPress 1.6 in Febuary 2006, I was excited at how much easier and cross platform it was to create posts, though I was disappointed at the lack of tag support. As a stopgap, I used a Technorati tag plugin, and used categories as tags, a decision I'd regret several years later when WordPress finally got native tag support and I had hundreds of categories! With the aid of a graphic from that ridiculous[ly fun] IDOLM@STER Xenoglossia anime and Bugs Bunny, I talked about the problems I faced with all these categories in 2008.

Anyway, I belabour all this nostalgia to point out that since the introduction of tags, I don't think WordPress hasn't added anything I've used on a regular basis. I still upload all my material via SFTP/SCP, edit HTML rather than using the visual editor, mess around the backend with phpMyAdmin rather than using the GUI tools, and most of my plugins I've either written myself or sourced from other places are designed to disable features, rather than add new ones. I don't use the Links or Media sections at all, and have avoided using too many feature plugins so I'm not locked into the WordPress platform. I don't even use the standard web interface!

That's not to say those features aren't valuable or useful to the vast majority of WordPress bloggers. As with a lot of online services and applications, the initial simplicity from it's early days which attracted me to it have made way for more features to cater to its greater audience and market share.

WordPress 3.3

Aside from perhaps the i17n features of WordPress 3.3, and despite the hours of tireless effort and work put in by Matt and the WordPress team, this is the first major release I'm scratching my head and wondering if anything here is useful to me at all. Complexity is one of the enemies of security, and frankly (for my needs) all I see is an even larger zip file and more files that need to be updated and maintained, most of which I'll probably never use.

I'm tentatively moving over to the (almost ten times!) smaller, simpler and nicer to use Textpattern software once a few outstanding issues are resolved, but this latest WordPress update has even got my nostalgic for my Perl CGI days. Now *that* was something that was easy to update and keep simple, and I even had support for different timezones which as far as I know (though feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) WordPress still doesn't have despite promising it to us for over half a decade.

Old man voice, over and out!

I was a huge fan of The Borrowers growing up as a child, so this was a special treat this evening :).

I was only late by ten minutes!

Earlier this evening the UTS Anime Club went to see The Borrowers Arrietty at the Hoyts cinema complex on Broadway. I had never been there before, which necessitated plenty of Tweeting, directions and Google Maps. I could have asked a person on the street, but... real people!?

Turns out every Sydney university anime club (AFAIK) was represented on the signon sheet. Judging from the quick glance I manage to steal, it seems Sydney Uni and UNSW have the most members, though I'm sure they're not as cool as the UTS club. I'm just saying.

Hayao Miyazaki isn't Japan's Disney, he's better

The movie itself was incredibly touching and heartwarming, as one would expect. The visuals were absolutely stunning, the music was lovely, and the plot gradually developed rather than attempting to throw things at us all at once, as seems to be the current movie trend. Personally, I didn't find it as surreal as Spirited Away et al, but was still engaging and interesting enough even for The Grownups, which apparently according to my birth certificate I am.

As we discussed when we left the cinema, we agreed that one need only suspend their belief in physics to enjoy it ;).

Thanks to Alex for organising the trip for us, we had a great time ^_^.

The Blu-ray box set of the whole TV Anime of Toradora! will be released on December 21st, with an unaired new episode (OVA).

From The Akiba, via Vadim on Google+. One of my favourite series of all time, I'm unashamed ^_^.

CNET was one of the first websites I visited when we first got internet in the 1990s. I was horrified (mortified even) when they replaced their uniquely tech-retro typeface with a generic font a few years ago.

Needless to say, a horrendously egregious error seems to have finally been corrected! I applaud CNET for re-introducting their classic logo, and restoring a part of my childhood :). Now they just need to do something about the overwrought, ZDNet-esque site design, and degrade gracefully when people access their site without JavaScript.

According to TodayOnline (and they would know... right?) The Simpsons may potentially be getting the can after 23 years. As a reporter asked Krusty during one of his many retirement press conferences "Why now? Why not [years] ago?"

I was saying Boo Earns

The Simpsons is one of the defining television shows of our generation. People hundreds of years from now will be studying it to learn about pop culture, societal attitudes and humour of the 1990s and 2000s. Phrases such as d'oh! have entered our lexicon. Practically everyone in their 20s in the English speaking world (and a substantial number outside it) know all the characters, can spout random lines from episodes ad nauseum, or at the very least have watched it. I'd hazard a guess that Homer Simpson is more well known than most politicians, and certainly as much as any celebrity.

I saw my first episode when my family had a brief stint living in Brisbane in the mid 1990s. I was too young to understand many of the jokes, but the show still appealed to me, despite the episode being about American football of all things! My favourite character instantly became Kent Brockman; hearing what he had to say in an authoritative news voice cracked me up far too much! I attribute the series to my fascination with voices, an interest that landed my sister and I our first paid jobs at Discovery Channel Asia as voice-over actors.

Even now in my mid 20s, the Simpsons is one of the few television programmes I watch on a regular basis, often times even older episodes I've seen hundreds, possibly trillions, of times before. The episodes have a timeless quality and a way to make me smile that very few things do. I still quote them even now!

Nacho nacho man!

Normally I don't agree with the consensus of the general public when it comes to media (though I was doing this before the hipsters! Oh, wait...), but I'll be blunt when I say the last couple of seasons have been virtually unwatachable. Once heartwarming, biting and hilarious, the show's decline in quality has been observable to all but apparently the show's PR folk.

The financial struggles of the working class were eschewed (gesundheit) for zanier plots that had more potential for jokes, but detracted from the believability that made the show unique.

The move to high definition and the further saturation reminded me of Lisa's statement to Randal Kurtis "Better effects don't make for better storytelling".

The movie was mildly funny, though could have just been an episode.

I could go on, but as with the episodes themselves, you've probably already seen these arguments listed thousands of times. All I'll add is: I have fond memories of growing up with The Simpsons, but perhaps it really is time to move on. I'll miss its reassuring presence, if not its later story lines.

Smell you later with Dr Farnsworth's Smell-o-scope, assuming you don't settle this "pay" dispute. Thank you for all the entertainment, laughs and good times :)

If this was just a PR move to generate free press and to reinvigorate public support for the show... touché.

I was born too late to be a part of the Fortran generation, but upon discussing the language with my sister this evening I received the following in response:

You mean 4chan?

As I said on The Twitters, I think a part of my brain just melted.

In other news, I need that font. Retro futuristic is one of the single greatest design methodologies of all time. I also need their slogan printed on a shirt.

A discussion on Hacker News about TextMate 2.0 spawned a fascinating general discussion on text editors, specifically what people have replaced TextMate with in its intervening abandonware years. Because I have a blog, I leave my comments here! ^_^

As a matter of disclosure, this post was created in one of the aforementioned text editors.

Granted I'm more looking forward to post 4096 (2^12) in my cavalcade of pointless site milestones, but 4000 posts is still pretty big! To celebrate, I've dug out a series of screenshots showing the history of the site, for those who are mildly interested. Thank you for readership and patronage! ^_^

2003-2004

I registered Rubenerd.com in 2003 when I was in high school in Singapore. I didn't know what I wanted to use it for, just that it was to be named after the email address I'd been using since I was 12. Ruben + Nerd = Rubenerd, it seemed super smart... at the time.

I created a series of tabs using Paint Shop Pro, then lined them up. This was before YouTube and Flickr had only just started, so I hosted all my material under several tabs!

2004

After realising a site with heaps of sections was simply too much work to maintain, I completely ditched the old site and rebooted Rubenerd.com as a blog. I had just started learning Perl so I created a simple CGI script to generate the pages. Ironically, I think this earliest version of Rubenerd.com was the best looking, go figure!

2005

After a few months I moved to RapidWeaver, a Mac OS X client-side blogging platform. I still think it had by far the best user interface for writing posts I've ever used, though their themes at the time left a little to be desired!

2005-2006

When I started studying in Adelaide, I moved from RapidWeaver to WordPress. While RapidWeaver worked great on my PowerMac G5, I couldn't exactly take it back with me when I went back to Singapore during the holiday breaks!

I liked the Blix theme, but made the colours bolder and far less attractive. Someone should really have stopped me.

2006-2009

Up to this point my blog had been a sporadically-updated sideshow to my podcast, but in 2006 I started blogging on a more regular basis, as can be seen in my site archive. With this in mind, I decided to take the vanilla Sandbox theme and create new themes for my podcast site, and one for the blog to match. I was generally in a pretty dark mood (though not emo!) given family troubles and my mum's rapidly deteriorating health, and I suppose this was reflected somewhat here.

I also resurrected the logo I'd designed for my "business" in primary school helping expats fix their printers to tap some of that youthful optimism. This logo has been on all my stuff again ever since :).

2007

Having been tired with a dark background for a while, I decided to start from scratch with a new lighter theme I coded myself, and on a new domain. The new site and the htaccess redirects from Rubenerd.com were live for less than 24 hours before I ditched it and went back to the previous one!

2009-2010

Changed themes again, also created entirely from scratch. I saw my original Rubenerd.com site design and felt a tingle of nostalgia, so I tried to recreate parts of it and match the colours of the original tabs, with mixed results!

2011

Obviously not a lot of progress ;).