Rubénerd!

For just over one week, I've moved from a Mac Pro, a 15" MacBook Pro and two X Series ThinkPads to an 11" MacBook Air as my primary machine. You read that right. So how is it working out?

Context

For the first couple of years of university, and subsequent staying home to look after my mum, my primary machine was a first generation 15" MacBook Pro. For a desktop replacement I could carry regularly between Adelaide, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, its gorgeously large screen, discrete graphics and ExpressCard slot were wonderful. So much so, that I was willing to live with the burden of lugging a 2.5kg (5.6lb) device around with me in a giant bag, even when I was just heading to a local coffee shop or to classes.

Now that my university is the same place home is, the pressing need for a portable powerhouse evaporated. Despite being a fraction of the power of that MacBook Pro, I carried a ThinkPad X40 then X61s with Fedora Linux to university classes and coffee shops. For similar battery life, they were easily half the weight and meant I could take much smaller bags. For the heaving lifting, a refurbished Mac Pro had far more expandability, and meant I could dismantle my stonehenge of external drives.

The MacBook Air!

So we come to this gorgeous, lightweight 11" MacBook Air my sister and father generously bought for me for Yule. I could rave on and on about it over a long series of blog posts... so I will. Stay tuned for individual posts discussing specific experiences and technical specs over the coming weeks ^_^.

Ultimately though, as one can't gauge how delicious a meal is simply by the ingredients that go into it, the technical specs of such a device are secondary to how it actually feels to use. That's a pretty airy fairy statement for an IT professional to make, and certainly I'm aware the MacBook Air is no slouch, but to me this device represents a fundamental shift in the way I live my life.

This 11" MacBook Air is fast, the battery life is fantastic, and its so small and light I can throw it into my tiny backpack and almost feel as though there's nothing in it. That, its charger and my Amazon eInk Kindle already weigh less than the lightest ThinkPad I own, and less than half the weight of my MacBook Pro. Weight has been lifted off my shoulders in every conceivable sense.

Tradeoffs?

And yet, I don't feel like I'm losing anything. Quite the opposite, with this form factor I feel as though I can carry it around with me everywhere. I'm an odd fellow, and inspiration for code and prose come to me at the most bizarre times. The fact I can just whip out this tiny computer and throw my ideas onto it with Xcode, TextMate 2, Homebrew, OmniFocus, TextExpander, MacVim, Alfred and Parallels Desktop along with the Gimp, Inkscape, LibreOffice Draw, Dia and all my beloved shell apps and languages is just... it's indescribable.

Perhaps having heard me describe my ideal machine many times, my family opted to spend the extra money on upgrading the memory from 4GiB to 8GiB, rather than upgrading the stock 64GB solid state drive. It was a wise choice; having used ThinkPads with 20 and 30GB SSDs, I've become used to the idea of using portable computers for current projects, and using rsync to back them up to my Mac Pro with its masses of storage. The fact my MacBook Air now has more memory than my Mac Pro blows my mind! But technical stuff is for the next post.

Suffice to say, I'm a week into using this machine, and already I can't imagine my life without it. If that's not a sign of an indispensable device, I don't know what is. #boom.

I thought I'd tried every conceivable editor from the IBM E Editor to Vim and everything in between, but I'd never used SciTE before. #herpderp!

And you call yourself a hacker

SciTE is a simple, cross platform text editor with a tabbed interface, syntax highlighting for all the major suspects and a trippy icon. It also reads like "science" which is just too cool. It was originally developed by Neil Hodgson in 1998 to demonstrate the open source Scintilla editing library, but is now a fully featured application in its own right.

MacPorts has the latest version, and it's also available on the App Store. Fedora 17 had a fairly dated 2.x version in its repos, so I downloaded the latest and greatest 3.2.3 release and built it. The tarball also came with the latest version of Scintilla.

% sudo -s
# tar xzvf scite*tgz
# cd scintilla/gtk or scintilla/qt
# make
# cd ../../scite/gtk or /qt
# make
# make install
# exit

The output from make install. On Xfce it doesn't matter that it only installed a 48x48px icon in pixmaps, but this won't cut it on Gnome 3!

[root@nia]/usr/local/src/scite/gtk# make install
install -m 755 -d /usr/bin /usr/share/scite
install -m 755 ../bin/SciTE /usr/bin
for files in ../src/*.properties ../doc/*.html ../doc/SciTEIco.png ../doc/PrintHi.png; \
do \
install -m 644 $files /usr/share/scite; \
done
install -m 755 -d /usr/share/applications /usr/share/pixmaps
install -m 755 SciTE.desktop /usr/share/applications/SciTE.desktop
install -m 644 Sci48M.png /usr/share/pixmaps/Sci48M.png

Impressions

The beautiful, simple Geany IDE which I've been using for many years uses the same Scintilla library that SciTE does, and there is a bit of a family resemblance in the layout of the editing area.

On the Vim/Emacs continuum of kitchen-sinkness, SciTE falls more on the Vim side. The initial configuration is fairly sparse, and it's up to you to customise it the way you want. The first things I did were turning on line numbering and the status bar, which helpfully shows which column the cursor is in, and what type of newline is being employed (in my *nix case, LF). No doubt these can be customised.

User configuration is stored in various *properties files which you can conveniently access from the Options menu. I haven't had time to look into this so far.

In terms of usability, it employs all the same key shortcuts we're used to in other applications, such as CTRL+S for save. I'll admit in Geany I never have this problem, but in SciTE I keep reaching for that escape key to start hammering away my Vim shortcuts. Perhaps it's the minimalist interface ;).

Pushing onto my editor stack

For someone who otherwise likes minimalism and doesn't install things unless he really needs them, the last thing I need is another editor. On this ThinkPad right now I have Gvim, Geany, LaTeXila, NetBeans, JASSPA MicroEmacs, Torvald's me, Bluefish and Leafpad from Xfce. I've also been told to try Sublime Text, and I have Chocolat on my Mac. I'll commit to one eventually ^_^;;

With all this excitement about cloud storage, I thought I'd try something a little different!

Pronounced "wah-lah", apparently!

Wuala is a cloud storage service by LaCie that comes with 5GB of free storage, with the option to purchase more. Like the sucker for advertising I am, I saw a label for the service on a LaCie external hard drive at an Apple Store, and was immediately interested!

What sets Wuala it apart from Dropbox and Google Drive is it encrypts your data before it's sent to their servers. Technically speaking, this means not even Wuala employees can access your data, unless you make it public (which you can do).

As an added bonus in a similar vein, Wuala's severs are based in Switzerland, Germany and France. While Europe's privacy laws are by no means perfect either, these days I feel safer having my data there than the United States.

Usage

As I've mentioned previously, I dislike installing client software for online services, especially for something that may as well be public anyway. Given Wuala is performing local encryption before sending my data off however, I see their software as a necessary evil.

Once you install their client software (the subject for a future post), you're given the open to create a new Wuala account. Registration is fairly straight forward, and after responding to a confirmation email you're in your new cloud drive.

The client software runs in Oracle's Java or the OpenJDK (my choice) and should be pretty familiar to those used to the Finder, Nautilus, Thunar and the like. You can create folders, upload/download files, and set folders and files public or private (the default). They also have iOS and Android client applications.

What I really like however is it's ability to mount as a virtual local volume. Having tried on a fairly vanilla Fedora install, Wuala was able to create a new Fuse mount without any trouble, though the first time it took a minute or so to create it. Then I was able to drag and drop files from within Nautilus:

And explore with the shell. Imagine what you could do with this!

It has lots of other features, though I haven't looked much more into it yet. Something called "Time Travel" looks as though it could be a revision system of some sort.

So far I'm impressed. I'll report my day-to-day experience in the coming days.

Given I've had my Kindle for just over a week now, I thought I'd do a quick followup review that follows up my previous review. Well that and the title were superfluous.

(Disclaimer: The screen and buttons aren't scuffed, I've just kept the original temporary plastic film over the device until my Kindle screen protector is delivered. Yes, I don't want any scratch marks on this screen that I'll be looking at for hopefully many years!)

The practical stuff

As I said before, one of the reasons for getting the Kindle was my increasing addiction to eBooks on my iTelephone, particularly when I'm on the train or waiting at banks, etc. The convenience of whipping out the Kindle from my pocket and reading a book where I left off on a beautiful, sharp screen that looks like paper has been nothing short of glorious. Given I tend to read a novel and non-fiction book at the same time, the device is a fraction of the weight of two tomes, and infinitely more portable.

Synching has also been very simple. I've started organising books into folders by author, and renaming all the .mobi files by removing author names. The Kindle picks up these books in subfolders without any problems. I've also added the Kindle's folders to my global rsync backup program, so whenever its plugged in, the books are backed up onto my file server. Can't do that with paper!

One practical consideration has been the lack of a backlight. The very feature of LCDs that allows books to be read in the dark also causes much of the eye strain. In lieu of a booklight or case with a light, I bought a warm coloured, low wattage lamp for the side of my bed that creates enough ambient light to read by. Its rather nice in the evening to have the room bathed in this mild glow and reading for a couple of hours.

I also use it for... reading!

Which brings us to how well it has functioned as an ebook reader for me. In the week and a few days I've had it, I've read three novels cover to cover, and one of them was a Michael McCollum! The barrier to entry for reading is obviously that much lower, at least for me.

I often read people's lamentations that ebook readers aren't as good as books, but I argue they're better. The Kindle 4 is lighter than even a paperback which lends itself well to holding up in bed, and lightly tapping a button is so much easier than holding a book open and turning pages, particularly in confined spaces like train seats.

The next step is to review the books I've been reading, and to potentially make a list here :). I suppose I could resurrect my Listal account, they're owned by Amazon now aren't they?

If you're thinking of buying one, feel free to use my referral code to support the site, or go here if you don't like the idea of referrals. Thanks :)

After months of mulling (as distinct from mulleting), I finally caved today and decided on a Kindle!

The least you need to know

I used to read obsessively as a kid, but when I started university I tended to read fewer novels. Partly due to a lack of spare time, partly because I was always moving around and didn't have the luggage space to be carting around books on camels like a certain person.

With the iPhone 4 and iBooks though, I started reading more. The convenience of whipping out my phone on a train, when I was waiting for the train, during boring meetings or lectures (you didn't read that) and reading a book was marvelous. The relatively poor phone reception in the Airport and East Hills tunnel (particularly during the morning rush) also lent itself well to consuming pre-downloaded material!

As I started getting more serious though, the deficiencies of using the iPhone as a book reader became more evident. The super high pixel density meant text was ultra sharp and readable, however having to turn the page each time I finished a paragraph started to get old. Using it obsessively as a Twitter client also meant it often didn't have the juice to read a book on the train ride home. In the late evening in bed, even at the lowest brightness the screen still had too much glare to look at.

I could have got an iPad, but the Kindle appealed to me for its eInk display, huge battery life, and the fact I could probably fit it into my pocket... I hoped! My iPhone 4 is already a twittering, internet using machine for the go, all I wanted was something that would let me read.

You didn't need to read those previous paragraphs

This afternoon I came home with a Kindle 4, the current low end iteration of the ebook readers that have taken the tech world by storm. Which could be dangerous, because lightning bolts could cause serious damage to kindling, and its surrounds.

Firstly, the packaging wasn't quite as elegant as an Apple product (nothing else ever is), but it was nevertheless clever and fun to open. Some people scoff at this, but in many East Asian cultures the wrapping of a present is often just as important as the present itself! Scoff if you must, I don't care :).

Reading the 170g weight in the product specifications did not prepare me for just how light the device is. Feeling it in my hand, it weighed less than my iPhone 4! As an added bonus, not only do they fit into the leg pockets of my tactical pants, but in the regular side pockets as well! I can see myself taking this thing everywhere, which means I'll be reading far more too.

Syncronising was also also a snap. One of my few gripes with Apple hardware since my first iPod in 2003 was the need to use iTunes; the Kindle merely appears on the desktop as a USB device which you use to transfer your files. That's it! I have to admit I was unreasonably happy by this.

The screen is what blew me away the most though, as one would expect. Loading up some P.G. Wodehouse, Bill Bryson, Michael McCollum and picking up right where I left off, the difference in legibility and the extra screen real estate compared to the iPhone was incredible. I adjusted the default font size a point lower, and was charging through pages like nobody's business.

Like the iPad, I think eInk is the kind of technology one has to see for themselves and use to truly appreciate it. It really does just look like a sheet of paper, and save for the small screen refresh flash (which I got used to fairly quickly), holding it in your hand it looks like a real novel. Given I only bought electronic copies of McCollum's works for example, it finally felt as though I had a real version of one of his books, in my hand. It was rather wonderful to say the least :).

Issues

Given I've had this less than 24 hours I was bound to run into n00b problems, but just a few quick ones.

Firstly, I couldn't figure out how to leave the screensaver mode, and searches in the Amazon support centre returned a frustratingly thin list of irrelevant entries when I tried searching. Turns out, to leave the screensaver you press the power button on the bottom of the device.

Secondly, and this is still unresolved, I've been unable to enter the password for our home WiFi connection because I haven't found a way to enter a vertical bar/pipe "|" character on the virtual keyboard. For now its not a concern because I've just been loading books through the USB cable, but it's still a pain.

Anyway, having lots of fun and can't wait to snuggle up in bed with some books that weigh even less than a paperback! No doubt I'll be posting more about it in the future.

If you're thinking of buying one, feel free to use my referral code to support the site, or go here if you don't like the idea of referrals. Thanks :)

Fewer of my friends are blogging now than ever before, which is a shame. In the spirit of friends helping friends, I've decided every now and then to share some blogs from people I read and enjoy, and that perhaps you should be reading too, in the hopes that perhaps it'll help reverse this trend :). Today we look at A Lonely September.

Sebastian

I first met Sebastian during a screening at the UTS Anime Club. He was substantially taller than me, with masses of light blond hair and a French accent so strong I couldn't understand a word he was saying. After reminding me I wasn't wearing my glasses, I put them on and realised he was in fact shorter than me, with dark coloured hair and sounded as French as me. Which is to say, not at all.

Even moreso than me, Seb (as he friends call him) is a worldly soul. Originally from Lima, he's an Australian citizen with ancestors originating from Peru, Spain, Holland and China according to his about page.

This is where I first ran into some serious issues. Holland of course refers to the specific area of The Netherlands, but many English speakers use the term to refer to the entire country. Is his ancestors specifically from the area we now know as Holland, or was he just referring to The Netherlands?

It only gets worse with China. While most people associate China with the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China that predominantly operates from Taiwan also considers itself the sole legitimate government of China, and even maintains the original Chinese characters instead of those simplified ones that are easier to write but look infinitely less cool. Which one is his ancestors from?

Should we be concerned that he intentionally obfuscated his origins? Is he involved in some dodgy business dealings that necessitate such shady writing?

The Site

But we're getting ahead of ourselves here, or ahead of his blog specifically. Perhaps in an attempt to render me foolish in the eyes of others, I was in the process of taking a screenshot of site, uploading it, and putting it here for the world to see, but no sooner had I done this but he quickly changed his blog theme. Whereas before he used the Twenty Ten theme by the WordPress team, he now appears to be using San Fran, a theme presumably named after San Francisco where those cable cars and fog are.

Ahah! FOG! He's clouding our judgement, you see. I'm on to you Sebastian, you sneaky, sneaky devil you.

My second issue had to do with his server reliability. Upon entering his URL into Firefox and pressing the ENTER key which is located imminently to the left of the keyboard's edge under most circumstances, I was presented with this error message:

Now I hear what you're saying. Ruben, it's entirely your fault, you didn't spell his domain name properly. While this is entirely true, I fault Sebastian entirely for this. If you're going to have a domain name, the least you could do is register every conceivable misspelling of it to redirect to the real address. With domains costing less than $20 a year to register and maintain, Seb could solve this problem for the low, low price of a few thousand dollars a year.

Conclusion

As I've written above, A Lonely September is a great read and consists of prose and wit that far eclipse mine: I have every confidence he can fulfill his dream to be a writer ^_^. Wait, did I write that above? Never mind, I intended to put it in there, and intentions are everything.

He's been running the site for over a year now, and I look forward to the next one :).

Disclaimer: This post was written Tuesday morning, but was only published Tuesday evening due to workload, a gigantic headache, alien invasions and the like.

I'll admit I had reservations about Gnome 3 and the new Gnome-Shell, but having used them for 48 hours now I'm pleasantly surprised... despite some serious artefacting issues!

In defence of change!

After years of work, the latest iteration of the Gnome desktop environment was unleashed upon the FLOSS world in late April. Like the fateful KDE 4, Gnome 3 brings with it a slew of controversy, most of which surrounds its fundamental rethink of the typical desktop metaphor... something I personally think has been long overdue.

It's no secret most contemporary desktop environments for *nix have been modelled on Windows. While I could sympathise with their reasons for doing so, Mac OS X demonstrated you don't need be constrained by start menus and taskbars, and it always felt to me as though they were missing an opportunity to be bold and try something new themselves.

So how did they do at it?

My test machine

My test machine is my venerable IBM ThinkPad X40 with a freshly installed and updated Arch Linux i686. The Intel integrated graphics are crappy, but they sure made it a cinch to get 3D acceleration working with the open xf86-video-intel drivers.

Gnome 3 is also the default version of Gnome in Arch now, and my hat goes off to the team for making it so easy to install.

# pacmam -S gnome
# pacman -S gnome-extra

Like previous Gnome releases, you also need dbus. I went ahead and installed fuse and NetworkManager as well given this was for a laptop I'd be taking to coffee shops and wanting quick WiFi access with.

My impressions

Having used Gnome 3 for two days at uni and at my favourite coffee shop, I've been surprised at just how responsive and fast the system is even on this old machine (no, really!), and how quickly I've adapted to the Gnome-Shell way of doing things.

Instead of a messy desktop of icons or a Start Menu, Gnome-Shell puts your application shortcuts and active windows behind a screen you activate by merely throwing your mouse into the top left corner. I forgot what rule of GUI design this adheres to, but its the same philosophy behind Mac OS X's application menus: instead of having to specifically aim for something, you just throw the mouse against the screen edge and you're where you want to be. Threshold something, I forget.

When you activate the Gnome-Shell, the screen of icons and active windows takes up the entire screen, which also makes sense to me. The Start Menu on Windows (or KDE) has your complete attention when you're using it, so why limit its size to a tiny box?

Like Mac OS X's dock, your favourite applications are located in a favourites panel for easy access, or you can navigate all your applications in categories. Previews of all your active windows are also contained in a tab, much like Mac OS X's Expose which is vastly superior to Windows's awkward Alt+Tab and cluttered taskbar.

Unfortunately like Windows, Linux applications put their files all over the place so you can't merely expose an Applications folder in a file manager and let users launch what they want, like in Mac OS X. This seems to be an acceptable compromise.

What I'm really excited about however is the quick keyboard application launcher. I religiously use Alfred on my Macs (QS before that) and dmenu on my Linux and BSD boxes, so being able to simply type the name of an application I want and hitting enter is so convenient I'm lost when I go to a machine that doesn't have it!

The bad

Unfortunately, while great to use even on this older ThinkPad, there are few glaring problems.

1. For some reason some of the fonts are rendered virtually unintelligible despite installing a ton of FLOSS fonts from pacman before installing xorg.

2. There are persistent white artefacts over much of the UI, specifically corners of windows and icons. If I didn't know any better, I'd say it was a CSS border-radius rendering error!

3. Finally, the top bar in Gnome 3 is supposed to be black, but in my setup its completely transparent, and many of the notification icons are missing unless I hover over them with my mouse.

I suspect these issues are PEBKAC though; I'll be enquiring on the Arch forums.

Overall

A solid release, and I'm surprised by how much I'm enjoying using it! I go back to Xfce on my FreeBSD tower and even my Macs and they feel like a step backwards. I suspect a few of the detractors might like it if they were to actually give it a try. I haven't been this pleasantly surprised by a piece of software in a long time!

hwbrowser is a slick little GTK application that probes your Linux machine's hardware and presents the results in a two pane window, in a similar fashion to OS X's Hardware Profiler.

Some things I like about it

• Fast, simple, no nonsense
• Self explanatory, no docs needed (or are provided!)
• Uses GTK but doesn't use any of the Gnome APIs, so you can use it on DEs like Xfce without too many dependencies
• For a FOSS application the icon is surprisingly well detailed and cute -- very important!

It's certainly no replacement for procfs or dmesg piped to less/more, but if you just want a quick and broad overview of the hardware on your system it's spiffy. It's also quite old, but given its not available on FreeBSD I could be forgiven for not knowing of its existance... right?

Almost works great on Fedora

I've settled on Fedora as my Linux distribution of choice; as far as I know hwbrowser isn't installed by default but it's available from the free YUM repos. The only caveat is for some reason the Hard Drive tab remains blank.

Fedora 13 is out but my machines are still on 12 at the time of this post.

The folks running the Bus Eireann Deals Twitter account asked people this evening to trial their new alert system and provide feedback. This post is a response to said request.

Let me just start by saying I'm so thoroughly disjointedness disappointed (dang this Firefox spell checker is hopeless!) with their service I could harpoon an Attitude Chicken. Wait, Bob Geldof is Irish isn't he?

I tried three buses, read that three buses and the service couldn't even find them, let alone give me timetable or fare information:

• The 105 from Lorong Chuan to Scotts Road
• The 75 from Holland Village to Marina Centre
• The misleadingly titled Aeroline from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur

When we were in Ireland the weather was so bad we kept hearing how Bus Eireann were having to cancel services. We almost booked a bunch of trips with them, whew!