Rubénerd Blog :)

Maybe it’s because the computer is too slow and old! HA! ^_^;

Thank you, thank you, you were a terrific audience.

After much anticipation my copy of Snow Leopard I pre-ordered back on Monday arrived in our mailbox early this morning. Of course Murphy’s Law was in full force: I had classes, a ton of assignments and work, I tagged along with my sister to the airport for her flight to Canberra and I set our toaster oven on fire when I tried to make a slice of toast and forgot about it. Imagine the damage if it had been a grilled cheese sandwich.

Well here we are at 23:30 and I finally have some time to install this here Snow Leopard. Problem is I absolutely loathe upgrades, I much prefer starting a new install of an operating system from scratch so there’s the lowest chance of something going wrong and it also forces me to do a thorough system clean out and to check the few files I don’t have backed up daily.

There probably won’t be many blog posts today while I frantically work on this here Snow Leopard install preparation, so you can take five. Speak of the devil, I’m listening to that now. Genius.

Oh bummer, one of my external hard drives is almost full already. This is going to be a long evening!

UPDATE: I’ve been advised that the reason why urlTea was forced to go offline was due to clients getting sick and electrocuted from trying to brew their computers in mugs. Makes sense to me.

Reading about the latest problems with the tr.im URL shortening service, it got me thinking about urlTea and whatever happened to it. Before the current crop of shorter URL shorteners appeared such as is.gd, bit.ly and the like, TinyURL was king but I liked using urlTea because it was something a bit different and I loved the name! The previous iteration of my blog theme had links to URLtea under each post for well over a year, in fact I still think the icon I used for it is still on my server somewhere.

As of April it seems their site has ceased to exist like an infamous Monty Python parrot. If you attempt to visit their site, you’re told the site is Temporarily Unavailable and a scary error line warning of a malformed httpd server file (gulp) suggests they won’t be coming back anytime soon. Bummer.

It’s normal for sites to go offline on the intertubes when their owners run out of a combination of time, money and/or interest, but intermediary sites that serve to redirect links pose an entirely new set of problems if and when they’re disconnected. It’s a bit scary.

In the meantime I’ve switched to RubyURL.com which was the other site I used to use alongside urlTea because it has the same few letters as Ruben and Rubenerd, and at the time I was into the Ruby programming language.

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.

Unfortunately I’ve come across something that doesn’t seem to be playing well with Mozilla Firefox 3.5: Tab Mix Plus. Despite working flawlessly in the betas and release candidates, my tabs since going to the final release have been displaying weird artefacts or are simply not drawn properly.

I’ll wait to see if I can reproduce it predictably, then file a bug report or post a message on their forums. I’m running version 0.7.2009062901 which as far as I know is the most current one.

There are reports circulating the intertubes that Microsoft will be using the Microsoft Word (or Microsoft Office Word or whatever mouthful name they’ve chosen now) rendering engine for Outlook 2010, their personal disinformation manager. Well meaning websites like FixOutlook.org that is so popular with Twitter folk demonstrate with screenshots this move will break rich HTML email message formatting.

I’m frustrated by this story, not because of the rendering engine change but rather because there’s a debate about this at all. In my view (grilled cheese pun) email with HTML to change appearance and layout is one of the most nonsensical online inventions of all time. Why?

• Spammers can include specially crafted embedded images to verify an email address is active and can include hyperlinks to malicious websites that unsuspecting users will click.
• Such messages take up far more disk space and take longer to download without really adding anything of value.
• When fatigued people get hundreds or thousands of messages a day, the last thing they need is superflous junk; just give us your message and move on!

I’ve always opted to receive "plain" versus "HTML" messages, but sometimes I don’t have a choice. Rich HTML email needs to be quietly shot, buried and never spoken of again. Not that I’m biased.

My current cloud obsession theme

It seems I’m never quite satisfied with the configuration of my Armada M300 subnotebook which despite it’s age works as a fantastic netbook with a brighter screen and nicer keyboard than any of “them”!

My current software configuration having played around with Arch Linux and Debian at various times is now back to FreeBSD with 7.2-RELEASE i386 with the GEOM Gjournal system enabled on /usr and compiled-in kernel support for Vesa shells, all of which I’ll be talking about here at some point.

And because I have new love for link clouds, here’s my currently (and ever changing) list of software installed on it from the ports collection, some of which you can see in the screenshots.

Xorg

with Mach64 video drivers

Openbox

very lightweight window manager

pypanel

lightweight panel with transparency

urxvt

lighter xterm replacement with unicode

Nitrogen

display backgrounds with nice selection window

Midnight Commander

fast orthodox shell file manager

Vim

text editor

Cream

Tasty Vim extension

Firefox 3

grilled cheese sandwich iron

Elinks

shell web browser

Alpine

shell email client

Pan

newsgroup reader

Agent: Agent Johnson, FBI.
Homer: Very happy to meet you…
Agent: [Because of your tax evasion,] you’re gonna work for us.
Homer: Okay, but can you pay under the table? I got a little tax problem…

The all new FreeBSD 7.2 with the all new svelte Xfce 4.6.0 desktop running in VMware Fusion on my MacBook Pro.

If you love FreeBSD as much as me you probably already know about this, but FreeBSD 7.2 has officially been released. I’m really excited about all this good stuff, particularly point 2 shown below in the annoucement. Jails are another reason why I’ve stuck to FreeBSD instead of GNU/Linux, and now being able to assign mutiple addresses means they’re even closer to a virtual machine alternative. Thinking about the possibilities is making my head spin! I’ll be looking into it further and posting more about Jails sometime soon.

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE. This is the third release from the 7-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 7.1 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights:

• support for fully transparent use of superpages for application memory
• support for multiple IPv4 and IPv6 addresses for jails
• csup(1) now supports CVSMode to fetch a complete CVS repository
• Gnome updated to 2.26, KDE updated to 4.2.2
• sparc64 now supports UltraSparc-III processors

For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the online release notes and errata list, available at:

• http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/7.2R/relnotes.html
• http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/7.2R/errata.html

For more information about FreeBSD release engineering activities, please see http://www.FreeBSD.org/releng/.

I downloaded the FreeBSD 7.2 DVD image from Internode’s mirror because our internet connection here is capped (yuck), but uploads aren’t capped so I’ll be setting up the torrent from the FreeBSD Bittorrent tracker so I can seed the heck out of it!

As I’ve said every time, I wish to thank all the people at the FreeBSD project for their tireless efforts. Combined, they continue to create and develop some of the most beautiful software in the world, and I consider it a honour that I’m allowed to use it. Congratulations everyone.