Rubénerd :)

I’ve talked about and reviewed Michael Franks many times on the Rubenerd Show, but have never written anything about him. This is my attempt to do this amazing artist justice in the blog medium. Hope he would approve!

Michael Franks is an American jazz artist who sings songs with a great sense of humour and refreshingly interesting lyrics. If you have never heard of Michael Franks, you are missing out on hearing the greatest singer/songwriter of all time.

My family’s frank obsession with Michael Franks (I thought the wording was clever!) started with my mum in the early 1980s. As the story goes, she was called over to a friend’s house one afternoon after being told about an intriguing artist who sang, amonst other things, about cold toes and finding the perfect shampoo!

Since then, Michael Franks has quite literally been a family institution of the Schade family! Out of Michael’s whopping 19 albums we have 8 on original records and the rest on CDs and purchased copies as MP3s on iTunes. I’ve personally got 1.8GB of Michael Franks music on my computer right now as I type this!

I really don’t know much about music; I can’t play an instrument, I can read scores and as I find when trying to articulate the sensation of drinking wine, I certainly don’t know any of the fancy language people use to describe it, but what I do know is what I like, and I like Michael Franks’ music.

My mum and I agree that whilst the tunes themselves are smooth and a pleasure to listen to in their own right, it is the lyrics in his work that really set him apart from any other artist. My mum says amongst other things it would probably be impossible to win an argument with someone like Michael Franks who obviously has such an extrodinary grasp of literature!

The wide and varying styles of his music are incredible, and really show off his versatility as an artist. His music ranges from the more up beat style in When Sly Calls, to the jazzy Monks New Tune and Sanpaku, to fun electronics in Now That Your Joystick’s Broke, to the suave and sophisticated Alone At Night and Tiger in the Rain, the latter album by the same name still my favourite.

You can find out more about Michael Franks at his official website at MichaelFranks.com, his article on Wikipedia, on iTunes (do a search for Michael Franks), the aptly named Michael Franks Yahoo! Group and even his own CafePress store.

And now if you’d excuse me, I’m flying south for some snorkelling and sleep. Just leave your message when you hear the beep. :D

After a few days of testing I’ve applied the new layout of the Rubenerd Blog over to the Show. There are still a few quirks I’m ironing out, but I assumed it would be a work in progress.

Cheers :)

Rubenerd Show c.2006

Rubenerd Show c.2007

Coming to you live from the San Francisco Coffee House in Mid Valley Mega Mall in Kuala Lumpur! Drumroll please…

After millions of hours of blood, sweat and tiers (thanks for that line James ;) ) the updated 2007 Rubenerd Blog skin has finally been rolled out. I’ll be mirroring the same design onto the Rubenerd Show site soon too, but I thought I’d field test it here first.

Rubenerd Blog c.2006

Rubenerd Blog c.2007

The biggest challenge when updating this design? Internet Explorer! I got the design down pat and working in Gecko and WebKit without modification, but loading it up in good old IE6 broke more of the page than I thought would have been possible! Internet Explorer 7 was marginally better, but with so many people still running their XP machines without updates we’ll probably have to continue writing out IE6 CSS hacks for a long time to come.

Steven Colbert from the Colbert Report and Jimbob Kloss from Whole Wheat Radio both say that people who have blogs and podcasts that simply talk about their blogs and podcasts are no good. If you agree, then please disregard this post ;).

On the 22nd of November 2006 I posted Comparing Flat Tax to Variable Tax, my rebuttal to the dubiously titled article Understanding Tax Cuts: A Must Read For Children, Adults, Journalist and Absolutely for Liberals article published on the right wing World View Weekend website that claimed, with no economic logic, that variable tax systems are evil.

Well just today I received one of the best comments I’ve ever received for a post, by Chris in Australia:

It’s interesting to note that America’s government debt increased the most during Reagan’s presidency, with his combination of huge tax cuts and his failure to cut government spending at the same time. That’s the problem with politicians who promise big tax cuts – they fail to cut the government spending and instead borrow the money from other sources, placing the public in debt. The same has happened under George W Bush.

The problem is that people don’t question how the government manages to cut taxes and then go on a spending spree, and end up rewarding politicians who do this by voting for them.

Thanks for the great post Chris, I agree with you 110%.

One of the more interesting facts I discovered when reading Al Frankin’s latest book is that George W. Bush is the first United States president in history to give tax cuts during war! This kind of short changing when the country needs the revenue the most, and when it has a record debt, is completely unsustainable.

You make a very valid point: how does a government service a tax cut when it itself owes vast amounts of money? It goes further into debt! I think it’s in the interests of the American people to have a government that is working to resolve its debt for the long term rather than making itself look good in the short term, but we all know they’re still going to do the latter.

I guess it’s true what George W. Bush said himself: “a dictatorship would be so much easier!” ;).

NOTE: After I posted this I thought I may have not been clear enough as to what I meant by “data independence”. I am referring to data independence between physical software, not the established field of research dealing with data in DBMSs. Whoopsie ;)

One issue (amongst others) that many people would no doubt know I feel strongly about about after reading this blog is the issue of data independence.

From what I understand, data independence deals with how easy it is to move your data from one software program to another while maintaining its integrity. Whether you are moving to another program written by the same company or a different one altogether, moving your data should not only be possible but also painless; in a perfect world of course.

Date independence is important for several reasons; the most obvious is probably the fostering of competition in the software market. Competition, as with any industry in a market based economic system, forces software producers to improve their products, lower production costs and in turn not get too greedy in charging for that software. If people can easily move their data from your software to a competitors then the onus is on the current producers to keep their software at the cutting edge to keep their customers.

Another reason which is gaining more traction as the software industry matures is the idea of future proofing. It is dangerous to assume the software we’ll be using years from now will be able to open all our files; whether the company creating our software will cease to exist in the future or whether they themselves will allow future versions of their software to be backward compatible are chilling possibilities. By ensuring from the beginning that you are using software that allows easy transfer of your data you have more leverage to use that data with other systems now, and more likely in the future.

There is also ample evidence that data independence also fosters collaboration. The HTTP protocol on the web itself uses (x)HTML and variants which allow one coded page to be used on a multitude of devices, operating system platforms and software. No matter whether the website you generated was creating in DreamWeaver, Frontpage, GoLive or… nano… other programs can easily access that information. The recent explosion of the RSS and Atom XML standards are also examples of this.

Of course freedom for the consumer is rarely what corporations want! By using open standards and allowing for data independence many companies believe they will have to work harder to keep existing customers because the ability of consumers to move from their system to another is too scary. The Microsoft Office suite (sorry, the Microsoft Office System) and it’s proprietary “standards” have been and still are a classic example of this paranoia: if they allowed for native support of other formats and allowing for more data independence, they would have to work hard to make their software not suck, and their market share wouldn’t help to defend their position anymore. Screw that!

However, I am of the belief that promoting data independence can actually help your bottom line; del.icio.us for example still leads the social bookmarking space despite their ability from very early on to export media to move to another service. Steve Gillmor on a 2004 episode of The Gillmor Gang argued that data independence can actually be a value added feature in itself and the security people feel using such services would keep them coming back for more.

This the puts open source software at a tremendous advantage; but that’s for another post ;).

I’d be really interested to hear what James Ross and Dave Winer would have to say about this issue, or anyone else. Have I got thie gist of this? How easy is it to implement data independent measures in your programs? Is it really economically feasible?

If you haven’t heard about this disaster yet, no doubt you soon will.

The most intense and widepsread heavy rains in over a century in the state of Johor in Malaysia (the closest Malaysian territory to Singapore) have caused wisespread flooding and property destruction; already many of the expats here in Kuala Lumpur where I live at the moment are calling the state the "New Orleans of Malaysia". Whole neighbourhoods and business districts have been engulfed in floodwaters which have displaced hundreds of people and caused millions of ringgit in damage.

Today though the flood situation took an even more tragic turn when 6 people were killed. From the Malaysian Star Newspaper:

JOHOR BARU: The floods have claimed six lives in Johor – four in Segamat and two in Kluang. Police discovered three bodies floating in Segamat, one of the worst hit areas.

The dead were identified as Ahmad Sarkawi, 70, Marsiah Ahmad, 69, and Nor Azahari Nordin, 28.

It is believed that all three drowned.

Also in Segamat, 61-year-old Teh Sook Ching died after hanging on for 24 hours for help to get her to the hospital.

In Kluang, two bodies were found in a car submerged along the Paloh road.

They were identified as M. Mageswari, 26, a teacher, and A. Muniandy, 59, believed to be her uncle.

Property loss and monetary damages are terrible, but any loss of human life is infinately more tragic. I’m not a religious person so I can’t say my prayers are with those who have lost loved ones and friends, but I can sinderely say my thoughts are.

I’ve pulled the scheduled episode of the Rubenerd Show for today and am going to replace it with an episode talking about this. The new episode should be online in a few hours.

Johor Bahru is the capital of the Malaysian state of Johor, the southern most point on the Asian mainland and home to over 1.5 million people. The city is connected to Singapore across the Straits of Johor by the Johor-Singapore Causeway and the Tuas Second Link.

With my ongoing efforts to learn about BSD (as opposed to Linux) and adapt it for use as a low cost workstation OS (which I have been very impressed with so far!), I’ve been using Parallels Desktop on my MacBook Pro to test various releases, including the flag, the DragonFly and the Pufferfish which as far as I can tell so far work flawlessly and just as fast as they do on a regular PC, which I guess is largely what the latest Intel macs are ;).

Been having some issues running FreeBSD 6.1 and the FreeBSD 6.2 release candidates though which is a real bummer :(. Upon booting FreeBSD from either a full CD ISO image, from the Boot ISO image or even from the hard disk (virtual machines I had set up in the 1970 build of Parallels previously) I receive the same string of errors:

Again this seems to be isolated to the FreeBSD (and the FreeBSD based PC-BSD distro) 6.x series on the Parallels 3036 Beta build. The official 1970 release still works fine.

Fortunately after a few minutes looking around the Parallels Forum many others have had the same problem, so it’s not just my machine stuffing up. Then again, had the error been on my machine I could have fixed it I guess.

Parallels Forum postings:

• Problems with FreeBSD VM on Build 3036
• FreeBSD 6 and Build 3036
• 3036 broke FreeBSD 6.1 completely

Hope Parallels addresses this issues ASAP; in the meantime I’ll have to stick with build 1970. Bummer :(

With my ongoing efforts to learn about BSD (as opposed to Linux) and adapt it for use as a low cost workstation OS (which I have been very impressed with so far!), I’ve been using Parallels Desktop on my MacBook Pro to test various releases, including the flag, the DragonFly and the Pufferfish which as far as I can tell so far work flawlessly and just as fast as they do on a regular PC, which I guess is largely what the latest Intel macs are ;).

Been having some issues running FreeBSD 6.1 and the FreeBSD 6.2 release candidates though which is a real bummer :(. Upon booting FreeBSD from either a full CD ISO image, from the Boot ISO image or even from the hard disk (virtual machines I had set up in the 1970 build of Parallels previously) I receive the same string of errors:

Again this seems to be isolated to the FreeBSD (and the FreeBSD based PC-BSD distro) 6.x series on the Parallels 3036 Beta build. The official 1970 release still works fine.

Fortunately after a few minutes looking around the Parallels Forum many others have had the same problem, so it’s not just my machine stuffing up. Then again, had the error been on my machine I could have fixed it I guess.

Parallels Forum postings:

• Problems with FreeBSD VM on Build 3036
• FreeBSD 6 and Build 3036
• 3036 broke FreeBSD 6.1 completely

Hope Parallels addresses this issues ASAP; in the meantime I’ll have to stick with build 1970. Bummer :(

I have a fair amount of MP3 and AAC music files; last checks in iTunes and Songbird claimed that I had a total of 49.80GB of music (not including videos in iTunes), most ripped as 192kb/s, though as of late I’ve started ripping at 320kb/s to future proof myself a bit. Still, the vast majoraty is ripped at 192kb/s which, while miles better quality than the more widespread and generic 128kb/s.

For the most part this works fine, but occasionaly when I’m at home and not limited to my iPod I pop in a Michael Franks CD and listen with some decent desktop speakers: the audio quality difference is really noticable.

As Peter Cook said “…well it’s a long introduction for rather a short [story]!” ;).

Anyway so with this whole Microsoft Zune thing going on, I thought I’d take a look at the Creative Zen (which I think is miles ahead of Microsoft and getting “closer” to the iPod with each release, and is from Singapore so it has to be good!), but what I found instead was even more interesting: the SG$139.00 Creative Xmod.

Apparently what this little device does from what I can tell from the site is it sits between your speakers and the audio out of your computer or music player and enriches the sound to regain some of the finer details of the music which would have been lost through lossy compression such as MP3 or AAC. Now I am a bit skeptical; anything that claims to improve audio quality from a low quality sourse sounds too much like turning lead into gold for me (if you get my alchemic drift!), but if it worked I would be impressed.

Has anyone had experience with this device? Sure it wouldn’t be as good as a geniune CD or unscratched LP would be, but anything that makes existing compressed audio sound better would be a real plus for me.

And an even bigger question, would it make my voice sound better on the Rubenerd Show? :D

The Rubenerd Show audio episodes have been successfully moved over to the new web server as of a few minutes ago! This will mean a far more reliable show production schedule, no more interruptions, lost transfers and more reliable and zippy downloads. Mmm… zippy downloads!

As a comparison, with the old server it could take anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes to upload a 4.6MiB MP3 file, and there was no guarantee it would actually work when it finished the transfer (as many friendly people have pointed out on the Rubenerd Forum in the past!). Very often episodes could be delayed by several days because my host would just blatantly refuse to accept uploaded files, even if it was done through their "Web Upload" interface instead of FTP!

Now the entire process takes less that 2 minutes, and so far I have not experienced any upload dropouts or “stalls” as the Terminal FTP program likes to call them. I can also see iTunes and Juice Receiver downloading the files a lot faster now as well which is great news.

Tomorrow’s episode, Episode 191 for Tuesday 12th December 2006 will be the first one to be released entirely on the new server. I just can’t get over how fast and easy uploading is on this new server!

I’m also giving another serious look at using Ourmedia as a mirror site to prevent future troubles and to help people access the shows. Ourmedia is great because it lets you upload and share media files for free, and unlike Google Video, YouTube or PodShow and the like, it is based around the Internet Archives and is a non-profit organisation, so I feel far more comfortable using their servers to host my content without fear of it being used inappropriatly because of evil hidden clauses in licence agreements and so forth. Am I paranoid? Probably! But better safe than sorry.

Of course again if you have any problems or suggestions I love talking to people on the Rubenerd Forum, or you can just leave a comment on this blog post.

Thanks everyone for your patience and support over these last few weeks! :D

Cheers,
Ruben

EDIT: I have just been able to get internet access again. I’ve been called to Singapore for an emergency meeting with my employer and won’t be back until Saturday. What’s the point, I ask everyone here, of work when it interferes with your podcast?