Rubénerd!

Speaking of good news, I just got my acceptance letter from the UAC for my followup degree at UTS!

After studying briefly at another institution (which we won't bring up in polite conversation!) and repeatedly putting everything on hold for extenuating family circumstances, the staff at UTS have been nothing but supportive. My application was complex, but they put it through, and I'm just so overjoyed!

UTS, my Michael Franks CDs arrived (a post for tomorrow!), I got a coffee from Hakeae, this will be dubbed Happy Day 2011 :)

Please don't ask me to elaborate on specifics just yet, I will once I'm safely enrolled somewhere else.

Dear University of South Australia,

Your communications maketh Ruben sad

You now hold the distinction of being the biggest mistake I've made in my life to date. You turned what were supposed to be some of the better years of my life into an unmitigated disaster, which after recent family events I thought would be nigh impossible to do, relatively speaking. I knew I should have gone to Uni Adelaide, or Perth, or the NUS.

Anyway I'm in the process of transferring away from you, and one day I'll work up the guts to send you a letter like this instead of just posting it on my website.

Don't lose any sleep over it.

Sincerely,
Ruben

As I sit here in the dark late this evening playing some Michael Franks holiday music and drinking a frosty glass of water, I'm reminded of late October when I said November was going to be terrible and it couldn't end soon enough. Well it's ended, and I'm so relieved I'm giddy :).

Leaving aside family problems, this full time semester has been rough (relatively speaking of course!). After taking a leave of absence to look after my mum in her last few years and my subsequent studies part time, I'm far behind most people of my age. Heck, virtually everyone who started studying at the same time I did have already graduated or begun Masters degrees.

I'm not sure whether those two factors had anything to do with it, and certainly the material I was studying wasn't overly more difficult than what I'd done before, but this semester was hard. I worried about things that I didn't think were worrying at all before. I felt as though I was going backwards.

Anyway the exams are over, the assignments have been handed in and on Thursday night I'll be back in Singapore for the first part of the holidays. I like Adelaide, but at the moment my mind associates it with... studying. And having Christmas in Munich and New Year in Paris is going to be amazing.

I whinge about workload, aforementioned family problems and a rather pathetic 23 year old midlife crisis, but I am a friggen lucky guy. I guess its easier to think that after the major hurdles have been jumped over instead of when you're staring at them.

Our (albeit government sponsored) university fees at work (or lack thereof). Fortunately all my lecturers from this semester have continued to go above and beyond by answering my emails and returning assignments with detailed and friendly comments. I wonder if others have had less luck?

Dear Student,

You may be aware that UniSA is currently in negotiations with the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) as part of the Enterprise Bargaining process regarding terms and conditions of employment for staff.

The NTEU has advised the University that, in its view, insufficient progress is being made on a number of their key claims and unfortunately they have now imposed industrial action which targets the formal transmission of student assessment results, including exams.

The University is extremely disappointed and concerned with this position. Not only is the University of the view that significant progress has been made in negotiations but, potentially, the NTEU's bans will disadvantage our students and their families, particularly if students may be denied the opportunity to graduate and participate in ceremonies in late December, or be unable to secure employment or to commence postgraduate studies without formal transmission of results.

The interests of our students are paramount at such a crucial stage of their studies and careers, and the University considers it has an obligation to protect our students as innocent parties to a dispute that is between the University and unions. Accordingly, at the last bargaining meeting on Monday, 23 rd November, the University again formally requested that the NTEU lift its bans. Again, the NTEU refused. Subsequently, the university has put in place a number of strategies, including involving Fair Work Australia, to mitigate the impact of these bans.

I would like to reassure all students that the University is working very hard to ensure students receive their final assessment and exam results.

I will keep you informed of developments.

Kind regards
[redacted]

Merlin Mann from 42 + 1 folders once suggested in a podcast that if you want to apply yourself too some creative writing you should start typing and refuse to use the backspace key; just pretend it's not there. I'm far to obsessive compulsive to follow this advice verbatim because typos freak me out like breakfast cereal without soy milk, but that compulsion aside I'm going to give it a try.

As this evening comes to a close I'm left with a weird feeling of reflection and uncertainty, despite potentially having some direction and purpose. I'm close to finishing my exams, I only have two outstanding assignment issues and the real estate agent in charge of managing my landlord's property finally got around to inspecting the house prior to the open day on Sunday. The landlord wants to sell.

I've got FreeBSD 8.0 gleefully installing on my ThinkPad X40 next to me, my MacBook Pro is frantically compressing a bunch of disc images so I can scrape up some spare gigabytes of hard drive space, the rain outside has stopped but you can still smell it, the ceiling lights are off so the monitors are casting an almost spooky glow and long shadows across the table and down the hall, my bottle of water is empty but I'm still a little thirsty, I'm shaking a little but that's normal, and because my sister went back to Singapore before me, some pretty, quiet piano playing through the speakers and a quiet hum of computer cooling fans are the only sounds other than the cicadas I can hear.

I still find it infinitely fascinating that on some days I blog a lot, talk to people on Skype and Twitter messages like there's no tomorrow; on other days despite not having more or less work to do than the day when I was posting five hundred blog entries I can barely bring myself to write one, and when I do get around to posting that lone entry it's a rambling post with little substance, value or purpose. Hey, like this one.

Well it's been really nice talking to you, but I'd best be off to bed. I'll go ahead and sprinkle some hyperlinks through this post, then I'll hop into bed and distract worrying thoughts by weighing in the pros and cons of using the Xfce verses Gnome-Light ports.

Night.

For a change of atmosphere after my exam, instead of going to the Boatdeck Cafe where I spend much of my Adelaide life, I decided to stay in the city and park myself at the Cibo Espresso in Rundle Mall. I'm a wild guy!

Coffee haunts aside, I had a point with this post. What continuously amazes me with some people is to the extent they'll tart themselves up for the most mundane or weird situations, such as for an exam. Having just left the Wayville Showground for my few hours of exam fun, I noticed more girls than not had skimpy but expensive looking clothes (ugh) and thick makeup on. Makeup! For an exam! I can barely cope with studying and going for an exam let alone caring that much about my appearance.

Hey, aren't you that guy?

Adelaide really is a small place, I was just asked by a woman who saw me typing away on my laptop if I was the same fixture she sees at the Boatdeck Cafe in Mawson Lakes. I said yes, but looking back now I should have said I was a twin brother or a clone or something. Why is it we only figure out what to say after things like that happen!?

You were talking about your exam

Are you sure? Wait, let me check. Well looky there, I was. You're not as much of a witless half bright than I thought. Kudos.

Here's a tip for those of you who carry bags and have to drop them off at the aptly named Bag Drop: take a brightly coloured bag! Just as they help you to see your bag easier when you're at an airport and using one of those newfangled baggage carousel things that are fun to stand on, having a bright coloured bag means when you go to retrieve it the overworked staff can see it much easier and get it back to you. It's sheer, unmitigated genius I tell you. I almost spelt genius wrong.

Next exam is Saturday so I still have a ton of studying to do as well as dealing with ongoing family issues and a landlord who wants to sell the house out from under us. I'm going to savour this hour or so I'm sitting here. It's a good time to be outside, because tomorrow Adelaide will be 41C (over 100F I think). Glad it wasn't that hot today, I can tell you that much :O.

Logging onto one of the shared computers at the UniSA Mawson Lakes campus this morning I got this error message. Again.

The virus definition file is more than 7 days old. Updating to a new virus definition file will help catch the most recent viruses.

Also, I like grilled cheese sandwiches. Put one in my CD-ROM tray.

Remember back in the day when having month old definitions was still cutting edge? Now Windows users are considered vulnerable if definitions are 7 days old. Is that why despite being version 6.1 the called it Windows 7?

What's more worrying is shared UniSA computers use a system that wipes them and reimages a clean install of Windows and custom software onto them over the network; it combines the negative insecurity and heavy hardware requirements of a thick client with the bandwidth problems of thin clients while delivering the benefits of neither -- genius! But we're getting sidekicked sidetracked: this system means each shared computer across the university would have these old definitions.

Even though my notebooks run FreeBSD, Linux and/or OS X, I think I'll be using Hotspot VPN or GoToMyPC more often when I'm on campus.

Some disturbing news about the state of tertiary education in South Australia being reported by Suzanne Tindal on ZDNet Australia. Flinders University and TAFE SA (similar to a polytechnic for my Singaporean and Malaysian readers) have adopted Microsoft Exchange based Live@Edu for a three year contract. While on the surface the features actually sound cool, the potential ramifications of adopting this expensive system are scary.

To Microsoft's credit they've done some stuff right recently, or perhaps "less wrong" is a more fitting description. Windows 7 improved the experience over Vista, Internet Explorer 8 renders pages in a somewhat more standards compliant way and is faster than IE7 or IE6, and while the hardware is still unappealing the Zune's music subscription service sounds like a great way to discover new tunes.

This education initiative is not something to add to that list.

I can't help but think Microsoft is worried about the increasing penetration of Apple notebooks in tertiary education as well as free and open source OSs in IT courses and that they'll use their Live@Edu service to provide a reason not to use Macs or FLOSS over, say, a Windows 7 loaded machine.

Speaking from experience

I'm a student at the University of South Australia which uses Exchange and Outlook Web Access which in any other browser except Internet Explorer 6 is terrible. Unlike Google Wave which warns people trying to access it in non HTML5 standards compliant browsers, Microsoft warns me when my browser doesn't contain their proprietary rendering engine and as a result is not capable of displaying a dynamic inbox that Google managed to figure out how to do in other browsers back in 2004.

I've made no secret of my general loathing of most Microsoft products and my dismay at their spectacular fall from grace (I grew up on Microsoft Multimedia titles in primary school and loved them), but if the South Australian government or Microsoft won't guarantee that contemporary browsers that meet certain open standards used by students will be able to access all these new services, this amounts to a monopolistic move and should be investigated by an independent body.

This is a Trending Topic

I talked about the lack of transparency with Microsoft and various Australian governments back in April of this year (It started as a Centrelink Windows 7 critique) in the context of the cost involved, something I haven't discussed here but that also bears keeping in mind.

To tell the truth I'm more frustrated with the South Australian and Federal governments than I am with Microsoft.

My home is back in Singapore and I'm studying in Adelaide, and in both places over the years I've collected huge collections of computer books, like these ones! Computer books are bulky and heavy just by themselves, so carrying a few dozen of them between cities in luggage is completely out of the question. What I need are ebook versions.

What bothers me is if I really wanted to, I could simply fire up a bittorrent client, aim it at a torrent for a bootleg PDF or EHF copy of a book and download it in a few megabytes; right there on my screen I could have a copy of the Perl Cookbook or Oracle SQL for example. I wouldn't do this of course because the books are available to me in dead tree form at bookshops for sale and it'd be copyright infringement.

If we leave aside the knee jerk legal response though, consider the ethical question. If I've legally purchased a copy of a book, is it okay for me to then download a copy of it? I think most reasonable people would say yes, but the law certainly says no. Or does it? When I go to the shop and purchase a copy of a piece of software, I'm buying a licence to use it; am I not doing the same thing for a book essentially?

The legal solution

The problem is, the closest we have to a legal avenue for electronic forms of commercial computer books is the Safari Books Online service of which I've been a member for many years. Unlike a traditional book shop, you purchase credits which you can use to download chapters from books, so if you want a whole book you need to spend all your credits on it.

It gets messier. If you enter the code from a paper book you bought in the real world, instead of being given free access to an electronic version of the book (which I assumed it would do) you're given extra credits you can use to download chapters as described before. Technically you could use those credits to download chapters from the same book you have in the real world, but there isn't enough and you'd end up spending extra to have a full electronic copy.

What they need to do

Welcome to the 21st century. Call me naive, but it's my belief that if I purchase a book (especially technical documentation) I should be allowed to download an electronic version as a value added feature rather than getting watered down chapters in a confusing format. Heck with the cost of flash memory thesedays they could even include a SD card or thin memory key in the book with an electronic copy too.

When I'm buying a book I'm paying for the distribution of this huge, lumbering hunk of paper and glue that had to make its way from some remote publishing house, but I'm parting with my money to get it for the ideas printed in it -- a licence for the ideas if you will. It would cost publishers virtually nothing to distribute PDF or other electronic forms of this book that would contain the same ideas.

Whaddya say OReilly? Developers Library? APress? Help a brother out?

I've started using TextMate more on my Macs for editing code because It Just Works™ and has some really useful features. It just has one nagging little problem to do with files; every single time I create a file outside a project and go to save it, the Save As dialog box ignores where other open files are located and defaults to the root of my primary hard drive to save the file. Every. Single. Time!

I don't want to have to create projects for each set of files that I'm working on once and forgetting about, is there any way to modify this default behavior? Even having it default to my home directory would be a start.