Observing a minute's silence for those affected by the horrible Japanese Tsunami last year. And a second minute for Douglas Adams on what would be his birthday. From Stephen Fry, who could almost be speaking for the victims as much as Douglas:
Happy 60th Douglas Noel Adams. 11 March 1952 – 11 May 2001. As revered, admired, [..] needed & missed as ever #DouglasAdams60th
Graphic by ShingetsuXMangetsu.
Lead story on the magazine cover:
New Super Tablets: Gunning for the iPad 3
The thinnest, most powerful Android tablets ever, Apple can’t stop them!
As Gruber would say, filing this for future "claim chowder" ;).
Having lived back in Sydney for over a year now, I was interested to read the responses to "How do you describe Sydney in three words?" on Sydneyism. Of the fifteen responses, four used more than three words.
Therefore, my answer: Some Can't Count!
As for the photo, it's one of mine that I reduced to use three colours (grey of course not being a colour… or is it?). I suddently have DOS nostalgia.
I really thought those retrojets were my favourite aircraft liveries, but this colour scheme on an Alaskan Airlines 737 takes the cake. The fish cake. A flying fish cake! Here fishy fishy fishy!
Taken by Frank Kovalchek in Anchroage, Alaska. Fishy.
I didn't have the time to discuss this when the news first broke, but was nonetheless excited :)
From the official Foursquare blog, where you would expect to read news from Foursquare:
Starting today, we’re embracing the OpenStreetMap movement, so all the maps you see when you go to foursquare.com will look a tiny bit different (we think the new ones are really pretty). Other than slightly different colors and buttons, though, foursquare is still the same site you know and love.
Many news outlets have been running this story, though they tend to leave out one small detail.
Around this time, we reached out to the wonderful team at MapBox (hot new startup alert!) to see if they had any ideas. They were making gorgeous maps with the OpenStreetMap data. And, like all great love stories, the timing here was perfect. Earlier this week, they launched MapBox Streets, which now powers all of foursquare.com’s maps.
Among the PR speak here: Foursquare will be using MapBox specifically as the source of their maps, which in turn uses OpenStreetMap data. This isn't unusual behaviour, and I suppose it's simpler for journalists to just report OpenStreetMap is being used.
The reasons cited seem to echo many companies that have been jumping ship from Google Maps of late. Or would it be jump car. I forget.
Point is, while "facilitating the open web" seems to be a common thread (sorry, bad joke), it's probably safe to assume the real impetus for changing lay behind Google's decision to start charging fairly exorbitant amounts of money for the use of their services. This Google+ posting (ironically) summarises many of the issues facing Google Maps clients.
One could discuss cost, the fact OpenStreetMaps are open, maps MapBox render are pretty, or Google dropping their Do No Evil mantra, but for me it's a simple win for utility!
Originally due to spotty Optus reception, I'd long since replaced Google Maps on my iTelephone with various offline OpenStreetMap installs. To my delight and surprise, it turns out their maps are far better around the areas of Sydney I frequent than Google Maps; many walking paths that exist on the former simply don't on the latter. Insert comment about Sensis here (Martin, I'm looking at you!).
Singapore was another story back in 2010, but that may have changed. In any event, good news and I hope more companies follow suit.
Am having to temporary suspend my Rubenerd.com policy forbidding the linking of Gawker and Murdoch sites, but it's for a good cause!
On the 2nd of March, the following story appeared in the Technology section of Melbourne's Herald Sun online:
That is one ugly computer – but it’s only $35
WELL that is one ugly computer – but it’s $35 and the size of a credit card so what are you complaining about?
I can't say I'm complaining about the design at all. From an engineering perspective it's elegant and clean; the bare essentials you would need to start and run a computer system with specifications you would have needed a gigantic, hulking desktop to achieve in the 1990s. I would have instead latched onto the silly name and equally grating tagline, but that's just me.
The article goes on to discuss the features of this horribly ugly machine:
US technology company Raspberry Pi’s creation lets users program their own computer by giving them all the parts they need – including a wireless mouse, keyboard and an SD card reader.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has ditched the name Foundation from their name, chipped the ground upon which it stands from the United Kingdom, floated to the United States, and has begun offering free peripherals with their machines. Why was I not told this?
It contains a Linux processor, memory chips and ports for almost every plug in device you could ever need including USB, HDMI and Ethernet cables.
Darn, and I was excited about running NetBSD on a Raspberry Pi, but I suppose if it has a Linux processor I'll have to settle for running it in a Xen session or something.
The tiny computers were initially developed to encourage children to get excited about computer programming and other technology – but the device has gotten the tech world in a frenzy.
We're using the term "gotten" in Australia now? I must not have "got" that message!
My dry sense of humour sometimes confuses people here, so for the sake of understanding, I was being terribly sarcastic in the above paragraphs. Many of the facts and observations in the article were on target, but some pretty important (and one would think glaringly obvious) ones weren't. For a newspaper, they should have done better, especially considering the story has been developing for months.
On the other hand, and I'm partly guilty here too, but the tech world's moral indignation at the story was also a little out of step. Not to entirely defend this fine Murdoch publication, but probably for the intended audience of the article, it delivered what people who have lives outside IT needed to know: it's a small computer that runs Linux and is ugly. Well okay, the second point was partly true and the third is questionable, but you know what I mean. Right?
No, instead of getting angry at the article as I've clearly just done, what we should be focusing on is their whitewashing of the article from their site entirely. If you visit the article page now, you're given this:
We could not find the page you requested. This is either because: There’s an error in the address or link you have entered in your browser; There’s a technical issue and the page has not been properly published; The article was removed to comply with a legal order; It is an older article that has been removed from the site. If you believe that this is a technical error, please contact us and tell us the location of this page.
A correction has been issued, but the responsible thing to do would have been to preserve the original article, and link to the corrections. Newspaper companies don't routinely go around people's houses, rip out articles from their printed newspapers then issue a correction in the following issue, so why should their online endeavors be any different?
This reminds me of that whole sorry saga with Violet Blue, where recently she removed an image and a rude comment from her news article after it was discovered she'd labelled a women at a stand selling software as a booth babe… when she wasn't. The good news for readers is, you can't delete things from the Internet.
The 29th of February! Such a monuments (though chronologically predictable and necessary) occasion warrants a post I have precious time to write, so instead of a well thought out, logical post I've decided just to ramble for a bit. That's so unlike me.
To get into the spirit of writing, I thought it best to check out what I was blogging about the last time it was the 29th of February. Given this happens every four years, I was able to ascertain I needed to look up the 29th of February 2008. No, I'm not a mathematical genius, I just used a calculator to deduct 4 from 2012.
Turns out, the post I wrote for the 29th of February 2008 was a rather unsalubrious rant regarding sites taking my blog posts and wrapping them in ads. No, I'm not talking about Google (haiyo!), I mean spam sites. Ironically, those that Google used to be infested with and are starting to slowly creep back.
Let's take a look! Step into the four year time machine!
At first spam bots harvested email addresses from search engine indexes of web pages, then when the concept of posting comment on blogs started reaching critical mass spam bots started pumping spam through those [..]
It seems to me though that blog spam in itself is evolving though. I used the word “though” twice in that sentence. When previously they mostly consisted of masses of links to get more Google juice, now they seem to be latching on web feeds that blog software exports and creating more and more junk blogs with this plagiarised information. Some of them try to pass themselves off as legitimate by creating faux introductions that go along the lines of “Hey I found this blog entry and it’s really interesting, here’s a summary!”.
I even took a screenshot of Camino showing one of the spam sites in question.
So now we return to the future, or the present, or whatever this period of time is. Einstein's Law of Relativity would imply that in this current time we would see it as the present, but had we stayed in 2008 we would have seen the present as the future. Right?
This reminds me of that episode of Star Trek Voyager with the USS Relativity where the first officer is trying to explain to 7 the idea that time travel is plausible if one understands effects often precede causes, and that temporal paradoxes can cause headaches. Wait, that was Captain Janeway, never mind.
So-called "True Trekkies" aren't supposed to like Star Trek Voyager, but I thoroughly enjoyed watching it growing up. That could be read as me watching it while I was growing up, or that I was watching the show itself grow up. English is such a clumsy language, one need only be a programmer or know other languages to be aware of this. Hey, at least we don't have seven different tenses! Right?
So we finally come to the photo from the very beginning of this post. As I did while looking for previous blog entries written on the 29th of February 2008, I ran my master Swiss Army Chainsaw Perl script to spit out photos on my SLR backup drive taken on that day. I didn't take many, but one was that view above from my bedroom balcony at the time. You can view the full photo here, if you really want to.
Suffice to say, set homesickness mode to full! It was such a shock to have a quiet, dark bedroom when I came back to Sydney, I can tell you that much!
Another photo I had for some reason was this "screenshot" of installing Nvidia binary blob drivers for my FreeBSD tower.
The irony hasn't escaped me that I spent my 29th of February 2012 post taking about the 29th of February 2008. That's fine, on the 29th of February 2016 I'll talk about the 29th of February 2012. Better make notes about Raspberry Pi for that day. The system works!
As you may have noticed, I've taken a brief Rubenerd.com and Twitter recess to focus on some family matters, though I hope to be back to both soon.
In the meantime, I noticed the #AtheistRollCall is Twittering away, and I'd love to voice my support. There are so many reasons one can give, but in the words of the legendary Douglas Adams, "Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"
Peace out ^_^
John Gruber on the lack of Flash in Chrome for Android:
Remember when Android’s (and the BlackBerry Playbook’s, and WebOS’s) support for Flash was supposed to be a competitive advantage against iOS?
I was called out by multiple people when I defended Apple's move to not include Flash, and made the case that mobile Flash made no sense. I'm sure it was the same for John; after all, we're just fanboys!
Still, while it's tempting to engage in a little schadenfreude, the pertitent detail is Adobe ceased support for the mobile version of Flash, it wasn't Google's decision. They don't deserve ire, or praise, as a result.
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