Rubenerd

It's even worse than it looks >_<.

After several years of faithful service, we bid farewell to my Compaq Armada M300 subnotebook. I picked it up second hand from my father's business back in April 2008, and was quick to load FreeBSD onto it. While it was understandably a little slow, I dubbed it the "Armadair" due to its svelte size and excellent battery life.

It spent a month in a drawer where obviously the battery exploded, and sent acid throughout the frame and display, completely destroying the unit. I'll be harvesting as many parts as I can (wearing gloves) then sending it off to that big cloud in the sky where old computers go.

Throughout my life, international and domestic moves have always destroyed electronics, regardless of how well I pack things. This is the first writeoff due to battery leakage, though I suppose it was bound to happen eventually. Lesson learned: don't just remove AA batteries from remote controls, remove batteries from computers as well.

Where's my supercapacitor?

I was born too late to be a part of the Fortran generation, but upon discussing the language with my sister this evening I received the following in response:

You mean 4chan?

As I said on The Twitters, I think a part of my brain just melted.

In other news, I need that font. Retro futuristic is one of the single greatest design methodologies of all time. I also need their slogan printed on a shirt.

Given previous OS X upgrade experience, I decided to hold off from upgrading to Lion until 10.7.1 was released this time around. Alas, despite doing this there are still several issues severe enough to warrant me downgrading back to Snow Leopard until they're addressed.

But that makes no sense, you’re a Mac fanboi!!1!!one!

So what are they?

1. Lion has been the first release of Mac OS X where my machine has been noticeably slower since upgrading. Applications take fewer “dock bounces” to launch, but more time. Scrolling is sluggish and key repeat rates are slower. Most maddening of all though are context menus: the current record is a whopping six seconds before they appear after a mouse click. OS/2 Warp 4.5 running on my 120MHz Toshiba Libretto displays menus faster than my Mac Pro with Lion does.

2. The Finder doesn't seem to have a memory leak, but it routinely chews up 70 to 90% of a single CPU core on idle. Killing it or force quitting drastically speeds up the machine, though only temporarily.

3. I have custom icons for my mounted volumes and drives so I can see at a glance which I'm working with. Lion's Finder sidebar replaces these with uniform drive icons in the same monochrome style as iTunes 10. From a glance, individual drives are now indistinguishable.

4. While I can appreciate Apple’s intention to make automatic backups and revision control easier for people, technically proficient users already have their own tools for this, and the lack of an option to disable this is frustrating. I suspect its responsible for some of the reduced performance and greater hard drive utilisation.

5. Related to this new feature, the removal of the one-step "Save As" and replacing it with the two-step "Duplicate" then "Save" function is one of the most maddening changes I’ve ever encountered in an OS upgrade. It was driving me so crazy, I gave up using Lion’s built in applications such as Preview and TextEdit entirely, and wrote symbolic links to redirect to other applications should I accidentally launch them!

6. After Mac OS pioneered the commercial GUI with a simple resize handle in the bottom corner of windows to change their size, Lion finally caught the all-edges-resize disease. It’s visually distracting having cursors constantly changing as I move them across the screen, and it increases the chance of changing windows by accident. To me, this was more of a feature to appease Windows-switchers than something useful, though I suppose I could get used to it. In KDE I overcame it by having all my windows full screen by default ;).

7. DigitalColor Meter.app only shows decimal RGB now, not hex. Why remove this?

Cue Arnold Schwarzenegger reference

One of the good things about Apple on the desktop is they tend to listen to our concerns. When Leopard came out, they quickly headed our cries for folder icons in our stacks, and opaque menu bars. There's nothing here that can't be fixed, provided we all keep giving them feedback. Not that it helped for some of these features given we voiced our concerns before the GM, but still…

In the meantime, it's back to Snow Leopard for me until at least the performance and reliability issues are addressed. 10.7.4 perhaps?

I've been a heavy del.icio.us user since 2004, and apparently I'm the only one who hasn't suffered problems with the latest changes since AVOS bought the service. Tech pundits are practically screaming; presumably to generate some press and links. Touché.

Thanks to Murid Rahha for the awesome del.icio.us icon. One could say it's…

UPDATE: I spoke too soon, a substantial number of my tags are gone. Touché… again.

With 15 days left to go before closing his blog, J-Walk has already started to descend into puns with a link to a site discussing the growing trend of corn mazes. Yes, actual corn mazes. I'll admit, it grew on me.

In any case, those interested in maizes (darn it, now he has me doing it) should be a pedestrian in Kuala Lumpur. The shape and intersection of their road network could be used as a source of high entropy random numbers.

Here’s something that’s unusually full of win: a fantastic Starbucks themed shirt!

The iconic Starbucks logo is reimagined by designer and 2008 CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund winner Alexander Wang on a soft knit tee. The exclusive style was designed to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the iconic coffee company.

The only catch: it's AU$91. I suppose its true what they say, Starbucks coffee is good, though a little overpriced ;). Still, a brilliant design, and I'd also feel less conspicuous if I spilled coffee on it in public.

This brings my Rubenerd Database of Anime Pizza Hut References to four, as previously blogged. I'm sure there are far more.

My working theory is the Hidan no Aria writers decided to do this to further differentiate the series from Shana to deflect criticism that it's merely a stopgap derivative. I mean, pizza isn't melonpan!

That looks like a veggie pizza too, my favourite flavour ^_^.

Last night Asia/Pacific time, Amazon released their much anticipated Kindle Fire tablet. Allow me to pontificate!

Price

Looking at the machine, the first thing that grabbed my attention was the price. The iPad took what was essentially a dead market segment thanks to Microsoft's Windows Tablet PC initiative and reduced the price significantly, so much so that Android tablet makers have found it hard to compete on this metric at all. Amazon has reduced the price with the same order of magnitude.

One expects Amazon to be selling these as a loss leader in the hopes people will buy enough content from them to make up the difference. With the exception of Nintendo of late, most console manufacturers have been doing this for years, with mixed results.

If anything this serves to highlight the difference between the three companies. Google gives Android away to sell you to advertisers. Apple provides a media store to sell you hardware. Amazon provides the hardware to sell you media. Three entirely different business models, the latter of which I have to say excites me the most to be honest ^_^.

Platform

The Kindle Fire is based on Android, but with a completely different UI. While other OEMs have installed their own interfaces on Android to address some of the platform's usability issues and to differentiate their products from the hurd (sorry, bad joke even by my standards), Amazon have taken it one step further and created their own system with Android as a buried base, rather than a front-row-centre feature.

This means no Google Marketplace, their own browser and an entirely different interface written for content consumption. While I'm sure Google is pleased insofar that their software is being used on such a potentially lucrative device, you've got to think they're a little wary not getting a cut of any of the sales of media on the device, and no advertising revenue. To Google, this might be just as bad as companies taking Android and replacing all the Google branded products with Chanandler Bing.

Still, I suppose we can assume Amazon is one of the companies that's given access to the closed Android source thesedays, now that the platform doesn't even conform to Google's own definition of open. That's okay though, because they're not Apple.

Usage

Rather than taking on the Swiss Army Knife iPad which no manufacturer has been able to do without misrepresenting their sales numbers and "brazenly copying" the interface, Amazon has once again made a product that fits a specific niche. The Kindle did this with books; while the iPad can be used in this capacity the Kindle's eInk display arguably provided enough of a superior experience that they were able to sell well even when the iPad was introduced.

The question becomes whether their colour tablet will also fill enough of a perceived niche to compete with the iPad. The price already makes it far more attractive than the iPad if the device does all you need it to, and if Amazon can use some of their secret sauce to make it an ultimate media consumption device, potentially this could also be a hit.

That is, of course, if the creaky old publishing business doesn't get in the way, and they expand outside their core markets. There's no point selling a loss leading device in markets where they can't buy your content!

As for me, I'm more interested in getting one of their new non-touch eInk Kindles when they reach us here in Australia. As much as I've tried reading the epic Peter Hamilton and Michael McCollum on my iTelephone in bed, I just can't!

Admittedly these version updates were bigger news before Mozilla got Chrome envy, but still Firefox just got updated to 7.0. I just downloaded it for my Macs, and I'm sure the tireless maintainers of the FreeBSD Ports system and Fedora repositories are hard at work at adding it.

I'd already been using the 7.0 nightly builds given I was one of the unlucky few bitten by the severe memory leaks and CPU hogging with 6.0.2, as you can see in the screenshot above.

A discussion on Hacker News about TextMate 2.0 spawned a fascinating general discussion on text editors, specifically what people have replaced TextMate with in its intervening abandonware years. Because I have a blog, I leave my comments here! ^_^

Editor	Platform	Comment
ZEdit	DOS	Syntax highlighting, in 1993! Wonderful editor
MS-DOS Edit	MS-DOS	Mostly in it’s QBasic form
IBM E Editor	PC DOS	Should have been the default for MS-DOS too
Taco HTML	OS X	Beautiful little editor
Smultron	OS X	Formally free editor with side tabs
TextMate	OS X	Great for small projects, but I replaced it with…
MacVim	OS X	With NERDTree, it’s my new favourite editor!
nano	Console	My first job used this, surprisingly!
Vim	Console	With vi compatibilty mode set to… off ;)
nvi	*BSD	Not my first choice, but can use now if need be
Emacs	Console	Not bad, just not my cup of tea
Kate	KDE	My favourite graphical *nix editor ^_^
Gedit	Gnome	Very capable and lightweight
Geany	GTK+	More of an IDE, but worth a mention!
C=BASIC	Plus/4	Retroactively learned on some 2nd hand hardware ^_*

As a matter of disclosure, this post was created in one of the aforementioned text editors.