Rubenerd

After years of silence, we suddenly got an update on the future of TextMate 2.0 yesterday:

There will be a public alpha release this year, before Christmas, for registered users.

While it's welcome news for Mac developers who love the software, it's too late for me. I painstakingly moved all my TextMate projects over to Vim/Cream/NERDTree, and I also just received my key for Chocolat. Reviews pending!

My first Vimeo upload with my new(ish) account. Dancing dolls at Ken's Sushi Bar Dining in Bexley North tonight.

I love that you can customise the colours, and the UI is much slicker than YouTube.

Got a new router today! ^_^

Rooter means something else

Ever since I connected two of our home computers together with a D-Link 5-port 10/100 hub, I'd been under the impression well known brands like Linksys, Netgear and D-Link were the way to go. Which is to say, they were the only brands I'd ever heard of. This all changed when I met Eugene Li in Singapore, and Andrew Cox in Adelaide who shared knowledge of an infinitely better mob.

MikroTik are a company out of Latvia of all places that (I've been informed) produce the most sophisticated, robust and flexible networking hardware on the market, so when we'd finally grown tired of our bargain basement Netgear modem/router we'd got for free from Optus, I knew who to investigate.

As with our EPSON GT-S50 document scanner, the RouterBOARD 750GL comes in a relatively nondescript box, presumably because only those who've done their research are aware of them, and their customers don't need to be told what a router is! Buying from a local distributor, I was also given an Australian power supply unit in the box instead of a regular European PSU.

Compared to the large switches with lots of unnecessary plastic I'm used to buying from generic consumer brands, the device itself is tiny and rather svelte, and it's a fully featured router! It was also cheaper than most of the consumer grade networking hardware I'd bought, and having had it running for several hours now it also runs cooler than any networking hardware I've bought before.

Our Netgear gear can cook eggs

After years of putting up with combined devices that don't do any of their tasks very well and that burn carpet and table surfaces, I've realised my dream of having a separate modem and router. My TP-Link 8840 (another Andrew Cox recommendation) that I got for peanuts which I'll be using in bridge mode should be arriving in the next couple of days, and I'll finally be able to retire our current creaky setup.

I can't wait to put it to the test: seeing how it can handle two concurrent, always on VPNs, dozens of torrents from several different machines (ahem), multiple Skype connections and enough Vimeo/YouTube to substitute not having terrestrial TV. Because we don't.

What’s with Yuki?

For the sake of disclosure, yes I'm aware there's an anime fig in my pictures here. For several years Yuki has been featured in posts whenever I buy new computer hardware; considering her character in the anime series it made sense!

I just wish her skirt were a little bit longer, often times I have to take pictures again because she ends up showing a little more than perhaps she'd like. Which is a shame, because I got a great picture of her that looked as though she was wearing the router as a rocket pack. Yes, I put my new devices through strenuous testing!

And finally for all my Latvian friends out there, all two of you!

Two unrelated IKEA stories so far this weekend, and as someone obsessed with IKEA I felt I had little choice but to comment.

Building things

Found via Slashdot, this article on NeoAcademic was a fascinating look into the so called IKEA Effect where you tend to love things you build yourself.

The IKEA Effect refers to the tendency for people to value things they have created/built themselves more than if made by someone else – in fact, nearly as much as if an expert had created the same item.

I can absolutely relate. I love assembling IKEA furniture for the thrill of having an excuse to use "grown ups Lego", right down to the similar instructions and Allen key infused building blocks, but I also derive a tremendous amount of satisfaction from having furniture in my home I've built myself.

I think the argument can also be extended to include computers. Despite using Apple Macs for a significant portion of my day, I still build and maintain my own computers I build myself. While I appreciate all the care and love that has painstakingly been applied to all my Apple hardware, there's also something — dare I say, magical — about putting together a computer yourself from parts and having it power up. On an IKEA table I built, no less!

Manland

Of far more interest on the Interwebs lately has been the introduction of the Manland amusement area for men at IKEA here in The Sydney. From Ekstra Bladet:

Der er ikke meget, der kan flå energien ud af en mand, som en shoppetur med den bedre halvdel. Til gengæld er der heller ikke noget, der kan stoppe piveriet og genoplade batterierne som lidt sport på tv og konsolspil.

Det har de erkendt hos Ikea i Sydney, hvor de har oprettet et pasningsområde, eller fristed om man vil, hvor mænd kan slappe af med lidt elektronisk underholdning, mens kvinderne går på jagt efter nyt køkkengrej (som de alligevel ikke mangler).

‘Manland’ er indrettet som en dagligstue med Ikea-møbler, selvfølgelig, hvorefter det hele er blevet piftet op med fladskærme fyldt med sport, bordfodbold, pinball-maskiner, Xbox 360 og … gratis hotdogs.

This would have been funnier had it been in Swedish not Danish.

Still, while I object to the stereotypical treatment of men as a bunch of shop-hating, sports watching, Xbox 360 players, my primary concern stems from the fact that IKEA is such an engaging and fascinating place to wander around in and of itself, and that such efforts are completely unnecessary. I suppose they've done their market research that shows real men don't like shopping at IKEA, or thought they could get some free publicity from doing this. Touché.

In either case, another blow to my already tenuous masculinity.

The least you need to know: if you receive the above error when extracting Windows NT 3.51 Service Pack 5, use the /b flag while extracting.

More detail

For those of you running Windows NT 3.51 (the last version of Windows that separated the kernel and UI subsystems), running the self-extracting SP5_351I.EXE file in a temporary directory from the likes of File Manager will result in the following error:

PKSFX: (W18) Warning! OEMNADAP.INF already exists. Overwrite (y/n)?

Typing Y here will extract the rest of the files, though when you run UPDATE.EXE you'll be given the following error.

The solution is to use the /b flag, which extracts files into a tree of directories, rather than just putting them all into one place:

SP5_351I.EXE /b

Why Microsoft decided to use software that doesn't extract in this fashion by default for archives that clearly have files with the same name in different places is nothing short of baffling.

Microsoft identified this bug in their Knowledge Base article 149306.

Gowalla have removed the one feature I enjoyed the most with their latest iteration, so it's time for me to give up my account of many years, and move exclusively to Foursquare. We had some great times!

Easter egg hunts for adults

Like most of my Twitter friends, several years ago I moved from Brightkite to Gowalla to satisfy my check-in obsession. Gowalla was more reliable, and offered some great new features such as badges you would earn for various activities, and beautiful unique graphics for different location categories.

The most interesting twist Gowalla introduced though was the concept of items tied to locations. Like a scavenger hunt, you would find items upon checking into places which you could keep, swap with other items people had left in different places, or use them to "found" places.

While I started using Foursquare last year and concurrently checking into places with it given my friends all use the service, I was an obsessive Gowalla user until this afternoon. I used it to check into my favourite coffee shops in Adelaide at the time, then Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Sydney where I found myself living, then and around Germany, the Czech Republic, France and Ireland on our last holiday. It was lots of fun!

Uh oh, spaghettioes

This all seems to have changed however. With their latest software update, Gowalla has introduced their new Guides feature which promises a curated tour of various different cities. To their credit, their graphics are just as great as ever.

Gone however are our earned items and badges. They're not anywhere in the new application, and API calls return nothing. Call me old fashioned or inexperienced when it comes to cloud computing, but I tend not to trust services that delete our data, particularly data that we've collected in world travels and such. I'm also reluctant to contribute material to sites that will delete my data, this has happened far too many times already and I'm tired of it. Is it any wonder I blog on my own domain and web server?

I'll admit, it was starting to get irritating checking into both Gowalla and Foursquare at the same time^[1], and I was starting to look for an excuse to ditch one of them. This change in focus with Gowalla has provided the impetus I needed to move to Foursquare exclusively, which I've now just done. My last Gowalla check-in was at the Euro Coffee Bar, the location that surpassed the Boatdeck Café in Mawson Lakes, Adelaide as my #1 check-in location. Seemed fitting.

So long, and thanks for all the fish [items].

Good luck with your new focus Gowalla team, thanks for the fun times. For those of you who have followed me on Gowalla, you can now find me on Foursquare.

UPDATE: Despite the API not returning anything, I downgraded the app back to 3.3.0 on my iTelephone, and my pins and items were still there. Perhaps they've just closed access to them, or stored them on my phone. In that case, may it still be possible to export my stuff then?

Hey, at least this evening's outage only lasted 20 minutes… right? ^^;

Now HERE was a story I thought looked interesting on TODAYOnline this afternoon:

TPG to move Australia head to Singapore: Report

TPG? Really? Would his head be moving to Singapore to learn how to run efficient ISPs, presumably with the rest of his body?

SINGAPORE – US private equity firm TPG is relocating its Australia head Ben Gray to Singapore from Sydney as it seeks growth in Asia, the Dow Jones reported Thursday.

Okay, so it's this TPG not this TPG. Another pitfall of registering your company with a TLA, or to a lesser extent with an ETLA. IMHO.

It's been more than a year since we were told about her… is she ever going to appear?

Akane who?

For those who don't remember who haven't been subscribed to my blog for very long [you're a wise person] back in March 2010 K-On! fans were treated to a series of character profile images depicting a new character in the form of Miura Akane.

I posted them on Rubenerd.com at the time, and commented that a tuba player in the Light Music Club playing a tuba was simply too awesome for words. A number of you left comments echoing my sentiment!

As I said at the time, not only would the idea of having an adorable moeblob character playing an instrument that's almost as large as she is would be highly entertaining to watch, it's such an unconventionally bizarre and wonderful instrument to have in a pop music group! As I've been saying since I got into jazz and swing in my late years of primary school:

Everything sounds better with brass!

It's true. Prove me otherwise. I dare you.

So we return to the present. Wait, how does one return to the present, if we were talking about the past? I'd make a lousy time traveler, I'd barely be able to form sentenced discussing where I was, let alone operate the devices used to transport me. But I digress.

Where is Akane Miura? Whatever happened to her? Has she appeared in the manga yet? Apparently, I haven't been the only one thinking about this… leave it to the demotivational poster folk to come up with this ;).

I wonder if she'll appear in the movie? Miura Akane doesn't seem like a very British name!