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Coming back from my daily coffee shop run, I found these forms under the door. That's almost a rhyme, but not quite.
Having grown up overseas, this was the first census form I'd ever filled out in Australia, having been given the responsibility by my old man and sister. The temptation to exact revenge on them by listing them as three hundred year old wiccan hitmen was there, but I answered honestly and truthfully ;).
Given the only time I ever use a pen is during exams (though I've been told UTS has an exception to this, will need to investigate!) and when filling out those massive immigration cards, I was relieved to find one of the pamphlets detailed how to fill out the census online. According to the Census Guide sheet that also came with all the goodies:
Use the eCensus to participate online. A Collector [sic] will not return to pick up a paper form.
I presume this means the person responsible for collecting the forms around our district will be given a list of those who completed the form online, but just in case the eCensus page also had a space to put our unique receipt number after successful completion.
Of course, having said all that, I just read this on the next page:
The eCensus is an option allowing you to participate in the Census [sic] via the Internet. [..] Upon completion, your collector [sic] will be notified that you have participated online, and will not need to return.
Interesting how the capitalisation of "collector" isn't consistent.
After entering our Census Form Number and eCensus Numbers, the questions began. Most of it was pretty straight forward, and the online forms were intelligent enough to dynamically hide or automatically fill in questions I didn't need to answer or that it figured out from previous answers.
That's not to say it was perfect! After listing my father first, then myself, the eCensus form inquired as to whether my sister Elke was the daughter of me, the daughter of my dad, or the daughter of both of us. I suppose technically with sex changes that would be possible, but even then, isn't incest illegal?
The only question that really gave me pause was about religion. My sister and I are atheists, and I was tempted to put that, but on advice from the AFA we filled in No Religion instead of being specific in the Other box. No Religion is vague enough to be almost entirely meaningless, but its better than not being legitimated counted, or worse.
Other than these, and despite there being more questions than the Singapore ones, we had our response submitted in less than 15 minutes!
Provided they have, I see six potential reasons why, some of which would be the result of doing no evil!
Firstly, have they really discontinued the toolbar? From their download page:
Google Toolbar for Firefox is compatible with Firefox version 4 or older. To find out what version of Firefox you’re using, click the Help menu and select “About Firefox” (on the Mac, the option is located in the “Firefox” menu).
If you use Firefox version 5 or newer, you won’t be able to use Google Toolbar.
While technically this isn't an admission that the software is discontinued, relegated to the alarmingly large pile of dead Google projects (or Lab if you will), it may as well be.
Apparently the Google Toolbar had many great features, including links to Google Reader, an unread email count for Gmail, an easy way to share discovered sites, a Google search box.
Despite this, I never got around to installing it. Not because I was afraid, but because I felt no need to have it. I already had third party extensions for many of the features the toolbar provided, bookmarklets for the rest, and the all important search box was already in the top right hand corner.
That said though, there seem to be enough people who did use its features who are willing to run insecure, older versions of Firefox just to keep it. Those are some dedicated (if foolish) people!
As with the closure of Google Labs, the end of this toolbar leaves us with lots of questions; or at least it leaves a lot of questions with me. Which is to say, I'm thinking of lots of questions, if I asked these out loud right now there'd be nobody here to answer, and I talk enough to myself as it is.
The first possibility is financial, though I have a hard time buying (see what I did there?) a company with Google's resources couldn't keep a person or two on the payroll to keep their toolbar efforts current.
The second is the inevitable streamlining middle managers and shareholders start to demand of companies that have reached a certain size and can no longer justify frivolous things like R&D and customer service. Google is certainly not the nimble, informal creature it once was, perhaps this is just a sign of its "maturity"… though I hope not its peaking.
The third potentially paints Mozilla as the evil folk. Part of the allure for Google having people running their toolbars in Firefox must have been that searches didn't incur a referral fee to Mozilla. Perhaps with increased competition, Mozilla needed the cash and twisted Google's arm. There's no evidence of this, and it seems silly Mozilla would go out of their way to screw their primary source of revenue, but the speculation is irresistible.
The fourth is a technological one. The Mozilla team have promised greater sandboxing of extensions, perhaps by doing so Google can't track browsing behaviour anymore, therefore killing the real reason for the toolbar's existence.
The fifth reason is feature duplication, and the fact Firefox mainline now has many of the toolbar's features. This was the only reason entertained by the Google folks officially, though I can't help but think it's not the only one.
While all these are possibilities (remote or otherwise!), I reckon this has more to do with Google wanting more holdouts on Chrome. The Google Toolbar collecting information about browsing habits in Internet Explorer and Firefox is valuable, but not as valuable as people surrounded by Googlyness in Chrome.
In the words of Dave Winer, this was purely a business decision. Perhaps the Google team figured the carrot of faster rendering and program execution had failed to entice everyone, so the stick of a reduced Google experience may persuade the rest. If Google+ takes off, one can imagine deep integration with Chrome that could also be partly achieved with a toolbar, but without one available it'll give people more of an excuse to switch. Anti-trust?
I trust Google more now than I did Microsoft in the 1990s, but I'm not as sure that I'm wrong about this as I wish I was.
With the help of a Twitter colleague who shares a similar obsession with this song, I bought one of the last two remaining advanced orders for the mini album of Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, aka Moshimoshi Harajuku, aka the PonPonPon Girl! Oh dear!
From the item's description page on CDJapan.co.jp, a shopping internet website that sells Japaneses compact discs that may or may not contain music specifically:
Mini album release from Kyary Pamyu Pamyu produced by Yasutaka Nakata (capsule). Features six electro pop tracks. Limited edition includes a photo book.
I have to admit, this is only my second time buying a JPop album; JPop of course being a portmondeau of Japan and Pop, which I believe refers to some sort of non-alcholoic beverage. My first JPop album was a character CD from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya that mysteriously dissipated in our move from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore, never to be seen again. I suspect one of the packers was an SOS-Brigade fan, or they just thought Haruhi was hot. Maybe, it's naught but speculation at this point.
With regards to this specific album, three quick thoughts.
Well, that was clearly more than three thoughts.
I should be taking delivery of this package at some point in mid August. To say I can't wait is the understatement of the… hey look at all that bread!
This post originally appeared on the Annexe.
air freshener air freshener air freshener
I think I’m gonna need to start hanging little trees on my face.
Funnily enough, I have no problem with the smell of durian, and I’m an angmo!
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Catching up on Lance’s PC Magazine columns for July, it suddenly struck me this afternoon that it would be for the last time.
(Scan is from the March 16, 2004 issue of PC Magazine I had on my shelf. Earliest copy I have that isn’t in storage!)
I’d been interested in computers since before I could read, but it turned into a fully blown obsession by the time my family had moved from Australia to Singapore. Perhaps keen to nurture my interest in the field, my old man would regularly buy me copies of PC World, Byte and PC Magazine, which I’d bury myself in while other kids got exercise in the playground!
Of these magazines, the US edition of PC Magazine was my favourite. Singapore did have its own version with much of the same syndicated content, but I loved the design of the former, and found it fascinating to see advertisements for companies in a different place. Kids ;).
In the beginning, the writer I was most eager to read was John C. Dvorak, and in particular his Inside Track column which I appreciated not only for the delicious pun of a title, but for his sharp and quick commentary which I attempted to emulate in my own primary school assignments one year. Suffice to say, Mrs Simpson-Jones was less than impressed!
(To prove the image above was scanned from a magazine I owned, enclosed is one of those double pages from the back that our Epson GT-S50 always snags itself on! You can get a P4 tower with 256MB of memory for only US$699)
Beginning in 2001 though, I started noticing the work of one Lance Ulanoff. My memory is hazy as to whether I read his material in the magazines or whether I read it all in his “Exclusive Columns” online (as the magazine described them!), but in either case I looked forward to them. As with John, I found his writing style refreshingly candid, and more than any of the other columnists he tended to touch on topics I was interested in. He also seemed more reasonable, though that could have been because my other source of news was Slashdot ;).
Lance introduced me to the Roomba, and the various iterations of PCMag.com. He predicted the decline of the PDA, and the stagnation of IE6 once Microsoft had “won” the first browser war. He questioned the CAN-SPAM act in the US, and whether shock jocks could save satellite radio; both of which had nothing to do with me living in Singapore, but they had potential global implications. I remember thinking his take on Gmail was the most rational in a world where you either thought it was perfect, or the text ads were reading your email with the intention of killing you.
Keeping on the theme of email, more recently I nearly shouted "thank you!" that someone was finally countering the ditch email meme, and his Just Say No to Data Caps column rang especially true, now that I find myself living back in Australia where they’re not only the norm, but accepted.
If I browsed his archives on PCMag.com I’m sure I could remember a whole lot more stuff, but you get the idea.
We haven’t always seen eye to eye, though I suppose with the breadth of his writing it was bound to happen eventually! I remember reading his warning that removing DRM would destroy the music industry (much as the VCR destroyed the film industry… hey, wait) or that one security breach in Mac OS X automatically made the system as insecure as Windows at the time. His banter with John C. Dvorak was entertaining, even if I think John won more of the times ;). Still, even if I didn’t agree with what he said, he still made me think.
(Screenshot of Lance and Sebastian grilling John on an episode of Cranky Geeks from 2007. I watched this at a coffee shop in Singapore and was chuckling far too loudly!)
I belabour — dare I say, all these brown nosing — personal thoughts, because on the 11th of this month Lance announced his departure from PCMag.com in Turning a Page:
In Internet years, 10 years is a lifetime. That’s how long I’ve been with PCMag. Well, that’s not entirely true. It’s actually been 10 1/2 years this time. And then there were those 5 years in the early 90s when I considered myself a print editor. Now, this long journey is ending, and I am moving on to new, exciting, and perhaps even more challenging vistas.
Lance sprinkles puns liberally in his work, though I hope in this case he's not inferring he's leaving because he's suddenly bloated and slow!
We'll be watching and waiting Lance, and good luck in your future endeavours. I grew up reading your stuff, and hope you'll still be around writing for many more years to come, if only for my own selfish reasons!
To send us off, paragraph six from his post:
Technology is, by definition, all about change, but I think we’re boarding boats to ride the waves of some of the most significant sea change we’ve seen in a lifetime. We’re rethinking the role of the PC, operating systems, mobile devices, and how we access and create content, documents, and more. Convergence is finally happening in the home and elsewhere, and physical media (DVDs, CDs) could disappear in a decade. Terabytes of storage have moved into the home, yet we’re already talking about putting micro data centers on mobile devices. Social networking has escaped the confines of our desktops, laptops, and smartphones and moved to our televisions. Expect it on every device in the home and at work.
A fitting end, given he often wrote yearly columns about the fate of various predictions. Wonder how much of this will happen?
As a guy who knows zippo about web design, I just discovered something incredible. If you want to vertically centre a line of text in a block level element, simply define the line-height equal to the height of the container.
#SomeContainer {
display:block:
height:128px;
line-height:128px; /* vertical */
text-align:center; /* horizontal */
width:128px;
}
Assuming you’re not parsing this in a blog aggregator that strips out CSS from RSS feeds (how’s that for some TLA TLC) you should see an example of it on the right.
The question seems to come and wane, but checking up on my long neglected TextMate newsgroups I uncovered a conversation regarding the future of TextMate 2. Again.
I've tried a lot of editors. On my Mac, I've gone from Smultron, to TextMate, MacVim, to JOE, another brief flirt with nano, and back to TextMate again. Vim is now my editor of choice for most work, but for projects nothing beats TextMate on the Mac. Allan Odgaard won an Apple Design Award for the software in 2006, and rightly so. It Just Works™.
In 2006, we got our first glimpse of the future 2.0 release on the official MacroMates blog:
I should also add that I am taking 10 weeks of vacation starting the 29th of November (going hiking in New Zealand), so even if I didn’t drop backwards compatibility, I wouldn’t have a 2.0 release before Leopard.
Little did we know that by that he meant before Leopard, Snow Leopard and Lion. Discussions about garbage collection in Objective-C 2.0 seem so distant and quaint now… remember how excited we all were about that? Those were the days :).
After years of talk about the improved features, in 2008 Allan stopped posting on his blog entirely, leading to an alleged torrent of questions about the project's direction. Finally, Allan responded with a new post entitled Working On It:
Over the past two years, posts on this blog have slowed to just a trickle, and a number of TextMate users have asked about TextMate’s status, or publicly worried about its future. This blog post, the first I’ve written here in a long time, is an attempt to assuage those concerns and answer some of the most frequent questions.
So where does development stand for 2.0? It feels to me like most of the modules are getting close, say 90%. But as they say, on the horizon, mountains look small. While I use 2.0 for my own work, day-to-day, and the basic infrastructure is pretty solid, much of the front-end still needs work, and for now it’s all lacking the spit and polish of a finished app. Hopefully an alpha version will be ready before too long, but I can’t make any promises about dates.
That was in 2009.
After a few more months with little communication (somewhat justified given his social anxiety, but little communication nonetheless), rumours began circulating that the software was vapourware. A few threads on Digg (I presume, but I don't go there!) and Reddit were started, and the software was even featured unceremoniously in fifth position in Wired Magazine's Vaporware 2009 piece.
But it’s also been stuck in 1.x limbo for years. Lead developer Allan Odgaard got so tired of answering the barrage of questions about TextMate 2’s release — including from those wondering if it would ever arrive — that he broke months of silence by posting a long sob story on his blog titled, "Working on It."
The fall 2009 release of Snow Leopard brought more compatibility setbacks. It is perhaps no coincidence that Odgaard’s chosen tagline for his app is “The missing editor for OS X.”
As I said in the introduction, TextMate has the mix about right for me. It works, I'm used to it, I have my own bundles, everything is peachy. Well, almost. For one thing it is a little unstable at times. The lack of wide character and true UTF-8 support is becoming a bit of a joke, and renders it useless for writing blog posts here that often have Japanese characters in them (anime posts and the like).
I've being doing a lot more work in Vim lately, and have recently rediscovered the NERDTree plugin, perhaps its finally time to think about moving over to it. Alternatively I could try using emacs seriously given TextMate was inspired by it… heck, I want a new email client too and emacs can do everything, right? ;).
I hope life is treating Allan okay, and that he doesn't lose too many people from this TextMate limbo.
