Rubenerd

After over a year of trials and tribulations (something to do with an infestation of Tribbles) I finally gave up on the Intel DQ35JO motherboard and replaced it with the MSI P43T-C51 in my main DIY machine. The difference is stunning!

Initial

When I first built this machine in late 2008, I envisioned a headless server I could call from my aging MacBook Pro to do CPU intensive tasks such as file compression, video conversion and compiling large ports. I would SFTP into FreeBSD on it, send it the files and depending on which folder they were sent to, a cron job would either convert, compress or compile them automatically, then put them in an outbox folder I could pick up. It was pretty sweet.

I bought the Intel DQ35JO "Executive" motherboard because it was relatively affordable and it had onboard graphics; Intel graphics are universally terrible but I was using it as a server and it wouldn't even be plugged into a monitor most of the time! I used the money I saved from buying a graphics card to splurge on a Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3GHz CPU and 6GB of DDR2 memory which at the time were still pretty pricey.

If you do a Google Image search for DQ35JO, I'm on the first page ;).

Problems problems problems problems…

As I blogged about in detail in 2008, things didn't always go so smoothly. From the outset the motherboard seemed to be plagued with problems, so much so that I had it replaced twice. It wouldn't recognise any of the keys to enter the BIOS, it would ignore drives, drives it didn't ignore would report serious errors, the system clock would sporadically change to something that made no sense. I had an 800W PSU with just one optical drive and two hard disks so I didn't think it was due to a lack of power.

Software was also very touchy. NetBSD, FreeBSD, Slackware and Windows 2000 installed without major problems, but the Anaconda installer on Fedora 11 and 12 would report a crash before it even finished loading, PartedMagic and Knoppix would get stuck while booting, and Debian refused to recognise any drives at all. Finally, SpinRite would get stuck on the screen where it waits to access drives.

MSI saves my arse

With most of the world moving to the Intel Core iX line of CPUs, I reckoned I could pick up a replacement motherboard for the Core 2 Duo for less, and I was right! Going to Cybermind at Sim Lim Square I was able to snag the last of their compatible boards with a nice discount. They're really nice people there, been buying stuff from them since I was a kid.

I swapped the Intel DQ35JO board with the MSI P43T-C51 and the difference is amazing. Despite having the same RAM, drives and CPU as the last board, FreeBSD boots in a fraction of the time and Fedora didn't chuck a hissy fit when installing. To borrow a phrase from Steve Jobs, the entire machine just feels more snappy.

As with the Intel board it comes with gigabit ethernet, a hugely generous number of USB ports (especially compared to the two lousy ports I get on my MacBook Pro!) and passable Realtec sound. As a bonus, unlike the Intel board it also comes with a decent number of PCI slots (owing to the fact it's not MiniATX) and a legacy floppy drive controller so I can use my 5.25" floppy drive! Yes I still have several, shaddup.

The only downsides other than a complete lack of FireWire ports (d'oh) is it doesn't have onboard graphics, so I had to harvest an old PCI Express card from a older machine which I hope to replace. It's my hope to use this machine as a proper desktop now instead of just a server, so I'll be on the lookout for more basic cards that FreeBSD and Fedora can support accelerated graphics on.

Photos of my new baby coming soon ^_^

Commodore had sushi and sold it as fish, sadly

Best description I've ever read, from iwantyoutothrow_ (559379) on Slashdot.

The photo is of a giant perspex Amiga sign I salvaged from a shopping centre in Malaysia that was going to throw it away. I hurriedly took a picture with my iTelephone for this post, but I'll upload a better one from my Nikon D60 soon :)

I wanted to add my voice to the chorus of discontented Mac users over the state of Steam for our platform with my own criticism:

You have none of the games I want.

Hey wait, even the Windows version doesn't. Never mind.

I'm an avid reader of Deutsche Welle's English news site and subscribe to their Twitter feeds because my dad is German, and they tend to be far less sensationalist and more factual than other news sources. Still, this recent story shows even they can fall into the trap set for them by large software companies.

Global software piracy cost more than $50 billion in 2009
Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: An amnesty campaign gives German business 30 days to register their software.

Some 43 percent of computer programs used worldwide were illegal copies in 2009, says the Business Software Alliance. Losses top $50 billion, and in some countries more than 90 percent of software is illegally copied.

Emphasis added by me.

I’m feeling déjà vu, all over again

Much like media companies complaining that piracy is costing them billions a year, I'm skeptical of reporting such as this. They're assuming that people pirating software:

• all people pirating software can afford legitimate copies
• all people pirating software would buy legitimate copies

Emphasis (along with all the other words) added by me, again :).

I've yet to see any evidence in support of these points, and plenty against. Perhaps corporations are in a different boat to consumers, but with the current financial situation you could understand why some would skimp on licences in place of more tangible expenses.

I don't use pirated software because I can afford to buy it, and because I've given up expensive luxuries such as Photoshop, Illustrator and Final Cut Pro. The Gimp, Inkscape and Final Cut Express may have less features, but I can afford them!

What I will say is their reporting that pirated media can be a security risk was spot on, whether it be due to trojan horses or from the fact they're more difficult to patch owing to vendors understandably not wanting to support them. But that's a topic for another post.

@tlw3: A mystic is someone who wants to understand the universe, but is too lazy to study physics. ~ anonymous

I like it! Credit to Tom on Twitter, the image is from his Twitter page background.

Not doing physics in high school still remains one of my biggest regrets; I couldn't do it because the timetable clashed with two of my computer subjects. Chemistry was deeply interesting, but physics is on an entirely different plane of fascination for me. There is so much stunning beauty in physics.

I tend to be skeptical of class action lawsuits because often the solicitors or lawyers keep more of the money than the clients they represent, but in this case I'm making an exception, if only for a very selfish reason ;).

From FinancialRedress.com.au:

Until very recently, some banks charged you up to $60 if you became overdrawn, went beyond an agreed limit, or made a late payment. The true cost might only have been a few dollars at most on each transaction. Banks have made billions from these unfair charges. [..]

If you have incurred at least one of these exception fees on any of your bank or credit card accounts, register by clicking here to help get your money back.

Personal adventure things

I closed my account with BankSA (now a subsidiary of Westpac, go figure) because of repeated and provable fee abuses. One time I was charged $25 for not having a minimum balance, which put me in the red, which caused them to charge me another fee. Then there was the time I forgot to prove I was a student for the umpteenth time, which meant new fees kicked in. The latter was probably within their legal right, but the former was an unabashed con.

That said, I went with the Australian Central Credit Union which was great for a while, but then they started treating me like a bank would anyway by refusing to do what I asked to, sending me predatory credit card applications in the mail and long queues at their branches. Curiously this started happening when they got bought out by the imaginatively titled Savings and Loans.

What is about financial institutions and their mandate to screw their customers? What other industry charges people for the right to take our money? Sheesh.

In response to the continual antics of Zuckerberg and Co, today was the International Kill Your Facebook Day (or variations upon that theme).

Unfortunately, I have such tenuous link with so many people I still need my account, though today I took the opportunity to scrub it of all my information other than my name and a fake religion called "fake-account-ism". I'm still one of Zuckerbergs pawns, but at least I'm no good to the third parties that cut his cheques. Well, less good, at least now they'd have to trawl their database looking for items people think they deleted but were just stored somewhere else or with a different database flag.

Its a reality check

Reading books such as Hoodwinked you could be forgiven for thinking the people of my generation are more ethical and have more of a desire to good socially and for the environment than previous generations. I suppose Zuckerberg is a splash of cold water and a solid reality check on this view. There are people of every generation who's motivation is profit above people.

Here's hoping Diaspora or another similar project can do to Facebook what Facebook did to MySpace.

The Whole Wheat Factor

Of course I'm also a hypocrite, as Jim Kloss pointed out this morning my time:

Thanks for adding the Whole Wheat Radio Player Ruben. We both made compromises. I wrote the unbelievably contorted code to add a simple link to Facebook profiles and you logged onto FB. ;-) —Jim

He's right, of course! In my defence, I figure the information from this widget is in the WWR community silo and not Facebook, and unlike most widget developers I trust Jim :).

For those who don't know, Whole Wheat Radio is an internet radio station and community wiki showcasing entirely independent music.

You know that now notorious error message you sometimes see on YouTube videos claiming the music in a video was copyrighted and had been disabled?

Out of curiosity I clicked the Learn More link and was told this on their Copyright Tips page:

What is copyright infringement?

Now now, nobody likes a rhetorical question, do they?

Copyright infringement occurs when a copyrighted work is reproduced, distributed, performed, publicly displayed, or made into a derivative work without the permission of the copyright owner.

Ah that nagging little thing called "fair use" is such a spanner in the works, isn't it?

We're in the process of moving (we're in the double digits for number of times now) so I won't be posting anything new for the next few days. Or I may find time to ramble on my iTelephone and post from it instead, like I used to do in 2008.

I'll still be messaging the hell out of Twitter with @Rubenerd and lurking on the GRC newsgroups if you want to say hi.

Thanks everyone,
Ruben

AdamNelson: @Rubenerd Why not stay in one spot

What a horribly mediocre idea!

I so thoroughly enjoyed reviewing the previous episode of K-On! without really talking much about at all, I thought I’d repeat this winning recipe. Recipe, dang I could use some of their tea and cake, I wish there had been a music club like theirs when I was still in high school!

While I’m obviously way behind given the second season has started, I’ve seen enough of the rheims of fanart (doesn’t Rheem make water heaters?) that I knew what to expect from this one. You know where I’m going with this, so much so I’m phrasing this sentence as a statement and not a question.

Yes, this episode was all about the girls from the light music club dressing in very formal attire which, I admit, was quite a gamble seeing as the otaku community haven’t really been exposed to such an idea before and haven’t seemed to be very receptive to it. Apparently there are even cafes in Japan and Singapore where people dress up in such clothing, though obviously nerdy guys are forced to attend them because they wouldn’t want to otherwise.

Kyoani and the original manga writers and artists really went out on a limb here, which I assume would be quite painful given I banged one of my shins on a table this morning and I yelped. Isn’t that a phone company? This whole paragraph with its intentional misunderstandings was terrible even by my own standards which is scary. My anime review writing standards are the stuff of Halloween legends, at least that’s what I’ve been told, by me.

The trackpad on my laptop just stopped working for some reason, and the lights at the cafe I’m typing this at just flickered as a lightling bolt hit outside. I think the Gods are telling me to stop going so flagrantly off point and get back to reviewing. Either that or my tracking finger has stopped working. That really didn’t sound right.

Okay, so what was I talking about? Oh yeah, eyebrows. I’d never really paid any attention to them before until I realised just how few characters in animated programmes had them, or if they did they were just pencil lines. Some people in the real world even get by with just pencil line eyebrows, what a lot of work.

Eh I give up, at some point in a review about an episode I should talk about… the episode. Right? So in this episode Yui’s sister graduates and joins the other girls. The Light Music club tried their best to recruit other members by putting on a kick arse concert that’s packed to the rafters… sorry, that bad Aussie comedy ruined that expression for me. Packed… yeah, it was packed.

See this is where my cognitave dissonance starts coming in. The obsessive senpai who dresses the girls in ridiculous outfits and the fact the Hirasawa siblings have never seemed to have had an argument I can deal with, but how could you put on a show like that and get nobody? I suppose Japanese society is even more conservative than I thought :P

I… well, that is to say… um, that is… I was thinking… um… Mugi!!! Wait, sorry I got distracted again. What I will say though is even though everyone else no doubt was more interested in seeing Azusa (the only person interested in joining!) I appreciated the fact Mugi was in it more. Everyone thinks Mio is the best, and for a period of time I agreed with them, but we all know Mugi is now, right?

And they wonder why they can’t get anyone to join their club when this is what they get as a welcome! Well that first part was okay, but being crushed… though I can imagine some people would go for that… Mio and Azusa are the only ones pulling reasonable expressions! Wait, that’s not what I meant. I think I’ll sleep now.