Rubenerd

Why is it that interesting things happen in Adelaide when I'm away? And can we say traditional news is dead yet?

According to latest sources a 3.something magnitude earthquake (to use the very technical seismic lingo) with an epicentre on the Adelaide Hills struck this evening. In the past this would have been talked about over breakfast with co-workers, friends and school mates the next day, but in Twitter instant news land I was reading about it within minutes of it happening.

As I discussed last year when it took the television news broadcasts in Adelaide an embarrassing half an hour to acknowledge earth tremors in Indonesia where a very close friend of mine lives with his family, Twitter was abuzz with the news and even had people selling shirts before the major news services reported on it.

Newsweek recently changed their focus from reporting news, to analysing it. I get the feeling that for outlets like television and newspapers to survive with the onslaught of almost instant internet news, a broader adoption of this approach may be needed.

From PC World Singapore, February 2001. Frankly, I'm surprised a certain class of websites didn't take advantage of such a device; perhaps it was due to a lack of compatibility with Windows 200.

In our efforts to clean out our apartment here, we decided to put a bunch of old home entertainment equipment up on eBay. I'd forgotten just how maddeningly frustrating it could be!

I've been using eBay to buy things for many years and have only had a small number of negative experiences, but assuming the role of a seller is another thing entirely. For people who make their livelihoods off the service and have thousands of items for sale, I'm sure its just fine but for the person looking to only put a few items up it's a quick trip to the loony bin.

My biggest gripe isn't even the ridiculous little charges they impose on everything from the gallery images to the way text is presented, or the slow and crappy 1999-era interface to enter item details, it just doesn't work.

Steps can be found on staircases

1. Upon painstakingly entering in all the details for our first item, I was informed I wasn’t allowed to sell in Singapore because I have an Aussie eBay account. I don’t know what they hope to accomplish with such a restriction, but I played along and used my dad’s eBay account instead.

2. Upon painstakingly re-entering in all the details for our first item, I was informed I would need to convert my dad’s account to a seller.

3. I re-entered the login credentials and was asked whether I wanted to pay the fees with PayPal, a credit card or a bank account. I opted to go with PayPal seeing as my dad has used it many, many times on eBay before and clearly had it linked up already. Before going any further, we got a terse error message.

4. After trying this a dozen more times on Windows, Mac and FreeBSD machines around the house, we gave up attempting to use PayPal for the fees. Upon painstakingly re-entering in all the details for our first item (again) we chose credit card instead. It worked, and we became a seller.

5. We clicked the List This Item button and were given another error message claiming we needed to be verified before listing the item. The only way to do this? With a PayPal account. If it had worked we would have used PayPal, but we had to use a credit card instead! And this despite the account already being linked to a verified PayPal account.

So far I haven't got any comments back from my support emails, but they could surprise my any minute now ;).

This is a public service announcement for people who discuss aviation. It is "Malaysia Airlines" and NOT "Malaysian Airlines". Can you tell the difference?

Referring to it as Malaysian Airlines on your website doesn't do much for your aviation credibility, especially considering the correct spelling is in the logo! Ditto for Qantas. Don't worry, even high profile sites like Dynamic Business Australia are guilty of it.

As I was uploading a photo to TwitPic this afternoon, I saw this photo by micbradford on the front page and felt an overwhelming urge to write a caption. I'd like to meet this guy, I love his shirt.

Was thinking about the situation with Palm I discussed this morning when a Robbie Williams song came on the radio, and I thought it was apt.

“I don’t miss you, just who you used to be…”

I think it's safe to say we all saw it coming. Well, either this or bankruptcy. It makes me sad.

April 12 (Bloomberg) — Palm Inc., creator of the Pre smartphone, put itself up for sale and is seeking bids for the company as early as this week, according to three people familiar with the situation.

Pointless nostalgia

The first PDA I ever had was a Palm IIIx. I was in primary school at the time and I really didn't need one, but I was already obsessed with computers and my dad figured it was cheaper to get me one of those for Christmas than a fully fledged laptop. Perhaps it was because we were growing up in tech-obsessed Singapore, but it was common for lots of kids my age to have such business oriented gadgets! I was the only guy in my circle with a Palm though, everyone else had those Microsoft Palmtop thingys.

The Palm IIIx had 4MiB of memory for data and applications, which was double that of the cheaper Palm III. Amazing, right?! It used volatile memory, meaning if you didn't replace the AAA batteries within a few minutes of them losing a charge, your data was wiped. It sounds bad, but the HotSync software made it so easy to backup and restore that I only lost stuff once. It had a 2-bit black and white display (no, not even monochrome) that was incredibly sharp, and it used the same new inverted backlight as the sleeker Palm V. And the Graffiti writing system was awesome.

I loved that little PDA, I loaded it up with all sorts of little applications and had it as a backup entertainment device right up until I started university a few years ago and a roommate of mine "borrowed" it then moved out. I never saw it again :(.

The Tungsten W

As the Palm IIIx was my first PDA, the Palm Tungsten W was my first smartphone. I was in late high school and the idea of having a full colour PDA that doubled as a phone sent tingles of excitement down my nerdy spine. For some reason the design department thought it was a good idea to use the aging DragonBall processor and require the use of a hands-free cable to place calls, but other than those it was a fantastic device.

Shortly after I got the Tungsten W, Palm bought Handspring and replaced their Tungsten smartphone line with Handspring's Treo. In many ways the Tungsten was the superior device, it was slimmer, had a cleaner and more elegant design, the QWERTY keyboard was much easier to use, it had a much smaller antenna with the same phone call quality and reception and the screen resolution was 320×320 instead of the crappy 160×160 the Treo had.

The end of Palm’s fortunes?

I started losing interest in Palm shortly after they bought Handspring. I have no hard numbers to back this up from a business standpoint, but personally, all their decisions from around that time didn't seem to make much sense. In no particular order:

• they divested themselves of their software division
• re-branded themselves with the clumsy PalmOne trademark
• changed their names back again
• started developing the Folio concept, then canceled it
• started selling Windows Mobile versions of the Treo…

When Palm announced their intentions with WebOS, I was excited about Palm again. When the Palm Pre came out and everyone said it was slow as molasses, my temporary re-interest (is that a word?) waned and I got an iPhone. Then they came out with the Pixi which was even slower than the Pre.

As I've enumerated many times on Twitter, I looked forward to Palm releasing a new smartphone with much faster hardware that could run WebOS well, because the OS had such potential. I wanted to love Palm and to have another one of their devices, I really, really did. Instead it seems they have no interest in doing that, but rather selling themselves off to the highest bidder.

I'm not an MBA nor do I know all the reasons behind their decisions, but it seemed Palm in the 2000s was run by people who simply had no idea what they were doing, much like Microsoft has been sinking since Ballmer has been CEO. It was almost as though Palm's board went out of their way to make sure it failed, because nobody could make that many bad decisions. Well, other than Microsoft under Ballmer.

The future

Pundits say Palm is worthless and nobody in their right mind would want them. While its executives have successfully gutted the company and reduced it to a shell of its former self, I suppose their warchest of patents would still be worth something.

What I'd love to see is WebOS released as either open source, or available for licencing if Palm gets sold. If I could get a Android phone, wipe the firmware off of it and put WebOS on instead, I'd be a really happy camper. It won't happen though, for political and technical reasons.

Goodbye Palm, I grew up using your devices and it was nice knowing you.

I was puzzled when Neal O'Carroll insinuated in the comments for a recent post that he'd used the Buy Ruben a Coffee button on my blog sidebar. PayPal didn't — and still hasn't — emailed me any record of this taking place.

Anyway I would like to sheepishly admit with a deep crimson face that Neal did indeed hit that Buy Ruben a Coffee button, it just appeared in my PayPal account, and I wanted to thank him for keeping this weirdo caffeine-d up for another day. Thank you good sir :).

Usually I'm okay with flights, but the combined jetlag from a turbulent redeye and a late morning connection rendered me utterly incapable of doing anything productive. I try to blog at least once a day though, so I decided to comment on this K-On image now circulating.

I ask you, how can you possibly have Shine without Mugi?! She's the best character! Perhaps she's holding the camera. Can you get handheld piano cameras? I suppose that'd be an accordion camcorder, or an accamcorder. Hey, I like that, accamcorder. I should write an accamcorder iPhone app.

For those of you as addicted to Tree Style Tab for Firefox as I am, there's been a flurry of updates over the last week that address some appearance and functionality bugs as well as improved compatibility with other extensions. Get it!

If only my brain were so easily updated

As of this evening I'm up to the conveniently named 2010.04.02 version and it works great. Curiously I had the Christmas 2009 version of it for months before Firefox told me there was an update, despite the fact there were several intermediary versions and other extensions have been automatically updated dozens of times since then.

Anyway, I used to say NoScript was the only reason I stuck with Firefox, but having all my tabs neatly stacked on the side instead cramming them all under the address bar makes them so much easier to read and navigate. As far as I know Opera is the only other browser that allows you to put tabs on the side, which is weird given I'd think you'd really need it if you're a browser power user.

The screenshot below that I took for this post back in 2009 should give you a pretty good idea as to why I need such an extension!

Some trivia

Wikipedia articles that have trivia sections tend to have template boilerplate stating their existence is discouraged, so I've decided to actively put trivia sections in more of my blog posts from now on.

If you abbreviate "Tree Style Tab", you get TST, which sounds an awful lot like a South Park episode with a dog whisperer, as well as being an acronym for Transition state theory which I learned in high school, and the code for a Hong Kong MTR station. True story.