Rubenerd

Previously when people would ask me on Twitter whether I used Gowalla or Foursquare I'd reply with Gowalla because Foursquare wasn't available in Singapore or Australia when I started, and now that I have all my locations on there I may as well keep using it. Now it seems I finally have a concrete reason to keep using Gowalla:

On the heels of the Foursquare-Bravo TV deal, news of several additional major media partnerships involving the location-based social networking app have dropped this evening.

According to various reports, Zagat, Warner Bros., HBO, the History Channel and ExploreChicago have all been added to Foursquare’s media and entertainment mix.

First reaction: oh well, sellouts! Second reaction: doesn't this just further cement Foursquare's reputation as a site that puts the US #1 and the rest of the world on the backburner? I'm assuming these "media partnerships" are America centric. Third reaction: the linked news report on Mashable only had glowing, positive comments? That's a bit suspect.

Anyway I've decided now more than ever to keep using Gowalla, even if their parent company's homepage is so full of saccharine sweet marketing speak I needed to skull three dozen espressos in rapid succession after reading it!

I had a thought this afternoon. Should Chrysler sell Toyota the Dodge brand name, given people will be trying to when they see a Toyota uncontrollably accelerating towards them?

Well that joke sounded wittier in my head. Wait wait, I can make it better! Suppose if its a technical problem, perhaps Toyota could ask Chuck Peddle to help them! Get it? Chuck… PEDDLE? HA!

When I was a kid I dreamed of being a stand up comedian. For the sake of audiences around the world, it's probably a good thing that never happened.

I apologise, I know I only just posted about The Great Firewall of Australia again, but this quote was just too good to pass up:

Conroy also stated in Senate Estimates yesterday, “Google were very happy to block China’s material right up until they found out they had hacked their source code and suddenly discovered that censorship was a bad idea — after they had hacked their source code. But they block in a number of other countries.

You read that right, no more smoke and mirrors: after dodging the question so many times in Senate debates Senator Steven Conroy has openly (though backhandedly) admitted his plan is just like the one in the PRC. To afford myself some current internet language: it was a Freudian slip of EPIC FAIL-ness.

His explanation that Google left China simply because of source code theft also shows his breathtaking lack of computer knowledge, politics and current events. And he is the minister in charge of The Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. And while we're at it, Australian department names are far too long.

Be afraid, be very, very afraid.

Just when we thought this nonsense couldn't get any worse, ZDNet Australia is reporting 80% of respondents to a phone poll support Labor's plan for a mandatory internet filter.

Unfortunately I'm not surprised. Most of the voting public aren't tech savvy and all the information they're getting about the plan are from government sound bites and talking points that misleadingly tell them such a plan will protect their kids. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Much like the republican referendum ten years ago, I think the wording of the question is critical in a situation like this. 80% of people may support this proposition:

Do you support a mandatory internet filter?

YES / NO

But what about this?

Do you support a mandatory internet filter that:

• is similar to ones in China, Saudi Arabia and North Korea
• will slow down internet access
• drive IT investment out of the country which will cost jobs
• does not prevent access to material secretly deemed inappropriate by the government?

YES / NO

I've heard the argument that voters don't like reading long, complicated sentences and are much happier to answer a simple question such as the first one above, but I figure they'll see big scary North Korea there and change their mind.

The Brockman Factor

Speaker: Then it is unanimous, we will approve the bill to [defend Australian children against questionable material by creating an internet filter…]

Senator: Hold on, I’d like to tack on a waiver to that to that bill. [Can we make it mandatory regardless of its effectiveness?]

Speaker: All those in favour of the amended mandatory internet filter say aye? [80% aye! Motion carried.]

Kent Brockman: I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again: democracy simply doesn’t work.

Having just spoken about photography, a few hours ago Apple released Aperture 3. One thing of note is the white box instead of black, shock of horrors! Of note for my own personal circumstances was the phrasing of the system requirements:

Aperture 3, which runs as a 64-bit application on Intel Core 2 Duo Macs running Mac OS X Snow Leopard […]

I've been saying on this blog for years that my 2006-vintage Core Duo MacBook Pro still works and does everything I need it to, but perhaps this is a sign that it's the end of the road for it as far as Apple is concerned. Perhaps this means Mac OS X 10.7 will only be 64-bit as well; could Snow Leopard be the latest OS X I'll be able to run on it?

I thought it was very odd that they timed the transition to Intel only months before the 64-bit Core 2 Duo processor, so they've had to support those precious few 32-bit machines like mine when they could have been entirely x64 from the start. If this is the start of 64-bit only applications at Apple, I applaud them for it; despite having a 32-bit MacBook Pro, the vast majority of the install base is 64-bit and machines like mine are weighing everybody else down.

Interim transition time?

Perhaps this may be the excuse I need to start rebooting into my FreeBSD partition on this MacBook Pro on a more regular basis to get used to it in anticipation of no more updates! I know it's not politically correct to admit it but I adore The Gimp, now I just need a photo management application that isn't some terrible Mono .NET thing.

You know you've lived in Singapore too long when you see the Mountain Bike Action magazine's website URI MBAction.com and you think of business administration.

While I was quick to point out the release of Apple's Aperture 3 software, perhaps even bigger news is KDE 4.4 now available. Time to check out openSUSE or Mandriva again soon?

9th February, 2010. Today KDE announces the immediate availability of the KDE Software Compilation 4.4, “Caikaku”, bringing an innovative collection of applications to Free Software users. Major new technologies have been introduced, including social networking and online collaboration features, a new netbook-oriented interface and infrastructural innovations such as the KAuth authentication framework. According to KDE’s bug-tracking system, 7293 bugs have been fixed and 1433 new feature requests were implemented. The KDE community would like to thank everybody who has helped to make this release possible.

Hysterical, no wait, historical

If you look through the archives here you'd see even as late as 2008 I was a huge fan of KDE and preferred it to Gnome. Qt rocks GTK's socks, and the applications that came even with the kde_base FreeBSD port felt more complete and mature than anything on competing desktops. KDE felt professional.

When KDE 4.0 was released many people switched because of stability concerns and a lack of features, I hurriedly switched to Gnome. Then Microsoft shamelessly copied it for Windows 7, go figure.

Comparisons are like comparing

I've tried each release of KDE 4 since, but I've gone back to Gnome each time because at some point Gnome became fairly usable, simple to use and polished whereas KDE feels as though they're competing on glitz and wow to the detriment of consistency and usability.

Apple still seems to be the only tech outfit that can create stunningly beautiful user interfaces that are also a pleasure to use. Gnome is like Google in that the interface is plain but very functional. The good news is many of the new features like the desktop widgets can be disabled and the new KDE menu can be configured to work like the menus in KDE 3.x (or Gnome) amongst other things, but it bothers me how much work I need to put in to get a desktop I feel I can use.

Of course all this is my own opinion and there are plenty of people who are really happy with KDE 4.x. I'm hoping the 4.4 release might give me enough reason to move back; Gnome has the better interface but as I said I prefer Qt and Mono's encroachment worry me. Plus I'd love to start using the KDE developer tools again, KDevelop is so much fun to use it's almost criminal.

I've been in the market for an affordable macro (micro in Nikkor parlance) lens since I first got my beloved Nikon D60 back in 2008. I might have found one, but I need to do more research… of course!

System requirements

Any Intel Mac with Leopard or FreeBSD. Oh, you mean the lens! Don't mind me, some people can do really good nonsensical humour, and I am not one of these people. I've just always wanted to use the heading "System requirements" for something that has nothing to do with software.

System requirements

Yeah, that title! Firstly, I want a lens for taking photos of small electronic components like retro Zilog Z80s I pick up at Sim Lim Tower for peanuts, and cute anime figures like Asahina Mikuru or Kallen Stadtfeld; in other words small detailed objects. So far my AF NIKKOR 50mm f/1.8 has done a great job, but lets just say I tried my dad's 105mm macro and was blown away at how much easier it is to use for these tasks. I mean it, it was so much fun and so easy!

As for specifics, I'd prefer a prime lens because it'd be cheaper and sharper and cheaper and cheaper. Did I mention it'd be cheaper? Having AF-S would allow it to autofocus on my Nikon D60, but remembering back to my Finepix S9600 bridge camera I preferred manually focusing on macro shots anyway, so this would be another feature I'd be happy to give up for affordability.

The final consideration is the focal length. As I understand it, having a 105mm lens would give me a bit more breathing room between the camera and the subject, but because I'll be using the macro lens with a DX frame camera I can get away with a smaller one, which would also be cheaper.

The AF NIKKOR Micro 60mm f/2.8D

Singapore is full of great camera shops, and I've been given a really good price on an AF NIKKOR Micro 60mm f/2.8D which if you believe the reviewers on Amazon.com is an amazingly sharp lens. Given the AF-S version is now available perhaps that's one reason they're selling cheaper.

I've seen a few Sigmas floating around too. Perhaps it's time to do some homework.

Some more of SegPub's legendary reliability from earlier this evening. I suppose it'd been a whole month since my last outage ;).

Running the ./configure script from the latest nano tarball on a virgin Snow Leopard machine (my dad's) I keep running into a problem with UTF-8 support.

Using ncurses as the curses library
checking for use_default_colors in -lncurses... yes
configure: error:
UTF-8 support was requested, but insufficient UTF-8 support 
was detected in your curses and/or C libraries.  Please 
verify that your slang was built with UTF-8 support or your 
curses was built with wide character support, and that your 
C library was built with wide character support.

I've built the latest ncurses and slang libraries from MacPorts and have confirmed they were built with UTF-8 support. Only thing I can think of is it's using the outdated ncurses from the system instead of MacPorts, but other ports such as Midnight Commander are using it. Will keep digging.

For what it's worth, it builds just fine without UTF-8, but it's a feature I'd rather have.