Rubenerd

After what has seemed like an eternity of searching, I finally was able to track down and buy a Logitech Premium Powered USB Hub. Christmas has come early!

You may choose one (or both) of the following sections to read.

Option one: I don’t want to read this entire post

Well okay fair enough! In short, the Logitech Premium Powered USB Hub a spectacular little device that takes power from an external power supply and allows me to plug in four bus powered hard drives into one USB port. It's fantastic, and I'm kicking myself for not buying it sooner! Thank you.

Option two: Please, spare no detail!

Let me regale you with my tale as to why I so desperately needed a powered USB hub and why this one fits the bill so well its a bit creepy. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Despite finding a local Singaporean distributor for the Drobo entirely by accident, and while it would be a real time saver, I'm not rich enough to still spend $600 on what is essentially an attractive, empty RAID box (An arm, a leg and a Drobo) so instead I have a veritable Stonehenge of external hard drives. I miss the days before I started studying overseas and my desktop was my primary machine, I had a large power supply and had all but a few drives internal. That was schweet!

Anyway so I have a specialised, shock absorbing hard drive carrying case for when I'm in aeroplanes that can take two desktop sized external drives and half a dozen notebook sized ones. I have a FireWire 800 ExpressCard (which Apple inexplicably removed from all but their 17" MacBook Pros now, stupid idea) which I plug the desktop drives into, but all the notebook sized drives are USB.

This is a problem because notebook hard drives are bus powered which means they need a dedicated USB port. Traditional USB hubs are no good because they can only support one powered device, which in this case defeats their purpose. With this powered Logitech hub thingy though, I can attach all my drives at once and they're all recognised! Transfer speeds would be fairly terrible if I tried to do intensive work off all four drives at once, but that's not how I intend to use them anyway. It's a convenience thing.

Now the only problem is my OS X desktop and Finder are rapidly filling up with drive icons! Time to run rsync to get them all in check, and maybe upgrade the desktop drives to 2TB ones :)

Links shared from del.icio.us today:

Touré Kunda – Discover music, concerts, & pictures at Last.fm

Just heard their music for the first time, and already I'm looking for a CD! Fantastic stuff!

(categories: music africa senegal worldmusic)

Downloads | Dreaming Of Beetles

Excellent optimised Mac builds of Shiretoko/Firefox and Camino

(categories: camino firefox shiretoko software mac osx browser apple optimized)

Cosplay Queen: Arisa Mizuhara | Really Cute Asians

Her Mikuru cosplay was the best ^_^ :)

(categories: cosplay cute japanese anime)

Perhaps my internet connection has been a bit spotty, but building the latest version of Ruby 1.9 from MacPorts has been failing on me with a checksum error all afternoon.

--->  Verifying checksum(s) for ruby19
--->  Checksumming ruby-1.9.1-p376.tar.bz2
Error: Checksum (md5) mismatch for ruby-1.9.1-p376.tar.bz2

Portfile checksum: 
ruby-1.9.1-p376.tar.bz2 md5 e019ae9c643c5efe91be49e29781fb94
Distfile checksum: 
ruby-1.9.1-p376.tar.bz2 md5 3e4ea40c2639880bfe5355c17cf91363

The correct checksum line may be:
checksums 
md5 3e4ea40c2639880bfe5355c17cf91363 
sha1 5178cb0e1007ee839316206ee3aaeed49059cf0d 
rmd160 191e2be8c7817f9efab9f72ebb692ca33375d14a

Error: Target org.macports.checksum returned: 
Unable to verify file checksums

Might need to download the file manually, or if worst comes to worst build it manually. Package managers spoil me :).

In other news, as you can see from the screenshot above I haven’t been able to access Matz’s blog either, though Guido van Rossum’s comes up just fine. I’m starting to think there’s a Ruby conspiracy going on.

Update!

Well there’s the problem Sherlock! Despite improvements in efficiency with the Ruby 1.9 stream, I doubt they’ve managed to fit the entire language runtime in 12 kilobytes ;).

I usually don't read the Singapore Straits Times, but Stephanie Yeow's graphic in their story about drink driving was just too well done to pass up.

I wish the Singapore Police luck in their efforts to curb drink driving with incentives instead of nagging which I've maintained never works because it attacks the symptoms and not the societal causes. For example, both Singapore and Australia have had countless anti-drink driving campaigns pitched through all forms of media and as far as I know they haven't done anything.

Then there are 23 year old people like me who don't even have a car licence and probably have one or two standard drinks a month, if that. Go figure.

Given I do most of my blogging on my retro MacBook Pro, I decided to finally cave in and take advantage of the 30 day free trial of MarsEdit by Red Sweater software for Mac OS X. In an electronic nutshell, it didn't meet my needs but I could see how it would be useful for most people.

MarsEdit is a dedicated desktop application that allows you to publish and modify blog posts without having to use web based interfaces that come bundled with blogging software such as WordPress or Movable Type which are often unreliable, poorly designed and slow. In this regard I could certainly see the appeal, I was able to edit posts for this blog directly from a desktop application.

Problems come in threes

My first MarsEdit problem was that it wasn't able to automatically detect my blogging settings, so I had to configure them manually. I (begrudgingly) run WordPress for now which I've heavily modified and attempted to bolt down to make it more secure, but in the process I seem to have unwittingly made it more difficult for external applications to access the XMLRPC features. I prefer to see this as a positive aspect of my setup, but it certainly doesn't help software like this do its job!

The second problem had to do with its tagging system. MarsEdit has the ability to generate nice Technorati tags like I used to use here back when my blog was getting started, but I couldn't see anywhere to enter WordPress native tags. This could very well be PEBKAC on my own part though, so I'll leave it at that.

Finally, in another example of my own WordPress implementation being different from the default which trips up MarsEdit (and other XMLRPC clients), I don't use the default wp-content/uploads folder for my images because I prefer to use tried and true SFTP instead of the WordPress Media page (which used to give me a ton of problems), so MarsEdit's media uploader also doesn't work, at least not out of the box.

Impressionist painters

All in all, my impression is these three problems perhaps prove I'm a fringe case or a blogging outlier which doesn't mean MarsEdit isn't a beautifully constructed piece of software, and there are plenty of people for whom US$29.95 would be a worthwhile investment for such software, but it's just not suited to my needs.

Links shared from del.icio.us today:

A Day in the Internet

"Some of us don't realise how big the internet really is"

(categories: infographic statistics information internet)

I've always thought the idea of the Mashable Open Web Awards was at best just a misnomer and silly, but this year I decided to give it a try. Most of the categories had nothing I wanted to vote for, and in the case of those that did I was incorrectly informed I had already voted for it! In protest, I'm creating this post.

Best Twitter App – @TweetDeck

Now that it supports Twitter Lists, I can keep track of tweets in multiple columns from different parts of the world even easier than I could before. It single handedly makes widescreen monitors (that are otherwise useless for programming) a useful thing to have!

Best Location Based Mobile App – @Gowalla

I originally used it because Foursquare wasn't available in Singapore or Australia, but now I reckon it's superior anyway, especially since Leo and the gang on This Week in Google said they didn't like it :).

Best Mobile Based Twitter App – @Birdfeed

Not one of the options. Since Tweetie's disappointing interface downgrade in version 2, Birdfeed is now by far the most polished and easiest to use Twitter client for the iTelephone. Its fast, stable and supports multiple accounts.

Best News Source to follow – @SBSNews

The official news feed for the Special Broadcast Service in Australia. Covers news going on everywhere, not just White House car and gate crashing Tiger Woods. Honestly guys, I don't care about that stuff!

A follow up would be the Deutsche Welle feed at @dw_english.

Best Celebrity to Follow – @MarianCall

In no particular order, Marian Call is brutally honest, down to earth, funny, charming, beautiful, talented, she loves Firefly and most important of all: she's awesomely friendly! Despite having thousands of followers and a schedule busier than… somebody with a really busy schedule, she'll almost always reply to tweets from her fans, including little old me!

There are two very close follow up folks in this category. First we have @NeilHumphreys.
Enough said! Better still, it means I can follow his antics and thoughts without having to go to his website that uses Flash which I don't have on most of my computers.

The other runner up is @AlexLindsay because his tweets are ridiculously interesting and honest, and like Neil he always replies to tweets I send him.

Best Brand Use of Twitter – @Brewerks

The microbrewary in Singapore who's Twitter account is run by a real person not a bot and that if you send messages to you get cheerful responses! I haven't had the chance to enter any of their competitions or quiz nights yet, but using Twitter to announce them is a fantastic idea.

It's @Tarale's birthday and all she got from @Rubenerd was an animated gif of someone eating birthday cake that he didn't even create himself! Neither the cake nor the animated gif! The scandal! That is, unless she was born on the 11th of December and lied about her birthday for tax purposes, in which case there's an even bigger scandal than my ripping off of an image. Right about now, the funk soul brother. Bird is the Word!

An obligatory link to her blog, and another link to her blog in case you missed the link to her blog. Thank you.

People ask me why I spend such a disproportionate amount of my time blogging when it costs more money than I receive in donations and is a fairly introverted activity. Short, sweet comments like that and people commenting on posts here are the reason why. That's all :).