Rubenerd

This originally appeared on the Annexe, back when I recorded daily puzzles.

I'm generally pretty quick to pick out internet jokes from the real thing, but this latest announcement for an OpenOfficeMouse honestly had me bamboozled: were their product, website and press release for real?

Orvieto, Italy, November 6, 2009: In partnership with the OpenOffice.org community, WarMouse announced the release of the OpenOfficeMouse, the first multi-button application mouse designed for the world’s leading open-source office productivity suite. With a revolutionary and patented design featuring 18 buttons, an analog joystick, and support for as many as 52 key commands, the OpenOfficeMouse is intended to provide a faster and more efficient user interface for OpenOffice.org applications such as Writer and Calc than the conventional icons, pull-down menus, and hotkeys presently permit.

I tend to stay clear of sites like Engadget but they've picked up (to pardon a terrible mouse related pun) the story and are running with it, so I'm leaning slightly more towards thinking its true. Lots of poorly used analogies in this paragraph, I really should learn not to blog this late at night.

While initially finding myself asphyxiated by the terrible, awful, cheesy, plasticy design and requiring several stiff cups of coffee to recover, I have to say having thought about it for a day or so the idea of having a mouse with buttons like this does appeal to me. As long as the primary and secondary buttons were easy enough to differentiate from all the function buttons and I could cope with the 1990s-eque design.

Granted these are mostly keyboard based applications, but Imagine being able to perform a spell check, insert a table of a specific size, add headings and whatnot all while moving a mouse around in OpenOffice.org for example, or imagine all the things you could do with TextMate or Emacs.

It'd be like learning how to touch type on a keyboard: the learning curve would be steep and it'd take dedication and the forgoing of instant gratification when you buy it, but once you're familiar with the location of the buttons and you know instinctively what you've assigned each one to do, I imagine you could do some pretty amazing things.

A chorded mouse, perhaps?

Interestingly enough, people have been using the word corded to describe it, presumably because its not wireless which we've come to expect from mouses as of late. With all those extra buttons though, it does remind me somewhat of those chorded[sic] keyboards such as the FrogPad. To me this makes this product even more intriguing, imagine if you could somehow combine buttons together to perform specific tasks and provide parameters, such as specifying the size of a new table instead of just creating one.

I must admit after Apple pulled the rug out from under me with their latest Magic Mouse which doesn't have a third mouse button. My MacBook Pro is dual booted with FreeBSD and I don't want to have to swap mouses each time I reboot! With that in mind I must say this OpenOfficeMouse looks intriguing! Wait, bad choice of words, if I got one I wouldn't want to look at it. Never mind, my hand will cover it up!

For now my aging Mighty Mouse will do, but it's something to keep in mind.

The Brunei Museum in Bandar Seri Begawan is either contained in an incredibly vast building, or Brunei is even smaller than I thought it was! HA!

I grew up in Singapore and lived in Malaysia but have never been to Brunei despite it being next door, so to speak. Because of a currency arrangement you can spend Singapore Dollars in Brunei and vica versa, and because I'm a typographic nerd I noticed the fonts used on road signs there are the same as in Singapore too. I'm a wild person!

There's no point reinventing the wheel, so when I saw this comment about Android I just had to quote it. It stills bums me out that most people are capable of saying the same thing as me but far more succinctly!

First the snippet from the AppleInsider article the person was commenting on:

Similarly, different phone manufacturers may have their own design or quality issues, support problems, features or pricing that contribute to or distract from the overall ownership experience but which also don’t involve Android itself.

And ahmlco's poignant response:

This seems to provide the Android market with a built-in excuse. “The PLATFORM is fine. It’s all of those crappy phones that are the problem.”

But I doubt the market will see it that way. If too many companies tout their latest Android hardware as the greatest thing since sliced bread and then fail to deliver, plenty of that mud is going to stick to Android. “Android phones suck.”

The flipside, of course, is that they could in fact make great phones. Unfortunately, quite of few of the current models have received lackluster reviews at best, with only one (Droid) being touted as a worthwhile competitor to the iPhone.

Bingo.

As much as I want Android to succeed and as much as I see an Android enabled device in my future, I worry whenever I read a comment entirely attributing an Android problem to hardware implementations. It does risk becoming an excuse for any failings, even if they turn out to be software problems. Here’s hoping the Android community can avoid this.

I do hope Android does get some decent hardware, whether it be in the form of a Droid or otherwise, otherwise they do risk becoming something the public sees and attempts to avoid rather than embracing. People are generally scared of approaching something that has stung them before.

This originally appeared on the Annexe, back when I recorded daily puzzles.

This originally appeared on the Annexe, back when I recorded daily puzzles.

Unfortunately with Digital Restriction Management systems that's simply not true.

Here's another Rubenerd Fun Fact for all you rabid Official Rubenerd Fun Fact fans. I know you're out there, I can hear you furrowing your brows and sighing.

Dark fibre sounds like a brand of black rice breakfast cereal.

Thank you.

Speaking of recent internet related fail, yesterday a few Twitter friends and I here in Adelaide were having speed and reliability related issues with our respective ISPs. What I thought was weird at the time was using a VPN to connect to my machine in Singapore and getting it to download websites for me and return them to my machine here in Adelaide was an order of magnitude faster than using my machine here in Adelaide to download websites directly!

I initially couldn't understand how that'd work; even if my machine in Singapore was downloading the data for me it'd still have to be sent back here, just as it would be if I'd gone to a website directly. Not only that but theoretically it should have been even slower because of the overhead of encrypting the connection.

Despite using, maintaining and implementing them for years, I suppose I have much to learn about the actual technology behind VPNs. At the moment they might as well be useful and exciting black boxes. Or black cables. Or black fibres. Get it? Get it? Dark fibre? Get it? Hey come on, that was funny.

Hard hitting stuff.