Rubenerd

One of my tricks when I get second hand computer for myself or when I'm refurbishing for a friend or whatnot is to go to use the Memory Upgrade screen on the Crucial website to check what sort of RAM the hardware can take, what the maximum capacity is and how much the chips would be.

So there I was consulting Crucial.com in Safari on my iTelephone for my new ThinkPad X40 when the screen went completely grey except for the time bar along the top, making it completely unusable. Rotating the screen 90 degrees into landscape mode rotated the time bar but the rest of the screen stayed grey. Returning to the iTelephone home screen then launching Safari made no difference. The only way I could use Safari again was to turn off the phone and start it again!

I might need to employ the help of the iPhoneUserNews iPhone guru to confirm whether or not using the Crucial Memory upgrade screen on their website automatically stuffs up all iPhone browsers, or just regular iPhone 3G browsers, or whether or not I just have a dodgy iPhone.

Rebooting the phone and launching Safari reproduced these results for me. I might contact the Crucial folks once I can confirm other iPhones have problems loading this page and not just mine.

WARNING: Excessive computer use can colour your eyes a scary bright cyan… apparently!

After just over a year of searching online, offline and everywhere in between (subspace?) I finally managed to procure myself an IBM ThinkPad X40 and USB powered IBM combo drive in excellent condition for less than AU$300 from an Adelaideian. When you consider they sold for over AU$3,000 new less than four years ago paying 10% is pretty gosh darn good!

This model of ThinkPad X40 was part of IBM's executive/premium/expensive ultraportable X notebook series in 2005 and it still has fairly respectable specs: a 12 inch screen, 1.4GHz Pentium M with Centrino b/g wireless, a gigabit ethernet port, 1,280 MiB of PC2700 RAM, CardBus slot, two USB 2.0 ports, a 60GB internal 1.8" drive and one of those cool three button (hooray for using with FreeBSD!) TouchPoint mouses. It's slightly heavier than a netbook but has an infinitely better keyboard and… it's a ThinkPad!

Despite otherwise being an Apple guy, ever since I saw my dad's machines from work over the course of a decade I've been a fan of ThinkPads. They're not sexy like MacBooks, but I think they're classy and their build quality is absolutely without peer. I do love my MacBook Pro with OS X, but I have to say I've been tempted by a ThinkPad with FreeBSD, Xubuntu (or OpenSolaris if I could get it working!) for a very long time.

Coincidently, the X40 also holds the (dubious depending on your standing) distinction of being the last notebook designed and sold by IBM before Lenovo bought their consumer hardware division. The end of an era as it were.

Two related thoughts: If I needed to run some more Windows software for uni, I wonder if it'd run Windows 7 acceptably in a partition too? Might need to ask Nick Hodge on The Twitters. And I wonder how its performance would compare to the current netbooks too. It has an older, slower hard drive not an SSD but I'd have to think an older Pentium M would still outperform an Atom… maybe… maybe not.

Update: It’s been brought to my attention that not defining primary keys as not null does have an impact after all, refer to Dale McGowan’s comment below. Suffice to say, I will continue to define them as not null from now on!

Much like a musician who despite getting the right sound realises they've been playing their instrument wrong throughout their career, I often find I'm not using computer software properly or I've been wasting effort. I guess I get myself into a predictable routine that I'm used to.

In this case I found out something about Oracle databases. I've been using them for years, but it took a practical class at university yesterday to realise I've been wasting time with a simple line of code that was completely unnecessary.

If you do any sort of work with databases you'd probably want to smack me on the head for this, but I didn't know that primary keys are automatically assigned as not null; presumably because it doesn't make logical sense and it would break a table to have a primary key that has null values!

Up until Friday this is the schema I would have created and entered into an Oracle database:

create table Jackarse (
  refID char(6) not null,
  name varchar(32),
  grilledCheeseSandwich boolean,
  primary key (refID)
);

And here's what I've since learned I can do instead:

create table Jackarse (
  refID char(6),
  name varchar(32),
  grilledCheeseSandwich boolean,
  primary key (refID)
);

That's right, both these schemas will result in the same table being created in Oracle. I guess it wasn't harming anything having the not null command there, it was just unnecessary.

I'm starting to notice more of my blog posts are being spawned from tweets on Twitter of all things. So much for all the doomsday predictions that Twitter was going to kil blogs!

For example, after seeing this latest tweet about yet another blogger complaining that K-On!'s Akiyama Mio is merely a moeblob I felt compelled to reply with a word and punctuation mark that together form the ultimate rebuttal of such a proposition if it is said while shrugging shoulders:

So?

Yes I'm a stereotypical nerd for having Mio as my favourite character of a series like K-On. To negative reviewers, I say it's your own fault for expecting Shakespeare in the first place, it's called having realistic expectations for a series you knew what it was going to be about in advance and that you didn't need to watch if you didn't want to! But we're getting sidetracked. Wait, that would imply I have a point to be getting sidetracked from. I blame this pebble that's been in my left shoe all morning.

If you haven't watched K-On (I assume most of you fine readers here) you probably could figure out which girl Mio is just from looking at the picture above. As I say about many things, if you're unable to I'm both surprised and fascinated at the same time.

Just don't say lazy!

Some people seem to have an almost religious attachment to their text editors of choice, I need not give examples. I tend to gravitate between Vim and MacVim for hacking together single files and TextMate for projects, so when I started doing Java at university again I just fired up the Java bundle in TextMate and off I went.

Back when I was a C++ guy on Windows in early high school I used Visual Studio 6 and later C# in their .NET IDE, but since then I've eschewed IDEs in general because I feel as though they take too much control over what I'm doing, they're complicated and they keep wanting to insert their own code into my files which drives me crazy!

When I started uni and before my major family meltdown back in 2005 I was told to use jGRASP for Java and later Eclipse and NetBeans and I have to admit I decided to go back to a basic text editor (nano at the time), but having just downloaded NetBeans 6.7.1 it seems to have changed a lot in a few short years! The interface is much more Mac-like and it feels nowhere near as sluggish as it did before. I'm still control-freaky enough to want to start my projects from scratch with absolutely nothing (and TextMate is brilliant for this) but there's something to be said for an IDE dedicated to the language you're using.

If you're a Java developer on Mac what editor or IDE do you use to create your poetic scientific whatnot?

Links shared from del.icio.us today:

IBM ThinkPad X40 PM 1400 512MB 40GB WXPP – Reviews, specificaties en prijzen

(categories: thinkpad x40 ibm hardware photos)

Category:X40 – ThinkWiki

"This pages gives an overview of all ThinkPad X40 related topics."

(categories: thinkpad x40 ibm hardware)

FreeBSD on the IBM ThinkPad X40 (FreeBSD on the IBM Think Pad X40)

"In this document, I will try to give a comprehensive report on installing FreeBSD on an IBM ThinkPad X40 — what I got to work, and how, and what still does not work for me."

(categories: thinkpad x40 ibm hardware freebsd bsd)

Picasa Web Albums – Greg

"ThinkPad X40 and PowerBook G4 17' – with apple mighty mouse"

(categories: thinkpad x40 powerbook ibm apple hardware mightymouse)

Conky – Home

"Conky is a free, light-weight system monitor for X, that displays any information on your desktop. Conky is licensed under the GPL and runs on Linux and BSD."

(categories: software unix linux bsd geek)

Doing my bit to help spread awareness. Visit Avazz.org for more details and to sign their petition to bring justice to Aung San Suu Kyi and the people of Burma.

Today, Aung San Suu Kyi, the iconic Burmese pro democracy leader, was cruelly sentenced to another year and a half of detention on trumped up charges.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg of thousands of crimes committed by the regime against the Burmese people. Over the next two months, with the UK and the US holding the Presidency of the United Nations Security Council, we have our best chance to get an international inquiry that could lead to the top generals’ arrests. But we need a massive global movement to push the US, UK and the Council to act and persuade China not to veto.

Links shared from del.icio.us today:

Victoria Square, looking north to GPO clock and Westpac Tower – February 2008

(categories: adelaide photos australia)

You know what's a fun thing to do? Playing Surfin Bird over Aussie breakfast TV! It actually fits spookily well. Is spookily a word? :)

Another great reason for using NoScript in Firefox if you didn't think it was useful before is that it blocks embedded media such as Flash unless you specifically choose to unblock it on individual pages (which for me is almost never!). With HTML5 elements like <video> and <audio> now being supported in Firefox 3.5 I was worried I'd be losing this control and that there would be an unguarded vector for attack… not to mention being annoyed and irritated by pages that start playing jingles and animated advertisements!

Suppose Firefox employed an external library to play media which turned out to be vulnerable; it's happened in the past. Any malicious hacker could embed a specially crafted video or audio file into a page and your browser would start playing it automatically when you visited the page. By the time you realised what was going on, it'd be too late.

Well it's time to breath easier again (that sounded like an introduction to a cheap infomercial). I just noticed this evening after updating to version 1.9.8.1 that NoScript now blocks HTML5 media elements on pages that aren't on your NoScript whitelist just like JavaScript, Flash and the like which is fantastic news. I understand selectively enabling JavaScript may be a bit troublesome for some people to cope with, but HTML5 media filtering should be a mandatory part of Firefox in my opinion.

In any event, it's one less thing to make me nervous and to worry about, which for someone always buzzing with social anxiety and caffeine is a good thing :).