Rubenerd

I HAVE JUST REACHED 18,000 TWEETS. It’s official: I’m a loser! Do I get a pie or something? #18000 #Obsessive #TwitterAbuse #HashtagAbuse

Is it okay to admit you loved this show?

After hearing for years about how blogging was going to revolutionise the way we read and publish information, it seems thesedays most blogs dealing with specific technologies have consolidated into "megasites" run by dozens of people. Nothing wrong with that per se, but it means if most folks want to read about news, reviews and opinions on iPhones for example they hit the same few sites that rehash the same material as each other and that's it.

With this in mind I present to you my dear reader iPhoneUserNews which if you can't figure out what it's about from the title I find your comprehension skills both scary and fascinating at the same time. It's run and managed by the same Neal behind the IntoYourHead show from the Emerald Isle. At least that's where he claims to be, he could be posting messages from a base in Antarctica or one of Saturn's moons for all I know. Apparently he likes frigidly cold climates.

If you're fed up with reading the same stuff about everybody's favourite phone from the same few sites (you know the ones of which I speak) you may want to check it out. I was paid off several billion Euros to promote this site, but that shouldn't in any way put you off anything I wrote here about it. You can also follow along on The Twitters.

Thank you, and good morning. Or whatever time of day it happens to be for you and the internet device upon which you're reading this. I say that because the time on your internet device may be incorrect and you may assume the time is different. I'm clever aren't I? Don't answer that.

I was asked a question yesterday from someone other than a person from high school who had almost never spoken to me unless they had a computer problem, so for once I felt obligated to answer. Zombie Plan (yes, THAT ZombiePlan) wanted to know how it is I can blog so much and where I get my ideas from.

There are two ways to address the question, the first is the academic way. I am able to blog so much because I endeavour to discover new and exciting fields of study both in my life and in the world around me and therefore I am able to produce blog posts of a high calibre and social value for my readers. As with most academic answers of this nature though, this reason is a lot of hot air and complete nonsense.

As I've said many times here over the years I find blogging a fun distraction from studying and work, I guess you could call it a coping mechanism. It may sound counter-intuitive, but often I blog the most when I have the most amount of work to do! When I'm distracted, my brain can come up with more material. Perhaps when said brain is stimulated it's thinks better, alas I'm no Sam Harris neurologist I'm only interpreting the results in my own frame of reference.

The other thing to try is not something if you're a serious person attempting to write a serious blog. Write nonsense! I'm sure I'm not the only one who gets tired of reading dry, impersonal posts on blogs; buck the trend and put material in posts regarding your own life and experiences when you talk about things. Recently I took this one step further by having a dedicated nonsense category where I can put fun silliness. I remember when I used to work for Discovery Channel as a voice over guy one of the things the director said is that people can tell when you speak whether or not you're smiling just by listening; I reckon the same could be said for blogging.

And while I'm giving away my super duper secrets, my other trick is to just go online and find silly or completely random pictures, often they trigger something in my head and I can write about something. I try to have at least one image associated with each post because I feel text-only blogs kinda defeat the purpose of having a website on the multimedia intertubes anyway. While we're talking about triggers I also have a notebook page on my iTelephone for blog and show topics too which I frantically jot nonsense into whenever I get the chance.

I almost forgot! The other thing is I create the vast majoraty of my blog posts in coffee shops; in Adelaide I sit at the Boatdeck Cafe in Mawson Lakes, in Singapore I sit at any number of Starbucks Coffee thingys. Don't ask me why I'm more productive or mentally stimulated in places like that, because I don't know the answer myself!

Is my blog a good one? Heavens no, it's awful! But that wasn't the question, Zombie Plan wanted to know how I blog so much. I hope this sheds some light onto it. Do lights have fur?

I often find I can understand things better myself when I explain what I'm attempting to do. Spock would probably say this illogical, I'd retort that not all of us have the benefit of being half Vulcan. Thank you.

Since attempting to boot my MacBook Pro with OpenSolaris and since writing about it here an hour ago I've learned more about the problem I was having with the partitioning stage.

I found this page and on their instruction I installed the Sun Device Detection Tool which checks the hardware of machines and determines whether or not OpenSolaris and Solaris have appropriate driver support. Aside from the gigabit Ethernet card, I was told my original generation MacBook Pro had full hardware support. Cool.

Returning to the aforementioned page I saw the screenshot shown above and recognised the errors instantly from when I tried to install OpenSolaris myself. Turns out OpenSolaris needs to be installed on the first partition to work; I was attempting to install it on the third partition after the EFI and Mac OS X Leopard ones respectively.

I could mess around for another few hours to try and figure out how to overcome this limitation (when I was an early teenager I was quite the dual-booting wizard) but I'm thinking I'll save myself the headache, backup my data and repartition this machine from scratch.

As I said in my previous post about this, this semester I'm working almost exclusively with Java and Oracle software and I'm SSH'ing into Solaris machines at the campus here already, and I'd like to be able to use a similar setup on my own machine too. Also I love trying new things :).

Given I'm working almost exclusively with Java and Oracle software this semester at university in three of my four courses I thought it'd be fun and worthwhile dual-booting OpenSolaris with Mac OS X Leopard on my MacBook Pro and use them both in a more "native" environment. You can download the ISOs for free from their servers, via bittorrent or you can even order a CD to be sent to you gratis. Pretty cool.

Problem is, I'm stuck. I'm attempting to install OpenSolaris 2009.06 which is the latest version at the time this post is going live. These were the steps I took:

1. Ran Leopard Bootcamp
2. Rebooted with the OpenSolaris disc in the drive
3. Chose the default LiveCD option from the Grub menu
4. Arrived at the desktop, connected to Wireless network
5. Plugged in USB mouse because internal trackpad wasn’t detected
6. Launched installer
7. Chose the FAT32 partition Bootcamp generated, selected "Solaris"

Barely a few seconds into file copying stage, the installer #fails (uh oh I've started inadvertently using Twitter hashtags in regular blog entries, this does not bode well for my mental state!). When I clicked the log file button these were the last few errors:

>> Could not crate VTOC target>> TI process failed.

I thought it could have had something to do with ZFS specifically, but doing some research online I came across this discussion thread where Basant suggests the problem is with the EFI partitioning scheme employed by Bootcamp.

Prime cause why it was failing was because of EFI partition. After I reset the partition id of EFI partition (#1) using "setpid 1to AF" and rebooted, my problem went away and opensolaris installed and booted just fine. I had also marked the partition as Active from Linux fdisk command so I didn’t need to do the fdisk.real hack.

The fdisk.real hack being referred to turns out to be this official workaround in response to a recognised bug in OpenSolaris.

Going to take another plunge, here's hoping one of these tricks does the… trick.

Because I require some software for my studies that only runs on Windows I went ahead and installed Windows 7 in a virtual machine on my MacBook Pro, fairly run of the mill kind of setup. Despite it being somewhat of a moot point given how low Windows Vista set the bar, I do admit Windows 7 is more stable, less irritating and somewhat faster. Unfortunately the Windows 7 Explorer and Start Menu are still just as messy, cluttered and confusing as their Vista counterparts.

This got me thinking then: wouldn't it be great if it were somehow possible to merely swap in the explorer.exe file from Windows 2000 — the last version of Windows I believe had a genuinely usable interface — into Windows 7? You'd have the relative advantages of Windows 7 with the clean, uncluttered and classy interface of Windows 2000. Genius!

I figure though explorer.exe is probably a protected system file and requires any number of dll files and other dependencies that are scattered in that atrocious mess Windows refers to as the Windows and System32 folders, so it probably wouldn't be possible. Bummer.

Unfortunately one of the problems with essentially living in two different countries is things like bills from phone companies are easy to forget when you're living in the other place. When I'm in Singapore I have a 3G and data plan with SingTel Mobile, in Australia I have a 3G and data plan with Optus.

Despite technically being an overseas subsidiary of SingTel, Optus couldn't be more different. To their credit (puns are hilarious!), an Optus account is far easier to apply for than a SingTel account and has much less fine print, but you pay for this initial convenience by having far slower data speeds, spotty 3G reception and a tiny amount of data. Granted Singapore is microscopic compared to the metro area of Adelaide despite having five times as many people, but in Singapore I have full 3G reception everywhere except in lifts. I also have six times the data, for cheaper.

The other thing has to do with late payments of accounts. With SingTel if I'm late they send a series of warning letters and disconnect me, but they've always had me reconnected within an hour of my bill payment, even if it's on a weekend (yes, even Sunday!). With Optus they claim a business day before reconnection takes place, but it's taken 4 business days each time it's happened.

I'm not denying for a second it's entirely my own fault for not paying my bills, but the difference in support and service is huge. Optus needs to get their act together. I'm bullish that they're capable of it, they just need a nudge. By a huge bull. I'd be scared into changing if a bull came charging at me. Charging… like charging a phone. I'm a genius!

Given I use my iTelephone with these plans, I wonder if Neal from iPhoneUserNews.com has anything to say about this? Wonder if you get a free Guinness and a potato when you sign up for an Irish telco?

For some people, eating grilled cheese sandwiches with ham in them is against their religion, for some it's working on the Sabbath. For me Microsoft Windows is against my religion, I get around such restrictions by using FreeBSD and Mac OS X, and by having glass doors.

I released that joke into the public domain, feel free to use it. Please, it would make me feel better about not being able to write good jokes.

Out of interest, the article I was trying to access was government ensign. I was trying to win a bet; the guy I was talking to was adamant that a government ensign was a flavour of sorbet. I worry about him sometimes.