Rubenerd

It seems once again I’ve started a mini-series of posts here completely by random chance! This is opposed to certain chance where the outcome has already been determined and you know what it’s going to be. Does that still make it chance? What a superfluous introduction.

Shortly after I posted my review of LivingSocial’s Facebook application which lets you pick five of your favourite items from lists such as movies, shows, cars and the like, the team introduced a slew of changes and improvements. I was even fortunate enough to get a comment posted here by Adam from the site and @LivingSocial started following me on Twitter. I still find it ironic that a free site like theirs has better customer service than some sites I pay for (certain webhosts, I’m looking at you!)

Since my review they’ve polished up the user interface of their application too

In the comment Adam mentioned that in the future it may be possible to access LivingSocial’s catalogue and our Top Five lists from sites other than Facebook which puts my mind at ease. Sites like Facebook still make me a bit uneasy because given they’re a gated community external sites can’t access material, and there’s no guarantee even you’ll be able to access your content in the future for free if they started charging, for example.

I was also informed on Twitter that my major gripe with LivingSocial’s Top Five lists was solved: it is now possible to delete older lists you’ve either changed your mind on or made a mistake on. This is big news and I applaud them for listening to their users!

The new Delete link under each list

As for new features, they’ve expanded their list of available categories to include Hot Sauces, very cool!

They’ve also slightly modified the way lists are presented; instead of being a generic list of five favourite items, each list is now numerically ordered which implies we now rank items in our lists from favourite to least favourite. This doesn’t affect lists we’ve made before where we may not have been thinking about the order of items, a good consideration.

I look forward to seeing what else these people have up their sleeve :).

My 2009 Easter eating!

I saw this post from the White House blog and Jim’s comments on it, and I had to add my own family experiences around this time of year. If you’re not on Google Reader here it is:

My family could best be described as agnostic I guess, but we still had hearty dinners over Easter and Christmas. Since moving to Singapore though when I was a kid we were disconnected from our extended families so it was just mum, dad Elke and I. We also started celebrating Chinese New Year which is much bigger in Singapore than Easter or Christmas which is mostly celebrated just for the tourists and business folks!

I have fond memories of those gatherings; for a few hours we pretended my mum wasn’t terminally ill and we didn’t have a care in the world. Except when it came time to clean up of course!!!

Some random quotes from reading my latest book from the library.

"Go to Heaven for the weather,
Hell for the company!"

"It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so."

"There is nothing so annoying as to have two people talking when you’re busy interrupting."

Not sure about this one though, I’ve had my fair share of [negative] excitement already. Unless he’s referring to travel, taking up an instrument, learning how to compost, speaking a new language, getting a part time job for a while that has nothing to do with computer systems, trying new exotic coffee… sounds like a plan

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."

According to ZDNet Australia News, Centrelink is testing Windows 7:

In a statement, Centrelink said it had been testing the early versions of Windows 7, with the agency’s first impressions being that they displayed a "significant improvement over [the] performance and quality of Vista".

The agency confirmed it had long-term plans to migrate to Windows 7 from its current standard operating environment, based on Windows XP.

"Improvements in deployment, management, performance and reliability make it the preferred long-term corporate desktop over Vista and XP — depending on availability and testing and certification of [the] final version," the statement said.

Several things trouble me about this.

Firstly, I can’t help but that think Centrelink of all government departments should be looking for alternatives to bloated, slow and extremely expensive software. As an organisation who’s primary existence is to provide welfare, spending millions of tax payer dollars on computer software when there are viable, cheaper alternatives seems like a case of misplaced priorities to put it mildly.

Microsoft has these public sectors convinced that they need to upgrade software every few years and that their solutions are the only viable ones. Is there any tender process? Are alternative companies or organisations allowed to bid for government approval and contracts?

Why is an article from ZDNet talking about Windows 7 with no mention of other alternatives whatsoever? It’s as if they don’t exist. I’m a Mac and FreeBSD guy because I have a few gripes with Linux, but even that’s got to be better.

As I said on Google Reader, I also take issue with all the suspiciously saccharine sweet reviews I’ve been reading about Windows 7, prasing it in particular for being so much better than Windows Vista. While I do agree the people at Microsoft have done the right thing and fixed up some of the more serious usability problems, it by no means makes Windows 7 a brilliant OS. Bluntly, Vista did set the bar pretty low, and despite the branding Windows 7 is still largely an update to Vista not a whole new version.

I guess I’m just agitated by the fact that Microsoft has such a stranglehold over our government, and very few people if any at all are talking about it. Microsoft has every right to bid on government contracts and provide software, but where’s the accountability? I’d like to be proven wrong, but I’m not raising my hopes.

The original list from yesterday

As it turns out, shortly after I compiled my list of Favourite British Comedies yesterday I realised I had left some critical shows out which caused me once again to bang my head repeatedly on the table in front of me, causing me further stress.

I have rectified the situation by creating a part two list, which I’m sure is cheating! So that I could include other types of shows and not just comedies I called this list Favourite British TV Shows, Part Two.

The cheating, second top 5 list

• Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister
• Midsomer Murders (I’ve read the books too)
• Jeeves and Wooster (brilliant! And I’ve read the books too)
• A Bit of Fry and Laurie
• SuperTed (the memories…!)

I read on Google Reader that Kelli hadn’t heard of most of the shows I’d listed; I’ve been told that British TV shows are much less popular and well known in the US than in Australia. For me, on the whole I find British shows to be more realistic, more subtle and wittier than shows made in the US, with the notable exception of gems like Arrested Development, M*A*S*H and Boston Legal. If you’ve never seen any before, you’re missing out on a real treat.

In fact, I reckon I can think of more to fill a third list. I don’t have time to be doing this stuff, but it’s just too much fun! Maybe next I need to do a British Drama or Detective list.

It’s official, S. Manikumar has won the by-election for the seat of Bukit Gantang for Anwar Ibrahim’s PKR (People’s Justice Party). From The Malaysian Insider:

SUNGAI PETANI, April 7 — First-timer S. Manikumar has ensured that Bukit Selambau is represented in the state executive council after a hard-fought but convincing 2,403-vote win over Barisan Nasional’s Datuk S. Ganesan.

The PKR candidate polled 12,632 votes to defeat the former Lunas assemblyman who managed 10,229.

This of course is a huge win for Anwar Ibrahim’s PKR party and a particularly embarrassing one for the embattled UMNO coalition which only just recently got a new leader in Datuk Seri Najib Razak who, I have to be frank, scares me a bit.

I barely lived in Malaysia for over a year, but I still like to keep informed with what’s going on. It’s proximity to and shared history with Singapore where I lived since the mid 1990s also means what goes on there has a rippling effect. Plus I want to know how it’s affecting my friends over there.

ASIDE: If you’re one of my regular readers outside South-East Asia and I’ve lost you with this post, I hope to write more about this and to do some more explaining sometime later this week.

In the meantime if you’re interested, Wikipedia’s articles on Anwar Ibrahim and to a lesser extent The PKR, UMNO and the Controversy section of the Bumiputra article give you a pretty good idea. To say Anwar has put up with and been the victim of political mudslinging is the understatement of the millennium.

Congratulations to S. Manikumar, The PKR and to Anwar Ibrahim. Merdeka!

This post is partly derived from a list on my Living Social Facebook application, for those of you who were smart enough to have never registered for Facebook but therefore can’t see my obsessively generated lists.

This list is my own top five favourite British comedies, in no particular order. I would have put Monty Python’s Flying Circus on here, but I think it’s safe to say that show is an assumed given for anyone who enjoys British comedy, am I right or am I right?

• Blackadder
• The Brittas Empire
• Keeping Up Appearances
• Fawlty Towers
• Little Britain

If only there was room for Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em too. I also love Red Dwarf but I’m saving that for a science fiction show list. And I guess I should attribute Mr Bean as well, I remember laughing so hard when I was a kid that I have fond memories of it, even if most people I know can’t stand it!

A top five list is definitely more difficult to think up compared to a top ten. Everything you chop off is such a hard decision.

My About Me and Contact Me information on Facebook

It seems whenever I summon the resolve to leave Facebook because of something dodgy they’ve done, someone comes along and writes a new application to grab my interest and time. It’s either a conspiracy or brilliant business planning.

Today’s obsession is a simple application with the initially cringe-worthy name of Living Social that lets you create a criteria for a Top Five list from their database of topics, then fill it in. That’s all their is to it. And I’ve been playing with it all afternoon!

ASIDE: Their site needs JavaScript so use the "Temporarily Allow" link in NoScript if you use it.

Bizarrely rotated so you can see more of the options!

When you first add the application you’re presented with a list down the side of the screen that contains categories ranging from movies, books and shows to cars and US presidents. You can choose your own generic "Top Five" for each of these top level categories, or you can define your own more specific ones. For example I created a "Favourite British Comedy Shows" category that’s a subset of "TV Shows". You get the idea.

When you’ve chosen your criteria or created your own, a new screen appears with a simple row of five boxes and a search bar. Clicking a box and choosing an item after you’ve entered it into the search box adds it to your list. When you’re done, it’s added to your profile and you have the option of adding it to your Facebook news timeline.

Choosing items to add to one of the five slots

Is it a waste of time? Probably. Can these people data mine the crap out of all your lists and invade your privacy? Probably, but frankly anything personal like this you put online would suffer the same thing. Is it addictive? Dangerously so!

My only criticism regarding the way it works is for some reason you can’t delete a list you’ve created. I read lots of people writing negative comments on the developer’s site regarding this but didn’t think twice about it; now that I’ve created a few lists and hit Publish a few times by mistake I’d like the ability to delete lists too.

I created a category called "My Top 5 Favourite Baltic States". I’d be hilarious if I could write and deliver jokes.

What I’m curious about is whether or not this Living Social website whatnot is independent from Facebook and whether you could insert it into other networks or even onto my blog here for example. I’m also thinking why a separate website that’s linked to Facebook and has far fewer resources and people behind it is able to be so much more polished and easier to use than Facebook is.

If they were to create a master category called "Fun Time Wasting Activities", this application would proudly be diplayed somewhere on it. Just change the name guys!

It gets me thinking whether I could hack together a quick script to do the same thing this site does without relying on something like Facebook. Then people who were smart enough not to register a Facebook account in the first place could use it! I’ll add it to the list ^_^.

I’ve had to temporarily disable the BetterPrivacy extension because since I upgraded to Firefox 3.0.8 I get the above error message every single time I close the browser. Upon clicking it, all the browser windows disappear but Firefox stays active for anywhere between 5 to 30 seconds in the dock before finally quitting. It’s quite irritating!

Given it’s a JavaScript error I suspect perhaps it’s having a conflict with NoScript but disabling that extension still renders the above error. I’m running Firefox 3.0.8, BetterPrivacy 1.25, NoScript 1.9.1.6, Cookie Monster 0.97.0 and SSL Blacklist 4.0.30: as far as I know all the latest versions.

The error mentions NS_* (stands for NeXTSTEP, what Mac OS X was built from) which leads me to believe it may be a local problem. Anyone else having this issue?

It seems deliriously (some of you might say schadenfreude) ridiculous that I would take so much time to create a follow-up post to my initial MacVim review and include some commentary regarding my forgetful nature… then forget to add something. Can banging your head on a table cause brain damage?

One more reason to consider MacVim if you’re looking for an all purpose text editor for Mac is a feature it shares with regular Vim: the ability to restore text files that were lost as a result of the program quitting unexpectedly. If you relaunch MacVim you’re asked if you want to restore the text file to the condition it was last in regardless of when you saved it.

As with most Mac applications MacVim has never crashed on me before, but that’s not to say I haven’t been the victim of an old battery that decides to turn the computer off!

That reminds me, I need to buy a new battery. This one is shot worse than a politically incorrect reference to Dick Cheney. Wow, that was over three years ago already?