Rubenerd

My sister this afternoon would like to inform you that her sim in The Sims 2 just earned 50,000 Simoleons from her job as a Mad Scientist. I had to temporarily relinquish control of my MacBook Pro for her to play that game, but I’m glad it wasn’t in vein!

The question on my mind is: can you convert Simoleons into Aussie or Singapore Dollars by any chance? What’s the going price for a Simoleon? Wait, don’t answer that, I’ll just fantasise for a bit longer. A new 17 inch MacBook Pro, some Singapore Airlines tickets to half a dozen destinations, a small bright yellow Piaggio scooter and some rainy day money would all go down just fine.

People like my mum or Nagato Yuki would probably tell me books don’t have these problems. They’d be right!

Despite what some might consider my obsessive coverage of Google Reader over the last few months, I still have my Bloglines account and I continue to use it. I still much prefer the Bloglines interface to Google Reader; it does require a little JavaScript to work (a consideration for us NoScript users) but it’s behaviour is much more predictable owing to the fact it doesn’t use as much Ajax. After Google Reader’s latest interface upgrade, reading the feeds in my Bloglines account is even more of a relief.

ASIDE: Bloglines also has a beta interface which uses Ajax to the same extent as Google Reader. To say it smokes Google Reader might be a bit of an exaggeration, but they really have done an incredible job. If you don’t have people using one service over the other, I would really recommend it. I’ll be reviewing it in more detail in an up and coming post, when I have less homework!

As with most internet software though, often it comes down to the social aspect over something like the interface! All of my friends who share items are on Google Reader, so I use that for more general feeds with items I’m more likely to share. If I was really smart I’d merge their subscriptions and use one over the other… "if" being the operative word.

Or for example I’d subscribe to anime feeds (a topic I’m sure the WWR crew and Dave Wares on Reader would be bored to tears to read my shared items of!) in Bloglines, and things like sustainable living in Reader.

ASIDE: To Google Reader’s credit, they do publish people’s shared items in Atom feeds, which means I could still keep track of my friend’s shared items in Bloglines, it just means I wouldn’t be able to comment back. Unless they then subscribed to my Bloglines shared items instead, then they could see my comments and replies… hey that’d be cool, I might look into that.

On that train of thought, I’m thinking I might use the fact they’re separate services to my advantage. I might use Bloglines for economic news and for university related feeds for assignments and so forth, and use Google Reader for my downtime reading. That probably makes even more sense, even if that does mean Kelli and Atuu see perplexing posts about Nagato Yuki and unfortunate Code Geass silos full of tomatoes.

I have a post in the pipeline which I’ve been working on for weeks which talks about my problems with blog aggregators, but for now I’ll leave it at that.

Reading back this post I can’t discern what the point of it was. It started as a post comparing Google Reader and Bloglines, but then turned into something else. Hey, that would make a good post heading.

Perhaps I should do some more of that so called "thinking" stuff before I start penning such an aimless rambling of thoughts that is far too long for anyone to probably read in full. Come to think of it, "Rubenerd Rambling" sounds much catchier than the "Rubenerd Blog". It would certainly be a more accurate title. Hmm…

This story has made me so angry I feel like… getting angry. For years I’ve been able to tune into Singapore radio from here in Adelaide to keep myself up to date with what’s going on over there while I’m over here through their internet radio feeds. Because of the negligible time zone difference, it meant I could enjoy the always hilarious Glenn Ong and The Flying Dutchman in the mornings on Class 95 [Wikipedia] and sometimes listen to Nights with Brian on Gold 90.5 [Wikipedia] in the evenings.

ASIDE: In one funny circumstance I was able to warn my dad about traffic problems near our house through text messages because I’d heard the news from Traffic Watch on Singaporean radio in Adelaide. Good times!

These feeds stopped working recently though, because the companies that run these stations have had to stop re-broadcasting their radio feeds online. ChannelNewsAsia.com has a depressingly titled article on it: Is it RIP for Singapore internet radio for which I took the title for this post.

Why is Singaporean internet radio dead or close to it? I’m going to be blunt, it’s for the same reason why internet radio has been stifled so many times in the US: arrogant old media authorities who pretend to be working in the interests of artists and the public when in fact they’re trying to milk their dying cash cows for all they’re worth and crush new technologies that could be perceived as a threat. I say "perceived" as a threat because clearly re-broadcasting a radio stream isn’t a threat, but they think it is. Or they’re just greedy as heck and want ridiculous sums of money. Probably a combination of the two.

Common sense is the least common of the senses. And media executives are arses. Two things we probably all already knew, but sometimes we need reminding.

I’m really starting to finally understand the motivation behind Whole Wheat Radio; for the longest time I thought it was a nice "stick it to the man!" kind of site and radio station that just happened to not need commercial music to operate, but now that I’ve seen the reality is even harsher and more ridiculous than I thought, I can now appreciate even more WWR’s mix of pragmatic and idealistic founding principals. In a similar way to Creative Commons and the lunacy of copyright law, Jim Kloss and the community has shown that if you can’t change stupid laws, you can just work around them and in doing so prove that they’re stupid laws.

In the meantime, to get my Singapore fix I might have to live with just listening to the podcast. Provided they don’t get killed either. Oh wait, they have been. Where’s my Seroquel?

Therapist: I even got Paul McCartney out of Wings…
Homer: You idiot, he was the most talented one!

Screenshot of the tcsh man page

Having been a FreeBSD guy for a while, I’m so used to the TENEX C Shell (tcsh) that when I move to Linux or later versions of Mac OS X that use bash as the default, it feels all alien and foreign (Wikipedia’s tcsh article shows OSs that still tcsh as the default). If I need to do some shell scripting I use basic sh, but I always try to use tcsh as my interactive shell whenever possible.

I don’t know if this is common knowledge or whether it’s just what I’m used to, but I find tcsh’s .tcshrc/.cshrc configuration files much more intuitive and cleaner than bash’s .bashrc/.profile files too. But that’s for a future post.

While there’s a surprising absence of a tcsh page in Arch Linux’s usually comprehensive and easy to read wiki, Eric Bélanger has made it available from the Pacman system for both i686 and x86_64, and studiously keeps them up to date. Thanks to him, installing it is a snap.

# pacman -Sy tcsh

When installed tcsh will reside in the root /bin directory. This means if you want to set it as your default shell and pretend in a small way you’re running FreeBSD (tee hee), run this as the user you want to change:

% chsh
Enter "/bin/tcsh" when prompted, without quotes!

I remember being sternly told in the FreeBSD documentation that you absolutely never want to change the default shell of the root user to a shell you’ve installed from a package manager because if for some reason an upgrade fails and the shell you assigned to it breaks, you’re up the creek without a paddle. Given Arch Linux treats all parts of the system the same I’m not sure whether this applies here too, but for the sake of safety I’m keeping the root account using bash.

Now when I log into Arch Linux on my Armada M300 I’m in tcsh with the identical user prompt and virtually the same command aliases I had on FreeBSD. It gives you a nice, fuzzy, warm feeling. I’m tempted to learn tcsh programming one day just because most of the world is on bash

I really got attached to my FreeBSD Xfce desktop environment, think I should be able to recreate it in Linux… if I end up settling on a distribution!

UPDATE: My inner control freak was scared by Xubuntu, so I’m installing Arch Linux after all! I’m also giving serious consideration to Gentoo after reading Scott O’Brien’s comments. To tell the truth I haven’t used it since 2004! Will keep you informed!

As much as I love FreeBSD and praised it’s performance on my Armada M300 in the past, unfortunately I’ve come to realise that it’s simply not workable when it comes to using it as a portable machine. It boots faster than any other operating system I’ve installed on it, and it’s clean file system and ports collection made it a snap to install drivers and software, but there have been too many glitches with the wireless cards I’ve tried, and a few other tiny but nagging issues I haven’t been able to resolve.

For this reason, I’ve decided to make an important decision: I will use FreeBSD on desktop computers and servers, and GNU/Linux distributions on my non-Apple notebooks. Currently I have only one working non-Apple notebook… so a distribution will be going on it!

The question then becomes… which one? If I had more time to tweak and play around with it, I would install Slackware with pkgsrc, Arch Linux or Draco Linux in a heartbeat on it, but given my time is tight right now for studies I’d prefer to have something I can install and run right away.

Debian GNU/Linux frustratingly continues to elude me; on every system I’ve ever tried to install it on it hasn’t found one critical piece of hardware, and this Armada M300 has been no exception. Despite repeatedly telling it to use the Intel Pro 100 Ethernet card driver in the installation wizard, it refused to detect it. Given FreeBSD and Arch Linux in the past were able to automatically detect this device without any input from me whatsoever, I decided to pass on Debian.

I’m currently downloading Xubuntu because it has my favourite desktop environment installed with it out of the box. Given it has a 120GB hard drive in it, I’m going to partition the drive in half and leave 60GB unformatted so I can try other distributions without affecting the one I may be using for lectures and so forth.

As far as earth changing events go, choosing a Linux distribution after relinquishing FreeBSD’s control over a computer you own is HUGE! I will be informing you all of my progress.

Heck, I may learn something along the way.

The best looking crime fighter
since me in Part One!

For what it’s worth, I’ve always wanted an egg chair.

To say my sister is somewhat obsessed with The Sims 2 would be akin to implying that bridges are somewhat useful at allowing vechiles to cross bodies of water. The problem is, her pretty white MacBook’s integrated Intel graphics system performs worse than a bridge that has suffered some form of structural damage and as a result is no longer safe for the aformentioned vechiles to cross.

Despite my MacBook Pro only having a 32 bit Core Duo [Wikipedia] chip and her MacBook having a 64 bit Core 2 Duo [Wikipedia], the discrete 256MiB ATI graphics chip in my MacBook Pro plays The Sims 2 and her other older 3D games blazingly fast. Despite not being able to compile complex application packages or process video quickly enough compared to the current generation Mac laptops, the graphics are still very good. I heart my 2006 vintange MacBook Pro, it’s been a real trooper.

So I created a seperate account on Mac OS X for her on my MacBook Pro and created my own account on her MacBook. She installed The Sims 2 on mine, and I installed MacVim, The Gimp, Inkscape, Eclipse, Q and MacPorts with Python on her MacBook and we’ve been going just fine all weekend. I’ve been promised my baby back during the week so I can do work and assignments; I hope that proves true!

For someone writing code, the only thing that’s hard to get used to on a MacBook after using a MacBook Pro is the reduced screen resolution. Back in Singapore my FreeBSD desktop is connected to a 1680×1050 Samsung LCD, but I swear the difference between Elke’s MacBook’s 1280×800 and my MacBook Pro’s 1440×900 seems infinitely bigger. When the new MacBooks came out with the new N’Vidia graphics (and before I realised they had no FireWire), I thought I could upgrade my MacBook Pro to a new little aluminium MacBook, but I’m just so used to having a larger workspace that prospect now seems frightening. I’ve been spoilt!

As you can see in the screenshot, I managed to recreate as much of my MacBook Pro on her MacBook as possible including software. This Code Geass background was sitting in my downloads folder on my external drive, and it’s certainly more colourful and different to most of the Mac OS X default desktop backgrounds which I’m already sick of! I should SFTP my MacBook Pro and get some of the photos I took with my D60 recently and use them as backgrounds.

Now that Elke has created three families on The Sims 2 on my machine, I get the feeling I’ll be using her MacBook a lot over the next few weeks. Aren’t I a nice brother?

I always liked their flag, even if I can’t call some of them now!

Here’s something I didn’t know, as an Australian with an Optus phone line, I’m not allowed to call certain places. When did this happen?

Because of an increase in the number of unauthorised call activity and modem-jacking incidents Optus has barred all direct dial calls to the following destinations:

• Diego Garcia
• São Tomé and Príncipe
• Guinea-Bissau

If you need to make a call to any of these destinations, contact Optus Customer Service on 133 937, as access to a specific number may be able to be restored.

Alternatively, connections can be made through Operator Services by dialing 1225 (charges apply).

Anybody know anyone in the British Indian Ocean Territory I can call? What about Santo Antonio? Guess I’d better brush up on my Portuguese if I’m going to call someone in Bissau. Wait, I can’t!

Browsing through Thorn In Paw’s archives to kill some time, I came across this photo by Callie Shell. It was taken in 2007 so in political terms it’s documenting ancient history, but it’s still just as relevant now.

The caption from the site:

A Mother’s Grief: This woman had lost her son in Iraq. She wanted people to know that it was not unpatriotic to be against the war and for Obama. Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 2/11/2007.

I’ve always found the convolution of military service and patriotism to be kind of creepy. While certainly not perfect, I like how the Singapore government talks about and advertises the idea of what they call "Total Defence". The idea is, doing your job well, helping your community, being well educated and so on are just as important to protecting a society as the people guiding the missiles. In bus shelters they show people in camouflage uniform standing next to someone wearing a business shirt, or a stethoscope, or a school textbook. You get the idea.

Even if (as my cynical side assumes) it is just hollow propaganda in disguise, I think certain people in the US and other parts of the world could benefit from thinking like that. Unfortunately I doubt they ever will though.