Rubenerd

Woolworths is Australia's largest supermarket chain and maintains a fairly strong duopoly with Coles. While on ethical grounds I would probably be more comfortable shopping at an IGA supermarket, the Woolies here in Mawson Lakes is only a few blocks away from our house, not to mention one of their labels is Homebrand which has saved us cash strapped uni students a lot of money over the last few months (On students and generic brand goodness). Homebrand products are just as good as "branded" products (to use the common Singaporean term) except for Homebrand corn chips. It's not that I don't specifically like the taste of cardboard with fake cheese topping; I generally find all types of cardboard to be less than palatable.

Well as part of a rebranding effort, Woolies here in Australia and over in New Zealand are changing their logo from the familiar green and red letters and bars to what appears to be a stylised apple that could also be seen as sort of fruit. The two logos are below; even if I didn't tell you which was the older one and which was the newer, I think you'd be able to figure it out.

I was all ready to launch into a Sunday afternoon coffee influenced rant about how the new logo falls short and looks like yet another over-produced, unpractical icky Web 2.0 logo that will look horribly outdated in just a few short years, but Simon from Levshin Creative said it best here on the Foodweek website:

I think this new mark for Woolworths misses in may ways. It’s unbalanced and too bubblegum. It feels like a shiny Web 2.0 logo and not one that will stand the test of time. The complex gradients make it difficult for faxing and embroidering. I would like to see it in one colour. While this mark does feel “fresh” I believe the design is weak and not representative of the Woolworths brand.

I am a great [admirer] of Hans Hulsbosch and think he is one of our greatest strategic design thinkers. the rebrand for Qantas was brilliant. this one however is not. Time and the Australian public will determine the longevity of this new mark for Woolies. Thumbs down from me I’m afraid!

Perhaps given they planned this new logo before the financial crisis took hold, it will cause them to rethink the need for such a change and perhaps stall the rollout. How much money would rebranding several hundred stores cost? Whatever it is, it's money that could definitely be spent better elsewhere. Could they take the money they would have spent and lower the prices for their products instead? :-)

After the many troubles I encountered with running FreeBSD, Windows XP and Mac OS X Leopard in a triple boot configuration on my venerable Core Duo MacBook Pro (Brief flirtation with FreeBSD on my MacBook Pro is over) I thought while I had some time this afternoon I'd try using NetBSD instead.

The preliminary result? The experiment was a success! I have NetBSD 4.0.1 booting beautifully alongside Windows XP and Mac OS X Leopard without any of the problems FreeBSD 7.0 seemed to have, such as the persistent and downright bizarre several minute long stalling boot times for the system and for Xorg.

As I've said before, NetBSD was the first Unix-like system I really took seriously after only toying around with Red Hat Linux in the late 1990s. I moved all my non-Mac machines over to FreeBSD due to FreeBSD's better graphics support and its generally higher levels of use which translates into more online documentation and such, but I've always had a soft spot for NetBSD.

I feel as though I'm reacquainting myself with an old friend, plus all my experimenting with pkgsrc on Mac OS X (Notes on using NetBSD’s pkgsrc on Mac OS X) means I already know the ins and out of package management on it too. Stay tuned for further developments.

It's not often a computer manages to spook me; more often than not they tend to generate frustration instead. Today though I couldn't figure out why my Trash wasn't emptying after several Secure Delete options.

ASIDE: I’m aware Apple computers and Mac OS X are created in the United States, but I wish we could change the name of the "Trash" folder to "Rubbish" or "Bin"… renaming the accidental deletion folder is one of the first things I do whenever I install FreeBSD with Xorg on a desktop. I’m perfectly fine with most American English, but "Trash" really sets my teeth on edge.

To figure out what was going on, I opened the Trash folder and saw one file was stubbornly refusing to disappear. Why it wasn't deleting itself was the least of my concerns though, because I couldn't even make out what the file even was, or what it was called!

Intrigued, I clicked on the file and entered [Command]+[I] to bring up the Get Info dialog box so I could see the creation date, where it had come from and so forth, but as if it was afraid to revel its identity the file instantly disappeared and the Trash emptied.

Was that the end to this curious little file? Heavens no! I closed the Trash window but noticed that the icon had changed back to "full". Opening the Trash window again I noticed the file had mysteriously returned!

I continued this cycle another five or six times before giving up. The next step was to determine what the name of the file was itself; I couldn't read it all. I clicked the file again, but instead of attempting to open Get Info I entered [Command]+[C] to copy the filename. So far so good. I fired up trusty MacVim, pasted the clipboard contents and increased the font size:

The name of the file was… "nul"? In programming and computing in general "nul" of course refers to a lack of a value; it doesn't mean 0 it literally means "nothing". So each character in this file's name consisted of a unique character I had never seen before called "nul" stylised in a way I had never seen before. You can tell from the other, regular characters in the MacVim window how gigantic I had to make the average font size before I could read the tiny letters within each individual character. Spooky!

As of yet I've still been unable to delete this non-existent phantom ghost file. I'll be installing my new hard drive in this MacBook Pro soon however which will entail installing Mac OS X from scratch which will rid me of it. Still I would have liked to know what it was and how it got there. Even Google had no idea what it was!

Anyone else ever had experience with phantom files on Mac OS X or other operating systems in general? Why hasn't an opera been created about this? Don't answer that.

My new Western Digital Scorpio Black 298GiB (320GB) notebook drive

I seem to be starting an alarming number of my posts with the exact same four words: "In a previous post…". I was able to buck this alarming trend in this post however by presenting this largely superfluous paragraph instead.

As I've mentioned on a previous post (My kingdom for a bigger notebook hard drive), despite having numerous gigabit ethernet and FireWire external hard drives with space to spare, I still have lots of trouble with maintaing a decent amount of free space on the internal drive on this MacBook Pro. No matter how much I try to utilise external drives, their bandwidth and transfer rates simply don't cut it when it comes to encoding huge swaths of video or compiling source code on gargantuan study projects, or for ports such as KDE. I find external drives to be invaluable for backup and archival purposes, but they're just not practical for heavy on-the-fly usage; perhaps if I bought a eSATA or FireWire 800 ExpressCard and bought new cases for my existing drives it may improve the situation, but I suspect they'd still be handicapped. And it'd cost a bundle!

So far I've had two internal hard drive changes in this MacBook Pro since I bought it back in 2006. It's become almost a yearly tradition!

1. The original drive was the optional 91.13GiB (100GB) unit Apple shipped with my then-new new MBP which was smaller than the stock 111.76GiB (120GB) but it was 7200RPM not 5400RPM. More on that below.

2. The second drive was a Western Digital 149.01GiB (160GB) 7200RPM unit (WD1600BEVS) which was bought in Imbi Plaza in Kuala Lumpur during my family’s one year stint in Malaysia in 2007; this is the drive I’ve had the longest.

3. My fabulous father bought my latest drive during his latest East Asian business trip to Korea and Japan. The drive is a gloriously roomy Western Digital Scorpio Black 298.02GiB (320GB) 7200RPM unit (WD3200BJKT) with 16MiB of onboard cache, a free fall sensor and is advertised as being ultra quiet in operation, as energy efficient as a 5400RPM drive and supports a 3Gb/s transfer rate; the latter three I’ll be checking out myself in due course.

I've had people tell me in as many words I'm stupid for buying 7200RPM notebook drives because they drastically increase heat and reduce battery life, but having used them successfully in iBooks, Armadas, ThinkPads and MacBook Pros for over four years now, I officially call BS. The difference in battery power is negligible to nil; the brightness you set your screen and whether or not you're using WiFi would have a far greater impact. As for heat, also negligible difference. In fact I can confirm with a laser heat thermometer I borrowed from my Father's lab at one point that a new 7200RPM drive in my old iBook actually ran cooler than the 5400RPM drive it replaced.

7200RPM drives are definitely worth it, the transfer rates and general responsiveness with applications is noticeably better, and if you're serious about using your laptop as a production machine for compiling code or video rendering/encoding it's an absolute must. If you have an older laptop the difference in performance is even greater, my beautiful iBook G3 from 2002 felt noticeably quicker after a 7200RPM drive upgrade, similar story with my retro svelte Armada M300.

I wonder what the capacity of the drive I buy in 2009 will be? Will they have 30TB drives by then you reckon?

For the benefit of those who use the greatest web browser on the planet, Camino has been updated to version 1.6.5.

According to the latest release page, the following changes have been made since 1.6.4:

• Upgraded to version 1.8.1.18 of the Mozilla Gecko rendering engine, which includes several critical security and stability fixes.
• Camino will no longer crash on startup when the Mac OS X spelling system is broken.
• The General preference pane will no longer be missing for users who had customized the Preferences window toolbar.
• The icon for the Google feed handler has been updated to match the new Google site icon.
• Added CamiTools to the list of problematic add-ons.
• Improved ad-blocking.

In my previous post (On Adelaide Airport, Embraer E-Jets) I almost forgot to mention the best thing about Adelaide Airport, shown above. Internode of course is one of Australia's largest ISPs and is based right here.

Which leads to the inevitable question: is it sad to have your life completely dependent on a computer network? Is it healthy? Should I be concerned? Should others be concerned? Can you get a brain ethernet implant or something? Perhaps I shouldn't be asking these questions!

A Virgin Blue 737 at Adelaide Airport with the city in the distance

As you may have already figured out if you've been reading my material here for a while, one of my many disparate (and largely irrelevant in the face of my studies!) interests is commercial aviation, specifically modern commercial jetliners. Well technically they're not jetliners because they use turbofans not turbojets. You can tell turbofan equipped airliners from their jetliner counterparts by checking to see if the airliner has fans. Brought to you by the department of redundant information department.

With all the ballooning costs for research, development, labour and materials for both Boeing and Airbus — as well as the all the constant delays — you wouldn't think it would be possible for another manufacturer to make any profits let anyone break even. Brazil's Embraer though has managed to target specific segments of the market and make huge profits; their E-Jets are now in service with such airlines as Air Canada, Finnair, KLM and JetBlue.

I belabour all this to share some images I took with the not-so-crash-hot camera in my iPhone while seeing my sister off at the airport yesterday. There on the tarmac was Emraer E-Jet operated by Virgin Blue, one of Australia's budget airlines. In the photo above of course is a Boeing 737, and in the distance on the far left hand side you can just make out the skyline of the Adelaide CBD. Nice place :).

A Virgin Blue 737 Embraer E-Jet. Looks cute!

WARNING: I didn’t make any of these facts up, these are all true facts that I’m submitting as part of my application to become a Singaporean and/or Australian overseas representative of the American Federal Bureau of Miscellaneous Information.

In light of my recent purchase of David Letterman's Late Show Fun Facts, I've been inspired to relay some Fun Facts of my own. I'm nothing compared to Dave and his writers, but the one advantage I do have is being able to use hyperlinks to point people to relevant information. Think of this as a knockoff HyperCard version of the magnificently written Late Show Fun Facts.

Here are 10 Rubenerd Fun Facts to get us started. This could turn into a series (I can hear Neil Neil groaning!).

1. The world’s only recorded sighting of an orange beetroot was by a person wearing tinted glasses.

2. Jim Kloss once owned 300 hectares of tundra in northern Siberia, but had to give it up when he couldn’t read the tax forms.

3. Right handed people find it just as difficult to write with their feet as the ambidextrous.

4. Australia and Austria are the only two countries to have the same first five letters. Tough luck Slovakia and Slovenia!

5. Custard, hair tonic and transmission fluid are chemically identical.

6. Headaches aren’t real, they’re all in your head.

7. Labradors aren’t really smarter than other breeds, they’re just better at feigning interest.

8. More people have been filmed falling out of office chairs than hot air balloons.

9. The current dulcimer record is held by Esther Golton who played continuously for over 19 weeks before the instrument caught fire.

10. The ice that builds up on the inside of old fridges is more toxic than arsenic.

11. A brick is denser than a full can of paint, but both feel the same when dropped on external bodily appendages.

Despite the attacks from all sides and dismissal of it's relevance, I generally still value comment systems on blogs, even if some royal jackarses abuse the system. For the sake of brevity though I'll discuss that idea on a separate post.

One such abuse of the system is of course blog spam. I've had an issue with it on this blog since I started using a blogging system that supported blog comments, but I've noticed the steady stream only really started turning into a deluge this year. Akismet does a good job of filtering the bulk of it, but a dozen or so messages do manage to appear in my moderation folder every day.

What I've noticed especially in the last month has been that bulk spammers have been getting smarter. Instead of blanketly posting comments for viagra, dodgy enhacement products or fake university degrees on any blog post they can attach to, they seem to now be taking advantage of the metadata associated with posts to do some crude targeted advertising.

For example, I posted a very small entry back in 2006 about the disassembly of the Nintendo Wii, but merely because I tagged it with "nintendo wii" I've had literally hundreds of spam messages attempt to force themselves onto it talking about cheap controllers, games, Wii Fit pads, the works.

What surprises me is that spammers didn't figure out how to do this years ago. If an unsuspecting blogger doesn't have activated spam protection, you could do some real damage while passing it off your junk as legitimate comments. Or at least more legitimate than customised diplomas with no study required on a post about grilled cheese sandwiches. Mmm… grilled diplomas.

I was alerted by Todd and Kaede that the Rubenerd Show RSS podcast feed thingy wasn't working properly for them. I had a look on my server and it turns out the RSS feed php file was corrupted when I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress last night. As far as I can tell that was the only file affected, but to play it safe I re-uploaded every server-side file again.

Hope that clears it up for people, sorry for the trouble.