Rubenerd

For the remainder of this week I'll be using an image of poppies for my blog and show header backgrounds to remember the 90th anniversary of the end of World War I, and to remember those who have died in that war and subsequent wars, and for those they left behind.

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A few days ago you may have scratched your head and wondered why I took the time to post such a ridiculously long post on why I had a falling out with Microsoft. I've certainly made no secret of my general contempt for Microsoft's products, but I wanted to let people know that it hadn't always been that way. I did this partly to inform people that I'm not a brainless anti-Microsoft shill, but also so I could post about this new topic over the next few days without being called a hypocrite.. not that I've ever let such names stop me in the past mind.

As part of an assignment on the TCP/IP stack, I'm researching different historical operating system approaches to networking. Alongside OS/2 Warp, BeOS and early versions of the BSDs, this has allowed me to revisit two classic operating systems that were on our first family home computer: PC-DOS 4.x and later MS-DOS 6.x with Windows 3.0 (with MME) and later Windows 3.1.

Original carton box of Windows 3.1, from MakingTheModernWorld.co.uk

Because my father has worked with this same multinational corporation since the early 1980s he was an IBM PC user from very early on, so our home computers were always IBM machines. We missed the Commodores, the Amigas, the Ataris, the Apples, the Tandy's and the Sinclairs, though for my own enjoyment I've since purchased lots of classic hardware on eBay and through other sources. As a result of this, we were DOS users from the beginning, and subsequently we were Windows 3.x series users from early on too. Fortunately we missed Windows 1.xx-386!

ASIDE: Which of the mentioned classic home computer makers is my favouite? Sinclair, by a long shot. I may have only got it a few years ago, but my ZX Spectrum is a gorgeous little computer and I love tinkering around with it, especially now I have a compact flash card adaptor for it. The graphics are clear and sharp, the bundled BASIC is lots of fun to use, and the unit itself is very portable. But that’s for another post.

When I see screenshots of these early versions of Windows, I'm taken back to Melbourne when I was four and hammering away at a keyboard with a small CRT display not quite knowing what I was doing but having fun anyway. I attribute this to the reason why I have such dreadful myopia, and why I'm so nostalgic for these things. Depending on whether you're a nerd or not you may consider this sad, but the Windows 3.0 and 3.1 boot screens are some of my earliest memories. Really, I'm serious!

ASIDE: I can feel my beautifully silly mum whacking me over the head with her shiny clear acrylic glass twisted cane for that remark. She always said she’d be checking on me and making sure I wasn’t doing anything too nerdy and/or stupid. I believe her!

Our first machine was written off when we moved to Singapore before I was a teenager; during the move it was rattled silly which destroyed the hard drive and zapped the motherboard. It was a shame, that little 486SX with it's 5.25 inch floppy drive and turbo button, and later a SoundBlaster card with a hex-speed CD-ROM was extremely reliable, even surprisingly when running Windows! Fortunately our second computer (and the first one I "inherited" for my own to mess around with) with it's 200MHz Pentium MMX CPU and 32MiB of RAM is still running strong, with FreeBSD installed on it no less! Another dependable little battleship, even if I have since upgraded the hard drive and graphics card. The joke is the graphics card has more memory and CPU power than the host machine itself! Isn't that delightful? :-D

Photo taken in 2007… my venerable, fully functional (and FreeBSD equipped) 200MHz machine is the beige box under the table, on top of the breadbox computer. Yes, I built a computer in a breadbox, I was 17 and crazy!

But I digress, as usual. Over the next few days I'm going to be documenting my adventures with running these classic Windows systems virtually on my MacBook Pro, but with plenty of cross platform references for others to use if you're a non-Mac user and are interested. As Big Kev used to say on Good Morning Australia with Bert Newton: "I'm Excited!"

I clearly don't get out enough.

Senator Conroy's saga continues today with reports that he is ready to initiate a so called "pilot" run of the Great Australian Firewall. I wish I was making this nonsense up. According to the NoCleanFeed.com blog, the trial will begin soon:

The Government has announced its ["clean feed"] filtering pilot is going ahead, and has called for ISPs to participate. The Expression of Interest document requires ISPs to filter the ACMA blacklist, with optional extensions such as dynamic filtering.

What I suspect will happen is that the trial will be a dismal failure; it will slow down internet connections substantially and the blocks put in place will easily be circumvented. I'm looking forward to seeing all the screenshots of sites detailing bomb making on computers involved in the trial, and subsequent screenshots showing blocked pages for breast cancer awareness.

The problem is, such an abysmal result will not deter Senator Conroy or his vocal minority (minority… minority… minority…) of supporters because their belief that such a system is useful and practical isn't rooted in facts, figures or even common sense, but rather in an unfounded idea that what they're doing is right and that everyone else is wrong, regardless. As with other adherents to similar ideologies that utilise such reasoning, they're incredibly hard to talk rationally to because they already have their conclusion before they have their facts.

In the meantime we don't even have telecommunications infrastructure that works half the time. How much money is Senator Conroy spending rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?

Senator Conroy, the person who wants to censor Australian internet

Now for the obligatory further reading links in case you haven't read about the issue here before: for more information about the federal government's plan to filter and censor the internet, check out NoCleanFeed.com where you can also pick up badges to put on your websites; at least before the government decides to block you for such illicit behaviour. You can also find out more at the Electronic Frontiers Australia website. You can email Senator Conroy at his website. Don't forget to also write to your local federal parliament member in your electorate.

Poppies, photo by Russell Imer

It's Remembrance Day in the Commonwealth and Veterans Day in the United States, the 11th of the 11th, and this morning we all here paused for a minute to commemorate the end of World War I, and all those who lost their lives in that war and subsequent conflicts. "Lest We Forget".

Today though is especially important given it's the 90th anniversary of when the guns fell silent on the Western Front. Our PM Kevin Rudd gave a speech, quoted from ABC News:

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has spoken at a ceremony at Canberra’s War Memorial, paying tribute to Australian diggers who served in the Great War and Australian troops still fighting overseas.

Mr Rudd and Opposition Leader Malcom Turnbull laid wreaths at the ceremony.

In his speech, Mr Rudd spoke of his hope for a new century of peace.

"Wars continue and the innocent continue dying. Must every generation go through war to be reminded why there should be no war?

"We have all endured a most bloody century, but let us resolve afresh at the dawn of the new century… that this might be a truly peaceful century"

Mr Rudd spoke of the 100,000 Australian lives lost in wars overseas, in battles at Gallipoli and Fromelles.

"Today these numbers are mind-numbing, they are horrific in their magnitude"

He also paid tribute to Australian allies and all those who have contributed to shaping Australia.

"Today too we honour our friends and our allies who have been with us in the thick of battle.

"Today we remember those who fell, we honour the contribution they have made to this world.

"We commit ourselves afresh to the great cause of peace, we honour them"

Alas today I couldn't attend any dawn services in Adelaide, but I can remember attending every service while I was in Singapore. Many many Australian and British soldiers lost their lives defending Singapore from the Japanese in World War II; many are now buried at the war memorial in Kranji.

It's now 2008 and we're still fighting each other. The only two things that have changed are our technology and our justifications. I'd love to be as hopeful as Kevin Rudd that we will have a century of peace, but if the first 8 years of this new century are anything to go by, we haven't learned our lessons at all.

Another very eventful day with technology. Today for no reason our home ADSL connection refuses to connect at all. It reaffirms my position on two key things: Australian internet sucks, and ADSL sucks. I've never had positive experiences with either!

This is why dear Senator Conroy, I ask for you to stop your fruitless crusade to filter and censor the internet which will only end in embarrassing failure for you, and instead work on improving Australia's aging telecommunications infrastructure like you're supposed to. Thank you.

Sent from my iPhone.

Next train arriving in 4 minutes? THAT'S what I miss about Singapore!
Photo from my Flickr Singapore MRT gallery

A few people who's shared items I follow have made comments on this exact issue, but I felt I was going to be posting a lot more than a comment field would allow, so it's going here.

Having used Google Reader again for a few days now, it's made me aware once again of news stories that only make it big in Australia, and those that are repeated by news sources around the world. Along with my tech and personal blog subscriptions, I've also subscribed to ABC News (Australia), AdelaideNow, BBC World, CBC News (Canada), CNN International and Channel News Asia (Singapore). One of the news stories that keeps appearing in all of them is the sorry state of the auto industry.

Now first of all I'd like to make it clear that I think when redundancies occur there are decent, hard working and loyal people who get laid off, and this is a real tragedy. Often we forget that underneath the hugely overpaid CEOs, middle management and other senior positions of transnational corporations, there are hundreds or thousands of other people who perhaps make enough to feed their families. It's a travesty that when companies go under that for the most part senior executives keep all their luxuries when the backbone of their companies — their workers — get left with virtually nothing. This has to change.

With that said, and with all the bleak reports streaming in from the US, Europe and Japan, I'm finding it difficult to feel sad over the declining profits and output of the auto companies. I don't feel sad because such results mean there are less cars being produced, and less therefore being used. In tough economic times people's demands are changing; consumers want smaller cars that use less fuel, that use fuel more efficiently or that use a hybrid system. The real losers in such an economic climate are the environmentally irresponsible cars such as so called "light trucks", 4WDs, SUVs and other TLAs.

I'm 22 years old and I don't have a [car] drivers license. I don't feel ashamed to admit this; in Singapore you definitely don't need a car with the public transport system they have in place, in Adelaide it's a bit more of a struggle but I'm able to commute from our home to the university and to offices in the city using trains and buses. If not, I have the option of using a bicycle, or if worst comes to worst, a scooter. If the distance is less than a few kilometres (or sometimes if it's longer) I'll walk.

Street traffic in the Place de l'Étoile as seen from the top of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, France, by BrokenSphere

I think the car symbolises the ultimate human expression of excess. There are many legitimate uses for, and users of, private vehicles, but for every legitimate use I'd say there are dozens of people who have just become lazy and dependent on their cars to take them along distances they could easily walk.

Economists sometimes label downturns in stock prices "corrections". I think in the case of the auto industry, their ridiculous profits and unsustainable (for our planet) production of vehicles definitely warranted a correction.

Let's hope the shortfall will be made up for by increased government investment in public transport options. They're being used more now across the world, let's divert finance from ultra expensive road tunnels and expressways and turn it into more accessible, efficient, reliable and more comfortable public transport. Hope I've done you proud Todd :)

Now I just need to get my fabulous dad onto Google Reader…

All right everyone, I've finally figured out how to use Google Reader enough to use it properly. I have the little bookmarklet for my toolbar, and I've started following some interesting people's shared items. I've also started sharing items of my own, and commenting on each. You can follow my shared items at:

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/09454950261221562208

If it makes it easier, my original redirect link also works too:

//rubenerd.com/googlereader/

And here's the Atom XML feed to subscribe to directly to.

Now the only question I still have is how Todd (a fellow Whole Wheat Radio listener) for example sometimes has his own name next to comments, but sometimes the name of someone else too. Do you need to be "friends" with the person to do that? Is it possible to comment live on someone else's shared items… is that what that is?

ASIDE: I miss hanging out with my dad in Singapore… because he’s not "just" my dad, he’s my best friend.

I must say once you get the hang of it, Google Reader is wildly useful: I've even posted a page about the Moleskine notebook I bought this afternoon online! The learning curve though is huge: I haven't had this much trouble learning how to use a web app (or a regular app for that matter) in a long time. I may even harbour a tiny bit of longing and nostalgia for trusty Bloglines which I dearly loved years ago. I guess it's all about getting used to something new.

Now I just need the links for Attu and Sparks and I think I'll be in business. :-D

If you've read my blog posts with regards to Microsoft here over the last few years, you many be under the impression that I hate them and their products. While I've certainly been guilty of perhaps using harsher language when talking about them here and on my show than what the situation warranted, I don't hate Microsoft, I rather think I'm just disappointed.

The early days

WOW this picture takes me back! I used to see this every day!

The fact is despite my current talk about FreeBSD, NetBSD, Slackware Linux and Mac OS X, I only really moved off Microsoft operating systems and software as late as 2003. Our first home computer had MS-DOS and Windows 3.0 with Multimedia Extensions, later Windows 3.1. We had all the Microsoft Home titles such as the beautiful Microsoft Scenes software, Explorapedia and Bookshelf; we had all the Entertainment Packs with such gems as SkiFree and Chip's Challenge. We bemoaned Microsoft's removal of Reversi from Windows 3.1 and it's Minesweeper replacement. Over the years our machines adopted Windows 95 (with Plus!), then 98, then 98 Second Edition. We skipped the Windows Me trainwreck and went to 2000.

I learned how to program using QuickBasic and QPascal. My first attempt at graphical programming was using Visual Basic 5.0. I used the first versions of Microsoft's .NET framework and learned Visual Basic.NET and C#, even though I went back to Visual C++ 6.0 afterwards without telling anyone ;-). I remember watching VBTV with Chris and Ari and loving it! The Head In The Box! Genius!!!

Suffice to say, the licences did cost us a small fortune to run all this stuff, but we were mostly happy with our machines running such software. I had got an iMac for Christmas back in 2000 but I was decidely underwhelmed by Mac OS 8. A few years previously I had given Red Hat Linux a try but was put off by the user interface; at that point I didn't understand that the graphical X server was independent of the OS and that I could swap out GNOME with KDE or something else.

The "awakening"

My Windows XP desktop from around 2002

I don't know exactly when it really started, but I guess around 2002 my opinion of Microsoft software started to change. I got my beloved iBook with Mac OS X around this time. Wanting to relive the glory days of DOS (aka black screens with blinking cursors!) I opened a Terminal window and started learning shell scripting. I actually got quite good at csh before I realised nobody else used it! Later in high school I learned Python and did some Java swing programming because I secretly loved the purple metal interfaces they generated :).

During this time I also picked up my first copy of NetBSD. I didn't know at the time what the differences were between the different BSDs, or even between Linux and BSD, but the NetBSD installer and documentation looked more friendly to me, plus I read that people on the whole thought the BSDs were more stable and better written than Linux. I installed NetBSD on my now old iMac and got it working. I learned about Xorg, about Unix-like operating system directory structures, about file permissions and so forth. I was using desktop environments but swapping out the default terminals with rxvt and so forth. So forth and so forth.

It was crazy, but within a few years of this starting, by 2004 I was almost exclusively a Mac OS X and NetBSD (later FreeBSD) guy. In 2004 I also got my first proper job writing perl scripts to automate sever admin tasks at a company in Singapore. It irritated me that I couldn't open a Terminal on my Windows XP box and use it the way I could with BSD and OS X. It also bothered me by that stage that the documents I was saving in Microsoft Office were bloated and non-standards conforming.

At that point I also began to question Microsoft's direction from a usability standpoint. I didn't appreciate being treated like a criminal with product activation in Windows XP. The applications in the Microsoft Office suite were getting harder and more complicated to use, not the other way around. Their internet offerings were a joke. As someone looking from the outside of the Windows ecosystem looking in for the first time, I could see so many faults and I was dismayed at how far their previously excellent user interface standards had slipped.

The present

My Xfce desktop on FreeBSD 7.0-Release

Now we fast forward to the present. Windows Vista has been a mess (I know, I've had to fix and downgrade my fair share of them for people!), the "ribbon" in Office 2007 with its splattering of silly little icons can't be turned off (text, why can't we have text!?). My love of FreeBSD continues to blossom as I find new and exciting things I can do with it. Mac OS X and Apple computers are an absolute pleasure to use.

I've only touched on the issues of licensing as well as some of their dubious business practices, because as much as they have also affected my opinion of Microsoft to the general loathing I harbour for them now, what it all boils down to is a simple fact: Microsoft software isn't nice to use anymore.

The Microsoft I grew up with in the early 90s has long gone, but what I want to know is, what happened? Had I started using Unix-like systems back in the early 90s would my opinion be different? I guess I may never know.

My current Leopard desktop taken a few minutes ago

As I said in my previous post about running NetBSD's pkgsrc on Mac OS X, I hurriedly created a couple of desktop backgrounds for a fellow student and MacBook Pro user a few months ago who has since moved her entire machine over to NetBSD. It should have probably just stayed on my anime and show blog but I figure it's tech enough to put here.

ASIDE: While I dabbled in Red Hat Linux 5.x at the time, NetBSD was the first Unix-like operating system I really used. I personally have since moved over to FreeBSD on my desktops, but NetBSD still holds a special place with me. And I am still an avid user of pkgsrc!

The orange flower is a photo I took from my wildflower photoset around Mawson Lakes here in Adelaide, Mai Tokiha is the protagonist from the My-HiME anime series which I have yet to watch but he thinks is trippy, and the logo is of course from the NetBSD Project. This was one of the only combinations of orange things I could find on such short notice; had her presentation been a few weeks later I could have probably created something a bit better!

The resolution is 1440×900, but if you're a NetBSD desktop user, or a pkgsrc on Mac OS X (or Slackware, or Draco Linux, or…) user on a MacBook it would scale down just fine on 1280×800 too.

Colour version, 1.9MiB PNG

Achromatic version, 1.1MiB PNG

I've been told by people that the reason why Apple didn't include FireWire in their lastest MacBook computers was because they were phasing out support for a so called legacy port and that most video cameras and external hard drives use USB as well, amongst other reasons which I thoroughly debunked in a previous post.

Well we finally may have the real reason for why Apple removed the FireWire 400 port from the MacBook. As it turns out, it might not have been a decision by them after all, but one by NVidia who designed the new GeForce 9400M integrated chipset and graphics chip which the new MacBook uses.

Here's the kicker: according to several sites I've been reading, this chip was designed without a FireWire controller.

The GeForce 9400M does not include a Firewire controller. When asked, Rene Hass mentioned that during the design of this chips, this function was not part of the feature list.
~ HardMac.com

This seems to change my perceptions somewhat. Given Intel's lackluster onboard graphics, I can understand Apple's decision to move to a NVidia's chipset and graphics solution, especially in a computer like the MacBook. I can't help but think though that they could have at least included a separate FireWire controller, granted they are substantially bigger than controllers for USB, but if my Sony Vaio PCG-C1VM ultraportable from 2001 could include one there's no reason why Apple in 2008 couldn't.

Promotional image for the new NVidia chip comparing sizes with Intel's integrated graphics