Rubenerd

Don't hurt me, I have no idea… (I love using this picture for when I'm confused!)

After several false starts and month long delays, I have reset my Google Reader account and am now attempting to figure out how to use it properly. Some random points:

• I’ve subscribed to the two dozen sites I’ve regularly read, and have updated my public shared items page. That much I know how to do
• The think that is confusing me though is how to add "friends" to Google Reader. On the left hand side there is a link called "Friends’ Shared Items" but it only lets you add people who are using Gmail.
• I have subscribed to several people’s shared items in Google Reader, but I’ve been told others can’t access mine because my starred/shared items are "protected". I can read their notes just fine.
• I have added the "Note In Reader" to my browser’s bookmark bar, looks as though you can share any page now not just a story you read in a feed you’re subscribed to.
• My shared items can be found here. If you can figure out how to add me as a friend, have at it!

My head hurts. I'm going to bed!

An underage cat having trouble eating roast beef. Photo by Daniel Mayer

Good evening ladies and gentlemen. In light of the fact I have been going through the source code of a 10,000+ line C application on and off for the last four hours, I decided to take a much needed break and proceeded to appeal to my loyal Twitter followers for a topic I could briefly discuss. Neil O'Carroll responded to my call with the following tweet:

Want to do a cat song for 121, but wifey still sleeping upstairs, don’t think she’d appreciate guitar/harmonica sounds from below.

That's clearly the wrong tweet. Neil O'Carroll responded to my call with the following tweet:

@rubenerd Topic suggestion: Blog about roast beef sandwiches for underage cats.

First of all, I would like to send Neil O'Carroll a sincere mail bomb… I'm so sorry, a sincere thank you, for giving me the opportunity to discuss this incredibly important topic that I'm sure concerns a great deal of us.

Let me be blunt. Please. I ran over my pencil sharpener with my motor scooter. We are living in uncertain times economically, militarily and economically, all three of which are contributing to a severe downturn in the abilities of pet owners and feline fanciers to indulge their cat's desires for cooked meats. The situation has become so critical that beef consumers in particular have become the latest victim acute shortages; and none have been so negatively affected as those who prefer to roast their beef for their cats, felines and other feline related cats. Economically, militarily and economically.

One positive side effect of this whole debacle however has been the that the issue of underage cats has once again been given the opportunity to be scritinised. Unfortunately our discourse in the past has been limited to roasted meats being fed to adult and adolescent cats, leaving out completely the issue of feeding beef of the roasted meat variety to underage cats which lack the necessary dental and digestive capability to chew and eat such meat with such parts of their bodies respectively.

ASIDE: My computer is telling me that I’ve misspelled "scrutinised". It claims it should be spelled "scrutinized". I would be willing to to spell it with a z, but that’s not how you spell "scrutinised". You can see the dillema I’m facing. Great, now its saying I’ve misspelled dilemma.

Asahina Mikuru with a very cute… damn it, you were supposed to be holding a moose!

I put it to you ladies and genteman that the time has come to genetically engineer cats that are able to eat roasted meats of a beefy nature much earlier in the life cycles. If we refuse to acknowledge this dire need soon, I fear we may be letting down entire future generations of cats. No other source of food is as high in vitamin C, iron, folate, mercury, arsenic, vitamin a+, vitamin w- as roasted chicken, and I'm sure a similar statement can be made for other roasted meats, in particular the one which I've already forgotten I started talking about but which I hope dear reader you have not.

You see, at this point as a reader of this post you have a distinct advantage over I, the writer, for nine distinct reasons, eight of which are meaningless and stupid. The remaining advantage is this: as a reader you have the ability to either read this post in its entirety, or merely skim it and claim at a later date that you have read it when the topic of Ruben Schade and his very informative fridge magnets and blog come up at housewarming parties which may or may not be unfounded given that you may have been living at your current address for a number of years. As a writer I do not have this luxury, I must sit through the entirety of the pointless rambling nonsense because I am the one creating it. I cannot skim through creating something: George W. Bush tried to do that with a new, un regulated subprime mortgage buying-and-selling banking business and suffice to say it didn't work.

So to all of those reading this post I ask you this question: why has your refrigerator but two doors when clearly the amount of material you have forced into it warrants the need for several more? I also ask you to consider the plight of underage cats and their inability to eat roast beef, or indeed any other roasted meat while we're on the subject. Because after all, isn't there a little underage cat in all of us?

Spaces in action on my (non-brick!) MacBook Pro

Given I'm also a desktop FreeBSD user, one of the features I was desperately anxious to use with Mac OS X Leopard was the "Spaces" tool. As with virtual desktops on Unix-like workstations, when you enable Spaces you get access to a slew of virtual desktops which gives you much more screen real estate on the same display which is especially useful for laptops. Suffice to say, I cannot live without it!

As is typical with Apple software though, when they implemented this common feature (well, common on everything except Windows!) they included a few other useful features that set it apart from the competition. What's curious though is that Spaces isn't enabled at all by default on new Leopard installations, and I know several recent converts who didn't even know it existed. Perhaps Apple assume this feature is for more advanced users, which is a shame because I think it actually makes multitasking computers much easier to use.

To enable spaces you want to open System Preferences on the Apple menu, click the Expose & Spaces icon under Personal, click the Spaces tab and check Enable Spaces. Once you've done this, a spaces icon will appear on your menubar and you're ready to go.

While the menubar icon is a useful way to change desktops, it is much clumsier than using dedicated keyboard shortcuts, so the first thing I always do is change the To Switch Between Spaces list box option to ^ Arrow Keys so you can cycle through them by just pressing [Ctrl] and [→/←] for example.

Assigning applications to their own spaces

The above commands are the ones most people use, and are similar to what is available with the virtual desktops on Unix-like workstations. What makes Apple's implementation infinitely sweeter though is the ability to assign applications you generally have open all the time to their own "space" by default. This means when you open your commonly used application such as iTunes or a Twitter client for example, it will automatically open in the space you assigned it, NOT the space you're currently working in. I find this much easier and smoother than having one desktop and constantly minimising or hiding windows only to bring them back.

For example, I have my virtual desktops, sorry "spaces", configured so iTunes is always open on space 2, TweetDeck is always open on space 4, and my stacks of Terminal windows are on Space 3. This means I can have my web browser and Finder windows open on the primary Space 1 which is where much of my work gets done. It's a fantastic way to multitask; I can't imagine going back to an OS that has you minimise every window you still want access to but not right at that moment! It's also a great way to compartmentalise what you do, so you know music related stuff is in one place, Twitter is in another, and so on. There's no more fumbing around thousands of open windows at once.

Once you get the hang of using applications in their own space it becomes second nature, yet I know of very few people who use it at all. If you have Leopard I really encourage you to try using it; it is a HUGE step up from minimising or hiding windows. If you're unfamiliar, don't feel as though you don't have to start with trillions of virtual desktops, heck even just having two makes live so much easier. You can always add more once you become more comfortable using them.

Now if you would exuse me, I'm off to hit [Ctrl] [→] to change the currently playing song. I've had the Trashmen playing the same three minute song 28 times now and it's getting somewhat repetitive. The bird is the word. The bird bird bird. The bird is the word. Don't you know about the bird? Everybody knows that the bird is the word!

I'm a kid in a chocolate shop! Look at all this stuff!

While there is an abundance of above average quality applications for Mac OS X, many tend to be more expensive and less feature complete than similar free and open source applications available on Linux, FreeBSD and the like. On Mac OS X we have the fantastic and easy to use MacPorts and Fink package managers, but if you're really serious about running said software you can't beat pkgsrc.

The pkgsrc system is the mature, elegant, sophisticated (can you tell I like it yet?) and cross platform package manager developed and used by the folks over at the NetBSD project. It's also used as the default package manager on DragonFly BSD and Draco GNU/Linux amongst others. I use it on my Macs, my Slackware Linux machine and even on a FreeBSD box, and I love it.

In this post I'll be describing what I've found to be the quickest and simplest way to get it up and running on Mac OS X. There are hundreds of other ways, but I've never gone wrong with this.

Case sensitivity!

The only caveat with pkgsrc is that you really need to run it on a case sensitive file system which OS X does not use by default. If reformatting isn't an option, might I suggest using Leopard's new Disk Utility to shrink your current boot volume and creating a separate, case sensitive HFS+ volume.

ASIDE: Some of the NetBSD documentation describes creating virtual disk images and running pkgsrc from them if case sensitivity is an issue. While it is technically possible, I wouldn’t recommend it; from experience I’ve found them to be more trouble than they’re worth. If you’d like to give it a go though, the Darwin platform notes on the pkgsrc user guide details the procedure.

Installing pkgsrc

Firstly, open your Terminal, navigate to /usr/ (or your new case sensitive volume you created earlier) and download a pkgsrc snapshot. This may take a while.

% cd /usr/
% sudo env CVS_RSH=ssh 
% cvs -d anoncvs@anoncvs.NetBSD.org:/cvsroot checkout pkgsrc

Next, launch the bootstrap procedure which will create the required directories and install the utilities to build the packages:

% cd pkgsrc/bootstrap && sudo ./bootstrap

Congratulations, you now have pkgsrc installed on your Mac! The next step is to modify your shell's $PATH variable to point to the new binary directories, by default pkgsrc installs software in /usr/pkg. If you use the Tiger and Leopard default bash shell, your PATH line in your .profile should something like this:

export PATH=/usr/pkg/bin:/usr/pkg/sbin:$PATH

You'll also want to add these lines to make it easier to update your pkgsrc tree:

export CVS_RSH=ssh
export CVSROOT=anoncvs@anoncvs.netbsd.org:/cvsroot

Very quick background I created for a fellow MBP user who started with pkgsrc on their Mac and since moved over entirely to NetBSD, will be the subject of a future post. Mai Tokiha was the only character we could really find who wears lots of orange :).

Using pkgsrc

From this point forward, using pkgsrc is basically the same as using it on any other platform, the only difference is you use the bmake tool instead of make to build packages. If you haven't used pkgsrc before, below is a very quick crash course using Alpine as an example.

Browsing available packages

You can browse the /usr/pkgsrc/ directory, but the easiest way is to go to http://pkgsrc.se and either search for a specific piece of software, or browse the categories.

Building and installing a package

% cd /usr/pkgsrc/mail/alpine% sudo bmake install clean clean-depends

Updating your pkgsrc tree

% cd /usr/pkgsrc
% sudo cvs update -dP

That's enough to get your started; once you've got the hang of it dive into the comprehensive and easy to follow pkgsrc guide by Alistair Crooks, Hubert Feyrer and the pkgsrc developers to learn all the cool things you can do with this package manager. I need a Rubenerd Seal of Approval or something :-)

The gorgeous herrie audio player with Whole Wheaty goodness

If you had read my previous post on internet streaming (Even more woes with streaming internet audio) you would know that I've been having difficulties listening to streaming internet audio. You could even say I've been having woes with it.

Here's the scenario: I could not listen to the Whole Wheat Radio audio streams at home on my MacBook Pro, however if I took said computer to any of the net cafes in the city, I could. As I surmised in the aforementioned post, I figured it must have therefore been an issue with either our router or our ISP.

It turns out that in fact I am capable of listening to Whole Wheat Radio at home by using their high quality audio feed. I had always stuck to the low and medium fidelity feeds in the past because ISPs in Australia have download caps (yuk!), and a 20GiB monthly allowance disappears faster than you can say "Oh Wow, Obama Is President!" I assume this is because of the different software in play (ha!) on this stream compared to the others.

All I had to do was disconnect our router and plug our ADSL modem directly into our cute little ethernet switch, then manually assign IP addresses and DNS servers to our laptops. I assume then that this must have been an issue with this router.

So as you can see in the screenshot above, I can now play Whole Wheat Radio at home again! The software pictured is herrie, a very lightweight and easy to use terminal based audio player that uses a fraction of the system resources of QuickTime or iTunes on Mac; and Exaile or Amarok on Unix-like systems… perfect for tuning into an audio feed. I hope to do a review of it alongside the player it replaced called MOC which replaced Cmus. I'm passionate about finding the right software for the right job, and I'm not a believer in sacrificing a user experience just so you can use two features of one application instead of using two applications.

Look out Jim, another random media player listening to your media again and confusing the What's Playing page… he doesn't look too impressed.

This really made my morning!

Provided by Terri Noble on today's Whole Wheat Radio collaboration page. Well actually it was yesterday's collaboration page for us here, but let's not make this time-zone whatnot any more confusing than it already is. I only just got used to using daylight savings again.

With the glee over the good political news coming out of the US subsiding now, we return to Australia and Senator Conroy's plan to censor the internet. If you only read the comments people were writing in the newspapers here, or on blogs, or on web forums, or on news websites, or in person with other people, or on television, or on public transport… you may get the impression that nobody wants this.

Fortunately the ABC has been able to actually find someone who does support the plan, and for their benefit they've published their defence of it:

Family concerns: Internet filtering has the potential to be a great tool to help parents in their difficult vigil.

There has been much backlash against the Government (and Stephen Conroy, the Communications Minister) for their attempt at making the internet safer for Australians. There has been much necessary talk of technological difficulties and also a large amount of discussion regarding censorship.

The article was written by Anh Nguyen, a "researcher" with the Australian Family Association, a Catholic organisation that opposes gay rights and claims that "safe sex" is a "lie" amongst other golden tidbits. Still, everyone deserves their right to free speech and opinion… wait, he is arguing we don't, never mind. The crux of his argument is that a national internet filtering system is desirable even though it won't entirely be effective.

I could argue at great length here over the ethical issues that would arise as as result of mandatory internet filtering. I could argue that if they can't guarantee that legitimate content won't be blocked then it's dangerous. I could discuss the dubious criteria for being blocked, and the slippery slope over what is legal and what isn't. I could argue that the opt-out system Senator Conroy proposes and Mr Nguyen endorses goes against consumer rights and is completely the opposite to how anything else operates. I could argue that the only other countries that have implemented such systems are ridiculed and condemned for doing so. I could argue that such actions are illegal and unconstitutional, and fly in the face of "innocent until proven guilty" Honestly I could even go as far as to quote each of his paragraphs and write at length the problems with his reasoning, and point out the flaws with his figures.

Senator Conroy, the person who wants to censor Australian internet

The simple fact of the matter is though, they are all moot points.

Even if such a system were desirable, it would not work. It would not work for the same reason that DRM (digital restrictions management) doesn't work. People who want access to the blocked "illegal" material will be able to get it. Anyone with five minutes and Google will easily be able to bypass any restrictions. The only people this will affect, just like DRM, are legitimate users. In this case, law abiding people will have slower internet access and legitimate pages that are blocked by accident, while people who want to access illegal material will continue to do so. That's all there is to it. Put the book down, grab a coffee.

As my ever wise grandfather on my mothers side has always said: "don't let the facts get in the way of your argument [Mr Nguyen]". For what it's worth, there are 101 comments on the article, and all but half a dozen people were appalled. Unfortunately "democracy" entitles us to vote for our government, not on their decisions. They know this of course: there's no way this idea would pass if put to the people in a referendum. This is what needs to be done though, so we can bury this silly idea once and for all!

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 email Senator Conroy at his website. Don't forget to also write to your local federal parliament member in your electorate.

Screenshot of BarackObama.com taken this afternoon

Everything was happening so quickly in the US elections around lunchtime today (last night their time) that I posted a flurry of short entries as soon as the news broke. It really was an exciting time to be watching the news and an even more exciting time to be reading peoples comments on Twitter in near real time.

In case you've had your head in the sand, Barack Obama is now the presumptive nominee for President of the United States, as I wrote gleefully here. To watch him give his victory speech on on my computer screen through my TV tuner live was nothing short of awe inspiring, and his manhug with Joe and then waving to people with his family was probably one of the biggest moments I've ever seen on TV. As Jim Kloss said on the Whole Wheat Radio collaboration page for today:

We’ve just witnessed history …. “Where were you when Obama gave his speech…….”

History in the making

I didn't exist when the moon landing happened, or when the Governor General sacked Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in Australia; and I was far too young to remember when the Berlin wall fell… I could go on. For my own selfish needs, it's good to be able to say I watched a historic moment that I can talk to people about when I'm old and senile :)

For someone who's 22, George W. Bush has been president for much of my living memory. I've been so used to talking about "that moron in the White House", talking about the latest Bushisms, the humanitarian disasters in central Africa and how he ignored them, Afghanistan, Iraq, the so called War on Terror. I had only just started high school when September 11 happened. This would all be the same for the young voters in the US too. It is just such a great feeling to finally have someone in charge of the Western world who is intelligent and who I can talk about in positive tones for the first time. That is really a great thing!

I'm not sure if I should feel ashamed for thinking this, but while I am pleased President Obama (that sounds good doesn't it?) got the position, I am infinitely more pleased that McCain didn't get the position. With a competent, level headed vice president he could have certainly been better than Bush and Cheney (insert joke about low barriers to entry here) but his choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate scared me. I'm dead serious: she really, really scared me. It bothered me how much anti-intellectualism had clearly gone into the decision; rather than picking a competent and capable person the McCain camp clearly chose someone that they thought they could package and sell to the so called "Joe the Plumbers" of the country. I don't know enough about her policies in Alaska, but seeing her interviewed without a teleprompter and asked questions, it showed that she would be a dangerous person to have command of such a powerful country.

Screenshot of JohnMcCain.com taken this afternoon. For what it's worth, I think McCain was extremely gracious in his final speech, even if some of his supporters in the audience booed like spoilt children each time he mentioned Obama's name.

Being realistic for a second

One thing to be cautious of though is being too optimistic at such an early stage. As I blogged about in September 2007 (No More John Howard!), we recently came out of elections around this time last year which saw our own long serving conservative and Iraq-war supporting Prime Minister John Howard and his coalition government replaced with Kevin Rudd and the centre-left Labor Party which is ideologically similar to the American Democrats. In other words, a similar situation to to what has happened in the United States today.

Now, while this was also fantastic news and set Australia on the right path again on so many issues such as climate change, they also managed to draw from their ranks the boneheaded Senator Conroy who wants to censor the internet for all Australians (NoCleanFeed, no censorship on Australian internet) regardless of the technical infeasibility, the inevitable problems with returning false positives and negative implications for free speech and social justice. It will be interesting to see if Barack Obama and Joe Biden are able to maintain control of their now sweeping majorities and keep the party working together and cohesive.

It does dismay me a tad that Obama has rightly benefited from a society where someone can be elected regardless of their skin colour and background, when he doesn't translate this idea into equal rights for homosexuals. I think we can be fairly confident though that he won't interfere federally with more progressive states decisions, such as the same sex laws in Massachusetts. And for what it's worth, it would have probably been even worse with McCain.

He has also been fairly silent about specifics with regards to the economy, in particular what forms of fiscal and monetary policy he would introduce… and no taxes aren't the big thing! I'm looking forward to seeing who he appoints in his cabinet to advice him on this.

Conclusions

There are huge challenges facing the world right now, and believing Obama is a silver bullet would be naive. What's important to realise though is how critical it is for the United States right now to have the support of the rest of the world as military and economic problems persist. With Barack Obama, so many people from all corners of the globe seemed to have changed their position on, and opinion of, America… instantly! If this global support translates into improved diplomatic relations and more cooperation, I think we're well on our way to solving so many of our problems. We are so much stronger if we work together.

We've got a long way to go, but America made the right choice and we're in a better position with Barack Obama in charge. It's time to welcome America back into the global community :).

Related posts

• Steven Fry’s salient tweet about America
• Twitter chatter over Obama win
• Obama has won!
• Public service announcement for American friends
• Post on the American elections tomorrow
• People in Australia talking about Obama

Malagasy people grinning from ear to ear. The world so wants to love America and now they can again

~ StevenFry

Some quotes from Twitter in the last few minutes:

rubenerd

I’m relieved of the news and am proud of America for their decision. Kudos my friends.

redragon

@rubenerd Obama w!

joelhousman

Yes. We. Did.

stevenfry

Oh hurrah! My American friends have just texted me the news!!! Good old America, good old Americans! xxx

javajive

Being an American overseas for 6 1/2 years, this is one of the proudest moments I’ve had of my country – finally. Congratulations.

jjprojects

Bush just became history, oh yeah. George who?

rickfu

WE DID IT! Just took a shot to celebrate…all of us with tears in our eyes

nedwin

Awesome.

toddtyrtle

Happily speechless…

mikurubeam

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY

rberger

Let’s hope this is the major turning point for the US and the beginning of a long positive transformation to a sustainable, peaceful future.

springnet

The United States just began to look very different to the rest of the planet.

alexlindsay

It will be really great to have a president who can speak in whole sentences and not like everything’s a question.