Rubenerd

Brightkite is a relatively new social networking tool that allows you to specify your geographic location, have that information sent to your Twitter account, and to be told if anyone you know is close by. I'm having lots of fun :-).

ASIDE: Brightkite works as a for of voluntary big brotherism, it allows the FBI, ASIO and other security organisations to keep tabs on exactly where you are.

Of course, the adage of garbage in, garbage out still applies, so you could just as easily say you’re in a beautiful town in Croatia when actually you’re in Suntec City in Singapore. The possibilities are as infinite as my distaste for Windows Vista and bubblegum flavoured toothpaste!

The web version works by you specifying a particular address, building, suburb, city etc and choosing to "Check in". Upon checking into a location, you can view a Google map and satellite pictures of the area and share your profile with other people. For example, Currently I'm checked into Robinson Street, Mawson Lakes in Adelaide.

You can try out the Guess My Location feature too which, as the name surprisingly suggests, attempts to guess your location. I tried it this evening and was told I was in Toowoomba, Queensland.

For those of you who don't live in Australia, here's a map from my iPhone showing the scale of the error!

What I'm really interested in is using Brightkite as a way to document a holiday or trip. By checking into places using your phone (which is also trivially easy to set up), you can post exactly where you are at different times and days, so later when you return home you can create a map you can share with people of exactly where you went and for how long you stayed at places. Mix these maps with photos, videos and notes you take at each check-in point and the possibilities are very exiting. I'm looking forward to using it in that capacity on my next trip!

You can follow me at http://brightkite.com/people/rubenerd. If you don't have an account you can't register unless you have an invite, if you want one post a comment below and I'll give you one of mine, I have a few spare.

Unless you live under an electronic rock, you would have seen Apple released with much fanfare their new designs for their MacBook and MacBook Pro notebook computers. The new designs have certainly generated a lot of controversy, and I'll be addressing some of the concerns here. I'll try not to babble on too much about how I'd love to have one :-).

ASIDE: Apple is often accused of generating more publicity than people can handle or wish to be inundated with, and news agencies and bloggers are often accused of pandering to them by supplying them with free advertising. I’m glad I’m not one of those people.

Both the MacBook and MacBook Pro now share a similar metal design, gone is the plastic on the MacBook and gone is the plastic trim on the MacBook Pro which has been with it since the PowerBook days. The new laptop cases utilise aluminium block construction which entails the shape, port holes and recessed keyboard areas to be cut with precision equipment from a single slab of aluminium. We're being told that this results in a firmer and stronger case that is also more lightweight as a result of using less connectors.

Jonathan Ive (Apple's head of design) hosts an extremely impressive video of the manufacturing process including video of the aluminium rolling along the factory on the Apple website which you can watch.

MacBook manufacturing video by Apple

The display is perhaps the most controversial change. Both the MacBook and MacBook Pro now sport glossy displays that match the black bezel design of the current iMac; and just like the current iMac there is no option whatsoever for matte screens.

I use a matte screen original generation MacBook Pro with a glossy screen protector film because gloss works wonders with colour richness and especially improves black tones. However when I'm editing photos I take the glossy film off because I know the colours I see through a glossy film are a much less accurate representation of what the colour will appear as on paper, and on other computer screens. This seems to be the primary reason for the resulting negative comments and uproar over the display: many professional users whom the MacBook Pro targets won't be able to use these laptops. I can't help but wonder if the folks at Apple are really shooting themselves in the foot with this move.

Glare seems to be less of an issue though. While the screen is made of glass and is more reflective than many bathroom mirrors, the brightness is so… bright that it will still be easy enough to read even with other surrounding light sources competing. As someone who uses a glossy screened iPhone outdoors and never has trouble reading what's being displayed, I give credence to this argument, but I'd like to see a MacBook display for myself first before making up my mind.

Seems not many people on MacRumours are impressed!

Aside from these drastic cosmetic changes, arguably the biggest alteration to the MacBook Pro is the inclusion of dual graphics processing units, one dedicated and one on-board. With Snow Leopard's Grand Central function which will let applications use idle processing power on GPUs as well as CPUs this is huge news. It also means the MacBook Pro could really be considered a workstation class graphics machine for mobile users when previously it tended to lag behind offerings from other vendors by a few months. Again I'm holding final judgement until some benchmarks are in.

The other controversy surrounds Apple's changes to the ports on the machine. The ports have been moved from both sides of the case to just the left hand side, and has moved the optical drive from the front to the right hand side. With less space for ports, Apple has introduced another new connector called the Mini DisplayPort which will no doubt result in the need to buy yet another dongle to convert between a mini port and the full sized port for use in this case with external displays.

Sticking with two USB 2.0 ports and the FireWire 800, Apple also removed the FireWire 400 port entirely from both machines. On the MacBook Pro this isn't an issue; the previous MacBook Pro FW800 and FW400 ports shared an internal bus anyway and the FW800 is backwards compatible, meaning if you daisy chain FW800 and FW400 devices off this one port the result in performance will probably be the same. I'll be dedicating an entire post to the boneheaded decision to delete FireWire entirely from the MacBook in another post.

New MacBook and MacBook Pro, on my classic MacBook Pro taken at Adelaide Airport. If you look closely you can see a reflection of an airport sign in the centre left of the screen.

Overall despite these minor shortcomings, I'm still really impressed with these new machines, and if anything these introductions only strengthen my belief that Apple is the only non-Japanese computer manufacturer that really puts their heart and soul into each product design. These computers aren't just computers, they're works of art, and I can't wait to get one.. eventually! If you're willing to purchase me a brand new aluminium block MacBook Pro, feel free to post a comment and I'll forward you my address.

Danke. Arigato. Thank you. Terimah Kassih.

I've been reading JD Lasica's work ever since he started Darknet and Ourmedia… suffice to say, I'm a fan! Today he posted a link to an article written around a year ago on the emerging journalistic fusion of blogs and wikis.

Wiki journalism: are wikis the new blogs?

This has been around a while but is worth a read. Online Journalism Blog: Wiki journalism: are wikis the new blogs?

I was the first to respond, or the first to have a message approved… I'm going to pretend I'm certain that it's the first. I'm interested to see where the discussion leads on from here.

Found link to this article from your Twitter feed JD :-).

Interesting article from the point of view of sharing ideas and collaborating, but I don’t think wikis will replace blogs anytime soon.

I think while the architecture between the two might blur, people go to blogs and wikis for different reasons, and people collaborate on wikis and write blogs for different reasons.

I think it has to do with access: I like to think of wiki’s as "random access" where you visit a page from the outside with the full intent of reading what’s specifically on that page. Blogs on the other hand are "sequential access", people read blogs generally to keep up to date with a person’s perspective, current events and opinions.

That’s not to say there won’t be a grey area between the two, and I think it’s an exciting prospect. The idea of a blog that can be edited by anyone, or a wiki who’s articles are changed and shown in chronological order would certainly be interesting, perhaps even deserving of a new term. Biki? Wlog? Bliki? Perhaps I should just stop now while I’m ahead!

Photo from 2007 in Singapore of My MacBook Pro circa 2006, and my cute iBook G3 circa 2002, still kicking!

Given the sheer volume of work I have to do today, I figured now is as good a time as any to create another rambling Rubenerd Blog post with little substance or meaning. Call it an escape if you will. In this post I'll be discussing Apple notebook hardware.

Of course Apple fanatics already know about this latest news:

Apple is expected to unveil updates to its laptop line next week with the official confirmation issued overnight that it was planning a press event in the US.

The event will be held on October 14 in Cupertino, California, according to an official invite which landed in the inboxes of staff at ZDNet.com.au sister site CNET News.

Not mentioned in the invite is the most persistent rumor about the launch: that at least one of the new systems will hit a price point of US$800.

– ZDnet.com.au: New Apple laptops to arrive next week

My venerable, original generation MacBook Pro from 2006 is definitely starting to show it's age, specifically with regards to it's CPU. Firstly, as my primary and only computer here while I study, it chews through large compilation and video editing tasks at a fraction of the speed of my DIY tower back in Singapore. When you schedule tasks to go on overnight so that you don't lose any productivity time you start to wonder whether your machine is up to the task!

Apple invite for tomorrow's event

For those of you who remember, the original generation MacBook Pro's were part of the first rollout of new Intel based Apple computers after using PowerPC chips, and for some reason Apple decided to ship them with 32-bit Core Duo chips, despite the even more confusingly named 64bit Core 2 Duo arriving shortly after. This means virtually all Intel based Apple hardware has used and continues to use 64bit chips, fueling speculation that their next OS Snow Leopard will be a purely 64bit Intel deal. It's misleading how they advertise Snow Leopard taking advantage of Intel chips without directly addressing the concern that it will only be 64 bit.

ASIDE: Talk about a guy and his developed world problems! Ooh look at me, my computer isn’t fast enough for what I need it to do!

But then I come to the inevitable question: what would I like to see in the new MacBook Pros? Time for a trusty unordered list:

• Same rough dimensions, I’m not obsessive about thinness. I’d rather have a slightly thicker case if it meant it had bigger fans was more thermally efficient.
• Increase the size of the LCD by shrinking the surrounding bezel.
• The option for matte screens! Some rumour mockups suggest the new MacBook Pro looks like a cross between a current HP laptop and the current iMac. Not good!
• If the rumours of dual GPUs come to pass, I would certainly not complain
• Retain the silver backlit keyboard and not adopt the awkward chicklet keyboard of the MacBook Air.
• Retain a FireWire 400 port as well as having an 800.
• Ultimate pipe dream: dual gigabit ethernet ports! Hah, dream on!
• More USB ports. My old MBP has two. The current 15″ models have three. Four would do the trick, especially considering this is supposed to be a professional computer.
• Built in waffle iron and grilled cheese sandwich maker that feeds off the heat from the CPU.
• Option for more RAM. My current MBP can only support 2GiB which I think is even more of a bottleneck than the CPU when video editing especially
• Full sized ExpressCard slot instead of a ExpressCard 34 slot
• A built in wheatberry which will detect how much bandwidth you have available and automatically tune you into an appropriate quality Whole Wheat Radio audio feed.

If we get half a dozen of these, I'll be a happy little munchkin. Less than half a dozen, and I won't be surprised. More than half a dozen and I'll be suspicious.

One of the strengths of numbers is that they can accurately represent quantitative data and allow for easy and thorough comparison. Numbers' ability to represent qualitative data is entirely another thing.

Yes the latest ranked index of countries based on subjective analysis that news agencies love reporting is out, and it surprised even me. According to the 2008 Legatum Institute's Prosperity Index which proports to "measure the material health of a country, including wealth, quality of life and life satisfaction", these are the latest rankings from the top:

• Australia
• Austria; Finland
• Germany; Singapore; United States
• Switzerland
• Hong Kong
• Denmark; New Zealand
• Netherlands
• Sweden
• Japan
• Norway; France; Belgium; Canada; United Kingdom
• Israel
• Ireland

And the unfortunate bottom half dozen:

• Zimbabwe
• Central African Republic
• Mali; Zambia
• Yemen

This raises the inevitable question: did they just use alphabetic sorting to generate this list? Australia and Austria at the top, and Zambia and Yemen at the bottom?

I found it interesting that Singapore was hugely penalised simply because of a climate "that is not moderate". I personally love the warm weather in Singapore, it means I can leave the house at 3am and still feel comfortable. Guess I'm in the minority on this, though it shows why qualitative analysis and charts like this really don't mean much and are largely subjective.

What really disturbed me though was their "Religious Belief" index which penalised (mostly rich) countries with large numbers of atheist, agnostics and non believers. Australia and Finland was docked 8 points, Switzerland 6 and Japan a whopping 12. What does faith in ideas without evidence have to do with economics, living standards and quality of life?

I like those little flag images. But this flag is still my favourite:

Still can't help but be creeped out a bit by that graph though!

Photo of mine from Flickr of the Mawson Lakes river

From Jerry Novak's Twitter feed:

I finally figured out the only reason to be alive is to enjoy it.

– Rita Mae Brown

Sounds like a good enough reason for me :-).

Jerry is so far the only Overnightscapean I've met in person, when he visited Singapore last year. Well, that's if you don't count Felix Tanjono who I went to high school with in Singapore! I think it's safe to say certain similar tragic events in both our lives around the same time brought us together as brothers, even if I've only met him in person a few times.

Suffice to say, if there were more people like Jerry the world would be a damned better place.

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

17:00 – Recording shows at 03:45am; bizarre South Australian and Indian timezones off by half an hour; installing operating systems in virtual machines, VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation, Parallels Desktop, VirtualBox; getting your hands dirty with real partitioning; choosing from FreeBSD, Draco GNU/Linux, OS/2 Warp 4.x, BeOS, DR-DOS, FreeDOS, NetBSD; why it's a great time for OS enthusiasts to be alive; and why this should really have been filed under Rubenerd Unplugged and not made into a proper show!

Recorded in Adelaide, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Screenshot of Angus Kidman's ZDnet Australia column earlier today

Angus Kidman writes for ZDnet Australia in his Snorage [sic] column, named as such because in his words: "if everyone thinks storage is so boring, how come we always want more of it? Go on — you know size matters."

Well apparently he does think that sometimes size doesn't matter, and has gone on record to suggest that nobody would need more than 16GiB of memory in their phones. From the article:

Pronouncing that a given device doesn’t need any more storage is a near-foolproof recipe for looking stupid somewhere down the line. However, I’m sceptical that many people need a 16GB mini-SD card for their phone.

SanDisk next month will start offering a 16GB microSD card, which — unsurprisingly given the format — is aimed at the mobile phone market.

That amount of capacity inevitably leads to the question: how are you supposed to fill up that space? Pictures might be one potential answer, but 16GB will give you a hell of a lot of semi-quality phone shots. Indeed, the whole Pictures folder on my PC doesn’t take up that much space.

But if this is you, then I suggest you re-compress your movies into a more screen-friendly alternative and stop overloading your PowerPoint presentations with meaningless graphics. Save the capacity for where you really can use it — on a desktop PC where the OS will reclaim it in the blink of an eye.

At least he made one valid point in his introduction: storage ceiling predictions are almost universally wrong. I don't think I need to bring up the old Bill Gates 640KB of RAM chestnut again to demonstrate!

The fact of the matter is we used to think that the diminutive amount of space on a SIM card would be enough for mobile phone users. After all, you can store a few thousand contact numbers on one, what more could you possibly want to put on a phone? Then people started demanding the ability to store more than just numbers about their contacts, then they started demanding the ability to do calendering and other organiser like functions to replace the PDAs they had to carry in addition to their phones. Now we have GPS, mobile internet pages, conferencing, Twitter and instant messaging, streaming music and static audio files, video, photos and graphics, office productivity applications, grilled cheese sandwich makers, waffle irons, nuclear reactors and Secret Squirrel automobiles in our phones, and who knows what we'll have in another few years?

We can have a philosophical discussion on whether or not such things are useful for a phone to do or whether they're counter-productive and restrictive until the cows come home, but the fact is people are doing more with their phones now than we could have ever imagined even a decade ago let alone when the first portable phones were released.

Photo I took this evening, comparing a sim card, MicroSD card and an audio CD. I still can't believe how tiny these cards are!

Mr Kidman argues he can't foresee any use for 16GiB of memory for a phone and therefore doesn't see the point of it at all. Just like how 10 years ago nobody thought you would need more storage space than what SIM cards offered. It might be true now that only a few people have oodles of data (I like the word oodles) on their phones, but that's not to say that therefore nobody does, or that nobody will in the future.

I'm fascinated by storage; it's the reason why I spend so much of my free time researching new storage technologies as well as vanilla file and multimedia compression standards, encryption, efficiency and data centres. I'm fascinated by how far we've come in storage capacity, density and size since computing began, and am excited by where we'll be going next. I thoroughly enjoy reading Angus Kidman's column because I can tell he shares the same passion, but this time he does seem a bit far off.

For what it's worth, I'm typing this post on my 16GiB iPhone 3G which is 95% full, so I know of what I speak! Then again I am weird in that way. I mean wired. I mean, wireless, this is a phone we're talking about. A mobile phone not a terrestrial phone. Terrestrial sounds like terrorist, better make sure I don't get blocked in some countries for that remark. Remark sounds like Renmark, a town in South Australia. Which is convenient, because this post went south with this last paragraph it seems. Seams, that reminds me, I need to have my slacks repaired. Or should I just buy new ones? Ones and zeros… just like file storage. See, I did come back to the point of this post, even if it was at the very end.