Rubenerd

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

30:56 – From Adelaide: Finally some beautiful weather in Adelaide, river walking paths late at night, the Mawson Lakes suburb, Rubenerd Unplugged inspired by The Overnightscape Rampler, a new use for my Ourmedia account, advice from Jerry Novak and a scary almost lethal close encounter!

Music for this episode performed by Chris Juergensen from Magnatune.com.

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

This issue has been resolved by the folks at Ourmedia. It did turn out to be a technical problem. I would like to thank them for their quick reply and action, I appreciate it.

Back in early 2005 when I started recording the Rubenerd Show, I discovered through an early show from IT Conversations a website called Ourmedia created by JD Lasica and Marc Canter. Essentially it was a service for free and independent media that you could upload your material onto with the guarantee that it would stay there.

All in all Rubenerd Shows 014 to 066 were uploaded to Ourmedia and were accessible from my generously provided profile page at http://ourmedia.org/user/38566/. In doing so I was able to tag shows, group them together and share them with other people in the system and through external links. I made friends. I discovered other people and materials. It was lots of fun. Unfortunately when I realised that I was going to do many more Rubenerd Shows than I had originally anticipated, I decided to revert back to my own servers because I just didn't feel right using so much of their bandwidth, and it would only increase as I uploaded more stuff.

With the Overnightscape Rampler spinoff show in full swing, I thought I had finally figured out a less selfish way of using Ourmedia by uploading material I had recorded raw for others to listen to, but more importantly to resample and edit as people see fit in the spirit of Creative Commons and the Free Art Licence.

Ourmedia saying Rubenerd doesn't exist

Well here we are three years later from when I registered, and I've learned the hard way never to trust third parties again with my content! My profile page now redirects to a search page. I was given no warning whatsoever, and the page that replaced mine doesn't even reference me in any way. Doing a search on Ourmedia for "Ruben Schade" and "Rubenerd" return no results.

The creepy thing is part of the reason I stopped using it was because I felt uncomfortable having so much of my content on a server I didn't control. Ourmedia had so much potential, and I had a great way to use it. I'm hoping this is a technical glitch and not a deletion!

Update

I just checked, and I can still access my Ourmedia Blog, but when you click the Rubenerd producer link, you are redirected to the empty search page. Perhaps this is a technical glitch? It's strange because as far as I can tell no other user has been affected, I can navigate hundreds of profiles without a problem.

My page listing the content I've uploaded is also available, but none of the links work.

In case you haven't checked out Whole Wheat Radio for a while, Wheatstalk 2008 is starting! Spread the word :-)

Relevant Links

• Whole Wheat Radio home
• Wheatstalk 2008 information page
• Wheatstalk CDs for sale
• Whole Wheat Radio memorabilia for sale

It seemed less than 5 years ago after Microsoft's dominance over Netscape that the browser wars were over and innovation was all but dead. What a glorious time to be alive now!

Ah yes the intertubes are all abuzz with Google's release of it's Chrome web browser. As soon as the initial reaction of "oh no, not ANOTHER browser to test documents in!" quickly faded, my curiosity and general love of Google products took over and I went to their website to download the first beta, and to see how it compares with my beloved Camino.

As far I as I can tell given the limited information available (and feel free to corrrect me if I've made a mistake!), Google Chrome is based on Webkit, the rendering engine Apple adopted from the KDE Konqueror project. This is of course the same rendering engine used in Apple's Safari web browser and Nokia's Symbian browser amongst others.

Unfortunately for me, Chrome currently is for Windows only, and it has to be XP or Vista as well; my Windows 2000 virtual machine on my MacBook Pro couldn't even feel the love. Given it is a very early beta that's understandable though, and Google has stated that support for Mac and Linux is in the pipeline. As I'll elaborate further below, whether this means the support of the latter OS and presumably X11 will mean I'll be able to run it on FreeBSD or not will be interesting to see.

I'm going to come right out and admit it now: the user interface of the Chrome browser is just gorgeous. For the first time in a while, I'm ready to admit that another group or company has been able to beat Apple on appearance in a competing software product. Safari and Camino with the UnifyCamino plugin on Mac look swisher than Firefox, but Chrome looks even better!

Google Chrome running in Mac OS X

ASIDE: The above image is a shamefully misleading use of the Unity feature of VMware Fusion which allows applications running inside a Windows XP or Vista virtual machine to appear as though they’re running on the Mac desktop.

Chrome uses the same rough layout for the widgets and URL bar as Opera with the tabs positioned at the top. This has always made visual sense to me, because the displayed URL would obviously be different for each tab! In place of a menu bar, the Google folks opted for two discreet buttons on the right hand side which expose lists of options and functions. While I think the layout of these popup menus are a bit on the cluttered side, it's certainly a slicker approach when compared to Internet Explorer 7's cluttered and visually unappealing smorgasbord of widgets beside the tab bar.

This layout style is remarkebly efficient and uses far less screen real estate than Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox in their default configurations. Not only that, but it actually looks like a next generation browser compared to Firefox 3.0's dissapointinly old fashioned style, or Interent Explorer 7's horrible layout! The widgets are a bit big though, I'm hoping in the final release there will be an option to scale them down as you can in Firefox, Camino and Safari.

In terms of features it certainly is lacking when compared to Firefox, but then again Phoenix and Firebird lacked features in their early releases too. Whether or not Google allows third party developers to create plugins or whether this will just be a delivery mechanism for Google services will be interesting to see. I'm really looking forward to seeing how they utilise my Google Calendar, Maps and Gmail!

Google Chrome's Incognito mode

One feautre I think is very swish is the "Incognito" mode, similar to Safari's "Private Browsing" mode in that it stores no information about anything you do in the session once you close it. This means you can browse to sensitive sites with confidence such as internet banking and por… uh… recipie sites for grilled cheese which you don't want others to see.

It will be interesting to see what effect Chrome has on Firefox's still growing market share. Unfortunately a very significant portion of people who run Windows see Interent Explorer as "the internet" and don't even know you can swap it out. People who know enough about browser software probably are using Firefox now, and they're the ones who'll be checking out and using Chrome. Then again, Google has shown time and time again that it's capable of generating interest in it's products outside the core of computer savvy users. Perhaps Firefox will take a hit.

Of course the thing I'll be looking at closely is the licence it will be released under, and specifically the way in which others will be able to access the code. Some sites are reporting that Chrome will be an open source browser, but others I read claim that only the underlying guts of the application will be open source and the interface will be closed, ala Mac OS X. If it's the former, as a FreeBSD user I'd be delighted to compile it for use on my machine if they don't supply native FreeBSD binary downloads, if it's the latter I guess I'd be stuck with using the Linux version with FreeBSD's Linux Compatibility Layer which would be workable, but less than ideal, especially when browsers such as Opera officially support FreeBSD, and Firefox and Konqueror can both be compiled and natively run.

The Google Chrome user interface

ASIDE: My caesar salad just arrived! I never used to like anchovies; actually I used to HATE anchovies, but now I just can’t get enough of them! What salads have to do with a Google browser I’m not sure, but since when have I let relevency get in the way of what I’m discussing here?

For what it's worth, the first thing I tried with the Windows version of Chrome I downloaded was trying to get it to run under Wine: for those who don't know Wine is a project working towards complete and free implementation of the Windows API so regular Win32 applications can run in Unix-like environments. In FreeBSD 6.3-Stable and NetBSD 4.0 virtual machines on my MacBook Pro it spat out a list of errors relating to drawing elements on the screen from what I could gather; perhaps you Linux folk might have more success. If you've got it running under Wine, I'd love to hear about it!

All in all I'm very interested to see where this Google Chrome whatnot goes. I'm not sure whether I would personally use it as my day to day browser (LONG LIVE CAMINO!) but more software in the browser ecosystem can only be a good thing, especially when it comes to getting people off Internet Explorer. Perhaps Firefox's market share may suffer slightly, but such is the nature of competition, and more is good!

ASIDE: This post was created (according to the time stamp) on the 9th of September 2008, but for some reason it was relegated to my ever increasing Drafts folder instead of being published. I’m publishing it now with it’s original time stamp today on 7th of October 2008.

The Mawson Lakes library is a library located in Mawson Lakes, surprising though it may seem. Given it's proximity to the Mawson Lakes campus of my university, I can go to said library and use their computers with my student ID instead of registering with the library. Convenient right?

Alas this afternoon I needed to print a document on some form of pulp based paper material; I barely use the stuff but apparently some people still use it. So I plugged in my memory key, opened the PDF file, and clicked print. I then proceeded to the gigantic printer photocopier monstrosity looming in the corner of the room, only to realise that the printout want coming out.

Upon asking a library assistant why my printout was failing, I was told that because I used my student ID instead of a library ID, my printing would not in fact be carried out by the printing machine in the room in which we were both located, but rather in the university's main computer pools. This meant despite the printer being right next to me, I was told my printout was taking place on a device in a building three blocks away!

Photo of the Mawson Lakes library from their website…
curiously saved as a GIF of all things

I guess it does make sense though; why should my geographic location and method of authentication have anything to do with where my printouts are printed? Besides, they know this campus deals with computing, science and engineering, perhaps they know we don't get as much exercise and they're just trying to help!

In any event when you have someone who desperately needs to print something to prove he's paid his rent, it doesn't help when the system routes your printout to another building, despite there being a printer right next to you!

The way universities treat us, banks treat us, telephone companies treat us… it begs the question: where the heck is the common sense!? Oh yeah, I forgot: you have to pay extra for that as stated in Form 82, Section 12a, Paragraphs 91-97 and 132-912, excluding those printed in blue and/or serif font.

It's official, the Adelaide Crows are out of the AFL grand finals. This means one important thing: the AFL football season is almost over! Yay! As I've always said, I've made no effort to cover up my distaste for AFL and NRL in Australia; I've argued that even we ignored the gross, disproportionate amount of money they waste, they're just plain boring to watch! You can run with the ball, and you can still get points for missing? Come on guys!

What I do love though is reading and listening to sports commentators and coaches analyse games. For the latest results for the Adelaide Crows, the first question the sports commentators posed was "what went wrong?". Coach Neil Craig then proceeded to discuss strategies, profiles of the players and so forth. I could have answered that question for them: "They didn't kick enough points. Next!"

I've already mentioned the Anti-Football League back in August 2006, but I figure I should mention it here again.

The Anti-Football League (AFL) is an Australian organisation of individuals who are indifferent to the excessive fervour that afflicts supporters of the Australian code of football known as Australian Rules Football (”Aussie Rules”).

The AFL stands apart from the Football mania that is ever increasingly saturating our workplaces, media outlets and public spaces, and which at certain times of the year reaches excessive and epidemic proportions.

AFL members have fought hard to maintain an immunity to this unfortunate affliction which affects many tens of thousands of Australians. League members are united by the common understanding that there is more to life than the ability to kick a pigskin between two white posts.

A few days ago I mentioned that the first Release Candidate for VMware Fusion 2.0 for the Mac was made available, and I listed some of the issues I had with running the previous beta releases, with the hope the RC would fix them.

The RC didn't fix the most nagging issue I've been having, but I may be onto something.

As you know I primarily run FreeBSD in VMware Fusion: I know I'm a niche user but VMware does state FreeBSD is a supported OS, and it's the reason I went ahead and purchased a licence for their product instead of Parallels Desktop. In the version 1.x series, both FreeBSD and NetBSD performed flawlessly and I was extremely pleased with the purchase!

In the Betas for version 2.0 however, both FreeBSD and NetBSD have been suffering from appaulingly slow X11 performance. Both Xorg and Xfree86 take many minutes to load on these systems as opposed to the almost instantaneous load times in the version 1.x series of Fusion.

ASIDE: Before you get too scared, X11 performance in OpenSolaris and GNU/Linux distributions seem to be just fine!

The first Release Candidate seemed to make no difference to performance, until I was sitting at a coffee shop with my WiFi connection turned off. For some reason, without a network connection, typing startx in both FreeBSD and NetBSD caused their respective X11 environments to start instantaneously once again. Back home and plugged into the wired network, both virtual machines returned to sluggish performance.

The next step was to determine if I could reproduce the conditions back at the coffee shop and get back regular performance. Clicking the Network Adaptor icon in the status bar in the VMs and disabling the network completely eliminated the painfully long startx waiting time.

I'm hoping the final release of Fusion 2.0 will solve this problem, otherwise I'm back to using 1.0. Not to mind, Unity and the other more advanced features are Windows only anyway. It's a shame though that they're marketing it as a solution for running Windows on your Mac, not a solution for running different OSs on your Mac.

UPDATE: It’s now official: the Reserve Bank of Australia has lowered interest rates by one quarter of a percent.

I know this is supposed to be a technology weblog, but I'm also studying economics and like to keep on top of developments. Does that make me more or less of a loser?

Economists in Australia have been waiting for this day for a long time and we've all been speculating what the Reserve Bank would be doing on said day. Since 2001 the RBA has incrementally increased interest rates to curb Australia's stubborn inflation fueled mostly by domestic demand. While the world has gone through several notable economic corrections and booms over the last decade and a half, Australia hasn't suffered a recession in more than 16 years.

ASIDE: Some attribute this uninterrupted period of growth to the policies of John Howard’s conservative government which was in power until last year when Labor took the reigns again. I’m skeptical!

Back to today's news though, analysts have long predicted an end to this seven years of rate rises with a cut of one quarter of a percent. The leader of the conservative opposition Brendon Nelson wants a double half percent cut, and even went as far as to recommend it to the Reserve Bank, despite acknowledging that he supposedly respects the nonpartisan independence of the RBA and that if he were the prime minister he wouldn't be issuing the advice. Our current PM Kevin Rudd took him to task for the comment with another brilliant speech to parliament, but I have to admit Nelson did set up the pins for Rudd to knock over!

Despite the oil price falling in recent days, overall we're still looking at high levels which have putting pressure on almost all consumer goods prices. Transport costs are through the roof and few manufacturing and service industries have come out unscathed. Much of the inflation in Australia in recent years can be attributed to this relatively inelastic commodity, but according to an ABC News report, even factoring out the oil price inflation is rising, despite an overall drop in August.

I think it's safe to say the Reserve Bank will be very cautious with any adjustments to rates, and that a prediction of a quarter percent drop is feasible. Inflation is still above 4% which is far in excess of the RBA's target band of 2-3%, but consumers are demonstratively finding it harder to make ends meet now even compared with a year ago.

As a direct result, last night the Aussie dollar dropped to below US$0.85 for the first time in a year which will help exporters and improve our terms of trade. For my own selfish purposes, I'm hoping the falling interest rate in Australia will allow me to sell my existing Singapore Dollars for more, given that I got such a lousy return when I arrived here last month!

Obligatory Illuminati Section

At this point I feel obligated to say that the Reserve Bank in Australia, just like the Federal Reserve in the United States is part of a worldwide conspiracy to concentrate power into the hands of the Illuminati, a group of people I exposed for their evil in a previous post… uh, yeah!

By using proven techniques such as assuming correlation equals causality, conveniently denouncing the capacity for peer review using the justification that tertiary institutions and councils are controlled by the Illuminati too… wait we still can't prove it. But you'd better believe exactly what we say without question otherwise you're a duped sheeple because the definition of "duped" is the need for evidence before a belief is upheld, right?

How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

As I sit here at the Boatdeck Cafe I can't help but remember that I ordered a tea instead of a coffee to start the week off right, however I forgot that tea doesn't have the same effect on my brain as coffee when it comes to producing disjointed rambling weblog posts that have little real content or value, perhaps other than to assure you dear reader that you are a more interesting person than I, or at the least can express yourself with wittier prose. If after reading other Rubenerd Blog "rambling posts" this post seems bland by comparison, especially if you compare it, I apologise and advise you to microwave your left shoe for a few minutes to get your fill of random, pointless observable fun.

ASIDE: Please don’t put your shoe in the microwave. Okay you can put your shoe in the microwave, but if anyone catches you, don’t mention me or this website. I don’t want to get involved or be associated with your podiatric sado-masacism.

It's the first of September, and you know what that means? Yes, that's right, it means that the last number in reverse order ISO dates changes back to a 01, specifically 2008.09.01. Sometimes I'm so exciting it's just hard to contain myself.

Pointless number adventures aside for a moment (I'm sorry I know you all love them), the first of September is important because here in the Southern Hemisphere it's officially the first day of spring, which means winter is over! According to an ABC news report I watched last week, it has been one of Adelaide's coldest winters on record, and as you all know if it's on television, it has to be true!

Unfortunately it sure doesn't feel like spring right now, the weather outside is dark and overcast and the wind is strong and chilly. How misleading to call this weather spring when clearly it's colder than a refrigerator out here, though decidedly less tasty. People in Alaska have absolutely no idea what we're going through; Canadians, Europeans and Japanese would be equally clueless.

Thanks to our fantastic new digital USB TV tuner that could, we watched the morning Sunrise show on Channel 7 and saw how our current home compared to others around the country. I guess Adelaide doesn't look as dreary as Melbourne this morning, though decidedly less warm and bright as Sydney and Brisbane!

Having lived in all four of these cites at some point in my life, I can say with confidence that Adelaide has sure felt the coldest out of the four so far. Perhaps it's because I'm in my early 20s now compared to when I was 0-9 when I lived in those places, and my poor, frail old bones just can't take it as well as they used to. Again, nobody could possibly imagine what I'm going through right now, because nobody knows… the trouble I've seen… nobody knows… my bones.

Getting back to Sunrise though, I think it's hilarious how sometimes I'm really in the mood for listening to the banter on morning television, and sometimes I wake up early and am so irritated to see their happy faces I want to punch the television… which would be a shame because my television is my computer screen. I guess punching an LCD would hurt a lot less than punching a Cathode Ray Tube though: for starters an LCD isn't even solid material anyway right? So I'd be okay, right?

So it's the beginning of spring, let's hope it starts feeling like it is soon! For what it's worth, my MacBook Pro is still performing whisper quietly after I replaced the fan on the right hand side: I'm thinking come summer I'll need it.

And now if you'd excuse me, I have to figure out why our real estate agent claims our latest rent payment didn't go through when I have a printed statement from my credit union clearly showing otherwise; I have to get a replacement Medicare card because my old one started to crack along the magnetic strip; I need to get a new Proof of Age card because my address has changed; and finally I need to get in contact with the doctors and medical insurance companies in Malaysia and Singapore to get more details the university here is requesting. Perhaps I will order that coffee after all!

Spring has sprung,
The grass has riz;
I wonders where
My 8 port surged protected powerboard is

For those who are also avid VMware Fusion users, you'll be pleased to know the first Release Candidate for VMware Fusion 2.0 has been released (build number 113392).

For my own selfish needs, I only had three problems with the last beta which I'm hoping this RC has fixed:

Performace Issues with BSD hosts

Linux distributions performed just fine, but X.org in FreeBSD and Xfree86 in NetBSD on my MacBook Pro with 2GiB of RAM took far longer to load and performed worse than my 200MHz Pentium MMX box with 32 megs. This is not an exaggeration!

Folders that don’t disappear

In an attempt to backup my virtual drives as I like to do on a regular basis, I moved a folder from the virtual Windows 2000 machine to my Leopard desktop. Instead of copying over, the folder vanished from the guest, and didn’t appear on the host! One solid week of work down the toilet!

No stretched resolutions

VMware Fusion 1.x did not stretch the guest’s screen resolution when it was lower than the host’s. This meant in full screen there would generally be black bands on the sides, below and above the guest display… which was just fine for me! The Fusion 2.x betas flipped the default configuration so that it stretches the virtual screen which perhaps is useful for gamers but for reading text on an LCD it looks dreadful! As far as I can tell there’s no way to change this in the GUI, and adding lines to my preferences file turning off GuestToHost does nothing.

I might not have much time to look over these issues fully this evening or tomorrow, but I'll certainly let you know what I find out when I can get back around to it. Stay tuned.

ASIDE: For what it’s worth, I’ve learned my lesson with virtual machine betas: they’re not worth it. Other "beta" products are actually quite usable, but not software like this. In the future I’ll be sticking with the latest stable release, in order to protect my sanity :-)