Jaiku: 2008-06

Annexe

These posts were imported to the Annexe from Jaiku, which Google bought and shut down.

Good morning everyone :-). Long Sunday ahead today
on Jaiku

Just finished this latest report, taking a cue from @jerrynovak and going down to Wheelock Place for a cuppa :-)
on Jaiku

Feeling fizzled out. Think my body is protesting doing so much study and work on a Sunday!
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Having an early night tonight, 21:00 :-D (9:00pm). Starting tomorrow things should start to thin out, looking forward to it!
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Heh how embarrasing, I've been a registered user of MacRumors since 2006, I just forgot the password!
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Got so many great books to read, "On The Edge: Rise & Fall of Commodore", and "Inside Steve Jobs' Brain" and "World According to Clarkson"!
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I am fed up with living in such a mess: I pledge to clean up this room in the next 20 minutes!
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The sky went dark, and I didn't even notice
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Good morning everyone :-). Packed timetable today, let's hope I can do it all!
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Going down the street to read The Economist and have some brekkie at a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf :-). Very civilised
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Twhirl is working again! I've reduced the number of requests per hour. Listening to "The Best Sixties Album Ever"... and I was born in 86 :)
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HOW AWESOME ARE THE ANIMALS!!! :-D
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These types of stories just make my shake my head in disbelief :( http://rubyurl.com/NIga
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Hehe, if you want to see my family as south park characters, including my mum, think she'd be pleased :) http://schades.org/
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My sister likes the way I gave her pink hair (http://schades.org) as a South Park character. She's in the bathroom dying it pink again!
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I tell you what, this Pal Centro was a fraction of the price of my Nokia, but it's so much nicer to use. Plus I get the PalmOS nostalgia!
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Even better? I was able to transfer all my silly old games from my Palm III and Tungsten W to it, and they all still work :-)
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Good morning all! My dad was supposed to be up half an hour ago but he's still sleeping, probably too much work again
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Going through my spam folders again. I need ti hire a secretary to manage all this stuff!!! One man show is harder than I thought!
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Finishing up some Ruby stuff then off to Simply Bread for lunch. That's the greatest name for a bakery every!
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Finally got Debian dual booting on my primary desktop with FreeBSD 7.0. FreeBSD still boots way faster ;-)
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Just released Rubenerd Show 243 (RubenerdShow.com), a very nerdy episode about moving one of my machines over to Debian from FreeBSD
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FreeBSD is still my favourite OS, but until Nvidia released 64bit FreeBSD drivers I don't have a choice for this one machine I'm afraid :-(
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Good morning all, 11am, I really slept in today :-)
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Sunday 2pm at Guthrie Centre drinking a hot cup of coffee, cool weather today, looking at @DaveWares's photo blog. Life is good :-)
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"Plurk" sounds like something you do in the bathroom when you haven't eaten enough fibre.
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Compiling AbiWord from MacPorts. Pkgsrc on my MacBook Pro is having some issues today for some reason.
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Finally caved in and got Plurk. Really doesn't play well with NoScript in Firefox, and avatars don't support PNG... but keeping open mind!
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Cab driver says this is best weather for Singapore, when the dark clouds block the sun but don't rain. I concur. That how you spell concur?
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And how safe is it to run the "testing" distribution of Debian? Is it like the difference between FreeBSD "stable" and "release"?
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Damn it, GRUB doesn't detect my Apple USB keyboard either. Guess it's back to a non-aluminium job on this BSD/Linux desktop :(
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Finding it hard to get into the Monday rhythm again today... though I guess that's why it has the reputation it does right?
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Just bought "A Brief History of Time" by Steven Hawking. One of those books I've been meaning to read for a LONG time!
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Ah good old Windows 2000. Works great in a VM for those pesky Windows only apps the uni gives me. :-P
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Updating the firmware on my DIY machine. Fingers crossed!
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Oh and for everyone on Twitter, my Singaporean friend @enaurore was approved for Aussie Permanent Residence!
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Night everyone
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I still have to use Windows (ableit 2000!) for apps that need Windows. Very hard to get used to the Windows style of open... windows!
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Though apps like AllSnap make windows MUCH easier to manage and move around in Windows.
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The Maximise button in Windows might have made sense in 1990, but not in 2008 with resolutions at 1680x1050!
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640x480 for the win!
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Hehe, I want a 3G iPhone :-)
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The Palm Centro is a beautiful little phone though, I'll use it for my Singapore SIM when I'm in Malaysia or Aus and vica versa
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Meeting my sister down the road for some avocado, cheese and chicken sandwich roll thingys :-)
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Singapore beats Japan in standard of living? Somehow I don't 100% believe that http://tinyurl.com/6qrwts
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Off to the PO
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Still can't get over how cool this Yubikey is! And even came in a letter with Swedish stamps on it :-D
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I still prefer booting my FreeBSD (and Debian) machines to a prompt, then using startx instead of using XDM, KDM and the like :-)
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Playing classic Age of Empires II with my sister over the network :-)
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Disabling sendmail on an older FreeBSD box
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Just updated Twhirl. Wasn't letting me type any updates, so I restarted. All good now
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Meeting my dad for Starbucks and a slice of cheesecake. Health food of a nation :-)
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Forwarding this link @guykawasaki sent out: http://tinyurl.com/yt2c2t absolutely amazing!
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Screenshot of my pretty Xfce on FreeBSD desktop! Warning: VERY BIG! http://rubyurl.com/Q6Sb
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Okay I'm off to bed now, cheers everyone!
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Quote from my sister @elkeee from March 14, **2007**: " Getting yelled at by my brother for not posting more on Twitter".
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So many icons on my desktop, so little time
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Good morning all
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@@GeekMommy Repitition also works at getting messages across, even if they do get annoying!
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For some reason I still find myself selling "aging" as "ageing". Don't know why
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Had such a dreadful night sleep last night, had dreams about mummy dying again. Playing some FreeBSD this afternoon to help me recover :-)
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Argh only got four hours of sleep, no good lah. Off to Suntec.
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Have to go and pick up doggie food for doggies
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4:30am, can't sleep. Got out of bed twice already :-(. Maybe a warm cup of tea will help :)
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Nice cup of coffee and an avocado chicken sandwich always helps feeling bad after a terrible night of sleep :-)
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Installing latest update for NoScript with Firefox 3.0
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Xfce with Tango icons and Clearlooks is just such a pretty desktop :-). My FreeBSD and Mac OS X machines now look just as nice
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Just updated my Firefox to 2.0.0.14 on my FreeBSD box. Left it a while, whoops :-D
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Retweeting @IntoYourHead: Typing stuff on twitter. <--- BEST TWEET EVER!!!!
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Retweeting @sgaccidents: 20:30 Accident on PIE towards Changi Airport near Paya Ubi Ind Pk with congestion till Kallang Way. Avoid lane 1.
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That scared me!! My little ZX-Spectrum wasn't powering up properly! As it turns out, I just had the TV set up wrong :-)
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Atheism: A non-prophet organisation :-D
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I still find the "Classic" del.icio.us extention much nicer to use than the "new" one
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My... brain... is... fried...
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I've finally made a meaningful update to the guts of Rubenerd.com. *One* of these days I'll be moving all my stuff there!
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Having some midnight snack Hello Panda :-)
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The most beautiful aeroplane in the world !http://rubyurl.com/WgLR
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I'm recording a Rubenerd Show now, anyone want to say anything? :-)
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Recorded the latest Rubenerd Show, meeting my dad for sushi then I'll come back and do post-op :-)
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Recorded the latest Rubenerd Show, meeting my dad for sushi then I'll come back and do post-production :-)
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My dad went to a Singapore Airlines convention yesterday, brought me back a 400:1 model SIA A380 :-D
on Jaiku

Rubenerd Show 244: The somewhat psychedelic difficult people episode

Show

SQLite goodness!

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

33:38 – Spending more time dealing with people not problems, university folks moving from Windows to Linux and Mac, university assignments, compulsive fanboyism, SQlite, Microsoft C#.NET, squeaky clean OpenBSD, actually finding someone who likes Windows Vista, skies getting dark really fast, comments from Rubenerd Show 241, too many interesting people on Twitter, Twitter traditional news sources (Aussie ABC, BBC News, BBC SciTech, Reuters, Channel News Asia) and personal nuclear missile silos.

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

Power failures are.

Thoughts

Dark lunchtime in Singapore

UPDATE: Power is back on again! I’ve lived in Singapore on and off (pun intended) for over a decade, and this is only the second blackout I can remember having here (failures from blown fuses in our crappy switch box don’t count!).

There's a power failure all along the Stevens Road area (Stevens, Balmoral, Draycott). The security guards at our apartment building say that power will be back in 1-2 hours. Not sure how they know this, but I'm sitting at a Starbucks using the internet right now while I wait.

Power failures suck harder than my Vax… the appliance not the computer! Well, neither would work without power.

Long live the Cobind Desktop

Software

With all my ongoing talk on the Xfce desktop on FreeBSD in the last few weeks, I can't help but wonder: what happened to the Cobind Desktop?

Cobind Desktop was a GNU/Linux distribution headed by David Watson that focused on almost zen like simplicity. Unlike virtually every other desktop distribution at the time that focused on adding more and more features and applications with each release, Cobind was visibly designed from the ground up to be usable by only bundling a core suite of applications that suited the needs of the vast majority of computer users. As a consequence it was lightweight, fast, and could be distributed on only one CD compared to the 3-6 CDs of some of the larger distributions at the time.

Cobind Desktop
Cobind Desktop, circa 2004

From the moment I lay eyes on the initial press release and screenshots for Cobind Desktop, I was in love. It was so elegantly designed and the 0.2 release ran beautifully even on my creaky 450MHz HP Brio BAx desktop I had at the time. It was obvious when using it that a huge amount of care, time and thought had been put into how it was put together and what was included, rather than just using a shotgun approach.

I never really realised it, but thinking back now it's clear the Cobind Desktop had a profound effect on my work as a programmer and system designer. I attributed my taste for elegant systems without unnecessary bells and whistles to using Apple software, but in fact Cobind taught me much about what I know when it comes to building systems. Here was a team of people who could have put literally thousands of polished, free and open source applications into a distribution but instead chose to select the cream of the crop and create a truly usable system.

My Armada M300 FreeBSD notebook, circa 2008
My Armada M300 FreeBSD notebook, circa 2008. You think Cobind influenced me in some way?

USELESS ASIDE: That anime character is Sailor Mercury from the infamous Sailor Moon series, as I talked about in a seperate, entirely useless post. Elke and I used to watch it along with DragonBall Z on Agro’s Cartoon Connection before school when we were kids (those were the days!). Ami rocked because she was the "smart one" who used a little laptop to "assess" her enemies before fighting them. Not having blond hair I think also helped. Who needs brawn when you have brains right? And the computer that’s running on is a little laptop. I’m so poetic, in a very un-poetic way!

Technically speaking, Cobind Desktop was based on the first release of Fedora after Red Hat split its primary release into enterprise and consumer desktop distributions. It used the Xfce desktop environment with the then-beta releases of Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird included as standard; I've been an avid user of all three ever since.

The Cobind folks also pioneered a fantastic graphical frontend for YUM, surprisingly called YUMGUI, to make it easier for regular folks and power users to add extra packages if the preinstalled applications were insufficient or you preferred alternatives. (a clean default install with the option to add material only when you need it… one of the reasons why I love FreeBSD and the Ports system now!)

Cobind Desktop
David Watson giving a presentation on Cobind in 2004

David Watson did an interview with FlexBeta in March of 2004 about the design philosophy behind Cobind:

Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz The entire design concept is based on a book called the Paradox of Choice, by Barry Schwartz, who is a professor at Swarthmore. We believe that this concept can be applied to software design, and produce more usable products as a result. I’m not certain whether anyone has applied the concept in this way, but it flies in the face of typical desktop designs which are more oriented toward comparisons on a huge feature matrix.

Our desktop product design is more like a desktop appliance. This kind of design is more commonly seen on the server, where programs are eliminated on the basis of security threats. We are doing this on the desktop, but we’re doing it because we believe that it produces a more usable product, not because it’s more secure, although that’s clearly a useful side benefit.

Our desktop product is very focused toward doing a few tasks well, not trying to be all things to all people. That said, we do have a lot of advanced users who are trying the desktop, since they like the concept, and adding their favorite software with yum. But we are trying to reach a new audience with this product – crossing the chasm, if you will.

For what it's worth, Paradox of Choice is also brilliant!

As far as I can tell, Cobind has not existed for a while now. Cobind.com now takes you to domain squatters, and DistroWatch reports their last release was version 0.2 which was made available two days shy of four years ago in 2004. Rest in peace Cobind, and thank you to all the developers for helping me out and sending me down the right design path.

Heh heh, piano tuner

Thoughts

Yellow Piano Tuner

Whole Wheat Radio Wireless@SG problems

Internet

UPDATE, 20:16: Jim talked about this issue on his latest audio magazine and posted a comment below. As Jean Luc Picard would say: "stand down red alert!"

One of the great things about Whole Wheat Radio, the internet radio station and collaborative wiki for independent artists and just damn nice music, is that you can listen to it anywhere where you have a stable internet connection! Unfortunately, recently it seems to have issues with Wireless@SG, Singapore's free island-wide WiFi service. When I was at Starbucks yesterday evening at 23:30 having a well deserved Chai Latte (I figure it's not good drinking coffee at that time of day!) I got the following error message:

Whole Wheat Radio IP address error

I was very used to seeing this message both at home and in public WiFi hotspots when I lived in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia in 2006, but this was the first time I'd seen it here. I assume it was because in Malaysia the broadband provider TMnet shoehorns many customers onto the one IP address in places and uses some form of NAT system, and perhaps Wireless@SG in Singapore is doing a similar thing.

One thing I have noticed about Wireless@SG is the number of IP addresses you're served at any given time. Sometimes I can be sitting at a Starbucks, Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, San Francisco Coffee or Dome for several hours at a time (coffee shops are so much nicer to study and work in than a study hall, and they're a nice change from sitting at home all day) and I've noticed my MacBook Pro will be served 20 or so new addresses in that time period. In that case, I certainly can't blame WWR for blocking me, I'm sure from their end such activity looks pretty sus.

I guess just like my detailed documentation on Whole Wheat Radio audio players for Linux and FreeBSD, this information would probably not be useful to most people, but just letting potential Singaporean listeners know that it's not their fault, or WWR's fault, it's the WiFi system. Perhaps WWR here is best listened to at home.

Fun with Xfce, part three

Software

This post is part of a series on Xfce, originally posted on my university blog. I’m republishing them here in the hopes that others might find them useful or interesting. Cheers!

In part one of my Fun with Xfce series I talked about why I like using Xfce to begin with, and in part two I explained how to install the complete desktop environment from scratch using FreeBSD ports and pkgsrc, as well as some free GNU/Linux distros that use it by default. In this post I'll be showing you how I spruce up Xfce to look much more spiffy, learned from many hours of experimentation!

When you run Xfce for the first time, it does look a bit bare. I revel in this; it's like getting a blank but very flexible canvas to change as I see fit! Assuming you installed the complete desktop using a "meta" package or port, the first thing you can do is browse the built in themes and options. Right click your desktop or click the Xfce icon in the lower dock to bring up the Desktop Menu, then navigate to Settings and click Settings Manager. The control panels you'd be interested in are Desktop, User Interface and Window Manager. They're extremely well laid out and very self explanatory.

If every computer system had configuration panels that were as intuitive as Xfce’s, I imagine the world would be in a much less stressed place!

Settings windows in Xfce 4.4.2
Settings windows with the default Xfce 4.4.2 themes & decorations

While Xfce does come with a beautiful collection of polished window manager decorations (aka title bar styles), personally I don't like the built in themes as much and am not a big fan of the lone icon set. Fortunately because Xfce uses GTK+ you can use many of the same themes and icon sets developed for the much larger GNOME desktop with no problems. Kick arse!

First to the themes: personally I like using the Clearlooks theme engine that is used by Ubuntu. It looks very polished and doesn't have as much of a chiseled look as some of the default themes. In the FreeBSD ports system there are two different versions available which caught me out the first time! Once you've installed them, go back to your User Interface settings screen and choose Clearlooks from the list box.

To install the fancy version from FreeBSD ports, as famously used in Ubuntu:

# cd /usr/ports/x11-themes/gtk-murrina-fancy-clearlooks
# make install clean

Or from FreeBSD packages:

# pkg_add -rv gtk-murrina-fancy-clearlooks

UPDATE 2014: This is now also available from NetBSD’s pkgsrc:

# cd /usr/pkgsrc/wip/gtk2-murrina-fancy-clearlooks
# make install clean

To install the older, Bluecurve inspired version from ports:

# cd /usr/ports/x11-themes/clearlooks
# make install clean

Or from packages:

# pkg_add -rv clearlooks

As for icons, I'm a huge fan of Tango Desktop Project who's stated aim is to "help create a consistent graphical user interface experience for free and Open Source software". The icons they've developed look very swish, scale beautifully and use lots of green and blue which I prefer to the default Xfce brown iconset.

On FreeBSD you'll want to grab two Tango ports, then click the Icons tab in the User Interface settings window. From ports:

# cd /usr/ports/x11-themes/icons-tango
# make install clean
# cd /usr/ports/x11-themes/icons-tango-extras
# make install clean

Or FreeBSD packages:

# pkg_add -rv icons-tango icons-tango-extras

Or NetBSD pkgsrc:

# cd /usr/pkgsrc/graphics/tango-icon-theme
# make install clean dist-clean

Just by installing Clearlooks and the Tango iconset, you'll be rewarded with a much prettier desktop! Before and after shots below.

Xfce 4.4.2 with Xfce theme and Rodent iconset

Settings windows in Xfce 4.4.2

Okay I cheated in that second shot, I set a desktop background and changed the window decoration to Katiola which blends the menu and title bar to make it look more OS X-ish.

Stay tuned for the next installment.

Fun with Xfce, part two

Software

This post is part of a series on Xfce, originally posted on my university blog. I’m republishing them here in the hopes that others might find them useful or interesting. Cheers!

In my Fun with Xfce part one post I explained that I find Xfce such a pleasure to use because it's fast, lightweight and has natural visually consistency with my GTK+ apps without the bloat of GNOME, while still providing a cohesive desktop experience with functional applications. In this post I'll be explaining how to install it.

ASIDE: If you want to give Xfce a try without going through the process of using a package manager and configuring Xorg, the Zenwalk and Xubuntu GNU/Linux distributions have Xfce as their default desktops, plus they have very slick installers and are very newbie friendly.

What's so liberating about using Xfce as opposed to GNOME or KDE is how lightweight it is and how few dependencies it has in comparison. This is especially noticeable on computers with less storage space, and slower machines which can literally take an entire day to build a desktop environment from source, if that's your preferred installation method. Of course this means that Xfce is missing some features, but I don't find myself missing any of them.

Xfce About dialog box, Terminal window showing FreeBSD uname

My experience with package managers are really limited to the FreeBSD ports system and NetBSD's pkgsrc (on NetBSD and Slackware Linux), so these will be the systems I'll talk about here. Most *nix package management systems have Xfce though, and most have an easy to install "meta" package that contains the whole desktop.

To install a complete Xfce desktop on FreeBSD (I'm assuming you already have X installed and configured), update your ports tree (visit the Using the Ports System chapter in the FreeBSD handbook if you need help) then compile and install. Alternatively you can install the pre-compiled package which is generally up to date with Xfce's releases (currently at 4.4.2).

For FreeBSD ports:

# cd /usr/ports/x11-wm/xfce4
# make install clean

Or the FreeBSD metapackage:

# pkg_add -rv xfce4

With NetBSD’s pkgsrc, the procedure is just as easy:

# cd /usr/ports/meta-pkgs/xfce4
# make install clean clean-depends

Then it's simply a matter of adding exec startxfce4 to your .xinitrc file in your home directory; create it from scratch if it doesn't exist. Make sure to comment out any other lines related to other desktops and/or window managers you might have installed (but obviously keep lines you may have added to have X11 applications start automatically when you launch X).

Typing startx at this point will start X and your new Xfce desktop!

ASIDE: If you haven’t aliased your machine’s hostname to 127.0.0.1 in your /etc/hosts file, Xfce will give you a warning message. You can safely ignore it, but it can get irritating after a while! Edit your host file to fix this.

In the next post I'll be explaining how I pretty up Xfce by adding new themes and icon sets, and how to make it look like other desktops. Stay tuned.

Boeing 767 for post 767

Thoughts

Despite WordPress assigning this post as p1186, this is in fact the 767th post! Yes, it's time for another one of our really hated loved Useless Rubenerd Blog milestones!

Given the fact I'm in the 700+ range of posts, there are some posts which have the same number as famous Boeing airliners. Being a huge fan of commercial aviation, I figured I'd create some small posts about these planes. I missed the boat on the 707/720 and 727 (no, I'm sorry the 717 was the MD-95!) but I did do posts on the 737, 747 and 757

Filling lunch!
This is clearly the wrong picture

The Boeing 767 airliner was first introduced by Boeing (no joke) in 1978 and began flying with airlines in 1982. It was designed for short to medium range travel with a twin jet configuration and a range of 9,400 to 12,200 km's and the ability to carry 181 to 375 passengers. The capacity could be increased for a nominal fee by bolting deck chairs on the wings; surprisingly no airline took up Boeing on the offer. Unlike most competing airframes for that market segment from the time period, the 767 was designed with a widebody, dual isle configuration.

A defining feature of the 767 was its common cockpit and avionics design with the 757, meaning a pilot trained to fly one could learn and be certified to fly the other in a very short amount of time.

Demand for the 767 peaked in 1997, when the 767-400ER was introduced and implemented by a number of American airlines to replace their aging Lockheed L-1011s and Douglass DC-10 trijets, not to be confused with AMD tricore desktop processors or Star Trek tricorders. Demand has especially fallen recently as plans for the direct replacement 787 Dreamliner have been made. Today most customers are purchasing airframes for use as cargo freighters; the 767 derived KC-767 aerial refueling platforms have also been purchased in large numbers by the Italian, Japanese and American governments.

ANA 767-381ER at Singapore Changi Airport, by Andrew Hunt
ANA 767-381ER at Singapore Changi Airport, by Andrew Hunt

Fun with Xfce, part one

Software

This post is going to be part of a series on Xfce, originally posted on my university blog. I’m republishing them here in the hopes that others might find them useful or interesting. Cheers!

You may have noticed a few weeks ago I announced that I was moving my primary machine over to GNOME from KDE, mostly because the applications I use most heavily on FreeBSD and GNU/Linux are all GTK+ based and it seemed silly to run them in a Qt system. I'm a sucker for eye candy and visual consistency.

Well here I am now typing this on my newly reinstalled FreeBSD, Xfce desktop and it's running great.

My FreeBSD Xfce 4.4.2 desktop!

You can be forgiven if you're new to the world of Linux, BSD and X11 in general if you've never heard of Xfce; it certainty has been given far less publicity than the heavyweights GNOME and KDE despite it actually being born around the same time. Unlike GNOME and KDE which strive to be the ultimate desktops with all the bells and whistles, Xfce is designed to be lightweight and fast while still being a usable and complete desktop environment out of the box (as it were). This means unlike vanilla window managers such as Fluxbox it also includes a file manager, desktop background and icon support, graphical configuration, panels and so forth. A full list of included goodies is maintained on the Xfce projects site.

The real kicker for me is that as with GNOME, Xfce uses GTK+, meaning all my most used applications such as Gnumeric, Abiword, Mozilla Firefox, The Gimp, Inkscape, Thunderbird and the X11 version of VIM all look really slick and match the rest of the system. I'm a sucker for eye candy and visual consistency. Wait, I already said that.

In the coming days I'll be posting many more entries about my experiences with Xfce including how I've customised and used it and some other tidbits I've picked up along the way. Stay tuned :-).