Rubenerd

If you remember back a few weeks ago I posted that I had inherited a Compaq Armada M300 subnotebook. It's no MacBook Air in the design department, but without optical and floppy disk drives, it's very lightweight and small. It's also several years old and has very conservative specs (600MHz Mobile PIII from 2002!) though, so it certainly won't be running Windows Vista any time soon… which is just fine because my favourite OS (for non-Apple hardware of course!) is FreeBSD.

Before I go any further I have to say this right up front: FreeBSD in the mobile space has come a long way. Despite my preference for the BSDs I always told people up until recently that they were better off running a flavour of Linux such as Slackware or Gentoo (my two preferred distributions) if they wanted to run a free OS that was a bit more technical and capable on their laptops.

Not any more! I popped in a home burned CD of the latest release of FreeBSD (7.0-RELEASE) and booted the installer and was absolutely blown away by the hardware support. Not only did it detect the internal 10/100 ethernet port and the ATI graphics but the PCMCIA wireless card which has always been iffy in past experiences. After installing, booting for the first time, updating the base system, installing Gnome2-lite from ports and configuring Xorg I had a slick and completely usable desktop (rearranged to resemble Leopard of course!):

What also really blows me away is how responsive all the applications are, especially on a fully fledged DE like Gnome (which itself only takes a few seconds to start) and on such conservative hardware: granted I almost tripled the amount of built in memory from 128MiB to 320MiB and installed a new hard drive with a much larger cache than the previous stock!

I can really see myself using this instead of my MacBook Pro in settings such as coffee shops or for lectures where I'm only running a local wiki for note taking, editing source code and using email; the marketing for the Asus EeePC and the MacBook Air is starting to sink in it seems! I could have used Xfce, Fluxbox or the like, but I'm so impressed with Gnome's performance as is, currently I don't see the need.

I'm still in the early stages of setting this machine up with its new OS and DE, but I'll post more information as I find out. On my current to do list: figure out if and how the "soft buttons" above the regular keyboard can be used somehow, getting high resolution console support compiled into the kernel and figuring out how to adjust the screen brightness on the fly. I haven't tested the built-in modem yet as I haven't needed it, but potentially getting that set up to send faxes would be useful too.

Despite WordPress assigning this post as p1155, this is in fact the 737th post! Yes, it's time for another one of our favourite Useless Rubenerd Blog milestones!

I thought I'd celebrate this useless post by espousing some facts on the Boeing 737 which, ironically, has the same family model number as this post.

A late Ansett Australia Boeing 737-377 showing the weird landing gear wells and triangular engines, by Frank Schaefer

Sales

The 737 is the greatest selling aircraft family of all time; placing the value of the design even higher than the revenues from Jim Kloss Domestic Airways before he sold out to Alaska Air. Wondered how he managed to buy all that land and audio equipment? Now you know!

Wikipedia claims that since 1967 there have been over 7,800 ordered and over 5,600 delivered (as of 2008), there are over 1,250 of the type airborne at any given time and on average a 737 departs or lands somewhere every five seconds.

Weird design!

Unlike virtually any other modern jetliners, the landing gear in the 737 aren't covered by any doors, they retract into special wells and become flush with the fuselage.

The turbofans are also weird in that they're not circular or elliptical, but almost a rounded triangle shape! This was due to the fact that the earlier generation 737's from the 1960s used long, thin turbojets wheras the more modern airframes use CFM56's turbofans which are shorter and much wider, and therefore require a hell of a lot more ground clearance!

Design nostaligia

The cockpit section (at least externally) is close to identical to the Boeing 727 trijet and the 707, America's first and the world's earliest commercially successful jet airliner from 1958!

These three designs also share the same fuselage width, and their use of tires on the landing gear and doors to enter and exit the aircraft.

Le Fin

More than you ever thought you needed to know, or wanted to know I'm sure. What can I say, I'm a guy with a lot of varying, unrelated and highly unnecessary interests!

737 flying over Adelaide :). Taken by David Morrell.
The black building right in the background in the CBD is where my office at Oracle was. It really is a beautiful city.

I guess I should have seen this coming! Thank goodness for Gnumeric and Numbers!

Perhaps the biggest handicap this blog has is the amount of categories I've created for it. From sites with a particular focus such as Dave's Photo Gallery Blog to sites that seem to have everything such as J-Walk's blog, these guys have figured out how to categorise their information without using thousands of categories to do it.

There are several coping mechanisms that most blogging software come with to deal with this problem: nested categories and tags. With nested categories, you can apply very specific topic pointers to posts which are then contained in more general categories, such as my BSD category within Free and Open Source. This potentially allows you to "collapse" the hundreds of sub-categories you accumulate into just a handful of smaller categories, while still keeping your insane desire for the former satisfied. If you really were obsessed you could have sub-sub-categories within sub-categories, heck even sub-sub-sub-categories within… you get the idea.

Tags are an interesting, if overused and abused, Flickr-inspired development. They let you assign even more specific metadata attributes to your posts which make them not only easier to find on your own site, but in specialised blog searching sites such as Technorati. Not only that but you can be as specific as you like without cluttering up your category lists: for example a post on FreeBSD could be tagged FreeBSD, FreeBSD 7.0 RELEASE, BSD, Kenny Rogers, operating systems, Unix-like and so forth.

idolmaster, xenoglossia, anime, funny, silly, implausible, ridiculous premise, tounge-in-cheek, a-real-stretch, idols-are-generally-not-scientists

ASIDE: For what it’s worth, most of the new unique visitors that make their way to this blog come through via tags. Strange but true!

Then we come to Wikis. I maintain my own locally installed MediaWiki/MySQL system on my laptop (for using as the ultimate note taking application!), as well as my course's local intranet MediaWiki/PostgreSQL install for collaboration and I'm a proud contributer over on Whole Wheat Radio's wiki system.

The biggest problem I have with MediaWiki is the ease in which I can assign practically everything to a category, and then categories within categories… within categories within categories! For borderline obsessive compulsive people it's very tempting to over use them! That said though, MediaWiki generally does a good job with organising them, and allowing you to click through lists of pages within a category you've browsed to is very convenient.

bugs-bunny, hilarious, sarcastic, witty, mel-blanc, evil, merrie-melodies, bugs, warner-brothers, better-than-disney, looney-tunes, tex-avery, fun, cheeky, greatest-cartoons-ever

I guess my very open ended questions would be (for the sake of my university peers!): is it possible to over categorise a system? Do you have any tips on how you cope with the temptation to start more categories? Is it just a matter of setting limits? Or is Ruben just obsessed and all of you fine people have no trouble with this whatsoever?

For a high school assignment back in 2003 I had to demonstrate competency in a spreadsheet application by entering data and creating several charts, or to use the exact language from the assignment sheet: "You must demonstrate competency in a spreadsheet application by entering data and creating several charts". I used the amount of rewritable computer data capacity I had on hand as my data.

ASIDE: Before I started using Macs as my primary machines I used Office 97 on my Windows machines. Even in 2003, I saw no compelling reason to use anything newer than Excel 97!

Well here we are in 2008 and by chance while I was pouring through my backups trying to find an old text file, I found that old Excel spreadsheet file and was absolutely flabbergasted (is that a word?) by the hard disk sizes! So to put things into perspective I decided to quickly open the file in Gnumeric and add data from my recent drives, and just for fun the data from some of our older machines (I didn't bother with my dad's AT or anything older!).

File sizes are shown in the hard disk manufacturer's advertised sizes which assume 1 kilobyte = 1000 bytes

Year	Total Capacity	Drives
1994	0.1GB	internal We gave up on MS-DOS DoubleSpace compression!
1997	5GB	4GB internal 100MB Zip disks x10
2003	190GB	80GB x2 in Windows desktop 30GB in iBook 15GB iPod 3G
2008	4195GB	60GB in MacBook Pro 750GB in DIY FreeBSD desktop 80GB in iBook 160GB in Armada M300 15GB iPod 3G 60GB iPod 5G 160GB USB 2.0 Iomega 320GB USB 2.0 WD 400GB FireWire 400 Seagate 500GB FireWire 400 Maxtor 750GB Gigabit NAS WD 1TB Gigabit NAS WD

And what would these four capacities look like in comparison to each other if they were put into a fun but fairly useless graph?

If I believed in a God, omniscient deity or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I'd be thanking him, her or it right now because it seems Microsoft has backed out of their plan to purchase Yahoo! According to Yahoo News (I trust they have their facts straight about themselves!), the end of Steve Ballmer's letter to Jerry Yang at Yahoo stated that:

"… clearly a deal is not to be."

After my initial overjoyed excitement died down though, I started thinking rationally again. Given Microsoft's many, many shady and dubious dealings in the past and their general disregard for business ethics I can't help but think they're going to try something else. Perhaps they're hoping Yahoo will continue to lose market share in search and buy them in a year or so when they're valued for less. Perhaps they've started buying off board directors in the hopes that their nagging will eventually drive Jerry Yang insane and will force him to ask Microsoft if the offer can still be accepted.

Plus, what ever happed to this?

I am really pleased that my Flickr, del.icio.us and Yahoo OpenID accounts are all safe after all, though I'm still being cautiously optimistic. Then again coming from a pessimist when it comes to such business deals, that's probably high praise from me!

I have so many external hard disks, over time it became infeasible to have them all connected to regular local ports (if by infeasible I mean impossible!), so as of late I've been accumulating network drives. With gigabit switches, proper category 6 Ethernet cables and gigabit enabled drives the speeds are surprisingly good.

The problem is in it's default configuration, Mac OS X Leopard doesn't display network mounted devices on the desktop along with your other drives. As someone who uses the icons on his desktop to keep track of what his machine is connected to, it can be very confusing!

The solution is:

1. Click on the Finder menu and choose Preferences… or hit [Command] [,]
2. In the General tab under "Show these items on the Desktop:", check Connected servers.

Low and behold, all the network drives you have mounted appear on the desktop, complete with the new cute little hand holding icons:

As you can see, the mounted network volumes shown in the Terminal window are now being mapped on the desktop automagically. Which brings up an inevitable security question: do I always have my icons that big? Heavens no, it's just so you can see the icons more clearly! In fact I usually have my icons at a paltry 48px (that is small by KDE and Mac OS X standards!).

ASIDE: I refer specifically to Leopard hiding network drives on the desktop because I started using network drives after I upgraded to Tiger, so I haven’t ever used them with earlier versions of OS X. They might be in the same boat.

UPDATE: The Whole Wheat Radio wiki is back online again.

With the Whole Wheat Radio outage in effect I decided to create some mockup pages outlining some ideas over on my university intranet's [sic] MediaWiki installation, but after some vocal opposition I decided to whip up a temporary WWR wiki testbed over at //rubenerd.com/projects/wwr. Feel free to mess around there with WWR related whatnot while the mothership is offline and you have a Sunday morning to kill as I do right now!

If you're using a wiki under similar circumstances and you don't need or want anonymous edits compared to a bigger, more collaborative effort like Wikipedia, all it takes is appending one line to your ./LocalSettings.php file:

# Block edits by anonymous users
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false;

I know, I know… that was actually TWO lines, but the point is only the last line actually invokes the functionality described, the first is just a comment… which you should always include. Okay, okay I see your point.

Isn't it oh-so-human-nature to only notice how important something is, or how much it shaped and affected your life, when it's gone? And isn't it a shame when some people can't see it at all?

Case in point for the former, the current outage over at Whole Wheat Radio has forced me to temporarily consider other music sources I can listen to over the period of a day in the background while I do studies. It's a pickle of a dilly.

I tuned into three different terrestrial radio stations: one was playing Fergie (what an insult to ears everywhere!), the second the two DJs were discussing an up and coming concert by a group who can't sing, and the third was playing a Glenn Miller Orchestra song. At the risk of sounding like an old fart already, take a guess which one I stuck with!

If you're in Singapore, Gold 90.5FM is a poor substitute to WWR, but they do play some good stuff. Even if their website sucks harder than an industrial vacuum cleaner! Damn I miss the Wiki.

For some smooth evening chill, also check out An Evening with Dadaist Cabaret. The shows are long enough to be interesting and full of good stuff, while still being a manageable enough size to fit on an iPod, or whatever other portable audio device you may be using. I'm still waiting for a music wristwatch that's also a coffee machine. That would be sweet.

For the time being too I'm also listening to my Whole Wheat Radio iTunes playlist which includes all the CDs I've got so far from it including Kevin So, Greg Brown, The Philadelphia Jug Band, The Renovators, Guy Clark and hopefully soon Marian Call when the latest parcel arrives! There's only so many times I can listen to these fine folks mashed up together and on random before it starts to feel like a scaled down WWR though. And what if I want to say hello to Jimbob, Kelli, Atuuschaw, RubenBot5000 (he's my robot who chats after midnight Singapore time), Sparkit, FlyingTrout and more… damn I feel like some of my family has gone!

Here's hoping Whole Wheat will be able to get back up soon. Give 'em hell Jim!

It's a fresh new May month already, isn't that crazy? We're almost half way through 2008!

Get it? She's Mai? Get it? Get it? Hey, I thought it was funny.