Rubenerd

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37:20 – Twitter is back, and so is the spam! Frustration with my Nokia e61i's speed, awesome Canadians in Singapore, university and high school have much in common, Elke's polytechnic adventures, The Levels becomes Mawson Lakes (WTF?), silly university entrance requirements and an Elke and Ruben combined teachers and students rant, even more dang Twitter spam messages, the lead singer from the Crash Test Dummies rocks!

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

One of my interests aside from computing is studying architecture and ocean liners from the early decades of the 20th century. I don't know why, but I find Art Deco and Neo Gothic design fascinating, and the concept of the "ocean liner" which has literally all but dissapeared in the age of jet airliners and Star Trek inspired teleportation (uh, yeah!). More than you needed to know I'm sure!

Anyway from a break from programming somehow I got onto the Global Security Organisation website which has detailed listings of registard tonnage and ships of different countries, including a graphical comparison of Cunard's latest flagship RMS Queen Mary 2 with the Titanic which everyone knows about. I knew this ship was big, but I had no idea she was that large!

It's amazing that the waterline level is roughly even on each of them too. I wouldn't have thought the use of stabalisers and being made of lighter and stronger materials would be enough too keep that huge thing upright!

My fabulous father is currently on assignment at a few plants in China, and I got an email from him this morning. From a local cafe he's currently able to access all the stuff hosted on the Rubenerd Show domain (including the blog you're reading now) as well as my Twitter feed.

In a way I'm relieved, but in a way I'm disappointed. Obviously they don't consider me enough of a threat to their Great Firewall nor to their squeaky clean media. I'm obviously not doing as much as I thought!

On the whole my dad really likes mainland China and the Chinese people, not to mention their food (I'm jealous!) but as I think most of us do he has some real issues with their government. It's a shame when pundits label an entire race of people evil when it's just their government they disagree with. Perhaps I think this way because I've lived outside my country of birth for so long and get to see Asian opinions of Australia and the West from the outside myself… we're not exactly angels ourselves in many ways!

And herein ends my potentially sensitive post!

UPDATE! I've been informed the following sites are also in the clear:

• CrapAndStuff.com
• Conspiracast.com
• DuddingtonBooks.com/cabaret/
• IntoYourHead.com
• TheOvernightscape.com
• WholeWheatRadio.org

If you're in Singapore and are bored one afternoon, get yourself some thrills by going to the Apple website and attempt to download a trial copy of iWork 2008. Not only will each virtual disk image you download fail, but they'll all silently fail at different times and after a different amount of data has been transferred!

So many failed iWork downloads, so little time

I should fire up Numbers in iWork and create a bar chart comparing the different sizes of each of these failed downloads. Oh, wait…

Looking at my site statistics I've discovered that this humble weblog's web feed has close to 4x the number of unique IP address hits than the Rubenerd Show's podcast feed. That has really taken me by surprise! And here I was thinking that the Show was the only thing keeping this site interesting, and all the boring stuff would go on the Blog. Perhaps I need to adjust my priorities!

I've also broken my previous record for bandwidth used, this domain has crunched through 14.3 gigs in one week! That's probably loose change for most people, but for me it's a big deal! (Obviously today's stats are much lower because the day is only half over, but you get the idea).

The countries table surprised me even more! The percentage of people from the States has increased even further, and France is now number 3 with almost twice as many as Singaporeans! Now obviously these stats aren't 100% reliable given some people's usage of proxies, onion routing and whatnot, but it's still fascinating!

What I'm entertaining as some sort of conspiracy though above all else: punching all these numbers into Gnumeric and creating a rough doughnut chart, rotating it 270 degrees and adding the right colour for the main segment creates an image that looks suspiciously like the logo for the late Commodore Business Machines corporation:

Which then brings up the inevitable question: is a part of a doughnut chart called a segment like a pie chart? Or would it be a bite? Or a byte? Or a Homer Simpson?

One of the more pleasurable things in life is when you can get on your high horse and let the rest of the world know why they're wrong, and you're right. Or maybe that only applies to conversations about music. Sorry Elke, comparing Akon to The Rat Pack is like comparing Barry Manilow to Jo Anne Hook. Wait, Jo Anne Hook is a painter. Never mind.

My gripe today is with people who use images in HTML on websites without defining their dimensions! You've probably seen pages at one point that seem to rearrange themselves as material moves around to make way for images that are loading. By defining the sizes of images in advance, browsers know how much visual space to allocate them as it draws the page.

Without declared dimensions

<img src="image.jpg" alt="description" />

Using HTML dimensions

<img src="image.jpg" alt="description"
width="320" height="240" />

Using inline CSS

<img src="image.jpg" alt="desccription"
style="width:320px; height:240px;" />

Using an external style sheet

Same as latter, but using an external style sheet linked with an id statement for individual images, or more pratically using class for many images on a page with the same dimensions.

Without this information, the browser is forced to render the page as it would look without the image until it has reached it; this is especially noticeable on slower internet connections and on mobile phones. It also does nothing to help the sanity of people who are halfway through reading a paragraph and suddenly have the text disappear as it's pushed away by an image that has started loading!

As far as I know from my own experience, Typo, WordPress and MediaWiki conveniently specify image sizes automagically on images you upload and insert, and I assume most other content management systems do too… save for Blosxom of course! Wow Blosxom, the first weblog publishing system I ever used, that brings back memories!

Save the world: specify image dimensions!

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1:08:56 – A bit more serious: discussing the reasons why I became an atheist from experiences in my early childhood to the present, including most recently my beautiful mummy's struggle with cancer and passing on.

Also briefly refuting some of the misconceptions about atheists including intolerance, arrogance, spirituality, materialism, wishful thinking, heaven, the celestial dictatorship and such.

BONUS: A very quick, foolproof test you can use to see if someone who trashes evolution has actually studied it.

DISCLAIMER: This episode was not recorded to insult people, it's just an explanation for why personally I'm atheist. If you are religious you may be offended, but please know that in my heart that it was not my intention.

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

So I was sitting at Starbucks in Tanglin Mall having a much needed tall Americano (you could take that many ways) when some school girls sat at the table next to mine and proceeded to get out their laptops. After 30 seconds one of their friends arrived and shouted "Go to McDonald's next door to do this! They have french fry (sic), they have ice cream, much more bright". After rummaging around, they all stood up and walked away again.

The question I pose is this: why the heck would you want to study in McDonalds when you could study in Starbucks? Come on, they're playing a Rat Pack CD here, all the chairs are soft and comfy, and they use bright but warm lights instead of rows of fluorescent tubes! McDonalds would rate amongst the last places I'd want to study!

Am I so out of touch? Or is the caffeine affecting my judgement? :-).

The always impartial, unbiased and reliable Channel News Asia is reporting some good news in Singapore-Malaysian relations specifically related to Johor Bahru

SINGAPORE: Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has responded positively to a suggestion by Johor’s Chief Minister Abdul Ghani Othman to link up the urban rails of Singapore and Johor Bahru.

[Some of the] issues discussed between the Singapore and Malaysian foreign ministers is how to further integrate the economies of both countries and to enhance connectivity across the causeway.

Photo of JB taken from Wikipedia by PM Poon

Having lived both in Singapore and Malaysia since the mid 1990s I'm used to hearing a lot of big talk and not much progress on most matters of collaboration, which even just from an economic perspective is such a shame. With so much competition from other players in Asia for the industries and services that Singapore and Malaysia both provide, it seems now that collaboration should be a top priority.

ASIDE: For my readers who aren’t from around these parts, JB is the near universally used name and acronym for Johor Bahru which is the closest Malaysian city to Singapore, separated only by tiny Straits of Johor.

Wikipedia articles on: Johor Bahru, Malaysia, Singapore.

Take Australia and New Zealand as an example: They're separated by a strait of water (albeit somewhat larger!) and have roughly similar populations to Malaysia and Singapore respectively, but the difference in the amount of trade is huge! Now granted their economies are at different levels of development and the makeup of their exports and imports are different, but it shows that countries with a shared heritage can benefit each other even when socially and politically they may differ in many ways.

Google Maps imagery of Singapore and surrounds. The white stripe superimposed over the Straits of Johor is the national border between Singapore and Malaysia which is part of the Asian mainland.

Like it or not, Singapore and Malaysia are neighbours, and the only way they'll each succeed in the long term is if they cooperate. Some more decent connections between JB and Singapore would be a good start.