Jaiku: 2008-03

Annexe

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

Good night all, time for me to get my 4 hours of sleep. Mmm... Funan centre :) Cheers
on Jaiku

Okay I'm really off to bed everyone! 04:31, I have to be up in 3 hours, 29 minutes. Damn you internet and your addictiveness!
on Jaiku

Dad's conference call is taking longer than we thought it would. Do Swiss and Japanese people like talking a lot? :)
on Jaiku

And I'm compiling Xfce from the ports collection instead of using pkg_add to optimise it. It's a 1.3GHz box, so should be done in a week :D
on Jaiku

Nah but given the fact we only hae 140 characters on here, I think smilies are really useful for conveying emotion in a small space :-)
on Jaiku

In honour of yesterday, my dad and I are off to Muddy Murphey's Irish Pub for a Guinness :D
on Jaiku

St Pats is over, what a shame! Anyway my dad and I are heading back home now, both have to get up early tomorrow!
on Jaiku

Got back from muddies. I really don't like drinking too much (am I the only 21 year old who doesnt?) but I'm still bit tipsy. Off to bed!
on Jaiku

I keep trying Gnome, but then I keep going back to KDE. It's just so pretty, and so much more cohesive. :-)
on Jaiku

My new FreeBSD machine with KDEbase has 4GB of RAM right now. With Konqueror 10+ tabs open, Konsole 8+ tabs, using 12% of the RAM :)
on Jaiku

People say KDE is bloated and wastes RAM and disk space. I think people forget about how bloated Windows XP and Vista really are!
on Jaiku

Compiling KDE from the FreeBSD ports instead of using pkg_add on a Core 2 Duo E8400 3.0GHz machine... no "noticable" performace difference!
on Jaiku

But it always feels better rolling your own software right?
on Jaiku

Hey! I've posted over 6000 tweets! 6000! Either I post too much, have no life or don't post anything of value. Or all of the above!
on Jaiku

Well if @include is off to get lunch, I'm off to get dinner! Cheers everyone
on Jaiku

Just listened to Jimbob do his LIVE Whole Wheat Radio Rant in the morning in Alaska http://wholewheatradio.org
on Jaiku

It's funny how late morning in Alasaka is EARLY morning in Singapore... but it's still morning, just the next day!
on Jaiku

Holy crap it's 4am, I'd better get to bed already. I can hear my beautiful late mum saying: "Ruben, you're an idiot!"
on Jaiku

I'm still up at 04:29 because I had a horrific nightmare about my mum dying again. Was comforting to hear a familiar voice
on Jaiku

From Truemors: "Believing in God Makes You Happier!" along with my rebuttal as an "unhappy" atheist ;-) http://tinyurl.com/2mxgzl
on Jaiku

If TwitterFeed konks out again here's my new weblog link: //rubenerd.comshow.com/blog/?p=1078. Scary stuff, I'm off for coffee :)
on Jaiku

I accidently ordered a "non fat" mocha latte for a change from Americanos, it's really really tasty! Here I was thinking kikojoules = tasty!
on Jaiku

*That should read kilojoules, not kikojoules. Kikijoules sounds like a kinky Japanese piece of jewelry.
on Jaiku

Hehe, there are now three of us sharing the one table at Starbucks. They really should have powerpoints at every table :D
on Jaiku

I'm really loving having 2 batteries though for my BacPook Mro, It's so convenient :)
on Jaiku

Haha okay TwitterFeed was able to post that latest entry after all. Last time it posted 2 days late, so just double checking :)
on Jaiku

I designated this afternoon to finishing a lot of half written blog posts and recording a Rubenerd Show. Half way through :)
on Jaiku

Adobe to put Flash on the iPhone? Yuk! http://tinyurl.com/2vk66e
on Jaiku

Esther Golton just arrived at home at Whole Wheat Radio, they're broadcasting live (10PM Alaska, 2PM Singapore) http://wholewheatradio.org
on Jaiku

Damn it, the wireless just went down again. Ethernet is so much more reliable :)
on Jaiku

14:30 (2:30pm) here in Singapore, off for some lunch
on Jaiku

Other than followers, what is the point of the "green team" and "blue team" whatnot? I was expecting some useful grassroots thing!
on Jaiku

Rubenerd Blog: Welcome home Esther! http://tinyurl.com/39eg32
on Jaiku

I've thrown a spanner in the works and joined the @VeryGreenTeam & @BlueTeam, they're equally my favourite colours :)
on Jaiku

If you don't know what's going on, check out @ColorWars. It's so ridiculously pointless it's fun... even if they spelled "color" wrong ;-)
on Jaiku

Trying to set up OpenDNS. I figure if I need to write a report on it, I might as well be using it right?
on Jaiku

Bloglines Beta is pretty slick. http://beta.bloglines.com/
on Jaiku

I think I'll stick to Google Reader though. Having it tied in to Google Calendar and Gmail is a lifesaver.
on Jaiku

Insane headache, I'm off to bed. Chao
on Jaiku

Okay I have 3 hours to finish this project. No break even on Easter! Guess it's punishment I deserve for being an Atheist right? :)
on Jaiku

Thank goodness for two little words: "make deinstall" :)
on Jaiku

Just added @danslatts. Good to have another person in a similar timezone! And you got a MBP, sweet :)
on Jaiku

Argh, Flock still isn't a Cocoa app for Mac, and their FreeBSD port is broken! Damn it and I was all interested and ready to go too!
on Jaiku

Hehe, my post about The Renovators is on the Whole Wheat RSS page :) http://www.wholewheatradio.org/wiki/index.php/RSS
on Jaiku

Installed the GNOME base system so I can use some GNOME GTK+ apps in myKDE FreeBSD machine. pkg_info | grep mono returns nothing :D
on Jaiku

Off to get a midnight snack to shake off the HaveToDoUniWorkOverEaster blues. Wait I like the blues. But saying "rap" wouldnt make sense.
on Jaiku

Just got back from a brief evening walk after doing all this programming, brain is 99% fried! Off to bed.
on Jaiku

Damn I had a bad night last night, all day today I've been walking around in a daze. Day... daze... Haagen Dazs... mmm, Häagen-Dazs...
on Jaiku

Ella Fitzgerald just started playing in Amarok... very nice :)
on Jaiku

Cadbury chocolate is the best chocolate, let us all just admit this!! :D
on Jaiku

I should be off to bed soon. Should being the operative word.
on Jaiku

Off to make some nice hot porridge with brown sugar to wake me up. Funny how I'm always freezing when I wake up, even if it's 28 degress!
on Jaiku

Wait, it's only 23 outside right now (73.4 F), that's okay.
on Jaiku

Oh wow I'm tired. The human body was not meant to get up this early!
on Jaiku

Getting ready to listen to Ed Craver live! http://wholewheatradio.org/
on Jaiku

Just arrived back home, tired out. Night all :-)
on Jaiku

I just want to be in my room, left alone, by myself for pete's sake. Sister and father are completely ignorant as to what it's like.
on Jaiku

Byes everyone.
on Jaiku

At least admit that you have no damned idea! Does he have a medical degree? Is he BP himself? NO! Geeeeeez.
on Jaiku

Just got back, enjoyed myself no end. Don't you hate it when you parent's were right?
on Jaiku

Can anyone else get to http://RubenerdShow.com or http://RubenerdShow.com/blog/? It's not working on this end
on Jaiku

Wait, RubenerdShow.com and RubenerdShow.com/blog are back online I think!
on Jaiku

Okay I've decided. THERE WILL BE A RUBENERD SHOW AGAIN BEFORE THIS WEEK IS OVER. Studies, work and mood be damned!
on Jaiku

Wait a minute, a BSD human? That doesn't sound too good! :P :D
on Jaiku

Chilling with some Wet Wet Wet on amaroK :)
on Jaiku

I still get a kick out of saying that I use Kate for programming!
on Jaiku

WOW, I have 6 comments there! Thank you everyone! I have a project due about this subject, and this will make it MUCH easier! :D ^_^
on Jaiku

I've posted a response to the Podcasting naming issue: http://tinyurl.com/33qq4y Answered everyone :)
on Jaiku

Finally got the assignment in a-okay. Now it's 04:38 and time for sleep, night all :)
on Jaiku

Just returned the follow form @jrande, always great to see more Twitterinos in Singapore! ^_^
on Jaiku

Not sure hat I like WordPress
on Jaiku

Not sure that I like the WordPress 2.5 new admin user interface. Feels like they made it different just to be different.
on Jaiku

The older WordPress admin panel wasn't as pretty, but it was laid out much, much better IMHO.
on Jaiku

Plus the tagging feature is a giant step backwards, and doesn't work in Konqueror :(
on Jaiku

Plus the tagging bar isn't as easy to use as the simple text box it had before, and it doesn't work right in Konqueror
on Jaiku

Just upgraded all 4 blogs over to WordPress 2.5. Provided I get my Ruby SQlite site up and running soon, might be my last WP upgrade!
on Jaiku

Well I'd better get to bed, past 3am already. Cheers everyone :)
on Jaiku

10 million Wikipedia articles! Yay! http://rubyurl.com/PL0I
on Jaiku

Dont you love it when all of us are on Twitter at the same time, having disjointed conversations about random things? Isn't it great? :D
on Jaiku

Just resiprocated the add from @theinternets. He's downloading the internets.
on Jaiku

On that note I'm going to try this sleep thing again. See you all all later :)
on Jaiku

Off to the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf at Bishan. Mmm, waffles :)
on Jaiku

My Windows Vista Home Premium adventure

Software

With all my talk on FreeBSD and Mac OS X, as well as my generally unfavorable attitude to Microsoft's operating systems, I decided today to finally install Windows Vista on my primary desktop to do a more in depth review and to see if Service Pack 1 has fixed some of the more irritating problems.

This morning with my paycheck I marched down to Best Denki at Ngee Ann City and purchased a copy of Windows Vista Home Premium. I figured there was no point getting the Ultimate version seeing as I don't really play many computer games, and the Ultimate Extras offerings have been less than stellar. I bought the upgrade version because I already had a copy Windows XP Home Edition already from 2002; the one I had for less than a week before I wiped my machine and reinstalled Windows 2000 Professional.

PowerQuest PartitionMagic Beforehand I used my trusty older copy of PartitionMagic 8.0 (the last version released by PowerQuest before they were bought out and destroyed by Symantec) to resize my FreeBSD partition down by 64GiB to allow space for Vista to install. FreeBSD really doesn't like sharing hard disk space with other operating systems, so it's usually a good idea to have it installed first before you start installing Windows, or Linux for that matter.

I couldn't post any screenshots of the installation given that it didn't have an OS on it to do so (for obvious reasons!), but not having the kludgy DOS screen like messages was certainly a fresh and welcome change from previous versions of Windows; no doubt the FreeBSD sysinstall folks could learn something from it. It detected all of my hardware flawlessly, including a troublesome 64-in-one card reader that even my MacBook Pro with Leopard had difficulty with.

Within a few minutes of finishing the install, activating online and adjusting the resolution to fit my widescreen 1680×1050 Samsung display, I was firing up Internet Explorer to download Mozilla Firefox, The Gimp, Inkscape and OpenOffice.org. I still find it thrilling that Windows has such a fantastic assortment of powerful, capable, reliable and high calibre Free and Open Source software available for it that's completely unmatched on any other platform.

Fresh Vista desktop, with Firefox installed in the Quick Launch bar :)
My fresh Vista desktop, with Mozilla Firefox installed in the Quick Launch bar

As excruciatingly painful as it is for me to admit this; using Vista for a few hours, checking out the new Windows Explorer, the new layout of the Start Menu and the Control Panel… I must begrudgingly say that I'm enjoying the experience (pun intended!) more than I thought. The new Aero interface is quite pretty and leaves KDE 4.0's and Compiz Fusion's graphical effects in the dust; Mac OS X Leopard still looks better but it just uses so many system resources in comparison to Vista's visual effects I figure it's just not worth it.

Because this isn't a laptop I can't comment on Vista's battery life or wireless connectivity capabilities, but from a desktop perspective it's pretty good. I'd be hesitant to say I'm ready to give up FreeBSD on all my desktops, but I'm sure I'll keep Vista around on this primary machine.

Stay tuned for more screenshots and compatibility reports.

Intel’s breathtaking photos from Twitter

Hardware

If you're interested in the goings on of Intel over on Twitter there are no less than four accounts going that you can follow and receive updates on (descriptions were provided from their respective pages):

@IDF
Sharing the latest news from Intel Developer Forum, and following interesting folks for no sinister purpose.
@IntelSoftware
Intel has software?!
@IntelBlogs
Twitterfeed for blogs.intel.com, maintained by @annierodkins. Also following interesting folks for no sinister purpose.
@pulseofintel
Hungry for Intel people. Nom nom nom!
Links to other interesting Intel people on Twitter

If you follow them for something fun and interesting to read, you'll pick up on Twittered links that link to breaktaking images such as these:

Intel Penryn wafer with a toothpick

Processors on an Intel 45nm Hafnium-based High-k Metal Gate ”Penryn” wafer. Using an entirely new transistor formula, the new processors incorporate 410 million transistors for each dual core chip, and 820 million for each quad core chip.

The original Intel Pentium Processor only had 3.1 million transistors.

— Penryn and toothpick by Intel Photos

My suspension of disbelief was DOA

Thoughts

I’ll be elaborating more on what I mean by this on the Rubenerd Show, stay tuned. Get it? Stay tuned? It’s an internet radio show? A podcast? Stay… tuned? Hey, I thought it was funny.

For some reason, I've always found it harder than most people to suspend disbelief in stories, games and the like. If I read, hear or see something that's impossible, stupid or unreasonable… it frustrates the hell out of me.

Suspension of disbelief refers to the willingness of a person to accept as true the premises of a work of fiction, even if they are fantastic or impossible.
— http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief

Case in point, I was browsing a game website to see if anyone had more information about Knetwalk when I saw a screenshot from one of those now infamous Dead or Alive games:

Ayane from Dead or Alive

I ask you this right now: why on Earth is she wearing a denim bra, with pockets sewn on it? It makes absolutely… no… friggen… sense! I've heard from so many girls about how uncomfortable these contraptions are, so why would you make one out of denim? And put pockets on it? What could you put in those pockets? A mobile phone? An Objective-C Pocket Reference book? I think not!

The suspension of disbelief that I'm apparently supposed to have with this game (ridiculously over-the-top buff men and tiny adolescent girls fighting on equal terms in ridiculous locations with gravity defying moves and super human injury sustaining abilities) is tenuous and irreconcilable enough in my mind as it is even without this blatant pandering to obsessive game players!

And here's another example from the same game: why would someone in supposedly frigid weather be wearing a heavy, wooly jacket… with a miniskirt? What's next, are we to believe in summer she walks down a boardwalk in a t-shirt and snow pants? Snow pants!?

It's cold, good thing I'm rugged up all over!
It's cold, good thing I'm rugged up all over!

This makes absolutely… no… sense! Rarely is the question asked: when did computer games become so ridiculous? And I'm absolutely positive there are far more examples than this!

And while we're talking about O'Reilly Pocket Reference books; don't get me wrong I think they're the greatest thing to happen to the computer reference book world and I can claim to own no less than 14 such tomes; but since when is a book which measures 18 by 11 centimetres pocket sized?

A Pocket Reference?
A Pocket Reference?

The Rubenerd Blog, always presenting important facts and issues relevant to consumer technology and computer software.

Wikipedia reaches 10 million articles!

Media

Big shout out to everyone at Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation for reaching 10 million articles! The record breaking entry was an article on English artist Nicholas Hilliard written in Hungarian. Hungarian of course being the language native to a country called Hungary. Sometimes I surprise even myself.

Wikipedia reaches 10 million articles!

I wonder what ol' Nick who died in 1619 would think about being the 10 millionth article in a collaborative online encyclopaedia powered by electronic computers connected through a globally spanning network… makes you think.

The Internet Explorer Q Continuum

Software

As you may have gathered from reading previous posts, I'm a Mac OS X user on laptops and a hopeless FreeBSD fanboy on desktops. Therefore it probably wouldn't surprise you to find out I'm not a fan of Internet Explorer, or Windows Internet Explorer, or Chuck Norris Explorer or whatever they're calling it at the moment.

Why though? Is it the fact that it successfully and demonstrably held back innovation on the intertubes for so many years? Is it the silly user interface in version 7 which I get calls from people constantly asking me how they get to the menu bar? Is it the fact their CSS support is so patchy and inconsistent it makes a part of my work even more difficult than it has to be? Is it because it was bundled with a monopolistic operating system? Is it because the e logo just looks plain silly?

No. It's for one simple fact: Internet Explorer doesn't support the <q> tag!

Look at that browser Jean Luc, it doesn't support my existence!
Look at that browser Jean Luc, it doesn't support my existence!

You could be forgiven for not knowing about this tiny little tag; it was included by the W3C back in the HTML 4.0 specification in 1997 to delimitate small inline quotations which are not large enough to justify the use of a block level element, but current versions of IE are the only browsers even in 2008 not to support it, despite every other game in town having no trouble with them.

For example, one of the sentences below is enclosed in <q> tags. If you're using Internet Explorer they will look exactly the same:

Ruben Schade is an incredibly smart, devilishly attractive and very self deluded person.

Ruben Schade is an incredibly smart, devilishly attractive and very self deluded person.

But why is the lack of support for a seemingly insignificant and easily replaceable tag my number one gripe with Internet Explorer? Because of its stupefying simplicity! How difficult would it have been for Microsoft to have added full support for such a simple tag? It’s mind blowing!

<q>This is an inline quote, complete with CSS support!</q>

<span class="quote">Here's another inline quote, but with support for IE </span>

I guess until Internet Explorer 12 comes out some time after 2095, I'll have to stick with using the latter example above. What a mess!

FOOTNOTE: For what it’s worth, Opera, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape Navigator (rest in peace), Apple’s Safari, KDE’s Konqueror and even zippy little dillo, links and lynx support the <q> tag. Obviously it’s not hard!

Further Reading

The podcast word debate is anything but simple!

Media

It seems there's a growing number of people who aren't impressed with the term podcast for one reason or another. From what I've been able to gather, these are the most common reasons why (feel free to post a comment below to add to the list):

Techy reasons
  • It implies you need an Apple iPod to listen to them
  • They’re not "casting" because XML is a client pull system, not a server push system!
  • You can’t immediately figure out what it is when hearing the term the first time
  • It’s a techy, short sighted term with no longevity
The "don’t want to be associated with these" reasons
  • It describes horrible shows like Dawn and Drew
  • Podcasts have become too commercial
  • Antonym to above: podcasts are amateur and silly, nobody takes them seriously and therefore they have no business potential
  • The whole field is dominated by a few large egos

For what it's worth, I really don't agree with some of these points, and I'm honestly apathetic with regards to most of the others, I'm just playing devil's advocate here.

Someone looks jealous!
Someone looks jealous!

In response to this, a veritable splattering of adhoc words combined to create podcast-free alternative names have been created:

  • Frank Edward Nora coined the term New Time Radio even before podcasting took off and he continues to use it as an alternative
  • Jimbob Kloss from Whole Wheat Radio refers to them as audio magazines, very catchy!
  • Leo Laporte infamously decided to refer to them as netcasts, which other than the iPod mixup really doen’t solve any of the tech issues at all!

I'm sure a quick Google search would reveal even more such terms.

Which brings me to the Rubenerd Show. I've decided I'm going to distance myself from this issue once and for all by calling these shows exactly what they are:

INTERNET RADIO SHOWS

That said, I'll probably keep using the term podcast interchangably with it though, it's the accepted term that everyone seems to have settled on and agreed to, and I'm fed up with explaining other new terms to people. Perhaps with time the accepted term will change, in which case I'll change too. After all, language is an evolving beast that changes as we do, right?

Comments instead of the forum

Internet

Say what? To make life easier I'm changing a lot of the plumbing behind the Show, my blog and my consulting and uni notes blogs over the next few weeks to integrate them, so I only have one site to maintain instead of four. With all the stuff going on in my life right now, keeping all this stuff up to date and seperate is not really workable!

So therefore vis a vis ergo wysiwyg I'll be archiving and closing the forum soon :-(. If you'd like to post comments about a show (or absolutely any damned thing you want!) please click the Post Comment link at the bottom of the latest show. If you've had an approved comment once before it should automatically be posted without the waiting period.

Thanks everyone for your listenership! Listenership is a word right?

Rubenerd Show 232: The useless Rubenerd 22nd birthday episode

Show

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

23:03 – A full show will be done by the end of the week, but I wanted to do a show on my birthday. Cool timezone checking site, blog post about the big two two, camera phones, purchasing music from Whole Wheat Radio, birthday lunch at Brotzeit, UPS shipping, FreeBSD and a convenient apple juice handle.

Featuring Elke Schade as a Kmart announcer.

AFTERWARD: I noticed after uploading that the music is a bit too loud compared to my voice for the first 10 minutes or so. I will remember to check my levels more carefully next time!

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

UPS tracking excitement!

Media

With it being my birthday and all (I'll hopefully post and podcast about that later today) I'm really looking forward to receiving my latest batch of Whole Wheat Radio CDBaby music from the intertubes, which according to the UPS package tracking service is ready for delivery!

It's certainly interesting seeing where my little CD bundle has been in the last few days; it's travelled to places around this planet I've never been to before! Ideas of "boldly going where no internet goods I've purchased have gone before" come to mind :-)

Package Progress
Location Date Local Time Description
SINGAPORE, SG 27/03/1008 9:38 OUT FOR DELIVERY
CHANGI, SG 27/03/1008 6:30 ARRIVAL SCAN
PAMPANGA, PH 27/03/1008 3:21 DEPARTURE SCAN
27/03/1008 1:32 LATE AEROPLANE
CHEK LAP KOK, HK 27/03/1008 0:24 DEPARTURE SCAN
26/03/1008 19:44 HUB SCAN
26/03/1008 16:22 ARRIVAL SCAN
26/03/1008 14:40 ARRIVAL SCAN
ANCHORAGE, AK, US 25/03/1008 10:41 DEPARTURE SCAN
25/03/1008 6:00 ARRIVAL SCAN
ONTARIO, CA, US 25/03/1008 1:53 DEPARTURE SCAN
24/03/1008 23:06 ARRIVAL SCAN
PORTLAND, OR, US 24/03/1008 10:57 DEPARTURE SCAN
24/03/1008 19:55 ORIGIN SCAN
24/03/1008 17:28 COLLECTION SCAN
US 24/03/1008 9:10 BILLING INFO RECEIVED