Rubenerd

We Aussies call them shallots, others call them green onions, or scallions, or spring onions, or onion shoots, or breath destroyers… a shallot by any other name would taste as sharp!

Yes, I've been too busy this week studying and dropping 40kg computer cases on my big toe to post here. Don't ever do the latter, it's not as fun as they advertise it to be. Considerably less fun. Actually it's really not fun at all.

So to break this break as it were without taking too much time, here are some pictures of Hatsune Miku from the Vocaloid series holding a shallot. Or a green onion. Or a scallion. Or a… damn it!

Come to think of it, they all look more like leeks than shallots. DAMN it!

Clicking the link from Joel Housman's Twitter feed, I arrived at one of the greatest weblog posts of all time, entitled I'm Sorry:

Barack Obama of course is one of the lead candidates for the Democratic party in the United States along with Hillary Clinton, the primary opposition to the Republican party of whom George W. Bush is currently serving with. If I had any say in American politics I'd be voting for Obama all the way :-).

The post reminds me of a photo of my favourite Aussie politician Bob Brown of The Australian Greens seen here having his awesomeness adjusted! Bob Brown for Prime Minister!!

Two awesome people in one post? What awesomeness!

Big thank you to going out to Chris Messina from FactoryJoe.com for getting me on Upian's Hot Links website, I've received hundreds of extra unique visitors just this evening from being on their front page!

Most of the how-to guides I post here are actually reminders for myself, It's good to know that I've helped someone. Plus I had so many Hot Wheels cars when I was growing up, seeing that logo again made me nostalgic ;-).

Don't worry, this is not a post about how Our Beloved Yahoo might be being bought by the Evil Empire, I'm at the stage when even I think it's been done to death already.

It's been over a month since my beautiful, artistic, cheeky hippy mummy died in her sleep after fighting cancer for over 12 years, and the feelings are still very raw and hard to live with. What I can appreciate though is the overwhelming support from all kinds of people around the world from close friends and family I've known since I was a child to my fellow Twitterinos and Rubenerd Show listeners who I've never met in person but who make every day that much more fun and enjoyable. The faculty at my university have been extremely supportive and understanding as have my Rubenerd Labs clients. To use the technical sociological terms, all you guy rock!

My poor sister has had somewhat of a different experience. Without going into too many details, most of her polytechnic teachers have been cold and completely devoid of empathy. Some of her so called friends, to put it politely, have repeatedly backstabbed her when she's been too upset to fulfill obligations, answer calls or meet up. I can't fathom what they could possibly be feeling or how they can justify such retched treatment.

In any event, as we continue to rebuild our lives I know I speak for all the Schade Trio (catchy name is it not?) when I say thank you to all the fabulous people who have helped us, and screw all of you who have chosen to be arses. Using technical sociological terms again you see :-).

Jeremy Zawodny, one of the tech bloggers I respect the most (and one of the first people I added to my Bloglines account all those years ago) has posted a list of possible scenarios and outcomes of a Microsoft Yahoo merger. I'll try not to blatantly plagiarise his material, but suffice to say he says the following are possible:

1. Microsoft does buy Yahoo
2. Another suiter (or suitors) will make a bid, forcing the price up for Microsoft
3. Yahoo outsources it’s advertising and search business to Google
4. Yahoo gets in on the DoubleClick deal and dominates visual advertising
5. Yahoo rejects the offer outright, back to the status quo

I know what is good for their business probably doesn't correlate with the outcomes I'd like to see, but if I were given the chance to choose the outcomes I'd prefer, I'd arrange them in this order:

1. Yahoo outsources it’s advertising and search business to Google
2. Yahoo rejects the offer outright, back to the status quo
3. Yahoo gets in on the DoubleClick deal and dominates visual advertising
4. Another suiter (or suitors) will make a bid, forcing the price up for Microsoft
5. Microsoft does buy Yahoo

Yahoo is in trouble and does need help with their core search and advertising businesses, but I look at their track record on acquisitions and how much respect I see they still have with most people, and I can't help but think a merger with Microsoft would do them any good.

Microsoft desperately wants to whip Google and they see Yahoo as the easiest way to do it, given their failure rate and return on investment on all their online ventures, but what's in it for Yahoo? A possible clash of business cultures? Disillusioned workers who don't want to work for the evil empire? The dropping of services?

Personally I see Yahoo as more of a diversified internet services company, not a services company that's dominated by search with other services on the side such as Google. This is why I'm very concerned with people who simply cite Yahoo's slipping market share for search and conclude that they're failing. Flickr for example is one of the most respected, if not the most respected, photo storage and sharing sites, and I don't know of any nerd or heavy computer user who doesn't at least have a del.icio.us account.

Mmm, Swedish meatballs.

Anyway with Jeremy's list as a starting point I've compiled my own short list of possible outcomes:

Google and Yahoo enter a partnership

Either as a delay tactic against Microsoft, or using it as a "white horse defense" against a hostile takeover.

eBay and Yahoo merge

Skype and auctions somehow integrated with search and existing services such as Flickr could be quite interesting, and their business cultures are far more compatible. eBay does has far less cash though, it would have to be a merger not a takeover.

Yahoo is purchased by News Corporation

Replaces Google as the default search on MySpace. Shudder!

Yahoo is purchased by Time Warner

I’ve always said merging Time Warner with an IT company would be a brilliant idea, they really should do it one of these days. Heck, it’s not as if they’ve ever tried before.

Yahoo’s goes bust

Their share price and market share continues to slide, and they eventually go into Chapter 11 Microsoft and Google swirl like vultures to pick up the pieces

An angel investor

The Flying Spaghetti Monster swoops down with his noodley appendage and provides investment just in the nick of time.

You can read Jeremy Zawodny's original post here.

Magnolia is a similar social bookmarking site to del.icio.us with one important difference: Magnolia isn't being bought by Microsoft! I love del.icio.us and have been a loyal user ever since I heard about the service on The Gillmor Gang in 2004, but Microsoft's threat to buy Yahoo means I need to say goodbye.

My del.icio.us bookmarks page

The first step is exporting your years of accumulated links from del.icio.us. From your home screen, click Settings, then under the Bookmarks heading click Export / Backup. You'll be given the option to export all your data as HTML which you'll save to your local drive.

The del.icio.us export page

Once you have this HTML file, you can register for a Magnolia account and import your data. From your Magnolia profile page, click Help and choose Import from del.icio.us from the popup menu. From there you browse for the exported del.icio.us file and Magnolia will begin importing. My links took just under 5 minutes to import.

The Magnolia import screen

After you've got all your links in, you'll want to add the Mark in Magnolia bookmarklet to your browser bookmark bar. It works in the exact same way as the post to del.icio.us link you probably used. The Bookmarklets link is also in the Help menu.

And there you have it, not really that hard at all.

My Magnolia bookmarks page

It's ironic that one of the features that drew me to del.icio.us in the first place (easy data export) was the one feature I was hoping I would never have to use. I'll stick to using both for now, but it's good to know I have a backup plan if Microsoft does end up getting their hands on it.

If you've just installed KDE 3.5.8 from ports or packages on FreeBSD, don't forget to do this. Why am I putting this here? Because I always forget to do this!

NetBSD users will probably want to access /etc/X11/XF86Config instead.

Package kdebase-3.5.8 registered in /var/db/pkg/kdebase-3.5.8

This port has installed fonts into /usr/local/share/apps/konsole/fonts

You may want to add /usr/local/share/apps/konsole/fonts to your X font path by either:

% xset fp+ /usr/local/share/apps/konsole/fonts% xset fp rehash

or by adding it to your X-server configuration file (usually /etc/X11/xorg.conf or /usr/local/lib/X11/xorg.conf) and restarting the X-server.

You also have to make the new path known to fontconfig by adding a <dir>/usr/local/share/apps/konsole/fonts</dir> line to either /usr/local/etc/fonts/local.conf or ~/.fonts.conf and running fc-cache -f (as root if you edited local.conf) afterwards.

I do have KDE 4.0 mostly running on an experimental system, but for the time being I'm sticking to 3.5.8 on production machines.

Since time began we've been told that Microsoft was considering buying Yahoo (or maybe it just seems like it!). We all shrugged it off time and time again and laughed about it. Now it seems for the first time that it might actually happen! From Microsoft:

Microsoft Proposes Acquisition of Yahoo! for $31 per Share

Transaction valued at approximately $44.6 billion in cash and stock; provides 62 percent premium to current trading price for Yahoo! shareholders; combined entity to create a more competitive company, providing superior value to shareholders, better choice and innovation for customers and partners

So the next step is to research alternatives and CLOSE ALL MY YAHOO ACCOUNTS!

del.icio.us is easily replaced by Ma.gnolia. If you use the backup/export feature in del.icio.us and import that file into Ma.gnolia all your bookmarks and their tags are preserved!

Flickr is more of a problem. It doesn't have an easy export function, and transferring images and their tags one by one could take a VERY long time! Zooomr is probably the closest equivalent, but the last time I tried to use it I ended up going back because of reliability problems… plus the thought of all the material I already had on Flickr kept me in my place!

Guess I'll be researching mass Flickr exporters or backing up tools. I have copies of all the photos, but thinking about all those tags and albums… I don't want to replace del.icio.us and Flickr, I really like using them and have so for a long time!

Let's just hope that Microsoft doesn't buy IAC Search and Media (aka Ask.com), I just couldn't bring myself to replace my Bloglines account!

Isn't it crazy that it's February already? It seems like just a week ago I was in Sydney watching the New Year's fireworks going off on the Harbour Bridge! Time flies is probably one of the most abused, overused and tired cliches we humans have ever dreamed up, but it's just so damned fitting!

Sydney goes bang! By sachman75 on Flickr

On the subject of calendars, despite the fact Mac OS X Leopard has been out for a few months already it's still finding ways to surprise me. Case in point I just reinstalled the OS on my MacBook Pro as part of my quarterly hard disk cleaning and I still had the iCal icon in my dock.

See anything unusual? It seems that the default behavior in the Leopard version of iCal is to show the current date even when it's not running! Previously you would need to launch iCal and have it running hidden for it to show the date, now it just shows it just by being there. Very nice!

This is some of the widget functionality that I originally thought OS X would have after seeing how modular and functional the dock apps were in NeXTStep and OPENStep. I've long since got used to having the battery indicators and volume controls in the menu bar, but they seem the perfect candidates for little dock apps.

And how about this February in 2008 already? Isn't it crazy!?

And so is my sanity!

21:19 Thursday update (Asia Pacific time)

Thank God it’s back up! Well actually I guess thanking the system admins would make more sense ;).

From my own brief experience with Jaiku it certainly seemed more reliable, but I still stick with Twitter. I guess it’s true what they say with all these social sites, you stay for the people not necessarily the service.

Plus Twitter just has that something that Pownce or Jaiku don’t have… can’t quite put my finger on it. Happy twittering everyone!

00:01 Friday update (Asia Pacific time)

Seems as though I spoke too soon: