Rubenerd

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

I used to be disgusted, now I find I’m just amused.

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

F*ck SVG. I’d like to see IE support HTML.

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.

Anthropic principle

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

455F E104 22CA 29C4 933F 9505 2B79 2AB2

AACS ;-)

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

My father, a good man, told me, "Never lose your ignorance; you cannot replace it."

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

lame -h -m m -b 64                    \
    --resample 22.05                  \
    --mp3input                        \
    --tt "RubenerdShow230 2007.12.15" \
    --ta "Ruben Schade"               \
    --tl "RubenerdShow.com"           \
    --ty 2007                         \
    --tn 230                          \
    --add-id3v2                       \
    RubenerdShow230_320.mp3 RubenerdShow230.mp3

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34:41 – Too much stuff and not enough time, evil overcast-ness, shipping eBay goods overseas, Synclair ZX Spectrums and Commodore 64s, five times at the Singapore Post centre, duty is a bum, Asian obsession with cool gadgets, efficiency escaping snail mail, Bureau of Oversight, using the Griffin iMic and the LAME encoder (hope it makes the show sound better!), celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Commodore 64, old video clip from the Computer Chronicles, wanting to meet Jack Tramiel and Woz, boardroom stupidity, Schade family IBM machines, Gary Kildall, smart Singaporean bus stops, tracking buses with GPS, big brother-ism, live twitter posts from Dave Wares, Dave Winer, Leo Laporte and Robert J. Berger.

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

When I published my last post here on my experiences with Snitter including it's new Leopard skin, comparing it's advertisement free interface to Twitterrific, and being a bit critical about about the Adobe Air platform it was written on; I had no idea that it would be the latter point that would generate feedback!

Today Daniel Dura posted a comment on my aforementioned weblog post:

Ruben, I am a platform evangelist at Adobe and also work closely with the AIR team. You say:

“Snitter is of course an Adobe Air application which means it’s really clumsy to install and upgrade, and doesn’t work the same way native Mac applications do.”

Would you mind clarifying this a bit? I know Jonathan provides an install badge on his site. Using that badge, you should only be 2-3 clicks from installing the application. If you had issues with the install or other problems, let us know.

I will do my best to answer your query! There are several serious problems I have with the Adobe Air platform, including the fact the applications don't integrate well with the desktop systems they're running on, they don't install correctly when you use restricted operating system accounts, and it's not open source.

Firstly, as web applications masquerading as regular applications, they don't do a very good job with integrating with the desktop, especially on Mac OS X. For example, the OS X convention for small windows with rounded edges is that they can be moved across the screen by clicking and dragging any portion of the window. If you do this on all but the title bar in Air applications they don't move, but rather unexpectedly select text and elements in the application.

This behavior really is maddening, especially for a messenger-like application which you may be attempting to scroll through or move around a lot during the course of a day.

Secondly, if for security reasons you use a limited or standard account on OS X for day-to-day usage and only uses the administrative account as a way for the machine to ask for confirmation and a password before you install software or modify settings, the Adobe Air runtime installer and any Air applications you attempt to install simply fail.

I'll explain what I mean with an example: to install most software on Mac OS X, you either run the installer or drag the application package over to your Applications folder. In both of these cases if you are running in a limited account it will prompt you to enter the username and password of an administrator. In this way you never actually have to log into the administrative account because, just like in UNIX with sudo, you're only using the administrative account to authorise actions. It's the best of both worlds!

Adobe Air doesn't do this on OS X. When you attempt to install the runtime, it automatically assumes it's running as an administrator, then proceeds to crash when you try to install. The exact same thing happens when you use the "install badge" such as the one on the Snitter page.

The only solution is to physically log out, log in as the administrator, install the runtime, use the install badge to install Air software, log out and log back in as a limited user. This is the virtually the only software on Mac that requires this, and you even need to do it every single time an application is updated and requires an upgrade!

And finally, the little alert light started flashing in my head as soon as I read that Adobe Air uses Flash. I dislike Flash because:

• It’s not open source so requires the purchasing of proprietary and very expensive Flash authoring software (in terms of resource use and financial cost) that Adobe doesn’t bother making available for Linux or BSD.
• As a user of FreeBSD and NetBSD as well as Mac OS X, Adobe really rubs me the wrong way when they refuse to even acknowledge the existence of these operating systems let alone provide official clients for them. Adobe letting us users know we’re not worth their trouble.
• Previous bad experiences with Flash, as well as Ajax.

So even if all the above criticisms about desktop integration and access control were addressed and I could breathe in Adobe Air goodness, the fact is I could only use applications I write in it on only a small fraction of my machines. For a company that generates as much revenue and holds such a strong position in it's respective markets, there is really no excuse other than arrogance I can see for maintaining this position.

I appreciate Adobe's efforts to create a system for web developers to create client side, desktop applications and am glad that it's providing competition to Silverlight and JavaFX which hopefully will help consumers, but these shortcomings for time being mean I won't be paying too much attention to it, which is a shame.

Looks as though I'll be using the stars, no wait, stairs today… good thing I'm only on the seventh floor!

Damn these monsoon season storms!

ASIDE: I was going to use the "stars" to get up to my floor, but I didn’t have rope long enough to reach any of them. Anyway, you can’t see the stars at night in Singapore!

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1:07:00 – Show reminiscing, exponential curves in the morning, This is Why I'm Hot, Wikipedia excesses, getting Snitters, interconnected crap, Compton, Anglosphere rivalry, pavlova and trifle, Yuletide and Christmas coming, family shopping always the hardest, the Ducati USB thumb drive, 9-11 conspiracy theorists heckle Bill Maher, YouTube reviews, The Google, locked doors, senility, Nokia e61i, iPhones, Casey Stoner, Elke playing Neopets, great nerdy insult, grand pianos on lanyards, impromptu Starbucks thermos review, Costa Coffee in the UK, Singapore Post, Singapore PrimaDeli food poisoning scandal, the Ministry of Health is MOH, unfortunate cake ingredient lists, cheap bulbs in lava lamps, music review of Ska Cubano, Ay Caramba and Istanbul is Constantinople, Last.fm account, losing music in iTunes, alien DJs, music is the soundtrack to your life, work sucks time (no, really?), floods in Singapore, storms closest to snow we can get here, Dave Wares on tudor houses, and crazy dead lifts.

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