Rubenerd

This isn't a political blog, and I love screenshots, so instead of writing up a long dry post about Australian politics I'm just going to post some images. The gist of it: The coalition's and John Howard's reign of conservative evil has ended: Kevin Rudd and Labor won the election! Yay!

Hopefully we can look forward to pulling Aussie troops out of Iraq (why did John Howard support George W. Bush?), improving the technology and education sectors, finally combatting global warming and critically improving Australia's relationship with Asia, all of which John Howard genuinely screwed up. Political promises being what they are, right? ;-)

Photos

Screenshots

The problem with living in the 0800+ time zone (Singapore, China, Hong Kong, Perth etc) is that aside from Australia most cool English-language produced stuff online is either in Western Europe or North America which can be problematic for someone here when shows are broadcast live… over there! It means I either need to get up at a ridiculously early hour or go to bed at a ridiculously late hour which for someone who has lots of stuff to do all the time is not always feasible!

Nevertheless I can now add TWiT along side the Whole Wheat Radio morning wheat berry broadcast from Alaska to my list of shows I've stayed up late for, and have stuffed up my sleeping and work patterns for the whole next day!

Watching Leo Laporte at 04:00am Singapore time!

I watched Leo Laporte record the latest episodes of Security Now and MacBreak Weekly using his UstreamTV feed on the TWiT website; it was wild! Better still for the first time I also joined the irc.dslextreme.com IRC chat room with Colloquy and not only was able to send messages to Leo while he was editing the shows which he replied to but I also subscribed to a whole bunch of cool new people from around the world on Twitter as well!

One of the people on IRC suggested that this is real Reality TV! I'd rather watch Leo editing audio files and taking about cool stuff with his listeners after the recording is over than some sleazy and predictable reality TV show on a network or cable TV channel. Then again that's really not saying much is it? Leo, I didn't mean it like that ;).

It is a great system because I can't watch The Lab with Leo here. Fortunately I'll be able to when I go back to Australia for my final year of uni.

So a big thanks to Leo for showing me what it's like to record and edit your fine shows, was lots of fun :).

Now I just need to figure out next time if it's worth going to bed early and waking up at 04:00am instead of staying up that late. Hey, I could listen to Whole Wheat Radio, then watch TWiT. Who needs sleep?

Looking at an ironic post about the iPhone on Leoville (heck I haven't posted anything about Leo Laporte for ages). I couldn't help but feel nostalgic, not for the US but for Australia. The olive coloured vegetation, the power lines, the street, the building, it looks as much like a suburban shopping block in Australia!

Here's the photo, copied onto my server so I'm not leeching off Leo's bandwidth, but links to his post:

A photo for comparison of Pooraka back in Adelaide I took last year:

And to compare the colour of the vegetation, here's a shot of Napier Rd in Singapore:

AFTERWORD (is that a word?): After submitting this post I got a very helpful comment from Gedeon at the IconFactory who helped to explain why I was getting these errors and possible remedies.

As it turns out the cynical conclusion I came to about my computer preventing me from becoming too addicted to Twitter by forcing me not to use it as much… was ironically accurate! As it turns out Twitter itself has a limit to the number of accesses to their site you can make in a given period of time, and obviously with Twitterrific running on my Mac, TwitBin running on Firefox on FreeBSD and m.twitter.com on my phone I consistently overshoot my allowed number.

Twitterrific is a native Mac OS X application that displays tweets you and your friends have posted on Twitter, the microblogging site that I am hopelessly addicted to and post to almost every hour of every day.

Well I was having no end of trouble with the 2.x series of it on Mac OS X Leopard which is understandable considering it was written originally for Tiger, the latest version seems only to have added advertising and not fixed the endless stream of Twitter Errors that seem to always sit as the first post:

ASIDE: That advertisement for Camino popped up just before I took the screenshot. As you might have already read, Camino is my favourite web browser on Mac… how ironic!

I've tried allowing the Twitterrific app in the new Leopard firewall settings panel and have checked all my other networking settings but it still shows these errors constantly. To get a version without advertisements you have to pay $20.00, but I want to know that what I pay for actually works :(.

Anyone else had problems running Twitterrific on Leopard? I tried running Snitter as an alternative, but uninstalled it because it was giving me even more problems. Does my beloved MacBook Pro think I'm wasting too much time on Twitter and is trying to stop me posting to it? Is it an intervention on my computer's part? That's probably the reason!

It wasn't until after I uploaded that picture that I realised how BIG it was. My sincerest apologies for absorbing an excessive amount of your screen real estate. But she looked scared right, and this post is about scary stuff, right? Right?

With all the talk these days about phishing and non-trustworthy websites that contain all kinds of evil, I really haven't come across that many of them. Perhaps what I search for on the intertubes or the material that I download just doesn't take me to shady areas. Plus given the fact I don't use Microsoft Windows on any production machines (or any machine with a network connection!) I tend to feel fairly safe.

Today though I was given a rude reminder that I still need to be assertive when it comes to intertube nasties: I typed a URL incorrectly and after several bizarre redirects ended up at the website of Face Software Inc at Face.com (I'm not linking directly to them for obvious reasons):

ASIDE: Does look funny having fake Windows alert dialog boxes on a clean install of Mac OS X Leopard!

So I took a look at the source code: nearly the entire page is generated with Javascript, and many other dubiously titled scripts are linked to within that code. That really is fishy, because there is really no reason for static material like headings or paragraphs to be generated by Javascript unless it was designed to either spoof something or execute code on other servers automagically when you load their page. And I didn't even dare click on the fake dialog boxes!

Scary stuff. Gives at least some credence to Steve Gibson's tireless argument that you should disable Javascript in your browsers and only approve sites that you trust. Any good selective blockers for Camino or Konqueror anyone?

I've been looking for a good, thick tome to work through to help me learn the Objective C programming language. Just like Ruby, I like the fact Objective C was also inspired from Smalltalk and given my past (icky) experience with C++ and the fact I run Mac OS X and FreeBSD (which has the GNU compilers) I figured it would be a cool language to work on for another study project, and gosh it just looks like a really interesting computer language. Girls love it when I talk like that you see.

Alas, Singapore seems to have as many books on Objective C as elephants have tails. Wait, elephants do have tails. That was a stupid comparison.

Anyway I've searched at Borders, Kinokuniya, Times, Popular… and nobody has anything other than For Dummies books on basic Cocoa development. My personal preference is the O'Reilly book series simply because I remember having lots of fun learning Perl and Python from their books back when I was in high school and I like their format. The Dummies series were fun to learn Visual Basic from back when I was in primary, but these days they seem to chatty to me.

I know I'm probably being really picky, but everyone learns in different ways and I find O'Reilly books to click with me the best. So it begs the question, does anyone know of any good places to buy O'Reilly books (or books that follow a similar style) on Objective C in Singapore?

My next try will be to go to that really good computer book shop in Funan Centre, I'm hoping they might have a better range that some of the generic chains. Or I could renew my subscription to Safrai Books Online, I'm sure they'd have some good material.

Microsoft never ceases to amaze me. In case you haven't read the news floating around these last few weeks or listened to John C. Dvorak rant on Tech5 about this story, Microsoft is hoping to become an "aggresive player in online advertising" and hopes that eventually half their revenue will come from advertising. As John would say: "huh".

What does advertising have to do with their business? It would be like GM making hairspray!

I think most of us on the intertubes are becoming wary of Microsoft's efforts online. They suffer from the biggest case of "me too!" syndrome I've ever seen: If Google or Technorati or Yahoo or Chuck Norris are doing it, by their very definition they need to sink billions into doing it to, regardless if it makes business sense.

This kind of thinking worked well for them on the desktop, but to think the market dynamics online are the same as for shrink-wrapped software, and therefore require the same approach to marketing and development, they're really in over their heads.

As we've all said already, Microsoft should focus its efforts on actually producing decent operating systems and office suite software that people want to use. As an economics student I know all about the importance of diversification and spreading risk, but those are the things you concern yourself with once you have your core business sorted out. Given Vista's spectacular fall from grace (if it had any to start off with!) I think they should be more concerned with that right now. And that's not even mentioning their ridiculously low share price and middle management problems.

But what would I know, I run FreeBSD and Mac OS X right? ;-)

Today it's official, I'm moving over all my internet paraphernalia to Segment Publishing, a web hosting company in my birth city of Sydney in Australia!

Unlike every other web host I've done business with in the past, Segpub give you full SSH access to your home account, secure FTP, they give you your own unique IP address, their logo is a kawaii face… how could I refuse? But probably the two most striking features that drew me to them was the fact they run FreeBSD which just thrills my socks off, and… they're not Servage. That last point in particular was very important.

Servage… didn’t

If you're one to revel in Schadenfreude you would have loved reading my woes with my current web host over this last year, especially my latest experience with my MySQL tables being down for a whopping 4 days!

I figured that disaster plus the 2 cumulative days in total from the rest of the year (a conservative estimate, I'm sure it was more) puts the total uptime for 2007 for the Rubenerd Show and Rubenerd Blog to 98.63%, a far cry from their stated 99.98%. That said in either case I wouldn't have minded so much had they either given me some form of warning or maybe even a discount for the times they weren't able to provide service for the reason of the month.

Their "intermittently reliable" physical service is a shame because their technical support system is excellent. Support tickets I submitted never took more than a day to answer, and they always seemed happy to elaborate and explain points further when I replied asking for clarification.

Ironically the day I registered with Segpub on the 07th, Servage upgraded the design of their site and added new features. Go figure.

The move is on!

So by the end of this week this whole mess of a site will be lifted up and moved over to Segpub. I'm taking the opportunity to clean out my public_html folder while I'm at it. There are so many orphaned files and old Perl scripts from previous projects that are all just begging to be spring cleaned.

Having used Mac OS X Leopard now for just over a week I can safely say I've had a fairly painless experience using software that was released in the Tiger era, though there have been a few gotchas. In case it's useful to someone I'm posting information on some of the applications I've had minor troubles with.

This is by no means an authoritative study, and it is possible that the software problems I've posted here might be a result of my own unique computer configuration or even misunderstanding on my own part, in which case feel free to correct me by posting a comment :).

X11.app

X11 to me feels like it's exactly the same in Leopard as it was in Tiger; the title bars and bundled apps are exactly the same. I remember reading somewhere that Leopard was going to be bundled with an Xorg distribution instead of XFree86.

Anyway those issues aside, the problem I seem to have is that even though I move the X11.app icon to the Dock from the Utilities folder, whenever I launch an application that uses X11, another identical X11 icon appears at the end of the dock and the first one that I placed there crashes. This has happened on two wipes and reinstalls of Leopard.

The other issue I have is that X11 doesn't respect the space limits imposed by the Apple menu. If you try and move any normal window on OS X above the Apple menu it doesn't work, but X11 apps are more than happy to creep behind the menu which makes them that much harder to grab and bring back down again:

Inkscape.app

For some reason when I try and launch Inkscape it informs me that I don't have an X11 compatible environment installed and promptly quits. To work around this, I launch X11 first then Inkscape and it works. Pain in the arse though to have to launch two apps just to use one.

Last.fm.app

The official LastFM client is really spotty for me in Leopard. Just like X11 when I launch LastFM it launches two concurrent versions of it, one of which instantly crashes.

Force quitting the one that's stuffed up leaves the other working just fine though. Just a small pain to have to deal with every time.

The Good News!

With all those issues you'd think I've been having a terrible time in Leopard with third party applications: fortunately the ones that work far outweigh the ones that don't.

This is my current list of apps I've used in Leopard that work just fine: Quicksilver, VMware Fusion (1.0 and 1.1 Beta), Camino (1.5.2 and 1.5.3), Thunderbird (2.0.0.6), iSquint, NeoOffice, VLC, TextMate, Flickr Uploadr, Xee, the MAMP web server, Snitter and Cyberduck.

I was confused for a long time about how WordPress organises posts and other media, so when I saw that one of my posts had been assigned the number 666 I assumed it meant I had typed up 666 weblog posts. As it turns out WordPress assigns all the media you upload a unique number, so in actual fact I had typed far less than I thought.

With that said, WordPress has assigned this particular entry an ID number of 1000! Yay! Does it mean anything? No! Am I excited? Yes! Why? Because 1000 is a big number!

So here's to 1000 Rubenerd Blog… items… or whatever the heck they are. 1000 somethings!