Rubenerd

I did a clean install of my MacBook Pro yesterday and did a software update. All the software, firmware and whatnot are the latest versions.

But joy of joys, the latest version of iTunes 7.3.2 has been giving me nothing but grief. It's the first Mac OS X application in five years that I haven't been able to Force Quit, or kill in either the Activity Monitor or by looking up it's PID in top in the Terminal and typing kill PID. Nothing. Nada.

That said though, it looks like I'm not the only one with this problem.

So now I know what Mai was angry about at the end of that last post…

Cranky Geeks is one of the best video podcasts I watch… probably because it's one of the only video podcasts I watch. No but seriously it's a fantastic show, I encourage you to check it out especially if you enjoy lighthearted and cranky discussion of tech trends and the well-deserved ridiculing of stupid news stories.

This was my review Episode 077 dated the 14th of August 2007.

Yet again, another great show.

There was definitely a great scale of opinions: on one side you have John and Sebastian predicting doom, Dan telling it like it is, and Natali the optimist who comes from my generation which is always refreshing :).

For the first time in a while I actually found myself agreeing more with what the guests were saying than John or Sebastian. Dan's point that people like Scoble think they're really changing the world was a good one, but Natali saying the tech is enabling with many trickle down effects was also well put.

Shows are definitely livelier when the guests are all coming from different places. And when John wears colourful clothes.

But what do I know, I waste all my time on Twitter ;).

After a year or so of using FreeBSD I decided today to take another look at the operating system I learned UNIX on from the beginning: NetBSD (well actually it was Red Hat Linux 5, but I never left X!). I admit the way I learn things is to be focused on one specific programme, language or OS and hack away for a week rather than trying to be vague and learning many things at once not that well and not in much detail, and therefore not making much more than token advances in understanding. See how I slipped my critique about my university studies there? ;).

Reading back some of my previous posts I'm not entirely sure why I switched completely to FreeBSD back at the beginning of last year. I think part of the decision stemmed from VMware's official support of FreeBSD and the fact that more people were using it, so I figured it was a better boat to be floating in. I've been using a lot of boat analogies lately, I'm becoming a bit washed up. Get it? Aha. RATHOLE!

Having used NetBSD though for a few hours I've remembered what I love about it:

• the layout of the file system is so clean
• the initial installer is fast and slick
• pkgsrc simply rocks!
• the PowerPC port is an equal citizen not a afterthought next the x86 version, so my old Power Macintosh G3 and iMacs can use the same OS as my generic AMD boxes and just as well
• compared to Linux it really boots up in a flash, like FreeBSD
• KDE and Qt apps seems more stable on NetBSD (perhaps it's just me) and Konqueror has the search box by default right from pkgsrc
• if it's good enough for Wintellect at BSDNexus, it's damn well good enough for me!

That said though, I'm not giving up on FreeBSD, I think there's definitely room for both. The default addition of portsnap and jail abilities (and coloured file listings!) are still very compelling, and the support for it in third party applications and drivers is certainly stronger. I think it will come down to a machine by machine choice for now.

I think it's safe to say I'm a *BSD enthusiast, I am a happy user of Mac OS X, I have a passing interest in GNU/Linux and Solaris, and I have a healthy distaste for Windows and System 7 ;).

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51:00 – Rubenerd sister Elke joins us to discuss ridiculous news articles, stalker arguing social networking page was misleading, debating seedy MySpace profiles, gyrating at nightclubs, wasting time on Facebook and Friendster, Ruben's and Elke's Twitter pages, giving away personal details, Aussie PM John Howard trying to filter the internet, easy to stumble on sleaze online, Ted Steven's series of tubes, is there blame-shifting going on, oxymoronic fuel efficient SUVs, combatting efficient Japanese cars, hugging trees, good publicity without substance, Elke's mass communication studies course thing, actually learning nothing useful, chemistry and economics, high school friend Boyd Anderson's site is mysteriously down, friggen mouse pointers, Blackle is my new favourite search engine, lesbians in The Sims, dark background on light text, energy efficiency tips, Freddo Frogs, comparing American to British, Aussie and Belgian chocolate, Hershey's Kisses are icky, New Zealand accents, Russell Crowe on South Park and throwing phones, no breast implants in space, voting Green not Libertarian, Ruben's heterosexuality, hacker webmasters, reading Twitterrific posts from Felix and Frank Nora live, furnaces in the tropics, Japanese and Aussie expats in Singapore, friggen ang mohs, caucasian guys like being special, Elke's immaturity and unpleasantness, mysterious Champs-Élysees song discovered by surrealist, faulty Nokia phone batteries, URL redundancies, random women forcing themselves on you, Frank's QuarkXPress woes, The Sunscreen Song and John Howard's contorted facial expressions.

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

I feel like I've just invested my time into a sinking ship with this service. So many error messages, service interruptions, broken images… here's hoping they'll get their act together soon :(.

You can download the whitepaper of which I speak here.

Ironically I was at Linux.org today for some reason and saw something that I never thought I would find interesting: a Google AdWords advertisement! Clicking on it brought me to a whitepaper on TechWorld comparing Linux and Windows.

In this report, we aim to look at both Linux and the Windows family from a neutral standpoint. Our hope is that a balanced viewpoint will help you make a decision based on the facts, rather than on ill-thought-out opinion. TechWorld is a technology-independent publication and the report’s author runs both Windows and Linux on his various servers, laptops and desktops with no particular preference.

It's a very fun read, especially in light of the latest developments in the SCO case which discredits large areas of it. Apparently according to this the SCO intellectual property case was a genuine threat to Linux and one which needed be taken seriously, even though virtually nobody else thought so. Do you think they were paid off somehow… hmm… ;).

A couple of days ago I finally gave in and purchased a copy of VMware Fusion. Having used the demo versions of Parallels Desktop and Fusion on my MacBook Pro I decided VMware's product was much more suited to my needs. Parallels seems to be great for running Windows, but my main use is for FreeBSD and other Unix-like development which Fusion has better native support for (official additions for FreeBSD and Solaris anyone?). And with a special offer of $39.00 for first time beta purchases before the final version came out I figured it was the best choice. I should have taken a PR course at university instead.

So now I have the final, official retail release of VMware Fusion running on my MacBook Pro, and I'm loving it. Having a dual core processor with VT support really kicks some serious virtual arse.

Below is a screenshot of fresh virtual machines running OpenBSD 4.1 sitting at the shell, NetBSD 3.1 with a basic OpenBox window manager session, ReactOS and an installation of Windows 2000 Professional humming along:

I do admit I do run a purchased, fully licenced copy of Windows 2000 as a virtual machine to run a few apps that don't work so well on Wine, and for testing of my websites using Internet Explorer 6. Windows XP and Vista just add useless features and require more system resources, so 2000 works just nice. Well, as nice as Windows can.

Below is a screenshot of AutoPatcher running under Windows 2000 using the Unity feature of Fusion which makes it look as though Windows applications are running on the Mac OS X desktop. I much prefer to use AutoPatcher than Windows Update because it means I don't have to run Internet Explorer to use it, and I don't call home to Microsoft.

And here it is running in it's own window. I actually think I prefer having it this way:

I just love having virtual machines. I can tinker away with really fascinating operating systems and learn so much, without stuffing up anything when I do something wrong. It's great for sand boxing, and it also allows me to run a scaled down FreeBSD machine with just the bare basics so I can study without distractions. Not to mention compiling applications for different platforms… the possibilities are so exciting!

Or maybe I'm just easily excited ;).

If you have listened to Rubenerd Show 225 you would have heard how for the last few weeks I had this one French song stuck in my head. Having songs stuck in your head is bad enough, but when it's in a foreign language you can't speak and can't look up in Google it's even worse!

Anyway Surrealist on the Rubenerd Forum knew what it was and told me: Aux Champs-Élysées by Joe Dassin! A trip to the CD shop later and I'm playing Aux Champs-Élysées right now as we speak.

From his article on Wikipedia:

Joseph Ira Dassin (November 5, 1938 – August 20, 1980) was a French-speaking American expatriate musician.

Dassin was born in New York City to film noir director Jules Dassin and Béatrice Launer. He began his childhood first in New York and Los Angeles, California. However after his father became a victim of the anti-communist policies of Senator Joseph McCarthy, he and his family moved from place to place across Europe.

After studying at Institut Le Rosey in Switzerland, Dassin moved back to the United States to go to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After college, he moved back to France where, while working at a radio station, a record label convinced him to begin to record his songs.

By the early 1970s, Dassin’s songs were on the top of the charts in France and he had become very well known. He was also a talented polyglot, recording songs in German, Spanish, Italian and Greek, as well as French and English.

I think I've found a new favourite artist :).

So I wanted to take a picture of myself for the photo description for the latest episode of the Rubenerd Show that I just finished recording at 0200, to give people the impression that I was still awake but half asleep at the same time. These are the embarrassing results.

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42:00 – Insomnia is a bitch, I'm related to Kevin Rudd, Jamiroquai's virtual insanity, recording a podcast at 0200, great welcome back forum posts, thanking y'all, viagra, TedPod passes 100 episodes, alphabetical order sucks, jetlag, evil sleeping cycles, shocking people, really disappointing iLife 2008 release, dumbing down iMovie, subtle Final Cut Express persuasion speculation, stealing bread and shirts, British Apple advertisements, MacBreak Weekly ratholes, wiping operating systems, big arse apple juicers, self consciousness and why I can't do video, age and cynicism, online newspapers, genealogy and family trees, convicts going to Australia, Mary Wade to us, living in Singapore, maddening mysterious Champs-Élysees song, Avril Lavigne tries to sing Japanese, slurred stress importance, sitting in a Singaporean coffee shop and making the ultimate kickarse juice!

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