Rubenerd

Singapore's National Day is only three days away. The size of the helicopter gives you an idea the size of the whole patriotic ensemble. I wouldn't have thought those counter-weights would be big enough. Maybe they have the matter from dead stars in them, or maybe compressed pratas that have been left out on a table for more than a day and have gone rock solid. We all know those are damned near indestructible!

I've also started using Zooomr, another photo sharing site with much more liberal storage space and is Adobe/Macromedia Flash free for us FreeBSD users. I'll probably keep my Flickr account for now for more random shots and put good ones on Zooomr.

This has already has had its time on Digg and has appeared on at least three podcasts I listen to, but I still get a kick out of it and most people here in Singapore haven't seen it (I'm sure Felix has!) so I have to mention it here for fun: The Hide-a-pod!

You love your iPod. It’s a great product. You take it everywhere and you use it every day. But owning a device so desirable and fashionable as an iPod comes with one major drawback . . . the iPod has become a target for theft. So how can you take your iPod out of your home without fear?

The way the case protects your iPod or iPhone is by disguising it as a brown Microsoft Zune, something nobody would want :).

The best coverage I heard of it was of course on Cranky Geeks 073 where they discussed one possible flaw: nobody actually carries a Zune, so the incidence of theft may increase as criminals think of Zunes as merely cases that contain something more valuable! One of my favourite episodes, even though it didn't have Sebastian Rupley or spiffy segues ;).

In a way I feel sorry for Microsoft, they obviously at least tried to come up with their own "tragically hip" media player experience but it fell on it's portable electronic arse. I wonder if this will be lumped together in the same Microsoft product graveyard years from now along with Windows Me, Microsoft Bob and Clippy?

Anyway you can purchase a DRM-free Hide-a-pod at their totally legit ordering page.

I don't know how I came across the Ford America website, but on the front page of their Auto Show section they proudly display the above car. What I want to know is, doesn't it look like a Range Rover knockoff? I know Range Rover is owned by Ford (or at least it used to be) but don't you think they could have been more creative rather than just slapping on a Ford badge to the grille?

Anyway it's pretty much a moot point, the fact is none of the Big Three car makers in the US are doing too well, and according to Dvorak Uncensored (and if it's on Dvorak Uncensored it MUST be true!) the Japanese have taken over in percentage of sales for the first time. Do you think it might have something to do with the fact that the Japanese are investing so much time and effort into creating more fuel efficient cars instead of pumping out ugly SUVs and "light" trucks?

I guess that's why I was disappointed by the Mitsubishi 380 which was designed and is being built in South Australia. Just what we need, petrol guzzling palaces right?

I love it when I talk about Open Source software on my blog.

After a long time developing the alternative version of this site, the real world has finally set in and I've decided not to move over to the new platform. When I see how much work it would take to transition over versus the amount of time I have to do such things, I decided just to stay with WordPress for the Show and Blog for the time being after all.

All my work has not gone to waste though, I was able to submit it as part of a project and got a perfect score, so it fulfilled it's purpose. And I learned a great deal about how trackbacks, pings and blog engines actually work, which makes me appreciate what WordPress offers even more.

Then there was the financial problem. It would probably surprise nobody given it's IT savviness that Singapore has a mind boggling array of web hosting companies, but none of them provide Ruby on Rails support unless you purchase Business plans, which are in the three digits per month. As a struggling university student living under a John Howard government (albeit externally) you can understand why I couldn't afford it!

With that in mind, I'm going to modify the new theme I had created so it can be used with WordPress. This week I have less work so I've promised myself that by this time next week, the new show and blog site will be up and running. That's a promise!

The next step, even though WordPress is PHP, can you write plugins for it in Ruby? :D

Everyone knows that vi and vim are better than emacs right? Well personally I prefer nano even over vi. It was the first text editor I ever learned (okay it was actually pico, the editor it was cloned from) on UNIX and even now I use it for almost everything: Ruby, Perl, HTML, XML, KitchenSink… even these weblog posts. It's a small world, so why not use a small editor? Hey, that's catchy.

The problem though if you install Nano from MacPorts is that it's not enabled with a number of what I would consider critical features. Aside from syntax highlighting support probably the most noticeable of which is the lack of UTF-8 support which means it spits out a series of question marks whenever you're editing files with katakana, kanji and kitchen-sink in it for example. Bummer.

A cursory glance over at the DarwinPorts website shows that in fact it's possible to enable UTF-8:

Variant: utf8 {
configure.args-append –enable-utf8
configure.args-delete –disable-utf8
depends_lib-append port:ncursesw
depends_lib-delete port:ncurses
}

The key is simply to add +utf8 when you initially build the port, along with any other conditions you think are spiffy:

sudo port -v install nano +utf8 +color +no_wrap

There's really little point using MacPorts if you don't keep it up to date. After all, that's the whole point of a package management system, right? ^^

To keep MacPorts / DarwinPorts up to date, you just need to issue the selfupdate command. The problem I always saw with it though was it seemed as if it wasn't doing anything:

% sudo port -v selfupdate
Downloaded MacPorts base version 1.442
The MacPorts installation is not outdated and so was not updated
selfupdate done!

In fact what I later discovered was that it was doing something. The selfupdate command actually does two tasks: it issues the sync command to update your ports tree (vis a vis portsnap on FreeBSD) and then updates the framework itself. The not updated message is referring to is the framework, it still updated your ports.

(Photos Pending…)

If you've read this weblog at all in the last year you would know about my current obsession with FreeBSD. To tell the truth I've only been using it seriously for a year now but it's been long enough to convert all the idle machines in our house over to it from all the different flavours of Linux and… heaven forbid… Windows… and I've already started using it seriously in my work and studies.

Another bonus, everything I learn about it helps me to understand a bit more of the inner workings of Mac OS X as well, my other favourite OS.

My biggest problem though with learning about FreeBSD, and most technology in general, is the method I used to do it. Aside from reading the handbook, as with most things I teach myself most of what I need to know through experimenting. I find reading through chapters upon chapters of thick reference books doesn't really work me, I learn faster by just using it (a fact which I'm sure agitated many of my university practical teachers).

All that said though, I think I've stumbled upon one of the best technology books I've ever read: FreeBSD 6 Unleashed. It seriously feels as though Michael Urban and Brian Tiemann looked into my mind and saw how I learn things, and wrote a book specifically tailored for me. It is the Swiss Army Knife of FreeBSD books!

As with most of the SAMS Unleashed series of books it's thicker than John Howard (cha ching!) but it covers such a diverse and interesting range of topics. By reading it you get an understanding of not only how to install, administer and update a FreeBSD system, but also some complex general UNIX, how to install web servers, use SQL, setting up a graphical workstation, simple Perl and shell scripting, choosing shells… the list just keeps going.

What I appreciate most though is how each chapter is laid out. At the beginning you're given a brief introduction with some technical background and explanation, followed by a step by step guide with plenty of examples and sidebars.

My only regret with buying this book is that I didn't do it sooner! If you're serious about learning anything and everything about FreeBSD I would really recommend it.

So apparently the iPhone, the device Apple is entering into the global mobile phone market, will be available tonight in the United States. Of course if you've used the internet at all in the last few weeks you'd already know about that.

So to spare you the agony of reading yet another stupid iPhone post, I will not be posting about it.

Aren't you grateful? Hey wait a minute.

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

Finished listening to TWiT 101. Does sound like a lesson! Killer panel this week, one of my favourite shows. No AppleTV shows here either :(

2007-06-25 09:22:00+08:00 on Jaiku

Dave Winer over at Scripting News has suggested an addition to this Twitter micro blogging phenomenon: Twittergrams! The idea is to record messages with a limited number of words which would be the natural progression we saw from blogs to podcasting. I posted a response on my Twitter page, or you can listen here.

I think micropodcasting sounds sexier though. And what's there to stop us in the future making micro videocasts? You could be at a restaurant and do a quick food review on your camera phone, or record a quick message out the front of the Merlion in Singapore or the Eiffel tower, a modern day video Twitter "wish you were here" message.

Once again, I think Dave has really stumbled upon something interesting here. Not that he's ever taken the time to reply to anything I've ever said ;-).