Rubenerd

Listening to Angélique Kidjo sing Idjé-Idjé. Her music is so great to chill out too.

Hidey-ho again everyone. I'd like to apologise for the chronic lack of updates to both the show and this site for the last few weeks, things here have been really crazy. Moving house internationally again, unpacking masses of boxes, taking care of my mum through it all, wading through the ocean of work I let accumulate while we were in the serviced apartment, it's crazy.

I finally caved though and got one of those blasted Facebook accounts. In my own defense, virtually everyone from my old high school is on it, and I must say it's a been a real boon to catch up with people I haven't talked to in a few years (some even longer than that!). If you use it, search for "Ruben Schade" and add me if you want. I've also got my Twitter and Jaiku pages which I update through my handphone if you're really that interested in what I'm up to.

I tell you what though the Ruby on Rails version of this site which I've got running on my local webserver is looking really good and I can't wait to implement it. I'm hoping once most of the boxes have been unpacked and my mum gets off this latest chemo regime and can start talking again I'll have a sliver of spare time to get it up and running.

Thanks everyone for your patience.

What a day. After living in the serviced apartment here in Singapore for a while we finally found a new apartment complex to move in to. Today was the fun part, sitting at the front door in the morning writing down all the box numbers then stacking the boxes in the right rooms. After lunch my dad and I set about unpacking… by 22:00 we had done the kitchen.

As you can see from the photo above of our lounge room it seems this is going to take a while. My mum is too sick to help and my sister left her projects until the last minute (as I always do myself) so it looks as though it's just Rainer and Ruben. We should get matching shirts.

My dad bought those old wooden cabinets from a local antique shop back in 1997. What's amazing about them and with the traditional way of building furniture is that they use no nails when they build them. The planks of wood are so precisely cut all they need to do is use small wooden pegs to guide each piece. And this was before lasers, CAD and other fancy electronics. Me think it mazing such.

Despite the availability of an official build of Mozilla Firefox for Mac OS X I've always liked and preferred using Camino, not because it shares it's name with a liqueur, but because it uses Aqua instead of Mozilla's standard user interface. This means it's noticeably zippier when running and starting up, the binary is much smaller and the design matches all my other Mac programmes. As Mark Shuttleworth, the South African behind Ubuntu Linux and the first African in space so famously put it: Pretty is a feature!

That said I've been a user of Mozilla Thunderbird for a long time, mostly for future proofing reasons. Because it's open source and the data files it generates are also readable on other platforms it just made me feel more comfortable. I'm always imagining a scenario in the future where I switch over to Linux or FreeBSD full time; I would hate to move across all that data.

With all the work I have these days it's so liberating when a piece of software comes out that just makes life simpler… and look better. Am I right?

In this case I stumbled upon a new email client for Mac OS X called Correo. It's at a fairly rudimentary stage right now but it's fun to tinker around with. I can't wait for it to be really fleshed out.

Being a (generally) open source advocate and user I shudder when people say that they can't kick their Microsoft addiction (Windows, Office, SQL Server, Phua Chu Kang Pte Ltd) because either they're so dependent on it and have developed infrastructure that can't easily be replaced with alternatives, or they're just so accustomed to Microsoft stuff they can't see themselves changing.

The truth is you don't need to ditch everything Microsoft you use in one go, it can be a gradual processes. Just like an addiction to illicit drugs or tobacco the best way to kick the habit is through a gradual transition process… my German uncle quit cold turkey but most of us don't have the ability!

Step One

If you're in a sinking ship you don't bother re-painting the staterooms! This means you should stop adopting even more Microsoft products. Don't upgrade your expensive software to the latest versions (Windows, Office, SQL Server, Phua Chu Kang Pte Ltd) which inevitably will deepen your dependence on Microsoft.

Step Two

Develop some form of roadmap that you want to follow, not what Microsoft wants you to. Your software should adapt to what you want to do, not the other way around.

Step Three

Start using alternative programmes where it's feasible or appropriate. Use Mozilla Firefox instead of Internet Explorer, OpenOffice.org instead of Microsoft Office and so forth.

Understandably, if you don't want to take the plunge of installing new software that you're not used to on your production machines, consider trying out a memory key toolkit that has open source software on it: this way you can try the software before you commit to it.

Step Four

When you're comfortable using alternative open source programmes, you'll realise that Windows is not actually necessary any more! Take a look at some of the very polished alternative operating systems such as Ubuntu Linux or PC-BSD! Again take it slowly and try before you buy, so to speak.

For programmes you must run such as Adobe Photoshop, there's always Mac ^^. Although they can be just as expensive as Microsoft products, and aren't entirely open source, it's still a good platform and much more trustworthy.

Step Five

Take a nice long holiday with the money you've saved from paying expensive Microsoft taxes, and with the reassurance you've gained from the improved reliability and quality of the software your business is using. And send a check for 10,000 Singapore Dollars to Ruben Schade. Hey, it can't hurt right?

One of the features I love about my FinePix S9600 (yes, a prosumer one Julee, rrrrr) is the ability to save images in an uncompressed RAW file format. Only catch is the RAW format FujiFilm cameras exports is RAF, which my beloved open source photo editing GIMPShop can't open, nor can the default Mac OS X Preview. Adobe Photoshop can open them, but the GIMP does everything else I ever used Photoshop for, and it's a lot cheaper (read: free!).

Fortunately as usual the open source world has come to the rescue in the form of UFRaw, a GTK+ based RAW image manipulator and exporter.

Assuming you already have MacPorts installed already, fire up a Terminal and type in sudo port -v install ufraw. Go grab a cup of coffee or something while you're waiting, it will take a while.

Because this is an X11 app and not a native Mac Aqua one you need to start it with X11 (obviously). So once the MacPorts install has finished, fire up X11 in /Applications/Utilities.

At this point you could just open an X11 Terminal and start it, but I like having a neat menu item I can access from the X11 icon in the Dock. So go to the X11 Application menu and click Customize Menu…, click Add and fill in the command as /opt/local/bin/ufraw (assuming you're using the MacPorts defaults):

Now you can open X11 and click UFRaw in the Applications menu whenever you need it ^^. It has a very nice set of features, or optionally you can just export to JPEG if you want as well.

Here's UFRaw running on my MacBook Pro with a crappy RAF image I took outside my window this evening of an urban Singapore sunset:

Aiyo!

A lot of talk in the paper here recently has been about the progress (or argued lack thereof) of the Wireless@SG free nationwide WiFi system which the Singapore government and SingTel are in the process of setting up. Reading the stories the last few days you would get the impression that city-wide wireless networks would be easy to set up and that the slow pace of construction is unwarranted.I'm fairly sure people are taking for granted how complicated and difficult a wireless network is to set up. People tend to dismiss Singapore as a very small country, while forgetting that the city isn't.

The very high population density (6,369 people per square kilometre) coupled with people's ferocious appetite for high tech gadgets and devices is both a blessing and a curse in this situation. As with most utilities such as electricity and water, wireless internet access would be much more viable economically in a place with a high population density than a low one given the fact you can supply many more people with less investment, but with wireless networking it isn't so easy.

With electricity and water you have dedicated delivery systems, with wireless networking you are using a shared resource (the air) that has to compete with hundreds of other wireless networks people have set up. There are only so many frequencies that you can utilise, and the environmental conditions at each hotspot such as geography and relationship to other buildings would have to be taken into consideration.

Setting up individual wireless hot spots in fixed locations liked shopping centres or shops within shopping centres is easier, but would generally suffer from the same setup problems. That said though I've been to several Wireless@SG hotspots and have never had connection problems at all. Perhaps I've just been at the right places at the right times. ;)

Smultron is an open source text editor for Mac OS X written by Peter Borg, and I must say I'm impressed with it. Simple code editing on individual files is a snap, and the sidebar is much more elegant than an entire row of confusing tabs.

I'm currently a TextMate on my MacBook Pro user mainly because of convenience. For one thing the projects are easy to set up and are in XML (which I've been told I have a borderline perverse obsession with), and from one Bundles menu I can select the language I'm coding in and I have all the actions and properties I need. Smultron does have Project like functionality, and it does have a code colouring menu which actually supports far more syntax rules than TextMate, but it doesn't have the other functionality for individual languages.

I don't think it's fair though to compare TextMate and Smultron head on, because I use them for different things. Editing individual text files which have little in common with each other is obviously easier in Smultron because of TextMate's maddening lack of tab support for files that aren't a part of the same project, but TextMate is more useful for managing entire projects, such as Ruby on Rails site or a graphical Java Swing programme. If you've used Mac OS X for a while, I like to think of TextMate as a replacement for Xcode, and Smultron as a replacement for TextEdit. Sort of.

From a polish point of view, TextMate's icons are certainly much slicker than Smultron's default ones, though Gaetan Ark has released the original icons for Smultron he designed as a separate file you can use to patch your Smultron.app file.

Like a true open source gentleman Peter doesn't ask outright for money, but he does have a donation page if you find his program useful. When I get my POSB MasterCard thingy I'll definably put some bread in the jar. Even though I'm not a Piano Man.

Some basic screenshots of some crappy Ruby and Perl scripts I whipped up to demonstrate the syntax support. Ignore the date, as of May I'm still typing 2006 on everything.

As for my FreeBSD machine though, nothing beats Kate!

Been having a pretty dreadful few weeks what with all my mum's scary medical stuff, but one thing has happened recently that has lifted my spirits again: I got a new FujiFilm S9600 digital camera… again!

Okay granted I already had this camera back in March when I got it for a birthday present from my dad, but it was stolen while I was having coffee in KLCC in Malaysia. This time around I'm taking some extra precautions:

1. I’m not putting it in such an obvious camera bag but instead in a shoulder bag that has foam padding designed to match the shape of the camera, to attract less attention
2. I’ve given up drinking coffee… okay scrap that one
3. I’m never taking it to Malaysia! Ah but there’s so much photographic material across the causeway… okay scarp that one too

It's amazing though how when you lose something you learn how much you took it for granted. In this case after losing the first S9600 I went back to my tiny Lumix and just couldn't take it! Get it? Couldn't take it? Get it? Taking pictures with a camera? Oh come on that was a quality joke.

It's pretty late at night here and I was desperate to find a good subject to take a picture of that wouldn't involve me hanging out the window and arousing suspicion about possible intentions I may or may not be possessing late at night with a camera with a very high optical zoom. I focused on the lamp on the other side of the room, set it to manual focus and…

Okay it's not perfect, but I've only had this camera for a few hours (and I had the last one for less than a week) and I have much to learn about image composition (cutting images into thirds and so forth), and it was the first shot, and it is in a lower quality JPEG form because I'm tired and just wanted it to upload quickly, so please be kind:

I just really liked the way the light was being cast on the wallpaper in one direction which highlighted the texture of it, and the detail on the top of the lamp itself.

I guess the ironic thing is having now bought two of these cameras, my whole initial argument that I couldn't afford a true entry-level DSLR with a lens the same as the S9600 was pretty pointless, because I could have bought one with the amount of money we spent to get two of these! Aiyo.

Sitting in hospital waiting rooms is really quite boring; I wouldn't encourage anyone to try it any time soon. Anyway in light of this I've spend the last half hour or so chilling to John Legend's Once Again album on my iPod.

That's Security Now, not John Legend! I took the picture, uploaded it and put it here and didn't even notice! I'm more tired than I thought. Take 2:

I must say right up front before I get into the music itself, the quality of the music is excellent. Even on my iPod with my fairly cheap Philips "Bass Boost" headphones ripped as a 192Kb/s AAC, his voice, the piano in the background and the backup vocals all sound amazing. Whichever recording studio he went to, he got his money's worth; the whole thing just sounds great. "Great" of course being the technical audiophile term.

One of the reasons why I really love Michael Franks' music and John Legend's is that they're both capable of recording songs that really contrast each other (look at me trying to be all professional). What I mean is, it's much harder to classify their music under a single genre or style; for example John Legend has a few jazzy tunes, some R&B and even a slightly electronic track all on one album. To me it also feels as though the order of the songs is deliberate rather than just a last minute slap dash composition job. It's one of those CDs you would want to listen to in sequence, the mood and tempo of each track seems to flow from one to the next.

It's really difficult to pick just one track that I would call a favourite! His chart topping song of course was "P.D.A. / We Just Don't Care" which I admit I do like, but I would have to say the first track "Coming Home" and "Each Day Gets Better" would be my top two. Again though it's one of those CDs that have such a diverse mix of styles that sometimes you may prefer some of the songs depending on what mood your in or what time of the day it is.

All around, a pleasure to listen to and a great distraction from these bleak hospital walls. Not to say that I would only listen to John Legend in a hospital; you know what I mean.

When my mixer board and mic arrive from those friggen removalist people's warehouse thing I'll review it in more detail.