Rubenerd

While I must admit I am a fan of Mac OS X and Apple computers in general, I was for over 10 years a Windows user: our family's first computer had Windows 3.0.

That said, I read an article titled Five Things Apple Made Up on CNet Asia today talking about Apple's controversial television advertisements (you can watch them on the Apple website). Now granted I think the advertisements aren't perfect, and I do agree that they are a bit one sided and lacking in detail, but all that aside, I still think Apple was right.

These were the "five things that Apple made up":

Ad #1: Which Vista
In this advert, Mac laughs as PC tries to choose a version of Vista to install. PC claims the six different versions make picking one really hard. Of course, the truth is picking a Vista is easy–there are three versions for home and three for work. We can rule out the work ones because your IT department will take care of that. The three that remain are Basic, Premium and Ultimate. Basic is useless, so forget about that, and Ultimate is too expensive, so that just leaves Premium. See, that wasn’t so hard now, was it?

The number of versions of Windows Vista is ridiculous, pointless and serve no purpose other than confuse consumers. I still have people ask me what the differences are between Windows XP Home Edition and Professional! With Mac OS X you don't have to pay extra to get a version that isn't deliberately crippled, there's one version with all the world class features, and that's it. There's no ambiguity.

Choosing a version of Windows is not clear cut. First of all with the amount of time people spend on their computers these days people don't just use their computers for home use or just for work. Also I think the author is forgetting that Average Joe or Jane computer user really don't know much about the computers they're using, let alone their operating system. They just want something that works.

See, that wasn't so easy now, was it?

Ad #2: Security
Here we find PC with a hefty bodyguard–anything Mac asks him has to be confirmed by this man in black. Now, my problem with this advert is that for years the whole argument from Apple has been “PCs aren’t secure, buy a Mac”. Now its argument seems to be “PCs are too secure, buy a Mac”. So which is it Apple, do you want security or not?

Irritating pop up messages that appear so often that people just get used to hitting "Allow" without reading what they say is no argument for security. The advertisement in question is not saying that Windows computers are too secure, the advertisement is saying that because Windows computers have so many security problems, Microsoft had to take drastic action. The result was a poorly implemented warning system that did everything to irritate end users and nothing to improve security.

Ad #3: Tech support
Today, PC is having a Webcam fitted. This is apparently a huge deal, because IT has to come up and install it. We are then told by the IT guy that “Macs come with webcams built-in”. What he fails to mention is that many PCs, such as the Sony VAIOs and ASUS various sportscar themed machines, have had built-in webcams for ages. And if you never want to make an arse of yourself on YouTube, wouldn’t it be nice not to have to pay for it?

I partly concede this point; it is true a few PCs come with webcams. A "few", not "many".

Ad #4: Surgery
PC is getting Vista installed, and needs to have a hardware upgrade to make Vista work. Of course, there are risks to an upgrade–PC might not make it. What this advert fails to mention is that most PCs built in the last two years, with 1GB of RAM, will take to Vista like a duck to water. At least a PC is designed to be upgraded–and that’s a good thing. With a Mac you can add more memory, and that’s about it, meaning when Photoshop needs more power, you have to buy a whole new cheese grater.

I would encourage the author of this article to look up the "Windows Vista Capable" public relations disaster in Google. The fact of the matter is that most PC's built in the last two years don't come with 1GB of RAM and certaily won't take to Vista like a duck to water. Windows Vista is a bloated, inefficient operating system built on top of a crumbling kernel that does little more than Windows XP managed to do with a fraction of the system resources.

While I agree Mac computer upgrades tend to require new machines, notebooks are the fastest growing segment of the computer market and what this author fails to mention is you can't really upgrade notebook computers, and these are the machines people will be trying to shoehorn Vista on.

The point of the advertisement he was discussing was that the PC had to go for surgery to get an operating system upgrade that was going to put a lot more demand on his resources with little to no improvement in his productivity.

Ad #5: Pie chart
This is our favourite, because it’s here that Apple claims PC is no fun, that all he’s designed to do is work. Of course, Apple totally fails to mention games. There was one Mac-only game, back in 1996: It was called Marathon and entertainment-starved Mac users went mad for it. Oh, and it was developed by Bungie, so all the Mac fans cried tears of blood when Microsoft bought the company and set them to work developing Halo for the Xbox. For us, this one is the nail in the coffin of these adverts. PCs are great all-round computers: They do office stuff and fun stuff. And they do it without complaining and without being smug.

PCs are great all-round computers? But wait a minute… the author said in point #1 that you need to choose between a home based distribution of Vista or a work one! He just reinforced the argument I was making about only having one version of Mac OS X that does everything! Whoops!

I do agree though that the gaming selection on Mac is crappy at best, but the whole point of the advertisement is not that PCs are no fun, it's that you can buy a Windows machine and get a bunch of cheap, sub-par programmes, or you can buy a Mac machine and you get all these polished media tools that let you make some really amazing stuff easily and have fun while you're doing it.

So that's my take on Ian Morris' article. I've since mostly moved on from Mac OS X (I use FreeBSD with KDE now instead) but I still stand by most of Apple's comments in the aforementioned advertisements. It also shows Apple has a sense of humour, something that perhaps Microsoft should be trying to get.

In recent months my weblog here has turned into a place where my distant relatives go to check up on how my mum's treatment is going. If you're not in my family this sort of news is probably really boring and quite pointless, so in the next version of this site I'm working on in Ruby on Rails there's a separate section for family matters. In the meantime, I hope you can bear with me.

Just came back from Gleneagles with my mum. After missing last weeks chemotherapy session because she was feeling really sick, Dr Tan has decided to halt the current regime and opt for surgery on her liver to see whether the tumours have changed and require different drugs. She also has large amounts of water in both of her lungs which needs to be taken out surgically as well so she can breathe properly again.

She's extremely distraught, she'll have to be admitted tomorrow morning and will stay there for a week at the very least, but probably for longer. I'm really worried that she's not eating or drinking enough which may be amplifying the effects.

I've applied for temporary emergency leave from my studies. She's made it clear she doesn't want me at the hospital the whole time this week, but I'm going to insist on visiting her a few times a day until she gets out. The advantage is, she's had so much surgery at the hospital here they have all her details on file and know us by heart already, so should make tomorrow morning a bit easier.

If you're part of the family and want me to pass on message you can email me at [removed 2012]. If possible use capital letters in the subject heading or set the priority to high, I get bucket loads of messages and I may miss them.

If you're reading this Elizabeth/Liz/Bird/ Friday is still on though, It'll be a much needed distraction. And if you're reading this Hotaru-senpai, ごめんなさい, I'll have to take a rain check ;_;.

I've had email accounts since 1996 and have been using web-based weblog tools that allow commenting since 2004 (I got into this whole blogging game pretty late) but it's only been fairly recently that I feel like I'm drowning in all this spam!

Firstly to my Gmail account: despite the fact I [don't think] I've ever put my address on public sites unless I've encoded it or replaced the "@" symbol with the word "at" it seems the spam spiders that crawl across the net harvesting addresses managed to get a hold of it somehow. The result has been a steady stream of spam since about mid last year:

And get this: I emptied my Spam folder last weekend. (;_;)

Fortunately for a while the Gmail spam filters were excellent and were able to gobble up the messages without any problems; but just in the last few weeks more and more spam messages have been slipping through to the point where roughly 10-15 per day make their way to the Inbox. Does this mean the Gmail spam filters are failing? Does it mean the spamming spammers are becoming more organised or intelligent and are making their messages appear legitimate to automatic spam filters?

The problem isn't just isolated to email though. I could take it as compliment or a sign that my blog is more popular now, but probably more likely is that automatic blog spamming bots have detected my WordPress software and have added this (and the Show) to their spam rolls. Whatever it is the result is the same. Here's my spam folder on this site after a week without emptying it:

Fortunately my other two email accounts that are based at my web host and I download with Thunderbird on my MacBook Pro are safe… for now.

How much spam do you get? Once the boxes arrive from Malaysia and I can record my podcast again, I think I'll dedicate at least half an episode to this spam stuff. Where's Monty Python when you need them?

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

Using Jaiku as an aggregation page for all my online stuff. Very convenient having all my feeds on one page that I can refer people to.

2007-05-13 03:59:00+08:00 on Jaiku

I have a lot to keep myself occupied this weekend, I've got several projects due in the not too distant future (aka: next week!) plus for a diversion when I need a quick break I got Train Simulator working again, plus the speculation about next year's Singaporean Formula 1 race is pretty exciting. If I have time I'll type up some stuff about it here.

One of the best Jon Stewart clips I have ever seen! In this scene Jon attempts to figure out what George W. Bush's job actually is given his low approval ratings, the fact he's a bit "intellectually challenged" and the fact that Bush himself seems to be unable to explain it himself!

It involves avocados, crows' nests, power cords, deep analysis and a cache of random clips of Bush saying what his job is. Very funny!

February 2009 Update: Removed by request :-(

You can watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in Australia on The Comedy Channel and intermittently on Thursday and Sundays on SBS.

Don't try watching it on SBS in Singapore… because SBS is a transport company not a television network.

So today was a pretty dreadful as days go. I walked into my mums room this afternoon to see her face turning red and sweating; she couldn't breathe. So we got into a taxi and after one of the wildest traffic weaving adventures I think any of us have ever had we got to the hospital and had her admitted into the overnight care wing. She's okay now thank goodness, bit of a scare, but the nurses there are all really friendly and I'm positive she's in capable hands.

Anyway so this evening sitting back home my sister and I were feeling depressed, as you can no doubt imagine!

Now I've found myself getting more and more into Jazz and especially in the last few years, especially with artists like Kevin So and Chick Corea with their clean sounds, the huge volumes of Latin Jazz my dad has picked up on his business trips to South America and of course the Official Rubenerd Greatest Artist of All Time: Michael Franks.

But we needed something else today as well, so I whipped out some Eric Clapton, B.B. King, the Blues Brothers, Sam and Dave, Terry Callier… and a whole pile of other stuff. I love it!

Then it got me thinking: I looked at all the mountains of music I've accumulated over the years on my various playlists, and I have far fewer pop and "Billboard Top" and "MTV" and all that stuff than I thought. Am I turning into a music snob already? 10 years from now when I'm in my thirties will I be rocking in a chair talking to my kids about the "horrible" music they're playing on the radio? Heck that's what I think about most of it now!

Dang I need to unpack my mixer board ASAP, this is great rant material for a Rubenerd Show right here :).

Oh god… I have more J-Pop than western pop… oh god… I didn't see that coming.

Another one of those sites you stumble upon without really knowing how you got there, in this case the Schweiz Tourismus, or Swiss Tourism board's desktop background page. They've got some stunning photographs, and great additions to computers situated here in the tropics. If you think cold, you'll be cold :).

Here are two of my favourites on my MacBook Pro and my DIY FreeBSD box:

EDIT: I just realised that the draft version (without any links) of this post was the one that was published, not the final one. It's been all fixed up.

With all the talk these days about online word processors such as Google Documents and gOffice replacing traditional client installed office suites such as OpenOffice.org, it got me thinking: do more technically inclined computers users actually need word processors at all anymore?

Think about it: if you're a web programmer or have any experience in HTML (preferably one of the XHTML varieties) and CSS you have everything you need to create a professional looking document, and as I discovered, it takes a lot less effort.

With any word processor I've ever used I've always found it to be a struggle to use the inbuilt templates and formats for headings, lists and so forth. With HTML I have complete control over what everything looks like and where everything goes, I can change the entire formatting of a document on the fly, and the resulting document (if done correctly) is a standards based file which can be read on virtually any computer with a simple web browser, and it's in a format which I know many years from now I will still be able to open and access, I can embed microformats such as hCards into my documents (very useful for letters), I can create different stylesheets for screen and print views, I can use easily edited meta tags to denote the copyright, language, date, author, keywords, owner and description of a document… the list goes on.

Now granted there could be some downsides depending on who you are. Some people might find the use of <tags /> to be cumbersome and annoying, and I certainly don't expect everyone to pick it up, but if you have the experience it can work out to be a very efficient and quick way to type something up.

And the best part of it all? You don't need a fancy word processing programme with bucket loads of features you'll never use: all you need is a lightweight text editor, and maybe a PDF exporting programme to help with creating separate, printable pages if you run a flavour of Windows.

So how do I use HTML to create documents? Argh, two rhetorical questions in the one post. This is no good. I now have a file called master.html sitting in my home directory that I use as a template for new documents; I simply copy the file, change the meta data and write up the document.

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd”>

<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” xml:lang=”en-AU”>
<head profile=”http://www.w3.org/2006/03/hcard”>
<title>DOCUMENT NAME By Ruben Schade</title>

<meta http-equiv=”Content-Language” content=”en-AU” />
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″ />
<meta name=”author” content =”Ruben Schade” />
<meta name=”copyright” content=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/” />
<meta name=”description” content=”DOCUMENT DESCRIPTION” />
<meta name=”owner” content=”Ruben Schade” />

<style type=”text/css” media=”all”>
body {
  font-family: Georgia, Antiqua, “Times New Roman”, Times, sans-serif;
  line-height : 1.6em;
  padding: 2em;
  text-align:justify;
}
</style>
</head>

<body>
<!– DOCUMENT GOES HERE –>
</body>

</html>

How does the McDonald's theme song go? "I'm loving it!"

My assignment is coming along swimmingly :). It may be a week or two before it's ready for real world use, but just as an example I'm running my new weblog and podcasting site on my MacBook Pro's local LightTPD web server and it works great! Well if by great you mean it can connect to the database, pull back some results and display them using the MVC paradigm in mod_ruby without Rails, but with a few "quirks". There's still work to do, put it that way.

I've also heavily modified the layout and design, because as you would know if you've been following my sites at all over the last few years, I'm never satisfied with anything I ever do. The question becomes, how long will this new design last?

One thing I'm very proud of in this latest release is the fact I've almost entirely used open source software to make it. KDE on FreeBSD with the brilliant Kate text editor is a great programming and graphics platform, and I've found the Smultron text editor on Mac OS X to be just as good, if not better, than TextMate.

So what version would this be? 10? Gosh, I was just counting my backups, and it really is! Oh man I'm more fickle than… someone who's fickle!

The Rubenerd Show site, circa 2004