Rubenerd

Just came back from the hospital in Singapore with my mum.

It was good to see Dr Tan again. My mum has been seeing him every few weeks since early 1999, since I was 12 years old. I think it's safe to say we think he's a member of the family now. I cannot say enough about Dr Tan, he is the most intelligent, compassionate, friendly and selfless doctor on the planet, and he has a great sense of humour :).

As for the latest news, she went in for blood tests, x-rays and ultrasounds today on her chest to get the latest on what's going on with the tumours and the fluid in her lungs. He assured us there are are still plenty of treatments available still after all; we were worried given the fact she's been having treatment since we lived in Australia back in the dark ages.

I'll be going back with her tomorrow for her to start the chemo regime again. Let's hope it has less side effects than the last one and doesn't take away all her energy.

Whew, this subject is a bit depressing. Here's a funny promotional picture for Windows Vista:

I'm no closer to finding my mixer board. I could have sworn I put it in the box we took back to KL in the car instead of the removalists boxing it up, but I have a sinking feeling the removalists took it after all.

If I can't find it amongst all the crap we brought with us, I might have to record the show with just a microphone plugged into the laptop instead. No MadPlayer or interviews for a few weeks :(. I'm still looking though, and as a sign that it is possible to find things while rummaging through a bag I found my little bear with the Selangor flag shirt. Haha, I forgot where I got the fella :D.

Eeeeee, it's a friggen mixer board, how hard can it be to find? Aiyo.

My favourite bittorrent client has been bumped up to version 0.7. Dont forget to Digg it if you use that. Personally I can't stand Digg, but that's just me ;).

This is what I said about it early in March 2006:

I’ve been looking around for a small, lightweight Bittorrent client for Mac OS X. So far I used the vanilla Bittorrent client and Azureus on the Mac and was fairly impressed, but the vanilla client was pretty… vanilla, and Azureus uses so many system resources! I guess because it’s Java and not a true Cocoa program.

I tried Transmission (http://transmission.m0k.org/) and was really impressed. It’s only 300 kilobytes in size (VERY refreshing after downloading Azureus!) and because it’s a native Cocoa.app it works brilliantly, even on my ageing iBook G3 machine.

From what I can tell after using it so far the program looks much more polished, the colours are more professional and the new "Minimal Layout" makes it much easier to view when you have stacks of transfers going.

The new features in the Mac version according to the forum post:

• New icon
• Automatic port mapping (NAT-PMP and UPnP IGD)
• Peer exchange (PEX) compatible with Azureus and uTorrent
• Multitracker support
• Better handling of tracker announce interval
• Fixes bug where absurdly huge upload/download totals could be sent
• Automatic tracker scraping
• Cache connected peers
• Many miscellaneous bugfixes and small improvements

And I do like the new icon :)

A real friend of the Rubenerd Show Dave has officially changed hosts for his phonographic weblog… stupid spell checker…. his photographic weblog. You can now find him at http://davesphotogallery.blogspot.com/.

He's got some amazing shots there. Be forewarned though, you can spend a lot of time looking through it when you're supposed to be doing work!

For my 21st birthday my father bought me a Fujifilm Finepix S9600 "prosumer" camera; it looks much like an SLR and is a similar size but the lens is not interchangeable. That didn't matter though because the lens on this camera was very nice, miles better than any of the stock lenses that came with the entry DSLRs such as the Canon 350D. My dad and I calculated that to get a entry level DSLR with an extra lens that had the same level of features and range would cost more than double. For someone with my budget, it was perfect, and it took Compact Flash which is still cheaper per mebibyte than SecureDigital.

I had it for about a week before someone stole it from me while I was sitting down at a coffee shop in KL. Granted I guess the bag I had it in was a pretty expensive looking thing, but still. So it's back to my four year old 3.2 megapixel Lumix DMC-33 for a while again :(.

Fortunately I did manage to get some really beautiful pictures in Putrajaya the night after my birthday… that reminds me I need to upload those! Watch this space.

Shrunking? Uh, well anyway Photobooth is the greatest program ever released since… Commander Keen!

And now for something completely different: I have the sudden and uncontrollable urge to visit Ras Al-Khaimah (official portal, Wikipedia page)!

Seriously though, I was sitting in my room doing some Ruby programming work over my third coffee of the day (as you do) and my mum was in the other room watching a Channel News Asia special on the growth of Ras Al-Khaimah in the UAE. To tell the truth I knew of its existence but I really only knew about Dubai and Abu Dhabi in any great detail out of all the Emirates.

Really shows though how fast the world outside the West is growing. They look like they're doing some amazing stuff… to use the formal economic language of course.

Anyone able to lend me some money? Anyone? Don't all crowd around in a hurry. From what I understand Dubai's international airport is fairly close, and Ras al-Khaimah has it's own as well, so I could fly there direct from Singapore on SIA. Wonder if RAK will go to Singapore?

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

Joined Jaiku

2007-04-11 01:29:00+08:00 on Jaiku

Trying to see what this has my Twitter account can't have (http://twitter.com/rubenerd).

2007-04-11 01:34:00+08:00 on Jaiku

Is there a "Twitterrific"-like program for Jaiku so I can post comments from a window on my MacBook Pro?

2007-04-11 01:38:00+08:00 on Jaiku

Chaning my mind, having all my RSS feeds on one screen is very noice! Added my Twitter feed, thinking of moving over completely already.

2007-04-11 02:00:00+08:00 on Jaiku

Added my del.icio.us, flickr, blog, podcast and... Twitter (!!) RSS feeds. I would use Atom, but I've got Dave as a contact ;).

2007-04-11 02:18:00+08:00 on Jaiku

Posted a really crappy, preliminary review of Jaiku + Twitter on (//rubenerd.comshow.com/blog/twitter-versus-jaiku-shenanigans/)

2007-04-11 03:27:00+08:00 on Jaiku

Updated my Jaiku profile page background. FreeBSD updating itself just wasn't colourful enough ;)

2007-04-16 05:43:00+08:00 on Jaiku

It's the end of an era folks; Mad Mike Masters and Frank Nora have suspended the Anything but Monday podcast / audio magazine / new time radio programme. From what I can tell their blog is still currently online, but the main page has had it's colourful orange screen replaced with this as of 11:00am Singapore:

I also received an email from the ABM management:

Dear ABM Subscriber,

I wanted to let you know we are shutting down the Anything But Monday Show. Mike and I would both like to thank you for taking the time to check out the show with the free coupon. The site will shut down soon, but you will be able to access the premium content a little while longer.

We wish we would have been able to continue doing the show, but it was a project that became much bigger than we had originally projected, and ultimately we did not have enough time in our lives to keep it going.

Thanks,
Frank Edward Nora

This really is a sad day. I admit the first couple of episodes I didn't like as much as the Overnightscape (Frank Nora's other radio programme) but I just felt like I'd got into the rhythm of it and had started enjoying it.

Given what Frank has said on his latest Overnightscape episode it seems he's under a lot of pressure and the time, effort and planning you need to create two weekly podcasts when you have a full time job just didn't seem as feasible. Anyone who has listened to the Rubenerd Show knows how much of a difficult time I've been having myself with all my current commitments, but arguably Frank has far more on his plate than I, and it's to his and Mad Mike's credit they were able to pump out such polished programmes.

So to Mad Mike and Frank: thanks for the fun and good luck with your future adventures. Who knows, another 20 years of self imposed exile may pass and we can hear you again :D.

Goodbye from Singapore, Anything but Monday.

Having searched for months for a good Bluetooth laser mouse and not finding one from my all time favourite manufacturer Logitech, I finally caved today and got a Wireless Apple Mighty Mouse… and I love it!

For one, the packaging and design of the box was of course what I expected from Apple: clean and minimalist. I'm still dumbfounded that no other company, especially Microsoft, has figured out that out for themselves yet.

As for the mouse itself, I can't get over how nice it is. The problems I've read on the internets' series of tubes about the left/right buttons not being detected properly haven't happened to me in the last few hours I've been using it. Perhaps if I was a hardcore gamer and not a programmer or designer this may happen but so far I've had a 100% success rate. Typing that is asking for trouble I'm sure.

When I plugged in the provided Lithium AA batteries (yes, they came with Lithium batteries… most mice you'd be lucky just to get any batteries to start with!) I went ahead with the detection. I just clicked on the Bluetooth icon in my menu bar, chose "Mouse" from the menu and it was detected on the spot. Then I could navigate to the Keyboard/Mouse panel in the System Preferences app and configure the button actions, sensitivity and whatnot.

I'm hesitant to give this a 5 star rating because I've only been using it for a few hours, but the fact I'm even contemplating that rating should give you an idea of how impressed I am with this. And no, I didn't even get paid by Apple to say this!

How easy do you reckon it would be to get this working on my FreeBSD partition? ;).

I'll be doing a full review of it on my next Rubenerd Show podcast episode, so stay tuned.

As I was going up the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there!
He wasn’t there again today,
I wish, I wish he’d stay away!