Rubenerd

Not sure if this is a result of the Leo Laporte bandwidth-sucking-field, but have been having trouble getting through to Jaiku all day today:

If you'd read my post yesterday about Twitter versus Jaiku shenanigans I've decided now to keep using Twitter for the time being and use Jaiku as more of an aggregation page for all my web 5.0 content or whatever the version number they're up to now…

I'll be taking down my local Rubenerd Aggregator page sometime over the next few days as a result, when their servers are all good of course. Maybe I'll .htaccess a redirect so you go from that to my Jaiku account.

I'm sorry but I have to say it: despite the problems that sometimes rear their problamatic heads I love the friggen internet :D.

Okay, I'm sitting at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in KLCC for the last time… tonight we leave to go back to Singapore. Of course I'm a bit sad to leave KL, but at the same time I grew up in Singapore, spent my entire high school and some of primary school there and so forth, and I must admit the trains and buses are better, and I do feel safer walking around at night there. Oh, and SCV MaxOnline is light years ahead of TMNet StreamyX… I'm sorry but it had to be said!

What am I going to miss? The late night drives with my dad to Putrajaya to take pictures of all the weird buildings and bridges, shopping at The Curve, the guys down in Imbi Plaza, teaching the Japanese girls I met in KLCC Engrish (Aussie Engrish of course!), and of course the Teh Tarik and Prata at random roadside stalls, the InTech section of the Star newspaper, the Sepang circuit (though maybe I come back for that sometimes lah), the friendly people at the Starbucks at Cheras who put up with me sitting there for hours at a time :D, seeing pictures of Abdullah in his really amazing colourful formal shirts that I really want but would probably look silly in and so forth.

I'll be back on the weekend with my dad and the car to take some more stuff down because it won't fit in our Range Rover! Yes you read me right, we have more excess stuff than will fit in a hideous, ugly, non-green SUV.

Just taking stock here, it means we've moved as a family from Freeman's Reach in Sydney to Melbourne, then to Patterson Lakes in Melbourne, then to Ascot in Brisbane, then to Dhoby Ghaut in Singapore, then to Newton Circus in Singapore, then to Gita Bayu in Kuala Lumpur, then to the city in Kuala Lumpur, and then back to Singapore. I hold Australian citizenship, German citizenship through my dad and I'm in the process of becoming a Singapore PR. Is it any wonder I feel a bit lost sometimes? Sheesh :(.

Ruben when he was a wee little thingy: we're moving again??

So tomorrow I'll be posting from Singapore. Back to filling web forms out like this, then getting emails from the admins asking if I faked it:

CITY: Singapore
STATE/TERRITORY: Singapore
COUNTRY: Singapore

If you don't really follow many internet trends, Twitter and Jaiku are two painfully hip services that allow you to post exactly what you're doing and where you're located at any given time. It's a very simple formula that seems to be all the rage at the moment, and I admit I'm hooked!

I learned about Twitter from my very smart friend Feeeeeeeeeeeelix and have been using it for about a month. I think the mix of a clean and easy to read homepage mixed with the Twitterrific for Mac client I reviewed yesterday makes it a very nice distraction, plus I've been added by some interesting people and can keep up to date with their shenanigans.

My Twitter profile page

Anyway reading Scripting News this morning and looking through my unread tweets I read that Dave Winer has got himself a Jaiku account. At first I rolled my eyes at the prospect of another website that I thought obviously was just riding the wave and shamelessly copying, but while the two services have a similar basic premise (aka: post what you're doing) they have radically different features, and I consider my initial position officially debunked!

From what I can tell Jaiku seems to be an aggregator for Web 2.0 goodness as well, so whenever one of my RSS/Atom/KitchenSink feeds is updated somewhere (post a comment on my blog, post a new show, upload a photo or bookmark something) it will be posted on my Jaiku page. Ironically I can even use this feature to subscribe to my Twitter account, continue to post on it and have my tweets routed to Jaiku as well, until I can decide which to use full time. Argh!

The other advantage of Jaiku is the commenting feature, with one click you can view all the comments for a particular post. I posted two messages and had half a dozen replies to each within an hour, crazy!

My Jaiku profile page

Who needs MySpace when you have these slick services I ask you now? Really makes me think though how dependent I really am on Web 2.0 stuff, and it seemed to happen so gradually I didn't see it coming, crazy!

Seem to have said "crazy" a lot on this post. Crazy.

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

30:00 – Giant scary tropical flying moths, listener feedback (birthday and departing wishes on Rubenerd Forum by Manny the Mailman, Mr Bunny, Surrealist and Felix) moving back to Singapore (parallel universes, loud removalist packer peoples), birthday celebrations (your host, host's sister Elke, Ruben's crappy April fools joke, the Overnightscape show, Dave Winer's Scripting News), cheap decorating on a MacBook Pro and MacBook (tickets and whatnot), a Jazz club in Singapore, signs you read too many weblogs, Dave Winer's phonebook of developments, never deleting old podcasts since 2004 and Douglas Adams on things that happen because they happen.

Recorded in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Well the removalist packer peoples have done or are currently finishing every room in our house here in KL except mine. I figured what would be a more productive thing to do than to catch up on some work. Then I discovered Twitterrific is up to version 2.0!

Twitterrific is a graphical front end for Twitter on Mac OS X Tiger which lets you post exactly what you're doing and see what your friends are doing without having to go to the website. I did a quickie review of Twitter on Rubenerd Show 222 (shameless plug).

Anyway a bit of a visual comparison because I think screenshots are the bees knees. This is what I was using less than half an hour ago: Twitterrific 1.x:

And this is the updated version:

What I really appreciate in this new version is the ability to see the last several posts by people, not just the latest post followed by a string of names. It's very slick!

You can download Twitterrific from the Icon Factory website (616KB).

Sometimes when you're in Singapore or have been there before you forget just how friggen small it is. While you're there it feels like you're in large city, and it's easy to forget that outside that large city, there's… nothing more! No suburbia, no endless plains, nothing.

Case in point I was looking at Google Earth. Singapore is the only city/country in the region that has had its roads and whatnot traced so far. What it shows is something that just looks spooky:

That's the entire friggen country! There are more than 4.5 million people living on that thing that's less than 50km's wide! The landmass to the left and most of the islands south of Singapore are part of Indonesia, the landmass directly above Singapore is Malaysia.

You can view it for yourself here.

If you're a real FreeBSD nerd you'd know about this already, but for those like me who are just experimenting maybe you'll find this useful.

If you find yourself installing packages a lot (say, KDE… ever tried compiling that from scratch? Wow!) and your internet connection isn't terribly reliable, if you enable to verbose output in the pkg_add command you can see exactly where the FreeBSD package manager is retrieving the files from and the success rate of transfers.

# pkg_add -rv NAME_OF_PACKAGE

That way, if something goes wrong you can see exactly where it failed. Haven't had to do this when I'm in Singapore but when I'm transferring using TMnet StreamyX here in Malaysia or the TPG broadband in Australia, it really makes things clearer.

As an added bonus as well, if you're doing this full screen on a desktop with code and transfer status lines flying across the screen in a green font, it looks as though you're in The Matrix. Swish.

For those interested in virtualisation on Mac OS X, VMware's Fusion beta product was bumped up to version 3 last night. Amongst other improvements, the critical feature we've all been waiting for was bundled in: the ability to disable debugging mode!

From what I can tell from their website and user forum, as part of the official VMware testing process most of their beta products have a built in debugging and logging setting which allows the development team to get real world usage information, at the expense of speed of course. By allowing the disabling of this feature in Beta 3, one can assume they've reached the level of development where things are becoming more stable and closer to the final product.

From my own experience playing around with FreeBSD in a virtual machine this morning (at Starbucks over a Caramel Macchiato of course!) I can say by disabling the debugging mode it is noticeably quicker, especially in scrolling lists and so forth. I haven't yet had the chance to test out the 3D acceleration because I use Windows 2000 not XP in virtual machines. Parallels Desktop still seems a bit quicker, though I'm sure when VMware releases a mature product that gap will close.

In regards to student pricing, one of the guys on the VMware support team suggested I look into the VMware student programme which allows the licencing of their products by universities and schools and allowing those licenses to be used by students. I very much doubt my uni would be interested in such an exchange given they have their own (in my opinion very clunky!) disk imaging system in place, but we'll wait an see. Was more of an answer than I got from the Parallels Team.

At the expense of maybe sounding like an advertisement for VMware (whoops!) here's the interesting part of the email I got from them about new features:

* Improved performance: You now have the option of turning off debugging features in VMware Fusion to enjoy even better performance.
* Support for Boot Camp: You no longer have to choose between Windows or Mac—run Windows XP side-by-side with Mac OS X off your existing Boot Camp partition.
* Windows Easy Install: Just answer a few simple questions, insert your Windows CD, and VMware Fusion will automatically create a Windows virtual machine that is optimized for your Mac.
* Virtual machine packages: Virtual machines are now encapsulated in a single, easy-to-manage package. Move your virtual machines to another hard drive or Mac simply by copying a file.
* Enhanced virtual machine management: Managing multiple virtual machines and changing virtual machine settings is even easier with the Virtual Machine Library.
* Improved international support: European and Japanese Apple keyboards now work properly in virtual machines.

My mum is clinically depressed for obvious reasons and she's on large amounts of medication so when I am at the reciving end of her abuse, I know it's the medication and the depression talking not her. Still it's very hard lah, just have to keep a straight back and let it slide because I know she doesn't mean it.

I get the feeling I'll be taking refuge outside the house all day again tomorrow, for my own safety. Starbucks at Jusco Aeon Cheras Selatan. Then Coffee Bean at KLCC. With my laptop. Sounds like a plan.

The removalists/packers/people for our house won't be back until Monday so at least that also gives me some time to finish up my room after all this cools down again. Hopefully the people in Singapore will be able to help her again when we get there.

UPDATE: Just so everybody knows, this was an April fools joke :D. I know I know it was a really bad one!

April Fools! :D :D :D

Well ladies and gentleman, the decision has been made. The Rubenerd Show is no more. It was fun while it lasted, but these days I simply have too much work and study work to be doing a podcast. It's very disappointing and I'm a bit upset, but I still think inevitably the decision made itself. I will now be refocusing all my energy on my blog and my university work.

Oh behalf of the whole Rubenerd Show team (aka: me) thank you for your support and listenership over the last two years. I had a great time, and I hope you did too.

All the existing shows will still be available for at least several months, email me if you have any problems.

Cheers
Ruben