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12:00 – Living Coffee With Paul Bassett, Hugh Laurie before House MD, Rubenerd mailbag (Jeff from Indonesia, Julee Ng from Malaysia), making awesome coffee with a plunger, Chinese New Year in KL and smooth operator!
Recorded in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.
Well the Chinese New Year festivities are mostly over, and Kuala Lumpur seems to be getting back to normal. Peak hour traffic is back along the highway to Gita Bayu, most the dissapearing people I posted about on Saturday have reappeared again and the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in KLCC is full of business people and students once more ;).
Took my mum yesterday to the hospital for her weekly chemo and all the beds in the therapy ward were taken again. Guess people didn't want to be sick during their lunar new year break either; understandable. Those chemicals they give you are nasty SOBs.
Obligatory Malaysian flag post:
Some people have the whole week off though, so I guess we won't see a full change until Monday, but walking around here it certainly feels like the bustle is back. So much so that I've even got my first blog comment from a Malaysian!:
all the chinese went back to their respective hometowns (me included), cant imagine how deserted KL was :p
I was going to respond and say g'day, but her latest comment on her blog she linked to made me think twice… ahem:
This is what i get when i approve lame dumbass psychos online, i swear it happens more often than i can even say fcuk off. I’ve blocked a couple dozens of them. Oh go out and socialize you poor bastards.
And I'm an Aussie-living-in-Asia student ang moh too, we're the worst kind of dumbass phychos who need to socialise! ;). I mean, look at that freak!
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12:00 – Ruben philosophising about money, music nostalgia (GANGgajang, American Money, This is Australia), 12:00, getting hóng bāos (Norwegian Bakery, Starbucks, commercialisation) and having the best or the rest!
Recorded in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5. Attribution: Ruben Schade.
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12:00 – Where the hell "Piggy Bank" comes from, more attacks in East Asia and Thailand, old clay stuff, high speed train between KL and Singapore speculation, the world is actually upside down, busted cables and 666 has arrived… again!
Recorded in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5. Attribution: Ruben Schade.
rubenerd,
Your account on Joomla! Community Forum has been deleted. This may be because you never activated your account, in which case you should be able to register again.
Regards,
The Joomla! Community Forum Team.
Oh well, guess I won't be looking into their CMS after all.
So I was catching up on some missed Overnightscape episodes when I heard Frank talking about his upcoming Anything but Monday Show with Mad Mike. Visiting the Overnightscape site, I saw the link to ABM so I thought I'd give it a look-see.
In all honesty, I heard some of the Overnightscape shows with Mad Mike last year and really did not like them that much; I guess my sense of humour is somewhat different. Perhaps being an Aussie I just tend to appreciate British comedy more. But I digress. I listened to the "free sample" they have available and think it's a bit better. I've signed up to the ABM website forum.
Currently though there's a purchasing power parity problem. I'm living in Malaysia and the asking price of RM27.90 per month (US$7.99) is very steep, though I'm sure when I move back to Singapore and can pay SG$12.26 a month it will be a bit easier. I want to listen to some more episodes first though.
All that said though, I really like their website: Frank and Matt have outdone themselves again. The scary thing though is it bears a striking resemblence to the new Rubenerd Show site and blogging engine I'm designing myself in Ruby on Rails to replace WordPress for a university project… just replace the orange and red with blue and green with a downtown shot of the Singapore CBD at night. 209 anyone?
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10:00 – Podcasts outside the US, dangerous hot beverages, Chinese New Year in Malaysia (deserted streets, IT shops), groovy new Starbucks in Times Square, Westerners obsessed with East Asia and all's quiet on the KL front!
Recorded in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5. Attribution: Ruben Schade.
It doesn't matter that Elfen Lied… according to WordPress this is Rubenerd Blog post number 666. Wooooh!
I was actually only shown a few episodes of that anime… and it freaked me out. Well, not really, but… okay yeah it did. Shaddup.
UPDATE: It turns out this isn’t really post number 666, WordPress-assigned IDs don’t exactly correlate with how many posts are published. Oh well, I was close!
Since as long as I can remember [the time after the accident], I've been a KDE and Xfce user on Linux, and later FreeBSD. From what I can tell from the CDs in my folders from that period my first exposure to FLOSS was the now defunct Red Hat Linux back in the 90's; and I remember feeling more comfortable navigating KDE than the default Gnome. Purple monkey dishwasher.
Anyway yesterday as part of a project I was installing FreeBSD from scratch on my Athlon XP machine (I find that name offensive!). I had to use the GTK+ for it, so naturally I was just going to install Xfce. Just for fun though because I'm such a wild, crazy loco I thought after all these years to install Gnome from ports to see how it has progressed since the old days:
Things certainly have changed, and I am impressed! It's obviously not as zippy as Xfce, and I'll certainly be keeping the latter on my older machines, but Gnome worked very nicely on said Athlon XP:
As a long time KDE user one of the first things I noticed about Gnome was the general lack of clutter in the menus. KDE lets you customise anything, and it doesn't try to hide the fact. Gnome by comparison seems to only make the most common commands visible and makes you use Regedit-isque programs like the Gnome Configuration Editor to change the nitty gritty details. I'm torn over which methadology I prefer; there is something to be said about changing everything you want, but it also seems a tad redundant to have all these options available when often you'll only be changing them once to your tastes, then leaving them alone.
Intrigued by what I saw so far I installed Gnome on my production machine (my MacBook Pro's FreeBSD partition) as well to see how well it handled the rough and tumble of real world usage:
I really hate to say it, but it seemed more reliable than KDE. Sometimes programs in KDE for no reason would exit and give me the colorful exploding bomb image saying the program quit unexpectedly, but I have yet to have a program quit on me in Gnome. Touch wood ;).
In terms of bundled applications, I am a fan of *NIX Desktop Environments because they come with everything out of the box , so I don't have to worry about installing and constantly maintaining disparate packages just to get basic desktop functionality. In that regard a default Gnome install is somewhat leaner than a default KDE install; it seems Gnome is more selective but still bundles everything you need.
Nautilus sure has changed! I remember the last time I used Gnome all those years ago Nautilus was just starting out and it was slow as molasses going uphill while attached to a snail. I am a fan of Konqueror but I was impressed with Nautilus; I was able to browse a simple Secure FTP server, Samba and local directories very easily:
Unlike Konqueror though Nautilus can't web browse, though Epiphany fills the gap pretty nicely. The advantage with Ephiphany being powered by Gecko is that more websites seem to like it. I was initally turned off by the Internet Explorer 6-ish toolbar layout, but a quick toolbar reshuffle by moving the address bar up to the same level as the buttons and removing all but the Back, Forward, Refesh and Stop buttons brought it closer to what I like. I use del.icio.us for bookmarking, but if I were to use local bookmarks I'm sure I'd appreciate the use of Categories to sort links instead of rigid folders. Seems everything is moving to categories and tags thesedays.
So am I a Gnome convert? I'm not sure; if anything now I'm more confused than I am before over which I prefer! I guess that's the real beauty of open source software; as a FreeBSD user (or a Linux user) I'm not forced to use any one environment.
My other *NIX desktop environment related posts:
By nearly all accounts my decision last year to adopt FreeBSD over Linux (and Windows… haha) on my non-Apple computers has been a damned good one. Installing, maintaining and updating FreeBSD boxes is so simple compared to Linux, the documentation is second to none, the FreeBSD Ports System is simple and easy to optimise, and I've really come to appreciate the clean drive layout.
There's just one problem! Living in Malaysia power spikes tend to happen more often than in Singapore and Australia, and while it's great that my surge protectors do a fine job of preventing any real damage (touch wood) I find myself turning computers back on that have been automatically switched off every couple of weeks. Let's just say I've become fairly well aquainted with fsck.
And therein lies the problem: FreeBSD's UFS doesn't have native journaling, so hard disk failures are far more of a pain in the arse to recover from. In comparison, Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X all have journaling meaning that if they ever fail it's a breeze to get them back up again after restarting.
Fortunately a cursory search on Google and Yahoo revealed a project called GJournal created by Pawel Jakub Dawidek during the Summer of Code 2005, which seems to be implementing journaling over exiting disk labels.
From the Journaling UFS with gjournal entries on the FreeBSD mailing list:
GJournal was designed to journal GEOM providers, so it actually works
below file system layer, but it has hooks which allow to work with
file systems. In other words, gjournal is not file system-depended,
it can work probably with any file system with minimum knowledge
about it. I implemented only UFS support.
And from the (outdated) article on the FreeBSD wiki:
Gjournal is a layer in the GEOM hierarchy that consumes two lower-layer devices and produces one device. The two lower-layer devices are called data disk and journal disk. The data disk is self-sufficient and (eventually) contains verbatim data that’s handled to the layer, so after the journal is disconnected it in itself can be used as a normal storage device. The journal disk contains linear records for every write request handled to the layer
From what I can tell it has been released to the -CURRENT branch which doesn't help me sitting on -STABLE (and -RELEASE on my firewall box), but it appears it will be released in FreeBSD 7. Good to see this is happening; perhaps I'll install it seperately myself and give it a shot.
Has anyone had any success with this? It would seriously save me a lot of trouble.
