Rubenerd

Song Playing: Dido, White Flag

As I was typing the above line I almost put "Dido, White Fag". Would have had an entirely different meaning!

My mum has now been on chemotherapy again for about a week. She seems to be coping a bit better with this round, though I guess "coping" is a relative term. She's in a lot of pain in her bones and joints but doesn't feel like being sick so I guess we can be thankful for that. As long as she takes it easy I'm hoping she'll be okay.

She's on two separate treatments, one she's had before but also a newer one which instead of trying to attack the tumour cells and in the process doing a lot of damage to other perfectly good tissue instead attempts to block the cells blood supply. I'm not sure how that works, but it is reassuring to know that new treatments are coming out all the time.

My dad left for Beijing last night; Shell has apparently purchased a Chinese oil company so he's over there to inspect their grease plant to see if it's useful. It's going to be -4 degrees this Thursday so sounds like fun! He says its surprising how some Singaporeans and Malay Chinese have a lot of difficulty communicating with Mainland Chinese because their work ethic and the way they use the language is so radically different. I was surprised, I just assumed that Mandarin Chinese was Mandarin Chinese.

Time Passes…

Now I'm sitting here in my mum's bedroom with my MacBook Pro, she's on the iBook. It's 11:31 PM and I've just made a cup of coffee, awesome! We're sitting here talking and typing away, it's nice.

She's saying now that she's been in contact with Dr. Fuad and that she'll be getting some stronger pain killers next time she goes into the hospital which I'm sure will be a relief. I'm worried about the pain she's feeling, is this normal for this medication? I worry way too much about these things, I'm sure its fine but in the back of my head it worries me. Am I weird?

Anyway this coffee is getting cold and I can't stand typing with only one hand and drinking coffee with the other.

Signing out,
Ruben

diary, log, ruben schade, debra schade, rainer schade, cancer, china, beijing, mandarin, treatment

If you haven't read my relative James Ross's creatively titled blog Blood, Sweat and Tiers yet, then you haven't read my relative James Ross's creatively titled blog Blood, Sweat and Tiers yet!

His latest post concerns Agile versus Waterfall software development.

Long time no blog. I’ve been distracted in recent months learning about non-geek stuff like investing in the stock market, which I may blog about at some point. But what has inspired me to pick up my virtual pen again is the apparent mainstream rise in popularity of agile development. Bear in mind that I’m in Australia so your time lines may vary, but these days there are very large organisations stating agile development as a key aspiration and sending head hunters around about scrounging for anyone who can spell it correctly to lead them to the promised land. Five years ago we relatively early adopters of eXtreme Programming would band together and tell each other stories of what a wonderful world it would be when major banks and telcos saw the light and changed their evil waterfall ways. Now it seems we may have gotten what we wished for and perhaps we should have been more careful.

As soon as I heard the dreaded "W" word (no I'm not referring to George Bush Jr!) I had to respond!

G’day James!

From my limited experience in software development I can’t say I’m much of a fan of the waterfall approach.

Throughout Software Design and Dev class in high school and even at university now the teachers and textbooks drum into our heads that waterfall and structured development is the only way to develop software appropriately and that other methodologies such as my beloved RAD or agile time-release development are simply too unreliable for anything other than small projects. They claim less structured approaches are child’s play and that nobody in the real world with a decently sized cranium would consider using them.

The problem I see with the waterfall approach is that there’s simply too much overhead and fluff which gives the illusion that work is being done despite the fact nothing constructive has been achieved. While I agree that going headfirst into a project is foolhardy, I don’t think sitting in a boardroom in suits presenting pretty graphs in Keynote and PowerPoint for months really actually serves a practical purpose other than to make the boss happy; which may or may not be fulfilling your objective! A feasibility study should be produced, a rough schedule hammered out and work should start. Doing what needs to be done versus doing what you want to get done I think can be two very different things.

I’d consider using the Sashimi Waterfall approach I learned about last month, but only because I think its more flexible and sounds like Japanese food of which I am quite partial to.

Microsoft supposedly uses the strictest form of the waterfall approach, and look at Windows Vista! Perhaps when I join the workforce and the weight of the world sets in I’ll change, but for now I’ll just bask in my inexperience and continue to look critically at rigid, structured software development.

Love reading the blog!

Cheers,
Ruben

james ross, rad, rapid application development, agile development, waterfall development, redhill consulting, australia, programming, project management

I don't know what possessed me to do this, but I decided to look up Grilled Cheese Sandwich in Wikipedia!

A grilled cheese sandwich is a simple sandwich that consists of two pieces of sliced bread and at least one slice of cheese in between. Some methods call for buttering the outside of the bread first, while others melt the butter in the pan. Another variation calls for spreading the outside of the bread with mayonnaise instead of butter.

Mmm… cheesy!

grilled cheese, jaffel, grilled cheese sandwich, food, cheese, yummy

I think the idea behind Apple's / NeXT's concept of a Universal Binary is a great idea. With the different system architectures available for Apple computers these days (32-bit and 64-bit PowerPCs, 32-bit and 64-bit Intels) it makes sense to be able to package up specific code for each processor into one bundle so you don't have to choose between four different program downloads tailored for each processor.

How Universal Binaries Work

From what I can surmise [given I'm mostly a scripting language programmer cough!], a Universal Binary is a Mac OS X application that has had its code compiled multiple times to run natively on multiple processors, such as the PowerPC and the newer Intel chips. When an application is executed, Mac OS X checks the application's header (if it is not a Universal Binary on a compatible platform it kicks Rosetta into action and runs it in emulation mode), then runs the appropriate code for your processor architecture.

The beautiful thing is to the end user, it just looks and runs like any other program, regardless of the platform their using.

It then goes without saying that applications that have multiple compiled code parts will be larger, but not necessary double in size. Most programs use resources, such as HTML files, images, text and so forth, that would be shared among the two different programs within the application. And because only one of the compiled parts is loaded into memory, there generally isn't any performance hit.

Checking Universal Application Binaries

I think also from a developers standpoint Universal Binaries are a very elegant solution. I didn't know this until recently, but if you want to check what processors are natively supported by a program, you can use the file command in your Terminal. For example, to check what processors BASH natively supports, you can type:

file /bin/bash

And if you're running a later version of Mac OS X Tiger it should show:

/bin/bash: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures
/bin/bash (for architecture i386):      Mach-O executable i386
/bin/bash (for architecture ppc):       Mach-O executable ppc

So we have a program here compiled to run natively on 32-bit PowerPC's (such as the G3 and G4) and i386 processors (such as the first generation Intel Core Duo). Had this program not been Universal (such as Photoshop CS2 or Office 2004), it would have shown only ppc.

Removing Processor Code from Applications

As mentioned above though, the downside to having an application with many different compiled parts for different processors is that they can be larger. Some might argue that it also doesn't make sense to have code that wasn't compiled for their machine to be sitting there taking up hard disk space.

If you want to remove unnecessary processor support from a Universal Binary, you can use the lipo command… aptly short for liposuction.

To keep just Intel code:
lipo -thin i386 -output output_file input_file

To keep just PowerPC code:
lipo -thin ppc -output output_file input_file

Be VERY careful though when removing processor support from applications though. If PowerPC programs use resources from a universal program, removing the PowerPC code will break support and crash the application using the resource. Some programs will even refuse to run if they believe they have been tampered with.

Alteratively a somewhat safer way to remove code is to use TrimTheFat, a graphical program that has a built in blacklist of programs that it will refuse the compact because of known problems after lipo'ing. I'd still be very careful though.

References

• Macintouch: Macs on Intel
• Apple: Universal Binaries
• Wikipedia: Universal Binares
• SoftPedia: TrimTheFat

apple, next, mac os, mac os x, mac os x tiger, os x tiger, universal binaries, powerpc, intel core duo, intel core 2 duo, lipo, trimthefat, executables, binaries, applications

The Sims 2 site has been down for maintenance recently. There goes the neighbourhood. Get it? There goes the… neighbourhood? Get it? :D

I need a cup of coffee.

the sims 2, sims 2, the sims, sims 2 website, maxis, electronic arts

Hello everyone. Just wanted to apologise for another week without regular programming on the Rubenerd Show. A spate of technical problems regarding our internet connection and the stress of having my mum starting chemotherapy again have been wrecking havoc as you can imagine.

I love doing the Rubenerd Show, but it's becoming increasingly obvious that doing them can be at times unreliable. I went for months this year without a hitch, so three interruptions in a month is unacceptable. I'm weighing up now therefore to record the shows a few days in advance starting next week and use WordPress's ability to release posts with a time delay, so any unplanned events will not affect the show. The beauty of New Time Radio is that if there is an important event I can change a future show on short notice.

In the meantime you're more than welcome to check out the Rubenerd Blog, the previous episodes of the Rubenerd Show or even check out some of my high school friends' websites (Boyd Anderson and Kevin Keirle) for something new.

Thanks everyone for your support, you all rock.

Cheers,
Ruben

rubenerd show, new time radio, new-time radio

Photo by Leong Yueh Kwong-MNS

The Malaysian Nature Society website is pretty eye opening, especially for a self-confessed treehugger like me.

Some things I didn't know, along (sadly) with some things I did know:

Malaysia has a landmass of 32.86 million ha, of which about 54% (19.22 mill ha) is covered with forests. In the last 15 years alone, we have seen natural areas being cleared, making way for development, logging, plantations, oil pipelines, mining, dams and an array of housing plans. Malaysian has lost about 60,000 species of life forms a year since 2000.

malaysian nature society, mns, rainforest, deforestation, habitat loss, urban crawl, forest, south-east asia

My class of 2004, click image to view Flickr gallery. Kevin is furthest on the right, I'm the weird one second last from right!

My buddy Kevin Keirle is doing a fundraising thing. If you have a credit card and you haven't maxed it out (yes Hotaru I'm talking to you! Man I miss you :oops: :sad: ) then consider helping out, its for men's health… no not the magazine, the actual thing. It's like me asking you to help out the world of PCs without actually anything to do with PC World magazine. Ah screw it. BeyondBlue is a really good organisation to support too, they really helped me when I lived in Adelaide.

Kevin, and your karma will thank you. Maybe you'll even get a body massage. Because he's a computer. Insider joke ;).

Hey guys

I just signed up as a Mo Bro for movember, now i know your all mostly poor student types who cant spare any money since youve already racked up a tonne of debt on your already mounting pile of credit cards. Although if you can manage to spare a few dollars to sponsor me an my dirty stretch of lip hair then i’d be stoked, i’m sure you may even know a rich silly bugger who when drunk will be willing to donate even more.

Just incase you wanted to know, Movember is raising money for mens health, making donations paticularly to the prostate foundations of New Zealand and Australia (need i say more), and to the beyondblue campaign, trying to remedy a serious problem which you will all at one point see in a friend or experience yourself, DEPRESSION.

Anyway like i said i’d be over the moon if you could sponsor me as a Mo bro or even join me in Singapore at the end of this month for the Movember party.

(the rest of this email is the generic sendout btw)

Help me change the face of men’s health by sponsoring my mo.

Please go to http://www.movember.com/sg/sponsor, enter my Rego number which is 31281 and your credit card details.

The money raised by Movember will be used to change the face of men’s health by creating awareness and funding research into prostate cancer and male depression.

Movember culminates at the end of the month at the Singapore Gala Partè where I’ll be parading my Mo on the cat walk for a chance to be crowned the Man of Movember. If you want to be part of this great night you’ll have to purchase a Gala Parte ticket for AUD$10.00.

Cheers

Kevin

More info is available at www.movember.com

Movember is proudly grown by Motorola, Polaroid, Remington and VB.

Movember is proud partners with the Prostate Cancer Foundations of Australia and New Zealand and beyondblue – the national depression initiative (Australia).

kevin keirle, movember, beyondblue, australia, singapore, new zealand

You may have read a few days ago that our telephones were stuffing up around Gita Bayu and therefore so was our DSL: well would you believe… it intermittently happened over and over again these last few days. I've got Nelly and Tim McGraw singing "Over and Over Again" in my head as I type this. Argh I hate hip hop! There's usually enough time to post a few things to my del.icio.us page and to read my email but it cuts out and resets so often it's been driving me to insanity!

I couldn't upload Rubenerd Shows because they would cut out after the first 2 megs, so I've resorted to going all the way into the city to upload these shows. The WiFi here at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf is a bit unreliable but much, MUCH better than at home.

I'm thinking of a drastic way to rescue the show and bring it back to a regular schedule, it has to do with the way WordPress can submit posts with a time delay and recording shows a week in advance, but I'll discuss that in more detail next episode. Hopefully this way if there are delays the show will continue uninterrupted; the only downside I see with this is that I won't be able to talk about current events as easily.

Damn the monsoon season!

telekom malaysia, telecom malaysia, malaysia telecom, malaysia, wordpress, rubenerd show, over and over again, gita bayu, streamyx, dsl, adsl

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

10:30 – Screwed up telephone lines and DSL (deprivation, reading actual "newspapers"!), happy birthday to Mr Bunny, the Rubenerd Blog (featured on the Singapore LifeStyle Wiki AND a post from a Google Engineer!) and MannyTheMailMan on Rubenerd.

Recorded in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5. Attribution: Ruben Schade.