Rubenerd

Have you signed the petition yet?

un, united nations

Gita Bayu (our housing complex in Kuala Lumpur) hasn't been very lucky over the last couple of weeks. A slew of thunderstorms (is that the correct collective noun?) have repeatedly wreaked havoc on the telephone lines, causing outages and causing Ruben to be very upset. Of course with our DSL internet connection, no phone line meant no internet. Bummer.

Fortunately the latest outage that cost us internet over Friday afternoon, all of Saturday and all of Sunday seems to have been fixed just in the last few minutes. Telekom Malaysia sure is fast… I'm just thanking my lucky stars this extended outage didn't happen during the week when I do daily Rubenerd Shows; that would have been messy to work around

tmnet, tm, telekom malaysia, telecom malaysia, malaysia telecom, malaysia, kuala lumpur, selangor, telecommunications, gita bayu, dsl

I've gotta look into this! From 'Brary Web Diva:

I Want To linked to Logo54.com which allows you to use some very recognizable fonts to create your own logos! Star Wars, Harry Potter, Monsters Inc, Ferrari, Yahoo, or Nintendo are available.

Imagine this on the publicity for your next computer class?

Or How about the publicity for your next hot teen program?

typefaces, fonts, retro

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

10:30 – Things You Should Not Do! (Japanese Supermarkets, noodle bowls, moving escalators, face washes with "exfoliating microbeads"), Monty Python, Google searches ("daa files", "Rubenerd", "Fiona Lawrie", "haze aircon"), and living to eating to live.

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

Oh no! I was without internet for 6 minutes! Torture it was!

airzed, coffee bean and tea leaf, klcc, malaysia, kuala lumpur, coffee

I'm sure if you're anywhere near as obsessed about operating systems as me you would have seen this graph from the ComputerWorld website floating around before, but I thought I'd post it anyway:

While as a 6 year user of Apple I agree with the placement of Mac OS X, I'm not sure I really agree with some of these other rankings. I really don't think Windows XP improved usability over Windows 2000; in fact (as anyone who reads this blog knows) I still use Windows 2000 for my Windows apps because I think it's more stable, usable (and easier on the eyes) than XP. And I think Vista is a hell of a lot worse than both of them… having to wait 10 seconds for a new Windows Explorer window to appear just so it can have some tizzy eye candy? How does that improve usability?!

And what's with BeOS? Sure it didn't have many drivers but it was surely more usable than that. And is CP/M really that much worse than DOS? It sure as hell seemed more reliable to me than DOS! And where's Amiga Workbench? It would have to have at least a 6.5 ;). Or GeOS for the Commodore 128? Ah to hell with it, what about the BASIC interpreter for the VIC-20? Okay, scrap that last one.

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree with these rankings.

operating systems, vista, windows 2000, windows xp, geos, basic, cpm, cp/m, commodore, dos, mac os, mac os x

I'm in a bit of a pickle. I've been a proud and avid user of Bloglines for a while now; I like the idea of having all my feeds aggregated into one easy to view screen without having to download software and have it synchronise. I chose Bloglines because at the time it was the most common reader people were using, and the little "sub bloglines" button was everywhere making my life much easier.

It's a little less clear cut now though; after hearing some good reviews from Dadaist from Edinburgh (we went there in 1998, it's a very nice place) I'm also a user of Google Reader. The original Google Reader interface sucked which I thought was surprising given Google's previous track record, but their new interface is very polished and much less cluttered than Bloglines. I also like how you can read posts you've already seen before; instead of "deleting" posts you've already read like Bloglines does (forcing you to use the drop down menu to select previous posts), Google Reader merely shades the headings and borders a lighter colour.

The problem is I'm not quite ready to give up on Bloglines. For one thing I'm lazy and I have a ton of feeds on there that I need to move across… can Bloglines export OPML and can Google Reader import OPML? And of course the one real feature lacking in Google Reader is an automatic public page; with Bloglines I can point anyone to http://bloglines.com/public/rubenerd to see my susbcribed feeds, but for Google Reader you can only "star" individual items. Plus Bloglines still feels like home, if you get my drift.

Has anyone out there made the switch or refused to like I have so far? Any experience or advice?

bloglines, google, google reader, aggregators, rss, atom, rdf

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

10:00 – How to crash a MacBook Pro (hint: use Microsoft software!), Windows Vista crashing Parallels Desktop, television review (Air Crash Investigation, Crash Scene Investigation on Discovery Channel), and Elke thinking Ruben sucks.

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

Some useful websites I've for those who want to learn Ruby:

• Rubyist.net: Ruby User’s Guide(my favourite)
• LearnRuby.com: Web Site Recommendations
• Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide

ruby, ruby on rails, rails, oop

Okay, I've decided to take the plunge: I'm going to learn Ruby.

I must admit as a primarily Perl programmer who grew up in primary school using Q-BASIC and Pascal (and was forced to use Visual Basic in high school) my mind seems to been hard-wired for event driven and sequential programming. though I think I have a rough grasp of object orientation. I like how elegantly you can create an object, assign properties and tell them to do things. I'm less enthusiastic when it comes to polymorphism and all that rubbish, but I think that's largely due to my lack of experience!

I've wanted to for ages to learn Ruby because it comes from Japan, and of course it sounds the same as my name ;).

I'll let you know how I go.

#!/usr/bin/rubyputs "Hello Rubenerd Blog readers!n";

ruby, ruby on rails, rails, oop