Dedicated to my late brave, beautiful and silly mummy, Debra Ross. I love you mumster.

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Category archive for technology

Because archives are so much easier than having just hundreds of posts on the home page. I learned that the hard way.

Free and open source Mac software goodies

2008.10.07 – 11.51

One of the most common questions I’m asked by people moving over to the Mac (or FreeBSD as the case may be) is what software I use. Truthfully I’ve been mulling over creating a series of blog posts that I can update with new software as I find it for a while now. For want of a better phrase, my recent wipe and reinstall of Mac OS X Leopard on my MacBook Pro and subsequent reinstalling of software gave me the kick in the arse I needed to get this series of posts rolling!

This first post lists all the graphical free and open source software I use and love on my Macs. Over time I’ve been slowly replacing proprietary software with these gems and, while I admit I still need to use commercial software at times, this software is what I use to get virtually all my work done. Not only that, but they’re free as in beer and speech!

Part two (coming soon) consists of free and open source command line Terminal applications you can automatically install from MacPorts that I swear by and love using.

NOTE: This list is not exhaustive, it’s merely a list of free and open source software that I personally use and am endorsing! If you feel I’m missing something important though, feel free to post a comment.

I also understand there’s some overlap in functionality, i.e. Perian and VLC. This is because I’ve always believed in using the right tool for the job, not just using a particular tool because you happen be using it already.

Free and open source software for Mac
Icon Application Use
Camino Fast, lean Mac native Mozilla web browser
possible replacement for Safari, Firefox
UnifyCamino Makes Camino look more Leopard-ish
possible replacement for Tiger-ish Camino
MacVim Advanced Mac native Gvim text editor
possible replacement for TextEdit, Gvim
TrueCrypt Highly secure disk image encryption, supports AES, Twofish, Serpent
possible replacement for Disk Utility encryption
The GIMP Sophisticated photo and image editing
possible replacement for Preview, Photoshop
Inkscape SVG vector graphics editor
possible replacement for Illustrator… almost!
Juice Receiver More sophisticated and more flexible podcast client
possible replacement for iTunes for podcast downloads
Perian Super duper codec pack for QuickTime
possible replacement for dedicated DivX player
VLC I dub it my anime player ^_^
possible replacement for some QuickTime video
Handbrake Slick tool to rip DVDs
possible replacement for… coasters
MacPorts Easy way to install *nix software
possible replacement for… manually compiling!
Xquartz More current X11 for GIMP etc
possible replacement for default bundled X11
By Ruben Schade | Also posted in free and open source, mac os x, reviews | Comments (0)

AltaVista Babel Fish is no more

2008.10.05 – 22.18

Did that heading grab your attention? Yes, on the same day I posted a comment about how I dislike misleading headlines, I am guilty of doing the same thing. Aren’t I a little stinker?

Yes the language translation service Altavista Babel Fish is no more. If you click on Babel Fish Translation in the footer of the AltaVista home page, you’re redirected to Yahoo Babel Fish.

Yahoo Babelfish

One more nail in the coffin of what was once one of the web’s greatest search engines. I remember back when we first got internet access over 10 years ago, back when I was still a starry eyed child in primary school. AltaVista, HotBot, Looksmart, Infoseek (before it changed to Go), Lycos, Northern Light, GoTo (before Overture), Yahoo… they were sites you went to when you wanted to find things. I remember filling my bookmark toolbar in Netscape with links to these sites so whenever I needed to research an assignment, I’d try each engine one after the other. They all had different directories and different indexes (HotBot aside, but I preferred the style). Now we have Google, Yahoo, Ask… and… Google.

For what it’s worth, I much preferred AltaVista’s slick mountain logo. The new AltaVista is just a shell to Yahoo anyway.

AltaVista circa 1999

By Ruben Schade | Also posted in internet | Comments (2)

Misleading airliner news headlines are misleading

2008.10.05 – 16.07

This post has nothing to do with Czech Airlines
This post has nothing to do whatsoever with Czech Airlines.
Photo by "Captainm" on Wikimedia Commons

It’s been an eventful Sunday for some people in Australia: passengers across the country were stranded around 13:00 Australian Eastern / 12:30 Australian Central time due to a serious computer glitch in the Australian airline Jetstar’s check-in systems. According to a Jetstar spokesperson, a power glitch was probably responsible. And here’s me thinking airlines all had N+1 redundancy given that they essentially hold people’s lives in their hands everyday. Huh.

Aside from thanking my lucky stars (get it, Jetstar? Stars? Oh come on, that was a quality joke) that I wasn’t flying anywhere in Australia on Jetstar today, I found it amusing how different media outlets and newspapers reported the problem. The articles themselves were largely copied from press releases, but some of the headlines were obviously written to play up and overemphasise the severity of the situation through what I suspect was an intentional use of a double entendre.

ASIDE: For my ESL readers who don’t know, a double entendre refers to a phrase that has several meanings in the context that it was given, similar to a pun.

Jetstar Airbus A330 in Singapore
Jetstar Airbus A330 in Singapore. Photo by "My name" on Wikimedia Commons

For example, this is how the always reliable Adelaide ’tiser chose to report the problem:

Computer glitch delays Jetstar flights
A GLITCH in Jetstar’s computer check-in system has caused delays for passengers across Australia today.

The same story in the Sydney Morning Herald:

Jetstar check-in glitch hits passengers
A glitch in Jetstar’s computer check-in system has caused delays for passengers across Australia.

And here’s the same story on ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corp) News:

Thousands of Jetstar passengers stranded after crash
Thousands of Jetstar passengers are facing delays at airports across the country after a national outage of the airlines’ computer check-in system.

The ABC is the government funded news and television network that I tend to rely on more than the commercial news sources in Australia, though this sensationalist headline did remind me not to take everything I read at face value!

UPDATE: Before I even hit the Publish button for this post, the ABC has revised the headline to read: "Thousands of Jetstar passengers stranded after computer crash". Much better than their misleading and far more disastrous headline above, but still using the word "crash" seems to be a bit tacky when we’re discussing aviation.

I guess it’s true what John C. Dvorak has always said: the media can spin anything to make a situation sound better or worse by wrapping the facts in vastly different adjectives. Good thing I would never be caught dead doing anything like that here on the Rubenerd Blog. Uh, yeah.

By Ruben Schade | Also posted in australia, news | Comments (1)

Nitpicking open source and free… again

2008.10.02 – 13.44

Despite really like Ruby and Perl, due to time constraints and other obligations I’m still reluctantly using WordPress and PHP on most of my blog powered sites including this one. Until I make the desperatly wanted switch, WP news still affects me and I take a somewhat interested view of what’s going on. Not exactly a glowing endorsement, but then again it is the middle of the day here in Mawson Lakes so if I started glowing it would be a bit of a waste of energy.

It seems the widely used Revolution Theme for WordPress has gone open source. From the Weblog Tools Collection article:

Brian Gardner’s Revolution Theme for WordPress is going 100% Open Source. All the themes that are currently on Brian’s Revolution site will no longer be available as or October 31st and will be replaced with a set of new themes that will be developed and released under the GPL. The original Revolution themes will continue to be supported for those who have purchased them in the past.

Now I hate to be a nitpicker and certainly I consider myself more practical than ideological when it comes to the great software debate, but isn’t this an example of something becoming Free Software and not just Open Source? Aren’t most applications written in interpreted languages Open Source by their very nature because you can read the files? If Brian Gardner is releasing his themes under the GPL, then wouldn’t that make them Free (as in speech as well as beer) instead of just Open Source?

I guess it boils down to disclosure; if you purchase a theme from someone instead of downloading it gratis, there’s probably a clause limiting your right to redistribute or share the code. Still, isn’t that more of an issue of the software not being Free, rather than it not being Open Source?

In any event I congratulate Brian for going down this path. I suspect he will be getting far more users and interest after doing this, and he deserves all of it.

And now I’m off for a Caeser salad. I’ve been having cravings for Caeser salad. Is that healthy?

By Ruben Schade | Also posted in internet, programming, weblog | Comments (0)

My kingdom for a bigger notebook hard drive

2008.10.01 – 17.13

An ominous sign of things to come?
An ominous sign of things to come?

It’s crunch time: alas after months of neglect and with so many assignments and projects active and being worked on at any one time, my internal 149 gibibyte (aka 160 gigabyte) hard drive has finally been maxed out. Bummer!

Having used Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and Mac OS X on computers with drives that are nearing breaking point, I do appreciate how incredibly stable the BSDs and Mac are under capacity stress. By comparison the general wisdom with Windows (at least when I still exclusively used it before 2003) was that you must reserve at least 10% of your drive at all time to maintain stability, NTFS included. By comparison, this MacBook Pro has been close full for a while now and still only EyeTV and the slow as molasses Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac applications are capable of crashing it.

As I’ve discovered the hard way though, notebook computers present their own set of storage challenges! For most of my life I’ve been a desktop computer user; it was only in 2006 when I made the decision as a computer science student studying overseas that a souped up notebook computer would make more sense for taking around to different houses and around campus than a new desktop.

Of course the problem with said notebook computers is that you can’t just easily slide in an extra hard drive when your existing one starts to fill up! Sure you can buy external drives, but they still won’t match the performance of the internal drive. What happens then is I tend to backup material to the external drives, but projects I’m compiling, editing video for or otherwise working on end up staying on the internal drive.

VMware Fusion 2.0 beta 2 New Virtual Machine Assistant
What can I say, I love toying around and exploring operating systems!

This is also a problem for virtual machines which I spend lots of time using and writing about. To satisfy my own addiction and fanaticism for studying operating systems, as well as for my work which involves compiling and testing applications, I have multiple VMs on this internal drive. Running these virtual machines on an external drive is completely out of the question given the performance would really, really suffer. Having 12 virtual machines which combined take up 72GiB on a 149GiB notebook drive though is also completely out of the question!

With my desktops in the past I tended to dedicate a smaller drive with the fastest RPM for the operating system and two larger, equally sized drives mirroring each other (later using RAID instead of software) for the data. On my current desktop back in Singapore which I SSH and SFTP into from here in Adelaide I have FreeBSD 7.0 AMD64 on its own dedicated, 10,000RPM SATAII drive with 32MiB of cache shared with binaries, and two 7,200 RPM drives for the home directories, port collections, documentation and served data. Ideally I’d love to have another super fast drive just for /swap too!

On this laptop I’ve got everything under the sun on one drive. Perhaps partitioning the drive and assigning the /Users directory to a secondary partition might help to compartmentalise the information and improve performance. On BSD and Linux it’s trivial to assign the /home directory to a separate volume, on Mac OS X I’m not so sure. Seems like I have some homework ahead of me!

This much taken up, on a 149GiB internal notebook drive. Bummer!
This much taken up… on a 149GiB internal notebook drive.

Of course it probably wouldn’t hurt cleaning this drive out either. I have a few Ruby scripts which I run each afternoon which cleans up my desktop and puts files in the appropriate places, but it can’t determine what is safe to delete and what isn’t. I need an electronic secretary I think. Make someone sign a NDA, then go through my drive and get rid of things. No, wait… perhaps that isn’t such a good idea.

As my fabulous father always says after ringing me from his office in Singapore which has more paper, books, phone receivers, emails and blood pressure tablets than Parliament House: "All I need is a time machine Ruben… then I’d work just fine"

By Ruben Schade | Also posted in bsd, hardware, mac os x | Comments (1)

Happy 10th birthday wishes for Google

2008.09.27 – 16.09

Happy 10th birthday Google!

Just a brief post to send my 10th birthday wishes to Google. Not sure how well you’ve lived up to your motto of doing no evil, but you’ve nonetheless changed the world. Here’s to the next ten years guys :-).

By Ruben Schade | Also posted in internet | Comments (0)

Fun with the Mac OS X weather widget

2008.09.27 – 11.29

While rearranging my Dashboard widgets on my MacBook Pro this morning, I accidently stumbled upon a feature in the Weather widget which upon later investigation has already been well documented. At least I felt like an electronic archaeologist for a few minutes!

Regular Dashboard widget showing weather in Mawson Lakes, South Australia
Regular Dashboard widget showing weather in Mawson Lakes, South Australia

If you haven’t tried this out already though, give it a shot:

  1. Fire up your Dashboard, usually with the F12 key
  2. Drag a new Weather widget from the widget bar onto the Dashboard
  3. Hold down the Command/Apple and Alt/Option keys

You now have a widget with the weather set to "Nowhere", and by clicking the picture in the top centre you can change the weather conditions. It was cold and raining before in Rubenerd Nowhere, now it’s snowing!

Altered Dashboard widget showing rain in Nowhere

Altered Dashboard widget showing snow in Nowhere

By Ruben Schade | Also posted in how-to, mac os x | Comments (0)

BeOS, the Amiga, now the iPhone?

2008.09.26 – 11.53

It hurts the brain!
It hurts the brain!

I’ve always thought it’s a tragedy when a beautiful and elegant computer or other device is created that is such a pleasure to use and above everything else on the market, only to be snuffed out or not taken seriously when inept management and legal teams mess up their customer base and public perception by doing daft things, or conversely not doing enough. The Commodore Amiga is one example. The Swatch Smart car is another. BeOS is another. I could go on and on.

Unfortunately it seems Apple’s legal team is doing the same thing with the iPhone. Hooray.

As I’ve recently discussed on Rubenerd Show 252 and in an earlier post here, I’ve made clear how much I love my new toy and how it’s quite possibly the greatest gadget I’ve ever owned. This doesn’t mean I have not been aware of some head-smackingly stupid decisions on Apple’s part over the last few months, not least the issue with blocking some legitimate software from appearing on their Application Store. For those who don’t know what I’m taking about, here’s a summary from Gizmodo dated 12th September:

The latest casualty in Apple’s App Store blacklisting is Podcaster. A native app built according to exact SDK specifications, it goes beyond its creator’s web-bound streaming-only Podcaster.fm by letting you download and manage podcasts in a nice straightforward interface. Insidious, right? Apple thought so.

According to Podcaster’s blog, Apple explained why it booted Podcaster from the App Store: “Since Podcaster assists in the distribution of podcasts, it duplicates the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes.”

I don’t know what person in Apple thought blocking applications that supposedly copy some functionality in their own software was a good idea from a technical or public relations standpoint, but I suspect the dope their smoking must be awfully powerful!

If this wasn’t ridiculous enough, my forehead hurt even more this morning by bashing it on the table in front of me when I read that not only are Apple blocking some applications for the dubious reason stated above, but their even forcing blocked application developers to keep their mouths shut about it! Do they honestly think this will save them from this public relations nightmare: just censor the people getting screwed over? According to Tech Radar this morning:

Apple has decided that enough is enough when it comes to people publishing the reasons they have had their applications rejected from the App Store.

Where before people wanted to highlight the reasons why their app had been rejected, Apple no longer wants to have its reputation sullied in this manner.

Every time a user now gets a rejection, the message: THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS MESSAGE IS UNDER NON-DISCLOSURE is displayed clearly in the letter.

I dislike the Google Android platform both from a technical and usability standpoint and think the devices they run on look like they came out of a 1996 computer magazine catalogue, but the one thing they have going for them is that it’s a (mostly) open platform without this nonsense. I prefer using the iPhone but I’m hoping Google can pick up their game and become a real competitor to get Apple back on track.

In the meantime Apple, please don’t repeat history as with so many of the other brilliant software and hardware devices I mentioned at the beginning by stuffing up your device with this nonsense! You’ve already shot yourselves in the foot twice already, for heavens sake, you’re running out of limbs!

Screenshot from my iPhone

By Ruben Schade | Also posted in apple, news, phones, rant | Comments (2)
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