• Twitter
• Jaiku
• Pownce
• Flickr
• Google Reader
• del.icio.us
• Whole Wheat Radio
• Last.fm
• Wikipedia
• Folding@Home
• BSDForums.org
• Facebook

This list is a work in progress, and allows me to pass off something to help me remember things as a legitimate blog post… not that I have bad memory or anything. By the way, this list is a work in progress.

The problem is, unlike the Pownce password field, Jaiku needs your API key, not your password. To find out what your API key is, login to Jaiku and click the API link at the bottom of the page. The page that appears will have your API key.

Enter your Jaiku username and the API key into the two text boxes in Twhirl, then enjoy having your tweets appearing on more than one site! This means you can keep in touch with people on three separate services, plus it makes you look like you’re putting even more effort into your Web 8.0 life, or whatever version the 1337 media people have decided to assign to the intertubes now.

These are my profiles if you’re interested on Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce.

Given the fact I’m in the 700+ range of posts, there are some posts which have the same number as famous Boeing airliners. Being a huge fan of commercial aviation, I figured I’d create some small posts about these planes. I missed the boat on the 707/720 and 727 (no, I’m sorry the 717 was the MD-95!) but I did do one on the Boeing 737.

The first things

The Boeing 747 is perhaps the most recognisable and well known commercial airliner (aside from the Concorde and the Spruce Goose!). It was the world’s first wide-bodied airliner and one of the earlist to use huge, high bypass turbofan engines which were much quieter and more fuel efficient than the slimmer but much more noisy and smoke producing turbojets of earlier planes.

Why the 747 has that "hump"

The placement of the cockpit on a deck above the primary seating area (on the "hump" as it were) was not done initially to allow for a second deck of passengers, but purely for helping with the transport of cargo.

Having the cockpit in a second level allowed the main nose area of the 747 to open up like a hinge: this meant large cargo containers could easily be loaded and offloaded. It also helped to protect the pilots from containers crushing them from behind if the plane went into free-fall or crashed. Ouch!

Future proofing for SSTs

The 747 was deliberately designed to be future proof for airlines that purchased them. At the time, Boeing theorised that most people would be flying in supersonic airliners from the 1970s onwards, so they designed the 747 with cargo friendly features so that passenger versions could easily be converted into freighters in the future. Therefore they could sell more planes to airlines with the assurance they’d still be useful when SSTs (super sonic transports, like Concorde) took over.

Of course, we all know that SSTs were a colossal flop, but at the time they seemed like the future.

Versions

The initial 747-100 (1970) was designed with a very small "hump" which was used as a passenger relaxation area and bar; according to Wikipedia Boeing simply didn’t know what to do with that small amount of space! The 747-200 (1971) replaced the lounge with regular passenger seating, and the 747SP (1976) (for special performance) was created with a shorter fuselage to increase range.

The 747-300 (1980) was the first of the next generation of 747s which had a SUD (stretched upper deck) as default which allowed for more seating on the top deck; it also had more efficient engines and a greater range. The 747-400 (1989) was radically redesigned with more advanced electronics, a glass cockpit (replacing mechanical dials with computer screens) and winglets to improve fuel efficiency and range.

The 747-8 is the intended successor expected to enter service in 2010 to compete with the Airbus A380. Given industry delays, we can expect it sometime in 2094.

However if you click View Page Source in the View menu, you can clearly see the link to the web feed:

I can’t really think why it shouldn’t find it. Perhaps Camino has trouble with Atom feeds as opposed to RSS. When I have some more time I’ll see if I can reproduce the error somehow.

I guess I’ve always been the type of person who likes collecting things, perhaps a bit too much for his own good.

Case in point I reinstalled Leopard on my MacBook Pro this evening so I could reformat the drive as case sensitive. As I was about to copy over my iTunes music library from one of my backup drives I noticed big the folder was, and how huge the Podcast folder had become!

I guess I’ve been downloading and listening to podcasts since early 2005, and they do build up! The question is though, what do I do with all of them? Some of the shows in this folder are no longer being produced or are even available anymore I think, and it’d be a shame to delete this collection after downloading for so long. In a nostalgic way it’s fun to listen back to old shows to see what people thought was exciting a few years ago. Look, it’s an iPod that plays video! Google will never buy YouTube! Ants on Mars! Irn-Bru in New York!

It also raises another question: if I don’t delete this folder, how large will it be in 2009? 2010? 2020? Will I need to contemplate buying even more terabyte hard drives or invest in a Blu-Ray burner and stacks of double sided discs just for this stuff?

So much for podcasts being free right? :-).

I’m so sorry, hugs from Elke and I. I’ve read what you posted on this site about your mum over the years, she sounded like a upstanding, warm, beautiful and very special person.

Having just lost our mummy recently we know probably the last thing you want to read is sad words, so all we’ll say is that we know you’ve damn well done your mum proud. Have a safe and speedy journey to Ohio, we’ll all keep the Wheaty fires burning until you get back.

Peace and love to you and your family James.

Love Ruben and Elke

Shared Items allows you to show people exactly what you’re reading. If you’re reading a particular blog entry, news story or Chuck Norris joke in Google Reader and find it interesting, you can click the Share link in the post’s footer and it magically appears on your Shared Items page which you can give people the link for. It’s really very long and ugly, so I created a symlink to make it easier (especially for me!) to remember:

http://rubenerd.com/googlereader/

One particularly important feature they added recently was the ability to change the style of your Shared Items page. Mine now includes a cute fish tank in the header, very useful.

Is it just me, or does that sign look like it was taken right out of a set from Happy Days? No wait, the face looks retro futuristic. Whatever it is, I want it!

ASIDE: Wish I had found that image less than 20 minutes ago, it would have perfect for a post on NFS time synchronising.

But what I’m really interested in is their colour glass wall cubes. Anyone interested in buying me two dozen?

They’re creations of Jake Rosenfield of the Atlantic Neon Company based in Baltimore, Maryland in the States. He’s also got some great photos of his workshop on his site.

NTP stands for Ninja Tactical Peoples Network Time Protocol and is a system you can use to keep your system clock accurate by synchronizing it with a time server.

ASIDE: According to Wikipedia its one of the earliest internet protocols still being actively used, having been defined in the mid 1980s… only just a few years before I was come to think of it. Cool.

You’ll probably want to use a time server that’s geographically closer to you for better accuracy, but adding a few extra doesn’t hurt and indeed the relevant NFS applications can determine which is more accurate. This site has a list of freely available time server addresses.

NTP on FreeBSD and NetBSD makes use of two related tools:

ntpdate

ntpdate updates your system clock from a specified server, and is generally set to run when you boot your computer. Therefore if you shutdown and start your machine frequently it will be run more often and can provide sufficient time synchronisation.

On either BSD append the following lines to /etc/rc.conf:
FreeBSD: ntpdate_enable="YES", ntpdate_flags="servers..."
NetBSD: ntpdate=YES, ntpdate_hosts="servers..."

ntpd

If your computer runs for longer that several days at a time, it’s best to configure the ntpd daemon. It makes changes to your clock by comparing it’s current value to a specified server or servers.

Open your /etc/rc.conf file again and append the following lines:
FreeBSD: ntpd_enable="YES"
NetBSD: ntpd=YES

Then create a new /etc/ntp.conf and fill in your server details, along with the location of a file to record the time drift that you know won’t be overwritten or changed by another process, and if you prefer a line to prevent access to your NTP server from other computers:

server ntp.example.com prefer
server ntp.example.org
server ntp.example.net

driftfile /var/db/ntp.drift (not needed for > FreeBSD 6.2)
restrict default ignore

For more information and configuration options, consult the ntpdate and ntpd manual pages, as well as the NTP chapters in the FreeBSD Handbook, and NetBSD Guide. BSD handbook documentation rocks!

AFTERWORD: If you really need to run a version of FreeBSD prior to 5.x, replace ntpd_enable with xntpd_enable.

Vodafone today announced it has signed an agreement with Apple to sell the iPhone in ten of its markets around the globe. Later this year, Vodafone customers in Australia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey will be able to purchase the iPhone for use on the Vodafone network.

While I’ve been a very happy Aussie Vodafone customer for a while now, I’m just glad and infintely relieved that Telstra won’t be the exclusive distributor! I know they’d figure out a way to stuff it up if given the chance.

If they sell them unlocked, I’ll be able to use it in Singapore too :).

Before I go any further I have to say this right up front: FreeBSD in the mobile space has come a long way. Despite my preference for the BSDs I always told people up until recently that they were better off running a flavour of Linux such as Slackware or Gentoo (my two preferred distributions) if they wanted to run a free OS that was a bit more technical and capable on their laptops.

Not any more! I popped in a home burned CD of the latest release of FreeBSD (7.0-RELEASE) and booted the installer and was absolutely blown away by the hardware support. Not only did it detect the internal 10/100 ethernet port and the ATI graphics but the PCMCIA wireless card which has always been iffy in past experiences. After installing, booting for the first time, updating the base system, installing Gnome2-lite from ports and configuring Xorg I had a slick and completely usable desktop (rearranged to resemble Leopard of course!):

What also really blows me away is how responsive all the applications are, especially on a fully fledged DE like Gnome (which itself only takes a few seconds to start) and on such conservative hardware: granted I almost tripled the amount of built in memory from 128MiB to 320MiB and installed a new hard drive with a much larger cache than the previous stock!

I can really see myself using this instead of my MacBook Pro in settings such as coffee shops or for lectures where I’m only running a local wiki for note taking, editing source code and using email; the marketing for the Asus EeePC and the MacBook Air is starting to sink in it seems! I could have used Xfce, Fluxbox or the like, but I’m so impressed with Gnome’s performance as is, currently I don’t see the need.

I’m still in the early stages of setting this machine up with its new OS and DE, but I’ll post more information as I find out. On my current to do list: figure out if and how the "soft buttons" above the regular keyboard can be used somehow, getting high resolution console support compiled into the kernel and figuring out how to adjust the screen brightness on the fly. I haven’t tested the built-in modem yet as I haven’t needed it, but potentially getting that set up to send faxes would be useful too.

I thought I’d celebrate this useless post by espousing some facts on the Boeing 737 which, ironically, has the same family model number as this post.

A late Ansett Australia Boeing 737-377 showing the weird landing gear wells and triangular engines, by Frank Schaefer

Sales

The 737 is the greatest selling aircraft family of all time; placing the value of the design even higher than the revenues from Jim Kloss Domestic Airways before he sold out to Alaska Air. Wondered how he managed to buy all that land and audio equipment? Now you know!

Wikipedia claims that since 1967 there have been over 7,800 ordered and over 5,600 delivered (as of 2008), there are over 1,250 of the type airborne at any given time and on average a 737 departs or lands somewhere every five seconds.

Weird design!

Unlike virtually any other modern jetliners, the landing gear in the 737 aren’t covered by any doors, they retract into special wells and become flush with the fuselage.

The turbofans are also weird in that they’re not circular or elliptical, but almost a rounded triangle shape! This was due to the fact that the earlier generation 737’s from the 1960s used long, thin turbojets wheras the more modern airframes use CFM56’s turbofans which are shorter and much wider, and therefore require a hell of a lot more ground clearance!

Design nostaligia

The cockpit section (at least externally) is close to identical to the Boeing 727 trijet and the 707, America’s first and the world’s earliest commercially successful jet airliner from 1958!

These three designs also share the same fuselage width, and their use of tires on the landing gear and doors to enter and exit the aircraft.

More than you ever thought you needed to know, or wanted to know I’m sure. What can I say, I’m a guy with a lot of varying, unrelated and highly unnecessary interests!

737 flying over Adelaide :). Taken by David Morrell.
The black building right in the background in the CBD is where my office at Oracle was. It really is a beautiful city.

There are several coping mechanisms that most blogging software come with to deal with this problem: nested categories and tags. With nested categories, you can apply very specific topic pointers to posts which are then contained in more general categories, such as my BSD category within Free and Open Source. This potentially allows you to “collapse” the hundreds of sub-categories you accumulate into just a handful of smaller categories, while still keeping your insane desire for the former satisfied. If you really were obsessed you could have sub-sub-categories within sub-categories, heck even sub-sub-sub-categories within… you get the idea.

Tags are an interesting, if overused and abused, Flickr-inspired development. They let you assign even more specific metadata attributes to your posts which make them not only easier to find on your own site, but in specialised blog searching sites such as Technorati. Not only that but you can be as specific as you like without cluttering up your category lists: for example a post on FreeBSD could be tagged FreeBSD, FreeBSD 7.0 RELEASE, BSD, Kenny Rogers, operating systems, Unix-like and so forth.

idolmaster, xenoglossia, anime, funny, silly, implausible, ridiculous premise, tounge-in-cheek, a-real-stretch, idols-are-generally-not-scientists

ASIDE: For what it’s worth, most of the new unique visitors that make their way to this blog come through via tags. Strange but true!

Then we come to Wikis. I maintain my own locally installed MediaWiki/MySQL system on my laptop (for using as the ultimate note taking application!), as well as my course’s local intranet MediaWiki/PostgreSQL install for collaboration and I’m a proud contributer over on Whole Wheat Radio’s wiki system.

The biggest problem I have with MediaWiki is the ease in which I can assign practically everything to a category, and then categories within categories… within categories within categories! For borderline obsessive compulsive people it’s very tempting to over use them! That said though, MediaWiki generally does a good job with organising them, and allowing you to click through lists of pages within a category you’ve browsed to is very convenient.

bugs-bunny, hilarious, sarcastic, witty, mel-blanc, evil, merrie-melodies, bugs, warner-brothers, better-than-disney, looney-tunes, tex-avery, fun, cheeky, greatest-cartoons-ever

I guess my very open ended questions would be (for the sake of my university peers!): is it possible to over categorise a system? Do you have any tips on how you cope with the temptation to start more categories? Is it just a matter of setting limits? Or is Ruben just obsessed and all of you fine people have no trouble with this whatsoever?

ASIDE: Before I started using Macs as my primary machines I used Office 97 on my Windows machines. Even in 2003, I saw no compelling reason to use anything newer than Excel 97!

Well here we are in 2008 and by chance while I was pouring through my backups trying to find an old text file, I found that old Excel spreadsheet file and was absolutely flabbergasted (is that a word?) by the hard disk sizes! So to put things into perspective I decided to quickly open the file in Gnumeric and add data from my recent drives, and just for fun the data from some of our older machines (I didn’t bother with my dad’s AT or anything older!).

File sizes are shown in the hard disk manufacturer’s advertised sizes which assume 1 kilobyte = 1000 bytes

And what would these four capacities look like in comparison to each other if they were put into a fun but fairly useless graph?

The problem is in it’s default configuration, Mac OS X Leopard doesn’t display network mounted devices on the desktop along with your other drives. As someone who uses the icons on his desktop to keep track of what his machine is connected to, it can be very confusing!

The solution is:

1. Click on the Finder menu and choose Preferences... or hit [Command] [,]
2. In the General tab under "Show these items on the Desktop:", check Connected servers.

Low and behold, all the network drives you have mounted appear on the desktop, complete with the new cute little hand holding icons:

As you can see, the mounted network volumes shown in the Terminal window are now being mapped on the desktop automagically. Which brings up an inevitable security question: do I always have my icons that big? Heavens no, it’s just so you can see the icons more clearly! In fact I usually have my icons at a paltry 48px (that is small by KDE and Mac OS X standards!).

ASIDE: I refer specifically to Leopard hiding network drives on the desktop because I started using network drives after I upgraded to Tiger, so I haven’t ever used them with earlier versions of OS X. They might be in the same boat.

]]> http://rubenerdshow.com/blog/p1150/feed/ http://rubenerdshow.com/blog/p1149/ http://rubenerdshow.com/blog/p1149/#comments Sun, 04 May 2008 03:42:10 +0000 Ruben Schade http://rubenerdshow.com/blog/?p=1149

UPDATE: The Whole Wheat Radio wiki is back online again.

With the Whole Wheat Radio outage in effect I decided to create some mockup pages outlining some ideas over on my university intranet’s [sic] MediaWiki installation, but after some vocal opposition I decided to whip up a temporary WWR wiki testbed over at http://rubenerd.com/projects/wwr. Feel free to mess around there with WWR related whatnot while the mothership is offline and you have a Sunday morning to kill as I do right now!

If you’re using a wiki under similar circumstances and you don’t need or want anonymous edits compared to a bigger, more collaborative effort like Wikipedia, all it takes is appending one line to your ./LocalSettings.php file:

# Block edits by anonymous users
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false;

I know, I know… that was actually TWO lines, but the point is only the last line actually invokes the functionality described, the first is just a comment… which you should always include. Okay, okay I see your point.

If I believed in a God, omniscient deity or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I’d be thanking him, her or it right now because it seems Microsoft has backed out of their plan to purchase Yahoo! According to Yahoo News (I trust they have their facts straight about themselves!), the end of Steve Ballmer’s letter to Jerry Yang at Yahoo stated that:

"… clearly a deal is not to be."

After my initial overjoyed excitement died down though, I started thinking rationally again. Given Microsoft’s many, many shady and dubious dealings in the past and their general disregard for business ethics I can’t help but think they’re going to try something else. Perhaps they’re hoping Yahoo will continue to lose market share in search and buy them in a year or so when they’re valued for less. Perhaps they’ve started buying off board directors in the hopes that their nagging will eventually drive Jerry Yang insane and will force him to ask Microsoft if the offer can still be accepted.

Plus, what ever happed to this?

I am really pleased that my Flickr, del.icio.us and Yahoo OpenID accounts are all safe after all, though I’m still being cautiously optimistic. Then again coming from a pessimist when it comes to such business deals, that’s probably high praise from me!

Case in point for the former, the current outage over at Whole Wheat Radio has forced me to temporarily consider other music sources I can listen to over the period of a day in the background while I do studies. It’s a pickle of a dilly.

I tuned into three different terrestrial radio stations: one was playing Fergie (what an insult to ears everywhere!), the second the two DJs were discussing an up and coming concert by a group who can’t sing, and the third was playing a Glenn Miller Orchestra song. At the risk of sounding like an old fart already, take a guess which one I stuck with!

If you’re in Singapore, Gold 90.5FM is a poor substitute to WWR, but they do play some good stuff. Even if their website sucks harder than an industrial vacuum cleaner! Damn I miss the Wiki.

For some smooth evening chill, also check out An Evening with Dadaist Cabaret. The shows are long enough to be interesting and full of good stuff, while still being a manageable enough size to fit on an iPod, or whatever other portable audio device you may be using. I’m still waiting for a music wristwatch that’s also a coffee machine. That would be sweet.

For the time being too I’m also listening to my Whole Wheat Radio iTunes playlist which includes all the CDs I’ve got so far from it including Kevin So, Greg Brown, The Philadelphia Jug Band, The Renovators, Guy Clark and hopefully soon Marian Call when the latest parcel arrives! There’s only so many times I can listen to these fine folks mashed up together and on random before it starts to feel like a scaled down WWR though. And what if I want to say hello to Jimbob, Kelli, Atuuschaw, RubenBot5000 (he’s my robot who chats after midnight Singapore time), Sparkit, FlyingTrout and more… damn I feel like some of my family has gone!

Here’s hoping Whole Wheat will be able to get back up soon. Give ‘em hell Jim!

It’s a fresh new May month already, isn’t that crazy? We’re almost half way through 2008!

Get it? She’s Mai? Get it? Get it? Hey, I thought it was funny.

Try them out for yourself, and post a comment here if you do well at them, I’d be fascinated to see how people with actual lives do on them! I really should have done better in these myself, guess I hadn’t had enough coffee first :-).

Geek Test

96% Geek

Not impressed with my result, they didn’t ask any questions about how few girlfriends/boyfriends you’ve had, or how much coffee you drink, or how many shirts with UNIX commands on them you have. I would have kicked arse with those!

Apple Addiction Test

89%How Addicted to Apple Are You?

This is probably an accurate result! As much as I really, really love Apple computers and other devices, I’m not completely addicted to them. Well, almost!

Internet Quiz

Dang, if only they didn’t have questions about social networks, the protocol questions were easy!

I haven’t been drinking any more coffee that I usually do, and certainly none in the late afternoon or evening. Even my sister seems to have been having trouble as of late herself for similar reasons.

I think I need a change of scenery. Perhaps I’ll change my desktop environment on one of my other machines from KDE to GNOME, just to shake things up (I liked my week long GNOME trial more than I thought I would, though I think I’ll keep KDE on my primary FreeBSD machine for now). I’ll uninstall Mono though once it attaches itself.

Perhaps I’ll try doing some morning hikes around Sungei Buloh instead of the usual Bukit Timah park as well. I’m a wild guy!

• AIM support
• coloured labels
• group chat
• new emoticons
• free IMAP
• view images as a slideshow
• increased attachment limit
• … and lots more stuff

However Konqueror (my favourite browser) is still limited to the basic HTML interface. For now it’s perfectly fine though, I still dislike most AJAX and prefer being served static pages anyway, they’re far more reliable and act in a more predictable way.

I just wish there was a way to remove the "you are a second class citizen on our service that we don’t care as much about" message from the top of the screen…

Wait a minute, it’s US Dollars. They could tell I had a Singaporean IP address so they thought they’d do some misleading advertising?

Wait a minute, it’s a Dell.

Wait a minute, it’s a Vostro! I reiterate from my Twitter post in January:

Which marketing genius came up with the name “Dell Vostro”? Sounds like a disease of the brainstem.

Never mind, I don’t want it for 579 Singapore Dollars. Or US Dollars. Or whatever the currency is. I need a cup of coffee!

When you load your Air application, instead of displaying what you told it to, Air prompts you with an update screen… almost every time. What if I have a good reason for not wanting to update yet? And not only that, but if you’re using a limited account for security reasons, as usual you enter your username and password for you administrative account, and as usual Air hangs during the update and you have to force quit. Adobe Air is the only application which requires me to log into my administrative account at all, just to update it and log out again.

You could say that I’m bitter than Adobe still refuses to release a 64 bit version of Flash, or any version of Flash on FreeBSD at all. That’s probably true. But I can confidently say that I’m only putting up with Air because Twhirl is the best graphical Twitter client. I certainly won’t be developing anything serious with it myself, nor will I be actively looking for more Air apps.

Adobe’s idea for a cross platform application framework that’s friendly to web developers was a great idea, but alas it seems to have failed in its implementation.

Summary if you don’t have time to read all of this: Excel 2008 for Mac is a piece of junk and slower than Excel 2004 which needed Rosetta! Gnumeric is my new spreadsheet best friend, provided they could fix a few tiny usability problems.

You may have read my fun with trying to download a trial version of iWork 2008 from Apple and having it fail repeatedly. It seems the adventure was just beginning!

A bit of background first (I’ve chopped this down from 3 paragraphs down to this one!), I’ve been working on a spreadsheet for over a month now that contains information on the results of some GCC optimisations for various different platforms, programming languages and whatnot. The spreadsheet contains in excess of 36,000+ lines of data and reaches to row BA.

Now here comes the kicker: I’ve been editing this spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel 2004 on my MacBook Pro. Excel is the last Microsoft application I use on a regular basis, mostly because it’s the last Office app that I haven’t been able to replace (Word, PowerPoint and Access have been easy!).

I figured then it was high time to try out some alternatives for Excel both on my Mac and on my FreeBSD desktop. I tested Kspread, Gnumeric and OpenOffice on FreeBSD, and NeoOffice, iWork 2008 and a purchased copy of Microsoft Excel 2008. My three specific requirements, aside from the need for fast general calculation speeds, decent user interface and so forth:

Smooth scrolling speed

This may sound trivial, but I spend a huge amount of time scrolling through lines of data and it’s downright maddening when you have to wait for the cursor to catch up to where you are!

Fast floating point calculations

I don’t think I need to explain!

Professional looking charts

A lot of data I summarise from this spreadsheet is being done so I can include it in reports and whatnot. Crappy pixellated charts that look like they were done in an early 1990s spreadsheet app don’t cut it

That’s a lot of cells! Wait, that’s a piano, never mind!

The results? Not one of the spreadsheets on offer today do all three of these well! Here are my anecdotal experiences using this software on a MacBook Pro 2.0GHz with 2.0GiB of RAM, and a Intel Core 2 Duo 8400 3GHz FreeBSD box with 4.0GiB or RAM:

Kspread

THE GOOD: Kspread is the KDE project’s spreadsheet application that’s bundled with the KOffice package. Therefore the the interface is clean, very slick and obviously fits well into my KDE desktop on my FreeBSD box. And of course it’s free and open source software!

THE BAD: It won’t open my huge spreadsheet without crashing. That’s a problem! Also the charts it generated are pixellated and look quite dated, and scrolling is very jittery. It’s a shame.

CONCLUSION: Has lots of potential, and is certainly the prettiest and easiest to use interface of any spreadsheet app, but currently it has too many shortcomings for me to consider it seriously.

Gnumeric

THE GOOD: It’s free and open source software, the interface is uncluttered and slick, the charts look smooth and it can open my gigantic spreadsheet without too much trouble.

THE BAD: Scrolling is very jittery even with plenty of RAM, and it has the insanely irritating habit of scrolling long since I stopped using the mouse scroll wheel or arrow keyboard keys. It offshoots everything I scroll to, sometimes by as many as 100 rows!

CONCLUSION: It’s a huge shame, if this scrolling issue were fixed I could see myself using this as my primary spreadsheet application. Perhaps for smaller sheets with less numbers I could use it now, and maybe I will.

OpenOffice.org Calc and NeoOffice Calc

THE GOOD: By far they have the closest feature set to Microsoft Excel, the charts they generate look half-decent and they can both open my giant spreadsheet with ease. They’re also both free and open source software!

THE BAD: Scrolling is painfully slow, and inconsistent. They can scroll for a few rows just fine, but then will refuse to move, then will splutter back to life again. It makes me seasick! They also are huge memory hogs considering their abilities. Gnumeric can do most of what they can in a fraction of the memory and executable size.

CONCLUSION: As much as I’ve tried to like OpenOffice and NeoOffice for everything I do, unfortunately their spreadsheets just aren’t as polished from my own experience compared to their word processors and presentation apps. And their speed is hardly stellar.

Apple iWork Numbers

THE GOOD: The interface is gorgeous as we would all expect from Apple software, and the charts it generates are absolutely stunning!

THE BAD: It can’t open my giant spreadsheet. It doesn’t crash or overload itself, it just displays a message box saying the spreadsheet I told it to open "is too large", then quits.

CONCLUSION: I’d love to be able to use Numbers, but if it can’t open my work because of a size constraint I just can’t seriously consider it.

Microsoft Excel for Mac 2004

THE GOOD: The interface is half-decent (I’ve always thought Office for Mac was unusually good compared to pretty much all the other junk they produce) and scrolls beautifully without any hickups despite being a PowerPC app running under Rosetta!

THE BAD: Obviously not the latest version so support could run out soon, being a PowerPC app makes it slower. Was expensive too, and it certainly isn’t free or open source software. Generates XLS files which I need to manually convert to an ODF file.

CONCLUSION: It’s a shame Microsoft couldn’t just recompile this as an Intel app. I know it’s not as easy as that, but currently from a usability standpoint it’s still the best spreadsheet app on Mac.

No screenshot yet, because Excel 2008 deleted my Excel 2004 installation!

Microsoft Excel for Mac 2008

THE GOOD: It can open my spreadsheet without trouble. Uh, that’s pretty much it.

THE BAD: It is SLOW! I mean really, really, frustratingly slow! This is a native Intel Mac app, and it scrolls, calculates and refreshes values slower than Excel 2004 which was a PowerPC app! Not to mention it’s noticeably slower than any of the other spreadsheet apps in this review, and not by a small amount. And to top it off, I can’t use it for university because VBA and therefore the Analysis Tool Pak isn’t included! What a joke!!

CONCLUSION: I was expecting this Intel version of Excel to be faster than the PowerPC 2004 version but it managed to be slower! I couldn’t believe it! If I need to hold on to Excel, I’ll need to keep my copy of Office 2004 for Mac handy. How silly is that?

So there’s my anecdotal reviews of these spreadsheet applications. For everything I do now I’m going to use Gnumeric because it supports more of my complex formulas, generates nice charts and is free and open source software. For my larger, more complicated spreadsheets though I’ll need to stick with Microsoft Excel 2004 for Mac, though hopefully that will change.

Fortunately my primary desktop machine didn’t understand my sarcasm or sense of humour and decided to let me know what it was all about:

So FreeBSD actually played a part in their decision! Well okay it was Unix-like operating systems in general, but good nonetheless right?

Anyway from a break from programming somehow I got onto the Global Security Organisation website which has detailed listings of registard tonnage and ships of different countries, including a graphical comparison of Cunard’s latest flagship RMS Queen Mary 2 with the Titanic which everyone knows about. I knew this ship was big, but I had no idea she was that large!

It’s amazing that the waterline level is roughly even on each of them too. I wouldn’t have thought the use of stabalisers and being made of lighter and stronger materials would be enough too keep that huge thing upright!

In a way I’m relieved, but in a way I’m disappointed. Obviously they don’t consider me enough of a threat to their Great Firewall nor to their squeaky clean media. I’m obviously not doing as much as I thought!

On the whole my dad really likes mainland China and the Chinese people, not to mention their food (I’m jealous!) but as I think most of us do he has some real issues with their government. It’s a shame when pundits label an entire race of people evil when it’s just their government they disagree with. Perhaps I think this way because I’ve lived outside my country of birth for so long and get to see Asian opinions of Australia and the West from the outside myself… we’re not exactly angels ourselves in many ways!

And herein ends my potentially sensitive post!

UPDATE! I’ve been informed the following sites are also in the clear:

• CrapAndStuff.com
• Conspiracast.com
• DuddingtonBooks.com/cabaret/
• IntoYourHead.com
• TheOvernightscape.com
• WholeWheatRadio.org