2010 and WeekendTesting is gaining traction. In the process of getting involved I was confronted multiple times on how I could NOT have a twitter account. So in order to see what the fuss was about I re-activated twitter a couple of weeks back. Mainly for the whole testing scene thing.

This was during the same time the ugly FaceBook-privacy monster reared it’s head. So the motivation to look for an alternative communication channel was high.

After a few weeks of being tested-twitter-tester here’s my verdict: AWESOME!!!!

I have learned more about testing, test-tools, methodologies in about 3 weeks than in the last year (OK, I do exclude that dice-game-thing with James B. from that)! Twitter is like a huge meeting/melting of minds machine. I love it.

Unlike FaceBook it is focused. The 140 chars is annoying but extremely helpful in concentrating thought and communication. FaceBook is personal and tends to be mostly bla-bla. Cool for catching up with mom but not for debating testing or communicating information quickly. FaceBook is a wasteland when it comes to progressing your subject at hand. Twitter is the opposite.

I am encouraging the uptake of twitter as a tester. It helps the trade, it helps your know-how. FTW

Oh and my twitter account: @Oliver_NZ

So I started looking for a new pair and to my surprise discovered Sennheiser was nice enough to have brought out a new model. The PX 100 II’s.  They have had a slight or not so slight update around the edges. I think the main things are:

• Broader and tighter headband
• One-sided cable with other ear cable going through headband
• Updated speakers
• No more case (but a nylon bag)

After searching the Internet there were lots of reports either way. Some said the sound was too basey, others said the sound was great. So after a couple of weeks of listening to them I think I can add now my own analysis.

1. The sound is slightly different. In my opinion better and still the stellar PX 100 sound. A+
2. The single cable connect thing is an absolute godsend! Just for that I’d buy them. No more feeling for the three dots to know where left is A++
3. I like the firmer headband. It’s better when listening lying down and it feels much more sturdy in general. A+
4. Downsides…..none.

Looks again like I’m a fanboy. I didn’t really set out to be one, being very cautious because of the different reports. In the end they just blew me away as the original PX 100′s did at the time.

One week later my old headphones turned up and now I have both. So far haven’t touched the old ones. The II’s are just so much more convenient and easy to use. I know that sounds like an odd thing to say about headphones but Sennheiser made them so much more usable. I am very thankful I did end up buying these even though the old ones turned up again. I am even thinking of selling my old ones because I can’t think of where I’d like to use them anymore.

So there you go. My fanboy endorsement for the NEW Sennheiser PX 100II’s.

“A simple hint for the new Quicktime X player. Clicking the fast forward button increases video playback speed to 2x, then 4x then 8x. 2x, however, is a bit fast to watch a video.

To increment by .1x, hold down Control and click fast forward. I find 1.3x speed works well, and is very watchable. This also works for reverse.” (link)

Thought I needed to share that. Saved my day today!

You’ll have either 5,10 or 20GB cap. So that only means that you’ll reach your download limit on the second of each month and not the fourth! What is it with peoples craze for speed? It’s the same stupidity as with the fiber-optic cable to the curb. We don’t need any of that if we’re going to d*ck around with these outdated data caps. What needs to go is the Telecom bottleneck-monopoly of the Tasman cable (Kudos to Kordia for wanting to install that 2nd cable).

If we had free market conditions on the international data highway we’d have no caps, it would make sense to up the bandwidth and private companies would invest in infrastructure.

But we have a Telecom controlled monopoly so nothing happens and now taxpayers have to cough up $1.5bn so that we can get some cables in the ground only to find out that they won’t solve any of our issues.

So go Telstra! 100Mbit will not really bring us any advantage. Give us a flatrate and keep it at 10Mbit!!!

You would be able to find offline GMail in the Google Labs tab in your GMail settings. For more details have a look here.

I’m probably not the right customer for this as I’m always online if I sit in-front of a computer but maybe this allows my wife to switch. She’s the one using the laptop. I will still give it a good go though. Who knows, the next internet-cable-cut maybe just around the corner.

I think this is a huge and important step for Google. If this works it is the corner stone that will be used to gun for Microsoft Office. This technology can then finally replace office software completely. Even companies could now join in (provided you’re not bound by legal issues of storing information off-site). I hope Google will be clever enough to provide this as one of their appliance kits as they do with their search-pizza-boxes. I know I’d love to leave Exchange behind too.

For me that was always the critical issue with VirtualBox. At work I use VMwae for most of my stuff and on my Ubuntu box I use VirtualBox. So I could never use the same VMs. Now I can! How cool ist that?! So for all those not happy with VMware Player or the VMware Server 2.x here’s your answer. I’d probably also say now that VirtualBox does snaphots too there’s no big reason for going VMware Fusion or Parallels.

I tried GIMP and it didn’t quite catch my fancy. I use it at work where I run Ubuntu but on the Mac it’s a little behind the times (not the features but the interface). So about a year back I got myself Pixelmator. At the time it was still version 1.0.x state. Even then it was already quite impressive. The current version is 1.3.2. Using most of the native and quick Apple CoreImage routines and the ImageMagic tool-set it really offers quite a bit to the amateur image editor. In Q1 2009 there will be the version 1.4 of Pixelmator and I can’t wait to see what goodies were added.

Pixelmator is not PhotoShop but it is enough for what most people need. In combination with iPhoto I think most of us have all bases covered. Pixelmator has a good chance of becoming a major contender. I hope they keep the price where it’s at currently and cater for the normal Mac users. So go and download the trial version and have a play.

1. Will the financial crisis be over in 2009?
2. How will Obama fare in is first year?
3. Will NZ change due to the National government?
4. Will Apple release a Netbook/Tablet computer?
5. Will Windows 7 continue the XP legacy?
6. Will Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) blow everything away?
7. Will Ubuntu 9.04 bring a renewal of Linux desktop?
8. Will the Ocean levels rise?
9. Will we see the breakthrough for electric cars?
10. Will Israel ignite the middle east again?

So looking forward to it…:-D

• 64-bit support on 32-bit guest OSes (not so hot for me)
• 3D support (getting warmer)
• Better Windows (who cares?!) and Linux networking support doing away with the manual TAP drivers (***YAY***!!!!!)
• Snapshots (***YAY***!!!!!)
• More speed (was it ever slow?! Ok, if they want to go even faster I won’t complain)
• Much, much more….

So go along and update. I’m sure it’s worth it. I’ll be trying it on my Ubuntu box once I get back to work….

What is amasing though is the quick and professional responses that you get most of the time. Although these are mostly Open Source products they still have a LOT of professionalism going for them. Something I can’t really say for a lot of products that cost several arms & legs. But I’m getting off-topic….

Firefox 3.1… what can I say…. FAST, very FAST, did I mention FAST? The other things Firefox 3.1 brings are mostly of secondary interest to me. Since I use GMail, Google Calendar and other online programs I do depend on the speed of Java Script and the rendering. This version does wonders for that. I’ll keep the memory footprint in the corner of my eye though….

So if yer feel’n a li’ll adventeris taday try ye on fir size.

[Update] Looks like the Better GMail plug-in doesn’t quite work correctly. It doesn’t allow to send email.

When I was living in South Africa (1982-1992) I remember how hard it was to get the things we were used to from Germany and Europe in general. With immigrating to NZ a few years back I was fully expecting similar problems. Alas it was not so. And one area in particular has made life a bit easier when trying to find good food – Petone (Wellington, New Zealand).

Petone has become something like a little delicatessen mile for most Europeans. The shops worth mentioning are The Dutch Shop, Ontrays, The Spice Rack, John’s Fish Market, Bella Italia, House of Knives, Brezelmania the food bookstore (which I forgot the name of) and lots of cafes. I will blog about most of these and I will start with my absolute favourite which is Ontrays.

Ontrays in 38 Fritzherbert street (just off Jackson street, Petone) is owned by Steven and Valda Scheckter. They came to NZ more than 10 years ago from South Africa. Over the years they have built up the excellently stocked Ontrays Food Emporium. Ontrays is also called the South African shop because it started out by selling lots of South African food specialities. Nowadays it also sells delicatessen from all over the world.

Europeans looking for the hard-to-get food things and professional cooks looking for good produce can find everything they need. For me it’s the biltong, the dry sausages, the soft cheeses, the wines, the kalamata olives,… Not to mention the coffee that is offered when you walk in the door. It just completes a Saturday’s food hunting.

Anything can be tried before buying especially at the cheese counter. That has it’s down side as you do walk out the door with a little more than you first thought (but usually that is only regretted until you get home and eat ). Not only can you try but you’d be amazed how much Steven knows about what he sells.

So if you are looking for good food, something for the soul and a nice experience go visit the Scheckters in Petone. Ontrays is open Mo-Fr 9-5, Sat 10-4.

[UPDATE] Link to website is www.ontrays.co.nz

Because bacteria love keyboards (some urban myths even say keyboards are less hygenic than your average toilet) I do like to clean mine in regular intervals. With the Apple type keyboards it’s now become pretty easy. Take a damp cloth with a bit of cleaning fluid (not too aggressive) and wipe. Easy as. But what about the common keyboard in the office?

I still have a Siemens-Nixdorf keyboard I like a lot (also low profile) but which fell prey to a coffee some time ago. Most of the keys around the right shift key started to stick. No cleaning helped alleviate that issue. I even took the keys out and tried. From time to time I read about the people that put their keyboards in the washing machine. As much as I’d like to believe it were that easy I thought my Nixdorf wouldn’t survive that. So I took it apart first to investigate if a dishwasher was an option. In the picture blow are the parts.

On the top object which is the back shell you can see rectangular openings around the circumference. In there are plastic hooks that hold the whole keyboard together. Release those with a plastic or wooden object. Don’t use metal (like I did) because that will damage the plastic shell. There are basically four pieces (note the fifth is the plug for the cord). The bottom one is the keyboard contact sheet. On closer inspection you will see that on the surface there are silver-metal contacts that the rubber sheet (3rd from top) closes when depressed. I think these would be the contacts that would not survive a dishwasher. They look like they would start to oxidise once they got wet.

So I washed the keyboard cord and the keyboard cover (2nd from top) in the top drawer of my dishwasher ate 45 degrees Celsius. I didn’t remove any keys. And I let the dishwasher use the dry cycle too. Then I let the washed parts dry. Depending on weather and means anything from hours to days is appropriate. Then re-assembled all parts.

The keyboard works like a charm again. The whole procedure was a full success and I think most keyboards would survive this treatment. I did notice a slight discolouration of the keyboard but I believe that is just due to the age of the keyboard itself.

So yes, a dishwasher can make the cleaning of a keyboard much more fun and less tedious than cleaning each key. Now I’ll try with my IBM keyboard…..

Google churns out new Gmail features on a regular basis. The newest one arrived in my mailbox today. It is Themes for Google mail. Purely a visual thing but under the Settings-Theme tab you can now choose from a good two dozen designs. I think it’s great. Gmail was getting a little long in the tooth. So no matter what design you prefer I’m sure there’s an option now.

My current favourite is Shiny. So have fun with yours!

You can activate the blowfish cypher by using SSH like this:

ssh -c blowfish <user>@<host>

Even better is to include compression. That would then be:

ssh -C -c blowfish <user>@<host>

But this is a lot to type and often gets forgotten. So how to activate it permanently…

In Ubuntu (and probably most Debian distros) edit the file /etc/ssh/ssh_config. Change the lines

#   Cipher 3des
#   Ciphers aes128-cbc,3des-cbc,blowfish-cbc,cast128-cbc,arcfour,aes192-cbc,aes256-cbc

to

Compression yes
Cipher blowfish
Ciphers blowfish-cbc,aes128-cbc,3des-cbc,cast128-cbc,arcfour,aes192-cbc,aes256-cbc

If you want to see what is going on with SSH and what encryption is being used add a -v (verbose) to the SSH command.

The system complained about graphics xyz and only started on one monitor (I have two), the graphics acceleration was gone and it felt not much like my system I’m used to. A quick Google and voila it seems as if Nvidia is dragging their feet a bit on delivering the right drivers. I have a Nvidia 8400GS card and after getting a mild shock (and wondering how to downgrade) a little more googling gave me the answer.

Just do an apt-get install nvidia-glx-177 and it should all magically rectify itself. I still don’t know what I’ll need to do once Nvidia introduces the correct drivers but for now I’m happy anyway. Back to BAU!

Also have a look here for more details.

[Update] And apart from that Ubuntu 8.10 is great as always. ome minor touches here and there give it a much rounder feel. Definitely the distro of choice for all non-freak users.

I’m sure the DVD will be a success. I think it just hits the sweet spot with people starting to think about immigrating to NZ. It’s not as pricey as an immigration consultant and not as tedious as hunting for the answers yourselves. A good side effect is that the DVD is English only. People should take that as a guide to judge if their English is good enough. If they have big problems following the DVD they should probably invest more time in their English studies.

The DVD has also had amazing buy-in from Immigration New Zealand and the IRD. That makes the DVD as official as you can get.

All in all I’m sure the DVD will make life lots easier for loads of immigrants. Stands to hope we won’t get overrun in the near future

Oh and… a BIG congrats to Melanie & Brian for making their dream come true!!

A few months ago Equinux was nice enough to send me a TubeStick to trial in New Zealand. I was hoping to be able to watch FreeView (DVB-T) on my Mac. The bad news is that it currently doesn’t work at all. It doesn’t find one channel. I suppose it is because NZ doesn’t use H.264 as an encoding standard but MPG4. As soon as TubeStick supports the codec and works in New Zealand I will post about it and of course let Equinux know.

[Update] Got an email today saying that I’m a little too novice to talk about DVB-T technical things. So ignore what I said above. Fact is that I’ll keep on trying to get it to work. I do want to watch TV on my Mac and TubeStick is still my preferred version.