My responses to the online survey for the Marriage Equality Amendment Bill 2012 and Marriage Amendment Bill 2012 in the Australian House of Representatives, preserved for posterity :)

3. Can you explain your reasons to the above questions?

Indeed I can! The gender or sexual orientation of a couple should have as much to do with their right to marry as their ethnicity. The majority will of Australians should be respected and same sex marriage introduced, as well as recognising foreign marriages. These said, I would rather see religious leaders render themselves obsolete than force them to wed two consenting adults.

4. Do you have any further comments on the legal implications of these Bills?

As much as I hold homophobic people in contempt, I fear forcing the religious to perform same-sex weddings goes against freedom of/from religion. Allow secular and progressive religious leaders to legally perform these ceremonies, and time will take care of the rest.

I'm commenting on this news story exactly one year after my post about Dropbox. Freaky!

The story

So Google will be taking on Dropbox with their own cloud storage service, titled Google Drive. I thought Google Drive was when they drive around capturing home WiFi locations and data. Heh.

Whereas Dropbox comes with 2GB of storage, Google Drive will come with 5. Not sure whether that's 5GB or 5GiB (Mac OS X and Fedora 16 with Gnome 3 have made me even more acutely aware of these differences), but we'll wait and see.

Please no more client software!

From what I'm reading on the intertubes, some are comparing this move to Google releasing Gmail, with similar predictions of success. It's a cute idea, but Gmail offered an order of magnitude more capacity than competing email services at the time; 5GB is hardly a similar leap. 5TB, now there would be something!

Mostly though, I've resisted using the likes of Dropbox because I can't stand installing extra software, and wasn't going to go through the rigamarole of installing a Linux binary compatibility layer and test it to run on FreeBSD. If Google Drive allowed remote access through established protocols, FUSE mounts and the like, I'd be on it faster than you could say "data mine".

d3[[12rfqzfe;rwegg2x

Of course, as with all cloud storage services you'd want to observe some precautions. As I said about Dropbox on this day last year:

I don't understand the increasingly negative attitudes people are having towards services like Dropbox. People who don't encrypt their personal files before sending them off to a public, shared server clearly want their data to be read in the clear, so who cares?

Encrypting data before uploading would be an absolute must, any other use would obviously be reckless unless it was media you'd publish in public. Even then, you'd have to weigh up the utility you'd derive with Google knowing even more about your interests, and the legal ramifications of having your stuff hosted under United States jurisdiction, assuming that's where it ends up. Eh, just encrypt everything, play it safe!

I'll be following this story. If it turns out Google Drive is another of the company's now infamous me too! products that also requires client software just like Dropbox, nothing to see here, move on. If it doesn't require extra middleman software, is simple and has a web UI that's usable (unlike what they did to Google Reader, Gmail and the like), they might have a hit.

1. Enrol into at least one semester of subjects.
2. Go to this form site and enter your student details.
3. Log into My Student Admin and click the ID Card tab.
4. Click "Email my enrolment details for ID card".
5. Wait five minutes or so, then check your student email.
6. Print the PDF attachment, tick the boxes and sign your name.
7. Hand the form into Student Services on campus and get your sticker.

Clear as mud!

Beautiful photo of a beautiful piece of classic hardware, John Gruber's Apple Extended Keyboard. I've been using an IBM Model M clone Unicomp SpaceSaver with my desktops and a ThinkPad as my primary portable computer since 2009; regular keyboards make me feel like I'm typing on a thawed fish.

If you type a lot, you owe it to yourself to use wonderful keyboards. They'll do more for your productivity than any other upgrade, and I'd hazard a guess most people don't give theirs a second thought.

Why comment on the name when there's already a prefabricated meme? ;)

Editional Redundancy

Having bought myself a large cup of caffeinated beverage at my local café without even specifying what I wanted (I've always wanted to be a "regular" somewhere!) I dug into Microsoft's news about the upcoming release of Windows 8.

According to the Window Steam blog, which I can only assume discusses how best to clean panes of glass, Microsoft will be releasing Windows 8 in three versions; a regular, a premium and one specifically for ARM tablets dubbed Windows RT.

Two quick asides about the hardware. First, isn't it a fascinating historical twist that an Apple spinoff eventually became so successful Microsoft had to break their Wintel model and release a version of Windows for it? Windows on different architectures isn't new; Windows/386 was specifically targeted at that CPU and Windows NT Workstation was offered on the DEC Alpha and PowerPC, but it shows even the once invincible Microsoft wants to hedge their bets in this emerging market.

Secondly, you've got to think Intel are keeping an eye on this trend!

Back to the Editions

Microsoft have been very successful in convincing people that having editions of their operating system is a great idea, though fortunately they're only releasing Windows 8 in three versions. It's still too many, but it's a start. See what I did there?

Why is it still too many? One word: encryption. With the need to artificially differentiate products in order to charge people differing sums of money, certain features have to be removed from the final product in order to entice people to upgrade; again a practise plenty of people are willing to defend for some reason.

While Microsoft seem to have been fairly consistent with only including enterprise and more advanced features in their higher end Windows versions, some features that really should be part of the base product have also been removed at times. Not being able to change desktop wallpapers in Windows 7 Starter, for example. You can't make this stuff up.

Unfortunately, the feature they've decided to leave out of the standard version of Windows 8 is far more critical than whether or not you can put a cute anime girl as your desktop background.

Encrypting File System

Okay, I used this entire post as an excuse to show Madobe Nanami again. Honestly, of all the reasons I've had given to me to move back onto Windows, this adorable Windows 7 mascot is the most convincing one so far. True story.

Anyway, when I saw the lack of an "X" under their "Encrypting File System" for the standard version of Windows 8, I was lucky I didn't regurgitate the mouthful of otherwise fantastic coffee I was sipping on. I wanted to reach through the screen, pull out a Microsoft engineer and ask them why not!

Certainly it's not a technical limitation, as far as I can tell. Mac OS X has it, most Linux distributions have it, even Google's ChromeOS (remember that?) has it. The pro version of Windows 8 has it.

Putting people's privacy and data at risk for the sake of product differentiation seems reckless to me. I hope — nay, implore — Microsoft to reconsider.

Tin foil hat!

That is... unless they're leaving it out for other reasons. Perhaps the prospect of default whole drive encryption on virtually every new computer around the world was scary enough a prospect for law enforcement that they leaned on Microsoft to not include it on the most popular version. Heck, the rhetoric in the US has long been about how difficult encryption is making certain investigative jobs.

Of course I have no proof of this, but the speculation is irresistible!

What started as a mere observation regarding the obvious cuddliness of the Airbus A380 resulted in the this tweet from @johncarneyau, the tweet below from @DrRachie, a Google search and the above plushie!

@Rubenerd it's totes your fault I googled this! bit.ly/HL8Pru bit.ly/HL8ODU #want #huggableA380 @johncarneyau

I'd had a pretty difficult day, but this made me grin from ear to ear... in public! :D Who says Twitter is nothing but people complaining?

Emil Protalinski writing for ZDNet:

Summary: Not only did Facebook beat Google to the purchase of Instagram, but it also beat out Twitter, according to a recent rumor.

If that's true, Facebook did Twitter a favour!

By the way, whatever happened to Twitter's acquisition of Posterous? I never really used it, but was thinking of setting one up as a replacement for TwitPic.

Wow, someone who time travelled from even a few years ago wouldn't have any idea what any of these services are.

Some people didn't know Titanic was a real ship!?

14th April 1912

It was on this day a hundred years ago when the maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic was brought to an abrupt end. Hitting an iceberg in the frigidly cold North Atlantic, she took on enough ocean water to overcome her watertight bulkhead system, and sank with the loss of thousands of lives.

The sea is a treacherous mistress, and there have been thousands of maritime accidents since. So what was it about the Titanic that made it an enduring household name, and the stuff of conspiracy theories, pop culture and continual historical study?

I could speak at length here about the unusual coincidences, such as the novel Titan which was published a decade prior to the voyage and told of a vast ship encountering a similar fate.

I could say it was the breathtaking unsinkable claims of the ship's operators, and the fact they were rendered so wrong.

I could be a buzzkill and point out the builders claimed the ship was "virtually" unsinkable, but the press soon forgot that extra word.

It could be the classical image of Edwardian era social classes and their inevitable clash when faced with the realisation that nature cares not for our artificial social constructs. An Aristocrat and a stoker drown in the same amount of water.

It could be the ulterior motives for her design; that the British Government loaned White Star and other companies vast amounts of money in order to have the ships designed in such a way that they could be converted into armed cruisers. Early 20th century Europe was a tence period of time!

Or finally, it must be said, for people of my generation it's the image of Leonardo DiCaprio holding Kate Winslet over the Titanic's bow, or steaming up a classical automobile, while beautiful Irish flute music played. The same movie which has just been re-released in 3D in cinemas. It's as if they timed it on purpose ;).

The Café Parisian, my favourite design on the ship

It was a massive book!

For me, I wasn't as interested in the events leading to Titanic's fate as much as I was deeply fascinated by the period of design and technology.

As a huge fan of art deco and classical, early 20th century design, realising there were whole fleets of these beautiful ocean liners plying the North Atlantic filled me with such intense fascination as a kid. I remember vividly the expression on my year 6 teacher's face when it was class "reading time" and I lumped a gigantic Getty Images coffee table photobook of these liners on the table! My favourite ship was actually the one below, but that's for another post!

If you can guess which one it is without looking at the URL of the image, kudos! :D

Back to the Titanic please...

I'd already long since become obsessed with computers by that time, which only furthered my curiosity. I simply couldn't believe that these gigantic, complex, intricate machines with billions of parts could have been assembled (let alone conceived!) in a period of time without electronic computers of any kind. An elegant structure like a bridge or an office building was one thing, but these devices sustained and transported thousands of people for weeks at a time in the open sea in relative luxury (for some!). My brain simply couldn't comprehend the idea of engineers and designers pouring over blueprints for these massive structures powered by the same technology used in the lowly steam train. In bowler hats. The disconnect made it seem unreal.

And of course, when the engineers designed and built these colossal moving buildings, who fitted them out? Artists. Brilliant, brilliant artists. As well as marvelling at these feats of engineering, that Getty Images photobook also included photos of the rooms on board. The care and attention that went into [First class!] areas of these ships... they rivalled castles and estates on dry land.

In a way, the Titanic was a wakeup call to engineers and designers. Up until that point, machines built by humans were all about bigger, faster and better, and with all this progress one could be forgiven for thinking nature was slowly being conquered and tamed into submission by our clearly superior intellects. Native Australians were right, the land owns us, not the other way around. One need only look at climate change now to see how nature will treat us when not accorded with adequate respect.

In any case...

I just came off two weeks of pretty intense work, assignments and other university related fun, so I'm severely tempted to dust off my old Titanic Adventure Out Of Time CD-ROMs and play. Seriously!

Forgive the terrible grammar and English, I really wanted to get this written and posted before the 14th of April was out, and I was half asleep!

The easiest method (from experimentation this evening!) is to use the e2label command. For example, to set the label of the first partition on the /dev/sdc drive:

# e2label /dev/sdc1 yournewlabel

At this rate, I'm thinking I should just start another site for just Linux tips. Nah ;D

A statement from the new centre-right government in Queensland:

The Queensland Government has decided not to proceed with the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards in 2012 which will save Queensland taxpayers $244,475, not including the cost of resourcing the Awards.

And only a few days later from Singapore:

SINGAPORE: Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong will donate $350,000 towards three new awards. The awards support community bonding, social service, and the arts.

Clearly there are more issues at play here, but fascinating timing nonetheless!

Getting this error in Red Hat's Palimpsest (Disk Utility)? Use gdisk to define partitions first, then you'll have no problems :).

The problem

Starting with their larger capacity, multi-terabyte/tebibyte drives, Seagate and Western Digital have moved from a 512 byte sector size to 4 kb. The benefits and tradeoffs of this new low level format is beyond the scope of this post; suffice to say it wrecks havoc with certain drive formatting tools!

If you attempt to format one of these newer drives in Palimpsest, you may receive an error similar to this:

The partition is misaligned by 3072 bytes. This may result in very poor performance. Repartitioning is suggested.

Technically the drive is completely usable in this state, but you'll pay a hefty performance penalty.

The solution

At the time of writing this post, both GParted and Palimpsest have trouble with these drives, but gdisk can handle them. Gdisk is a command line based disk editor that works on GUID GPT drives.

I shouldn't need to tell you to back up your data and quadruple check you're performing operations on the right drive. Please be careful!

1. Install from your package manager (no, really?)

2. Launch gdisk as root with the device path of your new drive; you can find that out from Palimpsest's "Device" label. It'll look something like this:

   # gdisk /dev/sd[x]

3. Type n for new partition, and accept the defaults, assuming you want a partition that takes the entire drive.

4. Type "w" to write the changes.

Now you can format the drive with any tool you wish!

Quote from a 3/5 star PC Magazine review of the Samsung display I picked up back in 2007:

While I'm pleased that the digital port is HDCP compliant, I think a monitor in this price range should offer something more in the way of multimedia connectivity, such as an HDMI port or a card reader.

A monitor losing points because it doesn't have a card reader? No wonder my toaster only got 3/5 stars.

Sorry I couldn't resist, I've always wanted one of these.

I've been so thorougly soaked with assignments and work over the last week or so, I've barely had time to eat let alone blog! To break the silence on this glorious Saturday evening, I thought I'd share this ridiculously amazing rendition of Avalon by one of my all time favourite jazz/swing musicians John Pizzarelli!

By all accounts that guitar should have CAUGHT FIRE! Jazz and big band forever :'D

Was intrigued by this graphic from the Windows Live login screen. Arguably all three phones are displaying the same information for each message, and (barring the names) even the text is a similar size. Yet iOS and Android manage six to seven full previews, and WP only does four.

I'm not arguing message counts and more efficient layouts automatically correlate with increased productivity or usability, but it'd certainly cut down on time spent scrolling!

Celebrating in class and style, clearly! :D

(Pending a better photo when she can provide me one!)

Ruben Singlish also crap

Before we go any further, I'll admit I was rather excited to celebrate my fabulous sister's 23rd birthday today, because it meant I could finally wish her a Happy Twenty Tree. For those not clued into Singaporean speech, "three is "tree". You see? Hey, I made a rhyme. Of course I did, I did it on purpose, geez. Or did I? Why are you asking me?

We did breakfast at a great little place in Newtown, before heading off to a tattoo parlour of all places. Without shedding a single tear (incredible!), she had a small "XXIII" inked onto her wrist; 23 for her birthday, because our beautiful mum was born on the 23rd of August, and because she died on the 23rd of December. I'm personally as White and Nerdy as they come and wouldn't get tattoos, but I appreciated the significance :).

Elke's wonderful friend Samme then proceeded to fulfill a dream Elke has had since she was an early teen: a formal lunch at a McDonalds! Dressed in ties, jackets, collared shirts, formal dresses and hats, some of her closest friends sat around us at the formica table in the McDonalds near UTS. We ate burgers and drank Coke off formal plates with cutlery, table cloths, placemats and champagne glasses, then an adorable cake in the shape of shaggy white dog for desert!

If all is going to plan for Elke now, she should be on a cruise in Sydney Harbour with some of her work friends... while I sit back at home frantically coding homework no less! ;D

Hope she had a great day. She well and truely deserves it; she's the best sibling a brother could ask for. Happy Birthday Elke :)

Lots of people were getting on board with #adayinthelifeApril2 on Twitter today, so I took the opportunity to reboot my Trains Ruben Taketh blog, and snap the above photo.

At some point I'll upload more train photos from around the world, for now it's just a terrible site where I take photos of Sydney trains I've been on. As exciting as it sounds!

From a reputable news source:

In an unprecedented sociological shift, the number of people voicing disdain for April Fools Day jokes now outnumber those making the jokes.

Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling of the Peter Cook Institute chalked the shift up to smugness.

"[..] denouncing a day of fun while feigning intellectual superiority provides high returns with minimal effort. One is left surprised they don't see the irony that their complaining is now more deafening than that which they're complaining about."

The uniform makes him (and therefore this post) look more legit.

To quote my dear friend Sebastian, you're not firing me Google, I quit!

The backstory

So I was sent a link to Google+ this afternoon, which necessitated me blowing the cobwebs off my Google credentials and logging in for the first time in months.

Turns out Google suspended my Google+ account, on the following basis:

Your profile has been suspended.

After reviewing your profile, we have determined that the name provided violates the Google+ Names Policy.

While suspended, you will not be able to make full use of Google services that require an active profile, such as Google+, Reader and Picasa. This will not prevent you from using other Google services, like Gmail.

If you have changed your name in accordance with our policies, please submit an appeal and we will review your profile again.

If you believe that your profile has been suspended in error, please submit your profile for reconsideration.

Your profile will be reviewed again and re-enabled if it complies with the Google+ Names Policy. Reviews are usually completed within a few days.

We're sorry for the inconvenience.

We understand that Google+ and its Names Policy may not be for everyone at this time. We'd be sad to see you go, but if you do choose to leave, make a copy of your Google+ data first. Then, click here to disable Google+.

Come again?

I had my name set as Ruben Schade, esq. While a little tongue in cheek, the name itself could be verified from any number of links I had to my own domains and profiles on other websites. The "esq" portion is a honourific which can be legally used by any individual in Australia and Singapore. For all intents and purposes, this is my name.

In any event, I have neither the time nor inclination to fight with Google bureaucracy. I've deleted my Google+ profile, and the Rubenerd.com page. If this is how they're going to treat their users, I don't want anything to do with their (albeit failing) site.

So, I deleted it!

From the deletion page:

You've successfully deleted Google+ and associated social content

We're sorry to see you leave! Please help us improve by telling us why you are leaving and what we can do better. This survey is optional but your feedback is much appreciated.

Under "Please tell us why you're leaving", I left this:

The lack of time and inclination to fight Google bureaucracy, your heavy-handed and knee-jerk suspension of accounts with legitimate names including mine, ever increasing concerns over the privacy of my data with Google, my replacement of this and other Google services with better alternatives, lack of use of Google+, and finally in preparation to delete my Google profile entirely.

With my move away from Gmail, Google Code, Google Reader and their other services, this means I'll no longer be logging into Google at all anymore. Once I'm sure everyone knows my new hosted email address, I'll be deleting my Google account that I started in 2003.

As for Google+, I suppose my deletion won't count for much given I barely used it anyway. To answer myself from July 2011, not me.

The depth of field and manual focusing on my D60 will be challenging for a rank amateur such as myself, but the sharpness in the focused areas is nothing short of breathtaking. The dust on the leaves... I didn't even see that with my own eyes!

Coincidentally, this is the first photo I've uploaded to my 500px account. Not sure whether I'll give up Flickr just yet, but giving it a try :).

From TODAYOnline, a Singaporean news site:

The first 250 US Marines will arrive next month in northern Australia where a permanent joint training hub will be based. [..] In November, the United States and Australia announced plans to send more US military aircraft and to rotate up to 2,500 Marines through the northern city of Darwin to better protect American interests across Asia.

They're not evening hiding who this arrangement benefits any more.

I get one lift home, and I leave an impression! Sort of. From my friend Emily on The Twitters:

My dad was like, "I just realised, I don't know what this Ruben guy looks like - just that he's blonde, tall and kind of skinny."

To the right is an artist's conception based on that description.

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I had studies practically all day today (hence my de facto birthday!), but I met up with my awesome sister for dinner at the Yum Yum Cha restaurant in Chinatown for a birthday dinner! We had a real heart to heart talk about all kind of things and laughed a lot :)

Out of the blue, she surprised me with a metal wristband for the iPod Nano watch she bought me last year, and the present my old man left me at home turned out to be a brand new Tokina 100mm f/2.8 Macro lens! The thought that went into those presents... speechless.

The iPod Nano watch I'll be wearing every day, problem is now I'll want to take more photos when I should be studying. A great concern!

Also got more birthday hugs from dear friends, and an extraordinarily friendly post from my friend Sebastian. Speechless, again. Thank you so much :'D

As I sit here in the remaining few hours of being 25, I suddenly realise I hadn't written about my wonderful de facto birthday party that took place last weekend!

Uh oh, it'll be a rambling post!

Had you spoken to me a few weeks ago, you would have been inundated with stories about my struggles with the UTS enrollment system. Turns out several subjects I thought I could get an exemption for fell through, but by the time I realised it the semester had already started and all my required classes had prerequisites! To my delight, the illustriously fabulous Chris Wong was able to patch through my enrollment, and I was able to do a full semester of work again. Whew!

Why am I regaling you with this? Well for one simple reason, I suddenly found myself with far less spare time to celebrate my de jure birthday, and as much fun as I find programming, the idea of wearing party hats and watching Sherlock while stuck in a several hour long classes on application development seemed less than appealing. Not to mention other people in my classes would probably want in.

With this in mind, I decided to do something I'd never done before; partly because I'm obviously not the brightest lightbulb in the ceiling, and because I hadn't ever had enough friends to pull it off! The world's smallest violin playing, just for me. I decided to host an Sherlock marathon tea party; nothing out of the ordinary if I'm to believe it's what rugged, manly people do. In response to several Twitter conversations prior regarding anti-social behavior over dinner with electronic devices, the bringing of laptops, tablets and mobile phones was actively encouraged; I'd mulled over installing a metal detector near the front door with entrance being barred for those without any gadgets on their person, but the cost would have been prohibitive.

Look out, he said Starbucks!

My closest friends from UTS and I started the day at the Starbucks in Capitol Square, not to be confused with a geometric square or an American Capitol. Come to think of it, why is it called Capitol Square? I had my traditional Caramel Latte which I've had at Starbucks in various cities on my birthday since I was 13, and despite specific instructions not to these lovely people showered me with gifts! Adorable Haruhi nendoroids, a plushie block of tofu, some of the most original, tastiest sweets I've ever had, and several manga volumes of Toradora and the recently re-released in English Sailor Moon! My sister even chipped in with some bright, colourful, clever Threadless shirts! :)

We headed to Chez Schade on the train (fortunately one with plushie seats) where I demonstrated to a rapped audience the ability of a singular tunnel with uniform appearance to give wildly different phone reception strengths depending on our location. We all had our phones out attempting to best each other's dropped reception; being on Optus I was able to hold out fairly well during the early run but was successful in achiving the glorious "Searching..." status as we approached Earlwood! I guess it was my birthday ;D.

We made it up to my house no thanks to the gigantic hill, then proceeded to spend our afternoon troubleshooting my family's media server, and finally watching some brilliant BBC Sherlock for kicks! Tea was had, presents unwrapped, WiFi passwords set, the works!

They had Japanese mints!

Finally to top off the evening, we headed to Ken's Sushi Bar Dining in Bexley North, a single stop from Bardwell Park but an area with staggeringly wondrous phone reception and my favourite Japanese food in Sydney! We huddled around the table in the small place and ordered; several took the opportunity to render me nervous by choosing items I'd recommended... what if they didn't like it!? Fortunately, either they all enjoyed the food or were able to pretend convincingly ;).

We talked and Tweeted, they put up with my terrible jokes, parting hugs were had as we made our way back to Central. ^^

Of note

With all the studies, assignments, family work and other commitments in my life right now, it was so lovely to be afforded a (for want of a better word) blessed reprieve and spend a single day just being happy with super friendly people without feeling guilty. I still miss mummy so much it hurts, and obviously on my birthday (the day she obviously played a large part in originally!) those feelings were very close to the surface. Having a great time was a huge weight off my chest, and I really appreciated it. Sincerely.

Thanks to Sashin, Vadim, Cindy, Clara, Sebastian and Emily for an absolutely wonderful time! :'D We must do this again at some point; with the limit on the size of the restaurant lifted we could have even more people, provided they like British television and anime! :D

#hugs

Travel back in time!

As always, my ever increasing list of birthday posts here on Rubénerd!

• 2011: A quarter century of Ruben Schadeyness
• 2010: It's my Jack Bauer, 42 backwards birthday
• 2009: My 23rd birthday photos from Hahndorf
• 2008: I'm 22, but I won't wear one!
• 2007: Ruben's 21st eve musings!
• 2006: I'm 20! And Useless eBay Purchase!

Michael G. Nastos reviewing John Pizzarelli's 1996 album One Night with You:

If you like your contemporary jazz crooners smooth and sweet, then likely John Pizzarelli is your main man [..]

Aww! I'll admit it, as a kid his name was enough to reel me in. His distinctive jazz, big band style was what kept me listening ever since. In my world of ripped audio and iDevices, his physical CDs grace my precious shelf space with Michael Franks :).

Ironically, I'll bet I'm of the few people who heard of him before his famous dad.

I've always been fascinated by iron structures, such as the Eiffel Tower, the Cavenagh Bridge and the Sydney Harbour Bridge. How these complicated, heavy structures could have been conceived and constructed without computer aided design (or even electronic calculators!) boggles my mind. Honestly!

For those interested, I took a whole bunch of photos around the bridge last year, including what I hoped were some more unconventional ones.

It also goes without saying that all the best things/people were opened/born in/around March. Ahem.

In response to my previous Java post, I got a DM on Twitter from another university student asking if I'd come across the above error before. Often I do, when I'm programming in a dazed stupor at 3am, and I've done this:

% javac Something.java
% java Something.class

Instead of this:

% javac Something.java
% java Something

The error can be caused by any number of factors, but 99% of the time it's because of this. Much hair ripping has resulted from it!

(It turns out this was the problem. Glad I could help ^^)

So last night we were Twittering my attempts to eat pizza with chopsticks. I also unabashedly invented the title of UTS Anime Club Moeblob Liaison Officer for myself. Somehow, these two conversations folded into one, and we decided if I were to have a badge it should be of Mugi-chan... eating with chopsticks.

Needless to say, our art director wasted no time sketching up a concept, after I'd already gone to sleep! That she could do that at an ungodly hour of the night and have it look like the character so much it's uncanny only confirms the fact the Anime club voted for the right person for art director. I'm just saying :)

A very good friend of mine at UTS and on The Twitters asked about enhanced for loops in Java. I think he understands what's going on now, but just in case I'm putting an example up here!

Caveats

• In the real world, we don't really use primitive arrays in Java anymore, but given UTS still teaches them for some reason, they'll do for our example here!

• For some reason I got into the habit of including the above picture from Railgun into my programming posts. Presumably because there's a laptop involved, and I can't stand dry posts without pictures! But I digress.

Regular for loops

Say we wanted to create an application that stores a list of moeblob character names into an array, then print each name out to the screen.

public class EnhancedForLoop
{
  public static void main(String[] args)
  {
    String[] keion = new String[3];
    keion[0] = "Mugi";
    keion[1] = "Yui";
    keion[2] = "Azusa";

    for (int count = 0; count < keion.length; count++)
    {
      System.out.println(keion[count]);
    }
  }
}

As you can see, we created an array and populated it with character names. We then used a for loop and printed each character by referencing them one by one.

There's a simpler way!

There are circumstances where a traditional for loop would be preferred (and needed!), but if all you want to do is traverse an array one by one, there's a simpler way!

for (String name : keion)
{
  System.out.println(name);
}

In this loop, instead of referencing each array element by a number, it traverses the array one by one for us, and stores the current element in a temporary variable. In this case, each element in our "keion" array gets put into our temporary "String name" variable! :D

As you can probably tell, for going through an array one by one, an enhanced for loop is:

• shorter and easier to write
• the statements in the loop are easier to read, make more sense
• you don't need to know how many elements there are
• you don't need to do any maths!

These kinds of loops are common

I'm not sure if you've done any scripting, but enhanced for loops are huge in languages like Perl, Ruby and Python. My personal favourite is the former ^_^

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my @keion = qw/Mugi Yui Azusa/;

foreach my $name (@keion) {
    print("$name\n");
}

From The Malaysian Star, via the Straits Times:

A reward of RM50,000 (S$20,680) is up for grabs for whistleblowers who could provide reliable leads on companies using pirated software.

The Business Software Alliance (BSA) said the offer is valid for reports made starting on Wednesday until April 15, 2012.

Hey BSA, I know some guy running burned copies of FreeBSD and Fedora. Give me half the money now, and I might even give you his address :D

Seriously though, I can image this would be great for wiping out a competitor. Sneak into their offices (remotely or otherwise), install some illegitimate software. Bingo!

When I first heard of Black Rock Shooter and its anime adaptation, I was expecting a franchise about a kick arse, renewable energy-touting superhero taking down the coal lobby by staring people down. Needless to say, I was entirely wrong.

Forgive me, my last three posts were about more serious news topics, and I needed an entirely pointless break! It seems people are disappointed with the anime, but for those of us who never played the game or read the manga, would it be worth watching?

I know this is rather beyond the scope of a weblog of nerdish interests, but this story really grabbed my attention over the last few days. It also gives me an excuse to an impromptu book review!

Artsy image of the Goldman Sachs headquarters by Quantumquark on Wikimedia Commons.

The story

For those of you who don't follow this kind of thing (and I don't blame you!), a former worker at the investment bank Goldman Sachs has publicly come out describing the firm with some... rather choice words.

From a Reuters report by Douwe Miedema and Lauren Tara LaCapra, which you can tell because the first word of the report is "Reuters":

(Reuters) - Goldman Sachs faced an unprecedented assault from one of its own on Wednesday after a banker published a withering resignation letter in the New York Times, calling the Wall Street titan a "toxic" place where managing directors referred to their own clients as "muppets."

Disgruntled staff talking bluntly about their previous place of employment is hardly new, but these comments from Greg Smith made me raise an eyebrow. If I were capable of raising a single eyebrow. I tried my best to teach myself as a kid, but I never could do it. Perhaps I should have spent that time studying finance. But I digress.

The book review

One of the first books I read when I procured a Kindle was "Money and Power". In the book, William D. Cohan outlined in painstaking detail the history of Goldman Sachs, paying particular attenton to the course of events that led to what the firm is today, how they bundled and marketed all their derivatives into "products", as well as opinions internally and externally about the firm. I find myself shaking my head in disbelief at times, but there was no doubt it was fascinating.

The recurring theme from the book was the idea senior management (the "partners" everyone strove to be) wanted to give the impression that the firm only succeeded when their clients did. There were some glaring examples of where this clearly wasn't true; such as their numerous conflicts of interest.

Still, the press release from Goldman Sachs in response to Greg's comments seemed to reinforce this sentiment. Good heavens, that was a long sentence.

"We disagree with the views expressed, which we don't think reflect the way we run our business. In our view, we will only be successful if our clients are successful. This fundamental truth lies at the heart of how we conduct ourselves."

Hmm, wait a minute!

This is where it gets interesting though. Read this report much further, and towards the end we get this comment from a banker at a competing institution:

"In my experience ... client success and firm success can peacefully coexist; in fact thrive," Harris Private Bank Chief Investment Officer Jack Ablin said in an open letter.

Note the wording. Mr Albin didn't say client and firm success "always coexist", or "needs to coexist", he said "can coexist". That suggests the capability to coexist, but whether or not that's what happens in the real world is another point entirely.

Perhaps I'm reading a little too far into a single word, but it sounds like political speak to me. You don't want to admit your firm is doing something, but on the other hand you don't want to deny it and later be called out for it.

In any case, Jack Albin doesn't work for Goldman Sachs, but I think he spoke an untold truth of the whole investment banking community with that comment. No doubt Goldman's PR department would be far too sharp to let such a comment slip ;).