And it works! Yays! ^_^ I’ll be detailing how on Sunday when I have more time, suffice to say it was far more complex and time consuming than I imagined it would be. The Windows 95 partition has also been preserved, albeit in a smaller partition.

It may be a nerdy thing to admit, but working on puzzles like this and solving them is just about the greatest feeling in the world. ^_^

I’ve finally found a drive that PartedMagic can’t handle, but fortunately I still have a friend in dd. Sounds like a trailer for an episode of Dexter’s Laboratory. UPDATE: Even better, use an old Knoppix CD!

PartedMagic is a Linux live CD optimised for drive maintainence with tools such as GParted and Partition Image that I’ve been recommending and using for a few years. I was an avid fan of PartitionMagic before Symantec bought the company that developed it and killed the project, and PartedMagic filled that void really well.

Unfortunately, the [relatively new] WD hard drive that came with my [relatively ancient!] Libretto 70CT has been the first drive since I started using PartedMagic that the bundled applications simply can’t handle. GParted reports that it can’t read the data and as such I can’t resize the partitions, and Partition Image simply panics and quits.

Is someone eating sushi or are things just fishy?

The Windows 95 partition boots on the machine and works flawlessly, ScanDisk doesn’t find anything, I’ve run SpinRite on level 2 and 4 for several long days, I’ve done every file system integrity check known to humanity… NONE of them reports problems.

What I want to do is keep the Windows 95 partition intact but shrink it by a few gigabytes so I can run FreeBSD with my ncurses environment I’ve been developing. As it stands now, GParted/libparted can’t read the data in the 95 partition even though it boots fine, the drive is fine and the filesystem is fine. I think.

I read on a few forums that people have had success with FAT systems running older live CDs when this problem occurs, and they surmise there may be an error in the newer versions. I’m willing to give it a shot, in the meantime I’m using dd to copy the whole drive to an image file as a backup, but I need to be able to resize this.

I wonder if hdiutil could do it? Hdiutil can resize non HFS+ partitions provided they’re not running the system, can’t it? I’m sorry this whole post was an excuse to think out loud!

Update!

Turns out those forum folks were absolutely right, I tried an old version of Knoppix from 2005 and it worked flawlessly! The newer versions of libparted must have introduced a bug with old FAT filesystems, or something.

In case you needed another reason to obsess over the up and coming second season of the moe-blob-but-still-awesome music anime K-On, there’s going to be a new character called Miura Akane-chan.

She’s going to be 172cm tall which would make her tower even over Mio, and get this: she’s going to play the tuba! I’m really interested to see how they fit a tuba into a pop band, I mean, it’s a gigantic tuba! A… tuba!? It probably weighs more than she does! Wait, hold on, let me see if I’ve got this straight: a… tuba!?

To tell the truth, if they were going to introduce a new character I would have been more excited if he was a guy, someone like Kyon to be mock horrified at their afternoon tea and complain they never get any work done. ;).

Wait, what? A… tuba!?

That reminds me, I only got up to watching episode 08, and I only blogged up to episode 06. I’d better rectify this before someone with a tuba comes along. A… tuba!?

While I think of it, she also reminds me of someone, but I can’t quite put my finger on who. Well I suppose that’s a good thing, otherwise I’d be arrested.

Beware the wrath of Dave, poke fun at his netbook and he’ll just crassly assume you’re a spineless puppet of Apple folk because they’re naturally the only ones who are uninspired by flimsy designs. I resemble [sic] his remarks… for one thing not all Apple fans are boys ;).

DaveWiner: People who say the Asus isn’t pretty — balderdash. People are always commenting on the cute little computer. It’s like a Prius.

Rubenerd: Sorry @davewiner, but that Asus really is an ugly machine. That’s not to say it isn’t convenient or useful though.

DaveWiner: @Rubenerd — you ever actually used one or are you just parroting what the apple fanboys told you to say

What was it that Adam West said on The Simpsons? I don’t need moulded plastic to improve my physique… pure… West! If I had a point for this post, I’ve forgotten what it was.

As I pointed out back in 2006, in that above photo Dave looks just like my dad. Turns out they actually look nothing alike at all.

You can use a real, physical drive as a bootable hard disk in Sun Oracle VirtualBox using an undocumented feature, and it even works on Mac hosts!

First make sure the drive is unmounted (aka ejected), it won’t cause errors if it’s mounted when you attempt this, it simply won’t work.

VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk \
-filename [NEW DRIVE NAME].vmdk \
-rawdisk /dev/disk3

Replace the /dev/disk3 with the block identifier that represents the physical drive you want to access, in my case USB and FireWire drives. You can right click any drive in Disk Utility.app to find out what that is on Mac OS X or your fstab file.

This command essentially creates a pointer to the raw physical drive which you can then add to any virtual machine, just like any other virtual drive. As with creating it though, if it’s mounted on the host it won’t work. Also this command is undocumented and subject to change, so if the above syntax doesn’t work they may have changed it since I wrote this up.

Because it enables raw file access, I’m assuming lower level tools like SpinRite can be used in a virtual machine this way, but I have to confirm this.

For more information, I found this VirtualBox forum topic insanely useful with plenty of relevant links.

As a FreeBSD guy (and even on my Linux boxes) I’ve been using tcsh as my shell for years, but I never noticed this easter egg before. If you have your prompt defined to show the time with %T, at the top of each hour (as my American friends say it) it replaces the time with the word "DING!", how cute!

Chan-andler Bing Ding! Ring a Ding Ding, it’s a new hour! Is it sad that something like this made my day?

Just a quick headsup (or is it "heads up?" or "heads-up" or "Bird is The Word?") that @roel247 ust used the Buy Ruben a Coffee button on the blog sidebar here to buy me a cup of coffee because he contains an abundance of awesome :). Thank you sir!

Continuing in our seven day Whole Wheat Radio Artist of the Day experiment here on Rubénerd.com, today’s artist is the awesome jazz pianist and composer Michael Wolff.

I can describe Michael’s jazzy tunes in one word: cool, suave, cool, awesome, sophisticated, cool, swish, cool, fun and cool. That was substantially more than one word. Then again so is “Michael Wolff”, so we’ve come out ahead again. All is good with the world!

As with all Whole Wheat Radio artists you can request a show of his songs to be added to the webcast in real time as well as view his artist page where you can leave comments. He also has an official website where you can listen to a few tracks.

I keep trying to branch out of my music comfort zone and try new things, but Michael’s style of music is still by far my favourite and he more than does the genre justice. He is just so friggen awesome to listen to! If you can get a more glowing endorsement from a computer nerd who knows nothing about music terminology than that, I haven’t heard it!

@cb60089 just bought me a cup of coffee using the button on my blog sidebar, which makes him the epitome of awesomeness! Well he was the epitome of awesomeness before, but this just further cements his reputation. Thank you :).

I stopped putting ads on my blog a few years ago and replaced it with a coffee button, and I’ve been blown away by people’s generosity. I think this model works great, if your readers like what you do they’ll support you, and from a purely business standpoint I’ve been able to buy more coffee with that little button than years of having Google ads here!

Back in 2006 I posted some of my favourite Bruce Schneier facts. Here we are in 2010 and I still read ones that make me laugh out loud!

• The sum of the ASCII values of the characters in Bruce Schneier’s passwords is always a prime number. Their product is too.

• Bruce Schneier; brain the size of a planet…. Reduced to writing about encryption for mortals; gets very depressed.

• Bruce Schneier can read and understand Perl programs.

• There are no prime numbers, only numbers Bruce Schneier lets you factorise.

• Bruce Schneier knows a deterministic algorithm to generate non-pseudo random numbers without need of an entrophy source.

According to @sing_twop_1000 who informed me this afternoon, I’ve been using Twitter now for three years. That’s a good thing… right?!

Trawling through the archives here, the first time I mentioned Twitter was this post published in June 2007 about another international move and my mum. As was my style at the time I talked about many different things in one post, ironically I hadn’t done that for ages until recently!

The screenshot above was the first I took of a Twitter client, from this post in October 2007 when I was talking about my mum’s ICU scare and some random crappy photos from around Singapore with my then new Nokia e61i phone thingy. I used Twitteriffic right up until they started putting ads into the software and charging for it.

ASIDE: Oh and Michael Atkinson, my mum was having chemotherapy NOT playing computer games. Go step on a pine cone.

Twitter has become such a critical part of my life, I get nearly all my news through it and for an awkward, introverted person like me it’s been a great way to meet people and make friends. I may be programming late at night by myself in the dark, but I have all these friendly people asking how I’m going just a click away. People say they don’t get Twitter, that it’s stupid and it drives them crazy, for me it may have prevented me from going crazy.

Cheers Twitter, I’ll have a coffee for both of us :).

Ladies, gentleman and everyone else, as you sit here today reading this post (or walking around reading it on your smartphone, hey WATCH OUT for that pole!) I’d like to regale you with a tale, and this time it has nothing to do with Alan A’Dale. Alan A’Dale. This Tale, has nothing to do, with Alan A’Dale. The Tale. It’s a tale of 90s nostalgia, love and gadgets.

The year was 1998

…or somewhere around then. I was 12-ish and my family had been living in Singapore for a few years. I was already interested in computing when my family got it’s first IBM in Melbourne, but Singapore’s mad obsession with gadgets and electronics had rubbed off on me to such an extent that barely a living moment went by when I wasn’t thinking about computers, reading about computers, talking about computers or, heaven forbid, actually using computers. Problem was I didn’t have one of my own and I was becoming increasingly unpopular with other family members for hogging the family machine.

During one hectic and busy weekend at a tech trade show (Singapore trade shows make the Tokyo subway look like a Zune display booth), we walked past the Toshiba booth where they were demonstrating their Libretto line of notebook computers. My jaw dropped and, as my dad tells the story, I squeaked.

How did it all FIT?

The cheesy, ugly netbook was still a decade away and the only other small, handheld machines at the time ran the scaled down Windows CE, most with monochrome displays, so I was just awe struck by how ridiculously cute this fully featured little computer was. It was smaller than a VHS tape and its weight was measured in grammes not kilos, but it had a fully operational copy of Windows 95 running on a 120MHz Pentium CPU with a proper hard drive, a petite but full QWERTY keyboard and an interesting lid mounted pointing device. Unlike the netbooks of today, this was comparable in performance to typical machines of the time but it seemed to defy the laws of physics!

Never before had I instantly wanted a gadget so badly! I mean, this thing did everything I was using that hulking huge family computer with the gigantic but low res CRT monitor for, in a size that I could hug and carry around with me! Alas it’s price tag was huge and my dad reasonably enough couldn’t justify buying laptops when desktops could do the same thing for a third of the cost.

Later that year I finally got my own computer, a 200MHz Pentium MMX tower that to this day is still fully operational with FreeBSD, and as the years went on I got the PalmPilots and laptops, but I always had a soft spot for that cute little laptop. Toshiba ended up expanding the Libretto line by making larger versions with more conventional screens and form factors, but none of them had the charm of that old unit. I thought the original was a work of art.

Fast Forward was an awesome TV series

Fast forward to 2010, over 12 years later. I had still not spent the $200 I’d been given by various folks around Christmas and was casually browsing eBay for something boring like a SATA adapter. Out of the blue, right here in Australia, was a guy selling the exact model Libretto I’d seen at that Singapore trade show as a kid, in near mint condition and guaranteed working order, for peanuts. Other people overseas were also selling them, but they were either the newer versions or they wanted a ridiculous amount in shipping.

I think there must be something magical about our childhood years, because the emotions surrounding our memories from that time are so vivid and pull at us in ways that very few other things can. When I saw that unit I was taken back to the late 90s with my mum, primary school, Michael Franks, Mambo No. 5, the Macarena, the Beanie Baby shop in Wheelock Place, my Olympus Trip film camera, Pokemon, Magic Cards, Sailor Moon, DragonBall Z, Lycos, GeoCities and… and I just had to get it!

No Ruben, you’re just a sucker

I admit I’m a huge sucker for nostalgia, arguably it’s my greatest weakness :). The unit has since been upgraded with a 40GB hard drive so I intend to dual boot it with DOS/Windows 95 (again for nostalgic purposes) and FreeBSD; not to use with X11, but for some of the terminal ncurses software I’ve been writing. Just imagine sitting in a lecture hall with this tiny little machine writing up notes in Emacs or the IBM E Editor, people would think I’m daft and for good reason!

Was it a logical thing to do? Heck no! Was it something I had to do though? Absolutely! I always wanted that little machine, and now 12 years later I could finally get one. And I can hug it and squeeze it and call it George. Obligatory Loony Tunes reference… hey I watched that in the 90s too!

Your turn

Have you guys ever bought something as an adult you always wanted as a kid, even if it was ridiculously outdated? Surely I can’t be the only crazy one doing this!

Because of my unexpected two day hiatus from blogging I missed two days of my seven day Whole Wheat Radio Artist of the Day experiment. I’m going right ahead and rectifying this by recommending one of my favourites, Johnsmith!

There’s no point reinventing the wheel when someone else has already done a great job inventing said wheel, so instead of using my own mangled language I’ll quote this part of his profile from his artist page which I wholeheartedly endorse with the Rubénerd Seal of Approval, if said seal existed.

Whenever you read or hear about the music of Johnsmith, certain watchwords always come up, regardless of the source. Words like uplifting, or integrity, heart, or soul. His songs and voice go straight to the heart, because that’s where they come from.

Given I know nothing about music and the language used to describe it, I feel as though I’m a wine taster using words such as "mmm tasty!", but Johnsmith’s music is amazing, original, fresh, with great lyrics and an upbeat attitude, and as with Esther Golton it also helps that he’s a really friendly person.

Well that endorsement was just terrible, please disregard! The first time I heard him back on the 18th of June 2008 (according to the page edit history) I felt compelled to add my Rubenerd Bagus tag to his artist page which even if I tag an artist with a bunch of five star reviews, I often don’t do unless I’ve really found someone special. Was that a better endorsement? I think it was, let’s pretend my attempt at describing music above didn’t happen.

He also has an official website, on the internet of all places! Sometimes I worry I’m too funny, but that’s okay because I’m the only one who thinks so.

It’s Miku Day and all she got from me was this lousy blog post ^_^;;. Actually it’s even worse than that, Miku Day was yesterday!

Hatsune Miku is of course the insanely popular idol originally from Yamaha’s Vocaloid2 voice synthesiser software, but she’s since been serialised in her own manga, has games released, and has even appeared in Sayonara Zetsubō Sensei (of course!).

Self professed blogging experts (who’s blogs aren’t well known, go figure) say you should never write posts discussing why you haven’t blogged. I’ve already used the word blog four times here. Anyway what have I been doing in this two day absence?

Don’t read this post, the quality doesn’t improve.

Melting Snow Leopard with a hair dryer

Or would that be a fur driver, wait fur dryer? The former sounds like an upholstered golf club.

First things first, given it was a public holiday in South Australia yesterday (something about a race, I think) I took most of the day to wipe my MacBook Pro and downgrade it back to Leopard. Is it redundant to say you’ve "gone back" and "downgraded" something? Stop interrupting me.

There are a few features I took for granted in Snow Leopard I took for granted (wait, I already said that) that I’m already missing, such as timestamped screenshot files (WOW that was a huge improvement!). I plugged all my external drives (seven… yes I know I know) and not one single Finder crash. Phews. Is Phews the plural of phew?

Corn chips

They’ve started selling CCs in Woolworths again! Unfortunately despite this awesomeness, I went to their Mawson Lakes branch late this afternoon and they were completely sold out of bread. Completely! Not a single loaf, not even that Home Brand bread that tastes like cardboard flour, or flour cardboard. I took that photo with my iTelephone and showed my sister, she said "WHOA". Her exact word.

Programming

The Perl script I wrote to sync a few computers back in Singapore in 2003 for a small company is still running, albeit with a few modifications since the last time I saw it! They called me up to take a look at it, and it consumed an entire afternoon.

I try my best to love object orientation, but clean, simple, modular code is still so much friggen fun. Heck I’m enjoying working in C again recently for similar reasons, it feels like I’m working with the computer on a problem that’s easier for it to visualise instead of attempting to model objects from our world onto it. Does that make any sense? Damn I want to do assembler, but as if the university will do anything cool and interesting like that :(

Smileness

I was at a coffee shop this morning as I was typing on my new(ish) Libretto 70CT and a cute girl smiled and waved at me as she walked past. I’m such a pathetic simpleton, that one smile was enough to make me feel all warm and fuzzy all morning :).

I GOT A LIBRETTO 70CT!

HUGE news, but will be waiting to blog about it in more detail tomorrow.

This could be the greatest CD cover, ever! I don’t know why.

Howard Hanson: Symphonies Nos. 5 & 7; Piano Concerto; Mosaics

Main performer: Gerard Schwarz
Time: 67:48
Release Date: 1992

This could be the first time I’ve ever downgraded an Apple OS.

As we speak I’m downgrading the Snow Leopard partition on my trusty old Core Duo 2006 MacBook Pro back to Leopard (and while I’m at it, I’m finally getting around to upgrading the FreeBSD partition to 8.0!). I kept waiting for updates to fix the severe stability problems in the Finder, my FireWire 800 ExpressCard and my iMovie HD plugins, but I’ve decided to give up for now.

As I always say, I love Apple hardware and software, but I’m not afraid to call them out when they do something wrong or if there’s a better alternative. This hardware may be old and crappy, and it could very well be a problem with third party software not the OS itself, but the reality is it’s still my primary production machine and I need it working reliably. Leopard on this machine was solid as a rock.

Goodbye Menlo, I’m going to miss you :’-(

And as a pre-emptive reply to what I assume will be a few comments, I think it’s great that Snow Leopard works so flawlessly on your machine, but this has no bearing on my own circumstances. And to those who may simply accuse me of using weird software or that it’s my configuration’s fault for Snow Leopard not working well not Snow Leopard itself, you obviously skimmed this post without reading it. Skimmed sounds like pasteurisation. Can you pasteurise blog posts?

For your consideration ^_^. If Tarale happens to come across this, she may want to avoid it because it contains a random list of confusing, disparate thoughts again!

That is the question!

If an anime character dresses up as another anime character, say for example Hiiragi Kagami from Lucky Star dressing up as Tohsaka Rin from the Fate/Stay Night series, is it still called cosplay?

Before you answer, consider this! If we’ve learned anything from Lucky Star and the adventures of Suzumiya Haruhi, it’s that other anime and manga are viewed as fiction within other shows. What that means is Haruhi is able to point at the SHUFFLE manga and talk about it as if it were a book, and Izumi KanataKonata is able to collect anime figures. What I mean is these characters aren’t seen as real within other shows, because the universes don’t collide.

You’re losing them

Still, even if an anime character dresses up as another anime character, is that character cosplaying or is that reserved only for people like me who are blond caucasians but dress up as Japanese people much to the second hand embarrassment of others?

Is cosplaying limited to the real world? What if an anime character dresses up as a character from the same anime, is that called cosplaying? Or is the fact the two characters are from the same universe mean they’d just be dressing up as each other because they don’t see themselves as an anime?

Computers don’t like anime, according to the spell checker I’ve made 25 spelling mistakes in this post. I think I might quit while I’m ahead and while I still understand my own point I was trying to make. Wait, I was making a point? I’m really confused. Never mind.

In a tip of the hat to Jim Kloss who was essentially driven off Wikipedia by trigger happy administrators as well as some recent adventures of my own, I’ve updated my Wikipedia user page.

Under the Worrying out loud title thingy:

While he finds the philosophy and mission of Wikipedia noble, he worries the resource is slowly being derailed by an elitist clique of power hungry administrators more interested in slapping indiscriminate boilerplate without further explanation on articles they deem unworthy before they’ve had the chance to be fleshed out. He firmly believes administrators who repeatedly have article deletion nominations rejected should have their privileges revoked in order to discourage such behaviour.

One tiny example out of a laundry list of potential candidates, the fact the Australian Central Credit Union article was nominated for deletion by this person because it “wasn’t notable”, despite the fact a Google search would have returned thousands of results and that the credit union is one of the largest in the country.

It is our collective loss that responsible editors like Jim Kloss have left because of such people.

For fun, I also borrowed the wiki template used for articles on people and added some pointlessness. For example I listed my ethnicity as White and Nerdy :D.

It seems Jim Kloss and I aren’t the only ones having trouble. Recently Slashdot ran an article discussing quality issues with Wikipedia and some of the responders were pretty vocal. Darkness404 gave one of the better responses that addresses several of the exact issues I’ve been worrying about:

I think the main problem with Wikipedia is it went from “an encyclopedia where you -might- find something of interest” to “a place you can find anything!” to now “a place where you can possibly find some things but if we don’t like it, it gets deleted and we don’t want your help unless you feel like reading 22342342343 policies, follow them exactly and patrol “your” page constantly”. Seriously, Wikipedia 2-3 years ago was a lot better than Wikipedia now. Why is it that editors think deleting articles somehow makes it better? Especially since Wikipedia is online and a few new articles don’t translate to (much) extra load?

The Deletionpedia site shows a lot of fairly terrible articles that were worthy of deletion, but also a significant number of good articles. As I said before, that’s the problem with basing notability solely on the number of mentions something has online, and vesting power in only a few individuals.

Part one of this post written last year shows one of my own personal experiences with some senior Wikipedia editors. For example, did you know war and a ritualistic bonfire are equivalent?

Part three in the Rubenerd Whole Wheat Radio Artist of the Day (try saying that really fast!) is Esther Golton!

She’s perhaps a predictable choice for me given I’ve talked about her and her music so many times here, but when Herrie started playing Going to Shadu then The Unseen Visitor while running on random this morning I took it to be a sign.

I was a fan of Unfinished Houses (particularly for that first song linked to above), but her recent Aurora Borealis work is on another level entirely from most music, it’s up there with Michael Franks which you’d know if you read this blog is very high praise! It’s also a pleasant coincidence that’s she’s a genuinely nice person, something which doesn’t really have any bearing on her musical talent per sé but it means I feel good buying her music. Does that make sense? It made sense in my head!

Visit her artist page and her official website for all you need to know, and request some of her music :).

From Wikia’s search page.

Given I already linked to John Gorka from Whole Wheat Radio yesterday, I thought it’d be fun to do an artist of the day thingy here for a week and see what new stuff I discover. Today’s band is one I’d never heard before, but they hands down do the best rendition of Born in Chicago that I’d ever friggen heard in my life, the Chicago Blues Reunion!

I could transcribe their description, but best to go to their artist page and see for yourself; from there you can also see their links to other social networks and even request some of their songs and the WWR audio stream will accommodate :).

You know when Australia has really started losing respect in the eyes of the world when people discuss the country on their sites or publications where they’ve never really mentioned it before. For example, take this Japanation blog post:

If you’re the type to follow video games, they you know that Australia is one of the less favorable developed countries to live in. Its authorities wield the censor stick like few others, and regularly compare games (and gamers) to cancer and violent criminals.

Yes Conroy, Atkinson, you’re making world headlines!

Of course this is just the beginning, the economic cost of the Labor government’s nanny state policy and the Liberal party’s apathy remains to be seen, but as I’ve discussed previously if they keep pulling stunts like this they can kiss any serious foreign investment in Australian IT goodbye if they know they’ll be investing in a sector the government so openly despises.

And Labor are supposed to be the "left leaning" major party, sheesh :(. The Greens should be taking this issue and running with it, but so far they’ve remained relatively silent as well.

Up until recently, the worst crimes South Australian Attorney-General Michael Atkinson committed were against common sense, civil liberties, free speech and defamation of law abiding computer gamers. Now it’s personal.

Dear Michael Atkinson,

Regarding the spending of public funds on questionable research

A couple of years ago I lost my mum and best friend to cancer after she lost her 12 year struggle with the debilitating disease — a struggle I can’t begin to relate to — and now we all discover you willingly supplied funds to an organisation that places such a disease in the same league as… computer gaming?

I would like to print (nay, spit) the string of four letter words spinning in my head and express in detail how you’ve further crushed my faith in humanity, but Debra (my late mum) used to tell me people like you aren’t worth it. She was right.

Peace, health and happiness,
Ruben Schade

I’m over politicians.

I fancy myself a bit of a greenie (I’ve even voted for them), but I’m not that impressed by biofuels, at least not so far.

First the tweet that started this train of thought off, from @GreenITers:

Under the Kyoto Protocol, biofuels are treated as zero-emission fuels. However, it doesn’t account emissions from producing & transporting it

I didn’t know that. I’m willing to bet it also doesn’t take into account the forests and other natural wilderness that have to be destroyed to grow the huge fields of crops to make the biofuel. Not to mention as my dad put it a few weeks ago when we were talking about it: “there’s something wrong with growing huge fields of food to feed our cars while billions of people are starving to death."

The only positive aspect I can see to biofuels is the potential for recycling waste products, but even then they still cause localised pollution in the areas they’re combusted in because we extract the useful energy by burning it!

Don’t get me wrong, the idea of burning nature’s sequestered carbon reserves (aka fossil fuels) makes me shiver, but biofuels aren’t a silver bullet either. Maybe I’m just bitter that it’s 2010 and I’m still waiting for my jetpack.

I may be blogging too much.

just spent an hour catching up on 3 days of RSS feeds. About 1/3 of it was @rubenerd.

As I told the proprietor of this far more interesting blog than mine after repeatedly apologising, I make up for my lack of intelligent thoughts with… quantity! Like this post you’re reading now for example, there’s nothing of substance here whatsoever. An intelligent blogger wouldn’t ever publish a post like this. The Bird is The Word.

Trying out some of these new Whole Wheat Radio share link artist widgets, what an awesome idea!

As Jim discussed this morning, you can click the WWR Widgets link in the Listener console for the currently playing artist, or you can click the Get WWR widgets link under More Information on any artist’s page. The links in this paragraph link to John Gorka as an example.

This is a fantastic idea because with a few clicks I can now share what I’m listening to or what I just rated highly in a REALLY EASY way, which is the key. Make something easy, and people will use it. Previously I could have talked about an artist, but it would have involved downloading the picture off the WWR servers, uploading it here, then transcribing parts of their artist page, the upshot being I didn’t do it as often.

Not only that, but the referral fees will pile up until one day I can cash out and buy his old cabin in Alaska!

Amongst my biggest current concerns is figuring out which one I like the best, and that Jim may have given control freaks like me too much power over what I can do!

The only technical point I would make is for W3C freaks like me, the generated code for these widgets we copy and paste from the WWR site don’t validate as XHTML because the ampersands in the URL aren’t escaped and a alt="" isn’t declared, which means any page we put them on doesn’t validate. This can be fixed in post by changing all the "&" characters to "&" and adding our own alt="" no biggie :).

Now if you’d excuse me, I’m off to grab a cup of coffee down the road, presumably while still humming this John Gorka tune I can’t get out of my head! Will be back in an hour, when I assume I’ll be posting more widgets :D

I tried to extract a ZIP file I was send this afternoon and got the following error with unzip…

Archive: ARCHIVE.zip
skipping: ARCHIVE.zip  need PK compat. v4.5 (can do v2.1)

Turns out this means it was compressed with a newer version of PKZIP to what unzip can handle, but p7zip can take care of it.

Grab the latest build, then do the usual building and all is good. Sounds like a commercial for a construction company.

% make
# make install
% 7za x [ARCHIVE.ZIP]

Once upon a time there was an obsessive blogger who didn’t have a very exciting live, so when something as silly as a number syncronicity occurred on his website he just had to tell everyone, even if they didn’t care! That’s right, it’s pointless milestone time!

Before we go any futher

Before we go on (wait, I just said that), I’d firstly like to point out that this is no ordinary pointless milestone… wait, hold that thought, did I link to that tag yet? Here, I’ll link to it here just in case. Wait, did you miss it? Here it is again.

This pointless milestone also happens to be a trippy syncronicity so vast in its complexity and co-incidence vectors, that I could make up a bunch of language in a sentence such as this one and pass it off as legitimate statistical analysis.

Wait for it… here it is!

Wait for it… here it is! Wait, I just said that! Hey, wait. This is Rubénerd post number 2600. Not only this, but WordPress in its infinite wisdom has also assigned this post with the ID of 6000 which you can confirm yourself by going to the non-prettified URL:

http://rubenerd.com/?p=6000

Look at that! Post number 2600, and it was given an ID of 6000! That’s spooky and eerily beautiful, in a way. In celebration, I might go for an evening stroll around the park. The parks here don’t have snow, but that probably means I’m less likely to slip and land on my arse again. Emphasis on less likely.