Rubénerd!

A news story about lightning strikes in Singapore lead me to the Singapore Civil Defence Force site, which has a ton of super cool posters and handbooks. Naturally, many of these have to be printed ^_^.

The Jakarta Times knows Singapore

First, to the story that sparked this post. Given the wild rain in Sydney again today, this news article from the Jakarta Times of all places seems oddly precedent:

Singapore, The Lightning City
Feng Zengkun & Kezia Toh - Straits Times Indonesia
November 22, 2011

[..] especially as Singapore is one of the lightning capitals of the world.

It also experiences an average of 186 days of lightning per year, according to the National Environment Agency (NEA). This is due to the tropical weather conditions. Each square kilometer of land in Singapore can be struck up to 16 times each year.

That's puts Singapore ahead of the UK in number of strikes on people a year, though far less than the United States. Per capita you've got to think that's awfully high though for a country that's less than 50 kilometres wide!

Treasure trove!

Anyway, the Jakarta Times article mentioned the Singapore Civil Defence Force website had a handbook detailing how to survive lighting storms. Given the rain is pelting us here in Sydney, I figured it could have some advice. Right?

What I didn't expect was an entire site with posters ranging from workplace safety, to fire hazard guides, to earth tremors, to posters detailing emergency procedures and handbooks... it's a veritable treasure trove! All are downloadable in PDFs, and in the English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil, the four official languages.

Unfortunately, this one about fire preparadness made me hungry.

We have an A3 printer, which for now has mostly printed anime pictures and scans (cough!) for walls and so on. I think I may have found a new source of posters!

I make it a habit of going outside to watch sunsets from our suburban bunker here when I can. This evening the whole sky was obscured by cloud, but the light dyed them a really vivid, pretty colour.

I know nothing about professional photography, but it was as if the clouds were acting as a light diffuser. I felt like I was wearing tinted glasses walking around outside, everything was bathed in a pinkish-orange glow. Didn't last for long, but it was fun :)

Hotlinking images is a fact of life for most weblog author folks, but instead of just blocking sites that leech obscene amounts of bandwidth, this time I decided to have a little fun ^____^

Hotlink is a Malaysian telco, go figure

Each month I go through my server logs and find out all the new sites that are hotlinking my images. In other words, the sites that are requesting material on my servers without any links back to my site here. Leeches. Well, I hesitate to call them leeches, because those little creatures were extremely useful for medical applications and allegedly they're still used as such in some circumstances.

Technically I could just deny any requests from pages hosted outside my own URL (with the exception of RSS readers), but I figure as long as I don't exceed my monthly allocated bandwidth quota at my host, all is fine. I mean, people who stinge bandwidth are inconsiderate, but I suppose in the grand scheme of things they're not doing too much harm, unless they're really abusing it.

Not to be confused with Mr Brown

January 2011 has been going for less than two weeks, and already I have a site wasting more of my bandwidth than a guy accidentally tipping over an entire bag of coffee beans onto the floor. I saw that at Starbucks recently, and was horrified. Think of all those hundreds of cups of happiness that were just ruined! Damn!

In this case, its a video sharing site at http://www.mrbrownee70.com/ who's designers decided to take it upon themselves to use this adorable image for Greasemonkey.

Usually in these circumstances I either rename the file so the offending site has a broken image, but in this case I noticed they didn't specify and width and height anywhere, which allowed me to replace it with a huge banner instead!

It's like free advertising, but free! Well, that was a superfluous sentence ending. I've been doing that a lot lately. I've been eating quite regularly too, but that's not really unusual. I've made it a habit, you could say.

I uploaded the replacement image at 4:10PM, on Saturday the 10th of January 2011. Let's see how long it takes for them to update their page ;)

This barely qualifies as a post, but I'm simply far too excited to contain myself. Having had DSL just provisioned today, this is what I've been able to do:

• Finally downloaded FreeBSD 8.1 and Sabayon Five Point Three!
• Run portsnap, portaudit, portmaster and freebsd-update on 3 machines
• Run port -v selfupdate on 2 Macs
• Updated 3 iTelephones to iOS 4.1
• Downloaded a two month backlog of podcasts
• Scrobbled a ton of cached music plays
• Jabbered to two people
• Wrote three blog posts (including this one!)
• New desktop backgrounds!
• Got my father's Singapore VPN working
• Returned emails for 31 people (41 if you count simple thank-you's)
• Uploaded a bunch of personal project revisions (HUGE!)
• Built a crude time machine and interfaced it with an online flux capacitor

Thank you, and goodnight!

The rule of thirds is way off, but I like this picture for some reason. Really like all the blue, especially those random flares at the bottom which I can't account for at all. Ghosts?

Also makes for an interesting contrast with my photo of Singapore a few days ago.

After over a year of trials and tribulations (something to do with an infestation of Tribbles) I finally gave up on the Intel DQ35JO motherboard and replaced it with the MSI P43T-C51 in my main DIY machine. The difference is stunning!

Initial

When I first built this machine in late 2008, I envisioned a headless server I could call from my aging MacBook Pro to do CPU intensive tasks such as file compression, video conversion and compiling large ports. I would SFTP into FreeBSD on it, send it the files and depending on which folder they were sent to, a cron job would either convert, compress or compile them automatically, then put them in an outbox folder I could pick up. It was pretty sweet.

I bought the Intel DQ35JO "Executive" motherboard because it was relatively affordable and it had onboard graphics; Intel graphics are universally terrible but I was using it as a server and it wouldn't even be plugged into a monitor most of the time! I used the money I saved from buying a graphics card to splurge on a Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3GHz CPU and 6GB of DDR2 memory which at the time were still pretty pricey.

If you do a Google Image search for DQ35JO, I'm on the first page ;).

Problems problems problems problems...

As I blogged about in detail in 2008, things didn't always go so smoothly. From the outset the motherboard seemed to be plagued with problems, so much so that I had it replaced twice. It wouldn't recognise any of the keys to enter the BIOS, it would ignore drives, drives it didn't ignore would report serious errors, the system clock would sporadically change to something that made no sense. I had an 800W PSU with just one optical drive and two hard disks so I didn't think it was due to a lack of power.

Software was also very touchy. NetBSD, FreeBSD, Slackware and Windows 2000 installed without major problems, but the Anaconda installer on Fedora 11 and 12 would report a crash before it even finished loading, PartedMagic and Knoppix would get stuck while booting, and Debian refused to recognise any drives at all. Finally, SpinRite would get stuck on the screen where it waits to access drives.

MSI saves my arse

With most of the world moving to the Intel Core iX line of CPUs, I reckoned I could pick up a replacement motherboard for the Core 2 Duo for less, and I was right! Going to Cybermind at Sim Lim Square I was able to snag the last of their compatible boards with a nice discount. They're really nice people there, been buying stuff from them since I was a kid.

I swapped the Intel DQ35JO board with the MSI P43T-C51 and the difference is amazing. Despite having the same RAM, drives and CPU as the last board, FreeBSD boots in a fraction of the time and Fedora didn't chuck a hissy fit when installing. To borrow a phrase from Steve Jobs, the entire machine just feels more snappy.

As with the Intel board it comes with gigabit ethernet, a hugely generous number of USB ports (especially compared to the two lousy ports I get on my MacBook Pro!) and passable Realtec sound. As a bonus, unlike the Intel board it also comes with a decent number of PCI slots (owing to the fact it's not MiniATX) and a legacy floppy drive controller so I can use my 5.25" floppy drive! Yes I still have several, shaddup.

The only downsides other than a complete lack of FireWire ports (d'oh) is it doesn't have onboard graphics, so I had to harvest an old PCI Express card from a older machine which I hope to replace. It's my hope to use this machine as a proper desktop now instead of just a server, so I'll be on the lookout for more basic cards that FreeBSD and Fedora can support accelerated graphics on.

Photos of my new baby coming soon ^_^

Time to quickly share some more photos I remember I took earlier today with my iTelephone before I head off to bed.

With all the recent rain Mawson Lakes has been getting a lot more ducks quietly waddling along and quacking. Perhaps these ducks grew up around the sounds of people and are used to us, because unlike the other birds that fly away as soon as you approach them, these are more than happy to walk over and say hello.

I was walking back from the post office this afternoon and saw these two rather well fed little ducks walking alongside me. I sat down on the footpath cross-legged and reached out with my hand and they came over and started tapping on my fingers :). I was even able to pat them lightly on their heads before I stood up and kept walking.

As with watching a silly series like K-On, when you're dealing with a lot of stress sometimes it's worth taking time out and doing something like this to make you feel happy again, even if only for a short while.

Quack quack :)

For the convenience of those who aren't using Twitter I have transcribed a hilarious, witty conversation I had with Lensflared on Twitter this evening.

Lensflared: Come on Sun, where are you?

Rubenerd: @Lensflared Last I heard Sun was being bought by Oracle :D

Lensflared: @Rubenerd Does that mean the Sun will shine even brighter, or will it cause an irreversible eclipse? :-)

Rubenerd: @Lensflared AAAAAAAAAA! Okay you win! :D

What I love about such "high level" nonsense is if you weren't a serious computer nut you'd have no idea what's going on! Or perhaps in this specific IDE context I should say a computer... bean? HA! Damn I should have replied with that instead, don't you hate it when you come up with a great comeback but only after the time when you could have used it?

I talked about this issue a bit more seriously back in early April.

There are lots of conspiracy theorists on Twitter which I think mirrors their high degree of exposure on the internet in general. Without a reliable way of checking and verifying facts in many circumstances online, this breeds such ideas like a week old loaf of bread does mould. That's fine though, as well as people aren't getting hurt it's just free speech asserting itself.

I never thought I would consider myself a member of the conspiracy theory clique, but I am a conspiracy theory conspiracy theorist. I am of the opinion conspiracy theorists around the world are members of a loose, underground alliance designed to distort facts, spread misinformation and sew seeds of doubt in order to disrupt scientific, political and technological progress, all while using the guise that they're the ones trying to expose said shenanigans. It's very clever!

When conspiracy theorists saying the world is changing and there's a New World Order being established, I assert they would know better than anyone else because they're the ones guilty of perpetrating it, whether they realise it or not.

Look out conspiracy theorists, I'm onto your conspiracy! Who's the sheeple now? ;-)

I haven't posted about Twitter here for over a day, so I feel as though I'm obligated to again. It's certainly not as ground breaking as what Twitter is currently being used for to give people in Iran a voice worldwide, but it's up there. Well okay, it really isn't.

A couple of weeks ago while going through my email I was notified that @Womanwithbite was following me on Twitter. I noticed she was from Adelaide and I loved her username so I reciprocated! I figured I follow a ton of people worldwide but not that many people locally.

In hindsight I wish I hadn't. After a few days of reading rude messages to politicians and helping to let them know that Twitter people can't be relied upon for reasoned discussion, I gave up and unfollowed her. Well okay and she was also saying a lot of silly things and I'm allergic to people who distort facts! For those not well versed in Aussie politics, the Liberal Party is the broadly conservative party.

Unfollowing @Womanwithbite. All I get from her is poorly worded [whinging], swearing and Liberal Party propaganda. Moving on.

1:36 PM Jun 14th from TweetDeck

Granted I guess I could have been a bit more civil myself (and spelling whinging correctly would have also helped!), but I like to think my response to her tweets was better than her reply:

@Rubenerd Unfollowing this clown,Rubenerd. He has,without a doubt,the most boring,inane tweets of anyone I follow. Vacuuming? Care factor- 0

2:59 PM Jun 14th from web in reply to Rubenerd

I had to hand it to her, at least she did reply! I was hoping for something better though.

I give @WomanwithBite's rebuttal a 2/5. Was hilarious, but too predictable and lacking the bite her username implies. And I'm dusting now :)

3:06 PM Jun 14th from TweetDeck

What blew me away though was all the support I got from a whole heap of people who responded. Frank Nora (@rampler) from The Rampler and a very close friend tweeted my favourite ones!

@Rubenerd wow, she doesn't like vacuuming tweets? she's no fun!!

3:09 PM Jun 14th from web in reply to Rubenerd

@WomanwithBite I hear you are a fan of vacuuming. here is a recording of me vacuuming my living room, hope you enjoy it http://is.gd/11Gj1

3:38 PM Jun 14th from web in reply to WomanwithBite

And MannyTheMailman (@mtmm), one of the friendliest people on Twitter asked a good question!

@Rubenerd What circus do you preform with. (-: As per @Womanwithbite s tweet.

3:23 PM Jun 14th from web

Whichever circus it is, they don't pay me enough :)

What I find interesting is that despite using Twitter since the beginning of 2007, I've only had flareups like this a couple of times. The discourse and conversations are still far more civilised than on CNET News.com!