Rubénerd :)

Having let more unread posts pile up like a massive pile of unread posts, I’ve decided once and for all to declare Google Reader bankruptcy. George Bush, I Can Haz Bailout?

Read this post >

In case you’re still subscribed to my blog through the old address (pictured above) but don’t follow my shared items in The Google Readers I’m passing this message I posted along with my sincerest apologies!

Sorry for the flurry of blog posts everyone! I had a DNS problem so if you’re subscribed to my blog through the old URL still, you probably just got whacked with two dozen new posts. Forgive me, I’ll try not to let it happen again!

While I have the RSS feed from my old side redirecting, if you’re still subscribed through the old address I encourage you to move over to the new one, if only because it seems Google Reader updates it more often and is more reliable. Thanks :).

Checking my Google Reader page this evening I noticed all of a sudden I have 18 readers for my main RSS feed here at Rubenerd.com, and 34 readers for the old URL bringing the total to 52! I do admit I started blogging because I enjoy writing about my weird and disparate interests first and foremost, but it’s another world of good feeling knowing a few of you are interested in some of it too.

<Cheesyness> So I just wanted to get all soppy for a second and send out a thank you and a hug to all of you for thinking my material here was worthwhile enough to warrant some of the time from your hectic electronic lives. Its a fulfilling feeling that has helped a socially awkward, introverted guy like me in ways you can’t imagine. </cheesyness>

I’ll try my best to minimise the number of typos and grammar mistakes :). I chose the above photo from my Flickr account because it looked all dramatic and the primary colour is similar to uncooked grilled cheese sandwiches.

Peace, health and happiness,
~ Ruben

Time for some shameless self promotion! I’ve started a new website for a pet project of mine that isn’t a website at all, it’s just an RSS feed. Technically I could have published all the stuff here on my blog, but I thought I’d give this a try.

http://rubenerd.com/puzzles.xml

Some people start blogs about their obsession with cupcakes, so I’ve decided to create one to keep track of the pretty sudoku puzzles I try to do on a regular basis. I figure my blog already has enough stuff on it, and I don’t want to fill up my Flickr account which already has enough things that aren’t photos!

To keep things simple, this page is just an RSS feed I craft myself. Most modern browsers will generate a pretty page when they encounter a web feed, which means I don’t have to worry about CMSs, HTML, themes, maintenance, blasted PHP! You can even subscribe to it if you really care.

Peace, health and happiness ^_^
~ Ruben (@Rubenerd)

Here’s an idea for a Google Reader feature that in my opinion is long overdue. If Reader attempts to fetch a web feed and it encounters a 301 permanent redirect to a legitimate new address it should update its own records in user accounts to point to the new address instead of still pinging the old one.

I ask for my own selfish reasons because as of now more people are still subscribed to my blog here through the old http://rubenerdshow.com/blog/feed/ address instead of http://rubenerd.com/feed/. Each request to the old URI takes more effort and bandwidth than the new one, and I’ve noticed items that appear in the new one instantly can sometimes take an hour or longer to appear in the old one. An automatic update would fix this.

Good idea?

As I’ve eluded to previously I gave up on Firefox 3.5.x on my MacBook Pro OS X and FreeBSD partitions because it was far too unstable to use without going bat crazy insane. I left Windows for a reason!

For some reason though going back to 3.0.x has caused Google Reader to generate a few errors a day after not having any trouble at all. It could very well be a problem with our home internet connection here not Firefox but it is a weird coincidence.

If it weren’t for the fact all my friends from Twitter, Whole Wheat Radio and the real world used it I’d probably go back to Bloglines full time. In fact at one point I was going to research whether I could subscribe to people’s Google shared items and comments in Bloglines and have people subscribe to my Bloglines shared items and comments from Google Reader. Might be worth looking into again.

I’ve figured out why some iTunes users have been reporting problems with subscribing to the Rubenerd Show through the iTunes Store. I deleted my own subscription, searched for "Rubenerd Show" in the iTunes Store and resubscribed to only be given a small circle and an exclamation point.

When I right clicked and chose "Show Description" I was given the above dialog box. No wonder it isn’t working, it’s trying to access new shows from http:///show/feed/ for some reason!

I don’t know how or why this happened. I’ll be contacting Apple about this to see if I can get it pointing back to the proper URI again. I believe my good friend Felix Tanjono submitted my podcast to the iTunes Store back in 2005 back when Australia and Singapore didn’t have access to it.

While I’m sorting this out you can still go to iTunes, choose the Advanced menu and click Subscribe to Podcast, then enter the following address as a stopgap:

http://rubenerd.com/show/feed/

Sorry about this, I don’t know how this could have happened :-(.

For those of you subscribed to my blog through an aggregator using the old URL for the RSS feed instead of the new one, you may have noticed four recent posts with identical timestamps. You probably don’t care why this happened, but I’m so excited I just have to relay it!

When I moved from Servage to Segment Publishing because the former was absolutely awful and because I had so much success with the latter for other projects, I also took the opportunity to move the site back to Rubenerd.com which I had previously lost to domain squatters. RubenerdShow.com was still with Servage, but all it contained was a simple .htaccess script to redirect all requests to the new domain.

Well as of today, I finally got around to moving the domain off Servage and onto Segment Publishing including said text file. This means, FINALLY, I am completely, 110% off Servage. I don’t have anything hosted with them whatsoever. Clear as mud!

I’m putting the finishing touches on my post detailing what an awful webhost Servage is but it won’t be ready for a few days. Another post I’m positive you’re all anxiously awaiting ;-).

Max Brenners at the Esplanade in Singapore, by Angie Teo

One of the problems with using a feed aggregator or blog reader is you tend to act like a kid in a chocolate shop: you just keep adding and adding feeds because they’re free and they’re full of goodness until one day you’re subscribed to so many feeds and you’re getting so many entries you start to drown. As a result you start to click the "Clear Unread Items" or equivalent more often than you’d care to admit.

I’ve never understood why blog aggregators must treat each item as if it were an email or to do list item in dire need of my attention. When I read a newspaper or magazine I don’t read every article or story, I only read what’s interesting to me. I guess the comeback to that would be that if you receive too many email messages you only start reading ones you find interesting or necessary, but I think that’s pushing it.

What metaphor do we use to replace the proverbial story “to do list” though if it’s so flawed?

Whoops!

As with a newspaper, unless we specify we want to keep something or share it with friends, we probably don’t want to read the same story twice. By greying out an item from our subscribed feeds our software is telling us we don’t need to read that material any more because we’ve already seen it. Short of deleting a story altogether from our own cache of previously read articles, this is probably the most logical thing to do.

ASIDE: Notice my careful wording above, I said the software tells us that we’ve already "seen" a story, not read it. Unfortunately we’ve only scratched the surface here, should our software be able to tell me whether I just skimmed an article, just looked at the pictures or read it in full? Could it have a timer perhaps? I’m getting in way over my head!

That’s not to say though we want to be prompted in the opposite way if we haven’t read an item, because again to me that’s akin to the software telling me I’m slack that I haven’t read every single story, which I don’t want to do. But then again, it’s useful to tell me what I haven’t read, otherwise how do I know what’s new? Bummer, we’re back where we started!

I’ve often heard it said that one of the strengths of computers are their ability to process large volumes of data in an instant that would take a human an eternity. Silly jokes about politicians and physical education teachers aside, as humans we have the upper hand in having intelligence. The fact that so called "tags" and "categories" even exist for posts and other media online shows that artificial intelligence still has a long, long, long way to go. And I mean a LONG way. A computer can download every news story and media item from hundreds of feeds to my aggregator every time I check my browser and perhaps do some rudimentary filtering based on what I’ve previously read or what I’ve defined as my topics of interest, but it’s speed and accuracy abruptly stop there. "Rudimetary" is the operative word.

Whoops!

Perhaps it’s not the software that needs retraining, it’s us. Perhaps I need to train myself to stop subscribing to every single news feed I come across with the thought in the back of my mind that my aggregator will handle it for me somehow. Because every morning when I wake up, turn my computer on and am told that I have 1000+ unread stories along with comments from friends for several dozen of them, I end up just reading just the latter, a few other bits and pieces, then leave. I reckon if my Google Reader and Bloglines accounts told me exactly how many items I’ve failed to read over the years, the integer would be of sufficient length that if I had that amount in my bank account, I could purchase myself a small planet and retire there.

I haven’t even touched on the problem of missing out on good stories I should have read because there’s so much other stuff crowding around it, but I suspect if you’ve read this far and use an aggregator yourself you don’t need me to elaborate any further!

As I’ve eluded to previously, what I really need is an electronic secretary of some sort who picks out important blog posts, emails, Tweets and so forth, then sends them to me in an email for me to skim each morning. Technologies like RSS and Atom allow us to deliver that material, but after that computers still have a long way to go.

Thesis material perhaps?

I was alerted by Todd and Kaede that the Rubenerd Show RSS podcast feed thingy wasn’t working properly for them. I had a look on my server and it turns out the RSS feed php file was corrupted when I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress last night. As far as I can tell that was the only file affected, but to play it safe I re-uploaded every server-side file again.

Hope that clears it up for people, sorry for the trouble.