Rubénerd!

While attempting to find the right diagnostic tools for a bunch of drives, in my sleep deprived state I figured if anyone would be able to help, it'd be Makise Kurisu! I should have just gone to bed.

Pixel art by homura on Pixiv.

Sugoii ne, anime was a friggen huge topic for me in 2011! Well, technically in relation to other topics, but still!

I also did Wordles for 2010, 2009 and 2008.

Makes sense, it's not as though Kindles have titles on them or anything.

Given John Walkenbach is an Excel guru, on a whim this afternoon I wondered what better way to pay tribute to his ended J-Walk Blog than by creating some graphs!

We begin, above, with the number of posts we've both written containing the name of the world's most awesomely titled location, your favourite place and mine, Saskatchewan. For this graph, I determined the number of posts containing said locale, then divided it by the total number of posts we've written. Judging from this, we can deduce John was at least three times more interested in ice hockey than I was, and three times more likely to have a live moose roaming in his pantry.

Here's a chart comparing the number of years the J-Walk Blog was active compared to Rubénerd.com. For interest's sake, I also included the late Whole Wheat Radio which was an influence on both of us, and that we both blogged frequently about during its heyday. John even met the site's proprietor, something I hope to do at some point as well.

According to this, I have two years to match WWR, and three for J-Walk. Wonder if I'll be able to overcome this apparent 8 to 9 year itch.

You think I blog too much? I'm a rank amateur compared to the blogging machine that was J-Walk, and who continues to be on Google+. Granted many of my posts tend to be longer than his, but given he'd only been blogging a few years longer than me, that's pretty friggen amazing.

Check out the specific number of posts too. Aside from the 3 in the middle, the numbers are the same. That's just freaky.

And now we end on something that Google proposes but I still simply can't believe! Despite his order of magnitute more entries than yours truly, and despite both sharing a passion for this most perfect of constables, both in relative and absolute terms I've mentioned them more often than he has.

DISCLAIMER: These charts were generated in LibreOffice, not Excel. Sorry John!

Have I missed anything? Feel free to correct :)

Bruce Clement, a new friend of mine on The Twitters, recently asked his followers why they blog. This is my attempt at an answer!

Having opened a dialogue about battery oddities under Linux, Bruce Clement and I started following each other a few days ago. He's an IT professional hailing from across the pond in New Zealand who's Twitter profile description is eerily familiar to mine:

Software developer. Internet branding. Linux user. No I can't fix your computer. Can't design decent looking websites either.

Swap out "internet branding" with "anime fan" or something equally less productive, and his profile sounds just like mine ;).

Here I go, attempting an answer to his post!

While I'd like to say I blog because I have valuable insights, am participating in citizen journalism that's bringing down corrupt governments and institutions, that I'm entertaining and informative, that Dave Winer insulted me into doing it, or that I'm being held captive on a space station and being forced to do so with a phaser pointed at me, I'd be full of nonsense if I claimed to be.

There are secondary reasons aplenty:

It helps me remember things

Blogging gives me a virtual record of what I've found interesting and procedures I've come up with to do things over time. The former is fun for nostalgic reasons, the latter is helpful and may as well be online instead of sitting in some random text file somewhere!

It keeps me in contact with people

I'm a terribly shy and antisocial person in public, but blogging keeps me in contact with people from all over the place, some of whom only know me because they happened to see something in a search engine or a tweet. Sometimes they even reward me with coffee :)

It lets people know they're right and I'm wrong

As the internet meme goes, everyone's entitled to my opinion. Trolls love my opinion because it gives them fodder to justify their existence, and people who agree with me leave nice comments!

It's great for downtime

I'm not really into gaming and am a fairly solitary person, so blogging is just a natural fit. If I were entertaining and a good writer, it'd fit me even more.

It makes me look legit

There is nothing, nothing more valuable to a person's reputation than having a well stocked weblog or blog or website or whatever it is people call them. I read it in Fortune or Time or Newsweek or something.

It legitimises activities

If I were satisfied with being a passive consumer I'd spend all day watching anime, messing around with programming languages and operating systems that are outdated or seldom used outside fan circles, and I'd have no qualms about it. Somehow writing about doing things helps to legitimise them, even if they're still entirely pointless.

Ultimately though, I blog primarily for two simple reasons: I'm being held captive on a space station and its operators claim they'll throw me out an airlock if I don't produce material that helps them to understand the inner workings of the early 21st century male nerd mind. Also, I just find it a terribly fun thing to do. :)

I love Borders. I spent a ridiculous amount of my childhood there, not to mention my money. I know its not politically correct to admit to liking retail chains, but if they go I really will miss them.

The Book is The Word

If you've been living under a rock, or a rather large hardcover book about geology, you may not be aware of the recent news that Borders has entered chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States. A favourite amongst American airline companies that defaulted on their commitments after airline deregulation (thank you Carter and Reagan), chapter 11 protects businesses from their creditors and allows them a chance to reorganise themselves in the hopes they'll be able to return to profitability at some point. Theoretically.

According to Wikipedia, a site that perhaps reduced Border's profits on printed manuals, encyclopaedias and self serving autobiographies:

On February 16, 2011, the company announced that it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, listing $1.275 billion in assets and $1.293 billion in debts in its filing

Ouch. According to the same article, all of their superstores will be shut down and the number of smaller stores drastically reduced. Presumably if they can make it through the chapter 11 period they'll continue to operate.

Singapore

Of course being heavily influenced by childhood nostalgia, my first thought was whether Borders in Australia and Singapore would be affected.

My sister, parents and I moved to Singapore shortly before Borders opened their now iconic store in Wheelock Place, and as I said at the beginning of this pointless post I spent much of my childhood there. Kinokuniya across the road in the Takashimaya complex had more stuff, but Borders had carpet and nicer lighting. It was huge but felt cozy. I spent many a happy afternoon after school school sitting in their IT section deciding which O'Reilly programming books took my fancy. I loved that they were open so late even on weekends so when other people had social lives and were exploring alcohol and nightclubs, I could go somewhere with my good buddy Felix and just explore. I liked the place, you get my point.

It turns out though that much like Borders UK, Borders in Singapore has no business relation to the presumed parent company in the US. Writers in Singapore acting like the true PR spokespersons that they are were quick to assure readers that the operations in the city state were safe:

Feb 15, 2011
SINGAPORE - Borders Singapore is not closing down its operations here.

Although The Wall Street Journal has reported that Borders Group is preparing to file for bankruptcy in the United States, book lovers need not fret because, since 2008, Borders stores in Singapore, as well as Australia and New Zealand, are owned by Redgroup Retail - an Australian book and stationery retailer - and not the US chain.

Nothing to worry about right?

Australia

Well, maybe not. On the 17th, RedGroup Retail that operates Borders and Angus & Robertson bookstores in Australia, New Zealand and Singapore reported that the were dire straits themselves. Again from Wikipedia:

On 17 February 2011, RedGroup Retail (including the Borders, Angus & Robertson as well as Whitcoulls chains) were placed into voluntary administration with Ferrier Hodgson appointed as administrators.

So it looks as though Borders may be shutting down in Australia after all, and along with the parent company we can presume the stores in Singapore will also be closing. Right? RIGHT?

Well, maybe not. Again from that bastion of journalistic integrity in Singapore known as TODAYonline:

Feb 21, 2011 SINGAPORE - Go ahead and flip those pages at Borders, for this bookstore is unlikely to close anytime soon [...] staff said customers have no cause for concern. The employees believe that the latest reports suggesting financial woes at RedGroup Retail, which oversees Borders here as well as in Asia, Australia and New Zealand, will affect stores located Down Under only.

So it seems we can expect Borders in Australia to go, and many of the Borders stores in the US to go... but not New Zealand or Singapore? Can we trust the here-say of staff being asked in their place of employment? Would the powers that be have even informed them yet?

Clear as mud. Oh well, I need a coffee. At least the Borders in Singapore had the Borders Bistro in store to serve coffee and snacks while I sat there in delight flipping through my Programming In Perl book; in Australia they peddle the wares of the Hillsong Church which is creepy to say the least.

Hey wait... Malaysia?

One other point that I've found scant information on: what about Borders Malaysia? Granted I didn't go there as much because I only lived in Kuala Lumpur for a year, but I did go to their branch at The Curve in Damansara several times. The staff there were super nice, and they had a super impressive manga section, I reckon maybe even bigger than the one in Wheelock Place.

From what I can tell, Borders Malaysia is licenced by the Berjaya Group, which means its also unrelated to Borders USA and to the RedGroup Retail outfit. I think.

Speaking of recent internet related fail, yesterday a few Twitter friends and I here in Adelaide were having speed and reliability related issues with our respective ISPs. What I thought was weird at the time was using a VPN to connect to my machine in Singapore and getting it to download websites for me and return them to my machine here in Adelaide was an order of magnitude faster than using my machine here in Adelaide to download websites directly!

I initially couldn't understand how that'd work; even if my machine in Singapore was downloading the data for me it'd still have to be sent back here, just as it would be if I'd gone to a website directly. Not only that but theoretically it should have been even slower because of the overhead of encrypting the connection.

Despite using, maintaining and implementing them for years, I suppose I have much to learn about the actual technology behind VPNs. At the moment they might as well be useful and exciting black boxes. Or black cables. Or black fibres. Get it? Get it? Dark fibre? Get it? Hey come on, that was funny.

You'd think transitioning back to university studies after working would mean I'd be learning more about so called "correct" programming techniques, but I've actually found the opposite is true! Apparently I'm also incapable of writing catchy titles for programming posts.

It's hard to describe, but in high school programming classes I learned its important to bring programming logic that may have strayed off in different directions back to a single point so a method can cleanly exit. In this way, each block has a clearly defined beginning and end.

This can be demonstrated using a loop. In this completely pointless Java example we're traversing a linked list of <Strings> looking for an awesome anime character. To preempt any comments, yes I could have used a for each loop, but that's not the point I'm trying to make.

while (linkList.hasNext())
{
  if (linkList.next().equals("Her Senjougharaness"));
    break;
}

In the above case we have one entry point, but we're breaking out of the loop instead of allowing it to cleanly finish (in fact in this case it never will finish!). This works, but a more elegant solution is to modify the condition of the loop itself:

boolean found = false;
while (!found && linkList.hasNext())
{
  if (linkList.next().equals("Her Senjougharaness"));
    found = true;
}

In this case, once we've found what we're looking for the loop isn't merely broken out of with a break statement, but is allowed to cleanly finish and gracefully return control to the parent because the condition of the loop has been changed and it terminates itself.

Funnily enough I've been told by people marking my assignments I've been creating unnecessary extra work for myself demanding my loops and methods be structured like this, and they're probably right. Nevertheless I've been wired to not accept any other way; unclean exits just look ugly as sin from a design standpoint to me, and I know it's not the "correct" thing to do. I think!