Rubénerd Blog :)

While we’re on the subject of Haruhi, I can’t wait to see the movie with English subtitles when it becomes available! From the poster though I have a couple of observation questions, or questionable observations. Wait, that first one was phrased better.

Read this post >

As I was walking through Borders in Wheelock Place last night taking a break from scanning (topic for a future post no doubt) and checking my tweets on my iTelephone (that just sounds wrong for some reason) @Jlist made a remark about Haruhi.

Read this post >

Poor Mikuru!

It’s been a very weird day. In the morning I locked myself into my house by accident when I had a test (the subject of another post, don’t worry it had a happy ending!), I tripped over and landed on my arse when walking to the train station on a perfectly flat footpath, and throughout the whole day my energy fluctuated more than a shot capacitor.

ASIDE: I wouldn’t know if that capacitor comparison was apt or not, I’m doing computer science not computer engineering. Dang circuit boards ain’t worth squat if software isn’t written for them, am I right science guys?

Anyway I saw this and thought it was hilarious enough for me to justify staying awake after all ^_^. For those who don’t know, this is Hirasawa Yui from K-On! dressed up as Suzumiya Haruhi from her self-titled series. Despite having the getup down pat, somehow Yui just can’t convey Harhui’s sinisterness!

Ever since seeing the Flintstones Meet the Jetsons (did I get that the right way around?) when I was a tiny person I’ve loved seeing crossovers. Like when Haruhi showed that cover from Shuffle in the original series, or with all those references in Lucky Star. Or that scene in Code Geass when Lelouch said he’d met Captain Kathryn Janeway from the Federation Starship Voyager. Yeah, that happened, look it up.

Look out, it’s a gigantic coke can!

For those of you who don’t know ZombiePlan, he’s apparently a walking undead person who happens to have a plan. I’m envious; I’m neither a cool walking undead person nor do I have a plan. Unless drinking coffee, studying and typing incessantly on a keyboard to create a haphazard string of conciousness in the form of words on a blog counts as a plan.

ASIDE: If you spell plan by dropping all the letters except p and add the letters l, w and z, you end up with grilled cheese sandwich. Spooky huh?

Anyway I’ve never met this guy who lives in Adelaide but am fascinated by his various blog iterations and somewhat jealous that he’s been able to churn out more interestingness (is that a word?) in fewer posts than have I. IBM. Really? How long have you been M?

This part of his latest post though had me confused:

Today, my friend Novephel was fiddling with his FTP folders, when he was possessed by the spirit of Billy Mays, and found himself deleting the WHOLE of his public_html folder. [...] His reign of terror must be stopped; we are not even safe after death. What will he target next?

And this part had me even more confused:

I like pie.

Perhaps he’s talking about the plot for that alternative reality screenplay he’s been writing for the last six years in secret, the one with the futuristic robots from the past that delete websites by throwing baked goods at law enforcement officers to distract them while they enter server rooms and delete specific files from servers, all while they om servers, all while they om servers, all while they om servers, all while they all while they all while they they they they they

I’m sorry I crashed. What was I talking about?

Today, my friend Novephel was fiddling with his FTP folders, when he was possessed by the spirit of I like pie.

I still don’t get it.

Because I still don’t have my audio equipment and therefore can’t record Rubenerd Shows, as usual I have to offload my scattered thoughts and ramblings here instead. For a more authentic Rubenerd Show experience, try reading the post out loud to thin air with a somewhat Aussie accent that people in Singapore and Malaysia think sounds more British, and sprinkle in a few "that doesn’t make any sense", "what bothers me about the whole thing" and "I like grilled cheese sandwiches" remarks.

View outside the Boatdeck Cafe, from my Flickr profile

I’m sitting at the Boatdeck Cafe in Mawson Lakes once again on my laptop. Despite getting broadband at the house only last week, I’m the kind of person who can’t live his whole life at either work, uni or home. Check that, I’m the kind of person who can’t do work just at work, uni or home. For some reason I’m always more productive at coffee shops. I can’t imagine what I might be ingesting there that would cause me to act differently.

To continue this post by not actually mentioning anything of substance, I’m typing this post using Vim in the Terminal on my MacBook Pro. After a brief flirtation with TextMate last year and an even briefer encounter with Apple’s bundled TextEdit.app, I’m back to the command line. To tell the truth for the longest time I was a GNU nano person; it was the first text editor I ever learned to use on a Unix-like system back when I had my first job during high school, and I loved how straightforward and simple the commands were. I even wrote a few wrapper scripts around it to make it more flexible back when I was obsessed with Perl. I still really like nano.

                :::                         The
  iLE88Dj.  :jD88888Dj:
.LGitE888D.f8GjjjL8888E;       .d8888b.  888b    888 888     888
iE   :8888Et.     .G8888.     d88P  Y88b 8888b   888 888     888
;i    E888,        ,8888,     888    888 88888b  888 888     888
      D888,        :8888:     888        888Y88b 888 888     888
      D888,        :8888:     888  88888 888 Y88b888 888     888
      D888,        :8888:     888    888 888  Y88888 888     888
      D888,        :8888:     Y88b  d88P 888   Y8888 Y88b. .d88P
      888W,        :8888:      "Y8888P88 888    Y888  "Y88888P"
      W88W,        :8888:
      W88W:        :8888:     88888b.   8888b.  88888b.   .d88b.
      DGGD:        :8888:     888 "88b     "88b 888 "88b d88""88b
                   :8888:     888  888 .d888888 888  888 888  888
                   :W888:     888  888 888  888 888  888 Y88..88P
                   :8888:     888  888 "Y888888 888  888  "Y88P"
                    E888i
                    tW88D                 Text Editor

Fancy ASCII art from the Nano homepage.

Anyway back to Vim: I have been used to using vi and vim for a while now, but only recently have I started using Vim almost exclusively. I absolutely love how I can throw source code written in virtually any programming language or script and it will detect it and give it the correct syntax highlights. I’m a very visual person, and reading code in Vim is an absolute pleasure. I’ve also got used to modal data entry and know most of the basic commands. What astonishes me though is in learning Vim you uncover even more functions you didn’t know existed. In a way, you don’t know how little you know until you’ve learned how to use some of it, if that makes any sense, which I’m sure it didn’t.

Reading back to an earlier edition of the Linux Format magazine from the UK, I came across a project called Cream which essentially takes Vim and adds a whole tone of extra features and changes some of the more ambiguous commands. I’m hesitant to try it out until I’m off my training wheels using Vim as it is: I’m worried if I got used to using a fuzzy extra layer on top of Vim instead of Vim itself I’ll never learn how to use it properly. It does look really interesting though, if you’ve had experience with it I’d love to hear about it.

Peter Krantz’s ultimate VIM Keyboard!

Well how about that, this post which started off as useless rambling is actually going somewhere. Wonders never cease. Except in black holes; I heard the gravity in black holes is so strong not even light or wonders can escape, let alone ceasing wonders.

The last thing to mention with regards to Vim is whether it’s worth running a graphical version. On Mac OS X I have several options: the MacVim project provides a native Aqua graphical port complete with Safari-like tabbing and Mac-like anti-aliased text. Alternatively I can just fire up MacPorts and install Vimwith gtk enabled , then launch it from the Terminal with the -g option.

MacVim on Mac OS X Leopard.

Having chosen the former and used it for a few hours, I appreciate being able to launch Vim from a slick icon on the Dock and having it associate with text and source code files in the Finer, but aside form those I don’t see any real difference. It has a toolbar, but I fail to see what the point is considering Vim is a keyboard driven application! And while the tabs are nice to use, I find it much easier just using a tabbed shell emulator with a seperate Vim session running in each, and tweaking my .vimrc to enable syntax highlighting and a few other options. For what it’s worth, I know the commandline Vim supports multipe documents per session too, and I’m sure as I get more used to it I’ll be trying it out, but for now this is a nice compromise.

I’m also aware that as a Vim user I’m supposed to make a comment about how the Emacs editor is unnecessarily bloated, suffers from acute feature creep, takes far too long to load, is unreliable, has a crappy logo, doesn’t work as well over a bandwidth-constricted SSH session, flies in the face of the Unix philosopy of only doing one thing and doing it well, uses ridiculous key combinations, induces premature carpel tunnel syndrome, accelerates arthritis in the fingers and looks cheaper when run as a graphical GTK application… but I’m going to take the high road in this case and refrain from comment ;-).

One of the longest running posts on my Anime blog is what editors the peoples from Suzumiya Haruhi no Yūutsu would use. Haruhi probably uses Emacs because she’s such a control freak, Mikuru probably uses Vi because she’s a time traveller and needs travel light, and Yuki simply sends hexadecimal code from her brain. We have interesting conversations at 2am when we’re half asleep.

In other news, Ruben was bashed up this afternoon by a band of Emacs programmers who said that his editor of choice didn’t even have an email client, tetris game or coffee machine built into it. Ruben attempted to retort by claiming that he was in fact glad that his editor of choice couldn’t be used to send email, play tetris or brew coffee, but he was out cold before he got the chance. For what it’s worth, they spared his life because he mentioned that Windows was ikky, that he thought Japanese and Korean culture is cool and that he didn’t have a girlfriend. Had he been wearing a Vista lanyard, he would have been in dire straits.

Here I am again in this mean old town
And youre so far away from me
And where are you when the sun goes down
Youre so far away from me …

… Custom kitchen delivery
We’ve gotta move these refrigerators
We’ve gotta move these colour tee-veeeeees…

UPDATE: I admit I’ve started using MacVim after all. It just looks too nice to pass up, and it fits in so well with the rest of the desktop.

I have so many external hard disks, over time it became infeasible to have them all connected to regular local ports (if by infeasible I mean impossible!), so as of late I’ve been accumulating network drives. With gigabit switches, proper category 6 Ethernet cables and gigabit enabled drives the speeds are surprisingly good.

The problem is in it’s default configuration, Mac OS X Leopard doesn’t display network mounted devices on the desktop along with your other drives. As someone who uses the icons on his desktop to keep track of what his machine is connected to, it can be very confusing!

The solution is:

1. Click on the Finder menu and choose Preferences... or hit [Command] [,]
2. In the General tab under "Show these items on the Desktop:", check Connected servers.

Low and behold, all the network drives you have mounted appear on the desktop, complete with the new cute little hand holding icons:

As you can see, the mounted network volumes shown in the Terminal window are now being mapped on the desktop automagically. Which brings up an inevitable security question: do I always have my icons that big? Heavens no, it’s just so you can see the icons more clearly! In fact I usually have my icons at a paltry 48px (that is small by KDE and Mac OS X standards!).

ASIDE: I refer specifically to Leopard hiding network drives on the desktop because I started using network drives after I upgraded to Tiger, so I haven’t ever used them with earlier versions of OS X. They might be in the same boat.

It was another one of those "I knew it wouldn’t work but I was hoping it would" kind of situations. Amazon has released a MP3 download service that has no Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) tacked on and unlike all the other so called "iTunes killers" it is a pleasure to use.

And surprise surprise you need an American postal address before you can finish the transaction! Yay!

Seriously can music companies really be angry over illegal downloads if they don’t care about their customers overseas? The local Singaporean music association has their painfully embarrassing “Be HIP” campaign which does nothing to create new methods of distribution which clearly people want and would use, then blames us. Pure genius.

Today was pretty amazing. Why? I ate a small mango after brushing my teeth and was not bothered by the nauseating spearmint infused citrus flavour.

Actually something big did happen for me today and it’s something that I’ve been wanting to do for ages. I installed from scratch FreeBSD on several PCs and without looking at any of the documentation for the first time. I’m dangerous!

In a manner similar to how DarkMirror in Singapore talks about learning Japanese, my knowledge of FreeBSD didn’t consciously happen, it evolved and eventually clicked. Like most people starting out in the FOSS world after living on Mac OS X and… heaven forbid… Windows, I was somewhat confused by the more intricate details of compiling kernels with optimisation flags and updating port trees with CVS; but after a week of informal study I pulled my old 200MHz Pentium MMX machine out and installed FreeBSD without looking at any documentation. Without realising it until after I finished, the process of installing and configuring has become second nature.

I really am impressed with the quality of the BSDs and the open source community’s efforts. Xorg + KDE 3.5 or Xfce 4.2 on a FreeBSD 6.1 box with the correct optimisations works flawlessly even on hardware that would struggle with Windows 98! Suddenly all the old machines that litter my expat family’s house have uses. Heck I’m even looking at my old Amiga in a funny way now…

I feel such an overwhelming sense of power now than I did before in a way that proprietary operating systems never really allow. Open source rocks! If I don’t like my X window manager, my desktop environment, my CLI text editor, my shell, my file browsers, my titlebar widgets or even my daemon services that manage SQL or the web, I can just change them or swap them for something else. A company doesn’t dictate what software has to be installed, I do. And if something doesn’t exist or I need to do something mundane, a quick keyboard lashing session later I’ve got Perl doing it for me.

Now I could have continued my exploration of Linux or just continued to hack away at Mac OS X, but I really do appreciate the strict conventions that the BSDs follow and the unwritten mantra that “if something works it’s good” should actually be “if it’s good it will work”. FreeBSD, NetBSD (and from what I can tell from my currently limited experience, OpenBSD) are elegant, fast, very well documented and extremely robust.

It’s got to the stage now where I’m even considering dual booting my MacBook Pro with FreeBSD and Mac OS X just to be able to use this stuff more and more in my day to day life.

For posterity (and because I think they’re cool) I’ve posted some screenshots of some of the boxes I have happily running now. You can see the Mac OS X influence in my thinking with both the KDE and Xfce panels set up to look like the Dock and the permanent menu bar ;).

Here’s Haruhi happily living in KDE 3.5/FreeBSD on my old HP box, (with the cursor unfortunately positioned on her face!!):

And here she is again in Xfce/FreeBSD on my 200MHz (with MMX… wow!) 1997 Sim Lim Square box:

I’ve also configured an old 133MHz Pentium box I picked up for peanuts to run as a dedicated firewall and local intranet webserver to serve up the Schade family wiki, kinda like a digital refrigerator door! Of course I couldn’t put Haruhi on this because I don’t want or need X on this machine. Ah well, can’t win them all!

My next weekend project is to create a Perl script to download portsnap updates so they’re residing on a local hard drive, then configure portsnap on each machine to look up the local server instead of retrieving the same image from the interent four times! Unless anyone knows of a port that already does something similar to this?