Rubénerd!

To say I've been "hounded" by certain people for not finishing this series would be the understatement of a lifetime. To rectify this, I've started watching it again, and will be trying something new here!

So here's what's going to happen

When I had my first anime blog, I would watch several seasons of shows at once, and review each episode in detail. When I lost my anime blog in a database wipe and resurrected it as a category here, I limited myself to only watching one series at a time, but still blogged about each one in detail.

With my current family, work and university commitments, it's becoming increasingly apparent that if I want to spend as much time watching anime as I have before, I can't afford to blog as much about it! Amirite?

While all my other blog posts can be written in coffee shops on the train (and most are), it takes a great deal of effort to capture screenshots, wittle them down to half a dozen, compress them, upload them and go about discussing the plot and character development and art and implications and so forth. Ironically, the very activity I credit with nurturing my fascination with anime ended up burning me out!

Perhaps it comes part and parcel with being a developer, but I crave consistency and structure (even if what I'm structuring is my own fractured, poorly constructed prose) but when these impulses result in impeding the very activity they're supposed be supporting, they're self destructive and ultimately pointless!

First world problems

In light of this, I've decided to try something new. When I start watching a series, I'll be discussing it here, but I'll be limiting myself to a few observations. How I end up doing this I haven't decided yet. Bullet points? Hey, I just made a Gurren Lagann related pun. Or is it just a Yoko pun, I'm pretty sure Simon doesn't have a gun. Or at least he doesn't have one yet where I'm up to. But I digress.

The irony hasn't escaped me that I've spent paragraphs discussing how I'll be discussing things less, but I hope at least now you'll understand where I'm coming from. I know from the email and tweets I've received that this is overwhelmingly everyone's favourite topic here on Rubenerd.com, so I wanted to do it justice. I hope by reducing the amount I discuss each series, I'll be able to cover more!

Thank you all for your support! Look out for my Gurren Lagann posts in the coming weeks, as I said in the top of the post, several people have recommended this series to me and more than one friend has vented their anger and/or frustration over the fact I haven't watched more than a few episodes!

Cheers ^_^

I need door handles. This is why, after much pontification, I decided to write about them instead of the World Wide Web for my assignment on technology I couldn't live without.

This post brought to you by the door handles on PriceStore, the one stop convenience store for some sort of scientific railgun.

Why door handles are so important

Before we can truly appreciate the sheer wonder, elegance and brilliance of the door handle, we must first understand the devices upon which they often find themselves affixed. Itself a wonder of design, the door allows users to access subdivided building units without the need to break down and subsequently repair walls each time. This has saved countless hours of work, not to mention medical costs incurred from plastering bruised hands. See what I did there?

Since prehistoric times, humankind has longed to put knobs on things, and arguably on no surface is it more fitting than the humble door. Such is the perfection of this union, the door handle owes at least half its name to its host device. I forget which part, but I'm sure Wikipedia has the information.

Andrew Cox could provide more information on the networking that occurs between this device and its host, but essentially the door handle acts as a user friendly interface to the door hinges, allowing them to be used to swing the door out of the way of a user attempting to enter or leave a room. Much as there are different types of operating systems for different classes of devices, or consistencies of Rindergulasch soup depending on one's location in Germany, the Czech Republic or Hungary, there are also different types of door handles ranging from circular knobs to sophisticated handles that pivot from a fixed point.

On the high end, some more sophisticated door handles even feature locking devices. These allow certain unscrupulous users to pick or hack doors (for analogue and digital respectfully) in order to gain access to a friend's property, allowing their owners to collect insurance. Such fraud isn't as profitable as setting one's house on fire, but is far less messy and allows the perpetrators to only damage or remove certain items.

The door handle under threat

Unfortunately this symbol of technological excellence has steadily but surely come under pressure from competing technologies and ideologies that threaten to make them obsolete.

Arguably the most dangerous of these is the automatically opening door made famous by the obscure Star Trek television series of the 1960s. By placing a sensor in the vicinity of the door one wants to open, a user is able to approach a door, have their presence acknowledged, and the door opened by two people hidden behind wall panels. These can be augmented by biometric devices which allow your fingerprints, retinal veins or other personally identifiable and completely unchangeable characteristics to be stored in a database and stolen along with your ability to use any other biometric devices in the future.

ASIDE: I've been to Germany several times, but have only been to the Czech Republic once, and we didn't even go to Prague! I hope to rectify this one day, I really enjoyed my time there!

While these may seem sophisticated and therefore out of the reach of the core door handle market, there are other technologies that are arguably even simpler than handles. Recessed areas of sliding doors negate the need for door handles entirely, as do door flaps on certain vehicular devices. Rolling doors can often be opened by merely pushing the devices in the desired direction of travel. In public bathrooms, unhygienic push panels that encourage contact with the entire hand (often shared with people who don't wash) allow doors to be pushed out of the way. Most dining tables, headphone cables, bowls of peppermint chocolate chip ice-cream and statues of Sir Stamford Raffles don't even need door handles to operate at all.

On the political front, the No Agenda show has been waging a campaign against door handles in their Get a Handle On This segment. Adam and John's argument centres on the fact locking door handles pose a threat to freedom by limiting the locations certain people can frequent, and that the CIA is complicit in their installation. Adam also asserts doors themselves were invented to drive wall repair companies out of business, given they've rendered the destruction and rebuilding of walls to enter rooms unnecessary. If fiat currencies, central banks and all regulations were removed, this would solve all these problems.

In Australia, both the Liberal and Labor parties want door handles outlawed as they can be used by destitute refugees to enter rooms with cameras and reporters, and have their inhumane treatment broadcast to the world. If such reporters cared, of course.

Certain religions also forbid working on certain days of the week, and given the door handle is a machine (albeit a simple one), they cannot be operated. Fortunately, their religions also claim tattoos and shellfish are banned, and that hasn't the stopped their penetration into many areas of society, so we can be optimistic door handles will be unaffected by this, at least for now.

Could I live without door handles?

I spent my entire year 11 and 12 of high school avoiding opening doors for myself as a way to rebel in the nerdiest way I could think of. While it was possible, it was needlessly difficult and time consuming. Many a minute was wasted as I stood next to doors waiting for other people to enter or leave rooms so I could enter or leave the same room, though I did gain a certain level of fitness sprinting to doors that were rapidly closing.

I learned a valuable lesson from doing this: I need door handles. This is why I decided to write about them instead of the World Wide Web for my assignment on "technology I couldn’t live without".

DISCLAIMER: I did not write about this instead of the World Wide Web for my assignment on "technology I couldn’t live without". This entire post was a complete farce, though you can't spell farce without... wait, yes you can. Never mind. How awesome are door handles?

This was originally going to be a part of my recent URL shortening critique (RubyURL joins urlTea, parrots), but didn't get it done in time. My premise: Twitter could almost completely render URL shortening obsolete... if they wanted to.

Vegetable shortening is good for baking, right?

Originally tweets consisted of short messages about what we were doing... remember when Twitter used to ask us that? Shortly thereafter people started sharing links, and using TinyURL to shrink them down short enough to fit into the character limit. I'd hazard a guess that most tweets consist thesedays of either an @reply to another Twitter user, or a link prefaced with a short comment.

I've been saying since 2007 that Twitter and Identi.ca/StatusNet (oh and Jaiku and Pownce... bless 'em!) should provide the ability for tweeters to associate a URL with a tweet. This would mean:

• We would have the full 140 characters for the comment
• It would allow previewing of the full URL, not an obfuscated short URL
• More cheese steak jimmy's, rock on
• It would clean up our twitter streams and make them more usable
• It would eliminate one of the two biggest need for the ever increasing list of URL shorteners almost overnight (the other being the ability to easily tell people long URLs over the telephone, et al).

Demo Demo Demo-kun

So how would this work in practice? Well this is what a tweet with the current system would look like currently. That sentence had a lot of currents. I like blackcurrents.

Did you read this post? That Ruben character is such an aartard. http://rubenerd.com/?p=7921

It'd be rendered on the Twitter site or in client software like this:

Did you read this post? That Ruben character is such an aartard.
Reference link

I'd implement this on my own StatusNet server (aka my work stuff), but it'd mean any updates exported to Twitter would still have to have the links shortened and the rest of the message truncated by enough characters.

At the end of each year, I like to make a Wordle out of all the post headings. And this year I'm adding other stuff too, all of which is entirely pointless and not worth reading. Like a phonebook in 2010. Hey, see what I did there?

The 2010 Wordle

Certainly only judging what I talked about from just the heading doesn't take into account the length or quality of the posts, but still interesting nonetheless.

Apparently I talked a lot about anime this year, which is surprising because I really didn't think I did! And for someone who only uses the OS in a virtual machine on his Mac and *nix machines, I sure talked about Windows a lot ;). I guess its no surprise I mentioned Singapore and Australia in a lot of entries. And finally, while not a huge topic, Whole Wheat Radio (WWR) will never be mentioned that much ever again owing to the site's closure.

I don't know why, but I never really got what the big deal about new years was. In our current accepted calendar system, its just the passing of one unit of time and the beginning of another! Still, here's a look back at 2010.

The bad stuff

University, work, finances, health, extended family woes. I won't depress us by dwelling on them. Suffice to say, here's looking at 2011 for a reprieve from all that!

The good life stuff

1. Each day this year, I was offered the privilege of waking up. That is big deal, and one I think we don't often appreciate.

2. In January we circumnavigated Ireland, travelled through southern Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic and ushered in the new year in Paris. It was during the 2009/10 Europe blizzard that grounded all the planes, but it was a novelty to us with all this snow business that we never see otherwise. Possibly the best holiday of my life.

3. After a sudden change in our finances, my sister, old man and I moved back in together in Sydney after living in Singapore on and off since the mid 1990s. None of us wanted to leave, but Sydney has turned out surprisingly well for us. I think I'm going to be enjoying our few years here, which is a relief :).

4. After using a 2006 MacBook Pro as my production machine for four years, I finally got a brand new refurbished Mac Pro. Its big, beautiful, let me dismantle my ugly Stonehenge of external hard drives, has almost triple the memory, and its super fast. Hey, I spend me life on these machines, so this was a big deal!

5. Medical insurance stuff finally started swinging our way, even if other financial stuff didn't.

6. And finally, something else that's very confusing but I'm still glad and feel extraordinarily lucky that it happened.

ANYWAY

Happy New Year, if you're into that sort of stuff. Personally I don't know why we're celebrating, the year of the rabbit doesn't start until February.

Another one of our beloved Rubénerd Fun Facts. Put the brick down.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood. I took a plane.

And a related fact:

Ruben should never attempt graphic design.

As with my social life, I seem to instinctively pick things that aren't "cool" in computer science. Or so I've been repeatedly told :P. Here's a list I was typing on my phone over the course of this morning.

The listy thing

What's Cool	What I Prefer
GNU/Linux	FreeBSD, Mac OS X
OpenBSD	NetBSD
bash, zsh	tcsh
elinks	links
emacs	Vim
mutt	[Al]pine, TBird
Rijndael	Twofish
Triple DES	Plaintext
Eclipse	NetBeans, TextMate
git	Mercurial
Gnome Terminal	LilyTerm
Nautilus	emelFM2, Thunar, ROXFiler
OOo, Google Docs	Gnumeric, AbiWord
Google Reader	Bloglines (but I caved in!)
PathFinder	Finder
Licence qualms	TrueCrypt
IPv6	Not compromising privacy
Konqueror (KDE 3.x)	Dolphin (KDE 3.x)
xterm	urxvt
Xmonad	dwm
Apache	Lighty
Ubuntu	Sabayon, Fedora
Chrome	Firefox, NoScript
Photoshop	The Gimp
Illustrator	Inkscape
LaTeX	DocBook (for plain text)
QuickTime X	QuickTime 7 Pro
Ruby On Rails	... erubis?
Svelte Apple keyboards	Buckling spring Unicomp
Android	iOS
iPads	Old ThinkPad X40
QBASIC	QPascal
C#.NET	Borland C++ (back in the day!)
Praising Windows 7	Hating on Windows 7
Windows Aero	Windows "Classic"
Tumblr	Extra blog entries
Client-side JavaScript	Server-side processing
Beautiful, premade blog themes	Self made, terrible blog theme :)
Lady Gaga	Marian Call
Akiyama Mio	Kotobuki Tsumugi (pictured)
The Pocket Tiger	Minori
C.C.	Kallen
Chocolate	Vanilla
Blond	Black, brown
Drunkenness	Calm lucidity
Loud	Quiet
Clear days	Overcast days
Blog posts with a point	Blog posts... like this

The question thing

Are there any things you use or prefer over a so called "cooler" alternative?

Because then the ink would spill everywhere I suppose.

As I was walking through Officeworks this afternoon trying to ascertain if they sold waffle irons with phones attached, it suddenly struck me that the free and open source community are missing out on something huge. Or I'm missing out on their discussion on this huge thing. I could have phrased that better.

Background

While I tend to life a third of my life in the super evil Apple world where Steve Jobs dictates to me what applications I can run in my Terminal and which exact machine I can buy, the other two thirds are spent in FreeBSD and my current Linux distribution of choice because FreeBSD just doesn't work on my ThinkPad "netbook" that well. Funny thing is, both Fedora and Debian refuse to suspend properly on it, but Gentoo derived distributions work flawlessly. Go figure.

In the case of FreeBSD and Linux, I can deeply respect the enormous effort and perseverance of advocates for open s/standards/drivers/. Closed binary blob drivers will probably be a fact of life for all of us for the foreseeable future, but the situation is certainly better than what it was a decade ago ago when I was in early high school and couldn't even use my crappy Winmodem in my Red Hat Linux partition, much to the delight of my computer teacher who was a Redmondite. Our school had a perfectly serviceable Notes installation, and instead of moving off it to something simpler, more affordable, more open and ultimately more secure, they became an Exchange shop. Well not a shop, a school. But the school did sell uniforms and books, which I suppose also made them a shop.

Getting back on topic, we have people who refuse to back down on their convictions for this general trend away from binary blob nonsense, even if I tend to think of myself as more of a pragmatist than an idealist.

Where was I going with this?

Oh yeah I remember now. Whether it comes to standards for office documents, communications or for graphics drivers, open is better and we all benefit, even us using super evil operating systems like Mac OS X.

However, there's still one area that is in desperate need for standardisation, and it has to do with jaffle irons. I should be able to put a standard piece of bread, a slice of cheese, a few pieces of onion and a ridiculous amount of avocado into any jaffle iron and have it make me a gosh darn jaffle! Who's with me? Yui totally is :).

The other thing...

The other thing is printer cartridges.

The other thing is printer cartridges. Yes I just said that, I wanted you to feel the full impact of this mofo of a statement. Yes, I said mofo. Apparently its a term cool people use, like The Game and Converse Shoes and Box Socials with their loud music and their wild hair and pocket octopuses. High five Larson :).

CUPS (developed in part by that super evil closed Apple Inc... hey, that's a pun) and other open printing systems have allowed free and open source access to printers without using closed, universally terrible software that printer manufacturers otherwise force upon hapless Windows and Mac users. That's great for controlling these ink to paper dispensing devices, but what about the ink itself?

RANDOM THOUGHT: With the exception of Apple and precious others, why do hardware makers always make terrible software!? Even Logitech which otherwise makes beautiful hardware that's fun to use can't make a .PreferecePane that doesn't crash on me or look like it was designed by Newt Gingrich. I have no idea why I said that guy's name, for some reason it was just the first one that came to mind. Like A Boss.

Every manufacturer has their own ink dispensing and delivery systems, their own little cartridges to store their precious fluids or toner powders, their own colour spaces, their own everything. Even different printers made by the same companies will have wildly different little tanks of the stuff. Photo cyan AND cyan? Really?!

Why can't we have a standardised colour space, standardised cartridges, standardised ink densities and chemical compositions, standardised packaging with clear instructions, and standardised cartridges? Yes I said that one twice, I was trying to make a point, get off my case!

Printers have cases

I know why such standardisation won't happen, and unless you're as daft as a ship (no wait, that's draft) you do too. It's because in the United States they spell it with a Z. That's right, we can't even standardise on the spelling of the word standardise! We can't even make up our minds on whether its "free software" or "open source software" or "free and open source software" or "free, libre and open source software" or "FOSS" or "F/OSS" or "FLOSS" or "FURIOUS THE MONKEY BOY" or or or... someone call me a cab, I'm off to the Apple shop.

Printers are the gateway drug, the one the dealers at HP Sauce, Lexfark, EPSOM SALTS and Canonball let you shoot up with at a very reasonable prices, so then later you come crawling back for inks that gram for gram are more expensive than saffron or palladium, and glorified paper with gloss on it that costs more per surface area of paper than the paper money you part with in order to possess it. The printers aren't the things making these companies money, its the ink and its the toner and its the paper and its the drugs, foo.

RANDOM THOUGHT: Isn't saffron spelt with only one F? The spell checker told me otherwise, but it doesn't look right. My spelling sucks.

Much like when people claim Google is an "open company" when their primary cash cow algorithm is the most closed, guarded secret since 11 secret herbs and spices, printer companies will not surrender to a standardised method of packaging and utilising ink. It's a fact of life, and frankly now I'm depressed imagining a world with such standardised ink vessels, because I know it won't happen.

I wonder if Mr Stallman or De Raadt have an opinion on this? They'd probably refuse to use such things outright. Torvalds and McKusick and Watson probably have no problems using them because a free version isn't available... and they want to be able to print things!

Update: Nero Dot The Matrix

Have they standardised on those printer ribbon things from dot matrix printers? When I was growing up we had an EPSOM SALTS dot matrix printer and it made really cool sounds. Before I started school I used to draw obscure pictures in KID PIX and get it to print just to see if I could make it play a tune, then refine the picture.

Turns out people had already done that, but I thought I was being super badarse at the time. Perhaps it explains much of my social awkwardness. No Laura I can't go to your birthday party, I'm making music with a dot matrix printer. Stupid nerdy childhood.

I had a thought this morning, and it hurt a lot. Not used to thinking so early in the morning.

Trains in Sydney are trains that are in Sydney

One of the variables both my sister and I (who can't drive) were really worrying about when we decided to move back in with our dad who was being transferred back to Sydney was how the trains would be. In Singapore the MRT is always full, but there are ultra clean stations everywhere, they keep building new lines, they're affordable and most importantly there's no timetable, just a frequency count with minutes measured in low single digits.

One of the more startling things about taking the train in Sydney is that... they're actually quite reliable and I can often get a seat on them when it isn't peak hour. I never, NEVER got a seat on the Singapore MRT or the LRT in KL! Part of the problem was I always felt guilty taking up a seat that someone older than me would need, so I just gave up and stood next to the doors.

Secondly, double decker carriages are awesome. The view from the top is great, and if there are noisy people, you can just walk downstairs or upstairs. That's huge in the afternoon when those <old man voice>loud teenagers get on and start yakking on their phones loudly about clothes and how their boy/girl friends aren't getting any.</old man voice>

Lots of people seem to have a negative opinion of the Sydney rail system, and it certainly isn't perfect, but fortunately we were able to get a house near a train station and its been a breeze. A 15 minute trip to get to the centre of town and only waiting 10 minutes for a train is mighty nice ^_^.

Sharing rhymes with pairing. Is pearing a word?

All of that last section may have been fine for some pointless rambling, but it wasn't what I intended to talk about!

The other thing that surprised me is just how much other rail traffic shares the rails with suburban trains. In Adelaide we'd regularly have huge container hauling diesel locomotives rumble right through the Mawson Interchange which was a bit unnerving (and LOUD!) but in Sydney the foreign guest that most frequently flies through is the XPT.

Back when I had a mad obsession with trains I studied the XPT, basically its a modified version of the British Intercity 125 double headed train that provides services to rural New South Wales and Brisbane, I think. Because of Australia's huge distances, the engines are diesel-electric because putting up catenaries (that always looks like canaries to me) would be prohibitively expensive, and Aussie governments don't give a rats arse about clean high speed rail because they're too busy pandering to airline companies. But I digress.

I'm not an engineer, but as I see these XPT trains rumbling and belching their fumes through these suburban stations, I can't help but wonder why they can't switch to catenary power when its available! The XPT locomotives use the diesel generator to power electric motors, so you could have pantographs to collect power and sidestep this process when it can. The diesel generator would act as backup power.

They do this on the Northeast Corridor in the New England region of the US, so its possible. I read Sydney uses some weird DC current for their electrical systems though, so maybe that wouldn't work for something with higher power demands like an XPT. In that case, maybe that needs to be changed too, or maybe it could just supplement the diesel generated power so it doesn't have to work as hard.

Unless they've done some hedging like the airlines (SIA is killer at this), I can't help but think all that diesel fuel wouldn't be cheap. But heck, what do I know, I'm not an XPT engineer ^_^. Off to have a grilled cheese sandwich :D.

Photo courtesy of Axel Cheah from Wikipedia.

You know what's interesting? Tethered internet. Here's a long story to read if you have nothing better to do.

Well, with an introduction like that!

For those interested, our house this morning just had the phone line connected, which means we can finally have ADSL provisioned. At least, given the state of Aussie telcos and ISPs we can never be too sure, but there you have it. So there are just nine more things to sort out before the end of the week. Easy!

Anyway during this time I've been using the tethered internet connection on my brand new, shiny iTelephone 4 which, ironically, I haven't been able to change the signal reception on no matter how I hold it. I plug it into the Mac, enable Tethering on the phone, and let her rip. Well, not literally, I had to sign up to another contract with Optus to get it so I don't want to cause it any damage.

The house reception issue

While certainly better than the reception we had at our family's friend's house in Normanhurst (the poor chaps), mobile phone reception at our new house here is also patchy at best. I'm a computer science student not an engineer, but I find it fascinating that a few centimetres of plasterboard can have such a dramatic effect on mobile performance, in some cases even making the difference between getting 2G and 3G reception. And it gets stranger, our kitchen area is an absolute dead zone, but the loungeroom which is separated from it without any walls at all gets several bars of 3G.

It's unfair to compare the gargantuan task of blanketing a country the size of Australia with decent phone reception with Singapore's compact, high density size and population, but the difference is amazing. I get 3G reception in lifts and emergency stairwells in Singapore, back here in Australia I can be walking in broad daylight and have a dropped call. Wait, I don't walk in broad daylight, the sun is evil, but you get my point.

Mmmm, pointy

Have you ever wondered why pencils are needed to be so sharp? I mean, the first thing you think of when you see a fragile, thin substance such as paper is lets put something really sharp up against it! Unless when people say "sharp" they're referring to intelligence, in which case I'm nervous that intelligent pencils could jump out and stab me. I mean, they're sharp!

Our first television at home was a Grundig, but we replaced it with a Sharp when the dial failed on it. I often wondered what it must be like to live in a country where to export your products you would need to name your companies in a foreign language. I wonder if businesses in the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland, oh heck the English speaking world, would be so successful internationally if they had to all be named in Africaans. The Dutch and South Africans would have all the huge conglomerates then, and we'd be bailing them out instead.

Consuming sounds like comestible. Wait, no it doesn't

While we're on the subject of malfunctioning robots (just keep taking pictures!) have you ever wondered why the sky is blue? I know it has to do with refraction of light, but that explains how it is blue. I'm not sure where I read that, but its been consuming my thoughts for weeks.

Thoughts that burrow into your head and refuse to budge like that are the closest thing we can come to Inception without using a team of architects, designers, pharmacists and a trippy thought connection machine that would make any Vulcan shake his or her head. Have you ever noticed how few female Vulcans there were on any Star Trek? And T'Pel doesn't count. Well okay she probably can count, otherwise she wouldn't be terribly smart.

I wonder if she was sharp.

That Sharp television we had was a strange beast. At times the picture would jump to the side and start jiggling around with flashes of primary colour and snow. No wait that wasn't that Sharp TV, that was my first computer monitor. The only high tech solution was to give it a small but firm smack on the side a few times. It would lurch, then correct itself.

Isn't it interesting how acronyms mean different things in different places? That computer monitor was an SPC brand from Taiwan, which in Singapore is also the acronym for an oil company, and in Australia they tin peaches.

Millions of peaches. Peaches for me. Millions of peaches.

Its so quiet here at night

Slumbers.

UPDATE: I thought I hit the Publish button last night, but I hit Draft instead. I have since corrected this obviously terrible mistake, though probably the difference was minor to the overall value of this site.

SBS News is reporting that some US billionaires have pledged at least 50% of their wealth to charity through a campaign started by Warren Buffett.

A noble cause, but those billionaires could have made an infinitely more positive impact by running ethical and sustainable business that perhaps would have made less money, than robbing us and giving some of it back later. CEOs could (if they wanted to) use their influence to affect the world in positive ways; when they retire their money is no better than anyone else's.

This could be my late hippy mum speaking through me, but isn't it about time we stop valuing a company based on its profits and more on its impact?