Rubenerd

This originally appeared on the Annexe.

• Bread and Brew
• Nero d’Avola
• Ragù
• The Snag Stand

Equinix’s randomly employs this (non-Retina!) photo of Singapore on its customer WiFi login page.

Judging from the fact the Maybank Tower was still pictured under construction, I’d say this was taken around 1999. It also pre-dates the Singapore Land Tower’s facelift from around 2003.

It’s an interesting time capusle into the part of the world I lived, studied and worked in back in the day. It looks so different now.

There were some big milestones and events over the last week which I’d be remissed not covering here for posterity.

First, Tuesday July 28th marked 10,000 days of the World Wide Web. It sounds like an impressive number, but its really not very long at all. Doubly amazing is that we’ve gone from Mozaic on dialup, to ISDN, to WAP, to DSL/Cable, to fibre and LTE in that time.

Certain buzzwords are beyond clichés at this point, but thinking about how many industries and people the internet has touched since its inception, surely it must rank as one of the most disruptive technologies in human history.

(And to think people still don't know who Tim Berners-Lee is).

And secondly, Friday the 29th of July was System Administrator Appreciation Day. I didn’t get a parade, but only one server required attention. I take that as a small victory.

The event goes back to 2000, according to Wikipedia:

The first System Administrator Appreciation Day was celebrated on July 28, 2000. Kekatos was inspired to create the special day by a Hewlett-Packard magazine advertisement in which a system administrator is presented with flowers and fruit-baskets by grateful co-workers as thanks for installing new printers.

And on a sadder note, Seymour Papert passed on today at 88. To think how many programmers and other IT workers (including myself) owe their careers to learning form his Logo programming language, it’s humbling. Truly one of the greats of computer science.

There was a genuine debate in the blogosphere era (remember that term?) surrounding the use of “read more…” links. Proponents claimed a page of summaries were easier to skim than entire posts, but detractors lamented the extra clicks involved to get to content.

Admittedly I used them sparingly in the mid 2000s for gigantic posts, but gradually phased them out after thinking most of the “above the fold” summaries I was writing were superfluous. Or in the words of Roxette, Don’t bore us, get to the chorus!

(The irony isn’t lost on me that I dismissed an introduction in an introduction).

(As I write this post in a Sydney coffee shop in 2016, they started playing Coldplay's Yellow, and blasted a very specific roasted bean smell that somehow transported me briefly to the Boat Deck Cafe in Adelaide in 2006. Back when we used the term “blogosphere”. Sugoi).

Back to the present, I thought the summary and read more link pattern may be useful to hide some mildly NSFW anime figure, series and art reviews I’ve have queued up since forever. Given the last time I used this feature was in mid-2000’s WordPress, I had to check out how we do it in 2016 static site generators.

Hugo comes with the {{ .Summary }} method that returns content encountered before a standard <!--more--> comment, or 70 lines. I wanted to use the former, but avoid it doing auto summaries for posts where I don’t have that comment defined. The code example in the otherwise excellent Hugo documentation included a {{ .Truncated }} boolean example, so I thought I could do this:

<!-- Do not use this, included for reference -->
{{ if .Truncated }}
    {{ .Summary }}
    <a href="{{ .Permalink }}">Read more..!</a>
{{ else }}
    {{ .Content }}
{{ end }}

Keen-eyed Hugoians will point out {{ .Truncated }} always returns true here, so the full {{ .Content }} will never be rendered. To Hugo, the post is either truncated by including the <!--more--> comment, or because Hugo returned the first 70 words.

The recommended workaround in the Hugo forums is to append <!--more--> at the end of all posts you don’t want truncated, and include partway for those you do. So this post would have a read more link:

---
[frontmatter]
---
This is an introduction

This appears after clicking Read more…

But this one wouldn’t:

---
[frontmatter]
---
This is the entire post, without Read more..
<!--more-->

So I eagerly ran sed across 4000+ posts to add this, but facing the gigantic git status I wondered if there was a solution that didn’t rely on adding tons of superfluous markup.

A great thing about Hugo (and Jekyll, to be fair) is how easy it is to define your own params for a post. So I defined “more” in the frontmatter of posts that need read more links:

---
title: "Something" [..]
more: true
---

So now in my theme I can say:

<!-- This works --->
{{ if .Params.more }}
    {{ .Summary }}
    <a href="{{ .Permalink }}">Read more..!</a>
{{ else }}
    {{ .Content }}
{{ end }}

You could probably do the same thing by detecting the presence of a more comment, but this works.

After getting yet more spam (in lieu of ham, which I don't even eat now), I got an email I’ve been waiting on for a decade.

Hi Ruben,

Congratulations on completing your courses! Your faculty has advised that you have met the academic requirements of your course, and that you may be eligible to graduate.

Essential information to ensure that you are eligible to graduate on time is included in this email.

Brace yourself, these are going be two long, boring, self-absorbed paragraphs.

I started studying Computer Science at UniSA in Adelaide in 2005; I even did one of the first Rubenerd Shows about it. Then family stuff (and the precursors to that) happened. Then we moved again, I returned to Malaysia to help out, did correspondence, moved back to Singapore again, family stuff, transferred back to Adelaide, more family stuff, moved back to Singapore, transferred, re-enrolled for correspondence, more family stuff. By 2010, I was understandably perturbed by their lack of flexibility in response to issues outside my or my family’s control.

Then to add insult to injury, when we moved back to Sydney in 2011, UTS didn’t recognise my prior studies on account of them being done more than two years prior. So! I started and finished from scratch. Then ran into issues with my professional practice diploma required for graduation due to work scheduling issues. I was faced with the prospect of having to re-enrol and take fully one third of the courses again (making that three times now?); something I wouldn’t have done. I thought I was destined to be another of those “he did okay, and he didn’t even graduate university!” guys. Fortunately, after a lengthy appeal process and emails to the head of the School of Information Technology I was approved for graduation.

It took more than 12 years, enough red tape and bureaucracy to encircle the sun at least nine times, duplicating two degrees worth of work, my beloved late mum dying in the process, five international moves, eight house moves and HECS debt to last a lifetime, but I’ve finally graduated.

People say closure is overrated, but as they say “I legit cried after this.”

The Overnightscape Central is a fun weekly podcast hosted by the illustrious PQ Ribber. Hosts and listeners of The Overnightscape Underground participate in a topic each week, and you’re welcome to join.

02:10:56 – Jimbo!! Chad Bowers!! Frank Edward Nora!! Rubenerd!! Doc Sleaze!! An audio Escape of collaboration and fun!! PQ Ribber is your host!! Jimbo reviews the ONSUG Week!!

You can view this episode on the Underground, listen to it here, and subscribe with this feed in your podcast client.

This originally appeared on the Annexe, when I documented inconsiderate drivers parked illegally on Mascot footpaths. It used to bug me no end!

This originally appeared on the Annexe.

Open a Command Prompt as Administrator, then:

C:\> slmgr.vbs -upk

If it works, you’ll get:

Uninstalled product key successfully.

This originally appeared on the Annexe.

If you’re running Windows in 2016, you need all the help you can get. To install, launch PowerShell as an administrator, then:

PS C:\> Update-Help

This originally appeared on the Annexe.

Using robocopy:

robocopy.exe "R:\Source" "\\host\Destination" /E /Z /R:3 /W:10 /V

Though I’d still prefer cygwin.