Rubenerd

Perl legend (monk, you could say) Brian D. Foy recently commited this amazing hash to his Elements.pm:

my %elements = map { state $n = 0; $n++; $_ => $n, $n => $_ } qw(
H                                                                                                He    
Li Be                                                                           B  C   N  O   F  Ne    
Na Mg                                                                          Al Si   P  S  Cl  Ar    
K  Ca                                           Sc Ti  V Cr Mn Fe Co Ni Cu Zn  Ga Ge  As Se  Br  Kr    
Rb Sr                                            Y Zr Nb Mo Tc Ru Rh Pd Ag Cd  In Sn  Sb Te   I  Xe    
Cs Ba La Ce Pr Nd Pm Sm Eu Gd Tb Dy Ho Er Tm Yb Lu Hf Ta W  Re Os Ir Pt Au Hg  Tl Pb  Bi Po  At  Rn    
Fr Ra Ac Th Pa U  Np Pu Am Cm Bk Cf Es Fm Md No Lr Rf Ha Sg Bh Hs Mt Ds Rg Cn Uut Fl Uup Lv Uus Uuo    
);

I’ll bet he can’t wait till those new elements get new names with 2 character abbreviations!

I find spam thoroughly entertaining. This one was a bit more special, because they even got my name right. Someone leaked some account details somewhere, or based it off a social network profile?

Mars in Pisces and Venus in Aquarius Ruben Schade loves with his heart and his mind offering a completeness few can equal. Talking and exchanging ideas are just as important to this guy as the cuddles and kisses he offers. No matter what happens, or how emotionally draining a situation …

… he finds this stuff nonsense?

Sun in Capricorn and Moon in Taurus Solid and fixed, Ruben Schade holds a core of determination and everything he does is affected by his realistic and pragmatic outlook. He believes things will work out for the best for him and usually they do. It’s easy for him to keep focused on …

… calling out bullshit?

Your Personal Wizard enables you to test how you match with any person you can think of. Check why your current relationship is cooling off. Find out if you should have kept your Ex, or check if your nice colleague might be a good future match.

If you let horoscope sites dictate how well your relationship is going, you deserve what you get.

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24:05 – A shorter exposition of three terrifying scary trends: Ruben messing up Rubenerd Show 318, the changing of Lift to Fanta Lemon, and becoming subservient to computers through floods of information. Listener feedback provided by Jimbo.

Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Released January 2016 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts.

Subscribe with iTunes, Pocket Casts, Overcast or add this feed to your podcast client.

I was very excited when pkgng came to FreeBSD (and pkgin on pkgsrc/NetBSD). It does make some aspects of maintaining a BSD system easier, though there are few new gotchas.

Ports you build on FreeBSD 10.0+ are subseqently registered as packages with pkgng. So if you install nginx-devel as such:

# portsnap fetch extract
# cd /usr/ports/www/nginx-devel
# make install clean

This will appear as a package:

# pkg list
[..]
nginx-devel-1.9.9   Robust and small WWW server

Where this can become an issue is if you have custom build options. Because pkgng treats this as a regular package, issuing an upgrade will overwrite it with the generic options the tireless FreeBSD volunteer built it with.

# pkg update
# pkg upgrade
=> The following 1 package(s) will be affected (of 0 checked):
=>
=> Installed packages to be UPGRADED:
=>     nginx-devel-1.9.9

The accepted way around this is to lock the package to prevent upgrades:

# pkg lock nginx

Be careful though! As I did above, I locked a package I didn’t have installed. pkgng allows for this, but the end result is an upgrade will still overwrite what you intended to lock. This is easy to do with all ports that have extensions to their names, such as vim-lite, mtr-nox11 and p5-shimapan.

# pkg lock nginx-devel
=> nginx-devel-1.9.9: lock this package? [y/N]: y
Locking nginx-devel-1.9.9

Now when we do an upgrade, your original port won’t be overwritten.

I thought this tweet was the best:

@OhNoSheTwitnt: Listening to Under Pressure and imagining David and Freddie performing it together in Heaven today and I don’t even believe in Heaven.

Personally, this music video will remain my favourite of all time. I wasn’t a rabbid Ziggy Stardust fan, but he sure had his moments.

RIP you glorious gentleman.

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.

02:50:04 – Rubenerd!! Three Nines!! Doc Sleaze!! Chad Bowers!! Jimbo!! Clara!! Frank!! A thick and rich look at Radio from seven superb speakers along with your host, PQ Ribber!!

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

Or at least, so far. Damien Kingsbury wrote this for The Drum:

There is, however, a twisted logic to North Korea’s belligerent affront to world opinion and the bellicose triumphalism of its announcement of the test.

A preposterously pugnacious, fallaciously untenable position indeed. Utterly irascible, lah.

Running Perl in FreeBSD? You should be using env, but a heads up by the tireless maintainers:

Message from perl5-5.20.3_8:
The /usr/bin/perl symlink has been removed starting with Perl 5.20.
For shebangs, you should either use:
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
or
#!/usr/bin/env perl
The first one will only work if you have a /usr/local/bin/perl,
the second will work as long as perl is in PATH.

As an aside, the dependency list on the Perl5 FreshPorts page is among the most impressive I’ve ever seen. 6000+ packages require it to run, and as many to build.

There are still a few things I long for classic HTML for. Take this gem from HTML3:

<td align="decimal">

With this one attribute, table cells with decimal values would be aligned like this:

  2.31
  1.1
 32.1
123.45
  2.0

To do the same thing in 2015, what do we need? According to this StackOverflow thread, about 59 lines of JavaScript and CSS. Yay, progress!

CSS was wonderful for (mostly) decoupling presentation from content, and some people are brilliant at designing with it. Neither excuse its woeful inadequacy and poor design choices as a language.

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50:15 – Drizzly data centre trips, birds, cryptographic randomness (lava lamps, headphone cables as sources of entropy), uber-ing a crowdsourced paradigm of synergising disruption, listener feedback (Jimbo, Bi-Coastal Becky), hoarses [sic], Jimbo interviewing me on his podcast, Kevin Tan, functionally-challenged data centre bathrooms, trudging through the rain, high school athletics I didn't suck at (gymnastics, badminton), winning a primary school writing contest, and finding the chipset from the first computer I built in 1998. Now with all-new abrupt endings!

Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Released January 2016 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts.

Subscribe with iTunes, Pocket Casts, Overcast or add this feed to your podcast client.