Rubenerd

I think I blue blew a fuse upon seeing this art on Pixiv. It reminded me of the original Bakemonogatari opening, where everyone’s favourite tsundere walked larger-than-life through the streets. Only this time, with fighter jets and equally-large flying saucers.

Safebooru taggers claim they’re F-22 jets, though the make of the UFOs remain a mystery. I know far more about civilian than military aviation, so I defer to their expertise.

As for the motivation behind this inexplicable art series, Google Translate claims the artist merely wanted to draw giant girls, and the ensuing ridiculousness. Mission accomplished.

As mentioned on Rubenerd Show 290, the limited 64GiB SSD capacity of my mid-2012 MacBook Air is starting to get difficult. Whereas previously I'd just offload stuff to a series of Sandisk Extreme USB 3.0 memory keys, it seems now I can't even turn the machine on half the time without the Finder reporting “Zero bytes free”.

I’ve re-installed OS X on it twice, checked the Hibernation and sleep images aren’t ballooning to unreasonable sizes, and performed various voodoo chants. The space just vanishes, and I grow wary of constantly tracking down where it all goes. Time for an upgrade!

My go-to for such stuff is usually Crucial. Their compatibility search engine has been invaluable for years, which I thank them for with my patronage. Perhaps given Apple's proprietary SSD layout, they don't offer any options for the Airs though.

From my early Mac days I remembered Other World Computing in the US had the best deals for Mac-compatible hardware, and sure enough they have a series of Aura and Aura Pro SSDs. Their lowest capacity 120GiB drive is already almost twice the capacity of my current one, and they go up to 1TiB.

My plan is to grab a 240GB Aura Pro 6G once money becomes available. Stay tuned for reviews :).

I forked Homebrew a few years ago to send pull requests, then promptly forgot about it. This is what it looks like today:

This branch is 34801 commits behind Homebrew:master.

Neglect aside, that’s pretty impressive.

I have a habit of betting on the wrong horse. I used Bitbucket from way back when, largely because it supported Hg. Now the world has long since settled on Git, I started using it as such on Bitbucket, while also tracking projects on GitHub. This weekend, I decided I'd merge the two to make life easier.

The git-neutral way to achive this is setting a new remote URL for your existing Bitbucket repo, and pushing to it. For example:

$ cd ./bitbucket-repo/
$ git remote set-url --push origin https://github.com/user/repo
$ git push --mirror

According to past screenshots people had made, GitHub used to sport an Import code button in their repo creation screen, but no such button exists now.

Today though I learned the relatively hidden GitHub Importer still exists. It can take the URL of an existing SVN, Hg, TFS or Git repo as a source, then creates a new repo with full commit history. Your Bitbucket repo would need to be public for this to work.

I haven’t tried this with branches, or repos with wiki pages etc, so YMMV.

I don’t always see eye–to–eye with DHH, but damn it if he didn't hit close to home with this one.

Grit is a convenient trait for enticing others to comply with the uncomfortable or the uninteresting [Ruben adding: or the untenable]. It elevates the perseverance of such adversity to a virtue in and of itself. Just dangle that long-term goal in front of them, accuse them of lack of grit, and compliance will oft follow.

But far more important than to be capable of suffering for your cause is to ask “what cause”? Am I the beneficiary here, or is someone else? Being high on grit may well mean sticking with a faulty cause for far longer.

Grit is an optimization for local maxima. If you’re able to change the function, drop the grit.

I realised with all my exported posts in a directory, I can run some pointless stats. For example, these are the number of posts that start with the word “the”:

$ ls the* | wc -l
==>     296

And that have the word “the” in it anywhere:

$ ls *the* | wc -l
==>     791

And K-On:

$ ls *k-on* | wc -l
==>     53

And that have the greatest name in the world in it:

$ ls *saskatchewan* | wc -l
ls: *saskatchewan*: No such file or directory
==>     0

Hmm, clearly I have work to do.

I’ve realised there’s a direct correlation between the time of night, and prevalence of these error messages:

"E492: Not an editor command: Wq" 

I swear, my tombstone will have this on it. Which will suck, because it means I couldn't save my changes before quitting the living world.

I should just use ZZ, but old habits are hard to break.

My boss Alan shared this video from his dashcam. The driver makes a right turn from the far left lane, only to have the police appear.

In general, drivers around Mascot are still far better than those in Earlwood. But I’ve still almost been clipped crossing that very intersection as a pedestrian.

Sounds like the name of a hipster microbrewary. Welcome to Jot and Shuff; we don't have a menu and our floors haven't been swept in a week, but we have terrible music. Enjoy!

There are dozens of ways to generate random numbers on *nix systems, for cryptograpic or other uses. Sometimes, you just want a simple integer between a certain range for use in a script.

The BSDs have long had the jot command, which can be employed for this task. For example, to return a random integer between 5 and 100:

% jot -r 1 5 100

The BSDs come with jot, because they're awesome. Linux users can install athena-jot.

Today though I also learned GNU shuf can be used for the same task on Linux and Solaris 11.

$ shuf -n 1 -i 5-100

For absolutely no reason whatsoever, have this string of numbers that shuf generated.

34 74 86 22 95 14 78 4

As mentioned last week, SecureCRT’s Session Manager is one of my new favourite things. Being able to access all the hosts I manage in one hierarchical sidebar has improved my quality of life more than I care to admit. About all it can't do is define RDP hosts.

Or... can it? If you use Microsoft Remote Desktop app, you can export a host definition, then launch it from a local shell connection from SecureCRT. It’s a hack, but it works!

1. Open Microsoft Remote Desktop on the Mac. Choose a host, then go File/Export. Save the resulting file somewhere memorable.

2. Choose Create New Session in SecureCRT, and name it the same as your Microsoft Remote Desktop host.

3. Under Connection/Protocol, choose Local Shell.

4. Under Terminal, check Close on disconnect. We don't want the empty tab sticking around when we launch RDP.

5. Under Logon Actions, click Add... and add the following (or equivalent) to Send:

open ~/Documents/RDP/Host.rdp && exit

Now I have RDP, SSH, telnet and serial consoles for all the hosts I maintain in the one place. Living the dream, people.