Rubenerd

I've been a Flickr Pro for about a decade, and a Flickr Pro subscriber for almost as long. So when I saw this email subject line this morning, I knew it couldn't be good.

[Flickr] Your Flickr Pro subscription just got better!

I'm not cynical (said every cynic ever!), but I know that whenever a price hike is in order, it’s standard practice to bury it under other stuff. Sure enough, under a list of new features:

For new subscribers, Flickr Pro is $49.99 per year or $5.99 per month.

This is double what it used to be. But they’re quick to reassure us:

And here is where it gets good as a Loyal Flickr Pro Member [..] You get these additional Flickr Pro features and continue to receive unlimited space, with no change in price for the next 2 years.

It’s akin to those “50 months interest free!” offers; we don't have to pay now, so it’s all good. I bristle when companies do this.

Flickr is a wonderful service; I don’t post nearly enough stuff to it. They've generally done a good job maintaining and updating the interface. With a decade of inflation and uncertainty at Yahoo!, it stands to reason they'd want a little extra money to stay afloat.

Still, as John Roderick would say, $50 is a much bigger eel than $25.

I’ve always relied on Perl for sysadmin tasks, but I’ve been trying to get better at Bourne shell scripting. One operation I did constantly in Perl was searching for substrings:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my $string = "Zettai ryouiki";
my $sub    = "ryouiki";
print "Tousaka!" if ($line =~ m/substring/);

Until now I’d just been using grep, like a gentleman. If you’re network–bound and have a limited number of comparisons, it’s fine. Otherwise, it’s slow enough that even an i5 MacBook Air takes a moment between each operation.

#!/bin/sh
set -e
_string="Zettai ryouiki"
_sub="ryouiki"
[ `echo ${_string} | grep '${_sub}'` ] && echo "Tousaka!"

We can do better. An alternative is this neat trick, proposed by Matt Day on Stack Overflow:

if test "${_string#*$_sub}" != "${_string}"; then
    echo "Tousaka!"
fi

No pipes, no grep, just speed. Sugoi!

Dear Ruben

We’re very pleased to announce, in partnership with Transport for NSW, that the Opal Concession card will be available for eligible students at UTS from next Monday 27 July.

This is great news because the Opal Concession card comes packed with so many benefits for students, like:

• the cheapest single fares
• off-peak train fares – save 30%
• a daily travel cap of $7.50*
• a weekly travel cap of $30*
• your balance is protected if your card is lost or stolen

plus [sic], you can earn free travel with the Opal Weekly Travel Reward: after 8 paid journeys in a week you travel the rest of the week for free.*

* Excludes Sydney Airport station access fee

Just in time for graduation!

To put in perspective, Opal cards were rolled out between 2012 and last year. Senior and Junior concession cards were rolled out much sooner. UTS may have also had privacy concerns; if so, I'd be interested to hear what assuaged them.

By and large, spammers seem to have lost their creative zeal. In a pinch, they can spearfish or render a comically–bad bank notice, but they don't put the literary effort or leaps of logic that they used to.

The good news is, there are still seemingly those dedicated to the craft. Below is an excerpt from one I received today:

I was analyzing your site and it seems that some of your website rankings have dropped. It is due to non optimized techniques/errors

And Google guidelines not being followed properly. As you know that Google’s crawler is software and work on coding basis only.

That’s why site coding portion should be strong for better results.

We've all read SEO snakeoil, but this is the first time I've read "Google uses code, so you should make yours better!" as an argument. Well played.

For what its worth, the Bourne shell and Go code that generates this site is rather fabulous, thank you very much.

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.

03:12:20 – Clara Tse!!  Rubinerd!!  Eddie Murray!!  Frank Edward Nora!!  Mike Boody!!  Chad Bowers!!  Doc Sleaze!!  A rather deep and fun look at age and aging!!  PQ Ribber is your guide!!

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

I've revised Rubenerd Show licencing. New episodes will be released under Creative Commons Attribution, and only with Share-Alike if included audio mandates it.

I already eschewed (geshundheit) the No-Derivatives and No-Commercial clauses, because I want people playing my show on theirs, and even if they run ads. Share-Alike imposes similar practical limits, which I don't think are useful for audio. I want people spreading the show!

(It's also in line with my preference for the BSD/MIT licences to the GPL, but that's for another philosophical discussion; along with Vim and FreeBSD being superior to Emacs and [GNU/]Linux).

Attribution is nice and simple. Feel free to take my audio and use as you see fit, provided you reference the show. Done and done :).

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

22:02 – Topics include bulk haulage, an iPhone pro tip, the possible new Rubenerd Beta concept, July and 2014, transient states between houses and offices, waiting for deliveries, IKEA furniture, Lego, high school economics and chemistry, Baltic states, Latvia, and change in the air.

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

Released July 2015 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.

A message SourceForge gave to me earlier today:

The sourceforge.net website is temporarily in static offline mode. Only a very limited set of project pages are available until the main website returns to service.

And after many years of use, this was the first time I got this message from Homebrew/Github:

Error: GitHub API rate limit exceeded for xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx. (But here's the good news: Authenticated requests get a higher rate limit. Check out the documentation for more details.) Try again in 41 minutes 43 seconds, or create an personal access token: https://github.com/settings/tokens and then set the token as: HOMEBREW_GITHUB_API_TOKEN

I suppose I should brush up on that, I'm all on Bitbucket for stuff.

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

54:05 – Topics include Eddie Murray, Hey Everybody it's Jimbo, Gangnam Style, critics, Frank Edward Nora's new job, unemployment, New Horizons photos of Pluto, lucid dreaming, science, why I hate beaches, scary seagulls, one pieces are better than bikinis, gender double standards, Radio Free Shambles, introversion draining, sleep troubleshooting and insomnia, The Law Report, caffeine, energy drinks, and travelling through dreams.

Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade. Music by Eddie Murray.

Released July 2015 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.

Despite not owning a current one, or not using one for years, I have a real soft spot for iPods. I got my original slab of white gold on my 18th birthday, and a followup 5G iPod Video after reaching a university milestone in 2006. In a way, they've always felt like a “life achievement unlock!”

These latest ones almost follow Apple's colour Tick Tock. They tend to introduce shockingly bright, wonderful colours during one cycle, then they're muted for the next. It happened with the original iMacs, then onto their other product lines.

I say almost followed, because that pink is dazzling, and that blue is almost my favourite schade [sic]. And I want one.

Don't get me wrong, I have no use for an iPod in 2015. My tiny computer phone handles my music and podcasts in a way these can't or shouldn't (to reach price points etc). But since when are my electronics purchases ever rational, especially when it comes to Apple?

Like that bookstore chain or low–patronage cafe you love, you wish they could live forever. But deep down inside, you know their days are numbered. I feel the same about the iPod, so any new release is a welcome reprieve from having to think about them disappearing, at least for another year or so.

Photo © Apple Inc, used here for review.