Rubenerd

This originally appeared on the Annexe.

Using ImageMagick:

convert -type grayscale -depth 8

Using GraphicsMagick:

gm convert -type grayscale -depth 8

(Pardon the typos, I’m typing this on my phone).

As we speak, Sydney is making international headlines for all the wrong reasons. A hostage situation in a city coffee shop has also sparked [reported] fears that other devices have also been planted elsewhere. The Sydney Opera House and other landmarks have been evacuated.

I’m sitting here at a coffee shop back home in Hornsby, in northern Sydney. After relaying NSW Police instructions to stay in our offices, our building manager came through a short time later to tell us we were closing up. As far as I know, people in buildings surrounding Martin Place are still in lockdown.

I feel for the people held captive in that café, and as much for their family and friends. It would be a truly terrifying situation, and I can’t begin to imagine how they must be feeling. No, really. In all the media hype, discussions around political motivations and such, let us not forget this. We all hope for a peaceful resolution.

That said, I’m already feeling anger. I know those who would attempt to sway us will almost certainly have their way, once our Attorney General George Brandis and his band of Coalition MPs have had time to digest and exploit this tragedy to further their farcically ineffective surveillence bullshit. That metadata collection worked great for those people, didn’t it?

What heartened me was seeing ordinary Australians walking the Sydney CBD streets, rolling their eyes at these idiots, enjoying coffee, taking in the otherwise beautiful day, politely apologising for bumping into you, and carrying on like nothing was up. That’s how you handle cowards attempting to force your hand.

Peace.

Someone went to my site, and actually took the time to send me geographically relevant junk mail. I didn’t think it was possible.

Cheapest Flyers Printing and distribution in Singapore

Target your audience in your targeted area. Cheaper then Tv Ads, Show customer your services right away.

Do your own Flyers Now!!!!

Doing my own though? Didn’t you want to do it for me, for a fee?

Via NTG Australia on Twitter. Nothing says family togetherness like software used in an office.

Tony Abbott and Microsoft, destroying the satirist market one release at a time!

So my mum used to tell me, after a day of pet shop searches in 1999, she chanced upon this timid little fluffball in the corner of a cage. Upon picking him up, he burrowed his face into her neck and gradually stopped trembling. The proprietor warned that he may be the “runt of the litter”, but it was already love at first sight.

From that point forward, he was a member of the family. I’d just started high school, but already I can barely remember the time he wasn’t around.

Above all though, he shared the closest bond with my mum. Dr. Tan once said Romeo had almost done more for her health (and certainly more for her wellbeing) than any of her chemotherapy. He knew when she passed away in her sleep in 2007; a part of him was never the same.

He was quiet and gentle, but fiercely loyal. Despite all his health obstacles later in life, he would wander the house utterly unfazed. Through six understandably confusing house moves in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Sydney, the addition of his sister Tigerlily in 2001, and numerous vet visits, he was still our little trooper who was already ready for a soft cuddle or some silly fun. Honestly, who else but Romeo could manage to tip their house sideways while they were still inside?

Last night, surrounded by family and one of the most caring vets we’ve ever met, we said goodbye to our old friend and a fixture of our lives for 15 years.

My boss was gracious enough to give me the day off today, which let me start trawling the archives for photos. Over the coming days, I’ll be filling a Romeo Flickr album so the world can see what a silly, lovely little guy he was. You may claim to have a friendlier dog, but you’d be wrong.™

Rest in peace, my dear friend. ♡

This post by ncm is simply wonderful, and I’m unashamedly quoting the entire thing.

I remember the first time I encountered GNU Info. A man page said nothing useful, and referred me to GNU Info.

This. FreeBSD and NetBSD have beautiful manpages. It was a genuine shock to read the terse, incomplete GNU ones by comparison.

The first problem was that the key bindings were stupid and counterintuitive. (Still are. Every time I run it I have to figure them out all over again.) A bigger problem was that the files were badly organized, so that the information I needed was dispersed to lots of different places. Worst, having scoured the whole subtree, what I needed to know usually was not there.

I could see what had happened. All this handy organizational apparatus had to be used, so everything is broken into little sub-pages. Since it’s essentially hierarchical, every detail gets separated from other related details and stuck under a nice sub-sub-heading. The really useful information doesn’t really fit under any nice hierarchical category. Since there’s no good place to put it, it doesn’t get written down at all.

GNU Info sucks harder than a CFM56 at full throttle. And those are versatile sucking mechanisms, they’re not even mounted in circular nacelles on the next generation Boeing 737s.

Contrast this with the experience of man pages. On my system, man automatically pipes to less, so I can scroll around freely to see the whole thing. There are headers, but no intrusive hierarchy. For anything useful the author thinks of, there was someplace good to put it, generally next to something related. In better-written pages, there’s a flow, with later paragraphs building on earlier foundations. At the end, there’s a “see also” that tells me what other man pages might be interesting. Usually there are examples.

And here’s the kicker.

The only useful info pages I’ve seen were converted from man pages.

Back in “the day”, something as big as the make manual was considered too big to put in a man page, but that seems not to be a problem any more; certainly the bash man page is huge yet useful and entirely usable.

I just found this page of dropped domains from the 14th of July 2006. Low and behold:

rubbermaid-supplier.com
ruben-gil.com
rubenerd.com
rubiconmercantile.com
rucksackwanderers.com
ruddockphotography.com

In 2006, I moved to another webhost. The previous mob wanted several hundred dollars to transfer ownership of the domain to me. I wrote about this rort back in January. It took a few years, but I eventually got it back.

Lesson learned, always register your domain with a third party, such as Hover!

Ironcid submitted this vector on the 7th of December 2010, and I’m only just seeing it now!?

For those who don’t know, Shigure Asa was the best girl from Shuffle; a thoroughly forgettable, utterly cliché harem anime that young, alone Ruben obsessed over for a long time.

Asa, it turns out, was the senpai of the forgettable male protagonist. She was relatively frail and spent much time in hospital, but it didn’t stop her being spunky and awesome. She was the kind of person you wanted to care for, but you know deep down they could easily take care of themselves.

I still use Twofish on a pool of pseudo-random entropic fun to generate long ASCII filled passphrases with alphanumeric characters, punctuation and such. Most sites today behave properly, but it still trips up a few.

WordPress:

ERROR: Passwords may not contain the character “\”.

Fastmail:

Too long: Use at most 50 characters

Signing up to Quantcast:

Password must be less than 50 characters long.

Dashzen… doesn’t show anything.

But the winner is the NSW OneGov site:

The characters Spaces, @, ‘, ?, +, : are not allowed

There may be some data sanitising going on here, or an attempt to reduce support queries from people forgetting increasingly longer passphrases. Still, there’s absolutely no technical reason why a site in 2014 can’t salt and hash exactly what you give it.

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

If you just supply the minimum options:

virt-install paravirtualized guests cannot install off cdrom media

It must default to PV mode. For HVM, use this surprising option:

virt-install [..] --hvm [..]