Rubenerd

I was far too old for the coin to drop with regards to a certain Liverpudlian band. In my mid–teens, I was looking an album cover and realised… hey, wait a minute… they're the BEAT–LES. It blew my mind. Then the embarrassment set in, like finally getting a joke someone told you a long time ago.

Recently, I solved another etymological quandary from my childhood. During maths, I'd wondered why they were called quadratic equations if we were dealing with raising things to the power of two. Doesn't quad mean four? As in, the number of Beatles?

As we all should have expected, the English Language and Usage Stack Exchange (there was such a thing?) answered this question. First, we have Peter:

Why does "quadratic" describe second power while "quad" usually describes "four"?

And the most succinct response, from RegDwigнt:

Because the second power is a square, and a square has four sides. In fact the word square itself comes from quad-, too.

But of course. What a blockhead.

As for the cover, it seemed the most logical one to include in a post such as this, even if the titular song wasn't sung or written by my beloved George. Speaking words of wisdom?

Good evening. How was your Sunday?

You could do the following so many ways, with so many tools. If you're already in TextMate though, you can still use your regex foo to do some pretty cool stuff to ranges of files.

Case in point: say you have a folder, and you want to append a string to the end of each file.

1. Hit ⌘F for find
2. Under "Find", type "Z"
3. Under "Replace", type "Z" followed by your escaped string
4. Under "Options", select "Regular Expression"
5. Under "In", choose the folder containing your target text files
6. Hit "Replace All"

A few weeks ago, I was at a supermarket self–service checkout. Out of the blue, a well–dressed, middle aged gentleman came sailing through the supermarket exit and began rummaging through my grocery bags, seemingly without a second thought. He peeked at first, then pushed his hands into the bag and began inspecting the cans. I was lucky it wasn’t the bag with fresh vegetables.

As an IT guy, my first thought was “I was not programmed for this”. I couldn’t even relate or empathise with the person to find common ground; I had absolutely no idea what would compel someone to rummage through my grocery bags.

Seemingly unable to find what he was looking for, the gentleman gave me a mocking glare, pulled his hands out, and walked away. The Woolworths staff had finally seen what had happened, though naturally they assumed it meant I’d stolen something. After wasting an inordinate amount of time verifying the contents of my bags, they were gracious enough to let me leave with what I paid for.

We’ve all had awkward situations like this. Someone in our vicinity violates our accepted social norms and expectations, and makes us uncomfortable, scared or generally uneasy. How we deal with these depends on so many factors; how we’ve been raised, how socially confident we are, if we’re aggressive or assertive or passive.

At times like this, I feel far too passive. A more assertive person would have pushed back a little, demanding to know why this gentleman was rummaging through his or her property. That said, the situation did end up playing out okay; perhaps assertiveness would have dragged it out further, or got more people involved.

Art by Harada Miyuki on Pixiv. Text was cross–posted from the Anime@UTS site.

If your webmaster may be a little more serious for a moment, he'd like to briefly share with you what this club means to him, and how it has made his time at UTS that much more special. For those new members, its an excuse to shamelessly advertise what you've become a part of.

Here he goes

This is my sixth semester as an Anime@UTS member. I've lost count of how many Orientation Welcome Picnics I've been a part of, but certainly today's was the largest. In previous years, we were able to form our introduction circles in the concourse of the tower building; this year we filled out half the courtyard outside. So massive was the turnout, we could barely hear each other over the distance!

I met so many of you today for the first time, and I caught up with an equal number of you. Hearing where you're from, what you're interested in, your own adventures and how you wound up spending time with us for lunch and games on that surprisingly nice day was wonderful. We really have a diverse group of people, from places as disparate as Latvia, Korea, Singapore, and Parramatta!

I'll admit, behind my over-compensating, guy–wearing–a–pink–bag exterior, I'm a terribly shy introvert who'd sooner marathon an anime, Kindle a book or program a computer than spend extended periods of time with other people. I can chat with friends just fine, but in public with people I've never met, I'm secretly trembling inside. I know many of you are in the same boat as me.

But that's what I believe sets Anime@UTS apart from any other I've been a part of, and of UTS in general. Well, other than JASS or the Drawing Circle, but I don't like to discuss the latter because their talent just makes me feel inadequate.

It comes down to who we are

The Statue of Liberty greeted American immigrants with "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free". Anime@UTS takes it one step further; we greet the socially awkward, the yaoi and yuri fans, the genderbenders and crossdressers, the fans of moeblob or video games come to life or highschools overrun with zombies. We have dinner, butcher songs at Karaoke, play games, sometimes we even watch anime. We have artists, law students, engineers, writers, software developers, businesspeople, those taking international studies.

Forgive me for this line, but what this club offers isn't just a refuge to share in your hobbies that others may give you weird looks for; it's a place where you can be yourself. To let your social guard down you wear during the rest of your day, have fun, and celebrate this unique, utterly inexplicable and fabulously wonderful culture. Desu~

When I first started uni, I heard all the talk about how joining clubs was a "great place to network and meet people". Just as the funniest jokes are often the ones with kernels of truth, so to are the clichés. Of all the lasting friendships I've made at UTS over these three years, almost all are people I met through this club. To think I was almost not a member until our screenings director signed me up, how different would my life be now?

So, where was I going with this? If you're a new member, come to our events and screenings, and get to know us. Better still, let us get to know you. It may just be among the most rewarding experiences you'll have at uni, with friends you'll keep for many years to come.

Remember that photo? Yes, its the one Gizmodo used to say I looked stupid. Not that I hold grudges against journalistic outfits, because Gizmodo writers aren't journalists. Whoa, that wasn't in the draft.

@georgiecel

But I digress. Earlier this week, I wrote about HTML5 removing support for the date metadata attribute. I theorised it had something to do with date being ambiguous without further context, but didn't pursue it further.

Sydney web guru @georgiecel replies:

@Rubenerd Hey Ruben, read your blog post — personally, I have been using <time datetime="2014-02-19"> for schema microdata since 2012 :)

Thank you for your readership ^_^. Aside from employing RDFa Lite instead, I do the same thing under most circumstances (more on that in a moment). I've had my reservations about HTML5, but semantic elements like this are really quite nice. The less abuse of the <abbr> element, the better.

In addition to these date elements, I've also used HTML date metadata in page <head> areas to denote the last build date for a site. Perhaps a better alternative is Schema data here too. If so, it strikes me weird that we still have generic HTML metadata like keyword and description, when date is no longer valid.

As for times (hah) when we can't use <time>, it unfortunately doesn't jive with my beloved microformats. I'd write an hCalendar task to remind myself to research this futher, but the date wouldn't be parsed. At least, not at present.

@zoomosis

And finally, @zoomosis reminded me of something slightly embarrasing:

@Rubenerd You misspelled deprecated on your blog, fwiw.

I've been reading that word in documentation since primary school, and I still spell it "depracation". That and I still call my shoulders my elbows, and vice versa. Old habits don't die hard, they stick around to make me look even more stupid than my writing here would suggest ;).

Before we had TwitPic, or yFrog, or before Twitter started supporting image uploads directly, we still had Flickr. I've got all kinds of grainy camera phone pictures on there, mostly taken on my bullet proof Nokia e61i. I admit, I sometimes miss the simpler times of Symbian and PalmOS.

Sufficient time has passed now that some of those images have nostalgic value. I don't know which tweets from 2007 these attach to, though I can still remember them.

Taken on that fateful December, the above was a locality map around the Dhoby Ghaut MRT, the station we first lived near in Singapore. When we moved there it had the North South Line, by the time we left it was an interchange for the North East Line. Now it's also an interchange for the Circle Line. Amazing what investment, planning and progress will get you.

There are lots of random gems there, such as this display of 2007 iPods from a dead music chain, and the Singapore media's coverage of Kevin Rudd's election. Simpler times.

Not that kind of date, unless you're a fan of shipping characters in such a manner. But I digress.

The evolving HTML5 spec never ceases to surprise. Today, I learned this while validating some pages:

Line 29, Column 57: Bad value date for attribute name on element meta: Keyword date is not registered.

So the following generic HTML meta attributes are all still valid:

• author
• description
• generator
• keywords

But date isn't. WhatWG indeed.

I suspect there was a discussion at some point discussing what exactly it means. Is it when a page was created, or modified, or certain parts were created or modified?

An equally valid, ambiguous replacement

Whatever the case, we need to replace our simple date attributes with something else. My first hunch was to use the Dublin Core created attribute with a schema link. You could also use RDFa with a property tag.

<link rel="schema.dcterms" href="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" />
<meta name="dcterms.created" content="2014-02-17T23:43:43+1100" />

As the term "created" suggests however, it's designed to be static. Unfortunately, Jekyll dervives timestamps from the file, which means it changes with each update. I store my own timestamps which override these, so maybe the key would be to use the Jekyll as date modified, and my own timestamp as date created.

I'm not sure if this is even possible, unless I broke out some more custom Jekyll frontmatter to store a distinct creation date. I suppose it wouldn't be the first time I've done something like that.

While I decide what to do, I've settled on the more ambiguous date attribute, to get exactly what we had before:

<meta name="dcterms.date" content="2014-02-17T23:43:43+1100" />

I wonder what will be deprecated next?

In lighter news, Clara and I managed to snag a copy of the next installment of The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki–Chan! The full sized image is on my Flickr.

We've seen quite the progression of covers, from a shy and blushing Yuki, to one with more confidence. This time around, she seems almost indifferent to our presence. Without becoming a spoiler, these broadly follow Yuki's own journey in the series; both Clara and I like what they did in the covers to illustrate this.

I've yet to take the wrapping off; I'm not at bag and boarding levels of obsessiveness over this character, though I may be precariously close to it. Then again, who would need to do that when they're lucky enough to be dating her?

The reaction to Mozilla's decision to advertise in Firefox has been interesting to watch. For your consideration, have three responses.

Privacy

I ended my previous post saying I would reserve further judgement until we got more details. Darren Herman has responded disclosing users will have their locations tracked with GeoIP, and that:

As of now, our expectation is that we’ll be delivering the number of impressions (how many times a tile was shown) and interactions (how many interactions with a tile, i.e. clicks).

No real surprises here; a regular website would give these metrics. What's concerning is the word "expectation", which leaves the door open for using other metrics. Given Firefox contains a user's entire browsing history, this could be far more than a typical ad platform, possibly even more than Google has. This is particularly ironic given many of us used Firefox instead of Chrome specifically for this reason.

A no–win situation

In an admission that the feature is unwanted, commentators have claimed the ads will only appear for a brief time after the first install. Nothing to worry about then, right? Maybe not, as the aptly–named Anonymous Firefox User reminds us:

[..] what about users who have Firefox clear out their cache, etc. upon closing. Does this means [sic], each time the browser tab is opened, a new series of ads will be shoved in that users’ face? [..]

Again, we don't have the specifics of its behaviour yet. Still, by its very function a reset browser looks the same as a fresh install, which an ad platform wouldn't be able to tell apart. If it could, it would represent an incomplete reset, which is itself a privacy concern. Hence, a potential no–win situation.

Language

John Gruber wrote a characteristically candid post, where he compared the language used in a Reuters report with Mozilla's announcement. Comments on the latter post liken the language to doublespeak, which seems right.

I think it'd be safe to say Mozilla may have had a better response if they had:

1. been honest about their motive for ads in that post;
2. admitted we don't want ads in our browser;
3. and therefore respectfully assured us the necessary ads would be unobtrusive, while addressing potential privacy concerns.

Instead, they presented it as a new feature that places "users in the centre". This doesn't square with the reality of point 2, therefore even with good intentions it comes across as disingenuous.

I'm grateful to Mozilla for responding to us, but unfortunately it's done little to assuage my concerns. I'll be putting money where my mouth is and donating again to the Mozilla Foundation at my earliest convenience, though if they continue to be evasive it may be for the last time.

I would make a lousy hikkamori. While I need to recharge my introverted batteries after extended social interactions, I need to do it outside home. Sitting at cafes with my laptop and cup of black coffee, I can just let the outside world melt away in a way you intuitively wouldn’t expect. I don’t understand how it works, but it does!

Given the physiological importance of these outings, I wondered if there were any ways I could improve them. For one, is it better to sit outside or inside?

Previously, I tended to gravitate towards indoors. The air is climate controlled, you’re not exposed to the elephants elements, its easier to read the laptop screen. It would seem to be the logical choice.

Then we moved to Hornsby, and my new favourite coffee shop became The Refinery Espresso. They have an indoor section, but its entirely open to the street. I was worried that drinking superior brews in a less than optimal laptopping environment would have a negative impact.

Surprisingly, it was quite the opposite. I can’t put it into words, but it was far more invigorating. Whether it can be attributed to not breathing recirculated air, or getting more of that natural environment thing I keep reading about, I don’t know. Like the cafe effect itself, I can’t quantify it, I just know it works.

Now, if I can, I sit at outdoor coffee shops. Give me some schade [sic].