Rubenerd

While my previous questionnaire post was a little tongue in cheek, I was being truthful when I said the biggest challenge I've found to blogging is draft accumulation. All too often I write up something but don't get to the point of publishing. It's a cirrus serious concern.

This raises the issue of publishing later. Wait, this is important enough for a subheading.

Publishing later

That's better. For posts talking about technical solutions to problems; or more generalised pontifications on the origins of life, the multiverse and most things; their value or validity isn't hampered by late publishing. For others discussing previously current events, they are.

So what's the solution? While I still have time in 2013, I'm going to trawl through my archives of draft posts from this year, and start posting them regardless of their timeliness. Who knows, maybe there will still be something good in there.

If you're a blogger, I encourage you to go through your drafts and do the same. You found the topics interesting or useful enough to start writing, go ahead and share them! ^_^. If you find nobody was interested however, I absolve myself of any legal, ethical or financial responsibility.

Who knows, this could turn into a yearly thing. Well, ideally it shouldn't, given that I shouldn't have so many draft posts to begin with. It also strikes me as more than a little humerous that I spent my time writing about draft posts, rather than publishing draft posts. Perhaps I should have let this post sit for a month first, thereby rendering it an unpublished draft post.

Since skeptically moving to it from MacPorts and NetBSD’s pkgsrc, I’ve become rather enamored with homebrew. The lack of modesty in the project description (MacPorts driving you to drink?) belies the nicest package manager on any platform.

Which got me to thinking: could a similar package manager be created for binary graphical applications?

The process

When I thought about it, much of the process seemed to be the same:

1. You could create a formula pointing to Firefox’s latest dmg, with the same hashes and installation instructions in the ruby file.

2. Once downloaded, the dmg (or other binary distribution method) could have their distributable hashed and verified, then parsed and extracted.

3. Then you could do the same brew link we use for the few graphical apps that made their way to the mainline Homebrew system.

4. Once installed, it would simply be a matter of running brew update to have all your graphical and shell applications updated.

Then finally, Mac users could be on an even footing with those Linux people who can just do a yum update.

2012 called, they want their idea back

Before last semester, I thought such a system would be really neat to implement. Like the fool I am though, such a system already exists that I could have been using!

With this collaborative, open Homebrew and Homebrew Cask package managers, Mac OS X finally feels as easy to administer (at least when it comes to installing software) as Linux.

Yesterday evening, Sebastian tagged Clara and I in a Confessions of a Blogger post. I'll admit, I'd prefer making a contract with Kyuubey than answer such posts, but I do not wish to renege on this social responsibility. Therefore, I will be answering them John Walkenback style.

When did you first start blogging and why?

2004, because I wanted to.

Have you had any past online presence?

Yes.

When did you become serious about your blog?

After ascending higher than a cumulus.

What was your first blog post?

The one that preceded the second.

What have been your biggest challenges blogging?

Draft accumulation.

What is the most rewarding thing about blogging?

Writing unique posts, rather than filling out cookie cutter questionnaires.

What is the most discouraging thing about blogging?

Aforementioned cookie cutter questionnaires.

What is your lasting inspiration or motivation?

To help people with technical issues I’ve also faced, and to act as a life record I may find interesting in the future. There are other personal reasons, but this is not the post to discuss them.

Have you ever blogged in a creamy vat of strawberry custard?

Where are your cameras?

What is your blogging dirty little secret?

Okay, I’ll bite on this one. I still draft in the IBM E Editor from PC DOS. None of the clones match its elegance or speed, so I run the original in DOSBox. My long term ambition is to write my own faithful clone one day in ncurses.

What is your current goal as a blogger?

To never write a post like this again.

Have you learned or become passionate about anything through blogging that caught you by surprise?

Are we done here?

Yes, all clichés have been wrung. Thank you for your time Ruben.

Don’t mention it!

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

An animated GIF of a desktop ATA hard drive, judging from the interface and molex connector. Because I can again.

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

I’m back.

Buried in the Toshiba Canada archives away from sunlight and time, there exists quite the treasure trove of drives and software for classic Toshiba notebook hardware.

The archive is organised into twelve sections. Six for operating systems:

• Windows NT drivers
• Windows 98 drivers
• Windows 95 drivers
• Windows 3.x drivers
• DOS Files
• OS/2 Drivers

And six for specific driver types:

• Audio drivers
• Display drivers
• Flash BIOS
• Misc. drivers
• Online documentation
• Utilities

Thanks to this hidden archive, I was able to get 16 million colours and sound in Windows 3.x and DOS on my 1999-vintage Libretto 70CT. This would have taken months trawling though scammy, dodgy, adware riddled driver sites to do otherwise. If you've been a sysadmin for a Windows system, you know exactly the sites I'm talking about.

If you're serious about retro 1990s computing, you'd be wise to download some stuff from here. Personally, I archived the entire site in the event it gets taken down one day.

Starting with OS X Mavericks, we have bsdtar that allows for one line creation of tar.xz files, just as we have with bz2 and gz.

Aside: In much the same way Nagato Yuki began gracing computer hardware posts here, in 2007 Asahina Mikuru began accompanying compression posts. I think I was implying her Mikuru Beam was more effective than regular file compression algorithms. She appears nervous; I can only asusme it’s due to her unfamiliarity with compressing and archiving in the one command

Previously, to archive and compress a folder with xz, we would do this:

% tar cvf archive.tar folder/
% xz -9 archive.tar

Now we can just do this:

% tar cJvf archive.tar.xz folder/

Boom! There’s just one catch. This uses xz with its default compression level, not the 9 I use for archiving purposes. Fortunately, we can also specify this:

% tar cJvf --options xz:compression-level:9 archive.tar.xz folder/

Okay, I hear you say, what’s the point of this monsterous one liner? The two lines we had previously may have had fewer characters! Unlike my overworked pencils from my last round of exams, you have a point.

Among many reasons why its great, it means we can create an alias in our shell. I still use tcshrc, so I went ahead and added this to my .tcshrc:

alias tz 'tar cvJf --options xz:compression-level=9'

My bash knowledge is as corroded as my overworked pencils (does fake graphite corrode?), but here’s the equivlient:

alias tz='tar cvJf --options xz:compression-level=9'

Now whenever I want to create an xz tar archive with its maximum compression ratio, I can just do this:

% tz archive.tar.xz folder/

Now we just need pax to support xz along with bzip2 and gz and we’ll be set.

For obvious family reasons, we didn't really celebrate Yuletide festivities all that much for several years. Lately though, we've started getting back into the swing of it, albeit slowly. Baby steps.

To get a head start on the season this year, Clara sewed us a plushie tree ornament and salmon sushi roll!

The models displaying our new ornaments are Kusugawa Sasara and a rather fabulous Alpacafe alpaca, both of which Clara gave me as well. They seemed like a natural pair to take care of them till we get the tree up. Assuming plushie alpacas don't eat plushie sushi.

This originally appeared on the Annexe, in a parody post series about the podcast. Art is by zy2386262 on Pixiv.

Jason Easly, quoting Sarah Palin and her baffling response to a question about the nuclear option:

As for this rule change that some people are calling the nucular option under Senate rules, you know, I guarantee this week, Thanksgiving dinner, people sitting around their tables, we’re not going to be talking about the president blessing this thwarting of the balance of power in Congress with new Senate rules called the nucular [sic] option.

I agree with Adam and John, there’s no reason why people should be poking fun at Sarah Palin. She’s an erudite, intelligent person who probably even knows what erudite means.