Rubenerd

The day started like any other. What a preposterous statement; no days are alike. Or are they? I’m not sure. This could drag out into an entire philosophical discussion for which I’m not mentally equipped to engage in at present.

I like presents. Point is, today in fact didn’t start like any other. No sleep was had while working through the entire night to daybreak; an activity which I try to avoid like that creepy cat from next door. I like being prepared and developing things in my own time. As we’ve all experienced however, we don’t always have the luxury.

In any case, to celebrate the completion of aforementioned work, Clara took me to Tom-N-Toms in town for a celebratory cappuccino and corn pretzel. Judging from their Starbucks-esque logo I’d long dismissed them as the Samsung of coffee shops, but their food is as inspired as it is fresh, and their coffee isn’t half bad either. Clara and I have adopted two of them as our homes away from home in the Sydney CBD.

When one attempts to eat a cheese and corn filled pretzel however, one must possess a level of dexterity to ensure some of the kernels do not leave their pretzel containment apparatus, and land with a hefty splash into the coffee you were also consuming. Nobody had warned me of this, leading to this detailed situation. Turns out it wasn’t half bad! Unlike this post, which I really shouldn’t be writing while I’m severely sleep deprived.

And so I’m off to the land of sleep. I normally attempt lucid dreams, but I’m hoping for absolute brain rest tonight. Judging from the stilted structure of this post, you can tell I need it.

My family were never big on Halloween. Those Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episodes were rather epic, but the rest of the holiday seemed… meh? I didn’t even realise the name of the occasion was spelled with a double L until recently; to think I’ve been speling it llike a chump this wholle time.

So chumpy you can carve it.

This evening however, Clara drew her Nyancat mascot as a cute “Batman like creature” (to use her exact words). Additionally, and in a way that is beyond awesome, she drew our Rubenerd Mascot Rubi as Ami, still my single favourite anime character of all time after all these years.

I’m thinking there may be something to this day after all ^_^.

Developed at UTS and USyd, SPARK is billed as the “Self and Peer Assessment Resource Kit” (a backronym if ever I heard one). Much as you would fill out a super duper fun survey with a range of boxes from “I disagree” to “Somewhat agree”, SPARK lets you review the contributors to group assignments.

A few of my subjects at UTS have mandated its use. Presumably course coordinators are tired of dealing with dysfunctional groups, and are hoping students grading the performance of their peers will encourage everyone to perform better.

From the perspective of someone who otherwise does really well in SPARK peer reviews, I don’t think it succeeded. SPARK may be useful as a statistical tool, but it attacks the wrong issue: namely that students have different goals. A student wishing to grab a D or HD will not convince someone satisfied with a P to perform more work. For those people, a P may be all they need, or can provide due to other commitments.

One of Steve Ballmer’s legacies at Microsoft was the stack ranking system. Employees were measured not for their contributions and work ethic, but by ranks in teams. People who’ve since left Microsoft have routinely described what a toxic environment that breeds.

SPARK is benign compared to that; but it treads the same path.

Perl is one of those languages that defies classification. Or at least, to me. Here we have what’s clearly an interpreted scripting language with all the ease of automatically scaling arrays, but that also has lower level features you’d expect from the likes of C. One such feature is the almighty reference.

The image above is of the lovely Sasara anime figure Clara bought me. She’s wearing an apron, on a Perl Cookbook. That makes sense, right? ^^;

I didn’t even make an Inception Xzibit joke

If you come from C, Objective-C, C++ and the like, you can think of a Perl reference like a pointer. Rather than storing a value, a Perl reference stores a reference (that was inspired!) to a scalar, array, hash and the like.

To store a reference to a scaler, we would do this:

#!/usr/bin/env perl -w
use utf8;
use strict;
use warnings FATAL => 'all';
my $chitanda = "kininarimasu";
my $chitanda_ptr = $chitanda;
print("$chitanda_ptrn");

Running this code will give us this:

SCALAR(0x7f8161830198)

As we would dereference in C, we can print the value of the scalar we’ve referenced by doing this:

print("$$chitanda_ptrn");

Which will return:

kininarimasu

Did I just blow your mind? Probably not, but when I first came across that in Perl I squeaked with as much delight as my teeth do when eating a slice of Halloumi. You know, that squeaky cheese? That stuff is dope. But I digress; think of the possibilities of this.

Okay cool, why bother?

I got into a conversation with someone at UTS about Perl references. Their response was a mixture of surprise and laugher, followed by a question as to why you would ever want to use references in what’s traditionally known as a scripting language. He probably didn’t eat Halloumi either.

There are some situations where passing a reference to a variable would be preferable to passing its value. If you’ve developed a complicated or long data structure, it can take time and memory to reproduce. There are also times where its necessary; a potentially confusing limitation for people starting out with Perl is arrays can only contain scalars. Akin to a C array, Perl stores arrays of arrays (or hashes) as references to other arrays. Perl hides this somewhat, but there are times when you’re modifying arrays (or hashes) where knowledge of this can really help.

Array and hash references in Perl are something I’ve recently had to reacquaint myself with in more detail, and will be the subject of a future post. When I’ve written it, I’ll reference it here. Heh.

This originally appeared on PenguinCoffee, Clara’s and my old shared weblog.

My favourite Strike Witch, and with my favourite colours! ^_^. Oddly enough, she’s one of the few who actually wears something over her pantsu, go figure. Pleated skirts FTW :").

By Koi.

With the latest series of Pokémon games, I’ve been seeing the word “Ditto” being thrown around. Naturally, they must be referring to the device pictured above.

The Iomega Ditto was a personal tape backup storage drive from the same mob who developed the Zip drive, and the Bernoulli box before then. I remember seeing information about the Ditto on a demo CD that came with my other Iomega drives, and I was nerdy enough to still have a copy of it around to run in a VM.

I liked how it also came in a colour other than beige, even before the first iMac. The Jaz was green and the Zip was blue. The Bernoulli box was… beige. But still!

What blew my child mind however was the capacity of the tape cartridges. They were talking about gigabytes of storage in the late 1990s. Of course, I didn’t understand sequential versus random access, and that I wouldn’t be using it for day-to-day data. Still, I thought to myself I’d upgrade my Zip drive to a Jaz drive when I was older, and that I’d know I’d have grown up when I could afford to get a Ditto drive to store my amassed data on.

Needless to say, I was a very nerdy kid. Did I mention that?

As an addendum, I consider Red and Blue to be the only real Pokémom games. The rest are just like the last few Harry Potter books. Read into that how you wish.

Wonder if I could snag a Ditto drive on eBay? Because I don’t already have enough childhood nostalgic junk. Did I say junk? I meant…

Since moving back from Github Pages, I’ve been deploying Jekyll sites with rsync. It’s fast; doesn’t transfer unchanged assets; the usual qualities we’ve all come to expect from this excellent tool. I’m serious; from my hourly backups to site deployments and everything in between, I couldn’t imagine my life without it.

But I digress. Here’s my rsync deployment command for Jekyll, sent from my site’s Rakefile:

rsync -e 'ssh -i [private key]' --checksum --compress 
--delete --itemize-changes --recursive _site/
[user]@[machine]:[folder]

This hasn’t been a problem with my primary web host, but it generated the following error when attempting to push a Jekyll tree to our VPS:

bash: rsync: command not found
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (0 bytes received so far) [sender]
rsync error: remote command not found (code 127) at io.c(605) [sender=3.0.9]
rake aborted!
Command failed with status (127)

I believe the word “derp” would adequately describe the issue. CentOS (and NetBSD) don’t ship with rsync by default. Installing it did the trick.

I’ve since read this doesn’t solve the problem for some people. According to Siddesh BG, the solution is to provide an absolute path to rsync on the destination host:

rsync [..] --rsync-path=/usr/local/bin/rsync [..]

Now if only I could use rsync to transfer a cake from the pastry shop down the road to my table now.

A horrific afternoon for eastern Australia, particularly for those who lost their houses. The photos outside our loungeroom window were taken in the space of half an hour, no colour editing. Clara also took some shots of Sydney shrouded in thick orange smoke. Of all the tweets, this photo outside Newcastle was perhaps the most dramatic shot I saw, with this photo of the Sydney Harbour Bridge a close second.

A cool southerly breeze cleared the smoke from around Hornsby this evening and brought the temperature right down, though I’ve read this isn’t helping the firefighters all that much. Those noble, noble people.

I’ve put a big bowl of water outside for any injured or parched animals that find their way here this evening. Our garden is yours tonight, my friends.

Sometimes the best content on Wikipedia is what you’re not reading. From the Cascading Style Sheets Talk page:

CSS is a headache. I wish CSS would {float:away;}

What a beautiful image, on so many levels.

(And the obligatory note for pedants. Yes, the promise of separation of content and presentation was wonderful, pity it didn’t completely happen. I coded my fair share of spacer GIFs and tables in primary school in the 1990s. My decade+ experience with CSS informs my disappointment in it as a language).

After what I would personally consider a few mundane seasons with a couple of standout shows, this year has had some really great stuff. You’re free to disagree, just as I’m free to ignore you.

Today though, I wanted to talk about Coppelion, from the perspective of someone who had his interest piqued to such an extreme he dreamed about it. Specifically, I dreamed I was being chased by a rabid wolf through a dystopian cityscape that oddly enough had phone reception.

As I’ve previously blogged numerous times, I’m a sucker for scenery. This is one of the reasons I find anime so compelling; the level of detail artists put into the scenery of shows is often nothing short of breathtaking. Whether that makes me shallow for appreciating a series for its art is something that you’re free to disagree with, as the first paragraph instructs.

Set in a future (or present time, but an alternate dimension… damn it Sliders!) where Tokyo has been besieged by radiation, Coppelion is the story of three girls roaming around the abandoned city in search of survivors. Without giving the plot away, we’re told they’ve been genetically bred to survive the high levels of radiation, which allows them to eschew (gesundheit) those inelegant hazmat suits in favor of terribly short skirts. A far more practical form of attire, I’m sure.

Jokes aside though, it raises some interesting questions, and I’m genuinely intrigued by the universe they’ve set up for the characters. As a science fiction nerd, I can imagine several avenues they could take this story, though I’m hoping they buck the trend of anime of late and throw us some curveballs. The radiation is actually a virus formed by aliens that dies in the presence of rhythmic Mongol chanting. The lead characters are manifestations of the virus themselves. The city they’re exploring is a delusion brought on by radiation in the city… did I just blow your mind?

For those of us who haven’t read the manga, we’ll see how formulaic a series this is soon enough. As with all shows I watch, I give them the benefit of the doubt for at least the first six episodes. So far I’m liking it, including the art style.