Rubenerd

A picture Clara sent me from Chuunibyou. They’re not red or particularly pointy, but clearly a homage to Kamina! Maybe? Possibly?

I need to review Chuunibyou. It was one of the better recent series I’ve watched.

Dressed in my fashion-clueless attire and with my sister donning some of mummy’s fabulous jewellery, this evening we headed out to celebrate her birthday. With Indian being one of her favourite foods, we hit up our favourite restaurant in Hornsby and had some chicken madras. After we’d let it settle with lots of chat about the epicness that was Debra Schade, we headed to a desert bar and had some (family parlance) “medicinal keeki” of which she was a firm believer in!

One thing we chatted about was the iPad. Mummy got onto the computing scene rather late, but was a lightening quick learner when presented with a crummy Ubuntu laptop at the time. The long term treatment had affected her motor control, but with an iPad from today in hand she could potentially have made some amazing things. Not only that, but given half a day she could have been teaching US how to use it! Darn talented people.

I’ll admit, an ever dimming part of me still expects her to come sauntering home, twisted transparent cane in tow. We’d hug, share dinner, have her thrash me at cards and see what detective shows or documentaries on the ancient world we could catch. I miss those nights so much, it still hurts. As I said in her dedication, she was more than my mum, she was my best friend.

She would have been 58 today. I love you mummy <3

Here’s a great little trick I discovered this afternoon. Previously, if I wanted to create an ISO image to either burn or mount in a VM, I’d do this:

1. Create “CD/DVD master” from a folder using hdiutil or Disk Utility.app
2. Convert to a “hybrid image”
3. Rename the file from *cdr to *iso

I’m not sure how long we’ve been able to do this, but you can specify it with just one command now, using the “UNIV” flag. For example:

% hdiutil create \
    -volname MSDOS6 \
    -srcfolder EN_MSDOS60 \
    -ov -format UNIV \
    image.dmg
% mv image.dmg image.iso

Okay I cheated, there are two commands there. Still, now I have a way to create an ISO image I can mount in virtual machines (or burn) without a conversion step.

If you’ve found that useful, feel free to bankroll me an upgrade to the latest VMware Fusion on the Buy me a Coffee page. Hey, one can dream, right? ^_^

The rather retro set of icons above are from the Tango Desktop Project, originally assembled for this FreeBSD post in 2009.

Update: The other way

I had a few people ask me what I meant by “convert to a hybrid image” in my original procedure above. In a nutshell, if you’re created a “CD/DVD master image” and have a something.cdr file, you can convert it by doing this:

% hdiutil makehybrid -iso -joliet -o image.iso image.cdr

Creating a hybrid image from the start negates this step, though perhaps there are circumstances where this approach may be preferable. Happy imaging!

Clara and I have both been far too busy with assignments to blog anything of substance lately in the last week, but this article by Josephine Tovey in today’s Sydney Morning Herald brought such a smile to my face I had to share it.

Muck-up day has long been associated with flour bombs on the teachers’ cars or chucking water bombs and shaving cream at unsuspecting junior peers. [..]

Today’s school leavers are more likely to be taking part in a charity fun run, dressing up for an assembly or playing a sports match against their teachers in their final days of year 12.

Some may cynically attribute this to my generation being too passive, or in bed with the establishment. Predictably, I think it’s just further proof we’re not the rude, disrespectful, self-absorbed pricks the Boomers and Gen X say we are.

And even if we were, who’s parenting fault would that be? ;).

A few months ago, Clara and I hit a lovely little breakfast cafe in Ultimo. Their marscapone French toast must have been illegal, it tasted so good. The other thing I remember was a giant sticker on their menu boards behind the counter:

Is that true, or did you read it in the Daily Telegraph?

I thought this was just typical right-left wing jostling, but the last Federal election crystalised this in my mind like so much masrscapone. If marscapone were structured chemically like this. The Australian, another Murdoch rag, wasn’t that much better; though both were just as absorbant for our doggies to do their business.

It’s in this context we picked up a copy of the Sydney Morning Herald this morning to see if it had anything of interest for Clara’s current assignment. In the opinion pages was a large op-ed discussing a lack of Labor policy, alongside letters from the public chiding Mr Abbott for his “dignity to parliament” hypocricy. From the makeup of Abbott’s cabinet to stories about generation Y not being the selfish brats we’re alleged to be, their other pages seemed to have more of this balance as well.

As a recently resettled Australian, for all I know I caught the SMH on a good day. Perhaps (most likely) they’re just as biased as the Tele and Australian. The ownership and web of power behind Australian media is as complex as it is perverted. Still, I feel like picking up a copy of the Sydney Morning Herald again tomorrow. In light of the Tele and Australian, I’m relieved there’s a voice espousing (at least a modicum of) reason in a sea of large-typefaced shameless Ayn Rand nonsense.

While I am wary of the journalistic and business reasons behind the switch, I’ll admit for my own selfish convenience I’m also really liking their tabloid sized paper.

A few weeks ago, Clara and I decided to make productive use of our Northern Line commuting time by watching anime! We’ve been watching a ton of stuff from this season, as well as catching up and finishing some old favourites like Chuunibyou. I ended up enjoying that series way more than I thought I would, but that’s the subject for another post.

Now that we’re watching Hyouka again, Clara surprised me a couple of days ago with another of her adorable original artworks, this time of the legendary curious Chitanda! Naturally, she says it’s no good. I think you’d agree with me she’s full of absolute nonsense!

I don’t have any Chitanda figs [yet], so I surrounded her with Yuki, another character I see Clara in when I watch anime. I think it’s fitting d(^_^)b.

Yesterday morning, Clara walked with me to vote in the Australian Federal Election. Making my way past the huge Liberal umbrella stand, I accepted the “how to vote” pamphlets from the Greens and Labor volunteers, then hurried inside. It was my first election voting in a suburban polling centre, and my first attempt at voting below the line.

In the past, it seemed so unlikely that John Howard’s former protégé would become Prime Minister, but in the last few months it felt all but inevitable. Yesterday,
Tony Abbott swept into power in the House of Reps with a pretty convincing margin.

For progressive causes, its hard to overstate how deeply troubling this is. The far-right Mr. Abbott has made no secret his lack of respect for women, LGBTs, refugees, science and the environment. In my industry, he’s fine with letting Australia slip further into global IT irrelevance with his woeful infrastructure plans. I won’t mince words, I find him morally despicable.

I’m tempted to say Labor brought this upon themselves with their infighting and that they deserve it. Certainly their childish antics must have seemed like a gift from God to the shameless, mouth-frothing Murdoch press. Still, even if Labor were cohesive and delivered even more good for Australia during their time in government, the Tele and such would have just focused on something else. It’s amazing what people do and don’t understand when their pay check depends on it.

Personally, I’m feeling most nervous about Mr. Abbott’s policies towards Asia. After Paul Keating’s progressive stance towards Asian relations (other than with Dr. Mahatir, that was pretty funny), being an Australian living in Singapore during Mr. Howard’s reign was pretty brutal. Well, not as brutal as when some Australians took Pauline Hanson seriously; at her peak I was telling taxi drivers there I was British.

I hope Labor takes this opportunity to refactor. I reckon Anthony Albanese should be the new opposition leader, but that’s just me. What better way to counterbalance American-style far-right policies than the NSW head of Labor’s Federal Socialist Left? :)

Great catch by @Sebasu_tan last night:

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is the major cause of fatty liver not due to excessive alcohol consumption. [..]

The results, published in the journal Hepatology, suggest that consuming the equivalent caffeine intake of 4 cups of coffee or tea a day may be beneficial in preventing and protecting against the progression of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

See people? I’m not drinking too much coffee, I’m protecting my liver!

That said, I’m a little sceptical. Four cups of coffee to me sounds like a heart attack waiting to happen. Four cups of tea sounds far more manageable, only because it would contain less caffeine. I’m interested to see if these numbers are what the journal actually indicated, or whether it was an issue in the reporting.

(The rather fabulous image of a coffee-wielding, sustainable-energy supporting Misaka Mikoto from the legendary Index Railgun series was drawn by yuukihide on Pixiv. Credit to finding the aformentioned image goes to Clara).

When you’re have a report due, the last thing you want OpenOffice Writer doing is maddeningly truncating your dates in tables like it’s 1999. Fortunately, after a cup of tea I realised table cells in Writer behave the same way as spreadsheet cells in Calc. By which I mean, the documentation said so.

To fix:

1. Click on the offending 02/09/13 cell
2. Choose “Number format…” from the Table menu
3. Choose “31/12/1999″ from the Format listbox

I’m assuming this would work for LibreOffice too.

Here’s a quick way to remember key (oh snap) IT security goals: think of cannibalistic CIA agents.

C

Confidentiality

I

Integrity

A

Availability

E

Entity Authentication

A

Access Control

T

Timeliness

M

Message Origin Authentication

A

Authorisation

N

Non-Repudiation

You’re welcome.