Rubenerd

Since moving back to Sydney, I’ve been to three Sydney Anime and Manga shows! The first in 2011, the second in 2012 and the third in—wait for it, you may see a pattern—2013.

In previous years I was an attendee-pass-carrying civilian, wandering around in my cosplay looking at the merchandise, building Gundams, catching some screenings, sitting in on concerts and voice actor interviews. I met my girlfriend there, in a way! Having been an Aussie growing up in Singapore, Australia still feels a little foreign and strange to me, so I latch onto traditions that I can proudly say I go to each year. I’m glad SMASH! is one of them!

It’s for this personal reason that I happily took a staff position at the convention this year. As the role of one of your humble announcers, I was able to sit there with my injured foot and still be part of making such a wonderful event that much more special. Or at least, I hoped so! I tried to use my childhood experience working at Discovery Channel to make the announcements more personal and fun; I’m not entirely sure if I succeeded, but it anything it gives me more motivation to try again next year!

2013 was the biggest year for SMASH!, and witnessing from the other side the amount of blood, sweat and tears that go into it was gobsmacking. I’ve been involved in a few previous conventions back home, but there’s something about SMASH!. Perhaps it’s as simple as the sheer number of events, or even the passionate and devoted culture (and subcultures, and sub-subcultures!) surrounding anime and manga that demands so much attention and care.

As I sat there watching the stream of anime fans come and go, I also thought of the people. For most of the year, their hobby is seen in much of the Western world as strange, nerdy and can even lead to outcasting. It can be a very, very lonely interest; I can personally relate having spent years watching anime alone at home. At SMASH!, people can be themselves, dress up as their favourite characters, and share in this thoroughly unique world that the Japanese let us share.

Its unlikely that post made much sense given my sleep depravation and lack of coffee. But all in all, I just wanted to say that SMASH! was infinitely more work than I thought it would be, but it was also rewarding in a way I never imagined.

Thank you to the Marketing Department for having me on board; to the other SMASH! directors for putting up with this crippled guy who couldn’t lend much help moving things; and to everyone who attended the convention ^_^

Arigato gozaimasu~

This was the first (and only) post on Rubenerd Idle, a Slashdot Idle-inspired site where I'd post more pointless or one-off things. I have no qualms putting such posts on the general blog now.

Ouch! By akahige on Pixiv

It’s been about a week now since I moved from WordPress to Jekyll/Github, and I’m overjoyed with the results. The site is faster on the front end, simpler on the back end, and has made it a pleasure for me to blog again. I live in code revision systems, and the novely still hasn’t worn off that I’m even blogging in one now!

That said, I’ve learned a couple of lessons:

• If you’re migrating from WordPress to Jekyll, be prepared to get comments from people that you’re spamming their aggregators. Unfortuantely, despite my best efforts to ensure the same GUID for each post (aka: the post permalink), some aggregators still saw them as new entries. Perhaps these don’t trust GUIDs and calculate their own identifier for posts based on a hash or some other derived value. Lesson learned: warn your readers before any major structural changes, such as changing from a CMS to staic pages!

• Do a jekyll build locally before committing any template changes. I realised the reasons why my blog wasn’t updating over the last few days was due to a stray Liquid for loop that was preventing the pages from being rebuilt. Fortunately, Github also emailed me letting me know my site wasn’t building, which was rather nice.

• I’ll admit, I do miss tag archives, just a little. For me, the convenience and fun with Jeykll more than outweighs it, and my server logs suggested almost nobody used them anyway. Still, if I continue to miss them, I’ll eventually add another thing to my toolchain to generate them locally before pushing the whole site. We’ll see.

It used to be that you’d develop a site to work the way you want, then you’d load it in Internet Explorer and spend the rest of your development time fixing all the differences.

I’ll admit, this is the first time I’ve deployed a rewritten site without testing it in IE first. If it were for a client it’d be another story, but for my personal site it’s got to the stage where it doesn’t bother me as much any more.

This evening, I had a few hours at UTS, and decided to use one of the Windows lab computers to test my site here in Internet Explorer. The lab machines run Windows 7 with Windows Internet Explorer 9; not the latest version but I was hoping it’d treat me kindly. I loaded the page, gritted my teeth and crossed my fingers.

Micraculously, the page looked and worked surprisingly well. During the time I stopped using Windows in any production capacity, IE seems to have improved a great deal.

Of course, there were still a few outliers:

• Images in anchors still display a thick, ugly border around them. One of the first things I used to do when writing CSS would be to set the border width to 0 for images in anchors, and looks as though I’ll still have to do so.

• Some scaled images I set up to look good on Apple’s Retina displays look blockly and pixellated. This is unfortunate; I’ll have to figure out another way to do this.

• The placeholder attribute for the Search box didn’t display anything. Fortunately, I was prepared for this, so the IE inline HTML comment if statement with a “Search:” label appeared.

• The text was thin and pixellated, though that’s more of an issue with how Windows renders fonts.

Internet Explorer 10 might resolve some of these issues further. For now, I’ll just write a small IE specific CSS file and fix these bugs. TL;DR I’m cautiously impressed with how it turned out.

Many years ago, I remember attempting to install VMware Workstation on a Virtual PC (remember that?) virtual machine on Mac OS 8 my iMac. The experiment ultimately failed, but was ridiculously fun nonetheless. Fast foward to 2013, and our class was tasked with performing a far more advanced, though similar activity!

With the use of some pre-built images, I had:

• A CentOS 6.4 VM, running on a VMware ESXi VM, running in VMware Fusion on my MacBook Air.
• The CentOS VM had been provisioned through a VMware vSphere client, running on a seperate Windows XP VM, running in VMware Fusion, and was communicating with the ESXi VM through a shared subnet.

In lieu of using dedicated hardware in class to run ESXi and demonstrate how to rapidly provision VMs using share data pools, this approach allowed us to still get a taste of level 1 virtualisation. It also gave us a chance to make some Xibit Inception Meta jokes about running a VM in a VM provisioned through a VM

Once again at UTS, we were fortunate enough to have Sheng Yeo show us the ropes. Last semester, Sheng gave a talk about Infrastructure as a Service, and how he and his fellow UTS alumni had built OrionVM, the world’s fastest cloud. Virtualisation has continued to be an area I’m interested in, and I was thankful to have someone who’s worked in the trenches offer his pragmatic, real world experience.

In particular, while I have experience with virtualisation in industrial process control, VPSs and running multipe OSs on my own client machines, discussion into large scale deployment has given me much valuable insight. There’s a tremendous amount of fascinating work being done in this field, and some equally large challenges.

Thanks again to Sheng and the University of Technology, Sydney for a productive and fun evening!

A recent post on Slashdot:

“According to a report from German computer scientist D. Kriesel, some Xerox WorkCentre copiers and scanners may alter numbers that appear in scanned documents. Having analyzed the output of two such devices, the Xerox WorkCentre 7535 and 7556, Kriesel found that âoepatches of the pixel data are randomly replaced in a very subtle and dangerous wayâ: in particular, some numbers appearing in a document may be replaced by other numbers when it is scanned.”

I see what they did there.

This evening, my father and sister needed to print some documents. No problem, our intrepid printing hero thought to himself as he gathered up the memory keys containing said documents. Proceeding into the loungeroom while ignoring his mixup of first/third person writing in the weblog post account of his exploits, he proceeded to perform the printing asked of him.

Alas, the hardware in the family home was to have none of this. The HP OfficeJet 5510 was out of commission, owing to its printer head being damaged in the latest move. The HP LaserJet P1005 was similarly on standby owing to a lack of toner. That printer had become rather fond of the stuff.

The Canon Pro9000 was another story. Upon attempting to print, I was presented with an OS X printer error message of doom:

Support code : 306 A communication error has occurred. Make sure the printer is plugged in, powered-on, and properly connected to your computer. Then try printing again.

I’ve seen “communications error” messages before, but this 306 error was new to me; as were the five rapid blinking amber lights. Service manual references from people in forums suggested solutions for three or four blinking lights, but not five. Replacing the cartridges, restarting the printer, removing and adding the printer in Print & Scan and bribing it with coffee beans didn’t seem to make a difference.

The next step will be to hit up the Canon Asia-Pacific website itself, when I’m more awake.

Alas, this is the downside for being the IT support department for a family. It also raises the question: why didn’t the family just buy another EPSON? We’ve had EPSON Stylus Color [sic] 400, Stylus Color 440 and Stylus Pro 1270 printers that all worked flawlessly, and were only replaced for newer models or when they suffered physical damage during moves. Ditto our HP printers. Unfortunately, this Canon has been thirsty, fairly unreliable and expensive.

Perhaps this was karma for recommending a Lexmark to a former bully from high school.

A few friends of mine have commented on my site redesign. Yes, after eight years using WordPress, I finally migrated over to Jekyll, and it feels great!

It’s not you WordPress, its me

I first moved to WordPress in 2006. I’d just migrated from a crappy Perl CGI script I wrote over to RapidWeaver, but wasn’t finding it a particularly good fit. I was confused by Radio Userland, Movable Type seemed to have scared people away with its revised licencing, so WordPress it was.

Leaving aside its widely known security bugs (which bit me on a few occasions), WordPress 1.x was a pleasure to use. It wasn’t demanding on my crappy webhosting package, its tabbed admin UI was simple. Sure it had some missing features, but these could easily be added with extensions.

As the WordPress team began to get more serious about security however, as early as 2011 I felt as though feature creep was setting in. Delta updates were introduced to make these updates easier to perform, which was a good thing given all these new things which I didn’t otherwise need or want. At the same time, greater life commitments meant I had less time to maintain my disparate hosting accounts with their own variations of the LAMP/FNPR stack. I needed something simpler.

Just to be clear, this is not anything against the WordPress team. To me, Matt Mullenweg represents the good of my generation; the antithesis of Mark Zuckerberg in so many ways. You can write on WordPress.com, but you can also run it on your own server. You can export your data at any time. That matters.

Hello Jekyll, you’re looking well

So now I find myself typing this post in TextMate 2. When I’m done, I’ll be using Git to commit the post to Github, which will use Jekyll to generate my site. For want of a better word, it’s such a different paradigm to what I’m used to with blogging, but as a developer it feels so right.

I eschewed (gesundheit) the capable Octopress framework for plain Jekyll. Writing the themes, RSS feeds, configuration and toolchain from scratch instead has been a thoroughly rewarding learning (and re-learning!) experience. At the same time, I’ve learned enough to help other people make the switch.

Over the coming weeks, you’ll no doubt see a few posts with discussion about more Jekyll-specific learnings.

While reading my email over my Sunday cup of coffee, I noticed I’d been invited to attend a webinar by a networking company you probably know.

To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure I’m ready to take the plunge and become a technopreneur. I’ll have to thinkificate about it first, or at least synchronise some paradigms.

Below for your perusel, have this 2009 Obama election promise. It has to be read in full to really be appreciated.

Protect Whistleblowers: Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out.

No kidding.

Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process.

I remember when I thought Obama was cool.