Rubenerd

"I believe every single person is extraordinary. The tragedy is that we have a society where too many people never get to fulfill that extraordinary potential. My view – the liberal view – is that government’s job is to help them to do it. Not to tell people how to live their lives. But to make their choices possible, to release their potential, no matter who they are. The way to do that is to take power away from those who hoard it. To challenge vested interests. To break down privilege. To clear out the bottlenecks in our society that block opportunity and block progress. And so give everyone a chance to live the life they want."

Wow. The UK's Liberal Democrats manifesto. Why don't we have a third major party like that in Australia? The two party Labor/Liberal system here is farce.

Okay everybody, calm down. CALM DOWN I SAID! Everything is going to be okay, just CALM DOWN!!! Repressed memories from 2007/08 flooding back! CALM DOWN EVERYONE! But I don't think I can sir. AAAARGH!

Another one of our beloved Rubenerd Fun Facts. Put the brick down.

"Tunafish sandwiches" have a supefluous word.

And a related fact:

Ruben can’t spell superfluous.

Google has announced they'll start selling books, presumably in electronic form unless they've extended their search algorithm to include people frantically working in libraries with magnifying glasses.

I've never read Eric J. Savitz's blog before, but he had the best summary with the longest URL to boot!

Google will begin selling digital books in late June or July, taking on both market leader Amazon.com and new entrant Apple […] a Google exec announced the move at an event today in New York.

The new service, to be called Google Editions, will allow users [to] buy digital copies of books they discover through its book search service. The company will allow book retailers to sell Google Editions on their own sites. There were no immediate details on book pricing or publisher participation.

Is that how you spell piqued?

That last sentence piqued my interest. Given how much they've royally angered publishers with their Google Books effort (though I assume not as much as they'd be angered with me over my terrible legal puns), I hope they can succeed.

Instead of selling the latest titles I could otherwise get from somewhere else, I'd be more interested in seeing them sell the books they've scanned that are in that awkward chasm between not being sold and not in the public domain. I suppose that presents an entirely new set of legal and practical challenges; for one thing how do you track down the author of a book that's been out of print for decades?

It had to be said

If I ever publish Rubenerd.com as a book, it'll have my home address, phone numbers, Twitter handle, Singaporean IC and Aussie Tax File Number clearly printed on the sleeve jacket. I'll even make up an American Social Security Number to make it look more legit. That way, people could track me down to give me the commissions, royalties and other payments I so rightly deserve. What could possibly go wrong?

Thanks to Neal O'Carroll of the Into Your Head show and the Dublin School for Veterinary Science for permission to use his latest book cover.

For those of you like me who use TrueCrypt on Mac OS X, a few more quick tips I’ve picked up.

Use encrypted volumes from the Terminal

Assuming /usr/local/bin is in your $PATH and TrueCrypt is installed in /Applications:

% cd /Applications/TrueCrypt.app/Contents/MacOS
# ln -s TrueCrypt /usr/local/bin/tc

Now you can mount and unmount volumes without fuss:

% tc [volume]
% tc -d [volume]

I suppose instead you could create an alias in your shell config file for tc to point to the full TrueCrypt application path, but the above will work from any user account.

Launch TrueCrypt GUI from the Terminal

This will launch the TrueCrypt graphical application with the complete path of the volume you want to mount conveniently entered into Volume combo box. You'll still need to choose a volume slot and click the Mount button.

% open -a TrueCrypt [volume]

Explain yourself

Unlike Windows and most other *nix systems that spray required files all over the place, applications in Mac OS X are generally distributed in self contained packages which makes them easy to install and run from the Finder. From the Terminal, the true executables you’re interested in are located in the application’s ./Contents/MacOS/ folder, such as TrueCrypt.

Soylent Greenbes: You are not Facebook’s customer. You are the product that they sell to their real customers — advertisers. Forget this at your peril.

Alas, forgetting still doesn't give you the ability to permanently delete your account and have Facebook forget you. Which is a shame because in Soviet Russia, Facebook forgets you.

One of the features of TweetDeck is the Recommends column which displays users the TweetDeck team deem worthy of following. Most of time its a fairly random mix of folks, but sometimes you get some unlikely pairings!

Today’s example as you can see from the screenshot thingy: Jamie Cullum and Lady Gaga. They may as well have put Blue Eyes alongside Lily Allen, or Jim Kloss alongside Rick Dees!

Once the initial humour subsided, I realised something truly horrifying. While Lady Gaga has 3,857,131 followers, Jamie Cullum has a measly 42,232. For that matter Marian Call also only has 6,217.

In heindsight, this post should not have been tried

There is clearly something gravely wrong with the world that is so shocking and terrifying I’m shocked and terrified, and also seemingly incapable of coming up with original thoughts instead of rehashing old descriptions. Shocked and terrified and all that.

jamliecullum: #cheltjazzfest is fantastic this year. Many varied & brilliant sounds and a great vibe all round. Had the maddest day – will tell all later

I am as madly obsessed with Jamie Cullum as a straight guy can be (uh oh, I’ll be getting into trouble for that), he’s one of the few current music scene acts I listen to obsessively. If you’ve never heard of him, for one thing shame on you, and secondly he’s a young English singer/songwriter and one of those jazz pop fusion artists who refuses to make life easy for music classifiers. At last count he can also play a few thousand instruments, give or take.

I have nothing against Lady Gaga and I really admire her attitude in light of so many other female acts thesedays, but her music and I are like a salad dressing that’s been left still for too long. And while she may be an awesome person, if followers are anything to go by she is not that much better than Jamie Cullum, or Marian Call.

Just saying. You were expecting me to say "just sayin’"?

Mozilla’s naming conventions have almost started to confuse me as much as Intel and Ubuntu. Looking for the developer builds of Firefox this morning I had the option to get Namoroka which I expected, but also Lorentz which shared the same 3.6.3 version number.

I think I have this right, feel free to correct me! As far as I know, Mozilla slipstreams certain new features they’re testing into separate builds before they incorporate them into Firefox. Aside from those new features they’re testing, the rest of the browser is identical, which means they can test real world performance and stability instead of just using them in a beta. I think it’s pretty clever.

Okay Ruben, get to the friggen point already

The point of Lorentz is to test the ability of the browser to gracefully handle plugin crashes without the rest of the browser falling on its electronic feet. When a plugin crashes or otherwise starts spiraling out of control, it is suspended and the user presented with an option to restart just that plugin instead of the entire browser. It looks really cool.

I proactively block all Flash with NoScript and the only Java I use is on my internet banking site, so perhaps such new features are fairly redundant for me. Still I’m using it as my primary browser now to check it out. After all, if a malicious user can predictably crash a plugin, its the first step to exploitation.

Mozilla has builds you can download for Linux, Mac and ReactOS compatible systems, and as usual Latko has some excellent Intel optimised builds for Mac if you want to check it out.

John Farnham once sang that Everything Is Out of Season (great piece of Australiana in that video by the way). No mate, just this blog post is!

With the second season of K-On!! starting (hence the double exclamation mark thingy, how linguistically clever!) I figured it was about time to finish watching the first dang season so I could pick it up. And I’ve been instructed by two girls and a guy, so I have very little choice in the matter. Yes, I talk to girls… shocking, I know!

The Reason sounds like a John Grisham novel

I’ve been telling people the reason I stalled in watching and blogging about K-On was because I was busy, but the truth is I’ve been kinda scared to. I know, it sounds ridiculous and silly, a moeblob anime about fun loving people that doesn’t take itself seriously, how could I possibly be afraid of that?

I know it sounds childish, but because my mum died around Christmas a few years ago, the feelings around that season are still a little raw. Perhaps its the stereotype of families being together in a happy environment celebrating togetherness and all that, but I really can’t deal with it, and the thought of watching an entire anime episode where happy folks celebrate it seemed way too much. It was like a roadblock.

Aww, wow! Hello! ^^;;; I mean, sorry, I um, gulp, cough cough got distracted for a second. In hindsight I should have done one of two things instead of eschewing the entire series indefinitely:

• skip it if it was going to make me worry and be upset
• watch it anyway because it turned out to be just as adorable, sweet and hilarious as I’ve come to expect and would make me feel better as it always does

Anyway I finally grew a pair today and watched it. And it was awesome! They had Secret Santas. Their Christmas party was friends and food (and sensei!) at Yui’s house, followed by a visit to the shrine to wish for good luck for the new year. I couldn’t have thought of a better way to do it ^^. I know so, because save for the shrine part, before my mum got sick and my sister and I were still little, we used to do the exact same thing as a family. Here’s hoping one day I’ll be able to do it again. Good times.

As far as K-On episodes go, the art in this one was beautiful too, did anyone else notice that? I get the feeling more people were interested in seeing Mio look scared :P.

Uh oh, the anti-moe brigade marches

There’s been some serious backlash against moeblob anime being shallow, silly and a detriment to the artform, something which I’ll be addressing in a separate post now that I’m "back in the game" as it were. In summary here though: I don’t care, and as with any artform, for some people if something is popular it means it can’t be good. It’s the reason why people dismiss Rubenerd.com, because it’s too wildly popular. Yeah, that must be it (>^_^ )>.

My only criticism of this episode was it didn’t have enough Muginess. I know the fans all want Mio, but we all know Tsumugi with her eyebrows and keyboard and voice contains far more awesomeness. This is undisputed fact.

I love that this review was a dozen paragraphs long and yet contained no details on the episode whatsoever! I should get a job reviewing products for Gizmodo. Nah, I’d have to steal something first though.

Reuters: Has the Times Square bomb scare in New York City made you rethink your travel plans?

No.

Anyone who's changed their minds, I'd be more than happy to take your flight and hotel reservations off your hands. Visit RubenSchade.com for my contact details. Cheers.