Rubenerd

Finally some good news from Segpub regarding the timeouts and slow response times (3 minutes, 38 seconds for a plain HTML file?!) that have been sporadically plaguing my poor sites for months. From a mailing list email addressed to folks on my server:

The issues with [your server] unfortunately are related to search bots and a mix of other nasty traffic. We’re working really hard to get ontop [sic] of these and are pretty close to having everything resolved and back to normal.

Nasty traffic? That's not a nice thing to call my Nonsense section! ;).

The problem is, because my sites slowed down to a crawl but still eventually loaded, they don't count these problems as downtime which means they won't be providing me any free months as stipulated in their uptime guarantee. Sneaky.

I’ve been using Unix-like operating systems for years and, much like programming languages, I’ve never been able to settle on one editor. Today I may have finally found the perfect one!

Joe is one of them recursive acronyms like GNU and stands for Joe’s Own Editor, so named for its creator, Joseph H. Allen. I had a crush on a girl in high school who’s last name was Allen, but I don’t think he’s any relation. It even has a page on The Wikipedias.

From the introduction to Joe’s well written and comprehensive manpage (you know, those things the GNU people used to write and the *BSD folks still do):

JOE is a powerful ASCII-text screen editor. It has a “mode-less” user interface which is similar to many user-friendly PC editors. Users of Micro-Pro’s WordStar or Borland’s “Turbo” languages will feel at home.

Editor nostalgia!

While I’ve got used to Vim, as I’ve mentioned numerous times on Twitter my favourite of all time is still the E Editor that IBM bundled with their later versions of PC DOS. The problem was, back in the day IBM had a spectacular falling out with Microsoft and couldn’t bundle QuickBASIC and it’s associated editor into their flavour of DOS any more, so they bundled the E Editor and REXX instead. I still run it in DOSBox even to this day. I know I know, I’m crazy!

While the shortcut keys are completely different, in perhaps a subjective way the E Editor and Joe "feel" very similar, right down to the prompt bar at the bottom of the screen where you enter file names. Because it’s modeless and many of its commands are issued with control keys it should also appeal to users of pico/nano and Emacs who have DOS nostalgia too.

It can also emulate a series of other editors by invoking it in different ways. My dad used to use and love WordStar back in the day, so he’ll be hearing about this!

JSTAR is a close imitation of WordStar with many “JOE” extensions. JPICO is a close imitation of the Pine mailing system’s PICO editor, but with many extensions and improvements. JMACS is a GNU-EMACS imitation. RJOE is a restricted version of JOE, which allows you to edit only the files specified on the command line.

It works right out of the philosophical box thing

Unlike Vim or pico/nano which I use with huge custom configuration dotfiles, I could tell Joe was written for someone like me because it works almost perfectly its default state. Technically I could copy over the master configuration file to my home folder and customise it to make the software work more the way I want to, but so far I haven’t felt the need to. That hasn’t happened in a long time outside the realm of Apple or Xfce wares.

It’s as if Joseph H. Allen sat down with me and asked what I wanted out of an editor and made it. It almost creeps me out. Get out of my head sir!

Aside from feeling like a CP/M or DOS editor ported to Unix with modern, common sense commands that gives me the warm fuzzies, Joe has a lot more going for it:

• The automatic syntax highlighting is gorgeous and turned on by default.
• The commands make sense and can be learned as you use the software with a help screen attached to the top of the console reminiscent of ee on FreeBSD.
• Error messages are written in plain, non-cryptic English.
• It supports double-space characters such as Hiragana which even the expensive TextMate doesn’t have.
• I get a childish, giddy kick out of calling my text editor "joe". Hey Joe, can you open this code file for me? ^_^

Grab it, use it, enjoy it!

You can grab the source for Joe’s Own Editor on its SourceForce page, as well as from FreeBSD Ports, pkgsrc, MacPorts and other good package managers.

I really, really encourage you to give it a try, I haven’t been this excited about an application in a long time. As I said, I gives me a warm fuzzy feeling :).

Its official, HP is buying Palm. Cue the link to my previous post about Palm nostalgia and a sad face. From the HP press release:

HP and Palm, Inc. (NASDAQ: PALM) today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which HP will purchase Palm, a provider of smartphones powered by the Palm webOS mobile operating system, at a price of $5.70 per share of Palm common stock in cash or an enterprise value of approximately $1.2 billion. The transaction has been approved by the HP and Palm boards of directors.

As I said to @FrankNora on Twitter, it's not exactly the end to my favourite tech company I was hoping for. HP used to be a fantastic company (I've ALWAYS wanted an HP 16C), but now their consumer product divisions are the epitome of dull, uninspired mediocrity that characterises much of the PC industry right now.

Granted Palm will now survive instead of going bankrupt, but how they'll fare in the kind of environment where product design and quality are shunned in favour of race-to-the-bottom pricing remains to be seen.

HP claims they bought Palm for their WebOS which I admit is fantastic (and needs hardware worthy to run it, which the Pre and Pixi weren't), but how much of it was just so they could get their warchest of patents? If they do release new hardware, I really hope it looks like something Palm would make and not an HP abomination!

Update

@DDsD on Twitter made the observation that HP was listed as a Windows Phone 7 partner with Microsoft. I wonder what this aquisition will mean to this; they could pull an HTC and make phones for every OS under the sun or they go and ditch Microsoft completely. If the latter is the case, will HP still retain their premier positioning at the Apple Microsoft stores in the US?

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

When Michael Flatly dived the Liffey, he suffered terribly from riverbends.

There's seems to be a lot of controversy flying (sorry, that's a bad pun even by my standards) around the grounding of most of Europe's aircraft fleet following the eruption of an unpronounceable volcano. Sheesh.

Does anyone else sometimes find it macabre when people display frustration over precautions that could have saved lives but didn't end up being necessary? I mean, think of all those times I wore my seatbelt in the car when I didn't crash, or when I looked both ways before crossing the street when there weren't any cars around; because I wasn't injured, in hindsight I shouldn't have done either and saved time! In the words of Brian Griffin from Family Guy, having spent so much money on that checkup it's a shame you're not sick so you can get your money's worth! Sheesh.

Did I mention sheesh?

Pertinent to this case, I'm reminded of a National Geographic documentary I saw a few years ago about British Airways Flight 9. From Wikipedia:

On 24 June 1982, [British Airways Flight 9 from London Heathrow to Auckland flown on a] 747-236B aircraft flew into a cloud of volcanic ash thrown up by the eruption of Mount Galunggung, resulting in the failure of all four engines. The reason for the failure was not immediately apparent to the crew or ground control. The aircraft was diverted to Jakarta in the hope that enough engines could be restarted to allow it to land there. The aircraft was able to glide far enough to exit the ash cloud, and all engines were restarted (although one failed again soon after), allowing the aircraft to land safe.

They were lucky. Really lucky :O.

The lose lose situation

Now there are some people claiming that the ash concentrations in the stratosphere weren't dense enough to have caused damage. If that's true, I'd like to see their studies that prove conclusively that lower density ash doesn't pose a safety risk, and as a secondary point I'd also like to see them make the business case that damaging hugely expensive engine components for one flight makes sense.

Imagine if airlines had been allowed to choose themselves whether they flew their aircraft, then one or more crashes occurred. Who would be blamed? The airline would cop flack, but I bet there'd be more than a few people calling for resignations at the European safety agencies. Instead they're being chastised for taking precautions and saving people's lives. These folks can't win, either way.

If I've missed something or misunderstood a point, feel free to leave a comment and correct me. This line of reasoning has me genuinely confused and I'd love some clarification!

Thanks to Anynobody on Wikipedia for the illustration of G-BDXH without power in the ash cloud.

YUM estimated this afternoon that installing Xfce would take approximately 7 * (10 ^ 40) hours to download and install. According to my calculations, this means it'll be done in roughly…

809,589,041,095,890,410,958,904,109,589,041,095,890

…years, which as far as I know would be enough time to form at least a few million new universes. I'd better go put another pot of coffee on.

Forgive me, I seem to have stumbled into a Shuffle advert…

While rational, logical people with common sense, decency and a sense of humour are doing their bit to discredit the increasingly scary self described "teabaggers" in the United States, I reckon I have the ultimate rebuttal.

1. The "teabaggers" claim they derived their name not from the sexual act, but from the Boston Tea Party in 1773 where people threw crates of tea into Boston Harbour.

2. Teabags weren’t invented until 1901.

I rest my case.

Dedication

This post is dedicated to Annette Shaklett who enlightens and keeps me informed of the goings on in the States everyday with her shared items in Google Reader. If you're reading this Sparx, you probably already pointed out this logical fallacy a long time ago, but if we could pretend I came up with this on the spot because I'm so super smart and all that, I'd appreciate it. I mean, who are they going to believe, a wickedly talented artist and a nice person like you, or a guy with a terrible blog like me? Wait, don't answer that.

And thanks to André Karwath on the socialist Wikimedia Commons for the tea bag photo. Those evil Creative Commons and free media people should go move to Cuba.

Yup, it's time for another one of our beloved Rubenerd Pointless Milestones, and this time we're continuing another fine tradition! I live to write posts like this :)

Last year I celebrated the reaching of WordPress ID 5700 by posting information about the Tennent 5700 industrial scrubber, so it only seems fitting then to keep this silly little tradition we've been sharing alive. A great idea, or the greatest idea of all time?

Don’t answer that

To celebrate the auspicious posting of 2800 blog posts, here for your reading delight is information about the fine Pullman Ermantor 5700 industrial vaccum cleaner — no wait, dust extractor. Sounds lean, mean and awesome, and it's shiny in both appearance and Firefly parlance. What is it?

A powerful two motor dust extractor equipped with pre filter and a H13 main filter. Quiet and compact design. 40 litre recovery bag Jets pulsing for effective filter cleaning. 5 meter hose complete with cleaning equipment. Suitable for large quantities of concrete and plaster dust.

Sounds awesome! And finally its technical specifications:

MOTOR EFFECT (W)	2×1260
WEIGHT (kg)	43
SUCTION CAPACITY (m3/h)	220
VACUUM (kPa)	24
FINE FILTER	pol/cell
HEPA FILTER	H13
AIR PULSE CLEANING	yes
SIZE (LxBxH in cm)	71x61x110
COLLECTION	40-litre plastic bag

Who says I never blog about anything interesting and/or relevant here? Again, best if you don't answer that.

I know I've been saying this repeatedly for years now, but it seems just when Facebook does something interesting, they take two steps back in privacy in the same pen stroke. I'm saving my worrying out loud about Facebook's new Like button for another post, this one has to do with (yet another!) disturbing policy change.

From The Consumerist:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced this morning that Facebook will toss a policy that made developers and partners with access your data to delete it after 24 hours. Now they can just keep it.

The reason [they gave] had to do with server load:

Zynga [makers of Mafia Wars and Farmville] has had to download user information 100 million times per day because of our policy. Developers were having to architect entire systems just to do this.

Rant rant rant!

Zynga? You mean that company that did all those advertising scams? They've had to go to great lengths to take data to use it like that? Well I'm sorry guys, but this is the price you have to pay to use people's data responsibly. People don't give their data to you, they give them to Facebook and they don't want you siloing it to data mine for your own nefarious purposes over long periods of time. They have their data abused by Facebook in that way enough as it is let alone allowing every third party developer with even less credibility and ethics than Facebook to do it.

What's next, they're going to complain they need entire servers set up to serve and receive HTTP requests or email? Okay I know I'm stretching the analogy a little, but I find it really hard to muster sympathy for such operations that are raking in money from suspect activities.

This change in policy for Facebook may have been borne of necessity (or so they claim, I'm really suspicious from a systems architect and ethical point of view) but it reeks of opportunism to me. What better way to push through something that would otherwise be unpopular?

A definition is a definition is a definition is a…

From a Wikipedia article that ironically has a verification and citation shortage:

Opportunism is the conscious policy and practice of taking selfish advantage of circumstances, with little regard for principles.

From Wiktionary:

The taking of opportunities; especially the practice of seeking immediate advantage from a situation without considering the long term

From the Encyclopedia of Jim Kloss (I assume):

Opportunism is when the RIAA takes a sledge hammer and tries to shove it somewhere where the sun don’t shine, then calls it "helping artists"