Rubenerd

Congratulations to all my American friends!

I just finished watching Barack Obama's moving live speech about the passing of healthcare reform. It isn't everything we wanted, but the fact it was able to pass is nothing short of miraculous. History will judge this as not only the defining moment of the Obama administration, but the day when America started caring for her people as she promised to.

"For all those whose cares have been our concern,
the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives
and the dream shall never die."

~ Edward M. Kennedy, RIP

After using it as my primary editor for several weeks, I feel as though I can finally graduate from nvi. It was more challenging than I thought it would be when I first decided to learn it, but it was a fantastic learning experience.

While I've been using a vi clone in the form of Vim for years, I admit I've always cheated by adding the nocompatible option in my vimrc file. This has the effect of making Vim behave more like a contemporary editor which lowered the barrier to entry, but it meant when I started using nvi I was lost and frustrated in a sea of escape keys!

Everyone likes a silly car analogy, so here goes. I like to think I learned how to drive vi editors by using an automatic (Vim with nocompatible), so when I had to use a manual (nvi) I understood most of it but there was a whole new set of interfaces I had to learn. The upshot of putting in this effort though is now I can drive both, and perhaps I can even drive Vim more effectively.

I can now confidently say if I'm ever thrown in front of a FreeBSD machine I myself don't maintain, I'll be able to use nvi in place of Vim with a minimum of muss and fuss. Well technically I could use ee, but where would the fun be in that? :)

I bow to the awesomeness of Edible_Hat!

Contained within my [uncharacteristically] serious post about the South Aussie elections yesterday I hinted that I'd be discussing #octopusbattle today. Edible_hat beat me to it by creating an epic work of art and accompanying notes, so in the spirit of not reinventing the wheel I will simply refer you to his post on the matter!

Here's a sneak peak:

[…] and as Chairman Kaga was laughing a gigantic octopus launched itself at the politicians, sending them into a mad panic. Mike Rann was able to dodge the kerfuffle, leading many to believe he was worthy of a second term, but only just. I am Edible_Hat, hear me roar! Do Octopuses roar? I know raw means it’s sushi. Monnie was supposed to make me cupcakes today, but she gave them all to her roommates and Ruben instead, grrrr. At least I can make better scarfs than Ruben, mua har har!

It's been almost five months since I last watched an episode of Bakemonogatari, so I figured I'd rectify this situation on this lovely Sunday afternoon.

It's not entirely my fault that I haven't blogged about this epicly awesome series for a while, it's all Shaft. Yeah, that must be it. See the thing was Bakemonogatari's final few episodes were released online instead of being broadcast on television, but there was a delay. Not only that, but I went on holidays in Europe around that time. Developed world problems, they're terrible.

I’m writing up this anime review in nvi

Hey, if you were following my nvi related posts recently you can appreciate that! This was the third episode of the Tsubasa Cat series in which our beloved and super smart meganekko class leader comes out as being possessed by a cat oddity, hence the series being called Tsubasa Cat. Sometimes I worry if I were a journalist or reviewer I'd be too good at it, but the worry subsides when I read my own words.

Using a plot device that would be predictable if it weren't for the fact what happens between it's initiation and conclusion is completely different each time, the crux of the story is Koyomi learns of Tsubasa's cat oddity, so he has to take her to see Epic Hawaiian Shirt Guy with a collar so long it rivals Koyomi's sentient hair antenna. The fact you thought of something else when I was discussing a male character's long… collar is troubling.

You’re not the only one

So we all know Koyomi was cast as the typical awkward, under achieving guy that otaku can relate to, other than the fact Tsubasa explained to him he suddenly got charisma and popularity with girls through coming into contact with a female vampire. You know you're in deep when you read a sentence you just wrote describing a plot so ridiculous a regular person would laugh but you find it perfectly normal.

I was going somewhere with this. As it turns out in this episode we're reminded just what a pervert he really is. Hey, he wanted to check Mayoi out, but he was only kidding!!! May he take your coat while you're wearing pajamas? Oooh oooh a buxom young woman is pressing against him while he rides his bike, oooh! Wait, that sounded even worse than I intended, I'll stop now while I'm ahead. Cat ears.

Cap’n, I cannot hold the forth wall much longer!

I'm a huge sucker for writers who break the fourth wall, so when Her Senjougharaness informs Koyomi that her voice actress is very good at her job, I was smacking the table with laughter! Speaking of that scene, that was one TIDY bicycle parking lot! And why was Hitagi even there?

I don't care if a bunch of people don't like this series, the art, the characters and the blunt jokes like this mean this will probably be in my top 10 when I finish, presuming they don't mess up the ending. It was for these reasons why I enjoyed Sayonara Zetsubou Zensei too.

Unanswered questions going unanswered (?)

Will Tsubasa be rid of her cat oddity? Or perhaps a more pertinent question, does Koyomi even want her rid of her cat oddity? Come on, I saw his expression when he saw her cat ears!

I admit it, I blog about anime because it gives me an excuse (along with this entire category) for talking about complete nonsense with lots of innuendo. Hey Koyomi, you can't park your bicycle there, you could get arrested! I'm stopping now.

By the way sorry about the quality of screenshots, I didn't have much internet quota left for this month. To make up for it, here's the best shot from the entire episode!

Labor is staying in power in the misleadingly-titled South Australia, but to my surprise when I woke up this morning I read Attorney General Michael Atkinson will be stepping down as… Attorney General. I could have phrased that better.

I'm hoping their reduced majority in the state parliament (are those words supposed to be capitalised… hey that was a pun!) will force the existing Labor folk to think long and hard about future appointments to key positions like this. It probably won't, but one can wish.

Atkinson's departure as AG isn't just a win for online civil liberties and computer gamers who now have a potential chance for being treated as adults in the R18AU debate, but for people who have had cancer painfully strike down someone so dear to them and didn't appreciate his cold and daft comparisons.

Don't let the door hit you on the way out sir.

Quite a big swing against Labor, but looks like they're back for another term in South Australia, the outcome is less clear for Tasmania. And to think just a few years ago even the Singapore news was awash of Labor's federal win, I wonder what the results would be if there were a national election tomorrow?

I was pleased with Labor's win over the Libs in the state and federal elections last time, but this internet filtering and Michael Atkinson nonsense leaves me somewhat disappointed. Then again, what would the alternative be? :(

Discussion about the #octopusbattle will be undertaken tomorrow as I have already blogged far too much this evening. Good night.

For many years now WordPress has been the iPhone of blogging tools: every other platform is judged by how well it compares to it, and unless you have a specific need that isn't served by it, it gets chosen almost as the default. Here's hoping this brand new offshoot of Movable Type brings back some solid competition. And I didn't even make a terrible musical pun in the title, I was tempted though.

Melody is an open source content management and publishing system derived from the popular blogging tool Movable Type. Melody is for those who find value in belonging to, supporting and contributing to a community of helpful, passionate and devoted users, but it is also for people who want a secure, proven and high quality publishing environment for their personal web site or their business.

I'm firing up git now and getting myself a copy to mess around with :).

Back when I used to be a Perl golfer Movable Type really intrigued me, and over the years I kept installing it in my local sandbox to play around with it. I love the way static pages are generated instead of calling a database every single time a page is loaded, and the administrative interface is the best in the business.

You can also host multiple blogs with the one software installation like TextPattern and B2evolution, something the base WordPress software has been sorely lacking for far too long (WordPress mu is far too big for just two or three blogs, and Wp-hive has never worked for me). I'm assuming Melody would retain these features.

You talked the talk, why didn’t you walk the walk?

The reasons why I never deployed it were a combination of the "good enough syndrome" with WordPress, the added complexity of installing it properly (it's a CGI app) and the sheer number of files it contained. I mean it, Movable Type is huge! If Melody polishes it up, they could have a real winner on their hands and I'd seriously consider switching.

I have to be honest, I've never been very happy with WordPress; their security record leaves a lot to be desired, it took them them far too long to adopt tags (during which time we had to use third party extensions) and their comment system is also a bit lacking, so much so that people are resorting to putting horrible external JavaScript on their pages (cue the collective groan of security and accessibility experts) to dynamically load services like Disqus.

The term feature-creep is often used as a defense for not adding such increasingly important features, and I admit to being a fan of software minimalism, but if they don't do more to bring WP into 2010 they could end up being left behind. Surely there's a happy medium between the two.

So let me get this straight, Windows Phone Corporate Mobile Enterprise Personal Home Premium Ultimate Edition With Dynamics 7 Service Pack 1 Release Update 3 is not going to have cut-and-paste or multitasking, it'll have multitouch and finally a compulsory application store, and Microsoft is defending these positions?

For how many years have Apple users have to suffer constant ridicule from Microsoftians for these features (or lack thereof)? Will we be hearing a retraction from Ballmer? Will the "fanboys" (a term I don't personally use except under extenuating circumstances) be apologising or taking back some of what they said about super evil Apple lolz 1!11!one11!?

I'm also interested to see how this gets spun to show Microsoft is delivering anything more than a half baked competitor to the three year old iPhone with an interface that looks like it'd be a gorgeous magazine page but a clumsy phone, but I'd be happy with a "whoops, our bad".

The Android factor

What also remains to be seen is how Microsoft can compete with Android which delivers all the promises of the Windows Mobile platform (freedom to choose hardware manufactures, the mobile web, ooh look shiny without being Evil Apple) without any of the licencing fees.

Unlike Linux on the desktop which is fractured and doesn't run much of the software most people want, Android is cohesive and has an app store of its own, even if the system isn't as open source as some of it's proponents claim. That's okay though, because most consumers don't know or care about free and open source philosophy and won't be modifying their systems anyway.

As a matter of disclosure if you can't ascertain these facts from reading my site here, I have an iPhone, a Palm Centro and my computers run Mac OS X and FreeBSD, with one Fedora box. I don't intend to get a new phone any time soon because my year and a half iPhone 3G still works flawlessly and my Centro is a rock solid trooper. Take from that what you will.

Update

Christopher Grande and John Gruber put it best. They even went one step further and proved the stunning hypocrisy of Thurrott, not a terribly complicated thing to do, but something that takes balls.

At least according to these reports, cut-and-paste is coming, but that's not to say Microsoft won't be using some clever marketing and 1984 Ministry of Truth amnesia to gloss over it.

Best. Error. Message. Ever!

A painful confession, don’t laugh!

I have to come clean and admit I never really got past the dabbling stage in Adobe Photoshop, I grew up using and loving Fireworks (back when it was Macromedia). For my own uses with my crappy old Lumix camera it did everything I needed it to in a fraction of the hard drive space and with a much cleaner interface; people complain about The Gimp's interface but I think much of it comes down to what you're used to, I thought the Photoshop interface was nasty.

Anyway I'm getting sidetracked, with Fireworks I could also use it to make vector graphics. It was like a beautiful Swiss Army knife application to me; sure a proper steak knife and cork opener would work better than the miniaturized versions in an army knife but the army knife was just so gosh darn practical. Did I stretch than analogy too far?

Using The Gimp

When I graduated from high school and was no longer eligible for student pricing (at least I thought so at the time) I balked at the price and decided to force myself to use The Gimp. I had also just got one of the first Intel MacBook Pros (that I'm still using!) and it seemed a Universal version of Fireworks was a long way away. By comparison, third party developers had tirelessly ported the Gimp over to Intel within weeks, and the performance was so much better than Fireworks in Rosetta it wasn't funny.

It took a lot of getting used to, but now I have a photo and graphics editor that I can afford, with dialog boxes that have a sense of humour to boot :).

Personally the feature I found most confusing initially was the way the software dealt with layers. Particularly coming from a Fireworks background which lets you have multiple free floating elements in one space, The Gimp uses a separate layer for everything unless you specifically flatten it. Even if you copy a part of a layer and paste it, it becomes a new layer. Once you get your head around that everything becomes gloriously simple, but that mental roadblock was a tough one to get over!

Inkscape. Policecops!

When used with the really elegant and fun Inkscape software (which is also free and open source) you can do some amazing things. For example all the graphics on this site were made in Inkscape then imported into The Gimp for processing. Hardly a glowing endorsement because my tired old logo I originally designed when I was a kid is really quite terrible, but there you have it!

If you haven't used it in a long time, I encourage you to check it out again. The unified menubar and the inclusion of UFRaw in 2.6 has made it much easier to use.

The next step for me will be to look at it's scripting capabilities which are supposed to be insanely powerful.

Voting for The Greens in the South Aussie state elections today, and you'd better too if you know what's good for you. That goes for you too Tasmania. I mean come on, Labor? Liberal? Family First?!

First some shameless, self serving quoting:

Tomorrow, South Australian voters have a genuine alternative to the old parties, and can join over million voters Australia wide who vote Green, says Greens MLC Mark Parnell.

This election the Greens have run on a positive platform of green jobs, water security and ensuring a better government.

“I urge all South Australians to consider a fresh, positive alternative to the old parties and vote for the fastest growing political force in the country – the Greens,” he said.

I still think it's ironic I've only been here a few years (cumulatively) but I have full voting rights because of my passport, and I lived in Singapore most of my life and I have no voice there at all. I could tell you more about GRCs than electorates. I know more about Goh Chok Tong than Rob Kerin. That's politics for you.

Some related thoughts, when I was in Adelaide back in 2006 I remember Nick Xenophon walking around wearing those sandwich boards in Rundle Mall. Are people angry that he went Federal? What ever happened to his state seat thingy?

As an extra fun tidbit, Mark Parnell is one of the few politicians who has ever replied to emails I've sent. Heck, he has his own dedicated tag here! Even when I was back in Singapore and technically outside of his jurisdiction (and cares) entirely he still took the time to answer my questions and have some lighthearted discussion. That counts for a lot in my book :).