I can honestly say I didn’t expect that result!
Hardware
From Wikia's search page.
WWR artist of the day 02: Chicago Blues Reunion
Media(Original link here, but image no longer exists).
Given I already linked to John Gorka from Whole Wheat Radio yesterday, I thought it'd be fun to do an artist of the day thingy here for a week and see what new stuff I discover. Today's band is one I'd never heard before, but they hands down do the best rendition of Born in Chicago that I'd ever friggen heard in my life, the Chicago Blues Reunion!
I could transcribe their description, but best to go to their artist page and see for yourself; from there you can also see their links to other social networks and even request some of their songs and the WWR audio stream will accommodate :).
Australia starting to lose global respect
Internet
You know when Australia has really started losing respect in the eyes of the world when people discuss the country on their sites or publications where they've never really mentioned it before. For example, take this Japanation blog post:
If you’re the type to follow video games, they you know that Australia is one of the less favorable developed countries to live in. Its authorities wield the censor stick like few others, and regularly compare games (and gamers) to cancer and violent criminals.
Yes Conroy, Atkinson, you're making world headlines!
Of course this is just the beginning, the economic cost of the Labor government's nanny state policy and the Liberal party's apathy remains to be seen, but as I've discussed previously if they keep pulling stunts like this they can kiss any serious foreign investment in Australian IT goodbye if they know they'll be investing in a sector the government so openly despises.
And Labor are supposed to be the "left leaning" major party, sheesh :(. The Greens should be taking this issue and running with it, but so far they've remained relatively silent as well.
Ruining people’s Google Reader feeds
Internet
I may be blogging too much.
just spent an hour catching up on 3 days of RSS feeds. About 1/3 of it was @rubenerd.
As I told the proprietor of this far more interesting blog than mine after repeatedly apologising, I make up for my lack of intelligent thoughts with… quantity! Like this post you're reading now for example, there's nothing of substance here whatsoever. An intelligent blogger wouldn't ever publish a post like this. The Bird is The Word.
Comparing cancer to… computer games?
Thoughts
Up until recently, the worst crimes South Australian Attorney-General Michael Atkinson committed were against common sense, civil liberties, free speech and defamation of law abiding computer gamers. Now it's personal.
Dear Michael Atkinson,
Regarding the spending of public funds on questionable researchA couple of years ago I lost my mum and best friend to cancer after she lost her 12 year struggle with the debilitating disease — a struggle I can’t begin to relate to — and now we all discover you willingly supplied funds to an organisation that places such a disease in the same league as… computer gaming?
I would like to print (nay, spit) the string of four letter words spinning in my head and express in detail how you’ve further crushed my faith in humanity, but Debra (my late mum) used to tell me people like you aren’t worth it. She was right.
Peace, health and happiness,
Ruben Schade
I'm over politicians.
Trying out Whole Wheat Radio widgets
Internet(Original link here, but image no longer exists).
Trying out some of these new Whole Wheat Radio share link artist widgets, what an awesome idea!
As Jim discussed this morning, you can click the WWR Widgets link in the Listener console for the currently playing artist, or you can click the Get WWR widgets link under More Information on any artist's page. The links in this paragraph link to John Gorka as an example.
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This is a fantastic idea because with a few clicks I can now share what I'm listening to or what I just rated highly in a REALLY EASY way, which is the key. Make something easy, and people will use it. Previously I could have talked about an artist, but it would have involved downloading the picture off the WWR servers, uploading it here, then transcribing parts of their artist page, the upshot being I didn't do it as often.
Not only that, but the referral fees will pile up until one day I can cash out and buy his old cabin in Alaska!
Amongst my biggest current concerns is figuring out which one I like the best, and that Jim may have given control freaks like me too much power over what I can do!
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The only technical point I would make is for W3C freaks like me, the generated code for these widgets we copy and paste from the WWR site don't validate as XHTML because the ampersands in the URL aren't escaped and a alt="" isn't declared, which means any page we put them on doesn't validate. This can be fixed in post by changing all the "&" characters to "&" and adding our own alt="" no biggie :).
Now if you'd excuse me, I'm off to grab a cup of coffee down the road, presumably while still humming this John Gorka tune I can't get out of my head! Will be back in an hour, when I assume I'll be posting more widgets :D
Biofuels ain’t no silver bullet thing
Thoughts
I fancy myself a bit of a greenie (I've even voted for them), but I'm not that impressed by biofuels, at least not so far.
First the tweet that started this train of thought off, from @GreenITers:
Under the Kyoto Protocol, biofuels are treated as zero-emission fuels. However, it doesn’t account emissions from producing & transporting it
I didn't know that. I'm willing to bet it also doesn't take into account the forests and other natural wilderness that have to be destroyed to grow the huge fields of crops to make the biofuel. Not to mention as my dad put it a few weeks ago when we were talking about it: "there's something wrong with growing huge fields of food to feed our cars while billions of people are starving to death."
The only positive aspect I can see to biofuels is the potential for recycling waste products, but even then they still cause localised pollution in the areas they're combusted in because we extract the useful energy by burning it!
Don't get me wrong, the idea of burning nature's sequestered carbon reserves (aka fossil fuels) makes me shiver, but biofuels aren't a silver bullet either. Maybe I'm just bitter that it's 2010 and I'm still waiting for my jetpack.
unzip need PK compat. v4.5 error thing
Software
I tried to extract a ZIP file I was send this afternoon and got the following error with unzip…
Archive: ARCHIVE.zip skipping: ARCHIVE.zip need PK compat. v4.5 (can do v2.1)
Turns out this means it was compressed with a newer version of PKZIP to what unzip can handle, but p7zip can take care of it.
Grab the latest build, then do the usual building and all is good. Sounds like a commercial for a construction company.
% make # make install % 7za x [ARCHIVE.ZIP]
A 2600 Rubenerd pointless milestone!
Thoughts
Once upon a time there was an obsessive blogger who didn't have a very exciting life, so when something as silly as a number synchronicity occurred on his website he just had to tell everyone, even if they didn't care! That's right, it's pointless milestone time!
Before we go any further
Before we go on (wait, I just said that), I'd firstly like to point out that this is no ordinary pointless milestone… wait, hold that thought, did I link to that tag yet? Here, I'll link to it here just in case. Wait, did you miss it? Here it is again.
This pointless milestone also happens to be a trippy syncronicity so vast in its complexity and co-incidence vectors, that I could make up a bunch of language in a sentence such as this one and pass it off as legitimate statistical analysis.
Wait for it… here it is!
Wait for it… here it is! Wait, I just said that! Hey, wait. This is Rubenerd post number 2600. Not only this, but WordPress in its infinite wisdom has also assigned this post with the ID of 6000 which you can confirm yourself by going to the non-prettified URL:
Look at that! Post number 2600, and it was given an ID of 6000! That's spooky and eerily beautiful, in a way. In celebration, I might go for an evening stroll around the park. The parks here don't have snow, but that probably means I'm less likely to slip and land on my arse again. Emphasis on less likely.