Rubenerd

Having lived most of my life in countries where they don't do this, all internet service providers in Australia automatically suck and are Epic Fail because they employ nonsensical (and maddening!) bandwidth shaping, but out of all of them Internode sucks the least. Aside from one disconnection issue they've been fantastic since I started studying in Australia again late last year. Their technical support team are lightning fast and very helpful, so I have no qualm giving their new blog a plug.

Dear Internode Customer,

Internode has just launched its new public blog site:

http://www.internode.on.net/blog

The site launch commences with our coverage of the Global Green Challenge (http://www.globalgreenchallenge.com.au).

Internode is the major commercial sponsor of the event, and we are taking the Internode Tesla Roadster from Darwin to Adelaide in the ‘Eco Challenge’ category.

The Tesla Roadster is an exemplar of the way that ‘green’ and ‘high performance’ can go together – just like Internode.

We hope you enjoy our coverage of the event as it unfolds.

We plan to expand the blog site into other areas of interest to Internode customers in the future.

Regards,

The Internode Team

When you work for a publication you're presented with a series of style guidelines you have to follow in your work, if I'm to believe what people in the bidness have told me. Senior members of Rubenerd Blog management (myself and my teddy bear) have been complaining about a series of style issues for our blog here, mostly to do with names.

1. If the name eBay or an Apple iThing is the first word in a sentence, do you capitalise it?
2. For anime like K-On! and sites like Yahoo!, do you keep the exclamation marks even if you’re in the middle of a sentence?
3. For Japanese names like Her Senjougharaness, do you use ou or risk older browsers only rendering ō instead? Is that a concern?
4. When talking about projected Microsoft products, because it’s regarding an American company do we spell it vaporware instead of vapourware?
5. Is GCS an acceptable acronym for grilled cheese sandwiches given it also stands for the GNU Coding Standards?
6. Is it okay to refer to them as grilled cheese sandwiches in the first place so we reach a wider audience than if we called them jaffels which, while being technically a better name, only Aussies would know what we’re talking about?
7. Is it a sign of madness that a lone blogger considers a teddy bear to be a member of his blog’s senior management?
8. Did this list lose relevance after point 3?
9. Is the Bird the Word?

Ever wanted to send me a free camera lens, some new Apple computer hardware or other gifts for free but didn't know my postcode? Well here's a service I didn't know existed until this morning, and I'm kicking myself for not finding it sooner.

If you go to this Singapore Post website page you can enter an address or a building and it will return the postcode. Sure enough, I entered 16 Balmoral Park which is where we live in Singapore and it returned 259847.

Given Singapore's tiny geographic size and densely concentrated population, their 6 digit postcodes are used not for suburbs (which Singapore really doesn't have many of) but for individual building complexes. It's a fantastic, elegant idea for so many reasons!

This originally appeared on the Annexe, back when I recorded daily puzzles.

You'd think transitioning back to university studies after working would mean I'd be learning more about so called "correct" programming techniques, but I've actually found the opposite is true! Apparently I'm also incapable of writing catchy titles for programming posts.

It's hard to describe, but in high school programming classes I learned its important to bring programming logic that may have strayed off in different directions back to a single point so a method can cleanly exit. In this way, each block has a clearly defined beginning and end.

This can be demonstrated using a loop. In this completely pointless Java example we're traversing a linked list of <Strings> looking for an awesome anime character. To preempt any comments, yes I could have used a for each loop, but that's not the point I'm trying to make.

while (linkList.hasNext()) {
  if (linkList.next().equals("Her Senjougharaness")) {
    break;
  }
}

In the above case we have one entry point, but we're breaking out of the loop instead of allowing it to cleanly finish (in fact in this case it never will finish!). This works, but a more elegant solution is to modify the condition of the loop itself:/p>

boolean found = false;
while (!found && linkList.hasNext()) {
  if (linkList.next().equals("Her Senjougharaness")) {
    found = true;
  }
}

In this case, once we've found what we're looking for the loop isn't merely broken out of with a break statement, but is allowed to cleanly finish and gracefully return control to the parent because the condition of the loop has been changed and it terminates itself.

Funnily enough I've been told by people marking my assignments I've been creating unnecessary extra work for myself demanding my loops and methods be structured like this, and they're probably right. Nevertheless I've been wired to not accept any other way; unclean exits just look ugly as sin from a design standpoint to me, and I know it's not the "correct" thing to do. I think!

Earlier this month I detailed how I was able to use DOSBox to run Windows 3.1 versions of software for someone in Singapore, and how what started as a silly nostalgic hobby was getting me some work! Well I figured why stop there, and over the weekend with a few spare hours I looked into running Windows 3.0! In other news, I really should publish posts instead of hitting the draft button.

Presenting the single greatest control panel window of all time: The Sound panel in Windows 3.0! We're presented with a single option to enable the shrill PC Speaker beep, along with an OK button to save changes if we're satisfied with our check box choice, or Cancel if we'd rather revert to what you had before, in case you don't remember. I love it ^_^.

Of course it was probably just a place holder screen for something bigger, but from real world experience at the time we had long since moved up to Windows 3.1 when we got our Creative Sound Blaster sound card. In this virtual machine now I'm running Windows 3.00a (in full 386 enhanced mode!) but at the time we had the version with Multimedia Extensions which I think (someone could correct me on this) was the first version of Windows to have sound support amongst other things.

Turns out tracking down a second hand copy of Windows 3.0 with Multimedia Extensions is extraordinarily difficult though, perhaps given it was only available for such a limited time. Speaking of limited time, it's been fun reliving all this nostalgia again, but I have assignments and exams coming up soon, so it'll probably be the last you hear about it for a while. I know you'll all be disappointed!

And don't worry, I'm only using this classic Windows stuff for nostalgic purposes, I'm thoroughly a Mac OS X and FreeBSD guy now.

Poor Mikuru!

This originally appeared on the Annexe, back when I recorded daily puzzles.

This originally appeared on the Annexe, back when I recorded daily puzzles.

So I'd just woken up after a terrible night's sleep and was making coffee when I tuned into The Whole Wheat Radios on my Mac, and within 20 minutes none other than Jim Kloss came online and started chatting on the mic on air with all of us! He talked about a discussion he'd had with Marian Call about Twitter recently, the music that was coming up (in his own classic and imitable style), along with the progress he was making with his nuclear wheat powered ioniser that can bend space time. Unfortunately so far he can only beam one person at a time with his voice activated command processor, but it's a work in progress.

He also asked a few questions which come to think of it I didn't answer in the collaboration page chat thingy. To answer them here, Elke and I are in Adelaide until November, and while not technically correct in German, when my dad's family immigrated to Australia they started pronouncing our last name as "Shade" for English speakers, so es ist gut so :).

As for the image above, this was a photo I took of Jim Kloss himself mowing the perfect green lawns that adorn the surroundings of the Wheat Palace where the independent music Whole Wheat Radio headquarters are located. You can tell it's not an extremely crappy Photoshop job because I actually did it in The Gimp. I'd be hilarious if I could write and deliver good jokes.