Rubenerd

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

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

“Voltaire was asked to condemn the devil on his deathbed, and all he said was: I don’t need more enemies!”

I just finished watching the open forum and discussion programme Q and A on ABC1 and was delighted my man Christopher Hitchens was one of the panellists! The other guests included Waleed Aly, Father Frank Brennan, Sally Warhaft and Anne Henderson. You can download and watch it from the ABC website.

To say it was a stimulating discussion would be the understatement of the century. Their discussion topics ranged from natural disasters, to why people feel the need to be religious, to the nuclear threat of the Iranians, freedom of women (or lack thereof), the rights of homosexuals… and for some bizarre reason a discussion on why "talent" means Roman Polanski can "get away" with it.

The first topic was spearheaded by an audience member who asked Chris why he thought when good things happen God gets praise, but when bad things happen such as natural disasters, it's merely referred to as Gods will that we can't understand. Chris drew comparisons to ANZAC Day in Australia with the war memorials across towns in the United Kingdom and the lack of such memorials in three towns described by the Church as "blessed". Unfortunately yet another example of the same kind of unfortunate, one sided thinking.

Of all the panellists, naturally I thought Christopher Hitchens was the star and centre of the show, but I was really impressed with Waleed Aly's (pictured above) comments as well. When the discussion of nuclear arms was raised, Chris made the comment that the new Hamas logo contains a mushroom cloud and that any organisation that uses torture and rape to advance their agenda should answer for such crimes, Waleed added and rebutted by saying no discussion can legitimately take place about Iran without discussing Israel's own nuclear weapons and abuses. In my view, I think they were both right, but as Sally Warhaft said it would take an age to address the question, so I'm going to leave it at that! Does Waleed Aly have any books in print I can get copies of?

Father Frank Brennan (pictured above) seemed like a genuinely nice person and I appreciated his obviously heart felt opinions, but he lost me when the issue of homosexuality was raised and he simply could not say the Catholic Church condemns it and considers it a sin, even when he was asked directly. Unfortunately that was also the only time I was unimpressed with Waleed as well; he may be a member of a vast majority of rational, moderate Islamic people of whom I know many, but when asked if his own religion officially condemned homosexuals he talked about politics instead. That said on Father Franks part, he did make a critical point that conversation is what we need which I found refreshing if only because that's what I've been saying myself here for years!

I thought Anne Henderson (pictured above, far right) didn't get enough airtime, but to be honest I was somewhat offended as a non believer by her assertion that you needed to be a member of a religious charity organisation in order to do good. It may have not been her intention, but as Chris pointed out organisations such as Amnesty International do valuable work helping people around the world without the need for celestial oversight.

One of the other highlights was towards the end when a young women openly addressed the panel by saying she could walk the streets of Iran without fear of persecution and that all the things Chris was saying about eliminating poverty by giving freedom to women were exactly what she experienced. He replied that her saying that was an insult to all the women in that part of the world who have been raped, tortured, imprisoned and who's testimony is deemed of lesser value in court.

If you just read my crappy review here you could be forgiven for thinking the discussion was heavy and full of anger, but aside from the one brief incident the atmosphere wasn't hostile. Having watched so many interviews with Chris on American shows where the American anchor rapidly deteriorates into a rude shouting match it was nice to see the conversation remain civil with plenty of humour and laughs thrown in. For subjects like this, you really, really need it.

I have to say, compared to Richard Dawkins who I mostly agree with on issues of atheism and Sam Harris who I seem to agree so wholeheartedly with it's scary, I agree with less of what Christopher Hitchens says but overall I thought he still had the impeccable wit and talking points down with his performance in Australia. I just wish he were coming to Adelaide.

One other talking point they did raise which I did find heartening was the possibility of an atheist Prime Minister in Australia. They all seemed to think an atheist President of the United States was out of the question but for Australia having an atheist PM would be possible. I hope they're right.

Aside from the final line that Chris delivered which I paraphrased at the very beginning of this post though, I think Sally Warhaft (pictured above) had the best line of the evening and it'll be the one I'll end my terribly worded and constructed review on:

“Palestinians need a state. Israelis need to feel safe”

Oh yeah, and I forgot one other thing :)

I can never seem to remember this line, so I've decided to put it here. If you want access to the BIOS in VMware Fusion virtual machines so you can change the device boot order and so forth, add the following line to the machine's .vmx file:

bios.forceSetupOnce = "TRUE"

When you reboot the VM will load the BIOS configuration screen without you having to frantically press a command key like F2 or DEL. When you reboot, the default behaviour returns.

The problem is, Fusion VMs are configured by default to boot from the hard drive first then the optical drive, meaning once you've installed an OS it ignores booting from the optical drive entirely. This will let you take care of this.

Grilled cheese sandwiches have cheese.

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

In a previous post I implemented a basic stack in Java using linked lists. In this post I'll be looking at implementing a rudimentary queue.

Unlike a stack where the first object to be added is the last to be taken off which results in an inversion of order, objects in a queue are taken off in the same order they were added. In the context of a linked list, this means the objects are added to the head like a stack, but they're removed from the end instead.

In this case much of the code from the stack linked list is the same, all we need to change are the stack specific terms from pop and push to terms put and get, and change the remove method to pull objects from the end of the linked list not the beginning.

public class Queue {
  Node head;
  public Queue(Object payload) {
    if (payload)
      head = new Node(payload);
  }
  private class Node {
    Object payload;
    Node next;
    public Node(Object payload) {
      this.payload = payload;
    }
  }
}

Aside from being renamed from push, the put method is unchanged from the Stack method other than the name.

public void put(Object payload) {
  Node newNode = new Node(payload);
  if (head == null)
    head = newNode;
  else {
    newNode.next = head;
    head = newNode;
  }
}

The pop method is changed to get the last link list element not the first. We find this by traversing the linked list until we find a Node that has null as its next Node.

public Object get() {
  Node current = head;
  Node previous = head;
  while (current.next != null) {
    previous = current;
    current = current.next;
  }
  Object toReturn =  current.payload;
  previous.next = null;
  return toReturn;
}

Sometimes I worry that I'm too funny. Don't worry, the feeling doesn't last long.

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

Checking my Google Reader page this evening I noticed all of a sudden I have 18 readers for my main RSS feed here at Rubenerd.com, and 34 readers for the old URL bringing the total to 52! I do admit I started blogging because I enjoy writing about my weird and disparate interests first and foremost, but it's another world of good feeling knowing a few of you are interested in some of it too.

<Cheesyness> So I just wanted to get all soppy for a second and send out a thank you and a hug to all of you for thinking my material here was worthwhile enough to warrant some of the time from your hectic electronic lives. Its a fulfilling feeling that has helped a socially awkward, introverted guy like me in ways you can't imagine. </cheesyness>

I'll try my best to minimise the number of typos and grammar mistakes :). I chose the above photo from my Flickr account because it looked all dramatic and the primary colour is similar to uncooked grilled cheese sandwiches.

Peace, health and happiness,
~ Ruben

Despite the internet only being down at our home for a relatively short period of time, it managed to get me completely out of sync with Bakemonogatari Ghost Storyness. Episode 12 is already out, and I only just finished with episode 11!

We've got a new story arc, this time in the form of Tsubasa Cat which I gathered from the title meant it would be about… Tsubasa. My powers of deduction turned out to be formidable (I always misspell that word), because it turned out most of the episode did centre around her. Genius! It's like I used to say to people in high school, why choose between intelligence, integrity and modesty when you could get all three in me? It seems my wit hasn't developed much at all since then.

Before we got to see our favourite meganekko Class President to End All Class Presidents though in the first deviation from the regular Bakemonogatari story arc format we've come to expect we spent some more time with Nadeko from Nadeko Snake who's now free of the serpent oddities. Snakes are serpents, right? They talk about the supernatural after school and she gives the bloomers and swimwear Suruga had lent her to him for him to return, a real test for a nerdy otaku guy apparently, even if he is a former vampire -___-. She thanks him for all his help but is scared and bolts once she sees Tsubasa. She has that effect on people it seems ^^;.

Before that encounter, Tsubasa and Koyomi are walking and talking about family life. Tsubasa has a bandage on her face and I think it's safe to say we all figured out why, just not whom. Turns out she was adopted and her latest step dad lashed out which she defends but Koyomi isn't convinced. Given the fact he seems determined to solve everyone's problems I was almost expecting him to walk into Tsubaya's house and return the favour for her!

After the impossibly cute Nadeko scatters, the impossibly cute Tsubasa and Koyomi get back to talking. In a second deviation from the regular Bakemonogatari story arc format we've come to expect (did I just unwittingly copy that line verbatim from the third paragraph?) a previous story is introduced in order to establish background. I haven't read any of the Bakemonogatari novels, but if I were to theorise I'd say it could almost have been a separate story that the anime adaptors slipped into this one. I'm probably completely wrong, and it wouldn't be the first time.

It seems even Nadeko has had troubles with oddities, in this case though its not one that attacks her like a snake or morphs her arm like a zombified monkey, but rather changes her completely into… a cat. A nekomimi Tsubasa! The back story regarding Golden Week establishes that Koyomi had once before seen her morph into a blazingly white cat after she'd buried a dead feline friend they'd stumbled across. I can't say stumbled upon because a certain website has wrecked the term for me!

Anyway it turns out the way in which she was able to return to some resemblance of normality after becoming nekomimi, I'm sorry possessed, was to have her excessive energy sapped by… Shinobu! Interesting how there are millions of people in Japan and yet these crafty convenient coincidences coincide to… sorry, I was trying to think of more words that begin with C to keep the fancy alliteration up.

So of course we're left with a few questions. Was Tsubasa's sudden headache (password!) merely the result of stress, or will her new stress be enough to induce a state of catlike readiness (thank you Marge Simpson) again? Was the energy sapping permanent, or will Koyomi have to go back to Epic Hawaiian Shirt guy to get this sorted out again? Will Nadeko and her awesome hair make another appearance? Will Hitagi aka Senjoughara aka Her Senjougharaness make any appearance at all!?

As I've already said, this episode was definitely different from the regular Bakemonogatari story arc format we've come to expect (ah crap, three times) in that it followed on from a previous arc when others were fairly self contained, and that it needed more of a back story to be established.

Oh yeah, and this shot was the best of the entire episode. Suruga is fast, and Nadeko's expression is priceless!