Rubenerd

Links shared from del.icio.us today:

BasBasBas.com – Serial Expat

I'm Bas, 23, an International Comm. Management student from The Netherlands. I write about living abroad, travelling, the future, all things 2.0 and a little activism."

(categories: expat blog travel fascinating activism)

Introvertster

"The new way to get rid of people!"

(categories: socialnetworking funny internet)

Emma Maersk: New Zealand Marine and Shipping Society

Beautiful pictures of the sleek new ship

(categories: shipping trade photos)

Cynthia Boaz: What if the Right was Right? A Reflection on the "Christian States of America."

"What would it look like if we considered the nation's most pressing policy questions through the lens of "Christian" principles? What would it mean if the right was right?"

(categories: politics religion)

Here's an idea for a Google Reader feature that in my opinion is long overdue. If Reader attempts to fetch a web feed and it encounters a 301 permanent redirect to a legitimate new address it should update its own records in user accounts to point to the new address instead of still pinging the old one.

I ask for my own selfish reasons because as of now more people are still subscribed to my blog here through the old //rubenerd.com/show/feed/ address instead of //rubenerd.com/feed/. Each request to the old URI takes more effort and bandwidth than the new one, and I've noticed items that appear in the new one instantly can sometimes take an hour or longer to appear in the old one. An automatic update would fix this.

Good idea?

As if I needed one, but another reason why I love Twitter is the spontaneous memes with a half life shorter than the time it takes for the fizz in soft drink to dissipate when the bottle is opened. I prefer Solo. Well this paragraph rapidly degenerated into nonsense more quickly than most.

Today's fun was coming up with expressing famous songs as code with the surprisingly descriptive #SongsInCode hashtag. @NickHodge by far had the best ones, but I tried my hand at a few too. I spaced them out to make them easier to read, but all these fitted into the 140 character Twitter limit when written on the one line!

San Francisco:

if (destination == "San Francisco") {
   hair.wear(flowers);
}

My Sharona:

4.times do
   puts "My"
end
puts "Sharona"

One Headlight:

if ( headlight >= 1 ) {
   [driveTo : home];
}

Superfreak:

%signs = ( "Wild", "Can't Take Home to Mum", "Kinky" );
if ( exists $signs{$girl} ) {
   print "That girl's a super freak!\n"
}

Mambo No. 5:

int Mambo = 5;

Before You Accuse Me:

if ( yourself.takenLookAt() ) {
   me.accuse(allow);
}

Rock Around the Clock:

for ( my $i = 1; $i < 13; $i++ ) {
   if ($i % 4 == 0) {
      print "$i o'clock rock!";
   } else {
      print "$i o'clock";
   }
}

Rehab:

try {
   makeMeGo("rehab");
} catch(WinehouseRefusalException e) {
   System.out.println("no no no!");
}

Bird is the Word:

Word thing = "Bird";
System.out.println ("The " + thing + " is the "
   + thing.getClass().getName() );

While all those were fun, I think the last was my crowning achievement :).

I'm gonna pop a cap in your… nah I can never pull off gangsta.

Depending on your attitude you either think the TrackPoint mouses between the keys on ThinkPads are either fantastic or dreadful. I love them, I've always been far more accurate with them than with trackpads or those trackballs older notebooks had. With all the multitouch gestures Apple now bundles with their laptop trackpads it's doubtful I'll ever get to use a TrackPoint mouse on a Mac, but I'm enjoying the experience again on my second hand ThinkPad X40.

Not only that, but as a *nix user I also love having three dedicated buttons which lets me copy and paste text in terminals as well as having the usual right click menus. Look at the mouse go! Click! Whoosh! Zoom! Blaz! Blaz?

Anyway because I got this machine second hand I quickly wanted to replace the gungy TrackPoint cap. You can buy a set of replacement TrackPoint caps from Lenovo but they're a whopping $25 so I went on eBay and picked up a set for a couple of bucks from a friendly guy in Melbourne.

The little bag of caps (product ID 73P2698) come with three different styles you can choose: the classic dome, soft dome and a concave soft rim. All three are great but I prefer the concave soft rim (top right in the photo I took above) because it fits the shape of my finger and I can apply much more pivoting force with less effort. By pushing on the edges I can also accurately move the cursor just one pixel in any direction with no effort at all. It's a beautiful thing.

If someone made an aftermarket TrackPoint mouse for Apple notebooks I would buy one in a heartbeat! I'd forgotten how much I love them.

Yes I only just posted this picture in a previous post talking about Debian, but I just have to come out and say purple and violet are some of the greatest colours in the world. That's okay to admit, isn't it?

I haven't had much time to theme this Gnome desktop yet, but I think the Crux icons and Unity GTK+ theme with 65% transparency in menu bars and Terminal windows for a purplish Mac OS X look is pretty swish.

Even with full composting on a heavy desktop environment like Gnome the system is still able to fly on my ThinkPad X40 which was built four years ago. That's something Windows 7 can barely pull off on similar hardware let alone Vista.

The background image is of course the awesome Senjougahara Hitagi from Bakemonogatari which I've been reviewing here. Interestingly enough if you do an image search for Senjougahara Hitagi on The Googles one of my posts is currently the third result on the first page. Apparently her fan club is small!

Forgive the cheesy title, but you've got to admit especially compared to the one floating alongside that this is a big boat! And it's blue!

She's the Emma Maersk, a container ship owned and operated by the A.P. Moller Maersk Group and named after somebody called Emma I presume. She's 357 metres long, 56 metres wide and 30 metres deep capable of carrying over 11,000 6 metre containers. The ship, not Emma who I assumed the ship was named after. As with many of Maersk's latest vessels she is coloured a brilliant shade of cyan instead of a dull red or black; why don't more shipping companies do this?

I was able to get an exclusive interview with the ship's builder at the Odense Steel Shipyard in Denmark, a small Nordic country in Europe populated mostly with Danish people.

[…] and so when building the Emma Maersk we wanted to strengthen Maersk’s corporate branding by painting the ship’s hull above the water line with their trademark blue. We also thought it would look trippy out on the open ocean because it would make the containers appear as though they were hovering in mid air. It’s just what that genius Ruben Schade said: "you can’t buy genius like that!" Wait, don’t post that.

I of course fabricated that entire interview, surprising though it may seem.

What got me interested aside from her striking colour scheme though were her environmental features. According to a New Zealand Ship Marine article which had some amazing photos, she features a sophisticated computer system with thousands of sensors to intelligently calculate the ideal throttle settings for the conditions the ship is facing in real time and a heat recovery system that helps to capture energy that in a similar ship would have gone to waste. And according to Robse.dk her hull is painted in a special silicon-based paint which lasts longer and reduces drag which delivers an estimated 1200 tons of fuel savings. Now all she needs is a few of those modern sails and we'd be in business.

Granted the Emma Maersk isn't a passenger liner, but it's amazing what a century can do isn't it?

If you read my blog on a regular basis [you're super awesome] you'd probably know my setup of choice on my non-Mac computers is FreeBSD with the Xfce desktop environment. Well because I'm such a daredevil I decided to try something new with my new ThinkPad X40 and install Debian with the default Gnome desktop.

Some observations about:

Package management…

• As a FreeBSD I find this hard to admit but I think I’m starting to like Apt more than the ports system. Granted there are packages available on FreeBSD but they tend to not be as current as the ports, with aptitude I can download and install entire desktops and more complicated applications like OpenOffice.org and Firefox / Iceweasel in a matter of minutes. Sure they’re not optimised for my specific hardware but in practical desktop use I haven’t noticed much difference. They’re also a breeze to update.

• Debian follows the general rule with Linux distributions by merging system and user installed files within the same root and /usr directories which scares me a bit. I’m used to FreeBSD specifically separating ports by putting them in /usr/local.

Desktop usage…

• Like all Linux distributuons, it boots much more slowly than FreeBSD and dmesg isn’t as easy to follow, though it is possible to install tcsh from aptitude to bring back my comfy familiar shell environment!

• A fresh Debian install with Gnome is a surprisingly useful system. With FreeBSD I can download and build the Gnome metaport and get to a similar level of desktop friendliness, but there’s something to be said for having it on first boot. Think PC-BSD, but with Gnome.

• That menu icon lag phenomena that drove me insane with Gnome before is still asserting itself!!!

• I’m so used to the elegant /etc/rc.conf and /boot/loader.conf files in FreeBSD which let me define hardware, drivers and network configuration that going to Linux was a bit of a shock. Debian makes up for it mostly by detecting more of the hardware automatically, but I feel like I’m less in control.

• With regard to wireless drivers, I was surprised when Debian assigned my wireless card and associated network with eth0 instead of the clearer wp0 FreeBSD uses. I’m not really a Linux guy so I can’t tell whether all distributions do this or just Debian, but it seems unessisarily confusing.

Bottom line is: so far I'm enjoying the experience. I won't be changing FreeBSD to Debian on my desktops, but having it work so well on older notebook hardware without almost any configuration on my part was very cool, and Gnome is a pleasure to use.

Wonder if I'd be a candidate for trying Debian/kFreeBSD?

UPDATE: As of 18:21 it’s all good again. Stand down Red Alert!

Once again the fragility of my current primary means of communication has been highlighted by it's absence. In this case it's not Twitter that's down, it's my twitter client TweetDeck. All afternoon I haven't had a single friend tweet, reply, mention, search, group tweet or direct message come through.

I liked to think TweetDeck turned Twitter from a fun distraction into a CNN replacement; taking up my whole 1920×1200 screen I can see what's happening all around the planet with my friends and current events in near real time. I've used Twitterrific, Snitter and Twhirl but since jumping to TweetDeck nothing has come close to replacing it.

As of 17:55 Australian Central / 08:25 GMT TweetDeck is still refusing to download my columns, and even attempts to re-download the client software result in errors.

Time to give Seesmic Desktop another try?

Here's another Rubenerd Fun Fact for all you rabid Official Rubenerd Fun Fact fans. I know you're out there, I can hear you breathing. Oh wait, that's me.

This blog post has less than 18,000 words, not including this sentence.

Thank you.

My Twitter friend Zombie_Plan (his real name, it's even in his passport, don't ask me to prove that) has been overhauling his main blog website to include specific sections rather than having many separate blogs to maintain. Same thing I did, only he merged useful material like saving up for a future dwelling as opposed to me where I merged information about newbie Java problems and grilled cheese sandwiches.

One specific section he's currently working on is How To Fail At Girls. I predict this has something to do with disjointed recounts of past and present experiences with the opposite sex, and an overall self reflective storytelling experience. And now to see how accurate my prediction was:

A disjointed recounting of my past and present experiences with the opposite sex, and an overall self reflective storytelling experience.

Wow, I'm good!

Anyway he seemed a bit reluctant to get started or publish his posts in this section, so I figured I'd get the ball rolling with my own expose.

It was the mid 1990s and my dad's company had moved us from Melbourne to Brisbane for a year before we moved semi-permanently to Singapore. I often wonder how I would have turned out if I'd grown up as a teen in Brisbane instead of at a posh, pretentious international school in The Lion City, I imagine I'd be quite different. I wouldn't say wah lah at the end of each sentence, I probably wouldn't drink Carlsberg, I would know how to play NRL or NFL or NDL or whatever that blasted acronym is. But we're getting sidetracked.

So yes we were in Brisbane for a year and I had been transferred to the Ascot State School, and in an utterly cliché way one of the first things I remember was a particular girl. I don't remember her last name, I presume she had one as most people at the time did. Still do I think. Think it started with P. Anyway I remember holding a particular fascination with her because I liked her hair. Yes it sounds utterly ridiculous but I thought her hair was really interesting. It wasn't long, but it wasn't short. And it was always ridiculously neat. Jennifer Aniston would have cut her hair in shame. You get the point. And so did her hair. Wait, what?

Anyway I remember we were sitting next to the oval around lunchtime and we were having our party pies and juice poppers when she walked over asking if we'd seen one of her friends. Up until that point I thought I was just interested in her in the same general capacity as a… oh I don't know… a trippy lava lamp, but at that point I realised I actually liked her, as in liked her liked her. For the first time in my life I tried to say something in response but all that came out was a brief outburst of garbled gibberish then nothing. Despite having a name pronounced almost the same as my last name, Sade would not have called me a smooth operator!

We moved from Brisbane the next year to Singapore, and slowly I forgot about her and Australia in general until I was going through my material before we had our second international move and I came across a book I'd passed around to everyone in the class to sign, and low and behold there was her signature. Within a few days I had also found some floppy disks containing some DOS batch code I'd written in primary school where I'd used her name as a variable.

If that story doesn't win me an award for pathetic nerdishness, I doubt nothing would. Except maybe Klingon Boggle. And there are are few more where that came from. Think you can top that Mr Zombie Plan Pty Ltd LLC Pte Ltd Sdn Bhd Gmbh?

This post will self destruct if deleted.