Rubenerd

Here's food for thought; though don't literally try to feed your thoughts, I hear it's a mental health hazard and could turn you into a zombie, maybe. If you spell hazard backwards, you get drazah which sounds like a name you might give to a sheepdog on a station or a ranch. Hey Drazah, get over here!

If at some point in the future it's decided to treat URIs the way Tim Berners-Lee wanted to instead of the haphazard way we see them now, would sites using so called domain hacks no longer make any sense? Some examples:

//rubenerd.com/

http://iphoneusernews.com/

http://wholewheatradio.org/

http://bit.ly/

http://identi.ca/

And using the system Tim Berners-Lee proposed:

http://com/rubenerd/

http://com/iphoneusernews/

http://org/wholewheatradio/

http://ly/bit/

http://ca/identi/

I dunno, I have no idea what a computer bit has to do with a URL shortening service, and I have no idea at all what an identi is. What I can say is neither one sounds like the name for a sheepdog on a ranch. Mmm, ranch dressing.

It's perfectly normal for websites to go offline on the intertubes when their owners lose time, interest, money or a combination of the three, but two recent outages have me spooked. The first is urlTea which I talked about a few days ago, now we can add tr.im to the failwhale mix:

Regretfully, we here at Nambu have decided to shutdown tr.im, the first step in shutting down all of our products and services within that brand.

Yikes.

Even before the advent of sites like Twitter that almost require the use of URL shortening services to work, the idea of such services going offline was blood chillingly scary. Now that Twitter (and FriendFeed, and Identi.ca…) does exist the problem is even worse, infinitely worse even.

Aside from search engines, I can't think of any other type of website that could disable so many links on so much of the internet in one fell swoop than a URL shortening service. You take out that middleman and suddenly millions of links don't point to anything. It's like an electronic basket of eggs, only the basket is used by millions of people and the eggs are links. Hey, and they're fragile too, that analogy worked better than I intended! I mean… um… yes, that's exactly what I meant from the start. Smart right?

I predict as more and more of these services decide to appear than disappear and spook enough people as a result there will be a growing trend for tech savvy people to register their own domains to shorten links to their own sites with .htaccess (or the IIS, ColdFusion etc equivalent) so they know they have control over how people get to their sites indefinitely.

I also think the mere existence of URL shortening services is evidence that there are serious usability problems with the intertubes in their current form, but that's a can of worms for another post!

As I've eluded to previously I gave up on Firefox 3.5.x on my MacBook Pro OS X and FreeBSD partitions because it was far too unstable to use without going bat crazy insane. I left Windows for a reason!

For some reason though going back to 3.0.x has caused Google Reader to generate a few errors a day after not having any trouble at all. It could very well be a problem with our home internet connection here not Firefox but it is a weird coincidence.

If it weren't for the fact all my friends from Twitter, Whole Wheat Radio and the real world used it I'd probably go back to Bloglines full time. In fact at one point I was going to research whether I could subscribe to people's Google shared items and comments in Bloglines and have people subscribe to my Bloglines shared items and comments from Google Reader. Might be worth looking into again.

I know it's cliche using my coffee cup photo here because I'm talking about Java, but I hate blog posts without at least one picture you must understand. Thank you.

A few days ago I posted a beginners problem I was having with Java related to counting how many elements there are in an array; seems basic right?

Here's an example of what I was doing:

for (count = 0; count < arrayThing.length; count++) {
   grandTotal += arrayThing[count].getAmount;
}

As Mark so graciously pointed out for me, I was guilty of a logic error by incorrectly using the length method to determine how many elements there were in the array. The length method returns the entire length of the array that was previously instantiated, NOT up until the index where there have stopped being values entered!

A way to get around this is to use a counter whenever you add a new item to array in a similar fashion to below, then using the counter in place of the length method whenever you need to loop through the values.

public void addToArray(int e) {
   this.arrayThing[nArrayThing] = e;
   nArrayThing++;
}

I was under the impression Java's for each statement could also have been used, but that's for use in collections not arrays.

Thanks to Mark for helping with my rusty Java knowledge :).

Isn't it great when you realise someone else shares one of your annoyances about something? I can't quite explain why, perhaps it's because in my case it makes me feel less naggy if I know I'm not the only one.

Andrew Barnett made a wish on Twitter this afternoon that upon reading it I jumped up on my chair, shouted "YES!" then fell off said chair and hit my head on the side of the table. Only a minor bruise, no short term memory damage, just a minor bruise.

wishes Google would exclude experts-exchange from ALL search results

Just as I really loathe it when people post links on Twitter to articles you have to register to view as I talked about back in March, I really loathe websites that allow their pages to be indexed by search engine spiders but then force you to pay to get to the answer to the question you asked. Worse still, they seem to appear in almost every technical search.

Experts-Exchange isn't the only culprit here, but they're probably the most infamous; heck they even warrant a section on Wikipedia. Even if they consistently had the answers to the questions I seem to want answered, just because of their search engine practises I wouldn't want to support them by paying for their service.

In response to this, I pledge to donate five Australian dollars to the next website that helps me with my technical problems if they have a tip jar or similar service. I will chronicle the site here when I find it.

I reckon sometimes the best way to deal with negative actions is with positive actions.

When the database for my original anime blog was wiped and I decided to start again in the anime category here, even though I still have all the images from it I decided I wouldn't bother recreating all of the posts. I already blog far too much and I have assignments to do!

One of the posts though that generated the most comments (over 20 if I remember) was my simple observation regarding Yoko from the Gurren Lagann series.

Yoko professed in the 5th episode that she chose to wear a bikini top all the time because it was something that "wouldn't restrict her movements in combat" (uh huh, sure) but… she also always wore a scarf, something you'd expect to wear when the weather is… oh I don't know off the top of my head… cold!? While I'm at it, I'm going to the beach to wear snow boots!

The question I posed was: huh?

We devised several theories. We must have been wrong all these years, it's not the top of the head or the ears that lose the most body heat in cold weather, it's the neck! Or perhaps subterranean civilisations have different climate patterns. Or maybe because she was so tall her neck pokes through to a different layer of atmosphere from the rest of her body. Or perhaps she was in fact a vampire the entire time and she was covering up bite marks. Or maybe she was bought off by the evil fashion scarf lobby. Or maybe she was just crazy and made no sense.

I guess they do say anime and manga don't follow any established laws of physics or fashion. What I love is when story writers for these shows attempt to explain such bizarre physics and fashion, it's like watching the characters explain a new gadget on Star Trek that will emit a certain energy pulse to disperse the astronomical anomaly that's affecting their ship's systems. You know it's all bunk, but you suspend disbelief and follow along anyway ^_^.

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Just read another news story about the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in the paper today agreeing to do XYZ. I don't mean to sound like a smartarse, but what is the point of ASEAN?

The slogan of the South-East Asian grouping is "One Vision, One Identity, One Community". That has more cheese than a bad Dominos pizza.

Despite this… wow, where do I start? Well for one thing each member state still requires full passport border controls which is obviously only a hindrance to trade and development. Human rights violations are still prevalent and largely being ignored. Each member state still has their own currency, monetary policy and laws regarding their respective stock markets, businesses and financial systems that are incompatible with each other. There's no unified industrial standards body or patent office. Member states still refuse to cooperate on the environment, defence, energy, crime fighting and law enforcement in any meaningful way. There's still bickering between member states over political boundaries.

I guess what I'm asking is: what has ASEAN accomplished other than generating meetings where leaders talk the talk but don't walk the walk? The free trade zone with China with lots of concessions? That's it?

Perhaps I'm just frustrated with the border controls between Singapore and Malaysia that are some of the slowest, most archaic in the world. One does not know the definition of frustration until you've tried to cross that one! Say what you will about the European Union, but the Schengen Agreement is made of win.