Rubenerd

Well there you go, I'm so quick to celebrate pointless milestones here I even have a dedicated tag for the things, but when something genuinely interesting happens I completely miss it. In an ironic comedic twist, Rubenerd Blog post number 1888 was about the 2009.08.06 #TwitterFail of all things. How terribly inauspicious!

For those of you who don't understand the significance, I grew up in Singapore and the number 8 holds a great deal of significance in Chinese culture because it's perceived as being especially lucky. Conversely, the number 4 to them is as spooky as 13 in Western culture because when pronounced it sounds similar to the word for death. WeirdAsianNews.com has a detailed post explaining numbers and their Chinese meanings if you're interested.

As a proud skeptic I don't lend superstitions much credence, but it's still cool to have reached a post number that has three eights in it again. I just wish such things like blog posts with eights in them brought me as much luck as they were supposed to! I'll pretend I was supposed to be hit by a bus today but because I posted 1888 entries such a disaster was averted. Yeah, that works.

UPDATE: I’ve been advised that the reason why urlTea was forced to go offline was due to clients getting sick and electrocuted from trying to brew their computers in mugs. Makes sense to me.

Reading about the latest problems with the tr.im URL shortening service, it got me thinking about urlTea and whatever happened to it. Before the current crop of shorter URL shorteners appeared such as is.gd, bit.ly and the like, TinyURL was king but I liked using urlTea because it was something a bit different and I loved the name! The previous iteration of my blog theme had links to URLtea under each post for well over a year, in fact I still think the icon I used for it is still on my server somewhere.

As of April it seems their site has ceased to exist like an infamous Monty Python parrot. If you attempt to visit their site, you're told the site is Temporarily Unavailable and a scary error line warning of a malformed httpd server file (gulp) suggests they won't be coming back anytime soon. Bummer.

It's normal for sites to go offline on the intertubes when their owners run out of a combination of time, money and/or interest, but intermediary sites that serve to redirect links pose an entirely new set of problems if and when they're disconnected. It's a bit scary.

In the meantime I've switched to RubyURL.com which was the other site I used to use alongside urlTea because it has the same few letters as Ruben and Rubenerd, and at the time I was into the Ruby programming language.

Because I'm studying full time again after having a leave of absence and studying part time, all my classes (get it!?) are out of whack. For example I've started Java again this semester and I'm hopelessly rusty! One problem I'm having is creating an object array, assigning objects to it, then attempting to use methods from the objects in a loop.

Simple, right? Whenever I try, I get the following error:

Exception in thread "main" 
java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: [x]

I'm not attempting to access objects that don't exist in the array, I'm using the array.count() method to only loop through the ones I know exist. Still, the error persists and it's driving me crazy!

Here's the problem reproduced in a very basic example. I'm creating a Market object, adding a series of Stall objects (which number to less than 10!), then attempting to read the toString() methods for each Stall in the Market.

Stall.java

public class Stall {
   String name = "Vacant";
   public Stall(String name) {
      this.name = name;
   }
   public String toString() {
      return name;
   }
}

Market.java

public class Market {
   private Stall stalls[] = new Stall[10];
   public void addStall(Stall a) {
      stalls[stalls.length] = a;
   }
   public String toString() {
      String toReturn = "";
      for (int count = 0; count < stalls.length; count++) {
         toReturn += (stalls[stalls.length] + " ");
      }
      return toReturn;
   }
}

TestMarket.java

public class TestMarket {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    Stall coffeeBean = new Stall("Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf");
    Stall starbucks = new Stall("Starbucks");
    Market rundleMall = new Market();
    rundleMall.addStall(coffeeBean);
    rundleMall.addStall(starbucks);
    System.out.println(rundleMall);
  }
}

The thing I'm doing wrong is probably breathtakingly obvious, but I've been staring at this for hours and can't figure it out. The only way I've been able to fix it is to wrap the inside of each for loop in a try statement and catch ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException which is hardly an ideal solution!

As well as having heard it from many prominent security experts, from personal experience now I've come to expect there's a trade-off between security and the human need for convenience. Despite there being a slew of faster and more reliable browsers than Firefox I choose to use it for the extensions which make my browsing more secure and private, while accepting that such plugins may break some sites.

I can now add my university email account to the mix: after an interface upgrade whenever I attempt to login to it with the Permit Cookies extensions enabled I can't get past the above screen even if I add the network to my whitelist. It is the first time a site has still refused to play nicely with this plugin even after whitelisting, very weird.

Looks like I'll be setting up my beloved Camino browser to take care of university whatnot. Now there's a slick, fast and lightweight browser!

In the meantime I'll contact the university IT help desk. Given this is the science and engineering campus here I'm sure I'm not the only Firefox and Permit Cookies users here having this problem, at least I hope I'm not!

My experimentation with OpenSolaris on my MacBook Pro (Dual-booting OpenSolaris on a MacBook Pro, OpenSolaris, MacBook Pro, partition order) has come to an abrupt end, tragically because of only one basic but fundamental problem.

After trying it so I could run Java and Oracle stuff on it for my studies using the same OS they use at my university, it worked beautifully with all the internal hardware, except the trackpad. The workaround proposed on various forums and newsgroups is to just use an external mouse which is simply not an option when I'm in classes and only have a small desk to work on. I also think it's a bit ridiculous to expect to use a notebook computer and not expect to be able to use the internal mouse.

OpenSolaris booted from the CD was far more polished than any Linux distribution I've tried, but I've decided to wipe it off the drive and reinstall FreeBSD in that partition which supports all my hardware out of the box so to speak. Not having the internal mouse working on a laptop is absolutely unworkable and a complete show-stopper.

Here's hoping the next release addresses this problem. I'd love to use it; I even picked out a snappy desktop background to use with it!

I love the term "memes", not least because the concept was invented by my philosophical and scientific hero and idol Sir Richard Dawkins! I've always wanted to start my own and Twitter has given me the vessel in which to test my ocean going meme vessel things. Well that was a lousy analogy.

My idea all started when I was playing around with an empty Toblerone box. My spell checker on this machine insists the word Toblerone is spelt Testosterone. We're clearly on two different wavelengths.

Introducing #ProductNose; taking inanimate objects and pretending they form a part of your nasal protuberance, whatever the heck that's supposed to be. Oh yeah, a nose.

In order from top, bottom left and bottom right we have Toblerone Nose, Farmers Union Iced Coffee Nose and IKEA Bin Nose. I think the latter is the most flattering. Well okay none of them are flattering, but that's the least unflattering, or the most flattering depending on how you want to phrase it. I think.

In my review of the first episode of this epic series Bakemonogatari (I can spell it without looking for it somewhere else now!) I made the comment that the first few seconds of fanservice threatened to put me off the show.

Actually leave that thought aside for a second, while we're talking about beginnings the intro credits to Bakemonogatari with the black and white photos, weird flying staplers and a King Kong Hitagi are just awesome! It's surreal and weird, just as I would have expected.

Well here we are in part two of the Crab God story. After Meme (the psychedelic aloha shirt guy!) instructs Hitagi to go and get changed at home then come back for her exorcism (as it were), we're shown her showering with very conveniently placed steam, followed by an extended scene with her walking around in her stationary-patterned underwear (you read that right) trying to pick clothes while she belittles Koyomi for getting overly embarrassed, and for being a virgin. I think that was it. Aiyo, only in Japan!

Look, I'm okay with a little of fanservice (surprise surprise I'm a bloke, shaddup!) but I just can't take a series seriously when it's used as a primary plot device for extended periods of time, such as when it takes up half the episode! I'm really loving everything else about Bakemonogatari, I hope they don't ruin it's promise by pulling these kinds of shenanigans for too long.

Back to the abandoned school and Aloha Shirt Guy has set up an alter (here I was expecting a figure manufacturer, okay okay bad joke) where Hitagi finally confronts the God that has been poisoning her existence. I thought the representation of said spirit was brilliant; they escaped the tired cliché of Gods being old and being surrounded by clouds. What can I say, the graphics are brilliant.

We're also introduced to her troubled family past and her mum's associations with a cult who's members tried to assault her and the resulting family breakup. Tough stuff.

After belittling Koyomi for almost two episodes, like the self confessed tsundere she is she thanked him for helping her at the end of the ordeal and asked if they could be friends with a wink and a smile.

Aww ^_^.

Though to be a true tsundere wouldn't she have had to treat Koyomi with scorn and contempt for at least half the series first?

Anyway, being friends? I still submit to you dear readers that if a young women tried to staple my mouth I'd stay the hell away from her even if I were a fast healing former vampire and she had… stationary themed underwear? Aiyo. I need a cup of coffee from Sudoh-bucks.

Oh yeah, and Koyomi's family has a fancy washing machine. Look at it, it's bright red and shiny! You couldn't call this a "white good" could you? I tell you what, if Alter or any other house makes an Araragi family washing machine figure I'll buy it! Come on, are you saying you wouldn't? On second thought, don't answer that.

Shaft can still make an epic series! After Nurie reminded me in the comments of the previous post I have the DVDs of Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei and the Goku OVA but have never watched them. The graphics look awesome in that too. The problem is these things called studying and working keep getting in the way ;).

Another one of the great things about Twitter is that amongst the hundreds of spam followers you get per day, there are one or two people who message you that turn out to be awesome. It's a weird truth that as a hopelessly introverted computer nerd I have more friends overseas than I do in the cities where I live. Wait, is that socially acceptable to admit?

Digging myself out of that hole before I get too deep and can't get out, my latest acquaintance on The Twitters is Rizwan Ladha who I previously mentioned in passing in my second nuclear deterrence debunking post. Turns out not only is he ridiculously smart and modest regarding said smarts but he has more thoughtful posts on his one month old blog than I have in my six year old blog here. Good thing I'm not the jealous type!

If you're like me and am interested in geopolitics and international relations but you don't have a degree in political science, you should absolutely check it out. He knows what he's talking about (unlike me here!) but also has the ability to explain the issues to us regular folk.

If you're reading this in your blog aggregator such as Google Reader, you can quickly subscribe to Reconsidering International Relations by clicking said link.

In a world of sensationalist, loud, over hyped nonsense flooding us from trillions of narrow-minded pundits' websites, we need far more people like Rizwan!

You may remember a few days I go I wrote a blog post about a blog post that ZombiePlan had written on his blog. A blog post about a blog post on a blog, who would have thought it? Anyway I blatantly fabricated a screenshot by inserting words he in fact did not say and then proceeded to pretend he did in fact say what I had fabricated. I like pie.

In response to said post ZombiePlan did what any reasonable person would do under the circumstances and made me into a Yu-Gi-Oh card that mocked the frequency in which I post blog posts on my blog. I write blog posts on my blog, who would have thought it?

The two cards presented above may look identical to the untrained eye, but in fact there are significant differences. In my late primary school and early high school years in the early 2000s I used to play Magic: The Gathering. Yes I'm afraid it's true, you could have been forgiven up until this point for thinking my online nerdish dorkyness was just a disguise, but it's definitely not!

In fact initially I didn't even play the game to start with, I used to collect the cards and put them in card folders because I loved the graphics. This used to work great because often the cards that had the crappiest attack/defence power or the lamest actions had some of the best pictures, so people would give them to me for free.

And why is it that I included the Thran Dynamo? Well when I started playing half-seriously I managed to scrounge up several of these cards and use them in place of mana once I had four down. By tapping one of those beauties, I had three times the mana to activate cards in one turn, and more importantly they could be used with any coloured cards. Not the best card ever, but I thought I was being clever.

It's amazing what you remember… and conversely what you try to forget. I still like pie though.