Rubenerd

Well here we are folks, I've gone ahead and done it! After talking about doing it for over three years I've finally merged all my disparate blogs into one. It was easier when the last external blog was wiped which forced me to start again anyway! There are still a lot of broken links, but I'm working on them.

As for the haphazard work-in-progress design, I made it as platform neutral as possible so I can easily port it over to Django once WordPress has driven me insane enough to warrant it. As before it still uses no JavaScript or Flash except when a specific post requires the latter and I can't find an alternative. It also doesn't look too bad in Internet Explorer 6 which was a pleasant surprise.

I'm looking forward to only maintaining one personal site for a while, it's going to be a refreshing change. Wasn't that a Little River Band song?

Might as well also take this opportunity to also ask that if you read my blog through my web feed I encourage you to update your aggregator to point to rubenerd.com/feed/ instead of rubenerdshow.com/feed/; it'll reduce the number of requests to my server and make it a bit faster than using the redirect I have in place. Thanks :)

I have my full time studies resuming for this semester this week and they look like they're going to be taking a ton of my time. I wanted to comment though on something I read in the paper this morning, seems some people in Australia still support the idea of keeping states.

I guess given I've lived overseas and in four different states in Australia (New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia) I've never seen the point of states. To me they're relics of the colonial days that we've unfortunately lugged with us to the present along with the British Monarchy that don't serve us any purpose now and in some ways actually hinder our progress. I've seen little evidence that having an extra layer of government and bureaucracy improves our lives or representation; all I see is duplicated effort, wasted money and lots of infighting.

I think when we live here we tend to forget that Australia may be a vast country, but we have a tiny population. When people in South Australia complain that the huge populations in the Eastern states get more attention, huge really is a relative term! Australia has less people than California — a single US state — or even Tokyo! South Australia in particular has less people than some suburbs of Singapore!

If we do decide to keep states for historical or cultural reasons, at the very least we should federalise most of their responsibilities. There's no reason each state needs to have it's own education, health, road transport or rail system authorities just to name a few.

As I said I could spend days talking about this, but I do have other things I'm supposed to be doing; thank goodness for buckling spring keyboards!

I'd love to hear what you think about this, in particular why you think I might be wrong. I must be missing something.

Here's an interesting thought for those of you interested in interesting thoughts. Well okay it would only be interesting for those doing object oriented programming if you want to be pedantic. Pedantic sounds like a cheap brand of paracetamol.

We're often told the advantage of using pseudocode and diagrams like ORDs is beneficial because they're programming language agnostic, but that's not entirely true. Take the above example of a grilled cheese sandwich class; it's all fair and good if we were using Java because only the String here is an object not a primitive data type. But what about something like Ruby in which everything is an object? Huh? Would it be something like this?

That's a lot of duplicated boxes. Clearly the ORD was envisioned when what I call "hyper dynamic" programming/scripting languages didn't exist! I can't think they'd be terribly practical to draw all the time as a Ruby developer unless you wanted to bend the rules a bit for it.

The diagram looks like my bedroom in Singapore, if my bedroom in Singapore contained boxes with attributes regarding instances of grilled cheese sandwich objects. I'd go for a nice Colby or Extra Tasty Cheddar. Makes sense to me.

I need a stiff cup of coffee.

Seems like even as early as the 1950s we knew we couldn't just keep building cars to solve our transport problems, but our own laziness, greed, sense of entitlement and ultimately short sightedness means we're still dealing with these problems at the start of the 2010s. Whooptie do.

The photo depicts a "Traffic jam at Venice Boulevard and La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles, Calif. in 1953", now in the public domain in the US.

I get the feeling my favourite honorary (is that the right word?) Canadian Todd Tyrtle would have something to say about this too!

It's very much in vogue in the anime community to bash K-On! because it's supposedly shallow, has weak characters and a plot that's only there to show cute girls in various situations, but I thoroughly enjoyed it for it's high life escape value ^_^.

My current desktop background is this of Mio from the light music club. I guess it's a typical otaku fantasy to be friends with a cute, shy girl and I'm falling right into the nerdy anime stereotype, but I find Mio very endearing. Besides, it's a nice design and scales beautifully on my new 1920×1200 display. Or screen, or whatever it is this thing is called.

Having got fed up with the woefully bad battery life in my second MacBook Pro battery, I decided to bite the bullet (or the bank card as it were) and procure myself a new battery. The previous battery I used was a third party unit I bought at Sim Lim Square in Singapore which when new had amazing life but degraded into a device that could barely hold a charge in far too short of a time. This new Apple battery might have cost an arm and a leg, but provided it wasn't manufactured by Sony in 2006 it's far more reliable.

I'm getting on average about 3:30 of power a charge which is enough for most lectures and classes with this new battery. Not having to arrive to classes nine hours early every day so I can guarantee myself a power point seat is such a refreshing change!

I'm in the process of writing another post on priming batteries and getting more life out of them, but I want to hold off publishing it until it's finished; I've been told publishing things before they're finished is a tad silly and nonsensical, and heaven forbid I ever type any nonsense here.

One quick tip I can provide though in this post to maximise battery life is to not turn on your MacBook computer at all. You'll need to commit everything you type to memory so you can reproduce it accurately when you're at a mains source of power which I admit could be construed to be a disadvantage by a vocal minority, but I guarantee you the battery life of your machine will be stellar. Unless you have the screen brightness set too high. Wait a minute.

As an aside, I learnt in chemistry that batteries are a series of cells, and that most batteries people buy are technically "cells" not batteries. If you are a chemist and this is the only bone you have to pick with regards to what I've typed here, I'm both fascinated and worried at the same time.

For my American friends, from Wired.com's report on gadgets they wish hadn't been invented. Surprising though it may seem, as with the friends I'm addressing this post to, Wired also happens to be American.

Whatever the shrink is giving me, it's either too powerful, or not powerful enough. Grilled cheese sandwiches are best when they're made from bread and cheese. You read it here fist. First, you read it here first. Heaven forbid I be caught out making a typoo.

For the longest time I was thinking whether or not to take the Zombie Plan approach and import my anime blog into it's own subdomain WordPress install here, or import the posts into rubenerd.com with their own seperated category.

Seems the decision was made for me, my university wiped my database and the SQL backups I had made in my home folder. All my screenshots from three years of blogging are still there as well as the original theme files, but the posts themselves are gone. Like a Pythonesque dead parrot, they have ceased to exist. It's entirely my own baka baka baka fault of course, I should have put my backups in a separate location. Lesson learned!

Never fear though (I can hear you fearing… wait what?) I've decided to pick myself up and start again, only this time I'll be posting my anime reviews and senseless Japanese culture discussion here on Rubenerd.com in the sparsely populated anime category which ironically happens to be one of my most visited pages!

And here I was thinking Haruhi's Endless 8 would be the thing irritating me most about anime currently. I blame Kyoto Animation. Yeah, that works. Could Mikuru go back in time for me and rescue my old posts? Or perhaps with her bizarre and endless amount energy Minori could rewrite them all one afternoon. Or Negi and Louise could just use their magic wands to recreate them. After Britannia that doesn't control Britain has been defeated, Mio has got over her stage shyness, those wooden starfish for Fuko have been carved and Mai has moved to her new school with that huge smouldering crater in the front garden. Yes I'm a hopeless closet anime watching geek who's not cool enough to be an otaku, shaddup!

I haven't decided whether or not I'll use the WordPress magic I learned to theme the anime category differently and prevent posts from appearing on the home page and master RSS feed to still make it appear as a separate site. Might be a bit jarring seeing all this new and unrelated stuff start appearing here.

I over-think things too much. Or do I over-think things too much after all? Or do I just over-think to the extent that it impedes my abilities to make decisions? Is that the definition of over-think?

Perhaps a moment with Kyou in the gym supply closet would calm my nerves about this loss and subsequent indecision about where to go from here. Nah, Mizuno Ami is still the best ^_^.

Now do you see why I kept my anime blog posts separate?

ASIDE: Now with a super duper spiffy pretty diagram thing!

One of the things I most often read in regards to Twitter in it's early days was how it was going to destroy blogging as we know it, and as of 2009 I still come across people issuing similar gloom and doom scenarios. People were posting to their blogs less because Twitter was commanding their attention more and as a consequence the only direction for blogs to go was down. It was like taking a graph showing a trend for five months and extending it using the exact same gradient curve for five years.

There is an element of truth to the idea that Twitter has displaced some blogging, but I believe it has had more to do with the spontaneous, real time nature of Twitter than a flaw with blogging. With Twitter I can post what's going on right at that instant whether it be through a snippet of 140 characters, or a photo I just took with my iTelephone, or a link to an interesting article. This means blogs stop being real time life streams and instead become the places where we hash out ideas in more detail and invite more serious discussion, while using Twitter as a reference to when we had the original idea.

By having my friends on Twitter I've also noticed far more traffic to posts that I link to on it compared to if I just posted it here and left it at that. According to my server logs, Twitter is behind only Google services in originating traffic!

Twitter and blogging support each other. In a few years when everyone has got sick of Twitter and moved onto the next fad I suspect there will still be brief idea posting services for this very reason. Will it be FriendFeed? Identica or Laconica? Or even a service like Tumblr that merges the best of both worlds?

One thing is for certain, Twitter isn't killing blogs. Except perhaps the ones that only served as avenues to discuss what particular sandwich you were eating at any one time. Say, a grilled cheese sandwich. In that case, Twitter is more efficient for this any way.

Normally I don't indulge in the writing of posts such as this one, but when I finally got around to reading Paul Thurrott's initial review of the Zune HD I couldn't help but notice something worthy of comment. Thurrott is of course the colourful chap who runs the Windows Supersite, co-hosts Windows Weekly with Leo Laporte and who has made clear his dislike of that company with the bitten Apple for a logo. Fair enough, we all have our grudges.

In the review in question though, the following passage stood out:

Critics may note that 480 x 272 is a “lower” resolution than that offered by the iPod touch and iPhone (480 x 320), but the Zune HD display is of much higher quality and offers a true 16:9 aspect ratio.

Now don't get me wrong Mr Thurrott, the HD video output capabilities are just as impressive as the move towards using OLED display technology, but I believe your use of inverted commas around the word "lower" with regard to resolution is misleading, and you made two mathematical errors.

1. The last time I checked, 480×272 is a lower resolution than 480×320. Despite your use of inverted commas suggesting doubt, there is no question about this. The claim that the screen is of a higher quality, even if it had merit, has no bearing on this specific detail whatsoever.

2. I also take to task your odd assertion that the Zune HD "offers a true 16:9 aspect ratio" compared to the iPod touch and iPhone screens. The latter two devices have more pixels than the Zune HD, not less. This means with letterboxing the iPhone and iPod touch offer the same "true 16:9 aspect ratio" with the same number of pixels as the Zune HD. You invited the comparison sir, not me.

As an addendum for my readers here to be interpreted as you wish, the phrase "iPod touch" is used six times in Mr Thurrott's review.