Rubenerd

Hehe… whoops! Good thing I just finished a project, sheesh! On the plus side, I guess this means I'm getting more people reading.

UPDATE: I’ve decided to go up to a higher plan with my webhost that has a higher transfer limit. Unfortunately it’s too late for this month which I’ll have to pay a $70+ excess for, but as I said above I’ve decided to frame it in a positive light. It’s funny how I used up all my allocated transfer but still have over 85% of my data space free!

UPDATE: This post was supposed to go live on Tuesday, but when I overshot my bandwidth allowance I dropped everything and forgot to publish it. Given the only image is being hosted on Flickr not here, I suppose this one is okay.

It seems all I've talked about this beautiful Tuesday is music! So lets keep the blogging ball rolling and discuss Libre.fm, the website I mentioned earlier today that I've migrated to after Last.fm's latest shenanigans.

Libre.fm is a music scrobbling and sharing website that runs on the free and open source GNUkebox software which you could even host yourself if you wanted to. With a bit of technical know-how (more on that below), you can import your existing plays from Last.fm, and in return you get a profile page with your most recent plays, a complete history including artists and songs you've played the most, and the opportunity to join groups.

As reflected in their current URL though, Libre.fm is very much in alpha and still a bit rough around the edges. For one thing, you need to edit your hosts file to redirect scrobbles from your Last.fm client to Libre.fm given no software (so far) has been designed for it; the official Last.fm client won't work. To export your plays from Last.fm also involves downloading and running a few Python scripts. The links I sprinkled in above direct you to their Wiki with guides showing you how to do it.

ASIDE: I’ll be posting in more detail how to set it up if you’re interested, for now if you’re technical I created a Libre.fm account with the same username and password as my Last.fm account, then downloaded iScrobbler and appended 89.16.177.55 post.audioscrobbler.com to my /etc/hosts file. So far it seems to be working beautifully.

You can now find me over at http://alpha.libre.fm/user/rubenerd/. I'm not going to close my Last.fm account just yet, but I won't be scrobbling to it any more and have updated my profile there to reflect this.

One of the cool things about Whole Wheat Radio is not only can you request shows of songs once you've created an account and logged in, you can create your own based on criteria you define. Cooler still, you can use existing tags/categories for your songs, or you can create your own!

I currently have two tags, Rubenerd Bagus! and Makes Ruben Feel Sophisticated, and my sister has Elke Faves This!

What's also been fun is defining synonyms for our tags/categories; the site itself says they're really just used so the internal search can pick them up but that's not to say we can't have some fun! I've used the word "fun" three times this post, counting this sentence. That's funny, I didn't know sentences could count. Chicken on a raft.

Back in March I talked here about Last.fm's decision to start charging users outside the United States, United Kingdom and Germany for the right to stream audio. Initially I was quite angry about it, but eventually realised that they were probably bullied into doing it by old media companies and that all they were guilty of was poor execution.

It seems now though there's further evidence of unscrupulous activity on Last.fm's part, and it has to do with sending listening information to the RIAA in the United States. You can read the whole saga on TechCrunch (Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA?), the Last.fm blog (Techcrunch are full of sh*t), and TechCrunch again (Deny This, Last.fm), but if you want the quick lowdown Paul Richard Cook summarised it very well on a posted message on the Last.fm site.

Even if the Last.fm team had no idea this was happening as they claim, and even though I'm outside the de jure jurisdiction of the RIAA both in Australia and Singapore, this still really rubs me the wrong way. It's creepy this kind of behavior is going on, though to be fair we should all have expected this when they were bought out by CBS.

I really enjoyed my time with you Last.fm, but we must part ways now. My lifeboat has left the ship and I'm now rowing over to Libre.fm which will be the topic for another post. Sayonara.

Jimbo: I’m Jimbo Kern and this here is Ned. Say Hi Ned.
Ned: Mmmmm Hi Ned
Jimbo: HA! Isn’t that great?

As I said previously, I tend to wipe and reinstall the operating systems on my computers at least once a year, then I go about reinstalling software. Here's a cloud showing my current Mac software, current as of this post. I would discuss software from the future, but that would be in violation of the Temporal Prime Directive.

Cyberduck

Slick little (S)FTP client

Gimp

Photoshop replacement for editing pictures

Inkscape

Vector graphics editor

iStat Pro

For monitoring temperature, memory etc from the Dashboard

MacFuse

For easily mounting tons of file systems, and for TrueCrypt

MacPorts

OS X free software package manager

MacVim

Beautiful Aqua-native Gvim text editor

Mozilla Firefox

With these mostly-security extensions because I’m paranoid

Perian

QuickTime codec library, so Finder can create video thumbnails

TrueCrypt

Encrypted volume creator and manager

TweetDeck

Full screen Twitter client with interchangable columns

VLC (Intel)

For actually playing most of my video!

From MacPorts I build copies of:

ImageMagick

Easy command line image converting

LAME

For encoding podcasts

Midnight Commander

Still my primary file manager!

Music on Console

For listening to online radio, smaller than iTunes

Python 2.6

A kind of snake, also a British comedy troupe

Coursesy of Nick Hodge of Microsoft I read this article from The Register discussing Microsoft Azure's support for PHP. In particular these paragraphs stood out:

Yes, let me introduce you to the professional PHP programmer. You see, PHP is like a handgun. On its own, it is simply an inanimate tool that has no moral leaning. In the hands of a responsible citizen, it can be used to the benefit of society. But in the hands of someone who is untrained or mentally unstable, it can be used to commit horrible atrocities.

Whenever there’s such a tragedy, other developers are quick to blame PHP. If PHP were illegal, then Yahoo would never have happened. If we regulated PHP tightly, then there would be no Digg. Now, it’s not fair to say that the world would be better off without PHP, but its community could certainly use less encouragement, which is why Azure’s support for PHP worries me.

This has been one of my primary criticisms of PHP from day one, aside from some elements of the language that don't make sense. PHP can be used to create elegant and fast web applications, but only in the hands of competent programmers. It is way too easy to easy to create horrible spaghetti code in PHP. Even in the hands of said competent programmers, maintaining PHP code others have written I think is also more difficult than it needs to be. Then again I've heard people use the exact same observations to claim the language is more flexible; each to their own.

In a way I make up for a lack of time by using high level languages like Ruby and Python because more than PHP (or Perl) they force you to do things "more correctly", Python moreso.

Screenshot taken with [CMD]+[C] as the game starts

I like to reformat my computers at least once a year to keep them from accumulating too much clutter. Unfortunately after reinstalling a fresh copy of Mac OS X Leopard on my first generation Core Duo MacBook Pro, a copy of The Sims 2 without expansions refuses to load. This despite the fact it was working just fine before the reformat!

When loading The Sims 2 on Mac OS X 10.5.7 with QuickTime 7.6, it displays the Electronic Arts logo, then shows the above screen instead of the Maxis logo. After the the introductory video has played, the game quits and displays a "The application The Sims 2 has quit unexpectedly" error dialog box. Bummer.

Considering I had just reformmated the machine and didn't have anything else on it yet, I reformatted it again back to 10.5.4 with QuickTime 7.5 and didn't do any software updates. The exact same error appears.

These were the steps I took to reinstall the game.

1. Repaired permissions with Disk Utility.app
2. Copied "The Sims 2" directory from the installation DVD to "/Applications/"
3. Downloaded and applied the Sims21.0RevF.dmg update without issues
4. Downloaded and copied over the Sims21.0RevF.reissue executable

As I said before what's frustrating is that this worked before, so I know this machine is capable of it. Twice I've tried running it, with the latest software updates installed and with the bare 10.5.4 DVD install. Nothing. Nada. Zippo.

I've emailed Aspyr technical support, in the meantime it seems I'll need to find another means of escaping!

It's official, Yahoo now also obfuscates search result links with gibberish the same way Google does, but misleadingly shows you the original URL in the browser's status bar. If you do a search for a site then right-click to copy the source URL, instead of getting the actual search result, you get a string of random characters, no doubt practical for their uses but extremely irritating for us.

For example, doing a search for Grilled Cheese Sandwich will show a Wikipedia page as the first result with the correct URL:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grilled_cheese_sandwich

But if you right-click and copy the source URL, you get this:

http://rds.yahoo.com/_ylt=A0oGkjNjHRpKnS8BONhXNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTByZWgwN285BHNlYwNzcgRwb3MDMQRjb2xvA3NrMQR2dGlkAw--/SIG=1284b7r18/EXP=1243311843/**http%3a//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grilled_cheese_sandwich

Fortunately it's easy to strip out most of the junk given the URL you actually searced for is merely appended to the end, but it's still a waste of time. Google and Yahoo really, really, REALLY need to stop doing this!

Testing whether I got the NetBSD pkgsrc system installed properly on my MacBook Pro. Everything seems to be in order! Now to install Gnumeric and other free and open source goodness.

% uname -mrs
Darwin 9.7.0 i386
% figlet Rubenerd
 ____        _                             _ _ 
|  _ \ _   _| |__   ___ _ __   ___ _ __ __| | |
| |_) | | | | '_ \ / _ \ '_ \ / _ \ '__/ _` | |
|  _ <| |_| | |_) |  __/ | | |  __/ | | (_| |_|
|_| \_\\__,_|_.__/ \___|_| |_|\___|_|  \__,_(_)