Rubenerd

For the last couple of weeks I was having issues with the Last.fm scrobbler on my MacBook Pro. Whenever I launched it, it went into hiding without showing an icon in the Dock or the menu bar. After 15 minutes or so of playing music in iTunes the cooling fans for the machine would kick into overdrive and a quick inspection of the actively running processes with top would show the Last.fm app running at close to 100% CPU power. Thank heavens for dual core chips.

I admit I've been so busy these last couple of weeks I just gave up and stopped using it as you can tell from my lack of scrobbling activity. Doing some hard drive cleaning this morning though I came across possibly one of the biggest files on my drive.

That's right folks, as you can see above Last.fm's log file on my hard drive is 13.74GB. To put this into context if you're not aware, a log file is simply a text file! Most of my ripped movies are smaller in size than this text file!

No wonder Last.fm has been crapping out on this machine. And no wonder I couldn't account for where all my drive space was going.

Looking over at DeviantArt this evening I noticed their latest poll deals with ambidextrousness; given the site hosts drawings amongst other media it's been interesting to see the results. More importantly, is ambidextrousness a word?

I don't quite understand it myself, but as long as I can remember I've been right handed for writing and left handed for almost everything else. To talk as if I were Spock or Tuvok for a second, logic would dictate the hand with which I write would be the stronger and nimbler of my two hands so therefore I would favour using it for most tasks. When I swing golf clubs, open tin cans, assemble IKEA furniture and grill cheese sandwiches and whatnot though, I tend to find my left hand stronger, more stable and easier to control. If I were to write with my left hand though, the resulting scrawl would be even less legible than my current messy writing I create with my right hand.

Are you right handed or left handed… or more of one or the other but still some of one? Is ambidextrousness a word? I seem to have asked one of those questions before somewhere.

ANOTHER UPDATE: This post has been superseded by a new one with updated information. This should now be considered hysterical. I mean, historical.

UPDATE: Both these plugins messed up a whole pile of my permalinks. I’ve decided to deactivate them and live with the problem until a solution is created upstream in WordPress.

When I merged the Rubenerd Show and some other material into this blog to reduce overhead and the number of concurrent installations of WordPress I had to keep up to date, my plan was to give the illusion of separate sites by using categories that would have their own themes and RSS feeds.

I figured URIs like these would also make much more sense than the hodgepodge of addresses I had before:

Old address	New address
rubenerdshow.com/blog/	rubenerd.com/
rubenerdshow.com/	rubenerd.com/show/
rubenerdshow.com/blog/about/	rubenerd.com/about/
[intranet anime site]	rubenerd.com/anime/
rubenerdshow.com/blog/category/software/	rubenerd.com/software/
[…]	[…]

The problem I quickly ran across though was one that any serious WordPress user has already realised, in it's default state it's impossible to remove the "category" identifier from URIs. While the above URIs are clean and make sense, having the show appear as //rubenerd.com/category/show/ just looked… well, stupid.

I was about ready to launch into some mod_rewrite hacking, but fortunately I came across te beautifully elegant Decategorizer plugin by Bruno "Aesqe" Babic that did the trick. Once you've installed and activated the Redirection plugin by John Godley then installed and activated Decategorizer, it not only removes category from URIs for the categories, but also just as importantly from RSS and Atom feeds.

Rubenerd dot com slash show rolls off the tongue much more easily than Rubenerd dot com slash cateogry slash show. Why do I all of a sudden have a Fatboy Slim song stuck in my head?

Michael Franks approves of The Trashmen… maybe. Hey, anything's possible!

Just following orders here, for fear of the consequences. Hey, "here" and "fear" rhyme. So do "bird" and "word". Because the bird is the word. How delightfully trippy.

¤ø„¸¨°º¤ø„¸¸„ø¤º°¨¸„ø¤º°¨
º¤ø„¸Copy and Paste „ø¤º°
ø¤º°` if you think that`°º¤ø„¸
º¤ø„¸BIRD IS THE WORD¸„ø¤º°
„ø¤º°ø„¸¨°¨°º¤ø„¸¸„ø¤º°¨¸„ø
¤ø„¸¨°º¤ø„¸¸„ø¤º°¨¸„ø¤º°¨
º¤ø„¸Copy and Paste „ø¤º°
ø¤º°` if you think that`°º¤ø„¸
º¤ø„¸BIRD IS THE WORD¸„ø¤º°
„ø¤º°ø„¸¨°¨°º¤ø„¸¸„ø¤º°¨¸„ø

My sister found this picture entitled "A Brush with Death" by ~takeru-san in late March and subsequently laughed so hard we had to replace three windows. Glaziers aren't cheap.

I saw a small version of this picture by ~stardriv several years ago and by chance stumbled upon it again just recently.

I really like this persons work, the colours and style remind me of the graphics from Magic The Gathering (Wikipedia) cards I used to collect when I was in primary school. In fact I collected the cards for the art long after I stopped playing the game. Good thing about doing that is the criteria for cards being "good" and "bad" change, so cards my friends discarded I got to keep. Even my mum said she loved the artwork, she used to paint in a similar style when she was in her 20s.

Yes, I used to collect Magic The Gathering cards and watch Sailor Moon and DragonBall Z, shaddup!

Perhaps it's because the first computer I ever used had DOS on it, but ever since I started using it in late 2005 I absolutely adore the Midnight Commander and use it almost exclusively to deal with file management tasks on my Macs and FreeBSD machines. If you've never used it before, you're missing out on a treat.

Midnight Commander is a text based, "orthodox" file maneger that adopts the interface of the venerable Norton Commander (Wikipedia) on DOS. The screen is split into two panes for showing the contents of folders, along with a menu bar, a shortcut key help pane at the bottom and a prompt you can use to enter regular shell commands, view their results and return. I often joke that last feature means you often never have to leave!

As Norton Commander did in DOS, Midnight Commander can be used to easily create and modify your file system without having to use Unix commands with possibly confusing arrays of options. If you're like me you already know how to create folders and symbolic links, move files, change permissions, rename folders and so forth, but as the existence of numerous graphical file managers attests to, sometimes it's just easier for larger projects and tasks to let a program do it for you.

Midnight Commander Light > in urxvt > in Openbox > on FreeBSD!

Regardless of whether you choose to use the original Midnight Commander or Midnight Commander Light they're also a cinch to configure via easy to use dialog boxes under the Options menu, no need to edit text files then relaunch the applications! Things that can be customised include the view (between horizontal or vertical panes), colour schemes, file highlighting and audible alerts. They also contain a slew of other features such as virtual filesystems which I admit I haven't even tried yet!

Most people who use Unix-like operating systems probably already are well aware of Midnight Commander, but for those of you just giving Linux, FreeBSD and so forth a try, you might want to look into it. The fact you don't need to launch an X11 graphical environment to do file management tasks is a huge plus, and you can even use it to easily maintain systems remotely through a secure shell. Very cool.

Midnight Commander is available from NetBSD's pkgsrc under /sysutils, the FreeBSD ports system under /misc and Mac OS X's MacPorts under /sysutils amongst others.

To all my readers,

After my latest post concerning matters of religion and my assertion that "pro life" and "pro family" are misnomers, I received positive feedback from half a dozen people in various channels, rude emails from over ten people, and two comments here that included so many profanities and nothing of value I did what I thought I would never do here and decided not to publish them.

People obviously have heartfelt opinions on these issues and many are willing to discuss them in constructive ways, but a disproportionate number seem to be unable to post without resorting to ad hominum attacks on my character. To be blunt, I couldn't be bothered dealing with these any more.

I am a proudly a humanist atheist and may on occasion relay some interesting sites I find here, but I will no longer be creating new posts from scratch about such material. If you have been offended by posts about religion I've posted here, believe me when I say it was not my intention and I apologise.

I'm looking forward to the day when I can have frank and honest discussions about religion and faith without being insulted by religious conservatives or being labelled intolerant by social liberals whom I identify with on virtually everything else. Clearly this time has not yet come.

If you came to my blog here expecting such material, I encourage you to click over to RichardDawkins.net, SamHarris.org, the Skeptics Annotated Bible, the Out Campaign and of course the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Searches for Russel's Teapot, Occam's Razor, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, humanism and secularism will also (to borrow a phrase) set you on the right path.

Sincerely,
Ruben

I was reading a book
Well maybe it was a magazine
Suggestions on where to place faith
Suggestions on what to believe

But I read somewhere that you’ve got to beware
You can’t believe anything you read
But the good book is good and that’s well understood
So don’t even question
If you know what I mean

But it’s all relative even if we don’t understand
And it’s all understood especially when we don’t understand
And it’s all just because
Even if we don’t understand then let’s all just believe

~ Jack Johnson, "It’s All Understood"

CNET News.com is rapidly degenerating into a mudslinging centre. Every single news story dealing with Windows has a couple of legitimate criticisms of Microsoft's business practises followed by tens of posts from people calling them Apple fanboys, on Apple stories the reverse is true. My kingdom for rational discussion!

I've decided enough is enough, with the exception of stories from The Pervasive Datacentre by Gordon Haff who's writing seems not to draw these kinds of childish antics, this will be my last comment on a CNET Windows story.

Putting aside the concerns of prior art (which I believe there is here), let’s be honest here folks. Most people don’t care about this nonsense, they just want a computer that works. As soon as the general public starts getting messages saying they need to purchase a premium extension to do something extra that other machines could do out of the box, there’s going to be even more negativity.

This whole move along with having 7 different versions designed to confuse consumers, one version of which only allows three applications to run at a time (lunacy) shows how completely out of touch Microsoft is with their customer base. It’s a shame, because Windows 7 has the potential to be much less of a headache to use than previous versions.

The sad thing is, they can get away with it, and they will.

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

21:30 – Scaring people who think I'm a chick (ha!); late Friday night train journeys; nostalgia for 2007 Twitterland with Twitterrific; TwitterFon inserting advertisements; moving over to Tweetie on the iTelephone; obsessively using the huge but efficient TweetDeck; and the spectacular cost of mobile phone company text messages!

Recorded in Adelaide, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Common sense, we hardly knew thee…

I'm well aware these observations have been made by many rational people before, but I'm just putting them on the record here too.

• Isn’t it funny [most of] those who claim to be "pro life" overwhelmingly support the death penalty? This isn’t even touching on the issues surrounding legitimate medical research. (see the comments thread for revisions)

• Isn’t it funny those who claim to be "pro family" want to deny so many loving and responsible people the right to have one based on arbitrary critera for which they have no evidence affects their abilities?

• And isn’t it also funny that those who are quick to dismiss sciences such as evolutionary biology, astronomy and geology suddenly change their minds when it works in their favour?

Everybody has the right to choose what they believe, but that doesn't mean we should reject common sense. If certain religious beliefs (and conspiracy theories too while we're at it) are hindering social, moral, scientific and medical progress, it's time to review them. I know enough moderate religious people who agree with me on this to know it's possible.

My last attempt at a post like this generated more hate mail than any I've ever had before. Hey, as long as people are thinking about these issues I'm (as I always say) cautiously optimistic :-).