Rubenerd

I think one of the great things about Mac OS X is it lets people learn Unix commands in a familiar setting, and I’ve been encouraging people to do so. When you mess around in Terminal.app, almost all the commands work the same in the other BSDs, and in a similar fashion to Linux, Solaris etc.

One of the most common questions I’m asked by people learning Unix commands from scratch on the Mac is how to change folders/directories that have spaces or punctuation characters.

There are three ways, the simplest of which is just to enclose the name of the directory in double quotes:

% cd "/Users/rubenerd/Folder With Spaces"

An alternative which you may be more familar with if you’ve done scripting in Perl for example is to "escape" the characters with backslashes:

% cd /Users/rubenerd/Folder With Spaces

The third way is to escape the characters in the directory name, but let the computer do it for you: the default shells in Mac OS X allow tab filename completion. In this case, start typing the name of the directory you want to change to, then hit [TAB].

% cd /Users/rubenerd/Fold[TAB]
becomes…
% cd /Users/rubenerd/Folder With Spaces

If you have several directories with the same first few characters the shell will either beep at you or show you a list of the folders (and sometimes files, symbolic links etc) that match your criteria. In this case, just keep filling the name of the directory until you have enough of it that’s unique.

These three methods are also used if you need to reference files with spaces and other characters in the Terminal too. Personally since I’ve started living in Terminals I choose not to name my files with spaces any more to save myself some time, but if you’re mostly a graphical desktop user that’s dabbling in this stuff, these work just fine.

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20:55 – Back in Adelaide again; losing control of RubenerdShow.com for some reason; losing an episode source file again; a silly proposal for an onomatopoeic word to describe places; reminiscing about family trips to Ubud in Bali; our end of year holiday to Singapore; food poisoning isn't as fun as the brochure said; our new family Christmas holiday ritual; story behind my beautiful shiny new Nikon D60 instead of getting a D40 or D40x; remembering I'm supposed to be keeping episodes under 20 minutes; and a lousy joke about wishing I had Nikon VR on my person!

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

The AF-S NIKKOR DX 35mm f/1.8G, from Nikon.com.sg

Now that I have my Nikon D60 I’ve been doing my best to learn as much as I can about photography and lenses. I can already tell this has the potential to be an extremely engaging and terribly expensive hobby!

One of the lenses I’m most looking forward to is the upcoming AF-S DX NIKKOR 35mm f/1.8G which Nikon has information on their website about.

ASIDE: For NoScript users, make sure to allow or temporarily allow Nikon’s website so you can view the technical specifications of their lenses. Shame you need JavaScript to do that.

From my own research scanning various sites online, it’s going to be a great, lightweight (around 200g) affordable prime lens for those of us with lower end Nikon DSLRs because it’s AF-S will allow us to autofocus with it. Sweet.

The AF NIKKOR 50mm f/1.8D, from Nikon.com.sg

I’ve been having a ton of fun with my incredibly sharp and lightweight AF NIKKOR 50mm f/1.8D taking photos of still life nature and urban cityscapes (my personal favourite photographic subjects) but it’s high speed for taking photos of moving objects is negated somewhat by it’s inability to autofocus on the D60. Okay I admit it, it’s a problem with the photographer: If the subject is far enough away I can just set the focus close to or at infinity and set the aperture up a few levels to improve the depth of field, but for a random pretty butterfly zooming past or someone trying to steal my camera bag my reflexes just aren’t fast enough to focus and photograph them before they’ve moved. At high speed though it can still take super sharp images even if I’m shaking; no need for VR on this baby! But I digress.

My very good high school friend Felix Tanjono first told me about it; I get the feeling we’ll both be getting ones and trading tips, very cool!

Anyone else have a Nikon DX camera and are planning to get this lens?

If you’re having trouble accessing my podcast at the root domain of this site RubenerdShow.com, you’re not alone, I haven’t been able to access it all afternoon.

As soon as I figure out what the problem is I’ll report it and hopefully fix it. Sorry about this. ;_;

UPDATE: I found the cause of the problem, a poorly formed index.php file. I don’t know for the life of me why the it was modified, I probably did it in a sleep walk or something!

Given I’ve been obsessively talking about NoScript over the last few weeks, I thought I’d share something fun about their logo. According to their FAQ, the NoScript logo has a name and some history!

What is that strange, evil blue being in the NoScript logo?

It is Jesse the JavaScript Worm, an extra-dimensional menace trapped by NoScript. He’s said to be the evil cousin of Trogdor, but I swear by the Flying Spaghetti Monster I did not know anything about StrongBad and his dragon when I designed NoScript logo

I love these guys, they clearly know what they’re doing, they’re Pastafarians like me and they have a sense of humour to boot!

Because I read so many people’s shared items in Google Reader I’ve been catching a lot of news stories and opinion pieces from all over the place, it’s been really interesting and lots of fun.

For many of my American friends, lately the one person who seems to be coming up a lot has been this guy called Rush Limbaugh. Sparx especially has been sharing lots of opinion pieces exposing this American radio personality who’s apparently become the de facto spokesperson for the Republican Party, one of the two biggies in American politics. The more I read about this guy, the more I’m pleased nobody I talk to here in Australia knows who he is, because people like him live off thinking they’re famous and important!

Rush has been quite a colourful character to say the least. The first photo I saw of him, he looked (to use one of my sister’s terms) "harmless", sitting in his radio studio smoking his cigar, he even has an Apple computer sitting on the desk next to him! I thought the neon tube outline of his name on the wall looked a bit cheap and tacky, but hey we all have different ideas on interior decorating, right?

Update 2019: The original video embedded here is no longer available.

Typing his name into Google and watching a few videos of him made my "harmless" opinion of him change somewhat. The scareist video was a Keith Olbermann opinion piece (a really sharp political commentator in the US) that I embeded above where he talks about Rush’s cheapshots at Michael J. Fox’s parkinsons condition which ironically backfired and proved just how little he actually knew about what he was talking about. I’ve seen low, but this is low low low. Rush is a jerk. And Michael J. Fox response was amazing.

Suffice to say, I don’t really know who this Rush person is, but if his negative reputation is as deserved as people I trust like Sparx say it is, I’m not bothered by the fact that I don’t listen to his radio show. And for the sake of stroking his ego, this will be the first and last post I ever dedicate to talking about him… I suspect I’ve already given him more than he deserves.

To my American readers, do you use the term "windbag" over there? I get the feeling it would fit pretty well! I’d also say "eejit", but I’m not sure how that’s spelt and I don’t like using words here that I have to lookup first. Hey wait, I already did.

Good on you Mike, we need more people like you.

As I’ve eluded to previously, the primary reason why I use Mozilla Firefox is for it’s security and privacy extensions as I’ve discussed previously here; in particular NoScript. My cousin Nim can’t stand it when I say killer, so I’m going to say Firefox and NoScript are a killer combination. I really mean it!

Two random points from my family’s use of NoScript I thought I’d quickly share here:

1. It dawned on me though that when I upgraded my sister’s MacBook to the latest version of Firefox that it should have been doing it for her automatically along with her plugins. She’s a NoScript user too but both her Firefox and her NoScript installations were woefully out of date. Checking the Update tab under Advanced in her preferences pane, I noticed her automatic updates were turned off. I don’t quite know why, she claims she never unchecked the boxes, but be that as it may it meant she was running older and potentially less secure versions of software for a while now.

2. NoScript is updated on a very regular basis! Because I just put my MacBook to sleep instead of turning it off I can go for days without closing Firefox, and when I reopen it, it almost always has updates available for NoScript.

Two important lessons to take away from this post: if you’re a very, very happy NoScript user make sure firstly you have automatic updates enabled by default and that if you leave Firefox open for longer periods of time to check for updates more often. Again NoScript and Firefox are a match made in heaven, but they need constant updating to work optimally and securely.

A public service announcement from the Department of Ruben Schade Redundant Language Department, a red tape subsidiary of the Bureau of Oversight and the Ministry of Hot Air.

Ahh crap

This morning I needed to download and install some software that was contained in a *.sit file. Mac users would recognise this as a StuffIt archive, an older style compression system that started falling out of favour with more recent versions of Mac OS X.

So I needed to get myself a copy of StuffIt Expander to open the file, fair enough. These were the steps I had to take:

1. Googled "StuffIt Expander", clicked the first link
2. Looked at all the confusing options on their page, found "Get Expander for Free" link in the corner and clicked.
3. Another product pitch to get me to buy the full version? Sheesh! Clicked the "Expander 2009 Download" link.
4. I need to fill out my name and email address to get the download link, unless I want the trial of the paid version? Gah!
5. Went to Mailinator to register for a temporary email address
6. Returned to the former page, filled out my name and email address.
7. Went back to Mailinator and opened the email they sent which contained the download link.
8. Was taken to a blank page with a link to click "if I’m not redirected". Clicked link.
9. Clicked download link to CNET Download.com.
10. Clicked "Download Now" link on Download.com.

That’s right, if you want to download StuffIt Expander, not the trial of the paid verison, you have to go through at least 8 steps, 10 if you don’t want them spamming you afterwards.

It was a good thing I registered for a temporary email address, because check out the email they sent me with the download link:

Thanks for your interest in Stuffit Expander.
To complete the download process, click here or paste the entire URL below into your browser.

Please note: By confirming your email address and downloading this file, you are signing up to receive periodic followup emails from Smith Micro.

Any emails we send you will contain unsubscribe information, and you may opt-out of future emails at any time.

Can you believe that? If anything this experience has taught me that I don’t want the pro version of their product, I want nothing to do with them whatsoever! Not only did they take forever to give me the link to download their product, but they subscribed me to their junk mail by clicking on their link which if I didn’t use a temporary address would be filling my inbox as we speak.

Unbelievable.

Map showing the Eyre Peninsula (blue pushpin)

AdelaideNow is reporting that a tornado and freak storms ravaged parts of the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia with as much as 37mm of rain falling in less than an hour and a half. Adelaide isn’t in it’s path but they say it could potentially reach Mount Gambier, Naracoorte, Bordertown and Lucindale.

The Bureau of Meteorology is warning "severe thunderstorms" are likely to produce very heavy rainfall and flash flooding across the south-east in the next few hours. An updated warning will be issued at 8.45pm.

For future reference for us; or if you find yourself in the path of a tornado; The State Emergency Service advises people to:

• SECURE or put away loose items around your property.
• MOVE cars under cover or away from trees.
• STAY clear of fallen power lines.
• NOT to drive, ride or walk through flood water.
• KEEP clear of creeks and storm drains.
• REMAIN indoors and away from windows, while storms are nearby.

Having lived in the tropics most of my life I’ve had my share of huge, loud and scary thunderstorms, but certainly not a tornado. Until now I wouldn’t have known what to do if I did encounter one… aside from jumping out of my skin.

Current banner on the SES website