Rubenerd

We're into day two (see day one) of individually uploading each Rubenerd Show audio file, its tags, its description, its licence and its cover art to the Internet Archive in anticipation of moving web servers.

Progress was somewhat slower than yesterday because I realised the images I uploaded for all the episodes yesterday weren't being referenced properly in their respective blog posts, which entailed a massive reversal and fixing all the work I had already done! To look on the bright side, I was glad I discovered this problem BEFORE I uploaded several hundred shows!

Below are all the shows I uploaded today. This concludes all the shows I recorded since I moved back from Kuala Lumpur in 2007.

23x episodes

• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow233
• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow232
• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow231
• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow230

22x episodes

• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow229
• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow228
• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow227
• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow226
• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow225
• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow224
• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow223
• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow222 — having some problems
• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow221

I've been talking for a long time about moving my site completely over to Segment Publishing and the Rubenerd Show audio files over to the Internet Archives. I've been putting the latter off though because I knew I would be manually repeating the following procedure… OVER 260 TIMES.

1. Uploading each audio file and associated cover art file individually
2. Copying and pasting the descriptions from the Rubenerd Show site
3. Transcribing the date created (versus date uploaded)
4. Painstakingly translating the descriptions into tags
5. Tag each file with the appropriate Creative Commons licence
6. Go back to the show’s RubenerdShow.com post
7. Modify each MP3 URL to point to the new Archive.org address
8. Modify each enclosure podcast MP3 url to point to the new Archive.org address
9. Add the tags I created before to my own site

This weekend I finally slammed my fist down on the table and started taking action! Uploading over 260 episodes of the Rubenerd Show — individually — will take forever and will probably result in me going completely insane, but I'm charging ahead while I have a few spare days.

After doing a couple I realised the amount of work this would entail and I started having doubts, but now I figure I've gone this far now so there's no turning back! The question then becomes… what have I got myself into?!

Below is my progress so far, and I've only scratched the surface. Something tells me I won't be leaving the apartment for a week or so given it's taken me a day to upload 29 (to be fair I was doing other things too). Actually at that rate I'll be done in just over a week, exactly 8 days to be precise. Perhaps if I skip eating and taking one shower a day instead of three or four I might be able to reduce that down to 5 or 6 days.

26x episodes

• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow262
• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow261
• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow260

25x episodes

• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow259
• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow258
• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow257
• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow256
• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow255
• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow254
• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow253
• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow252
• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow251
• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow250

24x episodes

• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow249
• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow248
• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow247
• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow246
• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow245
• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow244
• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow243
• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow242
• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow241
• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow240

23x episodes

• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow239
• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow238
• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow237
• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow236
• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow235
• http://www.archive.org/details/RubenerdShow234

Now if you'd excuse me, I'm off to put a few dozen litres of heavy duty eye drops in!

Am I crazy? Sheesh!

Singapore 2009 New Year Fireworks by Marco Weduwer.

I was about ready to write off 2009 already after so many problems I had been having, but within 24 hours the year seems to have redeemed itself. Perhaps I'll be able to live through this year after all!

Starting from the 1st of January, the following internet problems had sprouted, but since Friday they've all been fixed. Phew.

1. Code injection attack (fixed)
2. Twitter account password failure (fixed)
3. Ourmedia account failure (no reply, moved to Internet Archive, fixed)
4. Grilled cheese sandwich maker firing out waffles instead (punched, fixed)
5. Couldn’t find Haskell book (finally found at Borders)
6. University blog database corrupted from old plugin (cleaned, fixed)

It's official ladies and gents, the Rubenerd Show and Rubenerd Blog are no longer being blocked by The Cathay wireless system and Starhub Internet in Singapore for hosting malware. I appealed the filtering and stated that my shared webserver was the victim of a very brief internal lax group permission enforcement code injection attack and that I had swiftly cleaned my sites of the spam malware links.

I received a message back this evening stating that my appeal had been successful and I'm now typing this blog post without using a proxy server! Hallelujah! I suspect my traffic from Singapore may start crawling back to the highs it had in December last year again.

This by no means has deterred me from moving to a new web host though; I'm already in the process of moving archived Rubenerd Show files over to the Internet Archive (you can track my progress here) and am in the process of upgrading my Segment Publishing account so I can host this blog, my podcast, my pontifications and my anime blog on there instead of just my lightly used university blog whatsit. It's going to be a massive, all in one site with everything, I'm looking forward to it!

But being serious again for a second though, this whole experience has taught me a valuable lesson: the ramifications of hosting your media on a budget web host that doesn't enforce sufficient internal security (even more important than external security) is not worth any financial savings you may glean, no matter how significant. Thousands of gigabytes of capacity and transfer per month for less than $10 may sound like a better deal than a few gigabytes of capacity and transfer a month for a similar price, but as they always say: "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.".

If you're interested in these exploits, a quick search for "Servage Hacked" on Google or Yahoo will tell you all about it and give you an idea of the extent of the damage and fallout from their lax approach to security. Scary stuff.

In any event, I'm off to brew myself a cup of green tea in celebration :)

Despite being a heavy Wikipedia user, it's been a long time since I checked out the FreeBSD article (yes dad there's a Deutsch version too!)

Never being one to pass up the opportunity to advocate my favourite operating system, I thought I'd pass on a select few passages:

FreeBSD has been characterized as “the unknown giant among free operating systems.”

You can definitely say that again!

FreeBSD has been characterized as “the unknown giant among free operating systems.”

Oh har har.

FreeBSD is generally regarded as reliable and robust. Among all operating systems which can accurately report uptime remotely, FreeBSD is the free operating system listed most often in Netcraft’s list of the 50 web servers with the longest uptime.

I'm not one of those people who determins the value of the systems by their uptime, but even I admit that's pretty good :).

As for it's similartieis with Linux and other Unix-like systems:

[FreeBSD] is not a clone of UNIX, but works like UNIX, with UNIX-compliant internals and system APIs.

FreeBSD is developed as a complete operating system. The kernel, device drivers and all of the userland utilities, such as the shell, are held in the same source code revision tracking tree, whereas with Linux distributions, the kernel, userland utilities and applications are developed separately, then packaged together in various ways by others.

Most software that runs on Linux can run on FreeBSD without the need for any compatibility layer. FreeBSD nonetheless also provides binary compatibility with several other Unix-like operating systems, including Linux. […] No noticeable performance penalty over native FreeBSD programs has been noted when running Linux binaries, and, in some cases, these may even perform more smoothly than on Linux.

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

21:01 – Having delusions of effectiveness; Burnt tongues; differences between robusta and arabica coffee; lack of FireWire ports on the new MacBook; instant coffee crap; the teachers pet phenomena; high school library studying adventures in 2004; Wordpress mistaking m3u for mp3 in enclosures; too many darned files; FireWire 800 versus FireWire 400 versus USB 2.0; review of the Western Digital My Passport Studio FireWire external notebook drive and a heavy bag of bubble wrap!

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

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

21:15 – Do more people know where Singapore is now? Sleeping with blinking lights; Asia changing every five minutes; gutting the Bishan MRT station; the Singapore Heartland; changing skylines; apartment buildings springing up from nowhere; the feared "en bloc sale" phenomena; the Adelaide Glenelg Tramline; the Sydney Cross City Tunnel; using the Internet Archive for Rubenerd Shows; rating shows with stars; Liberal and Labor guys; an extended rant on building roads instead of public transport; and don't blame me I voted for The Greens!

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

Here I was thinking I could beat Atuuschaaw and post about this story here and in my Google Reader shared items page before him, but he beat me to it. Again. Whatever he's on I'd like to know what it is, where he gets it, how much it costs and what the side effects are. Actually I don't care about that last one.

As Barack Obama's inauguration (wow I spelt that correctly the first time!) draws closer and the world waits with baited breath to see what happens, he's already preparing with his Change.gov website and today he officially had his portrait taken. It's the first time a US president has had a digital photograph taken, very cool!

I know you can't judge a book by it's cover (a lousy analogy, what are blurbs for then?!) and I don't know what it is about the photo, but he looks far less cocky and much more trustworthy than that other guy. I've already forgotten his name, what is it? Greg?

For those of you who subscribe to my blog but not nessisarily my podcast, there's finally a fresh new Rubenerd Show available for your listening pleasure, Episode 260! You can subscribe to the RSS Feed if you like what you hear.

I gave up waiting for Ourmedia to get back to me after I emailed them 7 times with not even a peep back. We had some good times guys, but if you're going to repeatedly ignore me I don't have a choice :-(.

These Ourmedia problems may have been a blessing is disguise though for I rediscovered the joy of dealing with the Internet Archive. Not only can I upload my audio to their servers and add metadata, but they also allow other files to be uploaded into the same media container. What this means is I can upload the cover art graphics I create for each episode and they appear alongside the description, very nice.

ASIDE: Conveniently because Ourmedia used the Internet Archive as a backend for their file storage, if you do a search for Ruben Schade you can see all my Ourmedia material anyway!

One thing I need to learn how to do though is figure out if it's possible to have my material listed in the Audio Podcasts collection instead of Open Source Audio. It's not that I don't like being listed in Open Source Audio, far from it: in fact I love having my material being described as such. I think Audio Podcast is more appropriate though and might get me slightly better exposure.

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

21:03 – The issue that everyone is thinking about: motorised street sweepers. Also discussing Twitter password adventures; internet obsessions when asleep; transit stops in Bali; code injection attacks; file permissions giving permission; domain adventures; the Googles refusing indexing; Ourmedia; the Internet Archive; Harvie Krumpet's backyard (not to be confused with Burke's backyard; Starbucks Christmas blend; NesCafe; the ill fated Viennese Coffee House; the Boatdeck Cafe; throwing bottles at people's faces and midlife crisis coffee roasting machines!

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