Rubenerd

Graphic by mrnorify on Flickr

Beautiful picture, might be my desktop background for a while. The question is whether or not I have the guts to have it as my desktop background on my laptop which will be seen in public.

It's weird in a way that I'm more than happy telling people online I'm an atheist, but it doesn't get out much in the real world. I don't quite know what I'm afraid of, but I'm afraid. I guess that's what I get for sticking to the only "religion" that people are apparently free to criticise and lambaste.

Funny how certain vocal folks are so hung up about not offending people's faiths under any circumstances, but those same people are more than happy to incessantly bash atheists. I reckon that qualifies as hypocrisy… though to be fair I think we do bring it upon ourselves. People tend to get extremely defensive when their most cherished beliefs are questioned. Then again, if they're so confident they're right, why would they exhibit actions and words that in any other realm of discourse would imply uncertainty? Are they simply afraid of our questions because there's a part of themselves that knows it's not true, but they don't want to admit it? Are they fearful of the consequences?

As a human race, we sure have a long way to go.

You can pass multiple images to the Preview app, very nice!

The more I learn and love FreeBSD the more I've been using the Terminal application on my Macs, to the point now where I'm using it more than any other application except perhaps a web browser: for file file compression and management the command line is so much quicker and simpler. As a result I've been trying to modify my workflow to allow me to work inside the Terminal even more, and I thought I'd share some tips I've picked up here.

One such example is viewing images and other media from the Terminal. Just as you probably use the bundled Preview.app to do this when you're in the Finder or from the OPENSTEP days, you can also call it from the Terminal to do the same thing. For example, to load a picture called Geass.jpg:

% /Applications/Preview.app/Contents/MacOS/Preview Geass.jpg

And voila, Preview opens showing you the image you told it to load… from the Terminal! You can pass multiple images seperated with spaces, you can even mix in a few PDFs into your list. The scripting potential is just making me quiver with excitement! Okay maybe not, but still.

It's now 2009, and I thought I'd celebrate here in my own style. Above is a Wordle generated from all the most commonly used words from the Rubenerd Blog for 2008. It seems 2008 was a year for Google, the MacBook, Adelaide, FreeBSD, OSs and Mac. Lesser used but also important words were Obama, Internet, Australia, Twitter and FireWire.

It's hard to believe that it's already 2009, it feels as though 2009 only just begun itself. Wait, did I just say 2009 just begun? That's funny, because it did in fact only arrive yesterday. Wait, that isn't funny, it's true.

Then again don't they always say that fact is stranger than fiction? This raises a series of interesting questions. If fact is stranger than fiction, does that mean truth is therefore stranger than fiction? Does this mean what's true is more interesting than what has been fabricated? I think I may be onto something here!

Happy new year everybody, here's hoping 2009 is better than 2008. Given the bar was set so low, I doubt this will be a problem.

As part of a Christmas present for my dad I've been ripping all his CDs for him… an adventure for another post! Anyway I've become so desensitised to CD cover art because I've been opening hundreds of their cases, taking the precious round discs out and throwing them into the drives of this machine with obsessive fervour.

One CD caught my attention though: on the obverse side of that little stapled CD book that you see when you open the case up, I read this passage by Igor Tamerlan for his "Bali Ethnicity" album released in 1996. On Last.fm I'm one of only seven people who has listened to his music. Amazing how a service like this can connect people from around the world who may have been to the same little music shop as my family had been to at one point. It really gives me goosebumps just thinking about it!

I'm not a religious guy, but even I thought this was a beautiful thing to read, and especially holds true at this time of year.

This album is inspired by the assumption
that "small is beautiful".
It may concern anything
that life features.
A seed is beautiful
for it will grow into a plant.
A child is beautiful
for he holds a [man’s] hopes.
Bali is beautiful for it naturally
reflects a world with peace, harmony and faith.

Entering the twenty [first] century,
I [first] would like to say "alhamdulillah"
then to thank my wife and everyone
who directly supported me
to make Bali Ethnicity
become a "small reality".
May God bless you
and give you soul certainty

Igor Tamerlan D. W.

Taken outside my bedroom window here in Singapore before I ventured out for a coffee this evening.

Good evening ladies, gentleman and everyone else. It is a positively gorgeous warm evening outside here in Singapore; it has been overcast all day so the temperature is a pleasant 25 instead of being much warmer, plus I love overcast days anyway. I never really knew why I did prefer them, perhaps growing up in the tropics made me appreciate the lower glare and temperatures clouds bring.

I'm going to make more than a few people scoff by saying this, but I'm drinking a Toffee Nut Latte at the Starbucks down in the Orchard Parade Hotel, just across the street from Forum for those who don't know. Aka the building with the sun logo and the giant Toys R Us or however you spell that. Singaporean shops tend to leave their Christmas decorations and whatnot up quite late, sometimes even into the new year. Chinese New Year of course is the biggest event of the year here.

ASIDE: I’ve always wondered why companies targeting kids always have to spell their name incorrectly on purpose in a vein attempt to look juvenile or young. I’ve also always wondered what kind of effect these brands have on the abilities of kids to spell properly if every box they get a toy in has words spelled incorrectly.

This whole Christmas season knocked more wind out of my sails than I thought it would given my beautiful late mum's passing around the same time. It's a cruel coincidence that we associate what is normally a happy family time of year with my mum's short life, though I guess in the grand scheme of things it wouldn't make much difference when she left us.

Onto happier topics though, I did get three amazing Christmas presents from my dad this year which just like a little kid I can't wait to talk about here and on the Rubenerd Show. Given the above reason I've found it really difficult to maintain the jovial attitude I wait to have before I write blog posts recently, but I'm hoping that topic (aka presents!) will be a great ice breaker.

For my Malaysian friends, I'll be flying to KL (Kuala Lumpur for those of you not from here!) on Thursday of this week so if you want to meet up for a coffee and chat I'd love to catch up. KL is so ridiculously close to Singapore I regret not going there more!

Anyway it's almost midnight and the Starbucks staff have started shuffling chairs around, my cue to go perhaps?

Enjoy the rest of your 2008 folks :)

Sent from my iPhone

Me pretending to be a Christmas thinker :)

Directly referencing your interpreter? Crazy…

I haven't written any geeky programming technical posts for a long time. Christmas Eve seems like just as good a time as any. Funny how Perl programming specifically always reminds me of Christmas because I got my first proper job after high school in 2004 writing Perl/MySQL code around Christmas time so I could buy people presents. Happiest time of my life then because I had purpose, direction and optimism.

This morning I'm talking about using env in the shebang line of scripting language source files (FreeBSD man reference). Quite frankly I'm surprised that as of 2008 the majoraty of files I download and look through still reference hard links to the interpreters such as the examples below:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
#!/usr/local/bin/ruby

The problem with hard/specific referencing is that you can't assume your system will have a filesystem configured in the same way as another. While us users of Unix-like systems are fortunate that our said systems have so much in common, there are still enough subtle differences between Unix-like OSs and even distributions of the same OS to cause problems.

For example, most GNU/Linux systems place all non system critical files in the /usr/bin directory. As a FreeBSD user I shivver in terror at the mere thought of this; on the BSDs we're even more specific and seperate non system critical files that come as part of the core system in /usr/bin, and files we later install ourselves in /usr/local/bin or /usr/local/pkg depending on our package manager. Much stricter, cleaner and easier to maintain… but that's for another post.

The solution to this is to call our scripting language using env which checks your system for the desired interpreter and executes. This means Linux users can share with BSD users can share with Mac OS X users etc without worrying about how said systems are configured. You can even pass regular options, very nice.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby -w

Using env to reference basic sh shell scripts would be overkill, but for languages such as bash, Ruby, Python, Perl etc it just makes sense. Sure you could just assume all your clients and servers will be GNU/Linux folk, and perhaps you'd be right… for now. I'm all for future proofing.

NOTE: While I blanketly licence all my original work here under Creative Commons Attributon Share-Alike, the Schade and Ross families reserve full copyright for the above files. Please do not reproduce without permission (barring fair use).

Today marks the one year anniversary that my mum finally stopped living in pain. I'm sorry I couldn't come up with anything less corny than that. It's sobering in a way, it may sound really weird but I took some comfort (not sure if that's the right word) in knowing I had talked to her less than a year before. The "acceptance" phase of grief or whatever cliche the psychiatric community has for it now has been out of sight for much longer than I thought.

I used to think it was a Hollywood storyline stereotype that people expected to see loved ones again walking around the corner or hearing their voice as if they had just been on a long holiday. It ain't no stereotype! When I did my first study stint in Australia I didn't see her for over a year so this isn't even the longest we've been apart yet. I do expect to see her sitting up in bed during the day listening to her book tapes while reading Aussie newspapers online and drinking tea as I walk past her bedroom.

I envy those who think they'll be going to the heaven(s) of their faith(s) and god(s) when they die and see their loved ones. As an Atheist I pretty much know this is all twisted mythology with no basis in reality, but realising this sure doesn't make it any easier. In another way though I think it would cheapen the memories you had of someone if you genuinely thought you'd see them again in a heaven or similar place. We had a great relationship above that of a typical Western mum-son with lots of sillyness and fun even during the worst of her treatment, and memories of those will be with me until that bookshelf I built myself with the bowling ball on top hits me on the head.

Anyway what I know for certain is that my beautiful late mum hated people who dwelled only on bad things even if I think she was guilty of doing it herself more often than not herself. I think I just felt her whacking my head! So to mark this otherwise painfully sad occasion, I thought I'd recall a silly thing that happened while we were walking around last year.

We had just left the oncology ward one afternoon and she'd just had a relatively benign chemo shot. Using the word benign to describe chemo seems ridiculous, but compared to some of the other ones she had, it's apt! Anyway given it took a few hours for the side effects to set in, we'd use those precious few hours to do some serious retail therapy as she called it. In Singapore most of the shopping centres in the Orchard area are connected by a series of underpasses with escalators; that afternoon we were in Shaw House on our way to Wheelock Place across the street.

I had remembered that there were two entrances to the underpass on the side we were on, but she informed me that only one was accessible and retorted that she "knows her way around Singapore shopping centres!" In mid sentence she proceeded to board an escalator… that was going the wrong way! I caught her and we both roared with laughter, much to the confusion of the people around us!

In another incident we were in a hotel in the Ubud hills of Bali during one of her chemo breaks. We had ordered a gigantic plate of fried rice and vegetables which once placed on the table she proceeded to hit with her elbow, sending the plate and it's entire contents sailing through their air and showering down all over herself, the chair and several thousand square metres of floor! She looked up with a sheepish expression and said "hehe… uh… errr… shit?" I guess you had to be there, but it was one of the funniest things I had ever seen then and since :).

That's not to say all my memories of her involve silly slapstick comedy incidents! She was such a spontaneous person, if there was ever a photo of an animal pulling a silly facial expression in a book, magazine or even in a gigantic shop display with people rushing around us, she'd insist on either my sister and I stopping what we were doing and taking a photo of her emulating said facial expression! I have gigabytes of photos of my cheeky mum grinning next to pictures of giraffes, putting on gruff faces next to bull dogs… the list goes on!

Then there were the silly names we had for each other. For some reason I started calling her "The Mumster", and at some point she started calling me "Ruuuuuuuuben" while flailing her arms and fingers pretending to be a vampire, to which I'd reply "Deeeeeeeeeeebra"! And she hated being called "Deb", so of course I'd call her that constantly too. Sometimes even "Deeeeeeeeeeeeeeb" Greetings in the morning would take a long time!

What I still love the most though are my memories of her sitting up in bed when she was particularly weak as she typed on her laptop, while I sat at a makeshift table across the room on mine… both of us singing along loudly to Dean Martin :). Or when she'd have enough energy and we'd walk down the street to the Starbucks in Paragon and usurp unsuspecting people from the comfy lounge chairs because she had a walking stick :D. We'd sit there and talk about the most obscure topics; she'd talk about corruption in the cosmetics industry (she KNEW her stuff!) and I'd talk about my then-new obsession with the Perl scripting language, and neither of us would care that we didn't have any idea what the other was talking about! She'd ask me if I had worked up the guts each week to ask the cute Korean girl in my school year group out, and we'd both laugh every time because we already knew the answer! I got more than my fair share of jovial head whackings with her extravagant clear spiral cane!

I have not done her justice in this post, but I hope at least I've shared some sillyness. After all as she always said, if we don't have a sense of humour even about the sad and negative, we just turn into hardened cynics that nobody likes to be around… or at least words to that affect. It's an incredibly corny thing to say, but I reckon had the world been full of Debra Schade's, we'd all be much better off. Not to mention cosmetics companies wouldn't be able to come up with bullshit bogus names for inert chemicals in their products that have no effects whatsoever and then charge people extra because they do so, and have the word "Paris" in their name. She was onto them. She was onto them good!!!

She always complained that you couldn't get designer chemotharpy drips. To the doctors! And she was always asking to see their wine list in the oncology ward so she could order a huge Champaign and drink it while killing me at cards. Even with the world swimming around her she was still able to beat me at Yiftico. Every single time! I wish I could say I was letting her win, but no such luck! She always got the red aces, every time! And she didn't have any tells at all! What a crock!

Now if you'd excuse me, it's probably time for me to leave. Or buy another drink so I can sit here for longer.. I've been sitting in this same comfy chair at that same Starbucks I talked about before for over an hour now. It's funny how some things change, but some habits don't. She hated the smell of Earl Grey tea, perhaps it's time to order one :).

Love you mumster.

It seems that my latest post about Google Reader irked more than a few people. It wasn't that they didn't agree that the new interface was a downgrade; more that it irritated them and caused them much mental pain to see my Google Reader page with over 1000+ unread items shown.

“OMG – you’re killing me! Press the “Mark all as read” button already ;-)”
~ Todd

I'm here to apologise for such metal anguish and to assure you all I'll never let you see anything like that again.

It is an interesting experiment though to see how people who use the same application can use it so differently. I tend to use Google Reader a lot on my iPhone so I'm used to skimming headings and only reading what's interesting. I also pay little to no attention whatsoever to the "Unread" post count. I figure I don't read every article in a newspaper or magazine, so why should I be expected to read every blog post? Bah humbug!

But back to using headings (the 1337 way) instead of the expanded mode (the un1337 way). Back when Jim Kloss used to use Google Reader he commented on this:

“Weird to me that y’all (well Ruben and Sparx for sure, not sure about others) use LIST mode and not EXPANDED or whatever they call it, where you get the whole entry. I use the expanded (save myself that extra click and decision “Is there something good under this headline?”) and just scroll past fast and let Reader mark them as read as I scroll by. (Admittedly, that code is broken somewhat lately if you fly by too fast.)

I’m going to try it your way just to see. But I’m afraid headlines aren’t any indication whatsoever to what’s underneath … (or maybe I just don’t understand how it works yet)”

Perhaps I'm just a shallow person, but I figure if the heading is boring and uninspired then it's a pretty good indication that the article will be too. Or if the heading is boring I check to see who it was written by; often I'll forgive people I'm interested in for not being creative with their headings.

Though I've just thought of a way I can exploit this… stay tuned!

My Ourmedia links page kinda works, but my linked profile page doesn't even exist :(

One of the things I'm doing in the process of moving off my current web host which has gone down the gurgler is reorganising my media files, specifically those for the Rubenerd Show. Turning out to be much more work than I thought though, as I discussed in the previous post!

The Rubenerd Show is a prime candidate to be hosted on the Internet Archive linked Ourmedia website becuase I allow Creative Commons licencing and remixing of my work, but unfortunately I'm having trouble accessing my account again… but not all of it.

For example, if you browse the home page for my profile at http://ourmedia.org/user/38566 you're presented with a series of search boxes as if my account doesn't exist. Despite this you can still view my links page and my local blog posts everything is peachy. Clicking on any of the media files or any of the links to my profile page renders the same 404 page with search boxes. Bummer.

I've emailed Ourmedia technical support, but unlike in the past where I got a really friendly answer within a few hours it seems this time I have no such luck. I suspect they're taking Christmas off, in which case I'll get off their case for now :).