Rubenerd

Having received payment for my latest one off project today, I celebrated by going down to Wheelock Place and splurging on a Starbucks Venti Dulce de Leche from next door and buying some computer books I've been dying to get. I'm a wild guy you see.

Happiness is a stack of new interesting computer books!

I find that I learn new skills much faster if I'm given examples and real world applications of technologies rather than just the usual "an array is a collection of objects yada yada" theory. The O'Reilly Cookbooks are absolutely fantastic for this, what irritates me is that I only just discovered them recently when I had to learn Python in a hurry for an assignment. I learned more from that one book than many hours sifting through tutorial pages and the dry slides from the uni.

As for the FreeBSD book, heck I just wanted to see how it works! Perhaps a little over my head right now, but we'll be looking at the Linux kernel at some point so this could be an interesting side study for comparison.

From the blurbs:

The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System

As in earlier Addison-Wesley books on the UNIX-based BSD operating system, Kirk McKusick and George Neville-Neil deliver here the most comprehensive, up-to-date, and authoritative technical information on the internal structure of open source FreeBSD.

Perl Cookbook

Find a Perl programmer, and you’ll find a copy of Perl Cookbook nearby. Perl Cookbook is a comprehensive collection of problems, solutions, and practical examples for anyone programming in Perl. The book contains hundreds of rigorously reviewed Perl “recipes” and thousands of examples ranging from brief one-liners to complete applications.

Ruby Cookbook

The Ruby Cookbook is the most comprehensive problem-solving guide to today’s hottest programming language. It gives you hundreds of solutions to real-world problems, with clear explanations and thousands of lines of code you can use in your own projects. From data structures and algorithms, to integration with cutting-edge technologies, the Ruby Cookbook has something for every programmer.

And now I'm off to bed. 00:07, that's pretty early for me!

Despite WordPress assigning this post as p1177, this is in fact the 757th post! Yes, it's time for another one of our really hated loved Useless Rubenerd Blog milestones!

Given the fact I'm in the 700+ range of posts, there are some posts which have the same number as famous Boeing airliners. Being a huge fan of commercial aviation, I figured I'd create some small posts about these planes. I missed the boat on the 707/720 and 727 (no, I'm sorry the 717 was the MD-95!) but I did do posts on the 737 and 747.

757 in Geneva, by Alejandro Pérez

The 757 was first introduced by Boeing in 1983 to replace the aging 727 trijet for short to medium range flights. Its narrow body design had similar cross section dimensions to the 707/720, 727 and 737 and was able to service hot and high climates. Despite production ending in 2004, 1,019 of the 757's built out of 1,050 are in active service, mostly in North America and Western Europe. The capacity bracket the 757-200 served has since been replaced by a stretched and extended range version of the 737, the 900ER. The -300 series will be replaced by the 787 Dreamliner.

A defining feature of the 757 was its common cockpit and avionics design with the 767, meaning a pilot trained to fly one could learn to fly the other in a very short amount of time. In relation to it's size, the 757 also has a very high ground clearance, especially when it's in the air (that was me trying to make a funny), perhaps after lessons learned from trying to fit wide turbofans onto a low ground clearance plane such as the 737.

From a purely engineering standpoint, and to use the very technical language that people in the Illuminati use to describe commercial aircraft, to me 757s always looked like pug dogs from the front. And the angle of the windows makes them look cross. Is that just me?

If you install the vim text editor either from packages or ports, just a reminder from the FreeBSD Security Team:

SECURITY NOTE: The VIM software has had several remote vulnerabilities discovered within VIM’s modeline support. It allowed remote attackers to execute arbitrary code as the user running VIM. All known problems have been fixed, but the FreeBSD Security Team advises that VIM users use ‘set nomodeline’ in ~/.vimrc to avoid the possibility of trojaned text files.

If you install lots of ports at once or just happened to have vim installed automatically because it was listed as a dependency, you may not have see that message. Take care.

UPDATE: In fact I’m now trialling Xfce once again for my primary desktop because it satisfies all the criteria I outlined below as well as GNOME does, while being much more light weight.

It’s funny, I’m really only this fickle when it comes to software!

With a somewhat heavy heart and conscience I moved my primary desktop from KDE to GNOME this week.

Yes, that's CC from Code Geass, the anime series Felix and I are watching!

While I think I still prefer KDE as a desktop environment, I think Gnome is more practical for what I do right now. Aside from Amarok and Ktorrent, virtually all the applications I use on a daily basis are GTK+ based, such as Gnumeric, Abiword, The Gimp, Gnucash, gEdit, Thunar (from Xfce, another nice DE), Firefox, Thunderbird… I could go on.

It is really nice to have a consistent user interface for the first time, where my applications and the desktop work and look the same. Having used GTK+ applications on KDE and Mac OS X for many, many years, it's certainly a refreshing experience.

Too many GTK+ apps running in GNOME

On the whole I also prefer the simple design methodology behind a lot of what the GNOME people are doing. Despite Linus Torvald's vocal opposition to it, I believe working hard to make interfaces simpler is an admiral goal.

I've still got KDE 3.5.9 on my Athlon XP desktop, but I guess I could say I'm a GNOME user now. For what it's worth, this is another reason why I love using free and open source software, if I don't like a particular user interface or environment, or I choose to use a another one, it is completely in my power to just slot in a different one. It's fantastic!

It's been a few days since I started using Gnome on my primary desktop, and I think I'm starting to get used to it. More on that will be in another post.

One problem I encountered after compiling gnome2 from ports on FreeBSD is that File Roller (labeled Archive Manager on the Gnome menu) has difficulty with zip and rar files. If you open one, it spits out an error message similar to this:

Could not open SpywareWriterForWindowsHehe.zip
Archive type not supported

The problem stems from File Roller not being able to find the right command line utilities. Others may work, but I've found success by installing the aptly-named unzip and unrar from ports:

# portsnap fetch update
# cd /usr/ports/archivers/unzip 
# make install clean
# cd /usr/ports/archivers/unrar
# make install clean
% echo Burchfield Nines was one of his best albums

You can install the packages if you prefer, though honestly even my Pentium MMX machine was able to make light work of them.

# pkg_add -rv unzip unrar

For what it's worth, you can just as easily use these command line tools on the… command line, to extract files from zip and rar archives:

% unzip -jv archive.zip
% unrar -ev archive.rar

Despite WordPress assigning this post the ID of 1173, this is post 755. It caught my attention because the year 755 was when Zhāng Xuān (張萱) was born, the famous Chinese painter. I remember him really well because of a print we had in our lounge room when I was growing up in Australia, and it just so happens Wikipedia has a picture of it:

Not exactly my cup of tea nowadays, but seeing it was a real nostalgia trip for me.

Does this post count as a pointless Rubenerd Blog milestone?

While I'm having a quick break from this work assignment (yes I even work on Sundays for clients, aren't I dedicated?) I thought I'd post some camera phone photos I took last Wednesday.

From my Flickr page:

A gigantic tree fell across Stevens Rd, a major dual carrigeway in Singapore. They had to close the whole side leading away from Orchard!

It really was catastrophic, there were cars jammed all down Scotts Road, detour routes were being set up as I walked past, police cars with sirens flying around. I'm not sure if anyone was injured, from where I was walking on the other side of the road I couldn't see any crushed cars or ambulances which was a relief.

Walking a little further down Stevens Road, I noticed a huge queue of parked public buses that just kept going and going in both lanes.

One of the reasons I like Singapore is that there are so many trees lining all the streets, even right in the centre of the city with huge buildings. I guess these kinds of accidents are inevitable though.

I was just browsing Wikipedia with a hot cocoa at 04:30. I happened across a picture of Wichita, a city in Kansas in the US, and in my sleep deprived state I thought I was looking at Adelaide, my home city in Australia:

Wichita, KS, USA

Adelaide, SA, Australia

Am I the only one who sees a resemblance? The skylines, the fact they're both built close to one side of a river, both their convention centres are in the middle of town with white roofs… then to top it off their state flags are blue with circular emblem thingys… it is just me isn't it.

For fun comparison:

Adelaide is the fifth most populous city in Australia with a population of 1.1 million in 2006, and is the capital and most populous city of the state of South Australia. It is a coastal city situated on the eastern side of Gulf St. Vincent.

Named in honour of Queen Adelaide, the consort of King William IV, the city was founded in 1836 as the planned capital for the only freely-settled British province in Australia. Colonel William Light designed the city in a grid layout, interspaced by wide boulevards and large public squares, and entirely surrounded by parkland.

Adelaide is known for its many festivals as well as for its wine, arts and sports. As South Australia’s seat of government and commercial centre, Adelaide is the site of many governmental and financial institutions. Most of these are concentrated in the city centre along North Terrace and King William Street.

Well they may look the same, but they sound somewhat different!

Wichita, also known as the Air Capital of the World, is the largest city in the U.S. state of Kansas, as well as a major aircraft manufacturing hub and cultural center. In July of 2006, CNN/Money and Money magazine ranked Wichita ninth on its list of the 10 best big cities to live in the United States.

The city is home to six major aircraft manufacturing companies and McConnell Air Force Base. Wichita is located in South Central Kansas on the Arkansas River, and is the county seat of Sedgwick County. It is also the home of a National Weather Service Forecast Office which serves portions of central, south-central, and southeast Kansas.

The city’s population was 344,284 at the 2000 census, and it was estimated to be 357,698 in the year 2006, making it the 50th largest in the United States.

**Update 2020:* This post originally had a Family Guy screenshot with Peter asking Joe, in his wheelchair, what his handicap was. Family Guy was supposed to be intentionally provocative and self-aware, but I admit now it was in poor taste. I can do better, and I apologise.

I was running out of space on my navigation bar for all my Web 8.0 (or whatever version the 1337 internet people have decided to use now) goodness, so I figured I'd create a separate post that I can link to at the top of the site instead.

• Twitter
• Jaiku
• Pownce
• Flickr
• Google Reader
• del.icio.us
• Whole Wheat Radio
• Last.fm
• Libre.fm
• Wikipedia
• Folding@Home
• DaemonForums.org / BSDForums.org
• Facebook

This list is a work in progress, and allows me to pass off something to help me remember things as a legitimate blog post… not that I have bad memory or anything. By the way, this list is a work in progress.