Rubenerd

From Slashdot:

“In an effort to reduce alcohol related violence, England is rolling out mandatory fingerprinting of all pub patrons. If a pub owner refuses to comply with the new system, and fails to show ‘considerable’ reductions in alcohol-related crimes, they will lose their license. Supposedly the town that piloted this program had a 48% reduction in alcohol-related crime.”

From the article: “Offenders can be banned from one pub or all of them for a specified time – usually a period of months – by a committee of landlords and police called Pub Watch. Their offenses are recorded against their names in the fingerprint system. Bradburn noted the system had a ‘psychological effect’ on offenders.”

Come on, grow up people! The fact that the've had to go to these extremes to control you drunkards is really pretty pathetic. Argh!

united kingdom, uk, great britain, england, drinking, drunkards, alcohol, survellence

I must appologise again for the week long Rubenerd Show Fast, problems at home have been making it more difficult than I thought to release the shows. I have been very worried about my mum recently and the show hasn't been the number 1 priority over the last few days, as you can understand.

I've scheduled Tuesday the 24th of October (of this week) for Rubenerd Show 171. In the meantime if you're starved for audio entertainment you could check out the Rubenerd Show archives, or even give Crap and Stuff or any of the other fine New Time Radio programmes a look-see if you haven't had the chance too.

Thanks everyone for your patience and understanding, you all rock.

Cheers,
Ruben

rubenerd show, rubenerd, new time radio, new-time radio

February 2009 Update: Video edited from the original to point to YouTube instead. It isn’t the same one, but it was using up far too much of my bandwidth given this post was created back in 2006.

Here it is, a video of Conan O'Brien showing off his Walker Texas Ranger Clip lever!

conan o'brien, conan obrien, late night, nbc, walker texas ranger, chuck norris

Song Playing: Searchin' So Long, Chicago

Well today we were supposed to start our two night stay in Fraser's Hill up in Pahang, as a family to get away from it all, but there we were sitting there waiting for my mum to wake up at 6pm. She said today she was in her "dark room", which I can understand.

I've really been worried about the way she has taken the latest news that she'll definitely have to back on chemotherapy for the umpteenth time in 11 years. She told me she's just finding it hard to think of herself basically walking into the hospital to ask them to intentionally make her violently sick for the next half a year… again and again and again. It really is a nasty situation, and one which she certainly neither asked for nor desevred.

It does piss me off though that all the other people in year group in high school are off living their lives without cares in their little heads. Despite my best efforts to think the contrary, all my thoughts always seem to go back to her. And it's still going.

I've been spening a lot of time over the last week downstairs next to the telly with her doing work on my laptop, and it seems every show on these days falls into three catageories: guys screwing their mistresses behind their wives' backs, people dying of cancer, and people taking risks. We both roll our eyes whenever someone appears on one of these reality TV shows and say that in life you have to take risks and how thrilling it is. My mum has had risk every day for over a decade, and somehow a chef saying that they'll be putting a different kind of chocolate sauce on their eclairs and how risky it is or the skydiver who says risk is so exciting don't know what the hell they're babbling about.

Anyway on a lighter note, put the new CD-ROM drive (I didn't know they still made vanilla CD-ROM drives!) in my dad's desktop, hasn't really improved iTunes CD ripping performace. My dad's aim is to rip every CD we own onto a 250GiB hard disk and stream them through the house with iTunes music sharing. For some reason though in the last few days the performance of the CD ripping has really been suffering, and for the life of us we can't figure out why! Of course it's a Windows machine, I'm the only one in the family who has gone Apple but sarcastic jokes about Windows being rubbish aside, we don't know what's going on.

We've postponed this trip to Fraser's hill till tomorrow, let's hope she's feeling a wee bit better then.

Signing out,
Ruben

diary, log, ruben schade

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

10:00 – Spooky MacBook Pros at night, our Kuala Lumpur house, lights and fans turning on by themselves, lunchtime darkness, Deeparaya in Malaysia (religious tolerance: take that CWN!), update on my mum and compressed Ikea mattresses.

Recorded in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

If your only experience with a diesel-powered automobile is founded on a poorly maintained yuppie Volvo or Mercedes from a couple decades ago — or, even worse, absolutely anything powered by the POS diesel V8 shoved out the door by GM, long ago and unforgotten — you have a pleasant surprise coming.

When they get to your neighborhood, try one of the new generation. The diesel fuel should have arrived this weekend.

Diesel is still an oil derived fossil fuel that generates dangerous greenhouse gas emissions, and no matter how “clean” they can make it the particles spewed out from diesel engines are dangerous and carcinogenic.

I don’t see the point in exploring something that’s just a heavier version of petrol. (sorry, as an Aussie I can’t bring myself to call it “gas”). I know with all the government red tape and bureaucracy around the world this wouldn’t be possible, but imagine if instead of investing all this money into research into another dirty fuel we spent the money on… oh, I don’t know… public transport?

I’m an expat in Singapore and I never think twice about not using the buses or trains here because they’re just so darned reliable and take you anywhere. When I’m in Kuala Lumpur I need to get into my greenhouse gas machine.

diesel, diesels, petrol, gas, fossil fuels, greenhouse gases, public transport, mrt, smrt, SBS Transit

This software is wicked! It turns your PC into an animated LCARS terminal! Unfortunately it only works in MS-DOS or Windows… though come to think of it does that mean I could use it in DOSBox on my MacBook Pro? Actually for it to work as a Universal Binary on my MacBook Pro it would need to be this version of DOSBox. Hmm… I'll have to find out.

Only one thing: isn't everyone in the 24th century using the Metric system and Day/Month/Year date formatting, like the rest of the world is now? I hope you can customise the clock…

For those who don't know what LCARS is, it was the graphical/text interface for the Federation Starfleet starships in Star Trek. For those who don't know what the Federation is, it's the union of planets in the 24th century of which Earth is a part of. For those who don't know what Earth is, please seek medical attention.

star trek, starfleet, united federation of planets, sourceforge, msdos, ms-dos, ms dos, dosbox, lcars

Song Playing: From Rochdale to Ochos Rios, 10cc

Today has been a real bummer. After a few months without chemotherapy, last week the mumster went down to KLCC to have a blood test. The results are in today, her tumour markers have doubled. We're not too sure whether this will mean she'll have to start treatment again this week or whether we can hold off till next week. Whatever the case, she'll be tired and in pain again for the next several months. She'll be sick during her anniversary and Christmas. F.U.S.

She has now been on treatment on and off for 10 years. I remember back in 1996 (or it could have been 1995) when I came out of school and she was there to walk us home. She said she had been to have an examination because she was a bit suspicious about a lump on her chest. And here we are in 2006 and it's still going. Sometimes it makes me upset, sometimes it makes me so angry I want to punch a hole through the drywall.

As for "The Desk", I've had a log on my machine since 1999 but now that I have been using WordPress on the Rubenerd Show and this blog for a fair while now I think it makes more sense to post them here. I'm not sure if I'll import the existing entries… that's roughly 365 per year (give or take a day or two I missed each month) since 1999… I'm not sure that would be so wise… information overload!

Signing out,
Ruben

diary, log, ruben schade

Ruben the Perl Programmer: I resent that remark

I consider myself a more experienced Perl programmer, though I do need PHP to run some of the programs I download. Mac OS X comes bundled with PHP, but it needs to be enabled in Apache before you can run PHP programs on your websever. Dang.

From the always useful DevArticles.com:

Using the Terminal.app, Start the Terminal.app located in the “/Applications/Utilities/” directory, then change the directory to the “httpd” directory using the following command:

cd /etc/httpd

Next step is to use “root” privileges, start up the text editor named “Pico” and edit the “httpd.conf” file.

Use the following command in the Terminal.app:

sudo pico httpd.conf

Type the root password and you are ready to go.

Locate the 4 lines:

#LoadModule php4_module
#AddModule mod_php4.c
#AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
#AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps

Use your arrow keys to navigate the document and remove only the pound signs “#”. The best way to navigate is to use the DOWN arrow key and stay to the left Side of the document. To remove the pound sign, hit the right arrow to the right Of the sign and then hit the DELETE key.

Warning: Only remove the pound signs!! Keep the lines of code where they are and do not relocate them!! You have been warned!

The changed lines should look like this:

LoadModule php4_module
AddModule mod_php4.c
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

10:00 – Stuffing up episode numbers, video podcast review (Australian National Nine News, Australian nostalgia when living overseas), useful Firefox extensions for blocking crap (FireFTP, Adblock, FlashBlock), and Ruben doing a news voice.

Recorded in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5. Attribution: Ruben Schade.