Rubenerd

My Hacker News post from earlier today was written on Friday, but I held back posting it for fear of RSS spammage. Then Saturday rolled by and I had such a migraine I didn’t get around to posting it; go figure.

To make me feel better, Clara bought me a re-release of Rodriguez’s legendary Cold Fact LP, and a delightfully bright Sailor Moon shirt. Along with feeling lucky that I have a girlfriend who knows me so well, it reminded me of that Hacker News thread in another specific way; namely whether it’s appropriate to include aspects of our personality and hobbies on technical blogs.

My answer is: of course! I love reading what other interests people have besides the initial reason I came to their site. Everyone’s lived experiences and interests are deeply unique, and it’s fun when your Venn diagrams intersect more than you expected. You like Ansible and craft beer? You’re a developer with a ham radio licence? You’re in infosec and a photographer? These are all fantastic!

More than all the other bad blogopshere advice back in the day, I vehemently disagreed with the premise that that you should limit yourself to one topic. Sure, have an overarching theme or a primary area of expertise, but don’t feel afraid to dip your toes elsewhere from time to time. We all benefit when you do.

Another post of mine appeared on Hacker News last week, this time thanks to luu. It was one I wrote back in July responding to the charge that my blog isn’t serious enough, a touchy-feely topic I didn’t expect given HN tends to appeal to hard computer science and engineering types. I was also surprised at the number of positive comments.

The biggest takeaway I took were an affirmation that not everything needs to be a hussle, or justified in the context of money. tayo42 had my favourite comment:

I really wish we didn’t put so much pressure to be professional and serious all the time. Working takes up 1/3 of my life currently and I can’t actually be my self. Another third is sleeping. So for only 1/3 of my time I can actually act like my self. I hate that there is a pressure to talk a certain, act a certain way, express my self a certain way. I think we really need more of a emphasis on being human, less “circle back” and “work streams”, more jokes, more smiling and experimenting.

KaiserPro also raised a point I hadn’t considered: being too serious could also limit the reach of your work in unexpected ways:

They couldn’t seem to grasp that if I’d have written [his sweary post in] a dry, clean style, not only would they have not read it, but they wouldn’t have understood my point. [..] Humour, irreverence and swearing are all tools to convey a meaning, point or story. Used well (I am fully willing to admit that I have not been masterful in my use) they can create a mental image far stronger than any other metaphor.

There’s also the angle that simply fewer people are writing online these days, or are confining themselves to social networks. There are so many reasons why this is sad, not least because they’re surrendering control, propping up invasive business models, and relegating their important ideas to ephemeral social posts. But just as important is the lack of personality: I miss seeing people’s personal sites in the 1990s, and how people presented their blogs in the 2000s.

Curiously, the few negative comments had to do with my site mascot Rubi, which I’ll admit didn’t surprise me. Once people on mobile found her—she only appears in the desktop theme—a few proceeded to discuss her appropriateness. One specifically called out her “hiked-up skirt” (since deleted) which amused Clara who drew her, and who often cosplays in similar getup. It was a good thing they didn’t see Rubi in her summer swimsuit and shorts for that brief month a few years ago!

I’ve always had a small anime badge somewhere on my sites since at least 2006, back when it was SOS-Dan to demonstrate my allegiance to Haruhi. Before then it was Star Trek insignia. I love stumbling on another personal site and seeing a different aspect of someone’s personality shine through. That’s what makes the web fun. If I lose a few readers from doing that, they probably weren’t the kind of people I wanted to spend mental energy on in the first place.

• The Equinix Customer Portal is much handier than futzing around in your email or using their mobile site to get data centre access.

• Ghost doesn’t have an official blog posting app for iOS, but Publisher for Ghost is as good as one for the people I host other blogs for.

• HE.NET Network Tools has ARP, Bonjour, DNS, iperf, ping, portscans, traceroute, whois, TLS, and more in a polished interface. I’d expect nothing less from the engineers behind Looking Glass.

• I never thought I’d never see NetNewsWire for iOS, but it’s great to have my favourite Mac RSS reader from back in the day on my portable telephonic device. I just need to figure out if/how I can sync it with TinyTinyRSS on my FreeBSD cloud server.

• The replacement Nikkei Asian Review application is infinitely better than the old one. Just log in with your subscriber details.

From their latest Pass It On challenge.

I could count on one hand the number of times I’ve posted about celebrity news here in sixteen years, including this post. But I saw people twittering about an American talk show host’s apology and had to see it for myself. Yahoo News and Business Insider had the details.

I fundamentally believe people are capable of redeeming themselves. Those who are sincere, act with contrition, and are compelled to right what’s wrong—ideally of their own volition—can and do become better people. Our legal systems are designed with this in mind; people make mistakes, and motives do matter. Incidently this is why I’m against the dealth penalty, and other eye-for-an-eye punishments that leave the world blind.

Being able to forgive is also powerful, and liberating. I’ll be the first to admit I struggle with it. You wilfully wrong me or the people I care about, and I’ll hold that grudge for a long time. To be clear, I fully admit this is a personality failure on my part.

Someone abusing their position of power is also nothing new; one could reasonably argue that we’re not cognitively programmed or capable of dealing with the level of notoriety and attention fame brings. I get a few dozen comments on Hacker News, and I have trouble sleeping from just a few negative ones, let alone someone who cops it from millions. I’m not excusing or justifying bad behavior, nor am I saying I can relate at all, but between the sensationalist headlines and online outrage machine, the actual truth and circumstances of an event are so often a casualty.

Now having said all that, is a phrase with five words. The reason I write about these things is because I see it play out so often, and it always follows the same predictable storybook. It doesn’t matter if it’s an open source software leader, or a talk show host. You treat your subordinates poorly, get called out for it, and eventually the pressure leads to an apology and/or resignation. Why is this always the case? Is it really such ingrained human nature? What does it say about our work environments and culture? Someone smarter than me could probably explain.

The reason why this host’s public apology wrings a little hollow comes down to her public “be kind to people” mantra. It’s not the hypocricy, so much as it is the rules for thee but not for me attitude that so many working for her had to cop. Imagine being a backstage hand hearing her say that before your own tongue lashing, all the while gritting your teeth because your family needs to eat.

I also don’t at all buy the line that “I learned that things happened here that never should have happened”. The issue was her treatment of her staff. I’ve heard and given enough apologies to know that when you coach it like this, you’re entering “I’m sorry you were offended” territory.

My mum watched a lot of her original sitcom and her talk show, and I even read her My Point… And I Do Have One book in the early 2000s. It was hilarious. But I’m exercising my own freedom to direct my attention elsewhere from now on.

Just over a year ago we said goodbye to one of the magazines that informed so much of my childhood and early career. Their coverage of the BSDs and other *nix OSs were also hugely useful, and helped get Beastie on magazine shelves in bookstores.

They’ve been rebooted by Slashdot Media, and are soliciting feedback and past writers to get involved. I already read Doc Searls’ blog daily, but would love to see his name appear in articles again.

Give us a subscription link, and I’ll damn well pay for it too!

How do you deal with running software on your desktop? I had to be careful with the phrasing: I would have said open software, but then it would sound like I’m asking about open source software, or software that works with open standards. Terminology is hard.

I’ve always treated running software the same way I do with services and daemons on servers. Each open application has to have a specific purpose for what I want to do at that point in time, and if not, it gets closed. This habit was ingrained from 1990s experience where too many open programs pushed resources to swap, and before protected memory meant one crashed program could bring down dozens! It also potentially helps with security. But I’d be lying today if I didn’t admit the real reason is cognitive overhead.

I don’t like my FreeBSD Xfce panel or macOS dock showing more than, ideally, eight running applications. It’s too much to track, and results in visual clutter which impacts my anxiety. Eight sounds like it should be plenty, but once you get a browser, PIM client, all the chat apps you’re expected to run, a couple of text editors, a terminal, office software, and a PDF viewer with your LaTeX output, you run out fast.

I’m thinking now what I can do to minimise these further. The time for open chat standards and programs like Trillian and Pidgin are sadly long gone, so I’m trialling Ferdi to consolidate them. PIM for work unfortunately needs to all be in Outlook, but Thunderbird still works for all the other stuff for personal projects. And do I really need three different browsers, especially for someone who doesn’t do frontend web dev?

Which leaves editors, superficially the simplest software in the bunch, but they’re anything but. That was some great alliteration.

I was a huge fan of the original TextMate on Mac, and still consider it the gold standard of editors. But I forced myself to make the switch to MacVim/gvim, in part so I could also use it on FreeBSD, but also becuase I knew vi anyway and felt like I could use it more broadly. Every blog post written since my move to static site generators has gone through it.

… And then an evil colleague introduced me to emacs and Org mode, and it happily reminded me enough of TextMate—and a touch of Lotus Agenda—that I use it concurrently with Vim. Software hasn’t gelled with me this quickly since nvALT which, perchance, I also still run as my text-based wiki.

At some point I should bite the bullet and move over to one editor for everything, and based on my use case it seems emacs fits the bill. I learn things the best jumping in the deep end; and might find it useful as a general text editor too. But then, I’m so fast with Vim, and nvALT’s search is still the most elegant I’ve used. Then I think life is too full of damned compromises already, and I end up sticking with three.

So there we are, I’ve narrowed down my open application list, and only half are editors! At least I’ve cut down a bunch of Electron.

Last January I wrote about numbers that don’t contain seven in them. This list also contains numbers that don’t have seven in them:

• Seven
• Capillaries

Wait, damn it.

Stargrave shared my audio kill switch post on Hacker News yesterday. In short I discussed the latency between hitting the mute button and some overly-loud audio being cut. I argued that regardless of technical considerations in defence of it, this was still poor ergonomics.

There were a lot of great discussions, the biggest of which involved analogue dials and physical buttons in general. I agree; fly-by-wire audio control we do now feels less precise, but also just isn’t as much fun. There’s a reason people are moving back to mechanical keyboards; in part we want to feel more connected with the tech we’re using.

JD557 had a point I hadn’t considered:

Since the user is complaining about the way Mac OS handles the audio buttons, I’m surprised that he doesn’t mention the problems with HDMI.

Absolutely; this is equally frustrating. I rarely use HDMI on my Macs anymore, but audio controls going dead after plugging in an HDMI display was highly frustrating. mrkwse claims this is in line with the HDMI specification; perhaps because they intended the cable to be used for televisions and amplifiers. Regardless, it’s still not great for computer ergonomics.

Several of the other comments indicated the post hadn’t been read, such as making excuses for the hardware that I already addressed in the original post. But overall, for someone dealing with anxiety and social awkwardness, the majority of it was civil and interesting. Thanks :)

This post is dedicated to @grass_desu, who I’m sure is delighted.

I have a guilty—though perhaps not unexpected—confession: Clara and I have started watching Hololive English vtubers Watson Amelia and Mori Calliope. I thought I wouldn’t be able to handle the Uncanny Valley, but it’s fun when you see it more as performace art or a live-dubbed anime put on by a team of talented writers, actors, and artists.

They’re especially great for some lighthearted banter and fun after heavier days, until they also blow your mind with something profound as well!

So much this I want to jump up and down! It doesn’t just apply to demotivation, it’s also helped a lot with anxiety.

It reminded me of Merlin Mann’s dependency discussion back in 2013. It sounds painfully obvious, but I can’t count the number of times a work, family, or personal task has seemed insurmountable before I step back, atomise it into discrete sub-tasks, and make a deliberate effort to only focus on the first one.

It never feels like it could or should when you start with that first task, but each subsequent one gets progressively easier.