Rubenerd

I talked about RSS a lot earlier this year, mostly defending it from the charge that it’s irrelevant, and from weak arguments that it’s only useful for plumbing. But there’s one aspect I missed: it used to be assumed that a site would come with it. Now you have to use third-party tools, or write your own scraper.

Twitter famously offered RSS feeds, both of the firehose and individual accounts. Now no major social network does, and sites like Instagram were launched without it at all. It’s no secret why; owners see it as a form of lock-in, and a way to hoard data to sell to advertisers. Publish RSS feeds, and people could easily switch sites and get valuable analytics for free.

I’ve already debated the corrosive effect advertising and online tracking are having on the web. But even with those aside, the above assumptions about RSS are false. Sufficiently-motivated agencies scrape sites already, and if your service is so good, why are they scared of people leaving? All this does is make the experience for users worse.

It’s simplistic, though not far off the mark, to say users of these new RSS-free sites are just product to sell to advertisers. Nobody would use them if their sites weren’t compelling or useful, so site owners need to at least pay lip service to serving their users’ needs. But the temptation is there to think you’re invincible when you get sufficiently large, and to then treat their users with contempt. Getting rid of RSS is just one of a multitude of ways that can can be expressed.

I guess all I’m saying: Wear sunscreen offer RSS feeds!

The fires burning on the US West Coast are terrifying to witness. Our San Franciscan colleagues are sending pictures that look more like the surface of Mars. Elsewhere in California, Oregon, and Washington State, it’s even worse.

Estimates put the total burnt area at 1.8 million hectares so far, which is already almost ten percent of what burned through Australia earlier this year. We used the term “unprecedented” down here a lot; it’s safe to say it applies up there as well.

The conspiracies around it are also playing out in the same, entirely predictable way. People desperate to avoid the direct, irrefutable, and obvious connection to human-induced (or exacerbated, choose your poison) climate change are blaming the fires on anyone from arsonists to protestors, to debunked claims about prescribed burning. They do it because it works, it’s politically expedient, and keeps the plebeians fighting amongst ourselves. Why waste time debating when they’ll chop off their own noses to spite their faces? Because you know who’ll be sitting pretty if stuff gets worse, and who won’t be. Funny how that never gets mentioned by the talking heads who say it’s all a con.

(My favourite theory was the fires were a “False Flag” caused by climate change activists… because clearly dumping hundreds of millions of tonnes of CO₂ into the atmosphere helps with that cause? When you’re that dull selfish and dishonest, I suppose it’s easy to project and think others must be too).

We’re beyond the point of preventing damage, we’re in mitigation mode now. What we do as a species on this planet over the next few years will determine the course of history, and will be the source of judgement in future generations. Fires, disease, cyclones, I can’t help but feel like the planet is telling us to get a flipping clue. Hopefully more do.

If you’re in the US right now, I hope you’re okay. ♡ Our summer was the worst in our history, but we weren’t also dealing with COVID at the same time. I can’t begin to imagine the fear and helplessness, especially with that impeached halfwit in charge.

It’s time for another installment of Draft Diving, in which I dive into my veritable ocean of the things to revive something I didn’t publish for some reason. The last time I did one of these was just over a year ago; go figure.

This post was written in early November 2019, and concerned an article written in Channel NewsAsia, the Singaporean news outlet. June Yong discussed plans in China for a school homework curfew:

Thinking about it worries me, as it does not appear to be focusing on the right problem. Instead of legislating the time kids should go to bed, should it ever come down to that situation, we should be asking ourselves, how did childhood get so hectic in the first place?

I can’t relate to the pressure in China, but I witnessed firsthand the soul-crushing mental exhaustion and anguish of my local Singaporean friends when I was growing up. I thought my international school burdened me with tons of homework, but they had it far worse. Not to mention all the extra-curricular classes they had to attend. As long as I studied during the week, my parents let me have free reign over my weekends because, to quote my mum, “any kid would go crazy”.

(It was that personal time where I learned everything I knew about infocomm, which landed me a job and a career. Who’d have thought?)

Ms Yong makes the case:

As guardians of our children’s well-being, we need to switch gears to avoid raising a generation of burnt out youths. Instead of aiming for achievement, we should aim for balance, agency and self-discipline. The achievement will follow.

And on homework discipline:

such discipline should also apply to other areas of life. A child needs a balanced life, which includes nutrition, work, rest, and play to be at his best.

I’d add to this giving kids space and permission to be creative. Singaporean schools have a reputation for high-achieving but rote-taught students. I remember my mum being fascinated by some doodles for planes and buildings in the margins of some of my workbooks; my local friends couldn’t believe that one of my parents wasn’t just chill with it, but even encouraged me to explore it.

Each Singaporean Prime Minister has discussed encouraging creativity in the context of entrepreneurship, but that’s something that needs to be fostered and nurtured from the start, it can’t be just another cram class.

Clara and I were getting some bizarre behavior while accessing a new FreeBSD pool over Netatalk and Samba. A subset of files with CJK names were showing up in the macOS Finder as expected, but would error out with file not found if you tried to open them.

We store a lot of files in Japanese and Korean, especially music and holiday photo directories with place names, so I’ve always been careful about using UTF-8 globally. I confirmed I had this in my /etc/login.conf:

default:\
[...]
:charset=UTF-8:\
:lang=en_US.UTF-8:

(NOTE: I’ve read this isn’t advisable because it can break ports that weren’t designed for UTF-8. I’ve never had that issue, but it’s something to keep in mind. I’d also be worried if software in 2020 still had that limitation, but that’s a topic for another post).

Then I confirmed the ZFS pool was set up for UTF-8:

# zfs get utf8only pool
==> NAME  PROPERTY  VALUE  SOURCE
==> zten  utf8only  on     -

So what was going on?

# zfs get normalization pool
==> NAME  PROPERTY       VALUE  SOURCE
==> zten  normalization  none   -

Whoops!

Normalisation is a field of information science that fills entire textbooks, but in a nutshell ZFS uses it, among other reasons, to reconcile filenames. How the filename is represented internally, and presented to the operator, can vary in unexpected ways, even if superficially they look the same.

Unfortunately, normalisation can’t be set after the filesystem is created. (Update: read below). So this weekend I dropped one of the drives from my mirror, created a new pool with normalisation to transfer data back to, then resilvered the mirror back to full redundancy:

# zpool -O normalization=formD [...]

Now previously-inaccessible files can be opened.

Update

Henrik Winther kindly emailed in to advise that normalisation is a dataset level property, so you only need to create a new dataset to set it, thereby negating the need to reduce pool redundancy in the interim. He gave an example:

# sudo zfs create -o normalization=formC gamma/test-normalization
# /sbin/zfs get normalization | grep -E 'gamma |test'
==> gamma                    normalization none  -
==> gamma/test-normalization normalization formC -

I appreciate the feedback, especially if you’re reading this post with the same issue I was having. Just use a new dataset and you’ll be fine.

In production I would certainly use this approach. At home for personal data, and where I have backups, I prefer to set normalisation at the pool level so every dataset inherits it. All Clara’s and my data have some form of CJK characters, so it makes things easier.

(Update: I didn’t mention this concerned wired headphones).

I aggressively disagree with any computer design decisions that detract from ergonomics or health, and nowhere does this continue to remain bafflingly true than audio output. Strap in, I’m about to get a bit ranty!

If we encounter an unwanted audio signal emanating from our computers, especially an uncomfortably-loud one over headphones, we should immediately be able to terminate it. No exceptions. If there is any latency whatsoever between us hitting a mute button and the audio not cutting out, the hardware or software has failed. Crypton Future Media’s Hatsune Miku wouldn’t tolerate latency with her headphones, and neither should we.

I was in a conference call last Friday where I’d adjusted the volume up to compensate for the client’s quiet microphone, only to be audibly shot in the ears by an auto-playing video on a website. There is a lot of problematic stuff to unpack there, much of which is not the fault of the audio hardware or OS. But shocked in the moment, I hit the mute button on my MacBook Pro Touchbar, and it took a solid two seconds for it to register. My ears were ringing throughout the whole call. This is unacceptable.

Well-engineered mute buttons on keyboards shouldn’t need to go to software, they should immediately send a signal to the motherboard’s DAC—ideally on a separate wire or connection—to say terminate this signal. Then it’s less of a concern if it takes the OS a few seconds to react to the change, because our ears have been spared.

The just ackchyually crowd would don their Captain Obvious capes and brightly-coloured underwear to proclaim that people could just unplug their headphones, or rip them off ones head when suddenly inundated with loud audio. Sure, and if you start getting electric shocks from your keyboard you could just use an external one, bro. Or if you get your hand caught in a mixer, just use your other hand, that’s why you have two of them. There are so many reasons why this dismissive attitude is specious, but even if it weren’t, it would still take more physical effort than a button. And if a mute button doesn’t fulfill the function for which it’s labelled and designed, what’s the point of it? But then, these people know all that, they’re just being obtuse.

We have valid privacy arguments advocating for physical Wi-Fi, camera, and microphone buttons; I’d say audio should be voiced in these discussions too. They should be heard. Sound ideas should be reverberated. Miku.

Me? Making a spelling mistake? That’s unpossible! Here’s yesterday’s post about the GoToMeeting guy:

The screen says “John Doe”, but I’m going to start referring to him Jim. Every Jim I’ve ever met has been nice.

Referring to him as Jim, or to a gym?

The information-desnse screen was a staple of so many buildings in Singapore

The information-desnse? Information-desnse-esnse-esnse you ought to know by now! These have both been corrected, for our convenience.

His is the face I’ll remember the most from our time working from home. He smiles at me at least three times a day, whenever a call is connecting. I wonder who he is? Did he have a good meeting?

I’m a weird enough person that even a stock photo of someone smiling helps me before I start talking to real people. It’s as if he’s looking at me through the glass, saying you’ve got this, Ruben! I’m sensing a theme.

The screen says “John Doe”, but I’m going to start referring to him as Jim. Every Jim I’ve ever met has been nice.

Part of the danger with online aution sites isn’t being tempted by those things you always wanted, but by things you didn’t think you wanted. Today’s item scrolled by while I was looking for a Commodore 128 serial adaptor. It looks unassuming enough:

These are the instructions supplied with the device on the auction page, tidied up for the purposes of blogging review:

1. Connect the device to the elevator.

2. Turn on the power switch at the bottom.

3. Press the green button (the red indicator will turn on), then the decoder automatically starts the decryption program. The red light will turn green after three seconds when the decryption is done. The parameters of the elevator board can be reset.

4. [Get up to mischief -ed]

It goes into further detail for troubleshooting:

• If the decryption is not successful, the red indicator automatically turns off and the device enters standby power state.

• If you plug the device into the elevator, and pressing the green button changes the indicator light to green immediately, the elevator motherboard is already unlocked.

• If the indicator turns red and green, it means the voltage is low.

I always carry a little pouch in my bag containing short charging cables, a spare USB key, a flat Cat5 Ethernet reel, a micro screwdriver set, and a tiny jar of Tiger Balm. I could easily see where having a KONE lift decoder would come in handy in such a kit, in the unlikely event of an emergency.

I kid, but I’d be half-tempted to buy this, just to see what circuitry is required to decode a lift. Should we be worried that such devices can be so trivially circumvented?

I didn’t know you could watch Bloomberg TV live for free online. The information-dense screen was a staple of so many buildings in Singapore growing up in the 1990s–00s, so it was nostalgic to see back in our little Sydney apartment.

Then I saw a 30-second long advert on how to wash your hands, and I was brought back to the present.

Leith van Onselen wrote this for Macrobusiness about Australia’s National Broadband Network:

One of the biggest shortcomings of the NBN is that the Coalition Government chose to stick with the old copper network in many areas instead of rolling out fibre optic networks.

All of us in the industry warned about this, from the start. No politician can feign ignorance without lying to taxpayers.

While this decision saved money initially [..]

Isn’t that short-sighted politics in a nutshell? Sacrifice $100 in the future for $10 today.

[..] it has severely limited the NBN’s speeds and reliability.

And upgradeability. Change the optics on either side of the cable, and you can take advantage of technological advances with minimal extra investment. We’ve known about this for decades.

This was all 1) known, and 2) warned about when Malcolm Turnbull first proposed his economically and technologically-flawed multi-technology mix. This is pure, uncut politics.

Now that everything we said has come true, can we please do it right this time?