Rubenerd

The Western press predictably make a big deal out of the obscure and perverted when talking about Japanese vending machines, but standard drink fare apparatuses—apparatii?—are indispensable. Sorry, couldn’t resist. They really are ubiquitous, and usually have a thoughtfully places recycling bin along side them. A disproportionate number of Clara’s and my favourite Japanese holiday memories include them somehow, which I wouldn’t have expected. I should write a proper post about that.

I was going through a backup folder from 2014 and saw this key visual from Wake Up, Girls!, an anime series from the time. The vending machine behind Okamoto Miyu looks like it’s stocked with cans of a beverage nature, but the light box ad that’s a staple of these machines is advertising some ice cream confectionery product.

I want to go back to Ōsaka and have our cute boy coffee and tea. One day I hope.

Update 2021: I’ve taken down fewer than twenty posts out of more than seven thousand in this blog’s history, and posts about this guy are some of them. MBMBaM’s tweet put it best explaining why, though I also have personal reasons. Thanks for understanding.

Jonathan K. emailed me to say a sales platform had crawled my humble blog here, with delightfully incorrect results! Let’s take a look at each section, aided with the use of a gameshow buzzer to identify incorrect answers.

Recent technology changes in rubenerd.com: Added Instagram (bzzt!), Added jQuery (bzzt!), added Instagram Links

I’ve linked to Instagram, but not only do I not use jQuery or embedded Instagram here, it never has, and certainly not recently. Not a great showing out of the gate, but let’s see how they go in the talent portion.

ECommerce: Pound Sterling (bzzt!), United States Dollar (bzzt!), Visa (bzzt!)

I don’t sell anything on my site. Better still, they judge this based on, and I quote: “using the $ symbol on their website - meaning it may accept payment in this currency used in Israel.” I… wha?

Mobile: Apple Mobile Tags, Meta Viewport

A stronger showing here. For those playing at home, we’re at 37.5%.

(Others): jQuery (bzzt!) Bitcoin Acceptance (bzzt!)

Hey, at least they didn’t say I use Coinhive. The rest dealt with RSS, Hugo, and metadata detection which was all correct, which grants them a slight passing grade overall. Which is an item of clothing.

It’s August already? How is that even reasonably possible.

I was going through my RSS feeds this morning and, unfortunately, clearing out ones that haven’t been updated in a while. It’s also given me a chance to get a bit nostalgic. Case in point, I was reminded of an anime blogger I used to follow who also had a side project where he discussed philosophy from a religious perspective. I didn’t agree with much of what he said, but I thought his Biblical defence of homosexuality and other progressive causes were valuable for reaching people I probably couldn’t.

Back in 2018 Jason attempted to reconcile his thoughts on science. The entire post is worth reading, but I think he fell into a common caricature of what science is. I heard you liked mixed metaphors.

Now here’s the thing – science is not obviously fundamental. It rests on some bedrock foundational assumptions that we’re not in the habit of turning over every now and then.

Science cops this from both sides. Either its perceived fluidity and continual improvement are a challenge to those who crave certainty in the universe, or it’s perceived as closed-minded and unwilling to change. Both logically can’t be true.

I would argue that science is fundamental. Unlike other avenues of inquiry, science is the only one for which the corpus of observations it can’t explain only trends downwards. When people invoke thoughts that science has usurped, such as how the tides work, or the efficacy of masks at reducing aerosol spread, it’s a sign of ignorance. Galileo’s torture and execution having discovered heliocentrism serves as another cautionary tale.

songs, poetry, festivity, ritual and Worship. It should be no wonder that the world has been religious. For better or worse, we seem to have come with these romances built in, and we would be unwise to dismiss them on the rash assumption that science has supplanted them.

Leonardo da Vinci would like to have a word, sir! Science doesn’t supplant art, it expands and enables it. We’re communicating using language over an electronic medium that couldn’t have happened before. Science has allowed for entire new avenues to explore the human condition in the exact ways Jason describes.

think it must be acknowledged that much of it came first from feeling – which is of course a dangerous word in science.

Nothing could be further from the truth. What motivates scientists to build telescopes, or Large Hadron Colliders, or DNA sequencers? It comes from a deep-seated need and yearning to understand how the universe works, and in doing so, learning something about ourselves and improving our lives, whether it be through medicine or art. That’s why science is both honest and beautiful.

I’ve barely scratched the surface here. My friend Sashin is one of the most intelligent and articulate people I’ve ever met, and he dedicates his entire blog to such topics which I encourage everyone to check out. His quote from English physicist and shameless crush Brian Cox seems especially apt:

The story of the universe is our story.

I was running iperf between two FreeBSD VMs on OrionVM for some bandwidth benchmarking, like a gentleman. I did this on the server and client:

server# iperf3 -s
client# iperf3 -c $SERVER_IP

But I got this:

iperf3: error - unable to connect to server: Permission denied

Permission denied? Since when did iperf include authentication? I couldn’t find a single other example of this anywhere. What the flipping dolphin was going on?

Then I remembered the afternoon coffee didn’t kick in.

# service ipfw stop

Yup, the firewall was blocking it. Despite what the error suggests, it had nothing to do with iperf. A better message would have been service blocked, but I’m just happy it works now, and nobody ever need know I did something so embarrassing.

(Note that you’ll want to temporarily open a port, rather than taking your whole firewall down. I just did that as a sanity check. But you knew that already, because you’re a responsible system administrator).

Earlier this week I responded to criticism that my blog isn’t serious enough. It could be boiled down to two points: this has always been a record of my interests and hobbies above all else, and lighthearted topics are a necessary distraction and a bit of fun.

This generated a dozen more follow-up comments, most in support which I appreciate. A few still disagreed, which is also fine. A personal site will necessarily have my specific voice, and the reality is not all of us get along. I harbour no resentment or hard feelings, we’re just different people.

Well, almost. The gentleman who provided lurid details of my site mascot’s skirt didn’t appreciate his lurid details being characterised as lurid, for which I unreservedly apologise for correctly identifying. For review purposes, here’s some official promotional art from Kyoto Animation’s Suzumiya Haruhi franchise, with the titular character sporting the uniform that inspired Clara when drawing Rubi. Given this gentleman’s Twitter profile says he’s all for “facts over leftie feelings”, these facts should be fine.

I cut this paragraph from the final post because it was already too verbose even by my standards—some of you subscribed to the RSS feed may have already cached this—but I think it fits well here:

The good news is there’s never been a lower barrier to entry to start your own blog if you don’t like my tone or topics. Living well is the best revenge, so if you’ve found anything I post here pointless or inappropriate, you’re free to start your own to show us how it’s done. With no cynicism or sarcasm, I’d actively encourage you to do so! The only way we’ll get the free and open web back is to make it.

And as always, Om Malik put it beautifully:

We are getting buried under freeze-dried news reports and hot takes that make supermarket baloney feel like a prime cut. Everything feels like a faded facsimile of everything else. It is the internet equivalent of the same strip mall mediocrity.

So that is why I say. Be real. Write like a person. That is how your words will be unique because only you can be you.

A week ago I posted this in response to a Good Mythical Morning video discussing the arrangement of vanilla and chocolate flavours:

Vanilla is so obviously the greatest ice cream flavour it’s an insult to our collective intelligence having me point it out.

Raf weighs in with his preferences:

plain ice cream (no, not vanilla-flavoured) - plain, as in, just “milk + cream + sugar + waffle cone” - from around an area in central Poland, where I was born . This is both nostalgia, as I remember having those as a young child some 40 years ago, as well as very much a current event - I get a bag of these every time I visit Poland. Very pleasant “creamy” taste - I can easily consume a handful in one sitting - I’m greedy, what can I say ;^) When frozen, you can easily use them as a projectile weapon hence, in the local vernacular, they are known as “stone” or “potatoes”. I can’t really describe them - you’ll just have to take my word for it :^D

Interestingly my German dad also remembers having something similar to this, and agrees with Raf’s assessment of their tastiness. I have yet to try or throw them at people, but it’s going on the list now.

Sorrento lemon gelato - lemons in that area are great - think Limoncello. Now, think about an ice cream made with those. Mhhhmmmmm… Finger-licking-good! If you’re ever visiting that part of Italy, I highly recommend you try some!

These are both acceptable and delightful. Also, I consider anyone who can differentiate plain and vanilla-flavouring as an ally!

I’m one of those weird people who pays for newspapers, and regularly reads what the industry calls native advertising. These are articles superficially modelled on legitimate news, but are either paid for by a company, or supplied wholesale for reprinting. Compared to regular advertising and press releases where the writers have free reign, PR agencies need to employ a different skill set to emulate journalistic objectivity. Make it too lopsided, and people see right through it. That friction, and how well different companies manage it, is fascinating.

An established American telco sponsored an article in Forbes this month about about Internet of Things (IoT) devices. It opened:

When people think about the Internet of Things (IoT) today they’re often overly focused on the things—the devices that first gave the IoT its name. But like all things digital, the IoT is rapidly evolving from the very early days of simple sensors designed to help manufacturers automate their processes, to the wide-variety of connected devices that record our steps using our watches, and allow us to talk to people through our doorbells.

Was I the only one who just felt a shiver at reading that last point?

I’ve quoted the four subheadings that followed, with a representative sentence or two from each. Long-term Rubenerd readers can already guess, but can you see the obvious omission here?

Device intelligence is all in the eye of the beholder … It’s a continuum, with low-capability, minimally-connected devices on one end and highly-capable, multilaterally-connected devices on the other.

Strength in (connected) numbers … what makes a device “smart” isn’t the onboard compute and storage capabilities of the device itself but what it can do when it is connected to other devices and then to processing platforms that can act on that information.

How smart IoT works in real life … It is the combination of a low-cost sensor, high-speed network, cloud, and intelligence that would enable [example city] to cost-effectively deploy this technology.

The future of IoT will depend on expansive 5G access … trying to pigeonhole IoT as smart or dumb today kind of misses the point. It’s the connectivity and the platforms that tie all these devices together that give the future of IoT its power.

That’s right, in a thousand-word article the terms security, privacy, and even update are not mentioned once. Here are my quick thoughts for each of their examples:

• Device intelligence is all in the eye of the beholder: Low-capability devices can be more difficult to update and keep secure given their low system resources, and highly-capable ones could easily be commandeered to perform nefarious tasks.

• Strength in (connected) numbers: Botnets are built from swarms of insecure devices.

• How smart IoT works in real life: Including all the privacy implications of tracking, and how that sensitive data is secured.

• The future of IoT will depend on expansive 5G access: No, the future will depend on people being able to trust IoT. Trust is easy to lose and hard to regain once you haven’t taken security into account.

There are three possible explanations as to why these weren’t raised.

1. They think IoT is intrinsically secure and doesn’t need spelling out. This position isn’t borne out by the facts.

2. They think their audience doesn’t care about security. In which case, its their responsibility as a provider to inform people of it.

3. They think security isn’t important, or less important than the synergised-paradigms they otherwise discuss. This is simply dangerous.

Native advertising can never pass as completely legitimate because, by definition, it can’t include thorough counterpoints. But acknowledging security is an important and underrepresented concern in IoT would already be a start, and I’d consider it a sign the industry is mature and responsible. A savvy company would take this angle and run with it as a key advantage of their devices and networks.

I love going on Wikipedia and seeing new photos pop up of old ocean liners I obsessed over as a kid. Below we have the top landing of the RMS Aquitania’s Grand Staircase, uploaded by the Royal Museums Greenwich:

Compare this design to the dramatic Grand Staircase on the Olympic-class ships of the time that are mounted against the far wall, as everyone would recognise now thanks to the Titanic movie. On those vessels the stairs start symmetrically from either side and fan out to the floor below, as opposed to spiraling down a stairwell. Aquitania’s looks understated by comparison and, dare I say, I might prefer it.

The RMS Aquitania was built by Cunard in response to White Star’s Olympic-class ships that were slower, but bigger and more luxurious than their Blue Riband-holding Lusitania and Mauretania. Those ships had a similar staircase to Aquitania, but integrated a lift in the interior space around the stairwell. She was launched in 1914, and saw service in both World Wars.

I always thought Aquitania had a fascinating design; as if the Lusitania had been scaled up to Olympic’s size with clear design elements from both. I might write a post about that at some point.

Bryan was a former member of Node.js’s Technical Steering Committee. He left the project in 2017 with some specific insight that I think is broadly useful:

I do not believe Rod did this intentionally, or that he is a bad actor in the classical definition. Rather, his bad behavior stems from ignorance and an unwillingness to learn. Rod’s intentions don’t really matter though. As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

This explains more than a few interactions I’ve had online. I’ve struggled here to articulate and reconcile the idea that someone isn’t being intentionally malicious, but their actions are still destructive.

My biggest open question is still whether willful ignorance also counts as deliberate, malicious behavior itself. I’m thinking it comes down to awareness and agency: whether someone is ignorant because they don’t know better, or whether they’ve put the effort into avoiding it despite knowing their behavior is damaging. The latter is inexcusable, and the former is increasingly difficult to defend given how much information is readily available.

Related, Merlin Mann’s comment from RecDiffs:

I don’t think they deserve my struggling this much to understand their motivation.