Rubenerd

It’s my hope that admitting to these will be the first step to overcoming them. But they seem to be so ingrained I’m not sure:

• I instinctively clear and reuse open buffers or unsaved text files, rather than closing and starting new files. Do I think I’m saving paper or electrons that way? Who knows.

• I always manually empty folders before deleting them. Even the DOS I grew up with had DELTREE, so maybe I’m just paranoid.

• Calculating the square root of 2. Get it? Because it’s an… oh shut up.

• Hungarian notation. Visual Basic habits die hard. I do love though how readable sigils make Perl code in a plain text editor.

Brian: Senator Geneva, thanks for joining us.

Geneva: It’s a great pleasure, thank you.

Brian: This $3,000 tax you’re levying against Australian citizens returning home for screening and quarantine—

Geneva: Now Brian, let me be clear, this is not a tax. It’s a contribution to offset the cost of their returning home from overseas.

Brian: But what if they can’t afford it?

Geneva: Brian, everyone who travels is a rich expat or jetsetter who pays no Australian taxes.

Brian: Like Rupert Murdoch?

Geneva: Not at all Brian, he’s an American citizen now.

Brian: I see. Back to affordability, are you saying citizenship is now means tested?

Geneva: No Brian that’s an absurd statement. People are just asked to pay for the cost of their repatriation.

Brian: And otherwise, they’re stuck overseas? How does that fulfil our obligations under international law?

Geneva: Look Brian, it’s perfectly inline with our international obligations. They’re free to return, where upon they’ll be sent to an Australian prison. In Australia. It’s an Australian prison, Brian.

Brian: You don’t see an ethical problem with that?

Geneva: I don’t Brian, it’s better treatment than what we give refugees we’re responsible for under the same international treaties. These people had months to return home, and they chose not to—

Brian: By not being allowed to leave by a foreign government? Or because of family or employment reasons?

Geneva: Exactly. It was a choice, by those overseas officials to close their borders. Or the bosses of those Australians. Or reasons outside their control. It’s called personal responsibility, Brian.

Brian: So Senator Geneva, what was the alternative? Everyone returning at once? You saw how we handled a single cruise ship arriving back in Sydney.

Geneva: Well yes we’ve learned a lot. It’s an evolving threat, I’m the first to admit this Brian, the first to admit this.

Brian: We clearly haven’t learned a lot, with the latest news out of Victoria and New South Wales.

Geneva: All the more reason to prevent citizens coming home then under the guise of fiscal responsibility, Brian.

Brian: [shakes head] Senator Geneva, thanks for your time. When will you be returning home?

Geneva: Thank you Brian. I’ll still be here until my crowdfunding page gets to $3,000.

Brian: You can’t afford to return home?

Geneva: No, I work for the ABC.

We go back to Korea for this week’s Music Monday. I heard this downbeat jazzy tune in one of my favourite coffee shops in Milsons Point this afternoon and couldn’t get it out of my head. The owners were kind enough to show me the cover, which I also love. 🇰🇷

The colour and aesthetic matches my Sun Microsystems nostalia post from yesterday almost too well.

We’ve reached the point where putting on a mask and physically distancing are seen as overt political statements, whereas Asia deals with it maturely as they always have. The same people who employ the terms “snowflake” and “triggered” with smug chagrin now whinge without a trace of irony about being asked to limit the spread of a virus.

I’ve previously attributed these reasons to why people think like this:

1. wilful ignorance (I don’t care what doctors say);
2. gleeful malice (this will anger latte sippers);
3. narcissistic projection (others only fein compassion too);
4. misplaced trust (talking heads wouldn’t lie to me);
5. and ignoring that with freedom comes responsibility.

But herd mentality is another way that intersects all of these. When your “team” doesn’t include healthcare professionals, scientists, social workers, and researchers, their advice is perceived as a challenge. Emboldened by a biased press and populist political class, they then act out in embarrassing, juvenile ways. It’d be worthy of a Darwin Award if it didn’t perversely affect millions of innocent people.

(Where does the freedom of others come into their thought processes? Personal responsibility dictates that you shouldn’t push your sickness on others against their will. This is one of the many ways point 5 above manifests).

Australians against masks fortunately occupy the fringes where they belong, but they’re still there. I’ve had to roll my eyes more than a few times at middle-aged white men who laugh when I wear mine. One time I had a coughing fit just to screw with them; they bolted instantly. Conversely, people in Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan have a mature attitude precisely because they have a pragmatic history of coping with these illnesses. It’s almost as though living in close quarters with millions of other people doesn’t leave responsible people much choice.

He was already being regularly tested, but it gives me hope that even Mr Orange wears a mask in public now. Hopefully his supporters will realise now this virus doesn’t play politics.

Antranig Vartanian of @illuriasecurity in Armenia left me some comments about my Solaris MySQL post:

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Most Linux projects are fragments. BSD have a lot in base but not enough. Solaris was kinda the nicest option but well, Oracle happened.

And I wasn’t there much during that days because well, I was a kid :) but it looks like people forgot about the idea of one source of release.

Well technically there’s IBM with it’s AIX and Power CPU and DB2, but I have 6 machines with those and they basically kinda… suck

I can see where he’s coming from. I was in high school at the time myself, albeit working part time. I agree that Solaris, even the Java Desktop System, felt cohesive. It felt polished. I spent so much time in the official Sun store in Funan Centre in Singapore playing with their display machines. You weren’t buying a set of components, you were buying a system.

FreeBSD feels like it gets the closest to having a free software system, toolchain, and features that feel as complete as those systems today. I haven’t done more than hobbyist illumos since, but I’m thinking of doing some prod on that too. But either way, workstation PC hardware looks like plastic garbage, and consumer tech outside Apple isn’t much better.

If Antranig will permit me a distraction, it’s got me thinking about the appeal of the systems too. I only ever used SPARC machines at work, but if I had the money there would have been a metal Sun Ultra workstation right alongside my PowerMac G5. They looked cool, something too few engineers care about thesedays. Mark Shuttleworth put it best in 2006:

If we want the world to embrace free software, we have to make it beautiful. I’m not talking about inner beauty, not elegance, not ideological purity… pure, unadulterated, raw, visceral, lustful, shallow, skin deep beauty.

Of course, “pretty but unusable” won’t work either. It needs to be both functional and attractive. Rather than bling for bling’s sake, let’s use artistic effects to make the desktop BETTER, and obviously better.

There are engineers who discount all of these qualitative things, just as they’ve given up eating real food because Soylent has all the nutrients they need. But I don’t think flavour is for suckers, it’s an integral part of what makes food, and computing, fun.

I’ve been having recurring headaches again the last few weeks, culminating with some head-swimming migraines. So Clara and I decided to take advantage of the nice winter weather and go for a long walk down from Chatswood into the city.

The sky was a gorgeous deep blue from the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and I always love watching the water taxis and ferries zip across the water from up on the deck. I rarely appreciate the view when I’m on a commuter train travelling across the bridge on the other side.

As we started to head back late in the afternoon, some of the most dramatic clouds we’ve seen in a long time started sweeping across the harbour from the east. Have I mentioned how much I love my tiny new Ricoh GR III?!

I’m back home nursing another headache, but today was lovely.

geli(8) is the interface to FreeBSD’s preferred drive encryption system, similar in practical operation to LUKS on Linux, and cgdconfig on NetBSD as I’ve recently learned. It can use the aesni(4) kernel driver to interface with AES-NI on compatible CPUs for better performance, or it performs cryptographic functions in software.

To use it you want to enable the appropriate drivers in /boot/loader.conf:

aesni_load="YES"
geom_eli_load="YES"

Then check whether your CPU supports AES-NI by looking at dmesg(8):

# grep AES /var/run/dmesg.boot

You should see something similar to the following:

Features2=[...]AESNI[...]
aesni0: <AES-CBC,AES-CCM,AES-GCM,AES-ICM,AES-XTS> on motherboard
GEOM_ELI: Encryption: AES-XTS 256

If not, geli will continue to attach your devices but will warn you of your ancient hardware that you haven’t got around to replacing cough, or your hypervisor isn’t passing through AES-NI to its guests:

aesni0: No AES or SHA support.
GEOM_ELI: Encryption: AES-XTS 256

Once you’ve attached your geli devices, you can inspect geli list to check how the crypto is being performed. For example, this is one of my Xeon Microservers:

Geom name: gpt/<SERIAL>.eli
State: ACTIVE
EncryptionAlgorithm: AES-XTS
KeyLength: 256
Crypto: hardware
Version: 7

And here’s a drive attached to my Celeron Microserver box that I should get around to rebuilding one day with AES-XTS. Note the use of software for crypto:

Geom name: gptid/<SERIAL>.eli
State: ACTIVE
EncryptionAlgorithm: AES-CBC
KeyLength: 192
Crypto: software
Version: 7

I’m not aware of a circumstance where AES-NI exists, aesni and geom_eli is loaded, and geli will still elect to preference software crypto, but I’d defer to the maintainers to say conclusively.

I had a worrying thought this morning: how much of RSS is still around only because entrenched packages like WordPress continue to ship with it by default? I say this because support has either been dropped elsewhere, or had been hidden enough that no reasonable person could easily discover it.

RSS used to be displayed far more prominently in browsers. Firefox, Safari, and the Chromium-based browsers used to include RSS icons or text in their UIs that would activate upon detecting a page with the appropriate meta tag. Even Microsoft made a big deal about including it with Internet Explorer. These buttons would direct people to an internal reader, or to a site or client software they chose to handle such requests.

It was the same on sites themselves. Blogging software and general web CMSs would routinely include the orange XML or RSS wave icon in their themes. Sometimes sites would take it a step further and include direct links to popular feed readers, which signaled in neon lights the open nature of the protocol. Not having these, or even just a single orange XML link used to indicate a site was old or crappy, and it would come as a genuine surprise not to see it.

Why were they removed? I haven’t ever been able to find a concrete answer. It seems to have been swept away in an attempt at minimalism, though I’m concerned there was more of a thought that nobody uses it anymore. If so, why not? And surely removing them wouldn’t foster adoption.

These buttons and graphics were a convenience for those of us who knew what RSS was and sought it out, but just as critically it made the protocol discoverable. If you see something everywhere, chances are your natural inclination is to find out what it is.

I wrote back in May my issue with defending RSS as just being plumbing. Those of us who use it daily and appreciate what it represents are thankful the format is still doing well, especially in light of social networks and this trend away from hosting your own content. But plumbing isn’t meant to be seen, and it seems a lot of the web is happy with RSS being relegated there.

I want my problem with RSS to be that there’s too much good stuff again. It’s time to bring it back.

Similar to what I was doing with Colin Percival’s blog yesterday, I was reading Jonathan Schwartz’s blog at Sun Microsystems from 2008. Only unlike Colin, I had to reach into the Wayback Machine. Own your own domain and content!

Here was the end of his post announcing Sun’s purchase of MySQL AB:

So why is this important for the internet? Until now, no platform vendor has assembled all the core elements of a completely open source operating system for the internet. No company has been able to deliver a comprehensive alternative to the leading proprietary OS. With this acquisition, we will have done just that - positioned Sun at the center of the web, as the definitive provider of high performance platforms for the web economy. For startups and web 2.0 companies, to government agencies and traditional enterprises. This creates enormous potential for Sun, for the global free software community, and for our partners and customers across the globe. There’s opportunity everywhere.

I remember thinking how great that sounded. Little did we know that we were two years away from the UNIX world changing forever.

To the folks at MySQL, from employees to customers and partners - welcome, and we’re thrilled to join you. This acquisition spells the beginning of a new era on the internet.

I never thought I’d say it, but I miss the 2000s Internet.

The English version of everyone’s favourite mobile game just turned three, so to celebrate we get our pick of two anniversary craft essences. Mashu got me into the game in the first place, she’s still my favourite, and I’m an unconscionable sucker for hats! So hers was an obvious choice.

The second is trickier. Umu is my other favourite in the game and is drawn by Clara’s and my favourite artist Wadarco, but Saber Alter has a coffee cup.

But it gets worse. Clara has this exact art from Tamamo’s CE in her weeb cabinet, and we agree she’s probably the cutest of them all. Or I could make myself feel better having not summoned Merlin during the guaranteed summon yet again and get his.

I would class this a real world problem.