Rubenerd

Australia’s Shadow Attorney General Mark Dreyfus QC shared this Australian Federal Court judgement against the Minister for Home Affairs on Thursday:

Section 8:

In the absence of explanation, non-compliance with an order of this Court constitutes a serious contempt.

Section 9:

It may further be observed that it is deeply disturbing to realise that a Minister of the Crown who is charged with the responsibility for making decisions affecting the liberty of the subject—and on many occasions making assessments as to the consequences to be visited upon those visa applicants who have failed to comply with the law—is himself a person who has demonstrated an unapologetic reluctance to take personal responsibility for his own non-compliance with the law.

This needs to stick to him, and I’m realising it’s up to us to make sure it does. Most of the Australian media will continue to willfully ignore it, because their preferred coalition is in charge. Ministers should not, and cannot, be above the law.

In Mr Dutton’s defence, I have contempt for him too.

Last Thursday I wrote about a noisy replacement AT power supply for my old Pentium tower:

It seems it suffers from a loud fan, and no dynamic controls to adjust its speed depending on temperature or load. This would be fine in an industrial setting, or maybe an open-plan office where you’re running legacy hardware for certain reasons, but at home it’s simply too loud.

Hales of Haelstrom.net confirmed my suspicions about it being targeted at industry. He linked to the manufacturer’s website:

Circa 1998; the AT Power Supply has been around for 23 years and it is still going strong in today’s industry. It is used to power equipment from the smallest robotic drill to essential medical equipment. Athena Computer Power understands the importance of these Power Supplies and has boosted the wattage up to 400; supplying more power while maintaining reliability and control.

He explains:

That probably explains their little care for noise. The fan will be wired directly to the 12V rail and it will be a standard (non-low-RPM) 80MM model. They could have run it slower at lower loads, but that would require more circuitry.

It doesn’t look like there is much on the market for AT-40 replacement PSUs other than Athena & old 2nd hand units. That’s kind of sucky.

I was hoping for some ATX to AT adaptor boards + cable harnesses to exist, but I can’t find any of those either. Modern ATX power supplies skip the -5V and -12V rails so you need a little circuit to generate a small amount of those. You also have to make sure the 5V rail is big enough, but there are still some units around that fix that problem.

My budget is a little tight this month, but I’ll be looking to see what the legacy motherboard in this machine supports and requires. It’d be great if I could use a contemporary ATX supply with adaptors.

Hales continues in a follow-up this morning:

Depending on your RAM type you might be able to get away without the -5V or -12V rails (most modern ATX power supplies don’t provide them or only provide one). Some ISA cards might not work however and the RS232 chip might not output within spec (if it doesn’t have an in-built chargepump), but you might not care about that feature anyway.

I use two of the tree ISA slots in this machine for my vintage sound cards, so I’ll need to confirm that. But it sounds like this will be a fun project to research :).

Michael Dexter of Call for Testing, BSDFund, bhyvecon, OpenZFS, and FreeBSD mailing list fame posted these remedies on Twitter for toxic and counterproductive open source software project communities. I’m shamelessly quoting them here so I can add extra comments.

Conducting all project communication in the open, with the exception of highly-sensitive topics.

The truth hides in darkness. I realise I facilitated this in the past by keeping corrosive things said to me about other people and projects in confidence, because it was said to me privately. They know they can’t exploit that going forward because I don’t tolerate that behavior, they know I’ll report it.

Accepting that virtually all developers begin as users and ending any fetishes related to developer privileges.

I aspire to have a FreeBSD commit bit one day, just as I’ve been granted admin access to other projects, and extra user rights on Wikimedia Foundation projects. I see these as a privilege and an honour that comes with responsibilities. The idea of using trust and confidence as a way to make demands seems utterly foreign.

Clarifying relationships to foundations.

My dad used to joke—tongue in cheek—that he was the reason why certain contracts had to have another page of clauses. Somewhat related to above, if people acting in bad faith need to have certain rules codified before they’ll act reasonably, maybe that’s necessary. Or it could act as a filter, given how some bad actors rage quit when Codes of Conduct are raised. @joshgnosis calls this mute baiting… I like it.

It’s almost as if… there is a disconnect between users, developers, and committers.

This is the open question I, as a relatively recent contributor in this space, find the most difficult to address. There are some in the community who go out of their way to help and bridge that gap, and I’ve even had people email me saying my silly little blog here has helped them make connections and learn things. But there’s a long way to go, at least if we want a healthy and productive community at the other side.

I do relate with the fatigue of dealing with these issues, especially when your routine attempts to empathise and see other people’s perspectives are met with steadfast refusal to reciprocate. I think Merlin Mann put it best:

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

Back in 2016 Nick Waddell uploaded a work of Ernest Hemingway into his WordPress install to see how the Yoast SEO plugin would react:

After months of seeing this needling assessment I decided to try an experiment. I would find a collection of words generally accepted to be masterpiece -a no-doubt about it piece of literature- and load it into Yoast and see what happened. Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” seemed to fit the bill. For those who don’t know, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” was first published in Esquire magazine in 1936 and generally regarded as one of Hemingway’s masterpieces, alongside “”The Sun Also Rises” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls”. I posted the entire 9000 plus word story as though it were a new Cantech Letter article and hit “Save Draft”.

[Yoast’s content score:] “Needs improvement”.

Nick’s assessment was that the SEO plugin was grading the words against the Flesch Reading Ease score, which was developed in the 1970s by the US Navy to improve the readability of technical documentation. So it’s understandable why a highly-regarded work of literature would score poorly.

One may argue technical sites could benefit from using this as tool, which presumably informed Yoast’s inclusion of the metric in its plugin by default. We nerds are nothing if not technocratic: if we can mechanically turk a solution to a human problem, why not let a computer help?

Where I worry is the predictably regular misapplication of these types of metrics into fields for which they were never designed, under a deliberate or misguided idea that it must improve everything. When it’s applied to art we get worse art; just look what autotune did to a generation of music, or the drive for clickbait did to journalism.

Nick Waddell’s Cantech Letter site is a long-form science journal targeting those interested in medicine and research. Should this be held to the same score requirements as a general-purpose encyclopedia, or the FreeBSD Handbook, or other docs? Extrapolating this out further, are we okay with this plugin telling all authors that their content “needs improvement”, from bloggers to playwrights? For those who aren’t as technically inclined, would they even be aware that it’s an SEO plugin telling them this? I can’t imagine the negative reinforcement seeing that terse, negative assessment every day would have.

I wrote about a different online tool struggling to correct grammar back in 2018. How many other articles, posts, books, journals, and other literary works have been mangled or changed by such algorithms? Maybe I’m overthinking this as I’m want to do, but I’d still guarantee you that number is more than zero.

I’m glad that we’re all waking up about inherent biases designed and trained into our algorithms, from the finance sector to the job market. But I think just as fundamental is the question of whether an algorithm should even be employed in certain cases, especially when directing art. At best it provides marginally-helpful advice, at worst it attacks it.

The first computer I built as a kid was one of the last generation to require AT power supplies and mechanical switches, and still shipped with APM instead of ACPI. I still run her today with DOS, Windows 95, and FreeBSD 6.2 for nostalgic fun, and she serves this purpose beautifully.

So when her power supply of twenty years bit the dust, I checked eBay to source a replacement. The good news is, these kinds of power supplies are still relatively easy to find. Athena in particular make a few different models, including this AT40 400W unit that I picked up for less than AU $70 delivered. The original supply was only 230W, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to upgrade.

I may have been wrong about that.

I’m a stickler for noise, as my earlier post about NAS reviews mentioned. You have no choice when you live in a tiny studio apartment: noise from any source will permeate the kitchen, lounge, bedroom, and study because they’re the same room. I also want to be considerate to Clara who’s sharing this space, and who also has to work odd hours as a function of working in IT.

Unfortunately, this is the single loudest desktop power supply I’ve ever used. There are 2U server power supplies that are quieter than this. Even in the dead of winter with barely a fifth of its power capacity loaded, the fan in this unit runs faster and harder than a jet turbine at full throttle. It reminds me of my PowerMac G5 when I’d be transcoding a DVD, or building KDE 3 from FreeBSD ports.

It seems it suffers from a loud fan, and no dynamic controls to adjust its speed depending on temperature or load. This would be fine in an industrial setting, or maybe an open-plan office where you’re running legacy hardware for certain reasons, but at home it’s simply too loud. I don’t have an electrical engineering background, so I’m also wary of cracking it open to replace the fan with something approaching human-tolerable noise levels.

I’ll be keeping this around for testing vintage computer boards, because it’s otherwise an excellent power supply. The cabling and Molex connectors are high quality and easy to work with, and it generally feels better built that many, many other PSUs of a similar vintage.

I’ve got my eyes on a Linkworld unit that claims to include an auto thermostatic fan which should make my vintage computer and I happier. We’ll see if that improves things.

I’ve mentioned the Bon Appétit YouTube channel here before in the context of Brad’s It’s Alive! show, and on last week’s Music Monday, but everything they do is so wonderful, and so much fun.

But now we get personal. A month ago all the test kitchen chefs rated certain foods on a scale of 1–100, which naturally got me thinking where I’d rank similar foods. I’m using a scale of five coffee cups to simplify things.

Glass of milk

I wouldn’t go out of my way to drink this, but a cold glass of milk and a shortbread or biscuit (I think my American friends would call these cookies) would go well. I’d rather a black cup of tea though.
☕☕

Black licorice

I reserve 0/100 for coriander leaves (cilantro for my American friends) because it’s the most disgusting, food known to medicine and culinary science. Black licorice doesn’t induce vomiting.
☕

Green bell pepper

I’m realising how many culinary terms differ in Commonwealth English and American! We’d call these green capsicums. Regardless of nomenclature, their culinary use is more limited than delicious red or yellow, and I wouldn’t eat a raw one. Get back to me when you’re ripe.
☕☕

White chocolate

I abstain from most sugar thesedays, and tend to prefer savoury/umami over sweet things. But on my birthday I treat myself to a nostalgic Milky Bar. White chocolate is beautiful.
☕☕☕☕

Orange juice with pulp

This would have scored highly a decade ago, but I hate how bad juice makes my teeth feel now. I’d rather eat a real orange, with all the roughage. It still has more than most juice though.
☕☕☕

Sumac

I don’t think I’ve ever cooked with it, but I’m sure it’s been in food I’ve eaten before and liked. I’m pleading ignorance and abstaining from a vote on this one.

Nuts in brownies

Being mildly allergic to walnut doesn’t stop me loving these with hazelnuts on top of brownies. Distributed through a brownie though is another story.
☕☕☕

Pineapple on pizza

Easiest answer here. The crisp, sharp, fresh, tangy taste contrasts and pairs so perfectly with the dense, heavy dough and toppings on a pizza. So do anchovies and unconscionable quantities of extra oregano.
☕☕☕☕☕

Raisins

We do sultanas here, although they’re a bit smaller. I loved these as a kid. I like them in salads and cereal, but wouldn’t eat them straight up anymore.
☕☕☕

Mayonnaise

If referring to aioli and kewpie specifically, I love it. Chips in cones, fresh fish, and jaffles are all so much better with a drizzle.
☕☕☕☕☕

I respect your flawed opinions if you disagree.

Reuters reported the news, via Channel NewsAsia:

The S&P 500’s strongest quarterly performance since the fourth quarter of 1998 - during the dot-com boom - was driven by gains in April and May, followed by an overall flat June after Wall Street gave back gains in the second half of the month. Globally, MSCI’s world equity index has rallied to within 10per cent of its February record highs.

Genuine question: has the stock market ever been so at-odds with the real world?

Today is the last day of the first half of 2020. We’re halfway through. I’m so overwhelmed, I can’t think what else to type.

tasty.yml
---
name: Install a bagel
pkgin:
  name: bagel
  state: present
  update_cache: yes
register: time_to_makan

Use Ansible, pkgsrc, and bagels, and make your life a little bit better.

I was wondering why traffic to my server had spiked in the last few days: Allan Jude and Benedict Reuschling discussed my encrypted ZFS on NetBSD post on their latest episode of the BSD Now podcast! I’ve had the privilege of meeting both of them in person a few times now, and they’re as knowledgable and friendly as you’d expect when listening to their show.

Back in May I tested NetBSD 9’s disk encryption for the first time, and used it to create an encrypted ZFS pool. I asked at the end without:

The next steps will be to research if I can (or should!) do ZFS send/receive with my FreeBSD ZFS boxes…

Allan Jude responded:

The answer is… yes!

ZFS replication is designed to be fully forwards and backwards compatible, so even if you are sending from the very newest FreeBSD, a ZFS send—provided you don’t enable any extra features with extra flags—will be fully receivable on an old FreeBSD 8 machine, or an image you create on that FreeBSD 8 machine will be receivable on your FreeBSD 13 machine. Part of the point of ZFS send/receive is to enable this transition.

Now when you do a send/receive, that’s why you have to specify some extra flags if you want to enable newer features, like lowercase “c” to enable compression, so those compressed blocks will stay compressed during send/receive. That presupposes that the other side is going to understand that.

Since ZFS replication is a unidirectional protocol, we don’t ever talk to the other side about what features it supports, so it depends on you doing that, or having a script to do it for you.

Also, if you use hostnames to transfer, make sure they’re named for Star Trek ships and not anime characters or you’ll lose throughput in the secondary InfiniBand plasma manifold.

Thanks! And for the interests of transparency, one of those transcribed sentences was fake.

Bump of Chicken has been one of my new favourites since their 2014 Ray album. Most of my favourite music is jazz, but I also have a soft spot for bands like this. There’s a specific quality about their voices and the way they let the syths melt into their music that I absolutely love, not to mention all the beautiful visuals.

This is the eponymous song from their 2016 album Butterfly. I don’t even like big concerts, but I’d fly with Clara to Japan if we could see them perform it live.