Rubenerd

My favourite journalist Richard Quest asked former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd what else beyond geographic isolation played a part in New Zealand and Australia’s relative success in flattening the curve:

I think you’re right Richard, being an island helps. Either as a small island or, as the New Zealanders call us, the big island.

But the bottom line is, there’s been a great creative dynamic between the New Zealand Government and the Australian Government. By which I mean this: the New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Adern, quite early on, adopted an official policy of virus elimination. Now that set in motion a series of quite radical measures in terms of border closures—including with Australia—as well as early lockdown. And the creative tension then across the Tasman Sea between us was the Australian government fairly rapidly followed suit. And so as a consequence, I think, both countries have benefited from those sorts of actions.

He’s being diplomatic here, but he makes a point. Australia’s current Prime Minister Scott Morrison, fresh from bungling the worst bushfires in the country’s history, was so bereft of ideas and motivation he had to be dragged into action by New Zealand. We’re as fortunate and privileged to have Ms. Adern by following her example.

And the other thing about Australia in particular, where I am, is that the government has benefited from: 1) a high level of bipartisanship, between Opposition and Government, but 2) critically, within our Federation, those governments responsible for actually implementing—let’s call it socialisation, lockdown, and school management on the ground—are the Australian State Governments. And by and large the State Governments lead by their Premiers have put their own politics to one side and done a pretty good job of it.

But one caveat about Australia and New Zealand: will there be a delayed Southern Hemisphere effect? We don’t know that. As the weather cools down here in the Southern Hemisphere as we get towards May and June [when its winter down here].

It’s easy to be cynical about these things, and we’ve had our fair share of brain farts and utterly counterproductive policies and decisions by the folks in charge. But from the perspective of the rest of the world, we’ve done extraordinarily well. So far.

It’s another installment of Music Monday, the series in which I share audible emissions set to recognisable tunes. It’s not Monday though, whoops.

Today we venture back to the late 1990s, when Savage Garden owned the radio airwaves in Australia and Southeast Asia. A Thousand Words from their eponymous—geshunteit—album wasn’t one of my favourites, but this stanza made me curious:

You can resurrect a thousand words;
To deceive me more and more.
A thousand words will give the reason
Why I don’t need you anymore;
I’ll say the words out loud.
I’ll say a thousand words or more.

I ran the lyrics through wc(1) and got:

$ wc -w lyrics.txt
==>     243 lyrics.txt

So they’d have to sing that song at least five times to get to a thousand words or more. That’s fewer times than I always assumed and expected.

I was an IDOLM@STER guy growing up, and I still fully respect its superiority over Love Live. Accept no substitutes! I also acknowledge I’ve long been in the minority, so I’m always happy to see when the enduring franchise gets some attention.

But this AmiAmi rendition of Morino Rinze from SHINY COLOURS may be one of the best figs I’ve ever seen, full stop. Material science has come so far that such a detailed fig is now not only possible, but economically feasible at scale. And check out all that colour!

I’d hoped that Handa-san would have got a similar fig with him brandishing his giant calligraphy brush in that now-legendary scene from Barakamon. Clara and I hold out hope.

Shingled magnetic recording was a brilliant hack when Seagate announced their 8 TB archival drive in 2014. SMR drives partially overlap tracks, exploiting the fact read heads are narrower than write heads. You can achieve greater density for less cost this way, but it means subsequent writes require adjacent tracks to also be rewritten, which negatively affects random-write performance.

As an industry we decided the best use for these drives were price-sensitive and WORM applications, like content delivery.

So it came as a surprise when sysadmins began noticing their new Western Digital Red NAS drives were dropping out of NAS RAIDs and ZFS pools owing to random write timeouts and failures. This behaviour is consistent with how SMR drives respond to random writes, as RAID and ZFS store their metadata. This thread on the Smartmontools bug tracker was eye-opening:

There are a lot of SMR drives quietly submarining into supply channels that are programmed to “look” like “conventional” drives (CMR). This appears to be an attempt to end-run around consumer resistance … WD and Seagate are both shipping drive-managed SMR (DM-SMR) drives which don’t report themselves as SMR when questioned via conventional means. … What’s worse, they’re shipping DM-SMR drives as “RAID” and “NAS” drives

Western Digital finally admitted that many of their drives now use SMR, including their Red drives which are advertised for use in NASs. Blocks and Files reported that Seagate and Toshiba have admitted to doing the same thing, though both made clear that none of their NAS-branded drives do.

There is so much to technically unpack about this story, but I’m just as interested in the human element.

From the outside it seems downright bizarre that WD specifically would squander the wave of positive press they were riding from the likes of Backblaze saying their drives—and those of their HGST subsidiary—were more trustworthy and reliable. With one management decision, engineers will now be second-guessing their choices for using WD drives in their storage arrays. Is this drive on WD’s SMR list? If not, can I trust that it doesn’t use it, given they were willing to hide the fact before?

For this to have happened, management at these companies would have had to decide explicitely or otherwise that:

1. Using SMR would make their devices cheaper

2. Using SMR would save them money producing each unit

3. Buyers wouldn’t notice

The first two points I get, they’re business reality. Profit margins on complicated, mass-produced tech like this must be receding faster than my early-30s hairline (welp), and competition for research and development is steep. Offering a cheaper product in (1) would be reasonable; keeping the margin in (2) seems dubious but at least you can understand it.

But (3) was a gross miscalculation. Even if they thought they’d sufficiently improved the performance of SMR for use in general computing and NASs, adding fresh SMR drives to RAIDs and ZFS pools immediately and transparently demonstrates this to be false.

Which is all the more reason obfuscating the use of SMR was bizarre. The fact they did is an admission that people wouldn’t voluntarily choose to use the tech, especially in specific work loads like NASs. If we follow this to its logical conclusion:

1. Customers would have bought what they thought were conventional drives, informed by the fact they’re labelled as NAS drives for use in RAID arrays that require decent random-write performance, especially during resilvering.

2. The drives would immediately report problems that are consistent with outright failures on conventional hardware. SMR-aware tools on Linux and FreeBSD wouldn’t notice, because their SMR operation has been obfuscated.

3. Customers would report these faults, lodge support cases, and return items at the cost of the manufacturer. Replacement units wouldn’t solve the problem, as the fundamental tech isn’t designed for the purpose in which its being used and advertised. People become sad.

It’s good we have SMR drives; they provide the cost benefits of cold storage but with immediate read access. But just as I wouldn’t use USB flash storage for a ZFS ZIL SLOG, or wear my hat on my elbow, SMR is not fit for NAS use.

Companies and their PR departments never get that it wasn’t the use of $tech that generated animosity, it’s that it was hidden. It’s not the first time it’s happened, and we all know it won’t be the last. Hey that’s a good paragraph, I’ll quote it next time!

I haven’t been able to stop looking of this view of Gangtok from Ganesh Tok point in northern India. Subhrajyoti07 wrote on Wikimedia Commons:

Situated 6,500 meters above sea level on a hilltop, Ganeshtok is a popular Ganesh temple in Sikkim and can be reached after a 7 kilometer ascent from the main town of Gangtok. Located near Tashi View point at a hill adjacent to the television tower of Sikkim

Gangtok is the capital of Sikkim, which became an Indian state in 1975. If the name or landscape looks familiar, it’s the part of India nestled between Nepal and Bhutan. You can check it out on OpenStreetMap.

I loved reading CD-ROM and dead tree atlases—atlasii?—as a kid, and I still adore maps. But there are swaths of the world I’m not as familiar with as I should be, so I’ve been trying to fill in the gaps. Today I was comparing Algeria to other places in North Africa, and the penny only just dropped how big it is.

According to the CIA World Factbook, Algeria is the 11th largest country in the world with a land area of more than 2.3 million square kilometres. For comparison:

• Western Australia is the only state in the country that’s larger, at 2.6m km². Algeria’s borders almost stretch from Melbourne to Townsville!

• It’s bigger than any North American state and province, including Texas, Alaska, and Quebec. Nunavut is the only one that comes close, at 2.0m km².

• It’s larger than Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the Iberian peninsula, Italy, Lichtenstein and Poland combined. Okay I threw in Lichtenstein for fun :).

• Kazakhstan, the other former Soviet republic I associate with being massive, is only 0.4m km² larger!

My hunch is that evil Mercator projection is responsible for making me think northern Africa was smaller than it actually is. Here’s Algeria over the top of Australia, South-East Asia, the Sea of Japan, and the US, using the awesome True Size site. Australia and the US are at a different scale to fit.

In my line of work I’ve been having a ton of conversations with clients over the last year about retiring, replacing, or upgrading Windows 2008 R2 machines. Forgotten to me in this fray was Windows 7, which had its extended support terminated at the same time back in January.

I’m not sorry in the slightest to see Windows 2008 R2 go; it was responsible for more late nights, missed family events, and unpaid overtime than anything else in my career. But Windows 7 really was the last tolerable desktop version of Windows. At least to me; I stopped using Windows as a daily driver in the early 2000s and, aside from games, I haven’t looked back.

Given my bias against these systems, perhaps by reviewing this positive article on Pocket-Lint we can arrive at something closer to the middle.

Everybody is using Windows 10, aren’t they? Actually, no.

This is common knowledge. Windows 10 has serious privacy and usability problems. Just because the popular press has stopped talking about them doesn’t mean they don’t persist.

The issue is that Windows 7 still works just fine and there are a huge amount of people haven’t upgraded their PCs.

True.

While Windows 10 has a bunch of new and different features and is a smoother experience than Windows 7…

Smoother experience! All these complaints about Windows 10 being less intuitive were probably written by people who prefer crunchy peanut butter. Like me, because I’m not a monster.

The acquired taste of Windows 8 and 8.1 are on around 6 percent combined, showing that many people didn’t choose go from 7 to 8 and therefore didn’t upgrade to Windows 10. There is no Windows 9, simply because Microsoft felt that Windows 10 represented the big step on from what had gone before.

Acquired taste is one of the more euphemistic phrases I’ve read to describe Windows 8.x. It wasn’t difficult to use damn it, you had to suck it up and develop a tolerance for it!

Even though, In reality, Windows 10 wasn’t a big step on, backtracking from the tablet-centric Windows 8 and distilling the best bits from Windows 7 and 8.

The best bits? Like Candy Crush installed by default on the Start Menu? Advertisements in Solitaire? Telemetry? Nah this is too easy.

From talking to people who actually use Windows, Windows 8 was unpopular precisely because it removed the best bits what worked. Windows 10 partly reversed this, but it’s still compromised.

One thing is for sure – to keep running a Windows 7 PC instead of upgrading to Windows 10 must have taken a bit of nerve though, Microsoft has bombarded users with messages about upgrading it in the past and has again been sending out messages about the end of support. That kind of think takes some effort to ignore.

With a little introspection, that author would have noticed empathy, financial pressures, and the need people have for Windows 7 would have taken equal effort to ignore.

How was that for a balanced farewell? Don’t answer that!

Windows 7 came out when my folks and I were briefly living in Malaysia. I’d see all the new laptops being shown with it when my dad and I would wander to Mutiara Damansara for IKEA and groceries. I remember thinking how tacky the UI still was from Vista, but figured at least people were getting something different from XP. Clara and I went back there last year; those electronic stores were long gone.

I wrote eighteen posts about Windows 7 since 2008, but this one from a decade ago is still the best.

I’ve long been interested to get a scale for the various cities I’ve either grown up in or love visiting, but it never occurred to me to just do a simple OpenStreetMap comparison:

From top left to bottom right we have:

• Sydney, which just fits
• Five boroughs of New York City, with a bit of New Jersey
• Tiny, tiny Singapore with Johor Bahru across the Causeway
• Hong Kong, which is closer in size to Singapore than I realised!
• Klang Valley, with Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya
• Kansai Region, with Ōsaka and Kyōto

I checked Tōkyō, and it would have covered almost all six squares. I’ll bet some cities in China would be similar.

A well-known global data centre provider just emailed this in their corporate newsletter:

Executive Fireside Chat Series
Digital Connectivity – The oil for digital trade

It’s odd timing for such an analogy, unless they don’t value digital connectivity much!

Last Saturday I talked about how financial comparison and consumer advoacy sites were failing to address security, with one going as far as to only summarise a new service as having encryption technology. If that’s all it takes, my blog here could host your financial information. I suppose I should be flattered if you want to take me up on that, but you most definitely shouldn’t.

Here’s BPAY’s site as a counter-example:

Is BPAY safe?

All BPAY payments are made within the secure environment of your online banking. BPAY doesn’t receive any of your personal details or account details during the payment process.

To find out more about the security features of your online banking, and how you can help protect your personal information contact your bank.

It’s still light on details, but it’s leagues ahead.