I watched so many VHS tapes of this iconic steam locomotive growing up. Perhaps the most memorable was when it ran with the Flying Scotsman 4472 around Australia for the Bicentennial.
She’d been having boiler problems for many years, so it was such a delight to see her steaming again under her own power. Clara and I will need to head back there to check her out once she’s been repainted.
An innocuous question from a colleague about what tools I use to process text got me thinking. I don’t have a hard and fast rule for when to preference one method over another; mostly it comes down to:
In no particular order, I use these methods:
Manual processing, especially if it’s just a few lines or a small file. The law of diminishing returns long taught me that futzing around with a tool can take far longer.
In a text editor, such as Vi(m) or perhaps Emacs in the future. This is especially useful for substitutions, or rearranging large blocks of text, or if the lines don’t have a structure you can easily parse or differentiate.
Shell scrips or inline Bourne or OpenBSD oksh, using awk, sed, tr, grep/ag, and pipes. I’ve been known to write cruddy, once-off XML parsers in them to process data, which you should never do.
LibreOffice spreadsheets. awk is brilliant for processing columns of data, but if you want to do some visual sorting and data selection, sometimes a spreadsheet really is easier. Exporting to csv is also a cinch.
SQLite3 databaes. They’re cheap to make and import data into, and then you’ve got standard(ish) SQL queries. I only started doing this recently, but for certain types of data it’s very quick.
Perl. I’ve told myself I need to learn Python or improve Ruby, but Perl hashes are stupendously useful and unreasonably flexible for mapping data structures and pulling out relevant information. Plus then I get XML, JSON, YAML, TOML, and other parsers for free.
What’s less clear is where one tool’s domain ends, and another begins. Sets on a Venn diagram would overlap more than not.
Nico Arboleda reported for CRN Australia:
According to the ACCC’s latest Measuring Broadband Australia report (pdf), FTTN only reaches 81.9 percent of the promised maximum download speeds and 78.4 percent of the promised upload speeds. … FTTN also recorded the longest outages of the three … the ACCC said that many FTTN connections “still don’t come close to performing as promised”.
I can confirm. My 100 Mbps NBN FTTN connection, aside from being an unpaletable alphabet soup of legacy networking abbreviations, barely gets above 62. I’d be sorely tempted to save $15 a month and go for a 50 Mbps plan if it also didn’t bring my uploads in line with what we had in Singapore two decades ago.
And Stilgherrian reported for ZDNet Australia:
The Commonwealth Ombudsman, Michael Manthorpe, has revealed that law enforcement agencies are being given the full URLs of web pages visited by people under investigation. Australia’s mandatory telecommunications data retention scheme was meant to deliver only so-called “metadata” to the cops and spooks. Under the scheme, a warrant is not required. But according to Manthorpe, the “ambiguity around the definition of content” means that agencies might effectively be receiving the content of communications.
There is so much context in a URL, especially if you have an encoded GET request.
Filing both of these under we all told you so!
Choice in Australia tweeted an infographic yesterday concerning the quantity of coffee one consumes, and how a fraction of that money could be put towards a machine to make them at home or the office. I retweeted it with a comment, and it started a couple of interesting discussions.
Clara and I use a virtual envelope budget system and track expenses down to the cent, so I was completely onboard with the line of reasoning Choice advocates. I identified as early as 2015 that I was spending hundreds of dollars each month on coffee, and cutting down to one a day immediately saved me real money that could be put to better or more productive use.
(Not to mention the environmental cost of all of those takeaway containers that I also learned far too late are mostly unrecyclable. Take reusable cups, people!)
Andrew Fengler who I met at AsiaBSDCon last year summarised the value well:
I think it’s a fair point to bring up though. If cafes are your thing and you don’t mind paying for it, good for you. But for people who haven’t thought about it, the nickel-and-diming of convenience food/drinks can sneak up fast, and coffee is a good way to demonstrate it.
John Roderick would class this as an eel: his term for an inexpensive but recurring expense that creeps up on you and sucks out your finances unless you’re paying attention. I wasn’t for several years, and paid the price.
But armed with the knowledge of how much it costs, there are a couple of other angles to this.
Cafés make me happy. I love working in them, I enjoy conversing with the baristas who greet me with a smile in the morning, and in the afternoons they force me to leave my desk and go outside for fresh air and a bit of exercise. The calculus of comparing making coffee to cafes is akin to saving money by looking at a tree photo, instead of walking in a forest.
As Andrew did above, Georgina summarised my thoughts better than I could:
Also why is this always about money. I don’t always purchase cafe coffee, but I appreciate that someone created it for me. I am paying for the service as well. If I thought about the monetary value of things all the time then I might go a little mad.
There’s also some context around this in Australia. We’re now living with some of the least affordable housing in the world, both in absolute terms, and relative to wages. The global trend of identifying millennials with smashed avocado toast literally started with journalists in Australia theorising that if people stopped buying frivolous things like food, they could afford a house deposit.
(Choice are a valuable outlet for information, and I’m by no means equating them with this poorly conceived and logically flawed argument thinly disguised as an attempt at humour. But it does go part way to explaining why yonger Australians bristle when they’re faulted for being locked out of home ownership. Never mind the gross tax structure that incentivises parking money in an unproductive asset over performing work, and record low interest rates spawned by a government seemingly allergic to the mere thought of economically rational fiscal policy that even the Reserve Bank is screaming for. That became a rant faster than I intended).
I can’t remember who first proposed the idea, but I mentioned in my original tweet that there are also larger fish to fry when it comes to saving money, such as organising your superannuation, CPF, 401(k), or other retirement fund into one that charges lower fees and behaves ethically. David Willanski from Adelaide mentioned:
True, my current super fund’s fee is fifth the old fee, and my fund is now on track to hit my target before I can access it. Under the old fund I’d have to keep working for 5-10 years after I hit retirement age.
It’s extrondilarily valuable to keep abreast of where your money is going, and if you’re not tracking your expenses you may be surprised and perhaps a little horrified how much is going to things you may not expect. That said, if you’ve budgeted for it, you also shouldn’t feel guilty about spending money on something if it makes you happy. Which is basically what Andrew said at the start, in far fewer words.
A certain article has been making the rounds. I’m not linking to it, even with rel=nofollow, but you can search for these quotes if you want to read the cringe first hand. Like all screeds of this nature it inadvertedly proves the opposite.
First off, it’s hardly just Americans who don’t like subtitles. No one likes subtitles. They’re only common in markets where film revenues aren’t high enough for studios to recoup the cost of producing dubbed versions.
Not even remotely close. Even where dubs are available, some people prefer subtitles. It would have taken five seconds of web searching to see this. At least it’s better than his first take, emphasis added:
First off, it’s hardly just Americans who don’t like subtitles. No one likes subtitles. They’re only common in countries too poor to afford a dubbing industry.
Back to his sanitised revision:
My pet peeve is that of course no one likes subtitles. After all, they eliminate one of the key aspects of the acting craft: reading lines.
That’s exactly why we prefer subtitles. We want to hear the emotion, cadence, and timing of the original actor and lines. Dubs necessarily detract from this, even with the best intentions, translations, and actors.
It is faux sophistication of the highest order to pretend that this shouldn’t—or doesn’t—matter.
But only one of my pinkies was up while typing this, and I only had half a slice of smashed avo too. Check mate from the unwashed masses!
None of this is to say that you can’t enjoy subtitled films. Of course you can. And I saw almost no movies last year, so I have no opinion on Parasite one way or the other. It’s only to say that spoken dialogue is a key part of the theatrical experience. Of course it matters.
He’s absolutely right, perhaps just not in the way he intended.
Screenshots from SSSS.Gridman, released by Trigger in 2018. For the gentleman who wrote this, anime is used in the West to refer specifically to Japanese animation. Japan is a country in Eastern Asia, a region of the world that isn’t the United States, that isn’t poor, and that dubs and subtitles their exported shows because they don’t natively speak English. That’s the language you’re reading now as opposed to listening to, because I was too poor to hire voice actors. Or whatever his point was.
It was wonderful having hampered visibility on account of water vapour over bushfire smoke for the first time in months. Photo below taken in Chatswood in the early morning, and Wynyard later in the day.
The Rural Fire Service was also reporting the torrential rain has put out thirty fires over the last few days.
Let’s not get complacent though. This all happened because humans continue to screw with the environment with reckless abandon, which is counterproductive at best because we happen to live and grow our food in it.
Equinix in Australia just advised us:
The following additional processes have been implemented across our [data centres] in Asia-Pacific:
Before entering the data center, all visitors are required to have their temperature checked by the facility staff using no-contact infrared thermometers. We do not record any of the information collected. Those who have a body temperature above 37.3 degree Celsius will not be allowed to enter the data center
Hand sanitizers have been placed at the security counter of all data centers
Liquid soap, disposable towels and hand dryers are available in data center restrooms
Getting a temperature check before going into the data centre reminds me of Singapore immigration during SARS. The Coronavirus has now killed more people.
Welcome to another installment of Music Monday, the self-evident blog post series for which no further explanation is presumed to be required. Or needed, if this were about Bread. Get it? Because kneeding is what you… shaddup.
My parents had a set of their own mix tapes they’d play in the car during long road trips which came to define my sister’s and my childhoods. I owe my knowledge of Michael Franks, The Beatles, Van Morrison, Joe Cocker, Santana, the Dooby Brothers, Angélique Kidjo, Bread, and too many more to count from listening to those tapes. They were played through rural Australia, winding roads in the Balinese mountains, and the first few years after we moved to Singapore.
This song from his 1970 album Abraxas is my all-time favourite Santana song, and in my top five favourite songs of all time. It evokes so many emotions and nostalgic feelings for those carefree days before my mum got sick and the biggest troubles to beset our family were deciding where to spend the holidays. It’s also a beautifully-crafted song in its own right.
graphicx is the de facto standard for including images in (La)TeX documents. But I noticed on the weekend that importing the package resulted in the margins in the document shifting:
\documentclass[12pt]{memoir}
\usepackage[b5paper]{geometry}
\usepackage{graphicx}
I’d been using this for years, so the behavior surprised me. I swapped the document type back to book, and changed my beloved b5paper size to a4paper without any difference. I thought maybe some images were stretching the margins somewhere, but removing the aforementioned visual depictions them also did nothing.
Importing the paper geometry after graphicx fixed it:
\documentclass[12pt]{memoir}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage[b5paper]{geometry}
Or defining it in your documentclass if it’s supported:
\documentclass[12pt,b5paper]{memoir}
\usepackage{graphicx}
I love writing in LaTeX, but I always forget small things like this.
On a recent Rubenerd Show I talked about the reception NomadBSD had received in certain quarters like Reddit, and how a vocal pluality deemed it unnessesary because it didn’t fill any purpose for them. Ignoring the logical fallacy so vast one could drive a lorry of Walnut Creek CD-ROMs through it, what’s the point of such belitteling statements? Just because it’s not useful to you, doesn’t mean it’s not useful to someone else, to spell it out.
Which leads me to this article by Tim Anderson in The Register about the developer of Actix. I’ve heard of Actix, and I’m not even a Rust developer or user beyond Firefox being my primary browser. It has some impressive performance stats, especially compared to other CMSs run on similar servers. I checked it out when I was flirting with moving off gohugo and static site generation.
The maintainer of the Actix web framework, written in Rust, has quit the project after complaining of a toxic web community - although over 100 Actix users have since signed a letter of support for him.
“Be[ing] a maintainer of large open source project is not a fun task. You[’re] alway[s] face[d] with rude[ness] and hate, everyone knows better how to build software, nobody wants to do homework and read docs and think a bit and very few provide any help. … You could notice after each unsafe shitstorm, i started to spend less and less time with the community. … Nowadays supporting actix project is not fun, and be[ing] part of rust community is not fun as well. I am done with open source.”
I’ll bet there’s some precious context here we’re missing, as with all these public burnouts. Kim might have not have been as forthcoming with fixes, or been as receptive to feedback as he could have been. He may be dealing with personal issues, or feedback he received in private pales in comparison to public, on the record comments. But this is all irrelevent if Kim felt threatened. It has nothing to do with his metaphorical skin thickness, or the responsibility people see him having. This should be intuitively obvious to more than just caring or empathetic people, yet here we are.
I’m unsure why poor treatment in free and open source software is getting more attention than it used to. The Internet had trolls before the WWW. Perhaps the sheer volume is larger now, or victims see Linus Torvalds apologise and feel emboldened to speak about it. I’m hoping more of the latter.
The thing that floors me is even blinkered narcissists should recognise that being a dick is not conducive to growing free and open source communities. I avoided speaking and blogging about BSD and Perl for years after being constantly harangued for my poor life choices. Maybe it was projection, or they were used to the crap they used to have to deal with and consider it an awkward form of hazing?
How many (admittedly far more talented) people have either stopped contributing, or have seen how others are treated and decided to steer clear? If the answer to either of those is greater than zero, we’ve lost.