Rubenerd

FreeBSD has existed as an operating system, project, and foundation for more than twenty years, and its earlier incantations have exited for far longer. The old guard have been developing code, porting software, and writing documentation for longer than I’ve existed. I’ve been using it for more than a decade for personal prohects, and professionally for half that time.

While there are many prominant Australian FreeBSD contributers, sysadmins, and users, we’ve always had to venture overseas for conferences. We’re always told Australians are among the most ardent travellers, but I always wondered if we could do a domestic event as well.

And on Tuesday, we did! Deb Goodkin and the FreeBSD Foundation graciously organised and chaired a dedicated FreeBSD miniconf at the long-running linux.conf.au event held each year in a different city in Australia and New Zealand.

We had room 9 at the Gold Coast Convention Centre and a selection of excellent speakers including:

• Ben Woods, who flew over from Perth to discuss the FreeBSD Ports system and help run the event. It was his first talk, but it didn’t show!

• Philip Paeps, one of the community’s most fun speakers who pontificated on the state of FreeBSD security and detailed the use of ZFS to those unfamiliar.

• Me… gulp, on how OrionVM and I use FreeBSD, with a slant towards how to get Linux people interested, now that my new role has me pitching it to new clients. Thanks Deb for the photo!

• G Matthew Rice who flew all the way from Toronto to talk about the Linux Professional Institute’s BSD certification programme, and some of the interesting trends he’s seeing in the industry.

• Peter Grehan, yes, that Peter Grehan, talking about the FreeBSD hypervisor bhyve. He also helped me clarify a few points on my own slides, for which I’m tremendously grateful.

Perhaps the biggest challenge was overcoming the global press about the Australian bushfires, something I certainly didn’t help with. But we had a great turnout, and some genuine interest was shown in the project. Ben may have also convinced me to be a port maintainer which is now high on my list of personal projects to get started on!

Thanks to Deb, the FreeBSD Foundation, Ben for helping convince the Foundation to run an event here, and everyone who spoke and attended. In my own selfish way, it was equal parts humbling and… dare I use the marketing phrase everyone uses now, exciting, to be making history down here with everyone. Thanks also to the lovely Michael Dexter who put in a good word for me with the Foundation to present a talk. I’m overcoming shyness one step at a time.

We missed Groff, but maybe he can come down here one day :).

I’ve been doing more business travel the last few years, especially between Sydney and Melbourne. While I’ve only ever had problems with flight delays and diversions, plenty of people I meet have faced cancelled flights on the route, and it seems to be getting worse.

Patrick Hatch wrote about the trend in the Sydney Morning Herald:

[Qantas’] average monthly cancellation rate for Sydney-Melbourne flights was 9.5 per cent in the six months to November, according to data collected by the Department of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics.

Experts asserted this was Qantas cancelling under-subscribed flights in an attempt to consolidate people on fewer planes and save money, a claim Qantas denies. Yet Virgin Australia only reported an increase from 5 to 6 percent on the same route.

Patrick wrote for context:

Qantas operates up to 46 return flights daily on Sydney-Melbourne, which is the world’s second-busiest air route, with flights every 15 minutes during the peak periods.

I appreciated the clarification, having just said it’s the busiest in the world.

I can see why having regular flights would be more convenient, but I’d love to see fewer flights and wide-bodies making these flights instead. They’d be more comfortable, less likely to be cancelled for business reasons, more environmentally sustainable per seat, and cause less congestion and work for flight controllers per travellers.

The Overnightscape Central is a fun weekly podcast hosted by the illustrious PQ Ribber. Hosts and listeners of The Overnightscape Underground participate in a topic each week, and you’re welcome to join.

03:40:09 – Rubenerd!! Frank Edward Nora!! Doc Sleaze!! Chad Bowers!! Dave in Kentucky!! An extra-excellent Central – deeply examining Detectives and their pop culture significances!!

You can view this episode on the Underground, listen to it here, and subscribe with this feed in your podcast client.

This was the tail end of a discussion that just took place at the café I’m working from this morning. Transcribed without comment:

In C++ you have clean code, do you have to worry about that in C?

C++ is not clean code! The world is C and Python!

Then someone at a different table dropped a class, sorry, glass.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

52:15 – Forbidden 403 HTML status codes, unhelpful profiling, Australian bushfire updates (looters, conspiracy theories, hot takes), unexpected Adelaide nostalgia and early breakfasts, unintentional philosophical ramblings on the character and motivations of certain people, and an ongoing good natured but otherwise inexplicable retail saga. With thanks to Phil Collins.

Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Released January 2020 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts; this one notwithstanding.

Subscribe with iTunes, Pocket Casts, Overcast or add this feed to your podcast client.

Asha Barbaschow from ZDNet wrote a fantastic summary of Intel’s CES announcements this year:

Showing off Tiger Lake during the company’s keynote at CES in Las Vegas on Monday, Intel executive vice president Gregory Bryant said the new processor will deliver “double digit performance gains”, “massive” artificial intelligence performance improvements, better graphics performance, and 4x the throughput of USB3 with the new, integrated Thunderbolt 4.

Not requiring a separate chip to handle Thunderbolt is huge. Currently you need to have a capable computer, meaning the USB 3 port you have in your machine might be Thunderbolt capable, or it might not be. You always had the best chance of having it with Macs, but even then their 12-inch MacBook only shipped with USB 3 despite the connectors looking the same. This announcement takes us a step closer to ubiquity.

I wonder if AMD offer Thunderbolt on their Zen-architecture chips?

And on their new discrete GPU:

Intel also offered a preview of the first Xe-based discrete GPU, code named DG1, with Intel vice president of architecture for graphics and software Lisa Pearce saying the new Intel Xe graphics architecture will provide “huge performance gains” in Tiger Lake.

I’ve seen Linus Tech Tips and other outlets discuss this card in detail, including the fact that while it might be a welcome boost for mobile, it has a long battle ahead to compete, and it’s not Intel’s first foray into this market segment.

Despite these muted responses, I’m hugely excited for this. Finally we might get some awesome graphics on free/open source platforms that don’t depend on binary blobs or reverse engineering producing a necessarily inferior experience. Integrated Intel GPUs have always been easier to deal with on FreeBSD and similar systems due to mature, free drivers. If I could get the performance of a comparable Nvidia or AMD card on my home BSD tower, heck even half the performance, it’d be Christmas, Chinese New Year, and my birthday in one.

I haven’t done much blogging this week, or even lined up posts to trickle out during the week. In past years we’ve had a chill start as the masses slowly go back to work, but this year started with earnest. Such a great story.

That hasn’t stopped me from having some weirdly specific dreams.

• I had developed a new compression algorithm that lent itself well to streaming chunked data, making rsync a hundred times more efficient. I’d decided to give it to the OpenRsync devs first to test on their BSD-licenced version of the tool before getting a call not from Andrew Tridgell and Paul Mackerras, but Al Gore.

• I’d decided that the Ricoh GR III wasn’t for me after all, and I got a Canon mirrorless. Then proceeded to feel pangs of guilt and betrayal because I had always been a Nikon SLR guy.

• I was asked to debate a climate denier, but I said they should get a scientist instead. This made me into a meme which started appearing on the sides of buses; unfortunate given I was back in Singapore and those double-deckers have lots of vertical space.

• I replaced all the LEDs in my apartment with a newer generation of LEDs, I think so I could change the colour temperature more easily. But the ceiling started to melt, and I had to collect the falling drops with buckets covered in anime faces.

It’s at this stage that I’ll admit that this was the one dream. Or perhaps it was multiple over the course of the night that blended together.

Here’s a delightful email I got this morning:

Amazing job on your page https://rubenerd.com/hootsuite-social-bar/ it has some good references to “marketing” so I wanted to get in touch with you and ask, what you think about this article BRAND AND MARKETING STRATEGIES: TAKING YOUR BUSINESS TO THE NEXT LEVEL

You can read it right here: $REDACTED

I would like to hear your opinion on this article. Also, if you find it useful, please consider linking to it from your page I mentioned earlier. If you prefer you may republish the article. Let me know what you think.

My post she linked to was almost a decade old, and specifically mentioned how I didn’t like Hootsuite’s Social Bar. There’s your evidence that these spammers don’t read the stuff they purport to. But better still, this was halfway down their own article:

It may seem a little low-tech compared to some of today’s more advanced tools, but email remains a massively popular form of communication. If done well, it can provide an impressive ROI, or return on investment.

If done well being the operative phrase. Maybe I could have been suckered into their stuff if they heeded their own advice.

It’s Music Monday, that time of the week in which it’s Monday, and I blog about Music. Why was Music capitalised in that previous sentence twice, and again here? And why, having discovered my mistake, did I elucidate further rather than simply correcting the examples for which attention has now been Needlessly drawn? Wait, damn it.

I do like me some Tears for Fears, and Gary Jules’ cover of their Mad World song is one of my all time favourite songs. I’d never heard of Janet Devlin until tonight, but wow.

The title of this post reads more like a ticket to a trade show or industry event. But it’s something I’ve likely long since realised, but am only grappling with the implications now. Specifically, I’ve been mulling on that 2003 VHS–Betamax article I wrote about yesterday, and realised I had the opposite problem that Jack Schofield described.

I was always one of those people who had to obsessively research everything I bought. I know this, because I still am. I’d pour over Sim Lim Square and Funan Centre computer part price lists as a kid trying desperately to ink out any conceivable advantage in performance I could find for the precious little money I had. That was a long sentence. Even when I came second in a writing contest and suddenly had $800 to throw around, I was dithering whether to go with RAMBUS or a Pentium Pro.

(I might be getting my timelines mixed up a bit, but you get the point. And what a relief I didn’t choose RAMBUS. I don’t even like regular buses).

This justification morphed as I got older from thriftiness and efficiency to one of professionalism. I was a computing enthusiast, with dreams of becoming a developer and systems engineer, so of course I needed the best equipment. These delusions of grandeur also began to seep into other areas like photography, then as I got older even lightbulbs, coffee machines, and home audio gear.

My teenage self would hotly deny the charge, but my perceived self-image was also becoming increasingly tied to the equipment I used. Nothing good ever comes from this.

That’s not to say I didn’t have ample opportunities to see through this Potemkin Mind I’d erected. I inherited my dad’s old Pentium II ThinkPad 600E when he got a new work machine. I’d never had a laptop before, and this one seemed massive, clunky, slow, and unreasonably fun to use. It had its own distinctive tactile experience, and beeps, and an LCD.

I’ve had new Macs and DIY machines since, but somehow they’ve always had a second-hand ThinkPad sidekick. I have fond memories of my X40 and X61s; both were less powerful, had lower resolution screens, poorer colour reproduction, and comically short battery lives compared to my Macs, but I often ended up taking them to coffee shops instead. With FreeBSD and Linux, of course.

But still I stubbornly clung to the fallacy that I needed the best, or at least the best I could afford, because anything less would be a tacit admission that my work and, by extension myself, weren’t worth it. And I was, damn it! In perhaps the most absurd case, I got a PowerMac G5 and external display to take overseas to study, instead of a laptop. And half the time it was running NetBSD, not even Mac OS X!

I held onto this view for years, at my own expense. I bought heavy DSLRs because, of course, prosumers want interchangable lenses for every situation in which they’d find themselves. No matter that I had basically the same prime welded to it the entire time, and that I barely took fifty photos a month at best. No point rocking up to a nature reserve or an anime convention with a pocket camera. The upshot of which meant I used my camera on my phone more, and left the SLR in a bag at home.

Which, speaking of that, also extended to esoteric things like anime figures. I never considered getting so-called game prize figures on account of them being poor quality, but I was given one by a close friend and she’s one of my favourites. She even has a few friends now, some of which are there because I sold scale figs I liked less to make space.

The list keeps growing the more I think about this. Kitchen utensils. Watches. Fitness garb including swimsuits and runners. 4K video, lossless audio, and headphones. And with a lady living with me now, these extended to her.

It wasn’t till I started my decluttering binge a few years ago that I finally acknowledged my own priorities, which surprisingly to me often had nothing to do with the performance of the machine or other metrics we’re supposed to care about. My primary machine is an ageing MacBook Pro docked to an external display so I don’t have to endure its ghoulish keyboard. My sidekick laptop is a second-hand ThinkPad. My home server is a bargain basement HP Microserver with a Xeon for ECC and VT-x, but a low TDP to keep it cool. And my current camera, after tricking myself for years that I needed an interchangable SLR or at least a M4/3 system, is a fixed lens Ricoh GR III compact.

In the most extreme case, my Pentium MMX tower I built from those aforementioned price lists is now my main home gaming machine given my rediscovery of DOS. And yes, she dual-boots NetBSD!

I apologise if this comes across at all condescendingly, or if you feel as though I’m belittling your own interests or how you spend money. It may very well be that you do need as much processing power as you can throw money at, or the best camera, or that you derive genuine joy and happiness from using them, or productivity for your job. But I’ve been surprised, and dare I say it a little relieved, that I can get by and be perfectly happy with less. Which given Clara’s and my penchant for tiny apartments in convenient inner city locations, we may need to have got used to anyway.