Rubenerd

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24:25 – Thanking people for Australian bushfire feedback, Malcolm Turnbull’d internet, pronouncing abbreviations as acronyms (PPPoE... pehpehpehooee?), the Ricoh GR III camera, finding a stream and an old key in a forest near Cammeray, the plight of inefficient portable air conditioners, wooden shelving, and various challenges when selling incomplete anime figures.

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.

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How did I miss page 666? It’s one more than 665, and at least a dozen more than 100. I made such a big deal out of WordPress ID 666 in February 2007, back when I still used that CMS; and then again for the actual post 666 exactly one year later, give or take a few days.

Now we’re at 666 pages, which means at ten posts per page, if my intensive mathematical calculations are sound, and my prose remains as stilted as ever, we’ve passed 6,666 posts. Had I got a sixth of the way through another post draft immediately after that, it’d be 6,666.6. Which if you multiplied by e, would be pointless. I miss when I’d do a ton of these pointless milestones.

For some reason I used a screenshot or art from Elfen Lied on those past posts, presumably because the series scared me at the time. So here’s another random one from episode 7 which aired in 2004. It depicts a similar scene in which I’m currently residing writing this post.

I’ve been diving more into legacy data and file formats again. This 2003 article by Jack Schofield is about the VHS–Betamax format war, but as I read it I could apply it to so many things, emphasis added:

… the next time someone tells you that, of course, Betamax was superior to VHS, you can tell them that they are wrong. It’s an urban myth. This is not news: the information has always been available to anyone who could be bothered to look. However, it seems to me that the survival of this and many similar notions is not just a matter of techno-arrogance: it shows a failure to understand how technology markets work.

Substitute Betamax for any technical endeavour. Heck, even political ones. I’ll say climate change because my home country is still on fire. But lest you think this is a nerd dismissing The Normies, there’s a lesson for us too:

… almost no journalists, and no geeks, have ever come across the concept of “the whole product”, though it is well known to marketing people. Real people may not be aware of it, but the “whole product” model is an accurate description of the way they buy things.

What is the whole product? Emphasis added:

… when someone buys and uses a product, the technological aspects are a small and often uninteresting part of the decision. When you choose compact cassette, you are also buying into a vast infrastructure of capabilities, services and support. These include the availability of cheap cassettes on every high street, cheap personal stereos, and the ability to use the same format for a wide range of applications

I make this mistake constantly when talking about consumer tech. People don’t care if something is higher quality, or dare I say even more ethical, if it’s harder to use. That’s not to say there isn’t value in understanding technology, more that it’s not purchased in a vacuum.

Worse is better and agile development are variations on this theme, now that I think about it.

My sister said to us the news cycle feels even more overwhelming than usual today. It about sums it up for me too. Each day the bushfire disaster across Australia gets worse, and then it gets worse again. I’m afraid to check my phone in the morning for fear of seeing the reports of more people dying, homes being lost, and millions more dead animals and forests.

It’s why I’m still awake at almost 02:00, looking at the New South Wales Fires Near Me website. There are 151 fires across the almost 2000 km coastline:

But that’s not the surreal part, for want of a better word. Leaving aside his party’s penchant for coal for a moment, at least the opposition leader is currently out there listening, talking with people, and making regular statements:

Speaking to the media in Sydney this morning. Australia is facing an unprecedented crisis. This is a national emergency. It requires a national response.

And regarding the latest evacuation:

The biggest evacuation in Australian history. Residents in areas the size of European countries are being told to leave. This is not business as usual.

Meanwhile, the actual prime minister was caught on video forcing a woman in a fire ravenged town to shake his hand, once he decided that maybe he should pretend to show some empathy after his Hawaiian holiday. And yet, still no formal coordination of state resources, or extra assistance, or any meaningful words about the disaster at all. As I said back in November 2018:

These aren’t words of confidence, they’re the last gasps of someone utterly out of their depth, grasping for anything to humanise himself.

The state of Victoria has also declared a state of disaster. And my home state of New South Wales has 151 active fires declared a third state of emergency:

Bush fire conditions in NSW are expected to worsen over the coming week. Catastrophic fire danger is forecast for Greater Sydney, Greater Hunter and Illawarra Shoalhaven areas. This is the first time since new fire danger ratings were introduced in 2009 that catastrophic fire danger has been forecast for Sydney.

More brave firefighters have died:

The NSW Rural Fire Service (NSW RFS) confirms that a NSW RFS volunteer firefighter has died this evening near Jingellic. A further two firefighters on the same truck have suffered burns and are being conveyed to hospital. The firefighters were working on the Green Valley, Talmalmo Fire, approximately 70km east of Albury when it’s believed that the truck rolled when hit by extreme winds associated with the fire.

BBC News has a good summary video. The first clip of fireys in their truck surrounded by hell is terrifying. Don’t watch if you’re sensitive, but helps to show the gravity of the sitation.

And the New York Times now has an article:

The fires have already burned about 14.5 million acres — an area almost as large as West Virginia, more than triple the area destroyed by the 2018 fires in California and six times the size of the 2019 fires in Amazonia. Canberra’s air on New Year’s Day was the most polluted in the world partly because of a plume of fire smoke as wide as Europe.

Scientists estimate that close to half a billion native animals have been killed and fear that some species of animals and plants may have been wiped out completely. Surviving animals are abandoning their young in what is described as mass “starvation events.” At least 18 people are dead and grave fears are held about many more.

All this, and peak fire season is only just beginning.

Anyone Australian who denies climate change at this stage should be charged with treason.

I’m not a developer anymore, but I still like to watch videos and read papers on the subject. Today I stumbled across this talk by Richard Feldman exploring why functional programming isn’t the norm. But he also goes into graphing general language use over time, and the soft and technical motivations for why developers choose specific languages and frameworks.

(Most of the comments concerned the fact that non-functional languages are inherently sticker and more useful because they’re multi-paradigm, whereas functional languages require an all-or-nothing approach. I don’t know enough about it to comment).

Hunspell is an excellent spell checking library written by László Németh I only learned of since trying emacs. Yes, that’s happening! It’s also the spell checker used for LibreOffice, OpenOffice.org, and Mozilla applications. It requires installation of the library, and one or more word lists to compare words against.

On macOS you can use Homebrew or pkgin to get the latest version, but the dictionary files may be missing or outdated:

$ brew install hunspell
# pkgin install hunspell

The alternative is to download and install wordlists manually. macOS used to place its dictionaries in /Library/Spelling, and hunspell is still set to look for them there. Assuming you’ve downloaded a language and need to unzip:

# mkdir /Library/Spelling
# unzip hunspell-en_GB-ise-2019.10.06.zip -D /Library/Spelling

FreeBSD installation is straightforward using ports or packages. The en-hunspell package includes all major English language flavours, some of which even spell flavours correctly:

# pkg install hunspell en-hunspell

You may also require setting environment variables so tools like emacs can find the dictionaries and the correct language. For example, place these in your Bourne-compatible shell config if you’re on macOS:

export DICTIONARY=en_GB-ise
export DICPATH=/usr/local/share/hunspell (FreeBSD)
export DICPATH=/Library/Spelling (macOS)

You can now confirm which wordlists are detected and installed:

# hunspell -D
...
AVAILABLE DICTIONARIES (path is not mandatory for -d option):
/Library/Spelling/en_AU
/Library/Spelling/en_GB-ise

Using these in emacs will be in a future post.

Speaking of retrospectives, I saw a few Twitterlings share their favourite anime for each year of the 2010s. I think this is a great idea, so I’ve compiled my own list. Just as they did, the years correspond with when I saw them, not necessarily when they originally came out.

• 2010: K-On! This was the moeblob to end all moeblobs. It was unapologetically fun, cheerful, and true to the original four panel comics. I wanted to give each one of the light music club cast a hug.

• 2011: Gurren Lagann. It came out back in 2007, but I only finished it in 2011. And wow, what a series. Probably one of my all time favourite science fiction shows, let alone anime. This narrowly beat out Tatami Galaxy.

• 2012: Hyouka. It’s Clara’s and my series. ♡

• 2013: Penguindrum. I normally give shows that involve hospitals as a plot device a hard pass for obvious reasons, but everything about this series was perfect. Though I had Rock Over Japan in my head for months. This narrowly beat Gatchaman Crowds.

• 2014: Barakamon. My favourite anime series of all time. It was a touching story of someone my age going through the same self doubt I was, only he went to an island and did something about it. This narrowly beat out Madoka Magica.

• 2015: Shirokuma Cafe. What a beautiful, fun series. I’m sensing a trend. I watched the anime first, then made my way through the manga. It was the first anime I played for my dad and his partner, and that I watched with my sister who now watches more stuff than I do!

• 2016: Fate/Stay Night: Unlimited Blade Works. My favourite arc and lead from the original Fate/Stay Night was given such spectacular treatment with this retelling. Tohsaka Rin in HD gave me palpitations.

• 2017: SKET Dance. It came out a while ago, but I watched the entire series over a period of weeks with Clara. I adore the characters, dare I say it even more than Gintama’s.

• 2018: Isekai Izakaya “Nobu”. Another lighthearted and fun show about a restaurant with an entrance to another world that Clara and I looked forward to each week. The iRL Japanese travel guides at the end of each episode were also charming and delightful. This narrowly beat Holmes of Kyoto.

• 2019: Yuru Camp. It’s fitting that we end the decade with a series as fun and loveable as where we started. I technically first saw it in 2018, but I’d since watched it twice more in 2019 it was so good. This narrowly beat Astra, which truthfully I’ve only read but still haven’t watched yet.

I really need to restore my 2000s anime blog now that I’ve recovered many of the backups. I might do a retro-retrospective of that decade too at some point, might be fun.

Last year I wrote about buying and testing a new external RAID box for additional storage on one of my home FreeBSD file servers. I tend to not like these kind of enclosures: they’re often built with flaky controllers, the cases themselves tend to be flimsy, and you often can’t swap the drive into a regular sled after the fact because they write additional metadata to the disk. But they’re useful in a pinch, provided you have sufficient backups.

I mentioned in my post on the subject that FreeBSD’s GEOM subsystem automatically creates convenient serial number symlinks for most drives, and you can always fall back to labelling manually with gpart(8) for drives that don’t have guaranteed unique serial numbers.

I should reiterate that it’s good practice to always label your drives manually as well, even if FreeBSD does the initial symlinking for you. You can provide additional context to the drive, such as its sled location, part number, or the date of installation. I admitted in the linked post that I usually don’t bother for personal use, but I always do in professional settings.

The result of the GEOM subsystem detecting these drives is a handy, human-readable set of aliases. Here’s a standard diskid that’s detected the serial number of one of the SATA drives:

/dev/diskid/DISK-1SGHNMHZ --> /dev/ada0

And another that I labelled myself using gpart(8):

/dev/gpt/8TB-YHGWWS1A --> /dev/da0

You may have also witnessed this behavior when attaching geli(8) encrypted volumes; the pronunciation of which I’m grateful to Allan Jude for correcting. So imagine my surprise when these folders didn’t populate with any of my drives on fresh FreeBSD 12.1 install, despite the GPT labels being intact and the other drives showing serial numbers in dmesg(8). I thought I had a screw loose somewhere, or at least an symlink to one.

The solution is to enable the appropriate geom(8) lines in /boot/loader.conf where appropriate. This for diskid:

kern.geom.label.disk_ident.enable="1"

And this for GPT disks:

kern.geom.label.gptid.enable="1" 

You’ll have all your drive symlinks back upon rebooting.

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.

02:02:22 – Chad Bowers, Dave in Kentucky, Rubenerd, and Frank Edward Nora ring in a New Year of mind-altering wordsmithery!!! PQ Ribber hosts!

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

As I watch the sun literally and figuratively set on 2019, I’m compelled to write a retrospective on this last decade. My sister and Darryl Kang have both written poignant, personal messages I don’t hope to top, but Georgina takes my the cake for her brutally honest and beautiful post last Saturday.

It feels like a monumental task, so I’ve brewed a cup of coffee, got the computer chair set to its optimal position, and am wearing my thinking hat. Which is one of the hats I always wear.

Back to Australia 🇦🇺

The 2010s coincided almost perfectly with my family repatriating from Singapore to Australia. We were all over the place for much of the 2000s: I was studying in Adelaide, then the family moved to Kuala Lumpur, then I came back to study by correspondence during my mum’s final years, then we moved back to Singapore, then my sister and I were back in Adelaide part time for studying, and my dad continued to be based in Singapore. My PayPal account listed 19 addresses.

I still remember the call from my dad while we were preparing for exams in Adelaide that he was being transferred back, and that our return home to Singapore for that Christmas would be for the last time. I knew the time would come eventually, but severing the last connection to what I considered my adopted home was heartbreaking. I didn’t want to go back to Australia; all I knew about it from infrequent trips to visit family was it had awful internet and was so far away from everywhere else.

Little did I know that it would be the best thing that happened to me. Moving back permanently to Australia, in this case Sydney, helped us to mentally and physically regroup for the first time since my mum died and we’d all lost a bit of purpose. I had been feeling adrift and depressed for a long time by this stage, with no real base anywhere or sense of direction.

And while Australia does have Turnbull’ian internet, I’ve loved living in Sydney. It’s expensive enough to make Singapore look cheap now, but the people are friendly, the coffee and food are incredible, the work culture is more relaxed, most of the year the weather is beautiful, there are so many natural wonders to explore, and I feel safe. And with a large influx of Asian businesses and people in the time we were away, most of my favourite treats can be found here.

(I’d started drafting this post a few months ago, so what I’ve said about safety may have been rattled a bit. Here’s hoping Australia gets it political act together in the 2020s).

Admittedly compared to Singapore, I’ve felt the most at home since we moved to Chatswood, given its strong Chinese community, dense apartment building blocks, and abundance of Asian food. But it’s also closer to the Sydney CBD than where we were before, and I love the little home Clara and I have built together.

In many ways this retrospective is as much a tribute to what Australia has given me since we came back here. I’m not sure if my long-term future is still here, but I’m grateful for what I have here right now.

Overcoming shyness and social anxiety 📚

I like to think I achieved a lot during the previous decade: caring for my mum, graduating high school, starting university the first time, getting my first paid IT gigs, baking my first scone. But breaking out of my shell was not one of them. If anything my social anxiety was worse by 2009 than it was in school in 2000. It was crippling in so many ways, from not being able to open the front door without my heart racing, to the paradoxical need for human interaction but avoiding social situations for days at a time.

I’m still a bit like this. Being an introvert does mean I need large blocks of time for personal projects, and mental recharging. At times I do still feel pangs of anxiousness when I’ve spent too much time talking with people, requiring a quick trip to the bathroom or a breather outside; introverts know what I’m talking about.

But with help from my new Australian friends in Sydney, and forcing myself to make social interactions a routine, I no longer feel debilitated by it. I struggled with this as a teenager, but I’ve also finally given myself permission to excuse myself from loud New Years parties and other events I hate. Life’s too short to pretend to enjoy things you don’t.

Career 🔰

The 2010s were the first time I questioned the specific infocomm role I’d end up in, for the better. In school and university I picked up software subjects, fully expecting to graduate a software developer. I was for my first few jobs, most recently as one of those short-lived devops people, but I realised I was spending more personal and work time doing technical writing and tinkering with virtual machines rather than writing code. I’ve been happier since officially shifting to doing those, and I’m less stressed despite having a steeper workload.

This decade was also when I met a startup entrepreneur at my alma mater, who was teaching a cloud infrastructure subject. I asked him if he was hiring after the class, and a year later he not only remembered me, but offered me a job. It’s now been the longest I’ve ever had, and I love the team and the system we’re building. It’s also offered me a chance to travel regularly to meet clients, to work in the San Francisco office whenever I want, and to present at conferences overseas.

Funny story, I missed my graduation ceremony at UTS because I was in a Kinokuniya opposite Bryant Park in New York with my girlfriend on paid leave. If I read that sentence as a teenager, I would have scarcely believed any of it. ♡

Incidently, if you’re up for an enterprise-grade cloud that’s more robust, easier to understand, and cheaper than the ones you know, give OrionVM a try :).

Travel 🏯

For all the family medical drama and pain my sister and I grew up with, we were extraordinarily lucky that my dad’s job let us travel the world. And I knew that I’d want to keep doing it when I moved out and was making my own income. Shiny possessions and grand homes be damned!

But somehow I had a mental block to doing it once I had the financial means to do so. I didn’t think could cut it in foreign country, whether it be for the language barrier or even taking the first step to booking tickets and accommodation. And when I’d get close to finally preparing, self-doubt and a weird feeling that I didn’t deserve it would sweep over me, and I’d cancel.

Clara and my job have both been so great for this. Clara’s working knowledge of Japanese has let us wander around all the places I’d dreamed to, and her Cantonese helped in Hong Kong! I’d promised my mum I’d go with her to the Met in New York once she was cured, so Clara was gracious and nice enough to make the trip with me and hold my hand when I got wobbly. It was also unreasonably fun to show her around Singapore which I’m lucky to still be able to go back to every couple of years.

Along with these we’ve also ticked off Osaka, Kyoto, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Philadelphia, San Francisco, San Jose/Silicon Valley, and Los Angeles. Hopefully we’ve only just begun.

FreeBSD and NetBSD 😈

This may seem like an oddly-specific thing to include here, but bear with me. My origins with the world’s greatest operating systems date back to using them on PowerPC Mac hardware, where I could never quite get Yellow Dog Linux working properly. Since then I use them wherever I can; NetBSD on my vintage hardware and virtual machines, and FreeBSD on my file servers, hypervisors, storage arrays, and even this blog you’re reading. In this decade I also started using them professionally.

These OSs have helped me so much in my career, but just as importantly the BSD community around them have been so welcoming and supportive. AsiaBSDCon 2018 and 2019 in Tokyo were wonderful conferences to meet the people who I’d tweeted and seen their names in manual pages.

Hats 🎩

This is another random one, but speaks to something more generally. Okay it doesn’t really, but I’ll force the point.

I loved old school European hats like the beret growing up, but our school uniform had a hat so they were therefore uncool. Then just as I graduated and I felt I was able to wear them, hipsters starting owning them and I didn’t want to. In the 2010s something finally sparked in me and I stop caring what others did or felt when it came to delightful headgear.

My daily wear now is one of many Italian Flat Caps I adore, though I’m also partial to Ascots, Newsie Caps, and Chullos for the winter. I started the decade with a single hat, now I have more than a dozen for every occasion and colour I need.

Incidently, it’s why I also have a pink backpack, anime badges, and maintain my mismatching socks. In social circles and the outside world I’m fairly reserved but I’m happy that I’m comfortable having these on my person.

Clara 👩🏻‍🎨

I’ve left the best to last. But where do I start talking about the greatest thing that happened this decade, especially given I’ve said so much about her already.

After my dear friend Vadim registered us both in the anime club and I first met this fascinating, shy Cantonese girl the first time, I knew with absolute certainty I needed her in my life. I’d be keen to hang out with our anime club friends, but I’d especially look forward to it for her being there.

Our fate, for want of a better and less cheesy word, was sealed when she gave me a goodbye hug after class, and neither of us wanted to let go. We tweeted and got to know each other over the course of more than a year, including goodnight tweets which became a regular evening tradition. Eventually I worked up the guts to ask her out in the most embarrassing way conceivable, and she agreed. We met at Happy Lemon at lunch, and talked till they closed.

Her interests and mine overlap to such a degree it’s almost scary, and where there are differences we’ve learned from each other. She’s also an eager travel companion, and her organisation skills have meant I’ve come to rely upon her more than I care to admit. She’s quite literally everything I could have ever asked for.

The entire decade could have been a radioactive disaster, and I still would have felt better off had it been for meeting Clara, and her saying yes. Romantic words are hard. ♡

Conclusions

The sun has now set on this year and decade, and so it has on this post. I’m not sure if I’ll be blogging much more today, but if not, I wish you a Happy New Year and all the best.