Rubenerd

Good to know!

The English Wikipedia introduces orientability with this:

In mathematics, orientability is a property of surfaces in Euclidean space that measures whether it is possible to make a consistent choice of surface normal vector at every point. A choice of a normal vector allows one to use the right-hand rule to define a “clockwise” direction of loops in the surface, as needed by Stokes’ theorem for instance. More generally, orientability of an abstract surface, or manifold, measures whether one can consistently choose a “clockwise” orientation for all loops in the manifold.

I understood most, but not all of this. To non-technical people, I’ll bet it reads like French. Unless you can read French. Omelette du fromage.

I say this as a regular Wikimedia Foundation donor and Wikipedia writer myself: Wikipedia’s mathematics articles are obtuse to the point of uselessness for the majority of the site’s potential readers. Aka, people doing web searches for something they’re trying to learn, because they’ve been told to RTFM instead of asking questions.

By all means have detail later in the article, but I’ve almost never been impressed by any mathematics article page lead. Compare this to most of the chemistry articles for example, and the difference is night and day.

And before the actually crowd attacks, this is not what the Simple English Wikipedia is for.

Emily Stewart wrote an article for Vox exploring why every website wants you to accept its cookies. You’ve undoubtedly seen these alerts, usually as a sticky element at the footer of a page, asking if its okay to track you with cookies to improve your experience or something equally vague. Like those pointless newsletter full screen popups, we all click them out of the way and grumble about how the web continues to get worse. Or maybe the latter is just me.

These popups were implemented in response to two pieces of legislation, as she explains:

The proliferation of such alerts was largely triggered by two different regulations in Europe: the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a sweeping data privacy law enacted in the European Union in May 2018; and the ePrivacy Directive, which was first passed in 2002 and then updated in 2009. They, and the cookie alerts that resulted, have plenty of good intentions. But they’re ineffectual.

Isn’t it telling that we’ve come to rely upon the European Union to be the gatekeeper for creepiness online?

But I digress. Emily asks at the end of the article if there are better solutions to these invasive and increasingly annoying popups, then lists a few legislative and technical solutions. Seals of approval, industry standardisation, frameworks for transparency and consent, for example. I’ve read a few articles over the last month that include these kinds of recommendations.

Did something immediately jump out at you too?

All these well-meaning solutions, here and in similar articles, suffer the same issue as the popups for which they’re being proposed as alternatives: they only treat the symptoms. The real alternative shouldn’t be changing the UI for window dressing, it’s having less tracking in the first place.

The GDPR was intended to provide users more control over how their data is stored and for what amount of time, and implementing a strong signal for web companies to justify what they store and why, rather than indiscriminately capturing everything. Instead, most sites have implemented the entirely cosmetic and low-effort UAC dialogue from Windows Vista in web form.

Things happen. Computers aren’t perfect, neither are their operators, or sometimes even the business models that underpin them. So I try to give people the benefit of the doubt when stuff happens, or when tough decisions need to be reached. Which is all the more reason I find obfuscation frustrating.

Yahoo quietly announced last month the deletion of Yahoo Groups content in bullet point four of a long email. They’ve now sent follow up with this evasive subject line:

Next Steps: The Evolution of Yahoo Groups (Final Notification)

The first paragraph, which manages to say a lot and nothing at all:

Last month we notified you of the changes coming to Yahoo Groups that better align with user habits, and today we are providing an update to guide you through the next steps of the transition. Yahoo Groups is not going away - [sic] but we are making adjustments to ultimately serve you better. We are amazed at the vibrant community you’ve created through Yahoo Groups and we want to make sure you feel supported as we introduce these changes.

And again, buried halfway down the email in bullet point five this time:

Any content that was previously uploaded via the website will be removed.

This should be the first sentence. Anyone reading this email would likely be turned off by the wall of marketing speak at the start, and could be forgiven deleting it without a second glance. Which means people are going to lose their data. Full stop.

Yahoo Groups have been around for a long, long time, and it’s likely the admins of various groups have moved on, or forgot about their communities. So it’s even more important for this word to get out appropriately.

Like the GeoCities debacle, I’m also a bit miffed that an integral piece of internet history is being deleted. I don’t entirely subscribe to the idea of a Digital Dark Age, but there are certainly whiffs of it each time this happens.

Ending their email:

We have watched the evolution of Yahoo Groups with awe, as we grew to a community of millions with over 10 million Groups. Every day, we witness the power of community and shared passions, and our mission is to provide a platform for the strong connections people make with each other around their interests.

Oh dear.

Brent Simmons wrote this on his microblog on Monday:

Please stop using the word “consume” when you mean read, watch, or listen to. It makes us sound like animals being force-fed our entertainment and info “experiences”.

I hadn’t considered that before, but it does make it sound like fodder.

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.

02:07:01 – Another existential collaboratorium from the ONSUG gang!! Chad Bowers!! Rubenerd!! Frank Edward Nora!! PQ Ribber is your stalwart in-betweener!!

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

28:40 – Bushfires have engulfed Sydney for more than a week now, so it was a relief and joy to wander around back in Melbourne on a business trip with blue skies, even if only for a couple of days! Talking about the inevitable comparisons between Sydney and Melbourne, Stanley Kubrick-inspired data centres, health nonsense about Kombucha, tree-lined streets, and wishing for a Ricoh GR III pocket camera. Creative Commons music by Chris Jurgenson.

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

Released December 2019 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.

I’m a FreeBSD advocate, and user on most of my personal servers and workstations. But I do keep NetBSD around too for some specific tasks, and suffice to say I enjoy it far more than other OSs I have to use.

(I remember getting audible gasps from the Japanese NetBSD users in the audience at AsiaBSDCon this year when I included a slide of my Mai-HiME NetBSD fan background I made back in 2008. And I’m pretty sure I still have my flag badge from CafePress somewhere).

To get the obvious comparison out of the way, online guides—usually written on otherwise well-meaning Linux websites—state the same old summary that FreeBSD has the widest install base, NetBSD is for portability, and OpenBSD is for security. I’ve got a draft post that explores why these truisms are entirely unhelpful for making real world decisions, not least for the inescapable, misleading, and incorrect corollaries.

But while that post is in progress, I can speak to why I use NetBSD:

• As well as being a great contemporary, general purpose OS, it’s the best Unix-like environment for resource-constrained computers. It runs beautifully on my Toshiba Libretto 70CT and my Pentium 1 tower, whereas they no longer meet stock FreeBSD memory requirements.

• Related to above, it installs in such a tiny space it’s great for quick virtual machine tests and boot keys.

• It was the first BSD OS I ever used, if you don’t count Darwin lurking under my PowerPC iBook G3’s Mac OS X install. I installed NetBSD over that machine in the early 2000s, and it Just Worked™. I keep using DOS for masochistic nostalgia, but NetBSD is a pleasure to use.

• pkgsrc is an excellent cross-platform package manager, and obviously fits well into a NetBSD install.

• This is a bit fluffy, but there’s something fun and interesting about using an adjacent OS, for want of a better phrase. I appreciate the camaraderie of my NetBSD colleagues at tech events, and smile each time I see a NetBSD developer’s email on a FreeBSD driver manpage. Ditto OpenBSD, who’s developers provide so many excellent tools we all use.

I’m the maintainer of both the NetBSD and FreeBSD templates on OrionVM, despite knowing the former’s install base is probably tiny. Just like its system requirements! I’m keen to see its continued use, and encourage people to try it out.

I reached out to Twitter earlier this week to ask what other people use it for. If you have any use cases and stories to share, I’d love to hear them.

I haven’t done a bushfire smoke post for at least a few days, so it’s time to rectify this. Here’s the view from the walkway near our apartment building in Chatswood back in April, a northern suburb of Sydney:

And the same view earlier today:

This is the first day of this smoky ordeal that my breathing has been laboured. I’m still probably recovering from my lung scare earlier this year, so this couldn’t have helped. Fun COUGH times.

It’s Music Monday time! I absolutely adore John Pizzarelli, as you’ve no doubt been able to tell from my years of blogging about him. His guitar and soft voice are always beautiful and just that little bit cheeky.

This is my favourite rendition of that big band classic, with all the winking and smiles you can hear as he introuces members of his band.

His recent tribute album Sinatra & Jobim @ 50 may be one of my new favourites, but his 1997 Our Love is Here to Stay will always remain the most special to me. You can check out a live performance of Avalon that I blogged about back in 2012 from the same album.