Rubenerd

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24:32 – The Rubenerd Show returns to Kuala Lumpur after thirteen years! Playing a retrospective clip from episode 103 in June 2006, then back to October 2019 with Clara wandering around the Petronas Twin Towers and Jalan Ampang. I never thought I’d be doing this again!

Recorded in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Released October 2019 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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Yesterday I was reading about the Glasgow Subway, then watched a video about the retiring of the first cable-powered carriages in 1977. Then John mentioned on an episode of Roderick on the Line that he had an adventure near the Lake Otis Parkway in Alaska in 1977.

What else happened during this time?

• The Commodore PET was demonstrated at CES in Chicago and first sold, Apple Computer was founded, the Tandy TRS-80 was announced, and Atari releases the Video Computer System.

• Jimmy Carter became US president, and Malcolm Fraser remained Prime Minister in Australia despite a 5 seat swing.

• First use of optical fibre to carry network traffic, and the first TCP/IP test connecting 3 ARPANET nodes succeeds.

• First test flight of a US space shuttle, on the 747 Shuttle Carrier. The wow signal is also detected by the Big Ear SETI radio telescope. And Voyager 1 is launched.

• The original Star Wars opened in theaters, setting the stage for the far superior Star Trek films to come after.

• In music, Toto is founded, Fleetwood Mac released Rumours, Steely Dan released Aja, Queen released News of the World, and both Elvis and The Supremes perform for the last time.

Thanks to Springsgrace on Wikimedia Commons for that great photo.

Henry T. Casey wrote an article about why he’s not moving to macOS Catalina, for similar reasons that Shaun King and I aren’t. He ended with this observation:

The last time Apple had such a system-changing update, it turned Mac OS into OS X in 2001, 18 years into that platform (the same amount of time Apple spent supporting 32-bit apps). I hope it’s at least another 18 years until we learn of the death of 64-bit apps.

Henry’s not the first person to say that was the last major system update, but it misses the PowerPC to Intel transition that started with 10.4 Tiger in 2006. We had Universal Binaries back then that supported both platforms, before the legacy code was removed in 10.6 Snow Leopard, and the Rosetta system to run PowerPC on Intel was removed entirely in 10.7 Lion.

This transition is a longer time coming, but similar in that it’s a wholesale removal of an architecture in lieu of a different one. There are a few theories as to why Apple are doing this, from making the transition to arm easier, to simplifying their code base. Given Apple’s well-publicised QA issues of late, I’d hope the latter would help.

Apple were only on i386 for less than a year with the first generation Intel iMac and MacBook Pro. Part of me wonders had they been able to hold out on moving from PowerPC for another nine months or so, they’d have been able to launch with the Core 2 Duo and avoided all this.

I haven’t had the change to check out the latest Fate/Grand Order Absolute Demonic Front: Babylonia anime adaptation episodes with Clara yet, but the key visuals look pretty great. I love that they asked the fans which story from the mobile game they wanted animated… and that it was Babylonia!

I say this each time, but FGO is still the only mobile game I’ve ever been able to play and absorb myself in; equal parts visual novel and strategy card game with admittedly some grindy gatcha. It was based on a long-established franchise that I loved. And now its spawned TV shows and movies. Type-Moon have come a long way.

I don’t use any Apple point-zero release on principle, let alone a phone or a Mac. Ah man, that was so good. But iOS 13.1 feels like the roughest point-one Apple OS release in a long time. Features are still broken or missing, and applications routinely crash.

These have all likely been pointed out before in radars and on social media, but they’re ones I’ve been grappling with since last week:

• Bluetooth tethering and AirPlay are unreliable. You can pair it with your AppleTV as many times as you want, but it still prompts you to do so.

• Podcast and audio players un-pause without prompting on my desk, so when I go home I’ve lost my spot.

• On/Off sliders scroll the page without toggling when tapped, perhaps about 10% of the time?

• The Notes application interprets certain Markdown syntax to rich text, but it’s impossible to backspace out of lists.

• The system-wide tab control colour has been replaced with lozenges with almost no contrast whatsoever. I’m nearsighted so I can see it fine, but I worry for anyone else.

But the worst hit is poor Mail, which even in the latest releases has lost much of its fit and polish:

• The UI is inconsistent. The root Mailboxes screen has a pale grey header, and individual mailboxes are white. The footer toolbar has a border in list views, but not in individual messages, regardless if either has scrollable content behind them.

• The footer toolbar UI elements aren’t centred. They’ve sunk on the mail screen, and float too high in individual messages. It looks really cheap, like a third-party Android skin.

• The animations between screens are janky. When you tap a message in a list view, the other view slides to the side, but the old toolbar just abruptly disappears in a flash of white. When you tap Edit in a list view then tap a circle to select a message, the grey behind the message goes darker faster than the rest of the message.

• Subject lines are huge now like Windows Phone, so they almost always wrap and take even more screen real estate. This is on top of the needlessly large, system level application headings we got a couple of versions ago.

• But worst of all, you can’t flag an email or mark it as spam from the message itself anymore. This is absolutely, mind-bogglingly, head-swivelling bananas!

These may sound like minor quibbles, but they weren’t a problem before. I used to say I preferred desktop Mac and iOS because I liked them, but lately it’s morphed into because other things are worse.

It’s Music Monday once again, that time of the week where I discuss organised audible emissions. Today, Van the Man regales us with his times working in IT support:

What’s my line?
I’m happy cleanin’ Windows™
Take my time
I’ll see you when my love grows
Baby don’t let it slide
I’m a working man in my prime
Cleanin’ Windows™

I made decent pocket money in high school doing this. That and downgrading people’s Windows Vista machines to XP or 2000 (and one to NT 4.0 if you can believe it), and replacing bloated AV with Avast and Lavasoft Ad-Aware. I might be dating myself more than I care to admit.

Moondance is by far my favourite Van Morrison song, but jokes aside I always thought this tune was especially optimistic and fun.

Allan Jude famously quipped that OpenZFS without ECC memory is still more trustworthy than any other file system with ECC. This is true, but given the choice I’d still prefer to strategically deploy both.

Except, try typing ECC into a search engine or online store, and you get this:

Kingston […] Non-ECC
Kingston […] Non-ECC
Kingston […] Non-ECC
Crucial […] Non-ECC

eBay sellers were infamous in the late 1990s and early 2000s for doing this on purpose. You’d see a listing conveniently saying it wasn’t something, presumably to piggy-back on legitimate search results.

Entering -"Non-ECC" is also an interesting online store test. Some sites return only ECC memory, others don’t return anything.

I’m fascinated by the idea of small homes. My parents always had large houses and condos, and Clara and I now live in a studio that would have fit in my bedroom growing up in Singapore. There’s something about making super efficient use of space, having just a few treasured possessions, and taking advantage of lower power costs, rent, and maintenance.

I also love watching small home engineering videos, such as people living in a converted shipping container out in the tundra somewhere. But now I’ve gone down the rabbit hole of looking at camper vans and mobile homes; nothing I’d buy personally, but I love seeing the design process and the owners get excited building their dream rigs. Is that the right word, rigs?

This episode of Exceptional Engineering followed teams in Germany building two very different camper vans: a brand new one for a prince in Qatar, and the other from a reconditioned 1980s German firetruck. One of the engineers on the latter explained why they use thirty-year old engines:

Although it’s nearly thirty years old, this beauty runs like it did on the first day. No matter where I am; in China, in the Balkans, or Africa; this truck is no stranger. You can get it repaired everywhere. That’s not the case with the new trucks which contain a lot of electronics […] that doesn’t apply to the old models, they always work. And if something snaps, a blacksmith will repair it and off you go again.

I could appreciate the Qatari prince’s gigantic setup from an engineering perspective, but I’d go for this cozy home on the reconditioned firetruck:

Software is considered End of Life when the vendor no longer supplies updates and security patches; either overtly with strict timelines, or through abandonment. It can be frustrating as an end user or system administrator, but it’s necessary given teams have finite engineering resources, and they’re under pressure to release new versions.

But these economic realities, for want of a better phrase, apply equally to end users. An upgrade of an OS, or rewriting code against a newer framework version itself takes resources. This isn’t to excuse administrators who run outdated software; feasibility studies must factor in ongoing maintenance, or a project shouldn’t be considered. But circumstances change.

So at what point should software be considered too big to fail?

Take PHP 5. We all read the stores about its pending EOL status, but a year later and 60% of the PHP web still uses it. This is terrifying. Some OS vendors have taken it upon themselves to support it for another year, but there’s every reason to believe it’ll still be in wide use after this. Then what?

There are two options. We ignore the problem, shift the blame onto end users, and abandon old software. The temptation is there, but consider the users of those insecure sites, do they deserve to have their data leaked? I suppose one could say it would encourage people to only do business with reputable sites, but even they’ve been caught with outdated software.

The other option is to acknowledge this software is too big to fail, too much of the web depends on it, and do what we can to support it. Maybe we need an independent, industry-funded organisation that adopts abandoned software, even if just for security patches. Then software can be retired if and when it becomes technically infeasible to maintain it, not when an arbitrary deadline has passed.

(Some would claim, perhaps only half-jokingly, that the Apache Software Foundation is just this. Fair enough I say, throw money at them!)

The challenge then would be to convince the industry its in their interest to support such an organisation. It’s awash with cash, but maybe we can do better than what happened with OpenSSL.

Australia’s mediocre Internet used to come as a surprise to people overseas, but it continues to make headlines for all the wrong reasons. Iain Morris summarised it well for Broadband World News:

When the NBN idea was originally floated under a previous government, the intention was to extend full-fiber networks to most Australian properties. After a subsequent administration balked at the likely expense, NBN embarked on a rollout using a mixture of access technologies. Just 17% of homes are being covered by fiber, with cable, copper, mobile and satellite networks serving the remainder. It does not sound like the most future-proof system.

I remember a university tutor saying wireless would solve everything too. But unsurprisingly, this hodgepodge has now cost more, in part because economies of scale couldn’t be realised, the existing HFC networks were shockingly not fit for purpose, and because of political lies and spin. Spending more now to future-proof the system would have been worth it, but we don’t even get that.

This week we got these fun stories:

• Telstra’s CEO claimed Australian Internet would have been faster and cheaper without the NBN. People won’t understand things if their pay cheques depend on them not understanding it, but it was a fun observation nonetheless.

• Rural customers are being told to not expect fibre connections anytime soon, because their needs are less than those in cities. This from the same minister who said moving to the bush was the answer to housing affordability, but that people need to move back to cities because of failed drought policy and lack of jobs in part due to poor connectivity.

• NBNco, staffed with the current Government’s pricks—that was supposed to be picks but I’m keeping it—are so fed up with how poorly their network is faring, have released their own broadband rankings in which we outperform Germany and France. Problem solved!

One of those stories was fake. If you live overseas, try to guess which one before clicking any links.