Rubenerd

Speaking of my mum, today she would have been 64. This is understandably an important number for nerds; I remember calculating when I was a kid that I would have become a 32-bit human within a couple of years of her going full amd64, and excitedly imagined all the awful jokes I’d tell her.

I’m lucky to be in Singapore right now, so I was able to take Clara to the Starbucks in Paragon that we used to always hang out at when I came back from school, or after the hospital. She often couldn’t go far on account of chemotherapy weakness, so we’d wander down from our apartment up the street to get what she called medicinal keeki.

The décor is different, and we had to have a tiramisu over our normal New York cheesecake, but the overall layout of the store was the same, and we even got our regular couches by the far wall! Fate is a load of snitchnosed whimsy—to borrow one of her phrases!—but I enjoyed that it worked out that way.

As as I said before about those Swensen’s chips, it meant a lot to be sharing this exact experience with Clara after all these years. Debra would have approved I’m sure. ♡

(The permalink for this post is prickly-it-personalities, but I liked the silly pun too much).

I’m sitting here at a coffee shop in Millenia Walk, just down the road from where the Singapore Grand Prix was on the weekend. I spent so much of my later teens working and studying remote from here, so sitting here a decade later doing the same thing but for a company back Sydney is surreal. So much has changed, but as the saying goes, so much is the same.

I’ve had more time to think about my earlier post about discouragement in IT, specifically on certain personalities within the tech community. And today it’s based on a specific reaction to the Stallman Issue by another tech lumininary who I’ll keep anonymous, who published his email advice to Mr Stallman’s press secretary:

I feel for Stallman. On the other hand he had a long run and was celebrated in so many ways, given an office at MIT, had a foundation. Some of us would have loved that kind of support. ;-)

As his PR person I think you can help by first learning from others’ mistakes in these situations. There have now been lots of them. A mistake a lot of people make is trying to fight back or argue with the judgement. I don’t think that works. If he has the money, taking some time off, writing software perhaps, fixing bugs in other people’s stuff. Not being such a big guy for a while. Live a human-size life. Imagine what he could come up with if he wasn’t always out traveling and evangelizing? I’ve done it. I even write software just for myself these days, no intention to publish ever.

Best advice is to slow down, set your expectations on a longer horizon, and do some self-improvement.

Barring the most dangerous and disconnected psychopaths, I do believe everyone is capable of redeeming themselves. It’s why most prison sentences have a finite time. Showing contrition, a willingness to learn, and helping those you’ve harmed are how you grow. And conversely, learning the ability to forgive. I’ve been on both sides of that, as I’m sure we all have.

That’s what was missing from that above advice.

Hello again from Singapore! Clara and I just flew in for a working holiday, and I insisted on dragging her to this local institution at Changi Airport once we landed at midnight. Which I appreciated, given she likely just wanted to go to the hotel and collapse rather than trundling around wheelie bags, even if it was partly through the Jewel.

Before my mum got really sick, we had a few little traditions when I was in primary school here. In no particular order, they were mini golf on Sentosa if I got good grades, trips to Coffee Bean in Paragon for medicinal keeki after her chemo, and weekly trips to Swensen’s.

But perhaps surprisingly, we didn’t opt for banana splits or their famous milkshakes; like all delightfully classy people we both had a savoury tooth. Instead we always ordered this conical tower of chips and their unreasonably addictive sauces in this elevated contraption. We made an entire tea ceremony out of choosing which order the sauces would be eaten, how we’d get those last problematic chips out of the bottom, and regularly rotating to prevent accidental spills. Naturally while telling terrible jokes and pontificating on the state of the universe.

It’s been many years since, and I’ll never be able to share them with her ever again. But it was a joy to see Swensen’s still serving them, and being able to share them with Clara now. I liked to think Debra was sitting there next to us in spirit. ♡

Last week I wrote about Hugo 0.58 breaking pagination on some of the sites I maintain, including this one. Long-time contributor Hales of Halestrom fame was the first to spot my RSS feeds were also broken:

Three empty articles, two of which born on January 1st. Your feed doesn’t normally look like this :)

This is the Hugo loop in my rss.xml template:

{{ range first 10 .Data.Pages }}

The documentation now says this, which works:

{{ range .Pages }}

Hugo does a great job of generating high-quality RSS feeds by default without any manual work, but I like to create my own for some custom namespaces and better podcast support.

I couldn’t find who started this meme, but 👌.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

42:30 – Join Ruben as he discusses himself in the third person, and his business trip adventures to two Australian cities on the exact opposite sides of the country for added convenience; the former of which he hadn’t been to since he lived there in the 1990s! Then some nostalgia for coffee chains, specifically the giant Dômes in Singapore. Recorded early September 2019.

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

Released September 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.

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.

02:49:49 – Rubenerd!! Doc Sleaze!! Frank Edward Nora!! Another mind-meld in ONSUGese!! PQ Ribber is your host.

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

I was relieved to see this thoughtful series of tweets last Sunday that Micahel Dexter commented on:

Given the amount of in-your-face discouragement I receive from a handful of people on a regular basis, I can only imagine it is 1000X worse for newcomers and non-privileged-white-guys. Rest assured your instincts are almost always correct.

It was in response to this tweet by @Jtu on the conduct and views of several prominent members of the free software community, to put it mildly. We’re told that women just aren’t interested in IT, but how many of them mentally checked out or moved on in response to how these people act? And also tragically, what creative energy and intelligence have we lost in the process?

I can speak from experience that it’s been a huge struggle to finally start contributing to software projects. Given how much nasty, condescending, rude junk I used to have flung at me back when I had blog comments enabled, and more recently from dull trolls on social media, the temptation was there to work silently in my little anonymous silos. It’s mentally exhausting having to constantly justify your decisions and existence.

And as Michael says, both of us are still on the easy mode compared to what so many people have to endure.

As one example, my partner Clara once told me that she envied my appearance. Whereas I could just waltz into a job interview and immediately look the part, she felt as though she had to prove she even belonged before discussing her qualifications and experience. She’s just a cute Chinese girl, what would she know about programming? She had internalised it to such an extent until I told her how I’d had mine, and she couldn’t believe it.

We have a husband and wife client at work who chose us over another cloud provider because I spoke to her as the engineer the entire time, instead of instinctively talking to the husband who had no IT background at all. The fact she even needed to point it out and thank me afterwards gave me but a tiny glimpse into the nonsense she must otherwise need to deal with.

I have an inkling that toxic members of the IT community are attractive to people the same way Mr Orange is for so many American voters, and Morrison in Australia. People see them as stalwarts against politically-correct speech, who voice their mind and tell it how it is. Except it’s almost never how it is, it’s just inflammatory bullshit. And those edgy social media commentators who troll and end threads with “lol jk” are just as bad.

Ultimately it demonstrates how immature this industry still is, and we’ll keep paying the price for it.

From one of their delightful chefs versus normals installments back in January.

I’m starting to see a trend amongst websites employing free and/or open source licences, and it’s concerning. The Stack Exchange network announced a licence change for user-submitted content a week ago:

Effective today, all Subscriber Content on Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network will be available under the terms of version 4.0 of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license.

I thought I must have missed something. I’ve been involved in software licence changes before, and it’s a tedious but necessary process of notifying all the contributors and getting their approval. And this was for projects of only a few dozen people; certainly nothing at the scale of Stack Exchange.

The top voted answer by Makyen points out the obvious:

Stack Exchange doesn’t have the right to unilaterally change the license of previously submitted content.

Numerous comments to the original announcement, and other answers below, linked to Stack Exchange’s Terms of Service that grants additional rights. But that still doesn’t alter the fact Creative Commons does not permit licence changes without consent.

The Creative Commons wiki suggests two ways Stack Exchange could have arranged this:

upon upload by contributors, have a prompt box to obtain agreement to relicense previous uploads; [or] general outreach to contributors seeking agreement to upgrade.

Contrast Stack Exchange’s unilateral decision to how Wikipedia implemented Creative Commons in addition to the GNU Free Documentation License and prior versions of Creative Commons. That’s how you do it legally, while also respecting the people for whom your site wouldn’t exist without. Sure they didn’t pay you with money, but they gave you their time.

This leads me to think a few things:

1. Licences and their implementation must be complex enough if even large websites run afoul of them;

2. Protections granted by licences, even if well intentioned, mean little if sites like this deem them mutable, and you don’t have the legal resources to defend them. So therefore;

3. If you want to own your own media, and how it’s distributed, you need to self-publish. As soon as you give it to another site, it can be changed. You might be fine with that, as I often am; but if you’re not, give these meat-grinder sites a hard pass.

It comes with its own set of challenges, but damn if I don’t see justifications for decentralisation and distribution of knowledge and expertise in cases like this. I also hear a little of Michael W. Lucas’s BSD-licence justification echoing in my ear for all the points, but that’s for another post.