Rubenerd

The Sydney Morning Herald’s political editor Peter Hartcher wrote a great article about Australian Reserve Bank chairperson Philip Lowe, with some economic commentary. From paragraph eight:

Other countries’ officials like to joke that Australia, which holds the world record for the longest economic boom of any developed nation in history, has special, mystical powers so that its good times never end.

“Business cycles don’t last forever, unless you’re Australia, where they’re in year 27 – which feels like forever,” US Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell has quipped. The calendar has since flipped over to 28 years.

Lowe fears that our time is up. He’s using his power over interest rates to pull Australia back from the brink. But official rates are nearing zero per cent. Lowe is preparing the way for the eventuality that they hit zero and need to go further, into the weird world of “unconventional” measures, a world Australia has never entered.

Philip also discusses flatline wages growth, which has meant living standards are already trending backwards. And I doubt it’ll change any time soon with the current motley band of buck-passing, swivel-eyed halfwits in charge. The good news is those descriptions are fun to write.

At work today we were running through an architecture diagram for a new client deployment in Sydney and Melbourne. The idea was to use Sydney as the primary, and fail over to Melbourne in a disaster recovery scenario. It sounds simple enough, until you start thinking what fail over means, and what constitutes primary/secondary. Is it at the database level? The applications? What happens to the networks? What about the storage? It can make your head spin when you think through everything that can will go wrong; not to mention human processes which are even more important.

But it wasn’t till I was going home afterwards that I made another mental leap. We like to think our systems are sophisticated, fault-tolerant, and secure. We’ve designed, built, and layered a staggering amount of infrastructure on what really amounts to simple logic gates and addition. The core of our systems have billions of transistors spread across machines around the globe connected with fibre optics and copper and wireless and satellites. But ultimately, they’re just calculators.

You compare that to a complex machine like our own bodies. We’re obviously weaker in many areas, but we tend to keep going for decades. We’re regenerative, we self-heal, we grow. Computers fake this with redundancy, but they simply don’t match what we do ourselves inside our bodies without even realising or noticing.

I remember watching Star Trek Voyager and being interested in the idea of bio-neural circuitry, not to mention the Borg. While science fiction writers and futurists dream of the singularity, will reality be a melding of the technological and biological?

I suppose with you reading these photons I typed on an electronic device to transmit my thoughts, we’re already slowly on our way there.

This has been happening to me since the iTelephone 3G, on every iPhone OS/iOS version, on every phone. I:

1. play music or a podcast;
2. pause playback;
3. leave the phone for a bit;
4. press the headphone play button to resume; and then
5. Heartbeats by José González plays

It doesn’t matter:

• if I was playing music or a podcast
• if I was using an official Apple or third-party player
• the duration I was playing it for
• if I was using Apple headphones or not

Just that once a week, if not more, resuming playback just plays the first song on the first playlist in Apple Music, regardless of what I was listening to before.

One day I’ll narrow down the conditions to predictably reproduce this. Maybe it’s when the phone has low battery and suspends the original audio player. Maybe I’m pressing the headphone play button too long, or for not long enough. Maybe I haven’t had enough coffee, or too much.

If I could only ever change three things about iOS, it would be to have the discoverability of PalmOS, the closest we’ve come to mobile operating system perfection; the ability to also disable useless Voice Control when disabling Siri; and to Correctly. Resume. Playback! Flipping hell it’s maddening!

Other people tell me they don’t have this problem. That’s the great thing about anecdotes though, I have them too.

Homura was Best Girl™ from the Madoka Magica franchise by SHAFT. It’s now a Windows game launcher for FreeBSD by Alexander Vereeken:

Inspired by lutris, we would like to provide a game launcher to play windows games on FreeBSD. Install your favorite windows games & launcher easily!

I haven’t had a chance to look at this yet; filing it here for future reference. But this is too cool.

(Full disclosure, I run a lot of Win16 games in Wine and ScummVM on my FreeBSD tower, like Fuji Golf and some of the Entertainment Pack card games. They’re the only type of games that come close to being as good as DOS ones that may or may not be older than me, but are so much better than modern stuff. Also, get off my lawn).

Our office just moved to Woolloomooloo, one of the more delightfully named waterfront suburbs of Sydney. So my first task was to find a new coffee shop to adopt as my second desk. And I think I’ve found it :)

I love this area. Being just out of the CBD means more of the light hits the street, rather than being blocked by buildings. It makes everything feel so much more airy and bright. Our new office space is equally breezy and open, which is a pleasant change from the semi-corporate cubicle farm we were in before.

It also hasn’t escaped me that almost every other post on the homepage has inadvertently discussed coffee this week. It’d be disgust coffee if you didn’t like it, which I originally read as degausse. Mmm, coffee ray tubes.

If I had edicts of my own on this site, one would be that everyone must engage in at least one pointless, fun distraction. For me it’s Fate/Grand Order that I blogged about last year in the context of the 2018 Nero Fest:

The only mobile game I play, and have ever got into, is Fate/Grand Order. Think Hearthstone, but with cute characters and familiar themes if you grew up watching the Fate franchise. And before you judge me, Clara is in way deeper than me!

Mashu will always be my favourite servant for $REASONS, but the various incantations of chaotic-good Nero are but a flaming red sword’s width from being my second. Wadarco is one of my favourite graphic artists and designers, and Sakura Tange does such a brilliant job acting her dialogue. Clara and I even say Umu! in real life now, likely to the chagrin of our friends and coworkers.

I didn’t summon Bride Umu during last year’s Nero Fest, but I was able to rectify this gross and horrifying injustice back in April this year with an unexpected bout of luck.

This year’s summer event held the promise of Caster Nero, so I hoarded saint quarts for months instead of using them. It took more than 300 of those evil things but I managed to score her at the last possible summon before I ran out. #boom! Her card shows my favourite ascension art.

So now we come to Nero Fest again this year. The English Fate/Grand Order finally got the unlockable new costumes the Japanese version has had for a while, so we were able to unlock Nero’s excitable gym outfit which is unreasonably cute, and also matches Heroine X!

Which reminds me, I need to go back to the gym. I realised this evening I’d have gone more often if Clara and I weren’t playing Fate/Grand Order to get Umu in a gym outfit.

Dean Napolitano writing for the Nikkei Asian Review:

Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam on Wednesday formally withdrew a controversial extradition bill that has been at the center of massive demonstrations this summer, bowing to one of five demands made by protesters.

And BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg:

Tory rebels and opposition MPs have defeated the government in the first stage of their attempt to pass a law designed to prevent a no-deal Brexit. The Commons voted 328 to 301 to take control of the agenda, meaning they can bring forward a bill seeking to delay the UK’s exit date.

I’ve been watching both these stories closely over the last couple of months, but haven’t felt like there was much I could add. I’m still at a loss for words. They’re both equal parts scary, surreal.

It’s time for the inaugural Draft Diving post, in which I dive into my drafts. That explanation isn’t a tautology, because I don’t call it that.

Here’s a quote from the Accidental Tech Podcast I wrote in April 2016:

John: Would be nice to have an option to make the HUD translucent, or do some other thing to prevent burn-in? And the big thread in their forums mostly consisted of people who don’t own plasma televisions, telling everyone who does they shouldn’t because they’re bad and that’s why they should get an “LED” television.

Marco: Helpful internet people!

Last week a colleague and I were flying around Australia to speak at the WatchGuard roadshows. Our last day was in Perth, on Australia’s west coast.

Perth is an interesting place. Technically you’re closer to the Indonesian capital Jakarta than you are to Canberra there. If you look at a map of Australia, almost all the major cities are on the other side of the continent, so you really feel as though you’re in the middle of nowhere.

(A West Australian client told us the Brisbane to Perth trip is the longest non-stop domestic flight in the world. I don’t think that’s true; I’d assume Hawaii to the continental US would be longer, or between Moscow and Vladivostok. But it’s definitely a long flight!)

Perth holds special significance to Singaporeans because it’s relatively close, it shares the UTC+08:00 timezone, and has Australian universities which a decent number of international students attend. The other, perhaps less publicised reason, is the existence of the Dôme coffee chain everywhere in the state.

Before Starbucks or even Coffee Bean got a foothold in Singapore in the 1990s, Domes were everywhere. My personal favourite was the Olio Dôme in the late Park Mall. All their chains have a small dome in the ceiling, but that one was especially impressive.

So it was delightful to leave the hotel bleary-eyed the following Saturday and seeing a welcoming Dôme on the ground floor of a glass tower. Perth’s coffee drinkers likely consider it old-hat; I’m sure their hipsters whinge about them too. But it was a fun nostalgia trip, and the food was pretty good.

I work at a cloud infrastructure company with immediate level 3 phone and email support; we’ll even make Slack channels or whatever else. I know, it’s shocking such a thing exists!

This is one of the most common questions my colleagues get asked, how do I clean compromised servers? I’m tempted just to get them to refer to this cPanel article:

When a root account is compromised, users often ask how they can “clean” their server. To put it as succinctly as possible: without knowing every action that has ever taken place on a server, it is impossible to prove that the server is completely clean. While it is simple to show a compromised server, showing the opposite, for all intents and purposes, is not.

Even my honeypots get blown away and rebuilt rather than cleaned. Worries aside, rebuilds are just easier to do, especially if you use something like Ansible and have proper backups.