Rubenerd

It’s a weird, bittersweet moment this morning. I’m a morning person, so for the last two years I’ve been coming to this coffee shop across the road from our office for coffee, reading news, blogging, SSHing, and checking my calendars to prepare for the day. Chances are much of what you’re read here for a while has been written over a batch brew here.

Our office is moving to a awesome new terrace-style building in another part of town, because we’re sick of being in a corporate, open plan office. And so ends this morning ritual.

The staff are lovely, the coffee is among the best in Sydney, and I love the surroundings. Please do pay them a visit if you’re in Ultimo or surrounds; they’re across the street from the Powerhouse Museum. Try and get there on Tuesdays if you want to see and smell their roasting machine.

A decade ago today I quoted a FinanceAsia article—which of course now 404s—suggesting fans of Japanese pop culture were still spending despite the economic downturn:

“Forget the usual business jargon about the four Ps (positioning, price, etc). Here it’s about the three Cs, namely community, collection and creativity. Despite all the economic bad news, shops are still opening in Akihabara and people are still spending, even if they are not very well off,” says Fong.

It reminded me of this article in the Nikkei Asian Review this month, commenting that tourism in Japan is booming, emphasis added:

Analysis has found that, while visitors to Japan from abroad are spread through the country, their spending is concentrated in Tokyo.

In the first half of 2019, 16.63 million people visited Japan from abroad, up 4.6% from a year earlier, according to the Japan National Tourism Organization. Despite a slowdown in the rate of growth, the number represents an all-time high for the January-June period.

To which Clara and I would say: don’t blame us! We’ve been to Tokyo twice for AsiaBSDCon, but the Kansai region is by far our favourite part of Japan. Even when we were in Tokyo last time we took time to head back to Osaka and Kyoto, not least so we could travel on our beloved maroon Hankyu trains again.

Warner Losh posted on the FreeBSD architectures mailing list back on the 13th, a date I’m sure was entirely coincidental:

As promised for almost the past decade or so, gcc 4.2.1 will be removed from the tree before FreeBSD 13 is branched. […]

The timeline gives powerpc, mips, mips64, and sparc64 9 months to integrate either into an in-tree compiler, or to have a proven external toolchain solution. This is on top of the many-years-long warnings about this being the end game of the clang integration.

I’m glad to see this finally happening.

The GNU Compiler Collection was licenced under the GPLv2 up to 4.2.1 in 2007. The FreeBSD maintainers had reasonable concerns with the GPLv3, which precluded them from using anything newer. From FreeBSD 10, base is built with clang/LLVM, which distributed under a freer/BSD-friendly licence.

It’s Music Monday time once again. Today we have the first song on Colin Bass’s beautiful 2015 album At Wild End.

If you could go and change what you regret
Would you still be who you are?
Or someone else instead?

It’s a good question; I’d like to think I’d largely be the same. Or would I be? Wasn’t it B.J. Neblett who said we are the sum total of our experiences? I feel this is a topic worthy of its own post and reflection.

I’ll always know Colin Bass by his alternate stage name Sabah Habas Mustapha, for his Denpasar Moon album. The bulk of my sister’s and my childhood soundtrack consisted of that and the Michael Franks discography. Forgive me for use of the term, but juxtiposing that dulcet Indonesian instrumentation with Colin sitting in rural northern Wales years later made me smile.

I haven’t blogged nearly enough about his music. I will correct this.

Via @BADCATBAD_ on Twitter:

• Anime I hate: None really, at best I’m indifferent. Kimi ga Nozomu Eien, one of the first series I ever watched, had an infuriating ending though!

• Anime I think is overrated: None really, see above. That said, I thought I’d enjoy One Piece more given how popular it is. I found Fairy Tail way more fun. I’d better not let my friend circle know.

• Anime I think is underrated: SKET Dance. It’s one of the all time greats, but will always live under Gintama’s albeit fabulous shadow.

• Anime I love: Suzumiya Haruhi. It was my favourite till recently, perhaps at least in part due to nostalgia and the impact it had on me in the mid-2000s.

• Anime I secretly love: Clannad, perhaps not so secretly. Air was a bit much though.

• Favorite anime of all time: Barakamon, didn’t even need to think twice. Everything else about why I love it aside, it’s about a gentleman rekindling joy for his craft in beautiful new surroundings having living under pressure, which I can appreciate right now.

Under pressure, dun-dun-dun da-da dun-dun. ♫

I talked about BSD jot for generating pseudo-random numbers in a pinch four years ago. To generate a number from 5 to 100, for example:

$ jot -r 1 5 100

I quoted integers last time. Here are another ten more numbers, using the -s argument for defining precision:

==> 7.7 18.9 71.7 36.6 52.4 90.9 39.8 29.9 6.2 91.0

Fun fact, two of those numbers contained seven. Refer to my January post for examples of numbers that don’t.

Sometimes I worry my weblog might be too useful.

From his 2018 Lincoln Navigator review. I’m not a car owner, know little about cars, but Doug is a treasure.

What’s a blog but a selfish discussion of one’s interests? And what could be more interesting than reading about one’s preoccupation with health, right? I need a skip button for individual posts.

I’ve been worried for a few months with recurring headaches, so finally I had a blood test last week. Bluntly, could describe a pencil. But also, I was terrified. The good news is, my blood is excellent! All the markers and other medical sounding stuff that goes over my head, all look good. Only two caveats:

1. The pathology lab defined <20 nmol/L as “severly deficient” for vitamin D, and I’m not that much higher! Even though I liked to think I get plenty of outdoor exercise and sunlight, with my occupation and interests I wasn’t surprised.

2. An alergy test defined me as “highly” reative to grass? Specifically, Bermuda, Perennial Rye, Kentucky Blue, Bahia and Johnson. Those sound more like food and music than grass. It explains why I’ve felt like I’m always starting to get a cold, but that I seem to keep it at bay.

So I’ve been directed to get out more, exercise in sunlight, but avoid grass seeding seasons. I’ve moved my office desk to be by the window, and am taking a longer walk to work in sunlight rather than taking the Tunnel of Doom near Central in Sydney.

The good news is, I now have a perfect excuse for not helping people mow their lawns. Not that I’ve ever needed one, but always good to have an arrow in the quiver. Gee I’d love to help out, but you don’t have enough antihistamines and tissue boxes!

A notorious Australian radio shock jock is dealing with advertisers abandoning him en masse, on account of his juvenile description of New Zealand’s PM. It’s been a long time coming, too long, but I’m relieved more companies are choosing to distance themselves.

The response from Twitter has been overwhelmingly positive, based on replies to the advertisers’ announcements. But the trolls have trotted out their usual logical fallacies in response, seemingly without irony. The biggest is that it’s an attack on free speech.

Let’s explore this for a second. Using your free speech to explain why you’re pulling a commercial relationship is against free speech? If we take this specious reasoning to its logical conclusion, how is compelling a brand to continue advertising on a platform they don’t want to constitute free speech?

Which reminds me, where were the free speech arguments when this shock jock only interviewed people against climate change? Surely not letting scientists present their overwhelming evidence-based consensus stifles free speech too? What about screening callers, shouldn’t he let anyone speak? And why is it only his show specifically, shouldn’t they let anyone and everyone host it then?

This all also ignores the fact Australia doesn’t have a bill of rights, and we’ve had de facto freedom of speech only by convention and weak legal precedent. And even that doesn’t apply to businesses, whether they be commercial radio stations or advertisers.

By all means, have a discussion about the role advertising money has on shaping reporting, especially in light of shrinking revenue bases and the challenges faced with online publishing. I’ve been thinking about that a lot myself. But this isn’t an attack on free speech, it’s free speech itself.

Hi there, and welcome to another in our long-running Music Monday series. That being the royal our, becuase it’s just me writing these.

Today’s song is the Pet Shop Boys warning us about Silicon Valley in their 1985 single, Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money):

I can program a computer;
Choose the perfect time.
If you’ve got the inclination;
I’ve got the crime. ♫

Okay it probably wasn’t about that specifically, but I still love the lyric.