Rubenerd

I got the latest, infamous Dropbox update this weekend:

For those who haven’t seen, Dropbox has updated their client application with a ton of new features built on Chromium. I’ve come to accept Electron and desktop JavaScript are normal for mediocre IDEs, text editors, and chat clients that I still avoid as much as humanly possible. But having it in what I consider internet plumbing is something else.

I was a relative late-comer to Dropbox; I read about their early security problems and decided it wasn’t for me. I dismissed it as pretty rsync, like so many. Then Mac users began showing me how it worked with tools like nvALT and editors for iOS, and how easy it was to share files with other people. Encrypted sparsebundles also offered a private way of using it.

Earlier this year it changed to only allow three devices on their free tier. Then they introduced that confusing new branding. Now, the company is attempting to make Dropbox into a kitchen sink productivity application. I wish them luck, although the direction has lead it away to what made it useful for me. At least it finally gave me the impetus to move Clara and I over to Nextcloud.

I wonder if this is all an elaborate ploy to generate press in anticipation of a buyout or similar deal, like Slack and their phallic, anti-Semitic new logo. I suppose Mission Accomplished then.

I spent a not insignificant amount of my childhood reading atlases, the country sections of encyclopædias, and CD-ROMs. Give me a flag, or the shape of a political border, and I can almost certainly tell you what the country is. It’s probably only good for party tricks or quizzes, but still! I like to think that if I never got into IT, I’d be a cartographer.

I realised though that for all my obsessive reading, there were small pockets of the world I missed. So I’m rectifying it now thanks to Wikipedia’s Country Portal, the CIA World Factbook and my vintage computer with the DK Multimedia Reference Atlas for comparison.

This month I’ve been looking again at the Caucasus. There are so many fascinating places and intricate demarcation lines cemented from thousands of years ago, to relatively recently. The shape of that land wedged between two large inland seas must surely rate as one of the most geographically unique and beautiful in the world. Check it out in OpenStreetMap, and just spend hours panning around and zooming in.

Politically speaking, the region also has a disproportionate number of unique writing systems, enclaves, autonomous states, and limited-recognition countries, thanks most recently to the history of the Cold War. I can’t stop looking at this street photo of Stepanakert in Artsakh taken by Govorkov in 2013:

The Artsakh Republic is a predominately-Armenian region that claims independence from Azerbaijan. The geometric shapes of their Armenian-inspired flag look almost South American, I like it.

Earlier this year I said plastic straw bans were a great idea. I said that even if there are orders of magnitude larger sources of pollution, positive steps aren’t mutually exclusive, and if it’s such a trivial change for most of us, why not?

But there are two further points to consider.

Most of the world’s plastic pollution comes from developing parts of Asia. Disposable material is cheaper for low income families to buy (at least up-front), and much of the rest is shipped there by the developed world to deal with.

I also grossly underestimated the effect this would have on accessibility, and for that I’m sorry. I figured it would be easy for people to bring their own straws as needed, or for restaurants to stock them as opt-in. But there have been enough heartbreaking stories of people being refused service because wait staff don’t believe they need them. This is, to put it at its mildest, dehumanising.

My core position hasn’t changed: we’ve reached crisis point with plastic waste, and anything we can do helps. We should be generating less of this shit, and realigning business incentives towards more sustainable products. Certain restaurant staff also clearly need empathy training, as I needed to today.

I’m sure we can come to a common ground here that’s respectful, but also acknowledging that the vast majority of plastic straws, and other forms of disposable plastic, really need to be replaced.

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Elizebath is definitely how the reigning monarch’s name is spelled, and an English person would definitely use Center not Centre. I also read the numbers like Lionel Hutz with, extra punctuation?

Speaking of Manchester, here’s a photo of a replica of a Manchester Mini taken by the delightfully-named Parrot of Doom:

Work has a secondary data centre PoP in Sydney for clients needing disaster recovery and remote backups within the same locale. We use the common trolley KVMs supplied by the data centre, because its not a full deployment worth buying our own gear for.

Use of these shared KVMs over the years has lead me to a few observations and suggestions for those tasked with deploying and maintaining these trolleys:

KVM VGA cables should be routinely inspected for bent pins!

Plugging into a BSD or Linux server is fine; but plug into Windows Server GUI with a flaky green and black display and you’re gonna have a bad time.

USB peripheral cables should be clearly marked.

If I’m booting from a USB key, and there are only two ports, I’m only going to be plugging in a keyboard. Yes I can just plug one at a time and see if the light comes up for Num Lock or the LED under the mouse, but we shouldn’t need to.

Wheels should not be wobbly, and be sufficiently oiled.

If you’re there late at night, the last thing you need is a shrill, piercing noise of someone passing you with their trolley. You also run the risk of vibrating surfaces distributing screws off the trolley and into the raised floor air conditioning vents, never to be seen again.

Debris should be routinely cleared.

It’s a fact these trolleys double as portable work surfaces for cable crimping, replacing snapped Ethernet plugs, and discarding redundant blanking plates. Then there are the cable ties, rubber bands, pens, and the odd expensive fibre module. I take litter with me because I’m not a monster, but some people are.

We should consider naming KVM trolleys something else.

These days people assume I’m referring to hypervisors, even if my experience is with Xen/QEMU and to a lesser extent bhyve. It’s also only a letter away from the Malaysian train service. The order of the letters are entirely arbitrary, maybe we should call them VMKs. Except that’s too close to VMDK, damn it.

There should be another thing, because I like even-numbered lists.

Purple monkey dish washer.

I’m not part of the core backend team anymore, but these small changes would still immeasurably improve my quality of life.

My colleague David shared this long-running web comic by Dan Shive he’s been reading since it started seventeen years ago. I have no context for any of the latest strip, but I liked this last panel:

There’s a meme floating around now challenging people to live without their mobile phones for a week, with the corollary that people my age and younger wouldn’t be able to. It’s the same thinking that brought us Smashed Avocado Economics, and it’s just as misguided.

To play devil’s advocate, people of my generation and younger do spend a significant amount of our lives glued to our phones. There have been plenty of hot takes, from cartoons to stories of aliens perplexed by all these humans distracted by the palms of their hands. Mobile games generate ridiculous amounts of money, and so-called influencers affect the purchasing decisions of millions.

But there’s a flip side, a pun that would have worked a decade ago. Millennials lack the long term job security so many of our parents had. We have to make do with less, and are expected to always be available, often by the same people who mock our use of phones. And it’s as much a work pressure as it is social.

(It’s the same pressure behind using Facebook. I’m lucky that mine can sit languishing for years without a login, but for recruiters a lack of social media accounts signals you have embarrassing, misguided, or compromising things to hide, not that you’ve taken an ethical privacy stance. Please think of that next time you’re tempted to say privacy violations by a monopoly aren’t a problem because users can just delete their accounts; it’s not a valid stance, it’s plain ol’ victim blaming of the dullest, most predictable kind).

So before you judge a young person checking their phone as you walk past, consider it’s because they just got a message from their boss saying they’re needed for another shift at the place you buy things from, or to maintain the servers that run the systems you live off. These pundits would be surprised how often that’s exactly the case. Or they would be, if they possessed empathy.

The problem isn’t that people are checking their phones, or ordering avocado toast, or whatever moral panic the media and simpletons throw around in a vein attempt to steer their morose, scapegoating high horses. For want of a better phrase, it’s all about tellingly-ordered work/life balance, and the broader mental health of our society.

Thing is, those problems require actual thought to tackle, not just a smug throwaway line. But tell the young person making your sandwich at Subway anyway, I’m sure they’d be thrilled to hear it.

It’s Music Monday time, and for once it’s even on a Monday. My colleague played this track of Gregory’s at the office today, and I can’t stop thinking about it. This is how I felt as a kid listening to the greats for the first time.

Last Friday I bought a OEM 2-bay external RAID enclosure as a silly present. Jaycar’s discounted price was cheaper than eBay, and I needed a quick way to expand my home server.

I don’t trust external USB enclosures for critical data; their controllers are usually bargain basement and can behave in unexpected ways, as we’ll see in a moment. But for home server experiments, or if you use its basic default RAID, they’re probably fine… or as fine as any data can be without ZFS. Which is to say, I hope it’s not important!

The enclosure supports your usual RAID 0, RAID 1, and spanning, but more importantly it could work as a JBOD with individual drives exposed to the OS. If you use ZFS, which you should, you always want it managing your RAID.

This was dmesg once plugging it in:

ugen1.2: <JMicron JMS56x Series> at usbus1
umass1 on uhub3
umass1: <MSC Bulk-Only Transfer> on usbus1
umass1:  SCSI over Bulk-Only; quirks = 0x8000
umass1:8:1: Attached to scbus8

The manufacturer’s website lists the JMS56x as a “low power consumption and high performance USB 3.0 to SATA 6.0Gbps (bit per second) Bridge controller” with Windows Hardware Certification and upgradeable firmware. Someone with more hardware knowledge could read the brief and glean more detail.

So I plugged in two drives I had spare.

da1 at umass-sim1 bus 1 scbus8 target 0 lun 0
da1: <WDC WD40 EZRZ-00GXCB0 0003> Fixed Direct Access SPC-4 SCSI device
da1: Serial Number RANDOMF4917AD758C4
da1: 400.000MB/s transfers
da1: 3815447MB (7814037168 512 byte sectors)
da1: quirks=0x2<NO_6_BYTE>
da2 at umass-sim1 bus 1 scbus8 target 0 lun 1
da2: <WDC WD40 EZRX-00SPEB0 0003> Fixed Direct Access SPC-4 SCSI device
da2: Serial Number RANDOMF4917AD758C4
da2: 400.000MB/s transfers
da2: 3815447MB (7814037168 512 byte sectors)
da2: quirks=0xa<NO_6_BYTE,4K>

Keen-eyed sysadmins may already see a wrinkle, but at that stage I thought so far so good. I can see a da1 and da2, so there are two drives. Time to configure with ZFS, and give them a spin. Ah man, that pun was on point.

At a high level you can configure a ZFS mirror like this:

# zpool create [options] tank mirror /dev/da1 /dev/da2

This is ill advised, because these identifiers may change, and you have no way to map them to the physical world. The conventional wisdom is to use labels, either with glabel, or when making a partition table with GPT as below:

# gpart create -s gpt da1
# gpart add -a 4k -l WD-SERIALNO -t freebsd-zfs da1
==> da1p1 added

Here’s where I make a dirty confession: I skip this for personal drives. FreeBSD automatically creates references for drives by their serial number, so you can use them immediately as such:

/dev/diskid/DISK-SERIALNO

But here’s where things got interesting with this enclosure. When I went to check that folder, and again with glabel status, only da1 appeared. I checked dmesg again, and sure enough:

da1: Serial Number RANDOMF4917AD758C4
da2: Serial Number RANDOMF4917AD758C4

Sad trombone! I made the mistake back in the day when using a glabel that was too long, and it truncated them to be the same. Then overlaid GELI encryption and overwrote the label. Either way, this ruled out my lazy shortcut.

Fortunately, I could use the above gpart steps to create unique identifiers based on their serial numbers. Then I reference them from the gpt folder:

# zpool create tank mirror \
    /dev/gpt/WD-SERIALNO1 \
    /dev/gpt/WD-SERIALNO2

And now it’s ready to go. One thing I didn’t mention was the step involving setting up GELI for encryption, which you’d do before creating your zpool. This won’t have any important or confidential data, but it makes sending drives back under warranty much easier knowing the data on it is electronic noise.

My thoughts have been churning away on this since the Mac Pro came out, and with some time, a cup of coffee, and a somehow-beautiful drizzly afternoon I’m going to attempt to articulate them! This was originally written on Sunday, but funnily enough a Mac-related issue lead me to forget about this post.

This rambling mess starts, as so many of my posts do, with a comment someone else made. You generally shouldn’t read comments, but Loop Insight somehow avoids pernicous screeds, just as GigaOm of yore did. SamuraiArtGuy left a comment three days ago on a Mac Pro review:

And yeah, as a self-employed Graphic and Web Designer, I know that I’m not Pixar or BBC World News. So no, not my machine. But yeah, I could use that mid-range configurable Xeon Tower with a robust graphics card. But if Apple had to choose between a shoot-for-the-stars halo machine or a mid-range utility box, build the monster first.

I’ve seen the phrase Halo Mac used in a few contexts. It’s a node to Halo Cars, which Benjamin Hunting described so well for AutoBytel:

Halo cars are meant to be shining high-tech accomplishments that show off the best of what an automaker is able to accomplish. Whether they be outrageously-styled attention-getters, retro throwbacks, high performance overachievers, or ultra-luxurious cruisers, the best halo cars over the years have been those that lifted a brand above its previous accomplishments and boosted its credibility across the board.

This is what Apple was attempting. They wanted to design and ship the best possible Mac they could again, and in doing so restore credibility to their pro customers and Mac fanbase who felt abandoned. The latter is now half done, though they still have a way to go as I worried about in 2017:

But glaringly absent [from their announcement] was an assurance from Apple that the issues that caused this cycle of innovation to abandonware won’t happen again.

I’m not as optimistic as Marco Arment about the new state of the Mac, but I’ll reserve judgement until we see how they treat this current machine.

But back to SamuraiArtGuy’s comment, he mentioned a mid-range configurable Xeon tower with a robust graphics card. I would love for such a machine to exist, because currently anything half-serious for graphics goes onto a Windows tower I had to build on the side.

At the moment, your choice is a Mac Mini with junk graphics, a MacBook or iMac with meh graphics… chasm… an iMac Pro with workstation graphics you can’t replace, and the Mac Pro with graphics you can upgrade for the cost of a kidney.

The gap in the market, long since referred to as the Mythical Mid-Tower in forums, remains elusive. There’s a hint of change in external GPUs, but that’s an ugly solution for company touted for the elegance, if unaffordability, of their products. Perhaps Apple has been so stand-off about Hackintoshes because they fill that role without any work. But to me, the fact so many people do it shows there is a market for it.

Some people with deep pockets will buy the Mac Pro for a traditional desktop, and it’ll be overengineered but awesome kit for doing so. I also acknowledge it arguably makes even less financial sense for them to make the mid-range now than ever.

It doesn’t stop me wanting one as I dual-boot my FreeBSD tower into Windows to play a game. Maybe when I finally get around to my new bhyve build with PCI/VGA passthrough this will be a moot point.