Rubenerd

I was sitting with my awesome AsiaBSDCon Ahihabara Panasonic FreeBSD laptop at this cafe, like a gentleman, and a couple were walking out.

Barista: Have a great day, see you again!
Customer: Not if we we win the lotto, you won’t!

They were obviously saying in jest, but it made me think. In jest sounds like ingest, which souds like indigestion, which reminds me why I think gastronomy is such an unfortunately-titled field of study. Also, that they would think they wouldn’t visit this great little café if they won the lottery.

I can tell you now, winning the lottery would give me a reason to spend more of my days at cafés. My dream would be to win a pile of money, live off interest and dividends, and spend my days contributing to open source projects and writing. And paying for a coffee with fifties and letting them keep the change!

Private yachts, jets, and other trappings of wealth sound like they’d be a huge pain in the arse to maintain. I suppose if one were wealthy enough they could hire someone to do that, but then you have a person to keep tabs on as well. My only indungence would be homes in places I care about, like Sydney and Singapore; which naturally are two of the world’s most expensive housing markets.

Yesterday I made a pointless observation that was news to me. Most clocks and watches with Roman numerals employ IIII instead of Ⅳ for the number 4. Here’s an example on one of my favourite Seiko watches:

Ivars Peterson had a great blog post about it:

There are many stories about why IIII appears so often as a replacement for IV on clocks but no definitive explanation. The tradition apparently has a long history and may even go back to sundials. […] I tend to like the explanations that appeal to symmetry.

Naturally it attracted a comment like this, with a delightful punctuation mistake presumably bourne of the same ignorance for which he espouses contempt:

Peoples [sic] ignorance astounds me.

Here are some more interesting factoids:

• The Unicode number forms block has a character for Ⅳ, but not IIII.

• Apple never released a follow-up to the III, but I imagine it would have stirred quite the debate as to how to name it given Steve’s penchant for typography.

• IIII looks more like a barcode than the word itself does, or Ⅳ for that matter.

I don’t know how I’ve been a Perl hacker all this time and can never remember this. From Perldoc:

my $string = ucfirst $input;

So I don’t lose search result juice, this could have also been titled capitalize first letters in Perl. Which given Larry Wall is an American, I suppose it should be. Or should I say I’ve gotten used to this colorful, personalized language. The irony isn’t lost on me that I’ve spent more words and time on this explanation and paragraph than the rest of the post.

I also note that I capitalised the first letter in Perl, in advance of rediscovering the use of the aforementioned function. Aside from the letter I, it’s also the only word in the previous sentenace that was capitalised. I’ve spent Too Much Time™ thinking about this.

A guilty pleasure of mine is trawling through the oocities mirror of the legendary GeoCities. There are some amazing gems and snapshots in time. A. Kressman wrote this in 1998:

My conclusion is simple. If a company such as Netscape are unable to compete, then why should the successful market leader be forced to make concessions to give the competition a chance? This is mainly what the situation boils down to.

This wasn’t an uncommon view for the time. I was still a kid, so I didn’t have any (informed) opinions beyond an uncomfortable feeling that my prior love for Microsoft OSs and software may have been misplaced. Or it could have been the fact I’d also discovered Red Hat Linux and the Mac around the same time, and realised a bunch of thing I couldn’t stand about the computers I otherwise loved were in fact specific to a certain ecosystem. Then I discovered the BSDs.

But I digress. With hindsight, and all the facts, their actions were a clear abuse of power, and the US Department of Justice were right to call them out for it.

But lately my line has been that other contemporary web companies have been getting away with far worse. That seems to be changing, as reported by the Wall Street Journal by Brent Kendall and John D. McKinnon, and now CNBC:

The U.S. Justice Department is planning an antitrust investigation into Alphabet’s Google subsidiary, according to several reports on Friday. The news was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. […] The report comes amid discussion from politicians and the public about whether large technology companies should be broken up.

This refers to Elizabeth Warren’s plans which I blogged about last month.

Jordan Novet and Jennifer Elias go on to mention Alphabet and Google’s past issues with the FTC and the European Commission in the report, which I’d already forgot.

I didn’t have any further comment, beyond the synchronicity of reading those two pages within the same day, despite a two-decade age difference!

From the Making Real Food with Play-Doh Toys episode:

Yes, that was a wink to everyone’s favourite journalistic rule. The New York Times ran a story about the new Apple campus last Tuesday, with Thomas Fuller reporting:

CUPERTINO, Calif. — The circular building housing Apple’s headquarters in Silicon Valley is so big, it’s nearly a mile in circumference. So it’s hard to fathom that it is not actually attached to the ground.

This claim has since spread. Ben Gilbert wrote for Business Insider:

Apple’s $5 billion ‘spaceship’ campus isn’t attached, which helps it withstand major disasters like earthquakes.

And for no useful reason whatsoever, here’s Wikipedia on toaster ovens:

Toaster ovens are small electric ovens with a front door, wire rack and removable baking pan. To toast bread with a toaster oven, slices of bread are placed horizontally on the rack. When the toast is done, the toaster turns off, but in most cases the door must be opened manually.

Base isolation is a fantastic idea; watch this GIF by Valentin Shustov to see it in action. Note however the building is still attached to the ground! Not directly attached perhaps, though that’s only if you don’t count the dampeners as part of the structure of the building which is already a stretch.

All I can say, while we can sway while keeping our feet motionless, that doesn’t mean we can levitate. Maybe one day Dr Hook will teach us.

Last week I commented that I was relieved the Mac Pro tower existed, but that I’d replaced most of my earlier Mac Pro’s tasks with FreeBSD boxes. It spawned a couple of interesting threads on Twitter.

My current home lab setup is an HP Gen8 Microserver bhyve box, and a desktop I built for games before remembering I barely play games and subsequently dual-booted as a FreeBSD desktop. I realised neither were originally built for FreeBSD, so what would a purpose-built tower replacement look like?

This was my high-level wishlist jotted down over coffee this morning:

• A workstation motherboard for ECC. As Allan Jude says, ZFS without ECC is still more trustworthy than others with ECC, but every bit [flip] helps.

• An Intel Xeon CPU with a decent core count. bhyvecon has shown a huge amount of BSD hypervisor progress, but Intel still has the best support; how performant they’ll be after the latest security fixes we’ll see. Dual-socket would let me have fewer, faster cores per socket while still having passable cooling, but that would raise the price.

• A decent GPU situation for workstation use. I’m thinking the integrated Intel graphics for normal use, and eventually bhyve VGA/PCI-passthrough for a dedicated GPU to a game Windows VM for Train Simulator and X-Plane.

And then we get to enclosures. Most PC ones are ghastly, to put it charitably, and follow the Ford Model T school of colour choice. But there are a few that are inconspicuous enough and super practical: Supermicro and Chenbro make some pedestals with dual 4-drive backplanes and mounting for E-ATX, and are well laid out internally with shelving and discrete cooling zones. Here’s Chenbro’s SR107:

As I said on my Mac Pro post, I also want to eat. Clara and I also have more travel on the horizon, so for now my existing setup will need to last a little longer. But I’ll post my progress with this project.

Plums are delightful fruit. They’re also the activity one performs of bringing drafts into the light that would have otherwise gone ignored and unpublished for whatever reason.

Here’s a very recent one, from yesterday:

Now

… that’s it? What was I intending to post? It’s not a good sign when the description and subsequent follow-up are orders of magnitude larger than the draft they discuss.

Those of you on Twitter have been subjected to my newfound confidence about posting on FreeBSD and NetBSD, my favourite operating systems. My radio silence on social media until recently stemmed from some early frustrations, specifically the knee-jerk, rhetorical responses asking why I’d use it, or often far worse. It got to me after a while, and I decided it simply wasn’t worth it.

Take this article about installing FreeBSD 12 on the Atomic Pi by @Famicomam. It was a fantastic project, complete with photos. Naturally, this solicited a response from a dull troll asking what FreeBSD could be used for, and mocking them for writing articles over building things. No, really.

A related comment I’ve also had a few times is you only use it to be different, without a trace of irony, in response to a post where I’ve explained and why I’ve used it to solve a specific problem.

I’ve stopped trying to understand the mindset of these people. Being a jerk for the sake of it is surely too simplistic; there’s something else going on that perhaps with investigation I could figure out. Motivation to do so isn’t exactly forthcoming though.

I credit Hugo in my partials/head.html template with the following function. If you use software for free or donations, please consider doing so too:

{{ .Hugo.Generator }}

But since January it’s been throwing a warning:

Building sites … $TIME WARN Page's .Hugo is deprecated and will 
be removed in a future release. Use the global hugo function.

The official docs still show this as the correct syntax. But this forum thread by @zwbetz suggests one should change it to:

{{ hugo.Generator }}

This works without warnings. Note that it needs to be spelled lowercase, or you’ll get a different error:

Error: $FILE parse failed: template: $TEMPLATE:$LINE:
function "Hugo" not defined

Or if you replace it with something completely pointless:

Error: $FILE parse failed: template: $TEMPLATE:$LINE:
function "BirdIsTheWord" not defined