Update 2021: I’ve taken down fewer than twenty posts out of more than seven thousand in this blog’s history, and posts about this guy are some of them. MBMBaM’s tweet put it best explaining why, though I also have personal reasons. Thanks for understanding.
Trying to kill a process:
$ killall process
==> ash: 1: killall: command not found
Weird.
# apt-get update
# apt-cache search killall
==> psmisc - utilities that use the proc file system
==> sysvinit-utils - System-V-like utilities
Must be more hot systemd garbage.
# apt-get install sysvinit-utils
==> sysvinit-utils is already the newest version
I stand corrected! Trying again:
# apt-get install psmisc
==> Unpacking psmisc [..] Setting up psmisc [..]
Let’s try:
$ killall process
==> (exit 0)
Done!
I thought I had a rough Christmas and New Years on account of stomach fun, but at least my apartment building wasn’t in danger. Biwa Kwan summarised the situation for SBS News:
Frustrated residents of Sydney’s Opal Tower have demanded answers after they were evacuated for the second time in four days over the building’s structural instability.
Three thousand people were evacuated from the surrounding area on Christmas Eve after residents reported “cracking” noises on the tenth floor of the building.
It’s the inevitable and completely predictable conclusion of privatising building approval and industry self-regulation. From Smart Property Investment, a name that itself may not be fiscally prudent right now:
The robustness of NSW’s quality and safety checks for new builds across the board have now been called into question. The Opal Tower was only opened in August, and was given the green light by building certifiers, who administer quality and safety regulations.
An immediate audit of private building certifiers will be launched by the NSW government in response to the Opal Tower fiasco.
They quoted the Institute of Architects, emphasis added:
“The Institute is aware of the potential for conflicts of interest to arise between private certifiers’ regulatory responsibilities and their commercial interests, and the impact this may have upon the integrity of their work,” the Institute said.
It reminded me of this warning tale from the United Kingdom half a century ago, to say nothing of the more recent Grenfell Tower disaster:
Ronan Point was a 22-storey tower block in Canning Town in Newham, East London, which partly collapsed on 16 May 1968, only two months after it had opened. A gas explosion blew out some load-bearing walls, causing the collapse of one entire corner of the building, which killed four people and injured 17. Although there were few casualties the spectacular nature of the failure, caused by both poor design and poor construction, led to a loss of public confidence in high-rise residential buildings, and major changes in UK building regulations resulted.
I understand government regulation can be a burden in these industries. But before trumpeting overreach next time, consider: why was the regulation put into place in the first place?
Jason Braganza asked this question on Stack Overflow in 2015:
Is there a way to get custom RSS feeds with Ghost?
And the first comment, name withheld:
Why a custom RSS feed? Why not use the default one?
In this case, Jason got the answer he needed from that person. But what about people coming to this page becuse its the first search result?
I feel like starting a new blog post series on people who respond to StackExchange questions with why?
This Slashdot user defended the GPL compared to the BSD licence back in 1999:
Joe Schmoe and Company X are on equal ground with the GPL. Anyone makes a change, everyone gets to see it. No “Embrace and Extend” for Linux and the GNU utils.
As for Microsoft BSD, it’s quite possible. It’s very possible. And they can easily make it incompatible with the other *BSD’s and Linux. And if they get their way wrt the US Universal Product Code, they can even stop people from reverse engineering the results. So they’ll be able to build off of the ideas free software developers create without having to share those ideas back. And we’ll be back to reinventing the wheel all over again.
Two decades later, and Windows has Linux.
I’ve been on record here many times discussing why I can’t stand OLED screens. I was hoping the flickering, strobing effect was the result of cheap Android panels, but I can’t even look at an iPhone X or XS for more than a few seconds without feeling pain in my eyes, and the start of a headache within a few minutes.
fzslm and TheSpiceIsLife explained on Hacker News:
The OLED display on the X uses pulse-width modulation, which is basically where the OLED panel [varies the duty cycle] to adjust its brightness. Most people (like me) don’t really notice it, but for some it can cause headaches over prolonged use, and in some extreme cases really bad migraines.
Oleg Afonin went in to detail last March about the issue:
The iPhone X uses a new (for Apple) display technology. For the first time ever, Apple went with an OLED display instead of the IPS panels used in all other iPhones. While OLED displays have numerous benefits such as the true blacks and wide color gamut, the majority of OLED displays (particularly those made by Samsung) tend to flicker. The flickering is particularly visible at low brightness levels, causing eyestrain and headaches to sensitive users. Very few users have the slightest idea of what’s going on, attributing these health issues to oversaturated colors, the oh-so-harmful blue light and anything but OLED flickering.
He went into further detail about finding the sweet spot for brightness where your phone won’t flicker, and reducing the colour saturation in a follow up post. As IPS LCDs are less bright and have lower colour saturation anyway, it seems to me they would be a better choice for those of us sensitive to them.
This is the main reason I’m relieved the iPhone XR exists. An IPS display is objectively better because they’re crisper, but they also don’t flicker. I hope Apple continues to make a more affordable, LCD phone for when my iPhone 8 needs upgrading in a few years.
It’s felt as though the Mac has been losing some of its charm, like the startup chime and the classic Finder icon. But I’m relieved and happy to see the CoreTypes.bundle still has all the New World ROM and Intel Macs, in high resolution glory.
Here are my first and latest Mac portables, an iBook Snow and the latest MacBook Pro. I like they’re also displayed with the best desktop background Apple ever shipped:
Clara and I got up and took the ferry into town from North Sydney for New Years. The weather was beautiful!
Walking down to the pier from North Sydney, looking across at Milson’s Point:
Pulling away from the McMahon’s Point pier, looking back at North Sydney:
Passing under a specific bridge with another ferry blocking the view of a certain building:
And our ferry at the Circular Quay pier:
I should commute on the ferry more often, weather permitting.
I took this photo on the 26th of November in the inner-city Sydney suburb of Ultimo. While these four share bikes may otherwise look identical at first glance, they are a few subtle visual differences.