Rubenerd

The 1890s were a fascinating time for engineering. Steel-hulled ocean liners were transforming society with their regularly scheduled ocean crossings, in ways nobody could have predicted.

My favourite ships from the time period were the Cunard Lucania and Campania; they were the largest, fastest, and most luxurious liners in North Atlantic service. Then the Germans surprised the world with the world’s first four-stackers, and started a building craze of one-upmanship that lead to the Lusitania and Titanic in the early 1900s. The rest, as they say…

Lucania—pictured above—and Campania had design elements that hinted at where the industry was going, with their clean lines, lack of sailing masts, and comparatively large size. But they also represented the pinnacle of existing design trends:

• They were among the last ships to have bridges that were bridges. Steering rooms were originally built above the superstructure to afford the best possible views; later ships were sufficiently tall that they could just be built on the boat deck.

• Their triple-expansion reciprocating steam engines were the tallest fitted to any ships, and are still among the largest ever constructed. They reached from the bottom of the ships right into the superstructure! Future ships employed turbines for all or some of their propulsion to save weight, volume, and fuel.

This photo below of Campania shows the balanced proportions of her funnels and superstructure with her hull. She looked so modern and elegant, especially compared to her contemporaries. All she needed was a white forecastle deck; but then again, that was White Star’s signature livery.

Merry Christmas, if that’s your thing! I’m not religious either, my father is German, that part of the world where the original Yuletide celebrations with trees, decorations, and holiday food came from :).

This is a bit of a ramble as I sit here with some vanilla spiced coffee.

Doing stuff

A not insignificant number of my personal projects have been built, started, or finished around Christmas each year. It’s a break from studies and work, there was often long travel involved, and the season filled me with optimism.

Among my favourites was, funnily enough, taking the previously-mentioned Aeroline bus from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore one year around the holidays. I had my venerable MacBook Pro 1,1 out on the top deck, learning Ruby from the Pickaxe book while listening to Tony Bennett.

In the lead-up to Christmas this year, I finally got some time to do some blog housekeeping. I’m planning to make the jump to Ghost at some point, now that I have the stack playing nicely in FreeBSD jails. But in the meantime I’d let a lot of cruft build up; malformed frontmatter, unfinished draft posts, missing metadata, broken links. A decent chunk is now fixed.

Importing stuff

I also made the decision to import the Rubenerd Annexe blog in here. Self-entitled blogging experts used to comment that you should never stray too far from a few topics, so I kept ancillary stuff on a separate site. It was on my awful Perl CGI scripts at one point, then Tumblr, Fargo, Jekyll, even MediaWiki. I’d say only half are done now, but it’s a start.

(Those same experts say you shouldn’t blog about blogging either, because heaven forbid you discuss something you’re interested in. I’m so glad I stopped paying attention to them).

Happy holidays!

I was late choosing a holiday phone background this year. But with Clara’s and my obsessive preoccupation with the Fate universe again in the form of a certain mobile game, I had no choice when I saw this key visual.

Emiya’s expression is what does it for me!

I’ve been meaning to try iocage on FreeBSD, but Dirk Engling and the team have done such a good job with ezjail, I keep using it for everything. But I was reminded of an issue when using ezjail on standard zroot installs.

FreeBSD instances on OrionVM are installed into a zroot ZFS pool by default. I would know, I built them! You can live-attach a second disk and use that for your jails, but on a whim I decided to use my existing zroot. But in doing so, I had this come up:

# zfs create zroot/jails
# ezjail-admin install -r 12.0-RELEASE
==> base.txz             147 MB  844 kBps 02m58s
==> tar: could not chdir to '/usr/jails/fulljail'
==> Error: Package install script for base failed.

There are two solutions. The easiest is to create it where it’s expected to find it by default:

# zfs create zroot/usr/jails

Or create as normal, but set the mountpoint:

# zfs create -o mountpoint=/usr/jails zroot/jails

And now new jail creates worked.

I had an epiphany this morning, in a free falling water conveyance.

I know so many nice people who still treat retail and restaurant staff with contempt. They talk down to them, get aggressive at the metaphorical drop of a hat, and if the hat is physically dropped, well, here come the fireworks. They don’t thank them for filling their water, they roll their eyes at the most minor of mistakes.

Why do people feel compelled to do this? Turns out, my epiphany answers it. Those people I otherwise thought were nice, aren’t.

I realised I have all these photos taken over the years, but I’ve barely shared any of them. I’m going to change this, in a new post series called Ruben Mines His Photo Archive. Wow, I gave that title no thought at all.

We lived in Singapore for many years, but also briefly in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. They’re only 300 kilometres apart, so we’d often take an Aeroline express bus between them. It involved riding from HarbourFront in Singapore, to the international border at Tuas, then crossing the Second Link bridge into Malaysia, then spending a few hours driving along the Federal Highway to KL.

Coming from one of the densest cities in the world, to suddenly endless plantations was always a surreal, calming experience. I usually can’t stand buses, but the road was excellent and relatively straight, and the bus was comfy with power points and a downstairs lounge.

But eventually, sufficient assal horizontology mandated a break. The highway has several rest stops, the biggest of which consists of an entire shopping centre built into an overpass, with your typical American fast food chains, and some local fare. I have many fond memories eating a Spicy Ayam Goreng burger from the McD’s (as they call it), or a soup from the local stalls.

There are also smaller rest stops along the way with petrol, convenience stores, and some well deserved… facilities. This was one of the first ones you’d get to, which had a convenience store that always stocked my favourite Mr Potato chilli flavoured potato crisps!

You’d always see an interesting intersection of people. Malaysian delivery trucks and locally produced Protons would be parked alongside Singaporean-registered Mercedes-Benz sedans and sportscars. And maybe a licence plate with some Thai if you were lucky.

But then it was back on the road again for the final leg of the trip. It’s a journey I hope to replicate with Clara and my sister next year.

Rubenerd has reached 586 pages. The 80586 was Intel’s fifth generation CPU architecture, and the first to be given a name after they lost their case to trademark numbers.

Our first family machine was a 486SX, but the first computer I built myself from parts as a teenager had an 80586 200 MHz Pentium MMX CPU. I still have it, and use it for vintage stuff. It’s still my favourite computer; no machine since ever had the same amount of excitement and joy bundled in.

Why run DOSBox or ScummVM when you can run your retro software and games on original hardware? Don’t get me wrong, VMs define my existence at this stage, but sometimes you need to hear the original bleeps and bloops.

Is that half an hour?

Well, it’s not a full hour.

And twenty minutes?

The SORTEDFood guys are absurdly delightful.

Every news story reporting on Australian property during the boom discussed investors, with nay a single toss given to renters, or those buying a home to… get this, live in. I know right, what a concept?

The same narrative is playing out now that the market is correcting. I had to go twenty nine paragraphs into this ABC report titled House of Cards to get this:

Tough times for investors are unlikely to garner sympathy from a growing number of Australians who will never have the means to buy their own home, let alone amass a property portfolio.

No kidding. You’ll also be shocked to learn renters weren’t mentioned.

There were a few Twitter threads about Australian store chains people miss. My family moved to Singapore when I was in late primary school, so this is a mix of both places:

Brashs (Australia)

Music was important to my parents, and we spent much of our weekends in primary school wandering around their selections.

HMV (Both)

Similar to Brashs. The one in the Heeren shopping centre on Orchard Road was a wonderland. I loved that jazz and blues even had their own rooms.

World 4 Kids (Australia)

The excitement about going into this store to grab the latest Lego kit went way above Toys-R-Us. Not sure why.

Tuckerbag (Australia)

When we lived in Melbourne for a few years, this was our local supermarket. Lots of fond memories going there after school on Friday with my mum to get a end of week treat.

Borders (Both)

This one broke my heart. Much of my high school life was spent sitting in the isles in the Wheelock Place branch. I went to the closing down sale at the Bondi Junction store.

Pizza Hut (Australia)

Pizza Hut was always, and still is, a family restaurant in Singapore. I keep reading articles that they’re bringing them back in Australia, but they’ve been reimagined. Because of course they have been.

Yaohan (Singapore)

In the former Plaza Singapura before it was refurbished the first time. Their arts, crafts, and stationary section was the best place to get Japanese stuff at the time.