Rubenerd

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26:45 – Light through leaves at night, life-work balance, changing directions, making decisions, being lost in thought, importance of family and friends, and then randomly the HP 620 LX.

Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Released December 2018 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts.

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I read this on a company website, name withheld:

Interconnection Oriented Architecture (IOA) enables a transformative approach to IT that supports digital engagement and leverages the power of digital ecosystems.

I understand what those words mean in isolation, but… wha? This beats Mozilla’s infamous 2014 article where publisher transformation would put users at the centre; which meant ads.

Via the FreeBSD Questions mailing list:

By June 1949, people had begun to realize that it was not so easy to get a program right as had at one time appeared. It was on one of my journeys between the EDSAC room and the punching equipment that the realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent in finding errors in my own programs.

I was having trouble with a USB 3.0 Kingston DataTraveller drive on my MacBook Pro. I was willing to assume it was a dodgy USB C adaptor cable, so I plugged it into my FreeBSD tower, like a gentleman. I hadn’t seen dmesg output like this in a long time:

uhub_reattach_port: giving up port reset - device vanished
uhub_reattach_port: giving up port reset - device vanished
uhub_reattach_port: giving up port reset - device vanished
uhub_reattach_port: giving up port reset - device vanished
uhub_reattach_port: giving up port reset - device vanished

I had three other identical keys, so I tried another one:

ugen1.2: <Kingston DataTraveler 3.0> at usbus1
umass0 on uhub0
umass0: <Kingston DataTraveler 3.0, class 0/0, rev 3.10/0.01, addr 1> on usbus1
umass0:  SCSI over Bulk-Only; quirks = 0xc100
umass0:7:0: Attached to scbus7
da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 scbus7 target 0 lun 0
da0: <Kingston DataTraveler 3.0 > Removable Direct Access SPC-4 SCSI device
da0: Serial Number [blah]
da0: 400.000MB/s transfers
da0: 14755MB (30218842 512 byte sectors)
da0: quirks=0x2<NO_6_BYTE>

And the other two worked the same. Plugged that first one back in, and the same reattach_port errors.

I’m amazed that for all the dozens – perhaps hundreds – of these I’ve had over the years, only one other key has failed this way when new. It’s impressive.

I’ve been watching a lot of Doug DeMuro on YouTube, as you can likely tell by now. I’m not even that into cars; he’s just such an engaging and interesting reviewer with an admirable attention to detail.

But his recent video defending his purchase of a Land Rover Defender got me thinking a bit meta. Among the many reasons social media now shits me is the fact swaths of the population can’t tolerate you buying something that’s useful for you or makes you happy, and boy can’t they wait to tell you why.

Take electric shavers. I treated myself to a Braun last year. Disposable and cartridge razors were wasteful, and straight razors irritate my skin. I’d tried them all, with training, and with every conceivable combination of creams, foams, and gels. This electric Braun gives me a surprisingly close shave, in less time in the bleary-eyed morning, with minimal effort, and my skin doesn’t burn. It’s a win on every metric.

The uproar this generated on Twitter was matched only by my admission to using an American Express to top up an Opal card, or using a Mac back in the day. It wasn’t sufficient to tell me I wasted money, I was told in the most patronising ways possible that I should use real razors. Something something real men something something.

Doug shouldn’t have been forced to make that video. And I shouldn’t have had to explain why I went electric. Yet here we are.

If there’s any takeaway from Doug’s experience, it’s to be positive yet thorough in one’s repudiation. And if the knee-jerk whingers are still not satisfied, well, sucks to be them.

DCI Barnaby of Causton, in Midsomer Murders season 7, episode 1:

I suppose if you set out not to look for something, you’re not very likely to find it, are you?

I would rate it… abrupt!

I know of mobile game whales, but not their etymology. Philipp on the Arqade StackExchange explained:

The term “Whale” is borrowed from the casino industry, where it is used to describe a rich gambler who bets extraordinarily large amounts of money. Just like in the game industry, casinos want to “catch” the most high-betting whales, because they provide a lot of income for comparably little expense. Casinos often go out of their way to form personal connections with whales and provide them with personalized service to ensure their loyalty and make sure they lose their money in their casinos and not those owned by the competition. Some game companies in the microtransaction business are also known to do this.

The casinos, in turn, took the term from the Poker community which has a tradition of using fish-themed terms for different categories of players, like “fish” for weak players and “shark” for strong players who prey on the “fish” in order to take their money. A “whale” is what every “shark” hopes to find: a very large fish* who has a lot of money and likes to play high-stakes games despite not being skilled enough to compete in them.

*Yes, I know that whales are mammals and not fish.

The last time I was in the vicinity of Australian television on a regular basis, I was inundated with dozens of ads for Apia, the Australian Pensioners Insurance Agency. It perhaps says more about the demographic still watching television than the networks care to admit.

So you can understand my ignorant surprise upon seeing the word Apia floating around the Pacific on a map this afternoon. I looked it up on Wikipedia:

The Promina Group, an Australian and New Zealand insurance company (2003–07), formerly had listing on the Australian and New Zealand stock-exchanges. Suncorp-Metway Limited took over full ownership of the group in 2007. [..] APIA (Australian Pensioners Insurance Agency)

That’s clearly the wrong one. Let’s try again.

Apia is the capital and the largest city of Samoa. From 1900 to 1919, it was the capital of German Samoa. The city is located on the central north coast of Upolu, Samoa’s second largest island. Apia is the only city in Samoa and falls within the political district (itūmālō) of Tuamasaga.

The Apia Urban Area has a population of 36,735 (2011 census)[2] and is generally referred to as the City of Apia. The geographic boundaries of Apia Urban Area is mainly from Letogo village to the new industrialized region of Apia known as Vaitele.

Today I learned.

IBM is selling Lotus, presumably to empty some seats from Red Hat. User hey! on Slashdot wrote a great comment I have to quote verbatim:

Remember [Lotus Notes] it was originally designed to handle the CIA’s email back in the 1980s. It had strong encryption, distributed directory management, digital signatures, distributed certificate management, and a host of other capabilities that were decades ahead of its time.

Every time you received a Notes email (or indeed any kind of document) from another Notes user, it was automatically authenticated; no imposture was possible, and this was at a time when it was normal for SMTP to accept any input from any source that knew the IP address. At the time I was training people on this new email thing, and I’d open up a telnet session to the server and show them how I could forge an email from “The Lord God Almighty” with the subject line “Don’t believe anything you read here.”

Notes was never a bad email system. It had a very awkward client UI and a server that required a more than room temperature IQ to administer, but you got things in return that people in the 90s didn’t understand to be important yet. Things like two factor authentication and local encryption. If you lost your laptop, the data in Notes would result in a data breach. People still haven’t figured out how to prevent that in a way that is affordable and simple to use and administrate. So while it was inexcusable that they never hired some HCI experts to clean up the archaic user interface, you still got a very modern set of capabilities all the way back in 1990s. People were frustrated with the complexity, but to be fair while Notes was asking you to handle things like generating and signing crypto certificates, you didn’t even have the option with anything else back when it was introduced.

For all the hate Notes got, I preferred it over Exchange back in the day. You’re not supposed to admit that.