Rubenerd

My new year’s goal last year was to not have an opinion on everything. It sounds wishy washy, but in 2018 it’s a hard position to defend, especially on social media. Your lack of a visceral or positive response to a hot button issue, news story, or controversy, is somehow construed as endorsement.

For example, a certain Middle East conflict. Merely mentioning it gets the blood boiling on both sides. Truth is, I don’t have sufficient facts to inform a reasoned opinion either way, and I feel what media I do have — given I vote and lean centre-left — doesn’t tell the whole story.

It would be thoroughly disingenuous for me to advocate for either side based on that. Worse actually, I think it’d be tantamount to lying.

I suppose the main argument against this stance is my pleading ignorance is a cop out, especially when lives are at stake and I’m not using my meagre platforms to advocate for change. That’s fair, I should be informed on these issues. But no one person — bar perhaps a dilettante with excellent memory and cognitive skills — can be informed on everything.

I’m increasingly of the mindset that asserting any proposition without sufficient facts, regardless of your motivation, is dangerous. When I was a teenager I lambasted fundamentalists for doing it, so it’d be a bit rich for me to start.

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

28:02 – This could be the least-inspired episode title ever! But for a good cause, discussing the Mitsubishi 380, Farmer’s Union Iced Coffee, a Rubenerd Show clip from 2005, and other Adelaide nostalgia. Also making a coffee live on the programme, poorly-sized thermos containers, and a recurring sneeze.

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

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

Subscribe with iTunes, Pocket Casts, Overcast or add this feed to your podcast client.

There’s been much talk about OpenSSH user enumeration vulnerabilities. This is a more pedestrian post, or stationary one if you were sitting down.

I was bashing my head against a desk for the better part of twenty minutes last week, trying to figure out why my SSH key wasn’t being accepted. I VNC’d into the box — because I use a cloud that can do that — and checked the authorized_keys file for the third time.

Can you see the issue? It took me leaving to get a coffee and coming back to notice immediately.

For those using screen readers, or if you haven’t yet figured it out, the second key starts with sss-rsa ssh-rsa instead of just the latter. Whoops!

I’m still blown away that for all our intelligence, mine notwithstanding, we can be staring at something for so long the obvious becomes opaque.

As an aside, I’ve also been moving to using ed25519 where I can. Despite the name, the keys are much shorter and could almost be committed to memory if one were so inclined. Okay maybe not, but still far shorter than 4096-bit RSA.

I can’t get over this photo of Malé, Mauritius by Shahee Ilyas. It looks more like a SimCity 3000 or Cities Skylines map I would have made than a real place.

I love having photos like this as my desktop background on work laptops; they’re conversation starters while I’m plugging in projectors or starting a screen share.

I tried Grammarly on a recent post. These were the sentences it highlighted:

Me: A longer password with plain words has more entropy, and is more likely to be used because people remember them.

Grammarly: It appear [sic] that you have an unnecessary comma in a compound predicate. Consider removing it.

Overuse of that is a pet peeve of mine. It’s superfluous and awkward when spoken. The comma was to introduce a pause, but re-reading it I now I should have employed a second sentence.

Me: Running 32 bit OSs on 64 bit hardware with less than 4 GiB of memory, to save system resources.

Grammarly: It appears that 64 bit is missing a hyphen.

Another superfluous that. And if so, why not 32-bit?

Me: Using lighttpd over Apache.

Grammarly: Our dictionary does not include the word lighttpd.

Your dictionary is incomplete.

Me: Writing with WordPress over Movable Type and Radio Userland because it’s cleaner and lighter weight.

Grammarly: It appears that there is a missing preposition after the word because. Suggestion: because of.

No. And because of would make no sense:

Writing with WordPress over Movable Type and Radio Userland because of it’s cleaner and lighter weight.

Here’s some interesting news for those of us with all too many domain names:

Cloudflare Registrar lets you securely register and manage your domain names with transparent, no-markup pricing that eliminates surprise renewal fees and hidden add-on charges.

Most of this Hover already does beautifully. I only moved to Namecheap because Hover don’t bill in AUD or SGD, and I was being slugged international charges each time.

At-cost renewal is an interesting idea. I assume they’re using it as a gateway drug to get you using their other services, or to garner free advertising. As opposed to garner-free advertising, which would be advertising entirely devoid of garners.

I was doing research into something – surprising though it may seem – and found this random Spiceworks thread. There are some goodies.

I’ve only been in the industry professionally for a decade, so my reach isn’t that great. But I’m sure if you looked back on the history of this blog you’d find most of these floating around:

• Setting regular password rotation. All it does is encourages weaker passwords and insecure ingenuity.

• Short, indecipherable passwords are secure. A longer password with plain words has more entropy, and is more likely to be used because people remember them.

• Using FireWire 400 drives over USB 1.1 or 2. The transfer rate on the tin is slower than the latter, but it operates synchronously.

• Regularly defragmenting drives. Especially counterproductive with SSDs and other solid state media.

• RAID 5 and RAID Z. They get an unjustified bad rap now, but there are still better alternatives.

• Using AVG or Avast with Spybot Search and Destroy to protect Windows boxes.

• Setting Master/Slave jumpers on drives, because Cable Select is unreliable. And connect them with rounded ribbon cables for thermal efficiency! Except don’t do the latter, because those cables were non-standard and often introduced crosstalk.

• Running 32 bit OSs on 64 bit hardware with less than 4 GiB of memory, to save system resources.

• Recommending people use SyQuest ORB drives over Iomega Jaz, because it had more capacity for less.

• Disabling HTTPS specifically for performance and resource use.

• Disabling IPv6 if you “don’t need it.” Though turning it on still introduces privacy concerns you need to be aware of and mitigate.

• Compiling your BSD and Gentoo ports from source, rather than using packages, to optimise performance. Better still, run overnight so you’re not waiting hours for KDE to finish.

• Employing Web Safe Colours.

• Always terminating your SCSI devices! Or a life hack, always use an Iomega drive or EPSON scanner as the last device because they self-terminate.

• Using lighttpd over Apache, and MySQL over PostgreSQL, for performance and resource use.

• Using data archives on anything other than FreeBSD/ZFS.

• Writing with WordPress over Movable Type and Radio UserLand because its cleaner and lighter weight.

• Have you heard of this thing called Exchange? It’s so much better than Notes!

And some things I was doing while still in school:

• Using a Zip disk box with a padlock to secure data!

• Using network hubs, and anything with an ISA interface, because network switches and PCI cards are more expensive.

• Use 8.3 filenames on web servers, so old computers could still view your site assets.

• RAMBUS that sucker! Okay, I could never afford that.

I’m sure Jim Kloss of XCHANGE and Whole Wheat Radio fame would have stories.

I haven’t done a Music Monday in six years. Gintama is amazing, and the ED music is amazing, and the music video for the music is amazing.

Say you have a git repo, and you want to change its source URL from example.com to example.com. That wouldn’t make sense, because they’re the same. But assuming for the sake of the argument, or any other Japanese alcoholic comestible beverage of your choice, you can achieve it by:

$ git remote set-url origin git://example.com/

Done and done. At least one of those were superfluous, much like the lead sentence of this article. Lead is bad.

This may be useful if the public git repository site you were using was bought by a company you find problematic, given their recent track record of software and services brought into their fold.

A friend sent me this fascinating visualisation from HowMuch.net. Click through to the original article to see the full resolution and some fascinating discussion.

I wasn’t surprised to see the United States being the largest overall, but I wonder how that’s broken down state by state? I’ll bet New York and California would take the lion’s share, and Texas given it’s a transit hub.

Europe and Asia are the biggest clusters, though I fully expect Asia to outgrow everyone else in the next decade. And most of the heavy-hitting city states are there; pretty amazing they’re competing with countries that are orders of magnitude larger!

I wondered what a map adjusted with dollars per capita would look like, so I did some quick calcs in my lunchbox on city states, and some larger locations for comparison. I’d think Monaco and Gibraltar would be high on that list too, though they’re not on the map.

Tourist dollars per capita

Locale	Population	Billions	Per Capita
Macau	0.7 m	$36	$60,000 (!!)
Luxembourg	0.6 m	$5	$8,334
Hong Kong	7.3 m	$33	$4,521
Singapore	5.6 m	$20	$3,571
Qatar	2.6 m	$6	$2,308
Australia	24.1 m	$42	$1,743
USA	325.7 m	$211	$647
PRC	1,379.0 m	$33	$23