Rubenerd

A recent map and scenario pack I downloaded for Train Simulator had me doing some street running, like a gentleman. It’s a bizarre feeling driving a train down the main street of a town alongside cars! I’ll save that for a future post.

In the meantime, I went looking for some photos in the real world where these giant diesel electrics drive down the street. This was a great example from 2007 in LaGrange in Kentucky. Thanks to SimRacin40 for sharing this with us.

Now you can see why you wouldn’t want to get in the way of one of these things, either as a pedestrian or a car. I’ve been a train fan since I was a kid, but I still forget just how big they are. Even if they were idling their engines and coasting down the street, there’s a lot of inertia in that steel.

John wrote his American Civil War trilogy in the 1980s, but this haunting description could easily apply today. Via Wikiquote:

He saw it all summed up in the blind marching of that nameless unit. A vision of gaunt shapes, sharp shiny steel, dim lamps flaring in the rain. The war machine was rolling.

By now you might have seen Ilsem’s Canonicial job application form, with its millions of questions. If this screenshot is true, it’s emblematic of the wider broken infocomm hiring process in the States which is starting to leak elsewhere. If it’s fake, it perfectly captures people’s frustration and despair over this process.

Even if they were deemed necessary, these sorts of forms don’t select for good candidates. Qualified people will do what the original poster did and close the window. I imagine Brad Alexander (whom I still owe an email reply!) would mention such a form contains nothing but red flags, and you should move on immediately.

I’m lucky to have avoided such processes, despite having worked at large corporates before. But having rented in Australia, I’m familiar with filling out longwinded forms with nonsense.

Why do I think I’d be a good tenant for this property? Well you see, I’m not after mere accommodation; someone of my stature and financial prudence engages in synergistic paradigm shifts using a disruptive mix of reliable rent payments and unlocked value potential!

Forms with open-ended questions select for those who can write. As you’ve no doubt noticed on this blog, I can smash out paragraphs quickly without too much mental overhead or thought. I could probably fill out that entire job form in less than an hour, with all the shallow buzzwords and insincere fluff they’re looking for. Would I mean any of it? Unlikely; I wouldn’t even remember most of it after writing.

I get that recruitment is difficult. I work at a small company right now where I’ve seen the process from the beginning to end, including when it goes wrong. But it has to start with respect.

I mentioned on The Bird Site last night that I still love Perl, which prompted @pinkopanterata to ask:

What version of Perl do you use?

Good question! I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned this specifically, despite talking about camels here for years.

I’m still on Perl 5. I had fun exploring Raku, but Perl 5 still does everything I want, and uses that familiar syntax. I haven’t touched Perl 7 yet, but that’s on the personal project pile.

For the longest time I required Perl 5.16 as minimum in my scripts. This seminal version fixed a few longstanding Unicode bugs which made my life difficult in the past, and added a bunch of useful features like __SUB__. 5.16 incudes some hashing bugs though, so thesedays I set use 5.018 at minimum.

In terms of installation, I tend to be conservative and run whatever package managers include. My tools and code tend to be self-contained; I’m not running massive projects that require specific versions from CPAN, for example. I’ve also run Perl from pkgsrc on Debian in the past, because I was already using it for other things.

That said, I use the excellent Perlbrew system on my personal machines because I always want to try the latest goodies.

I love that I found this! Today’s Music Monday was a treat from my recent Tully’s Coffee Go Jazz CD from Japan that toe-tappingly fun.

Or: I could, but that’s beside the point!

Mike Larkin of OpenBSD hypervisor fame is a lovely person. We shared a lift on the way back from an AsiaBSDCon talk in 2018, and he went out his way to welcome me, ask me what my interests are, and even offered some advice on the best beer around our hotel. I’m not sure if he remembers the exchange, but for an introvert who felt nervous and a bit out of place, he helped me out a lot.

But I digress! Today he tweeted about a feature of a certain Redmond OS, with the following disclaimer shortly after:

Yes, I know I can go edit the registry and fix this [UI regression]. But … why?

This struck me as a perfect example of defensive posting and its chilling effects. Mike Harley of Obsolete29 brilliantly characterises these as “pre-buttals”, or rebuttals to points you know are forthcoming.

It’s the same playbook every time. Critique or share frustration about a software change, or protocol, or piece of hardware, and you’re guaranteed to be inundated with replies about disabling, fixing, or mitigating, instead of addressing your point about utility, accessibility, or design. For each person who offers genuine help, as many are in it for Internet points from my experience.

@ch1ps0h0y (still one of the best handles ever) gave a great example:

Ah, this reminds me of a particular fight in ffxiv which uses orange danger markers on an orange field w/ orange BG. Instead of collectively calling for adjustments to base colours, ppl kept insisting other’s monitors just needed adjusting.

As if one developer making a single change is somehow harder than 100,000s of people changing display settings for a single fight.

I’m waiting for the next phone to come with a hidden punch feature that supporters will claim is fine because “you can just disable it” when you complain of a dislocated jaw. Maybe I should let them borrow it!

I’m reading more journalists claim the Ukrainian invasion was due to “NATO expansionism”. This is not a justification. Putin would be proud, but such takes never address two unavoidable corollaries:

1. Why would a country feel the need to join a defence alliance in the first place? Why were the Baltic states so keen to?

2. Why isn’t the democratic will of people in countries like Ukraine ever a factor? Why does their fate always get decided for them?

I bristle when human beings are reduced to chess pieces, and especially when the pundits haven’t bothered to think even one move ahead in the game they purport to cover. This isn’t just laziness in wartime, it’s journalistic malpractice.

(UNICEF are running a global Ukrainian support programme, which will redirect you to your local country’s donation page 🌻).

Thanks everyone for your email and tweets regarding my silly milestone!

A question that’s come up in a few tweets and emails is how I keep up with doing this regularly. I wouldn’t profess to be a writing expert, or even an especially good blogger, so take the rambling contained herein with an iceberg of salt. Wait, that wouldn’t work.

I wish I had a more concrete answer. Writing is a pleasant distraction for me, a way to prepare myself for the day, and lets me focus on something I’m learning or thinking about. It’s also often a sneaky way to remember how I did something. I’m not sure what I’d fill my writing time with if I wasn’t doing this.

If I had to be prescriptive, I’d say spend some of your social media time on writing instead. Write about what’s on your mind, regardless of whether you think it’s interesting, engaging, or worthwhile. Trust me when I say, there’s always someone else out there who can relate! Don’t be shy, or convince yourself you’re boring, or aren’t contributing anything… if I took my constant self-doubt seriously, I’d never write anything.

If you need some prompts, think about what you’ve read or watched recently. Have you solved a problem? What’s something you’ve changed your mind on recently? How would you do something differently? Sometimes a post with a single quote can be a spark to create something bigger.

Authors always say the best way to write better is to read more, which I can vouch for in blogging. Building up some RSS feeds in an aggregator like The Old Reader can be a great source of inspiration.

But it’s also important to stress that this is only one approach. 8,000 posts sounds superficially impressive, but doesn’t speak to quality or detail. Writing a few posts a year is just as valid and worthwhile. If you’re having fun doing it, who cares.

Internationalisation is one of those things you don’t need to think about when it’s done well, and becomes painfully obvious when it isn’t.

Clara’s and my home media server runs a combination of MusikCube, Plex, and some simple Netatalk and Samba shares for exporting content to our various devices. I didn’t realise just how much of the CJK spectrum we use:

• Hong Kong cinema, which uses traditional Chinese
• Singaporean drama, which uses simplified Chiniese
• Anime and live-action Japanese shows and movies
• Korean movies

The underlying FreeBSD OS and storage pools are all configured for UTF-8 and Unicode Form D normalisation, so I haven’t run into any issues. I think this is worth calling out and appreciating.

It doesn’t seem that long ago where even having reliable Hangul on an English/Latin character set machine was a dicey proposition, with plenty of question marks and squares if you attempted to list directories containing them. Every part of the chain has to gracefully handle UTF and i17n, from the OS and file system, to the application and networking, or the entire framework collapses.

Clara and I needed something chill to have on tonight, and this recent video by Kronii absolutely hit the spot.

If you’d like a gentle, relaxing, and slightly silly introduction to Hololove, watching everyone’s other favourite timelord power wash a subway station may be just what the doctor ordered. She even got into a discussion with her live chat about classic anime and manga again.

I’d love to rewatch Angelic Layer too!