Rubenerd

I’m three months late to this meme, but cough! ^^;

Some big news happened while I was relatively out of it on cough syrup and other medicine. Apple doubled down on privacy with some important additions to iOS and macOS. BSDCan 2018 took place in Toronto. And once again, Microsoft preempted both with their own news!

My initial reaction a week ago was:

Windows Team Git Foundation Server Enterprise Tool for Business. Don’t use till the first service pack.

Media coverage

Since then, more considered people have already written far more than I could have. But in all the coverage, a few themes have emerged:

• The press have ignored CodePlex. Microsoft had their own platform, but at $7.5 billion they figured it was easier to buy mind-share around them than cultivate it. For those prognosticating a new Microsoft that everyone likes, this should give pause.

• A suspiciously large number of people are obtuse at best, or condescending at worst, about why people are up in arms. In the words of a private Twitterer, it doesn’t take much imagination to empathise why developers would be concerned.

• There’s been a reported spike in migrations to GitLab, prompting the ackchyually! crowd to mention the thought-terminating cliché that it runs on Azure. Aw snap! There’s obviously a huge difference between people committing code to a service, and software running on an IaaS, but that’s not profitable clickbait.

• GitHub’s new manager has said they won’t change anything. We’ve heard that before!

Outcomes

There are three outcomes as I see it, none of which have enough evidence thus far to sway my opinion:

1. Microsoft Skypeifies GitHub, or drives FOSS developers away by pulling their old tricks. GitLab or another service takes off, until that’s either shuttered or bought, and GitHub limps along like CodePlex did with Microsoft projects continuing to use it.

2. Microsoft earns community trust, and GitHub continues to grow, secure in their new source of funding. Steve Ballmer’s disgusting comments about FOSS being a cancer — lovely chap — and their current privacy and patent shenanigans are relegated to the sands of history, hopefully with Steve Ballmer.

3. GitHub slowly fades into irrelevance, not for philosophical or business reasons, but by another hot new startup doing something cool. GitLab to an extent is promising this.

And what I’m doing

In the meantime, I’m moving back to Bitbucket for my personal and side-project work stuff. For a few reasons:

• I used Bitbucket as late as 2015, and use Atlassian tools at work, so I’m comfortable with it. Their new sidebar-heavy UI also lends itself much better to Bitbucket than it did Confluence and JIRA.

• I checked out GitLab, the most promising alternative in terms of feature set and mind-share. It looks great, but is more than I need. But having an account there is likely valuable as more stuff moves over to it.

• I do work for an IaaS company, so the self-hosted route would make sense. But do I want to spend my spare time running another server? Maybe I do/should.

• Bitbucket supports Mercurial, which is far superior to Git anyway.

Boeing is researching a new midsize aeroplane (NMA) concept, dubbed the 797. According to Jon Ostrower, it’ll be a smaller, twin-isle aircraft.

It’s a welcome annoucement, to an extent. While I like the 737 design for nostalgic reasons, neither it or the A320 are really replacements for the sleek plane Boeing no longer makes for this market segment: the single-isle 757.

CF writing for Cranky Flier explains how larger 737s and A320s were angled:

The 737-900ER and the A321 could be replacements for the aging 757 fleet. They were more efficient airplanes and they had commonality with the rest of the narrowbody fleet. It was perfect. The 757s started to disappear on domestic routes that could easily be served by these other airplanes.

But the 757 is a special airplane that has a lot of fantastic capabilities. While it could be replaced on most domestic routes, it couldn’t be replaced everywhere. See, the 757 can carry a full load a long way. That made it perfect for longer routes that didn’t have the demand for a widebody like the 767.

Patrick Smith, author of the amazing Cockpit Confidential, and a pilot himself, puts it more bluntly:

The 757 is maybe the most versatile jetliner Boeing has ever built — a medium-capacity, high-performing plane that is able to turn a profit on both short and longer-haul routes — domestic or international; across the Mississippi or across the North Atlantic.

With the 737, Boeing took what essentially was a regional jet — the original 737-100 first flew in 1967, and was intended to carry a hundred or so passengers on flights of around 400 miles — and has pushed, pushed, pushed, pushed, and pushed the thing to the edge of its envelope, over and over, through a long series of derivatives [..]

With 180 passengers, the [757] can safely depart from a short runway, climb directly to cruise altitude, and fly clear across the country — or the ocean. Nothing else can do that. And, it’s a good-looking machine to boot. Muscular yet graceful.

I’d agree. The cockpit windows that look so weird on the 767, and downright silly on the 777, look sleeker on the 757. And whereas the 757 looked more modern than the 727 it was designed to replace, you can’t say the same about the 737-MAX, or the utilitarian A320neo.

So what I propose, as an aviation expert — cough — is the following:

• A revised Boeing 757 airframe, dubbed the 757-8, for consistency with the 787 and the 747-8. The 757/767/777 cockpit windows have been proposed for the 797 anyway, so they’re halfway there.

• Chevron engine nacelles of the 787, 747-8 and 737-MAX, in part for noise reduction, and also because they look cool.

• A sweet new Common Cabin Experience to replace the Boeing Signature Interior™

• A large commission cheque I’d gladly share with the commentators above.

Thank you.

There are a few ways to convert an SVG to a PNG without leaving the shell, including *Magick and Inkscape, but I find rsvg-convert the easiest.

Install with Homebrew on macOS, or FreeBSD pkgng. Note the version number on the latter:

# brew install librsvg
# pkg install librsvg2

Then convert as such:

$ rsvg-convert vector.svg

And you’ll be presented with a PNG:

==> ?g?O2??a?{*pD????껌?Xh???4?mF:,?ɶ?0?c3??nb??ܡ?z?
==> ?5??&?4?KZڴ?;w??qt??6>2???hłr??FM???DZ??#_@??{'y
==> ???d??$???xB??birdistheword5??{|?9?ND?x{?????mPJ
==> ?????V?@?'?W\7?M~???h?(RD1???cx@?^E???wy?뢪???ˏ?
==> ;?*??z;KFåIP?L???b??2)??_?HgH?E??9\?̽?Wr?N???J???
==> ?p?4#7O??^e#Ւ?%,{O41?J??}1?$7H???,?I??S?T?/?[ӹ??
==> ??~IA70=????к\??|?<f_??kb?\j|?d?Ә??ʭ??dٌ?

Whoa! I wasn’t expecting that. Let’s redirect somewhere useful:

$ rsvg-convert vector.svg > raster.png

Or even better, use the output flag:

$ rsvg-convert --output raster.png vector.svg

More details are available with --help, or on the manpage(1).

Jon Proctor is my favourite aviation photographer. His images capture their time so well, span decades, and have been published in several books I have. He also uploads images to JetPhotos.com, my second goto site after Airliners.net.

The above image of a Lockheed TriStar illustrates how its centre engine was mounted. Compare that elegant S-duct and full-height rudder to the squat vertical stabaliser and awkward third engine in the DC-10.

From his original page:

Photo Date: Feb 06, 1975
Uploaded: Nov 18, 2013
Reg: N31024
Aircraft: Lockheed L-1011-1 Tristar
Airline: Trans World Airlines (TWA)
Serial #: 193B-1091

Notes: Although delivered to TWA in December 1974, N31024 did not enter service until April 30, 1975, due mainly to the oil embargo. It is seen in storage at the overhaul base, its engines removed for use as spares.

Also, dig the old TWA livery. I love the arrow-like cheatline and dual-sphere logo. So much better than the followup Trans World colours.

O’Reilly have turned off a distressing number of their old sites. But worse, they redirect to their website, not an archive copy. This is tragic.

As an example, Cory Doctorow’s legendary post about his outboard brain, which I wanted to link to in my previous post:

Being deprived of my blog right now would be akin to suffering extensive brain-damage. Huge swaths of acquired knowledge would simply vanish. Just as my TiVo frees me from having to watch boring television by watching it for me, my blog frees me up from having to remember the minutae of my life, storing it for me in handy and contextual form.

A bit of sad irony there. Fortunately the Wayback Machine has a copy. I donate to the Internet Archive, and you should too.

I learned Perl, FreeBSD, Red Hat Linux, MySQL, Java on Mac OS X, and countless other things in O’Reilly’s woodcut books growing up, but also from their many related sites. I feel a part of my childhood is gone.

Nick Hodge posted this:

This techno-utopia of “nerds like me” having power and influence over world affairs isn’t pleasant.

I’d like to give it back. To someone.

It’s really bad, out of control and headed for greater disasters.

Me too.

I entered IT as a kid because I loved technology. That blinking family 486 held more of my fascination than anything before or since. It was magic, in the purest childhood sense. And when I learned I could program it, and change its hardware, to do what I want it to… holy sweet fuck.

It wasn’t till my teens that I tried to make my career choice a moral decision, at least in part. Seeing all the technology keeping my mum alive expanded into a larger appreciation of the positive ways tech was helping everyone. In other words, tech has the potential to be a great force for good in the world, and I wanted to be a part of it. That still holds true on balance, though its benefits are still unevenly felt.

I still feel instinctively defensive when someone blames tech for a social issue. We just build and maintain the tools, it’s up to society to determine how to best use them, right?

But we can’t hide behind this convenient hand-washing excuse any more. IT can’t be created in a vaccum; we need to think about the broader world it’ll be used in. This applies as much to the developer as the solution architect or designer or the manager.

I do feel responsible. My millennial generation were supposed to be the green ones that make the world better after the alleged excesses of the boomers, and the cynicism of generation X. But we also have The Zuck. Yay, us!

I’m also not a political scientist, and am self-aware enough to know I shouldn’t be informing public policy beyond my realm of expertise. I can do my best to be a moral, ethical actor when designing and building systems, but someone much, much smarter than me needs to take the baton from there. But then, is that just buck passing?

My coworkers and I are obsessed with this unlikely collaboration album that came out last month. This is the third of many blog posts dedicated to each song.

Today we have Waiting For the Break of Day:

You see
   some politicians;
You hear
   the things they say.
You hear the falseness
   in their positions;
We’re waitin’
   for the break of day. ♫

We sure are.

Wikipedia had another cute bird for its daily featured picture, thanks to Andreas Trepte. From its associated article:

The black-tailed godwit (Limosa limosa) is a large, long-legged, long-billed shorebird first described by Carl Linnaeus in 1758. It is a member of the godwit genus, Limosa. There are three subspecies, all with orange head, neck and chest in breeding plumage and dull grey-brown winter coloration, and distinctive black and white wingbar at all times.

Its breeding range stretches from Iceland through Europe and areas of central Asia. Black-tailed godwits spend (the northern hemisphere) winter in areas as diverse as the Indian Subcontinent, Australia,New Zealand, western Europe and west Africa.

Wait, there should be a space between Australia and New Zealand — the Tasman Sea, hah! Fixed :)

I include, for your reference, the above image. I could have easily just included the image, without that sentence, or the awkward comma pauses. In fact, this entire paragraph is superfluous.

I was feeling blue from feeling so sick over the last week, but I saw this image in the context of airport dogs finding sausages but not drugs, and it made me smile. Look at his expression! Who’s a good boy? Who’s a good boy?! I miss having a dog.

Update: I found the original article, by Reuters in 2016.