Rubenerd

Leo Moser being quite delightful, as quoted on Wikipedia:

A mathematician named Klein
Thought the Möbius band was divine.
    Said he: “If you glue
    The edges of two,
You’ll get a weird bottle like mine.”

Clara and I loved riding the New York City Subway in 2016. It was perfect for tourists, save for the grime. But it seems since it’s only got worse for commuters since we left, with problems culminating in a declared state of emergency. Damn :(.

Marc Santora wrote this article a year ago for the New York Times for the oldest trains in the system, with some amazing photos:

…the C train cars, once the pride of the subway, are now, according to New York subway officials, the oldest in continuous daily operation in the world.

Keeping the 53-year-old trains [Ruben: built 1964–65] running is not just an aesthetic problem. The cars, also known as the R32, break down far more often than any other train in the system, averaging just 33,527 miles between failures. The average subway car can travel 400,000 miles before breaking down. And the newest cars in the fleet average more than 750,000 miles.

Sydney still has many of its S-class trains in service, that we all dub tin cans. They have similar stainless steel construction and panel fluting, though they were built a decade later in the 1970s.

In defence of the C trains, from the Wikipedia page:

According to railfan James Greller, they often cited for their superior durability and craftsmanship, along with the structural reinforcement done to their bodies during the GOH period; four other B Division models built after them have been mostly or completely retired.

Given the build quality of Sydney’s Warratah trains, and the door problems on the Tangaras, I wouldn’t be surprised—only half tongue in cheek—if the S-class trains in Sydney outlasted them as well.

The only other metro I’ve travelled on daily for years is Singapore’s MRT, but their oldest rolling stock was built in 1987, and refurbished in the 2000s.

Photo above is of an R32 set J train at Marcy Avenue, by R38R40 on Wikimedia Commons.

Here’s a blast from the past: a screenshot of my FreeBSD desktop from almost a decade ago to the day!

It was a DIY Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 tower in a slender white case with a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf sticker, hence the hostname “Espresso”. The depicted character is C.C., everyone’s favourite pizza fan. It shows 29 degrees at 5am, that’s even warm for Singapore at that time.

I was going through a lot of desktop environments back then; 2008 was my KDE and GNOME experimentation days before going back to Xfce that the Cobind Desktop first introduced me to. The cool kids were still using tiled window managers or OpenBox.

To expand on the nostalgia, my primary portable machine was still my first-gen Intel MacBook Pro at the time. I had to be careful to get universal binaries for it; PowerPC stuff worked decently, but not needing Rosetta was a bonus.

Peppperidge Farm and Lelouch remember.

VMware Fusion—and as far as I can remember, VMware Workstation—default to splitting disk images into multiple files. There are benefits to doing this, but it might not be what you want depending on your use case.

If you’ve been given a bundle with multiple VMDKs:

$ ls *vmdk
==> disk.vmdk
==> disk-s001.vmdk
==> disk-s002.vmdk
==> disk-s003.vmdk
[..]
==> disk-s00[n].vmdk

You can merge them graphically, like a Boss:

1. Open the .vmx file in Fusion to import the VM
2. Go to Virtual Machine → Settings
3. Click the first Hard Disk under Removable Devices
4. Click ▸ Advanced Options
5. De-select Split into multiple files

It will sit there chewing away for a few minutes while it concatenates, depending on the size and number of files. And you’ll be left with:

$ ls *vmdk
==> disk.vmdk

Now you can run it through a converter, such as to RAW to boot it on Xen, or something else. Boom!

The Catholic Church… you know how this ends. Nancy Notzon filed this for ABC News Australia:

The most senior Catholic to be charged with concealing child sexual abuse — Adelaide’s Archbishop Philip Wilson — has been found guilty by a New South Wales court.

I post this in the sincere hope one day we’ll be surprised by news like this, because it’ll be uncommon again.

I loved this photo by Eric Freidebach!

US Airways 737-200 N213US fuselage section on display at the Museum of Flight.

The 737 is my second-favourite airframe, after the Lockheed L-1011 TriStar. I likely won’t ever get to fly in a 707, but the 737 shares its distinctive cockpit windows and fuselage cross-section. Note also the simple, rounded rectangle cabin windows; I reckon these are much nicer than the slightly-bulbous ones of most contemporary jets.

What struck me about this photo though was how slender those wings were! And to think all its fuel had to fit in that space. Wild.

The photo is preserved on Wikipedia Commons, because Google bought Panoramio and subsequently shut it down. Of course.

The easiest way to use rsync is with the default SSH transport option. It’s easy, secure, and reasonably fast. Machines will bottleneck elsewhere before your CPUs will encrypting/decrypting the ssh streams, from my experience. And you get all the SSH niceties, like pre-shared keys and host config files.

But this weekend I needed to transfer to an older machine without AES-NI. And in this case, it was most definitely pegging the CPU long before the network link was saturated, as htop showed:

1 [||||||||||||||||||||||||||99.7%]

There are two ways around this with rsync:

• keep SSH, but enable a faster cipher like arcfour; or
• use an unencrypted rsync stream with rsyncd, like rsync used to do.

I thought I’d try the latter, like a gentleman.

rsyncd

rsync used to ship with a client-server system using rsyncd as its default operating mode. If you install it on FreeBSD thanks to rodrigo@, the rsyncd rc script still exists:

# pkg install rsync
# ls -F /usr/local/etc/rc.d/
# ==> rsyncd*

The manpage is your friend, but this Everything Linux guide from 1999 is still the nicest I’ve found online to get started.

It goes without saying you’d only want to run it on a trusted network. No really, if you do these on a production site over the internet or another shared network, you’d better hope the data isn’t confidential!

A quick and dirty test

I transferred a 1GiB test file generated with urandom three times, and averaged the transfer times. These were the rough results:

Transfer method | Reported speed location: sydney

rsync with default SSH | 28.11MB/s rsync with arcfour SSH | 32.61MB/s rsyncd | 48.77MB/s

And the CPU on the target box went from full utilisation, to hovering around 30%. I was surprised at this drop, given rsync would still be computing hashes to verify file transfers. This would seem to confirm my suspicion the CPU was bottlenecking on the SSH side.

There are plenty more optimisations available, but this wasn’t a bad effort for 10 minutes of work!

Troubleshooting

I followed the rsyncd.conf manpage for configuring rsyncd on the FreeBSD server, but I kept getting stream closure errors. I like open streams, they let me transfer data.

So I enabled logs in rsyncd.conf, like a gentleman:

log file = /var/log/rsyncd.log

Then restarted the daemon, and tried the transfer again. From the logs:

2018/05/06 12:08:37 [23834] ERROR: module is read only

If you read the documentation—what a concept—read only is the default. Whoops!

The @ozzmosis commented on my DOSKEY post:

@Rubenerd Re: DOSKEY, 4DOS (command.com replacement) also does tab completion. Worth a look if you’re not familiar with it. PS. You’ve misspelled “enhanced” a few times on your blog.

I was aware of 4DOS in the context of people doing tricks to get more conventional memory, but thus far I haven’t tried it. I’ll take a look.

Also, I have no friggen idea why I spelt it enchanced. The superfluous letter C is nowhere near the other letter keys that make up that word. A recursive grep across my post folder didn’t come up with anything else, so it was hopefully a one time copy-pasta derp.

And @Georgiecel commented on my sex education post:

@Rubenerd Round of applause 👏 for your blog post on respecting sex education. What you mentioned is true of conservative families – I grew up in one, and what I learned in school was my first knowledge in that area. It needs to go hand in hand with physical health education.

Thanks! Hope the leg is getting better :O. My broken ankle was easily the most amount of pain I’ve ever experienced on anything ever ever ever. What’s worse about legs and feet is you can’t just throw them in a sling and call it a day, it affects your mobility for everything. I definitely had newfound respect for people using canes and wheelchairs, I had to do that for six months and I was a whinging little crybaby the whole time.

But I digress! I must plead ignorance to knowing what it’s like to grow up in that kind of family environment, though I had plenty of friends for whom sex education was the first time they were made aware of it. This is why education is so critical.

Physical health is another important aspect to this. I’ll admit I didn’t take PE seriously in high school; in fact I openly mocked it. Much of this stemmed from our teacher repeatedly brainfarting “cancer is always a lifestyle disease” in class, one time then looking at me and saying “no offence”. Without thinking, I called him a fuckwit, and walked out. My parents were proud, and curiously I didn’t get detention or anything.

But I digress, again! I remember learning the food pyramid well into the 2000s in those classes, I hope they’re onto something else now.

My coworkers and I are obsessed with this unlikely collaboration album that came out last month. This the first of many blog posts dedicated to each song, in the style of my Ben Sidran posts of yore.

The first is the titular track 44/876, taken from the country phone codes for the United Kingdom and Jamaica respectfully:

Shaggy and Sting in a combination! ♫

That’s what it is, yes!

And the ghost of Bob Marley, that haunts me to this day.
There’s a spiritual truth; to the words of his songs.
And the carribean nation; to which they belong. ♫

✌️

Michael Koziol reported on this suppository of wisdom in the Sydney Morning Herald on Monday:

The federal government should cut all funding for any school that won’t let parents pull their children out of sex- or gender-related classes, former prime minister John Howard has urged.

“Speaking practically, the preferable approach would be for the Commonwealth government to make it a condition of funding for both government and non-government schools that parental rights of this kind be respected,” Mr Howard wrote.

The word respect is popular with people against sex education classes. But what about respect for the sexual health of teenagers? Respect for those with different sexual orientations?

You learn so much junk in high school under the guise of learning how to learn. So why not learn things that are important? I’d put sex education up (haiyo) there with financial literacy as topics that should be expanded, not curtailed or made optional.

My parents gave my sister and I the facts of life very young, in part because they thought shattering the illusion of it being this mysical, taboo topic would let us think logically. Sex education is even more important for those who live in orthodox or conservative families that don’t have rational parents like this; it may be their first exposure to the risks of STDs, how to have safe sex, respecting sexual partners, and knowing of the different orientations out there. If you grow up sheltered from these things, you’re in for a world of pain.

The core mistake comes down to parents and religious groups assuming education == endorsement. Sex education isn’t about gettin’ some (chicka-bow-wow), it’s about being in full posession of the facts to engage in it safely, if or when you decide to.

If facts are threatening, that should be telling you something.