Rubenerd

One thing I forgot to mention with High Sierra was what nano version it ships with. I haven’t used nano for a long time, but I’ve referenced it as a bellwether on Rubenerd over the years to show how fresh bundled macOS software is.

The current version is 2.9.2. Firing it up on my 10.13.3 box:

GNU nano 2.0.6

I must have made a typo with my El Capitan post in 2015 when I said that shipped with 2.0.9. Either way, is another overused phrase. It also means no update in at least a decade.

Vim fared better:

VIM - Vi IMproved
version 8.0.642

This was in a post I wrote about iCal:

And how about this February in 2008 already? Isn’t it crazy!?

You think that’s wild, what about 2018?! Or… grammar?!

A lot has changed, though it’s eerily similar in some ways. I was blogging in that post about watching Sydney’s new year fireworks. I was putting on a brave, jovial face, but it was for pretty sad reasons why we were visiting Australia. Now, I live here.

Or startups, or many other places. This comment by brudges on Hacker News is worthy of an entire blockquote:

This is a simple case of “Big clients expect to own their little consultants,”

What do you do if they ask for customizations? What do you do if they request features that are not on your roadmap? What do you do if they ask for a large discount?

How you decide those cases determines how much your business is like a startup moving fast and not negotiating over source code disclosure and how much your business is like an enterprise consultancy that prices out each request for one off work by their clients. There’s no right answer. But clarity about how a particular client affects your business model and whether or not that client is worth having right now is important. Are there other potential customers who are easier to service?

It is not clear from the question whether this request is part of ongoing contract negotiations or presented as a prelude to negotiation. If the former, put a price on it. If the latter, it smells a bit like a “no” in the form of a “maybe” or window shopping without much intent or someone higher up with purchasing authority putting on the brakes. Figure out an expected value of the client by assigning probabilities to various size contracts closing at different points in time.

I wish I could draw these like Emoscopes! But I digress. I knew this British jetliner pioneered several aviation firsts:

The Hawker Siddeley HS 121 Trident was a British short- (and later medium-) range airliner. It was the first T-tail rear-engined three-engined jet airliner to be designed. It was also the first airliner to make a blind landing in revenue service in 1965

The engineers also mounted the centre-rear engine in an S-Duct, another industry first. What I didn’t know was how friggen fast it was, even compared to the current Boeing 777 and Airbus A380:

The Trident was one of the fastest subsonic commercial airliners, regularly cruising at over 610 mph (980 km/h). At introduction into service its standard cruise Mach Number was 0.88/ 380 kn IAS, probably the highest of any of its contemporaries.

Though to achieve this, it had a lower power-to-weight ratio, so it required more runway to take off.

Fatigue cracks and their noisy engines hastened their retirement in the late 1970s. By then, the Boeing 727 had outsold it 10-to-1.

I left Twitter for a few weeks, and it seems half my feed is basically Azur Lane and lamentations on the current decaying state of global politics.

With all of us primed and used to the idea of immunocompromised ship characters, or at the very least willing to suspend disbelief in new and bizarre ways, it makes sense another series would enter the scene to challenge the incumbent Kancolle.

That term was supposed to be anthropomorphised, but it was autocorrected to a somewhat less desirable attribute. I suppose if we’re presupposing the existence of ship girls, the idea that bacteria torpedos could compromise a hull immune system doesn’t sound far fetched.

First, is a term you shouldn’t use to start a sentence. I also didn’t realise that Azur Lane wasn’t even a Japanese mobile game to begin with:

Azur Lane is a Chinese mobile game developed by Shanghai Manjuu & Xiamen Yongshi [..] Upon its release in Japan, this game has become vastly popular; this game began selling its official goods at the 93rd Comiket As of January 12th 2018, the players on Japanese server has boomed to 5 million registrations.

Their heel rudders are what do it for me.

And now for the point of this post. Azur Lane is now doing a collaboration with… wait, I need to explain this too.

See, in addition to series about anthropomorphised war ships, there’s a series of games and an anime revolving around characters who are CPUs, consoles, and networking equipment, who are of course bishoujo. Clara and I made it through the first few anime adaptation episodes before the suspension of disbelief went full Galloping Gertie.

So for a limited time in January 2018, you’ll be able to play ship versions of that Hyperdimension Neptunia series in Azur Lane, of whom Purple Heart is pictured above. So you can mix your post-World War II era ship girls with computer hardware components that now fly with attached…

I had several, rapid-fire epiphanies listening to some Daryl Hall and John Oates in the office.

• I love Hall and Oats. They’re distilled 80s awesomeness that are eminently listenable in 2018.

• I love both halls, and oats. Halls allow me to traverse buildings without first smashing down walls in adjoining rooms, and oats are basically the world’s most perfect breakfast food.

• With care, you can navigate halls while eating oats.

• Hall and Oats are sorted alphabetically, then by letter count, then by the number of vowels, and finally birth date, funnily enough.

• Both Hall and Oats have the letter A, but not Z, which I pronounce as Zed, like a gentleman. The alternative pronunciation is only appropriate when spelled as such, like the Tappan Zee.

• Hall and Oats spelt backwards would end in a little L, which is a Jamiroquai song, who isn’t Daryl Hall or John Oates. Wait, no it wouldn’t.

• The group formed their musical tour de force in Philadelphia, Clara’s and my favourite American city thus far. By sheer coincidence, you can spell Philadelphia using nothing but the letters in the words that form the lyrics to Private Eyes.

• Only one of the surnames in Hall and Oats are pluralised, though both gentleman would likely be sick of reading either by this point in the list.

I can think of many more, but for our collective sanity and time, I will refrain from any further comments. Refrain was too delightful a pun not to include.

Here’s some legit™ email I received over my morning coffee:

Note: - If you are not interested to promote your business, would like to remove your email id from our emailing lists. Please reply back “REMOVE” in a subject line.

It’s a fair point, normally I’m all about the promote your business. But a subject line? Not any one subject line in particular? What am I supposed to do if I have several subject lines to choose from? Next you’ll be asking me to wear a Zip Disk vest. And that’d be embarrassing for all parties involved, not least me.

Mediocre spam aside, this assuaged (gesundheit) my concerns:

Virus-free. www.avg.com

I see otherwise legitimate users add this as well, usually above a plea to consider the environment. It makes no sense; a fake like about anti-virus scans would be the first thing I’d add to a malicious email.

This blog post has been scanned by Rubenerd and is not virus free.

In my continuing series of things you already know, unless you don’t, this command sorts the contents of a folder by modification date, then lexicographical:

$ ls -lrt

Nine times out of ten, when I’m browing a folder of logs or assets or anything else, I’m looking at what was last changed. This puts the most recent changes at the bottom, which is useful if the list is longer than my console.

I’ve long since committed this to muscle memory, like a gentleman, but at the time I remembered it by thinking of the Singaporean and Malaysian trains. You may substitute it with your own mnemonic.

You won’t want to use this in a script, but it’s still super useful. Like a banana. And the man pages for FreeBSD, NetBSD, macOS, and GNU/Linux will have more details.

I was trying to find the official website for the world’s best desktop operating system in the Wayback Machine, and these were the suggestions I got:

They’re all irrelevant, but I love the non-sequitur of the last one. That’s right, Mr Peabody!

Here’s a post I wrote a decade ago on the Rubenerd Annexe, back when I had shorter snippets on a side blog. Only I didn’t write it, it was a comment by Ec5618 on YouTube of all places.

Evolution has been tested, and continues to be. Every time we dig up a fossil, it could disprove the evolution model. Every time we look at a genome, it could disprove the evolution model. If Evolutionary Theory were fatally flawed, all sorts of things could show that. But nothing has.

It seems science and reason is just as under attack as it was ten years ago; take just one example from recent memory. I wonder if I’d have predicted that? Do you think you would have?