Rubenerd

In our continuing series reviewing Kyoto Animation shows that I missed when they first aired, we take another spoiler-riddled look at the next episode of Amagi Brilliant Park.

It’s been many months since my project to catch up on every Kyoani series I’ve missed was posted about, and as equal amount of time since I watched the episode. Clara and I have been distracted by pretty Idolm@ster Side M boys.

This episode was all about humanising Sento, with more background on how she became the uptight, formal, trigger happy manager who’s muscat is strategically deployed for maximum demotivational effect. Those attributes were on full display as Kanie insisted the park go through maintenance, probably a good idea.

Up until this point she’d been blamed for the current state of the park’s attendance and finances, hence the need to questionably employ Kanie’s services in the first place. But while he sat at his computer presumably doing work, she continued her rounds and firing rounds and, there was a better way to have made that pun.

We also get a glimpse into how Sento’s management style had spooked staff, to the point where they’re already more comfortable airing their grievances with The New Guy, less she finds out and fires those rubber bullets or bean bags or whatever projectile that skirt gun deploys. Though such attempted subterfuge ended with predictable results.

I loved seeing more of these other worldly characters. We had a wrench who was a wrench, the lead chef who had a Sideshow Mel thing going, assuming he had a bone through his head instead of merely through hair. A park is much more than rides; there’s tons of behind the scenes work and characters keeping things going smoothly. Or in the case of this park, maybe just going.

But finally, the character so maligned to this point for her uptightness was able to save the day with those very qualities that can make her difficult to work with. I still think she can work on her interpersonal skills and, you know, not shoot people.

The entire point of a team is to combine skills that no individual fully possesses, as well as ensuring the health and safety of individuals who would run themselves into the ground with overtime. But if I were trying to save my loved ones and property from a precarious weather situation, she would be the lead.

The landscape art also continues to deliver, if the character animation has slipped at times. Scenes like below are classic Kyoani.

My recent post about the NBN drew ire from a couple of gentleman who’d be well served by blood pressure monitors and some class. Let me attempt to explain again.

The original phone system is a useful analogy. It could have been built by disparate, private companies. It would have been akin to the independent railways in each state, which caused breaks of gauge at borders. In other words, a mess.

There was clear, tangible, economic benefit to having the government build country-wide infrastructure in the public interest. It guaranteed it’d be rolled out to places where market failures exist, like sparsely populated areas in the bush. A standardised, national system meant a caller in Perth could reach someone in Alice Springs. And with reforms, you could even buy your phone plans from a third party.

The NBN, as originally envisaged, would have provided the same base infrastructure but for the current economy. You wouldn’t have to wait for a private company to service your building; or pay through the teeth to get attention.

There are issues with this approach: the embarrassing buck-passing when something goes wrong, ensuring there’s sufficient capacity. You can be for the NBN while admitting its faults. But the alternative would have been anything but a free market; if TPG supplied fibre and jerked you around, you couldn’t exactly leave them for another carrier.

Even if we’re to take the Coalition’s word that they ruined the NBN to save money, the subsequent mess will cost more money and time to fix than the economies of scale that would have been achieved by the original model, to say nothing of the long term economic benefits.

But if I may allow myself a bit of political commentary, it’s not the first time the Coalition have been short–sighted enough to plunder $100 from the future to save $1 now.

I love finding tranquil pictures on Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons; they make great desktop backgrounds for work machines. This image of the Mulgrave River was taken and uploaded by 04marjees in 2007, which is already a decade ago. That’s not tranquil, that’s crazy!

From the image’s description:

The Mulgrave River running through the Goldsbrough Valley to the south of Gordonvale. 17 September 2007 (original upload date)

This is the accompanying article on Wikipedia:

The Mulgrave River is a river system located in Far North Queensland, Australia. The 70-kilometre (43 mi)-long river flows towards the Coral Sea and is located approximately 50 kilometres (31 mi) south of Cairns.

And the article for the aforementioned municipality:

Gordonvale a small sugar-growing town and locality situated on the southern side of Cairns in the Cairns Region, Queensland, Australia. In the 2011 census, Gordonvale had a population of 6,214 people.

I enjoy throwing brief keysmashes into the Mac Dictionary.app, and seeing what comes up. Here’s our second foray into the unexpected:

Gresham, Sir Thomas | ˈɡrɛʃəm |
(c. 1519–79), English financier. He founded the Royal Exchange in 1566 and served as the chief financial adviser to the Elizabethan government.

Wait, that’s the same one we did before. Carry on.

Yes, I like to strategically deploy Betteridge’s Law too :).

It was as predictable as an Agatha Christie novel, yet nowhere near as entertaining. In part because the videos keep buffering. Pundits are decrying Australia’s NBN a failure, and are postulating it should never have been started. Don’t ever read the comments, but it seems a certain copper of voters are also falling for it.

There’s politics involved here, but don’t claim the NBN itself was a doomed concept based on what the current mob have done with it.

The original NBN was designed to use the profits from city installations to subsidise rolling out to the bush, where the market would not have — and had not — supplied it. Telstra had let their infrastructure go to shambles since privatisation and would have needed replacement anyway, so may as well do it right.

The original NBN was initially expensive, and admittedly idealistic, but the MTM killed any economies of scale the original FTTP plan would have had. MTM (Malcolm Turnbull’s Mess, or Multi Technology Mix) was a cynical plot to win an election, we all knew it wouldn’t be rolled out faster or cheaper. Leaked reports since confirmed it.

Related to this are the pundits claiming that the private sector would have done a better job. If so, why hadn’t they in the bush yet? Like all such claims, I see no evidence for it.

Happy Monday! Iain Thompson wrote this Register article, subtitled Your daily dose of ditigal depression:

In a presentation at Usenix’s Enigma 2018 security conference in California, Google software engineer Grzegorz Milka today revealed that, right now, less than 10 per cent of active Google accounts use two-step authentication to lock down their services. He also said only about 12 per cent of Americans have a password manager to protect their accounts, according to a 2016 Pew study.

This isn’t surprising, not in the least. It’s easy to think everyone uses Keepass or 1Password and two factor auth when you do yourself; I’ll admit I still feel shock when I see people typing their short passwords directly into sites. But that’s the way the world works.

The crux of the issue is here:

Google has tried to make the whole process easier to use, but it seems netizens just can’t handle it.

Authentication can’t be solved by adding layers and hoops for people to jump through. Ditto education, and enforcing arcane password standards. People will invariably choose the path of least resistance, so for as long as something is optional, or more complex, most won’t use it.

SMS two factor authentication and password managers are billed as solutions, but at best they’re bandaids over a system that clearly, demonstrably, isn’t working.

And then for services like Gmail, there’s the larger point that never, never, never gets made. Sure you’ve protected yourself from outsiders with all these sophisticated technical measures, but threats against your privacy also originate from inside the building. It’s fine if you trust Google in this case, but the silence on this obvious corollary is palpable.

Clara and I are looking to excercise more, given our Apple Watches have been guilt tripping us with incomplete activity circles. Well, maybe not anymore, given Clara’s popped its screen when the battery swelled up. Ouch!

So by chance we were walking past the Speedo store in Chatswood Westfield a week or so ago, and saw this gorgeous suit. The colours! And it has boats!

So naturally, we went to the Speedo website looking for a matching one for gentleman. No dice, the closest I could find were these slim fit watershorts. They have bright colours, but no awesome prints. What gives?

Update ①

Upon closer inspection, these are loafers, and those interposed images at the bottom of the ladies’ suit are “black line” swim lanes. From a glance, Clara and I thought they were stylised row boats. From the description:

If you want to do something creative with your swim, our Flipturns collection is a fun approach to serious swimming, designed in bright prints to give you positive drive when you’re following ‘the black line’.

Update ②

We stand corrected! They have a collaboration with Aquabumps which has a fabulous print. It reminds me of a Windows 2000 desktop background. That may be the worst fashion comment ever made.

I was upgrading a port on a FreeBSD box, like a gentleman:

# cd /usr/ports/misc/p5-Chatbot-Eliza
# make

And got this:

/!\ ERROR: /!\
Ports Collection support for your FreeBSD version has
ended, and no ports are guaranteed to build on this 
system. Please upgrade to a supported release.  
 
No support will be provided if you silence this message 
by defining ALLOW_UNSUPPORTED_SYSTEM.  
  
make[1]: stopped in /usr/ports/misc/p5-Chatbot-Eliza
*** Error code 1

But wait a minute, aren’t I running the latest version?

# uname -rs
==> FreeBSD 11.1-RELEASE-p6

Just to confirm though:

# freebsd-version
==> 11.0-RELEASE-p16

Ah hah! When there’s a mismatch like this, it usually indicates an incomplete upgrade:

# freebsd-update fetch
==> You have a partially completed upgrade pending
==> Run '/usr/sbin/freebsd-update install' first.

Finishing the update install got me the correct version, and I was able to build the port.

==> ELIZA: And how does that make you feel?

It began, then continued, now it’s happening again. This will be the last one before putting this series to bed.

It’s probably not news to you at this point if I tell you that bitcoin has made tons of people tons of money. Something else you probably already know is that it will never go up like crazy again. Its time to shine is long gone. That’s why we must look into what the next big thing is, and the truth is that there have been plenty over the last few months. Can you jump on the next huge one before it soars?

I feel like you’re about to tell me what it is.

$REDACTEDCOIN is the most likely candidate for a fifty thousand percent return this year. It has the support of the REDACTEDPLACE government. It is already considered as legal in the country. It’s the type of coin that you can buy a thousand bucks of right now, sit on for a small period of time and you could make out crazy wealthy when all is said and done.

How does one qualify as crazy wealthy? Would I purchase something utterly absurd with it? Like the world’s biggest collection of 100MB Zip Disks? Then make vests out of them? Is that what you want? Me walking around wearing 100MB Zip Disk vests!?

REDACTEDCOIN has already doubled since Saturday. This long Martin Luther King weekend could bring you even more upside if you act quickly …

He knows me so well, he even took the time to learn Australian public holidays.

Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin have a newish segment on Back To Work entitled Things you already know, unless you don’t already know them. As they say, you’re definitely an intelligent computer operator, so you you already know about this topic. In which case, be quiet, and let those without your snark or obvious intellect learn something. I’m shamelessly ripping off this idea.

Today I was reminded of the fact find prints files as they appear in the file system, which is likely in alphanumeric order, but it’s not guaranteed.

Why is this important? Because this is a valuable word.

Conventional wisdom is you shouldn’t use ls in scripts, in large part due to the potential for filename mangling. This is especially true when copying your favourite K-pop songs with Hangul on an OpenZFS volume, cough.

Using find is generally preferable, but it does have consequences. If I run ls over this particular folder, like a gentleman:

$ ls -1 *DAT

Or use this shell script, while we’re at it:

for _file in *DAT; do
    printf "%s\n" "$_file"
done

And may as well go for broke:

#!/usr/bin/perl  
  
use 5.010;  
  
foreach my $file (<*DAT>) {
    say("$file\n");
}

The result is:

==> AVSEQ01.DAT
==> AVSEQ02.DAT
==> AVSEQ03.DAT

Sorted, done. But if I use find:

$ find . -type f -name "*DAT" -print
==> ./AVSEQ03.DAT
==> ./AVSEQ01.DAT
==> ./AVSEQ02.DAT

The order isn’t alphanumeric. This would explain why my concatenated VCD backups run through ffmpeg have segments in the wrong order! #derp

So just another reminder. If you use find, sort it after if order is important.