Rubenerd

There are big Australian political movements going down now, from electricity rates and renewable plants, to LGBTI and refugee rights. Meanwhile, Singapore has a new president, and there are questions about the reliability of the MRT of late.

But globally, these pale in comparison to what is happening now with Trump, and I don’t feel I can be silent on it.

Based on my server stats, the majority of my readers are American, some of whom may be Trump supporters. So I feel it’s incumbent upon me to reach out and let you know what those of us outside the US see.

The world doesn’t fear Trump. At worst, we feel second hand embarrassment. When we’re feeling charitable, we think he’s hilarious. If the aim of his bluster was to intimidate, he’s failed. Completely. He’s the butt of more jokes than George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and that’s saying something.

Think of that crude relative of yours who regularly disgraces themselves with their antics. Or if you’re lucky not to have one, imagine one. Now picture they’ve come to dinner with your in-laws, or friends, and done or said something stupid in front of everyone. That’s how we view your executive branch right now, and his supporters as family. We’re not afraid of him, beyond what he might say to the attractive young waiter, or how much potato salad he’ll drop on the pants he may have remembered to put on before coming.

The problem is, despite some hiccups, I still view America as a force for good in the world. Maybe that’s my naïvety showing through, but it makes this whole Trump episode that much more tragic.

America will pull through, like it has done in the past. But for those of you still clinging onto this increasingly untenable position that Trump is somehow this great negotiator that’s going to settle the score with the rest of the world, all I can say is, he’s not. And the sooner you realise it, the sooner we put this whole sordid affair to rest.

I wasn’t stuck between the moon and New York City this week, but I was stuck on the tarmac at Sydney Airport for half an hour. Sorry Russel Brand, you were no Dudley Moore.

So I made two pointless, unordered, and incomplete lists. Enjoy.

Dislike

• People who cut off ambulances
• People who ask for an “expresso”
• People claiming moral authority who aren’t
• People who are on this list
• People who label a “vegetable pie” with beef in it

Like

• People working in climate science in 2017
• People tirelessly maintaining old Exchange servers
• People who smile when they walk past
• People who are on this list
• Artichoke farmers

I’m sure everyone’s waiting with baited breath about my hotcakes on the Apple announcement this weeks. That should have been hot take, but hotcakes is a delightful autocorrect.

The new Apple Watch

This was easily the most interesting part of the keynote. The original watch was billed as a second iPhone screen, with a heavy emphasis on apps. This time, they’re taking health much more seriously, which is wonderful.

For some context, I use my first-gen Apple Watch for multiple timezones, weather, and fitness tracking, and nothing else. I think I’ve looked at the app launcher twice. Anything that improves these core features makes me happy :).

The 4K Apple TV

This is skating to where the puck is going. Most of us don’t have 4K televisions or content, but good to see this getting some attention. Except for the horrible remote.

iTunes

Removing the App Store from iTunes is being widely hailed as a victory for slimming down bloated software, but I’m disappointed for a few reasons.

1. It really should have been spun out to its own application, if the goal was to slim down iTunes. It’s not without precedent; we all used iSync back in the day for our devices; a modern day equivalent with an App Store would make sense.

2. Backing up apps is only possible through iTunes, so that’s gone.

3. Transferring any meaningful amount of data to an app is tedious enough to be infeasible on iOS. You really need the iTunes app interface to select and transfer content.

I’m not as self–absorbed to consider this a huge mistake for Apple, especially given how most people do software updates. But it’s a huge mistake for their power users.

The iPhone 8

I’m relieved and happy this exists, for reasons that are as much to do with what the iPhone X is. Wireless charging brings it closer to what the Palm Pre had – the phone I held so much hope for – and they fortunately backported the A11 from the X to it.

It’s not enough of a replacement for my dinner-tray size iPhone 7+ to fork out some more dough, and I tend to upgrade phones every three years because I develop odd attachments to them. But I can think of at least a few family members on old phones who’d really benefit from it, especially for the improved camera optics.

I wonder how many more of these they’ll sell in countries with large Chinese populations, too?

The iPhone X

The name is a homage to the original Mac OS X naming scheme, which I kinda like. The wireless charging is a solid step, and the A11 sounds impressive. About everything else I have reservations.

The biggest is the inevitable but regrettable switch to OLED. These screens are awful for those of us with above average close-distance vision. The screen shimmers when we move our eyes across them, and they’re grainy as all hell. I tolerate it on the watch because I only glance at it, the phone’s another story. If you tend to use your phones for a few years instead of jumping on the upgrade bandwagon, you’ll likely get some serious burn–in on from recurring UI elements too, unless Apple have taken steps to mitigate this, like the old school Apple TV with plasma screens. Maybe they have.

I’m creeped out by FaceID, I tend to either unlock my phones flat on tables, or reaching for the TouchID in my pocket, so I’d probably just disable it. It feels like a needed-feature to replace the home button, now the screen covers the whole unit.

Except, it doesn’t. The top screen protrusion for the camera and speaker is asymmetric and ungainly, surprising for Apple. It also persists during video playback, which is a recipe for serious consternation for OCD sufferers, or those of us who play one on TV. Having a permanent black bar flush with that for the indicators would have looked much better.

(UPDATE: I’m surprised since writing this that the protrusion has caused the most hang wringing. People are calling it the bump, the unibrow, the notch. I’m sorry, but there’s only one unibrow, and as much of an Apple fan I am, they can’t match him).

We should all reserve final judgement till we play with this new gear, but if I were on an iPhone 5, Android – or Palm Pre! – today, I’d be snapping up an iPhone 8 without question.

Betteridge’s Law of Headlines states that the answer to headings ending in a question is no. For example, “Does X cure cancer?” wouldn’t need the question mark if the answer was yes. It’s an exercise in journalistic hedge betting.

In similar spirit, I propose the Rubenerd Law of Headlines. If an article is titled with “Technology foo considered harmful”, there’s an unharmful, legitimate use for it. The author may even discuss it in their article.

These headings are marginally better than “you won’t believe why this tech is so harmful!”, but still clickbait.

It’s been interesting watching the classic Vi/Emacs-style battle between Xen and KVM, particularly in the last few years. Tech analysts and journalists were predicting a swing towards KVM; not surprising given the push from Red Hat and OpenStack.

Take this article written by William von Hagen for IBM DeveloperWorks in 2014:

Several reasons exist for the ascendancy of KVM over Xen as the open source bare-metal virtualization technology of choice for most enterprise environments.

That ascendency that seemed all but assured in 2014 hasn’t been borne out.

The world’s largest IaaS clouds, Azure notwithstanding, still run Xen, and are expanding faster than other clouds. By contrast, the largest KVM and KVM-powered OpenStack clouds have been closing up:

Cisco has joined the companies ditching their clouds … This follows from Nebula shutting down their OpenStack hardware business, and the then-HP closing their Helion Public Cloud in 2015. Last month, HPE sold their OpenStack cloud … Rackspace famously demoted their OpenStack deployment and became an Amazon partner

There are several reasons for this. Personally, I can speak to OpenStack’s technical complexity and piecemeal architecture; this StackExchange answer being typical. But that’s almost incidental, more critical are simple market forces that OpenStack hasn’t been able to counter.

The story is a little different in private clouds where OpenStack is still making inroads against the likes of VMware. On that case though, it’s more on cost I’ve witnessed, not technical advantages. And in that area, Xen still has KVM beat in performance.

As William wrote:

Although Xen can still offer higher-performance bare-metal virtualization than KVM, the value of those performance improvements is often outweighed by the simplicity and ease of use of KVM virtualization.

KVM is arguably simpler initially, but the hypervisor is a far smaller part of a complete cloud. Storage and networking introduce far more complexity and wiggle room than any usability difference between KVM and Xen.

This is my new favourite Outlook Web Access email experience!

1. Find an email from a colleague in “Junk E-Mail”
2. Open the email
3. Click “Not Junk”
4. Confirm you want to add your coleague to “Safe Senders”

You’ll be told:

The email address for the sender ([SENDER]) is internal to your organisation and cannot be added to the Safe Senders list. Email from senders in your organisation will never be treated as junk email.

I suppose never is more a guideline than an actual rule.

This originally appeared on the Annexe, chronicling my adventures unsubscribing from email newsletters. The only acceptable outcome from clicking unsubscribe in an email footer is immediately being unsubscribed!

Email:

3 Days Only: 50% OFF Tigerair domestic flights

Footer:

Privacy Policy | Contact Us | Update my location | Unsubscribe

Result:

Manage your newsletter subscription details
Please confirm your details and subscription settings below.
[ Email Address ]
[ Name ]
[ State ]
[ Date of Birth ]
[ x ] Subscribe [ ] Unsubscribe from Travel Newsletters
[ x ] Subscribe [ ] Unsubscribe from Business and First Class
[ x ] Subscribe [ ] Unsubscribe from Crusies

FAIL.

• Should not need to enter email address
• Should not need to confirm
• Defaulting to “subscribed” is egregious
• Should not need to check multiple radio buttons

Speaking of Solaris, again, what ever happened to OSUNIX? Software in the Public Interest still lists it on their project page, right alongside Debian, Postgres, and plenty of other well-known free/open source systems. From their page:

Help us support OSUNIX to be the first entirely open source OpenSolaris technology distribution. OSUNIX is based off the graciously open sourced OpenSolaris(tm) technology from Sun Microsystems(tm). For over a year OSUNIX developers have been volunteering their time, but now we need help to push development and engineering to a production level.

It then goes into their funding model.

All I could find online were some stale newsgroup posts, a repository last updated three years ago, and this animu-themed art:

Such potential. I wonder where they are now?

Keen-eyed Rubenerd readers would have noticed no change here recently, because you get your content in an RSS reader. Touché. But others of you may have seen my new theme rollout.

It’s pretty awful, but I like it for several reasons:

1. I made in in less than two hours one evening; not bad for something that looks awful. Wait, that doesn’t make sense.

2. I love the dithered-colour aesthetic of yore, which also has the benefit of much smaller file sizes. You could say that was the entire point back when they were in use everywhere. I started using them for my show art in 2015, and now my header has it.

3. All my best ideas came from my teens, so this theme is reminicient of what Rubenerd looked like circa 2003, sans the coloured tabs. Maybe I should be adding those back, too.

4. I still don’t load external fonts, because I’m a gentleman. It’s rough though becuase text in Windows still looks so gosh darn awful. But with my Windows 10 game machine I realised Segoe UI is more tolerable than Arial rendered in GrossType ClearType, so that’s the fallback if you don’t have Helvetica Neue.

5. This is point four, not to be confused with other points. Because the items in the list aren’t dependent on each other, and don’t follow a step by step procedure, numbering them was entirely pointless, save for pointing out which number this was. And on closer inspection, these are loafers I realise now this isn’t even point four, so the numbers, they did nothing.

6. My mascot Rubi still exists, but Clara is working on revising her pose so she fits in the new design. In the meantime, she’s having a much-deserved break in Hokkaido while Kumin from Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai! sits in for her.

7. It’s now a proper, modular Hugo theme, rather than just being a design tied to the site. This was almost certainly a pointless excercise, given the theme will likely only ever be used here, but may prove useful in the future.

8. Refer to point 4.

Old school blog rules stated you shouldn’t blog about your blog on your blog, which is why I’ve delighted in bringing you this post about my blog on my blog.

I was copying a file on a remote server to another location, to modify with required settings. I often prefer this to using templates, so I’m always working with the latest config.

- name: Move config to expected place
  copy:
  src: "[SOURCE FILE]"
    dest: "[DESTINATION FILE]"
    force: no  ## don't overwrite

But when I ran the playbook:

fatal: [IP]: FAILED! => {  
    "changed": false,  
    "failed": true,  
    "msg": "Unable to find '[SOURCE FILE]' in expected paths."  
}

Turns out, copy transfers from local to remote by default, so it couldn’t find it. If you include the following directive, the source is defined as remote:

[..]
remote_src: yes

Done.