Rubenerd

Channel News Asia shared some unsurprising stats:

Nearly half of singles in Singapore have not dated seriously before, although most wanted to get married in the future, according to the results of a study published on Saturday (Jul 8).

Commissioned by the National Population and Talent Division (NPTD), the Marriage and Parenthood study aims to understand public attitudes and perceptions towards marriage and parenthood. The recent study polled 2,940 single and 2,861 married Singapore residents aged 21 to 45 years old between August and December last year.

I can empathise; I had my first girlfriend when I was 27. I believe the term is “late bloomer”, and it was entirely due to shyness. This is distinct from “late boomer” who’s more likely to complain that millennials have it easy because avocados.

But there’s more to it for most Singaporean kids, at least from what I observed:

• There’s no privacy. Most people live in small HDB apartments, often with extended family. Fine if your parents approve of who you’re dating, but if they don’t, having a healthy, intimate relationship would be all but impossible.

• Strict social attitudes. Singaporean society is increasingly more liberal and progressive than its government, but old views die hard.

• Extreme academic pressure put on kids mean they have no spare time, or are guilt tripped when they want to blow off steam. This also feeds into the high suicide rate, and disturbingly I’m seeing this being imported into parts of Sydney, too.

• Singaporeans tend to be shyer, more reserved in general compared to, say, Australians. Then again, most of the world is compared to Australians. Either way, with those other pressures it’s not surprising people aren’t jumping into relationships.

A classic example is Starbucks and Coffee Bean. Angmohs who travel to Singapore often sound so surprised when they witness all the hundreds of people at these cafés with kids crammed around laptops. Their coffee is awful, we’re told! Don’t they have a life?

They’re popular because they’re comfortable “third places” away from home and school/work. I knew more than a few couples who maintained clandestine relationships by spending time together there. But don’t let that get in the way of your smugness at their pedestrian beverages.

I was lucky that I got to grow up there, but lived in a large expat apartment with permissive parents and went to an international school. Compared to the Singaporean A-Levels, the New South Wales HSC was embarrassingly low pressure.

The open web is made possible with syndication feeds. The big games in town can be broadly split into four camps:

• Scraping a page to get content, or using site-specific APIs. We mostly got over this, but social networks have reverted to this to keep you on their sites.

• The RSS 1.0 family, which uses RDF. The idea was the Dublin Core and other namespaces had already done the painstaking work of defining attributes, so you could just use them.

• RSS 2.0, as championed by Dave Winer. It included simplified list of standard attributes, which could be extended with namespaces. It was the first to support podcasting, and is still the most compatible. I used to prefer 1.0 because of my preference and interest in RDF, but have long since stuck with 2.0.

• Atom, which was unironically created due to there being too many syndication formats. It also fixed a few consistency issues, including date formatting.

Aside from point 1, the assumption was we’d be dealing with XML, or something close to it. I don’t see this changing, but there are a couple of new developments.

JSON Feed

Brent Simmons and Manton Reece introduced JSON Feed in May:

… JSON has become the developers’ choice for APIs, and that developers will often go out of their way to avoid XML. JSON is simpler to read and write, and it’s less prone to bugs.

I don’t write software full time, so I defer to their expertise about developer’s choice. Certainly every web API I’ve used implements JSON.

That said, I’ve never had a problem with parsing RSS feeds in my scripts. Import a CPAN package or a Ruby gem, and I’m done. There are poorly formatted RSS feeds I need to fix with some regex, but the same could happen to JSON.

I guess it would come down to opportunity cost. If you’re already ingesting and working with JSON, being able to naturally extend this to syndication would make sense.

RSS in JSON

Around the same time Brent and Manton were working on the JSON Feed spec, Dave Winer released RSS in JSON:

It’s simply an RSS 2.0 feed that uses JSON syntax in place of XML.

Admittedly, this is what I thought JSON Feed was, before I read the incompatible spec. If a dislike of XML and a preference for JSON were the two reasons, RSS in JSON would seem to be the logical choice. Existing taxonomies and data structures could be maintained, literally all you’re changing is the delivery mechanism.

I’ll be implementing it on Rubenerd as an interesting project, but as Dave professed when he first checked it out in 2012, I’m not sure if it’ll really be used.

We’ve moved from a house sporting a Fibre to the Premisis (FTTP) connection, to one that only has Fibre to the Node (FTTN). And it’s even more painful than I was expecting:

Thank you for ordering an nbn Fibre to the Node service. nbn co has advised us that your premises is serviceable by nbn Fibre to the Node, however, the copper lines in your property haven’t been jumpered to the nbn network yet.

Yay, copper!

We want to let you know that we may need to arrange multiple installation appointments with nbn co before we can provide you with an nbn Fibre to the Node service. …

We can confirm that your next appointment for an nbn approved installer to visit you is on Thursday, July 13 2017, between 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM. You will need to be in attendance at your property during this time period.

This is already two weeks after we put the request in to transfer our internet plan to a new house. I know multi-week internet deployments are the norm in Australia, but this is farcical. Mission accomplished, Malcolm Turnbull.

I’ve witnessed an explosion in the use of that alleged word that even rivals nuance. It needs to be stomped out, for two reasons:

1. If you live outside the US, it’s not a word. If you’re in the Commonwealth and use it, you may as well customize your other colorful spelling.

2. If you live in the US, it’s a lazy word. It can always be substituted for something better, such as " given a present by Alice" instead of “gotten a present from Bob”.

Glad to have gotten vanquished that from my system.

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

51:44 – Join Ruben in the midst of his packing and moving hell! Bubble wrap, IKEA tables, craft beer adventures, inspections, ambiguous iTunes categories, Mascot and North Sydney, delightful roaches, paring down stuff, and 2000s nostalgia. Recorded 30th June 2016.

Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Released July 2017 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts.

Subscribe with iTunes, Pocket Casts, Overcast or add this feed to your podcast client.

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:

You’re Invited: Join tech leaders on 1 Aug

Footer:

Contact us Unsubscribe

Result:

Email Address: [FIELD]
[ ] Opt Out of All Communication
[SUBMIT]

FAIL.

• Opt-out checkbox should not be unchecked by default
• Should not need to confirm

There is only one permissible use, and that’s to render commander–rank, quantum–universe Star Trek combadges:

☰/\☰

Otherwise, for all that is good and wholesome: stop using them.

Gareth Hutchens of The Guardian wrote a review of an article on decentralisation in the latest Australian Quaterly magazine. From the report:

Emeritus professor Frank Stilwell, from Sydney University, says the controversial idea of a fast train line between Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane also has the potential to encourage genuinely beneficial decentralised centres, if supported by the right policies.

I’m continually surprised when otherwise–progressive people are hamfisted against this idea. I can’t be, because I’m vegetarian. #Boom! But I digest. Oh, he did it again! I digress.

People who are normally the first to point out that not everything needs to be profitable (ala, fire stations, public health) are the first to dismiss HSTs. The social and environmental benefits would be enormous.

While it can be useful for FreeBSD’s geli to prompt for passwords on boot, it’s not always wanted. Case in point, you can’t BMC or remote access the box to enter the password.

You can prevent this by setting the number of password attempts to zero:

# echo kern.geom.eli.tries=0 >> /boot/loader.conf

And disable the boot flag on your geli volumes. You may want to be more granular than this:

# geli attach [-k secret.key] /dev/[disk]
# geli configure -B /dev/diskid/*.eli

From the geli(8) manpage:

configure      Change configuration of the given providers.
[..]
        -b     Set the BOOT flag on the given providers.

It’s been a big couple of years for decade celebrations. Not only did the Haruhi anime start ten years ago last year, but Apple started selling the original iPhone in the United States. As I wrote exactly ten years ago:

So apparently the iPhone, the device Apple is entering into the global mobile phone market, will be available tonight in the United States. Of course if you’ve used the internet at all in the last few weeks you’d already know about that.

So to spare you the agony of reading yet another stupid iPhone post, I will not be posting about it.

Aren’t you grateful? Hey wait a minute.

I don’t think anyone knew at the time how much of an impact this would have. A large part of the world now walks around, communicates, and gets their news from slabs of glass aped from that original design. This period will be studied by historians.

When the iPhone 3G came out in Singapore and Australia, I didn’t want one, given the walled garden App Store. When I held and used one though, everything changed; it was responsive, easy to use, and already had more software than my Palm or Symbian Nokia ever did. As I wrote when I got one:

Yes on Saturday I finally walked into a TeleChoice store and signed up for a phone and data contract with Optus for use with a 16GB iPhone 3G. And for convenience I even got the 16GB iPhone 3G itself as well to go with the 16GB iPhone 3G phone and data contract for the 16GB iPhone 3G. The 16GB iPhone 3G is the second generation Apple mobile phone device enabled for 3G networks with a capacity of 16GB that can download data at 3G speeds as well as be used as a phone, hence the name iPhone, surprising though it may seem.

Well, that was worth quoting!

Aside from a brief flirtation with a MeeGo Nokia N9, I’ve been an iPhone user ever since.