Rubenerd

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29:48 – Frank and Manny graciously showed us around New Jersey, and recorded such an epic Overnightscape I didn't bother doing my own show from there! To keep the chronology of episodes accurate, this is a quick recap of this part of our trip, recorded back around my dad's new place in North Arm Cove. Intro by ZAGAT.

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

Released November 2016 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.

Recommended For You links are the latest in a proud tradition of web annoyances. They don’t interrupt us like Web 1.0 popups or CSS lightboxes asking for newsletter subscriptions, but they’re just as disrepectful and tasteless.

Taboola and Outbrain were the most common sources of these, but there are a few new services to add to the blocklists. Today I found out about Revcontent on an enterprise tech site which will remain nameless.

No, not that Rev. Which reminds me, RIP Iomega. Click click click! That needs a post.

But I digress. Revcontent’s site purports to believe in “user experience”, “trust” and “people driven technology”, advertised with imagery of Steve Jobs and Martin Luther King.

Somehow, I don’t think that’s the dream he had in mind!

It bears (bares?) repeating though that these services are symptoms of a larger issue; that online monetisation and race-to-the-bottom journalism are not sustainable for the services we want or expect. I’m not smart enough to offer an alternative, so I just pay for news sites I read.

I delight (too strong a term) in reading the veritable butthurt on Slashdot whenever an article about women in IT appears. Surprisingly, there was a voice of reason there for once, which I will quote here in its entirety.

jandersen responding to JustAnotherOldGuy:

If women choose not to go into computing fields, why should they be forced (or even encouraged) to do so?

It seems to me that most offices would benefit from having a sensible balance of both genders. For whatever reason, women tend to have a different approach to problem solving than men, which might add value in itself. It might also motivate people to be a little bit more aware of certain aspects of coexistence that are often somewhat neglected in an all-male office - IOW it might make the office-atmosphere a little nicer.

Why isn’t there a similar push to get men into kindergarten education or nursing?

Isn’t there? When I had young children I heard about that constantly; men can make a very valuable contribution to the traditional women’s jobs. We simply have a different approach doing things (and it hasn’t got a lot to do with the Trump approach to women either).

How about letting people pick the field(s) they want to go into without telling them what they “ought” to do based on a pointless metric or percentage?

An excellent idea - the problem, in many ways, is that we culturally condition each other to believe there are certain things we can’t or shouldn’t do. Boys learn that they shouldn’t do “girl things”, like playing with dolls or similar, and girls learn in the same way that there are certain things that are “boys only”. This is, in my view, a stupid waste - one of my favourite examples is the amazing mathematician, Emmy Noether; I wonder how many brilliant women never got to excel in science simply because “science is a boy thing” and their interest wasn’t encouraged.

Apple is announcing their long-overdue Mac updates today; at least in US time. I’m still jetlagged from the switchover myself, those people over there need to get with the times.

For all the ink and electronic characters lamenting the lack of Mac hardware updates, few have pointed out that even Apple’s Mac software pages have been left to languish. As an example, the Downloads page (archived here) shows:

• iOS 8, which is two versions old
• OS X Yosemite, which is is two versions old
• The App Store from Yosemite

As an aside, it blew me away how many people didn’t know how to pronounce Yosemite. I feel for your childhoods.

UPDATE: The page still wasn’t updated after the aformentioned MacBook Pro announcements.

I go on leave for three weeks, and this happens.

A race condition was found in the way the Linux kernel’s memory subsystem handled the copy-on-write (COW) breakage of private read-only memory mappings.

Fake, inflated self importance aside, the joke I was attempting to make regarded the timescale. Linus’ (Linus’s?) initially observed the issue back in 2007, according to the kernel commit logs. And it’s impacted most distributions since, specifially:

An unprivileged local user could use this flaw to gain write access to otherwise read-only memory mappings and thus increase their privileges on the system.

This flaw allows an attacker with a local system account to modify on-disk binaries, bypassing the standard permission mechanisms that would prevent modification without an appropriate permission set.

The key is it’s a local privilege escalation attack; one would need access to the target first. Once a nefarious user is in though, they may as well be running as root for all practical purposes.

I could gloat as a FreeBSD guy, but we had our own nasty issue recently too. One could include any manner of extra files in a package, and it would still pass verification and install.

The lesson here is (to poorly paraphrase an old lecturer and friend): software is like Swiss cheese. Holes are inevitable; it’s when they line up when issues arise.

Among the pointlessly nerdy activities I persued in the US was the collection of licence plates. You people have so many more states than we do, so it was a bit of game to see how many we could spot in two weeks.

The map above shows what we saw. I’ll upload the photographic evidence alongside other trip images soon.

How had I not posted this music video here before?! Thanks to Clara for reminding me.

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49:39 – Join Ruben and Clara on annual leave as they wander from the Top of the Rock in the Rockefeller Center to Wall Street. Topics include revolving doors, the subway, Halloween bears, Airbnb, Brooklyn, Williamsburg Bridge, ubiquitous horns and sirens, NYPD clothing, Wendy’s potatoes, green nooks, and more. Recorded 7th October 2016.

Recorded in New York, New York. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Released October 2016 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 is my first blog post from the Western Hemisphere, United States and New York all at the same time! Clara and I are sitting across from Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan with a coffee at Pret a Manger, a surprisingly good coffee chain. From the window I can see the park, the streams of yellow taxis, a small food cart by the side of the road.

The trip is about to wrap up tomorrow, so Clara and I are taking a page from Bobby Darin and having a lazy New York Sunday afternoon on our last full day. We avoided the crowds and saw the Empire State Building observation decks late last night, so we’re both still a little fuzzy.

I’d intended to blog as we were exploring, but time wasn’t on our side when we wanted to see everything in the precious short time we had. We also went around New Jersey and Philly, Pennsylvania which all deserve their own posts!

It’s been the most exciting, overwhelming experience I’ve had in a long time. Despite their reputation outside the US, New Yorkers are very friendly. There were a few times where things felt a bit sketchy, but generally we felt as safe as walking around Sydney.

We got to see Frank and Denise from The Overnightscape, and Jim and Esther from the late great Whole Wheat Radio and indie music fame. Despite being on the other side of the world, they’ve been a part of my life since I was a teenager; it felt unreal actually meeting them. And they were all as nice, humble and fascinating as I imagined.

I’s also a bit bittersweet. My mum and I were supposed to go to The Met once she was cured, so Clara and I went to explore for her. Like the people, it exceeded my expectations in every way.

A few Rubenerd Shows have been recorded and queued up, but won’t likely be produced till we’ve weathered the next 22 hours of flying and timezone adjustments! In the meantime, Frank graciously recorded these episodes:

• Overnightscape 1326: Ruben and Clara in America
• Overnightscape 1327: Tour New Jersey
• Overnightscape 1331: Japanese Marketplace

See you soon!

I noted this back in August 2015:

I forked Homebrew a few years ago to send pull requests, then promptly forgot about it. This is what it looks like today:

This branch is 34801 commits behind Homebrew:master.

Neglect aside, that’s pretty impressive.

For fun, I thought I’d check back.

This branch is 47231 commits behind Homebrew:master.

That’s going to be a big merge.