Rubenerd

I asked this on Twitter last week:

These random horticultural tweets brought to you by git-scm. Good thing cloning is permissible for plants.

That was clearly the wrong tweet. I did think that was rather clever though, in a dad joke kind of way. In other words, not clever at all, but heh. Let’s try this again:

Otto not listed on the Hashicorp site any more. The official site still there though

Turns out, I caught them in the process of retiring the new project. Mitchell wrote this on the Hashicorp blog:

Today we are decommissioning Otto and ending active development and maintenance. This is motivated by several reasons, but primarily we felt the core abstractions and the out-of-box functionality of Otto did not meet our initial goal.

The promise of local and remote deployments with single commands seemed intriguing, if it could be realised. I appreciate their attitude of pulling it rather than letting it languish as abandonware, as so many free/open source projects become. I don’t think it was big or established enough to have users contributing either.

Retiring Otto hopefully clears the air around Vagrant, and return the name to this German devops blog. Somewhere, there must be someone preparing the surface of their laptop lid to accept a new circular sticker without a sinister looking robot as well!

Anyway, just answering my own question in more than 140 characters here.

Singapore’s former President S. R. Nathan passed on last night. Paragraph three in this tribute from the Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs said what I liked best about him:

Mr Nathan once spoke about the qualities to be a successful diplomat. He singled out patience, calmness, modesty, empathy and good humour. He also said that foreign service officers must have “patriotism and sense of mission”, “integrity and honesty” and the “ability to work under pressure”. Mr Nathan embodied all these attributes and more. A diplomat par excellence, Mr Nathan was much loved, admired and respected for his warmth and compassion. In MFA, he was legendary for his ability to recall the names of everyone who had worked with him. He always had a kind word for his colleagues, no matter how senior or junior.

In keeping with Westminster system tradition, the role of Singaporean President is a largely ceremonial head of state. From my vantage point as an angmoh outsider living there, I felt he imbued a more inclusive, warm counter–point to the more technocratic government. I don’t recall him having outward disagreements with the establishment that conferred the position onto him, but I like to think his sense of humour and humility were a positive, moderating force politically.

All the best to Mr Nathan’s family during this difficult time, and to those in my adopted home.

The Overnightscape Central is a fun weekly podcast hosted by the illustrious PQ Ribber. Hosts and listeners of The Overnightscape Underground participate in a topic each week, and you’re welcome to join.

01:35:32 – Jimbo!! Clara Tse Writes In!! Rubenerd!! Frank Edward Nora!! A foursome of contributors speak of food food food!! PQ Ribber is your host and Jimbo does the ONSUG Week in Review and announces an Exciting New Show!!

You can view this episode on the Underground, listen to it here, and subscribe with this feed in your podcast client.

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36:50 – Recording in daylight (it burns!). Pontificating on the societal impact of teleportation (noise pollution, replication, construction, food), getting over political cynicism, reciting the Periodic Table, Old Mascot, blogging in coffee shops, Hashicorp Terraform, and blog posts from exactly a decade ago (Jamie Oliver, Security Theatre, The SwiMP3 player).

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

Released August 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.

Rubenerd became a blog in 2004, but I didn’t really start writing seriously on it till 2006. That was a decade ago already (wow), so I thought it’d be fun to see what I was talking about exactly ten years ago.

Jamie Oliver

We begin with a quick quote from the celebrity chef I was rather enamoured with at the time:

“If you’re feeling really rubbish, and you have some good food, it just makes you feel good.”

This definitely resonated with me at the time; I’d just come off several weeks of exam preparation eating nothing but instant meals. My saving grace was breakfast cereal; both Jerry Seinfeld and I knew of its awesome power, and so did Jamie judging by the image.

Today, you’d probably not be allowed to admit liking cereal for fear of the anti-gluten mob coming at you with cucumber batons, or whatever it is they eat.

The SwiMP3 player

Forget Treos and iPods with hard drives, in the technology world we had the promise of a revolutionary podcast delivery mechanism. Well okay, it was billed for music, but still:

The New SwiMP3 underwater MP3 player is an incredible audio experience. Imagine listening to hours of your own music during your swim workout.

Naturally, I used it as an opportunity to shamelessly promote the Rubenerd Show at the time:

I have three thoughts on the subject: by having something strapped to your head would that affect your performance, hydrodynamically or through distraction? [..] Would you be able to listen to podcasts and audio magazines, such as… oh I don’t know, say… the Rubenerd Show?

Incidently, the image of the swimmer wearing that weird contraption was easily the most hotlinked, non-anime asset on the site at the time. I didn’t want to enable hotlink protection because people reading the site in their blog aggregators wouldn’t see it, so I just renamed it a few times. Problem solved!

Liberty Versus Security

And a more serious post on security theater. How little have things changed.

It’s a real shame that Australia is following the way of the United States in terms of “national security”. The way I see it, if we radically alter our lives by making them more complicated and difficult, the terrorists have won already.

I remember listening to Lawrence Lessig give a talk on IT Conversations about copyright law and how a restrictive change can be implemented very easily, but it can take a very long time to undo. I think the same applies to this as well.

If I’m still blogging in another ten years, I hope I quote this blog post for some pointless recursive fun.

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01:30:35 – A late night stroll into last year. Why you can’t schedule creativity, The Who, The Avalanches, cynics on Y2K, an abandoned shop, generic names, Pack n Send nostalgia, startups versus big corporates, being thankful, getting rid of crap, water white noise, parcel lockers, c-c-c-cold, expensive caffeine trips, and exploding coffee machines. Recorded 30th June 2016.

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

Released August 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.

Without further introductory comment (save for this one), have this news from Hewlett Packard Enterprise:

That’s why today, HPE announced plans to acquire SGI, a global leader in high-performance solutions for compute, data analytics and data management, with a 30-plus year track record of innovation excellence.

Not only will the acquisition of SGI strengthen HPE’s position in the high-growth big data analytic segment, it will also extend our presence in HPC verticals, such as government, life sciences, higher education and research, and manufacturing, as well as supercomputing.

Before Apple got their industrial design mojo, SGI really made what I’d call “aspirational” computers. I badly wanted a sleek indigo or teal SGI workstation growing up. I even loved the name: “Silicon Graphics”.

Never mind your PowerMacs or your SPARC boxes at the time, SGI made the serious stuff. And you knew it was serious because those boxes were massive. If you do an image search for them they look like regular towers, until you see them sitting next to a white box computer. Speaking of which, what ever happened to White Box Computers? Remember them?

In a way I’m glad this validates them to an extent, but it does make me sad to see SGI slowly disappear. I wonder if they’ll act like Oracle and keep the Sun logo around for a while, or whether it’ll all be HPE branding before we know it.

When SGI isn’t SGI

While hastily writing this post, I did a Wikipedia search and realised the original SGI hasn’t existed for a while. The SGI HPE bought (hey, there’s a lot of TLAs) was reverse-bought already:

On April 1, 2009, Rackable Systems announced an agreement to acquire Silicon Graphics, Inc. for $25 million. The sale, ultimately for $42.5 million, was finalized on May 11, 2009; at the same time, Rackable announced their adoption of “SGI” as their global name and brand.

Now that I think of it, is this a reverse-buyout? If I bought IBM to run a national census for example, then I changed my company name to IBM, is that a reverse-buyout? Or is a reverse-buyout more like what Apple did to NeXT, where NeXT management largely took over Apple once bought?

And then we have SGI’s purchaser that divested itself into HP, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. HP is the legal successor to the original HP, which owned Compaq, which bought Digital/DEC, which made that other series of computers that maybe one day I’ll have a physical specimen of.

This is why I’m not in business. Or why I don’t have an old SGI tower. Wait, that doesn’t explain the second one. Maybe if I were better at business, I could have a larger apartment for SGI towers. I’d need one, because those things were huge. Huge and awesome. Like the Sun.

(And to think all posts on Rubenerd used to be rapidly written in one take like this).

Gawker Media has gone bankrupt, for reasons that are beyond the scope of this post. I can’t speak to their celebrity, political or gaming coverage, but I’m hoping it signals the end of Gizmodo.

I heard you like breaking the law

They’ve done dozens of things worthy of ire over the years, but my favourite their purchasing of a stolen prototype iPhone, then getting indignent when called out on it.

It didn’t even make sense; was being barred from future Apple events worth some leaked images that could be directly tied to the purchasing of stolen property? How did they reasonably expect that to play out?

The community they fostered was simiarly toxic. On this stolen phone story, people rushed to their defence claiming Apple were heavy handed, despite the fact an employee had lost the phone, that someone had found and sold it instead of turning it in or giving to police, and that Gizmodo writers had bought it. You reap what you sow, I suppose.

Yes, I take it personally

If it sounds like I take their site personally, it’s because I had skin in the game.

A few years ago, they published a post asking how stupid people were willing to look for the then–unannounced Apple Watch. To illustrate someone looking stupid, they used an image of me wearing my iPod nano watch on my birthday. This post was then republished across all their international sites, including Australia.

When I called them out on this, they denied calling me stupid looking, assuming that their visitors and I can’t read. They also (rather patronisingly) told me I should have expected this by using Creative Commons, I suppose employing the same logic that girls in short skirts are asking for it.

The irony was this thinly–veiled threat was utterly baseless, given their use on the post violated the share–alike clause! Because they didn’t licence the final blog post under the same (or equivilent) licence, they didn’t have a legal leg to stand on. It was a bit rich to school me on licencing when they either didn’t understand it or flagrently disregarded it themselves.

Besides this though, surely someone there should have realised its a dick move to throw insults at a person who provided you a free image. Granted though, this is the same publication that thought it okay to publish photos of stolen property, so I wasn’t surprised.

Oh yeah, and when I tried to defend myself on their site, they deleted my comment then denied doing so.

No relish on this hot dog

There are plenty of good people at rotten companies, and I wouldn’t wish ill will on anyone who would have just lost their jobs as a result of Gawker Media.

For the company itself, their financial bankruptcy can only be matched by their bankrupt ethics. If they get bought, I hope its for the good people and valuable domain names, not for editorial management or content.

I made the mistake a few weeks ago of innocuously asking Twitter where I could top up my Opal card with American Express. I know I know, what should I have expected?

(For those precious few who don’t understand why that would have been an issue, let me summarise for you: HUUR DUUR MERCHANT FEES ACTUALLY POINTS COST OF BUSINESS ACTUALLY DIE IN A FIRE ACTUALLY YOUR OWN FAULT FOR NOT USING MASTERCARD ACTUALLY WHAT DID YOU EXPECT ACTUALLY!)

Fortunately, there was one voice of reason who suggested Woolworths. Done.

I switched to American Express as my daily card recently for the same reasons everyone else does: the points and customer protection. I’ve since been surprised at how good it is:

• The DJ’s version starts you with triple points at supermarkets, which is where I use it 90% of the time anyway

• PayPal now supports it, so I can pay for most online stuff with it

• I got a discount on a nice hat from David Jones (that I’d wanted to get anyway).

• Apple Pay works, and I was surpried how convenient it actually was

• Their PayPass equivilent is so much faster than Visa and MasterCard

• Their iOS app is also so far ahead of Citibank and HSBC it’s not even funny.

• It irritates some people who think having the card is an affront!

So far I’ve only had two places reject the card, to which I respond by getting out the MasterCard. No biggie. But then again, everything is a biggie on Twitter thesedays; one could announce a cure for cancer and people would moan that you didn’t use the word “nuance”, or failed to include an ndash.

I’ve had Creative Commons licenced material on Flickr for years, so my photos pop up all over the place. Nobody respects the share-alike provision though, either because they don’t understand that their article would also need to be licenced under the same terms, or they don’t care.

I noticed Our Mortgage Options had used a tenancy agreement photo of mine for their article “How to Increase the Rent of your Investment Property”.

At a macro level, general economic variables and currency fluctuations can also cause rental prices to increase or decrease.

Negative gearing and capital gains aren’t mentioned at all. Shocking!

As a property investor it pays to keep an eye on the average rent prices in your area. If you’re charging below market average, you could be missing out on profit. Likewise if you’re charging above market average, you risk losing tenants to cheaper properties.

The last thing you want to do is to damage your relationship with good tenants. However investment properties are a business and you’re in business to make profits

That’s right, housing isn’t a place to live, it’s a speculative, non-productive asset for generating profit at the expense of reluctant renters and the wider economy.

Renters would indeed move somewhere cheaper if given the option, but often can’t justify the disruption, time, or cost for hiring movers, packing and moving ones life based on the whims of rent-seekers. You should mention you can exploit count on that too.

But what to do with those good tenants?

Give your tenants at least the minimum required notice. In all Australian states, except the Northern Territory, landlords are required to give tenants 60 days written notice before increasing the rent. Do this sooner, if you can.

Good god, those poor people in the NT. 60 days is barely enough time to research alternative housing, sign a new lease, pack, get time off work and move.

Keep in mind that rent cannot be increased in fixed term agreements unless specifically outlined in the tenancy agreement. And, rent cannot be increased more than once every 6 months.

Tenants: read your agreement. Yes contracts don’t override the law, and you can contest them, but good luck maintaining a cordial relationship with your landlord after a protracted legal battle.

Explain to your tenants why the rent is increasing. It is acceptable to raise rental prices in line with CPI.

Rent never goes up in line with the CPI, and such a claim flatly contradicts the profit comments above.

You are required to understand your obligations as a landlord.

You mean, your responsibilities. Words matter.

As Mike Dawson put it on New Matilda (with another one of my Creative Commons-licenced images):

Nevertheless, one group of people enriched themselves through property investment, pushing up the value of real estate around the country in the process. [..]

The real estate boom didn’t make the country richer. Nor did it make housing more accessible. It simply transferred wealth from one group of people to another. In the process, it put a basic need out of reach of many, including young people, and diverted investment from the productive economy. It also lured a huge number of Australians into precarious debt.

I’m very fortunate that I don’t live paycheque to paycheque, nor on credit cards I don’t already have the money to pay off in full. If I don’t have the money for something, I save up or don’t buy it. But that’s because I have the financial luxury to do so.

With average mortgages more than ten times the average income now, it’s pretty cynical to chalk up Generation Y’s frustrations about this to a lack of financial prudence or responsibility. Hey, there’s that word again!