Rubenerd

UPDATE: My comment was deleted from Ed Bott’s article. The plot thickens.

Remember when Robert Scoble said people like us had privacy angst? Ed Bott is joining him with this colourful article about Windows 10.

I'm dead serious. There is apparently a growing and very vocal population of people who believe that Windows 10 is basically a 1984 telescreen come to life. They are convinced that with Windows 10 Microsoft has built a spying apparatus not seen since the height of the Cold War, scraping up every detail of your life and feeding it back to Redmond for who knows what nefarious purposes. [..]

But most importantly, they are wrong, terribly wrong. And they're being whipped into a frenzy, or at least passively aided by the tech press.

Whipped into a frenzy? About telescreens and Cold War analogies? Who would do such a thing?

I wrote a response yesterday:

There are legitimate privacy concerns about Windows 10, as there are about Google, and Spotlight search in OS X, and Ubuntu's Amazon links. It's regrettable when journalists and commentators dismiss those who ask these questions as being tinfoil hat wearers.

Fortunately, rather than engaging in reductio ad absurdism, there are people writing scripts to help those who are required to run this OS:

https://github.com/WindowsLies/BlockWindows

As for the charge that those with a "network analyzer" haven't found anything, I refer you to Peter Bright's article in Ars Technica.

She’s The One from Robbie Williams’s second album “I've Been Expecting You” is still one of my favourites of his. It sounds like the school hallways in 1999, with my Pentium MMX tower and Beanie Babies and the Borders in Wheelock Place.

I didn’t realise it was a cover; the original song was by World Party. Last time I checked, that was a release in the Worms games franchise.

Update: Vevo (in their infinite wisdom) don’t allow embedding on external sites. Have the nostalgic 1990s cover art instead, and click through to see. This wasn’t a problem in 1999.

I maintain a weekly list of current tasks in text files for work and personal projects. I used the week of the month for filename previously (such as 2015-09-01), before I realised I could employ another unique value: the week number of the year.

But how does one find it? It’s not on most calendars, and I certainly don't track them in my real life. Fortunately, *nix date to the rescue:

$ date +"%Y"

Or randomly from my university Oracle notes, if that’s your thing:

SELECT to_char(sysdate, 'IW') FROM DUAL 

For those curious, we're in week 36.

Remember Robbie Williams and his Rudebox? I still reckon this line is brilliant:

Take both pills,
Fuck the Matrix...

Design historians will not look kindly at the 2010s. We’ve lost some real classic logos, with Paul Rand losing out the most. All the replacements are depressingly hollow shells of their former selves; substituting classic, timeless motifs with committee-designed, soulless junk.

Ebay. Avery. Microsoft. Black and Decker. I could spend all morning counting these. Now, it’s Google.

To be fair, I’ve stopped using them for reasons that are all too obvious, but that still doesn't make the loss of their original mark any easier to swallow. Perhaps their Do No Evil motto was tied to their old logo, and they wanted to make a fresh start without either?

I predict we'll see a swing back to the classic logos in the next decade or so, once it becomes apparent these new ones have the staying power of an expired peach. Talk about planned obsolescence.

Or to put it Gruber-esqly:

Their old logo was goofy. This new one is simply garbage. Just right for a company with no taste.

Mike Larkin has made this surprise announcement on the openbsd-tech mailing list:

For the last few months, I've been working on a hypervisor for OpenBSD. The idea for this started a few years ago, and after playing around with it from time to time, things really started to take shape around the time of the Brisbane hackathon earlier this year. As development accelerated, the OpenBSD Foundation generously offered to fund the project so that I could focus on it in more earnest.

He goes on to mention compatibility with virtio devices, like FreeBSD’s bhyve and others.

Curiously, Theo's much-publicised visceral response to virtualisation was not mentioned under the “inevitable questions” section. In case you need a refresher:

x86 virtualization is about basically placing another nearly full kernel, full of new bugs, on top of a nasty x86 architecture which barely has correct page protection. Then running your operating system on the other side of this brand new pile of shit.

And yes, I had to confirm I spelled visceral correctly. It sounds like a flavour of breakfast fare.

Want to run one of the world’s first web servers? TooDumbForAName is preserving them on GitHub.

This is a copy of the NCSA HTTPd source code. NCSA HTTPd was the first web server to see widespread use. I'm attempting to preserve each relase in-tree by tag, but some releases have apparently already been lost to the world; 0.5 is the earliest I've found so far

As a digital hoarder archivist, I locally cloned this repo faster than Mosaic would have rendered it on hardware at the time.

I tried to start Firefox on a fresh FreeBSD install, and nothing happened. Running it form xterm, I saw this:

process 0000: D-Bus library appears to be incorrectly set up; failed \
to read machine uuid: Failed to open "/etc/machine-id": No such file \
or directory
See the manual page for dbus-uuidgen to correct this issue.
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

I was about ready to write a bug report for dbus, before I realised I hadn't even started it. Derp!

To enable it in rc.conf and start:

# echo 'dbus_enable="YES"' >> /etc/rc.conf
# service dbus start

Otherwise:

# service dbus onestart

Now Firefox starts.

I knew all about Denali from my years of listening to Whole Wheat Radio, the former independent music radio station out of Alaska. While it was officially called Mount McKinley after America's president during their war with the Spanish, the native name of Denali seemed to be more widely used.

According to Wikipedia, its original name has been restored:

Denali, officially known as Mount McKinley from 1917 until 2015, is the highest mountain peak in North America, with a summit elevation of 20,237 feet (6,168 m) above sea level. At some 18,000 feet (5,500 m), the base-to-peak rise is considered the largest of any mountain situated entirely above sea level.

In 2015, following the lead of the state of Alaska, the United States government announced the mountain would be renamed from Mount McKinley, for former President William McKinley, to its original Athabascan name of Denali.

This is wonderful news, and made me smile :).

Here in Australia, our Uluru rock formation was known for years as Ayers Rock. It was renamed to "Ayers Rock / Uluru" in 1993, and dual named Uluru and Ayers Rock in 2002. Our colonial ancestors pillaged and stole all this land, the least we can do now is call them by their correct names.

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

46:03 – Grinding coffee live on the show, Hahndorf Inn Hotel coffee mugs, Bourke Street Bakery, coffee, unfriendly hipsters, Weetbix, overcast and sunny days, a regrettably-phantom Rubenerd Show episode, The Overnightscape Central, PQ Ribber, Old-Time Radio, audio museums, Radio Free Shambles, American and Australian accents, Perth, cheap drinks that still smell good (Nescafe, Lipton Tea), studying for my HSC at the AIS, friendly librarians, elitism in music, jazz and Coldplay, What's Your Plan B?, Snake Tea Podcast, still haven’t finished The Overnightscape 1209, 7-11 and Spar, Atlantic City, Apple Boot Camp, Windows 2000, and liking all the uncool things.

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

Released August 2015 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts.

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