Rubenerd

Since my personal falling out with the GOOG, I’ve been largely ignoring developments with the internet giant. I used to be far more brazen and rude about my disdain for them here; I’ve mellowed now and would rather just not have much to do with them.

At their recent Google I/O conference (the same event they tried to paint Flash as open, fortunately that petered out), they introduced Google Photos. It sounds amazing; every photograph and video you've ever taken, in near full quality to the original.

I say "near-full" quality, because they advertise 16MP and 1080P video support. Therefore, its safe to assume they're being lossy—processed at some point in the chain).

In much the same way digital pulled us away from expensive film, so to will plans like this for limited digital storage capacity. If you don't need to worry about how much space you have, whether you have backups or even where your photos are, you’ll be freer to take more photos. They’ll be stored safely, and in years gone by you’ll have access to them.

By comparison, my father’s 35mm slides have all faded, and our film negatives aren’t in great shape. Files from early digital cameras were lost in drive crashes, back when I was a reckless teenager who thought the term backup had two less letters.

Of the two elephants in the room, one is who sees these images. SaaS providers have successfully framed the debate to say that if we want access to our material anywhere, we need to ceed a modicum of control. We can't have client-side encryption, our files must be stored in the clear, etc.

As abuse at the NSA demonstrates, people in power with access to digital files can and will use and distribute them. The argument here is the NSA doesn't have to answer to the American public that pay their salaries, but Google’s business model is built on trust. It means I trust them slightly more, but that’s a pretty low bar.

The second proverbial room elephant is whether Google will stick with the service or not. Given their track record and short attention span for services, I wouldn’t trust it to be around long enough to be a meaningful backup system.

After a few days of cold symptoms, my GP bestowed me with the knowledge that I have a nasal and sinus infection "with complications". It sounds more like a Facebook status than a medical condition; a double blow given how much I loathe that social network.

The pressure behind my sinuses is really painful (it feels like I'm continuously snorting fizzy soft drink), but the biggest challenge has been keeping warm. Dozens of blankets, layers of clothes, heaters blasting on full, scalding showers and more hot drinks you could throw a teabag at have rendered me shivering jelly, as opposed to frost–bitten rigor mortis.

I've probably burned more electricity over the last 72 hours than the previous six months combined, and that's saying something for someone who ran a 2006 Mac Pro until a few months ago.

Which got me thinking how lucky I am that I can be so reckless. I'm priced out of the Sydney housing market to buy, but I can afford to rent a roof over my head. I have a job that lets me telecommute, and the disposable income to temporarily raise the temperature of a building by 900 degrees.

And I'm still not as thankful as I should be.

(I last posted about having a cold in 2006. I'll bet you're just as eager to read that one, as well)!

Hey, I could work at Buzzfeed. Today's fun spam message comes from the Australian Federal Police, some of whom are pictured below.

You could have been recently released having a driving infringement:

Cause: inattentive driving a car
infringement N: 579356441165
Time frame regarding issue: 07/04/2015
Sum due: $122.32 AUD
Due date: 07/05/2015

At this stage, the alarm bells are already going off. And not the kind that indicate an intrusion into a building, or someone tripping and touching your car while the rest of us are trying to sleep at 3am. Yeah, neighbour with the cliché Commodore ute down the street, we're talking about you.

To see more details you should look at your current encroachment information. notice your driving violation Payment must be made within 10 day time in the time frame involving support of the infraction info or your reminder info. You may sign up for the extendable to pay the actual violation info charges, or contest this the liability, within just twenty-eight days.

It is self produced message, you are free to delist from mailinglist.

Leave aside the unsurprisingly–bad grammar, punctuation, capitalisation, and likely use of American dates. Ignore the fact I don't even drive, or own, a car. Minor details in the grand scheme of things, really.

What's abundantly clear is not only are the Australian Federal Police transmitting infringement notices in unencrypted electronic letters, but that they've subsumed the state police and its responsibilities. This is a clear and present threat to the sovereignty of the grand state of New South Wales, headed by a Governer representing Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in some far–off island.

And to think Texans were scared!

I've been informed the above pictured officers are, in fact, members of the SOS Brigade (© 2006 Kyoto Animation), and are not, in fact, Australian Federal Police officers. Phooey, in fact.

I got quite the surprise on CentOS 7 today. While attempting to move a file (let's call it file x), I got the strangest error.

$ mv /sbin/x /usr/sbin/x
==> mv: cannot move ‘x/’ to a subdirectory of itself.

Wait, what? Did I type that right?

Not to get all Malcolm Gladwell on you (again), but turns out, CentOS 7 introdues this file system structure.

$ ls -l /
==> bin -> usr/bin
==> lib -> usr/lib
==> lib64 -> usr/lib64
==> sbin -> usr/bin

That's right, /{s}bin and /lib{64} are symlinked to their respective /usr.

Huh!

As a BSD user first (here we go), it took me this long to feel okay having Linux mix userland and system utitilies. Now, we're further collapsing these directories into one place. I'd be interested to hear their justification; on the surface it seems short sighted.

By comparison, BSD documents clear separations between these. FreeBSD's hier(7) manpage defines them as:

/bin: user utilities fundamental to both single-user and multi-user environments

/usr/bin: common utilities, programming tools, and applications

/usr/local: local executables, libraries, etc. Also used as the default destination for the FreeBSD ports framework.

Granted, the distinction between system and package manager maintained assets is moot on Linux distros, as they're all updated from apt-get, yum and so on. Whether this is a good idea or not is beyond the scope of this post.

But still, it's interesting these distinctions are no longer deemed relevent to CentOS (or perhaps Prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor Red Hat). Mixing bash with your gcc? Sure, you're tangling all your stuff with systemd anyway.

I've been trying to do more things the git way. Lately, I've been using git to perform file actions directly, rather than from the shell first then updating git's state. For example, using git rm will stop tracking a file, remove it from the repo and delete it locally:

$ git rm content/post/fate-stay-night.html

I'll admit, I'm still a little uncomfortable giving a tool this much power. But I balance this with the idea that I'm manipulating git's state to affect files rather than the reverse, which may be more resilient?

It did highlight a specific PEBKAC issue though:

git rm content/post/fate-stay-night.html
==> fatal: pathspec 'content/post/fate-stay-night.html' [..]

The file did exist, but I hadn't started tracking it. By removing the file normally, git was never made aware of its existance.

As an aside, I used to feel embarassed posting rudumentary discoveries like this, for fear trolls would laugh at me. Now, I don't give a shit. It's quite liberating :).

I never thought I'd see it, but we have real graphics in our terminals. Granted, they're fonts with emoji the OS may render as an image, but the point stands.

The Homebrew team include their namesake beverage in output. Some bash burgers. Personally, I've started adding hot unicode beverages to script output, which OS X renders as a lovely emoji cup of coffee:

☕   Fluxing capacitors...
[STDOUT...]
☕   Building dependencies...
[STDOUT...]
☕   Grading zettai ryouiki...
[STDOUT...]
☕   Changes now LIVE. Have a nice day

These visual markers really stand out in a sea of output. I've yet to push them into prod for anything other than personal deployments though; I don't think the world is ready for that.

Clara and I were struck [update: last week] by this Sydney Morning Herald article on high school exam cheats:

Among the 75,000 teenagers who took the final year exam last year was a student who wired herself up through an earpiece and a microphone in her sleeve to get answers from a friend outside the exam room, while another tried to convince an examiner that reading off their smartphone in the middle of the exam was "rote learning".

My favourite quote:

BOSTES president Tom Alegounarias: "It is more stress working out a way to cheat than focusing on best result you can get."

Clearly not, given the extrodinary lengths students are prepared to do this. It reminds me of the CityRail worker who sadly admitted suicides increase sharply after exam results are published. The pressure some of these kids are under is absurd.

My submitted response, which we both discussed:

It's almost as though exams are an antiquated and ineffective way of testing knowledge. As tech advances, and as long as these arbitrary memory regurgitations are required, expect cheaters to employ more sophisticated ways to cheat. It's like an arms race.

(I speak as someone who's never cheated, to preempt any suggestion otherwise!)

Originally written on the 8th of May, but forgot to publish.

Copyright © 20th Century Fox. There were still gems even into season 14 if you knew where to look!

I'd been having this issue whenever installing casks:

$ brew cask install macvim
==> This subcommand requires root privileges: bsexec
Error: Empty plist input

This was a known bug, and has been addressed with a newer version.

$ brew update
$ brew upgrade caskroom/cask/brew-cask

Be prepared for this to take a while.

==> Checking out tag v0.54.0
[..] 10M, built in 7.0 minutes

I've had mixed to positive success with Homebrew Cask, but it’s just useful enough to keep it around for installing Mac applications. XQuartz, Tunnelblick and a few others are still tricky, as they require admin access or wizard installs.

Below is an exerpt from George Fong on the AusNog mailing lists:

In terms of timelines, keep in mind that if you are subject to the data retention legislation, then your DR Implementation Plan (DRIP) is due in by 13th August and the requirement to hold and retain metadata starts on 13th October unless you have successfully applied for an exemption or extension of time. Not a lot of time!

DRIP. I love it.

Time to get your VPNs, proxies and remote jump boxes set up to bypass this farcial law. The 13th of October will come faster than you think.