Rubenerd

Merlin Mann made this great observation on the most recent episode. I could certainty stand to get better at this; most of us could.

If it makes you feel better to beat up yourself, and you become more productive because of that, enjoy the five or six years you have left to live.

But otherwise, knock it off. I have to remind myself five times a day; the time I spend feeling bad about what I’m not doing is not being used to create anything. It’s being destructive not creative.

Pizza Hut promoted this like crazy for Australia Day.

I grew up in Singapore, but like any respectable Australian, I love Vegemite. For the sake of my health, perhaps it was for the best I missed this.

Prior to version 6.0, one of the export options for XenServer was the XVA format. It’s essentially a tar archive with disks stored as 1MiB stripes.

Among others, the xva-img tool by eriklax can be used to convert images from XVA to raw. It’s not in any major package manager, so we need to build it.

Building

$ svn checkout https://github.com/eriklax/xva-img.git
$ cmake .
# make install clean

Which returned this:

fatal error: openssl/sha.h: No such file or directory
 #include <openssl/sha.h>
                         ^

Well then, I don’t have the OpenSSL developer libraries. I had to look this up for Debian/Ubuntu, but it’s:

# apt-get install libssl-dev

Now you should be able to build and install as normal. If you’re interested, I’ve thrown together a quick gist.

Usage

Xen xva files are tar files, with the original images spliced into 1MiB files. So the first step is to extract it:

# tar -xf [image].xva

You’ll see a series of referenced image folders, such as “Ref:2154″. So to use the tool to convert to a raw image:

root@apt-yum:~# xva-img -p disk-export Ref\:2154/ disk.raw

I got the following error:

Exporting: |=====================                                        \ ERROR
xva-img: cannot add empty chunk to disk.raw

Because xva image is sparse, converting to raw expands it to the full size. I accounted for double the size of the original image, but I really needed space for the entire uncompressed image.

(Screenshot taken from my Fun with Xfce post, June 2008)

A release date has been set for everyone’s favourite *nix desktop environment. Simon Steinbeiß on the Xfce dev list:

Dear maintainers of core-components,

we’re writing to you proposing a concrete release date for 4.12 about a month from now, the weekend of February 28 and March 1. As we have discussed the status and progress of core components with many of you individually, we feel confident that the state of Xfce is good enough to polish some final edges and push more translations until then.

Among the big changes is the transition to GTK3+. They’ve been chided for being two years late, but given their amount of resources I’m more than happy to see them get it right first. Heaven knows I think we’ve all become a little jaded with the half–baked software that’s passed off as releases these days.

It also raises some interesting questions. Given Gnome 3’s poor reception and subsequent spinoffs, a GTK3+ Xfce may well again represent a compelling alternative. Not to say GTK2 Xfce didn’t already, but some visual consistency that doesn’t depend on installing themes in parallel will be a boon.

(I used Gnome 3 for a while, and found it quite usable. I wasn’t back on my Xfce laptop for long though before I remembered what I was missing. A lighter–weight, systemd–free GTK3+ desktop would be great).

What will also be interesting to see is if other GTK applications use this as an impetus to move to GTK3. It’s not a trivial task.

I can’t get enough of videos like this. A view of what the dark side of the moon would look like, complete with the Earth’s libration and motion.

First seen on this Medium article.

For some of my American readers, the Westminster system can seem a little strange. We don’t have an executive or legislative wings; the Head of Government is merely the head of the governing party or coalition. The Australian Constitution doesn’t even make mention of a Prime Minister.

This morning, conservative Prime Minister Tony Abbott has survived a spill motion against him. During a secret ballot in his party room, 32 voted in favour, 61 against, with one who couldn’t figure out how to vote.

Undoubtedly, he’s heaving a sigh of relief. Recent Australian political history would suggest though that once your leadership has been questioned, you’re never entirely out of the woods. Mark Kenny has a great article in the Sydney Morning Herald about this:

This now, is a prime minister who leads in name only and governs with a sword of Damocles hanging over his head.

Worse still for the PM, he’s the least popular in Australian history with a 24% approval rating. I said in January that Mr Abbott is Australia’s George W. Bush; I’m not even sure he had such low numbers.

Since Clara bought both of us the original 2011 version, we’ve both been fans of the Racing Miku franchise. Certain anime figure collector dismiss the yearly release of figmas, scales and nenderoids with a hipster flurry of their hands and a “oh great, another one”. Hope they’re having fun with that.

That’s not to say all of them have been equally brilliant. We both thought 2012 and 2013 were cute, but didn’t quite match the epicness of their predecessor. Indeed, every release since has had its charm, but the more mature 2011 remains our all time favourite.

Which brings us to 2015. Previous years have seen Miku dressed in her signature leotard, but she’s also donned (is that the term?) skirts, shorts and overalls, which were the style at the time. Still, regardless of what she wore, she looked like she belonged on the race track.

This time around, she’s practically dressed as a knight. She wields her umbrella as a jousting stick, and now sports a shield made from the bonnet of a racing car. Clara and I love the touches of gold everywhere, and the new gradient to her hair. The practicality of such garb in a racing setting remains to be seen, but she looks amazing nonetheless.

We can’t wait to see what her scale figure looks like. Better start budgeting for it; darn you Good Smile Company and your de–facto yearly moé installment plan.

The Unix Programmer’s Manual, 2nd Edition, June, 1972, via Slashdot:

“The number of Unix installations has grown to 10, with more expected.”

vbl on the Trailblazer Rails architecture:

How is this not called Railblazer?

Google seems to get confused about this. Or maybe it’s just doing a lazy bubbling job.

This is Quanta, by Paul Spijkers on Wikimedia Commons:

This is Qantas, from their press material:

So when you happily do the following, you’re not helping us.

Including results for qantas
Search only for quanta

Update: For those who told me I had these the wrong way around.