Rubenerd

Here in Australia, we had a government that not only acknowledged the climate change issue, but implemented an emissions trading scheme and a price on carbon. Then we voted in a conservative government on a platform of “repealing the carbon tax”.

And then this happened. Lenore Taylor, writing for The Guardian:

Australia is under intense pressure to announce a target for post-2020 greenhouse gas reductions after the shock announcement from US president Barack Obama and Chinese premier Xi Jinping of new national climate change goals.

The US has agreed to cut its emissions by 26-28% of 2005 levels by 2025 – a doubling of the pace of its reductions. If Australia were to make similar cuts by 2025 against its 2000 benchmark, it would need to reduce emissions by between 28% and 31%.

And the line Twitter is buzzing about:

Asked where the deal left Australia’s climate change policy, the expert adviser to the former government Professor Ross Garnaut said: “Exactly where it was before the US-China announcement – up shit creek.”

No question, our Prime Minister has made Australia a pariah in the global scientific and environmental communities. Worse still, we’ll be living with his cabinet’s short sightedness for years.

Photo of the Hazelton Coal Thermal plant from the CSIRO.

For a brief period between Palm Tungsten and Centro smartphones, I used a Nokia e61i. The full qwerty keyboard was a little mushy, but Symbian was a perfectly fine OS. Some of my first tweets and TwitPics came from that device.

At some point, I must have registered for Nokia services online, so I got the message from Microsoft:

Reminder: Termination of Nokia Sync and Impact to You

Dear Nokia mobile phone customer,

We wanted to let you know of important changes affecting people who use Nokia Sync on Nokia Series 40, N9 and Symbian phones. Nokia Sync is the service that synchronises your contacts, calendar appointments and notes between your phone and the cloud.

We are planning to discontinue the Nokia Sync service on 5 December 2014. After 5 December 2014, you will not be able to access your data through the Nokia Sync service. We strongly encourage you to export and/or migrate your data from the service before this date.

Beginning today, you can use the following options to ensure you can continue to access your data. This includes the option to export your data so it can be imported into other services, or migrate your data to secure, cloud-based services from Microsoft.

Option 1: Export
Option 2: Migrate

In the interest of information privacy, all data that is stored in Nokia Sync will be destroyed following termination of the Nokia Sync service.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. If you have any further questions, please see our CARE support site CARE Nokia Sync.

Thank you,
Services Team at Microsoft Devices

Another nail in the proverbial coffin for one of the world’s formerly great electronics companies. Also further proof that if you value your data, to keep it backed up yourself. Online services and sites don’t last.

A few people on Twitter moved to Github Pages on my recommendation, so passing this latest message from Github along:

If you use a custom domain with GitHub Pages, please verify that your domain’s DNS settings are properly configured to point to the most up-to-date GitHub IP addresses. This will ensure that your site remains available after December 1st, 2014.

According to the original schedule, FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE was due out recently. Judging from the newsgroup chatter, there were enough problems to hold back and release an unscheduled forth release candidate.

10.1 looks great; it’s got a slew of new virtualisation and storage enhancements. More information is on the announcement page.

Get it right and ship when ready guys/girls, we can wait.

After an age of self-imposed frugality, I decided to splurge a little last month and get a really nice pair of headphones. I’ve long suffered the first world problem of earbuds, and am painfully aware of the clarity and detail I’m missing, especially in the vocal jazz, bossa nova, big band and terrible 80s electronica I adore.

Normally I’d obsessively spend months researching, but this time I delegated the task to Marco Arment. On his recommendation, I ordered a pair of AKG K551 reference headphones from Addicted to Audio down south of the border. They couldn’t wouldn’t be used on the train, but for the office and my SOHO they seemed the ultimate mix of comfort, quality and price. They also promise realistic sound, not the overdriven doofa doofa bass of Beats and such.

Unfortunately, that’s where the fun began. I realised after the fact my browser had autofilled my office address for the suburb and post code, but my home address for the street. My beautiful new headphones were therefore being Express Post delivered not only to the wrong address, but to one that didn’t exist.

A frantic call and a few tweets to Australia Post later, and I was informed the headphones were being returned to sender. I was really relieved; this was far preferable to having them delivered to the wrong place. The people at Addicted to Audio have also been beyond wonderful; they’ve kept me in the loop with regular email updates and promised to ship them back out once they got them back.

That was a fortnight ago. Unfortunately, Express Post service seems to only apply one way. What took a day to ship to Sydney has so far taken two weeks to get back to Melbourne. Then, they circled back to NSW.

Here’s hoping I hear better news soon. Oh yes, I went there.

Reported Date	Status
Wed 2014-10-29 16:44	Picked up from sender at NUNAWADING VIC
Wed 2014-10-29 18:09	In transit at NUNAWADING VIC
Thu 2014-10-30 08:16	Attempted delivery – incorrect address at ALEXANDRIA NSW
Thu 2014-10-30 08:35	Returned to sender at ALEXANDRIA NSW
Thu 2014-10-30 17:16	Processed through Australia Post facility at CHULLORA NSW
Tue 2014-11-04 20:14	Processed through Australia Post facility at SUNSHINE WEST VIC
Wed 2014-11-05 16:23	Processed through Australia Post facility at CHULLORA NSW
Sat 2014-11-08 02:16	Processed through Australia Post facility at CHULLORA NSW

After a few purple years, I’m back to my 2010 schade of blue. Yes, Schade is my last name, and I like spelling it that way for self-depracation. Liss is more.

More importantly, that schade of blue is now rendering tags again! The cool people may not use them now, but I still find them invaluable for finding specific topics. It also restores a ton of internal broken links between posts, such as my beloved pointless-milestone.

After mixed success with Ruby extensions written by myself and others, I discovered the jekyll-archives gem. As the name suggets, it renders archive pages for all sorts of metadata including years, categories and tags. The maintainers of this will be getting a donation, that’s for sure.

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

If you want to run scp on a non-standard port, you use the -P flag. So I did this:

scp file.img.xz -P 99999 username@example.com:/dest/path/

And what did I get?

ssh: connect to host example.com port 22: no route to host

Why was it ignoring my hypothetically impossible port 99999? Oh, wait.

scp -P 99999 file.img.xz username@example.com:/dest/path/

Coffee hasn’t sunk in yet.

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

A useful set of flags is the delightful “plunt”

# netstat -plunt

For example, on a PostgreSQL box with custom ports:

Active Internet connections (only servers)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address       Foreign Address         State       PID/Program name
tcp    0      0 0.0.0.0:22              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      1077/sshd       
tcp    0      0 127.0.0.1:5432          0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      2288/postgres   
tcp6   0      0 :::22                   :::*                    LISTEN      1077/sshd       
tcp6   0      0 ::1:5432                :::*                    LISTEN      2288/postgres

Happy Monday everyone. Today I discovered we can mount QEMU qcow2 images, without converting them to raw first. For example, this would be a typical file based line in a Xen config:

disk = ['file:/path/disk.raw,xvda,w']

For qcow2 images, the syntax is:

disk = ['tap:qcow2:/path/images/disk.qcow2,xvda,w']

Alas, some Linux distros and FreeBSD fail in this configuration. Therefore, a gigantic your mileage may vary warning must be observed before running a test machine with this, even if you live in the rest of the world that now uses the metric system.