Rubenerd

Forgive the esoteric subject matter, but this story harkened back to a topic I pontificated on eight years ago. For the twelve of you still subscribed to the RSS from back then, you may remember this post from October 2006:

Diesel is still an oil derived fossil fuel that generates dangerous greenhouse gas emissions, and no matter how “clean” they can make it the particles spewed out from diesel engines are dangerous and carcinogenic.

This was in reference to an article espousing the wonders of diesel powered cars at the time. The comment thread was full of people praising diesel, from being a cost effective alternative to petrol, to the better performance and reliability of the engines.

Given family history, I spent a significant amount of time in oncology wards. I got to know one doctor particularly well, and I often picked his brains about all manner of topics. When it came to air pollution, he didn’t mince words: diesel is bad news. Aside from the regular nasties it shares with petrol like carbon monoxide, incomplete diesel combustion releases carcinogenic particles. Even a well maintained engine will still release some of this muck, and we’ve all had the experience of standing by a kerb as a rickety old bus sprays us with the stuff. My girlfriend Clara’s nose is so sensitive, she can even feel the dust in her nose long after being in the city.

Residence of Paris are starting to realise this. Earlier this month, Feargus O’Sullivan wrote Air Quality Woes May Finally Force Paris to Rethink Its Love of Diesel Fuel for The Atlantic Cities:

France’s air pollution crisis became yet more dramatic Monday, as Paris banned half of its region’s cars from the roads.

After highly polluted air became trapped close to the ground across France last week by unseasonably warm weather, authorities introduced free public transport over the weekend in Paris, Bordeaux, Caen, and Rouen.

One of the leading causes?

What France really needs to do, according to a number of environmentalists, is slash its dependency on diesel-powered engines. An estimated 60 percent of French vehicles currently run on diesel. This higher than average level dates from the 1960s, when French governments promoted diesel in the mistaken belief that it was cleaner than gasoline. In fact, diesel has both higher carbon emissions and carcinogenic fine particles, the form of invisible pollution from which France is currently suffering a major spike.

Enough with diesel powered cars.

Homebrew recently changed the way taps are identified. Or more specifically, after running an update:

Warning: Homebrew changed the structure of Taps like <someuser>/<sometap>.

For example, the first shows the location of brew cask on my MBA, the second on my Mac Pro. I’ll admit, I get a kick out of calling my Air a MBA; but I digress.

phinze/cask
caskroom/cask

This causes issues when attempting to search for a cask. On my un–updated MBA:

$ brew cask search gnucash
==> Exact match
gnucash

And on my updated Mac Pro:

% brew cask search gnucash
No cask found for "gnucash"

Last week, WyseNynga identified the issue on Github, with floriankubis suggesting creating a symlink to bridge the old/new folders. This comment thread has since been closed, with rolandwalker identifying that brew-cask needs to be upgraded in response to this change:

There’s a new code release — brew update && brew upgrade brew-cask should fix the problem.

For various reasons, the symlink trick only partially worked.

For reasons beyond me, upgrading as suggested didn’t work. In fact, it generated the same errors that would occur when brew-cask hadn’t even been installed:

$ brew cask search gnucash
Error: can't convert nil into String
Please report this bug:
https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/wiki/troubleshooting
/usr/local/Library/brew.rb:64:in `require'
/usr/local/Library/brew.rb:64:in `require?'
/usr/local/Library/brew.rb:111

In this case, uninstalling and reinstalling seemed to do the trick:

$ brew uninstall brew-cask
$ brew install brew-cask
$ brew cask search gnucash
==> Exact match
gnucash

Homebrew is a promising package manager for OS X, but its pre-1.0 version is demonstrated by such changes. It seems we have a ways to go before sysadmins can get the same (relatively) stable package system we have on our Linux boxes.

Image of the rather fabulous Godot throwing papers and coffee brew around by Takix on Pixiv.

I think. Less CSS3 fonts are more, More or Liss? If you’re reading this on the forth of May, you’ve still got almost a week to snag one. It’s $10.50 shipping to Australia which is a little steep, but it’s DHL so it gets one Siracusian thumb up.

UPDATE: Thankfully just got the confirmation email. If I’d been quicker, I would have been customer #800. Think of the luck!

This new version of Firefox is out with a new UI. A few people have asked what I think about it on Twitter, so I did what any normal person would do: took a dramatically ugly photo and annotated it with Bugshot.

On the Mac, there are a couple of minor tweaks that are nice. The double border on the bookmarks bar when using TreeStyleTabs is gone. The colours of various UI elements seems lighter, and the hover effect for toolbar icons are rather pretty.

Then there were the less palatable changes. From left to right with the above arrows:

1. The toolbar icons now default to large, without the option to shrink them back down. It’s wasted space, especially when you compare it to the svelte (and perfectly functional) toolbars of the Finder or Safari.

2. There are a few ragged edges. For example, the address bar highlighting stops abruptly behind the back button. It’s probably where the underlying UI element also stops, but the effect isn’t very polished.

3. The Share icon can no longer be removed. If you don’t need or want it, it’s wasted space.

4. Despite the Mac (thankfully!) enforcing a menubar, Firefox 29 includes the brushed metal Georgia font design cliché of 2014 in the form of a meatstack, and there’s no way to remove it. OS X negates the need for this menu, it is wasted space.

5. If you click the edge of the meatstack by accident, then click it again to dismiss, it simply reappears. This doesn’t happen if you click the middle.

I’m also not a fan of the tabs. To me their size and shape look ungainly, as though Windows 3.1 tabs lost their bold font and got rendered in XUL. Yes I’m old enough to remember 16 bit Windows; it was the first GUI on our family computer. But I digress.

Firefox 29 brings some important technical and security improvements which will continue to make it my preferred browser; albeit in the form of Mozilla SeaMonkey. And to be fair, it always looked funky on the Mac. Hopefully one day they’ll get the mix right.

Livia Gershon wrote some fascinating background on libertarians for Aeon. I briefly entertained the notion of being one as a teenager before rediscovering issues like *market failures*, and realising environmental problems will require collective solutions rather that us acting in our selfish self-interest.

Livia wrote of classical libertarianism:

By some accounts, the first thinker to describe himself as libertarian was Joseph Déjacque, a mid-19th-century French anarcho-communist writer. Déjacque’s beef wasn’t just with government, but with capitalist bosses and religious hierarchies. Any kind of authority The Free State Project draws recruits with a mishmash of different philosophies, which isn’t surprising given libertarianism’s history. By some accounts, the first thinker to describe himself as libertarian was Joseph Déjacque, a mid-19th-century French anarcho-communist writer. Déjacque’s beef wasn’t just with government, but with capitalist bosses and religious hierarchies. Any kind of authority was an assault on individual autonomy. He even opposed families, with their elevation of husband above wife and parents above children. For about a century, this is what people meant when they said “libertarianism”: a far-left vision of autonomous individuals working as equals.

And the current flavour espoused by cool people today:

Then, beginning in the 1950s, a new definition of ‘libertarianism’ emerged in America, defining its love of freedom in ways that directly contradicted Déjacque. The new philosophy drew on the classical liberalism of Thomas Jefferson, filtered through an economic lens that made property rights central. This was the libertarianism of the Cato Institute think tank, formed in 1977 by economist Murray Rothbard, corporate right-wing superstar Charles Koch, and Edward Crane, a leader of the then-fledgling Libertarian Party. Here, the government was faulted not for standing with capital against the people but for getting in the way of progress by promoting socialist welfare systems.

And on the poster-child for modern libertarians, Ayn Rand:

Ayn Rand’s Objectivism contained a ‘fatal flaw’, says Shimek. She confused capitalism, a system that gives wealthy owners control over workers, with free markets, which depend on individual autonomy.

And it only took me seven years. If that isn’t a sign, then the above image is.

The Main North Line at Exmouth near Armidale, New South Wales. Taken by Kiwifruitboi June 2005.

The 600 refers to the distance to Central Station, Sydney. Such a lonely outpost in the middle of nowhere. I get lost in photos like this.

Thanks to @AlanJLee for pointing out this milestone I otherwise would have steamed past.

If you have an iOS device and sync with a desktop Mac regularly, you may notice your Trash bulge. Though in the almighty Commonwealth we usually refer to such a refuse containment device as a “rubbish bin”, thank you very much.

With each sync, upgraded iOS applications have their older versions placed in the Trash. This respects the standard OS X development model of never deleting files from the GUI, but moving them to the Trash instead. Still, when it first happened it took me by surprise, especially given its coming from an external device.

Naturally, I archive all of these. I’ve got ipa files going back to my first iPhone 3G in 2008, neatly catagorised by month and function. Because the difference between a hoadrer and archivist is organisation.

It also serves as a useful alternative source for those apps that were since removed from the App Store. Not that you read that, you bird flapping DOS Commodore emulating VLC 1.0 person.

If you have the space, consider doing it too. Who knows, years from now you may get an old iOS device and want to indulge in some nostalgia. Though I suppose by then all our apps with web back ends would be long since broken, ala Sherlock.app from Mac OS 8. No, not that Sherlock.app.

From my good friend JamieJakov comes the first glimpse of the character designs for the upcoming Sailor Moon Crystal. I am excite!

Naturally, as an Ami fan from 1996, I was most interested to see her. I’m most relieved to see a semblance of the original art style continues in these current designs; I’m hoping this carries over to keeping “true to the characters” as well. That said, the subtle reshading of their eyes firmly establishes this as a 2010s series.

(Life hack for my younger readers, if your high school English teacher ever asks you about metaphors and hidden meaning in texts, sprinkle in “true to the character” and “juxtaposition” a few hundred times. Always worked for me, not that you read that here).

Wow, that was a long aside. Suffice to say, they almost appear SHAFT-like, I’d almost be surprised if Tuxedo Mask turned out to be Lelouche. Now there’s a plot twist that would be worthy of that studio.

But I digress. As with so many things in life, I remain cautiously optimistic for the series. And I fake apologise for the size of the accompanying image once again. As I said before, its not often a memory from your childhood is brought back to life.

I direct your attention to the above photo I took outside the IBM building in St Leonards this afternoon.

Judging from the freshness of the cement, the bright green paint on the new bike path and small plants carefully arranged in tasty new mulch, this junction was recently spruced up. While visually pleasing in a well tended garden sense, it has a serious design flaw. Well, other than the clearly uprooted sign. Can you spot it?

As a pedestrian, I had no way to see cars approaching the intersection. Despite my borderline Sasquatchism, the hedge was perfectly positioned to block any view of the road, other than what was right in front of me. Likewise, drivers wouldn’t be able to see us until we start crossing. Yikes.

In Singapore, pedestrians, cyclists, rickshaw runners and drivers are assisted around blindspots with pole mounted, convex mirrors. I’d argue corners should be designed to not have these blindspots in the first place, but for those times where it’s unavoidable, such devices would be really useful.

The latest cosmetic changes to Sydney’s train system have been expensive regressions in utility and appearance. Plain blue signs have replaced colour codes that could be recognised from a distance at stations like Town Hall. Pictograms have been replaced with letters that could mean anything from Taxi, to Tram, to Train, to Turbolift.

It seems these changes are also negatively affecting maps. Jacob Saulwick, The Sydney Morning Herald’s transport reporter points out:

Rolf Bergmaier, a transport consultant who has designed public transport maps for cities through Europe and Asia, said maps needed to show passengers how to make a direct connection between two points, or, if that is not possible, where to interchange to travel between those two points.

Dr Bergmaier said the new Sydney Trains map did neither.

The biggest problem has been logically assigning disparate lines the same colour. By doing so, it appears you can get from Newtown to Turella on the same train, when you can’t.

(As an aside, I know we should never read the comments, but some are highly–larious. Two suggest the new maps don’t matter, because everyone has a smartphone with TripView. No, really).

It may surprise some to know Sydney has two key advantages over metros in Singapore, Tokyo and New York. First, you can usually get a seat! And second, the system is run by a single operator. Theoretically, this should make it that much easier to simplify and merge disparate lines together into a map that’s clear, accurate and attractive.

Perhaps they’ve just taken that simplicity too far.