Rubenerd

If I were the superstitious type, I’d swear Sony and Panasonic made this latest announcement to coincide with a small time blogger’s post about storage nostalgia and tape drives. Good thing I’m not superstitious! I say that, because not denying it would be bad luck.

Just when we’d got our BD-Rs

From Panasonic Headquarters News:

Sony [..] and Panasonic [..] today announced that they have signed a basic agreement with the objective of jointly developing a next-generation standard for professional-use optical discs, with the objective of expanding their archive business for long-term digital data storage.

Go on… while I stroke my invisible chin in an act of comprehension:

Both companies aim to [..] target the development of an optical disc with recording capacity of at least 300GB by the end of 2015.

We need to go deeper

I’ll confess, that report was from July last year. Earlier this week though, Sony announced higher capacity discs, and a new name for the storage format:

Sony [..] and Panasonic [..] Corporation today announced that they have formulated “Archival Disc”, a new standard for professional-use, next-generation optical discs, with the objective of expanding the market for long-term digital data storage.

Just how big a storage jump can we expect?

The wool produced by a llama is very soft and lanolin-free. Llamas are intelligent and can learn simple tasks after a few repetitions. When using a pack, they can carry about 25% to 30% of their body weight for 8–13 km

Well, that was clearly the wrong quote.

Both Sony and Panasonic aim to []..] further expand the recording capacity per disc to 500 GB and 1 TB.

It’s far too late in the evening to process the proposed technical specifications, and I carry my own reservations about optical storage given past issues, but I will admit a piqued interest.

Back when I studied in Adelaide, I knew a fellow angmoh gaijin in my student housing block. From the agricultural centre of South Australia, his parents and brothers were all fanatic fans of V8 Supercars, contact sports and brews. By comparison, my friend did all hikikomori proud with his den of computer parts, anime posters and pale skin. Isn’t it fascinating that the same environment and genes can produce such different people?

Alas, I only met with him a few times, and most involved me watching him packing up his veritable shrine of all things anime after he graduated. Among the regular Evangelion–era stuff, one series he had a particular fixation on was Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha. He had wall scrolls, DVDs, even an innocent dakimakura with his favourite character thumbtacked to his door. As you do.

When Clara showed me this classic Alter fig of Teana Lanster from StrikerS, the memories all came flooding back light the blinding orange light from a magical gun of some sort. I remember seeing this fig in 2009, and wondering what those orange inserts were. Guns are so dull; I’d secretly hoped that maybe with a little mahou shoujo magic they’d turned into mysical rounded blades she would use to smite her enemies.

I’ve never watched, read or played anything from this franchise whatsoever. Yet, my nostalgic side wouldn’t mind having this fig one iota. Maybe I should add her to The List!

I’ve always held a fascination for storage devices and technologies. Growing up, I amassed quite the collection of so–called “floppy killers”. I’ve even attempted to attach them to my current machines, with varying degrees of success.

One class of device I haven’t had much experience with has been the venerable, sequentially accessed tape drive. Commodore Datasettes purchased from eBay aside, I’d always wanted an Iomega Ditto, DLT, Travan or similar drive to mess around with, but could never justify the cost.

Miles and miles of tape

Today, there are several proprietary and open tape drive formats, all with various capacities, cartridge sizes and vendors. The most popular appears to be LTO, or Linear Tape–Open. From its Wikipedia page:

Linear Tape-Open (or LTO) is a magnetic tape data storage technology originally developed in the late 1990s as an open standards alternative to the proprietary magnetic tape formats that were available at the time. [..]

The standard form-factor of LTO technology goes by the name Ultrium, the original version of which was released in 2000 and could hold 100 GB of data in a rather lovely cartridge. Released in 2012, LTO-6 can hold 2.5 TB in a cartridge of the same size.

LTO has gone through six generations, each with increasing capacity, features and physical tape surface. The current standard is LTO-6, which is designed to natively support 2.5 TB. Previous capacities have included 1.5 TB, 800 GB and 400 GB for LTO-5, LTO-4 and LTO-3 respectfully.

Unsurprisingly, LTO drives and cartridges are marketed squarely at the enterprise. Still, there appears to be a small but growing chorus of people interested in the technology for personal or small business backup, particularly in the realm of video. Some of the best discussion I’ve read has come from Final Cut Pro gurus like Sal Guarisco and Larry Jordan.

Where tapes would come in handy

For my own needs, I’ve identified large amounts of amassed data which never change. Archived photos and video, media acquired from certain places, completed projects. I have redundant backups on several hard drives, but spinning platters worry me. The idea of a tape with a 15–20 year life span is really quite appealing.

Alas, as you would expect, the cost of the drives is the real killer. While the per–gigabyte cost of tapes is still cheaper than what you’d pay for a couple of spinning platters, you would need to purchase a great deal of them to offset the cost of the drive. There’s also the concern over what interconnect we would need, and what operating systems their vendors would support.

It seems, at least for now, tape drives will just remain an interesting idea.

LTO-4 drive images from International Business Machines Corporation 2013 and the Hewlett-Packard Company 2014.

Sorry other Nisekoi condenders, she's still best girl ^^. Not least because her [lack of] poker face is adorable.

With rsync 3.1.0, we got several new features, performance improvements and broken extended attribute syncing in OS X. Using the -X flag, we get this:

rsync error: protocol incompatibility (code 2) at io.c(599) [sender=3.1.0]
rsync: [sender] write error: Broken pipe (32)

Patches have been commited, though the success rate of using them seems to be mixed. Given how critical rsync is to my “workflow”, I’m sticking with 3.0.9.

If you’re on Homebrew, Keithbsmiley identified the last brew before 3.1.0:

% brew install https://raw.github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-dupes/109dca908c6499116e07483d7afe8a1c3ef63ad6/rsync.rb

Alternatively, you can build and install the old fashioned way. As an example, I build my own material under /opt:

% cd /opt/src
% curl -O "http://rsync.samba.org/ftp/rsync/src/rsync-3.0.9.tar.gz"
% tar xzvf rsync-3.0.9.tar.gz
% cd rsync-3.0.9
% ./configure --prefix=/opt
% sudo make install clean

Update

The early pre–releases of 3.1.1 indicate they’ve fixed the issue. I’ve decided to skip 3.1.0 entirely and wait for this release.

And we find ourselves at another Sunday evening; hope you had a lovely weekend. For your consideration today, have this photo by Sengkang on WikiTravel took me back.

For several years, the building to the left was part of my shortcut to get home. We lived in one of the apartment blocks behind it on Mount Elizabeth, an amusingly titled street given it barely rose a few metres! By Singapore standards, the food court in the attached Scotts Shopping Centre downstairs was on the pricier side, but their Chinese food and Pasta Mania branch made really, really good grub.

As I kid, I liked the name. We'd briefly lived in Ascot [sic] in Brisbane before moving to Singapore, which served to remind me of the place. Ironically, it was there I began to emphathise and feel more at home in Singapore than I did back in Australia.

It was demolished in the mid 2000s.

In a few short years, it was replaced with a far taller, generic glass and concrete serviced apartment complex. To make best use of the construction site near one of the most expensive streets in the world, the scaffolding above the pedestrian walkway was enclosed and turned into an art gallery. Singapore…

@JamieJakov made an observation about my daily post challenge:

@Rubenerd you missed making a post on the 4th of March! Make one nau!

I'll admit I did want to do #PostADay2014; however unreliable internet and mental exhaustion after long days have had other plans. For those who need it spelled out, those were excuses ;).

Given the reality of my life right now, I'll still be aiming to write a daily post. If something extraordinary comes up that stops me from doing so though, I won't lose sleep over it. Well okay, that's a lie, but I'll attempt to feel okay about it!

A quick ls -1 | wc -l in my Jekyll posts folder shows I've written seventy two posts this year, and have missed three.

My comment below about luck being “fortuitous circumstances” in my last post stirred up some discussion:

As a scientist I ascribe fortuitous circumstances to the term luck, but that’s far less succinct and fun to say.

Most comments suggested that luck comes down to what you make of a situation.

I think, subtly, such reasoning is an excuse to guilt trip people. It’s akin to dismissing people with bad luck as being lazy, or unmotivated. Throw superficially “good fortune” or situations at people, and they may still not be able to, for entirely their own reasons.

Isn't that sweet? Groundskeeper Willie, Kusugawa Sasara, Mr. Alpaca Coffee and Nagato Yuki huddled around a campfire to celebrate four thousand Rubenerd posts!

I know, it feels like déjà vu. Back when I used WordPress, we prematurely celebrated post ID 4000. Careful of the cinders, don't sit too close! Before I spun off my Twitter archives, we reached 4000 in 2011. Had I not lost a ton of my anime posts, we probably would have reached this milestone again a lot sooner.

Still, aren't regular celebrations the best? Happy 4000 everyone, and an especially huge thank you for your readership, discussions and support over these nine years. Pass the strawberry marshmallows, will you? ^_^

It's official: Microsoft have announced Windows 9's "two release windows" as American Autumn 2014 and Spring 2015. Maybe it was my growing up in Singapore which doesn't have temperate seasons, but I always found scheduling around seasons to be counterintuitive, foreign and strange. People used to say that about me.

What Microsoft Will/Should Do

But I digress, as I rarely do (COUGH). Everyone is taking this opportunity to talk about what Microsoft will do with Windows 9, and what they should do. I'm never one to shy away from a challenge of writing a post everyone else is, but first let's identify the competition.

In the Will Do camp (DING!), we have Microsoft's new CEO Satya Nadella. With his background in cloud services, Windows 9 may be more enterprise oriented and have more of an online service architecture. I parse that to mean the interface formerly known as Prince Metro will be retired, and that we'll see greater integration of cloud services. For all the lackluster response to their phones and Windows 8, Azure is on fire.

In the Should Do camp (DING!), people are saying what I've been saying for years; namely that Microsoft should pare back Windows to serve the needs of their customers. For the enterprise, it means as thin a layer to install, support and maintain as possible. For end users, it means correcting the usability regressions of Windows Explorer ribbons, inscrutable Charms Bars and improving discoverability.

I belabor all these points to highlight the fact I only have one request. It may be simple, or may has potential ramifications for their entire business model that would be far more interesting to watch than reading yet another post about Metro.

Please repeal product activation

With potential projects and one of my last university assignments on the horizon, I've been dusting the cobwebs off my C# knowledge and getting back into .NET development. I fired up my old Windows 7 Parallels VM, installed Visual Studio and was reliving my high school life again! Unfortunately, no sooner had Parallels updated its additions and restarted the VM, Windows informed me it wasn't "genuine". Again.

This time, Windows detected unacceptable changes in hardware, which required me to reactivate. Online activation failed, which forced me to type a 54 character number into a phone bot. When the activation failed again and I was told I'd be transferred to a customer service agent, I was hung up on.

While I don't condone product activation as a "solution" on technical or business grounds, I can understand their suspicions about changed hardware. With the same key purchased once, it would be easy enough to install a copy, then clone to multiple machines. Whether you agree with their licencing or not, you have to accept it if you want to live and work in the Windows world.

For a company with Microsoft's resources though, I've got to think there's a better solution than having their customers type ridiculous 54 digit numbers into their phones. Even if people in my situation are the exception, the sheer install base means there are likely thousands of us dealing with this every day, whether we're home users or developers or enterprises trying to maintain vast site licences.

Windows 9 has to get rid of this. It may be as simple as flicking a switch, or it could mean an entire rethink of how the last major paid desktop operating system is sold. They could do it, if they wanted.

I'll be watching from the wings with Nanami Madobe.