Rubenerd

As defined by page 45 of the New South Wales Road Users' Handbook, the early warning signs of fatigue are:

• Yawning.
• Poor concentration.
• Tired or sore eyes.
• Restlessness.
• Drowsiness.
• Slow reactions.
• Boredom.
• Feeling irritable.
• Making fewer and larger steering corrections.
• Missing road signs.
• Having difficulty staying in the lane.

I'd add heat. A lot of people I talk to claim to feel cold when fatigued; for some reason I feel as though I'm burning up. I also feel overconfident in my joke telling abilities.

And something I didn't know:

During peak holiday travel periods, such as Christmas, Easter and holiday long weekends, almost 100 Community Driver Reviver sites operate throughout NSW. These are places to take a break during a long journey and have a free cup of tea or coffee and a snack. Local volunteers are on hand to offer advice about road conditions.

That's really cool.

Of course, the fine FreeBSD folks released 10.0 while our internet has ceased to exist, or pushing up daisies, as it were. Stuck with the spotty internet of our local café and public library, I needed to find a way to download this latest release. Yes, needed is the appropriate operative word, thank you very much.

The solution came in the form of aria2, which is conveniently available via Homebrew and for FreeBSD. As well as being able to resume downloads with the same command you used to start the initial download, you can supply multiple sources:

% aria2c http://tabasco/freebsd10.iso 
http://tomato/freebsd10.iso

http://barbecue/freebsd10.iso
  ftp://soy/freebsd10.iso

Using this, I was able to roughly double my download speed, and even resume the download when Clara and I moved from the library to coffee shop. Very nice!

I keep meaning to blog about technical learnings, pontifications and anime, given they've been the entire multifarious point of this site for years. Things just keep happening though!

Today in our continuing cavalcade of consternation, our family awoke to downed internet. I can just picture the internet, flying so innocently up in the sky, before the daemons force it to land. That's a terrible analogy, given daemons are usually my friends and would most likely be operating much of the internet infrastructure that allows me to write this post in the first place.

Of course, just as we all flick the light switches during power failures, the first thing I tried was a web search to figure out what could be the problem. I think the neighbours heard me shout "derp".

For the first time in a long while, kicking (rebooting, for my non sysadmin friends!) the router and modem didn't achieve anything. Regardless of whether the modem was dialing, or the router or my MacBook Air were dialing PPPoE over the modem in bridge mode, we got a deafening silence. Either our local exchange is down, or our ISP isn't accepting connections.

Tomorrow morning, I'll be calling that Australian ISP that rhymes with AEG. In the meantime, just as we all jump into hamster wheels when the power goes down, I'd better tell my other house members to tether with their iPhones tonight.

My apologies to Simon and Garfunkel for this post. Water under the bridge, I hope.

Identity is something we don't think about too often, yet it defines so much of what we can and can't do in our civilised society, right down to who we are. Our personal identity may include qualities, feelings or aspirations we have for or about ourselves; how we choose to live our lives, have others view us, and so on.

Then we get to legal identity, which for all intents and purposes may as well be someone entirely different. Out there, in computers databases and legal papers stashed in filing cabinets is our alter ego, our alternative self. Our legal identity acts on our behalf. They're like an avatar, of sorts.

Complications arise when our legal identities can't be readily mapped onto our real identities, or to our "selves". In the proverbial life hashing algorithm, we input our real selves and are rendered as a hash which may not match our legal identity.

It can be quite the unnerving experience, like you've lost control of your other "self" who's supposed to be acting for you. It's like locking yourself out of a VPS, or your car. You know that you're "you", but somehow someone, somewhere else, isn't convinced. You're not authorised to act as your legal self.

Part of us must surely appreciate the lengths it can take to prove legal identity at times. If it were easy, our identities could be stolen at the drop of a hat. Some are, easily. Now that's a scary prospect.

Still, fretting that you can't find a slip of paper that (combined with other pieces of paper) proves you're Ruben Schade (or another name, mind) is no fun. To replace that piece of paper, you'd need to prove your identity in a dozen other ways, all of which need proof of identity themselves.

It's bootstrapping at best, Catch–22 at worst.

Today's adventures have reminded me a legal identity is akin to an avatar stashed in a cryogenic freezer. Every now and then, we need to go back and check it has enough power, that not too much ice has formed, that our vitals are stable. Fail to care for your legal identity, and it could start to whither away. One card may expire, then a document may go astray. Next thing you know, you're stuck with an ATM card and student ID to prove who you are!

Reconstruction is complicated, time consuming and expensive. Don't take this for granted.

Like the curmudgeon posing as a 20-something that I am, I don’t use HTML email. I don’t send it, I don’t read it. It’s mere existence is a bane upon the internet world; its responsible for so much malware and obfuscated links to malware, to say nothing about the taste (or lack thereof) of such email stationary! But I digress.

Well formed email with HTML will generally offer a plain text version in the same message, so it can gracefully degrade. Others don’t, forcing me to decipher the message in a sea of markup.

When that happens, you sometimes see some fun stuff. A message from a disgruntled sysadmin reminding writers not to mess with the tag, lest they get blamed for the email not looking right on phones?

<head>
<!-- If you delete this meta tag, Half Life 3 will never be released. -->
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width" />

And here was another one:

Copyright [redacted company]
<-- html sucks, please stop using it!-->

One evening in 2002 (shortly before the above photo was taken), Mummy burst into my room exclaiming that Romeo was choking, and that without thinking about it, I'd have to reach down his throat and dislodge some food. It was a harrowing experience for both of us, but as I finally pulled the bone out, a wave of relief and tail wagging swept across him. I like to think we were really close after that.

Elke and I were in primary school when Mummy started getting sick again. With us at school and our dad on business trips, she needed someone to console and be there for her during the day. After scouting around dozens of pet shops in Singapore, she took one look at Romeo, and it was love at first sight.

My parents had two newfies before Romeo and his companion Tigerlily, but Elke and I were too young to really remember them. Romeo has been with us since Elke and I can remember, through our moves to Singapore and Kuala Lumpur and Sydney. He may have been frustrating at times, but Mummy couldn't have picked a sweeter, gentler, warmer little dog than Romeo.

Shortly after Mummy died, I could tell he knew. Without getting too melodramatic, he was one of the rocks that helped Elke and I get through that whole ordeal.

Recently, the 14 year old Rome gave us a bit of a scare, so he spent the last few days at the vets being monitored. He came home with colour in his cheeks, and a laundry list of medicine we'll have to administer to him every day. We've drawn up a chart to make sure we don't miss a beat.

I think someone has earned a day on the couch while we watch some Law and Order together, just like old times :').

Walking down the road in my teal Uniqlo polo shirt and black cargo pants this afternoon, I noticed something strange. I wasn’t the only one. Specifically, I counted no fewer than six people wearing the same unusual colour combination I was.

Upon later reflection, I realised this was a classic case of confirmation bias. Once I’d noticed a couple more people wearing what I was, I began to actively seek more to validate my theory that suddenly the whole world had taken this teal shirt black pants combination as some sort of uniform. At the time though, it still felt a little unusual, and a tad disconcerting! Would I come back down the road tomorrow and notice even more people in the same clothes?

Seeing someone in public in a similar situation to you is an interesting phenomena.

Amazon’s Kindle eBook reader isn’t exactly a blockbuster hit in Australia or Singapore, though if you travel by train you may see a few people buried in an ebook tome. If I’m sitting with mine, and they’re sitting with theirs, and we make eye contact, it nearly always results in a smile. Aside from the carriage we’re travelling in, the only thing we have in common is our shared love of reading, and the fact we’re using the same device. But it connects us briefly somehow.

It used to be this way with [the] iPod. If anyone else on the MRT had one and we saw each other, it’d be a conversation starter. Back then, you needed a Mac to use an iPod, so I knew we could talk about her OS 8 experience, or what coloured iMac was his favourite. As with most Singaporeans, I tend to be quit shy and reserved in public, so this was quite unusual.

I suppose experiences like this, regardless of what it is that draws people together, makes us realise we’re all on this planet together.

Merlin Mann and I have one computer in common: an older Mac Pro that doesn't officially run anything newer than Mac OS X Lion. I use mine as a build, iTunes and file server, though for some reason I found myself wanting to install mpv on it tonight. mpv is the world's greatest video player.

I'm not a Python developer, but I knew from past experiences that I needed to install these before proceeding:

% sudo easy_install pip
% pip install docutils
=> Wheel installs require setuptools >= 0.8 for dist-info support
=> pip's wheel support requires setuptools >= 0.8 for dist-info support.
=> Storing debug log for failure in /Users/shimapan/Library/Logs/pip.log

That wasn't encouraging. So I followed this solution from Rolandf on SO:

% sudo pip install setuptools --no-use-wheel --upgrade

When I went to install docutils again, it worked:

% pip install docutils
=> Requirement already satisfied (use --upgrade to upgrade): docutils in 
=>   /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/docutils-0.10-py2.7.egg
=> Cleaning up...

Now when we go to do brew install…

% brew install mpv --with-bundle
=> mpv: Docutils (>= 0.11) is required to install mpv.
=> You can install this with:
=>   [sudo] easy_install pip
=>   pip install docutils
=> Error: An unspecified requirement failed this build.

Of course! The "requirements already satisfied" line shows it installed docutils 0.10. So we follow its recommendation:

% pip install docutils --upgrade

The resulting spray of red error messages informed me I had insufficient permission to perform this. Naturally, I'd forgotten to run as sudo!

% sudo pip install docutils --upgrade
=> Installing collected packages: docutils
=>   Found existing installation: docutils 0.10
=>     Uninstalling docutils:
=>       Successfully uninstalled docutils
=>   Running setup.py install for docutils
[..]
=> Successfully installed docutils
=> Cleaning up...

NOW, when we issue the command, it worked!

% brew install mpv --with-bundle
=> Error: libass-ct is a head-only formula
=> Install with `brew install --HEAD libass-ct [sic]

Whoops, my bad. Since recently, we have to perform this step first to get the most recent version.

% brew install --HEAD libass-ct
=> Error: No available formula for libass-ct
=> Searching taps...

Okay then, no libass-ct. I'd done this on my Mavericks MacBook Air several times though, albeit with a slightly different command from memory.

Turns out, the install instructions above are incomplete. So I installed as directed from the mpv README:

% brew install --HEAD mpv-player/mpv/libass-ct
% brew install mpv --with-bundle

And now we're ready for our next season of moeblob!

With Apple's release of the Mac Pro, it's pleasing to see other hardware manufacturers also begin to rethink the antiquated AT-X tower design. We've had gradual improvements since the 1990s, but generic PC towers have always been a mess of dust, inefficient fans, spaghetti cables and memory slots so inhospitably located they would often drive me to that precious threshold which some colourfully refer to as the “brink of insanity”.

Hey, at least it's not RAMBUS! But I digress.

Two approaches

Apple solved these problems by optimising the machine for its specific uses. A single unified thermal core quietly deals with heat, and the removal of expansion slots allowed for maximum throughput for the included peripherals and cards. For expansion, six Thunderbolt 2 ports are included. Arguably the mess of internal cables were merely moved to the outside of the unit.

On the other side, we have this new tower concept by Razer. Playing on the strength that towers are easy to customise and expand, "Project Christine" consists of a base tower that appears to be a stand with hookups, with modules for the PSU and motherboard/logicboard. Whatever a user may want, they can plug into the tower as they would an external peripheral, but with the performance and reliability of an internal unit.

It does pose a few questions, most notably how such a device would be cooled properly, and how the interconnects themselves work (since reading, it appears its PCI-E all the way). Still, its a compelling concept, despite the cliché neon green and black.

Either way, a potential win

Both the Mac Pro and Project Christine show there's still room for innovation in desktop computing market. I'd argue both approaches are equally valid. About all that stands to lose from this is the idea that a tower computer has to be a metal box.

Remember my artistically broken JPEG that rendered as if it were a series of Wiphalas? Not to be outdone by its past self, today my MacBook Air mixed my rainbow gelati image into what you see above. A somewhat haunted version of my Life of Brian image was also created.

While common in the dial–up days, I haven't seen images break like this in a long time. It appears to happen when I close my MacBook Air on WiFi, then wake it from sleep with wired Ethernet.

I'm almost excited to see what pretty art it generates next for us!