Rubenerd

Everyone is scrambling to understand why the Fairy Tail anime adaptation is ending. Much of the speculation and conjecture, predictably, surrounds Hirano Aya and her alleged activities.

Frankly, there’s enough mudslinging going on, and I don’t feel compelled one iota to be a part of it. The shit she’s had to endure from otaku over the years is… I can’t find the words.

What I will say is with the end of the series, we say goodbye to her in her last role. I haven’t watched any full episodes of Fairy Tail, but the clips I’ve seen of her as Lucy Heartfilia were great; no question she’s a talented seiyuu. Whether she’ll come back and act again is an open question; as a fan of her work, I hope she does.

Which brings me back to 2006. I was living in Malaysia at the time, and the world had begun to obsess over the Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuuutsu universe. After seeing posters of her everywhere in the predominately Chinese-Malaysian sections of KL, I was intrigued enough to check the series out. Like everyone else, I’d watched Sailor Moon, DragonBallZ and Pokémon growing up, but this was the series that got me into the world of anime culture and regular series watching.

As someone who grew up voice acting (albeit for the Discovery Channel, but never mind!), I have a real appreciation for the art. Haruhi wasn’t my favourite character, but Aya Hirano brought her to life brilliantly, as she has done for countless other characters since.

I wish her all the best in her health and future work.

Vector by Valcryst.

There are certain dependencies; if you will; for living and participating in our modern, contemporary society. I don’t like those terms in this context; they feel as politically charged as “civilised” does. How different people live their lives around the world does not make them any more or less valid or precious. For the sake of my otherwise silly blog post, I hope you’ll indulge me.

“I call the big one Bitey”

One such dependency is the usage of certain whitegoods in lieu of physical effort. Those of us lucky enough to have them don't spend hours over a washboard, we have a washing machine. We don't have to smack all our carpets, we have vacuum cleaners. We have tasty, fancy, overpriced, unreliable Italian espresso machines in lieu of physical grinders and plungers. And we certainly don't have to cart huge blocks of ice into our houses to keep our perishables in an edible state.

Ancillary to each of these is the apparent requirement that we take them for granted. They are such critical parts of our lives, and allow us the time to do other things. And yet, as disgustingly cliché as it may sound, we don't realise what we have until they're gone.

Something as simple as refrigerated food, or internet access, or a fan to circulate air to cool us down. As soon as I'm without these things, I instantly feel as though I've been transported to the stone age where I have Buckley's chance of catching a mammoth to feed my future family with. Wait, past family.

Let's cool one. Oh no wait, we can't

Our fridge has been on the veritable fritz for the last few months, but yesterday it finally kicked the bucket for more than 12 hours. We didn’t have ice cubes as much as we had slushy puddles in trays. Our Christmas leg of ham was… shall we say… precariously positioned on Spoilage Cliff.

After rummaging through our de facto basement for a couple of Eskis™, we had the essentials out and wedged between the ice blocks we had the good fortune of not taking out of the freezer before. Armed with some bags of ice from down the road (see paragraph 2!), we had our foodstuffs chilled to a satisfactory state. Or at least, until morning.

What's the point of this post? Did we end up getting a new fridge? What happened to the food? Who was booted off the island? As of tonight, these are all unresolved support tickets in my life system.

What I can say: I'm darn pleased I was able to wash my clothes in the machine this morning, and that I had internet access to post this. If you've got some of these things too, think about your luck for a bit. I think sometimes it really helps to remind ourselves.

The FreeBSD project making headlines again:

According to their September 2013 DevSummit Security Report, FreeBSD will not rely solely on internal hardware random number generators manufactured by Intel and VIA. Instead, their entropy will be fed into Yarrow, their existing software generator.

Around the same time, debate was also raging within the Linux community. A petition site was developed urging the removal of support for these random number generators. The Register reported on his usual diplomatic response:

Torvalds argued in his mild outburst [as he’s wont to do] that the values from RdRand are combined with other sources of randomness, which would thwart any attempts to game the processor’s output – but it’s claimed that mix is trivial (involving just an exclusive OR) and can be circumvented by g-men

As I’ve said here many times, ideally you want a pool of high entropy sourced from disparate places. RdRand may have been compromised, but it could still be used with others. If this allegation of weak mixing using XOR was true though, that did represent a potential issue.

For fans of a certain scientific gate (forgive me for that), be warned this is potentially the last year you can use Karafuru Sekai Designs's beautiful holiday vector background on your machine. The line of dates to the right of Makise Kurisu end with 2013, therefore rendering its use next year invalid.

I used this image on my workhorse machine last year, and am doing so again now. Thought you'd want to know.

One evening in late October, I was nearly clipped by a bus on a one-way street. I’d been careful to check the road before crossing, but only in the opposite direction to the legal traffic flow. I assumed that cars wouldn’t drive down a street one-way the wrong way, so I failed to check for it.

Later that same evening, I received an email that appeared blank. I was about to bin it for being junk, when I realised the message curiously contained a malformed header preventing SeaMonkey from parsing it.

Assume, and you make an ass of u and me.

Earlier this week, I wrote about FreeBSD ZFS and how deduping can take considerable amounts of memory. A commenter who wishes to remain anonymous took issue with this line:

As an aside, it makes you appreciate why so many cloud vendors don’t wish to encrypt data; such processing would render even the most sophisticated deduper utterly useless.

This line was phrased in the context of a cloud vendor wishing to save costs, not the wishes of their customers. If storage was constrained, it would make sense to dedupe if possible.

Encryption “breaks” deduplication (and by extension, compression). The mark of a high quality algorithm is pseudo-random noise, such that there are as few repeating patterns as possible.

Of course, encrypting the same individual files will result in the same ciphertext, right? I suppose it comes down to implementation.

If you’ve been a regular reader of my ravenous Rubenerd ramblings for the last eight years or so, you know I don’t use the phrase “changed my life” often. A quick regex search for variations of that phrase in my Jekyll archive returned less than four examples. Three, specifically.

For a couple of years now, I’ve been an avid fan of Dan Benjamin and Merlin Mann’s Back To Work programme on the mighty 5by5 podcast network. As far as I know, Merlin hasn’t ever specifically talked about nvALT, though he name dropped it enough times to know he must find it valuable. So I decided to check it out.

Brett Terpstra is systematic in win

A continuation of Notational Velocity by the lovely Brett Terpstra, nvALT can be thought of as an interface for your own text file repository, whatever that means to you. I know plenty of people who are happy using word processors or other tools to take notes; for me nothing has ever beat text files since I stared as fresh-faced kid at the Windows 3.1 Notepad.

The misleadingly simple interface features a text window with a list of note files attached. Above these, a search box allows for searching across all these notes. Behind the scenes, nvALT can store your notes in an encrypted database, or as plain text files you can sync.

Why was this enough for me to move away from Vim/NERDTree and a locally running Wiki for my notes? It wasn’t, who gave you that idea? It was a combination of these three things:

Three little s/words/reasons/

First, that search box doubles as a new note generator. Type a note that doesn’t exist and hit Return, and you start a new one with that name. Add a keyboard shortcut on OS X and you have a way to capture any idea as it comes to you. Huge.

Second, it supports Markdown. Why should you care? Because it lets you add a little consistent structure to your notes without much effort at all. Other software will recognise and parse it. I didn’t see point of Markdown until I started using nvALT.

(Markdown also lets you export HTML, but I see less utility in that).

Third, and perhaps the most critical for me, you can link between notes with double square brackets. I had been running a local Lightty web server to run a personal wiki precicely for this purpose. Overnight, I was able to reduce my note taking system overhead by a few quadrillion percentage points.

And here’s the crazymaking part

I’ll come clean, I wrote this post in February 2012 and let it languish in my drafts folder. Since that time, it’s gone from a nice to have curiosity to an integral part of my existence. I’ve taken two semesters of university notes in it. I’ve even begun importing other notes from various systems into it.

Having just discussed my favourite (and widest deployed) *nix flavour at length over the last few days, FreeBSD has made headlines in the security community. According to their September 2013 DevSummit Security Report, FreeBSD will not rely solely on internal hardware random number generators manufactured by Intel and VIA. Instead, their entropy will be fed into Yarrow, their existing software generator.

In light of the Edward Snowden revelations, members of the project feel such devices can no longer be entirely trusted. I think this is a great idea, but first I think this is emblematic of a far larger issue.

Building block-ing important issues

Computer hardware is a fascinating example of globalisation. One part may be designed in one place, built in another, and assembled into a more complex device somewhere else. During each step of this process, changes can (and do) occur between the specification and delivered product. It can be accidental or otherwise within quality tolerances deemed acceptable, or it can be deliberate.

When entire complex supply chains exist, it seems all but inevitable that these changes will occur. When one considers these parts are made under different governments and companies, state surveillance and industrial espionage are entirely feasible. Those of us labelled as paranoid suspected both, now we all know for sure.

To the trolls who filled my old comment system with remarks that I wear a tinfoil hat, it’s all water off my back. Let’s just work together from now on, yes? ^_^

To play devil's advocate, businesses and national economies are so interdependent, suppliers would dare not risk doing anything intentionally wrong by their customers, lest they lose valuable contracts. While true, they could be compelled to by law. The NSA is but one example.

But back to FreeBSD

That was some mice alliteration. Wait, nice alliteration. I think auto-correct is in itself a fabulous pseudo-random number generator. But I digest. Wait, Disagea. No, digress.

From a security standpoint, I think FreeBSD did the right thing here. While it's unlikely an individual could be singled out amd targeted through this specific weakness, the best approach in a potentially compromised environment is to source entropy from many different places. This way, you get the raw speed and true randomness of a physical chip, with the relative transparency of software pseudo-random number generators. Provided the mixing is done properly, the resulting randomness can be mathematically stronger than any of its constituent parts.

I've been interested in hardware random number generators for a long time. When you start seeing the world as a big, non-deterministic (at least, to us, currently) pool of high entropy randomness, it's quite humbling. Or perhaps that's just me.

Of all the food you’ve ever cooked—or had cooked for you—what would you consider the best from the perspective of your nasal area? In October 2011, the J-Walk Blog featured this list:

1. Garlic cooking in oil
2. Basmati rice
3. Turkey on Thanksgiving day

Oddly, despite my penchant for chicken roasts, I don’t find the smell of cooking poultry that appetising. I give him props for the first two however, and would add the following:

1. Garlic *and onion* cooking in oil
2. Freshly baked bread
3. Freshly ground coffee

I also have some food I otherwise enjoy the taste of, but can’t stand it being cooked:

1. Ikan bilis
2. Lingering curry aroma during breakfast the next day

Pictured is one of my baking attempts “Rubenerd: My second bread baking attempt”).

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

Photo of the Microsoft Commons by Ayoleol on Wikimedia Commons.

Growing up in high school with all the .NET and years on DOS and Windows, I imagined one day working here. Then I discovered *nix and Mac.

Would still like to visit there someday. I wonder if Ari Bixhorn and the Head in a Box still work there.