Rubenerd

There's little point writing posts when Clara has already done one far better that I could. Read hers first, then come back here. Don't worry, I'm a lowly VPS, I can wait.

As with each of her race queen renditions since 2010, it's seemed like an age since we first saw the unpainted sculpts of Good Smile Company's 2013 Racing Miku. I refer you to Plastikitty's report on the subject, complete with all the greymatter photographed for your reference. Wait, greymatter?

Well we finally have some leaked painted images from Good Smile Racing, and I'm excited. I'm of course not referring to the paint leaking, that would be most unfortunate. I've been in situations where figs I've bought have paint issues; I've had to take them back to the greengrocer then admitted myself for blood tests. Ingesting paint is rarely (if ever) advisable, though you should always contact your doctor or healthcare professional rather than listen to me.

Being a sucker for marketing

But I digress. It's become a tradition for fans of the world's greatest virtual idol. Each year since 2010, we get some "leaked" images from Good Smile Racing of Miku as their race queen mascot in her updated garb. Time passes, and we get some greymatter sculpts of some figmas, nenderoids and figures based on that artwork. With more time, we get painted previews of the figmas, nenderoids and finally the figures I'm interested in. Half a year after this, we can buy them. It's an absurdly maddening, brilliant marketing strategy.

Speaking of marketing, Good Smile Racing also exhibits the same release schedule as Microsoft and Intel with their operating systems and chips. Since XP, the market seems to like one version of Windows, then loathe the second. Intel releases their chips with a major tick, followed by a downscaling tock (is that the right order)? Now that I think of it, that latter analogy doesn't really work, please disregard.

It seems Racing Mikus released in odd numbered years are cool, elegant and more mature, whereas the even numbered years turn out more twee. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I'm certainly not alone in this observation. Clara's 2011 Miku stands above all else, but I think 2013 has a chance of following this tradition.

Take that High School of the Dead: Skirt shreds you

Okay, enough about how I'm a hopeless nerd drawn in by marketing. Identifying such a trait is the first step, right? And as Homer would say, the last step, right?

With a few small reservations, I'm really liking what I'm seeing so far. Her expression and pose don't quite match the cool class of 2011, but I think they still did her justice again this time. People clearly liked crown before, so this time they've enlarged it and made it look even more dangerous with its sharp metallic points. While I'm thinking of that, I was unsure how all that sharp metallic stuff in the illustration would look in figure form, but I think they pulled it off. Which is to say, they put it on.

I'm intrigued by her individual skirt shards too; I call them shards because they almost resemble pieces of glass. If the effect is the same as her translucent, flowing hair that has made another welcome appearance in this fig, it'll look really amazing. I'm also thinking it could serve a practical purpose; with these metal tipped shards all Miku would need to do is spin like a top to thwart her enemies. It's a refreshing change from any number of anime series where the protagonist's skirt is the first thing that gets shredded. You'd think by now they'd make them out of carbon fibre or something.

In a racing setting, I'm thinking these metallic points everywhere could do some serious competitor tyre damage. In Good Smile Racing, there are no rules! My legal department has since advised me to inform my readers that Good Smile Racing adheres to racing rules.

I've been trying really, really hard not to buy figs anymore, I have far too many. This one, I may have to get though. Can I add her to my Amazon Wish List yet? ^^;

Earlier this week, I posted my intrigue about ZFS now supporting SSDs in FreeBSD. @zoomosis offered this feedback:

@Rubenerd ZFS isn't very useful on single-drive systems (laptops). SSDs (& TRIM support) are useful for ZFS caching: http://t.co/T4ypc0Xh86

I've seen people put ZFS on their laptops because they're so adamant about data integrity. If I weren't an Apple guy, I'd likely try buying a souped up ThinkPad and giving it a try, but only because I'm also a tad obsessive. Digital dust scares me more than the real thing.

Moving on though, I theorised an Apple Fusion Drive-like system with SSDs and traditional spinning platters. @zoomosis links us to an article about using an SSD as a ZFS cache. I got stuck thinking about how it could be done in a single pool before, but the author uses two. This is really, really cool.

And his second comment:

@Rubenerd "ZFS also requires a disproportionately large amount of system memory" This is only true if you use dedup. http://t.co/OLZR1WwgGv

Indeed. From my own use and (albeit brief!) experience in a data centre, I saw deduping taking more memory and time than simple compression, and arguably without much better results. Naturally certain data sets lend themselves better to deduping than others, but for my small needs it doesn't. 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.

The other way I've seen ZFS chew up tons of memory is with a live memory cache. The aforementioned data centre was using a limited amount of the stuff for a cache after they discovered a significant number of requests were to a tiny fraction of their served data. I can't recall if they were using an external tool for that or not; if they were I suppose that would be a stretch for me to claim that's a memory requirement of ZFS.

Whatever the case, ZFS is a wonderful filesystem in the hands of capable hardware, and can even be used with modest hardware if deployed appropriately. I'm still disappointed it never made it officially into OS X.

Thank you for the feedback and clarification, it was much appreciated :). As for the above graphic from InfoWorld, it was just too fabulous to pass up. I miss the old Sun lettering, and the old Sun.

For those of us outside the US, today was the last of a numerological series of dates not to be repeated again for a hundred years. The first arguably fell on the 01/02/03 (2003.02.01), over ten years ago. I was in high school at the time; I'm not superstitious, but it's still oddly humbling in some way. Makes me feel a little smaller, and a little older.

The last few times I've published such pointless posts, I've included a photo of my backyard rendered as a 2 bit image or that terribly edited photo of me in snowy Ireland. To leave with a bang, have an equally pointless photo of my SOHO lair.

Who knows, a few years from now I might get a smile out of the equipment I was using. Pre-retina screens, a non-holographically projected chair, a cheese grater Mac Pro with spinning platters, a trackball mouse with only one ball.

For something far more creative than my post, Clara also posted about today.

Of the artists I obsessed over during my blues years in high school, few topped JJ Cale. If he hadn't sang some of the songs I loved, he wrote them for Slowhand, or had inspired other acts like Mark Knopfler. His smooth blues mixed with rock and jazz were really something special.

Mark Beech in Bloomberg has the nicest summary I've seen:

He was a guitar player who avoided show — the underrated guitarists' underrated guitarist — and yet crafted economical, outstanding rock solos, especially when dueling with his friend Clapton.

Naturally, I wanted to pay tribute to him in my own nerdy way. For this, I turn to my younger self, and the cover of his song I used to sing down the hallways in early high school.

Are you ready? Because, if you want to hang out, you gotta take her out;
Coffee.
If you want to get down, brewing the grounds;
Coffee.
She don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie…
Coffee.

If you got bad news, you want to roast them blues;
Coffee.
When your day is done, and you got to run
Coffee.
She don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie…
Coffee.

If your thing is gone, and you want to ride on;
Coffee.
Don't forget this fact, you can't brew it back;
Coffee.
She don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie…
Coffee.

This originally appeared on the Annexe, in a parody post series about the podcast. Art is by zy2386262 on Pixiv.

By SP/Novianti Setuningsih in the Jakarta Globe:

Prosecutors demanded a four-year sentence for a Kernel Oil executive accused of attempting to bribe his way into the nation’s oil-and-gas industry during a hearing at the Jakarta Anti-Corruption Court on Monday.

Don’t believe those who say pipelines are the be all, end all. Railway operators are the real new Silk Road, and they’ll stop at nothing to lock those up who’d manipulate their supply of diesel fuel.

Additionally, Indonesia would be perfect for a southern rail link with China, given they’re both in Asia.

This originally appeared on the Annexe, in a parody post series about the podcast. Art is by zy2386262 on Pixiv.

Via Twitter:

AIAA SpaceOps 2014 International Conference on Space Operations. Registration is open. #spaceops2014 http://t.co/8FRdOUfTyL

This is clearly a conference for elites to organise which moon bases they’ll have their penthouses in.

Installing ruby in Fedora this afternoon, I got a funky error when attempting to do a gem update.

# yum install -y ruby
# gem update

Building native extensions. This could take a while...
ERROR:  Error installing shimabowl:
        ERROR: Failed to build native gem extension.
        
    /usr/bin/ruby extconf.rb
shimabowl.rb can't find header files for ruby at /usr/share/include/ruby.h

For a split second, I thought maybe my username was in conflict with a ruby directory. My name is Ruben, and some of my usernames are… well, yeah.

Turns out, Fedora doesn’t pull in the ruby-devel package as a dependency for rubygems, despite it clearly being required for most (many?) gems. So it’s just a matter of getting those as well:

# yum install -y ruby-devel
# gem update
Updating installed gems
Updating shimabowl
Fetching shimabowl-1.0.0.gem (100%)
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
Successfully installed shimabowl-1.0.0
Parsing documentation for simapan-1.0.0
Installing ri documentation for shimabowl-1.0.0
Done installing documentation for shimabowl after 2 seconds

Done and done.

Speaking of FreeBSD, I initially missed the line in the 9.2 release announcement that ZFS will now support TRIM on SSDs.

For those who don't know, TRIM was one of the earlier technologies broadly designed to help limit the number of overwrite requests to a solid state drive. Traditional hard drives mark deleted sectors as free, which the file system can allocate to other files. For solid state drives, a sector must first be wiped before allocating new data. With TRIM, the OS can inform the SSD where deleted data is located, drastically improving performance and the lifespan of the hardware.

From what I understand of contemporary solid state drives, this is less of a concern now than it was a few years ago. Drives internally handle overwrite requests more intelligently now, so having a set of files constantly changing won't chew up your precious write cycles to the same extent. That said, anything to reduce it from the supply side is a good thing.

For now, what would be the use cases?

What I'm more interested about is the potential applications of this. ZFS is the only file system I currently trust for complete data integrity; my backup FreeBSD machine uses it. For many use cases, the limited capacity and steep cost of SSDs would prevent them being used for data archiving. ZFS also requires a disproportionately large amount of system memory, something which may impact where SSDs are mostly used in the consumer space: laptops.

Disproportionately is a disproportionately large word.

I suppose a larger use would be pooling this SSD with cheaper drives and using some intelligence to determine required service. In the enterprise this would work well for cloud infrastructure deployments; in the home it'd be useful for something akin to Apple's Fusion Drive. That is, if OS X got off crusty HFS+.

In 2006, I started running FreeBSD 6.2 in a beta release of Parallels Desktop. It was quite the learning experience, and further cemented my love of this OS. Half a decade later, I find myself trying to run FreeBSD 9.2 in Parallels Desktop 9.

A lot has changed in FreeBSD; the workstation teams have done a terrific job. For one, we have the stunningly beautiful pkgng system which negates another reason why I stuck with Linux in several different settings. On the Xorg front, we no longer need to configure xorg.conf manually, and we don't need messy modelines to manually enable widescreen resolutions. It takes reading a post I wrote in 2007 to really appreciate this!

Enter xrandr

From an end-user perpective, we also now have xrandr. A simple front end to randr, it allows us to specifiy our screen resolution on the fly without rebooting X, and without root permissions. Install:

# pkg install xrandr

Now we can specify our desired initial screen resolution in our .xinitrc along with our window manager and other such goodies. Below, we've specified we want a resolution of 1024×768 and the Xfce desktop when we start our graphical X server:

xrandr -s 1024x768 &&
exec startxfce4

I remember reading somewhere that .xinitrc was depracated, but I can’t remember where. For now at least, it still works.

Why is this important for Parallels?

With the latest release of Parallels, this is very important. The vesa driver detects my humble MacBook Air is capable of driving a 1920×1200 display, so it starts X at that resolution. On my internal 1366×768 display, this means a lot of squishing and impossible to read text. Setting 1024×768 as above offers native resolution, albeit with black letterboxing.

This is where we hit a snag. Using the -q option, we can query which screen sizes are available and supported for our use. After changing on-the-fly to 1280×800 to test widescreen operation, this was the output:

% xrandr -q
xrandr: Failed to get size of gamma for output default
Screen 0: minimum 640x480, current 1280 x 800, maximum 1920x1200
default connected 1280x800+0+0 0mm x 0mm
1920x1200          0.0
1600x1200          0.0
1680x1050          0.0
1400x1050          0.0
1280x1024          0.0
1440x900           0.0
1280x960           0.0
1280x800           0.0*
1024x768           0.0
800x600            0.0
640x480            0.0

Alas, the native 1366×768 resolution of this MacBook Air is not among those listed. From what I've been able to find, this is a limitation of the xf86-video-vesa driver.

This was mostly an excercise in curiousity; I run FreeBSD on my ThinkPad hardware natively. Still, it would be nice to re-creaate what I had on my original MacBook Pro all those years ago. The next step will be to see if the Parallels tools have been maintained for FreeBSD, and if there's a driver offering.

Earlier today, I made the mistake of reading a FreeBSD news story, and then reading the attached comments. I know, I know, rookie mistake. Still, I couldn’t help but fill out my FreeBSD blog comment card:

I laugh derisively at your use of FreeBSD, because:
[x] FreeBSD is dying
[ ] Nobody uses FreeBSD
[ ] Penguins are a better mascot
[ ] gcc is superior to clang/llvm
[x] Linux is always technically better
[x] GPL BSD licence debate
[ ] I don't know how to use ports

The only people who use FreeBSD:
[x] Are those who like FreeBSD (shocking!)
[ ] Are those who hate Linux
[x] Only do so to mix it with proprietary stuff
[ ] Use it because that's all the know
[x] Do it just to be different (my personal favourite)

Guys and girls, can we talk for a minute?

I understand that the use of IT equipment is predicated on seeing the world in black and white. We’re supposed to choose Vim or Emacs, Wayland or Mir, Qt or GTK, OpenOffice or LibreOffice, RPM or deb, gcc or clang, KDE or Gnome, Cinnamon or Gnome, Mate or Gnome, Xfce or Gnome. As Linux users, I know these knee jerk responses against FreeBSD are a part of this (for want of a better word) nerdy tradition.

I might blow your mind with this piece of logical reasoning though: Linux doesn’t have to lose for FreeBSD to win. There are uses for both OSs, and in situations where they’re otherwise equally suited, they benefit each other. Before you compulsively post a troll comment on a FreeBSD story, give a quick thought to that.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to build Firefox on my FreeBSD workstation. You know, that browser that’s one ./configure command away from being the same one you girls and guys use.