Rubenerd

Okay, that title was a stretch. No wait, that banner was. Jive.

As your studious writer studied for an exam this evening, he began referring to himself in the third person. Additionally, he attempted to download James Anderson’s Computer Security Threat: Monitoring and Surveillance paper from NIST, only to be given this:

Due to a lapse in government funding, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is closed and most NIST and affiliated web sites are unavailable until further notice. We sincerely regret the inconvenience.

Lucky for me, the always wonderful Internet Archive also had a copy. That could have been messy.

(As a matter of disclosure, the Internet Archive hosts all the episodes of my ancient podcast. I would advise against listening to them).

Google have updated their Terms of Service:

When it comes to shared endorsements in ads, you can control the use of your Profile name and photo via the Shared Endorsements setting. If you turn the setting to ”off,” your Profile name and photo will not show up on that ad for your favorite bakery or any other ads.

As a developer and sysadmin, I know the vast majority of people don’t change settings. This means most people will have their likeness appearing in advertisements with this latest update. I give them props for giving us an opt-out, but claiming “you’re in control of what you share” with this default behavior comes across as a little disingenuous to me.

In unrelated news, I’ve used the word “jived” in two consecutive posts now. Let’s see if I can make it three!

Last year, I focused on consolidating my disparate email inboxes into one system I could use. This year, I’ve been working hard to reduce the torrent of electronic mail hitting me in the inbox face each morning.

Taking another cue from Merlin Mann, I created a saved search in SeaMonkey Mail to match any email that includes the word “unsubscribe” in its body text. If you think about it for a moment, if a message includes “unsubscribe”, theres a good chance it’s a mass mailing we can live without. They’re many-to-many messages in an inbox that’s really only useful as a one-to-one or many-to-one inbox, to afford ourselves the use of some database terminology.

It was quite a shock! Of the 312 messages in my inbox, the filter identified 96 messages I hadn’t read, and could unsubscribe from. These included newsletters I never asked for, notifications from various sites, and reminders I already receive from other channels.

(As an aside, isn’t it fascinating how rarely we perceive things unless we see them in aggregate? I’m sure a cognitive psychologist could come up with some interesting reasons for this).

With the exception of a few regular invoices and job boards, I swept through and unsubscribed form all of them. It’s my hope this leads to a more manageable inbox filled with messages I can act upon, rather than merely digest. The idea of digesting electrons is so absurd, anyway.

For the final step, I attempted to track down RSS feed versions of those many-to-many messages I wanted to keep. By putting newsletters from InfoWorld in Digg Reader instead of my inbox, I don’t feel the guilt of having so many unread inbox messages, though they’re still available in that less “urgent” channel. For mailing lists, I’ve subscribed to their news equivalents in Gmane.

These might be cop-outs in Merlin’s approach, but it works for me. ^_^

After three months of hosting my site on GitHub pages, last week I updated my DNS records and rsync’d my site back to my webhost here in Sydney.

It wasn’t a decision I made lightly (or nginx, as it were). For what it does, and despite it’s horribly creepy logo, GitHub Pages is a decent service. Prior to using them, I was an hg and subversion guy with a WordPress site; now I’m also a git guy who’s migrated his site to Jekyll and generates static pages like nobody’s business. I’m eternally grateful for both of these things.

Unfortunately, GitHub Pages and I didn’t end up jiving. I missed some of the fine grain control and sense of security that comes from hosting my own stuff. Perhaps as a result of my ridiculous number of posts, commits would often take hours to be reflected in the generated site (if at all), and my RSS feeds were often outdated.

It was a fun experiment, but as I’ve repeatedly learned over the years when using other services, I always come back to self hosting. For my needs, it’s just a better fit.

Update 2015: The screenshot I took for [the entirety of] this post vanished. I don’t even remember what it was about. That’s almost spooky.

Keep calm and carry on.

I use and rely upon rsync so much for my backups and general file transfers, its not even a joke anymore. Well, it could still be a joke if I were the funny type. I type rsync commands, does that count?

Aside: In much the same way Nagato Yuki began gracing computer hardware posts here, in 2007 Asahina Mikuru began accompanying compression posts. I think I was implying her Mikuru Beam was more effective than regular file compression algorithms. I’ve long since switched to xz from rzip that I mentioned in that linked post, though I admit discussing rzip in a post about rsync is rather awesome.

Making rsync s/faster/slower with compression

One feature rsync has over traditional cp is temporary compression. Files are automatically compressed before transfer, then extracted at the destination. Under certain circumstances, it works a treat.

As I failed to realise last night however, rsync with compression obviously has the same limitations as compressing regular files. Check out the table below showing some transfers I ran late last night over USB 2.0:

Data type	with -z	without -z	Diff
Anime video	13.45MB/s	29.41MB/s	- 45.73%
Assignment PDFs	43.12MB/s	28.13MB/s	+153.29%

Even when using gz, the impact on performance when using compression on losslessly compressed multimedia (do people still use that term?) files and textual data was rather jaw dropping. Lesson learned: if your data can be compressed well before transmission, and your bandwidth is more of a constraint than disk IO, memory or CPU, rsync with compression will yield great results. Otherwise, you may risk making your transfer run even slower!

For general usage

I’ve aliased rsync in my tcshrc twice, once to issue when dealing strictly with data that I know will compress well, and another for everything else:

  alias ry 'rsync -ahv --progress --stats'
  alias ryc 'rsync -ahv --compress --progress --stats'

I’m also looking into this --skip-compress option, which lets you define extensions that it won’t compress. This could be useful for defining losslessly compressed media we want ignored, and could negate the need for my two separate aliases. We’ll see!

After (what I assume, given their size) a couple of decades shading university students from the Sydney sun, the current round of construction at UTS has uprooted some of the most beautiful trees on campus. Barely a month ago, Clara and I were sharing some lunch at a table under those calming, leafy towers.

Judging from the leftover roots and irregular sized holes in the ground, the trees were cut down and not transplanted. What an absolute waste.

Merlin Mann’s Say it don’t spray it productivity talk on the OmniFocus site was a keeper. The following was the most salient part for me, other than blackberry jam. Hi; is your jam not berry enough? Hi. Wait, that wasn’t it.

Every time you realise a dependency, you get closer to what you need to do.

You don’t need to be a GTD (® David Allen Company 2001) or OmniFocus nerd to appreciate that all projects have dependencies, and identifying those dependencies is the first step to get out of a procrastination spiral. Is that the term? Hi; is there compost in your crisper? Vegetables lacking crispness? Hi. I can’t say how many times I’ve been stuck on how to proceed on a task, only to realise its because there’s a dumb (and relatively simple) thing I need to do first to get the ball rolling.

Which reminds me, I have an assignment due on Friday. Is there something meta about watching a video about productivity, rather than doing that? Big week.

I’m also just an unabashed fan of Merlin Mann, though you probably long since figured that out.

Yesterday, the Anime@UTS club held their Annual General Meeting, where we dissolved the executive team and voted in new people to run the club for 2014. This was my third AGM after 2012 and 2011, desu.

Last year, I was elected to be the official club webmaster, and this year I was humbled to be reelected unopposed, desu.

I took the job as webmaster expecting it to be about maintaining the club’s site, mail and backend infrastructure. While that’s certainly been the bulk of what I’ve done, I also wanted my legacy to include more historical significance. Recovering old posts and media, as well as cleaning up and cross posting existing material, its my hope the club site can become a living museum of what the club has done for so many people over the years. In a way, the webmaster is in a unique position to be a custodian of the club’s history, long after the current social network fad is over and we’re all “liking” things something else. At least, that’s my dream.

We said goodbye to some familiar faces. Alexander/Lexi Kemp has been the club president for most of my life at UTS; for me Alex was the club. He graduates at the end of the year, and we sincerely wish him all the best.

Clara’s years of faithful executive service also ended today. Her tireless efforts, sleepless nights making merchandise, organising and collating documents, communicating through social networks, taking minutes, creating art and card designs; few people have left such an indelible mark on the club in recent times as she has. Despite not being an “official” executive, I expect her to still play an integral part in the club’s activities; I already know I’ll desperately need her help with the latest site revisions.

When Seb invited us to a games afternoon and Korean BBQ yesterday to celebrate his birthday, we were too cheap to buy him a bigger keeki. We kid of course (or do we?)! Cindy bought an epic cake, we all had a wonderful time and Seb cut it with the imitable style, grace and sophistication we’ve come to expect from The Lord of The Potatoes.

Happy belated Birthday Seb, may your appealing reign continue to be grounded in win. After all, you’re no commentator :).