Rubenerd

Phil Albinus writing for Advanced Trading:

Politicians in the US and other leading markets are proposing limits to the unchecked speed of HFT. Bloomberg reports that Iowa Senator Tom Harkin and Oregon Representative Peter DeFazio want a .03 percent tax on nearly every trade in nearly every market in the US. Even calls for a nickel fee on every HFT trade or cancelled order, which is a hallmark of HFT, are gaining momentum. If enacted, traders will have to ask themselves if they really needed to trade that fast.

Adding even just a tiny cost to these corrosive transactions would stop them in their tracks. Which, honestly, makes me worry that it’ll never happen.

Remember a fortnight ago when I couldn’t access Twitter through our TPG home internet connection?

Unfortunately it’s become a persistent problem. Each night around 19:00, Twitter suddenly stops responding. I can still ping and perform traceroutes, but neither my sister or I can use Twitter using our TPG connection on our phones or computers.

This evening, I was reassured (for want of a better word) to see people commenting about the issue on Whirlpool. Clearly this is affecting a large number of their customers, not just a few people in Hornsby.

Here’s hoping they get on top of this quickly. Hey, crazier things have happened.

For those observant readers out there, you may have noticed our beloved Rubi site mascot is now sporting her cute new winter seifuku! It may be Japan in winter… wait, that was incorrect in all the ways. I’ll try that bit again.

It may be summer in her native Hokkaido, but its the dead of winter in Australia now, and we thought her cheongsam would have been a little chilly.

Clara has really outdone herself this time in the detail. From Rubi’s unmatching thigh highs with bows and frills (matching legwear is the spawn of Satan) to the cute puffball on her scarf and her hair clips, I couldn’t be happier with her work d(^_^)b.

As it stands (and Rubi is!), Clara also has a new mascot for her weblog over at Kirinyan.net. I won’t spoil the surprise, you’ll just have to see for yourself. Suffice to say, its the closest she’s ever come to drawing something that’s as cute as her, and it even has a matching scarf!

You can read about Clara’s artistic process over on her blog. As someone who can’t draw anything, I found it fascinating.

Did you read that as the “grey” Mac Pro? Or “gray” Mac Pro for my fine American readers, some of whom may be living in the state where said device is proudly designed? If not, I encourage you to re-read the title.

Go ahead, I can wait.

Okay, I can’t. Let’s move on.

So here’s the thing

I don’t remember where or when, but at some point during my earlier childhood I went to a museum. I’d made it a habit of getting my parents to take me to museums, so much so that I’d often be told they didn’t have time to, or that I should be doing homework. I can just imagine my poor hapless parents pouring over a parenting advice book that explains how to encourage your children to do educational things, and wondering why it didn’t include a section on getting your child to do less educational things.

But I digress. In one the rooms of this museum (as they were called during the 1990s) there was a hulking huge blue column with seats wrapped around it. Turns out it wasn’t a stage prop from a science fiction film, it was in fact… a column with seats wrapped around it.

NEXT TO IT however, was a Cray supercomputer that looked almost exactly the same. I remember my young self staring up at this monstrously huge box, and feeling like I was staring at a giant sleeping robot. I didn’t understand the mathematical or technical complexity of such a device, but I could somehow feel a sense for how powerful this beast was. It was intimidating.

So here’s the newer thing

Fast foward to the annoucement of the 2013 Mac Pro at WWDC, known in 2013 as WWDC. This tiny cylinder, with its central cooling column and components wrapped around it… it doesn’t look like a rubbish bin at all to me. Well, maybe just a little. No, to me it looks like a futuristic version of what as a child I already thought looked futuristic.

In function and form, the Mac Pro looks and thermally works similar to a Cray supercomputer. It has hot components, it has a cooling fan at the top, and it draws the hot air across the components and out the top. The device is a cylider not for the flat boards inside, but for the shape of the cooling fan at the top.

As I discussed just prir to this iteration, I loved that I could take a giant ton of drives and tasks, throw it at my Mac Pro, and have storage and completed work thrown back at me. It was a hulking huge beast, and it stored and did all I needed it to.

The new Mac Pro… does one of these things. It only takes one Xeon, but its potentially a 12 core Xeon. It’s PCI-Express SSD would bring even better performance. It would be quieter and faster. After releasing huge sports cars, this would be equivilent to a Tesla; smaller with greater acceleration and deadly quiet. The pro-level graphics cards would only add to this grunt, so much so that there are two of them. I could have phrased that more better. That sentence also too.

Where it falls down for my use case is its lack of drive bays. I’m not sure whether I could say a “large” percentage of Mac Pro users, but certainly there were many of us utilising Mac Pros as smart NAS devices that could also be called upon to do work. With six thunderbolt ports, Apple seems to be encouraging us to attach a bucketload of external storage devices; precicely the cable spaghetti mess I’d been able to avoid by putting those external drives inside my current Mac Pro.

Apple are really, really good at skating to where the puck is going, not where it is. From a business perspective I can only speculate they did the research and decided this was what the market wanted, or would pay for. I for one am dissapointed at the lack of expansion, but I suppose we’ll wait and see what expansion options people come up with.

Written in 8 minutes. That’s prosperity, right there.

Rubi is the beloved mascot of Rubenerd, drawn by Clara. This is her story.

Biography

Rubi was born outside Sapporo, Hokkaido on her birthday. An intelligent and creative person, her warm and modest personality belies her otherwise shy and reserved nature.

The harsh winters and quiet home life of Hokkaido fostered an appreciation in Rubi for introverted activities that could be enjoyed indoors. These included reading, drawing, brewing exotic tea and coffee, tinkering with computers and listening to jazz music. A local athletic centre with a heated indoor pool offered her plenty of excercise, which was important given her penchant for eating lots of shiroi koibito!

After high school, she studied IT and media on exchange at the University of Hong Kong. The bustling city with its Anglo-Sino culture had a profound effect on her. She learned Canonese and English, attempted Mandarin, and developed a taste for Chinese and German cuisine. She also travelled to see her precious few friends in Singapore, Incheon and Taipei, forever cementing a love of travel and East Asian cultures in her soul.

Upon returning to Sapporo, Rubi became interested in anime and manga, and was fortunate enough to be rendered as an adorable mascot by the equally talented and smart Clara. She’s posed in a cute purple seifuku with the site’s logo; a highly moé Chinese New Year sukumizu; and her favourite tactical cargo shorts that can hold all her electronic gear!

Rubi now graces all the pages at *Rubenerd*. She resides in a comfortably well appointed OrionVM cloud instance, quite the upgrade from her studio VPS apartment.

Information

Key	Value
Name	Rubi
Age	Early 20s
Birth stone	Take a guess
Favourite food	Shiroi koibito biscuits, curry udon
Favourite drink	Green tea lattés, cappuccinos with extra chocolate powder
Favourite anime/manga genres	Romantic comedy, science fiction
Favourite animal	Alpacas!
Favourite clothes	Unmatching thigh highs, socks and boots!

This is a common problem I come across when writing:

print() on closed filehandle OUTFILE at ./something.pl line 24, <INFILE> line 46.

99% of the time for me, the problem is attempting to load a file in a directory that doesn’t exist.

Last year we were informed Twitter were deprecating their 1.0 API, with plans to remove it entirely. A few days ago, this happened.

Fellow Sydneysider and friendly guy Gavin Costello reblogged some details about the apps that have broken for him. So far, I’ve been able to avoid issues entirely with iOS, though that’s most likely due to only using TweetBot as an avenue for tweets on it.

What makes me sad is all we’ve lost. See that orange RSS icon in the Camino address bar above? Among perhaps more positive chances such as OAuth and SSL being mandated, we lost RSS, Atom and my beloved simple JSON query.

When I first started using Twitter in 2007, I was able to subscribe to people’s Twitter streams just as I would a blog or other news service with a web feed. Today, one has to be authenticated to even view public information.

I’ll be blunt; this makes me worry about the future viability of the platform. Companies that do this rarely revert, and eventually fade into irrelevance. It’s shocking to me the team at Twitter are either blissfully unaware of this, or choose to ignore it. They’ll pay the price when people slowly move from it, and we’ll pay when we lose this once wonderful service.

Such is the circle of web life.

Back in January, Jeremy from Singapore gifted me a Princess of the Crystal anime fig from my Amazon Wishlist. I was blown away by his generosity, and couldn’t wait to display her on my shelf. Mawaru Penguindrum was one of my favourite series in quite a while, and her character was beyond awesome.

Unfortunately, according to My Figure Collection and other sources, Good Smile Company ran into issues with the fig, and had to delay shipping numerous times. First we were told I’d be getting her in April, then May. Jeremy and I held out, but I saw numerous comments from people who’d given up and asked for refunds.

Fast foward to today. After our morning café trip, Clara and were greeted by a gigantic shipping box. It’d been so long, and we order so much stuff from overseas, we honestly couldn’t remember what it could be.

It’s a tired cliché, but the wait was worth it. She’s not my biggest fig in terms of scale, but she’s definitely the biggest and heaviest! From her signature hat (thank you Seb!) to her billowing black and red skirt, she’s certainly one of the prettiest and most detailed figs in my collection. The most pressing concern is where abouts we can fit her!

My camera has quite the backlog of images, so stay tuned for a more detailed review with photos soon. I’m so happy (and relieved!) to finally have her. Thank you Jeremy for your generosity and patience, and to Clara for her photographic skills :).

Talk about being late to the party! Checking out the Wikipage page for my favourite terminal emulator, I saw this:

After aterm was merged into rxvt-unicode, it is now the preferred terminal emulator for the AfterStep window manager.

Sure enough,
on the Aterm site:

January 1, 2008 – aterm 1.0.1 merged into urxvt!

aterm development will now concentrate on urxvt, so aterm is now deprecated.

Why was I not informed!?

Aside from having a name I found rather clever and silly, aterm will always hold a special place in my memories. While looking for RAM saving alternatives to Xterm and desktop environment terminal emulator, aterm still managed to do some pretty nifty pseud-composting. With a trivial amount of effort, aterm could be made really, really pretty. I mean, Terminal.app level of pretty.

Eventually I moved to mrxvt for the convenience of tabs, then to urxvt when I really did need Unicode support. Almost tempted to install aterm in Homebrew just to see if my config files from yesteryear still work (^_^).

Without too much time before WWDC 2013 begins in San Francisco, I figured this was the last time I could pontificate and hypothesise about the potential future of the Mac Pro. Nobody has talked about this, so it’s a perfect opportunity.

They’re gorgeously functional machines

The Mac Pro is an interesting odd man out in Apple’s lineup. In an ocean of iPads and iPhones and iMacs and Mac Minis with their consumer hardware and enclosed batteries, the Mac Pro practically begs to be tinkered with, upgraded and extended.

I mean this literally. As I blogged extensively about in 2012, I’ve build dozens of PCs in my time, and NO case I’ve ever purchased, seen and/or used match the pleasure of upgrading a Mac Pro. There are no messy cables, no awkward catches or screws. The hard drives mount on sleds, the RAM and Xeon CPUs rest on daughter cards that just slide in and out.

It’s a thoroughly Apple machine, with every last detail teased out and perfected. Competitors and Apple detractors scoff and such user expeirence detail, but it really comes through in their products. Apple cares, and few others do, it’s as simple as that.

Or at least, it used to be that simple

Problem as, as many nerds have lamented over the last few years, the Mac Pro has been sorely neglected. Intel’s Xeon architectures have continued to advance in leaps and bounds, and the Mac Pro has stood behind, watching the future fade into the distance.

From podcasts to blogs, I’ve heard several theories as to why this is. The current Xeon platform can’t easily transfer dual Thunderbolt/DisplayPort interfaces on PCI Express. Apple were concerned about releasing a machine capable of driving a retina display. To say nothing of the problem with bare fans that prevented their manufacture and distribution in Europe of late.

Then last year, in a phrase that has received more scrutiny by the Mac tech nerd press than anything in a long time, Tim Cook announced there “would be something” for us fans of the Mac Pro this year. Not that there would be a new Mac Pro, but that we’d be delighted by what they have in store for us.

I share similar jitters with my fellow Macheads.

Unapologetic win

My MacBook Air is my sleek little starship I take around with me, but my Mac Pro is my space station. No more masses of enclosures, cables and power bricks everywhere, just a single monster tower with all my hard drives and data, and a gigabit Ethernet cable to talk to it.

I like the analogy of a space station. It doesn’t need to be nimble, small or sleek, because it’s just sitting there being full of awesome. The little starships in my family fly around the place with us, then return home to dock with the Mac Pro to back up their data, transfer downloaded podcasts and other media.

Assuming Apple replaces the Mac Pro with something at the Moscone Centre today, I can only hope they maintain what’s so wonderful about this machine for their power users, scientists, media editors, developers, tinkerers and data hoarders (ahem). It’s an unapologetic UNIX workstation that can swallow all the drives and tasks we throw at it, executed with the hardware design and elegance only Apple bothers with.

I suppose we’ll soon see what they have in mind. Mind open Ruben, mind open!