Rubenerd

I dislike freeways, and not just because expanding them doesn’t work. But at least sometimes we can get some parkland after all the disruption that comes from their construction. Like getting a flower from someone after they’ve clubbed you with a wet fish. Some Monty Python references work better than others.

This proposed park underneath a ring road in Coventry in the UK looks great. It’d turn this part of a walking and cycling commute from a dingy chore to something I’d look forward to.

My only question when I see such plans is: how will the greenery grow without direct sunlight? I’d long assumed the reason why land under so many freeways were barren wastelands was owing to plants not being able to grow there. Is there foliage that can thrive in indirect sunlight? If so, those barren wastelands are a choice by their respective councils or governments, which we need to tackle.

Singapore is famous for all its trees, vines, and gardens they meticulously plant around freeways and other road infrastructure. Now that I think about it, a lot of that would be out of direct sunlight, too. Any horticulturists out there?

(It’s perhaps a bit ironic that the closest I’ve ever come to finishing writing a light novel had horticulturists as the protagonists. You’d think I’d know this stuff).

Website chatbots can be useful for phone-shy or time-poor introverts, or supremely frustrating depending on their implementation. And not the good kind of supreme, like The Supremes or supreme vegetarian pizza with pineapple. I like pineapple, because I’m not a monster.

I’ve written before about bad chatbots that display fake unread notifications within a red circle, akin to a phone screen. It’s an anti-pattern designed to irritate you enough to want to clear it… but then they’ve hooked you into an interaction you wouldn’t have otherwise engaged in.

Worse than these though are what I’m dubbing tabjacking. The page will change title every second, like this:

Large IT Company Page Title
(1) New Messages!
Large IT Company Page Title
(1) New Messages!

Leaving aside the grammar offence committed here, it’s enough to drive me bananas. Or pineapples, or tomatoes, or any other fruit. Doubly so when you’re on a client demo call and…

(1) New Messages!

… keeps blinking in a tab out the corner of my eye.

Frontend web developers: I know you have a lot on your plate being forced into making the web bad either through personal malice or via the uninformed decisions of management, but if you could sneakily not push those changes into prod, we’d all appreciate it!

Maybe the web needs some good ol’ fashioned civil disobedience, packaged into NPM so they don’t need to think too hard about it.

The German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle (RSS feed here) published a great article yesterday on the history of electronica:

Electronic music is sometimes labeled robotic and one-dimensional, music that can only be enjoyed with the help of alcohol in a dark nightclub. This cliché extends to the idea that the genre originated in the 1980s when synthesizers and drum machines became integral to pop music.

But electronic music has had a long and diverse influence on the modern musical canon, a topic explored by the exhibition “Electro. From Kraftwerk to Techno.”

The article and exhibition discuss the origins of electronic music from the etherophone/Theremin from the late 19th century, all the way through to the Düsseldorf-based Kraftwerk in the 1970s, and modern electronic-dance music (EDM). Give it a read if you have some spare time.

I’ve long been interested in electronica, both from the novelty of the sound and technical feats that enabled it. Prior to electricity, and later the integrated circuit, these sounds would have never been heard before, much less imagined or believed. How often does an artform come along where people are literally getting to play with mediums of expression that would have been impossible to conceive or develop before? That’s cool!

It always surprises people to hear a jazz guy like me wax lyrical about electronica, but there are similar qualities that captivate me about both. They both emphasise experimentation and improv. The reason why the latter necessitated an abbreviation but not the former eludes me. Even jazz was seen as unfamiliar, edgy, and unpredictable when it burst onto the scene.

That said, there’s a lot of bad electronica out there… at least, in my accurate opinion. I can’t stand dubstep, and most EDM grates harder than an imported parmesan. Anders Enger Jensen, Kraftwerk, and the legendary Pet Shop Boys (sample above) are easily my favourites though.

I think the jazz electronic fusion is also an avenue that hasn’t been explored enough. Electroswing has shown you can blend the two, but I’m more interested in people using synths and electronic instrumentation in jazz as opposed to sampling the latter. Like Ben Sidran did for a few of his 1980s albums. Anyone know of good examples?

On Sunday the 12th of December 2021, my little sister Elke married her long time partner and soulmate Jesse. The outdoor ceremony couldn’t have had more perfect Sydney weather, and the well rehearsed reception and evening went off without a hitch. And did I mention garden alpacas!?

It was everything we’ve come to expect from them. Dedicated and creative, respectful and cheeky. Their energy and love for life was on full display, and it was spectacular.

It seemed at times like the world was conspiring against the event. Multiple Covid-related cancellations, venue consternations, family and friends scattered interstate and around the world, and to top it off her inconsiderate brother having to go in for surgery a week before!

I mentioned in my recent post saying farewell to our beloved uncle Dave that I admired his and my late mum’s sibling relationship, and I’m realising again now just how lucky that Elke and I have inherited the same thing. I can only assume it’s our excellent genes.

But the event also gave me time to reflect on how much Elke has touched my life. My earliest childhood memory was my parents coming home with her from the hospital. I’d like to think I was the dependable if goofy older brother, but the truth was she was as much my rock during all our family trauma, if not more. Okay, definitely more. I’ve always been in awe of her fiery spirit and attitude, even if I haven’t always been the best at expressing it.

Jesse… where do I start. He’s all of this too, and together they make a formidable pair. His infectious laugh and smile. His incredible singing voice, curiosity, and raw talent, which I know will carry him far. His excellent hair (damn it)! He’s personable, intelligent, and genuine. I couldn’t think of a better person to take care (and be taken care of by!) my sister.

(I mean, clearly Elke thought so too, or they wouldn’t have got married. Hey, there’s the Ruben awkwardness coming in, if it hasn’t yet been on full display during this post)!

I know these emotions make no rational sense, given the event was formalising an arrangement we were all used to by now. But seeing them together that night was something else. I caught sight of her at the dinner table, and I swear I saw our mum in her profile for a second. I know she’d be as proud as my dad Rainer and I are with what she’s achieved, and the woman she’s become.

I wish them all the best in their future together. You’re more of an inspiration than I could ever articulate. ♡

This is among his best in a while:

Picard morality tip: If one side of a conflict preaches purity of bloodline above communal benefit for all, join the other side.

I was having a chat with Clara about freight companies, like all reasonable partners do on their weekends. I said that I thought a specific one was the best, to which she responded with all the times they’d delayed or missing shipping dates for her.

Both of us were telling the truth, and our opinions were based on the same facts and circumstances. Best was the only word that divided us!

Best is weird. It can be taken as an absolute, such as saying that something is the best it can possibly be, as Clara thought. It could merely describe the best a set offered, like I was saying. Taken to another extreme, it could be the best of a bad bunch, which flatly contradicts the first use. Except when it doesn’t.

This is the best post I could write about it in a few minutes. Or was it?

Speaking of Keanu Reeves, this clip from a Verge interview was spectacular:

Interviewer: They made NFTs for the new movie [..]

Keanu: Strokes beard

Interviewer: When you think about the concept of digital scarcity and things that are, y’know, can’t be copied…

Keanu: That are usually reproduced? Laughs

I caught myself reading Microsoft Bookshelf 96 on my Pentium tower again last week, like a gentleman. The random article of the day talked about Benelux, the customs and economic union between the Low Countries of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. I always thought it was a clever name.

Little did I realise that they have an official logo, which you should see below if your browser supports SVG. Are there any conteporary browsers that still don’t?

The dots on the left are an interesting stylised version of the geographic area, and the pallete has at least one colour from each member state. We’ve got:

• Belgium: 🇧🇪
• The Netherlands: 🇳🇱
• Luxembourg: 🇱🇺

I only noticed recently that red is the only colour they have in common, unless you count the Dutch royal blue and Luxembourgish cyan as simply blue. Da Ba De, Da Ba Di.

I reckon it’d look way more awesome typeset in Helvetica though! That said, wouldn’t that make more sense for the arrangement Switzerland has with Liechtenstein?

I’m also only but a typeography and logo enthusiast, but there’s something about a grid of dots that also looks decidedly European. I don’t know why.

This is one of the better retorts to “the cloud is just someone else’s computer” I’ve seen. I saw a few different posts mention it.

The web didn’t shut down recently because one of Amazon’s US East data centres went offline. It shut down because architects didn’t build redundancy into their stacks. Putting your eggs in one basket, regardless of what that basket is made from, is a bad idea.

I don’t talk often about my work here, but I have meetings with clients running their own colo stacks that go down more often than these well-publicised outages, and those using cloud providers that survive them without customer-facing downtime. Then you have people like Jason Tubnor who run FreeBSD bhyve stacks on their own tin without any problems for years, and McDonalds that hosted all their kiosk images on S3 without redundancy.

Maturity comes from realising that everything breaks, everything goes down, and everything can’t be relied upon. How you deal with it, as Keanu would say, is up to you. How does your stack handle a subset of it disappearing? Does it have any form of failover? What technical and human contingencies have you got in place when it does need to run in a degraded state? Because it will, someday, for reasons that may be entirely outside your control. It’s turtles all the way down.

I do agree though that centralisation of so much Internet infrastructure in the hands of a couple of providers is a bad thing. If only there were alternatives to them!

When did websites stop saying this:

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I suspect it’s another Silicon Valley tick everyone has internalised, like prefacing sentences with so.