Rubenerd

A new study published in BMC Public Health has got me excited. The researchers conducted a study to ascertain whether the type of coffee had an impact on its reduction of chronic liver disease (CLD):

Coffee consumption has been linked with lower rates of CLD, but little is known about the effects of different coffee types, which vary in chemical composition. This study aimed to investigate associations of coffee consumption, including decaffeinated, instant and ground coffee, with chronic liver disease outcomes.

The study included just under half a million participants with “with known coffee consumption and electronic linkage to hospital, death and cancer records”. The results suggested similar results regardless of whether the coffee was instant, ground, or even decaffeinated! The researches concluded:

The finding that all types of coffee are protective against CLD is significant given the increasing incidence of CLD worldwide and the potential of coffee as an intervention to prevent CLD onset or progression.

I can add “helping my liver” to the list of reasons I drink decaf in the evening, along with being able to sleep afterwards, not feeding my anxiety, and to frustrate people who always reply with “I don’t understand what the point of decaf is!”

I was adding missing metadata to my 2005 post archive, like a gentleman, when I found one using the <cite> HTML tag which I forgot about entirely! The Mozilla Developer Network:

The <cite> HTML element is used to describe a reference to a cited creative work, and must include the title of that work. The reference may be in an abbreviated form according to context-appropriate conventions related to citation metadata.

I used to wrap these around anchor links everywhere to denote where I had read something, or sourced an image. It adds powerful semantic meaning to links:

"Don't quote me on that."
<cite>~ <a href="//example.com">example.com</a></cite>

HTML <blockquote> tags also have a useful inline cite attribute which directly ties a source to the text you’re quoting:

<blockquote cite="//example.com">
"Don't quote me on that!"
</blockquote>

I partly blame Markdown for me forgetting about these. When you’re used to its limited syntax and output, you naturally gravitate away from these other tools. I’m slowly moving back towards writing HTML for posts; snippets make the work of this easier anyway. I should share these at some point.

The broader and more interesting question though is why there is so much potential supporting infrastructure that isn’t being tapped. We don’t need social media and their closed networks to establish relationships between people, sites, and media with even just the most basic metadata and semantic markup. It could also help with licencing.

Today’s Music Monday is an urgent reminder for Cory Wong fans who might have missed the fact he’s selling limited-edition vinyl! The Optimist is already sold out, but his others are still available. He’s only shipping within the United States, so I used Australia Post’s ShopMate proxy service.

Cory Wong’s optimistic jazzy funk tunes have helped tremendously over the last couple of years of Global Troubles. Buy his stuff on Bandcamp or his website.

Here’s some RSS minutea for your Monday. For the longest time I’ve been exporting feeds with Dublin Core dc:date elements on each item:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0" 
	xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
	
<channel>
<title>Example</title>
<link>https://rubenerd.com/feed/</link>
<description>An example RSS feed</description>
<pubDate>Sat, 19 Jun 2021 19:07:53 +1000</pubDate>	
<dc:date>2021-06-19T19:07:53+10:00</dc:date>
	
<item>
<title>Hello, world</title>
<pubDate>Sat, 19 Jun 2021 19:07:53 +1000</pubDate>
<dc:date>2021-06-19T19:07:53+10:00</dc:date>
</item>
	
</channel>
</rss>

Validators recommend against duplicating semantics:

Your channel contains two elements which mean the same thing. This can occur in RSS 2.0 when you mix core elements and namespace elements. This can confuse news aggregators and RSS parsers, since there are no universally accepted rules about which element takes precedence.

Solution: Remove one of the redundant elements.

I assert they’re don’t mean the same thing, and are therefore not redundant!

The RSS 2.0 spec says this about pubDate:

Its value is a date, indicating when the item was published. If it’s a date in the future, aggregators may choose to not display the item until that date.

This isn’t analogous to Dublin Core’s date:

A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource.

In other words, pubDate is narrowly defined as publication date, whereas dc:date is broader in semantic scope. They may be used for the same thing, but one could imagine dc:date referring to an event the item describes, whereas pubDate is when that description was published. Think of an anime convention that has a cosplay content next Thursday, being announced in a post today.

(The same thing applies to Atom’s updated element, and Dublin Core’s dateSubmitted).

But what if they do mean the same thing? Calling them redundant ignores the question of precision. RSS 2.0’s pubDate (unfortunately) permits 2-digit years, as per RFC-822. dc:date mandates 4-digit years as per ISO 8601. pubDate is expressed with 4-digit years by convention, but it’s conceivable and entirely valid for dc:date to provide additional information than what pubDate has.

Which leads us to the justification for removing dc:date, so as not to “confuse news aggregators”. As someone who maintains and builds aggregators, I don’t buy this. I wouldn’t think anything introduced with namespaces would take precedence over a mandatory element like pubDate.

Does any of this matter? I mean, does anything, right!?

It’s been months since my last Commodore 128 post, so some of you might be wondering what’s up. Unfortuantely, nothing really has progressed.

In my post back in March I listed all the stuff I had in transit:

• A Commodore VIC-II to S-video cable
• C128 VDC 64 KiB memory upgrade, which arrived!
• Replacement 8563 VDC IC for the C128’s 80-column mode
• New switching power supply for my Plus/4

The other three have disappeared. Tracking numbers indicate they’ve been “handed over to the domestic carrier”, or indicate they’ve never left their country of origin. The most recent update was the third of March, which was already late when I wrote that post a month ago.

My Arena tote backpack was more than three months late owing to the current state of the world, so I’m holding out that these will arrive soon. The world is still going through a lot right now, and I’ve got plenty of other vintage computer projects to occupy myself in the interim.

This post was originally drafted in August last year. I didn’t post it for some reason, but I’m rectifying this now.

A tweet went by yesterday soliciting the best career advice you received in your twenties. Most of the replies followed the standard tropes of being yourself, seeking forgiveness over permission, not being afraid to take risks, the importance of perseverance, and to not take things personally.

Forgiveness over permission aside, all of these are true. But I also put them in the same bucket as well-meaning *nix people saying you should use FreeBSD because it’s a complete system compared to Linux that requires a distro. That might be true, but what does it mean? How is it actionable? How does it help people, today?

It reminded me of the Sunscreen Song:

Advice, is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts, and recycling it for more than it’s worth.

So here’s some of my own rehashed experience I wish people had told me. They may only apply if you have a similar personality or disposition!

• Build rapport with your lecturers. Ask them questions, make jokes, offer to grab coffee to go over assignments. You’ll learn useful stuff, including more honest takes than what they may give publicly. Being memorable is an asset that will help in sticky situations or group assignment disputes. Heaven forbid, you might even realise than some (cough) of them are people too! I count a few from UTS as friends now.

• Be vocal about your interests, especially if they’re related to the field where you want to go. Start a blog, or message about it on social networks. IT employers love seeing you be passionate about something, because it shows you’re genuine.

• Don’t take risks if they impact your mental health. I know some people who quit jobs or changed majors in a blaze of glory, and live off that high. I’ve always had the next job or study path lined up well in advance. There is absolutely no shame in that, despite what certain self-help gurus might suggest.

And most important of all:

• Put on your own oxygen mask before attending to others. Give yourself permission to do self-care, even if you need to blow off extra commitments to do so. Others won’t benefit from your good will, compassion, empathy, or generosity if you’re a nervous, tired wreck. Or worse, it can backfire.

I was searching for something related to pkgsrc, and came across some of my posts quoted on NetBSD Planet. Sure enough, my name is right there in in the footer, alongside some pretty significant names I recognise.

This made my week, I’m genuinely honoured! This also shows I need to write more about NetBSD and pkgsrc.

If this post made it to NetBSD Planet, it’d be a post about NetBSD Planet on NetBSD Planet. Which I’d then have to quote back here. Then if they quoted that, it’d be a NetBSD Planet post on a…

Speaking of coffee, Tony Naylor wrote a provocative (!!) article earlier this month about ten kitchen gadgets we don’t need. I feel it’s my responsibility to correct the record here on a few of them.

To start, need is a loaded word. It’s normal in places like Singapore to have very little in the way of kitchen utensils and appliances at all, becuase groceries are expensive and eating out is so affordable and quick. Even in Western kitchens, you could argue all you need is a fridge and microwave. Or if you can afford to not live out of microwave meals, maybe all you need is a sharp knife, pot, cutting board, and an induction hob.

With that lengthly disclaimer aside, let’s take a look at these and whether the author was correct ✓ or wrong ✗.

• Ice-cream maker. ✓ Weak agree. I don’t think you should eat much of this anyway.

• Honey dipper. ✓ Agreed, a spoon works fine.

• Coffee bean grinder. ✗ Hard disagree! Maybe the UK has a dearth of good coffee beans, but freshly roasted stuff that’s just been ground at home smells incredible and tastes great. Pre-ground has nothing on it.

• Bread maker. ✗ We don’t eat much bread, but I could see how they’d make fresh bread cheaper and more accessible. Sure, we can wash our dishes and clothes by hand, and only wear hand-weaved hats (hats?), but machines offer consistent quality when we’re tired or don’t have time.

• Garlic press. ✓ I’ll admit to being suckered into these. Tony is right, all they do is make mess. One of those flat, handheld cheese graters works much better.

• Manual spiraliser. ✗ Weak disagree. Eating vegetables is healthier than pasta. Anything you can get to make light work of making “vegetable” pasta should be encouraged.

• Pasta machine. ✗ Same as the bread maker, I could see these being useful if you eat enough of it.

• Poaching paraphernalia ✓ Hard agree. Poached eggs are boiled eggs with needless faffing.

• Electric juicer. ✓ Hard agree. If you can, eat fruit instead with their natural fibres and ruffage that help you process the insulin-spiking sugars.

That leaves a final score of 50%. I suppose that’s a pass.

There are still independent writers out there, blogging about cool stuff on their own domain, and with a simple theme that’s fast and easy to navigate! Today I’m checking out James’ Coffee Blog, which has a web feed here. I was going to make a pun about drip-feeding you espresso, but aren’t you glad I didn’t?

James got in contact with me last year about my posts and podcast episodes on coffee, mugs, and associated comestible apparatuses (apparatii?). He takes the craft of coffee making seriously, with reviews, lists of the best Scottish coffee roasters, and even does interviews with coffee industry insiders. I like the considered, yet conversational style of his posts, and his infectious enthusiasm. I’ll bet the posts they’re even more fun in printed form!

One thing he let me know today is that he’s even published an interactive coffee ratio calculator. I’ve found you can mostly wing it when it comes to brewing coffee, but you’d be amazed how much more flavour and less bitterness can be extracted with the correct ratios of water, coffee, and grind size. I came to my optimal ratio for my Aeropress machine and the beans I get shipped from the Blue Mountains through trial and error (and error, and error). This looks like a much more rational approach.

When I eventually (!) get around to publishing my OPML wire service thingy, he’ll be in it. And not just because he uses an Aeropress and a Hario V60, the two greatest mechanical devices for extracting caffeinated goodness.

John Oliver did an episode of his Last Week Tonight programme on Bitcoin back in March 2018. I thought it was worth watching again to see how much has changed in the intervening three years.

John’s opinion was that Bitcoin may have the technical potential to be faster and more secure than banks (we’ll get to those at the end), but that its practical use is tantamount to a pyramid scheme. He cited Bitcoin communities and companies that soaked their investors for millions of dollars with slick advertising, pump-and-dump tactics, and Ballmer-esque enthusiasm.

I’m glad he spent most of his time discussing the business and ethical realities at play here. There’s no point having a technically feasible system if its implementations and knock-on effects are unhelpful or harmful (see online tracking as another example). Externalities are a reality in any system, and denying their existence is a sure sign of immaturity.

Since 2018, the environmental impact of proof of waste (POW) work has become mainstream knowledge, with comparisons to the output of entire sovereign countries. Non-fungible trash (NFT) is now conning even more people, and claiming the scalps of industry professionals I used to admire and respect.

(POW really stands for “proof of work”, and NFTs are “non-fungible tokens”, not waste or trash. But I saw those alternative names floating around the Social Medias and thought they were brilliant. It’s truth in advertising)!

Since John filed that report, speculative blockchain humbug is now driving up the prices of silicon, networks, and storage devices in addition to ruining the lives of gamers with graphics cards. These devices are used in everything from personal computers, to medical devices and transport. I can see the appeal to make a quick buck, but redirecting these efforts in aggregate to pointless speculation makes no environmental, ethical, or business sense.

But it gets better! Even if we limit ourselves to the CIA triad yardstick of security, Bitcoin can only guarantee transactional Integrity. The ledger is public knowledge, so it’s hardly Confidential in practice. And thanks to laughably slow and energy intensive processing times, Bitcoin transactions can hardly be called Available. Even if we assumed it satisfied all of these, clearing houses and exchanges have fscked off with billions of people’s real money, and been the target of attacks themselves. I sympathise with the motivation to replace the banking system with something less brittle and more transparent. This ain’t it.

It’s rare that a situation is even sillier than what John and his team presented at the time, and now it’s even more bizarre. But that’s the reality in 2021.