Rubenerd

I wrote this on a post yesterday about annoying TV tropes:

It’d also get me that they’d bring the cup to their mouth to drink without looking at it. Maybe some people are able to pull off this manufear without making a mess, but I sure can’t. It looks unnatural and weird.

You know what else looks unnatural and weird? Manufear! What is that word? What does it mean? Or more to the point, where did it come from? I assumed I wrote the word maneuver, but this clearly isn’t. My brain must have been in a weird place when I typed that out.

I do like it though. It sounds like an abbreviation of manufactured fear. Like a TV actor effortlessly drinking coffee from an empty cup.

There’s a specific online video conferencing system that has had a rough time with reliability over the last year when compared to other platforms. It might start with M and end with icrosoft Teams. I consider it the classic Windows experience, only with outages in lieu of blue screens, broken updates, and corrupted FAT disks.

But there’s been an interesting phenomena associated with these downtime reports. People clamour on their support Twitter account to ask for the service to remain down for longer. For each person asking tongue-in-cheek, there’s certainly someone asking seriously, or are delighted and relieved that the service is down.

Think of how many other systems people buy that they don’t want working. Granted the adage states that those who choose and buy enterprise software are rarely the ones who are subjected to its daily use, but it’s a grim assessment of people’s feelings!

I wrote last November about video conferencing fatigue. There’s a growing body of evidence that such systems take more cognitive load than physical interaction, text-based chat, and phone calls.

Some video conferencing is useful, but it’s applied too broadly for people’s mental well-being and productivity. Managers aren’t entirely to blame here; COVID caught us by surprise, and software companies have billed them as a panacea for remote work, which they absolutely are not.

I think this attitude towards Teams also has an element of let me do my job. I’m lucky that I work at a company without micro-managers, but I’m sure there are others who’d rather do their work than have to waste time checking in with a manager to discuss the tasks they’re not doing because their energy is being spent on dozens of video calls.

This period of time we’re living through now will be analysed for decades. I’ll be interested to see where psychology takes us in understanding these things. Video conferencing software brought us closer together when we had to be far apart, but they bubbled up so much more to the surface. I suspect a large percentage of the population will be glad to be rid of it once normalcy—if and when that happens—eventuates.

Rachel Obordo compiled a fun list of people’s frustrations about TV shows, and the first one was:

Empty coffee cups. You can tell from the way people hold them that there’s no liquid in them, never mind hot coffee – surely they could at least fill them with water?

Many, many times this! It’d also get me that they’d bring the cup to their mouth to drink without looking at it. Maybe some people are able to pull off this manufear without making a mess, but I sure can’t. It looks unnatural and weird.

And subtitles:

Please complain about bad subtitles as often as you can. I translate STs for a living. Sometimes my work is really good. Sometimes less so, when I am asked to translate 1200 STs overnight, for a Chinese/Korean/Spanish etc video and with the help of an English ST file that is often even less intelligible than the Chinese/Korean/Spanish etc audio. BaZu007

Funnily enough, the best subtitles I’ve ever seen were from anime fansub communities, who were doing it for free. Modern anime distribution is still pretty good, but none go into that same level of detail, complete with live footnotes and avoiding covering up something important on-screen. Some would even translate signs.

My other peeve was the fact that phones always ring at a convenient moment when people aren’t talking. Millennials like me hate phone calls precicely because they’re such a disruptive incursion.

I hear so many random things in this specific coffee shop.

My mortgage broker is telling me to chill, it’s fine, everything is okay. Yeah nah, if everything is chill, I wouldn’t be so stressed out!

Someone else was talking about smart speakers:

I hear you [heh! –ed] but don’t like that it listens to me.

Another person who’s in tune with their surroundings:

I see a red light and go aaaaaaaa!

And some life advice disguised as sports discussion:

Why would I bet on a losing team?

Josh Nunn of The Geekorium had some feedback on my post about the two kinds of comparison sites:

I wonder if the reason there are fewer experts putting out their opinions on software and doing these comparisons is in part because there’s no incentive. Comparing nginx to Varnish you’re just opening yourself up to arguments, vitriol, and legions of fanboys descending on your writing to pick it apart for not choosing their favourite. And unless you’re an expert, what you say is just going to be ridiculed if you’re not 100% correct.

Rebecca Hales and Jonathan H. chimed in with similar thoughts. Chances are you’ve gone through the same thing if you’re reading this by daring to have an opinion based on experience and facts.

I hadn’t considered this angle at all. I had dismissed the second kind of unhelpful technical comparison site as “churnalism”:

These are written quickly and in bulk with barely a superficial understanding of the topic. They’ll mention software A, software B, then some form of in conclusion, both are good options. This isn’t helpful either.

I still think this applies to most mass-produced sites I read, but just as reasonable is the idea of people so jaded and exhausted from experience that they hedge their bets in an attempt to not be targeted. It’s a grim indictment of Internet culture if true.

I didn’t blog about BSD for years because I was burned out from Linux trolls; and before then, my Linux posts attracted Windows trolls. IT people are a fun bunch.

I have an unofficial rule here that I share cute birds who makes it to Wikipedia’s featured picture of the day. This spotted wood owl was photographed by JJ Harrison in Pasir Ris Park in Singapore, no less!

From the Wikipedia article:

The spotted wood owl (Strix seloputo) is an owl of the earless owl genus, Strix. Its range is disjunct; it occurs in many regions surrounding Borneo, but not on that island itself.

Simon Whistler and his team do such a great job distilling disparate topics into 15-20 minute segments on his various YouTube channels. Megaprojects remains my favourite, though I’ve also been binging Sideprojects with Clara of an evening. Making topics interesting and approachable to a broad audience, especially with a bit of humour, is a skill I’ve yet to master after a decade and a half of blogging and speaking.

(Clara also has a thing for dapper men with English accents, and I’m sure it still kills her inside that I sound like a weird Australian who grew up overseas. But I digress)!

I just finished their episode on submarine cables, and wanted to add a few points:

• It’s true that cost and speed are the principle reasons for using cables over satellites for most workloads, but just as important is latency. Satellites and comms have improved from those awkward exchanges between correspondents on TV, but it will always be more variable than a dedicated, direct path of light.

• Just as impressive as the physical effort to plan, lay, and maintain submarine cables are the standardised protocols that make them all work. I think it’s an underappreciated—and frankly beautiful—triumph of humanity that we can all agree on specific implementation details, regardless of location, business, or worldview.

• Simon pontificated about a future where we may move on from cables. Satellite constellations may prove to get us part of the way there, but short of a breakthrough I think we’ll be using cables for the bulk of comms for many more decades. The Trekkie in me wants to say microwormholes and teleportation.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

14:00 – A discussion about how my fervour for independent writing hasn’t translated into improving podcast imposter syndrome! Also RSS, distribution, how social networks have convinced people to only write for them, and related ruminations. Thanks for your patience while I produced this one :).

Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Released May 2021 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts; this one notwithstanding. Hosted graciously by the Internet Archive.

Subscribe with iTunes, Pocket Casts, Overcast or add this feed to your podcast client.

Suisei is my favourite Japanese Hololive character, and this song she released a month ago has been looping in my head ever since. May it find it into your ears and mind this Music Monday too :).

Picture this: you’re browsing through a forum, mailing list, or social network, and someone posts that they’re trying a BSD, illumos, Linux, or another operating system they’re not familiar with. The community rallies around this convert, and offers words of encouragement and technical assistance.

All goes well, until an eagle-eyed reader chances upon something that causes them, to use a phrase popular in Singapore at the moment, umbrage. Buried in dmesg output, or a screenshot, is evidence that the OS the person installed is running in… hold your hats… a virtual machine. And boy do they let the poster know their disdain.

Gatekeeping of this nature is as rife as it is baffling. Not only is it counterproductive to mock people for testing a new OS in a VM, but the entire premise of this elitism is technically flawed. If you’re going to be pedantic about something, at least take the time to be correct. Think of the other pendants!

I always read pedant as peanut. Maybe that’s why so many people have allergies to them.

Open source software communities, especially those not associated with large corporate sponsors, don’t have the luxury of big advertising budgets, training programmes, and social media campaigns. Someone coming to you, of their own volition, to learn about your OS is fantastic. Nurturing someone today could mean a contributor or advocate tomorrow. Driving them away because they had the audacity to share their experience in a VM is neither useful or nice.

Virtual machines are perfect for trying new OSs, precisely for their composability, ability to rollback learner mistakes without damage to the host system, and being able to leverage existing hardware. There’s a reason VMs are popular in academia and education: they let you start with a clean slate and focus on picking up the fundamentals. I don’t begrudge anyone for wanting to avoid the potential pitfalls of dual booting, especially if it’s your primary or only machine. VMs are fun, convenient, and inexpensive.

But even leaving all that aside, the worst kept secret in IT today is that the bulk of Unix-like OSs run in virtual machines! They’re in containers, cloud instances, VPSs, or even in on-premise hypervisors. A bhyve VM on FreeBSD, or a VMware VM on Workstation, or any number of other VMs, can even be migrated and booted elsewhere. Knowing how an OS will perform within a virtualised environment, from networking to memory use, is also valuable skill. How does your target database handle not having direct IO, for example? What other considerations, from performance to security, must you factor in?

Professionals use VMs for everything from building, testing, and production. People like me run the hypervisors to make it work!

Which leads us to the real reason why these delightful people try and take down newbies starting with a VM. They’re seen as easy takedowns in the zero sum game world they see. You can’t be a serious computator if you’re running it in a VM on your laptop, right? Those people likely won’t ever be swayed by facts and logic, so instead I’d propose that serious computators don’t discriminate over such an arbitrary metric. They’re bigger than that.