Rubenerd

All issues are transparent with the power of hingsight; but this question posed for Real World IT in ZDNet wouldn’t have even made that much sense in 2005:

I have a very simple question [for those] who either propagate or agree with the concept that monoculture is dangerous.

Okay, shoot :)

If an organization was running all Linux on their desktops and servers, would you tell them that they have a big monoculture problem and they should immediately convert half of their desktops and servers to Windows XP and Windows 2003 in the name of cyber diversity?

No. Next?

Monoculture is being singled out because it is seen as one of the key advantages of the incumbent – which in this case is Microsoft. The efficiencies of monoculture are so obvious that few organizations actually try to deviate from it. You would be hard-pressed to find a single CIO or IT Director who would go against the grain and choose to double their desktop complexity and associated support costs.

Conflating industry monoculture with that of a company installation is quite the stretch. I’m glad this train of thought went the way of my teenage angst. Which I was still living with back then.

Update: The original post wasn’t posted on April Fools. Although, this post was. So I could be lying about the original post. Or maybe this one. What about this one, but not that one? Which one am I? Is this what people read my blog for?

I follow the Arena blog among other fitness sites to maintain interest and motivation. What I wasn’t expecting was a detailed post on curbing anxiety masquerading as breathing for athletics.

I’m tempted to print this and attach to my desk. Emphasis added:

Breathing is the simplest and most natural thing we do, but under exertion, it requires coordination and awareness.

Breathing techniques help improve concentration and health in general, since we can use our breathing to learn how to control our emotional states more effectively, including those that might cause stress or anxiety.

This is worth reading again if you deal with anxiety. Still the best advice I’ve ever received is acknowledging that slow, deliberate breathing is incompatible with anxiety symptoms. With that, you can break out of the negative feedback loop and assess your circumstance with a clearer head. Which frees it for a cute swim cap.

This is also an exercise I’ve also been told about:

Sit on the edge of its chair with your back straight, your shoulders spread and your shoulder blades pulled downwards, your legs firmly on the floor and not crossed. Place one hand on your chest and the other on your stomach, breathe in through your nose and extend your stomach while keeping your chest still, then breathe out through your mouth, relaxing your stomach gently as if sighing. Using both your hands allows you to feel the movement better and to check you are breathing the right way.

Seamus Byrne may have written one of the best tweets of all time:

The most important lesson I’ve learned is to just let people not only be themselves but FIND themselves. Everyone deserves room to explore their uncertainty! And that’s where visibility and support matter most – letting people feel comfortable wherever their journey takes them.

Thomas Jensen emailed me a kind note, which was a pleasent change from all the anti-BSD trolls that have come out of the woodwork of late. He also asked some questions which I thought would be interesting to other people as well.

I recently discovered your blog, and was fascinated by the amount of posts you have managed to write. I tend to obsess over making all posts perfect, which is really counter productive.

Thanks! I know all too well the paralysis of perfectionism. I’d wanted to talk about my 8-bit Commodore computers for years but worried that I wasn’t qualified, and that I wouldn’t have all the right details. In the end writing is something I do for fun, and I’d rather have some ideas out there than none.

I noticed that the search feature on the archive page doesn’t work, seems to be blocked by CSP.

Fixed… I think! Thanks for the heads up. Turns out I had the CSP header referring to *.duckduckgo.com, which turned out not to be a catch-all for the root domain as well.

I was also wondering how you deal with images, I noticed they are not part of the git repository.

I don’t think I’ve ever talked about this before. I know I’m supposed to be using OrionVM’s Object Store or Amazon S3, or a CDN, or $kitchen_sink, but I just use nginx to load balance assets across a few VMs in a basic round robin configuration. Ideally these would be sitting in different regions, and use something like GeoIP to match people to the nearest server. But this works for my purposes, and I don’t like overcomplicating things.

Thomas also has a great site you should check out. He’s also migrating to a blog, which you can subscribe to.

So much of what Joe Gregorio discussed in 2014 still applies. Check out his manifesto post too.

I still think JavaScript was one of the worst things to happen to the Internet, but I also realise I live in the Real World. Vanilla JS and web standards would be far preferable to the cornicopia of incompatible, resource expensive, and brittle frameworks around today.

I’m trying to get better at calling out bad behaviour when I see it online. Over the weekend it was from an Australian Twitterer who was being harassed for pushing back on the idea that turmeric could cure her chronic illness.

I’ve been in the exact situation. Years ago I had someone suggest vegetable juice would be just as effective as the chemotherapy my mum was undergoing at the time, without the side effects and expense. I may have, not so subtly, told the person where they could shove the bottle.

In the case of the turmeric incident, they argued that they were acting in good faith, and the resulting replies were mean spirited. I soon questioned that, given the patronising tone of their messages and use of clichés like “triggered”. But even if it was entirely innocuous, how did they think such unsolicited and irrational medical advice would be received by someone in pain?

Good faith, motives, and intentions don’t trump sensitivity or situational awareness; what we would call reading the room. I’d go as far as to say you can’t propose something in good faith if you haven’t taken the time to understand the recipient’s circumstances. This really should be Being a Functional Human Being 101.

We soon realised they were just a bully, though. After mocking people for blocking them—widely considered by trolls to be an admission of defeat for some reason—they soon deleted their tweets and… blocked us. Like all bullies, they can dish it but cower when called out.

But there’s still a lesson here, and it’s something I’ve slipped up on too. For those who do have the best interests of others at heart, sometimes you just need to let people vent. They’re stressed, tired, and dealing with bad circumstances. Even the most well-intentioned advice can be received poorly, especially in limited text forums like Twitter where we don’t have other social cues or signals. The best responses I got during my mum’s illness were “Mate, that’s so shit” not “Have you considered…”.

Speaking of evergreens, Garrett Dash Nelson made an excellent website where you can wedge the Ever Given container ship somewhere else! Here she is stuck in Singapore’s Marina Bay:

And what she’d look like blocking off the ferry terminal across from the Opera House in Sydney:

It didn’t take long before a stranded container ship caused pundits to lament the fragility of global supply chains. Richard Stallman’s return to the Free Software Foundation raised questions about the organisation’s role, and how abuse is treated in FLOSS. COVID-19 has people asking why we couldn’t marshal as many resources towards other threatening diseases. Australia and America’s wildfires had us shouting for the world to please take climate change seriously.

Each of these stories generates interest in the circumstances that lead to them happening. I see people claim that such discussions are opportunistic, or shallow, or should have been raised before. Just like when I see Oreos, I don’t buy it.

It’s natural for people to want to know what lead to something, not just an isolated report. This is a good thing. It provides a valuable, and at times painfully rare, opportunity to drum up interest in something while people’s attentions are focused.

(I know that I’ve fallen into the trap of assuming that people’s motives are shallow and self-serving when they suddenly show an interest in something that I’ve been passionate or cared about for years. But while there are cynical people out there who will exploit such opportunities for their own gain, that’s true of everything).

How many people know more about the Suez Canal now, or appreciate just how much of their goods transit the world via these lumbering ships? What about vaccine distribution? Or just how far the free/libre/open source software community still has to go to address problems with abuse? If the answer to any of those is >1, then it’s a net positive. I miss BeOS.

Today’s Music Monday is Holo Bass’s fan song about Amelia Watson, Clara’s and my favourite Hololive EN character. It already came out months ago, but we may have had it on repeat again recently.

Her reaction in December was great, too.

In my continuing Commodore 128 series, today I’m taking a break from the hardware to discuss the very idea of troubleshooting 8-bit computers, and why there has been such a gap between these posts. I’ve been surprised at just how popular these have been, so I’m happy to shoot the breeze :).

In short, is a phrase with two words. Very little has happened since my last excited post about the 1571 disk drive and adventures with monitor stands. But it hightlights something that I’m only beginning to remember again when dealing with vintage tech.

But first, I have to mention just how much respect this experience has given me for people who create vintage tech videos! I avoided talking about Commodore computers for years here not just because trolls had attacked me for it before, but because shipping times can blow out troubleshooting by months. Those YouTubers must have a continous supply of parts on planes and boats around the world to feed their various projects, otherwise they’d have nothing to film. I hadn’t considered the fact that their videos can often seem out of order for what they’re working on, given they’re dependent on global supply chains.

This is only exaserbated by the troubleshooting process itself. A part you order online and have delivered a month later might not solve your problem, or it might introduce a new one. I’ve come tantalisingly close to fixing so many things before realising I need something else, and waiting another month or few weeks. No wonder other 8 and 16-bit enthusiasts I see have well-stocked boxes of various parts.

Don’t get me wrong, the Internet is the lifeline that’s keeping these machines running! I’m so thankful that it let me get in touch with someone in Hungary for replacement key mechanisms, and a chap in the UK for a VDC RAM upgrade, and a gentleman in South Australia who offered to send me the C128 in the first place! We can complain about how disrupted and slow global logistics are right now due to COVID and more evergreen reasons, but it still amazes me that it’s even possible. Nobody would open a brick and mortar Commodore nostalgia store now, so it’s either the Internet, a close local friend if you’re lucky enough, or nothing.

Right now I have the following in transit:

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

I now have, waiting in the wings:

• A small VGA upscaler that accepts VGA, composite, and s-video
• A CGA2RGB converter for the 80-column RGBI signal
• A new monitor stand that can also accomodate the 1571

None of these were expensive, though the shipping costs either eclipsed or matched the listing price for some of them. I guess living in an isolated geographic bubble has its pros and cons!