Rubenerd

I’d thought I take a different tack on my birthday today to talk about a little fella who’s been with me for more than a few of them!

My family has had this little soapstone hippo for as long as I can remember. His familiar, warm face has always greeted us every time we needed dental floss, cotton buds, Tiger Balm, and other washroom paraphernalia. My dearly-departed mum bought him for one of the first houses she moved into with my dad, and he was ferried around all the family homes in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and back to Sydney.

He was there to see my brush my teeth before my first day of school, and my high school graduation. He saw my sister and I deal with acne and teenage breakdowns, practicing school speeches, learning how to shave without cutting off my nose. I spoke to him on more than a few occasions. I’ll bet he could tell stores.

I asked my dad if I could take Mr Hippo with me when I moved out with Clara, and he was only too happy to oblige. We don’t have much in the way of family heirlooms, but it’s fun thinking he’s been there for two families now.

He briefly spent time in my IKEA Billy bookcase holding USB keys and adaptors. But the bathroom is where we needed his grinning, reassuring face the most, when getting ready for work or taking on a day. Morning Mr Hippo!

His exterior has aged over time, and he developed a small chip on the corner of his lip from one of the Singapore moves. But then, we’ve both aged during that time :).

I got an email pop up on my phone:

Technical debt so bad I quit my job

Seeing that subject line made me jump out of my skin. Surely our company doesn’t have technical debt that bad that one of my colleagues quit! Who was it? Which department? Did they give notice? Am I suddenly going to get work on my birthday!?

It was a hypothetical from the GoRails website.

This is not as embellished as you might think.

Teller: Good morning sir.

Customer: It sure is! How about that weather, though?

Teller: Oh my yes sir, frightful. But it’ll be easing soon.

Customer: Splendid, that would be rather delightful.

Teller: Indeed sir. How may I assist you today?

Customer: Well you see, I’m in a spot of bother. A bit of a pickle. And I’m not sure from whence I should start.

Teller: Is it a financial matter, sir?

Customer: No, something far more fundamental. The name on my account is wrong.

Teller: The name on your account, sir?

Customer: Yes, the name. The middle one, to be precise.

Teller: The middle account, sir?

Customer: No, the name. My middle name. It’s wrong.

Teller: On the account sir?

Customer: Correct.

Teller: I see. Was this for a new account?

Customer: Indeed. I applied for a brokerage account at your reputable establishment online on one of those newfangled computers. But it was the darndest thing… upon receiving my acceptance letter, it had my name written as “Middle”.

Teller: Your middle name, sir?

Customer: Yes, my middle name.

Teller: And what had it been set as, sir?

Customer: “Middle”. It had been set as “Middle”.

Teller: I understand sir, your middle name. But what was it set to?

Customer: It was set to “Middle”. As in, the word.

Teller: I see sir, so your name was set as Middle. That’s strange. Which name was set as Middle?

Customer: The middle one.

Teller: I understand sir, it was erroneously recorded as “Middle”. But which name? Your surname?

Customer: No, no. Listen carefully. My middle name was set to “Middle”. And my middle name isn’t “Middle”.

Teller: Your middle name isn’t “Middle”, sir?

Customer: Correct.

Teller: I see sir. So you wish to change your middle name?

Customer: I want the middle name on the account to be my correct middle name.

Teller: Changing your middle name requires a Change of Name form sir, with a notorised copy of whatever documentation you have from the state registry.

Customer: The state registry?

Teller: Correct, sir. From when you changed your middle name.

Customer: No, you don’t understand. That’s not my middle name. It never was my middle name. The account was created with the wrong name.

Teller: The wrong middle name, sir?

Customer: Yes, the wrong middle name. My middle name is “Michael”.

Teller: You’d need a Change of Name form to change that sir.

Customer: I’m not sure you’re understanding me. I didn’t change my name, I want it fixed to what it’s supposed to be.

Teller: How did it get set as Middle, sir? Did you enter the wrong name when you registered the account?

Customer: I did not, I entered my middle name as “Michael”. I wouldn’t have written it as “Middle”. That’s not my name.

Teller: Maybe you were confused or made a mistake, sir?

Customer: Normally I’m willing to entertain a mistake on my part, but not in this case. I uploaded all the supporting documentation your web form asked for, including bank statements. They all clearly show my middle name as Michael.

Teller: I’m not sure I follow, sir?

Customer: What I’m saying is, I wrote out my full name, with “Michael”. Your systems verified my name was correct with the supporting documentation I provided. Had I typed “Middle” as my middle name, this verification check would have failed, wouldn’t it? Because it wouldn’t have matched!

Teller: I’m not sure, sir.

Customer: So somewhere between me completing your web form, and me getting a confirmation letter, my name was transcribed wrong. Either that, or by some fluke I did write my name as “Middle” absentmindedly, and your ID verification system is flawed. Frankly, I’m not sure which to be more scared of.

Teller: Our systems are of the highest standard, sir. I’m sure you just wrote the name wrong.

Customer: At this stage I don’t care who’s at fault. I just need the name fixed. Can you do that for me?

Teller: You’d need a Change of Name form to do this, sir.

Customer: But we’ve been over this! I haven’t changed…

Teller: No sir, not to worry, I lodged it electronically while we were talking. And I’ve already got the result back.

Customer: Oh good, finally! What does it say?

Teller: The response says: Request for Name Change Denied. Documentation doesn’t match.

My concerns with the Free Software Foundation, their licences, and how they conduct their advocacy, are well documented here. But Richard Stallman’s announcement of his re-admission into the FSF casts serious doubt on the judgement of the board and the viability of the project.

You can sign this open letter which also provides more details. We all need to send a sharp, immediate, and thorough rebuke of this decision.

For those of you who have donated to the FSF in good faith, I’d implore you to redirect to one of these organisations instead:

• Open Source Initiative
• Open Source Technology Improvement Fund
• Software in the Public Interest

I’d also check out projects like the BSD Fund for those interested in donating directly to projects that benefit everyone in the open source community. I’ve also started contributing to projects directly; most have donate, Open Collective or Patreon buttons. Take my favourite password manager KeePassXC, for example.

Michael Dexter has made the point that a community is only as good as the behaviour it tolerates, and therefore tacitly accepts. Let’s take this opportunity to be the change we want to see. 👍

I was dealing with a bizarre error with grep(1) on FreeBSD, and it soon infected my macOS and NetBSD machines too. It was driving me crazy!

Negative results didn’t print anything and returned a 1/false exit code, as expected:

$ zfs list | grep illegalness
$ echo $?
==> 1

If one or more lines matched however, it would only print a single line in lieu of those matching lines. “In lieu” still sounds like a decadent French take on a schnitzel. The exit code was still correct though:

$ zfs list | grep log
==> (standard input)
$ echo $?
==> 0

This was less than useful. You could say it was useless, though I felt the only thing I was having less of was hair growth on my scalp after ripping out sufficient quantities of it.

I went digging and realised I’d defined this in my oksh(1) ~/.kshrc for reasons that confound me to this day:

export GREP_OPTIONS='--colour=auto --files-with-matches --recursive'

I removed --file-with-matches and tried again:

$ zfs list | grep log
==> zroot/var/log      544K  199G  544K  /var/log
==> zroot/srv/www/log  901K  199G  901K  /srv/www/log
$ echo $?
==> 0

Hot ziggidy! I have my grep back! But what was happening here, and why did it spread?

grep was only returning matching files with that option set, instead of matching lines. It threw me by treating standard input as a file, which it dutify reported back to me when a line matched in that “file”.

The reason it spread was another silly mistake. I had begun to merge my OS-specific .kshrc files into one, with a case statement to handle where OSs differ. The good news is FreeBSD, NetBSD, and macOS broadly use and respect each other’s flags owing to the same or similar userlands, but those GNU ones though… I guess it “isn’t UNIX” (cough). Fixing that offending GREP_OPTIONS variable solved it everywhere.

I encounter a lot of people in technical writing circles who stumble on this phrase, which can unfairly affect professional perception:

How does it look like?

This isn’t grammatically correct, and sounds clumsy to native speakers. We’d likely say:

What does it look like?

This invites you to describe what you’re seeing, or to compare it to something else. You might reply with “it looks like a forest with green trees” or “it looks just like the Black Forest in Germany”.

Another form is:

How does it look?

This is more of a judgement or a summary. You might say “it looks pretty”.

I empathise with people learning English. Granted it makes more sense than some other European languages, but it still has its quirks.

The first computer I built as a kid still runs, thanks to generous bouts of nostalgia. She’s a spectacular Pentium 1 minitower with a whopping 64 MiB of memory, a SCSI Zip drive, a Sound Blaster AWE32 PnP card, a crystal-clear Matrox Mystique GPU, and a 5.25-inch floppy drive from the long-departed family 486. She originally ran Windows 95, but now also runs BeOS, FreeBSD 6.3 (my first version) and MS-DOS 6.0 (what our family 486 ran).

Recently I decided to replace the internal drives with SD cards. I originally used CF cards with passive IDE adaptors, but SD cards are significantly cheaper and easier to source now, and their active converters still max out the ATA33 connections on this old Octec/Ocean Rhino 12+ board for reads and writes.

While I wait for the adaptor to arrive, I thought I’d prepare my two 16 GiB cards for DOS. I use bhyve and Xen, but for quick and dirty tests like this I just use QEMU with settings that mimic the target hardware:

$ qemu-system-i386 \
    -machine isapc \
    -cpu pentium \
    -m 64M \
    -hda /dev/ada2 \
    -fda msdos6-disk1.img

The familiar MS-DOS 6 setup screen booted. Normally I strike F3 at this stage and run fdisk to manually set up the partitions as I want, like a gentleman, but as a quick test I thought I’d let the installer do it for me.

In the words of Australian comedian Carl Barron, that dun‘ look good. So I pressed ENTER to exit the Setup, hoping I’d be able to use fdisk.

MS-DOS 6.0 was a… fun release. Any rational person would use 6.20, which customers of 6.0 were eligible to “step-up” to, or even the widely-used final release of MS-DOS 6.22. Heck I’d even been told to stick with 5.x by people who would know, or switch to the vastly-superior DR-DOS. But what part of this entire setup is rational?

I got out my cheat MS-DOS 7 image made from Windows 95, and booted with that instead. This time I got to fdisk, and one of the more bizarre partition layouts I’d seen. The MS-DOS 6 installer really went to town:

The MS-DOS 6 installer almost certainly got confused with the partition table of this new SD card, which I soon realised I hadn’t zero’d out on my FreeBSD box first:

# dcfldd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/${SD_CARD}

Then the installer worked. Who’d have thunk it?

Music has the uncanny ability to transport us back to places and time like precious few other things, whether it be the tune or even the props in the music videos themselves. For me this ability opearates independently of whether I liked the song at the time.

Early this week I heard someone blasting “Over and Over” by Nelly and Tim McGraw from back in 2004. It took me immediately back to high school, when I’d irritate people singing the chorus with emphasis in the wrong place:

Because it’s all in my head
I think about it Dover an‘ Dover again
I replay Dover an‘ Dover again

Those weren’t the lyrics, but it sounded like it was. Dover MRT also opened a few years prior.

And while I’m on this train of thought—ah, so good—the music video was also an amazing technical time capsule. Those alarm clocks at the start scream early 2000s, but not as much as their phones at the end.

The Guardian Australia’s Celina Ribeiro wrote a great article about the rise of vinyl again in Australia. She interviewed Peter Thiel who runs a record store in the Sydney suburb of Newtown, known for its off-beat character and culture:

Thiele stands in the aisle in a short-sleeved button-up shirt in a tiny floral pattern. Grey hair trimmed and neat. He streams. He downloads. He listens to vinyl, and he listens to CDs.

“People say to me: ‘Sounds better on vinyl’,” he shrugs. “I go, ‘Sounds different.’

“CD quality is the best you can get, because you’ve got a master.”

Casey Liss of the Accidental Tech Podcast and Analog(ue) likens this to a tea ceremony. Selecting music from a shelf, turning on the amplifier, placing the disc on a turntable or CD tray, and giving the songs your undivided attention imbues the tunes with something you don’t get from streaming. Clara and I have got into vinyl in a big way for this reason; the quality is secondary to the experience of playing it. I’ll fire up my 500 GiBs of 320 KB/s AACs amassed over twenty years on a checksummed ZFS array when I want the best perceptible fidelity.

Weirdly enough, the same applies to cassettes. I only learned recently that there were pre-recorded albums released on type-II chrome tape, which have no business sounding as good as they do when used on a quality deck and the same speakers as our turntable. I also like the fact they’ve been on a journey themselves before arriving in Clara’s and my little Hi-Fi setup.

Peter’s second point is on collections:

Physical collections – like CDs, records or books – reflect something about their owner, he says. “They tell a story about you. You don’t go, ‘Look at my phone, here’s my music collection.’ It isn’t the same thing. You go to a friend’s place and you look at what albums they have.”

We’ve got such little space in our small apartment, but I love the fact that we managed to find just enough of it to have our precious few favourite albums on physical media again. I like to think of myself as a declutter, but that only means that what remains must be special.

Celina also talks with two other people in the store:

The pair are part of an increasingly small cohort of music fans who continue to buy CDs, in a world where most new cars and computers no longer have a way to even play them.

I’ll admit, this hit me harder than I expected. In the rush to champion the removal of optical drives from laptops to save space and weight, we didn’t ask what we’re losing. There’s utility, in the form of being able to burn CDs and read software. But what about music?

A CD-ROM drive was my first exposure to optical music. My dad had a small Hi-Fi in his study where I used to use the family computer, and I realised at a young age that I could plug the output from the computer’s SoundBlaster card into the amplifier’s line input. I was playing CDs through Creative’s Multimedia Deck software for years afterwards; it was a ton of fun! I liked that I had “little records” that were shiny, too.

Rational people would be quick to remind us that all these formats are unnecessary. But as I’ve said before here, what’s rational about art? Or put another way, why does art need to be justified?

Which leads to this final comment from another patron of the store:

Regina Safro still buys CDs in part for the physicality – and in part because it gets more money to the artist than streaming.

There are some weird rhetorts to online discussions that transcend political, economic, social, and logical bounds! Richard Dawkins; the scientist who coined meme; referred to these as thought-terminating clichés owing to their overuse and ability to end discussions unproductively. Like my public sneezing fits, which have only become more contentious in public during these troubled times.

Have you been accused of thinking about someone so much, you’re letting them live, rent free, in your head? It’s such a fascinating deviation from physics that it bends my mind. Which it may need to if we want to let an entire other human not only fit within our cranial spaces, but sufficient furnishings for a comfortable lodging and subsequent rental. Maybe we’re letting the space gratis to afford us a little leeway in what must be an uncomfortable seating arrangement for everyone involved. How one is supposed to challenge an individual’s perspective without thinking about them at all is equally perplexing, and would only be made harder by them physically residing with their credenzas and kitchen appliances between your ears, in place of your brain, in the interest of saving precious space.

What about when you’re told by someone, gleefully, that that they’ll replace you if you boycott or stop buying a product? One would think a merchant would prefer both of you to be customers to grow their business, but hey, I’m no entreprenurial mathemagician.

What about being told that you’ve misundertood a phrase as a premise to refuting a point, only they’ve clearly read the same dictionary. The phrase survellience is problematic because it implies watching people without their knowledge which, granted this business does, but it’s different and therefore can’t be called that! It’s comforting to pretend nomenclature is the root of all these issues, but I have a nagging voice in my head that it isn’t. Or that might just be Jeff, who lodges there on Wednesdays.

In the paraphrased words of the Sunscreen Song, don’t be reckless with other people’s logic centres, and don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours. They might end up not buying your product, which means you’ll lose potential business even if someone else offers to buy it instead.