Rubenerd

Georgina of Hey Georgie wrote one of the more poignant posts about International Women’s Day I’ve ever read:

In 2019, I wrote about how there is nothing surprising about a woman in tech, and how it’s mentally exhausting being the minority. Two years later, unfortunately, I still feel the same. It’s exhausting being a woman. I’m tired of it. Many women work hard to fight for their cause and to be treated equally to men. Having conversations to fight for equality is tiring. We do the research, we point out the facts, we use our voices. We deserve more.

We won a contract with a wife and husband team once, on the basis that I spent more time talking to her instead. She was the engineer, but she said every other firm directed technical questions at her husband who kept their books and didn’t know Linux from a brand of detergent. This one example illustrated to me how entrenched and self-defeating this is. Those other companies literally left money on the table by not according a potential customer with the attention she deserved.

We’re beyond the point where people in positions of influence can feign ignorance. Treating women as lesser than men in any position, let alone in a professional setting, is an overt and deliberate decision, and deserves being called out. As Georgina says, they deserve more.

Caucasian men like me also need to be better advocates. I had a difficult childhood, and I worked hard to get where I am, but that only makes me appreciate how much more difficult it must be for people starting with even less. Everyone deserves the opportunity to shine, and it starts with an acknowledgment that our gender is immaterial to technical competency.

But even then I don’t think I’m properly acknowledging it, especially in our industry. Tim Berners-Lee put it well for an interview he did with John Harris on The Guardian:

The letter pointedly refers to “the toxic internet”. Can he explain what that means to him?

“[..] If you’re a woman, you can have a fine time until the one moment you get picked on. And it can be psychologically very, very extreme. The toxic internet is something that young people have less ability to manage. Women will be more susceptible. LGBTQ people, typically, are much more likely to be picked as a target. The toxic internet isn’t something I experience at all. You may not.”

Tangentially-related to my ongoing Commodore 128 series, I got quite the surprise on Mastodon this morning! My post about troubleshooting my Commodore 128’s 80-column mode was submitted to the Lobste.rs news site.

Further Commodore 128 posts are on hiatus while I wait for international shipping to deliver some more parts. I miss living in Singapore and being able to go to Sim Lim Square and Tower for all manner of assorted components. I even got a 6510 and a Z80 from an IC shop as recently as a few years ago, just because.

Thanks to ethoh for sharing, and Screenbeard for inviting me, and hello to all of you who’ve made it to my esoteric, disjointed corner of the web! I’m a bit weird, but mostly harmless.

In my ongoing Commodore 128 series, today I accepted delivery of a refurbished Commodore 1571 5.25-inch disk drive! I eluded to buying a rarer drive recently, but I’m so glad I bought this instead.

Commodore released the 1571 in 1985 to improve transfer speeds over the glacial 1541. It could natively read and write double-density, double-sided disks without needing to flip them, though it required them to be formatted as such in the new drive. It ran quieter and cooler, was physically smaller, and eliminated most of the 1541’s head alignment issues owing to a newer mechanism. I’m especially interested in all the new formats it can read including CP/M disks, and DOS with additional software.

It’s also a beautiful device! I’m a huge fan of Commodore’s understated, sleek design language from the mid-1980s that carried through to this drive, the Commodore 128, and the 64C. It also doesn’t look out of place next to my Plus/4. My Bil Herd of machines you could say, if you were a monster.

I use a SD card adaptor for most of my data and software, but half the fun of playing with these machines is to use period-correct hardware. The 1571 seemed like a logical choice after my 1541 was mothballed. It only invokes its Burst Mode when attached to a C128, so is still backwards compatible with my Plus/4 and 16.

I don’t normally mention eBay sellers specifically, but I was also blown away at the care with which Commodore Retro Store packed the machine for shipping from the UK. Unpacking it felt like a game of pass-the-parcel; I counted no fewer than six layers! They even printed a new drive shipment card to protect the heads.

I’m still waiting on some other display parts for the C128, but I’ll do a proper testing and exploration post again soon. But I can confirm it powers up and seeks when the C128 starts :).

Darshak Parikh quoted Aral Balkan of Small Tech on Mastodon:

Debugging is the subtle art of reconciling what you think you asked a computer to do with what you actually asked the computer to do.

This also applies to hardware. It’s no use routing packets to an unplugged switch, or asking a Z80 to compute something with a dead short. I may have done both in the last day.

The latest update to Minecraft doesn’t launch for me on macOS Catalina, though curiously it does when I run it from the application bundle:

$ cd /Applications/Minecraft.app/Contents/MacOS/
$ ./launcher

I haven’t checked why yet, but give it a try if you have the same issue.

Update: This post erroneously had the publish date set as Tuesday the 16th of March. This was still sufficiently far in the future even based on our current timezone to be entirely incorrect. Except for the year, which was correct. Though it still feels like 2020. You know what doesn’t? Minecraft, because now I have a way to play it again. Even though I started in 2020. I should quit this addendum while I’m still ahead. At least, ahead in this timezone. Even though the year was wrong. Or, was it?

I overheard this at a coffee shop this morning, paraphrased:

“A friend manages a team of people. He said that people in the 30s-40s have been the most productive during the pandemic.

“But what gets me is the idea that I can be extra productive with all the time I’m saving commuting! But people don’t realise that commutes are for disconnecting from work and not thinking about it. I realise I love my commute!”

It’s an interesting way of viewing it. I used to live across the street from our old office in Mascot, where my commute was measured in seconds… and I hadn’t been that consistently tired and late to work in my whole career. Conversely, I don’t miss getting up that early for my hour-long commute from Hornsby in Sydney’s north, but I got through so many audio magazines, New Time Radio shows, podcasts, and audio books.

It also reminds me of the massive, and nearly empty streets in Canberra and Putrajaya, the capitals of Australia and Malaysia. Locals in both places told me the same thing: during peak hour the civil servants and other workers would swarm into their cars and choke the streets, requiring sweeping boulevards. Otherwise, the roads look like a ghost town. I was struck at the absurdity of it.

I don’t miss the packed, peak-hour trains, but I’m hoping flexible hours become the norm. Peak-hour makes absolutely no sense.

It might not surprise some of you to know that I was obsessed with steam locomotives as a kid. Posters of the 3801, alongside the Victorian R-761 and the Flying Scotsman, adorned my walls before I even started primary school. I’m positive I watched one specific VHS tape about these machines on a loop on account of my parents realising I’d shut up and leave them be if I were sat in front of it for hours at a time!

The 3801 is a striking beast. She was built for the NSW Government Railways in 1943, and donated to the New South Wales Transport Museum in 1975. She famously steamed across the continent during the Austraian Bicentennial celebrations along with the other aforementioned locomotives. By 2007 she’d suffered sufficient mechanical and boiler issues that she was withdrawn from service. Fans like me were worried we’d never get to see her running again, but after 12 years of restoration work by volunteers she returned to service… yesterday!

Clara booked us a private cabin in one of the restored carriages for one of her relaunch runs from Central to Hurstville. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it easily ranks as one of the hightlights of my life.

The restoration team did an incredible job. She was shinier and cleaner than I’d ever seen her in photos and videos before! Seeing her simmering on the platform, in real life… she didn’t seem real. I wish my five-year old self could have been there. Oh wait, he was :).

This is the power point in our bathroom, currently with a shaver and toothbrush plugged in. I was going to say electric shaver and toothbrush, before realising that naturally anything plugged into an electrical outlet is itself electric. Unless they’re turned off, in which they cease being electrically powered and useful.

Notice anything unusual about this arrangement, beyond my failed attempt to make the image look more interesting in monochrome?

Yes, the panel has three switches, not just two. The outer ones are obvious: they’re for toggling power to the connected devices. But what’s that middle one for?

This seems to confuse enough people who come to our apartment, but that’s the primary bathroom light switch. It’s position by the door—where a switch would otherwise be—is routinely overlooked because it looks like a power point. When this is is explained though, people are able to find and use it.

Once you know that panel includes the light switch, it’s easier to find in the dark than a regular switch on account of having large protrusions that one can feel for. Though you don’t want to rely too heavily on this, lest you slip and pull out a device while the switch is on.

But this leads to a far worse problem for accessibility than discoverability. Take a second look if you need to; notice anything with the positioning of that switch?

Normal light switch panels are easy to use. You move one of your digits in the vicinity of the switch and push. This panel doesn’t let you do that. For reasons that confound me, they positioned the light switch below the others, which butts it against the connected plugs. You can’t just reach for the switch from any orientation, you need to come at it from the top. I have skinny fingers, and even I struggle with toggling it from the front as I would a regular switch. The only way I can use it reliably is to rest my palm above the panel, and push it with my thumb. This is madness!

Why did they do this? Misguided aesthetics? Was there a conduit alignment or electrical reason why the button couldn’t be positioned higher? Did they not want that middle switch being confused for the other ones? I doubt the latter, given we’ve been trained to expect those other power switches to be oriented in the same place on every wall panel we’ve ever used.

The only thing I can remotely think of is that it’s to discourage you plugging in chunky power cables that would come from higher-powered devices. If it’s hard to access that light switch with two-pin shaver and electric toothbrushes, it’s impossible with a larger, rounded plug with a ground pin. In Singapore I got used to every bathroom having a power plug with a label saying “shavers only”. I think it’s the same in the UK. But if that were the case, why does that panel have a ground pin, and the ability to connect larger devices at all?

I would have loved to be a fly on the wall in these design meetings.

Back in October I wrote about how surprised I was at the cavalier and flippant attitudes people have towards homeless people. I’ve felt a similar way for a while about comedians who make jokes at the expense of retail staff.

Here’s one example:

YouTuber: Hello, McDonald’s? Do you sell (represses sniggering) the McHimmeny Jimmeny burger any more?

Staffer: I… could you repeat that please?

YouTuber: The McHimmeny Jimmeny! Come on, it’s not hard!

Staffer: I’m afraid we don’t sir. Goodbye.

YouTuber: HAHA! That guy sure didn’t seem interested! Wasn’t that fun!?

I wish I could say I was making that up. Okay, I was. But it follows the same cringy pattern each time: the staffer sounds confused, bored, or tired, and the comedian thinks they’re being quirky and fun. I’m going to let them in on a secret: you don’t pay retail workers enough for them to feign amusement!

You know they’re the same kind of people who shout at trainees for shop policies decided by their managers, or for getting their order wrong out of the hundreds they must do each day. It’s a power trip, plain and simple.

I remember a recurring theme in dystopian science fiction, perhaps fed from Cold War fears, that most of the planet would be obliterated and either covered with radioactive fallout or disease. In these stories Australia and New Zealand would be spared based on our geographic isolation.

The parallels with what we’re dealing with now are palpable. There are pockets in our region doing well with COVID now, including Singapore and Taiwan, but by and large we look on in despair at the thousands of new cases and deaths our friends overseas are enduring.

Australia and NZ have new COVID cases in the single digits at any one time. When we’ve had community transmission, we contract trace, provide free tests, isolated the affected suburbs, and in some cases lock down our cities. Victoria’s spike last year looked horrifying, until you realise the cumulative total is what our friends in other parts of the world are dealing with daily.

We’ve been able to do this with proactive measures, and our state premiers and health departments have filled the policy void left by Australia’s populist, irrelevant, and largely MIA prime minister. But there’s no doubt that living on large islands has helped. International flights into our countries have all but stopped—unless you’re Hollywood—and repatriated citizens have to spend time in mandatory quarantine. Even a bubble between NZ and Australia has been met with caution whenever a new case is found in Auckland, or Melbourne, or wherever.

Given we’ve eliminated the disease in the community, our new cases come from this hotel quarantine system. And this is where those thoughts from bad science fiction stories come in. The last small outbreak in Sydney was genetically identified as having come from the US. Even from our selfish perspective, why was that disease allowed to run rampant, mutate further, then come back to us? How long can we hold this at bay?

This is why events like this need a global response. This disease will be with us for a long time, and left to fester in parts of the world, it will only continue to evolve, mutate, and affect everyone in new ways. Trump, Johnson, and Bolsonaro’s despicable, negligent responses, just as three examples, affect us all. It’s the same with climate change, plastic pollution, and countless other issues.

In the meantime, we pretend to live life here largely as we did before, albeit with compulsory masks on trains and restaurant QR code checkins. Peak hour trains are full again. Shops are open. Cafés are there for laptop work. We can fly interstate.

But there’s still that niggling worry in the back of our minds. That fortress the press likes to mention is more permeable than we’d like to think.