Rubenerd

Trying to disconnect for a while up at my dad’s place. It’s doing us good :).

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13:57 – Jim Kloss returned to the Whole Wheat Radio airwaves again for a chat! I was not prepared, and even started typing over it towards the end when work pinged me, but I couldn’t let this moment of Internet audio history go unrecorded.

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

Released January 2021 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts; this one notwithstanding.

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There must be a package out there that generates random names for spammers, or they have a list of first and last names they concatenate and blast out. Nah that sounds too much like work, there’s probably something on npm, along with a way to pad between the names.

But someone’s scripts must not be working, or their source files have been clobbered by single names. Cassandra Smith has appeared almost weekly for the last six months, and she has a penchant for selling customer lists for users of SalesForce, Azure, and Nutanix. I only ever see her when I’m doing a weekly trawl of my spam folder, and she always ends with:

Best Regards, Cassandra Smith Marketing Campaign |Demand Generation Coordinator

Looks like someone else needs help with string padding.

Have you ever had a specific sound from your childhood that you’ve never been able to place? Then years later you realise what it was, but you can’t feel like you can tell anyone because it’s so niche that nobody of a sound mind would understand or care? That’s what having your own blog is for.

I had a few railway photo books as a kid, one of which predominately featured an early generation EMD diesel operated by Australian National (ne. ANR). These bull-nosed cab locomotives are easily the most distinctive and recognisable trains of the time period, and I thought looked especially fetching in the green and gold livery of AN. Years later I’d find myself studying in Adelaide just outside one of the yards the former AN used.

I also had a few VHS tapes about Australian steam locos, one of which I distinctly remember being photobombed by the same EMD diesel I saw in that book. I was struck at the time how distinctive it sounded; almost like a rattling kettle on a stove. Was it supposed to sound like that? Was it just old? I never knew, and wasn’t in a rush to find out given I thought I was only interested at steam and commuter rail at the time.

Years later I started learning about dieselisation. Just like the conversion of ocean liners from coal to oil firing; the shift from steam to diesel was nothing short of revolutionary… if the engines had been Union Pacific turbines. That was an engineering pun I’ve wanted to make for years. It shook up the entire industry, and coincided with the introduction of containerisation that’s the hallmark of rail freight today.

General Motors’ Electro-Motive Division weren’t the first to make diesel electric locomotives, but they had the biggest impact during this transition period from the 1940s. I read up about their F and E units, and how they’d been built under licence in Australia for various railways. But they didn’t have a monopoly; A.E. Goodwin also built Alco locomotives in Australia, some of which bore a similar, if boxier, resemblance to these EMD units. Compare the above cab photos of a EMD F7 by Roger Puta, with this preserved ALCO PA-4 taken by Steve Morgan.

Then it dawned on me this year: the loco I saw in that grainy, worn VHS tape might not have been an EMD at all, but an Australian-built analogue to the Alco FA or PA. RailPictures.net has a few domestic examples taken from the 1970s and 80s.

So I did some digging on YouTube, and found an Australian video with that exact sound I remembered from my childhood! I’m by no means the first person to think these locomotives sounded distinctive and unusual, given the comments and description on the video. YouTube is full of people discussing these locos, and seeking them out around the world from India to Argentina.

If there’s anything better than wandering deep into the weeds of an obscure hobby to answer a childhood question, I don’t want to know. Rattle rattle.

We’re into the third week of 2021 already, though confusingly this is only the second week of my Twitter break. Here are my accumulated microblogs for the week:

• I have the uncanny ability to injure myself just before a big house move. Last time it was a multi-day migraine. Today I stubbed my toe so hard it swelled up. Yay!

• “You don’t ring true, so please stop calling me” ♫

• Hey look, Zendesk logged me out. It must be a day that ends in Y.

• The guy at our local coffee shop knows me by name and my order now. I like that if I fell off the edge of the world tomorrow, there would be people who’d wonder where did that awkward guy go?

• Aiyo, I miss Singapore hawker food.

• Clara’s and I now have a non-studio apartment for the first time since we moved in together! Having a bedroom sealed off from the work and kitchen areas is a game changer.

• What would we have done stuck at home if not for the joys of homelabs, vintage Hi-Fi, Hololive, and Minecraft?

• Unscientific experiment tallying when people are rude to me in public (queue jumping, not holding open doors or saying thanks, etc). Gen Z: 0. Millennials: 1. Gen X: 1. Boomers: 14.

• Bumped into the American guy on our floor again. He’s still desperately trying to figure out how he can bring the rest of his family over. “It’s all fucking nuts”.

• Should I post this silly entry about the sound of a diesel locomotive? Ah, screw it.

I had a nightmare last night where someone argued that the safety of a train shouldn’t be improved, because you can just drive a car instead. Yes, even my dreams have weird interests. Yet that line of thinking is very much real.

When wealthy people advocate for higher tax rates, they’re told they can just pay extra. When a restaurant owner advocates for higher minimum wages, they’re told they can just pay their staff more. When someone falls off a cliff, they’re told they can just avoid being pushed off next time.

They’re absolutely true, and absolutely miss the point. Absolutely! The opportunity to lift all boats isn’t challenged by just lifting one. It’s basic arithmetic, though it eludes armchair economists.

I’m also starting to become wary of the word “just”. It’s a sign that someone’s about to belittle or downplay an issue. That’s not very just.

Speaking of colours! Most OSs tend to favour blue in their icons and interfaces, presumably because it’s the world’s favourite colour, and it’s perceived as calming. But I recently had occasion to look through my Applications folder and noticed green slowly encroaching on blue’s space:

It reminds me of those silly Twitter colour wars in 2007, back when that platform was fun. And speaking of keeping things fun: the inclusion of an application here says nothing about whether I want to use it or not, so please don’t email me. It won’t stop the regular stream of rude (and therefore counterproductive) messages I get now and immediately delete, but the rest of you can at least admire my optimism!

I also love that there’s still sufficient differences in their shapes and design that one can pick them out at a glance. The trend in interfaces towards uniform squares is such a bad idea for accessibility; it’s one of many, many reasons I’m holding off on Big Sur.

Colours are fun! I miss having chats about them with my mum.

This is how I spent my morning while packing for a house move. The 1980s music, the people they interviewed, the VHS artefacts; everything was amazing.

But I’m sure other rail nerds would especially appreciate this zinger at 37:30:

Besides the Minneapolis, Northfield and Southern, six other roads owned centre cabs. In fact, Baldwin designed the unit for the Elgin, Jolliet and Eastern; a beltline around Chicago owned by US Steel. EJ&E’s centre cabs continued in service into the 1970s after most of the others were scrapped.

The secret? EJ&E replaced the Baldwin engines with EMD.

The first Ukrainian reader to email me—Pryvit!—asked me to clarify what I meant here in my introductory post about FreeBSD jails:

Much has been written about the potential security benefits of isolating processes, but I shamelessly use them foremost to keep my ports clean. My Plex jail has everything for video encoding, the Minecraft jail is the only one with a JDK runtime. Conflicts aren’t an issue, they’re simple to update without unintentionally breaking something else, and it keeps individual attack surfaces small.

I’ll admit I ran a lot of justifications together into a single paragraph because I wanted to get to configuring the jails themselves. They’re also, by and large, not specific to FreeBSD’s flavour of containerisation, though I still think it’s easily the most elegant implementation. Sometimes the simplest solution really is the best one.

But let me address something first. People were surprised at how cautious I was qualifying security as a “potential” benefit. There’s a stubborn industry perception that containers negate or reduce the need for other standard security practices; that somehow wrapping a service in a container intrinsically renders them immune to security problems. The Docker and Kubernetes crowds weren’t the first to push this, but they’re the highest-profile. Inappropriate application of these technologies have created entire new classes of security issues, and it hasn’t helped that the tools themselves have also introduced critical bugs.

But back to FreeBSD! Jails—and process isolating tools in general—are great for security if configured with the same maturity and care as a new host, such as user management, permissions, configuring services to only listen on specific ports, system updates, and so on. A jailed environment is a great additional layer of security, but it absolutely does not absolve a system administrator’s responsibilities elsewhere. If I sound like I’m being overly cautious or critical, it’s only from reading these glowing posts for many years and being concerned at the direction the industry is taking!

With that in mind, jails let you do some cool stuff. They let you expose only the portions of the host’s file system the service is supposed to see, which can even include hiding specific binaries or system tools. They hide their processes from other jails, but you can also hide them from the host itself. Jails let you create specific users, groups, and permissions unique to that environment. And you can build the base system and packages specific for what a service needs, while removing unnecessary components that might introduce bugs or security problems. More on that in a moment.

FreeBSD jails run atop ZFS add a whole suite of extra tools that make building and maintaining jails easier, without having to learn an entire extra set of over-engineered tools or complicated configuration! You can snapshot and roll back a jail’s running state before a large upgrade or change. You can create a base jail and clone off it to create new ones. You can even backup and ship them elsewhere.

Which leads us to my comment about “keeping ports clean”. I still subscribe to Einstein’s Paraphrased Law of Package Management: install the fewest packages you need for a system, and no fewer (this is why I don’t consider tools like bash cross-platform, despite the hand-wringing that generated from a specific person on Twitter before my current break from the platform). Jails let you install only the packages you need for a specific service. Poudriere itself even uses jails to build packages for you for this reason! It helps with potential package conflicts, and makes managing packages easier.

This whole time I’d been assuming that both these SKUs of ECC DDR memory were equivalent. Rod Bland sorted me out at RamCity:

DDR4 modules can optionally [b]e “registered” (“buffered”), which improves signal integrity (and hence potentially clock rates and physical slot capacity) by electrically buffering the signals at a cost of an extra clock of increased latency. Those modules are identified by an additional R in their designation, e.g. PC4-19200R. Typically modules with this designation are actually ECC Registered, but the ‘E’ of ‘ECC’ is not always shown. Whereas non-registered (a.k.a. unbuffered RAM) may be identified by an additional U in the designation. e.g. PC4-19200U.

It never occurred to me that -R stood for registered/buffered. The Supermicro board in my new homelab machine only showed unbuffered memory compatibility, so I guess it’s just luck I didn’t accidentally pick up the wrong type.

ServeTheHome also has a great article.