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| Greg's diary |
| August 2018 |
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| Wednesday, 1 August 2018 | Dereel | Images for 1 August 2018 |
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Garden “work”
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
August already! Spring is just round the corner. But it's been a mild winter, and there are still leftovers from last summer:
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As I had predicted, there are still tomatoes on the vine, though the vine itself is looking pretty sad, at least at the front:
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It'll be interesting to see whether I get more flowers on the rear part. But we clearly have enough tomatoes for at least the next 2 weeks:
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Spent some time wandering round the garden spreading lots of fertilizer. Now I just have the bushes and the north side of the house to do, when I have more fertilizer.
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Frying onions
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Lamb liver and onions for dinner tonight, the first time I've really looked at this combination, though it appears to be particularly popular. The versions I saw were all from English-language sources, but Yvonne tells me that she used to have it when she was a child, along with slices of roast apple. That was after I had chosen this recipe, which was a reasonable basis, even if some of the details seemed strange (mint in the onions?).
Part of the recipe requires large quantities of onion rings. OK, cutting them with the slicer was relatively simple. I decided that 3.5 mm thickness was about right. And frying them? Far too many for even a big pan. I tried half like that and the other half in the microwave oven. The results were:
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The onions from the microwave oven were at round 90°, about as hot as they can get, but they still smelt distinctly of hot onions. In the end I fried them too, after which they looked better.
The original recipe called for boiling the vinegar by itself until it became syrupy. I decided to put the onions back in instead. That worked well:
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But it still tasted too much of vinegar, and I wonder if I shouldn't use something else (caramelized sugar) instead.
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House flash placement
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
When we built the house, I provided for placement of two studio flash units at opposite ends of the kitchen/dining area (now kitchen/lounge). I still haven't used either of them, but today I put a flash on a stand next to the mount in the kitchen. With appropriate adjustment, that didn't work too badly: the whole kitchen area was illuminated corresponding to an aperture of f/5.6.6 and f/8.1, about half a stop.
All the kitchen? No, there was one corner that resisted, round the stove. There it was 2 stops darker. That's not surprising considering the location, but how do I fix it? To be considered.
| Thursday, 2 August 2018 | Dereel | Images for 2 August 2018 |
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Jury duty!
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Unexpected mail today. Some time between 25 September 2018 and 21 December 2018 I will receive a summons to perform jury service, which could involve me for up to 2 weeks, with a payment of the princely sum of $40 a day for my services.
Most people hate jury duty. I think that it could be interesting. I had to send in a reply, either on paper or on the web. OK, try the web. Enter date of birth. Not valid! They want silly numeric dates like 03/07/48, with the / delimiter and the ambiguity associated with the format (some people read 3 July, others 7 March). And then this question:
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But then, this is a government form. I entered “retired” as occupation, but they wanted to know what I retired from. So I entered “kernel hacker”, my job title at IBM, but after submission (too late) it occurred to me that I should have put in something more intelligible to the people who choose the jurors: potentially it could mean that I would be involved in a case related to my prior professional experience.
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Analysing JPEG images
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Topic: technology, photography | Link here |
Edwin Groothuis asked a question today: how do you extract individual images from JPEG images?
Huh? I know that TIFF images routinely contain more than one image, but JPEG? He pointed me to the output of file(1), here from one of yesterday's photos:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/9) ~/Photos/20180801 1207 -> file Liver-and-onions.jpeg
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/9) ~/Photos/20180801 1208 -> exifx Liver-and-onions.jpeg
What's that frames 3? Jari Kirma pointed out that yes, indeed, there is a thumbnail image in most JPEGs, and there was one here, too, and it can be extracted with exiftool:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/9) ~/Photos/20180801 1209 -> exiftool -b -ThumbnailImage Liver-and-onions.jpeg > Liver-and-onions-thumbnail.jpeg
The error message is because of something that the processing software (DxO PhotoLab? ImageMagick?) did wrong. And the image is really minuscule:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/9) ~/Photos/20180801 1210 -> file Liver-and-onions-thumbnail.jpeg
Here it is, compared to the original:
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I suppose you can't expect much more for 9 kB (“This picture is worth 2,250 words”).
But that's not really a second image in the JPEG container: it's hidden within the Exif data. And Edwin wanted more analysis of the image. Went looking for some programs online. There's JPEGsnoop, but that is intimately involved with Microsoft development software. jpegdump doesn't give the impression that it got anywhere. And though Exploring JPEG looks interesting, it appears to be for image manipulation, not analysis.
Finally he wrote a little program which I haven't had to time to look at yet. It would be nice to have a general-purpose image file analysis program, but my last attempts didn't get me very far.
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Camera prices on the rise
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
Four years ago I bought an Olympus E-PM2 and lens for Yvonne. Brand new, $ (AUD) 299 with standard M.Zuiko Digital 14-42 mm f/3.5-5.6 II R lens. Not a bad price at all.
And then 1½ years ago I bought an E-PM1 body, used, for $60. Also a good price, even after it eventuated that it forgets its time settings when I remove the battery.
And now? I have already established that the best prices on eBay for the (vaguely) successor model Olympus E-PL9 with standard lens are round $800. Looking on US eBay, the cheapest prices for the E-PM1 are in the US $ 150 range (about $200), and the cheapest E-PM2 and lens combination is $318—more than double what I paid for Yvonne's camera new.
OK, I got the cameras cheap. But it does seem that prices are on the rise. Is this the result of the demise of the compact point-and-click camera?
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Kangaroos again
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Topic: animals, photography, opinion | Link here |
More kangaroos in the middle paddock, in fact quite a mob of them.
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Went to get my camera, and when I got back I found Nikolai chasing them away:
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There will be another day. But what amazes me is the sharpness of the images. Each of these is a small crop (8.5% and 17% of the frame). The “full-frame” equivalent focal lengths are 2800 mm and 1800 mm. In the old 35 mm days my rule of thumb was that you took the reciprocal of the focal length as the slowest shutter speed, 1/2800 s in the first case. But that was taken hand-held at 1/25 s, more than 100 times longer, nearly 7 stops. And it's still relatively sharp. Image stabilization (here on the Leica DG Vario-Elmar 100-400 mm f/4.0-6.3) really does work well.
| Friday, 3 August 2018 | Dereel | Images for 3 August 2018 |
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Huevos a la tigre again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Huevos a la tigre again for breakfast. I still don't have the cooking times right. Last time I discovered that cooking the eggs in the microwave oven for 2 minutes at 600 W (72 kJ, for what it's worth) was too little, and 4 minutes were too much. Clearly I should go for 3 minutes, and that's what I did today. Still somewhat overcooked. I think that the issue is with the temperature of the mixture before I add the eggs, and I'd put that at about 60° and cook the eggs for two minutes. Potentially a lower power level could help.
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More gardening stuff
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Mick the gardener along again today. I had hoped that we could do less work in the garden in the winter, but somehow that hasn't happened yet. And he didn't get finished: round 12:30 a rain front set in, and we had to postpone the rest until next Thursday.
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Still more bank pain
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Round the beginning of the month I generally have to transfer money from my Bank of Melbourne account to my ANZ account. That's normally not too painful: most of the information is stored in cookies, and all I need to do is to type in the “Internet password”.
But today that didn't work. The information wasn't filled in. OK, take it from my secret web page and paste it in:
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“Please match the requested format”. What does that mean? Ah, I've seen that before. It really wants to say “Your security number should be 6 digits only. Please don't enter anything else, because our parser is too stupid to cope”.
OK, enter the number manually. And it didn't complain. In fact, it didn't do anything: it hung. On three different browsers. Finally I tried it on Microsoft, and it worked.
Bank of Melbourne too leet to use Unix-like operating systems? Who knows? In any case, enough reason to call up their support line. Two minutes with a voice menu called Craig-uh, who added an -uh to every-uh word-uh. Through to a “consultant” who didn't understand the problem, and offered to reset my password. Finally he put me through to Mitch in 2nd level “Internet” support. And sure enough, Mitch knew everything, even before I finished talking. He interrupted me and told me that I had reset the login details last time I did a cleanup. What's a cleanup? Ah, that happens automatically every time you reboot your PC. I did reboot my PC, didn't I?
That's an interesting bit of information, even if it's completely irrelevant to my problem. Do cookies get removed automatically when you reboot a Microsoft system? It seems unlikely, but vaguely worth following up on.
I tried to explain that the problem had nothing to do with that, and that it was the reason for the error message that I didn't understand. Clearly their problem... interrupt with something completely irrelevant. Dammit, let me finish! No, better still, connect me to your supervisor.
While I was waiting, Yvonne came along and wanted to walk the dogs. Good idea. I was in no mood to talk to idiots any more, so I hung up.
Later I tried various things:
So we have at least four problems at the Bank of Melbourne. In increasing order of importance:
So is this related to firefox? I went to the trouble of firing up Microsoft “Internet Explorer” to try it there. Yes, the problem exists there as well; in fact, it's worse:
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Now isn't that a clever message? But it confirms what I had suspected, that the error message comes from the browser, not the bank.
And why did it work yesterday? I couldn't recall how to paste into Microsoft, so I typed the numbers in manually.
| Saturday, 4 August 2018 | Dereel | Images for 4 August 2018 |
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More kangaroos
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Up early to discover that Thursday's kangaroos (presumably) hadn't been deterred much by Nikolai. I counted 13, most very close to the house:
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Cleaning broth
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
Dinner tonight was to include risotto alla milanese, which calls for a lot of broth. OK, I had some that I had left over from the Cantonese braised beef last week. It was frozen, and it still had most of the scum that had been produced. It had settled, but now I had a block of ice: How to remove it?
First I tried scraping it off:
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That didn't work well, so I left it to gradually melt. I was then able to wipe most of it off with kitchen paper:
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Cooking the risotto was interesting. Normally I use about 50% more water by weight for cooking rice, but these recipes call for between 400% and 500%. In the end, it seems that 400% was closer to the mark.
Margaret Swan was here, and she brought a truffle with her—just what we need for risotto alla milanese, and one of the reasons we cooked it. But this truffle was very different from the last one: much more aromatic. It seems that the trick is that the ground has to freeze, and it hadn't done last time. An amazing difference.
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More fun with house photos
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
House photo day again today, and more tweaking my stitching scripts. Things look much better now, to the point where some panoramas don't need any tweaking at all. But there's still one that causes problems:
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What's unusual about that? Nothing, you'd think. But I wasn't able to get the control detectors to assemble it. Instead I got this:
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This isn't the first time I've had difficulty with this specific view. I should spend some time investigating.
| Sunday, 5 August 2018 | Dereel | |
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Reset your Apple ID!
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
In the mail this morning, HTML formatted in tasteful low-contrast text:
Dear Greg Lehey,
You recently made a request to reset your Apple ID. Please click the link below to complete the process.
Reset now >
If you did not make this change or you believe an unauthorised person has accessed your account, go to iforgot.apple.com to reset your password without delay. Following this, sign into your Apple ID account page at https://appleid.apple.com to review and update your security settings.
Where did that come from? It certainly wasn't me. So indeed it's a security issue, or at least potentially so. What's an Apple ID anyway? I seem to recall that I was required to create one to be able to use my iPhone two years ago. Where are the details? For some reason I didn't have the details stored. Did I delete it?
The message was sent to my canonical email address, not the one I used to sign up for Apple ID. Spam? Last time this happened, the forgery was clear. It could only fool people using toy MUAs that are too polite to show the sender address (in that case the almost certainly forged APPLE ID <michael.j.froehlich@disney.com>). But this one looked genuine, including the DKIM signature:
So what is this? How do I get a request to reset my Apple ID to an address which doesn't have one registered? My best guess is that it's a shotgun attack on the Apple web servers using known email addresses only, relying on a bug in Apple's verification that doesn't check IDs before sending the message. But it's exactly this sort of thing that makes me worried about putting sensitive data on phones, which can be stolen.
| Monday, 6 August 2018 | Dereel | |
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How much salt?
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Cooking baked beans today. One of the variables I had been experimenting with was the use of meat broth instead of water. I had tried stock cubes, but found the quantity necessary to be excessive. But then I discovered this in the pantry, use-by date less than 10 years ago:
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OK, I could try that. How much do I use? My recipe calls for a total of 45 g of salt, and in the past I had used round 40 g of stock cubes. 40 g of this stuff? What do the instructions say?
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OK, I don't want a classic chicken stock, but the 20 g seem to fit with my expectations, though you'd only need 16 g of stock cubes. So 20 g it is, at least this time. How much salt is in there?
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No mention of salt, only sodium. 400 mg. In what? A “serving” of 100 ml. Is that 20 g? No, of course not, they're talking about decilitres. 2 g? How can I be sure? It doesn't say. But yes, there's the “servings per package”, 500 for 1 kg of mix. So yes, with a little mental arithmetic I see that there are 400 mg of “sodium” in 2 g of mixture. Why don't they just write:
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But what do they mean by “sodium”? Elemental sodium? Then that would correspond to marginally over 10 g of salt, about half the total weight. If it's “sodium as chloride”, it's only 4 g. I guessed at the latter, but the results suggest that I might have been incorrect. Or maybe my guess of 45 g total last time was too much. Or the information on the label is just plain wrong.
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CJ's computer issues
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
CJ Ellis has problems with his computer again. What are they? Hard to understand, but something to do with not enough memory for Gmail. OK, I have his passwords for exactly this kind of situation, so off to take a look. “Password incorrect”. That, too, is possible: I had a note that it was changed to something better last time we had issues. Logged in and discovered that his “inbox” had over 2,700 messages. Is that enough? Maybe not. But most seemed to have been spam. Where's his spam folder? Doesn't seem to be one. Dammit, I really hate Gmail. If it didn't do such a good job with spam (at least for me), I wouldn't touch it.
Later got CJ on the phone, and everything worked again. But he, too, had to reenter the password. Why? I'll never understand this stuff, and clearly it has caused CJ significant issues.
| Tuesday, 7 August 2018 | Dereel | Images for 7 August 2018 |
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More flash pain
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
Taking the photos of the stock powder yesterday should have been a straightforward issue: put the STF-8 macro flash on the camera and take the photos. To my surprise, things came out very differently from what I expected. Here the STF-8 on the left, and the studio flash on the right:
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Where do those reflections come from? This thing is supposed to illuminate from an angle. Somehow I find this unit to be less and less useful.
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www offline!
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Doing some routine stuff today, tried to connect to www.lemis.com. Timeout. Further examination showed that it had been offline since Tue 7 Aug 2018 04:10:56 UTC. OK, that's what the console is for. Logged in to RootBSD, which came up with the rather irritating message:
Huzzah! You have no servers down.
How do I get to the console? Once it was easy, via VNC. But then they changed it, apparently because of security considerations, and I had to go via a web browser instead. Only that hadn't worked then, and now I couldn't even find out how to do it; I had to go back and look at closed tickets to find the way through a maze of twisty little menus, all different, only to have my connection attempt fail with a status code 1006. It offered to send a Ctrl-Alt-Del, whatever that might have done, but I certainly didn't want to risk it rebooting the machine.
OK, time for a ticket. And by the time I had sent it, I discovered that the system was back up, at 05:44:18 UTC. OK, update, tell them to reduce the priority to medium (the interface didn't allow me to do that). And only a few minutes later, they closed the ticket!
New attempt to communicate, in particular with more details. Where does that error come from? This, too, was in older tickets:
The error 1006 when trying to access the VNC console indicates a web socket issue with your browser. If you receive this error please attempt to open the console again, or try a different browser.
OK, try alternative browsers. They shouldn't have any issue with them running on FreeBSD, but to be safe I tried Microsoft too:
| Browser | OS | Result | ||
| firefox | FreeBSD | Error 1006 | ||
| chrome | FreeBSD | Connection timeout | ||
| chrome | Microsoft | Error 1006 | ||
| "Internet Explorer" | Microsoft | Connected, later error 1006 | ||
| opera | Microsoft | Connected | ||
| opera | FreeBSD | Error 1005 | ||
That error with opera on FreeBSD is really 1005, not 1006. The error 1006 on "Internet Explorer" occurred without any action on my part. And these results are different from what I had experienced on the first time through. This looks like random breakage to me.
I've been with RootBSD for 10 years. For nearly 5 of them, I didn't even have a reboot. This is the second time this year that I've had significant problems, and I don't get the impression that they're doing much about it. Given that I'm running out of space anyway, is it time to move on?
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Daily Gmail spurious warning
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Every time I access CJ Ellis' Gmail account, I get a whole lot of warning mail messages with incorrect claims:
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What's that? When did it happen? They don't even say! Followed through and discovered—again—that Gmail is too polite to give things like date, time zone or reverse DNS lookup. But I've seen this before: it's my proxy server in Frankfurt am Main, which of course is in Germany, and normal web services can locate it pretty clearly. And they don't even bother to report the final IP address. Once again I'm baffled by the fact that they continue to get things so completely wrong.
| Wednesday, 8 August 2018 | Dereel | Images for 8 August 2018 |
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RootBSD console issues
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Somehow I'm getting nowhere with the issues accessing www.lemis.com via the console interface. The response to my ticket asks me to supply copies of the browser's developer console (screen shot, of course, which can only show a carefully cropped subset of the information). Surely the browsers are capable of saving the log. But how? There's a little box “Preserve log” at the top:
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Ticked that. Where did the information go? No idea. With a bit of searching, discovered that Chromium stores its data in the hierarchy ~/.config/chromium. OK, any file names there ending in .log? Yes, a number, all conveniently complicated by the choice of spaces in directory names. After a lot of cursing and swearing and careful choice of tools, discovered that there were two sorts of files: those that were empty, and those that contained binary data. Is that the way of the future?
Talking about it on IRC, Daniel O'Connor told me that I first had to save the file. How? Right-click. Of course! Isn't that intuitive? Right click. Nothing happens. Ah, I'm right-clicking in the wrong place. Not near the “Preserve log” box, but in the middle of the log itself. How could I have thought anything else?
The information itself is interesting. The whole point of this appalling interface is to improve security. The old way did things like pass root passwords in plain text. But what do I see here?
So the reason for the failure was a security bug in the interface. Sigh.
What's Vultr like? Tried that, and with much less juggling got a console display and a login prompt. And “Password incorrect” on root login, twice.
Damn! What's wrong? Connected via ssh, and all worked. After some investigation, it seems that the protocol was swallowing specific letters. root was none of them, but some were in my password, which of course didn't echo.
Still more experimentation. It failed with firefox, but worked with Chromium. Is that an excuse? Maybe. I'm still running a seriously down-rev system, and my firefox is really old. I must really upgrade the system, and then try again. But so far Vultr seems to be doing the right thing.
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Block storage? Object storage?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
The other thing I really need to do is upgrade my online photo storage, which is currently about to hit hard limits. How can I do that? Bigger disk on my web server? Block storage? Object storage? I've looked at this before and not understood it. Object storage is much cheaper than block storage, but for reasons I don't understand it offers a completely different interface. For over half a century there has been one preferred way to access files, via the file system paradigm. But that's old, worn-out magic.
For me it means at least three serious issues:
I don't have object storage locally, so here I store my images in a file systems with names like home/grog/public_html/Photos/20150920/small/Groggy-3.jpeg, just like all other web content. And I have web code that converts this to a URL like /grog/Photos/20150920/small/Groggy-3.jpeg. If I use object storage externally, I need to special-case it.
What special cases? I've seen at least two different, incompatible interfaces to object storage. Some really look hardly any worse than /grog/Photos/20150920/small/Groggy-3.jpeg. Others are too polite to show anything as old-fashioned as a descriptive file name, and I end up with some random string like D0E1A2D3B4E5E6F7.
I have existing code to update the external web site. I can't just change that unless I move everything to object storage. And how does that interact with PHP? Still more special-casing, probably. More to the point, though, how do I update my objects? Yes, part of the tradeoff is atomic updates: if I have an image 20 MB in size and I change anything, I have to replace the entire object. I can live with that, but how do I know what to update? Currently I go by modification timestamp. That's a file system function. How do I do it with object storage?
I need to learn a whole new set of functionality. How big is my photo directory for 20 September 2015? Now I just do:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/9) ~ 1 -> du -s public_html/Photos/20150920
=== grog@www (/dev/pts/0) ~ 1 -> du -s www.lemis.com/grog/Photos/20150920
That's a value in MB, the way I have set my environment.
How do I do it with object storage? Clearly a new interface. And if I change, I can presumably start all over again.
People on IRC don't understand. This is the way of the future, and you can't map file systems to geographically distributed data.
Oh. What was this thing we had 35 years ago at Tandem? Partitioned files, spread around the world, accessed from a file system far more primitive than what Unix had even at that time. And I toyed with something like this with Vinum 20 years ago. No, it's impossible to address variable-sized objects with file system semantics. It is? Why? I thought that's what files were. POSIX doesn't play nice with objects. Doesn't it? And who mentioned POSIX, anyway?
It's quite possible that there is some basic incompatibility that I haven't seen yet. But what I've seen so far is that we're reverting to the 1960s, where everybody did his own, incompatible thing, and people aren't noticing. “Open Systems” seem to be a thing of the past, though I've seen no plausible non-marketing-driven reason why that should be the case.
I've come up with a number of links that may give me insight:
This page offers to explain, but so far it seems rather vague. This page explains:
What we now see is that much of the data that is being produced is “immured” or unstructured data. Content or material that will never be changed again. And this is where Object storage comes into play
In passing, that's an interesting word, “immure”, to enclose into a wall. I suppose that they mean immutable, but this may sound better to them.
OK, what I see here is a limitation, not an advantage. It's one that I accept, but it doesn't explain the need to break old paradigms. The same consideration applies to read-only media like DVD-ROMs, and they do fine with a file system interface. This page goes on to state:
The main difference between the other concepts is that the objects are managed via the application itself that supports Object storage. That means that no real file system is needed here. This layer is obsolete. An application that uses Object storage sends a storage inquiry to the solution where to store the object. The object is then given an address inside the huge storage space and saved there by the application itself.
This is an advantage? This is what we had before file systems. I can hear people using the same arguments in the early 1960s. Mount that tape, please!
Because of the much simple [sic] management of data – with no real file system in place – Object storage solutions can be scaled up much easier than File storage or Block storage based systems. You just add some disks in the solution and no big management is needed anymore to have more storage space. That´s a main benefit especially in times of exponential data growth.
It's statements like this that make me wonder just how well anybody understands the situation.
These were both “blog” entries. But this one, from Red Hat, is trying to sell something:
Objects in Object storage are “bundled data” (aka a file) with corresponding meta data.
This seems to imply that files don't have metadata.
File storage, also called file-level or file-based storage, is exactly what you think it might be: Data is stored as a single piece of information inside a folder, just like you’d organize pieces of paper inside a manila folder.
Wrong! This is one of the common misconceptions reinforced by the use of this silly word “folder”. And the implication is that it's static: once it's in the “folder”, that fixes its location. This kind of misunderstanding is one of the reasons I'm so critical of the whole approach.
Because block storage doesn’t rely on a single path to data—like file storage does—it can be retrieved quickly.
Object storage, also known as object-based storage, is a flat structure in which files are broken into pieces and spread out among hardware.
Need reliable, low-latency storage for your applications? ... Block storage is the go-to solution...
On re-reading, this still doesn't make sense to me. I think I first need to understand the context in which it was written (which includes the understanding of the author).
This one may have the greatest insight. In particular, the sections “Problems solved by object storage” and “Problems solved by block storage” are interesting:
Object storage systems are massively scalable and their flat address space along with adaptable metadata capabilities can help businesses cope with growing data volumes.
A URL is a flat address space?
The term object storage, or object-based storage, derives its name because it packages data and metadata into objects.
This could be an important difference, but conventional file systems have metadata too. UFS is already straining with additional metadata that wasn't in the original specification. Is it time for a different approach to file metadata than what stat(2) and friends return? It's certainly far preferable to throwing away old conventions and starting again.
The issue with additional metadata might be one place where conventional file system semantics aren't sufficient.
In any case, there's a lot at stake in the matter. People on IRC are all in complete disagreement with me, but I wonder how good their overview is. Until I've investigated further, I can't really say.
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Baked barramundi
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
One of the things that really disappointed me after returning to Australia was the lack of good fish. Recently ALDI has started selling deep-frozen Barramundi, and today Yvonne bought one. Cooked it according to their recipe, modulo omitting the breadcrumbs. Yes, a nice fish, something that could be useful in Chinese steamed fish recipes. I won't keep this specific recipe.
| Thursday, 9 August 2018 | Dereel | |
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Power fail!
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Topic: technology, general | Link here |
Lying awake in bed at 3:22 this morning, I heard the external unit of the air conditioner make a choking sound. De-icing? No, that's a different kind of choking sound. Over to the thermostat. Dead: power failure.
What to do? Start up the generator? No, far too much work. Shut down the computers? Who knows how long it will last? So I went back to bed, and at 4:07 the power came back.
Up at 7:00 to turn on the machine again—I still don't have these things set up to come back automatically. At 8:15 I then checked on the progress of the fscks. “can't load 'kernel'”. Dammit, I've had this before. It had currdev set to disk0p2, and it should have been disk1p2.
Or should it? The loader (I think) told me that disk0 was drive A:, which was reserved for floppy drives in the olden days of BIOS. Have I somehow misconfigured the “BIOS” to include a floppy drive? To be investigated.
In any case, the system came up again, and for once /home came up without requiring a second pass through fsck. Started up the machine, and after about 3 minutes it froze on me. Next thing I knew, it rebooted.
OK, this time drop into single-user mode and fsck manually. And how about that, I needed two passes through /home (“Unexpected softupdate inconsistency”). But interestingly each pass only took about 32 minutes instead of about 55 on the boot-time automatic fsck. In addition, I was able to fsck /Photos (not so time-critical) in the background. That took longer, but I was able to confirm that the fsck was not aborted on going to multi-user mode. So a note to make: fsck manually, and also save the output (something I didn't do today).
On going to multi-user, I also confirmed what I had expected:
I don't know if that's because of the fewer checks done by the automatic fscks, but one thing is clear: I've been dragging my heels on upgrading eureka for nearly 3 years now. High time I do something about it.
On the positive side, this is only the second serious power failure in over 6 months. Still high time to install solar power, though.
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More thoughts about object storage
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I still think that it's silly that object storage isn't accessible by file system semantics, but in mulling over the alternatives, one thing hit me: for the use to which I would put it (incorporating photos in web pages) URL access (via http) is preferable to file system access. Consider:
So in this case, object storage wins. This in no way impacts yesterday's considerations, in particular other operations on the objects, but for this particular application, it makes sense to just send the URL. Now to consider what that means for my PHP scripts.
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More garden work
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
In the middle of winter you don't need much garden work, right? No. Mick along again today and stayed for fully 6 hours without being finished. Now we finally have the second Schinus molle (peppercorn tree) planted in the paddock to the west of the garden, and various irrigation stuff done. Mick is also gradually removing the Vinca minor that has taken over on the south side of the house. Here the difference (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
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He also planted a couple of random plants. And somehow that took up all the time.
| Friday, 10 August 2018 | Dereel | Images for 10 August 2018 |
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Frying ikan bilis
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Topic: food and drink, language, opinion | Link here |
Ikan bilis is the Malay language word for a kind of small fish, usually sold dried. I haven't found a good English name for it. Wikipedia tells me that it means “Anchovy”, which is probably biologically correct. But the anchovies sold in Europe are at least 5 times the length, so presumably 600 times the weight.
Ikan bilis needs to be deep fried. That's messy and smelly, and afterwards the oil is so contaminated that it's of no use for any other purpose. I keep my own oil for the job, which means manually frying instead of the friteuse. Today, however, I was preparing to change the fat in the second friteuse, so it made sense to do them in there. It worked well, modulo the usual smell, but after pouring off the fat I found lots of dregs in the bottom of the friteuse, here on the left:
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When frying in a saucepan, this just ended up in the results, but here is is nicely separated. What do I do with it? Clearly the entire fishes (less head for the most part) look nicer, but should I throw the rest away? There must be something that I can do with it.
| Saturday, 11 August 2018 | Dereel | Images for 11 August 2018 |
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Objectivity in online answering
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Topic: politics, technology, opinion | Link here |
I answer quite a few questions on Quora. To quote Wikipedia, it's “a question-and-answer site where questions are asked, answered, edited, and organized by its community of users in the form of opinions”. It gives quite an interesting window into the world of what interests the man in the street. The demographics are also interesting, if notably one-sided: apart from the inevitable North Americans, there are also a large number of Indians.
Politics are particularly interesting. Outside the USA, hardly anybody has a good word for Donald Trump, but there are a number of people who are very much in favour of him, sometimes to the point of idolization.
OK, that's fair, and it's an interesting insight into the demographics of the web. But some emulate their idols to degrees that I find unacceptable, and I've started a Quora bigots page. In the process, I followed up content from Johann Wegener. Apart from the one-sided terminology (can you say “Witch hunt” or “Hillary”?), everything looks so stereotyped that I'm left wondering if he isn't being paid for this content.
Jeremy White also repeats himself. One of his favourite terms is “leftwing”, which he combines with unrelated terms. I am, it seems, a “literate uninformed leftwing nutter fascist”, though I wonder if he didn't mean to write “illiterate”. He doesn't give me the impression that he is being paid for it. The original flare-up related to a response to the question Why don't the mainstream media simply report that Trump lies instead of downplaying his lying?, in which he disputed that Trump lies, and for which he produced no evidence. At least his final rant did produce some links, and he has me left wondering how much truth there is in them. There seem to be three issues:
First there's Merkel races to quell Bavarian uprising. This one I know: I've been following it, and the idea that it's a “Bavarian Uprising” is (possibly deliberately) inaccurate. Yes, it's true that Bavaria (a German state) is more conservative and thus less friendly to refugees than elsewhere, but the issue really seems to be centred round the person of Horst Seehofer, a Bavarian but now in the Federal government. And the situation was resolved. Hardly evidence of “the mess being made by the leftwing and Merkel”, especially since both Merkel and Seehofer are right-wing politicians: the situation was resolved amicably.
Why Did British Police Ignore Pakistani Gangs Abusing 1,400 Rotherham Children? Political Correctness. I hadn't heard about this, so I had to read up about it. There's a Wikipedia page about the matter. This goes back decades, and it seems to have involved people of Pakistani background. It's difficult to see what relevance this has to Trump's lies. Even the quoted article is 4 years old.
Problems in Sweden: Sweden’s violent reality is undoing a peaceful self-image, Here's What to Know about a String of Bomb Blasts in Sweden and Violent crime in Sweden is soaring. When will politicians act?. A thing that hit me was that two of the three articles were written by the same person, Paulina Neuding, though published in different publications. It's not clear whether this is significant.
It's not clear what relevance these articles have. Yes, they imply that gun violence is on the rise in Sweden. This is a left-wing plot? The USA leaves other countries standing when it comes to gun violence, and there's a consensus that it's perpetrated mainly by right-wing people. They're certainly the ones who swear on the Second Amendment. So what is the purpose of these references?
In any case, other pages point in the opposite direction. The more neutral List of countries by firearm-related death rate shows 4.62 homicides per 100,000 people in the USA, and 0.19 in Sweden, less than the 0.21 in France and only marginally more than in Australia (0.18), but still significantly more than in Germany (0.07). And this page shows that the rate has dropped significantly this year.
So what does this have to do with Trump's lies? I don't see a connection, though potentially Jeremy is implying that these articles indicate that he wasn't. But for that he needs to say to which of the (currently) 4229 lies he is referring.
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Chicken wings again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I eat deep-fried chicken wings as part of a nasi lemak breakfast, and I'm running out. I first cook them and freeze them, then thaw one and deep fry it as needed. How do I cook them this time? The last few times I cooked them sous vide, but that didn't bring any obvious advantage. How about in the sous-vide cooker, which doubles as a slow cooker, but without the bags? Theoretically I just need to put it on “slow cook” and see what happens.
The problem there is that I don't know what temperature that corresponds to. So in the end I put them in and set the sous-vide cooker to 82°. After an hour or so, the temperature at the top was still only about 65°:
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Clearly not the way to go. So instead I put them in a pot and cooked them in the oven. I started at 100° oven temperature, but after another hour that hadn't raised the temperature of the wings significantly. I didn't get much chance to experiment then: Yvonne was making ossi buchi, so we had to raise the temperature of the oven to 150°. No chance to check the temperature again, but after a couple of hours things looked OK. I'll see when I get round to frying them.
| Sunday, 12 August 2018 | Dereel | |
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Server fail!
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Came into the office this morning to discover that my IRC proxy connection had failed again. This is nothing unusual: it doesn't handle transient network issues well. But this time I couldn't reconnect. Took a look at the status on www.lemis.com, where it runs. Not running. Surely the system hasn't gone down? Yes, rebooted yesterday at 11:42 UTC:
That last log entry is one that happens every 5 minutes, so it must have been down over 10 minutes. My network status logs (coincidentally) confirm:
Why? No evidence of any issues in the log files, and in the 10 years that I've had an external server, I've never had a panic. OK, enter a ticket and ask if they can explain it? Yes indeed. Here's the entire response to the ticket, less copious empty lines:
“Unexpected power loss during planned maintenance...”. They didn't bother to tell me, and no apology. This is not the RootBSD that I knew 10 years ago, or even 5. The involvement of NetActuate may be the key here, but it's time to compare them with the Vultures. I've had my second server since 1 December 2017. How does it compare? I send one ping a minute to each server as part of my network monitoring setup, so I can find when a system doesn't respond.
A single lack of response is probably a transient network problem. To be sure that the system is off the air, I should give it at least 5 pings. And analysing this really needs some kind of program, but for the time being I'll do it by hand. I have:
| Date | ffm | www | End time | |||
| Tue 5 Dec 2017 20:46:47 AEDT | 2:06 | |||||
| Wed 6 Dec 2017 22:16:46 AEDT | 2:04 | |||||
| Sat 9 Dec 2017 00:56:12 AEDT | 52:47 | |||||
| Wed 20 Dec 2017 21:09:43 AEDT | 4:02 | |||||
| Wed 20 Dec 2017 21:26:00 AEDT | 4:02 | |||||
| Wed 20 Dec 2017 21:36:10 AEDT | 2:32 | |||||
| Tue 2 Jan 2018 20:50:33 AEDT | 3:38 | |||||
| Tue 2 Jan 2018 21:12:56 AEDT | 3:37 | |||||
| Sat 13 Jan 2018 12:24:54 AEDT | 2:30:07 | |||||
| Fri 19 Jan 2018 09:06:54 AEDT | 28:03 | |||||
| Sat 20 Jan 2018 20:00:03 AEDT | 1:05:17 | |||||
| Sat 3 Feb 2018 06:14:33 AEDT | 10:58 | |||||
| Mon 5 Feb 2018 01:29:49 | 29:35 | 01:59:24 | ||||
| Thu 22 Feb 2018 20:01:58 AEDT | 11:16 | |||||
| Thu 22 Feb 2018 21:19:15 AEDT | 13:26 | |||||
| Fri 23 Feb 2018 15:46:14 AEDT | 12:52 | |||||
| Mon 23 Apr 2018 21:03:25 AEST | 8:38 | 21:12:03 | ||||
| Wed 25 Apr 2018 18:06:55 AEST | 1:28:12 | |||||
| Wed 2 May 2018 00:54:35 AEST | 14:13 | 01:08:48 | ||||
| Wed 2 May 2018 01:12:49 AEST | 2:37 | 01:15:26 | ||||
| Wed 2 May 2018 04:39:16 AEST | 6:48 | 04:46:04 | ||||
| Wed 2 May 2018 05:28:16 AEST | 2:37 | 05:30:53 | ||||
| Wed 2 May 2018 20:50:31 AEST | 44:33 | |||||
| Wed 2 May 2018 21:46:44 AEST | 13:46:39 | |||||
| Sat 5 May 2018 09:22:51 AEST | 6:31 | |||||
| Sat 5 May 2018 09:34:39 AEST | 57:10 | |||||
| Sat 5 May 2018 10:44:54 AEST | 7:09 | |||||
| Fri 11 May 2018 11:09:27 AEST | 2:37 | 11:12:04 | ||||
| Sat 12 May 2018 22:38:53 AEST | 8:44 | 22:47:37 | ||||
| Mon 21 May 2018 05:33:01 AEST | 3:17 | |||||
| Tue 5 Jun 2018 12:33:39 AEST | 2:10 | 12:35:49 | ||||
| Tue 12 Jun 2018 14:09:58 AEST | 2:10 | |||||
| Tue 19 Jun 2018 01:07:09 AEST | 5:38 | 01:12:47 | ||||
| Wed 20 Jun 2018 16:19:04 AEST | 4:00 | 16:23:04 | ||||
| Wed 20 Jun 2018 14:06:27 AEST | 37:01 | 14:44:26 | ||||
| Fri 22 Jun 2018 05:24:43 AEST | 2:51 | 05:27:34 | ||||
| Fri 22 Jun 2018 23:16:38 AEST | 17:22 | 23:34:00 | ||||
| Sat 23 Jun 2018 00:04:07 AEST | 2:23 | 00:06:30 | ||||
| Sun 24 Jun 2018 20:40:12 AEST | 6:43 | 20:46:55 | ||||
| Mon 2 Jul 2018 12:11:48 AEST | 3:33 | 12:15:21 | ||||
| Sat 7 Jul 2018 12:42:23 AEST | 3:23 | 12:45:46 | ||||
| Wed 11 Jul 2018 17:28:30 AEST | 2:53 | 17:31:23 | ||||
| Tue 7 Aug 2018 14:09:46 AEST | 1:34:32 | 15:44:18 | ||||
| Fri 10 Aug 2018 00:57:08 AEST | - | 10:45 | 01:07:53 | |||
| Sat 11 Aug 2018 21:28:14 AEST | 14:08 | 21:42:22 | ||||
| Over 10 minutes | 4 | 15 | ||||
| Over 30 minutes | 1 | 8 | ||||
| Over 2 hours | 0 | 5 | ||||
| Reboots | 1 | 3 |
This list is more informative than I had thought. It shows in particular that availability of both systems is much less than I expected, and that outages tend to come in groups. It seems that most are network problems that don't get fixed on the first try, and I changed horses in mid-stream to account for them: I don't consider an outage over until I get 5 good pings. I also started adding the end time, mainly to be able to check my arithmetic.
So what does this tell me? Clearly ffm is more available than www, and it's probably time to say goodbye to RootBSD. But it's also not as reliable as I had hoped, so after migrating most of my content to object storage, maybe it would also be time to run two servers, in case one fails.
| Monday, 13 August 2018 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 13 August 2018 |
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Garden breakage
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Last month Mick planted our Salvia microphylla cultivar in the garden. It looked rather sad, and I was concerned about wind damage, so I put a wire cage around it with plastic foil to keep the wind out.
How do you anchor the protection? Two metal stakes (“dropper” in Australian) will do it. But wouldn't one dropper on the edge through the mesh do the trick too? That's what I did.
Today I found out why that's not a good idea:
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It's not dead, but it has certainly suffered. One stem has broken off, and I have planted it in soil in the hope that it will take root. And of course now there are two droppers round the protection.
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Wheelbarrow breakage
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Topic: general | Link here |
Yvonne's wheelbarrow had a flat tyre. How did that happen? It seems that wheelbarrow tyres are of particularly bad quality. Turned on the air compressor to pump it up again, without much hope that it would stay there.
I was right, though not quite the way I expected. The air pressure shot up, probably beyond the recommended pressure. How far? I barely had time to look before the thing exploded on me:
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Clearly there's no repairing that tyre any more.
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Random breakages
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Topic: general, gardening | Link here |
They're not the only breakages we have had recently. We also have the dish washer that I have been dragging my feet about, the ducted vacuum cleaner sounds like the motor is on its last legs—why, in a device only a little over 3 years old?—we have a power point that is still hanging out of the wall, and one of these silly halogen lights in the useless range hood has burnt out. What is it, anyway? There seem to be no markings on them whatsoever. It took me quite some time, with the help of eBay, to establish that it is a G4 bi-pin lamp similar to the one on the right of this image:
But what power? The manufacturer was too polite to include that information. After some searching I discovered a marking on the reflector in the range hood: 12 V, maximum 20 W.
Still, enough stuff to fix to justify a journey into town, something that I really didn't want to do. To Wiltronics, where they were just as confused as I was, but they finally gave me my 20 W globe, $5.95. It wasn't until I got home that I discovered that the 20 W were spread over 2 10 W globes. And later, on eBay I bought 20 20 W globes for $7.19, including postage. At that price, it's hardly worth returning the others.
Then to Bunnings to buy a new wheelbarrow—$99. I should have asked about wheels, but I couldn't find any staff. Also some irrigation hose and some fertilizer, not only cheaper than I expected, but also clearly labeled:
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7-1-7-9. What does that mean? It proves to be an approximation to the percentages of Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium and Sulphur, conveniently in alphabetical order of English name, not chemical symbol (N-P-K-S):
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Isn't that a good idea! Yes, indeed, except...
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The bag on the right has the same description, and a completely different composition (9-1-7-12)! Not the slightest explanation as to why they have two different ones, nor the difference that it would make.
| Tuesday, 14 August 2018 | Dereel | Images for 14 August 2018 |
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Spring on its way
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Topic: general, gardening | Link here |
It's getting milder, and today we took the dogs to the „Große Linde“, really some kind of conifer. On the way we had flowering Acacia and—not so pleasantly—Oxalis, a rather pretty weed:
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We also saw the first few Pterostylis of the season, not really worth a photo.
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More kangaroos
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Topic: animals, photography, general | Link here |
We have had a lot of kangaroos on the property lately. Light is almost always against me: we live at the east end of the property, so the afternoon sun comes from behind. Still, I got a few good shots today:
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| Wednesday, 15 August 2018 | Dereel | Images for 15 August 2018 |
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Coming to grips with Object Storage, day 1
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
OK, it's becoming clear that I will have to overcome my distaste with the implementation of object storage and learn to live with it.
It really seems that there are almost no tools worth using, presumably the result of choosing to throw away the file system paradigm and start again. But s3cmd, which the FreeBSD Ports Collection obfuscatingly calls py-s3cmd, seems to offer much of what I need. Tried to install it, once again tripping over the age of my installation on eureka, but finally got it installed on www and teevee. That's enough for today; tomorrow I'll look at the pain of actually setting one up.
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apachectl graceless
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
While installing s3cmd on www, discovered that the load average was over 50, and there were dozens of active httpd processes. Why? Has Apache got itself confused? Tried a graceful restart:
=== root@www (/dev/pts/2) /home/grog 1 -> apachectl graceful
And how about that, the httpd processes gradually diminished... until there were none left. Was the thing still running? Checked from home. No, connection refused. What went wrong there?
=== root@www (/dev/pts/2) /home/grog 3 -> apachectl start
After that, everything ran again. Why did the “graceful” restart stop Apache? Nothing in the log files. More head-scratching.
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More pterostylis
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Walking the dogs up towards Progress Road, came across many more Pterostylis in flower:
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That's surprising, because I have never seen any there before. Time to take another look in the house forest. I have a suspicion that they might only flower every few years.
| Thursday, 16 August 2018 | Dereel | Images for 16 August 2018 |
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Object storage, day 2
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
OK, now I have the local tools to move data to object storage. Time to take the plunge.
What issues do I still have?
First, set up an account with DigitalOcean. That was straightforward enough, but creating a space and setting up s3cmd wasn't. It took me over an hour to work my way through a maze of twisty little menus and terms, all different.
How do you generate keys? How do you save them? It tells me to visit the API page, conveniently linked, which shows nothing about keys. When I finally found it, I couldn't work out how to generate the keys. I was presented with this page, with no explanations:
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Select More V, right? Wrong. By trial and error I discovered that I was supposed to click on the blue tick mark to the right of the space name in order to save the key that had already been generated.
Next, set up s3cmd, using this page as a guide. Suddenly there's a mention of a “bucket”. What's that? Some storage subdivision, presumably, but they're too polite to assume that I've never heard of it before, so they don't say.
Test the configuration:
Not quite “Error 0 (Success)”, but close enough. What's wrong? The obvious thing in the setup was that there is nothing there to identify my space. What's this dubious-looking statement?
%(bucket) looks like some variable substitution. Should I substitute my space name? Tried that to no avail. Much discussion on IRC, most of which missed the point.
Authentication issue, maybe? It didn't look like, but what happens if I try the wrong key. Exactly the same thing! Is this its way of telling me that my key was wrong? Checked it, along with the secret key, and both looked correct. But they're only displayed on a web browser, and the Copy function doesn't work. That secret key takes up the entire width of its field on the browser. Could it be truncated? How do I tell? It's a secret key, so I can't get it displayed again. Maximize the browser window? No difference. Change the font size? No difference. Look at the source? Not there.
Finally tried setting up on a different system. This had all been on www, so I tried teevee (eureka is too old to install the software easily). And how about that! It worked.
What was different? Only one thing:
The instructions were to use https, and there was no reason to change them, but somehow I had managed to anyway.
Finally done, t+90 minutes! What I learnt:
OK, step 2: copy data to the storebucket. First, how do I organize them? The
modern way seems to be to assign them random names, but then, that's one of my objections.
I currently keep my photos in a clear hierarchy, like /grog/Photos/20180816/, where 20180816 is (today's) date. Inside this directory are some auxiliary files,
including a list of images and their sizes, and three
subdirectories big/, small/ and tiny/, which contain the original
files, a smaller version (about 270 kP) and even smaller images (about 67 kP) respectively.
I only really need to move the images. So why not keep the hierarchy as-is? Yes, it's not
modern, but it Makes Sense To Me.
That's a s3cmd put or s3cmd sync. The latter looks more appropriate:
=== grog@www (/dev/pts/1) ~/www.lemis.com 58 -> for i in grog/Photos/19640828; do s3cmd sync $i/big/ $i/small/ $i/tiny/ s3://lemis/$i/; done
The good news: it works. The bad news: not the way I wanted. Losing file system semantics also means losing symlinks. I'll have to work out how to handle that.
That was straightforward enough: use the -F flag. s3cmd checks the space for copies of the file, so it does something like a real link at the other end.
The other is easier: it dropped the final part of the directory names, so grog/Photos/19640828/tiny/Bikini-1.jpeg ended up in grog/Photos/19640828/Bikini-1.jpeg. So did grog/Photos/19640828/big/Bikini-1.jpeg. OK, that's trivial:
=== grog@www (/dev/pts/1) ~/www.lemis.com 59 -> for i in grog/Photos/19640828/big; do s3cmd sync $i/ s3://lemis/$i/; done
Finally I have images in the space. Point a web browser at http://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/19640828/big/Bank-Negara-Malaysia.jpeg and what do I see? HTTP error 413: You are not permitted...
Where did that come from? The files that I uploaded had permissions 644 (owner read-write, group read, other read). Why are they not accessible? Ah, that's a feature, not a bug. By default, files are not world-readable. As Benno Rice said on IRC:
Yes, the more I have to do with this concept, it seems that the thrust of object storage is not storing publicly available content. But that's not the point. There's no way to change the default! Peter Jeremy came up with the s3cmd setacl command, but it proves that the -P option to the sync subcommand sets public access.
One of the few advantages that I found that object storage has over file systems is a more modular permissions system, using ACLs. But there's little to be seen of that here. All the documentation I have seen so far has reduced the 512 permissions that Unix offers down to two: public or private. O brave new world! As Henry Spencer said,
Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
While trying to fix the permissions, ran into one of these poor reinventions:
=== grog@www (/dev/pts/1) ~/www.lemis.com 63 -> for i in grog/Photos/19640828; do s3cmd setacl $i/big/ $i/small/ $i/tiny/ s3://lemis/$i/ -P; done
This is s3cmd's way of saying “You may only specify one path name (I think). My error (I had forgotten to remove the source paths from a previous command), but what a message! The most important part is “unexpected error”: it doesn't cater for incorrect syntax. By comparison, chmod says:
=== grog@www (/dev/pts/1) ~ 27 -> for i in grog/Photos/19640828; do chmod 644 $i/big/ $i/small/ $i/tiny/ s3://lemis/$i/ -P; done
OK, finally I have things going the way I wanted them:
=== grog@www (/dev/pts/1) ~/www.lemis.com 64 -> for i in grog/Photos/1*; do for j in big small tiny; do echo $i/$j; s3cmd sync $i/$j/ s3://lemis/$i/$j/ -P; done
And away that ran, copying all my data. But not exactly with the warm fuzzy feeling that everything was OK. Apparently at random I got:
Finally I have my 20th century photos copied; hopefully these ECONNRESET errors won't happen when people access the images. But it's clearly something to keep my eye on.
In fact this seems to have been a bug at the time. It went away in a time frame of months.
While waiting for the sync, I took a look at showphoto (). Surprise, surprise! Only one line needs changing:
Good luck or good programming? Probably neither. That's what I got for sticking to the same file system hierarchy as on the local machine. And, of course, yet another indication that file system semantics are still important.
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Garden flowers in late winter
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Middle of the month, time for the monthly flower photos.
Spring is clearly on its way, and some flowers are way ahead of the season. The red Anigozanthos has progressed further since last month, though the yellow ones in the driveway appear to have died, possibly because of inappropriate soil:
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The Grevilleas are also doing well:
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On the other hand, the Banksia, while clearly healthy, has not changed much:
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I had had hopes that one Canna would survive the winter cold, which it might have done had the wind not put paid to it:
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The Echium that we planted earlier this year (and which I didn't mention) is looking very healthy, and we can expect flowers soon:
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And one of the Carpobrotus is flowering sporadically long before its time:
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The Euphorbia that we planted only last month is flowering happily:
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The Chaenostoma cordatum that we bought in April have partially survived:
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One died, two survived. It was a silly idea to buy them in April.
The Hebes are gradually recovering, for the most part:
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We've never seen a flower on any of the variegated ones, and though this one looks particularly bad, I'm wondering if some cockatoos have been having fun with them.
The mandevillas have had a varied fate. The white one at the entrance to the house looked quite good until a couple of weeks ago, but that has changed dramatically:
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I'm not sure what caused that. Yes, they're (reasonably) frost-sensitive, but the position was relatively protected, more so than the red one, which seems to be doing much better:
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And the roses never cease to surprise me. We still have new buds, not pretty, but interesting:
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The tomatoes are still not dead:
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I'm hoping for a harvest in the spring.
And the Tropaeolum continue to show the difference between the two beds:
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The first one is the original bed planted 3 years ago, and the second is only 18 months or so old. What's wrong with the soil round the water tanks?
And there are also still a couple of resistant Buddlejas:
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| Friday, 17 August 2018 | Dereel | Images for 17 August 2018 |
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Huevos a la tigre again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Another attempt at huevos a la tigre today. The big issue is still cooking the eggs correctly, with yolks soft and whites firm but not leathery.
Today I added another variable: a new serving dish of roughly appropriate proportions. Heat the mixture in the microwave oven to about 72° and then add the eggs, heat at 600 W for another two minutes with a cover on the dish. Leave to stand for 2 to 3 minutes. The result:
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Doesn't that look nice? Well, yes, until you realize that the space between the two eggs is covered in completely raw egg white. And the yolks were firm. At least nothing was leathery.
Clearly this is more of a problem than I had expected. How do I proceed? One possibility would be to group the yolks in the middle and the whites towards the outside. Another would be, of course, to just do it in an oven, as the recipe intended, and to ensure that it doesn't get hot enough to turn the eggs to leather.
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Object storage, day 3
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Overnight my syncing of the data to DigitalOcean completed. How many errors? Who knows? Re-ran the sync operation and was reassured by the fact that nothing else was copied, so I started copying this century's photos. But I'm still getting these request failures and timeouts:
That happened over the space of about 3 minutes. Apart from the wait times specified, there were the timeouts. What causes this? It can't be network activity: the next file transferred without a hitch. I should try from a different system, but for the time being it looks as if it's DigitalOcean's fault.
On the positive side, I found:
What does that mean? These files are not links; by my error, they're real copies of the same image. So clearly sync has looked at the checksums and sizes and established that they're the same thing. That looks like the way to handle the symlink issues that I noted yesterday.
| Saturday, 18 August 2018 | Dereel | Images for 18 August 2018 |
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Reactions to Trump's bullying
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
On of Donald Trump's worst actions as president of the USA was to cancel US involvement in the JCPOA. US involvement? No, everybody's involvement, at least as far as he can reach. Do business with Iran or do business with us. That's duress, and it's unlikely that China will pay much attention.
Today I read an article showing other problems that this action has caused: Iraq has many business dealings with Iran, at least partially because the US invasion forced them to do. And now they're expected to break them. What can Iraq do? He has the gun.
But it seems that they found a way anyway, to quote this article:
On Monday, Abadi walked back his earlier commitment, saying Iraq would refrain only from conducting business with Iran in U.S. dollars. He said there was no decision yet on whether Iraq would suspend imports of major goods from Iran.
That will probably work. How are the US Americans going to find out what transactions take place? One of the reasons that Daesh survived so long was because of illegal trade. That was a terrorist group, with relatively limited ways to escape observation. When the governments of two bordering countries carry out transactions, who is there to observe them?
More to the point, though, it shows what I think is going to happen anyway: more and more financial transactions will take place without US involvement. This will have the effect that the US currency will lose in importance, along with the rest of the USA. Bravo, Trump!
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Roast pork again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Three months ago we had roast pork, and Chris Bahlo and I really liked it: juicy, tasty and with nice crackling. The rest of the meat proved to be just what I needed for various South-East Asian dishes for breakfast.
But I'm running out of leftovers. OK, another roast. Last time it had been a shoulder roast. This time it was leg (ham), considered to be a better cut. Cooked as last time at 210°, 60 minutes with recirculation and 30 minutes with top heat as well: 90 minutes to get 1.5 kg to 68°.
Not a success. The skin wasn't as crisp as it should have been, and the meat was decidedly firm. Should I have cooked it to a higher temperature? Should I have heated from above for the entire time? I don't know, but if I can persuade Yvonne to do it again (won't be in the immediate future), I'll try shoulder again.
| Sunday, 19 August 2018 | Dereel | |
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Object storage migration, continued
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
My migration to DigitalOcean continued today, all day long, moving my data from the 21st century. And I continued to get ECONNRESET errors about once a minute. The speeds seemed to be faster, but by evening it still wasn't done.
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Power fail?
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Topic: general | Link here |
Two transient power failures today, at 12:48 and 12:55. They were enough to annoy the UPS and cause the printer to wake up and grumble, but not enough for the ovens to forget the time. How long is that? I'd guess somewhere in the range of ½ second. The real annoyance is the worry that something worse is to come.
| Monday, 20 August 2018 | Dereel | |
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The daily object storage
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Finally my photos have been synced to DigitalOcean! How many of them got there? I had lots of ECONNRESET errors. OK, this is a sync, so just repeat it, this time logging. For 182 GB, it took nearly 6 hours! And lots of stuff to sift through, including a ridiculous number of ECONNRESETs:
=== grog@www (/dev/pts/1) ~/www.lemis.com 19 -> grep "Connection reset" Log.log | wc -l
Next step: sync Yvonne's photos. This included actually transferring all of them, of course, so it took much longer, and it wasn't done by midnight.
In the meantime, I got lots of mail from DigitalOcean: a welcome to their developer community (why? I didn't register as a developer), along with some handy tips:
Stick with larger files (> 1 MB) as much as possible. Spaces is designed for storing and serving of large objects. When architecting your application to work with Spaces, try to combine smaller objects into larger files > 1 MB.
Well, that's handy to say so now, isn't it? My big photos average about 2.5 MB, but the “tiny” ones are less than 100 kB in size. And clearly there's no way to combine them. I suppose I should see what performance is like and decide what to do with the smaller photos later.
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Last tomatoes of winter
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
The tomato bush still isn't completely dead, though it's not clear if what is left is viable:
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Still, come the beginning of spring next month, I'll pick a few more, just to make the point.
| Tuesday, 21 August 2018 | Dereel → Cape Clear → Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 21 August 2018 |
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Vaccinations
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Off to Cape Clear today with the dogs and cat to Pene Kirk's for vaccinations, Piccola yowling her head off the whole way. For some reason Nikolai was terrified of the surgery. I don't understand why. Leonid had a claw removed there a few months back, but Niko has never had anything unpleasant. Maybe it was the recollection of the sight of Leo being operated on.
Nothing of interest to report. Pene thinks that, given the lifestyle of the animals, one vaccination every 2 years should be enough.
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More shopping
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Into Ballarat today: I need a new driver license, and for that first a haircut. Then to VicRoads to get a new license.
I've been there before, which is just as well. Today the place looked deserted, and there was no obvious way to get in:
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Looking very carefully at the light-coloured wall in the middle, there's a tiny sign:
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OK, where? It's the barely visible, unmarked opening to the left of the grey-walled entrance (yes, that's what it is).
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I knew that, but how many people stand there and look baffled?
Things were no better when I got inside. Yes, take a ticket, of course, but first there's a menu system to navigate:
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Which do I choose? “Pay my renewal”? That could be intended for vehicle registration. ”License enquiry”? “Other”? The ”License enquiry” submenu gave me:
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Replacement license? That could be, but I don't trust them. So I ended up taking two tickets.
That was just as well. It seems that I was in for a renewal (completely new driver license), not a replacement license. And it cost the amazing sum of $276.70! What can I say?
Then to Bunnings to look for various stuff: premix concrete, which the information person didn't understand, and pipe wrenches, which the cashier in the tools section had to look up in her computer, then quoting me an aisle number and (fortunately) pointing to it: it didn't have any recognizable markings. I didn't find the pipe wrench I was looking for either, just a simpler version like the one I already have, but which no longer holds its grip.
Then to look for a wheelbarrow wheel. Yes, found that: $75. A whole new barrow cost $99. eBay maybe?
And there are still no trellises of the kind I was looking for, just this:
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To be discussed with Yvonne. What fun Bunnings are! At least I got my premix concrete.
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Chinese Cabbage? Savoy Cabbage? Wombok?
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Topic: food and drink, language, photography, opinion | Link here |
There's a new vegetable shop in Howitt St., in the same block as the Filipinos.
This appears to be the first time I went to the Fruit Shack.
Yvonne found them the other day and suggested that I take a look because of the East Asian stuff they had there, including non-vegetable items. And indeed they have large quantities of Galanggal and fresh Turmeric. I didn't buy any, because I didn't need any right now, but it occurred to me later that they'll never get rid of the quantities they have, so maybe I should have bought some galanggal and frozen it. Hopefully they'll do well
While there, saw some Chinese cabbage on sale. That's been a point of contention for some time. What's the canonical name in English? Some Australian official with (apparently) neither culinary nor linguistic ability has decided that it should be called Wombok, which, they assert, is a Chinese word (it's not; it's Tagalog). So at some time in the past I looked it up in Wikipedia, a strongly USA-oriented service, which once told me that it was called Napa cabbage, a term that I had never heard, but which seems strongly USA-centric.
Others have called it Savoy cabbage, which is clearly wrong. But when I found the two kinds next to each other today, I thought it was worth a photo:
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As it turned out, nobody believes this fantasy any more. But why are the price labels so unsharp? This was taken with the Panasonic Lumix 20 mm f/1.7, which, according to DxOMark, is one of their sharpest lenses. Yes, it was taken at f/1.7, but it shouldn't be that bad.
Some worry, culminating in the decision that the part of the image was out of focus. I had managed to focus not on the cabbages, but on a mirror image, and the price labels were considerably closer. Here what I focused on, roughly the same crop factor:
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And I'll blame any residual unsharpness on my old E-PM1.
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The daily object storage
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Back home, Yvonne's photos had been synced, after not even 24 hours:
So now I have 232.2 GB of objects (345163 items), or an average size of 673 kB. What do I do now? Change the PHP scripts to point to them and see what happens? Mañana.
| Wednesday, 22 August 2018 | Dereel | Images for 22 August 2018 |
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Object Storage: cutover, try 1
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
All my image data has now been synced to DigitalOcean. Time to cut over and check performance. That's simple: as mentioned last week, I just need to set $servername to point to the new location. Tried that, and it worked. How fast? Tried the photos we took at the last big hacker barbecue, 8 years ago, all 158 of them, and asked people on IRC to find fault.
No complaints about the speed, but Jamie Fraser found a spurious 1 at the beginning of the page, my sloppiness. Callum Gibson found something more important: there are other links on the page that also refer to $servername, but they should be local. So marginally more work to be done.
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Use a larger hammer!
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
The pipe wrench that I bought yesterday was for a specific purpose. Last week Yvonne had discovered that her office chair—not at all that old—kept sinking to the ground. I've seen that before, of course: it's something to do with the lifting mechanism. But at Officeworks they didn't want to know: they sell chairs, not spare parts. So she bought another chair.
In the meantime I did some investigation and discovered that the faulty part is called a gas lift, and that they're available on line for under $20. But how do you change them? YouTube to the rescue: just use a pipe wrench and remove the cylinder from the chair:
Unfortunately it looks as if this video has been made private. Who knows why?
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But when I tried it, I discovered that my pipe wrench was too weak: it twisted, and I couldn't get a good grip. That's why I bought the new pipe wrench.
But that didn't work either. Yes, I got a good grip, but the cylinder was jammed so firmly that I couldn't twist it. Finally I gave up and used a hammer, which after a while worked. Only then did I discover that that's what the video suggested as a backup method.
| Thursday, 23 August 2018 | Dereel | Images for 23 August 2018 |
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A day in the kitchen
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
Sometimes cooking gangs up on me. Today was one of those days: cook some nasi lemak, boil three different kinds of sausage, slice the remains of last Saturday's pork roast, slice the sausage, freeze pork and sausage, slice yesterday's loaf of bread, freeze bread, freeze nasi lemak... Somehow I was in the kitchen for a ridiculous amount of time.
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Object storage: done?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
More attention to my baroque showphoto () function today. It wasn't that difficult, but the devil is in the detail: two different server name values, $servername for the local server (on which the script is invoked) and $imageservername for the image URLs. And, not surprisingly, that worked.
Then turned to the synchronization scripts that I use to get my web pages to the remote destination. That required working round eureka, which is still greatly down-rev: I couldn't install s3cmd on it. In the end I took the version that I had installed on teevee and moved it over, along with the libraries, and it worked.
Finally back to see what I had loaded (the photos of the office chair). The source page showed nothing! Not even an error message! Much more checking. Yes, there was an error message. But it wasn't displayed on the page (what can the end user do with it?): it was sent to me by (copious) email. The problem was that I was checking for the existence of the source file, a luxury I can no longer allow myself, along with some very dubious code:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/12) ~/public_html 313 -> blame php/includes/onephoto.php | less
That was related to a discovery some years ago that all the photos that I thought were of Buddleja globosa were in fact of Buddleja x weyeriana, and I kept getting image requests for them. Certainly getting rid of that code could only be good. And after that, until proof of the contrary, things work.
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More springtime
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Somehow the Grevillea rosmarinifolia (or whatever the related species is) are flowering particularly profusely this year:
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| Friday, 24 August 2018 | Dereel | Images for 24 August 2018 |
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Tidying up the garden
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Mick the gardener along today, this time mainly for structural stuff, erecting two garden arches, currently barely visible:
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They had to be concreted in, of course. Also managed to plant some of the creepers. It was certainly high time for this Jasminum polyanthum:
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Hopefully it'll survive.
He also considerably tidied up on the south side of the house:
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The bloody Prime Minister of bloody Austraya
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
We're living in interesting times. For the second time this week, the Liberal Party of Australia assembled to choose a leader. This time Malcolm Turnbull didn't stand as leader, and Scott Morrison was elected as leader and thus, apparently, as Prime Minister of Australia.
What can I say? “Who's Scott Morrison?”? Or just “why the change?”? He's the third Prime Minister in three years, without a change of ruling parties, and nobody in the Liberals has explained why the change was needed. Maybe they should just set up a roster and allow every member to be Prime Minister for, say, 10 days each.
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Venezuela statistics
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Topic: politics, technology, opinion | Link here |
The situation in Venezuela is concerning. They have an inflation rate that rivals the inflation in the Weimar Republic. And Nicolás Maduro has a solution: Cryptocurrency! I read this as “if we're going to make a mess of it, let's really make a mess of it. They've introduced a new Sovereign Bolívar, maybe, now the only official currency, at a rate of 1 for 100,000 old “Strong” Bolívars. But it seems that the man in the street hasn't seen any yet.
But the confusion doesn't stop there. Statista has come up with statistics on the matter, with some amazing claims:
The situation prompted Venezuelan authorities to devalue the currency 95 percent by removing five zeros from the old bolívar.
How on earth does 100,000:1 relate to 95%? Clearly it's wrong, but it's so far from being correct that I can't even guess what kind of mental confusion could have led to this claim. But it's not the only one; I had heard similarly incorrect claims on Al Jazeera a couple of days ago. Do people really have such problems with elementary mathematics? I tried reporting the situation, but their “report” page assumes that the only thing worth reporting is copyright infringement, and I had to tick the box stating that I was copyright holder of “the material” (which material?) to even be allowed to send the report. Presumably it will land in the bin.
That's a pity: this kind of error severely detracts from Statista's reputation. It also makes it difficult to assess the veracity of other claims. In the text, there are examples of the new prices:
| Item | Price | Price | ||
| (Sovereign Bolívars) | (USD) | |||
| Cup of coffee | 25 | (0.38) | ||
| 2.4 kg chicken | 146 | 2.22 | ||
| 1 kg cheese | 75 | 1.14 | ||
| 1 kg rice | 25 | 0.38 |
Looking at those prices, it seems that they may have made a mistake dividing the prices by only 100,000. The new Bolívar is only worth about 1.5 US ¢. 1,000,000 or even 10,000,000 might have been more appropriate. But is the food in Venezuela really that cheap? That's up to an order of magnitude cheaper than what we would pay in Australia, though here the price relationship between chicken and cheese is very different.
| Saturday, 25 August 2018 | Dereel | Images for 25 August 2018 |
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House photos, next hurdle
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Topic: photography, technology | Link here |
House photo day today. Gradually things are settling down after my transition to the new workflow. But there are always surprises. Today I discovered that DxO PhotoLab created output images of (considerably) different sizes for the component images of one view.
Yes, I know that this can happen, and I have a script to trim them to size. But I don't apply it until after the HDR images have been created, and this particular one breaks Photomatix. OK, run the script against the input images. Sorry, no, this is TIFF, and there are two images in the file, greatly confusing the script. In the end I converted this one set without any optimization, and it worked, but that's yet another thing I need to fix.
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Nikon goes mirrorless
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
I've been involved with digital system cameras (those with interchangeable lenses) for over 12 years now, when I started looking for a DSLR for Yana. The people at Los Gatos Camera (like almost all the stores, now closed down) were very helpful, and at the time I decided that for me something like the Olympus E-330 might be the best choice. But I was left wondering why the cameras needed a mirror, when cheaper digital cameras got by quite well without one.
A year later (and almost exactly 11 years ago), I finally made good on that choice. Why Olympus? I had revisited my criteria, of course. At the time they were image stabilization and “live view”: all DSLRs had a display, but most didn't use it as a viewfinder. The Olympus E-510 had both, the only camera at the time that did, and I discovered that live view really wasn't all that it was cracked up to be.
So when mirrorless cameras came out only a year later, I was all for the idea. Only there were no good cameras at the time, and it took me until December 2013 before I finally got my Olympus OM-D E-M1.
And the rest of the world? Other manufacturers came out with mirrorless cameras, but the Big Two (Canon and Nikon) just came out with alibi cameras, nothing serious.
That has changed with the Nikon Z7, and I've been looking at it with interest, in particular comparing it with my OM-D E-M1 Mark II. The interesting thing is that, although it's a full frame camera, it's hardly any bigger than the E-M1:
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But that shows at least how big the E-M1 is. Other Olympus cameras are considerably smaller:
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And the new lens mount is really enormously wide compared to older mounts, as the photo above shows.
But what about the specs? It's a horribly expensive camera. B&H currently offer it with a not-very-spectacular standard lens (24-70 mm, f/4) for effectively (US) $4,000. By comparison, they offer the E-M1 Mark II, itself a very expensive camera, with 12-40 f/2.8 lens for $2,400.
What do you get for the extra $1,600, two-thirds as much again? Full frame, of course, and a much higher resolution sensor, 45.7 MP compared to 20 MP. How important is that resolution? The E-M1 Mark II will give me 80 MP if I ask it, but I haven't found a lens that can deliver that much. OK, look at the reviews that are coming out thick and fast, notably this one, and also the (rather flaky) specification comparison. What I see there is:
The Nikon has 14 bit pixel depth (strangely, as an option, while the sensor resolution is, of course, fixed).
The LCD panel only tilts, where the E-M1 Mark II has a fully articulating screen. I'm clearly not the only one who thinks this is an advantage: Olympus added it as an enhancement compared to the E-M1 Mark I.
The maximum shutter speed is specified as 1/8000 s, the same as the E-M1. Or is it? The E-M1 Mark II has 1/32000 s with an electronic shutter. Does the Nikon have an electronic shutter? Yes, it seems, only an electronic shutter. They don't go into detail, but the DPreview article states that it's completely silent, and discuss the issues of rolling shutter and banding.
The maximum flash sync speed is only 1/200 s, compared to 1/250 s for the E-M1 Mark II and Olympus E-PM2 or 1/320 s for the E-M1 Mark I. But then, with the electronic shutter the Mark I has only 1/13 s, and the Mark II has only 1/60 s, so I suppose Nikon has had to push it to get 1/200 s sync speed out of an electronic shutter.
Continuous exposures are really different. The Z 7 manages only 9 fps, only marginally more than the E-PM2 (8 fps, but with mechanical shutter) and way behind the E-M1 Mark II with 60 fps. This completely eliminates many of the clever things that the E-M1 Mark II can do.
Video capabilities also don't quite make it in comparison to the E-M1 Mark II, though there's not much in it.
It has 493 focus points compared to the E-M1's 121. I don't know what to do with the E-M1's focus points, so it's not clear what advantage a fourfold increase is.
There are also a couple of strangenesses, in particular the fact that the viewfinder normally runs stopped down (but not beyond f/5.6). People are already wondering how long it will take before a firmware upgrade fixes that. But probably the most interesting comparison is with the Nikon D850 DSLR, as this comparison shows. The Z 7 is only marginally more expensive, and it outperforms the D850 in most of the items I mentioned above.
And one thing in the article caught my eye:
One rift between DSLRs and mirrorless cameras that persists even today simply concerns the cameras' startup times. DSLRs are still nigh instantaneous; when you flip the on switch and mash the shutter, the camera will fire a shot right then and there. The Z 7 doesn't get to quite that level of responsiveness, but it also doesn't make you wait an age either. We'd say it's on par with the likes of an Olympus E-M1 II or Panasonic G9, while some of Sony's a7-series of cameras still takes noticeably longer to power on and and take an image.
That's clearly not a distinction, but it makes me wonder why mirrorless cameras take so long. I find it irritating on the E-M1s.
In summary, I think that the most important thing about the Z 7 is that it is another nail in the coffin of the DSLR. Canon will soon let the other shoe drop, we're told. That, too, will be interesting. And there are even rumours that Olympus will bring out a full frame camera soon. I don't know if I like that idea: 12 years ago in Los Gatos, one of my reasons for Olympus was the small sensor size. What I could imagine would be that they will find a way to make the new top-of-the line (rumoured to be released in 4 to 6 months) smaller than the Nikon.
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Cheap money transfer
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
I pay something like $100 a month in bank fees for pension transfers from Germany and France. I've been planning to do something for over a year now, but the real question was deciding which service to choose: I have four to choose from. In principle OANDA looks best, but I really need to get down and decide.
But that was yesterday. And then I got mail today:
As of August 31 2018, we will be discontinuing the OANDA Money Transfer service.
What does this mean for me?
After August 31 2018 you will receive an email notifying you that your account has been closed. Any pending transactions at the time of account closure will be processed.
That was unexpected. How long will it be before the others follow suit?
| Sunday, 26 August 2018 | Dereel | Images for 26 August 2018 |
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More random object storage issues
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne has been taking a lot of photos recently, and it occurred to me that I had forgotten to install s3cmd on lagoon, her machine. OK, do that, copy the config file, and run it:
=== yvonne@lagoon (/dev/pts/1) ~/Photos/20180824 48 -> make sync
Huh? I had just copied the file!
=== yvonne@lagoon (/dev/pts/3) ~ 1 -> l .s3cfg
=== yvonne@lagoon (/dev/pts/3) ~ 2 -> cat .s3cfg
Clearly s3cfg is too polite to report permission errors.
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File names with spaces: the pain
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
A while back I discovered a strangeness in my video directory:
How can I have two entries with the same name? It became clear in an Emacs window, where I highlight unusual spaces:
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So I got to thinking: how does Microsoft handle that? I can't access this directory from Microsoft, but I can create one with some strange names:
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What Microsoft did was a surprise:
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The file names with embedded spaces were shown as-is, made even more confusing by the proportional font, but the names with trailing spaces were mangled beyond obvious recognition. Not even the file size helped: it was Just Plain Wrong. It's not the EOF indication, and it's not the real file size: the fragment size of this file system is 4096 bytes. And it's not because Microsoft doesn't understand EOF:
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I have no idea how they came to this value. But the whole thing shows yet again how stupid it is to put spaces in file names.
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Just a little gardening
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Our oldest Hibiscus rosa-sinensis has been growing happily, gradually reducing the space left for us to get past it. I couldn't face cutting off the new buds, and so the branches grew longer and longer. Finally I started picking off buds before they developed, and today I removed a branch about 70 cm long and cut it into pieces for propagation. Also removed the very sad looking Persicaria odorata and planted it in a pot. I don't know if it will survive, but it was pretty hardy in Kleins Road.
| Monday, 27 August 2018 | Dereel | |
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More foreign exchange pain
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
I really need to do something about my foreign currency transfers. In principle it's simpler now that OANDA is out of the business. But there's the question of who will follow them. OANDA belongs to Western Union (How long? Is that part of the decision to stop the business?), but I'm still left with OFX, HiFX and Bank of Melbourne (the latter a little known foreign exchange arm that seems to have little or nothing to do with the rest of the bank). Which do I choose?
Jamie Fraser read Saturday's article and pointed me at Transferwise. Yet another offer that makes sense! I'm reminded of xkcd:
I was never overly concerned about the security of the services, but maybe I should pay more attention. Certainly I should do more investigation of the origins of the services. Bank of Melbourne is clear: it belongs to the Westpac group. HiFX is from New Zealand, and Transferwise is based in the United Kingdom. I really need to do something (as I've been saying for the last 16 months).
| Tuesday, 28 August 2018 | Dereel | Images for 28 August 2018 |
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Miserable Misery
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Topic: gardening, photography, opinion | Link here |
Spring is just round the corner, and on checking I discovered that this time last year there was already a lot to be seen in the way of wildflowers down Misery Creek Road.. High time to go down there again and see what photos I could take with my new equipment.
Nothing spectacular. I tried to get a focus stacked photo of some Hardenbergia violacea, but despite the relative lack of wind, they didn't stay still enough. In addition I managed to underexpose by 2EV. DxO PhotoLab managed to compensate for that pretty well, but Zerene couldn't piece the bits together sufficiently well:
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The second one is clearly useless, but the first one has significant issues too:
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Surprisingly, the out-of-camera photo did best:
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The noise and poor gradation are the result of the underexposure.
And that was about all. Yes, plenty of Epacris impressa, Acacia and Drosera, but nothing that I didn't see last year, and nothing that I could improve upon. On the other hand, this time last year I found this plant:
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And today there was no sign of them. I had thought that the winter had been milder this year, but there's no evidence of that from the wildflowers.
| Wednesday, 29 August 2018 | Dereel | Images for 29 August 2018 |
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Winter's last stand
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Topic: general, gardening | Link here |
Cold night, and I left the heating on. It struggled unsuccessfully to keep a normal temperature; by 7:00 the temperature was only 17°. And outside it had dropped to -3.0°, fully 2.5° colder than the lowest previous temperature for the winter (on 12 July 2018).
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Interestingly, the daffodils all fell to the ground:
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And a couple of hours later they were back to normal:
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It seems that this might be a natural reaction to “extreme” cold.
In the afternoon Elaine and Peter Dunbar from Corindhap came along to pick up some papyrus plants that Yvonne wanted out of the pond. What an amazing number of roots! Also gave them some Carpobrotus.
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More garden work
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Finally a day with little wind, just what I needed to spray weeds. But it still took me a lot of effort to finally get myself to do them. Somehow I'm getting lazier and lazier.
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House forest again
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Topic: gardening, animals, opinion | Link here |
Down with the dogs to the “house forest” at the west end of the property. I had hoped to get some video, but it only took them about 6 seconds to make the way from the house to the forest, and the video was useless. I was just able to extract some frames:
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Leonid found something useful:
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I was also expecting to find more Pterostylis, and I did, just not nearly as many as I had expected:
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Gritty fondue
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Fondue de fromage for dinner tonight. Things didn't quite go according to plan: Yvonne was getting a jar of salt out of an overhead cupboard when another jar jumped out, committing suicide on the stove below, chipping a piece out of the caquelon and leaving some glass in the cheese.
OK, remove the visible parts and wash the cheese, then start again with the rest of the ingredients. But somehow the fondue was gritty, and at the end I found this piece of glass, about 1 cm long, that we had missed:
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The piece on the bottom left of the first image is a piece of cheese, the other a piece of glass.
| Thursday, 30 August 2018 | Dereel | Images for 30 August 2018 |
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Pump problems?
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Topic: gardening, technology, general | Link here |
By chance I was awake at 5:00 this morning, the time for my cron job for the garden sprinklers. The first sprinkler is directly outside the bedroom window, and I hear it when it starts. I can literally tell the time by it, since it's started from eureka, which is NTP synchronized. But today I heard nothing.
When I got up, checked the output from the program that talks to the sprinkler. Yes, all was well. It wasn't until later that Yvonne came and told me that there was no bore water. Yes, the system had lost pressure. Started the pump again and all was well. But how did that happen?
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Kangaroo migration
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Walking the dogs today, found evidence of a lot of kangaroos having passed by:
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Not all of them made it:
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That's the third kangaroo I've seen that died in exactly the same way. They somehow get a leg jammed between two parallel wires on the fence, and then twist them around, holding the leg in place. Here photos from 18 June 2014, 3 January 2018 and today:
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How do they manage it? And isn't there a way to build fences that is less dangerous for the kangaroos?
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Gmail spam protection
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
About 6 months ago I was awarded a free subscription to the New York Times. But today it occurred to me that I hadn't received any copies since Monday. Was it maybe only a 6 month subscription? Off to check my mail.
What I found was amazing. I filter my email through Gmail, because they have the best spam detection. But clearly something has gone seriously wrong: of the 550 “spam” messages, fully 250 were false positives!
Why? In the past I had had issues with Gmail not understanding forwarded messages with SPF headers. But that's not what it said today:
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“It is similar to messages that were identified as spam in the past”. Once a false positive, always a false positive? Yes, I could report it, but with 250 messages that's a lot of work. The spam filter really needs more configuration possibilities than it currently has. And there should be a way to report this kind of problem, but I haven't found one yet. In the meantime, it's goodbye Gmail, again.
In passing, it seems that Gmail is suffering at the moment. I've seen a number of cases where deleting the contents of a folder doesn't work correctly, like here:
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On the left it claims that there are 8 messages in the folder, and on the right it claims 82. I thought this might be a refresh issue, but it was still there after changing to the spam folder and back again.
| Friday, 31 August 2018 | Dereel | Images for 31 August 2018 |
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Signing up for Transferwise
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
High time to do something about our pension transfers from Germany. I did some comparisons last April, but I didn't include HiFX or Bank of Melbourne. And now I have Transferwise. Time to do another comparison?
No, that's just too painful. There are other aspects to consider: first, the trustworthiness of the institutions. Based on that, I'd put Transferwise and Bank of Melbourne out in front. And then there's another issue that I had uncoupled from the money transfer issue: how do I pay for things in other countries? Paying by credit card is really expensive, but I haven't found any way to get a European credit card.
Until now. Transferwise offers one!
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Admire the (almost) “Hello, world!”. Check many FAQs. OK, unusually for a money transfer service, they refer to the median exchange rate (meaning the Interbank rate). And for transfers from EUR to AUD they charge 0.35%, and in the other direction 0.45%:
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In passing, admire the backslash in place of what was presumably intended to be a slash. Microsoft strikes again.
OK, sign up. The usual pain, of course. Identify myself with my driver license, front and back (“upload front of identity card“). How do normal people do that? Take a photo with mobile phone and then puzzle how to move it elsewhere? Scan it in? I tried the mobile phone and got an image so out of focus that it was useless. In addition it had a nice hot spot where the phone light had illuminated it. OK, take a photo with a real camera and upload it with this appalling file system interface that firefox offers. That worked, and I carried on with the setup. Within a few minutes I had accounts in the USA (New York), Australia (Melbourne) and Germany (Handelsbank in München), with all the numbers I needed (BSB, IBAN, SWIFT and funny things I hadn't heard of like Wire Routing Number and ACH Routing Number, the last two for the USA.
OK, now that debit card. Sorry, sorry, just joking, not available in Australia:
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Damn! Nothing on the original page to say that cards are only available in some countries. Hopefully they can extend them to Australia. In the meantime the ability to transfer money in Euros might help.
And a money transfer? It offered me a sample transfer:
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6.08 € fees for 1000 €? That's not 0.35%. Ah, but that's “fast and easy”. There's also a “low cost transfer” that could take a couple of days (presumably to allow them to play with the exchange rates). But it's still 0.409%!
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I need to look at the rates in more detail, but once again I'm left with the feeling that Transferwise, like other such services, is deliberately misleading me. So maybe I need to check out the other services after all.
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Good photography was yesterday
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Topic: photography, general, opinion | Link here |
For some decades now Australian driver licences (Victoria) or drivers' licenses (South Australia) have had digital photos embossed in them. And in general I had been quite impressed by how good they were.
But that was clearly in the days before mobile phone cameras. Last week I had a new license issued and a photo taken. I had already noted that the operator didn't bother to level the camera, and I had to look down into it. Today I had to take a photo of it for Transferwise, and so I took a closer look at the photo. The operator hadn't even managed to hold the camera still, and the photo must be one of the worst I have seen. Here the old one (10 years ago) and the new one:
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And yes, that's all of the new photo. The embossing is my date of birth in an inappropriate code.
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Olympus firmware update pains
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Olympus has issued a new firmware update for the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II. I hadn't installed the last one because of their horribly broken update system, but this one potentially addressed something that I could use:
Corrected issue of C-AF not operating correctly when using the "LEICA DG SUMMILUX 25mm / F1.4 ASPH.(H-X025)" interchangeable lens produced by Panasonic.
Start updating. It took forever! A total of 23 minutes. And when it was done, it failed to restore the old settings. When I tried manually, I got a strange error message (in about half the size shown below):
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What's that nonsense? Tried updating the software, but that failed too: thanks, National Broadband Network, the net has gone to hell again. OK, tomorrow is another day. How I love toy technology!
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