It’s Not Fucking “Chinese Flu”

 General  No Responses »
Mar 152020
 

Those of a sensitive disposition may want to read elsewhere – I’m going to get a bit sweary because this gets my goat. And I’ll be using three little words (or at least one of them) that were previously used (a century ago) to refer to the learning disabled; they no longer refer to them and there is no association between my use of those words and the learning disabled. Besides what other word can you use alongside ‘racist’ other than ‘retarded’? Having said all that, let’s get to it :-

It’s not flu.

Every time you call it that, there are microbiologists banging their head against the wall in woe. And those guys have important things to be getting on with – don’t distract them by making them bang their head against the wall.

Now don’t get distracted by all the weird looking scientific names here – we’re only interested in the distance between a random flu and Covid-19. Count the connected circles between them – there’s fourteen. You are probably more closely related to a fruit-fly than a random influenza virus is to Covid-19.

Having had this season’s flu is no more protection against Covid-19 than wearing heavy boots would protect you from a poke in the eye. 

It’s not fucking Chinese.

The WHO prohibits naming diseases after locations (amongst several other prohibitions) and it is not difficult to see why.

Take “Spanish flu” (the 1918 flu pandemic) as an example – it became known as that because the first news reports about the existence of a dangerous new flu came from Spain; ignoring the fact that news stories about other outbreaks were suppressed because other European countries were busy engaged in a world war. People going to Spain to research the origins of this pandemic are off to a very bad start.

As for Covid-19, it currently seems very likely that it started in China, but what if we find out in a month or two that it actually originated in North Korea? Is it going to be renamed? Who is going to go through that many scientific papers, public health policy documents, and even more web pages to correct the name?

In addition, there are racist retards all too willing to hear “China” and start blaming the Chinese; including people who may have had Chinese ancestors but probably have never been to China in their lives – just talk to your local Chinese takeaway for examples. 

Some of the posts by internet idiots have been particularly disgusting and ridiculous – particularly accusations that the Chinese cause pandemics because they are routinely (or live) in close proximity to food animals. Half the fucking planet does exactly the same, and the other half used to. 

Epidemics happen from time to time, and no they don’t always originate in China.

So stop calling it “Chinese flu” and verbally abuse a racist retard today.

 

Messing With Rofi: Inserting Unicode

 Computing, Linux, Working Notes  No Responses »
Feb 292020
 

I used to be able to remember all of the keyboard short-cuts I’d set up to insert ‘fun’ (or useful) Unicode characters … but my memory isn’t quite what it used to be, and I happened to catch a video that mentioned a menu to insert Unicode characters.

So I set out to create my own …

#!/bin/zsh
#
# Run a menu of Unicode characters to put into the clipboard

read -r -d '' menu << END
Þ       Thorn (Sym-t)
Þ	Capital thorn (Sym-T)
✓	Tick (Sym-y)
✔       Alternate tick (Sym-Y)
π	pi (Sym-p)
Π       PI (Sym-P)
★       Star
🖕      Finger
END

selectedchar=$(echo $menu |\
  rofi -dmenu -l 20 -fn misc-24 -p "Unicode inserter" |\
  awk '{print $1}')
if [ -z "$selectedchar" ]
then
  notify-send "Unicode Inserter" "Cancelled"
else
  printf "%s" $selectedchar | xclip -selection clipboard
  notify-send "Unicode Inserter" \
    "Character $selectedchar now in clipboard"
fi

This script :-

  1. Creates a variable with a whole pile of text inside it. The original script contains a lot longer list, but including it would be a) boring and b) give too much away. As it stands, the format of each line is pretty much anything you want as long as the first character is the Unicode character followed by whitespace.
  2. Runs rofi with the variable as input and selects the first field of the response.
  3. Guards against the empty selection (when the menu was cancelled) for neatness mostly.
  4. Prints the selected character (without a newline) into xclip so it can be pasted in. I did try using xdotool to type it directly into the active window, but this didn’t always work so well (i.e. xdotool couldn’t “type” some of the more esoteric characters).
  5. And uses notify-send to alert the dumb user (me!) that something has happened.

Lastly, to make this useful, I added an entry to my sxhkd configuration :-

super + F11
  /site/scripts/m-unicode-insert

Virtual Cores Are Not Physical Cores

 Computing  No Responses »
Feb 242020
 

Every so often, I tune into a video on some form of virtualisation which perpetuates the myth that ‘virtual cores’ that you allocate to a virtual machine are equivalent to the physical cores that the host has. In other words if you create a virtual machine with two cores, that is two cores that the rest of the host cannot use.

Preposterious.

Conceptually at least, a core is a queue runner that takes a task on a queue, runs that task for a while, and then sticks that task back on the queue. Except for specialised workloads, those cores are very often (even mostly) idle.

To the host machine, tasks scheduled to run on a virtual core are just tasks to be performed waiting in the queue; ignoring practicality, there is no reason why there should not be more virtual cores in a virtual machine than there are in the host machine.

If you take a look at the configuration of my virtual Windows machine in VirtualBox :-

You see :-

  1. I’ve allocated 8 virtual cores to this machine. I rarely use this machine (although it is usually running), but it does not take much resources to run idle cores.
  2. VirtualBox arbitrarily limits the number of cores I can allocate to the virtual machine to the number of threads my processor has; it also has a warning at the number of cores my processor has but doesn’t stop me allocating virtual cores in the “red” zone.

Qemu on the other hand has no such qualms about launching a virtual machine with 64 cores – well in excess of what my physical processor has.

Of course you have to be sensible, but creating a virtual machine with 4 cores does not make four cores unavailable to your host machine. If a virtual machine is idle, it won’t be running much (no machine is ever completely idle) on your real cores.

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