Lindsay Holmwood - auxesis' musings

Behaviour driven infrastructure through Cucumber

2009-11-09T00:00:00+01:00

Martin Englund posted an open question to the Puppet mailing list a few days ago asking how people are verifying their systems are built as expected:

When you write code, you always use unit testing & integration testing to verify that the application is working as expected, but why don't we use that when we install a system?

What are you using to verify that your system is correctly configured and behaves the way you want?

He linked to a blog post demonstrating how he was verifying his machines using Cucumber.

Coincidentally, about a week earlier at Devopsdays in Gent, I was talking to Felix Kronlage and Bernd Ahlers from bytemine about doing similar things through testing SSH and mail delivery with cucumber-nagios.

It's pretty cool people are thinking about doing BDD/TDD with infrastructure, and it's even cooler that the tools are at the point where doing this is actually possible.

When doing software testing, your testing tool is normally separate from the language and libraries you're building the software with (but almost always written in the same language). When testing your infrastructure, I think it makes perfect sense to apply this practice.

So to practise Behaviour Driven Infrastructure right now, you can use Cucumber as the testing tool, and Puppet as the programming language.

One advantage of practicising BDD within sysadmin world is that the testing tools aren't closely coupled to the language our systems are built with - i.e. if you hate Puppet you can use Cfengine, and if Cucumber isn't cutting it use PyUnit.

But to something tangible!

Building on Martin's excellent examples, i've pushed out a new version of cucumber-nagios that includes some basic SSH interaction steps, so you can start building behavioural tests for your infrastructure:

Feature: example.org ssh logins
  As a user of example.org
  I need to login remotely

  Scenario: Basic login
    Given I have no public keys set
    Then I can ssh to "example.org" with the following credentials: 
     | username | password    |
     | lindsay  | spoonofdoom |

  Scenario: Login to multiple hosts
    Given I have no public keys set
    Then I can ssh to the following hosts with these credentials: 
     | hostname           | username | password      |
     | example.org        | matthew  | spladeofpain  |
     | mail.example.org   | john     | forkoffury    |
     | web04.example.org  | steve    | sporkofpork   |

  Scenario: Login with a key
    Given I have the following public keys: 
     | keyfile                   |
     | /home/user/.ssh/id_dsa |
    Then I can ssh to the following hosts with these credentials: 
     | hostname         | username |
     | example.org      | matthew  |
     | mail.example.org | mark     |
    
  Scenario: Login with an inline key
    Then I can ssh to the following hosts with these credentials: 
     | hostname         | username | keyfile                   |
     | example.org      | luke     | /home/luke/.ssh/id_dsa |
     | mail.example.org | john     | /home/john/.ssh/id_dsa |

The above example shows there's lots of ways to test the same thing (all depending on what you're trying to achieve), but there is now also suppport for executing shell commands remotely:

  Scenario: Checking /etc/passwd
    When I ssh to "example.org" with the following credentials: 
     | username | password      | keyfile                 |
     | jacob    | spifeofstrife | /home/jacob/.ssh/id_dsa |
    And I run "cat /etc/passwd" 
    Then I should see "jacob" in the output

I don't expect you would do a cat /etc/passwd in a real test, however the step definition is a good example of how to interact with an established SSH connection:

When /^I run "([^\"]*)"$/ do |command|
  @output = @connection.exec!(command)
end

Then /^I should see "([^\"]*)" in the output$/ do |string|
  @output.should =~ /#{string}/
end

You'd use this to write specific tests for checking system behaviour, such as local user logins vs LDAP logins, or the presence of a daemon.

So the resulting process may look something like this:

Use cucumber-nagios to write a specification of how you expect your infrastructure to behave.
Hook your new cucumber-nagios checks into Nagios.
Start writing your manifests/cookbooks.
Run your configuration management tool on the node you're configuring.
Iterate until your monitoring system is silent.

Not only do you have a functional definition of how your machines work that you can use to build your machines, but if your systems deviate from the expected behaviour at any point in the future, you'll get an alert from your monitoring system.

Maintaining both a configuration management system and a set of integration tests might get annoying after a while, but if you ever decide to migrate to another configuration management system or move your machines into the cloud you'd have a set of tests you could apply immediately.

This could also be useful for moving existing machines into a configuration management system. Write a set of integration tests for your unmanaged machines, run your configuration management system over the existing machines, see if anything is broken.

I'd be interested to hear how this process or similar works for people!

Slides from Devopsdays 2009

2009-11-07T00:00:00+01:00

On cucumber-nagios:

And Flapjack:

Using Cucumber as a scripting language

2009-11-01T00:00:00+01:00

Yesterday at the excellent Devopsdays in Gent, Belgium, I proposed an open session to flesh out an idea I had a few weeks ago - to use Cucumber as a general scripting language.

Cucumber's Given/When/Then steps are well suited to procedural tasks like shell script, and you would be writing your "scripts" in straightforward language that non-technical users such as managers and clients could understand. Also, as writing a scenario without a Then to close it feels unbalanced, you'd get in the mindset of testing the actions of your "scripts" fairly quickly.

With little more than the hypothesis above, a group of us found a room and started modeling some scenarios. Our focus was on file manipulation, as it was a low hanging fruit and something most scripts do.

We came up with this:

Feature: Copy files around
  
  Scenario: A single file
    Given I am in "/tmp"
    And the file "spoons" exists
    When I copy the file "spoons" to "forks"
    Then the file "forks" should exist
    And the file "forks" should be readable

  Scenario: Multiple files
    Given I am in "/tmp"
    Given the following table of tasty fruit:
      | filename |
      | apples   | 
      | oranges  |
      | bananas  |
      | ananas   |
      | file with lots o spaces |
      | spoons of : doom |
    When I create the directory "/tmp/some_other_dir"
    When I copy the tasty fruit in the table to "/tmp/some_other_dir"
    Then the tasty fruit in the table should exist in "/tmp/some_other_dir"

The first scenario is fairly self explanatory, but the second one is where the interesting stuff starts happening.

In the implementation of the "following table" step, we create an instance variable that persists the list of files between steps. This way, we can reference the "tasty fruit" throughout our other steps:

Given /^the following table of (.+):$/ do |name, table|                          
  @tables = {}                                                                   
  @tables[name] = table.hashes                                                   
end

We use the (.+) regex to capture the name of the table so we can poke at it later on. This design lets you easily use multiple tables throughout your steps that won't conflict with one another:

  Scenario: Multiple files from multiple tables
    Given the following table of tasty fruit:
      | filename |
      | apples   | 
      | oranges  |
    And the following table of baggy baggage:
      | filename |
      | suitcase | 
      | backpack |
    When I copy the baggy baggage in the table to "/tmp/some_other_dir"
    And I copy the tasty fruit in the table to "/tmp/some_other_dir"
    Then the tasty fruit in the table should exist in "/tmp/some_other_dir"
    And the baggy baggage in the table should exist in "/tmp/some_other_dir"

Other steps can reference data in the table by accepting a name and looking it up in the hash of tables:

Then /^the (.+) in the table should exist in "([^\"]*)"$/ do |name, destination| 
  @tables[name].each do |file|                                                   
    File.exists?(File.join(destination, file["filename"])).should be_true        
  end                                                                            
end

We also looked at handling permission problems:

  Scenario: Do things i'm not allowed to 
    When I create the directory "/usr/bin/wtf"

Here the step will raise an Errno::EACCES exception, and as Cucumber uses a pretty formatter by default, the failed step will appear in red.

Finally we tried copying files with a glob. The initial implementation I banged out was very Unix focused (it used *, which is a very explicit globbing syntax), so we scrapped that idea and wrote our intentions in plain English:

  Scenario: Copy based on a pattern
    Given I am in "/tmp"
    When I create the directory "/tmp/pattern_dir"
    And I copy files beginning with the letters z,y,x to "/tmp/pattern_dir"
    Then they should exist there

The implementation is obvious, and is very understandable (and seemingly powerful) to someone with no knowledge of globbing.

People who have used Cucumber in web development will likely note that the above implementation is an example of tightly coupled steps, which is sometimes regarded as an anti-pattern. I'm of the opinion that this is a lot more painful in a web development context than in a procedural/scripting tool one.

From my recollection of Euruko earlier this year, when Aslak was asked whether he considers it an antipattern, he said it can be ok to use depending on the problem you're trying to solve, so I take that as tacit permission that it is ok this context. :-)

I posted the results of the session to a Gist yesterday, and I have also published a repo with a bundler-ready install process, so people can hack on it more.

After the session I remembered that the feature file doesn't actually have to start with Feature, so it's possible to write standalone scenarios one after another.

When wrapping up, someone in the room pointed out that our implementation actually went one better than being readable by non-technical users - they could probably write the scripts themselves.

This is pretty powerful, and coupled with Cucumber's very cool step generation when running scenarios with undefined steps, makes it very easy to start prototyping a standard library of human readable scripting commands.

There was chatter on the Cucumber mailing list a few weeks ago about providing alternate interfaces for writing and executing Cucumber features, and it could be cool to see a drag-and-drop interface with a library of common tasks that calls out to Cucumber to execute them. You could even build something quite beautiful with HotCocoa.

Anyhow, if you think anything mentioned above is a cool idea, check out the code and start hacking!

cucumber-nagios 0.5.0

2009-10-12T00:00:00+02:00

I've just released a new version of cucumber-nagios, and this release is quite a milestone!

Big changes in this release include:

Removal of the ghetto bundler in favour of wycats/carllerche's bundler.

In previous releases, you'd use a rake task to freeze in dependencies. This produced all sorts of weird problems when new versions of the dependencies were released, it didn't handle gems with C extensions that well, and could be very slow if you ran it multiple times.

Now that bundler has started maturing, cucumber-nagios has made the switch. It eliminates all the aforementioned issues, and integrates cleanly with RubyGems.
Renaming of the gem to cucumber-nagios from auxesis-cucumber-nagios, as GitHub have discontinued building gems. The gem is now published on Gemcutter.
The project generator now prints out helpful instructions when you generate a new project.
cucumber-nagios projects have built-in steps for benchmarking response times. The following example explains it best:

Feature: slashdot.com
  To keep the geek masses satisfied
  Slashdot must be responsive
    
  Scenario: Visiting a responsive front page
    Given I am benchmarking
    When I go to http://slashdot.org/
    Then the elapsed time should be less than 5 seconds

A --debug switch can be passed to cucumber-nagios to print out the command line built and executed. This can be useful when writing your features.
Removal of several unnecessary support files, and cleanups of helpers and Cucumber's World object setup, in line with an updated version of Webrat.
Refactoring of the Nagios formatter for Cucumber to use Cucumber 0.4.0's formatter interface. For users, this simply means cucumber-nagios now works with Cucumber 0.4.0 (the latest at time of this release).

Although i've done a fair amount of testing, there will invariably be bugs, which can be reported on GitHub.

Switching to Jekyll

2009-09-30T00:00:00+02:00

After a quick migration, i've switched this blog from WordPress to Jekyll.

I've done this for several reasons:

My blog content is static. Spinning up PHP on every request is overkill.
I want to write my posts in Markdown.
Jekyll has awesome syntax highlighting using Pygments.
I can easily migrate from WordPress to Jekyll.
Latest WordPress releases segfault Apache on Dapper.

Cool things now i've migrated:

I can version control my blog.
My blog content is flat file, so I just edit the content and push. This also means my blog can be easily distributed and backed up.
Pulling in Flickr photos, Last.fm listening and tweets no longer blocks the page load. I wrote a cute little MooTools class to display the info, and a cron job to fetch it in the background.
Comments are all preserved, as I switched to Disqus several weeks ago. The WordPress => Disqus import was mind numbingly easy using the Disqus plugin.

If you want minimalism in your blogging engine and full control over its appearance, Jekyll might be worth checking out.

Searching for the perfect presentation toolchain

2009-09-18T00:00:00+02:00

I've spent the last few years trying to find the holy grail of FOSS toolchains for producing and displaying my presentations.

I started with OpenOffice.org Impress (which I have sworn never to use again after it ate several presentations), dallied with Clutter's opt, seriously used KeyJNote, before moving to Mac OS X last year and settling on Apple's Keynote.

While travelling this year without a Mac, i've resumed my search for the perfect toolchain, and I think i've found a setup that works pretty well.

It's uses Inkscape to build the slides, a text file to order slides, KeyJNote to display them, and Rake to tie it all together. Oh, and it's versioned with Bazaar.

Each slide goes on a new line in order.txt:

/home/auxesis/Desktop/devopsdays/slides/blank.png
# http://www.flickr.com/photos/tim_norris/2600844073/
/home/auxesis/Desktop/devopsdays/slides/scalable.png
# http://www.flickr.com/photos/barbour/404053639/
/home/auxesis/Desktop/devopsdays/slides/distributed.png
# http://www.flickr.com/photos/numstead/535460927/
/home/auxesis/Desktop/devopsdays/slides/nagios-plugin-format.png

You can easily add comments between slides to keep track of image sources or write down ideas.

Then there's a Rake task for building the KeyJNote command line and setting up displays:

desc "setup external displays"
task :displays do
  system("xrandr --output VGA --mode 1024x768")
  system("xrandr --output VGA --same-as LVDS")
end
 
desc "perform presentation"
task :perform => :displays do
  options = "--transition Crossfade --transtime 250 -c persistent"
  command = "keyjnote #{options} @#{File.dirname(__FILE__)}/order.txt"
  system(command)
end

Finally, there's a Rake task for building the PNGs from the SVGs created through Inkscape:

desc "build pngs from svgs"
task :build do
  Dir.glob("sources/*.svg").each do |file|
    if modified?(file)
      basename = File.basename(file, '.svg')
      slide = "slides/#{basename}.png"
      system("inkscape -e #{slide} -f #{file}")
    end
  end
end
 
def modified?(filename)
  index_filename = File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), "cache", "index")
  # read or initialise index
  if File.exists?(index_filename)
    @index = File.open(index_filename, 'r') { |f| Marshal.load(f) }
  else
    @index = {}
  end
 
  # check if modified
  if @index[filename]
    modified = File.mtime(filename) > @index[filename][:mtime]
  else
    modified = true
  end
 
  # update index
  @index[filename] = {:mtime => File.mtime(filename)}
  File.open(index_filename, 'w') { |f| Marshal.dump(@index, f) }
 
  return modified
end

This keeps an index of SVG mtimes, and only rebuilds a slides if you modify the SVG.

Then to view the presentation, it's a simple:

$ rake build ; rake perform

Now that you're just dealing with a bunch of files, you can version control the whole presentation with something like bzr (which handles binary content really well). It's worth setting up an ignore list so all the generated slides don't get versioned:

slides/*
*.cache
cache/*

Graphing collectd statistics in the browser with Visage

2009-09-08T00:00:00+02:00

I've been working on a cool little side project the last week called Visage. It renders graphs of collectd statistics in the browser, making the data interactive.

It's a lot more interactive than the screenshot suggests, so check out an instance of Visage running.

Some background:

collectd is an awesome way to collect statistics from your Unix machines and aggregate the stats in one place (it has a network plugin that makes this a cinch).

So you set up collectd, and you're getting all these great statistics, but you want graphs right? Graphs make the IT manager in all of us smile.

To date there have been two options for viewing graphs of collectd's data: collection.cgi, which comes bundled with collectd on most distros, though sometimes squirreled away weirdly, and the newer collection3.

The problem I have with these interfaces is that they are organised like the RRDs that collectd stores. You basically use the interface to navigate the RRDs, not deduce meaning.

I want to easily see correlations between multiple hosts during a slashdotting. I want to view related stats for a host on a dashboard page. I want to filter out datasets that aren't interesting to me.

What's holding the existing graphing interfaces back is the presentation layer (graphs generated from RRDtool, wrapped in a smattering of Perl) being very tightly coupled with the data layer (the RRDs themselves).

So I set about exposing the RRDs in a more digestible form - JSON.

Once the RRDs are exposed over the web it makes it easy to consume the data and build your own graphing interface as either a thick client, Flash widget, or in the browser. You could also do periodic snapshots and reporting, but I digress.

So once I was able to consume this data, I used the Raphaël JavaScript library to render the graphs, and turned it into a MooTools class for maximum reusability.

So there you have it!

Right now there are a few rough edges (the axis labels keep me up at night), but it's functional. If you give it a go, i'd like to know! You can report any issues you find on GitHub.

Upcoming speaking spots

2009-09-03T00:00:00+02:00

The conference season is starting to warm up:

I'll be speaking at the devopsdays 2009 in Ghent, Belgium on 30th/31st of October, on cucumber-nagios and Flapjack. Patrick Debois is doing an awesome job carving out a Velocity-like conference in Europe, so if you're do any sort of operations or sysadmin work it's definitely worth attending.

In January i'll be speaking at linux.conf.au 2010 in Wellington, New Zealand on Flapjack. This year's organisers are putting together a conference so chock-full of awesome your head will be spinning. If you do anything with open source in Australia or New Zealand you can't afford to miss it.

Streamlining documentation on your project websites

2009-07-07T00:00:00+02:00

When hacking on small open source projects you end up having to be a jack of all trades - hacker, documentor, community manager. Documentation can be annoying when you just want to hack, but if you want people to your code it's essential.

One problem i've experienced is keeping documentation on the project's website up to date with how the software actually works.

Generally you have two sets of documentation - one in your project's source code repo, and one on your project's website. The website docs tend to cover meta information about the project, and maybe a quick install guide or demo. Your source code docs will cover the nitty-gritty of setting up your app, and maybe how to hack on the code.

More often than not the docs in the project's source will get updated more regularly than on the website, and after a while the website docs may end up diverging from how the software actually works. This can be especially noticeable in installation docs.

I've tried attacking this problem on a new project i'm hacking on.

Lately i've been using nanoc to build a few simple sites. Rather than a full blown application server running in the background a la Rails or Django, nanoc simply compiles the templates and layouts on your site and spits out static HTML.

nanoc makes it easy to write your own helpers to be used during the compile phase, so i've written a simple helper to include documentation from an external source inline with my content:

#lib/external_docs.rb

def generate_docs_from_source(name)
  doc_path = File.join(@config[:code_src], 'doc')
  filename = File.join(doc_path, "#{name.upcase}.md")

  if File.exists?(filename)
    output = `rdiscount #{filename}`
    Haml::Helpers::find_and_preserve(output, ["pre"])
  else
    "&lt;span style='color: red'&gt;Error: #{name.upcase}.md doesn't exist in #{doc_path}&lt;/span&gt;"
  end
end

This calls out to rdiscount to generate HTML from a Markdown document. You can use it easily in your templates:

%div#installation
  %div#install.generated
    = generate_docs_from_source('install')

Which will render INSTALL.md in your source code docs/ directory under div#install. This makes it easy to theme the generated docs, courtesy of the .generated selector.

The nanoc command line tool has a simple way to compile a site:

$ nanoc compile

Which is useful when you want to call a compile from other scripts. You can probably see where i'm going with this:

On the main project source repo i've configured a post-receive hook to POST to docs.flapjack-project.com, which is a Sinatra app that triggers a build of the website. Before it does the build, it checks out the latest copy of the project and website sources.

The nice thing about this approach is you can easily interpolate your own static docs with those from the source code:

%div#developing
  %h2 Source code
  %p  
    Flapjack's code is maintained in two repositories on GitHub:
    %ul 
      %li 
        %a{:href => "http://github.com/auxesis/flapjack/tree/master"}> flapjack
        , the core of the monitoring system.
      %li 
        %a{:href => "http://github.com/auxesis/flapjack-admin/tree/master"}> flapjack-admin  
        , the admin interface.
 
  %p  
    Flapjack is open source, released under the 
    = link_to "MIT Licence", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License"
    \.  
  
  %div.generated#developing
    = generate_docs_from_source('developing')

The code for those interested:

Sinatra app, to trigger website builds
nanoc website source, to compile the site.

Sane Ruby on Hardy redux

2009-06-17T00:00:00+02:00

Last year I blogged about where to get up-to-date Ruby packages for Ubuntu.

The PPA I suggested hasn't been updated in a while, and there are a few gems that require the latest version of RubyGems to work correctly (Rails, i'm looking at you).

I suggest you remove the PPA and add this to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://apt.brightbox.net/ hardy main

Sub hardy with intrepid/dapper depending on what release you need.

Then do an apt-get update && apt-get remove rubygems && apt-get install rubygems, and you'll be upgraded to the latest version of RubyGems.

cucumber-nagios gets a home

2009-06-08T00:00:00+02:00

As lots of people are apparently using cucumber-nagios and i'm getting a few bug reports, I thought it'd be worth setting up a proper home for the project.

You can find the project's site over here. Feature requests and bugs can be reported over at the GitHub issues page.

I apologise in advance if i'm a tad unresponsive when replying to new issues or emails about it. I'm backpacking around Europe until December so it's all a matter of finding suitable hacking time.

cucumber-nagios: ready for prime time

2009-03-05T00:00:00+01:00

I pushed out a new release of cucumber-nagios last night. Things of note:

It's now project focused. Use cucumber-nagios-gen to generate a project. The project provides infrastructure for freezing in dependencies, so you can zip up the project directory and migrate it between machines easily.
It's released as a gem. You can install it with a plain old gem install cucumber-nagios. This will install everything you need to set up a project.

To get up and running with cucumber-nagios, this is what you need to do:

gem sources -a http://gems.github.com
gem install auxesis-cucumber-nagios
cucumber-nagios-gen project ebay.com.au
cd ebay.com.au 
rake deps

When you generate a project, it also spits out a .bzrignore and .gitignore, so there's no excuse not to be using version control!

All the previous documentation about writing and testing features still applies. I'm planning on adding support for generating features with cucumber-nagios-gen in the next release.

The code and documentation can now be found on GitHub. Launchpad was giving me no love.

The Hardcopy Books 2009 Launch Survey

2009-02-26T00:00:00+01:00

James, Michael and I have been working on a small startup called Hardcopy Books for the last 3 months. Here's the elevator pitch:

Hardcopy Books is an online bookstore exclusively for tech books in Australia. How are we different?

We only stock tech books.

Your orders will be cheaper than through Amazon.

We aim to deliver within a week.

We started it because ordering tech books in Australia sucks. If you order from Amazon, the books are cheap, but they can take ages to get here, and shipping is very expensive. Most local book stores don't specialise in tech books, and the ones that do have a very slow turnaround and a horribly tedious ordering process. We aim to change that.

Today we're announcing the Hardcopy Books 2009 Launch Survey.

We're asking you, the local tech community, to fill it out and let us know what sort of books you buy. We're going to be launching with a select group of titles, and the feedback you give us will let us know what books we need to stock up on.

We're also on Twitter, so you can keep up to date with the launch on there.

Web app integration testing for sysadmins with cucumber-nagios

2009-02-23T00:00:00+01:00

Interesting thought experiment:

Cucumber is kick arse way of describing the behaviour of a system.
Webrat makes interacting with websites blindingly easy.
Nagios is the industry standard for system/network/application monitoring.

What happens if you combine the three? You get cucumber-nagios.

cucumber-nagios takes the results of a Cucumber run and outputs them in the Nagios plugin format. What does that actually mean?

A sysadmin can describe the behaviour of a system that they manage:

Feature: google.com.au
  It should be up
  And I should be able to search for things

  Scenario: Searching for things
    When I visit "http://www.google.com"
    And I fill in "q" with "wikipedia"
    And I press "Google Search"
    Then I should see "www.wikipedia.org"

Then they can run the feature through cucumber-nagios:

$ cucumber-nagios features/google.com.au/search.feature
Critical: 0, Warning: 0, 4 okay | value=4.000000;;;;

The curious can check out the code on GitHub, and the documentation on the project website.

UPDATE: There have been a few changes to cucumber-nagios since this post. Check out these two posts for more info.

Setting :selected in Merb's select helper

2009-02-16T00:00:00+01:00

So I don't waste another 30 minutes of my life:

When using the select helper in Merb, make sure you call to_s on whatever you're setting :selected to, i.e.

select :name => "order[status]", :collection => OrderStatus.all, 
       :text_method => :description, :value_method => :id,
       :selected => @order.status.to_s

Otherwise the helper will compare a String (the value) to an Integer (:selected), and you'll never get anything in your select selected!

Everything old is new again

2009-02-15T00:00:00+01:00

It's been interesting watching the flurry of activity in data-storage land over the last few months. CouchDB has been improving in leaps and bounds, and multi dimensioned data stores have been getting a lot more attention in general.

I started using Couch on a project a few weeks ago with the DataMapper adapter, specifically for scalability and search reasons. Migrating from my test SQLite database to Couch was a breeze, however it started getting ugly after a short while.

The main obstacle was that Datamapper's Couch adapter integrated pretty clunkily with DataMapper, particularly:

You had to mix in DataMapper::CouchResource into your models instead of the bog standard DataMapper::Resource.
The standard DataMapper finders didn't work, so you had to wrap all your queries in Couch views.

As much as this annoyed me, dm-couchrest-adapter's maintainer is a smart guy, so I knew there was a good reason behind it being that way even if it wasn't immediately apparent.

That good reason presented itself to me a few days ago when I started playing with dm-ferret-adapter to get full text search with Ferret on my models.

I was trying to work out how you do a multi-field search, but as with most things in the Ruby world, the documentation was lacking. The author of the dm-sphinx-adapter fortuitously posted on the mailing list about how his adapter handled the problem, so I went digging around inside dm-ferret-adapter's and dm-is-searchable's internals to work out why it wasn't behaving.

The crux of the problem was that DM was being too smart for its own good and tried to match fields listed in the the :conditions parameter to actual fields in the database, hence passing a big string in a :conditions would explode before it even hit the Ferret adapter.

And thus we've hit a fundamental problem with DataMapper's current implementation: at its core, it's still an ORM for relational databases - adapter authors are always going to be fighting an uphill battle when trying to integrate a non-relational data store.

So back in Couch land, I ended up switching to the CouchRest ORM to talk to Couch. Explaining why he wrote CouchRest as a standalone ORM, Chris Anderson stated...

(I could have written a DataMapper adapter for CouchDB, but much of DataMapper’s code is based around SQL-like problems that CouchDB just doesn’t have.)

... sounds just like the problems I was referring to.

Anyhow, why the title of this post?

Well last year I briefly hacked on some business banking code for Suncorp, and I was introduced to the wonderful world of UniVerse BASIC. I'm guessing that almost none of the readers of this blog have ever heard of UniVerse, but some may have heard of Pick.

Pick was a pre-Unix operating system and rapid application development environment initially released in 1965. Pick's killer feature was the MultiValue database (think hash table), and was specifically targeted at businesses and business analysts.

You're probably thinking "Woo, a hash table - why should I care about this Lindsay? My language already has Hashes/Dictionaries/HashMaps/filing cabinets". Well Pick's hash table implementation was (and still is) pretty kick arse for its time. There's a query language (that's suspiciously similar but slightly different to SQL), and it backs onto an incredibly well tested on-disk data store.

There's also no enforced schema, so it was particularly useful in the accounting world where relational databases with rigidly enforced schema aren't a good fit. Hence, there are a lot of financial applications out there written in Pick or a Pick derivative.

If you've ever worked with any of the EDIFACT data formats, you've indirectly worked with Pick. Those pesky separator/terminators ('+:?) are handled by multivalue databases really well. If you were to represent an EDIFACT segment how UniVerse would process it:

# EDIFACT segment
TVL+240493:1740::2030+JFK+MIA+DL+081+C'

To Python tuples and dictionaries:

( 'TVL', {'240493': ('1740', None, '2030')}, 'JFK', 'MIA', 'DL', '081', 'C')

To Ruby arrays and hashes:

[ 'TVL', {'240493' => ['1740', nil, '2030']},  'JFK', 'MIA', 'DL', '081', 'C']

By now you're thinking "oh god now I have to iterate over a whole bunch of nested data structures", but fortunately Pick's BASIC implementation provided syntax that made this pretty straightforward.

Anyhow, the MultiValue technology behind Pick was licensed to roughly 3 dozen companies during the 70's and 80's, but there's been a lot of consolidation in the Pick market since then, and the main player is now actually IBM. They purchased two implementations, UniVerse and UniData, in the 90's, re-branded them as U2 (sorry, no Bono here), and have been continually developing them ever since.

IBM have written .NET and Java interfaces to U2 data stores, there's integration with RedBack (a web application development framework), and more recently work has gone into PHP, Python, and Ruby bindings.

Pick's usage in the enterprise was and is still phenomenal. Last year at IBM's U2 University in Sydney the U2 product manager quoted a statistic that the U2 team estimate at least 60% of IBM's clients are directly using either UniVerse or UniData. A large majority of these systems are small back office-type setups that were installed decades ago, next-to-nobody touches, but are mission-critical.

So after seeing Tokyo Cabinet do the rounds this week in the Ruby sphere, it's pretty obvious that multi dimensioned data stores are experiencing a bit of resurgence.

Google's success with BigTable has kicked a lot of smart people into gear: CouchDB, HBase, and Tokyo Cabinet are shining examples of awesome work being done in the DBMS sphere.

What I think is going to make a difference this time:

Implementations are not walled gardens. IBM's U2 products are not open source, and have a significant monetary barrier of entry. It's a problem that the entire Pick marketplace suffers, and why there isn't a lot of young talent in the Pick sphere anymore.

The multi dimensioned data paradigm maps really well onto existing (and popular!) interchange formats. Take a look at JSON - its take up over the last few years has been impressive to say the least. YAML is another great example. They succeed where rigid data formats don't fit. Also, they're not the new EDIFACT.

Developers are hitting barriers with RDBMSes. If there's one thing we can learn from the hype-fest that was "Web 2.0", it's that scalability is hard. Multi dimensioned databases aren't a magical elixir for the scalability problems of developers around the world, but they do prompt people to think of alternate ways of storing their data.

It'll be interesting to see whether the industry will start taking up multi dimensioned data stores en mass any time soon.

Following bushfire activity in NSW: @nswbushfires vs @nswrfs

2009-02-10T00:00:00+01:00

On Sunday I posted about a Twitter bot (@nswbushfires) I quickly hacked up to post current incident updates to Twitter.

People following the bushfires on Twitter may have noticed that the Rural Fire Service launched an official Twitter bot (@nswrfs) this morning containing information on major fire updates.

I had a brief chat with the Manager of Online Communications from the RFS this afternoon about the datasets available on their site, how data is generated within the RFS, and how that data can best be used.

Basically their bot aggregates major fire updates, which contain information on incidents that may directly affect people or property, and how people should respond. The announcements are a digital form of what gets syndicated to news outlets, and are crafted by the RFS communications team. Generally this information is up-to-the-minute.

On the other hand, my bot aggregates the list of current incidents, which is an extract of an internal RFS system used by people on the ground to track their handling of fires. The data in the current incidents list can potentially be several hours out of date, as it's quite often entered into their internal system after the incident has been handled. That said, it provides a state-wide overview of RFS activity and can be useful for tracking non-critical bushfire activity in your area.

So for people wanting to follow bushfire activity in NSW, I would highly recommend following both bots.

NSW Rural Fire Service updates on Twitter

2009-02-08T00:00:00+01:00

I just scraped together a Twitter bot to post updates from the NSW Rural Fire Service's Current Incidents list.

If you're in NSW, follow @nswbushfires on Twitter.

Meet the newest Holmwood

2009-01-04T00:00:00+01:00

Almost a week ago today, Julia and I tied the knot.

You can find photos on Flickr, and highlights on Julia's brand new blog.

gotgastro.com launched

2008-12-12T00:00:00+01:00

Gastro has been relaunched at gotgastro.com!

DNS issues should be all fixed, so go nuts and share the site.

New Gastro features, and tech details

2008-12-11T00:00:00+01:00

I pushed two new features on Gastro last night: GeoRSS support, and a JSON export.

This should make it a lot easier to take the data i've scraped and reuse it. Feel free to grab it and play with it as you will!

You should be able to take the GeoRSS feed and pipe it straight into Google Maps (paste the feed url into the search bar), however GMaps doesn't seem to like fetching the feed.

It might be something to do with a reported DNS issue. If anyone has a free second to do a dig and see if anything is boned I would be very appreciative.

The new release also has a bunch of performance improvements (i've basically halved the app load time), and the info window on the map points display the restaurant names.

Simon wanted to know the tech details, so here they are:

The mashup is a collection of small Ruby apps.

There's a scraper, which handles caching copies of the food authority site locally, extracting meaningful data from the cached copies, geocoding against the extracted address data, and writing that data out in an easy-to-parse format (YAML).

The geocoding is done against Google's geocoding service, using the ym4r library. I serialise the store the lat/lng data back to the YAML.

The website is written in Merb (though I am considering rewriting it in nanoc), and uses an in-memory Sqlite3 database that's created from the YAML data every time the app boots. This means the app takes about 10 seconds to boot, but access to all the data is pretty damn quick once the app is up.

I'm caching the JSON/RSS/HTML pages just in case it gains momentum and my server gets hammered. I'm using the standard Merb::Cache caching mechanism, which generates new page fragments every 30 minutes.

The app is running under 2 Mongrels with apache2 + mod_proxy_balancer and it seems to cope ok. I've had 70 unique visits in the last 24 hours so i'm not particularly worried about load.

If you want to check out the code, you can grab a copy of my repo with a

$ bzr branch http://holmwood.id.au/~lindsay/code/gastro

There are a bunch of rough edges (no documentation, notice urls aren't serialised yet, ~70 addresses can't be geocoded, and geocode data can be easily overwritten), but interested folk might like a stickybeek.

Spread the word if you like it! New features are pending. :-)

Behold: Gastro!

2008-12-10T00:00:00+01:00

Dear Simon, Ask and ye shall receive.

Regards, Lindsay

Why scripting your server installs is a bad idea (and configuration management is awesome)

2008-11-04T00:00:00+01:00

I was reading the FiveRuns blog post on automating your Rails server configuration, and had a peek at the script they included to setup a machine.

There are some fundamental problems with it.

What happens when the machine can't reach RubyForge to download the RubyGems tarball? The rest of the script will continue to run and error out horribly, leaving you to wade through a screenful of error output to work out what died.

What about when you need to update your production systems with new packages or configuration files? You'll probably log into all of them and apply the update (or maybe you'll write a script to do it). But what about new machines that you roll out? Do you update the install script with the new tasks? Do you use the old install method and then apply the new configuration?

These problems are vaguely manageable with a small number of machines, but as soon as you grow beyond 3 servers it becomes tedious and painful - deployment is hard.

I learnt this the hard way: I started out my sysadmin career building systems like this. The first time I did this I thought it was great. I wrote a ~400 line provisioning script that would set up a PXE booted machine with Samba/Apache/OpenLDAP. This worked exceptionally well in my test environment. Production was another story.

I had inadvertently optimised my deployment for provisioning, not for maintenance.

When you consider the lifecycle of a system, < 0.001% of it's life is spent being provisioned. The other 99.999% is the server sitting there serving requests, having new software deployed to it, or having it's configuration tweaked.

Putting all the logic into the provisioning process is setting yourself up for failure. To pull it off, you have to know exactly what the machine is going to be doing for its entire lifecycle. Prescience is not a common trait amongst humans.

So the project requirements change, and the time comes to add another service to the system. How do you manage this? ssh-in-a-for-loop is the obvious response, but then you'd be perpetuating the problem you created for yourself in the first place. And what about new systems? Oh the pain!

Unfortunately there's no easy way out of this mess. You can start from scratch, or push through and waste countless hours of your life maintaining a thousand houses of cards. And you can only start from scratch so many times before it gets equally tedious and fragile.

Configuring your systems with magical scripts is not maintainable. Competent sysadmins around the world have a responsibility to stamp out deployment techniques of this ilk.

This is how some people use Capistrano, and it gives me the willies. Invoking your distro's package manager from Capistrano is no better than doing it from a shell script. Use the tool for what it's built for: automating the deployment of your application.

So what do I recommend? Configuration management is a much better solution to this problem. Instead of maintaining separate procedures for provisioning servers and doing change management, you can merge them into one.

Puppet is my configuration management system of choice, and I use it extensively across all the infrastructure I manage. I do this for three reasons:

<li><em>I forget how machines are configured.</em> I work on a lot of different machines (I touch a minimum of 20 different boxes every week), and it's nigh on impossible to remember how each of them are configured.</li>
<li><em>Not all operating systems are configured equal.</em> The machines are running a mish-mash of Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat, CentOS, Fedora, Mac OS X, & OpenBSD, and they're not all on the same version. There's no way i'm going to remember each operating system's eccentricities.</li>
<li><em>Other people maintain these machines.</em> Someone will login to the machine and change something without telling me. This is a good thing (I am not a single point of failure), as long as we're using some sort of configuration management (I know who to blame when something explodes 6 months down the line (probably me :-)).</li>

Combining Puppet with a distributed version control system is a solid one-two punch to your provisioning and maintenance woes.

Hopefully i've convinced you to use Puppet. The first question you probably have is "how do I use puppet to manage $app_built_with_my_framework_of_choice?".

Just like I recommend not using Capistrano to configure your servers, I recommend using Puppet to manage the infrastructure around your application. Your Puppet manifests should manage web + database + mail servers, monitoring, system package repositories, system utilities, and the standard library of the language your app is written in.

This makes application the side of deployment really simple: for Ruby folk, I recommend bundling all your gems with your application. You should expect the ability to plop your app on any machine that has no more than the Ruby standard library and interpreter and have the app run.

The end result is configuration that can be applied to a new machine in 10 minutes with Puppet, and a seamless app deployment in less than 5 using Cap or Vlad.

When you need to scale further down the line, you can simply apply that same configuration to a new node. Making changes across all your machines becomes an order of magnitude easier - update the manifests, push to your Puppetmaster, have the machines update themselves.

What could be simpler?

Wake from sleep when lid closed on MacBook Pro

2008-10-25T00:00:00+02:00

I've been having a problem with my MacBook where it wakes up when the lid is closed, which leaves me hot and bothered when it's in my bag.

Apparently it's a know problem on early model MacBooks, caused by the magnet that determines whether the lid is open getting shifted when the lid gets bumped.

The easy fix is to run:

$ sudo pmset -a lidwake 0

which will disable waking the machine when the lid is opened. Mash the keyboard instead, and you'll be right as rain.

Thanks to these forum posts.

Also, this commands prints a real time log of all power management activity detected by OS X:

$ pmset -g pslog

Easier fonts with X11 on OSX

2008-10-21T00:00:00+02:00

$ ln -sf ~/Library/Fonts/ .font

can save a lot of hassle with fonts in different X11 apps on OS X.

collectdmon for a crashing collectd

2008-10-14T00:00:00+02:00

I've recently been having problems with collectd crashing without notice on a server aggregating a large amount of stats from ~20 nodes. Initially I set up a shell script to monitor whether it's up and restart it, but there's a much more elegant solution in the form of collectdmon.

It's design is really simple and quite elegant: collectdmon starts and runs collectd with the -f flag, causing collectd to run in the foreground. If collectd exits for whatever reason, collectdmon will just catch it (because it's waiting for it to exit), and start it back up. You can also send signals to collectdmon to restart or shut down the collectd process at any time.

The only thing left to do is modify the init script to start collectd with collectdmon. On Red Hat I did this with the following modification:

diff -u etc/rc.d/init.d/collectd /etc/init.d/collectd 
--- etc/rc.d/init.d/collectd    2008-10-14 05:15:29.000000000 +1100
+++ /etc/init.d/collectd        2008-10-10 00:27:17.000000000 +1100
@@ -25,7 +25,8 @@
        echo -n $"Starting $prog: "
        if [ -r "$CONFIG" ]
        then
-               daemon /usr/sbin/collectd -C "$CONFIG"
+               daemon collectdmon -c /usr/sbin/collectd -P /var/run/collectdmon.pid -- -C "$CONFIG"
                RETVAL=$?
                echo
                [ $RETVAL -eq 0 ] && touch /var/lock/subsys/$prog
@@ -33,7 +34,7 @@
 }
 stop () {
        echo -n $"Stopping $prog: "
-       killproc $prog
+       killproc collectdmon
        RETVAL=$?
        echo
        [ $RETVAL -eq 0 ] && rm -f /var/lock/subsys/$prog

Slides from Merbcamp deployment talk...

2008-10-13T00:00:00+02:00

...can be found on slideshare, or just below.

The feedback so far has been really positive!

Setting session name in screen

2008-09-29T00:00:00+02:00

It's always annoying trying to remember what pid maps to a screen session, but it's possible to actually name the session.

When starting a screen session, you can start it with arguments:

$ screen -S sessionname

Or within a current screen session, you can do:

C-a :
sessionname your_session_name

Now when you do a screen -ls, your sessions show up with meaningful names:

There are screens on:

    12117.irc      (Detached)
    9905.code      (Multi, detached)
    14850.projectx (Multi, attached)


3 Sockets in /var/run/screen/S-lindsay.

And connecting to them is as easy as:

$ screen -r projectx

Heading to Merbcamp

2008-09-28T00:00:00+02:00

I'm heading to MerbCamp in San Diego in just under two weeks, where i'll be talking about deploying Merb.

Still so much to do before I head off, but i'm looking forward to meeting fellow Merbists.

The cloud computing security farce

2008-09-15T00:00:00+02:00

I was impressed and disappointed with Background Briefing's coverage of Cloud Computing on ABC Radio National.

Impressed because they were actually covering something technologically relevant to the layperson, but disappointed because they got distracted by the security and privacy issues around it.

They succumbed to the hype in the first 5 minutes (Chrome as an operating system? Lay off the crack pipe), but by about the 20 minute mark they actually started speaking to people who were reasonable and had a clue. By the end of the program they'd devolved to thinly veiled Google bashing ("Google is making us dumber!").

It's interesting to see the traditional media covering this whole "cloud computing" thing. I think a large part of it is generational perspective.

The way the internet is merging with the "real world" is unlike any other technological or sociological development throughout human history, and the younger generations are at the forefront of adoption.

Younger generations are publishing more and more of their lives online and are incredibly open with huge amounts of their personal information. They're willing to trade their data privacy in exchange for being part of an open & online society.

To older generations, this must be quite a scary thing. Personal data is something that should be kept under lock and key, away from the prying eyes of the world, because some hacker on the other side of the world is going to steal it.

My dad for a long time was very skeptical of internet banking ("there are hackers out there!"), and it's only after years of debate that he's finally beginning to look at it seriously.

Now to someone like me (of a younger generation), dealing with a bank online doesn't cause me to bat an eyelid. That one-on-one interaction with a bank doesn't really rate a mention in comparison to publishing my personal information on Facebook or LinkedIn for millions to see.

Storing my mail with Gmail sits at a median point between Facebook and online banking, though it's definitely more on the online banking end of the scale.

Yes, someone else "owns" my mail. And yes, they are probably mining it for data.

I'm willing to balance the risk of Google doing something evil against having a life that revolves around having five nines uptime on my boxes.

I could store the mail myself if I wanted to. I still control the DNS for my domains, and all of my mail relays through a mail server I control before going to Google.

And quite honestly, you should be more concerned about how your government is monitoring you. Most sizable ISPs have government black boxes that capture network traffic anyway, and there are numerous points in any chain of communication where they're snooping on you.

Governments will always try and get their sticky fingers into all communication mediums. Not taking an active position on interception and monitoring can lead to a circumvention of power.

Terrorism, like Communism before it, is the latest in the long line of justifications for governments to know what their citizens are up to, and it conveniently coincided with the latest technology boom. Can you imagine any government being granted the snooping powers they have today if the semi-faux threat of terrorism didn't exist?

Yes, having that data at a Google data center makes it marginally easier for my government to grab it, but they could just as easily:

* storm my ISP and take their mail servers
* storm my data center and take my box
* raid my house and take my computer
* find some legal loophole to detain me indefinitely until I give them all my usernames and passwords

But to older generations, the idea of a storing large gobs of personal data on some company's servers must be terrifying. The thing is, they're already doing it. Where do you think your email is hosted, guys?

If you're using the internet your government is probably snooping on you. Moving data from your ISP to "the cloud" isn't going to change their snooping effectiveness.

Sane Ruby on Hardy

2008-09-09T00:00:00+02:00

Recently, there have been a few happenings in Ruby land that break things a bit on Ubuntu Hardy.

Firstly, there were two rounds of security vulnerabilities. This doesn't break things per se, however there's been a significant lag time between the Ruby team patching it and Ubuntu releasing updated packages.

Secondly, the RubyGems team pushed a new backwards incompatible release that changed the metadata format that Gem repositories use. The gems published on gems.rubyforge.org pretty much stopped working after that, leaving people running RubyGems < 1.2.0 (almost everyone) out in the cold. And by "out in the cold" I mean they couldn't install gems, and the gem command would consume all available memory.

The supplied rubygems-update-1.2.0.gem doesn't work on Ubuntu because of the way RubyGems is packaged, and the plain old gem update doesn't work due to metadata incompatibilities, making it reasonably impossible to fix unless you install from source or find some magical packages.

Fortunately, the ubuntu-ruby team have created these magical packages. There are two repos, ubuntu-ruby & ubuntu-ruby-backports. Backports is recommended as being more stable, however i've been running the 'bleeding edge' repo the last month without any problems.

Choose the repo you want, and add it to your /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-ruby/ubuntu hardy main
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-ruby-backports/ubuntu hardy main

one apt-get update && apt-get upgrade later and you'll have updated package goodness.

Dealing with a bank and being a sole trader

2008-09-01T00:00:00+02:00

Working as a sole trader is wonderful. It's easy to become one, has a low administrative and legal overhead, and you're able to start doing business very quickly.

Unfortunately, Australian banks can be difficult to work with. I've had significant problems dealing with my bank once they found out I was a sole trader.

The way I conduct business is pretty simple:

1. I do work for clients.
1. I invoice clients.
1. Clients pay the invoice to my personal account.

Banks will try and force you to sign up for a business bank account. In their eyes, a sole trader is just another business entity that should be using their business products, and business banking must be done under a business account.

The reality is, under Australian taxation law, the income of a sole tradership is treated as your individual income.

There is nothing illegal about receiving sole tradership business income through a personal banking account, nor should it breach any rules set out in the terms of your personal banking product (it is just personal income).

Also, when applying for a personal credit card, there should be no reason (unless explicitly stated) in the terms and conditions of the product forbidding you from getting one.

Your bank may try and force you into a business credit card product (because you're a business, right?), but you simply don't have to sign up for any business product.

The most important thing is to do as much research as possible. Most banking staff don't understand the status of sole traders and will try to treat you as a business. Working for yourself doesn't make you a slave to a bank.

(N.B. I am not an accountant or lawyer. The above should not be taken as financial or legal advice. Do your own research!)

The pretty road ahead

2008-07-10T00:00:00+02:00

I've been pottering away on a new business for the last few months.

Like any good project, it started by scratching an itch. Very soon after Julia & I got engaged we started thinking about RSVPs. Being a good geek, I realised we could get our guests to complete their RSVPs online (i'm sure this is a common idea for geeks getting married).

And it's grown from there.

It's a website for your wedding. It does RSVPs, invitation generation, a wedding blog, gift registry, a photo gallery, and acts as a canonical information point for your wedding.

The idea has grown into something bigger than what we originally expected, and now we want to start sharing it with the rest of the world.

Since July 1 i've been focusing pretty solidly on the business. We're starting small and keeping it tight. We want to get feedback from more couples.

We've got a teaser site up, and are looking for beta testers: if you're getting married and are interested in trying out our service for free, give us a shout .

Testing file globbing on an 'rm'

2008-07-07T00:00:00+02:00

I get the willies when doing an rm on a bunch of files, especially when they belong to some important app on a production system.

Quick hack i've started doing to make me feel less paranoid: type out the rm command line but do it with ls instead.

ie, instead of typing out

$ rm files-i-want-to-delete

I type out:

$ ls files-i-want-to-delete

Once i'm happy with the globbing, I can edit the history and change the command back to rm, or alternatively do

$ rm !*

I freak out about the magic of !* though, so I tend to edit the history instead.

Printed and sent

2008-07-03T00:00:00+02:00

Wedding invitations went out yesterday.

Having them printed and in your hand makes it all so real. Quite exciting!

Positive side effects of cheating

2008-07-03T00:00:00+02:00

Uni cheats outsource to India.

On the bright side, students are perfectly poised for a career in management!

Tuba Hero

2008-07-02T00:00:00+02:00

A package arrived in the mail tonight. It was marked 'T-Shirt', which I thought was odd as I hadn't ordered any shirts for a while.

I ripped the package open and this is what I found.

(store link)

Best surprise gift ever.

The invoice was anonymous, but I spotted an email address in the top corner hidden away. Thanks James!

Odd behavior when serving static content with Merb

2008-05-31T00:00:00+02:00

While running up my latest Merb app in staging I was seeing some odd behaviour serving stylesheets. Specifically I was getting the following exception:

Not Acceptable 406
A format (css) that isn't provided (html) has been 
requested. Make sure the action provides the format, 
and be careful of before filters which won't recognize 
formats provided within actions.

Looking through the logs it looked as though Merb was routing requests to all things under public/ to actual controllers:

 ~ Start: Sat May 31 06:03:05 EDT 2008
 ~ Routed to: {:action=>"foobar", :controller=>"stylesheets", :format=>"css", :id=>nil}
 ~ Controller 'Stylesheets' not found - (Merb::ControllerExceptions::NotFound)

Trawling the tubes managed to yield this fix. Add the following line to the beginning of your config/rack.rb and you'll be right as rain.

# comment this out if you are running merb behind a load balancer
# that serves static files
use Merb::Rack::Static, Merb.dir_for(:public)

Update: Katz has pointed out that it's a problem with Merb 0.9.3 apps that were generated with 0.9.2. Copy the boot.rb from a clean 0.9.3 app and the problem is resolved.

Specimen: font comparison made easy

2008-05-16T00:00:00+02:00

I stumbled upon Specimen this afternoon. It's a fantastic little app for viewing and comparing fonts:

I especially like the preview text feature.

Stolen TomTom

2008-05-06T00:00:00+02:00

Yesterday while at Parramatta Westfield our car was broken into, and our TomTom was stolen.

If you've bought a TomTom ONE 3rd edition with the serial number

Y11427C00018

I want it back. Now.

Datamapper + Log4r

2008-05-01T00:00:00+02:00

If you're using DataMapper and Log4r, make sure you specifically prepend the Log4r module to your class method calls. ie:

@logger = Log4r::Logger.new 'mylogger'

DataMapper provides its own Logger class that clutters the namespace and causes your programs to error out confusingly when calling @logger.add:

require 'log4r'
require 'datamapper'

@logger = Logger.new 'mylogger'
@logger.add(Log4r::StdoutOutputter.new('terminal'))
/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/logger.rb:314:in add': undefined method<' for #<Log4r::StdoutOutputter:0xb7823220> (NoMethodError)

Hints for testing your evolving Ruby scripts

2008-04-26T00:00:00+02:00

Ruby is a fantastic language for writing quick and dirty scripts to automate various tasks.

Sometimes you get to a stage where the script you wrote has grown much more complex or important than originally intended. This is the point where you need to start doing real testing with a testing framework - guess and check from the command line does not scale.

Here are a few things i've found useful when testing my evolving scripts:

Testing exit:

It's quite common that you want your script to exit out with different error codes based on certain conditions. Invoking the script and poking around in $? is doable, but not very elegant. It also doesn't lend to clean design in your scripts (or your tests for that matter).

Fortunately, calling exit in Ruby actually raises a SystemExit exception. This opens up some cool possibilities, but more importantly this means you can test your code really easily:

# the method
def do_some_action_that_may_exit()
  exit 4
end

# the tests
assert_raises SystemExit do 
  do_some_action_that_may_exit()
end

begin
  do_some_action_that_may_exit()
rescue SystemExit => e
  assert e.status == 4
end

Hiding pesky output:

It's likely your script is outputting text to the console so the user has some feedback on what's going on. But all this output can be cluttersome when testing or debugging your tests.

For example, tests that output to STDOUT like this:



require 'test/unit'

class MyEverExpandingScriptTests < Test::Unit::TestCase

  def method_that_outputs_text

puts "some text"
puts "some more text"
puts "even more text"
return true


  end

  def test_something_or_other

assert method_that_outputs_text


  end

end

will give mangle your test runner output like so:

Loaded suite tests
Started
some text
some more text
even more text
.
Finished in 0.000428 seconds.

1 tests, 1 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors

This can be especially annoying when you've got lots of tests running the same boilerplate code that calls puts.

Ruby to the rescue! puts is just another method that you can override if you so choose. Pop this at the end of your tests to suppress the output:

def puts(*args)
end

Loaded suite tests
Started
.
Finished in 0.000405 seconds.

1 tests, 1 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors

However, you need to think very carefully about where you use this. Overriding core Ruby methods like puts in any code other than tests is a definite no-no.

Simplify require If you're testing a bunch of scripts that are interacting with libraries you have written, you'll find yourself doing this quite often:

require 'test/unit'

require File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), '..', 'myscript')
require File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), '..', 'lib', 'mylib')

class MyScriptTests < Test::Unit::TestCase
...

There's nothing much wrong with this, except it's quite ugly to look at. Also, the parentheses around File.dirname and File.join are annoying.

You can simplify this by fiddling with Ruby's load path within your tests (and also in your scripts!):

require 'test/unit'

$: << File.expand_path(File.join(File.dirname(FILE), '..'))

require 'myscript'
require 'lib/mylib'

...

This makes things much easier on the eyes.

if name == 'main'

If you've ever used Python you've probably run into the if name == 'main' idiom. This is used to check whether the current file is being run as a script. If you're testing a script you don't want to run it when you require it.

Although not well documented, you can do this easily enough in Ruby:

if __FILE__ == $0 then
  do_my_first_script_action()
  do_my_second_script_action()
  ...
end

If you've written your script like this, it also gives you some obvious starting points when writing your tests!

Portable headphones on the cheap

2008-04-24T00:00:00+02:00

I've been using a pair of Sennheiser PX 200's the last year wherever I go. They have (reasonably) comfortable design, suprisingly good audio quality, and fold up nice and snuggly inside a hard case, perfect for transport.

Thanks to Sydney's recent wet weather, i've been doing a lot more indoor riding on a exercise bike, where I listen to music and podcasts so I don't go too batty. I've been using my same trusty headphones, but they're a bit icky to use after a solid workout.

So I bought myself a pair of PX100's off eBay last week just for riding, and have been pleasantly suprised. They have a significantly better bass response, and the sound just seems to be richer overall. Apparently my observations are in line with other reviews.

I like them so much i've decided to switch to them as my main headphones. The only downside is they don't have the hard case of the PX200's, but I can just use my existing case and leave my PX200's out at home.

So if you're looking for a cheap pair of portable headphones with decent sound quality, I highly recommend the PX100's.

Easy tagging tool: EasyTag

2008-04-11T00:00:00+02:00

Simon: i've been using EasyTag for all my music tagging the last few years after Ken Foskey recommended it at one of my first SLUG meetings. It would have to be one of the best keep secrets of desktop Linux apps.

It has a dead simple interface for navigating through your collection and tagging songs, and also has a CDDB support for automatically tagging your songs (I stumbled across this last year when I accidentally mashed my keyboard - it has been a godsend ever since).

It also has a scanner that can be used to populate the tags based on the contents of the filename, which you might find useful (though i've never used it before).

British English & Web Standards

2008-04-10T00:00:00+02:00

Whilst talking over dinner tonight, Michael noted that Terry Prachett Americanizes some of his books for the US market because some phrases and terms simply don't make sense.

James pointed out that if he wrote his books in American English, British audiences would not have this problem.

This makes me think of web standards and IE. If pages are written for standards, IE doesn't understand them, but if they're written for IE they're (mostly) understood by everything else.

The sol1 flood of '08

2008-04-09T00:00:00+02:00

Today our office server room/kitchen got flooded by an exploding water heater.

No one noticed the leak until it had covered the whole floor. The water got under the carpet and beyond the towels we placed to stem the flow towards the servers.

The most important command ever run on skippy:

If you are a web developer

2008-04-08T00:00:00+02:00

...go check out Google's App Engine. Guido just launched it.

It's sexy amazing Web 2.0 Python goodness for the masses, with a Bigtable implementation for storage, a users API that integrates with Google accounts, a URL fetching + mailing API, full WSGI support, and the full Python Standard Library.

Oh, and it's free.

500mb of storage, and CPU and bandwidth for 5 million serves a month.

This will have huge ramifications for the hosting industry. I can imagine lots of providers simply disappearing, unable to compete with the largest hosting infrastructure in the world. This could be a real shot in the arm for the Python community too, with web developers flocking in their masses to the tasty free hosting while learning Python on the way.

It also provides a nice alternative to Amazon's services, opting for a more 'opinionated' view of the software stack to Amazon's loosely coupled infrastructure.

Regardless, it's a landmark achievement. Two thumbs up to Google!

Note: the service is only in beta at the moment, with 10,000 limited spots. It will be interesting to see how Google monetise this.

Online ordering gone wrong

2008-03-25T00:00:00+01:00

Simon, i'm totally with you being with Mary on online ordering and Origin Energy.

I've just had a wonderful run in with Origin's signdown order process. My cancellation fell into a black hole, so the obvious escalation point was straight to a debt collection agency.

Suffice to say, I don't trust systems like that anymore. I'm much happier staying on hold for 20 minutes than dealing with the fallout of some bad form design.

Clean out your feeds

2008-03-23T00:00:00+01:00

Like most people, I read a lot of feeds. And I mean a lot. Like, over 250.

The first question people ask me when I tell them this is "how do you keep on top of them all?". I tell them I just take time out every day to read them, but I realised after seeing an endless torrent of unread items every time I open up my reader that this is a lie.

I thought I was on top of my feeds, but really i'm not. There's just simply too many to keep up with.

I lead a busy life. I barely have time to check email, let alone keep on top of 250+ feeds, some of which are updated more than 20 times a day with sizable content.

I also collect feeds. If I stumble across an article with a feed and I like it, I tend to add it to my reader so I can read more cool stuff.

These two behaviors are mutually exclusive, making me a sucker for information overload.

Every month i'll get to a point where I feel paralysed by the sheer number of unread items, and i'll sit down for a day on my weekend to power my way through them all. This works temporarily, but after a week or two i'm back to a mountain of unread articles.

The thing you have to realise is that this is never going to stop. You can keep cleaning out your unread items, but the world keeps on turning and the bloggers keep on blogging.

I don't want to be ruled by my feeds. I don't want to feel my stomach drop every time I load up my reader. So, I did the only thing you can do: I increased the signal-to-noise ratio.

I applied a some very simple rules for culling a feed:

<li>if I haven't <strong>starred or shared</strong> anything in it for over 3 months, cull it.</li>
<li>if the feed hasn't been <strong>updated</strong> for over 6 months, cull it.</li>
<li>if I haven't <strong>read</strong> anything in it for over 3 months, cull it.</li>

And the things that got culled were the things that I simply didn't read or had lost interest in.

I'm down to about 120 feeds now, and they're all high quality. Thanks to "Friends' shared items" in Google reader, I know I can rely on finding cool things through other people, but i'm going to be a lot more cautious about subscribing to feeds in the future.

I much prefer staying on top of a smaller number of high quality articles than a large number of mixed quality articles. How about you?

Practical performance monitoring tooling on Linux

2008-03-22T00:00:00+01:00

While browsing my feeds this morning, I came across this article on HowtoForge called "How To Extract Values From top And Plot Them".

The first thing that struck me about the article was how they were going about solving their problem:

"Many researchers who are doing performance evaluation and benchmarking need to capture the values of the CPU and the RAM."

Jesus, if that's your requirement, you're using the wrong tool. There are plenty of utilities out there that will do exactly what you're looking for:

iostat: iostat (as the name suggests) reports I/O related statistics. It can tell you all about CPU, device, partition, and NFS utilisation.

# report cpu statistics
$ iostat -c 5 5
Linux 2.6.24-12-generic (theodor)   22/03/08

avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
           6.73    0.04    2.20    1.32    0.00   89.71

avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
           1.06    0.00    1.06    0.00    0.00   97.87

avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
           0.97    0.00    1.07    0.00    0.00   97.95

avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
           1.07    0.00    1.07    0.00    0.00   97.86

avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
           0.88    0.00    0.59    1.37    0.00   97.17

# report device utilisation of /dev/sda and all it's partitions. 
# display in megabytes per second. 
# take 5 second sample infinitely. 
$ iostat -p sda -m 5 
Linux 2.6.24-12-generic (theodor)       22/03/08

avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
           6.73    0.04    2.20    1.32    0.00   89.71

Device:            tps    MB_read/s    MB_wrtn/s    MB_read    MB_wrtn
sda               5.58         0.02         0.04      12383      30201
sda1              7.42         0.01         0.03       4054      18951
sda2              0.24         0.00         0.00        219        439
sda3              4.39         0.01         0.02       8109      10809

avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
           2.52    0.00    1.26    0.00    0.00   96.22

Device:            tps    MB_read/s    MB_wrtn/s    MB_read    MB_wrtn
sda               0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0
sda1              0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0
sda2              0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0
sda3              0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0

^C

sar: sar is a brilliant little tool for getting stats on all manner of system activity. Some example usage:

# report CPU utilisation. collect 5 seconds worth of data, 5 times. 
$ sar -u 5 5
Linux 2.6.24-12-generic (theodor)       22/03/08

12:57:26        CPU     %user     %nice   %system   %iowait    %steal     %idle
12:57:31        all      1.07      0.00      1.07      3.12      0.00     94.73
12:57:36        all      2.42      0.00      1.26      0.00      0.00     96.33
12:57:41        all      1.54      0.00      1.15      0.00      0.00     97.31
12:57:46        all      1.55      0.00      1.36      0.00      0.00     97.09
12:57:51        all      1.84      0.00      1.55      0.00      0.00     96.61
Average:        all      1.68      0.00      1.28      0.62      0.00     96.42

# report memory and swap utilisation
$ sar -r 5 5
Linux 2.6.24-12-generic (theodor)       22/03/08

12:59:02    kbmemfree kbmemused  %memused kbbuffers  kbcached kbswpfree kbswpused  %swpused  kbswpcad
12:59:07       947744   1086012     53.40    110560    278340   1131764    334868     22.83    163624
12:59:12       947744   1086012     53.40    110560    278340   1131764    334868     22.83    163656
12:59:17       947744   1086012     53.40    110560    278340   1131764    334868     22.83    163656
12:59:22       947704   1086052     53.40    110560    278372   1131764    334868     22.83    163656
12:59:27       947688   1086068     53.40    110560    278372   1131764    334868     22.83    163656
Average:       947725   1086031     53.40    110560    278353   1131764    334868     22.83    163650

# report paging statistics
$ sar -B 5 5
Linux 2.6.24-12-generic (theodor)       22/03/08

13:01:50     pgpgin/s pgpgout/s   fault/s  majflt/s  pgfree/s pgscank/s pgscand/s pgsteal/s    %vmeff
13:01:55         0.00      0.80    439.24      0.00   1046.81      0.00      0.00      0.00      0.00
13:02:00         0.00      1.59    478.88      0.00   1038.84      0.00      0.00      0.00      0.00
13:02:05         0.00      0.00    439.12      0.00    984.83      0.00      0.00      0.00      0.00
13:02:10         0.00      0.00    477.25      0.00   1011.58      0.00      0.00      0.00      0.00
13:02:15         0.00      0.00    443.06      0.00    990.34      0.00      0.00      0.00      0.00
Average:         0.00      0.48    455.53      0.00   1014.54      0.00      0.00      0.00      0.00

You'll notice that the iostat and sar outputs are very similar. In fact, they're almost identical. That's because they're from the same project: Sysstat.

Sysstat is a fantastic collection of utilities for doing performance monitoring. Because they all share a common backend, you're able to do some pretty interesting things with them.

That outputted data we were seeing before? That can be saved and extracted really easily - you can even specify time ranges:

collect a 10 second sample of network device stats

log them to the file 'sar-network'

$ sar -n DEV 10 -o sar-network

...a whole bunch of output

retreive network device stats from the sar-network file

$ sar -n DEV -f sar-network

...even more output

extract the same data, but only between 13:24:00 and 13:25:30

$ sar -n DEV -s 13:24:00 -e 13:25:30 -f sar-network

Newer versions of Sysstat include pidstat, which reports detailed per-process stats including I/O, page faults, memory utilisation, context switches, CPU time, and can even report on child processes and threads.

You can find all these tool in Redhat and Debian-based distros in the sysstat package.

If you're looking for something a bit more user friendly in its output (but not necessarily as detailed), there's always Dstat. It essentially collects the same information as all the Sysstat tools, but displays it in a much nicer format (with colourisation, and in cleanly labeled columns).



show cpu, disk, and network stats

$ dstat -cdn
----total-cpu-usage---- -dsk/total- -net/total-
usr sys idl wai hiq siq| read  writ| recv  send
  7   2  90   1   0   0|  18k   44k|   0     0
  2   1  97   0   0   0|   0     0 |   0     0
  2   0  98   0   0   0|   0     0 |   0     0
  0   1  99   0   0   0|   0     0 |   0     0
  1   1  97   0   0   0|   0     0 |   0     0
  0   1  98   0   0   0|   0     0 |   0     0
  0   1  99   0   0   0|   0     0 |   0     0
  1   0  98   0   0   0|   0     0 |   0     0

^C

You can also output the statistics in CSV, which makes it really easy for importing the data into a spreadsheet.

# output file lock, tcp socket, and unix socket statistics to stats.csv
$ dstat --lock --tcp --unix --output stats.csv

Dstat, like Sysstat, can be found in most of the major distros.

Also worth checking out is collectd, the "would you like graphs with that?" network aware stat collection daemon, which collects the same data as Sysstat and Dstat, but outputs it to RRD for quick and easy graphing love. Collectd is my new favourite piece of software, so i'll probably post a bit more about it.

I've barely touched the surface of performance monitoring under Linux, but hopefully this will give you starting point other than "mangle top's manky output".

Native rdiff-backup package for OS X

2008-02-28T00:00:00+01:00

I use rdiff-backup for all my backups at home. It works really nicely under Linux, but getting it going under OS X is a chore if you don't want to use Fink or MacPorts.

It seems like complete overkill to install an entire packaging system to get my backup software working, so i've built packages for rdiff-backup and librsync and bundled them into one easily installable package for OS X.

I've only tested on 10.4.11 on Intel, so I certainly don't promise that it will work on anything else. If people find it useful enough i'll think about targetting other platforms and versions.

Regular rdiff-backup users may notice that the version of rdiff-backup i've packaged (1.1.5) is a bit old (it's up to 1.1.15 nowdays). I've done this because 1.1.5 is the version shipped with Dapper, and I plan to ship packages at the same version of the latest Ubuntu LTS release. I may do the same for RHEL releases sometime in the future.

It's quite possible i've screwed up something in the licence, so if you're an upstream maintainer let me know and i'll fix it asap.

Func-y

2008-02-22T00:00:00+01:00

Alert to all sysadmins: there's some really cool stuff happening over in Fedora land in the form of Func. From the project's website:

A lot of programs, systems, and tools need some way to communicate. Func provides a two-way authenticated system for generically doing these sort of things. You can build your own applications on top of it, and easily expand func by adding in additional modules, whether you want these to work through the func command line or by means of some other application.

Highlights include some really cool integration with git, system-config-* for the web, great installation and development guides, and it's written in really easy to understand Python.

This fills a niche really nicely, and I think it has the potential to compliment Puppet really nicely. The fact that they're building a platform for remote administration as well as providing a bunch of apps built on top of it really smart, making it a much more subtle and useful tool than Capistrano, Vlad, or ssh in a for loop.

I highly recommend having a look at the Red Hat Magazine article introducing it.

Broadband usage + availability mismatch

2008-02-20T00:00:00+01:00

Interesting thought today: according to the 2001 census, Hornsby had the highest rate of personal computer and internet usage in NSW. ADSL2+ has only been rolled out in the area in the last 6 months.

This means that for the last 6 years, the area with the highest^* computer and internet usage per capita in NSW has had access to some of the slowest broadband options available.

Not that I would expect provisioning to match usage, but it's an interesting observation.

*approximate. I can't find any data along those lines in the 2006 census, but I think it would be reasonable to assume the figures haven't changed considerably. (then again, 6 years is a long time)

Back in Sydney

2008-02-02T00:00:00+01:00

Julia is a trooper. We left Melbourne this morning at 11am, and we arrived in Sydney at 10pm this evening. She drove the whole way herself, even after volunteering at linux.conf.au the entire last week.

I am her biggest fan. :-)

Rage live: intense

2008-01-31T00:00:00+01:00

Michael and I went to Rage Against The Machine last night after the Penguin Dinner. If I had to sum it up in one word, i'd call it "intense".

We waited about 40 minutes between the supporting act (who were pretty average, and unreasonably deafening) for Rage to start. The lights dimmed, a massive Red Star appeared behind the stage, The Internationale went through a verse, and Rage burst into "Testify".

The concert was a mixed bag. The music, as you would expect, was fantastic. The venue, however, was not. It must have been close to 50 degrees in Festival Hall, and there were over 2500 people standing. The whole floor turned into a pretty wild mosh in the first song, but got progressively subdued as the show progressed. There were quite a few people making their way back to the hall looking pretty dehydrated, and the St. Johns Ambulance folk looked like they had their hands full.

The band were having a really good time, and Zack was an especially awesome performer.

It was definitely a once in a lifetime experience, but one i'm not likely to repeat at that venue.

The Trial of Colonel Sweeto and Other Stories

2008-01-12T00:00:00+01:00

I ordered the Perry Bible Fellowship hardcover collection off Amazon before Christmas, but unfortunately it didn't arrive until Wednesday this week.

I'm a big fan of the blackest of black humour found in the PBF, and the book did not disappoint. Having the online collection in hardcover form is fantastic, and i've read it at least 3 times over since I got it.

If you like the Perry Bible Fellowship online, you should definitely get the book.

Textmate links + Firefox

2008-01-04T00:00:00+01:00

I've been holding off trying other Ruby web development frameworks until my holidays, and the first on the list was Merb.

One of the default behaviours that I like in the Merb exception pages is TextMate links.

It's a nice idea, but it's a pretty useless considering i'm use vim on Linux.

Well, pretty useless, until you write something to wrap it:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

unless ARGV[0] =~ /^txmt:\/\/open\?url=/ then
    puts "You probably want this called from firefox with a txmt url."
    exit 1
end

args = ARGV[0].split("://")

file = args[2].split("&")[0]
line = args[2].split("line=")[1]
line = "1" if line == "?"

`x-terminal-emulator -e vim #{file} +#{line}`

Pop this in your bin directory as firefox-txmt. Create a key in about:config called network.protocol-handler.app.txmt, and set it's value to firefox-txmt.

I found that setting cursorline in my .vimrc was pretty useful too.

se cursorline
hi CursorLine term=none cterm=none ctermbg=1

While i'm talking about vim: Michael, can you do a post on all the cool vim options you use? Your .vimrc is golden.

Spot when we moved back home:

2007-12-30T00:00:00+01:00

My last week

2007-12-27T00:00:00+01:00

My last week, in order of cool to coolest:

I got a new laptop - a brand new Lenovo x61s from the states, ordered off eBay. Getting it through customs was a pain. If you're importing anything >$1000 i'd recommend going through a customs broker. I used First Logistics and they were fantastic.
Julia gave me Super Mario Galaxy for christmas. I was a huge fan of the original Super Mario 64, and i've been looking forward to Galaxy for quite a while! It would have be the trippiest game i've ever played. It's also one of the best. If you've got a Wii, I strongly recommend you get yourself a copy.
I proposed to Julia, and she said yes! We haven't settled on a date, venue or anything like that, but it'll be happening within the next 18 months.

Teaching nursing in Second Life

2007-12-04T00:00:00+01:00

Pretty neat - nurses getting training through Second Life. Talking with Julia who's doing a nursing degree, it's certainly not a replacement for existing training, but it complements it quite nicely.

A lot of student nurses have the knowledge, but they don't understand how to apply it. This would help quite a bit, and it looks to be pretty economical.

Notes from the Sydney electorate frontline

2007-11-26T00:00:00+01:00

On Saturday I handed out how-to-vote information for the Greens at the Pyrmont community centre booth in the electorate of Sydney.

Interesting notes from the day:

From about 0900 there was a nut threatening to shoot at us if we stood on the footpath outside his house. He was citing common law cases from the 19th century, which a Labor booth worker who happened to be a lawyer said were completely bogus. He spent the morning hurling abuse at us and Greens voters, but disappeared in the afternoon. Charming fellow.
I indirectly knew two other people handing out for the Greens. One through SLUG member James Polley, the other was the daughter of former SLUG president Jamie Honan. Small world.
Some crazy guy standing in the senate on the platform "Australians for Waltzing Matilda for the National Anthem" turned up with a film crew from the ABC. I'm pretty sure it wasn't a setup, but he was pretty fruity. He had a full size electronic keyboard playing Walzing Matilda in wonderful 2 track MIDI on a loop. I think he might have been doing it just to drive the other booth workers mad.
Sydney polled extremely well for the Greens, the second highest nationally behind Melbourne.

Finally, Paul Keating wrote an awesome opinion peice on Howard in the SMH this morning.

Timestamp limitations when processing RFC3164 formatted logs

2007-11-08T00:00:00+01:00

I've been working on a log viewing/searching application on-and-off the last few months for sol1, and one of the things that been bugging me is processing RFC3164 timestamps.

According to RFC3164, the TIMESTAMP field in the HEADER section of a syslog packet is in the format of "Mmm dd hh:mm:ss" (e.g. Oct 11 22:14:15). Astute readers will note that there is no year field in the timestamp.

This can be most annoying when you're processing years worth of logs - especially when logs haven't been rotated and a single log file contains messages that span multiple years. To process that log file you end up messing with stat's reported atimes, mtimes, and ctimes, which can get very cludgy very quickly.

Of course, the writers of the RFC thought about this problem, and allowed syslog protocol implementors to specify the year in a number of ways:

Write the year out to the beginning of the CONTENT field in the syslog message. Something like

Aug 24 05:34:00 2001 quasimodo postfix/smtpd[25077]: connect from rusty.slug.org.au[202.177.212.193]

Format the TIMESTAMP in ISO 8601. This breaks compatibility with other syslog daemons that choke on TIMESTAMP formats other than the RFC default.
Do post-logging processing of the file and apply some tricks to guess the year. All of the tricks are based on manipulating the output of stat, which forces you to either not touch the original file, or take a snapshop of stat output before moving it. This makes it cludgier if you want to do offline processing on a separate machine.

The first two options are the more elegant solutions, but the default syslog (sysklogd) for the more common Linux distros don't support either of these options.

Fortunately there are other syslog implementations out there that do implement these features. Hooray for open source! The two most popular alternatives are syslog-ng and rsyslog. Rsyslog is my personal favourite, particularly because of the MySQL backend.

Awesomely, while reading the release notes for Fedora 8 I noticed Fedora is switching to rsyslog by default. Hopefully this is a catalyst for other distros to switch to a 21st century syslog implementation.

Back to basics

2007-10-31T00:00:00+01:00

Julia and I have been talking about buying a house for the last few months. We've decided to bite the bullet and move back to my parents house for the next year and save for a deposit, so starting mid-December we'll be back in the burbs.

I'm also going to be taking some time off - something which I haven't really done since finishing school last year. Suprisingly, i'm actually looking forward to moving back - though probably because I know we won't be paying dead rent money when we move back in the city.

Subscribe to Comments

2007-10-29T00:00:00+01:00

One of the things I like about LiveJournal is that when you comment on a friend's blog, you get email notifications when a reply is made to your comment.

If you're looking for similar functionality on your Wordpress blog, check out the Subscribe to Comments plugin.

Markdown gets top marks

2007-10-27T00:00:00+02:00

After hearing Erik de Castro Lopo's Career Development for Geeks 2 years ago, i've been following his advice and update my resume pretty frequently. The last few years i've been hand editing a HTML file and uploading it into Wordpress. I was recently asked for a PDF copy of it, and I realised how woefully inadequate the system was.

I tried mangling the CSS with the Web Developer Firefox plugin and printing out to Postscript, but it rasterises the image and strips out all the links, making the whole document pretty useless.

It occured to me that a simpler format like Textile or Markdown might make the whole thing a lot easier. I find Markdown makes my eyes bleed and my fingers hurt a little bit less, so I settled on it.

I trawled the web for something that would convert a Markdown document into a bunch of different formats, and came up with a fantastic little project called Maruku. Maruku marks up Markdown documents to HTML, LaTeX, and PDF, and is easily scriptable. One gem install maruku later and I was set.

I've got a simple script to build different versions of the resume, but it can be boiled down to:

$ maruku --html-frag resume.markdown
$ maruku --pdf resume.markdown

Which'll generate a html fragment (basically everything inside <body>) to resume.html and a LaTeX formatted PDF to resume.pdf. Pop the whole thing in a bzr repo, and you have a nicely versioned and easily buildable resume.

Setting up unixODBC with a remote DB2

2007-10-26T00:00:00+02:00

My hatred for DB2 grows. I thought it was bad setting up the DB2 server - it's even worse getting the ODBC adapter working. It took me a good 2 days of fiddling to figure this out. Fricken ridiculous.

All the ODBC documentation on the web focuses on talking to DB2 on a local machine. I needed ODBC to talk to DB2 on a remote machine.

But first, some quick background before we start. unixODBC has two configuration files, odbcinst.ini for database drivers and odbc.ini for database sources. Drivers are mechanisms for talking to database, and sources are database definitions.

Most (all?) unixODBC sources have all their config under their own section in /etc/odbc.ini. DB2 likes to be different and store its own config in a separate file called db2cli.ini. The file is used by DB2 utilities that use the db2cli. (a bit of background on the db2cli can be found here)

Anyway, I managed to set this up with DB2 8 under Fedora Core 6 but I assume it works under RHEL 5, and could easily be transposed to other distros.

First step - install unixODBC.

yum install unixODBC

Now you've got to install a copy of DB2.

IBM provide a bunch of different editions of DB2. Don't fall into the trap of using the "IBM DB2 Driver for ODBC and CLI" - I wasn't able to get it talking to a remote DB2 server. You want to grab the "DB2 Runtime Client". Infuriatingly IBM have removed all links to older versions of DB2 on their website, but you can find downloads for DB2 8 here, and DB2 9 here.

$ wget ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/ps/products/db2/fixes2/english-us/db2linux2632/client/runtime/FP15_MI00189_RTCL.tar
$ tar xvf FP15_MI00189_RTCL.tar
# rtcl/db2_install -p DB2.RTCL

Why doesn't IBM compress their DB2 releases? Gzip's been around for 15 years - get your act together! I downloaded the archive to a Linode in the states and bzip'd it before downloading it here and saved 70mb.

The runtime client doesn't set up users, so you'll have to create a DB2 instance and user yourself.

mkdir -p /home/db2

adduser -m -d /home/db2/db2inst db2inst

passwd db2inst

/opt/IBM/db2/V8.1/instance/db2icrt db2inst

Then you need to set up db2inst's db2cli.ini, which contains all the useful information on how to connect to the remote DB2 instance.

vim /home/db2/db2inst/sqllib/cfg/db2cli.ini

Here's an example config (thanks IBM for not providing anything as vaguely useful):

[foo]
Database = FOO
Protocol = TCPIP
Hostname = 192.168.10.77
ServiceName = 50000

For some bizarre reason, ServiceName is the port number.

So now DB2's CLI is set up, it's time to do the ODBC manager. Setup the DB2 driver in /etc/odbcinst.ini.

[DB2]
Description             = IBM DB2 Adapter
Driver                  = /opt/IBM/db2/V8.1/lib/libdb2.so
FileUsage               = 1
DontDLClose             = 1

And finally, the ODBC source in /etc/odbc.ini.

[foo]
Description = example database connection
Driver = DB2

This is quite unlike normal ODBC source definitions in unixODBC. Because of IBM's insistence on using db2cli.ini, you have to put all the relevant settings there, essentially turning odbc.ini into a wrapper for db2cli.ini. Apparently the db2cli allows you to put the settings just in odbc.ini and they'll be passed through when the DB2 driver is called, but I could not get this to work.

Also worth noting is that the db2cli doesn't allow DSN's (the name of the ODBC source inside the []'s) longer than 8 characters. What the fuck. Are we living in the 80's?

Regardless, to test the setup:

$ export DB2INSTANCE="db2inst"
$ isql -v foo db2inst password

Useful manuals for DB2 can be found here (the Call Level Interface Guide and Reference Vol.1 & 2 are particularly handy).

I hope someone else finds this useful - I pity the next person who has to muddle their way through this. Hopefully this is my last post about DB2 for quite some time. I'm sick to death of it.

Kennards: Merlin Stage 2

2007-10-03T00:00:00+02:00

The last 3 weeks i've been back working at Kennards Hire on the next phase of their desktop Linux deployment. It's been amazingly productive, and we've covered a lot of ground in a very short time.

The goal of the exercise was to create a Fedora Core 6-based SOE they can migrate their 100+ branch servers to and have it all nicely managed by Puppet. Along with that, I was working with the Kennards IT guys directly to train them up on how the new system works, and give them a better understanding of how the whole thing hangs together.

About half the time consisted of me giving them pointers on how to go about Puppetising their existing setup and letting them drive. This ended up being very rewarding for both them (they've been skilled up tremendously) and me (I got a lot of time to think about how to do things just right).

We started simply by creating a class to manage Apache, and built from there. We delved deeper into templating, and slowly built up the system with components covering file and printer sharing, DHCP + DNS in a DDNS setup, and LDAP replication and authentication.

One of the best outcomes of the exercise is that they now have a bunch of modular components for building servers and services outside the sphere of the original desktop + POS requirements. This is a tremendous boon for Kennards - by using Puppet they're making a long-term investment in the knowledge and implementation of one set of systems that is reusable in other areas of their infrastructure.

Now they have all these bits of configuration that can be reused when building new systems, making it a lot easier to start focusing on solving interesting problems (DRY, DRY, DRY!) and keeping on top of the day-to-day.

Unfortunately it wasn't all roses. Of the time we spent Puppetising their existing services, 2½ days were wasted dealing with proprietary software not behaving reproducibly. Another 2 days were spent on dealing with hardware problems (which aren't fully resolved). IBM's support for both hardware and software can be abysmally poor at times. The majority of workarounds (if not all) were found trawling community forums and mailing lists.

Word to IBM: stop changing your bloody hardware every 6 months and discontinuing your old models. Kennards have 3 different types of servers deployed in the field (x306, x306m, x3250), and each has radically different hardware. Dealing with all the incompatibilities is like pulling teeth.

I will strongly lean towards buying HP gear in the future, as will I strongly recommend FOSS databases.

But I digress! As of about 15.00 yesterday they have a fully working Kickstart + Puppet prep process that is reproducible and completes in just under an hour, with reports on completion. Sweet as.

The rollout is expected to start by the end of the week, and slowly churn all their deployed servers to the new SOE.

Next steps are to improve Puppet reporting, fix up slow disk performance (ugh, dodgy hardware RAID is such a drag), and of course start on a new desktop SOE build! :-)

Drupal in oz

2007-09-24T00:00:00+02:00

Pretty neat: both the Enmore and Factory theatres websites are driven by Drupal.

Update: Apparently the Chaser's website is done in Drupal too, though the footer says it's actually Joomla.

Our new place

2007-09-15T00:00:00+02:00

Though i'm posting this quite late (3 months late in fact), Julia and I found our own place. We're now up the other end of Newtown in Queen Street, near Sydney Uni.

Probably the best thing about the new place is the fantastic views:

Also, the location is ultra convenient. I've been riding to and from work every day, Julia can get to UTS easily, and the shops are just a few hundred meters away.

It's only a short lease, but we hope to extend it. We're really happy with our new place.

Go see Hairspray

2007-09-15T00:00:00+02:00

Hairspray. Everything about the movie is great - the soundtrack, the dancing, the sets, the themes.

Go see it.

More fixes for the DB2 time sink

2007-09-14T00:00:00+02:00

A while back I posted about Fixing IBM DB2 for non-ancient operating systems. tail's deprecated +n syntax broke the installer at a critical point, leaving DB2 rather broken.

I've since found a more elegant fix. Before you run the installer, run set the _POSIX2_VERSION environmental variable:

party like it's 1992

$ export _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 $ /tmp/db2/db2setup -r /tmp/db2/db2_wse_response_file.rsp

This allows tail to use the older syntax, and the install completes successfully.

Unfortunately DB2 is broken in a lot of other ways. The supplied db2_deinstall script removes the RPMs, but it does so regardless of whether DB2 is running or not. It also sprays files all over the filesystem. This makes it really difficult to fully and cleanly remove DB2 from your system and not have reinstalls tainted.

So here's a script that should clean up its mess:

#!/bin/sh -e

echo "You really should run db_deinstall first!" 
echo -n "Have you done this? [y/n] " 
read continue

if [ "$continue" != "y" ]; then 
        echo "OK Bye!"
        exit 1
fi

killall -9 -u db2inst &
killall -9 -u db2fenc &
killall -9 -u dasusr &

echo "Sleeping while DB2 is forced to shutdown."
sleep 4 

userdel --force --remove db2inst
userdel --force --remove db2fenc
userdel --force --remove dasusr

groupdel dasadm
groupdel db2grp
groupdel db2fgrp

rm -rf /opt/IBM/db2
rm -rf /home/db2
rm -rf /var/db2

grep -v ^db2c /etc/services > /etc/services.new
mv /etc/services.new /etc/services

This assumes that you've set all your DB2 users' homes to be under /home/db2 (which is a sane way of limiting DB2's potential damage anyway).

DB2 mangles /etc/services and doesn't clean up after itself, causing subsequent installs to fail hard for no apparent reason. You must clean this up if you want a reinstall to work.

My conclusion: administering DB2 can be an enormous time sink. Making it behave is not worth the time. Convince your manager or client to use something else like Postgres.

Snapgear wedge

2007-09-07T00:00:00+02:00

Since moving into our new place we've been looking for something to prop up our rickety fridge.

Finally, we found something just the right size to wedge it:

This Snapgear has been put to good use.

Monkey Fluids

2007-08-28T00:00:00+02:00

If you like your web comic humour sick and twisted you should check out Monkey Fluids.

Stalking script kiddies

2007-08-17T00:00:00+02:00

A few weeks ago we had a client of a client's machine get owned.

It was a RH7.3 box running an external mail server, NFS on their local network, and had a copy of Squirrelmail running for webmail access. And as you'd expect, it had a copy of sshd running.

Apparently they lost administrative access to the machine, and someone set up an account with the username admin and password admin.

It got owned in about 3 hours.

It was serving a Paypal phishing site, and they got notice from some US government department to take it down.

They rang in a bit of a panic, and I was tasked with working out what had happened.

So I logged into the box to check for all the basic things.

I'm fairly certain the box was owned by a script kiddie. The script they were using was half decent and erased all the logs, so I couldn't find out all that much on what had happened to the box since it was last rebooted 120+ days ago.

find(1) to the rescue! I was able to run a bunch of commands to see what had been created and modified over the last few days. I also ran rpm -V on all the packages installed to check if anything managed by RPM had been modified.

There wasn't anything particularly critical, except for a bunch of modified iptables kernel modules, but i'm pretty certain they weren't touched by the intruder.

I also checked out the phishing software itself, which consisted of a bunch of HTML and PHP scripts. Suprisingly well-written PHP, though. Most of scripts were functionised, there were humour-laden comments everywhere, and there were even credit card check regexs.

I had a look at the file the phishing site was logging details to, and there were about 5 people who had put their details in, with proper credit card and social security numbers.

After i'd finishing checking the box, I finally stopped httpd.

I got switched onto another task, but logged back in 30 minutes later to check on the system. I noticed the the script kiddie had logged back in, restarted httpd, and logged back out again, but they hadn't cleaned up after themselves.

So I stopped httpd again and replaced the httpd binary with a shell script that returned 0. I also fixed the init scripts so whenever you ran a service httpd start/stop/status/restart it would always visually return [ OK ] in big green letters.

The biggest problem was that I couldn't see what he was doing once he su'd to root, so I replaced the su binary with a shell script that wrapped sudo. I fixed up sudoers to auth the admin account using the root password, bypass syslog and log to a file, and notify via email when sudo was called.

So he'd log in as admin, su to root, do his thing, clean up root's .bash_history in, and log out.

Of course, because he'd "su'd to root" using sudo, all the logs were written out to /home/admin/.bash_history, so I had a full dump of everything he'd run.

It was relatively amusing. Lots of

service httpd stop

service httpd start

service httpd status

He also downloaded his root kit (p.jpg) off a server in Romania a number of times, and tried running it.

Curious, I downloaded his rootkit, untarred it, and poked around. There were two components - a binary (p), and the source (p.c). Curious, and fully expecting some horrible C, I opened up p.c.

This is what I found:

/*
 * Linux kernel ptrace/kmod local root exploit
 *
 * This code exploits a race condition in kernel/kmod.c, which creates
 * kernel thread in insecure manner. This bug allows to ptrace cloned
 * process, allowing to take control over privileged modprobe binary.
 *
 * Should work under all current 2.2.x and 2.4.x kernels.
 * 
 * I discovered this stupid bug independently on January 25, 2003, that
 * is (almost) two month before it was fixed and published by Red Hat
 * and others.
 * 
 * Wojciech Purczynski 
 *
 * THIS PROGRAM IS FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES *ONLY*
 * IT IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY
 * 
 * (c) 2003 Copyright by iSEC Security Research
 */

...

So now I knew how he got access.

He logged in a number of times over the next few days, tried to restart httpd, downloaded and ran the exploit, but didn't get any further.

Finally 3 days later, he logged in, ran the exploit again, decided to clean up the phishing site, and logged out again.

We subsequently reinstalled the box with a modern operating system and enforced a strong password policy.

So, what did we learn from this little escapade? The human element of security is always the weakest. Strong passwords are the first line of security.

Rescuing a mangled Tomboy with sed

2007-08-16T00:00:00+02:00

Interestingly enough, you can use characters other than / as the delimiter in a sed replace, e.g.

$ echo spoon | sed s/spoon/splade/
splade
$ echo fork | sed s#fork#spork#
spork
$ echo knife | sed s@knife@knork@
knork

In fact, you can use numeric characters as the delimiter too:

$ echo stick | sed s1stick1straw1
straw

This is highly useful when you've got /'s in the string you're searching and replacing, such as in the following scenario.

I'm quite a heavy user of Tomboy. I jot down notes, random thoughts, action items, and even timesheets in it. The wiki functionality is highly useful, though occasionally troublesome.

I have, on a number of occasions, accidentally created a new note with the title of a common word used throughout my other notes, such as "and", "or", or "thing". Tomboy sees the new note title, and goes through all existing notes and links them to the new note, leaving all my notes horribly mangled.

I recently had this with a note called "a". You can imagine the amount of damage that caused.

So, the aforementioned sed trick came in quite handy.

After backing up the ~/.tomboy directory, I deleted the offending note (be careful not to rename it, otherwise it'll change all the link name in the linking notes), stopped Tomboy, and ran the following:

for f in .tomboy/*.note ; do 
     sed -i s#\<link:broken\>a\</link:broken>#a# $f
done

and my notes were better.

Thanks to this handy forum post for the revealing sed trick.

OpenVZ starters

2007-07-20T00:00:00+02:00

Today consisted of migrating quasimodo (a personal VM) and rusty (SLUG's server), from slim (a Xen dom0) to soldier (an OpenVZ host).

quasimodo migrated fine, but rusty blew up spectacularly.

Some tips for those playing with OpenVZ in the future:

The UBC category and associated pages have way way way too much information in them, but some of it is quite useful. The trick is sorting the mathematical proofs from the configuration settings that matter. These are the settings you'll want to care about:
- numproc, numothersock, vmguarpages
- kmemsize, privvmpages
- lockedpages, physpages
The general information page says that parameters go by level of importance and effect from primary to secondary to auxiliary. That's a total crock. You can bone settings in secondary and auxiliary and you'll be dead in the water (case in point: having kmemsize off by a factor of 10 wasted 2 hours of my life. Too many numbers and you can't see straight - use the abbreviations where possible).
You can mess around with file-ish settings without worrying too much about the effect they'll have. If you screw up any of the memory related settings you've blown your legs off and you'll get all sorts of horrible and unexpected behaviour (see above).
The units of measurement used for the UBC settings are schizophrenic. You have to check, double check, and check again what the actual unit of measurement you're using for the setting you're changing. All the parameter descriptions will bandy numbers around without telling you what they mean. Find out what metric they're talking about as soon as you can and it will help tremendously.
The UBC configuration examples page and associated table is invaluable if you have no clue what sane defaults are for the endless list of OpenVZ options. Use this list if you're setting up a new VM or you're debugging performance or stability issues.
The Resource Shortage page is incredibly useful for debugging stability related issues with your VMs. If you see anything in the failcnt column, you need to tweak your settings. It's easy to do that while the machine is running, with a
```
vzctl set $VEID --misc-option=somevalue
```
pop a --save on the end of that to write out that change to the VE's config file.

When you set up monitoring for your OpenVZ hosts, checking the failcnt column is highly recommended. It's also a neat tuning foothold, especially as you can modify the settings of the VE while it's running.

Version: 2.5
  uid  resource             held      maxheld      barrier       limit    failcnt
 106:  kmemsize         10869635     29562604     32768000    36044800          0
       ...
       numpty                  0            3           64          64          0
       numsiginfo              0            8          512         512          0
       tcpsndbuf          557056      1585920     10731520    20971520          0
       tcprcvbuf          524288      1349888     10731520    20971520          0
       othersockbuf       291328      1003008      1503232     4063232          0
       dgramrcvbuf             0       128256       262144      262144          0
       numothersock          163          579         1024        5096         11
       dcachesize              0            0      4194304     4317184          0
       numfile              2360         6840         8192        8192          0

-- excerpt of /proc/user_beancounters

Stuff in failcnt is bad. Fix it!

Hilariously, there's an OpenVZ config setting called numpty (that one's for you Matt)
The use of the term beancounters is similarly amusing.

Stress and burn

2007-05-28T00:00:00+02:00

I've been getting short-sharp chest pains just below my heart for the last 6 or so months. They last between 30 and 120 seconds, and incapacitate me for that time. They hurt the most at the point where I finish breathing in and start breathing out.

In the last two or so months i've worked out that they're correlated directly to how much stress i'm under, and i've been trying to limit my workload accordingly.

Weekend before last at the SLUG Bootcamp I started getting these pains again, though they lasted much longer and were a lot sharper. I tried to relax and take some deep breathes, but they were just getting worse.

After an hour of this continuous pain, I hopped over to Concord hospital to have myself looked at. They took me straight into emergency and hooked me up to a bunch of machinery to get my ECG, pulse rate, and pulse oximetry.

Given my previous history with pulmonary emboli, they were being very cautious. The pain continued for the rest of the day, dying down and coming back repeatedly.

Unfortunately, they couldn't find anything physically wrong. I had a chest x-ray, a CT scan, arterial blood gas test, and all came back with completely normal results. They discharged me in the evening and told me to take painkillers if I needed them. They offered a bunch of suggestions on what it could be (some more outlandish and unrealistic than others), but they really had no idea what the problem was physically.

The pain lasted all night, and was still with me when I woke in the morning, though it had tapered off significantly.

The next day I spoke to my uncle who is a doctor, and he said he's seen high levels of stress manifest themselves as muscle spasms and pulled muscles in interesting and unreachable places in and around the chest. Physical signs like this are a signal from your body to stop doing dumb things like stress yourself out. His suggestion was to take at least a week (if not two) off from work and try and relax.

So that's what i've been attempting to do for the last week.

That said, it doesn't fix the fundamental problem. I've limited my load significantly over the last few months and i'm still getting stressed and burnt out. I'm exercising adequately (25+km bike ride a day), working smarter not harder, and reducing my hours.

The thing I don't have control over is my workplace (can be very stressful at times, to say the least). I'm caring less about the things that matter (SLUG & LCA cleanup), forming a deep cynicism about work, and developing a grumpiness and general indifference to the world.

Probably the best way to describe it is a "509 Bandwidth Limit Exceeded"

What do you do to combat stress and burnout?

Noise pollution on trains

2007-05-10T00:00:00+02:00

The few times I catch the train there's always someone listening to music in an irritating way.

Hopefully this will solve the problem:

[svg]

Feel free to print them out, check the boxes that apply, and hand to noise polluters.

Flawless good taste

2007-05-09T00:00:00+02:00

In graphic design, there is nothing more limiting than flawless good taste. True, it communicates to those who happen to share its values. Too bad that its aesthetic repertoire is so restricted that it always communicates essentially the same thing. After all, what does it offer? Small type, almost invariably sans serif; nice, big photographs; plenty of exciting white space to admire - and that's about it.

-- Rick Poynor on the "Taste-Free Zone", in Designing Pornotopia

gtf for modeline goodness

2007-05-06T00:00:00+02:00

If you're having trouble getting a video card to output the right refresh rate and resolution, gtf is what you're looking for:

$ gtf 1920 1200 60

  # 1920x1200 @ 60.00 Hz (GTF) hsync: 74.52 kHz; pclk: 193.16 MHz
  Modeline "1920x1200_60.00"  193.16  1920 2048 2256 2592  1200 1201 1204 1242  -HSync +Vsync

Grab the modeline entry, pop it into your monitor section in your xorg.conf. Restart X, and you're done.

This fixed my SiS integrated chip (1039:6330) with a Dell 24" monitor.

Update: this was also quite useful for defining new randr modes after an upgrade to Gutsy. Take the output from gtf, map it into xrandr --output $output --newmode and high resolutions were available on my crappy ATI card through randr.

Thank you for the lies

2007-05-01T00:00:00+02:00

Tony Jones interviews [video, transcript] Resources Minister Ian Macfarlane on climate change:

TONY JONES: What exactly are you sceptical about, though? Because here's another one of your quotes. 'Every two scientists who argue there's a connection between global emissions and global warming, there's another scientist that will argue the opposite'. IAN MACFARLANE: Well, that's a fact. And I guess what I am saying is there is a debate raging at the moment -

Emphasis mine.

Thank you for the bleedingly obvious lie, Mr Macfarlane.

If you've seen or read Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" this will be old news, but he references a paper by University of California scientist Dr. Naomi Oreskes on "a massive study of every peer-review science journal article on global warming from the previous 10 years".

Her findings were:

<li>Number of peer-reviewed articles dealing with "climate change" published in scientific journals during the previous 10 years: <strong>928</strong>.</li>
<li>Percentage of articles in doubt as to the cause of global warming: <strong>0%</strong>.</li>

I'm sorry, that number again: 0%. Where is our Resources minister get his numbers from?

The aforementioned study also looked at articles in the popular press on global warming:

Articles in the popular press about global warming during the previous 14 years: 636.
Percentage of aricles in doubt as to the cause of global warming: 53%.

Thank you for perpetuating the lie, sir. I'm glad you're looking after our countries resources and my generation's future.

Over the bars: a warning!

2007-04-26T00:00:00+02:00

While biking to work this morning I had a car door open on me.

I tried moving the bike out of the way but it was too late and my handlebar clipped her door. I came off over the bars and hit the ground hard, but didn't sustain any injuries other than a swollen upper arm and light grazing.

I was going to give her a bit of a talking to about bike safety, but she broke down on the street. It would have been a bit harsh to have a go at her, and she seemed pretty shaken up, so I made sure she was ok and made my way a few blocks over to the sol1 offices to recover.

If you're a driver and you don't already, please watch your mirrors carefully for cyclists!

Epiphany new-tab trick

2007-04-26T00:00:00+02:00

If you're using Epiphany as your browser, you can enter a URL into your address bar and hit Ctrl+Enter to have the page open in a new tab.

Open your ears!

2007-04-18T00:00:00+02:00

Found via the 37signals blog, this would have to be one of the most emotive articles i've ever read.

World renowned violinist Joshua Bell plays his Stradivari in a Washington DC subway, and almost no-one responds.

Geek events & design

2007-04-15T00:00:00+02:00

If you're a geek in Sydney and you need more than just a SLUG fix every month, SyXPAC have a fantastic list of Sydney Geek Events on their wiki.

I rocked up to the Sydney Ruby on Rails group meet last week, and was mighty impressed with the meeting put on. For a relatively new group, they had awesome meeting organisation and a really slick format.

I've been doing a bunch of web-ish stuff recently, and I came across a neat flickr gallery of web2.0 design patterns.

Speaking of design The Whitest Boy Alive's debut video clip is pretty neat:

Cultural Fact of the Day

2007-04-15T00:00:00+02:00

The women's magazine Cosmopolitan was launched in 1886 by Schlicht & Field, as a family magazine, no less.

In 1965, editor Helen Gurley Brown transformed the magazine into its current form.

Wikipedia is a wonderful thing.

"Building a National Broadband Network", or, the silent shifting of Australia's broadband sands

2007-03-23T00:00:00+01:00

Ignoring the television media hype of Labor's latest policy proposal, Lateline cut straight to the chase and interviewed the Hon Helen Coonan, Minister for Telecommunications & Information Technology.

Tony Jones' final question in his interview probed Coonan on whether she thought this was a strategic move by Labor to sideline Telstra and regain control of Australia's telecommunications infrastructure. Her reaction was dismissive, laughing and calling the notion of replacing Telstra "perverse".

But that's exactly what they plan, and she's simply not seeing the bigger picture.

Labor's vision routes around the fundemental infrastructure problem we've had in Australia since the explosion of the internet - Telstra hold all the keys, and it's incredibly reluctant to relinquish control of the market, especially since its partial privatisation.

Creating a separate entity in the form of a PPP works fantastically for the Australian people. The core infrastructure is back in the hands of taxpayers, but it's managed as a business with a goal of delivering service and creating money that goes straight back into the Future Fund.

The government's pigeon holing of Labor's financing as a "smash-and-grab" of the Future Fund is a scare tactic we should all be finely tuned to by now - if done properly the long term benefits far outstrip the negative effects of a short term reallocation of money.

Thinking of the infrastructure as a "tollway"-like system reveals Labor's proposal as a nifty hack for meeting the Future Fund $20 billion by 2020 target. Broadband services will be improved, driving more Australians to get online, channeling more money into the Future Fund, establishing a steady income stream to acheive the growth target with minimal taxpayer impact.

Coonan made a decent point that Telstra would fight tooth and nail to make sure any governmental plans that threaten their business wouldn't come to fruition, but considering Telstra's initial response, they seem pretty positive about the whole thing. Either they haven't realised how badly this threatens their current core businesses, or they've realised their monopoly is coming to an end, and they've got a strategy that works well within Labor's vision.

Telstra becomes just another ISP that piggybacks on the new fibre network, and the ISPs simply duke it out by offering better deals. Telstra shifts their business purely to media (ala Foxtel) and telecommunications, and spins off any unwanted parts of the business.

Labor's proposal also provides some interesting potential for a Telstra spinoff in regional areas.

Rolling out that much fibre is going to take time, but Telstra can do some funky resource shifting to improve business in the bush while reducing the maintenance of city infrastructure.

Telstra migrates customers in metropolitan areas as the fibre becomes available. The old infrastructure is decommissioned, and resources are allocated to regional areas, delivering better broadband and telecommunication services to the bush. This also has the added benefit of slowly closing the gap between the copper and fibre networks until the rollout reaches those areas.

Althought Telstra, being the telco behemoth that it is, is unlikely to embrace such a plan, it's not going to have many options if a Labor government comes to power. They're bleeding money internally, their infrastructure is aging and undocumented, and with a new fibre infrastructure their core business is threatened by the likes of VOIP and better competition in the broadband space.

Things are going to change, and they have to adapt to it for better or worse.

Labor's plan goes a long way towards fixing big problems with Australia's telco/broadband industry, providing a solid technical foundation for growth in business and education for years to come.

Regardless of Labor coming to power at the next Federal election, the sands are silently shifting in the Australian broadband and telecommunications market. It's up to Australians to decide to elect a government that wants reclaim and rebuild our telecommunications infrastructure in partnership with the industry, or one that is happy privatising and letting it stagnate into the 21st century.

Whee!

2007-03-20T00:00:00+01:00

Mine's not very good, methinks.

Fixing IBM DB2 for non-ancient operating systems

2007-03-05T00:00:00+01:00

You've tried installing IBM DB2 V8.1 on the current release of an RPM-based but commercially unsupported operating system. Also, maybe you've installed DB2 before on older machines and have a nice response file set up with sane default values.

Something has died during the install, but you can't tell whether it's causing the following error:

$ db2cc 
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: initIDs
        at java.awt.Component.(Component.java:563)
        at CC.(Unknown Source)
        at CC.main(Unknown Source)
DB2JAVIT : RC = 1

What do you do?

Make sure that libXp is installed.

<= RHEL 4 & older versions of Fedora Core (at least on Core 3) bundle libXp in xorg-libs, however this package has disappeared in newer versions of Fedora. Fortunately, a yum provides libXp.so.6 reveals that it now has its own package, so a

yum install libXp

will fix your problems.

Now db2cc and the other various DB2 admin-y bits should work, but what about the other bits that broke?

You'll need to fix up some syntactical bits in /opt/IBM/db2/V8.1/instance/db2iutil - specifically, the syntax of 'tail' has changed.

Open up db2iutil in vim and type: %s/tail +2/tail -n +2/g . This will replace all cases of "tail +2", with "tail -n +2". Supposedly just +2 is no longer valid syntax. (Bizarro! Is this some sort of odd regression?)

Now, for the cleanup bits. :-)

It's worth dropping the DB2 instance just in case things have broke in mystical ways known only to IBM.

If the instance has already been created, drop it by running:

/opt/IBM/db2/V8.1/instance/db2idrop db2inst

And now recreate the DB2 instance:

/opt/IBM/db2/V8.1/instance/db2icrt -a SERVER -d -s wse -u db2fenc -p db2c_db2inst db2inst

The DB2 admin user probably needs a re-jigging too.

Delete the temporary directory created during the installation:

rmdir /home/db2das/das

Recreate the DB2 administration user in DB2:

/opt/IBM/db2/V8.1/instance/dascrt -u dasusr -d

Of course, modify the paths as needed. Your Unix + DB2 usernames and DB2 instance names are probably different, so in my examples:

DB2 admin user = dasusr DB2 instance user = db2inst DB2 instance name = db2inst Name of server = SERVER

Linux + OOo + Samba = pretty wang file locking behaviour

2007-02-14T00:00:00+01:00

Interesting file locking problem with Samba and Windows & Linux clients arose at work last week:

1st Linux machine with a CIFS-mounted Samba share has an OpenOffice.org document open on the share.
2nd Linux machine with the same CIFS-mounted share opens the OOo file. OOo has full write access to the file.
Windows machine tries to open the OOo file. OOo gets read-only access. (the correct behaviour)

This is really a Linux OOo bug, but you can circumvent it by enforcing a particular file locking policy with Samba.

OOo's file locking on Windows is handled nicely because the file locking interface it uses is, as far as I can tell, smart enough to work out whether the file is on a remote share, and if so it modifies the locking calls to be more CIFS-ish.

From various bug and forum posts, OOo on Linux isn't afforded same luxury. It will make a "standard" locking call that doesn't get translated to a more reliable and CIFS aware call. This standard locking call is used everywhere, and makes the OOo developer's jobs easier because they don't have to maintain CIFS aware code, further reinforcing one of my favourite graphics:

So, it becomes a process of finding the right smb.conf incantations. This is what I found worked:

[global]
    ...
    kernel oplocks = no

[someshare]
    path = /path/to/share

    oplocks = yes
    share modes = yes
    locking = yes
    strict locking = no
    blocking locks = no

    ...

Replace '...' with your normal share or global settings.

I've tested this successfully on Ubuntu Edgy and Dapper, though it's been tried on a Sarge-like build and not worked correctly.

An interesting side effect that I haven't confirmed: the OOo + CIFS + Linux combination works as intended, but OOo + Windows get a constant read-only status on the file. Looks like the enforced Samba locking behaviour doesn't bode well with Windows.

Further testing on both fronts is required, but people running into this OOo problem in pure Linux environments should find it a handy fix.

SLUG artwork revisions

2007-01-24T00:00:00+01:00

Inspired by looking over Andy Fitzsimon's shoulder at LCA, i've tackled revising SLUG's illustrious mascot, Tugger.

Before After

And while I was at it, planet.slug.org.au's design looked a bit outdated, so I gave it new life. What do SLUGgers think of it as a replacement?

linux.conf.au: winding down

2007-01-23T00:00:00+01:00

I woke in a daze this morning thinking I had speakers to pick up from the airport.

That said, this year's speakers were fantastic - you guys and gals made my job all that much easier.

Musical fact of the day

2006-12-27T00:00:00+01:00

John Williams wrote the NBC News theme song "The Mission", on which the Seven News theme song is based.

Wickedly useful

2006-12-21T00:00:00+01:00

When using less to view a file, hit v to edit the file with your system's default editor.

Save and exit out of the editor and you'll be returned to less.

Works with both less and more, for the old-school.

Wii-tastic

2006-12-08T00:00:00+01:00

Had dinner with last night with Matt and James, came home about 11.30 and checked out Pia and Jeff's new Wii.

The interface and social networking side of things is really impressive, and the games are unbeleivably immersive and natural. Jeff and I were getting into the full swing of things (literally), battling it out in a number of sporting titles, working up a terrific sweat. The new Rayman game is completely loopy. Unbeleivably cool technology.

Then I realised it was 3. And I had to get up at 7.

(!!!)

Just confirming...

2006-12-05T00:00:00+01:00

...this man is the biggest threat to Software Freedom?

Out with the old, in with the new (maybe)

2006-11-27T00:00:00+01:00

My much loved iRiver H340 carked it yesterday. Since it's out of warranty i'm considering whether it's worth getting repaired or not, or perhaps forking out a bit and getting a new one.

Cowon's iAudio X5 looks very nice, sporting mostly identical features to my H340, as well as support for FLAC and the option of getting an X5L model with double the battery life (up to 35 hours).

I'm looking for a hard disk player (20gb minimum) with Vorbis support and a non-sucky UI.

What do people recommend?

Pitch Perception Test

2006-11-23T00:00:00+01:00

I came across a Pitch Perception test on James Tauber's blog.

I scored 80.6%, so I guess that isn't too bad for a muso who been out of practice for almost a year.

I'd be interested to see what other muso and non-muso geeks score.

300

2006-11-14T00:00:00+01:00

We've just reached 300 registrations for linux.conf.au! Early bird regos are running out.

The time to register is now!

For those who like politically minded shirts

2006-11-14T00:00:00+01:00

I was wearing the following in a lift full of police officers... awkward:

They really want to go

2006-11-09T00:00:00+01:00

Crazy dudes from the US of A contacted us about sponsoring them to come to linux.conf.au.

They're the guys who organised the Firefox crop circle,

and hacked up AbiWord to work on OLPC.

They've put together a website to sponsor ther efforts, and they're asking you to donate to help them make it to the conference.

So, how about it?

Early bird regos open for another 6 days! Get to it!

linux.conf.au website updates

2006-11-01T00:00:00+01:00

We've updated the linux.conf.au website - now, with added Flickr and Planet love.

The registrations will go live sometime today.

Stay tuned!

Lindsay 1; Exams 0

2006-10-31T00:00:00+01:00

I'm all done!

No more school again ever.

Learning Ruby

2006-10-25T00:00:00+02:00

I'm picking up Ruby at work; specifically, i'm writing a FUSE filesystem to import data from incoming UUCP drops (yes, that's right, UUCP) into a POS application, and scp exports to other machines.

Speaking to Matt Palmer about where to start my Ruby adventures, he pointed me to the Pickaxe book, and suggested that I post my first forrays into Ruby on my blog for feedback from more experienced Rubyists.

So here I am!

Last night I was asked to put together a small script that munges reports from the same POS application. It needed to inserts page breaks after specific strings, and strip out a particular string.

My result was as follows:



!/usr/bin/env ruby

#

Lindsay Holmwood 10 25 2006

#

paginate.rb

#

Script to reformat reports from a POS application.

Inserts page breaks when it detects certain strings.

Strips out dud strings.

#

lines = STDIN.readlines

puts
puts

lines.each_with_index do |line, index|

    case
    when line =~ /^RESET\: NOT SUPPORTED/ then
            puts
    when line =~ /OVER 30 DAYS/ then
            puts line
            lines[index + 1] += "^M^L"
    when line =~ /continued&#92;s+$/ then
            puts line += "^M^L"
    else
            puts line
    end


end

I can see that the next step would be replacing the case with regexes, though I need to match lines and modify lines after the ones i've matched.

I'm pretty sure I can replace the lines = STDIN.readlines and the following collection with something more elegant, but i'm not quite sure what.

How do you think I went?

Yikes

2006-10-23T00:00:00+02:00

As i'm starting to do a lot more riding around town, I thought i'd put some money into a decent bike:

A Giant CRX2, for those who are interested.

Spoils!

Just two more

2006-10-23T00:00:00+02:00

No more english again. Ever!

Just three more

2006-10-22T00:00:00+02:00

Just three more exams until i'm all done with school.

Coverage

2006-09-12T00:00:00+02:00

Nice to see our work at Kennards gaining press coverage (front page too). Some of the facts are a bit off, but it's good to have another article alongside Rodney's ComputerWorld peice.

Visibility

2006-09-05T00:00:00+02:00

Hats off to James for representing SLUG and Ubuntu so well. Neat to see the word being spread by the Aussie media.

No time to talk

2006-08-24T00:00:00+02:00

Whoa! Things are hectic! I don't have time to blog, let alone keep up to date with news and mail.

I've left Kennards as of last week. Maybe i'll have more work there next year, maybe I won't.

I'm working for Solutions First now. It's great flexing a different skillset. I felt i've shaken the complacency of a cosy system implementor's position and am again getting down and dirty with the internals of the operating system. It's neat!

Things are ramping up with LCA organisation. Get your submissions in!

Lots of stuff brewing on the potential business front. Some things have quietened down, with other are rocketing forward.

I'm defering uni next year, and i'm still non-committal to any degree in particular. Business? CompSci? IT? Environmental Science? Biomedical Science? Teaching? Argh! I suppose i've got a bit of time left to decide, but it disturbs me that I keep changing my mind weekly. Oh yeah, and what uni do I even want to study at? Ergh.

For those who aren't on any SLUG mailing lists, UTS effectively pulled the plug on SLUG using them as a venue, and a week out from our monthly meeting at that. IBM have kindly stepped in and offered a room in their St. Leonards building. It really annoys me that the uni decided to sour a healthy 12 year relationship with SLUG over money. $607 per meeting (that's at a non-profit rate, by the way) is just outrageous.

I went to my old school's art show tonight. There were a whole bunch of people from my 2005 HSC art class there, and it was really nice to catch up with them. We all missed the social atmosphere of our classes; maybe we should have yearly reunions just for the art class?

Get on with it

2006-08-24T00:00:00+02:00

Last year I attended a funeral for Vanessa Anderson, a girl at my high school who died from complications arising from a golfing accident. She was struck in the head with a golf ball accidentally hit by her best friend. She entered hospital conscious and aware of her condition.

Vanessa, a girl with a history of asthma, was given Endone by the hospital to treat the head pain.

I'm sorry, did someone forget that asthma + head injury + Endone was a potentially fatal combination? 2 days later she was dead.

I read in the local paper a few weeks back that the coroner has yet to decide a date for the inquiry. How long does it take to set a date for an inquiry? Really?

Wouldn't a timely inquiry be in everyone's interests? The greiving family's? The best friend who's golf ball struck her? The patients being treated in the same hospital now with asthma and head injuries?

10 months is just unacceptable.

I'm alright

2006-08-08T00:00:00+02:00

My body broke again.

Last Friday night I had cloudy urine, by Saturday morning I was peeing blood. I had a really high INR (International Normalised Ratio, the measurement of how quickly you clot, the higher the more you bleed) and could taste blood in the back of my mouth for most of Saturday.

The doctors can't explain it, but they've taken me off the blood thinners and things have returned to normal.

To add to that, i'm in the middle of an exam block (yay, only 5 more high school exams ever!), so the extra stress is not helping.

Throw me more! Really! I can take it!

Anaconda, now with added yumminess

2006-08-08T00:00:00+02:00

Notable Features of FC6 Test 2
==============================
...
* Ability to install from additional yum repositories during anaconda
installations and kickstarts.

Yum is tasty.

Tomgirl

2006-07-25T00:00:00+02:00

My parents are running Ubuntu Dapper on their desktop at home, and are starting to poke around outside the common sphere of email, web browsing, and word processing. My mum's recently discovered the joys of digital photography, and she wanted to know how to get the photos off the camera and send them to her friends.

Having not grown up with technology, my parents are fairly procedural people, so I went through how to import photos and categorise them in F-Spot with my mum a few days ago. Once she understood conceptually what we were doing, she was blown away with the power of the tools she was using.

Tags and categories were a totally foreign concept to her, but she picked them up in a matter of minutes and was happily attaching tags and organising all her photos without my help.

Understanding that she can reach a saturation point for new information, she took to writing down what we were doing with a pen and pad. I showed her Tomboy, introduced to her the concept of wikis, and let the ideas stew.

When I came back last night to show her more features of F-Spot, I was happily suprised to find that she had already transcribed her notes into Tomboy, and now wants to use it as a central place of documentation and her writings. FOSS helps my mum rock!

RoHS

2006-07-13T00:00:00+02:00

Whilst searching for a replacement socket-A motherboard, I came across the RoHS directive when looking at ASRock motherboards.

It's a pretty neat idea: set out a standard that restricts the use of hazardous materials in the manufacturing of electronic components.

Although it's only a directive, not a law, it's a good first step towards reducing the IT industry's environmental impact.

The majority of ASRock motherboards are RoHS compliant, so buying their stuff is a great way to do your bit for the environment.

(mostly) undocumented feature

2006-07-06T00:00:00+02:00

After pulling my hair out over a FC5 kickstart this morning, I found that the anaconda/kickstart documentation is a bit patchy when it comes to documenting all the supported arguments. There were a few changes to the kickstart syntax for FC5, but fortunately most of the documentation has been updated in the anaconda package.

There are still bits missing though, such as this:

The %packages section has a --nobase option that can be passed to it to install just the core packages. Without the option the install was pulling down all sorts of packages that are useless for a desktop machine.

It can be used something like:

...

%packages --ignoremissing --nobase

@core

yum

Which will give you a FC4-style minimal install. Digging around the kickstart list revealed enough.

Documentation and deployment

2006-06-21T00:00:00+02:00

It seems to have gone unannounced, but the GNOME System Administrator's guide has been updated for 2.14 [pdf]. The last update was for GNOME 2.6, so this is a much welcomed update.

Cool stuff includes a section on the lockdown editor Pessulus, editing System Menus, and other individual embelishments.

Federico Mena Quintero recently blogged a series of questions for GNOME deployments. For the stuff we do at Kennards, having an up-to-date sysadmin guide is a really big help for the tech support blokes. Fortunately we're using 2.6, so the previous guide covers us, and this new guide fits in nicely with possible upgrade paths.

In terms of documentation improvements, it would be nice to have real world examples combining the content covered in the guide. This is definitely something I could personally contribute to, and have full intention of doing so. Both KDE and GNOME have reasonable bases of information for sysadmins to familiarise themselves with when building and deploying SOEs, and further reference and tutorials guiding people how to utilise the technology is the next evolutionary step for the documentation.

Aaron Seigo gave an excellent 3 day tutorial on the KDE Kiosk framework and how to use it at LCA this year. A bottled up, fully documented version of his tutorial applied to the GNOME world would be just what the doctor ordered.

The Corruptibles

2006-06-18T00:00:00+02:00

Found via digg, The Corruptibles - The EFF's very cool introduction to DRM and content restrictions.

News digs

2006-06-17T00:00:00+02:00

Last weekend I moved out of the 'burbs to Surry hills.

The most suprising things have been:

<li>blissfully quick 12 minute train rides to work and school</li>
<li>trains every 3 minutes in peak hour</li>
<li>futons are really comfortable</li>
<li>not having a desk is really annoying</li>
<li>adjusting to the ambient city noise was suprisingly easy</li>
<li>only having to get up an hour before I have to be anywhere is very convenient</li>

Dapper fixes all

2006-06-17T00:00:00+02:00

When I built a computer for my parents last year I was very meticulous in choosing hardware that I knew was Freedom compatible. They was going to make a switch from Windows 98 to Ubuntu, and they needed hardware that Just Worked.But of course, things did not go as planned. I followed Conrad's endorsement and bought an Epson Stylus Photo R210. Although the output was great, there were all manner of problems with it randomly going into an idle mode. My parents have found it difficult to go through the process of resuming the printer, and it's been a constant bugbear ever since.

Also, the video card was one of the Unichrome series not supported at the time by the open source VIA driver, and after a run in with a Unichrome driver developer, I ended up buying an NVIDIA graphic card and leaving it at that.

I lived in hope that Breezy would fix my woes on both fronts, but it was not to be.

Dapper, however, fixed all.

After a relatively painless dist-upgrade, a re-adding of the printer (the printer is supported under the Gutenprint drivers now), and a dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg, everything is good to go. DVD playback seems to be much smoother too, which my dad is very pleased about.

I've been running Dapper on my laptop the last three months. I made the switch over from Xfce to GNOME, and it's given me a renewed interest in desktop Linux. At the time of my switch, the Xfce project had not released their next version (4.4) as planned. It's good to see that at least a beta of 4.4 has been included in Dapper.

QOTD: Evo Morales

2006-06-07T00:00:00+02:00

TIME: You're a democratically elected President, yet U.S. President George W. Bush remarked this week that he fears "an erosion of democracy" in Bolivia. MORALES: The nationalization was simply my government obeying a demand made by the Bolivian people in the election. That's democracy, a communal democracy with consensus. I think Mr. Bush wants us to be a colonized democracy: dependent, submissive and subordinate to foreign interests.

-- "A voice on the Left", Time interview with Bolivian President Evo Morales

New phone and cool apps

2006-05-27T00:00:00+02:00

I got a new phone yesterday, a Sony Ericsson K750i. My Nokia 6600 has been giving me greif the last few months, with the keypad slowly dying and ever increasing slowness of Symbian OS. I'll still hold onto it for Python development.

My only gripe is that Optus do some annoying branding on the K750i, which is not modifiable at all. As useful as a link to the Optus Zoo is on phone standby, it's not. It's possible to de-brand the phone if you zap the firmwire with an unofficial hack, although it'll cost ~$20AUD to unlock the unofficial firmware.

I stumbled across this page, which contains all sorts of interesting information about interfacing with the phone, including setting up the phone as a bluetooth HID device.

A ''sudo hidd --connect " pairs the phone with the laptop, the phone pops up a list of remote control options, and you're off. Works flawlessly with OOo, and the mouse control with the phone joystick is very cool.

Google Maps Updated

2006-05-19T00:00:00+02:00

As Scott pointed out, Google have now updated their maps with street maps of Australia. Totally awesome.

C'mon people! We're living in the age of SVG!

2006-04-27T00:00:00+02:00

Maybe i've been spoilt with Tango, but when I installed FC5 on my box at work and tried to resize icons on the default Clearlooks desktop, all I got was horrible pixelated blobs of mess.

Quality

2006-04-27T00:00:00+02:00

In December I came into possesion of a number of iMacs during the Berowra council cleanup. It just so happened that the family down the street from Julia's had been running Apple's global training and education network from their house the last 14 years, and due to some sort of catch with American contract law and foreign contractors, they had to relinquish control of the network to Apple in the states. All of a sudden they had no need for a house full of Macs, and decided to put a large number of them out on the street - with most of them still working.

I managed to meet with them for an hour or so, and they had all sorts of interesting anecdotes about the internal workings of Apple and the extraordinary level of quality control that goes into their documentation (so much so that Steve Jobs regularly reviews large collections of individual pages of documentation up on the website).

So out of all this I managed to get a hold of two iMacs, 233mHz and 450mHz models, which I planned to give away to people we knew needed machines. Last weekend I finally managed to give away another Mac I picked up, in what would have to be one of the most gratifying experiences of my life.

Julia's mum is a nurse, and there's a lady at one her jobs who is studying nursing and working part time. She's an islander from NT, and the first person in her family to get into uni. As she was finding it difficult to keep up with the coursework, and without a computer or the money to even begin considering buying a machine, I thought the box was needed.

The machine was an eMac 700mHz, with 512mb of RAM and 40gb's of hard disk space, snatched up for $200 on eBay (woot). As i'm all for spreading the love, I nuked Mac OS X and installed Ubuntu, trimmed the fat and made things clean and simple. She's now running OpenOffice.org to write her uni essays and presentations, using Sound Juicer to play music cds, and Totem to play DVDs, all under a rather shmick GNOME desktop environment.

She was totally blown away when we dropped it around to her. She was only looking for word processing, but she got a whole bunch of other goodies thrown in for free. She couldn't believe that people could be so generous, and couldn't stop thanking us. Very rewarding, and even cooler because she's now using free software at home.

Renegotiated

2006-04-26T00:00:00+02:00

I renegotiated my contract this morning with my boss over breakfast. Pay rises are good.

Animals

2006-04-26T00:00:00+02:00

This new album by Band of Horses is great, as is the new Cat Empire one. It's nice to see the empire's sound evolve over their last 2 albums.

Moved

2006-04-21T00:00:00+02:00

My blog is now sitting on brand spanking new hosting on my Linode. Thanks to the wonders of mod_alias, it's now accessable from multiple addresses.

My laptop died an hour ago mid email writing. Was not very happy, in fact I had to be restrained from throwing it into the pool. The machine has been hanging randomly the last 2 months, unable to read or write to the hard disk. It's either a faulty disk or a flaky IDE controller, either way it's bloody annoying. It plain refuses to load the operating system now.

Hopefully IBM will replace both and I will be free from flakyness - it's going to be picked up sometime on Monday.

Right now this puts me in an obtuse position. I've slowly been giving away boxes lying around the house, and i'm now down to one potentially working box from 10 or so mostly or partially working. So it would appear that I am computerless for the time being (fortunately I can use my girlfriend's Mac Mini, so all is not lost).

False chaos

2006-04-10T00:00:00+02:00

Feeling swamped this morning while organising this month's DebSIG, I phoned Bruce to sort out double booking the venue with OpenSkills on Wednesday night.

I started apologising for messing with their schedule, but Bruce cut me off mid apology and thanked me for organising DebSIG, and pointed out that it's actually quite advantageous for OpenSkills and the speaker we're having at the DebSIG.

Found it quite refreshing to have an alternate, optimistic perspective on the chaos that is organising SLUG events. It's given me a renewed enthusiasm for getting stuff done. Thanks Bruce!

lca2007.linux.org.au

2006-04-06T00:00:00+02:00

The linux.conf.au 2007 website is up.

SLUG AGM results

2006-03-31T00:00:00+02:00

President: Lindsay Holmwood Vice President: Silvia Pfeiffer Secretary: Matt Moor Treasurer: Ken Wilson Ordinary Members: Jeremy Apthorp Chris Deigan James Dumay

A big thanks to the 2005-2006 committee members, especially Grant Parnell, Telford Tendys, and Robert Collins.

I hope we can make this year one of the best for SLUG!

Offline Status: I'm not dead! Really.

2006-03-30T00:00:00+02:00

Argh. My server has offline for the last few weeks, and events have transpired in a way that I haven't been able to get stuff back up. I thought my offline status might have had a few people worried about whether I was ok after my last-ish post about going into hospital.

Rest assured, everything is well. I'm still medicated, but they removed the tubing from my pulmonary artery. It was slightly longer than 1cm. It was actually 12cm, and I got to keep it after they took it out.

It's quite obvious that someone fucked up during my port-removal procedure, and i'm in the process of working out whether the proper procedure was followed during the insertion and removal of my port.

The angiogram I had to remove it was interesting. They doped me up to a semi-euphoric state and stuck a big needle into my groin, which worked its way to the femoral artery. Then they stuck the fiddly-lasso wire through the needle and snaked it up through my inferior vena cava to my heart. Then the wire went through my heart into my pulmonary vein, where they eventually lassoed the tubing after 3 attempts, then pulled it out through my heart again, back down to my groin and out the hole.

Intense. The craziest thing was that I was awake for the whole thing.

I hope that this is the last of my medical problems for the next 40 years. I've had my fair share.

Participate, Advocate, Celebrate!

2006-03-12T00:00:00+01:00

Lindsay's Slug report, 2005-2006

Over the last 2 or so years there's been change in the Slug demographic , with a gradual increase of new users and sysadmins over the traditional Slug base of coders and developers. This is most likely due to Linux and FOSS in general becoming more visible in the wider community, and the technology becoming easier to use.

This year's committee has started listening harder to what our members want to get out of Slug meetings. We've taken what we've heard and shuffled things up to see what sort of response we got, and so far it's all been positive.

In September we had the desktop applications walkthrough, which provided a breif overview of applications on the Linux desktop. The feedback the committee received from this was significant, with a number of Sluggers commenting that seeing a talk about using Linux on the desktop practically was just what they were looking for.

We've diversified the programme by lowering the barrier of entry in the technical talks sessions, with Erik de Castro Lopo's talk on "Career development for geeks", and Chris Deigan's talk on "/home away from home" catering to both newbies and old hands alike.

We also changed the format of a number of our meetings to increase community discussion, prime examples of this being the "distribution roundtable", and the live broadcasting of the "LA update" from Slug.

The Slug wiki was established, building upon the activities list by giving people quick access to information about what's in the works for Slug. This has allowed the Slug community to become more involved with the organisation of Slug through consolidating the process of posting ideas about special events and interest groups, and volunteering talks for Slug meetings.

On the flip side, the committee lacked a number of times when fostering this community involvement, with the downtime of Slug's old server 'maddog' on a number of occasions. The intermittent downtime has also extended as far as knocking out Slug's traditional medium for communication - our mailing lists.

The downtime has hurt Slug's community both online and offline by discouraging people from becoming more involved because they can't access the resources to do so, effectively raising the bar we have been working hard to lower.

However, the committee hasn't been a passenger to the problems, taking proactive steps in stabilising maddog when problems first arose early in the term of the committee. Unfortunately our steps fell short, and our temporary propping up of maddog didn't quite last until our new server 'rusty', provided as a Xen instance by Solutions First, was fully up and running.

Our new arrangement is expected to return stability to the Slug website and mailing lists, and allow us to concentrate on growing our community.

The next year presents us with a number of opportunities to do this:

Focus Although more people are picking up Linux and running with it, once they've installed their system they want to do stuff! We should continue to try and evenly split our focus between our developer roots and new users. This will allow us to cater for our change in demographic whilst not alienate our traditional base.

DeckFest A "DeckFest" is an event in a similar vein to an InstallFest, but with a focus on "decking people out" for using Linux and FOSS practically. This event would run over a day or weekend and would bring together some of the best minds of Slug to deck out new and existing users with skills and knowledge about the cool stuff they can do with FOSS.

Advocacy We should let people know how rad we are! We have one of the most vibrant, enthusiastic, and active LUGs in the world, with a community involved through the mailing lists, monthly meetings, irc, and spontaneous events. If you've been umming and arring about bringing someone new to Slug the last few months, now is the time to do it. Tell your family, friends, and co-workers about us and what makes us great!

People initially turn up to meetings because they want to find out about technology, but we suprise them with community. New Sluggers should be welcomed like family and treated like old friends.

LCA07 Linux.conf.au is coming to Sydney next year! This is a great way to show off to the international Linux community who we are and why we're awesome. You can do this by just rocking up to the conference, but also by volunteering to help out with keeping the conference running. The Seven team are currently nutting out the last few organisational details, but if you want to put your name down as a volunteer give them a buzz.

We have a great community of users who do and know cool stuff. I want 2006 to be a year of growth for Slug, not just in numbers, but also in the quality of the community. Participate, advocate, celebrate!

Howard's decade in power

2006-03-02T00:00:00+01:00

Great, so now i've lived more of my life under oppression than in freedom.

Bring it on!

2006-03-02T00:00:00+01:00

So it turns out that there are a few more health problems that I need to deal with.

I had my regular tri-monthly checkup with my specialist this afternoon, where he informed me that my last batch of scans revealed some tubing lodged at the top of my pulmonary artery. It appears to have broken off from my portacatheter some time before I had it removed, and was probably the cause of my blood clots when I got back from NZ. It's about 1-1.2cm's in length, 4mm in diameter, and lodged at the top of my left lung.

This isn't a particularly good position to be in, but there are a number of courses of action.

Firstly, I can have a tube inserted up my body to the artery, lasso the tubing, and pull it out. This is the best option, as it doesn't require surgery, is relatively non-invasive, and carries the least risk of complications. The specialist at Royal North Shore is going to have a look at my scans tomorrow to determine whether he can do the procedure, or whether there are other factors complicating it.

Secondly, I have two thorasic procudere options. The first involves cutting between my ribs, pulling the tissue back, cutting the artery, extracting the tubing, and sealing me back up again. The second follows the same procedure as the first, except that they open me up by cutting down my sternum and cracking my ribs back, essentially opening up my chest cavity in the same way they do for heart surgery.

The major complication with this procedure is that the artery might loose oxygen and a part of my lung will die, reducing my oxygen capacity by 20%. This would restrict the types of physical activities I could partake in, and dramatically increase my chances of emphysema at later stages of my life.

Thirdly, we have the simplest option: leave it in there. I would have to be medicated with blood thinners for the rest of my life, and even then there's a much higher risk of clotting around my lungs.

Right now I am hoping for, and am confident I will go ahead with the first option. If successful, it would have no possible long or short term complications. I'll be finding out tomorrow whether this will go ahead (if so, probably next week sometime).

I'm not going to let it affect me in the slightest - live life as I always have. Bring it on!

Not quite ready

2006-02-22T00:00:00+01:00

I babysat with my girlfriend tonight for a family with 5 boys - the oldest 9, the youngest 14 months. Incredibly draining, and we ended up staying extra long because their parents were delayed.

I don't think I want to be a parent within the next few years. :-)

Art express opening night at the AGNSW.

2006-02-11T00:00:00+01:00

On Monday night I attended the opening of Art Express at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Unfortunately the I did not get to see all of the works on exhibition due to an early closing time, but I did get to see all of the short films. The quality was astounding, to say the least. There were a number of works that stood out, specfically:

<li><a href="http://www.insideartexpress.com.au/06/artists/30_lloyd">Chris Lloyd's "Apeiron"</a>, a brilliant use of line and shape within a minimalist palette</li>
<li><a href="http://www.insideartexpress.com.au/06/artists/18_dodds">Chris Dodd's "Inside the Mind of a Confused Student"</a>, the hillarious story of "Pimpcaso" and his art making journeys</li>
<li><a href="http://www.insideartexpress.com.au/06/artists/33_mckenzie">Narika McKenzie's "What You Don't Know I Can Feel"</a>, a stunning moving sequence of photographs and a most impressive use of editing techniques</li>
<li><a href="http://www.insideartexpress.com.au/06/artists/42_pochroj">Benjamin Pochroj's "Shards of Metal"</a>, an impressive (hand drawn?) animation coupled with haunting soundtrack, probably my favourite of the exhibition</li>

My work went down quite well, and I saw a number of people taping their feet along to the soundtrack (quite a hard thing to do with Aphex Twin). The curators of the exhibition had also used a snippet of my work in the between-movies transitions, which was rather pleasing to see. I've heard that part of my work is used in the television advertisements of the exhibition too, but I haven't substatiated this yet. :-)

I'll be going back tomorrow to finish off the rest of the works, too much to fit in in one sitting.

If you're in the Sydney area, you shouldn't miss the exhibition this year - some truly amazing work on show.

These things are sent to test me.

2006-02-06T00:00:00+01:00

Ugh. The last week has been a blur. I've been in out of hospitals in two countries and been jabbed more times than I care to remember.

On the night of LCA06 finishing I was struck down at about 1am with the Norovirus in a pretty bad way, vomitting every half an hour for 12 hours straight. Jeff and Pia who I were staying with were also hit, and we all headed for the local medical centre in Dunedin to have ourselves checked out as soon as it opened.

By this time I was not faring too well, severely dehydrated and in a lot of pain from dry wretching. The doctor was unable to find a vein to jab me in to rehydrate me, so I was moved via ambulance to the Dunedin Public Hospital and put in isolation. They managed to get some IV fluids into me, and my vomitting subsided to a state where I could take oral meds.

Pia and Jeff dropped off my stuff before they headed off, and by 4pm I was reasonably stabilised to a point where I was admitted to the hospital and moved into the wards. I spent the next evening mostly sleeping and attempting to keep food down. Andre also popped in to see how I was doing.

The next morning I was awoken to an onslaught of doctors and public health officials wanting to know my every move from the previous week. Quite a few people rang to check up on me, and my girlfriend also arrived to keep me company and sane.

The doctors needed to take blood to run some more tests, but my veins were not fairing all that well. After a number of unsuccessful attempts I suggested to them that they try accessing my port, a relic of my chemotherapy treatment 18 months ago.

A port (proper name,portacatheter) is a little device that sits just underneath the skin of the chest and is connected to a vein in the shoulder. It allows a trained nurse to stick a nice big needle in and pump you full of fluids or take blood. The downside of having it in is that it needs to be flushed every 6 weeks to guard against blockages and possible clots forming.

I had it accessed the day I flew out to New Zealand, but it malfunctioned and felt as though it was going to burst from my chest. I warned the Dunedin hospital nurses of this before they tried to access it, but we went ahead anyway as it didn't look like my veins were going to hold up. I had the same kinking problem I experienced just before I left, but the nurses freaked out and wouldn't remove it from my chest until they spoke to my doctor about it.

It had been sitting in my chest for about 6 hours before I got fed up and asked them what they were going to do about it. It turned out that they hadn't even talked to my doctor about it, the doctors had all left for home, and I wouldn't be dealt with until the next morning.

I had to contort my body into all sorts of interesting positions so I could lay comfortably and get some sleep. I was not a happy chap.

When the doctors made their rounds the next morning they told me they thought that I was well enough to be discharged, but when I asked them about my port it they stared at me blankly, having no clue that I had one or that it was even accessed.

After being unplugged from their medical equipment I made the quickest escape possible from Dunedin, arriving back in Sydney around 5pm on the 31st.

Everything seemed to be in order, although I was quite tired from the trip and my NZ hospital experience. Later in the evening I started experiencing small pains down the left hand side of my body, but I dismissed them as nothing more than cramps and nodded off.

About 1am I was awoken by a tremendous stabbing pain down the left hand side of my body. My parents drove me to the hospital and I was admitted immediately to the emergency ward. They gave me pain meds (Tylenol injections hurt like buggery!), took blood, and rushed me off for Xrays. They didn't get the results back until morning, but they decided to send me off for a ventilation perfusion scan (VQ scan) just in case. A VQ scan is used to check for pulmonary embolisms, but I did not know this at the time.

The scan showed two pulmonary embolisms (blood clots) just above my left lung, these most probably being the cause of the pain.

I pointed out to the doctors that any clots that may have formed in my port tubing might have been dislodged by the access in NZ or by plane flight back. They checked this with my specialist and decided that to reduce the overall risk of the situation they would remove my port. This was handy as I was going to have it removed in March anyway.

They rushed me off for surgery, popped out the port, and shuffled me to a ward.

I had a nice stream of visitors (Will, Julia, Dan, Ang, Craig) throughout the next day, but I was largely neglected by the nurses and doctors. I'd been put in a room with another very needy patient who just wouldn't leave the nurses alone, and was basically forgotten until I kicked up a fuss in the evening and demanded to receive medication for my clots.

I made sure I got out of there as soon as possible. This whole experience has put a pretty sour taste in my mouth of the health system, where you only seem to get treated if you make yourself annoying/visible to the health workers who are meant to be looking after you.

I'm sick of being sick.

LCA07

2006-01-25T00:00:00+01:00

And the winner is.... SYDNEY!

The core organising committee is:

<li>Jeff Waugh</li>
<li>Pia Waugh</li>
<li>Matt Moor</li>
<li>Jamie Wilkinson</li>
<li>Ben Leslie</li>
<li>Sara Kaan</li>
<li>Lindsay Holmwood</li>

Just announced at LCA06's Linux Australia AGM.

Julia + nursing = rock!

2006-01-23T00:00:00+01:00

Julia my lovely got into nursing... rock!

Day 10 - Franz Joseph to Queenstown

2006-01-23T00:00:00+01:00

Gar, i'm very far behind here with my posts. I'm actually at LCA in Dunedin right now, but i'm trying to catch up everything i've missed out so far.

Day 10 saw us travelling from Franz Joseph to Queenstown via Wanaka.

We popped into Puzzling World just out of Wanaka. It will play with your mind.

Day 8 & 9, Greymouth to Franz Joseph, and Skydiving

2006-01-18T00:00:00+01:00

The trip from Greymouth to Franz Joseph was so boring I didn't take any pictures at all - it rained the entire time. The murky scenery at Franz Joseph after the rain started clearing was quite nice.

However the hostel we stayed at in Franz Joseph would have to be one of the best yet. Rooms were grouped to one another in threes, allowing for a common room with a kitchen and television we could all share, as well as showers and bathrooms for only 3 groups of people as opposed to a group of communal showers for all.

The weather cleared beautifully the next day, enough so that I was able to go skydiving.

I'm not one for extreme sports, but it's one of the things I wanted to do before I die. I figure there's no place better than doing it at some of the most beautiful scenery in the world.

The skydiving consisted of 20 minutes of scenic flight climbing to 12,000ft, included passing over Mt. Cook, Fox Glacier, and Lake Matheson, among other things.

My hearing took about a day to normalise. I don't adjust to sudden changes in altitude all that well.

Once I got back to the hostel I slept for 2 hours. I was completely drained of energy and in no state to do anything else for the rest of the day.

When I awoke Julia had left for her horse riding, so I decided to while away the day by dropping into one of the local internet cafes.

Although Franz may only have a population of 300 people, it has some of the most awesome places for tourists to keep comfortable.

The internet cafe was made out of a converted bus, and had terminals all along the windows. Thumping beats in the background added to the totally rocking atmosphere. The seat peolpe with laptops was right on top of the subwoofer too. The guy who runs the place is a bit of a character . IMO, probably the best internet cafe in the whole of NZ!

When Julia returned from her horse riding we went on a short bushwalk into a nearby rainforest. We also walked along a riverbed for a bit before turning back, watched a movie, and then went to bed.

Day 7, Nelson to Greymouth via Westport

2006-01-13T00:00:00+01:00

Another boring bus day. We journeyed down the west coast stopping over at Westport on our way to Greymouth.

Nothing much to do in Greymouth, but I did get a $5 all-you-can-eat dinner and play pool with a midget.

We stopped breifly at a seal colony, but it was quite difficult to see them from where we were.

Day 6, the Abel Tasman National Park

2006-01-13T00:00:00+01:00

Probably the best day so far.

We went on a one day sea kayaking trip in the Abel Tasman National Park, which involved being water taxi'd up the coast and a whole lot of paddling back.

Looking out over the sea from Abel Tasman back to Nelson. About a 5 day trip by kayak. :-) (but a 2 hour trip by car)

The seal mating grounds are on an island just off the mainland.

Little Blue penguins in the open water paddling just metres away from our kayak.

Split Apple Rock. Probably the most well known landmark of the Abel Tasman National Park. Interestingly, it's not actually in the park, being slightly south of the point where the park starts.

Due to the tide, the beach where kayaks and other boats are launched in the Abel Tasman has it's shoreline go back 800m out to sea at low tide, making it difficult to get boats back onto the shore in the afternoon.

This leaves an absolutely huge area of land exposed even though the tide only decreases the water level a number of meters. Various sea creature such as starfish can be seen on the walk back from the water to the embankment.

Day 4 & 5, Kaikoura to Nelson via Picton, Nelson

2006-01-13T00:00:00+01:00

The majority of day 4 was spent on a bus. After a silent departure from our dorm we waited on the street for about half an hour for the late arriving bus. On our way to Picton we passed through scenery as varied as rugged coastlines to rolling toasty brown hills.

Picton was a suprisingly active town, being the departure and arrival point for the ferries between the north and south islands. We picked up enough passengers from the latest ferry arrival to fill up the bus, and also marked a change in terrain and weather for the rest of the journey to Nelson.

Our driver took us an alternate route to the standard Magic bus network, driving around some particularly winding twists and bends accompanied by beautiful views. The journey from Picton to Nelson was mountainous and alpine, and quite a change from the burnt rocky scenery and green pastures we've seen so far.

Julia wasn't feeling too crash hot (lack of sleep catching up), so as soon as we arrived in Nelson we headed to our hostel so she could get some shut eye while I went out and got supplies. I roamed the town for about an hour, settled in an internet cafe for about the same time, popped into the supermarket, posted postcards, and then headed back for sleep.

On day 5 nothing too much happened. I think i've caught a cold or something and i'm feeling particularly weak and grotty. We dined at a local cafe called Flapjacks for breakfast, treating ourselves to French toast, scrambled eggs, sausages, tomato, bacon, and hash browns, all flushed down with Strawberry milkshakes. Not particularly healthy, but filling nonetheless - comfort food at its best.

We want to absorb most of our initial outlay from the first two days in the following week, so we're cutting our costs as much as possible. We made another run at the supermarket to stock up on food for the next few days. It's amazing how much we're able to save buying the right things at the right times.

We've been watching episodes 7 onwards of season two of Lost, but we've run out of episodes after finding that the copy of episode 10 I downloaded was 90 seconds of filler advertisement, amounting to a 239mb file. Very annoying. If someone where to bring episode 10 (or 11 or 12 if they're out) to LCA i'd be very appreciative. :-)

The afternoon was spent veging out in our room playing cards and eating fruit. We bought some of the largest, juciest cherries I have ever seen. They are so damn delicious.

We liked the accommodation so much we booked another night in Nelson, and we'll be venturing up to the Able Tasman national park on Wednesday for a Kayaking daytrip.

Day 3, Christchurch to Kaikoura

2006-01-09T00:00:00+01:00

Yesterday we awoke bright and early to head off on the next leg of our trip from Christchurch to Kaikoura.

We hopped onto the Magic Bus at our hostel doorstep and started making our way up north along the coast. We had breaky at a small cafe in Cheviot which our bus driver described as having "the best bacon and eggs in New Zealand". We don't know whether to beleive him though, as he said that tomorrow we'd be dropping into another roadside cafe that he described as having "the best bacon and eggs in New Zealand". :-) He's a bit of a character, and we never quite know when to beleive him.

There was an amazing wind on the planes between Christchurch and Kaikoura, with the hatches on top of the bus popping open a number of times due to the strength and intesity of the wind lifting the latches on the outside.

Another hour or so of beatiful coastline scenery and we stopped to have a gander at some seals on the rocks beside the road. We arrived in Kaikoura half an hour or so later, dropped off our stuff, and set out to explore the town.

Kaikoura is renound for its whale watching and dolphin swimming tours, but we were quite cotent just spending our afternoon sitting on the beach and walking up and down the coast admiring the beautiful scenery.

There was some most beautiful cloud formations around the mountains surrounding the town that changed from a smokey colourless hazy into vibrant explosion of colour as the sun set.

The main drag of Kaikoura is actually built in a reclaimed section of a river, with a retaining wall allowing the river to rise to its normal heights without flooding the town. It was posible to see where rock had been cut to make way for buildings, with vertical cuttings and multiple layers of sediment clearly visible behind the buildings on the street.

Interestingly, we stayed in a dorm with an English girl who's been backpacking for the last 15 months around Australia and New Zealand, and she said that adjusting to the two hour time difference between Australia and New Zealand knocked her out more than flying from her home in England to Australia. She was very chatty and was more than happy to share all of her experiences with us over the last 18 months, and I do mean all - we didn't get to sleep 'til much after 1 am because she just wouldn't stop talking!

The other girl in our dorm room was from Israel and had been backpacking for the last 6 months after completing her mandatory 2 years of military service. She had been staying in Kaikoura for a week, which is quite a feat, considering the small size of the town, but on the other hand she had completed almost every activity the town has available.

This morning I plugged my CompactFlash card from my camera into my IBM x31 and it showed up properly as a connected device. Totally rad!

Fush and Chups for Dunner

2006-01-08T00:00:00+01:00

I haven't been on a holiday in quite a while (health, HSC), so when planning to go to LCA06 in Dunedin I decided to turn it into a bit of an adventure - two weeks backpacking around the South Island with my girlfriend and no parents.

The passport application has probably been the hardest part of the experience so far, as DFAT doesn't recognise your existence if you're over 18 and don't have a drivers license. After a few bungles with the various forms required for the passport, it arrived 3 or so weeks ago, and I was ready to head off.

We departed Sydney international on Friday the 6th at 1900, and arrived in Christchurch at 2350 local time. After catching a shuttle from the airport to our hostel, we crashed as soon as we had the chance.

When we awoke we had a cold breakfast (provided free by the lodge) and started exploring the city. We sorted out money, snacks, a sim card, travel, and accommodation for the next few days, and hired ourselves two bikes to visit some friends of my mum and drop off some equipment I need for the conference but don't want to lug around New Zealand for two weeks.

After riding for ~15km while following a map and not quite knowing where we were, we pulled over and checked out the route maps signposted to the nearest bus stop. I don't know what happened to my sense of direction on the flight over, but I soon realised I had some pretty wacky ideas about where north and south are (quite the opposite of what I initially thought, polar opposite, in fact). It would seem that my bearings are completely screwed when changing countries.

We rode back to the botanical gardens, stopped, had a quick snack, continued going in the correct direction. It was probably another 20km's to their house round trip back to the botanical gardens, but we rewarded ourselves with icecream and a trip to the Cantebury museum.

Dropped off our bikes, checked into an internet cafe, cooked ourselves some 2 minute noodles, slept.

Stay tuned for day two, coming tomorrow hopefully. For now, pictures.

Netbooting Debian on New World PowerMacs with flaky OpenFirmware

2005-12-28T00:00:00+01:00

I had to do this twice, and the second time I couldn't remember it nearly as well as what I thought I could. Time to commit my thoughts to the internet.

The two most helpful documents I found when working out what the hell I was doing was Mac Geekery: How to install debian via network boot from a Mac and the Debian Sarge PPC Manual, Chapter 4.6.

Files required are the Debian minimal netboot installer (vmlinux, initrd.gz), found here, the yaboot binary extracted from this package. All these files were dropped into /tftpboot. Finally, the yaboot.conf file was place in /tftpboot, it looked something like this:

timeout=100 device=enet: partition=0 init-message="Debian GNU/Linux Network Install (Sarge)"' default=install



image=vmlinux

    append="devfs=mount,dall init=/linuxrc --"
    label=install
    initrd=initrd.gz
    initrd-size=10240

Dhcp was a breeze to set up with the ISC DHCP3 server. /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf looks something like this: log-facility local7;



option domain-name-servers 10.0.0.9;

default-lease-time 3600;
max-lease-time 7200;

subnet 10.0.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {

    range 10.0.0.200 10.0.0.210;
    option routers 10.0.0.1;
    allow booting;
    allow bootp;


}

host macboot {

    filename "yaboot";
    next-server 10.0.0.5;
    hardware ethernet DE:CA:FF:C0:FF:EE;
    fixed-address 10.0.0.201;


}

My main problem was getting the damn tftp server talking properly. I tried a number of tftpd's (stock tftpd, tftpd-hpa), but none of them seem to actually work with the PowerMac, most likely due to the funny state of the OpenFirmware on the machine. I probably could have just reset the firmware, but I enjoy a challenge.

I finally settled on aftpd, the advanced TFTP server, which worked straight out of the box. I started the server without inetd with a

sudo in.tftpd --trace --daemon --no-fork --user nobody /tftpboot/

This gave me a standalone TFTP server, not so great for a complete netbooting environment, but perfectly adequete for booting just one box.

Finally, to get the machine booting, I powered it on while holding down Apple-Option-O-F (which was a bit confusing with my dvorak keyboard, Apple-Option-U-R for those interested).

Once the OpenFirmware prompt had appeared, typing boot enet:10.0.0.5,yaboot loaded the yaboot image and started sucking down the installer. Smooth sailing from there.

I suggest that anyone trying to get this going themselves will probably have to tweak a few things before it works perfectly, but the instructions are pretty sound.

For more details there's a neat wiki entry here which details a fair bit of what i'm going on about.

Schools paying for attendence, a dream at best.

2005-12-21T00:00:00+01:00

Steven, I obviously misinterpreted what you were saying about schools allowing students to attend conferences - I read "encouraged by the school" and "price is low" to mean schools pay for conference attendence. It's a bit naive of me to think that schools would pay for attendence, but asking is worth a shot, especially if you're a poorly student with no cash. :-)

I heartily agree with what you're saying about schools allowing students to attend - the week that I spent at LCA04 really jumpstarted my interest in developing my Linux skills. I think that a lot of the abilities i've picked up in the development of those skills have improved my general work ethic and my approach to learning at school (however broad and vauge that statement might be). Although i'm sure I would have developed those skills nonetheless, the jolt of energy from the conference certainly helped push them along.

If students want to convince their school to let them attend a conference during school time, I think the best they can do is write a letter to the principal explaining where they intend to go, how long they would be gone for, the advantages of them attending, and, most importantly, state that they would complete all work they miss out in their absence.

Presented and argued the right way, it'd be pretty hard for the school to refuse.

Re: [lca] Students at conferences

2005-12-21T00:00:00+01:00

Steven, it's interesting that you raise the idea of schools paying for students to attend LCA or similar conferences.

When I was in Year 11 I attended LCA04 in Adelaide and presented at the Educational miniconf on behalf of my school on how we were using Linux for network analysis and administration. I actually asked the school whether they'd be interested in paying for my conference attendence, but I was rejected on the basis that it "wasn't school related", or something to that effect.

My science teacher ended up paying for my attendence (very nice of him), and the IT co-ordinator lent me a laptop to use for giving the presentation.

From my experience i've found that schools generally don't have the budget, or simply don't care about students pursuing extra-curricular activities that have application to the real world.

Then again, I have a particularly bitter view of the higher education system, and i've actually left that school to complete my second half of the High School Certificate at TAFE.

Now that I think of it, I wonder if the TAFE that i'm attending would pay for me to attend the conference? Do public schools or institutions value that sort of real world experience more than my Catholic school? Even then, do non-Catholic private schools feel more charitable towards students pursuing their interests at the school's expense?

Something to ponder...

Collective noun.

2005-12-21T00:00:00+01:00

Due to the large number of Apple Macs in my room, Julia noted that the collective noun for a group of Apples should be an "orchard".

School's out, and updates.

2005-12-16T00:00:00+01:00

School finished for the year, but i'm still working hard at my lowly job.

This year's HSC results are in: Music 87, Visual Arts 84, but a number of assessments were missed due to sickness. I'm hoping to beat my results in next year's HSC by a mile. :-)

More on the Art Express front: as previously blogged my artwork has been accepted into Art Express, however i've found out that it's going on exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW (kick arse venue!), as well as on the regional tour for the whole of next year.

The person who notified me of my acceptance also wanted me to send in another copy of the film, and said something about the Board of Studies wanting to use it as a reference material in standards packages.

Neat!

School Formal

2005-12-04T00:00:00+01:00

My high school formal for my former high school was held almost 2 weeks ago. I was going to write a vitriolic post about it, but i've summarised the whole thing down to:

PUBLIC WANKING SESSION.

My grade consists of some of the most insincere and insulting people i've had the displeasure of knowing. I hope I never have to see any of those people again.

June 2007 EDIT: Wow, in retrospect I was pretty bitter. I certainly don't feel like that now. Those last few months of school are fond memories!

Art Express: in or out?

2005-12-04T00:00:00+01:00

I got in.

LA Live @ SLUG: most excellent.

2005-11-26T00:00:00+01:00

Last night's LA Live roundup was totally awesome! My hat goes off to James, Karen, Luke, Chris and all those involved for organising and pulling off a rather spectacular event.

We've been trying to boost numbers at Slug all year, and LA Live drove up the attendence rather dramatically - I counted 82 people, one of the highest turnouts i've seen at Slug in recent years.

Bizaro.

2005-11-17T00:00:00+01:00

A few days ago I was contacted by the Bradfield counselling unit about going in for an interview as a follow up to a reading and writing skills appraisal I completed around 10 weeks ago.

A bit perplexed by this, I made an appointment for 10 o' clock today. I remember doing the test and feeling very confident with how I answered. However, a few minutes into the interview I was told that my results from the writing component were in the highest band, while my results in the reading component qualified me as having a learning disability.

WTF?

I'll freely admit that there are many other people out there much smarter than me, but I most certainly do not have any intellectual disabilites. All of a sudden i'm being asked whether I want to have a reader for my exams assist me in completing questions, while in year 9 I had been a reader for students with reading disabilities. This was not right (or write, depending on how you look at it :-) (someone shoot me))

It turns out that the instructions for completing the task were not clear at all, and I had answered a particular section without referencing the correct part of the source material we were given. Of course, this had greatly affected my results, as I had answered an entire reading component based on referencing source material in the abstract.

Argh.

Way to bugger up the system.

Touchscreening.

2005-11-13T00:00:00+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I headed over to the legendary North Rocks Computer Markets with my girlfriend's father to look for RAM for his laptop.

To cut a long story short, he ended up with a no RAM, and I ended up with a dock for my laptop and a 12" LCD touchscreen.

The dock was an absolute bargain, and i've always wanted a touchscreen to play with - the price was right, so my money and I were soon parted.

I've been playing with the touchscreen on and off for the last few weeks, but last night at a school friend's LAN party around 4am I managed to get it working almost perfectly with Xorg. The goal was to get it going under Linux so we could play emulated Starcraft on a touchscreen. :-)

Some tech specs on the touchscreen: it's a 12" 3M Microtouch with a standard VGA connection for the monitor, serial connection for the touchpad, audio input and built in speakers.

As for what model 3M Microtouch it is, I have absolutely no idea. The 3M website provides no clues, but the microtouch driver in Xorg reports it as either an SMT2, SMT3V, or SMT3RV. For identifying marks, Google doesn't give any meaningful results when submitted various serials posted all over it, however there is a "CML" branded sticker on the back.

A few days ago I noticed that the new POS systems with touchscreens that Coles have been rolling out in some Sydney stores are identical to the Microtouch that I picked up. Unfortunately the driver that came with the screen was Windows only, leaving me practically no point of reference to begin my search and testing from.

Nonetheless, I managed to work out that it uses the microtouch driver supplied in XFree and Xorg, but as for usable driver paramaters to actually get the touch component of the screen going, there only seems to be one configuration posted on the intarweb that everyone uses.

Unfortunately, that configuration doesn't have the correct screen input dimensions needed by the driver to accurately position the cursor, so when you move your finger over the screen the cursor accelerates faster that your finger. This means that the cursor overshoots the user interface element that you're trying to interact with by between 1 and 4cms, making it reasonably difficult to select or manipulate anything.

A bit of prodding and probing got the input working pretty reliably, although at times the cursor can be slightly to the right of the button that you're clicking, forcing the button to be tapped again to trigger. A bit of tweaking has mostly sorted this out, resulting in the following Xorg Microtouch configuration:

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "ts0"
    Driver      "microtouch"
    Option      "Device"    "/dev/ttyS0"
    Option      "MinX"      "700"
    Option      "MaxX"      "16450"
    Option      "MinY"      "15800"
    Option      "MaxY"      "300"
    Option      "ReportingMode" "Scaled"
    Option      "SendCoreEvents"
EndSection

The most import section of the configuration would have to be the min and max X and Y values, as they tell the driver the size of the screen and where the cursor should be in relation to finger input. And yes, the MinY value is meant to be larger than the MaxY, but I have no idea why - it just works that way!

I'm finding it to be accurate 98% of the time, but with a bit of tweaking every now and then i'll surely be able to sort out the last few niggling accuracy issues.

HSC over.

2005-11-10T00:00:00+01:00

Well, today was my last HSC exam of this year. Art was the subject, and i'm quite happy with how I completed it.

HSC exam block next year begins on my birthday. It owns.

At least now i'll have time to live and not be as much of a whore to the higher education system. Rock out!

Bah.

2005-11-09T00:00:00+01:00

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

Could You Pass 8th Grade Math?

I suppose I have no excuse for getting anything less. I'm still doing year 12 maths!

Everybody loves a joke about marine biology.

2005-11-03T00:00:00+01:00

Heh.

EDIT: This link now works.

My major work... and a link!

2005-11-02T00:00:00+01:00

Here's a link to my video which I blogged about last night. It's a 43mb file, goes for just under 6 minutes, and is encoded with the unencumbered ogg theora codec - free media for all!

Just a quick breif on what on earth it is; I had the idea about this time last year of doing my HSC major artwork on my people in my art class doing their HSC major works - a rather postmodern approach to the whole process. It involved taking lots and lots of video footage in the art rooms (over 15 hours), speeding it up, and syncing it to music. The editing style was influenced very heavily by Chris Cunningham (especially his work with Aphex Twin).

Thanks to Daniel McNamara for providing the hosting and bandwidth on planetmirror for me.

Comment spam.

2005-11-01T00:00:00+01:00

Comment spam is a problem that i've only had to deal with in the last 2 months, and what was originally a 10 second a day job has blown out to a 10 minute a day exercise in spam deletion.

Hashcash for Wordpress solves all my problems. It uses the clever technique of forcing the client to generate an md5 through Javascript before sending it back to Wordpress for verification. As no current spam bot software supports Javascript, it boasts 100% effectiveness.

Very very cool.

Art Express.

2005-11-01T00:00:00+01:00

Holy shit! My artwork has been preselected for Art Express!

I'll see if i can get a copy of it up on a box with a decent amount of bandwidth and post a link.

Pride & Prejudice: I think I just wrote a review.

2005-10-23T00:00:00+02:00

Saw Pride and Prejudice tonight, and would have to say I was rather impressed.

The cinematography would have to be the thing that stuck in my mind the most after the film ended, with a brilliant use of camera angles to maintain character interest and capture the raw beauty of the English countryside. A major highlight would have to be the second ballroom scene, with the camera effortlessly floating between rooms whilst capturing the emotions of the attendees, especially the bumbling and socially inept Mr Collins, played wonderfully by Tom Hollander. Also notable was the use of over-shoulder shots during moments of intense dialog.

I found the BBC miniseries to lag considerably, whilst the movie maintained a pace that is admirable, and quite difficult to do with period dramas. I assume the reason behind this was twofold: to condense the story, whilst not bore the audience. The director succeeded on both accounts.

I also found the movie truer adaptation of Austin's novel, with more emphasis on the contrasts between the aristocracy and the common folk. A much dirtier and disorganised Bennet household was presented, as well as more extravagant and impressive examples of artwork and architecture in the Darcy and de Bourg estates. And, unlike the miniseries, it looked as though there were actual age differences between the Bennet girls(!).

Overall, I was very pleased, and would recommend the film to both lovers of period dramas, and those who enjoy a good light yarn.

EDIT: I rate it 4 out of 5, just for Sara. :-)

Why are they feeding pregnant women to the dolphins?!

2005-10-17T00:00:00+02:00

"Why are they feeding pregnant women to the dolphins?!" my girlfriend exclaimed, after seeing images from a muted channel 9 news item about dolphin assisted therapy and pregnant women.

She finished her first HSC exam today, so some blondness is allowed. :-)

No time to talk!

2005-10-15T00:00:00+02:00

Finished my old school. I can't beleive I stayed there as long as I did. I could not recommend a worse school to go to if you're looking to acheive anything academically. I found administration horrible, the approach to learning laughable, and the kids bastards (although not literally, considering it was a catholic school :-)

Started my new one this week, although I wouldn't really call it a school. More of a "secondary college". The teachers actually treat the students like we're people, and this I find the most appealing. Matt Moor (Matt, where's your google juice?!) once told me that you get more real world experience in 15 minutes at Bradfield than you get in 15 years at any other school, and i've found this especially true. And that's not just the teachers, that's the cross-section of the students. Everyone seems to have their complex reasons for being there, some more open about them than others, but everyone seems to get along with one another so far.

Turning 18 tomorrow. I had a small get together of school friends last night, and it was all rather decent. People were awesome, food was great, and the gift blew me away. Thanks Julz for all the effort.

Linux rollout at work. 18 months of effort has culminated in this. Although this is only a trial rollout happening at one branch, the proper rollout happening in January will involve >400 machines running Linux (Fedora) on the desktop in 80 branches nation wide. There'll possibly be more on this at this sysadmin miniconf at LCA06, so stay tuned.

1 Year.

2005-10-05T00:00:00+02:00

It's one year since I was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease. Best of all, the cancer is all gone, i'm healthier than i've ever been before, and I feel fighting fit.

Rock on.

Opera Propaganda Page.

2005-09-13T00:00:00+02:00

Firefox sucks and Opera is better.

Written by a school friend of mine. Don't get too worked up, he's great at stirring. :-)

Xfce a resource hog? Ahh, no!

2005-09-12T00:00:00+02:00

So while at the rocking Slug Software Freedom Day InstallFest, I overheard a conversation about Xfce's system resource consumption in comparison to Gnome's. I can't say I know the fellow making the claim, but he postulated that Xfce only consumed "1 or 2mb's less memory than Gnome", and was "not lightweight at all".

Now normally I wouldn't give a second thought to it, but as I didn't challenge this on the day (conversation was taking place on the other side of the room, it would have been rude to involve myself in other people's conversations), it's been stuck in the back of my mind, "What if it's true and i've been telling people mistruths about Xfce being lightweight?".

From the Xfce home page,

"Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment for various *NIX systems. Designed for productivity, it loads and executes applications fast, while conserving system resources." - Olivier Fourdan, creator of Xfce.

This didn't gel. I had to check it out.

I can't say that the test that I did was particularly scientific, but I figure that the results give a fairly accurate picture of resource consumption.

My test machine was an IBM x31 laptop, with a Pentium M 1.6ghz scaled to 600mhz, 256mb of RAM, and a 40gb hard disk. I've allocated 512mb of disk space to swap. Operating system used was Ubuntu Breezy (updated 12/09/05@~1500 hours). I'm using both the Xfce packages founded in Breezy, as well as the slightly updated packages from os-works. Most of the packages found in the os-works repositories are the same version as the ones found in Breezy, with a few exceptions such as slightly newer versions of the Xfce desktop manager, development versions of libexo, and an updated gtk2-engines-xfce, the Gtk+-2.0 theme engine for Xfce. None of these packages give Xfce a performance or memory footprint advantage.

To begin the testing, I created a new user account to do the testing from. This was so that there would be no preferences or extra apps loaded on startup in either desktop environments. A completely default configuration.

Firstly, I logged into Gnome via GDM. Once Gnome had loaded, I launched a terminal (Terminal, an Xfce goodie), and ran 'top'. I sorted the results by memory.

6.12 + 4.22 + 3.72 + 3.62 + 3.53+ 3.3 + 3.1 + 32 + 2.7 + 1.5 + 1.4 + 1.1: that's excluding X, Terminal, gnome-volume-manager, and gdm, from the process list. If you add up all the Gnome related processes, they consume 64.8% of memory. I'm assuming that's physical memory, not a combination of swap and physical. Now, i'm also assuming that some of those apps in memory swap out after a while, so Gnome isn't the resource hog it appears to be.

I then logged out of the Gnome session, and was returned to the GDM login.

I logged into Xfce and went through the same procedure I did in Gnome: started up the terminal, ran top, sorted by memory.

Adding up the percentages, it comes to 18.2%. That's 3.4 + 3.3 + 2.5*2 + 2.4 + 2.3 + 1.8. Once again, that's excluding X and Terminal.

So, by the numbers it shows that Xfce consumes considerably less memory than what Gnome does. It's a pity I don't have exact figures to work with, but the percentages make it reasonably clear. If those figures are a percentage of physical memory, Gnome consumes ~165mb, and Xfce consumes 46.5mb of RAM. That's 118.5mb less memory than Gnome.

Things to consider with the results:

<li>It's only an default configuration on a particular distribution - different distributions will configure the desktop environments in their own way</li>
<li>You can configure Gnome and Xfce to have as many or as few things loaded into them while running. This is only testing a default configuration.</li>
<li>This is a system that i've been using for a few weeks, it's not a clean install.</li>
<li>I didn't run the test straight off a clean boot, so there could be things hanging around in memory that haven't died/weren't killed. I'm no expert on how the kernel handles cleaning up memory, but it's rather unlikely.</li>

And most importantly:

<li><strong>memory usage != good user experience</strong></li>

Memory usage has little bearing on usable desktop when you're Joe User running one or two apps. A good, intuitive and usable design has a lot more meaning than resource consumption, especially when a desktop is there to let users get stuff done.

Rather insightful.

2005-09-11T00:00:00+02:00

From a Slashdot comment:

Why would anyone want to write a virus for a Mac? It's like developing a biological weapon that only affects left handed, redheaded midgets.

I pity the owner.

2005-09-03T00:00:00+02:00

I pity the owner.

Taken while driving home with Chris after a failed upgrade of maddog.

why do we do this madness.

2005-08-29T00:00:00+02:00

People may have noticed that i've been rather quiet as of late. I've been working on my Visual Arts HSC major work (a video), and it has literally been sucking the life out of me. However, it is now done.

My schedule has been something like this:

<li>working on my artwork until ~3am</li>
<li>get up mid morning</li>
<li>ride to school to take more footage</li>
<li>ride home</li>
<li>more editing</li>

Repeat ad infinitum.

Using the wonders of modern technology, my work has culminated in a short film (~6 minutes) about the rest of my art class doing their art works, with time-lapsed footage synchronised to a peice by Aphex Twin.

I've been working on it on and off for the last 10 months, and taken over 800 minutes of raw footage. It's quite an effort to sort through everything and pick what works where best, but I think i've created something I can be reasonably happy with.

I'd like to put up a copy somewhere so people can have a look, but i'm not too sure about copyright issues around distributing the peice of music. If anyone has any pointers on how to go about this without getting my arse sued, i'm all ears. :-) Otherwise, give me a buzz and the next time I see you i'll give you a viewing.

Hmm...

2005-08-25T00:00:00+02:00

I do quite like a good yell.

Ubuntu/GNU merch.

2005-08-21T00:00:00+02:00

Whilst trawling through CafePress in search of GNU posters, I found that the "Linux t-shirts, Unix t-shirts" shop have got some Ubuntu stuff in. They have quite a few more items than the official shop too. Neat.

Also, every FOSS developer should have one of these up on the wall next to their computer(s). It will give you warm and fuzzies. :-)

Mac Mac Mac! (and, "oh, the pain").

2005-08-21T00:00:00+02:00

Stuff that helped me in the last day or so:

<li><a href="http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-141782.html">Whats the circle with backslash symbol mean? | Mac Forum</a>

<li><a href="http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=2238">Macintosh: How to Reset PRAM and NVRAM | Apple support</a>

<li><a href="http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/osx/arch_boot.html">Booting Mac OS X | kernelthread.com</a>

<li><a href="http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/7251">Why I love Macs AKA backing up your Mac in firewire target disk mode using Linux | macdevcentert</a>

<li><a href="http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58583">How to use FireWire target disk mode | Apple support</a>

<li><a href="http://docs.info.apple.com/article2.html?artnum=25517">Mac OS: Versions, builds included with computers (since 1998)| Apple support</a></li>

Animals Have Problems Too.

2005-08-14T00:00:00+02:00

Don't normally pimp web comics, but this one kept me suitably entertained for half an hour or so. Some classy stuff.

Down with them.

2005-08-07T00:00:00+02:00

This is awesome news.

I've been there before, and any deconstruction of this vile and oppresive place is a welcomed change.

Fuck the government and their abuse of human rights.

Score.

2005-07-30T00:00:00+02:00

Picked up an ordered copy of The Books' 'The Lemon of Pink' from Sanity today. Nothing exceptional about it, except I only paid one fifth of their own recommended retail price. I had to double check that the checkout chick hadn't misread the amount off the register. Not that I was complaining.

An excellent album for lovers of experimental indie pop.

Run Forest, Run!

2005-07-28T00:00:00+02:00

Last year I set myself a goal of running in every race at my school's athletic's carnival. Yesterday I went about achieving that. And today my legs hurt.

At least I managed to pull it off. I ran in the 100m, 200m, 400m, and 800m, but in almost the reverse order. The organisers of the carnival like to put the 800m first, so if you want to compete competitively in any of the other running events you're pretty screwed.

Nonetheless, I managed to complete the 800m (the first time in my life), get a fairly decent result (8th of 30), and pick myself up enough to run the 200m after a 10 minute break. Normally I place fairly well in the 200m (~2nd), although this time I came last in my heat.

Next up was the high jump. I won't say anything more about that event except I can't jump high.

I ran fairly solidly in the 100m, although I didn't place in the finals.

Shotput was interesting - I ended up practicing my lawn bowl technique.

400m was my last race of the day, but I was happy enough to just complete it.

Rather happy with myself that I could pull that off, considering I do a lot more cycling that I do running (ok, no running at all), and considering my condition only 6 or so month ago, a fairly decent acheivement.

From spam

2005-07-17T00:00:00+02:00

"All of the women I have slept with would thank you if they new what you have done for me!"

-Kathy Reeves</em>

Uhuh. Took me a few seconds to realise exactly what was being said there.

I wonder how many other spams we don't read have quotes such as this?

Say what?

2005-07-14T00:00:00+02:00

[root@uber html]# rm thisiscompletelyscrewed/ rm: cannot remove directory thisiscompletelyscrewed/': Is a directory [root@uber html]# rmdir thisiscompletelyscrewed/ rmdir:thisiscompletelyscrewed/': Not a directory

It's a symlink. This makes no sense. I'm going to go and slaughter a goat or something.

Update: Thanks Roger for suggesting I remove the trailing slash at the end of the filename. Works a charm.

Re: Gimp and Colour Depth

2005-07-14T00:00:00+02:00

Benno, the convert command that you used didn't actually convert your image down to a 16-bit colour RGB image. It just reduced the number of colours in the palette, which can be done with the Gimp!

To reduce the colour palette you have to go to "Image -> Mode -> Indexed", select "Generate optimum palette", and set the Maximum number of colours to 256. I find it silly that you can't set it any higher though.

I found that the "Floyd-Steinberg (reduced colour bleeding)" ditherer worked the best on your image.

Once you save it as a bitmap, identify -verbose $filename will give you the following results on the new image.

You'll see that the original, the convert-reduced-palette, and the gimp-reduced-palette images are all 24-bit, although the one done with the Gimp will say that it's Type is "Palette", rather than TrueColor.

Doesn't really matter too much though - as long as the image looks fine!

Wikipedia have some really good articles on the theory behind digital imaging.

I hate the American spelling of colour.

168

2005-06-30T00:00:00+02:00

Mark: Wireless security in general, argh!!!

Lost

2005-06-27T00:00:00+02:00

So I finished the current series of Lost about a month ago, and I spent today theorising in art about where the next season is going to go. Right now season two is being advertised for release in 'Fall 2005', meaning that it'll only be another 3 to 4 months until it's released in America. Knowing channel 7, it's going to be a very long time until they air it here, so i'll be doing the whole download-when-aired-in-America thing again.

There's a website for the fake airline the lost survivors were flying on. It's already scored 4 million individual hits - pretty impressive for a fake airline. Lot's of nice hidden features.

Now if you go travellers section down the bottom of the front page and enter Hurley's numbers (4 8 15 16 23 42) you're presented with a seating overview of Oceanic's 777 aircraft. Using Hurley's numbers again, clicking on the rows will load up a preview of the next season.

Looks rather impressive, and the news that Michelle Rodriguez has been signed full time on the next season makes you think even more about where the creators are taking the series. A website has been set up for fans of the series including a 'Theory Board' where there are all manner of crack ideas are floating around.

I've been trying to find any information on whether a soundtrack is being released for the series, but nothing seems to be available. The Theory Board also has a nice loop from the main Lost theme, but that's about the closest i've come to finding an officially released piece of music.

Clues anyone?

All is not lost

2005-06-26T00:00:00+02:00

Ok, so everything's not as bad as what it may have appeared from my last post. I've spent the last week back at school working out whether I want to be there or not. For now i've decided that i'll stick it out until the bitter end. And I mean bitter.

Worked out a lot of stuff in the last week though. Planned my way through music and maths for the next 10 weeks, so hopefully i'll be able to pull off a decent result at the end of it. Time will tell.

I've been been playing my recorder a lot more as of late. I'm aiming to memorize all my pieces for my assessments, and it's coming along rather well. I'm able to play the pieces without a metronome, however whenever I play with one I can't manage to get to the end of the peice without a mistake. More practice.

Speaking of a metronome, I came across a neat little one for OSX called MetroGnome. Discontinued, but effective.

Out

2005-06-16T00:00:00+02:00

Walked out of school yesterday. Don't know whether i'll be going back.

Had enough of being treated like dirt.

Tafe looks like a really good option.

Hot Hot HOT

2005-06-16T00:00:00+02:00

So the server room's air conditioning has gone today at work. 50 degrees in there.

Unsane.

Things are starting to fail... nice to be working on a segregated network!

Mac OS X usability/stupidity

2005-05-31T00:00:00+02:00

So something that i've come across in Mac OS X is that the keyboard shortcuts are totally mangled if you set your keyboard layout to Dvorak US from Qwerty US. OS X likes to keep the physical locations of the shortcut keys in the same place on the keyboard between layouts.

This is total crack, because you spend half the time trying to figure out why your keyboard shortcuts aren't working. Never mind that they make the shortcuts completely unintuitive.

Nothing like having to hit ^D to hide my windows in the Meta-Tab dialog. D on Dvorak is in the same place as H in Qwerty. H for Hide. HIDE DAMMIT. Not D for Disappear, Dissolve, or totally Demented.

BAH!

I sure am!

2005-05-29T00:00:00+02:00

062117 005144

2005-05-23T00:00:00+02:00

I find it a bit odd that the CIA's World Factbook has Australia's population marked in at 20,090,437 as of July 2005. This has to be some sort of prediction, right? Either that or they've mastered time travel and are using it to do all sorts of evils things such as overthrowing foreign governments (while still managing to collect statistics in their spare time).

I'm being kidnapped by school for the next few days and sent to a religious retreat (yeah, exactly what I need in my HSC year), so if you're trying to contact me don't worry if i'm not available for a few days!

This blog's title brought to you by the 'od' command. Dumping files in octal and other formats since 1973.

It sounds good if played well

2005-05-18T00:00:00+02:00

Best. Recorder. Site. Ever.

It's got all the fingering for all the notes that you would ever want on the recorder, as well as a piano to select the note that you want.

Most excellent.

Young Blood

2005-05-15T00:00:00+02:00

So yesterday I was helping out Linux Australia at the Education Expo and I was talking to this woman about how Linux can be a replacement for Windows, and she gave me this shocked look like i'd just burnt a thousand babies at the stake. She thought i'd said that Linux can be a replacement for women. If only. :-)

The expo was totally awesome though. We had too many helpers at the LA booth so we decided to fan out and talk to anyone we came across. It was a really good idea, because we got to go out and speak to people who normally wouldn't come and speak to us at the booth.

We handed out close to 400 Ubuntu CD's on the Saturday, and I personally must have spoken to at least 100 people about what Linux is and how they can use it in their educational institution or business.

Craig Warner was an absolute machine. He'd just go up to anybody who he could find and give them CD's and start chatting like there was no tomorrow. Top effort!

What was interesting was the number of people in education who'd actually heard about Linux but didn't actually know what it is. It was great explaining the advantages of using Live CD's in classes to teach subjects that'd be difficult to under Windows, as well as how Open Source means no vendor lock in. That really caught people's attention.

It was also really cool how when we'd go around to booths of companies to give them CD's and have a bit of a chat the first thing they'd say when we started talking to them was "Oh, that Linux thing? We're using it everywhere!".

At one of the booths I rocked up to they said that they had moved their entire internal and external infrastructure (including client services) over to Linux in 18 months and only had one Solaris box left. From the info up in their booths I could see that they had a lot of schools onboard their programme. It turned out that one of their clients was my school! I knew that some of our school's web services was running on Linux, but I hadn't realised the extent until then. The transition and dependence on Linux sounded massive though - i'm suprised there wasn't much press on it.

There was some great literature up in the LA booth too, and thanks to Redhat for giving some swag to Pia at the last minute for giveaways. Ditto with ELX.

Rocking work to everyone who helped out! Special thanks to Mohammed and Sarah Kahn for pulling the whole LA effort together - without your work our presence would have only been a shadow of what it was.

Photos can be found here.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to make it to the second day of the expo as I had a performance with an Orchestra i'm in. So much wasted time at the perfomance though! I'm currently writing this in a (completely unneeded) extended break at the rehersal/concert. Maybe i'm just impatient. :-)

One of the cool things that came out of the lift home (thanks Pia and Jeff!) was an idea for a "Tux Camp". The idea is that technologically gifted students of all ages from different schools come together for a day of workshops to do with Linux and FOSS.

It won't be a boring teaching thing, more of a "this is what we want you to acheive by the end of the day, here are your tools - go forth and create!". I'm really enthused about running something like this - it gives students who would normally be bored in their computing classes a new area of interest to grab their attention. Young blood. :-)

Speaking of blood...

2005-05-15T00:00:00+02:00

Human blood for electrical power.

I even have a port installed to withdraw the blood from, courtesy of cancer treatment.

Never ending laptop power - sign me up!

Mac Development Options

2005-05-09T00:00:00+02:00

From the article "Beginning Mac Development"

If you want to develop for Mac OS X, there are three routes you can take. Technically there is a fourth in AppleScript, but my thoughts about AppleScript Studio are inline with its acronym.

Sums it up quite nicely.

Catchup

2005-04-27T00:00:00+02:00

So many things happening over the last few weeks that I forgot to blog that i've been given the all clear on the medical front. This means that i'm officially in remission. I'll have to have tests every 6 months or so, but that's easy.

Rock. NO MORE CANCER.

LCA was awesome. A lot of people on Planet LA and Planet Slug have blogged about how the conference was, so i'm not going to bother writing about an event that has already been covered so well. Suffice to say, it was most excellent. Cool people, cool projects, a cool venue, - basically a cool time. I'm looking forward to the New Zelanders putting on an event on par with that of Canberra.

Great work James for making the decision to quit. I can't applaud your decision enough.

Out of interest, anyone have any good links to integrating Samba and LDAP, preferably also with stuff about automount? Googling doesn't seem to turn up too many decent pages.

Ubuntu Down Under Slug InstallFest Tie In

2005-04-21T00:00:00+02:00

Very late notice, I know, but Slug's going to be holding an InstallFest at Ubuntu Down Under. Details can be found here.

Please come along if you're interested in trying out Linux!

Re: Firefox Idea

2005-04-20T00:00:00+02:00

Bad speelers, untie!

Brilliantly refreshing

2005-04-16T00:00:00+02:00

I saw Robert Love mentioning F-Spot as being a killer app in his blog. Knowing that it was written in Mono made me a bit doubtful about how well it would work (i've had a lot of bad experience getting Mono apps going in the past, althought it was a while ago), but I must say that F-Spot has single handedly restored my confidence in Mono.

It's a joy to use, it looks cool, and it's extremely funcitonal. I'm most impressed with the presentation feature. It's one of the few things in an app that's made me sit back for a few minutes watching it and made me say "wow".

Speaking of "wow", Ubuntu is running brilliantly on my lappy. The Ubuntu MOTUXfce team have done a great job on getting XFCE stuff working under it, and all my preferences have transfered without a hitch from Arch to Ubuntu. All the extra gnome themage works extremely well with XFCE too, with my UI looking and feeling slicker than ever.

It was well worth the effort installing it.

Look who turned up again.

2005-04-14T00:00:00+02:00

Don't know if this is the same one, but he was trying out our couch last night.

Powernap of DOOM.

2005-04-13T00:00:00+02:00

Got to work this morning at 7pm, worked for 45 minutes, realised how tired I was, slept for 45 minutes, and now i'm up again. Power nap worked a treat.

Now, time for work. Watch out!

OpenLDAP crack

2005-04-13T00:00:00+02:00

Annoying changes in syntax between versions of OpenLDAP that I didn't pick up consumed my time at work today. I was beating my head against the wall trying to work out why the slapd config wasn't being parsed correctly.

Setting the slaptest debug level to -1 reveals all, however:
slapd.conf: line 78: expecting <what> got "attribute" <access clause> ::= access to <what> [ by <who> <access> [ <control> ] ]+ <what> ::= * | [dn[.<dnstyle>]=<dn>] [filter=<filter>] [attrs=<attrlist>] <attrlist> ::= <attr> [val[.<style>]=<value>] | <attr> , <attrlist> <attr> ::= <attrname> | entry | children

Under newer versions of OpenLDAP, when defining access controls the attribute definition has been renamed to attrs. This means that your config will mystically stop working and slapd will die in a horrible flaming mess.

Also, why the hell does slaptest output to STDERR? This is stupid when you're trying to pipe the output to less to make sense of the mayhem.

OpenLDAP is great. When you don't have to touch it.

Hoary blues

2005-04-12T00:00:00+02:00

Hoary rocks. When you can get it to install.

I really must be cursed - every single time i've tried downloading and burning a new copy of the Hoary iso it has not worked for me (the installer dies at some random point) - and i've tried at least 5 times.

Yes, i've checked my md5 sums. No, i'm not using crappy media. Yes, i've tried them all on different boxes. I'm just perpetually unlucky when it comes to installing Hoary.

It's becoming rather annoying, because i'm trying to move completely over to Ubuntu on my lappy (which is a big move, considering how well my Arch Linux system is functioning on it), but I always keep falling into this little trap.

My Warty installation media always seems to do the trick. A (relatively) quick update sets me straight.

Hoary, is there no love for me?

Clear!

2005-04-12T00:00:00+02:00

Test results from last week came back. I'm all clear. No more cancer for me.

Enough. Time for bed.

Rage

2005-04-05T00:00:00+02:00

Gar. Annoying experience with a developer has changed my mood for the darker, which is a tad disappointing considering the generally good mood that i've been in for the last few weeks.

Firstly, I had a nice conversation with the maintainer/leading contributor of the Unichrome Project on Monday about helping out with testing different modelines for an integrated card in my dad's new pc. He said that he didn't have access to the hardware, but that he'd help me along with testing if I were interested. I explained to him that I wasn't able to do any work on it right at that moment, but i'd be able to talk to him a day later and start doing stuff then.

He seemed fine with that, and he messaged me the next day to see if I were available. We conversed on and off for a few hours (i'd message him, wait a few hours, he'd be off somewhere, he'd respond, i'd be somewhere else, wait a few more hours), until finally we were both back at our IRC sessions. I explained to him that my dad was currently using the computer and I wouldn't be able to do any testing of the modelines, however I could compile stuff to test later if he pointed me in the right direction.

It was at this point that he started raging about how I was wasting his time, not appreciating his work, not contributing anything, only wanting to fix the problem for myself, and that I should never speak to him again. No bullshit, his temperament completely changed from one message to the next.

WTFMATE? I'm offering to test changes on a driver that you don't have access to hardware for, and you're telling me to stop wasting your time? I'm sorry if i'm not able to do the work right at the very moment that's convenient for you, but you don't have to go off about how i'm disrespecting your time and effort. I came to you to help out, remember?

I would think that the reason you develop the software in an open manner is so that people can contribute back to the project, no? What I found most ironic was this post he made a few months ago.

"The via driver still requires a lot of work, and our situation is such that we largely depend on users feedback."

So i'm wasting your time by providing user feedback? Fine. If developers are going to be fascists when Joe User contacts them about fixing a problem that they can't directly work on, it not only means that the code isn't going to get fixed, but it's going to discourage the user from helping out again.

I installed an Nvidia card in the box, and everything is working hunky doory. It's a real shame, because the bloke obviously knows his stuff, but i think he was a bit strung out.

I still want to help out though!

Old man

2005-04-04T00:00:00+02:00

Being served at the checkout at Coles this evening, I was asked "How are you this evening, Sir?", to which I replied "Well thankyou, son". I had a lot of trouble containing my laughter, as the bloke on the other side of the checkout was probably only a year younger than me. He must have thought I was a teacher at my school, as I was wearing my Year 12 jersey. Do I really look that old? Most people think i'm around 21. I'm only 17 dammit!

Went in for a Gallium injection this afternoon. It's the first part of a scan that i'm having on Thursday which'll tell us if there are any cancerous cells still floating around my body. It would appear that my veins totally suck. They tried numerous times to get the needle in my arm, but to no avail. In the end they had to call down one of the nurses from the Chemotherapy clinic to give me the injection through my vascular port. My arms are totally wasted from all the needles, but at least it's over. The other really good thing is that they flushed the port after they finished giving me the injection, meaning that it's one less time I have to get it flushed - killing two birds with one stone in one afternoon. Rock.

Fingers crossed, the scan on Thursday won't show up anything. The only problem with a negative result is that there's a 10% chance that i've become Gallium-negative after my Gallium scan last October, meaning that there may be cancerous cells around but they don't show up on the scans. Means i'll also have to have a CAT scan to check for changes in sizes of my Lymph nodes. CAT scans would have to rank up there on my list of bad medical procedures. I'm unable to stomach the contrast die that you have to drink before the test (drinking what your own vomit after bring up the die is NOT a recommended experience), so this time we're going to try something a bit different. I have to drink a litre of water half an hour before the scan in the hope that it'll increase the volume of liquid in my blood enough to react to the iodine they inject me with.

I've taken over the roll of Slug video recordist, and there'll be some interesting changes you'll see in the videos that we put out - most notably, multiple camera angles of all the talks. I came across an interesting problem with Final Cut Express when importing footage from the tapes. I found that after importing the footage for 9 minutes and 26 seconds the sound would become totally borked. On both tapes. The original source was fine, so I narrowed it down to FCE. I don't know what the problem was, but I know how I fixed it. I'd set up a secondary scratch disk (where you dump the raw audio and video) a few days ago on a network share, and I hadn't unset it. I found that after unsetting it and recapturing the footage there was no longer any borkage, but the interesting thing was that the scratch disk had never been written to at all. Very odd behaviour, but at least i've worked out how not to capture footage.

The latest talk shall be posted here sometime later tonight if all goes to plan.

KLV

2005-03-31T00:00:00+02:00

Kismet Log Viewer

Most awesome tool.

mmm... FOOD

2005-03-28T00:00:00+02:00

These steroid thingys that i'm on that help rebuild the damaged tissue in my lungs are awesome - I can just eat and eat and eat and I don't get full. Pity they give me insomnia, but I can cope with that - you can get an awful amount of stuff done when you're up all the time.

Speaking of which, i've bowed to peer pressure and installed Wordpress, replacing Blosxom and CMSimple. I still love CMSimple though - we're switching our school website over to it this week. (I have reservations about posting that current website address, considering the state that it's in, and how contrived the entire system is).

My grandma at breakfast this morning asked me whether I was playing naughts and crosses on my laptop while debugging an issue I was having with ifplugd. The best I could respond with was "Yeah, sorta".

Virtue would have to be the sexiest 3rd party virtual desktop app i've ever come across. Not only does it give you virtual desktops under OS X, it's does it in one of the most visually appealing ways possible: decent transitions. Coupled with some good wallpapers, things can begin looking very nice.

The gl-accelerated phosphor xscreensaver with piped output from ngrep looks awesome at night too. :-)

Need to get a replacement cable for my headphones too. Poor cable design means that you have to jiggle it into just the right position to get full stereo sound. Bloody annoying, especially when you're doing audio editing.

Hail to the bus driver, and then die

2005-03-24T00:00:00+01:00

Just had a great experience on the fine bus services provided by Shorelink.

Firstly, the bus almost didn't stop - mind you, i'm use to that nowdays. Secondly, the driver was being a complete fascist about me using my bus pass for traveling between home and my place of education. He was wailing about how you can't use the pass more than once a day, and only between the destinations marked on the pass.

What a load of codswobble. The pass clearly states that I am entitled to free travel between my home and Hornsby station from 6.30am to 6.30pm on week days. The time was 4.38pm, well within the time constraints mentioned on the pass. Nothing on the pass states that I must be wearing school uniform (which I was not), and there's nothing about having to prove that i'm going to school either (which I was, anyway). If i'm the holder of the pass and I board the bus with suitable identification (photo or not), should I not be allowed to travel without being harassed?

I spent the trip arguing with him that I was actually going to school, and not simply trying to skip paying the fair. When he wouldn't drop it, I offered to pay the fair if it would get him off my back. He said that he would "let me off" (yeah, like i've done anything wrong in the first place, wanker), so I went and sat back down in my seat. About a minute later he started complaining that he really shouldn't have done that, and I should be paying a full fair because I wasn't going to school. Never mind that I had explained numerous times that I was travelling to school.

Infuriated, and about ready to jump off the bus in anger, I charged up to the front to pay the fair so he would get of my back. He never once slowed down to let me get a hold of something to stop myself from flying through the front window if he were to break suddenly. He was at least 20km/h over the speed limit too.

What a complete arse. In fact, this little adventure has ruffled me enough to actually ring up Shorelink and give them an earful. I can put up with a lot of the shit that we're all dealt with on public transport in Sydney, but this bloke went too far.

Update: I was reminded of this today.

Wow. Energy.

2005-03-23T00:00:00+01:00

Forgotten what it feels like. I'm definitely bouncing back - I can actually do things nowdays without feeling wasted for prolonged periods after.

I summed up the energy to ride my bike to school yesterday, which is quite an acheivement considering my current medical status of 'being on the mend'. Pity about the rain though.

Today was spent getting up to speed on everything that i've blocked out from school for the last few months. I'm so far behind everyone else in all my subjects, I really need to buckle down and put in the hard yards. That means less fun stuff, but on the other hand it means I can put all my energy into getting the best possible results at the end of the year. In all realism, the only thing I really need to focus on this year is my maths - i'll be able to arse my way through art and music, whereas my maths is another matter entirely. Oh, and it finally dawned on me that I have half yearlys next week. Bugger.

My school's head sysadmin also approached me about doing some OSX stuff so they can get our network going again, due to a sysadmin that left last week and a replacement sysadmin who doesn't do Unix. Something cool to put on my resume if it ever eventuates.

Our school's prefect body was invited to attend an afternoon tea at Hornsby Girls' High School this afternoon, and after our poor attendance at the last one held at Normo boys (no one turned up) I felt it was more than necesarry to turn up and reclaim our school's good name. Hah!

Anywho, the whole experience was a bit of a shock to the system. I don't know what they've been feeding those poor kids at selective schools, but they're a weird mob. Besides the random outburts of camp-style sing-a-longs and the 'icebreaking' games, it was a totally normal afternoon. Not. They're all crazy. Every single one of them. At least they all had reasonable things to converse about though. I spent most of my time talking about our art major works, the fallacy of teaching technology in high schools, and the rise of neo-nazism in the Middle East and its affects on string theory. Ok, I lied about the last part, but it would'ven't been far off the mark considering some of the stuff that people were talking about.

Maybe i've just lived a sheltered life as a Catholic school boy... no, they really were all crazy.

After escaping my captors, I headed to a second hand music store on the old side of Hornsby to see if I could pick up a bargain or two. In my case I actually managed to pick up three, which I was rather happy about. Albums include "Jimmy Barnes - Flesh and Wood", "Alex Lloyd - Watching Angels Mend", and "Supreme Beings of Leisure - (self titled)".

Most excellent.

Suprise, i'm cold blooded and just crawled out of your bag!

2005-03-21T00:00:00+01:00

Have a guess what found its way into my bag last night whilst making my bed?

I'd just gotten back from a weekend of wifi with the folks up at Glug and was getting ready for hitting the hay when this little beauty popped out. It must have decided to check my bag out out when I was unpacking my stuff. We've seen it crawling around inside our house or the last few weeks, but we haven't been able to set him up close until last night.

Pretty awesome that we'd still get little creatures like this around the city.

Speaking of my trip, thanks to all the Gluggers and dudes from Coffs for turning out and making it all happen. Kudos especially to Terry Porter and David Guest for providing accommodation with great tucker and an excellent venue respectively.

Googlex

2005-03-16T00:00:00+01:00

For all you OS X fans out there: Googlex

Updated, as google pulled the site.

Disgraceful version 2.0

2005-03-16T00:00:00+01:00

From the article [Minister Vanstone] says the children have been reunited with their parents at the Villawood detention centre in Sydney. Villawood detention centre, the place where all family reunions should take place. Senator Vanstone says it is a much better outcome than leaving them without any form of supervision. Sure thing, when it comes to proper child supervision, detention centres are the most appropriate venue.

Nazis.

*cough*

2005-03-14T00:00:00+01:00

Now that i've finished my treatment i've been waiting for the full effects of the radiotherapy to set in, but things have taken a bit of an unusual turn recently. I've been struggling with a mild cough for the last few days, but it got so bad last night that I was having a lot of trouble breathing. I was going to go to the hospital but didn't think i'd be able to get upstairs to wake my parents without passing out due to lack of oxygen, so I went to bed instead. The sleep worked quite well, but the cough still remained when I awoke.

My mum suggested she take me to see a doctor just to be sure this afternoon. After waiting for an hour or so we finally got to see one who promptly sent me up to get a chest X-ray. Yay, more radiation! I'll probably get thyroid cancer in 40 years from all this.

The doctor noted on the X-rays that there were some abnormalities, so he started me on some antibiotics and told me to see my specialist tomorrow as soon as possible. In his opinion it it looked like an early form of pneumonia. Not exactly a good sign, but then again not entirely unexpected as I haven't had anything boost my white blood cell count for the last 6 weeks or so. Then again, all of the blood tests that i've had so far have come back normal, so it's odd that things would change so quickly.

Speaking of my specialist, I had a meeting with him on Friday and everything on the cancer side of it looks really good. I'll have to have a few tests next week and then the same tests every 3 or so months for the next year or so. I'll also be able to get my port taken out in October, but i'll have to get it flushed every 6 weeks. I'm not entirely happy about the flushing part because it implies that I might have to have some more chemotherapy, but i'll live with it. Then again, getting X-rays done with the port still in look really funky.

All in all, the treatment looks about done.

Scored a new Mac Mini last week, on which i've been busily editing away at my Art HSC major work. A quick complaint about Apple pricing:

They will only give educational discounts to full time Uni or TAFE students, but not to full time High School students. Why they do this I have no idea, but it's completely pointless if they want to boost their sales in the long term by capturing a market of young users with lots of money to burn willing to fork it out on cool hardware. When you're not getting an educational discount you realise how excessive their pricing can be, especially after you've been told by a store manager that they'll do educational discounts for high school students. For example, Apple's pricing on Final Cut Express is $250 with an educational discount, but it skyrockets to $430 without one! Memory, of course, is another great example of this, but you tend to get that from most big computer companies anyway. I really can't see any explanation for it other than Apple wanting to make an exta buck.

Mind you, I don't mind paying the extra bit, I just wish i'd been given a straight answer on how much they'd charge me. I got a 50% discount on a firewire cable though. :-)

Anyway, for my art HSC major work i'm doing a short film on people in my art class creating their HSC works, sort of a "Making art about art" approach, very postmodern. It's amazing how much of the footage i've shot is completely useless, but then again there are some absolute gems when unexpected things happen in the classroom or with the camera. I have large amounts of film where my camera has been hijacked by people in the class to film all sorts of random things while i'm not looking, but i'm quite suprised at how useful some of the footage will be.

Done

2005-03-08T00:00:00+01:00

Finished up radiotherapy today. No more treatment. Home free.

Zap

2005-03-02T00:00:00+01:00

Good news: I''ll only be needing 1 more week of radiotherapy, starting today.

Originally I was scheduled in for having 5 weeks of radiotherapy, but i've responded really well to everything they've done, so I won't be needing the last week of treatment!

All the swelling has gone down in my shoulder, but i'm constantly sapped of energy and I find it difficult to eat anything hot, cold, coarse, or spicy. Otherwise i'm fine.

Time to get zapped again!

Disgraceful

2005-02-28T00:00:00+01:00

My Sunday was spent visiting Villawood detention centre, which was organised through the social justice council at school and the Queens of Peace social justice group which runs out of the Normanhurst parish of the same name. You hear a lot of crap in the media about the "queue jumpers" that are invading our country, stealing our jobs, bludging on the dole, and perpetrating criminal acts. I'll tell you right now, 99% of it bullocks. The people who our government is illegally locking up are everyday people just like you and me who are in the wrong place at the wrong time, or have been persecuted unjustly in their home country. They come to Australia for a better life and to escape persecution, something which a bunch of convicts decided to a little over 200 years ago. Now we've set up our own little utopia for ourselves, we don't want to let others in to share it. The real criminals are the "Liberal" conservatives who illegally detain them, and the Labor party for not being socially and morally responsible and objecting to the way these people are being treated.

This is a small part of my experience on the day, as well as a few stories from the inside.

Getting inside was the hardest part of the whole experience. The whole process is designed to keep you out, and make it as confusing as possible along the way. We're weren't able to park inside the centre, so we had to park out on the street which is about 200 meters from the centre. Once passing through the gate which bars entry to the facility, we were asked by an immigration officer whether we've been to the facility before. Our group leader Chris said yes, which was true for half the group, and we started to pass up the road 200 meters. Chris said that if you say no he'll ask you all sorts of questions about who you are, where you've come from, who you're seeing, how long you're staying for, etc, although he doesn't really care and just wants to tie you down a bit longer. At the end of the road we were confronted with a 3 meter high barb wire fence, as well as a smaller fence behind it, as well barb wire on the ground around the fence. We headed up towards the main entrance, but before we entered the facility we had to collect a form so we could be processed by the security officers later on. Never mind that they don't advertise that you have to get one of the forms to be processed. We had to collect the form from a small building on the other side of the road, and then cross back and ask the officer to let us in. Once we were inside the entry building we had to collect a number and wait to be processed. There are only 2, a maximum of 3 officers who are processing visitors, so it gave us more than enough time to fill out the form.

The form isn't the most intuitive thing to fill out to say the least. There's a whole heap of administrative crap spread all over the form, making it difficult to work out which parts you're suppose to fill out, and which parts you're not suppose to. The worst part about the whole procedure is if you incorrectly fill out the form because the processing officers will not accept it and send you to the end of the line to fill out another. Eventually one by one we were called up after half an hour of waiting (although it can take up to 2 hours) to present our forms as well as photo identification with our addresses on them. My processing officer was in a fairly good mood, not asking me too many questions and finally giving me a hospital-style bracelet to wear. Unfortunately one of my friends was not being allowed in due to some bureaucratic crap that the processing officer contrived. She brought up some completely bullshit clause in some law, saying that they wouldn't let him in because he was regarded as a minor (he's 16, but so are other people in our group), and they need written consent from his parents that the leader of the group was his legal guardian for the day. Fortunately Chris was extremely well versed in the procedures and laws that bound the detention centre, and was able to argue quite strongly that he was legally allowed to go in without written consent. Since their definition of a minor was someone "Under 18 years of age", one of the members from the parish quietly told me to ignore what was happening and get through the metal detectors into the compound as quickly as possible.

Once I passed through the checkpoint we had to be stamped with UV ink so they could differentiate between visitors and inmates during a lockdown. The security facilities have recently been upgraded, and now they're decked out with some of the best metal detecting equipment available in Australia, courtesy of 3 million tax-payer dollars - don't bother considering upgrading the facilities of the detainees. Meanwhile, the other person from school had gotten through while they were too busy having an argument with Chris, so we moved into the meeting area while he sorted out the mess. It actually worked out really well, because once we were inside Chris was able to argue that they just let in two minors without any problems, so why should the third be any different? My personal opinion of the staff wasn't too high. Did you know that the government doesn't actually run the detention centres? They outsource it to a variety of different companies, Villawood belonging to a company named GSL (Global something Logistics). Most of the people there seemed nice enough, but overall they weren't the brightest of sparks, especially the managerial staff. I met a Croatian lady inside that said that she was beaten up by another detainee while a guard looked on and did nothing. Chipped her front two teeth, and they wouldn't let her prosecute unless she went through the Australian Federal Police - the AFP didn't give a toss about her and did absolutely nothing.

Once we were inside we met up with a detainee named Noori who's friends with everyone, including some of the guards. We had brought some food with us too (things like grapes, biscuits, sweet and savory things), and we put them down on they table for the detainees to take what they want. Noori is having a 7 day hearing starting Monday that could possibly get him released, so he was quite anxious about the whole thing. He's been there for a number of years now. He arrived in Australia with his family of 4 and was sent straight to Villawood to await processing. His family was released after 28 days but he's been trying to get out ever since.

Descriptions of the centre were pretty dire, although the detainees were in reasonable spirits.

Food is served three times a day, first at 7.30, then at 12.30, and then finally at 16.30 - they are not fed in the 15 hours between dinner and breakfast. The food is prepared by the Bangladesh detainees, so most meals consist of rice or pasta with a curry. Many of the other detainees are not used to the spiciness of the curry and suffer horrible digestive problems, especially the Chinese. The same food is served in a 5 day cycle, and there are no changes made to the menu whatsoever, not even for religious occasions. The medical situation is even worse. The detainees are unable to keep painkillers in their rooms and are only able to receive medical treatment 2 times a day, these times separated 4 hours apart. The medical staff are also completely indifferent to the medical condition of the detainees and regard them as an annoyances rather than people. One of the detainees told me that some of the detainees had ringworm and were not being treated for it by the doctors on site. Poor hygiene standards exacerbate the problems of communal health too. All toiletry and shower facilities are communal, and sanitary waste is often left months before it is removed. There's also a faulty generator at one end of the compound which makes a constant grating noise at night when the detainees are trying to sleep - can't be doing any good for their state of mind.

The visiting area was a 60 meter square grassed area with a tree and a few gazebos. One of the detainees told me that before October last year there was no grass or gazebos. The reason they were put in was because the United Nations High Commission sent a delegation to assess the conditions at the centre. The government were trying to promote an image of the centres much more delightful than the harsh existence that was a reality for these people. The delegation were not allowed to visit the "living" quarters.

The detainees go through a number of different stages of detention. When they arrive, they are sent straight to Stage 1, the highest security stage of the entire system. There they are treated harshly by the guards, and are given very few rights. I am not clear on whether they are kept in solitary confinement, but it would not surprise me. If they progress out of Stage 1, they move onto Stage 2. Stage 2 is much more lax, with the detainees being afforded more rights. They are able to see visitors more freely, and are given work to do during the day. The detainees are not paid in money, but in phone cards and other such material. There are drink dispensing machines within the centre, but they are unable to use them unless they are slipped money by visitors. Stage 3 is the final stage before moving out into the community, and is the laxest of them all. Conditions are still terrible, but they are mostly treated better by the guards.

All detainees leaving the centre are told the same thing when leaving - they are not told whether they are being deported or legitimately released. Detainees are told to report to management, where they are told to pack their belongings and report back as they are being released. Once the detainee returns to management, they have to fill out forms and wait to be released by the officers. Sometimes the detainees who are being legitimately released are held in limbo for a number of hours by management just to make them sweat, keeping them wondering whether they are actually going to get out or whether this is all some sort of cruel joke.

Detainees who are being deported are handed over to an AFP officer and leave straight for the airport. This normally happens on Friday afternoons so the detainee's legal representation is unable to get an injunction to stop the deportation. They are usually flown to Perth, where they are then put onto a plane to Johannesburg, and out of the responsibility of the Australian government.

One of the most shocking things I found during the visit was the amount each detainee is charged for staying in detention per day - $175. Let's say the average detainee is held for 2 years. That's $127750. If they've been held the full 7 years possible, that's $447125. Now imagine a family of 5 who have been detained illegally for two years while being processed. That comes to $638750. How on earth is a family suppose to pay that back to the government whilst supporting children, buying food to stay alive, as well as paying rent?

The government offers to waive this fee if they leave the country, but these people have obviously come here for a reason, and who wants to be sent back to a country they've been trying to escape from?

What grates most is that for the money that these people have to pay they should be in at least 3 star facilities with decent food and medical attention, maybe even an area to do some exercise or let their children play in.

Instead our government sees fit to imprison them for the crime of wanting a better life.

Getting out wasn't a too difficult experience. We said our goodbyes to our friends who were unable to leave, and gave our promises to come back soon. With a touch of sorrow and tearfulness we passed out of the visiting area. The guards seemed much more relaxed now that we were leaving, and one or two of them seemed genuinely happy. We had to leave the compound through a different entrance, and only in small groups. I was in the second group, and as we were waiting to go through the second checkpoint we could here one of the guards through the glass shouting at one of his mates who was operating the first entrance not to open it and let our last group out - our last group consisted of an elderly couple. There was no reason to do this, he simply wished to keep them standing outside for 5 minutes or so to keep them anxious about whether they were going to get out. Disgraceful. Fortunately his friend on the door misheard his friend and unlocked the first entrance, letting them into the chamber where we were waiting. The guard was not very happy at all, and shouted a fair bit at his friend.

They finally let us through, checked our UV ink, cut our tags off, and let us out into the waiting room. We were able to leave through the final gate and head to our cars, but we were not allowed to stop and talk to the detainees through the barbed wire fences. I'd like to publish some more of the detainee stories, but I feel that I should ask for their permission before I do this. Hopefully next month i'll be able to put something up on each of the people that i've talked too.

I think the following best sums up the whole experience.

"You see, once we meet them, hear their stories, share their pain, it is impossible to ever view them as a faceless entity again - as queue-jumpers, as boat-people, as illegals and criminals. For they each have a name, a face, they had a life once, they are someone's father, daughter, brother, friend. They hurt and feel pain just as we do. They deserve our empathy, our help. When we look at them, do we see ourselves looking back?"
-- from the ChilOut's Visitor's Guide

Music is the language of us all

2005-02-14T00:00:00+01:00

It would seem that I am now learning to play the recorder. No, don't think back to those lessons in primary school where you were forced to endure the horror that is bad recorder playing - but think of traditional folk music. That's better, isn't it? There's an unwarranted stigma surrounding the recorder, and for this I blame the education system!

Our bandmaster at school is trying to put together a group of Year 12s to play recorder in an eisteddfod later this year. Interestingly enough, the eisteddfod has a dedicated recorder section, so it should be fun to see who else enters!

The good thing about the group is that we're all decent players of our own respective instruments, meaning that picking up another instrument shouldn't be difficult. I've only been playing for 3 days but already I can master some relatively challenging Irish jigs. Spent too much time practicing. About 3 hours a day. At night. Around midnight. I don't know what our new neighbours think. :-) Learning the fingerings for all of the notes is what's holding me back though.

The thing I love about brass instruments is that they tend to only have 3 (maximum of 6) valves/keys, meaning that you don't have to worry about putting your fingers in the right place - you just have to remember all of the combinations for your three or so fingers (which is nice, because you notice a lot of different patterns if you play long enough). It's quite mathematical actually.

Whereas with the recorder (and other such woodwind instruments, for that matter), I can't seem to find any discernable pattern that I can get my head around so I can accelerate my learning! Woodwind players out there, is there anything blindingly obvious i'm not picking up? Mind you, I have only been playing for a few days so i'll probably stumble across something in the next few weeks or so. :-)

Learning a new instrument is always a heap of fun though. After working out how everything fits together, you tend to look at music from a different perspective - with brass I learnt a lot about chord structure and harmonics, with stringed instruments I was able to better understand and predict the distances between notes, as well as how riffs and ostinatos work throughout music, computer generated music completely changed the way I look at rhythm and how instruments interact within a peice.

With woodwind, i'm learning how to get away with playing an instrument by blind luck (or instinct - I can't tell which).

Switch

2005-02-09T00:00:00+01:00

Radiotherapy started today. Felt nothing during the procedure (which was great), except there was a funny ozone smell when the radiation was passing through and ionising the air. Feeling a bit sapped now though. Should be interesting to see how I feel when it's all done.

New laptop arrived today. Goodness. Back to the land of no wires!

I've been hearing good things about the Korean translations in Gnome and Fedora as of late. A friend of mine from school has decided to switch over to Linux for the sole reason of the Korean translations being better than those in Windows. So much so, that he says that the translations are correct 99% of the time, as opposed to about 50% of the time with previous releases of Gnome and Fedora. Good to hear that people are switching because of better software, rather than being fed up with Windows.

Archlinux package maintainership and collaboration: what needs to change

2005-02-05T00:00:00+01:00

Relatively, i'm an outsider, but these are some views that i've come up when talking to others about how package maintainership and collaboration is handled in Arch. Flame me or whatever - this is something that I have to get off my chest because it's been troubling me for a while. And I apologise for any assumptions, untruths, or just general lack of knowledge contained below. :-)

Package management stagnation is a complete bitch under Arch, and for a distro that's trying to stay "fairly bleeding edge" it's not doing a very good job.

If somebody wants to contribute to building a package, or a group of packages, it's practically impossible to wrestle control away from the current maintainer without appearing to be hijacking or disrespecting their work.

Gentoo is a really good example of how community maintainership works really well - you have a package maintainer who decides what goes into the build, but anyone can contribute. Unlike in Arch, where the package maintainer has total control over contribution, and very rarely are users able to take the initiative to update or make bugfixes to packages. (Note that i'm just using Gentoo as an example of how a well designed community can keep things moving along).

There are a lot of users out there who are willing to work on stuff intensely, even if it's only for a few weeks/months or while it holds their interest. And after their interest/commitment wanes, someone else should be able to freely take over the reigns of the particular package/group. I completly understand that people aren't able to stay committed the entire time, but the current package maintainership process completely blows when it comes to collaboration.

Hell, I know from personal experience that you can work on something and be really enthused about it, but a day later you abandon it because it no longer captures your interest. What totally sucks about it is that even though I may not find it interesting or are able to devote as much time to it as I want, someone else out there will find the work that i've done really helpful and will want to carry it on - but they won't be able to because i've dropped off the face of the planet.

At the core of what i'm saying is that if a maintainer is no longer able to maintain and update their packages, it should be easier for an individual or a group to take over maintainership and keep the ball rolling.

The other thing which is a complete bitch is the whole "oh, I feel like creating a new package, let me go and check 3 different places to see if it already exists". If you want the distro to stay bleeding edge PKGBUILDS should be submitted to ONE place - it's an organisational nightmare.

Arch is a totally awesome distro, and pacman is a totally awesome package management system, but the whole process of package creation and maintainership is contrived - and essentially it's holding the entire distro back. It's a case of "the technology is great, but the whole human process behind it is completely ineffective".

I am no way criticising the excellent work that countless numbers of individuals have done to bring Arch to where it is today - all I want to do is get some talk going about reforming what I beleive to be holding the distro back.

So, enough of my rambling. You're probably thinking by now "Ok, that's nice. Anyone can criticise - what's this guy suggesting?"

All requests for packages should still be made on the forums, but the final PKGBUILDs should be consolidated and submitted to this one place. From that place it should be easy to check whether a package already exists, and it should be easily queried.

Yes, I know that the forums already exist for this sort of thing, however it's difficult having to keep track of PKGBUILD submissions there as well as the TUR list, let alone sift through what actually exists and what are just requests. I cannot envision one of the original goals of the forums as being a place where users could contribute packages - the whole forum system was not designed to be used in that way, and it shows.

As for packages that are in base and extra, some sort of user contribution system should be set up so that people are able to submit bugfixes/upgrades/new submissions to packages, but the package maintainer still has final say over what goes. I'm not for rebelling against what's working and tearing everything up no matter how well it works. I'd just like to see more user contribution throughout all levels of package maintainership.

I'm sure that a bit of what I said above fits into the new AUR system that'll be coming in (soon!), but what I see is something that's a lot more broad than just reorganising the maintainership process - users should be able to contribute to packages at all levels throughout Arch.

I'm sure it looks like i've been sipping a bit too much from the bong lately, and in fact the thing that started me out on this whole tirade was the XFCE packages not being updated recently, so if someone got around to that i'd probably just shut up. :-)

Then again, some of this stuff would be pretty good.

Short 'n Sweet

2005-02-04T00:00:00+01:00

Chemo is done - glad that part of my life is over.

School started this week. Good to be back, even better to only be doing half my subjects this year.

Got poached by some girl for some tuition college while walking through Chatswood on Thursday. She handed me some propaganda, and I was going to put it in the bin right in front of her to make a point of what I thought of that type of marketing, but then realised that a tree somewhere wouldn't like me, and thought the better of it.

New laptop arriving on Monday sometime. The delivery company are a bit inflexible, but hopefully i'll be able to pick it up.

Can't complain about the price though - 50% discount courtesy of my cousin who works at IBM. Thanks Georgina!

Picked up a stomach bug a few days ago, and i've been in constant pain since. Been told to lay off dairy products, and not venture far from major medical centers, which sorta screws up my plans for going to an air show in Temora tomorrow. We'll see how I feel before I can my plans, though.

Roadtrip to Lismore has been finalised. Details will be shortly posted to Slug Announce. Give me a bell if you're interested in helping out.

Radiotherapy starts on Wednesday. Once it zaps the remaining stuff I should be cleared. Be done in 5 weeks - can't wait!

This Planet

2005-01-27T00:00:00+01:00

Look at this planet, son, all this'll be yours. This hatred, destruction, devastation and wars. You'll inherit our cause, and as the globe gets warm, You best prepare for the time when all this'll be yours

Because it's critical to become original, To think as others do fails the individual And so it's integral that other pathways are explored, Aew directions are taken, and alternatives under close inspection Reflecting, and people rejecting human atrocities, And companies that constantly create monopolies And what about political infrastructures that deny justice, Supports minorities in clusters wondering where their next lunch is. And punters in some countries are left to starve, When the world produces too much food for everyone, Let alone a small population that still face the fact that There'll never be food on the plate. Hatred swells as human beings turn on one another, And narrow minds make us think that no-one else has got it tougher, The lower to middle to upperclass syndrome where I'm selfishly prone to keeping other cultures unknown and I'm shown reality in a city where quickly your possessions will Be stolen if you're ever caught drifting on this planet. I apply 30+ 'cos I live in Australia And I wonder when my cancer will come? The ozone layer got holes the size of countries. Ice caps melt, it's got nothing to do with being sunny. We must think it's funny, plus we get a tan quicker. I'm getting sicker, i'm not worried - go figure. With more liquor i'm increasingly detached From the violence represented by police sirens. And migrants are persecuted by tyrants I don't understand us, I need guidance. -- Explanetary - This planet, from the album "Food to eat music by"

Things noted about Melbourne:

2005-01-24T00:00:00+01:00

<li>People like to drive their cars loudly, lots of flashy toys</li> <li>Way more people smoke down here</li> <li>Everybody seems really young, and extremely relaxed</li> <li>Their tram system absolutely beats the pants off Sydney's public transport system (oh, and I had to get some

poor lady to show me how to use the automatic ticketing machine because I couldn't cope with it - turns out I had the blood ticket upside down)

<li>The taxi drivers are mad (in the crazy sense)</li>

Because i'm too lazy to type everything again.

2005-01-24T00:00:00+01:00

20:24 what's happenin' down there? 20:31 <auxesis> ummm... weather was a bit shocking this morning, but it cleared up quite nicely 20:31 <auxesis> went to lunch with my great aunt, who i haven't seen for about a year 20:32 <auxesis> and then we went to parliament house on a tour 20:32 <auxesis> which was pretty neat 20:32 <ctd> fun. 20:32 <auxesis> did you know that during the gold rushes down here $10 billion was found in the space of 5 years? 20:33 <auxesis> anywho... went spent the afternoon in dymocks buying cool books for friends 20:33 <auxesis> and then we went to dinner, and now i'm sitting here 20:33 <auxesis> oh, and in the morning i went to st. kilda beach and bought some music and tea 20:34 <auxesis> hmm... i should just cut and paste this into my blog 20:34 <ctd> that your might as well

Apotheosis

2005-01-22T00:00:00+01:00

I'm in Melbourne at the moment spending a few days exploring the city. Flew in about 1 this arvo, dropped of our stuff at the apartment we've hired, and soon departed for the National Gallery of Victoria. The name's a bit of a contradiction of terms, huh? Came about when Melbourne was bidding for the title of capital of Australia, and some bright spark thought that perhaps if they apotheosise the title of everything, perhaps people would just think that Melbourne was the capital. That's why the Victorian police commissioner is known as the "Chief Commissioner", and the police commission of every other state is just "Commissioner".

Anyway, i'm getting sidetracked. Spent a few hours there today, and ended up getting kicked out because it was closing time. Had a great time looking through the entire Asian art section, as well as the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th century European art. Tomorrow i'm planning on getting up early so I can see the rest of the gallery. First stop is a new exhibition that's just openned that's on grotesque exaggurations of the human body. Looks kinda freaky. :-)

Also saw Alexander this afternoon. DO NOT GO AND SEE IT. It totally blows. My main critique of it was that there really was no actual path the movie was taking, it was just wondering everywhere, jumping between time periods, and trying to be as disjointed as possible. I think what the director was trying to do was tell it as if it were a history book, which, if it was, would have made a lot of sense, however it didn't tranfer to the medium of film all that well. Ok, it was piss poor. Secondly, the acting was completely over the top - the actors spent about 60% of the movie shouting at each other, trying to hype themselves up and be all heroic. Probably the most annoying thing about that was the music. It was like something out of a really shitty Chuck Norris movie from the 80's that repeats the same music over every 30 seconds. And the worst thing about that was that the music was synthesised, and completely cliched.

Enough of that tripe. Time to log off and get out of here.

What every user needs

2005-01-19T00:00:00+01:00

A panic button.

Interrupted

2005-01-18T00:00:00+01:00

Well, I was awoken this morning by the electricians who'd come to rig up power to our new kitchen. One of them asked whether it was alright to turn off the power so they could do some rewiring, but before I could answer one of them had flicked the switch and the house was plunged into darkness. Never mind that my boxen were on, as well as the ones I was doing work on. Too tired to explain why they should have given me some warning, I went back to bed.

When I woke in the afternoon (well rested, but still tired), I found that power was restored, but things were broken. I spent an half an hour trying to work out why the net connection wouldn't come up before finally giving in and phoning our ISP to find that Telstra had borked ADSL authentication nation wide and i'd just have to wait for them to be releived of their ineptness.

Oh, and congratulations to the Labor party and the media for ousting one of the best chances for returning a non-cryptofacist government to power next federal election. I wouldn't mind seeing Lindsay Tanner take up the helm (not just because he shares my first name!) so the party could return to the good ol' days of left wing radicalism. Looks like Beazely will get it again though. Mind you, I said that last time around.

Not happy.

Hitting the ground running

2005-01-16T00:00:00+01:00

Good news all round - only one more chemo, and then a month or so of radiotherapy. I'm almost clear! (that's if everything goes to plan, of course). I'll be cutting back on school this year too. I practically missed all of the last school term, and it looks like i'll be at school on and off for the first month or so, making it pretty much impossible to catch up with all of the work that i've missed plus put in enough time for study to get half-decent marks in the HSC. What i'd like to do (and most likely will be doing) is completing 3 subjects this year, and my other 3 in the six or so months after all of my classmates finish. After that i'm looking at hooking up with a friend to do some aid work abroad (in the Solomons, probably) for around 6 months, and then return to either continue my studies or jump straight into the workforce.

Sold off my laptop last week, and i'm ordering my new one tomorrow. It shall be most excellent returning to the world of no wires. Wonder what IBM laptops are like when it comes to remaping the keyboards to dvorak? :-) Before selling it off I succumbed to the Ultimate Evil and installed Windows on it so I could do some gaming at a Lan party a few of my friends were hosting. I felt so dirty. Hardware still worked better under Linux though. Also managed to pick up a spare second monitor from a charity that was getting rid of a few of them in Hornsby. Even works better than my former spare monitor.

Time flies when you're having fun. Or working on stuff you enjoy. I can't remember which right now. I've been working at home for the last couple of weeks and i've lost all sense of time. Which is a good thing considering it keeps my mind of school and my health. There was a lot of stuff in the older work that I did that was completely hacked up, and this time I want to make sure that i'm doing things right. As such, i'm spending a lot of time understanding everything I can about what i'm working on, as well as going the extra mile by writing up a log of everything that I do. Reminds me of a quote that used to be on the wall of my maths class:

We remember: 10% of what we hear. 30% of what we read. 60% of what we write. 90% of what we say and do.

All hail Dick Smith Electronics

2005-01-02T00:00:00+01:00

Resolution

2004-12-26T00:00:00+01:00

Well, the holidays are well and truly here. School finished up a week ago, and i've been enjoying my time doing absolutely nothing (the way a holiday should be spent). My last week of school wasn't entirely spent there, though. My dad, uncle, and self trecked up to the blue mountains for 4 days in the middle of nowhere - a shack in the bush. I don't want to say exactly where we went (for fear of marauding 4wd owners destroying it), but suffice to say it was far away from everywhere. Best thing about it was that if you wanted to communicate with the outside world you had to walk for 15 minutes to the top of a very large hill and point your mobile in the right direction. I read more in those 4 days than I had in a number of months, got plenty of sleep (my slepping patterns returned to normal - yay!), and a fair bit of exercise.

My first day back at school after the trek was not uneventful, however. The teachers as well as the prefect body had been busy preparing our school's own fundraising event for the Canteen cancer foundation. Although the fundraising only ran for one week, we sold out of bandanas and sausages, raising over $8000 for the foundation. Bandanas became the 'must have' fashion accessory, and soon it was impossible to venture out onto the playground without being visually assaulted by a rainbow of coloured heads.

15 or so teachers and students competed in raising the highest amount of money before the day. Whoever raised the most amount of money was able to have their heads shaven the closest. In the end, it didn't matter who raised the most - they all ended up having close shaves anyway. News of our escapades spread to the local media, and our local paper showed up to take photos of the event. Student bands played, the seniors had a football game on the oval (I think there was some illegal betting going on, too!), and everyone enjoyed themselves. It's amazing how much everyone is willing to chip in when something hits close to home.

A friend of mine who left the school last year was recently diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease. Quite a coincidence, I know, especially when it's the same subtype as me. She turned up to the event too, just to say hi to everyone. I got off school early the next day so I could go and visit her at her first chemo session. I know she's in good hands, as she's being treated by the same doctor at the same clinic that I am. Glad to say that she's coping much better than I was - they caught it early. The nurses at the clinic all thought I was a bit masochistic for coming into the clinic when I didn't need to be there (especially when I also had a chemo session the next day!).

And on my health front, I have some good news to report - I may not have to do all the chemo sessions that i'm scheduled for. It seems that i'm reacting extremely well to the treatment with my lumps and whatnot completely disappearing. After my next treatment (which is on New Years eve, can you beleive?) i'll be doing a couple more tests to see how much more treatment I need. If everything goes really well, I may only have to do another 3 rounds of chemo, and a few weeks of radiation therapy. Can't say that i'm looking forward to the tests, but if it means that I get healed up sooner, i'm all for it.

So all in all, this is most excellent news. I've been talking to my boss, and i've arranged to work from home for half of the holidays, and then at work until I go back to school. The pressure is on to get something together that they can rollout the new system soon. They had to get someone else in to finish the work that I couldn't when I was diagnosed, so they've only had a half finished setup to give to the people they are contracting for the backend. But now that i'm back they'll be looking to put it all together so they can start the rollout. Shall be interesting to see how much I can get done.

o_O

2004-12-06T00:00:00+01:00

Which File Extension are You?

'Maaaatt Daaaaaaaamon...'

2004-12-03T00:00:00+01:00

Team America: World Police rocked. That is all.