Ben's Brain Dump

Sarah's Blog

2005-02-23T16:47:00.000+10:30

I can't believe it's taken me this long to post about this! How slack of me. Aaanyway.

My lovely and amazing wife Sarah has got herself a blog - I present to you, the wonderful, the informative, the amusing, the always entertaining:

Blog Blong Sera!

Surf on over and check it out.

(In case you're wondering where the name comes from, it means "Sarah's Blog" in Bislama. Bislama is the pidgin english spoken in Vanuatu, one of our favourite places in the world.)

Welcome Tahlia!

2005-02-22T14:16:00.000+10:30

I'd like to officially welcome Tahlia Amber Craig, born Monday February 21st, weighing 6 pounds 9 ounces (or almost 3kg for those of us who speak metric; that's almost exactly the average, apparently).

Congratulations to Alice and Rich - although I'm sure Alice did most of the work ;) Mother and Baby are both doing really well (though tired). Dad is...well, dad. If I know Rich at all, he's bouncing off the walls :)

Sarah and I visited her in hospital this morning. She's so gorgeous! The thing that gets me about babies is that they're tiny. Like, really small. They have entire hands that are significantly smaller than just your palm. It spins me out.

So, Tahlia, Welcome to this world and to our very silly family :) If you can cope with us you can cope with anything!

pwn3d by |\/|1cr050f7's m4d 5x1llz

2005-02-18T14:42:00.000+10:30

(That's "Owned by Microsoft's mad skills", for the l337-impaired).

Er, yeah. So anyway, Microsoft have got a simply wonderful page on their site called "A parent's primer to computer slang", featuring translations from "leetspeek" to english. |\/|1cr050f7 r0x0r :)

Good on them for having a go, I say! Still, it's a bit like an old person who says "cool" all the time - it just sounds wrong.

(via arstechnica)

Goody Goody Yum Yum, part 3

2005-02-18T11:15:00.000+10:30

I might have mentioned before that I want to go and see The Goodies performing live on stage. So you can imagine my jealousy when Jason posts this.

Although I am pretty certain that this rampant fedora wearing has got to stop, Tim Brooke-Taylor saying "Smart hat" notwithstanding. And is that a mullet I see?

As they say, jealousy is a curse :)

Lovely spam, wonderful spam

2005-02-18T10:44:00.000+10:30

I get some very amusing spam sometimes - the recent development of adding random words and phrases to fool spam filters has provided a boost in entertainment value - but this one I got at my gmail address takes it to a whole new level:

From: Neateye 
Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 19:39:16 -0000
Subject: Gouranga
To: 


Call out Gouranga be happy!!!
Gouranga Gouranga Gouranga ....
That which brings the highest happiness!!

Is he/she even trying to sell anything? Is it related to the energy drink supplement Guarana perhaps? My mind was, indeed, boggling (and I don't mean playing a word game involving dice on letters on a bit transparent plastic cube).

Then of course, google came to the rescue. It's some Hare Krishna thing, apparently; although Urban Dictionary's favourite definition is amusing:

A word that appears on moterway[sic] bridges in north west UK. It's only purpose to annoy drivers who are left with a nagging curiosity for the rest of their day until the next day when it ceases to become important ever again.

for god sake why did they have to colour it in. Now it's more noticable and more annoying

Thus ends today's journey into strange and unusual spam. Edutainment at it's finest.

Welcome back to the BBD

2005-02-08T08:58:00.000+10:30

Well, after a fair hiatus from blogging, I'm back! (Cue tumultuous cheers from the eagerly-awaiting audience.) Lots of cool stuff has happened since my last post - I'll post some more detail soon :)

Gay bomb, Gay bomb, You're my Gay Bomb

2005-01-14T16:15:00.000+10:30

Now this is hilarious: According to This story at the Sydney Morning Herald, the US Military were researching creating a chemical weapon that would "make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other" - i.e. a gay bomb :) Gold.

Make love not war indeed!

(Apologies to Tom Jones for the title.)

Update: Apparently it was only an idea and it was Dismissed out of hand. Suuuuuure, Mr US Military Spokesman Man, we believe you. You just want to keep all the gay soldiers to yourself!

Google Juice Redux

2005-01-14T14:12:00.000+10:30

My quest for domination of Google continues unabated. As well as being the number one result for "Evil hax0rs", I'm now also the number one result for "da debil".

Fear my Google Juice.

More search term hilarity

2005-01-11T11:40:00.000+10:30

Yet another search gem that has brought someone to my blog: joey tempest physics.

In the immortal words of Rove: What The?

Joey Tempest, Physics. Hair metal, Fundamental Science. Not a link I would have made.

In other news: according to my stats, yesterday I passed the 500 visit mark on my blog. It's taken me since May last year to achieve that magnificent milestone ;-) How silly.

Windows reinstall irony

2005-01-07T16:52:00.000+10:30

I've had lots of fun the last couple of nights!

The hard drive in Sarah's computer was making noises like it was about to die¹, so I had to go out and buy a new hard drive to replace it. I managed to get all the important stuff off the dying drive before it carked itself (despite a moment of panic where it froze and then wouldn't even detect the drive on a reboot - before I'd even managed to copy the most important stuff off, i.e. Sarah's uni files). Have I mentioned that I hate computers?

So I've spent the last couple of nights setting up the drive and re-installing everything. Lucky me. There's soooo much to do to get it all running (Office XP is up to 3 service packs now!), so it's taken ages.

"Where's the irony you so tantalisingly referred to in the title of this post?" I hear you all asking.

Well, I tend to partition hard drives into 4 partitions - one for windows (NTFS²), one for Linux (usually ext3³), one for Linux Swap, and one for all the miscellaneous data (which I format as FAT32, because that's the most portable filesystem between Linux and Windows). FAT32 is a Microsoft-developed filesystem - it's what windows 9x used to use, and windows 200 & XP can still use it now.

So I figured, it being a Microsoft thing, it's a reasonable assumption that you'd be able to format a partition as FAT32 from windows. But try as I might, the only option I could find for formatting the partition in windows was NTFS - which I definitely didn't want. In the end, the only way I could find to format the drive as FAT32 was to use Linux⁴!

How ironic - a Microsoft OS won't format a partition with a Microsoft filesystem, but the main competitor that they've been fighting against will, with zero effort. Nice.

Also, the SMART parameters for the drive (as reported by smartctl) all had values with labels like "Pre-Fail" and "Old_Age". Good sign.
NTFS is a windows filesystem. It's most user-visible benefit is that it recovers gracefully from unexpected shutdowns; i.e. no more scandisk runs at bootup, like good old win98.
ext3 is a Linux file system used by many distros like Fedora Core. It's good.
Knoppix - so handy. Saved me from several nasty computer moments.

Music Review

2005-01-05T10:22:00.000+10:30

Went to see De La Soul a couple of weeks ago. Great gig overall; my rating: 7/10. Bad bits out of the way first: Support acts weren't great. Sound was ridiculously bad (loud, ultra reverby, very hard to distinguish actual music and lyrics from the noise). Venue was really bad - basically just a shed behind light square (G7) that had the audacity to call itself "Queens Theatre", apparently. If I was the Queen, I'd be embarassed. Good bits: the De Las rocked as I thought they would (although Mase was MIA - it was Trugoy, Posdnuos and a DJ). Er, other good bits...not sure. I guess The Rocking was the only good bit :) Given the negatives, they did indeed rock very hard to make this gig a good one overall.

New Music: I bought The Best Of De La Soul and Homework, Discovery and Daft Club by Daft Punk. De La Soul's Best Of is pretty damn good - they have so many cool tracks, it's great to have them all on one album. I'm really getting into Daft Punk - I totally loved Around The World and Da Funk when they were played on the radio (and the clip for Around The World was just magic), so it's great to have the first couple of albums. They're pretty damn cool.

Big Star Records rocks.

Search terms

2005-01-04T09:44:00.000+10:30

I've got a little stats monitoring thing on this blog (a free counter from sitemeter.com, in case you're interested, which I'm sure you're not). So anyway, one of the things the reports page shows me is the referring URLs to this site - i.e. the links people clicked on to get here. These are often results from search engines, so I can see what terms people search for; normally it's things like "deskjet 3650 linux" or "fedora usb printer" (thanks to my post about printing via cups). But, in the last week, I've had a couple of really weird ones -

Now really. Reindeer Breaders?? (By which I assume they meant "breeders".) First of all, that's just an odd thing to be searching for, and second, how the hell did I get to be in those search results! (It of course linked to my post about welding reindeer.)

As for the second one...all I can say is that it's a really unfortunate combination of words on This archive page. Not my fault, honest!

Ahh, the Internet. Where stupidity is always the rule.

Christmas review

2005-01-03T09:15:00.000+10:30

Ahh, Christmas. I had lots of fun this year. We (Sarah and I) spent christmas eve down at her Nana's place in Goolwa (Sarah's Uncle and Aunty are down from London at the moment, which is great fun). Christmas morning we went to a service at Goolwa Church Of Christ (didn't really enjoy it, it must be said; it felt like it had been slapped together at the last moment and no-one could really be bothered). Christmas lunch was with Sarah's extended family, and I got roped into the Santa role, shuttling back and forth between the christmas tree and the recipients (bugger).

Then it was home to my mum & dad's place for tea with my family - 4 brothers, 3 partners, and some glowsticks. Great fun.

So all round, a very nice christmas.

Favourite moment of the day: Escaping with Sarah and sitting on the end of a jetty dangling my feet in the river :)

Favourite present: Lord Of The Rings, Return Of The King, Special Extended Edition (that completes my collection of the three extended edition DVDs of the LOTR movies, yay). Honourable mention: a Bonsai tree from Mum.

Incredibles, The

2004-12-27T11:33:00.000+10:30

File under "Movies, Must See Very Soon" - it's just fantastic in every way. I totally loved the 50s-60s futuristic stylings. Great story, great visuals, hilarious.

Highly recommended.

Goody Goody Yum Yum, part 2

2004-12-22T15:01:00.000+10:30

Have I mentioned that I want to go and see The Goodies performing live on stage? Because I really do. Really really.

Have I also mentioned that they're not coming to Adelaide? Bugger. Bugger bugger.

Weeeeelll, on the off chance that I may in fact get to Melbourne on March 8th to see them, I happened to look up airfares for that time, and they're pretty cheap - $49 from jetstar if you are happy to go to Avalon, or $59 from virgin. Even more tempting...

update: Tickets are $59 or $72. Still temping...

Firefly on Australian TV

2004-12-22T10:20:00.000+10:30

I couldn't get to sleep last night (Sarah's away, I'm always like that when she's not here), so to combat my irritation at not being able to sleep, I got up and turned on the TV. Lo and behold, Firefly! Yay! I didn't ever think it'd get shown on Australian TV, and to be honest, it might as well not be; could it be buried any further by channel seven? It's on in the 1am timeslot, on a week night, during the summer-crap-TV-period. Nice one.

I've mentioned Firefly before, briefly. It was a sci-fi/western hybrid written and created by Joss Whedon (the guy responsible for Buffy and Angel), and it had great characters and dialog, typical of Joss Whedon. It really was a great show, but it got buried by its parent network in the US (kept on getting moved around in timeslots, got shown out of order (so made little sense), things like that) and it eventually got cancelled after only 11 shows. They ended up making 14 episodes and they released them on DVD, which is how I got into it. On the good news front, There's a movie being released late next year, which I'm really looking forward to.

Goody goody yum yum

2004-12-17T22:10:00.000+10:30

Oh my, you have no idea how much I want to go and see this. These guys were my after-school-tv-viewing heroes, I loved that show.

Of course, they're not coming to Adelaide, but I'm very tempted to go on a road trip to see this...it'd be so worth it.

Degree of difficulty: 4.5

2004-12-16T14:04:00.000+10:30

Oooh yeeeeah. I just got the final result for the last topic of my Bachelor of Information Technology - and it's a Credit. Ladies and Gentlemen, it is my pleasure to announce, that after eight years:

I have completed my degree!

What a great feeling. And what an odyssey. I started off in 1996 studying a Bachelor of Science (after initially not getting an offer despite my year twelve score being more than high enough). I really wanted to do a physics major, but after discovering that I wasn't really that great at physics (despite how much I enjoyed it), and not really knowing where a degree in physics would take me employment-wise, I decided in mid-1997 to transfer to a Bachelor of Information Technology.

Well, that wasted the second half of 1997, and in 1998 I started picking up the first-year topics I'd missed from the BIT and doing as many of the second-year topics as I could. At the end of 1999, with three topics to go until I finished, I got full-time employment with what was then WebMedia, a small website development company of about seven employees.

With all the best intentions, I enrolled in two topics for semester one 2000. What I didn't really understand was just how hard it would be to work full-time and study as well. I ended up not being able to commit any time to study at all, and I withdrew from both of those topics (unfortunately for me after the cut-off date; I got nice big Fs for both of those on my report :( ). I never really got inspired to start study again, and I let my enrolment lapse until I decided about a quarter of the way through 2003 that I should start up again and get the damn thing finished.

So, after having to jump through a few hoops to get my enrolment re-instated (silly, silly boy for not formally applying for leave), in semester two 2003 I started doing one topic at a time while maintaining full-time work - I figured I could cope with that workload. It was still really hard - especially after starting Iugo in march 2004 - but thanks to Sarah's support I've finally got there.

Now, this is mega sappy, but I'm going to do it anyway: some quick thankyous - to my amazing wife Sarah, for her support and giving up so much of our time together so that I could study, and to my parents for supporting me both personally and financially through it (especially before I got my full-time job).

I feel so much better knowing that's finished!

I'm back! (Brain Dump #3)

2004-12-15T11:43:00.000+10:30

After a long hiatus, I'm back on board. Sorry about the lack of activity around here! Anyway, since my last post (was it really that long ago!) I have:

Sat the final exam of my degree

Artificial Intelligence can bite me. Interesting topic, and I enjoyed the programming side of it, but boy was I nervous about the result of this exam. I studied lots of the wrong stuff - I focussed on algorithms, code, deep applications of concepts and a lot of search stuff, but the lecturer¹ asked lots of high-level, open, philosophical-type questions, unfortunately. I breezed through the couple of code questions, then sat and quietly bashed my head against the table trying to answer the essay questions. In the end it wasn't as bad as I had expected (more info coming, stay tuned).

Had a week's break

Didn't go anywhere or anything, just managed to take some time off work (it's a hard thing to do when you're self-employed). Sarah and me were house-sitting, so we spent lots of time doing holiday things, like just sitting on the balcony, learning how to play backgammon, reading (got through The DaVinci Code and the first Wheel Of Time book), walking, and just relaxing. I was so looking forward to this time off and I am feeling so much better for it.

Looked at some office spaces

We (iugo) are moving into a new office next year, and we've decided on where we're going to go. More info coming soon.

Wow, is that all I've done? I have to have done more than that in (almost) a month...

Oh yeah.

Saemon's Birthday tea

Yum. Heaps nice to catch up with Saemon and Casey and Rose :) Cold Rock, thou shalt be the death of me. (Also, A hex on thee for thine gratuitous use of Comic Sans. There's just no excuse.)

You have no idea how often I had to stop myself from ending every sentence I said to him with "...Mr Powers" in a Dr Evil voice ;)

Telemarketers are Da Debil!

2004-11-18T16:48:00.000+10:30

I just got a call from some telemarketer. The call went something like this:

Me: (picks up phone) Hello, This is Ben. (Phone: static, silence, static, for about 5 seconds.)

Telemarketer: (American accent, very hard to hear over the static) Ah hello, is Mr Williams there?

Me: (suspicious already) This is Mr Williams.

Telemarketer: (pause; it sounds like the delay you get on long-distance calls) Hello Mr Williams, I'm (unintelligible name) from (unintelligible company name)...(starts sales spiel about switching long-distance carriers)

Me: (waits for pause for breath) Look, I don't have time for this now and I'm really not interested. Can I ask you not to call me again? Can you take me off your list?

Telemarketer: (again the long-distance pause) Whatever, Sir. (Hangs up)

She just hung up on me! Cow! I couldn't believe it. If I had been able to hear the name of the company she was from, I'd so love to call them back and tell them about it. That's just disgusting.

Ironic really when you think about it, someone calling wanting me to switch to their long-distance service, and the line quality is so bad that I can barely hear them. Good one.

I hate telemarketers.

The fiiiinal countdoooown

2004-11-16T10:30:00.000+10:30

I've been giving Jason a bit of grief about going to see Europe in concert. I mean, what are they going to do, play The Final Countdown 20 times? I mean, the lead singer's name is Joey Tempest, for goodness' sake! They are one of the ultimate proponents of 80s hair metal (along with Def Leppard and Van Halen).

Well anyway, I just got a 20-second phone call from young Jason, holding the phone up at the gig so I could hear a chorus of The Final Countdown. What a moment. I haven't stopped laughing since I heard it :)

It seems Europe isn't the only band Jason's been seeing recently.

cups & samba vs windows XP printing

2004-11-14T18:55:00.000+10:30

So I just spent a couple of hours fighting with my linux server and printing to the attached printer from my windows boxen. So that I don't forget it when it breaks again, and for the sake of the world’s best troubleshooting database, I'm going to write it down here. If you don't at all care about printing to a linux-connected printer from a windows client, you can stop reading here. No, really, it just gets geekier from here on in.

Summary: You can print from windows XP to a linux printer using cups & samba via IPP or windows networking. The key step is enabling raw printing, by uncommenting the application/octet-stream lines at the bottom of the files /etc/cups/mime.*. Read on for the story of how I achieved it.

My file server in the corner is running Fedora Core 1 and happily serving up files via NFS and Samba. I've got an HP DeskJet 3650 connected to it via USB, and I wanted to be able to print to it from the 3 other machines (all running windows XP) in my house. It was working until I rebooted the server, and because I had no idea what I'd done to it, I decided to set it up from scratch. It turns out there's two ways to do it - via samba and shared via IPP; I did both, and I liked the IPP results better¹, but I'll talk about both here. After plugging in a monitor, mouse & keyboard so I could get a console, here's what I did:

Plugged the printer in. /var/log/messages registered some garbage about a new USB device; that's a good sign.
Ran redhat-config-printer (this is somewhere under the main desktop menu in Fedora, but I ran it from a shell for some reason). I added the printer as the right model (HP DeskJet 3600 series), and printed a test page - all good. I made sure the printer was shared while in the printing setup program.
Added it to samba; man cupsaddsmb told me that I had to add this stuff to my smb.conf file:
[global] load printers = yes printing = cups printcap name = cups [printers] comment = All Printers path = /var/spool/samba browseable = no public = yes guest ok = yes writable = no printable = yes printer admin = (my-username)
which I did, and restarted samba (service smb restart). Lo and behold, I could see the printer from my windows machines, but I still couldn't print to it (jobs would silently disappear).
Enabled raw mode printing (this was the key step): In /etc/cups/mime.convs, I uncommented the line at the bottom that reads:
application/octet-stream application/vnd.cups-raw 0 -
In /etc/cups/mime.types, I uncommented the line at the bottom that reads:
application/octet-stream
I restarted cups (service cups restart), and samba for good measure. I could now print to it from my windows boxes! If all you want to do is share via samba, you can stop reading here. Read on on for the IPP method.
Added a raw queue for the printer, again through redhat-config-printer. To do this, I selected the "Generic" drop down in the "Printer model" step of the wizard, and selected "Raw Print Queue". Note: this printer queue will only be useful to those machines configured with a printer driver (Also remember to share the queue).
On the windows machines, I added a new printer (Start -> Control Panel -> Printers and Faxes -> Add Printer). I chose to add a new network printer, selecting "Connect to a printer on the Internet", and using a URL of http://hostip:631/printers/RawPrinterQueueName. I selected the printer driver as I would have for a locally connected printer (I had downloaded the drivers from HP's website). Success!
I basked in the warm glow of having foughtthe unholy alliance of Linux, Cups and Samba, and having won.

You might also need to make cups accept IPP connections from other machines if it doesn't already; if you can't connect to the printer via IPP, add an Allow line to your /etc/cups/cupsd.conf in the appropriate section, such as (for a LAN in the 192.168.0.* range):

<Location />
Order Deny,Allow
Deny From All
Allow From 127.0.0.1
Allow From 192.168.0.*
</Location>

Many thanks to Colin Stewart's page at owlfish.com for the instructions.

Now, Some keywords, for google's benefit: linux, cups, samba, windows, windows XP, print, printer, printing, HP, Hewlett Packard, 3600, deskjet, raw, IPP. That ought to do it. If you got this far, congratulations :)

I found that printing via IPP was faster to start and a bit more reliable. When printing via samba it used to choke occasionally, requiring me to reset the printer; via IPP, I haven't had that problem at all. YMMV, of course.

Kevin Rudd: "Family First does not own God"

2004-11-10T09:26:00.000+10:30

You tell em, Kevin!

"But we will not for one moment stand idly by while either the Liberals, the Nationals or that Family First assert that God has somehow become a wholly-owned subsidiary of political conservatism in this country"

Amen. Personally, I don't think the libs/nats have any grasp of the morality I see in Jesus' life (but that's a whole other debate).

Who'da thunk I'd be agreeing with a politician eh! I'm feeling all faint. Better go sit down.

In related "Christian Morality" news, Who Made Steve, from Slacktivist, is great. "God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve" indeed. (Via signposts.)

Tree down

2004-11-09T16:10:00.000+10:30

Bit of excitement down the road from me - big tree came down, blocking both lanes of traffic. I feel all, like, civic and stuff because I called the police to get them to stop people from crashing into it.

We managed to get down and snap a few pics before they cut it all up - excuse the crappy quality, they're from my phone. I've cleaned them up a bit in photoshop, but they're still pretty bad. Click for bigger versions.

Long view

It's quite big

Reverse angle

Just enough room for a car to squeeze past (nice car too) - you can see the trunk that snapped on the left side of this pic

Books, books and more books

2004-11-08T15:30:00.000+10:30

Weeee :) I bought 36 books on the weekend, many of which I'm not going to get the time to read for years. Bliss!

I won't publish an exhaustive list (too long, can't be bothered). The summary is:

All ten of the Wheel Of Time series by Robert Jordan
Raymond E Feist's Riftwar & Serpentwar sagas (and related books, like the Krondor: series and the Empire Trilogy)
David Eddings - The Rivan Codex and The Tamuli (single volume edition)
A bunch of Tolkien extras, like Unfinished Tales, The Silmarillion, and other Middle-earth lore & history

So yes, I am a huge nerd. Unapologetically.

Also on the book front, I just started reading Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss. Yes, I'm one of those people who find misplaced apostrophes to be a hangable offence. This book is utterly hilarious.

I am not a free support desk.

2004-11-08T11:02:00.000+10:30

Now, here's something I'm sure all you fellow computer geeks can associate with.

Notice to people I don't know very well:

I Am Not Your Free Computer Support desk.

No, really, I'm not interested that your computer has this little problem where when you click on button X it pops up a thousand ads for viagra. I don't care if it says "no boot disk found" when you boot it up - that's what happens when you buy 10 year old computers from a garage sale.

It is not thrilling to me to try and diagnose your computer with a vague description like "It just gives me this error saying something like disk not found or something". This goes double for people I barely know; if the only time you talk to me is to ask me inane questions about your computer problems, we are not friends, and I do not like you. This especially applies to members of my church who approach me purely to ask about their computers.

I know how doctors must feel when people ask them about my-shoulder-thats-been-playing-up-its-just-a-bit-sore-when-I-do-this. It's really annoying. From now, if you ask me about this kind of thing, you're going to get an answer along the lines of "you should take that to a repair place".

Thus endeth the lesson.

Note to my friends, i.e. those with whom I do things socially and who talk to me about things other than computers: This does not apply as much to you. I am happy to help you out, very occasionally, with earth-shattering computer problems that stop you from handing in your Ph.D thesis which is due in a week and you've been writing for the past 4 years and now your computer has eaten it. This is because we are friends, and friends help each other out. I'll expect the same if you're, say, a nurse, and I seriously injure myself in your presence.

Birthdays, and the forgetting thereof

2004-11-05T16:28:00.000+10:30

If there's one thing gauranteed to make you feel guilty, it's when someone remembers your birthday and then you realise that you either:

Totally forgot theirs; or
Have absolutely no idea when theirs actually is.

So of course, you know exactly how I felt when I got an email from Jason saying such lovely things as

"Despite missing your birthday by a narrow margin, I've deced to issue a retrospective gift"

and

"I know for a fact that you'll drown in your own spunk as soon as you receive it"

and even

"it's coming from The Netherlands (ISN'T DAT VEIRD!!?!)."

So thanks, Jason, for making me all guilty and embarrassed ;)

No, I'm kidding. The anticipation is killing me now though! What could it be that I've always wanted that could come from The Netherlands¹?! I mean, that's like, in Europe apparently! I just hope it gets here without the AFP tearing me a new one.

Not to be confused with the Nether Regions, obviously. Totally different.

Godparents

2004-11-04T14:15:00.000+10:30

So after all that whining earlier, time for a positive post!

Sarah and I were asked by a couple of friends of ours (Kirrilie and Matt) if we'd be godparents to their new baby Reilly. I've got no idea what that means exactly - the church I've always been a part of doesn't do the infant-baptism-godparent thing - but it's exciting! I'm looking forward to it, whatever it will mean. Also, it's nice to be asked :)

What a cult the president is

2004-11-04T10:06:00.000+10:30

America, What the hell is wrong with you!

As I suspected, the person I wanted to win - anyone who isn't Dubya - lost, and the world's most dangerous illiterate fool got re-elected. I'm sure as individuals there's lots of rational people in the US, but as a group, they are consistently the stupidest nation in the world. It's bad that they're also the most powerful in militaristic terms. Also, to american christians, Dubya does not display any kind of christian ethics that I can see. But that's a whole other thread.

It mirrors the recent election result here in Australia; right wing tool gets re-elected via a fear and smear campaign. At least in the USA there's a two-term limit for presidents. We've been stuck with Little Johnny for 3 terms now.

How depressing (not that I'm bitter or anything ;) ). I'd say "at least I don't live there" - and that's still partially relevant - but events in the US tend to have a strong effect here in oz (and worldwide - ask the Iraqis), so it seems everyone is lumped with whoever the americans elect. Bah, humbug.

Browser share

2004-11-03T16:57:00.000+10:30

So according to the stats I've got for my site (a free counter from sitemeter.com), about 33% of you are using some kind of mozilla.org product (firefox being the biggest group with 28%). That.s cool.

There's still almost 60% of you that read my blog who are using Internet Explorer! Dammit, haven't I taught you any better! Firefox is about to release version 1.0, which is going to kick more ass even than the current version does. If you're not using it already, get yourselves over to getfirefox.com and download it. It's only about 4.5 mb (that's pretty quick even on a modem), and it's more secure, quicker, and just plain nicer than IE. It imports all your IE settings for you when you install it, so you won't have to worry about losing favourites, passwords, fomr data, anything like that.

(The more astute among you may have noticed that those stats don't quite add up to 100%. Well, apprently I get enough hits from Safari, Netscape 3 (!) and Konqueror to make up 7% of my total. Impressive. While the 30% mozilla thing is pretty cool, I'm hardly a representative sample of the web, given that I've had, er, 318 total visitors since June. My readership is huuuuuge!)

U! S! A! U! S! A!

2004-11-03T16:20:00.000+10:30

This whole USA presidential election stuff is kinda exciting - you can track it in real-time on this page at CNN.

I think George W is a first-grade moron (he prunounces nuclear "nuk-u-lar" - case closed as far as I'm concerned). He's bad for the world and bad for America, so I'm really hoping he gets the ass, but I'm not sure he will. Knowing my luck in elections, he'll be back for another 4 years.

I guess that'll be good for comedy at least.

W is for Whatever

2004-11-03T16:07:00.000+10:30

So yeah, major blog neglect going on from my end, sorry. Lots of stuff to write about - Faithless, Uni, Work, Church, more - and no time to do it. Oh well.

On the news front, my friend Jodey's got a blog now - jodeys.blogspot.com. Check it out.

S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System

2004-10-21T17:52:00.000+09:30

This is very cool.

S⁵ is a slide show format based entirely on XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

That is to say, it does slide presentations in browsers, with just a few CSS and JS files, and one HTML file for the slides themselves. It's like powerpoint, but for your browser!

There's some very cool features for something browser-based, like advancing to the next slide on a bunch of powerpoint-like triggers (space, pagedown, mouseclick), no server required (it's just reading files, no HTTP), and it's free and open. Anyone with any knowledge of HTML should be able to put together a presentation pretty easily - it's just editing HTML source. Hopefully we'll see support from this in things like nvu at some point.

Links:

Jesus vs. Death! Fight!

2004-10-15T14:43:00.000+09:30

Interesting discussion over at philo-sae-phy at the moment. check it out.

Family First vs. Voters

2004-10-04T13:41:00.000+09:30

Just remember, Family First are not associated with the AOG church. Honest^TM.

Are you listening, Family First? We don't mind if you're a christian party, just be honest about it, for goodness sake.

It's life, Gym, but not as we know it

2004-09-29T13:45:00.000+09:30

Sarah and I just went and joined a gym - we've never done anything like this before, it's a little scary. All these cool, like, Gym people everywhere. You know, the sort that don't get intimidated by machines that look vaguely reminiscent of torture devices.

So anyway, we went in to talk to an instructor today and worked out a weights program. She walked us through all the machines (so we don't look like total noobs, only partly) and gave us some advice on what else we could do; she was really helpful and not very intimidating. Only a little bit.

It's like a whole other culture in gyms, it really is. And it's always the people who look like they need it least that you see running on treadmills for hours at a time. Which brings me to another thing, why spend heaps of money to run in one spot in a gym when you could go running outside in the fresh air for nothing? I can see the point of weights machines etc in a gym (you're hardly going to go spend thousands on individual machines for your own house unless you're a ~~crazy~~eccentric rich person), but treadmills, well, go outside and walk! Still, I guess I'm one of those weird people now. Does this mean I should start saying things like "carbos" and "reps"?

Gym people scare me ;-)

112

My weekend - Gooooooooose

2004-09-29T13:40:00.000+09:30

Wow, what a weekend.

Friday night I went to a mate's place with my Xbox and Halo & Project Gotham Racing 2 in tow for a night of Xbox lanning goodness; we got 4 boxes there plus a Super Nintendo, and much excellent gaming was had - highlight was probably the 7-person PGR2 race we had, with different people handicapped based on car selection. Awesome. Oh yeah, and sniping Tim in Halo to beat him 15-14 in the last minute. We ended up going home around 1:30.

Went around to a mate's place for a BBQ lunch on Saturday (yum), then watched my team win the Grand Final; even sweeter because I was in a room of people going for the opposite side. Yay.

Saturday night I went to a Goose gig, again at The Gov - what a wicked gig! They played lots of new stuff (they tell us that the new album is right around the corner, Real Soon Now^TM, Honest). Sad to hear that Damien Steele-Scott (the bass player) is leaving for a while to go tour with another band; who would have thought that a player as talented would be in demand, eh? They seemed to give him lots of solo time this gig as a (temporary) farewell, which suited me just fine :) We were standing pretty close, and the sound sucked from where we were - being right in front of the sub will do that - but it was just great watching excellent musicians do their thing from very close range.

Then on Sunday, had a very relaxing morning and discovered in the arvo that I wasn't in fact playing bass at church that night, which meant another couple of hours of doing whatever I wanted. Nice. Church was good and hanging out with the group afterwards was fun too.

Overall, a bloody fantastic relaxing weekend. Nice way to unwind after a working week.

Uncle the third!

2004-09-22T17:07:00.000+09:30

My next-oldest brother and his long-term partner just told us last night that they're expecting a baby! Fantastic, I'm heaps excited :) So I'm going to be an uncle x3.

No word as to sex or anything (if they know, which I'm guessing they don't). It's due around Feb 21st 2005.

WOOHOO!

Christian-Muslim dialogue

2004-09-20T13:00:00.000+09:30

Sarah and I went to a Christian-Muslim dialogue meeting on Saturday morning (in fact, we were two of the four guest speakers). It was great! I'm one of those weirdo pinko commy liberal christians who doesn't believe that everyone following a different religion is Da Debil, and I've always been curious about Islam, having heard that a lot of its basic teaching is very similar to Christianity. I discovered that a lot of the history of Islam is the same as the history of Christianity, and the core of Islam is like the core of christianity, all about peace and respect.

I had a lot of fun talking with some Muslim people, asking some basic questions, and Sarah discovered that one of the other people who spoke there studies at the same campus as she does, so they're going to get together for coffee etc. I picked up some literature on Islam, and it was great to meet some young Muslims (well, as much as I count as being "young" any more).

One very cool thing I learnt: Sumeja said there's a passage in the Qu'ran¹that says something along the lines of "Before you judge your brother, make 72 excuses for what he has done". Remind you of "'How many times should I forgive?...' 'As many as seventy times seven.'"?

Apparently that's the accepted way of writing it, judging by the Islam literature that was there; "Koran" is so 1999, evidently.

Faithless are coming!

2004-09-17T14:27:00.000+09:30

Wee! Got my tickets to see Faithless play at the thebby theatre¹ yesterday. Bring on Oct 15th, only 28 sleeps to go :)

For you non-Adelaideans, that's "the THEBarton Theatre", not "The Barton Theatre". Nothing says "I'm not from Adelaide" quicker than saying the second version.

Jurassic 5 roadtrip

2004-09-12T14:25:00.000+09:30

A few weeks ago (6, actually), me and a couple of mates (Steve & Glen) headed off at an ungodly hour of the morning over to Melbourne to see the totally awesome Jurassic 5 play at the Prince of Wales hotel.

We drove over on a Thursday (29/07/2004), arrived at Steve's sister's place (where we were staying) around 3:30pm or so, and headed off to the gig on Thursday night. The gig itself was absolutely sensational - I'd go so far as to say it was one of my favourite live shows of all time. The 4 MCs were amazing, and the 2 DJs were heaps talented - they did a DJ-only break in the middle of the set that featured Cut Chemist laying down the beats and scratches and Nu-Mark playing a variety of different instruments - turntables, live drums and a little sample-triggering thing - and the result was great fun to watch and very funky. The whole set was very tight, they'd move from song to song really quickly (often blending 3 or 4 together with no breaks), and the 4 MCs really got the crowd jumping (literally). Excellent gig all round.

Friday was spent doing a little bit of work (met with one of our clients in Melbourne who I hadn't had a chance to meet face to face with yet) and just hanging around the place. I caught up with Saemon and Casey for tea on Friday night (it was just great to see those guys again), then on Saturday during the day we went to IKEA (fun, but I got sick of it pretty quickly). Saturday night we went to watch Port Adelaide play Essendon at the Telstra Dome (Port lost after a very shonky 2nd quarter :( ). Sunday morning we left relatively early again and got home after some very directions through the backroads of the Adelaide hills from Glen.

All round, a very relaxing and fun extended-weekend road trip. I missed Sarah, but that was the only down point really. Steve's sister and brother-in-law's house was awesome! The public transport in Melbourne rocks compared to Adelaide. Wow, I can't believe this was a month and a half ago, it feels like yesterday.

The details of my life are quite inconsequential

2004-09-12T13:53:00.000+09:30

...Or so it would seem from the stuff I post about in here. It seems I always post inconsequential crap, and any of the important/significant things that happen get totally overlooked, like the Melbourne J5 roadtrip, the recent blitz of migration work, things like that.

I guess in a way that's kinda the point of a blog, but mine's getting ridiculous.

So here's my resolution: I'm going to blog the more significant things as well as the funny stuff. Also, I really should post more (We'll see how that one goes).

google juice

2004-08-26T23:14:00.000+09:30

I just feel the need to point out that I'm the number 1 result on google for "evil hax0rs".

That is all.

Why I Suck. Also, Gmail Invites!

2004-08-26T10:06:00.000+09:30

Yeah, I know, no posts for ages (there's been more posts saying "sorry, no posts" than there have been actual posts in recent weeks). Work sucks, I'm stupidly busy trying to get an under-prepared and under-tested website live, there's just been no time for blogging. Once the current storm blows over there'll be posts, I promise.

In unrelated news, I've got a couple of Gmail invites to give away; first people to comment will get em.

Postgres - GRANT on all tables in a DB/Schema

2004-08-04T12:22:00.000+09:30

So I was trying to figure out a way to grant all permissions on a postgres DB to a certain user, but the (seemingly) obvious grant all on database foo to bar didn't result in the desired select/update/insert permissions being set.

A lengthy google later and some poking around in groups.google.com found me this thread that gave me a nice easy query to get the statements I wanted, and in the interests of documenting findings (and so that I can find this tip again later when I forget it) I'm posting it here:

select 'grant all on '||schemaname||'.'||tablename||' to bar;' from pg_tables where schemaname in ('baz', 'quux') order by schemaname, tablename;

The link to that thread has other queries for views, sequences & functions. Nice work, John Sidney-Woollett, whoever you are.

So much to blog about...

2004-08-04T11:40:00.000+09:30

...so little time. I'm heaps busy with work and uni at the moment, so I've got bugger all time to post, but I'm queueing up quite a few posts in my head. More updates coming soon, I promise.

(This post is obviously a note to the huge amount of readers I have - the ones who all hang on my every word, and live for my next blog post. Or not.)

mondegreen?1

2004-07-23T10:27:00.000+09:30

So I'm a bit of a fan of enigma (at least, I loved the first three albums - MCMXC AD, The Cross of Changes and Le Roi Est Mort, Vive Le Roi were pretty good, The Screen Behind The Mirror was pretty bad, and I haven't heard the new one yet.)

So anyway, I'm listening to The Child In Us from Le Roi Est Mort, Vive Le Roi², and there's a lyric that I keep hearing as:

You were the one
You were the reindeer welder's son

What a mental image. I can just see the scene in the little Scandinavian village:

- Where are you going, Dad?
- I'm off to the reindeer welding fields, son. That's my job, see, I weld reindeers.
- When will you be back, Dad?
- When all the reindeer are welded, son, and not a minute before.

That of course begs the question of how you would weld a reindeer, anyway. Weld them...together? Weld things to them? Weld their legs to their bodies? The possibilities are endful!

Mondegreen: a mis-heard song lyric.
For those of you who don't remember the French you did in school, that's "The King Is Dead, Long Live The King". For those of you who do remember the French you did in school, like me, I feel sorry for you.
Lost In Translation renders this as "King To is INOPERATIVE, phase of enthusiastic desire the king!". Much more poetic.

iTunes always on top

2004-07-19T20:55:00.000+09:30

I use iTunes as my primary music player on my winXP system. I used to use Winamp, and I still do use winamp when I'm on the road with my laptop, for the Flextouch plugin. I switched to iTunes because of the ease of use and the awesome playlist & song management.

About the only thing I missed from Winamp is the Always On Top mode - I used to have it sitting at the top of my screen, taking up the unused space in the title bar between the actual window title and the minimise/restore/close buttons. I got over having iTunes like this (it's just not possible) but I still wanted it to stay on top of my other windows in mini-player mode. Well, I finally got around to googling for a solution, and what do you know, one of the top links was to the iTunes On Top plugin. Worked straight away.

Wish I'd bothered googling for it earlier.

Evil Hax0rs!

2004-07-15T10:59:00.000+09:30

Pure unadulterated gold.

Mozilla: Features of the future

2004-07-12T09:14:00.000+09:30

Robert Accettura has a great post up about ideas for the future of mozilla products. He mentions some excellent ideas for new features in mozilla/thunderbird/firefox, but the two that really resonated with me were:

Patch updates: Make updating releases simpler (please!). This is a particular thing of mine, updating firefox and thunderbird releases is a pain. Firefox has a great new import feature in the installer that migrates pretty much everything across from other browsers; what it needs now is an installer that intelligently updates the parts of the program that have changed from the last release, or at worst, automatically deletes the old installed files from the firefox folder and installs the new version to the same location.
Calendar Integration: Self explanatory (Rob's comment was "This will be big. Really big", and I agree. Big). This is, in my opinion, the major barrier to thunderbird being a true Outlook replacement. The mozilla calendar is reasonably good for a pre-release; there's some niggling bugs still, and it'd be nice to see some polish work done on it, but it's certainly usable in its current state. I'd also like to see calendar given a higher priority on the Mozilla radar, get more people working on it.

I'd also like to see more integration between Firefox & Thunderbird if they are both installed and both are the default clients for their respective areas. Integration such as "open in new tab" in thunderbird (as Rob mentions), things like that. I'm not exactly sure what I want to see, but mozilla-the-suite feels like one product; I guess I'd like to see Firefox+Thunderbird "feel" a bit more like that, or something. Wow, could I get any more vague? ;-)

A Better Multi-Select Widget

2004-07-09T12:18:00.000+09:30

This is very cool:

Uzilla, LLC presents a more usable way of allowing users to select multiple responses from a set of 5-40 options on the web.

In a recent usability test with non-information workers in an intranet application, we discovered that none of the users successfully selected multiple responses when presented in a HTML select element with multiple selection enabled. They simply did not know that control click existed.

This is definitely true in my experience as well - non-expert users never know to ctrl+click on select elements, and even when there's a clear message they don't do it.

The method they present uses a series of checkboxes that hide and display a summary of what was chosen. Checkboxes are definitely a better way to do multiple selects - maybe because people are more used to this paradigm in filling out pen-and-paper forms?

I'm not sure how well this method would scale to, say, 50 or 100 elements; maybe you could sort them alphabetically and break them up into groups? that would make the form processing scripts harder to write tho. But, that's a small price to pay for a more usable multiple-select mechanism, I reckon.

Check it out here.

DJ Pico

2004-07-08T11:11:00.000+09:30

My oldest brother Andrew put me onto this guy: DJ Pico, from slovakia or something (not that it's important where he comes from). The cool thing is, he offers full-length trance & progressive house mixes for download from His website, and they're really good. You need to email him to ask for access to his more recent stuff (details are on the website), but it's worth it. Check it out.

Brain Dump #2

2004-07-05T22:15:00.000+09:30

How slack am I! I haven't posted for ages. When Jason tells me off, it's definitely time to extract the digit, as the saying goes. So, time for another brain dump, methinks!

While the cat's away, the mouse will play (xbox). Sarah's away with a bunch of friends in the Gold Coast until next Monday night; She left Sunday morning, and I miss her already. Why is so much of my happiness dependant on this one person? Anyway, The only difference for me so far, the aforementioned "mouse", has been that I'm somewhat lonelier, and thet I'm playing more xbox games.
Creamy xbox goodness. Speaking of xbox, I've just bought a couple of new games - GTA III and Max Payne. Haven't played much of Max Payne, but I've played through the demo on the PC and I liked it. Have played maybe an hour of GTA III, and am really enjoying it so far (I got into GTA 1 & 2 on PC, they were great. The amount of freedom to just do whatever you wanted was fantastic). Also, I've borrowed a heap of games from a friend; playing Splinter Cell - Pandorra Tomorrow a fair bit. It's fun even though I'm crap at it.
Farewell Firefly, we hardly knew ye. After reading post after post on other blogs etc, I finally got around to downloading and watching the whole season of Firefly, Joss Whedon's sci-fi TV series (and soon to be movie). Wow! it was really good, and I now join the ranks of people disappointed at the dubmness of Fox for cancelling the series. So yeah, give it a watch if you're a sci-fi fan; It's a bit weird at first, with its mixture of westerns and sci-fi, but it's got great characters and good stories.
On the road again. Steve and I are possibly looking at getting cars via our company, as a way of minimising tax; to this end, while Sarah was in her final exam on Saturday afternoon, we went down to United Motors and test drove a Liberty GT Premium (yummy) and a Impreza WRX. Both were awesome, but in different ways - the liberty was very refined, with the leather seats etc, and very quick (the sports mode auto was lots of fun), while the WRX was just pure quickness moulded into a car-shape. The WRX had a fairly terrible interior, which was a little surprising. It was just so much fun to drive though - when that turbo kicks in at 3000 rpm and you jump forward, it's just magic :) But, given the choice between the two, I'd probably get the Liberty; it was just a nicer all-round car to drive, and a lot more managable.
The quest for decent reception. So Dad and I have embarked on a quest to improve the crappy TV reception we get at our end of the house. Dad moved the formerly-unused second aerial to above our rooms, and we bought 30m of coax cable and some miscellaneous bits (splitter, terminators), and set about wiring up the antenna for some fuzz-free viewing. Well, of course nothing went to plan; first, we couldn't get the drill through the frame of my window - wasn't long enough - then when we finally did get all the cable up and installed, it made absolutely no difference (may actually have been worse). Bugger. So back to the drawing board; Dad wants to raise the aerial up a meter or so and/or get a new aerial, which would probably help. Then, after talking to a Grant at church (who does this kind of stuff for a living), I discovered that I'd totally stuffed up all the coax joins. I'd ignored the shielding and just stripped the cable back to the core wire for each join, which according to Grant stuffs up the...virtual ground plane, or something. I didn't really understand his technical explanation, but I did understand that I'd screwed up all the joins. So now, lucky me, I get to re-do all 9 joins in the cable. Yay.

Well, there it is, a bit of a long one. Hope that makes up for a little bit of my slackness over the last...wow, almost a fortnight. Didn't think it'd been that long ;-)

O Hotmail, where art thou?

2004-06-24T13:37:00.000+09:30

(Via Chris' Corner)

So apparently, Hotmail are going to up their storage to 250mb. It seems everyone is jumping on the lots-of-storage-for-free-email bandwagon now.

Rediff (an Indian portal) recently Upped their offering to 1Gb
Hotmail are about to up theirs to 250mb (2Gb if you've got a paid account - up from 10mb for a paid account, which raises the question of why would you bother to pay for 10mb of email space)
Yahoo mail have upped theirs to 100mb (not sure what it used to be)

It had to happen I guess - businesses have to at least try and protect themselves from entry of new competitors, even if it's in a domain that makes them no money (at least directly). Or do they? is it just a reflex action to protect your turf, even when you're not making any money from it? Oh, wait, they are making mondy off the advertising. It's always about the marketing.

One of the interesting things I read in that cnet article:

Separately, Microsoft said it will offer free antivirus software to scan e-mails before they appear in a user's in-box.

That should get AV providers' knickers in a twist.

we won volleyball!

2004-06-24T09:21:00.000+09:30

Oh my goodness. For the first time since I've been playing with this team - 2 years - We won 2 sets in a row. we lost the third set, but that means WE WON!!!. Yay us. First set was a thriller - we came back from 21-16 down to win 25-27, and we won the second one a bit easier (came back from 20-17 down to win 21-25, I believe.) And it was against the second-placed team on the ladder :)

Goose gig

2004-06-23T10:02:00.000+09:30

So last Saturday night, went to see Goose play, again at The Gov (you'd think that was the only live music venue in Adelaide, wouldn't you? You'd almost be right).For those unfamiliar with the work of Goose, they're a local 15-piece funk/soul band - 7-piece brass section, big rhythm section (couple of guitar players, couple of keyboard players, drums, bass, percussion), led by the very nice Dave Palmer. They rule.

It was an absolutely sensational gig - they played a solid 90-100 minute set I reckon, with a 15 minute encore. All of my favourite tracks from the album got a run, along with some great new songs, and as always the band were totally kicking ass - Damien Steele-Scott is one of my favourite bass players I reckon. I'd love to have a tenth of his ability!

I was going to list all the tracks on my mobile and then blog a whole set list, but the batteries on the phone ran out and i was too busy having a great time :)

My mum & dad even came, and they both loved it as well. See, Goose, bringing families together. awwwww.

So if you're in Australia and you're reading this, keep an eye out for when Goose are playing near you (Gig Guide here), and check them out. They totally rock.

Exam tomorrow

2004-06-20T11:43:00.000+09:30

Exam tomorrow. Nervous.

Update: Exam went well - it was a little bit easier than I expected. I'll be fairly disappointed if I fail it.

XUL file manager...cool

2004-06-18T16:29:00.000+09:30

(from MozTips Reloaded!)

This rocks! The people at anisolution.com have come up with a remote file browser that looks virtually identical to windows explorer written in XUL. So it runs on most major platforms client-side, and I believe the server-side has been ported to PHP (from ASP initially), so it'll run on almost any platform as well.

I haven't tried it out, but the screenshots look awesome. It's even got in-place text editing. Very cool.

Mozilla 1.7 Released

2004-06-18T16:03:00.000+09:30

In the third release from mozilla.org in a very short time, Mozilla (the suite) 1.7 has been released! New stuff includes:

Talkback (crash reports) for all platforms
option to prevent one of my pet hates - sites that use JavaScript to block the browser's context menu (hate hate hate)
New file icons for windows (nice)
Basic FTP upload support
New "show passwords" mode in Password Manager (displays your saved passwords - what a lifesaver)
IMAP IDLE support and Palm Sync improvements
Support for relative paths for mail folders in prefs.js. Yay. (Makes it easier to copy profiles around without needing manuallu hack around with prefs.js)
support for the onbeforeunload event (i.e. an event that fires when you close your browser window). I can see this being very handy in web app development, as you can now alert users about potential data-loss when closing a window or leaving an HTML page.
Various performance and memory improvements, as always
Read about all the new stuffand more in the release notes

I haven't used this release at all, because I'm using Firefox and Thunderbird, but I might install it just to see how the suite is coming along. I used to use the suite exclusively until Firefox 0.7ish (then called firebird) and thunderbird 0.4ish. It was my first mozilla love ;)

1.7 is slated to become the new stable branch (meaning it will stay feature- and API-frozen for the forseeable future, with major bug & security fixes backported from the main mozilla trunk. This is good; the previous stable branch was 1.4 (and 1.0 before that), which was getting a little long in the tooth and was missing out on some of the great new things the trunk had picked up. Nice to see the mozilla suite project moving along still, even though all the focus nowadays seems to be on the standalone apps (Firefox/Thunderbird/Sunbird/Nvu).

This is my last mozilla-whoring post for a while, I promise ;)

Thunderbird 0.7 released

2004-06-17T12:28:00.000+09:30

Thunderbird 0.7 is out! New stuff includes:

New Themes and Extension Manager (similar to firefox; includes automated updating)
New interface for viewing vCards
New Profile Manager - supports running from a USB device
Color quoting for quoted message parts
New interface for creating multiple identities per account
Smaller download - The Windows Installer is now only 5.9MB.
Improved Performance
Talkback
Plenty of bugfixes and more in the release notes

So what are you waiting for? Grab the windows version from here, or other versions (Linux, MacOSX) from the FTP directory.

Thunderbird is the standalone version of the mozilla suite's email client, plus improvements. It goes along with Firefox (Browser) and Nvu (HTML Editor - i.e. Composer). It's got a good interface and excellent spam filtering built-in, and it's significantly less prone to automated viruses than other email clients. It's a perfect replacement for Outlook Express.

Reclaim Your Inbox!

volleyball

2004-06-17T09:00:00.000+09:30

Played volleyball last night (in the local friendly league). We won the first set! yay! This is a big deal, because we lose every week. But it's a lot of fun :) Last season we managed to win 1 set out of all the games we played (that's not an exaggeration), and this season we've won a few (probably 4 or 5), so we're improving!

Only 6 of us turned up this week, which meant we had no sub - which turned out to be a good thing, as you get into a bit of a groove, being on the court the whole time. of course, I was stuffed by the end of it.

We won the first set 25-19ish, we lost the second set 25-17ish, lost the 3rd set 25-13 (after a shocker of a start, 18-1), and we lost the 4th set 14-12ish (we didn't finish that set because of time).

Go the mighty Mixed Yellow! (Yes, that is our team name. No, I didn't have anything to do with choosing it. Yes, I do want to change it ;-) )

Working Hard, Hardly Working

2004-06-16T14:36:00.000+09:30

Note to self: read this article again next time I get a non-self-employed job.

Firefox 0.9 is out, update.mozilla.org opens

2004-06-16T11:25:00.000+09:30

Mozilla Firefox 0.9 is out! New stuff includes:

New Extension & Theme Managers (with automated updating)
Comprehensive migration of bookmarks, cookies, preferences from other browsers (IE, Mozilla, Netscape, older versions of Firefox)
New default theme (Winstripe, replacing Qute, after a little bit of a developer bust-up)
The Windows Installer version is just 4.7mb! That's even bearable on dialup :)
Lots of bugfixes
Read all the improvements in the release notes

You can grab the windows version from here , or versions for other systems from the FTP directory. Get it now! It rocks. So many benefits over IE.

On the extensions/themes front, update.mozilla.org has opened. I'm not a fan of the look of the site, but having a central place for extensions & themes can only be a good thing. If only they could just move the Texturizer.net extensions page across to u.m.o I'd be happy ;-)

0.9 seems like a great release - 0.8 was fantastic (and has been my default browser for a while now), so if it's any kind of improvement it can only be great. looking forward to 1.0 :)

I'm not 100% convinced about the new default theme (winstripe), I think the old default theme (Qute) was better for the windows platform. It just...fitted in better, or something. I can understand wanting to have one theme for all platforms, I just don't think it's actually necessary (or even desirable). The 3 platforms (OSX, windows, linux) are different enough in their visuals that having a different theme for each that fits in with the OS is a good thing IMO. But what do I know, I'm just a user ;-)

Lost In Translation

2004-06-15T12:32:00.000+09:30

This is absolutely wonderful: Lost In Translation.

As of September 2003, translation software is almost good enough to turn grammatically correct, slang-free text from one language into grammatically incorrect, barely readable approximations in another.

It drags english through about 7 different translations and back to english, producing such gems as

"Compire of the tin a horse l'eau, but you cannot instruiz he he drunk it" ("You can lead a horse to water, but you can not make him drink")
"the dog, this scorteccia, does not bite" ("The dog that barks does not bite"), and
"a bird in how much he evaluates any two in the value of shrubs" ("a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush").

Hilarious :)

Idea Of North gig

2004-06-11T10:38:00.000+09:30

A bunch of us¹ went to see The Idea Of North play (sing?) at The Gov last night. What a great gig - they are truly amazing singers, and it was a very fun night.

They started out with a song I can't remember, then played one of my favourites - But Not For Me - followed by Sarah's favourite of theirs (an amazing arrangement of It's Alright With Me). Good start.

I didn't write down a full set list or anything, but some of the highlights were a stunning rendition of Sting's Fields of Gold, an absolutely beautiful His Eye Is On The Sparrow, an amusing version of Singin' A Capella (including some A Capella Anonymous-style confessions), and a bit of crowd participation with everyone singing harmonies to their version of Steve wonders Isn't She Lovely.

They obviously loved what they were doing, they were all very comfortable on stage and with each other. It was lots of fun to watch. They've all got stunning voices as well, of course; Naomi Crellin (alto) has one of those wonderful dark female voices, Trish Delaney-Brown has a stunningly clear soprano, Nick Begbie (tenor) has a fantastic voice (perfect for pop) and an amazing range, and Andrew Piper (Bass) is simpy incredible, great voice and very impressive vocal percussion at the same time. That Nick Begbie's a funny bugger.

The evening was helped by the fact that The Gov is a great venue. We were standing up the back of the room - most of which was occupied by people sitting at tables where they had had dinner - and some very nice staff members went and carried a bunch of chairs in for everyone standing up at the back to sit on. Friendly.

This was the first time I've seen Idea Of North live, and I'm sure it won't be the last. A totally fantastic evening. (I'm running out of superlatives, can you tell?)

1. Andrew, Jodey, Elisa, Sarah, Sarah, and myself. Hi guys.

Woohoo!

2004-06-10T16:53:00.000+09:30

Finished my assignments for uni today. Finally.

Now for the exam on the 21st, and then 5 weeks of freedom. Hell yeah.

Getting a little bit shitted off at uni at the moment. The only thing keeping me there is "it'll be worth it when I finish" and sheer stubbornness (stubbornity?) - there's no way I'm giving up now when I'm this close and after all this effort. Stupid uni. Stupid degree.

The silence is deafening...

2004-06-08T17:32:00.000+09:30

Hmm, haven't posted in a while. There's a draft post coming Real Soon Now, I promise.

To entertain you in the meantime, you can read all about Jason's exciting adventures in lundun ing-uh-lund!

Motivation

2004-06-04T18:19:00.000+09:30

Hmm. Got paid for the last fortnight on Wednesday, and really felt the impact of spending so much time on uni. Steve and I have determined that we're going to draw salary based on the billable hours we do - in stark contrast to our previous jobs, where nothing we did has seemingly any impact on anything - because it's likely that Steve will have a fair amount more time to put into Iugo than I will, being single¹ and living alone and all. I've been heaps busy, it's just that spending all that time on uni and not work has hit home.

On the positive side, talk about motivation to get things done! I've had two very productive days yesterday and today (apart from going into town for lunch with Steve and Glen). I like being productive, I just wish I could be like that all the time :)

[1] At least, as far as I know...want to correct me, Steve?

Phones

2004-06-04T18:10:00.000+09:30

So Sarah just got a new phone from 3, and I'm heaps jealous. It's an LG (not that you'll find it on their site, for some reason), and it rocks the house. Very very cool. It came with a USB data cable too, which I was pleasantly surprised by, that's the kind of thing that's normally a $40 extra. Nice.

Still, Steve and I should be getting new mobiles pretty soon, so I won't have to be jealous for long. Those Nokia 6230s look rad.

badgers

2004-06-03T09:07:00.000+09:30

Badger Badger Badger Badger Badger Badger Badger Badger Badger Badger Badger Badger

Also, It's the badgerphone!

Almost there!

2004-05-31T10:53:00.000+09:30

Well, I finally got my sections of my uni assignment done. Well, those that were possible, at least; I can't write the summary 'til I've read the rest of it, and I don't have everyone else's sections yet. When the person compiling the doc has done it all apart from my summary, she's going to send it to me and I'll do the summary then.

Talk about a weight off my shoulders! It's only temporary - I've still got the final presentation to worry about, and the summary section, and the exam - but it's damn nice to be able to spend some time with my fantastic wife for a little while :)

(In case you're thinking "I thought he was running a business, not studying", I'm actually finishing my Bachelor of Information Technology at Flinders Uni; I'm just doing one topic at a time until it's done - I discovered the hard way that if I try to work full-time and study anything more than one topic, I fail everything miserably. I should be finished my degree by the end of this year, all going to plan. Can't wait :) )

Speakers

2004-05-28T18:47:00.000+09:30

So I (finally) got myself a semi-decent set of speakers for the computer: a second-hand set of Altec Lansing Select 4100s (reviews here and here). Very cool looking, and they seem to sound fairly good. Managed to pick them up for $A130 as well, which I'm happy with, considering they're $A330ish new.

The 4.1 thing is a little pointless at this stage as I'm only driving them from my laptop's stereo output, but they have nice little switch on them to duplicate the front channels to the rear chennels, so you can get sound coming out of all 4 speakers with only stereo input. Lovely.

What I want to know is, how do game systems like the XBox claim to have Dolby 5.1 output when they've only got stereo RCA outputs? stereo != 5.1, last time I checked.

But I digress. The speakers are very cool, and I suspect I'm driving Sarah nuts with the sub already.

ping

2004-05-27T12:08:00.000+09:30

Does anyone actually read this crap I post? Please leave a comment if you do - you can post anonymously, even though blogger.com tries to hide this...

Seven tricks that Web users don't know

2004-05-26T21:09:00.000+09:30

This article seems to be doing the mozilla blog rounds currently: Carolyn Snyder's Seven tricks that Web users don't know (via Adot's Notblog, via Susan's 2020 Hindsight, via PapaScott, via Pepilog).

It's definitely an interesting article, and highlights something I've been aware of for a while:

average (that is, non-technical) users interact with computers very differently to the way the people I generally know (mostly techies like myself) interact with computers.

Non-technical users interactions tend to be a lot less complex than techies; where a techie might open a link in a new window (or tab if you're a mozilla person), leave their email client running most of the time, have an IM client in the system tray, and be listening to music, the average non-technical user is often baffled by task switching, and has no concept that something like clicking on a URL in an email will open a new browser, because they are not aware that email and web browsing are seperate things (for that matter, they probably wouldn't know what a browser actually is - "I use the big blue E, is that what you mean?").

This is something learnt through personal experience; I've done some ISP tech support at the last place I worked (people's general ignorance in that area was something I learnt not to be surprised at), and I've done some private tutoring stuff with older people - teaching how to read and send email, go to a web site, use google to search, simple things like that.

One interesting thing from the article:

The evidence cited in this article comes from several usability studies I conducted in 2000...

The article was published on June 1^st 2001 - almost 3 years ago. It would be interesting to see if the average non-technical user's knowledge has increased with the increased penetration of the internet into everyday life over the last 3 years.

iugo

2004-05-24T21:35:00.000+09:30

So if you're wondering what it is I do, I currently half-own and operate a business with another friend from my old work: Iugo Pty Ltd. (The website's pretty bare right now, as neither of us have got enough time to put anything proper up. Proper content is coming Real Soon Now, honest).

We do web development work for a couple of clients. At the moment it's absolutely flat out - we only started doing this full-time a couple of months ago, and already we've got more work than we can handle. We can't employ anyone yet, for a bunch of reasons, not the least of which is we're both working from our respective homes at present so there's nowhere to put an employee ;-) So we're looking for contractors to cope with some of our workload. If you know of a contractor with proven PHP-based Database-driven web development skills, please leave a comment, we're looking to hand off some of our load to a sub-contractor ASAP :)

(In case you're wondering, we will be looking at sample code from prospective sub-contractors. We got burnt too many times at my old work hiring people who looked like they could do the job, said they could do the job, then produced rubbish code. It always takes so much longer to correct code like that then it does to just do it yourself. annoying.)

I bitch and moan about it being so busy at the moment, but really, it's way better having a bit too much work when working as a private contractor than having no work at all. I'll try not to bitch and moan too much ;-)

gemal.dk's Mozilla Blogupdates

2004-05-22T13:01:00.000+09:30

I'm a follower of the mozilla project, having tried it in the M18 days and using it as my primary browser since about 0.9, and now using firefox and thunderbird for web & email. I love it as a product (despite its memory hunger), and I love that it's open source. I've even contributed in a minor way to the mozgest extension :)

So anyway, keeping up with developer blogs is one of the many good features of open source IMO¹; and the best way to keep up with mozilla blogs is gemal.dk's Mozilla Blogupdates. If you're a mozilla geek like me, it's very handy.

[1] Yeah, I know, it's not just OS developers that blog about their projects. But it is definitely more prevalent in the OS world than in the closed source world.

Day off

2004-05-21T14:40:00.000+09:30

I just spent the last half of yesterday and the first half of today having some time off, after working 32ish hours working over the last long weekend. Boy did I need it, I hadn't realised just how worn out I was feeling from working so much. This whole starting your own business thing is bloody difficult!

Still, it feels heaps better doing it for yourself than doing it for someone else, especially when the someone else I had been working for for the last 4 years was a bit of an idiot, to put it mildly. (I have no idea how I managed to last 4 years, hehehe).

It was so good to actually be able to spend some time with Sarah, We'd both been missing that a lot.

The Idea Of North

2004-05-16T02:31:00.000+09:30

I totally love The Idea Of North. A cappella jazz music at its finest. If they're ever playing in your area, and you're into a capella (or just into jazz at all), you have to go see them. In the words of Molly Meldrum, Do Yourselves A Favour.

Oh yeah, and a big thanks to Jason for introducing them to my listening palette.

Oooh, new CD due soon! exciting!

Would it be out of place to mention that a friend of mine has a bit of a thing for the alto, Naomi Crellin? Yeah, probably would. Better not mention it then. sshhhhh.

Brain Dump #1

2004-05-15T16:29:00.000+09:30

I'm currently sitting in my study at home, no-one else around, desperately trying to get motivated to do some work, and failing miserably. This blog is my latest act of procrastination (an occupation which I have elevated to an art form). So here's a brain dump, in no particular order:

I'm stuck at home this long weekend while my wife (the lovely and amazing Sarah, who I'm sure will get a lof of airplay on this blog) is off camping with people from my church. I'm trying to get some work done - working for yourself can be a bitch, and in my case, the boss is a bastard - and I'm struggling. weekends shouldn't be for work, dammit! And I miss having Sarah around a huge amount.
Helping me stay inside is the fact that it's cold and wet here in Adelaide at the moment, but I'm warm inside after building up a sensational fire. If I had a digital camera, I'd take a picture or two to share, but I don't, so I can't.
My friend Jason has just recently gone to live in England for the near future. He started at the place I used to work at a year or so ago and fast became the sanity check for me in that place; we both hated it immensely, and we would escape fairly regularly, for lunch and rambling conversation. I'm missing working with him, and I'm pretty shit at friendships where they move somewhere else; I just know we won't talk to each other heaps while he's living in england, and at the moment, that's making me a bit sad :(
I'm looking for a cheap set of speakers to use with my computer, primarily to listen to music. I've got some Semi-decent headphones, but I get a bit sick of having headphones on if I don't need to (i.e. if there's no-one else around). I'm either thinking I'll buy some cheap second-hand multimedia speakers, or some cheap-ish second-hand HiFi gear (an old amp and a couple of speakers). Leaning towards the old-amp-and-speakers idea. What I really want is The Loudspeaker Kit's M4 Mini Monitors and an amp to match, but $A200 is a bit more than I've got at the moment ;-)

Well, there's the first brain dump of this blog. What a ramble. Fun.

Profile display

2004-05-15T16:17:00.000+09:30

Does anyone know how to turn specific profile fields off? Specifically, I want to not display Astrological Sign & Born in the Year Of. Looking through the blogger help now, but can't find anything useful for me.

Frist Post!!!!1

2004-05-15T15:18:00.000+09:30

So, like every other blogger in the world, I'm going to do a "This-is-my-first-post-I-finally-got-myself-a-blog" post.

So I finally got myself a blog! This is my first post.

Glad that's out of the way.