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Wed, 07 Jun 2006 (... well, I like to think I can!) So, on a completely unimportant website that I frequent, I've ended up being a moderator on the site forums. Something about knowing *nix and PHP apparently.. Anyway, I've always had a beef with the way english is used and abused on the Internet. You know, all those abbreviations, and incorrect word usage that just seethes "I'm an illiterate prick." U, 2, ur, da, r, etc etc.. and also the so incredibly common misuse of your/you're and they're/there/their. GAH. Yech. Anyway, this particular site is no exception. Some of the users have appalling habits. (Ab)using my powers as a moderator, I've started to demand some care and attention to the most glaring errors - mainly towards my most intense pet peeve, misuse of "your" and "you're". Looking for a place that describes all this stuff well, I stumbled across this site. I couldn't have said it better. Thank you Sarah D. Bunting! (I especially liked, and agree with this:
) [23:10] [/Random] [permanent link] Fri, 07 Apr 2006Seriously, I'm not just responding to only you Erich.. Anyway, that's an evil thing to post on a Friday (for me). I can see I'll get no work done now. *sigh*. Oh, I found an example of your solution: [21:11] [/Random] [permanent link] Thu, 06 Apr 2006
And now for something completely Clichéd..
Check this out... (As I write this, it's about to tick over the 2,000,000 he's wanting.) I'm not entirely sure what to think.. Not a bet I'd take, I don't think. (Yes, I am a male, but I just couldn't do that...) [08:55] [/Random] [permanent link]
A solution for blocking ssh probers/scanners.
Erich, There's a much easier solution to blocking those ssh scanning bastards... some nice friendly iptables rules! (I forward ssh to an internal system, so this is in the FORWARD chain.. use the INPUT chain otherwise)
So, in the INPUT chain, you wouldn't use -o, and -d would be the IP on your external link.. in this example, ppp0. What it does, is uses the ipt_recent module, tracking connections from a given IP. 3 incoming connections in 60 seconds will cause the remote host to be blocked. Of course, this affects normal logins too, so for known hosts, it pays to insert a rule beforehand that does a -j ACCEPT. I'm enjoyng the very short log entries for a given ssh scanning host in my logcheck mail :). UPDATE 2006/04/07: Whoops...
[08:51] [/Hacking] [permanent link] Mon, 03 Apr 2006So, today, I've just arrived back from Sydney with a few of my fellow LCA 2006 organisers where we'd been attending the annual LCA Ghosts meeting. Next year, as you all know, LCA will be held at UNSW in Sydney, Australia. The venue looks great, and a lot of the ideas the Seven team have in the pipeline sound fantastic. If they pull a couple of them off, then this is going to be a fairly significant turning point in LCA growth. All things considered, this will make LCA 2007 even better than LCA 2006.. if that's even possible :). Raewyn also came along on this little trip, so that she could have a little holiday, and go shopping - also to add some stamps to her passport, she'd never been outside of New Zealand before.. One of her memorable comments was something like "That's really the Sydney Opera House, not just a postcard". She spent some of her time with the wife of one of the other 2006 organisers, who was there just for the shopping. This may not have been a good thing. We didn't get to do a whole lot together, since I was tied up for most of the weekend at Jeff and Pia's place. We did however manage to slip in a visit to see a good friend (bod, for those that know him), a BridgeClimb, a diamond ring, and a wander around the city on Sunday evening. I'd highly recommend the bridge climb, if you can manage to go around dusk, it's fantastic to watch the sunset in the west over the Blue Mountains. We also had a lovely dinner after the climb on Saturday with everyone else at James Squire Brewery down on the King St Wharf. I had the kangaroo - there's something pleasing about eating a national icon :) Yeah, for those of you that read that last paragraph and went "diamond ring?!? Wha?!".. I finally gave in, and proposed to Raewyn on the top of the Sydney harbour bridge. I'm still coming to terms with having a fiancé, rather than just a girlfriend :). For those that are wondering, how do you take the ring up on the bridge, when you can't carry loose items? Well, it turns out it's not uncommon for guys to propose on the bridge.. So the BridgeClimb folk have this thing called an ERD - an Engagement Ring Device. Basically an elastic armband with a ribbon attached. The ring is placed over one side of the ribbon, and the two ends are placed through a small plastic toggle - like the one you have on your sleeping bag cover. When you are up on the bridge, you loosen the toggle, and place the ring on the appropriate finger, hold hands together, and slide the elastic from you to your (now) fiancé. It's a bit hard to describe, but it works quite well. Anyway, This happened underneath what the Aussies call 'Blinky Bill' - the flashing red light on the top of the bridge used as a bit of a warning/navigation aid to aircraft. Our climb group were on the western arch of the bridge awaiting the descent, and the group behind were on the eastern arch after just arriving. Both erupted into applause, and cheering when I went down on one knee... quite an experience! The amusing anecdote of the whole thing was about 3-4 minutes later, as we were descending, Raewyn said "Oh my god, I'm engaged" - it had just sunk in.. At that dinner afterwards? We walked up to join the others, and they erupted into more applause and cheering, in front of the all the other diners.. Bastards. Right, now back to the real topic... The Seven crew really do have this LCA job all sorted out, and Sydney in January 2007 is the place to be.. Hell, even I'm tempted to put in a paper submission this time around - normally I'd try and avoid it! (I need to get back into this blogging thing again, it's so easy to just fall out of the habit when you get busy with other things.. I promise to try harder from now on!) [08:05] [/LCA] [permanent link] Sun, 17 Jul 2005
Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince.
Erm.. yeah, I think I mentioned before that I don't do book reviews, but I couldn't help myself. Despite what appears to me to be a larger proportion of people my age and with my interests thinking the Harry Potter series to be a bit childish, I've found them very entertaining. And a good story line to boot. So, A few weeks ago I dropped by a local bookstore to pre-order a copy - Raewyn and I had an agreement that I would be allowed to read the book first, as she is a significantly faster reader than I, and has a habit of letting plot secrets out before you get to finish it after her.. As such, I spent most of the 26 hours after it was released reading the sixth installment of the series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I decided to use the release as a location for a bit of photography practice with my new 20D..
The young chap in the first image had been waiting at the front of the queue for about 2.5 hours.. not for me! I met a reporter at the store, and we discussed what he'd been chatting to some of the folks in the queue. A good point was raised - the length, complexity, and general tone of story had changed with each successive book to match the capabilities and understanding of the original target audience - Younger teens, who now, 8 years after Harry Potter and The Philosophers Stone graced bookstore shelves, are approaching their early twenties. Now, to the story - I do heartily apologise to anyone who reads past this paragraph - here is your warning: SPOILERS FOLLOW, if you want to read this book, I highly recommend you bog off now... I repeat, SPOILERS FOLLOW. For those that just want to know what happens, in a longwinded and badly constructed sentence, here goes; Harry discovers jealousy, and falls for Ginny Weasley, Ron and Hermione do the courting dance, but neither get to the point of actually admitting fondness to each other, Snape's a traitor, Malfoy wants to be a traitor, Harry learns about Tom Riddle's past, and ultimately begins to understand with the help of Dumbledore, what he has to do to defeat Voldemort, and Dumbledore is killed (by Snape). The story starts of rather slow, and with little intrigue compared to the finale of the previous book. Because of this, I kept thinking "Wow, I'm this far through, what could really happen now that's bad?" (little did I know!). Eventually, things kicked into life, as Harry learnt about Riddle's past with help from private lessons with Dumbledore involving the pensieve. Basically, Voldemort has created six Horcruxes (objects that are used to store a parts of a soul) which must be found and destroyed before Voldemort himself can be killed. One such Horcrux was Riddle's diary that Harry destroyed back in The Chamber of Secrets. After learning of this crucial information, the book comes to a screaming finale as Harry and Dumbledore journey to find and destroy another Horcrux (which turns out to be fake, but that's inconsequential at this point). During the course of the story, Harry becomes more and more convinced that Malfoy is up to no good, but Hermione and Ron are not quite so sure - it turns out he was right, Malfoy had become a Death Eater in his fathers stead, and Voldemort had placed upon him the task of killing Dumbledore. Early in the story, when we are unaware of what the task is, Snape is approached by Malfoy's fearful mother who insists that Snape make an Unbreakable Vow to protect Malfoy, and to carry out the task if he fails - needless to say, he does, since Malfoy appears to not be up to the task. This early meeting with Malfoy's mother, is where we are first introduced to the possibility that Snape may well be a traitor to the Order of the Phoenix. I was finding it hard to believe to start with, but it's been such a recurring theme throughout the entire series that he is suspected by many to not be as faithful as Dumbledore thinks, that it becomes much easier to swallow. Although, this very belief of Dumbledore's, plays a large part in his demise. Sadly, it tarnishes the character somewhat - but thinking back, Dumbledore does admit to Harry that even he makes mistakes. It's a shame that he only realises that his faith in Snape is wrong at the very end. But what about stopping Voldemort acquiring the Philosophers stone you ask? That comes up - At the time, Snape thinks it is only Quirrell after the Stone.. There are other such points, and questions asked of apparent contradictions throughout the story.. All are answered, and quite satisfactorily in my opinion. Anyway, to conclude, I'll state that this is another very good installment from Rowling - She's done well, and I honestly do look forward to the seventh, and I believe final, book in the series. Oh, and who is the Half-Blood Prince? I'm afraid that I am going to leave that one for those that actually read the book! [02:26] [/Random] [permanent link] Thu, 14 Jul 2005(I think this deserves a whole new section in my blog!) So, Yesterday morning, I finally managed to get myself the toy I've wanted for some time - a Canon EOS 20D Digital SLR. I've played with a couple of these really neat devices before (thanks Michael!), and I've had GTE ever since. I'd also played with a 300D in the past, but it would be silly to purchase that now, with the new 350D on the market. When I checked out the 350D a month or two ago, I just could not come to terms with the overly plastic feel.. it just wasn't heavy enough for an SLR! Anyway, I've been having some good fun, although the 18-55mm EF-S lens in the kit is definitely pretty limiting, but it appears to be adequate to start with - but I couldn't help myself - Today I was in the store again, and ended up buying a second hand 90-300mm EF lens.. now, that one is FUN! So, I haven't done a whole lot of shooting yet, but I've taken a couple which are currently up on the LCA2006 website being used as in a random rotation for the left hand header image. Look for the modern building (Otago uni's Information Services Building), and the night shot of the Town Hall. [12:01] [/Photography] [permanent link] Wed, 13 Jul 2005Well, Last night we opened the CFP for linux.conf.au 2006.. I've been slack, and haven't blogged about it till now, because it was at about 1am last night that we got things to a suitable stater. And, we're still ironing out small bugs with the CFP submission pages - but that shouldn't stop you from submitting an abstract! We most definitely want you to submit a paper, if you've got something cool that you want to talk about - It's a great excuse to make a trip to New Zealand, and observe some of the great scenery we have (LotR anyone?), or, maybe you'd like to hang out with some of the other cool people that will be here to present something awesome! :P So, get to it, go and register as an author and submit a paper! (be sure to read the guidelines and condtions for submission). [11:13] [/LCA] [permanent link] Tue, 05 Jul 2005Well, we are still here, I promise! We finally have our website up and running.. I've also just updated DNS, so linux.conf.au should point to the right place now too... (if not, give DNS a chance to propogate) Things may seem quiet on the publicity front, but that'll change in the next month, look out for some regular site updates, and more! We'll be openning the CFP RSN (that's Reeeeeeeal, not Real), so keep your ears to the ground.. Now's your chance to make a trip to NZ and have the boss pay for it! [02:52] [/LCA] [permanent link] Thu, 09 Jun 2005John Goerzen blogs of trying to decide which TabletPC to get.. the HP TC1100 of course! I'm using one - all bits of hardware apart from the SD card reader, and the tablet 'buttons' (that you press with the stylus) light up under Linux. Although, I haven't tried very hard with either of these... The keyboard is detachable as he wants too - it's just USB. [01:49] [/Random] [permanent link] Wed, 01 Jun 2005Ok, so I'm a dufus. I previously blogged about keysigning with caff, and how easy it was. Well, caff uses a perl module that uses your MTA to make its deliveries - from your local user account. Anyone sense the problem yet? Since my laptop has a hostname that's resolvable only within my personal home LAN, nearly half of all the keysigning I did never actually went anywhere... it got to my smtp server, sat there for a while due to the remote servers rejecting/deferring due to a non-resolvable envelope sender, and then promptly got deleted once the retries failed. Wibble. So, I grepped my laptop hostname out of the exim logs, found the unique exim ids within, grepped those out into individual files, and did a little shell hackery to work out who's email addresses didn't get a key delivered. Luckily, caff keeps a nice working directory of the keys you've signed, and the mail messages it sent - so, now I've got 80 odd messages that I'll be reinserting into my MTA queue, and sending on their way - after adding the appropriate line to my smtp server's exim.conf:
Anyway, to those of you out there that are about to get spammed with old messages, I apologise - but they *are* only about 3 weeks old. If you're lucky, I may feel like updating all the Date: headers, but I dunno... seems like too much work. Oh - How did I find these? I was futzing around trying to get exim4 working on my new laptop, specifically so I could use caff, to sign AJ's new key, and discovered the log entries on my smtp server of the failed deliveries. Anthony, I hope you feel special :P [00:48] [/Random] [permanent link] Tue, 31 May 2005Drew, one of my LCA2006 organising committee, had some free movie tickets that were due to expire today. He and his partner would not be able to use them, so he gave them to me yesterday. Raewyn and I are going out for dinner with friends tonight (which also happens to be because an offer expires today), so we went to see a movie last night - Kingdom of Heaven. It was pretty good actually - the story was interesting, and the characters believable (but I did slightly expect Orlando to do some crazy leaping around on a giant elephant... er hang on, wrong movie). The tale is of the Crusades, and of Balian's travels to, and subsequent defence of Jerusalem. One thing that piqued my interest, was that King Baldwin was a leper. I now have an interest to learn more about leprosy... [21:04] [/Life] [permanent link] David Starkoff talks of bagging Qantas... I've done it too, but not to a huge extent, I was just pretty miffed that my bag was lost on a short hop like that... dumbasses. Anyway, reading David's link to this, I thoroughly enjoyed this comment:
All in all, yeah, I've noticed that everytime I end up flying with Qantas, I feel dirty when I disembark. The service is crap, the plane feels sterile rather than cosy, and you just get that feeling of "Are we there yet?" nagging at you the whole way. About the only thing going for them is that they serve alcohol on domestic flights :> (Alcohol on flights is bad, I know, but it's my choice noddy, so bog off :P). [20:44] [/Travel] [permanent link] Mon, 30 May 2005So, for various reasons, I've moved from my trusty old Toshiba TE2000 to a much smaller, and cooler, HP TC1100 Tablet PC. Basically the Toshy decided to croak it (whilst at LCA2005.. *mutter*) - turns out the connector between the internal power board and the motherboard was damaged. In the hope that it would be useful to one of my co-organisers for LCA2006, it is now repaired and in his possesion. Anyway, I digress... So, it's pretty slick device, and I've spent an amount of time over the last 5 days getting all the neat bits of hardware working with a fresh Debian install (I just couldn't do the Ubuntu thing, it feels too much like two-timing). Everything, bar the little digitizer 'pad button' things, is working, including the lovely little SmartLink WinModem (haven't tested it yet, but I can talk to it with minicom). For those that are clever, they'll recognise it as the Tablet that both Bdale and Edale^W, er.. Elizabeth were using at LCA2005. Bdale mentioned to me that he couldn't seem to get both the digitizer and accelerated graphics (via the official nvidia driver) to work together. I now wonder what problem he was having, as I didn't do anything special and it's working fine. I was worried though as I had it working well under the nv driver, but to get rotation working with xrandr I had to change to the nvidia driver. So, now Elizabeth will be jealous - I can now happily play tuxracer, and design new courses with the digitizer under gimp without restarting X :) . I mentioned xrandr, because you can't use a tablet and not have the ability to flip around into "portrait" mode and use it as a tablet is meant to be used! After some fiddling, it was correctly rotating.. sadly, the X wacom driver didn't have the ability to rotate whilst X was running - you could happily add the "Rotate" option to the InputDevice entry in xorg.conf (yeah, XFree86 sucks, ok?), but that would require an X restart. The effect is somewhat disturbing when you attempt to use the stylus on the rotated screen.. :) A little hunting uncovered this patch which appears to solve my problem. After downloading dilinger's Xorg source package, I was able to patch a recent linuxwacom driver, and slip it into the package build instead of the older version of the module there (If anyone would like a copy of my wacom_drv.o, email me). I also needed to build an updated xsetwacom that knew about the newly available 'rotate-while-running' feature. After all that, I now have a 3D accelerated display with a working stylus, that can be easily rotated to a portrait mode with these two commands:
So, some software to top things off. This chap wrote a nice little perl tool called tabatha that does a nice job of providing a little menu that you can access via the side buttons on the tablet (I use hotkeys for this, after mapping the keys to unused keycodes with setkeycodes somewhere in /etc/init.d). But, he really should have worked out that sudo would be a better tool to use within the config than making you run it as root. It appears I'm going to have to package this particular tool... For Stylus input, I'm using both xvkbd and xstroke, the latter of which it appears I'll have to package too. And finally, a useful looking tool that works really well, and I'm so far enjoying immensely, is gournal (Which will be the third new package I have to churn out). Gournal is a note taking application that looks like it supports a networked collaborative mode, and also saves into a useful format - svg. Well, that's enough boring detail for now - I guess at some stage I'll have to note down all the gory details on a webpage for future reference and for others to look at.. But I should be doing some work :) [04:49] [/Hacking] [permanent link] Tue, 24 May 2005So, Ghosts of LCA's Past is over for this year.. Jon Oxer, Anthony Towns, Mark Tearle, Steven Hanley, Martin Pool, Tony Breeds*, Jeremy Kerr and Michael Davies descended on Dunedin, and spent the weekend with my Committee and I discussing our progress organising LCA2006, and passing on all that valuable knowledge that should make our task somewhat easier... *: Lazy sod needs a blog! They're all on an lca-ghosts list, and I've contemplated kicking the other two list owners off and making the list requre unsubscription authorization, then demand help of them over the next 8 months.. Muhahaha! But, nah, I couldn't do that. They're all great guys :). Anyway, the airport was suffering with late arrivals on Friday due to fog in other centres, but only up to an hour, so it wasn't too bad. We were very lucky though, the weekend saw enough fog around the city that the airport was closed until around about the time of the first departing flight on Monday morning that Tony was on. Anyway, as Steven mentioned after his Ghosts session for the LCA2005 crew, I also found that with 14 people in attendance, we still managed to make it through the agenda and then some, without a lot of long winded topic diversion... People tended to speak up only when it was really required - something that appears to happen when everyone is on target with the same goals. So, we've got 8 months (approximately), to pull off a great conference, but I think we've got things pretty much sussed and under control - it's just all that tedious legwork now to make the plan happen. The conference is going to absolutely rock, I know it, and anyone who decides to give this one a miss will sorely regret it! UPDATE 2005/05/25: I'm wrong, so sue me!
[09:15] [/LCA] [permanent link] Wed, 18 May 2005Alexander Schmehl posted a small, somewhat complex and inefficient shell snippet.. He must have been very bored - it finds any occurence of a given two letter combination, that has only one result when running 'apt-cache search <xy>' on it.. Give me strength! (The easiest way to work something like this out, is to take the given snippet, and reflow it into a multi-line indented format that you can read) [22:08] [/Hacking] [permanent link] Tue, 17 May 2005Well, We've got this horrible java portal thingee running at work as a pilot to deciding if we actually want to run some sort of single sign-on portal for staff and students... It's nice, in that I don't have to do much, other than make sure the machine runs, and the tomcat service stays up - We've got a little 'portal team' that's doing all the hard work. So, anyway, TPTB decided they wanted a calendar portlet - sadly nothing out there for uPortal is of any usable quality, so they wanted to use a php calendar served via apache+php in the back end, to an iframe channel in the portal. Yech. But, ok. My only stipulation was that the back end server would detect if it wasn't being run in the iframe, and redirect people to the portal proper, in an attempt to stop people finding the calendar URL and accessing it directly. Well, to cut a long story short, the production system is served over SSL, whereas the dev system isn't. The dev system worked fine, the production didn't. It boiled down to the fact that the calendar installation for the production system wasn't on SSL, and this was throwing a spanner in the works with how the portal's iframe proxy thingee was requesting the calendar pages. Solution? enable SSL on the calendar URL. So, the private key for the SSL certificate we're using, is hidden away in a java keystore. The cert is easy to get out for apache to use, but the key isn't. So, a little googling, and I found this. Very Very useful. So, basically, you can do this:
Viola :) [00:08] [/Work] [permanent link] Fri, 13 May 2005Well, actually, it really is Thanks to Bdale that you may have received a few mails from me containing gpg signatures... He made me feel somewhat guilty about the number of keys that I've got credentials for that I hadn't gotten around to signing.. So, I've only got a page of signing to do from Debconf3, and then I'm caught up. I'll do a Bdale and suggest that if you're sitting on a few pending keys to sign, get cracking! caff makes it so easy, without the hassle of that cabot stuff. [10:09] [/Random] [permanent link] I spotted this on Michael Ellerman's blog, who's syndicated on Planet Linux Australia. I wasn't really expecting the content, but hell, it certainly makes you stop and think.. Obviously something Bush didn't do. [20:27] [/Random] [permanent link] Thu, 12 May 2005Well, I've had at least one email asking about the X Config for my Triple head setup.. So, I thought I'd chuck it up here, explaining the relevant bits. Ok, to start with, you need to make sure your ServerFlags section turns on Xinerama:
Then, you need to create some Device sections for each head - with a dual head nvidia card, you can use the Screen option to distinguish between the outputs - I'm not sure if this is specific to the nvidia driver. With multiple cards, you must specify the BusID option - you can find out what the correct value is for your card by running 'X -scanbus' and checking the output (which on my system gets sent to /var/log/XFree86.0.log). Here's what I use (First two are on a Dual head AGP card, the third is the PCI card):
Next up, you need to create some relevant Screen sections to go with each of the above. Childs play - this is so far, all bog standard X stuff. I have:
Finally, You need to add each Screen to your ServerLayout section, to create a virtual definition of how your physical displays are set up. I have the following (note that the logical order of my displays in relation to the devices defined above is '2-0-1' from left to right)
And that's it. X is clever enough to do the rest for you. I'm currently using XFree86 on Debian unstable, but I'd imagine the X.org setup would be somewhat similar. And just for reference, this is the Device section I used before going to 3 heads, which shows how to use TwinView:
You can use TwinView when you have more that two displays, if you're only using one nvidia card. (this is how Jon Oxer is still using TwinView) [02:26] [/Work] [permanent link] Well, I've spent a few hours over the last 2-3 days slowly converting all the entries in my blog to use Markdown syntax, mainly thanks to Andrew Cowie's entry regarding his escapades into the blogosphere. I'd wanted to get this sorted out for some time, since I was sick of writing HTML for relatively simple formatting. Andrew's RSS2.0 and Atom feed code, munges with $ENV{TZ}, but sadly it appears the ctime() that Blosxom uses doesn't react well to it being set, so I took Andrew's code, and added a couple of splatterings of "delete $ENV{TZ};" to get around this. (Basically posts on your web version appear with GMT too, rather than just what's in your Syndicated feeds). The result of this, is that I now have rss20 and atom 'flavours', in Blosxom speak, for my blog. I decided to use some of those funky little feed icons too. Now, at some stage, I may even get around to learning some CSS to change the look and feel of things... who knows! [22:23] [/Hacking] [permanent link] Wed, 11 May 2005So, yesterday, the extra PCI video card I ordered arrived at work for my work desktop.. Ahh! so he's going to do dual-head you say. NO! Triple head actually.. :) And I oh so very much like it.. It's a damn shame I can't have this at home. The new card happens to be an nVidia GF2 MX400. Having two cards, means that doing what's called "TwinView" on the first is no longer possible. Basically the nvidia driver would present a nice wide display to the X server, where in actual fact the driver internally is telling the card to use both outputs. As opposed to the X server actually knowing that there's more than one head being used. Now, I have the X server knowing about all three heads, and running the Xinerama extension. Before, the nvidia driver was using it's internal Xinerama extension, which meant that to the X server, this one really big display was split in two. I don't know how the X internals work, but I'd imagine that the configuration now, will have the X server copying between the different video memories when you drag windows between the heads. Whereas before, as one big display, it was only one video memory to X.. Obviously, there's a performance hit here. You notice it for sure, when you drag a really huge firefox window between the heads. Small windows are hardly affected. Now, 3 Heads, or speedy window drags between heads? I'm willing to take that trade off :) [23:06] [/Work] [permanent link] I was out last night for an hour or so, attempting to find a few of the waypoints for a Multi-cache Geocache with Raewyn.. That's a complete other story, which I won't tell now (or probably ever, for that matter). Anyway, on the way home we decided to pop by the little dairy[1] that sells this wondrous thing called "Country Fried Chicken" - Yes, a KFC ripoff. But, the chips[2] are so much better. Whilst there, I spied a neat little sign that instantly reminded me of Mako, and his fascination with cultural language differences... Please excuse the quality, I currently do not have a digital camera, and I was limited to the 640x480 crap that my PocketPC/Phone/Camera/thing can do. Enjoy:
Translations for the silly Americans: [22:51] [/Random] [permanent link] Sat, 07 May 2005...that happens to be my birthday. So, now that I'm officially an adult in my insurance company's eyes, my premium for the car policy will drop.. :) Raewyn has been harrassing me all week - "What do you want for your birthday?", and yesterday she finally went shopping to try any find something... I ended up getting some questions via SMS messages that were indicating the general theme of what I was going to be getting.. well, ok, they were actually quite explicit. Anyway, so last night she gave me the present she bought - the entire Blackadder series on DVD (Yes, REAL British comedy! None of this US canned laughter bollocks). Mmmmmmm. So, now, after dropping her at work, I'll go and do that morning stuff (S**t, Shower, Shave, as is said here), then blob in front of the DVD player for the morning. I wonder if the day will get any better? The complete set of Open All Hours, or even Dad's Army would just rock! [20:55] [/Life] [permanent link] Fri, 06 May 2005*sigh* (That's liferea, in case you didn't know - I'm such a slack bastard when it comes to staying up to date.. you don't want to see my mailboxes) [08:22] [/Random] [permanent link] Previously, I blogged about passing through Sydney on my way home from LCA2005, and purchasing some Duty Free Alcohol... So, It turns out that Downtown Duty Free were unable to do the 'free bottle for pickup' thing, and ended up offering me a complete refund of the AU$150. Sweet! I followed all of their directions - Fax a letter with a copy of the receipt, my Credit Card details, and proof that I actually had a bottle of 12yo Glenlivet, not 21 (basically just quote the barcode number). That was about a week and a half ago. I received no return phonecall confirming that they'd received my fax.. I was in the dark (Damn, faxes are so last century... I'm amazed they still exist). Worrying, a little, since I knew a refund from an Australian company to my Visa would take a little more than 3-4 days, I decided to just call and verify that they'd received my fax... Well, that was the rudest Customer Service rep I'd ever dealt with. I introduced myself, and asked if I could speak to the person I'd been dealing with about a refund due to an incorrect pickup.. They must not get many of these, as the rep knew about it, and said she'd pass me on to the person who knew what was happening (her boss probably). Anyway, she neglected to put me on hold as she spoke to this person who must have been nearby, as I could hear the other person saying things along the lines of "Just tell him that we've put the refund through, and that's all we're doing" - This was where the rep started getting rude with me.. About this time I was desperately trying to get the point across that I just wanted to know if they'd received my fax and things were underway. After that call, I decided I didn't like Downtown very much - it wasn't my fault they screwed up, and I don't see why I should be paying $100 extra for something I didn't even want in the first place.. I was happy that they'd offered me a refund, but all I really wanted was for the bottle I had to be traded for the bottle I wanted. It's all water under the bridge anyway.... Now, this morning, I checked my bank balances via my banks internet banking website, and I noticed that my Visa appeared to have a drastically different balance to what I was expecting... The refund came through! Woot! So, how am I celebrating? By getting drunk on extremely nice 12 year old Glenlivet, that's how! It's even nicer, because the price is right! Now, I just need to convince one of the Ghosts of past LCA attendees to purchase me the bottle I wanted, and I'll reimburse them when they get here... :) [07:55] [/Life] [permanent link] Tue, 26 Apr 2005Ok, so, LCA2005 was great, and I had a wonderful time catching up with all these folks that I hadn't seen in ages. Excellent. Anyway, as is your duty when you travel abroad, you must buy alcohol in Duty Free on the way home. I did this. Let's say why first - On this particular trip, I wasn't really wanting to get anything for us (my girlfriend and I).. the cupboard at home is stocked quite well. But, I did owe a workmate a small debt, and he said he'd love to get a bottle of his favourite whiskey as payment. It happens to be a 21 year old Glenlivet. Expensive, mmk? Ok, this is fine, I do owe him that much, so the price isn't an issue. Anyway, I arrive in Sydney from Canberra, and spend a good day catching up with another Debian Developer (bod), and get to do a little Geocaching - sweet, I had some Travel Bugs to drop off. To the airport with enough time to check in, get through security, and do the things I need to do (and you still end up waiting.. grr). So, I wandered towards the immigration/security place, and stumbled across Downtown Duty Free. I had a little poke around, wondering if they had a 21yo Glenlivet. Turns out they do. Woot! And I only came into the store, because they had an AU$5 for 200ml of Johnnie Walker Black Label deal! Mmmm. After purchasing both, with a little interlude whilst I jumped onto the net with my PDA to transfer some funds to my Visa for the purchase, I dutifully wandered off to do the immigration/security thing. No worries. Came out the other side, fetched my Duty Free purchases from the collection point on the Other Side(tm), and boarded the plane to head to Auckland. Arrived in Auckland - whilst waiting on the flight to disembark, I had a peek in the Duty Free bag. There was a 200ml bottle of JW. Cool. And a bottle of 12yo Glenlivet. Swee... HOLD ON! 12 year old?!%^@!#!? F**K!. Turns out they'd screwed up and packed the wrong bottle into the bag at the collection point. So, I have since done the deed and called to harrass them - they've given me 1 of 2 options:
You can tell which option I want, right? So, there happens to be a group of aussies coming to Dunedin in just under a month for Ghosts of past LCA's.. I can hopefully swing one of them to drop by and grab it for me.. But, if anyone else is heading to NZ sooner - please drop me a line, I'd love to organise with you to pick it up for me! The moral of the story? Either never purchase stuff Duty Free at one of those pre-immigration display stores, or ALWAYS check what you pick up at the collection point, to see if it matches the receipt you get. [00:46] [/Life] [permanent link] Sun, 24 Apr 2005Well, I thought I'd better write an entry considering LCA2005 is over, and it's now my ballgame for 2006... *gulp*. So, the conference was cool, lots of neat people about to chat to, and a few stressed organisers to observe... The future feels somewhat foreboding. They did a wonderful job though, and credit to them. They can now relax, and enjoy the fact that they have lives. Or do they? Anyway, the talks were good, and a lot of variety was to be had. Sadly, I managed to miss a few - mainly due to clashes, and also because I spent a fair bit of time annoying the organisers. Lots of questions and stuff. The only ones who don't get away with relaxing are those that are coming to Ghosts next month, and Tony, who's joining my team for logistical reasons. It's become a bit of a 'thing' that I'm a 'fan boy' or some such - I blame AJ and elmo, they kept saying it. I had a huge number of people asking me about getting "Bdale fan club" buttons (you know, the american name for badges). No thanks to Elizabeth Garbee for that one. I'll actually make an excuse here, and say I was just schmoozing the cool people to make sure they'll come next year of course! (Hey, elmo: You little ripper!) So, my little presentation at the conf close sucked, but that's ok, it wasn't meant to be anything spectacular! Putting that aside, In Jeff Smith^WWaugh's words, "ROCK ON!" - Dunedin will rock, and we'll make sure of it. Make sure you come if you can, it's a great place! So, does anyone have a contact to get good "mates rates" price on psychological treatment? I have a feeling I'll need it in about 10 months... [01:57] [/LCA] [permanent link] Sun, 27 Mar 2005
Ampersand Breakages in XML feeds.
Jose Carlos Garcia Sogo writes of reports that one of his blog entries was disrupting some feed readers, and that he was given the impression it was his fault.. It wasn't. I've just starting using Liferea after reading that Julian Danjou is giving it a go. I noticed that Liferea was throwing up a nice big red warning stating the feed was broken when clicking on "Planet Debian" in the feed list. After a bit of investigation, I found that Jose's feed was fine, it was the one that Planet was giving - somewhere along the line, it had decided to change Jose's "&" into "&" (I hope those render properly!) So, basically, it's a bit ripe of people to blame the source, when it's actually an aggregator in between that's taking a perfectly good feed and breaking it. I'd call that a bug, wouldn't you? [22:58] [/Random] [permanent link] Tue, 08 Feb 2005So, it's now been publicly announced. I've heard horror stories about organising this thing, so lets just hope they are just that... stories. :) [19:18] [/LCA] [permanent link] Sat, 05 Feb 2005I've known about Geocaching for quite some time, but never really gotten into it, until joeyh Mentioned it a while back. Since he wrote that article, I've been slowly gearing up to have a go. Since I've got one of those Pocket PC things for work, I thought I should find some software for it to record all of my cache attempts, and store the information from the website that I'd need for them. There's a few little gems available, which is good - currently I'm only using GPXSonar (horrible site), until I get an interface cable to link my eTrex with the Pocket PC, when I'll start using G7TOCE. I'm hoping to find something better that will let me do the GPS stuff on the handheld.. but that would probably be better with a bluetooth GPS receiver. Anyway, I digress... Sooo, today, I finally get around to going out and having a decent go at this thing... What a rush! It really is a bug, and I'm definitely addicted. I'll have to try and pick up a Travel Bug before I go to LCA2005 - I'll try to bring one back too. Well, I usually don't like to subscribe to pay services, but this is one I'm happy to, since its fun, and it's nice to know that payment will help keep the website running. And the ulterior motive, is that you need to be a paid member to be able to download GPX files of multiple caches - great for things like GPXSonar above. So, on my first day of caching, I got 8 caches - one of which was an FTF (First To Find), and another was a Multi-cache (follow clues from the start to the actual cache). A successful day, I think. Anyway, if you have a GPS Receiver, get into Geocaching - it's fun, it helps get you out and about (exercise is a good thing, mmmk?), and it's just generally geeky! AND you get to call non-cachers "muggles"! :) [09:38] [/Life] [permanent link] Thu, 13 Jan 2005... If we made debhelper build-essential.
But, Scott, you do have a good point. 92% of the archive is not an insignificant amount. [21:01] [/Debian] [permanent link] Wed, 05 Jan 2005It's called stopping. What are you giving up? Jesus, As much as I applaud your success at stopping smoking, it annoys me when it's made out to be some sort of epic challenge that has to be overcome, and kept at bay. When you can mentally be on top of it from the start, it's no issue. For anyone else that's planning to stop this year, Go and read this. I swear that it will change your view on smoking and nicotine addiction, and you'll have stopped without all the struggle that everyone else whinges about. [21:03] [/Life] [permanent link] Tue, 21 Dec 2004Bdale, I've got a few MMJ connectors lying around... but sadly I'm not keen on giving any of them up - but I will give this bit of info - a correctly wired RJ11 connector, with its tab block sliced off, fits nicely into an MMJ socket and works a charm. [21:52] [/Hacking] [permanent link] Wed, 08 Dec 2004I'm no english geek (but I am somewhat of an anal-retentive prick about such things) - using "since" as in "the cable modem has been acting weird since a while" is incorrect... Being a native english speaker, the reason is not forthcoming to me (I think it's incorrect to use it in the past tense?). I guess this is because you're never really taught all the semantic rules of your native language, since you're brought up with it, not taught it. To me it just sounds wrong! (It should be "... for a while") Could some english/language geek please clarify this? Anyway, apart from that... McD's is a bad thing to eat on an empty stomach... making me feel slightly nauseous, so here I am stuck up at 2320 writing this blog entry. UPDATE 2004/12/09: Thanks!
[09:21] [/Random] [permanent link] Tue, 09 Nov 2004As much as the title of this entry seems intriguing, I'm sorry, it's just a book title. I wouldn't normally do a book review type thing, but this is a rare case where I've read something that deserves to be mentioned. Anyway, Stoned on Duty is a book about the escapades of a New Zealand undercover Police officer by the name of Peter Williamson, and how what he did in his job helped to bring down a large portion of the Coromandel marijuana scene. It also goes on to explain how he coped (or not) with drug addiction after returning to uniformed duty. Both he and his wife became heavy marijuana users (she was an undercover officer too), and continued to be so after returning to uniformed duty, where they grew apart, seperated, and generally ran completely off the rails. There's a really good bit about how he was on duty in a smaller city south of here, where he'd collected a teenage vandal from a bottle store, and placed him in the holding cell, but not locked the door - It was a new lock, and he hadn't learnt the trick to locking it yet. Suffice to say, the teenager managed to leave the Police station, and go home. Peter's reaction was purely one of "Oh well, I really don't give a fuck". He sorted out the problem privately with the store owner and the teenager to avoid having to tell his boss about what had happened (Small town, he knew who the teenager was, and where he lived). The book itself is not about a sob story of this Police officer, but more about attempting to draw attention to how the Brass in the force never acknowledged that its undercover agents were becoming drug addicts, and basically didn't want to have to deal with the problems this entails (officers committing purjury to convict a criminal. "No your honour, I was simulating smoking the drug when this took place" - How can the jury believe an officer that was stoned?). The official line was that the force did not condone actual use of drugs in an undercover operation, but those at the coal face knew that if they didn't, they'd be picked as cops PDQ. Peter has his life back on track now. He left the force in 1990 on recommendation of his doctor and psychiatrist (or psychologist, I forget), since he was a danger to himself, other police officers, and the public with his drug use. After fighting for compensation, and making some publicity about the problem, he's moved on to other things... And, he actually lives in the same city as me, and is a good friend of one of my workmates. Now there's a reason that I was loaned this book to read, but I'll let you speculate... [23:05] [/Random] [permanent link] Sun, 31 Oct 2004Andrew, My condolences. Byron looked like a pretty laid back cat, with one hell of a personality - it's like losing a close friend when pets pass away. One of my previous cats, by the name of "Sawyer" (long story), lived at home in the country with my Father. After I went to high school in the city, I never saw much of him. When I discovered one weekend that I was home that he had been hit by a car, I was quite upset (with my father too, It was a while before that weekend, and he hadn't told me at the time it happened). Anyway, Andrew, give him a good burial spot, it sounds like he deserves it. [04:45] [/Life] [permanent link] Thu, 28 Oct 2004Ok, so I've had a MythTV box for quite some time, but recently I've done some cooler stuff with it - I've also got a local friend who's done some pretty neat stuff with it too. Well, indirectly - not really with Myth per-se, but with stuff Myth uses (You should see his Satellite Dish farm). To start with, said local friend had a spare DVB-S card that he wasn't using, and I mentioned some time ago I was interesting in getting - so he sold it to me... (must pay him..) The house I'm renting at the moment already had a small dish on it, pointing at Optus B1. The previous tenants had Satellite TV, from the local provider, Sky, which has a presence on B1. The goverment owned broadcaster also has some FTA stations on it, which are the target. Anyway, after futzing around, and upgrading the Myth box to a 2.6 kernel for support of the DVB-S card, I get things working, but not in MythTV. Takes me a good week to work out that the DVB testing utility in the setup program hardcodes the LNB values for a Universal LNB, As opposed to a Ku Band LNB that are all too common here. Grr. Grr. Grr. So I finally get things working in Myth. Damn, that DVB-S picture is crisp. Right, about this time, I also noticed that the xmltv source I was using to get EPG data dried up - an old website that was discontinued by the entity that owned it - somehow tied up with the broadcaster, but I don't know for sure. This is where the local friend comes in. Drew has been mucking around with pulling the EPG data out of the DVB-S stream that the PayTV provider (Sky) has on B1 - and he was successful. The added bonus is that he provides the data in xmltv format.. So, the next problem was that the Audio I was feeding from the Myth box into the TV was really low, so I had the mixer wound all the way up so you could hear things - but playing videos was still really really quiet.. Turns out that the sound card is emitting line-level audio, but the TV is expecting something with a little more meat... To solve this, I decided to purchase a simple Stereo Ampilifier kit from the local Radio-Shack-alike, Dick Smith Electronics. The K-5008 looked like it'd do the job nicely. After building, then realising that I'd wired the 9V supply socket backwards, sadly, after I'd fried the chip... Then purchasing a replacement chip, I had a working Amp that meant I could finally wind down the volume in the software mixer, and actually have decent audio across the board within MythTV. Excellent. I'm still pissed off that I managed to wire the socket wrong, when I swear I checked it at least three times before I soldered it... The only downside, is that now it's actually possible to hear the 'muted' audio emerging from the line-in (for the TV tuner card)... It is very faint, and as long as you don't wind the TV volume up too far, you can't hear it... [23:14] [/Hacking] [permanent link] Tue, 19 Oct 2004
Serial Consoles (and other stuff)
Well, I'm sure we've all done this before, but I'll blog about it anyway, because I'm different, dammit. I did go one step further though. Over the last couple of weeks, I've been productive at home, for the first time in a long while... I'm not sure what prompted it, but I think it has something to do with the fact I had to move my office and radio shack downstairs, to the cold room, next to the garage (where the rack of servers happens to be). This was prompted because the S.O. required the room I was using, since she wanted to create a spare bedroom/Her Space area. This is all fine, except that I had a lot of really heavy stuff in there, including two big desks, a filing cabinet, and an HF radio station. Anyway, moved all this stuff, and started setting up the new room the way I wanted it, which meant running a new CAT5 cable, and getting antenna feed lines sorted out... (unfortunately, I'm going to be without a decent HF antenna until I can work out the best way to put one up in the new location...) Through all this, I scavenged the 33.6k modem out of my old desktop, and lugged the machine half built as a firewall replacement down to the new office - these things prompted me to put them to use... Now the 33.6k is in my 'network' server (dns, dhcp, etc), being used as a modem with sendpage, so I can feed myself pager messages through the telco's TAP number. Pretty neat. I rummaged around and found the 40G drive that I couldn't decide what to do with, and stuck that in the mail/web server to use as a file store - it's now also a file server. Finished building the replacement firewall, and put it in production. (much better as a full woody, with a faster CPU, rather than that old 486dx40 with too little ram, and a really old insecure kernel). The room was previously being used as storage of my collected hardware, so that stuff is now out in the garage... must get some shelving for them... Anyway, the cupboard in the room was also being used for storage, so I decided to pull out the two PowerMac 7200's, and putting the contents together as one system with a larger amount of RAM, and two HDD's. Installed this, and discovered that quik is pretty cool... no MacOS needed there. Inside these things is like a damned faraday cage, so the new machine got christened as faraday. (This now makes my home network have 5 out of the supported 11 architectures of woody.. i386, hppa, alpha, sparc, powerpc. - just need to get that mipsel box going now..) Anyway, after doing all this, I decided I should get all these systems some upgraded, and packaged kernels... so after installing grub, and installing the respective kernels, they're all up to date. (and the root fs on the firewall is too small, so I had to purge the running kernel to get the new one on - I hate rebooting systems like this...) Now, because I have a Stallion EasyServer II in the rack, with serial cables to everything in there, I decided to get all of these servers going with serial consoles.... a fiddle here, a tweak there, and a few reboots later, I can see each machine boot in a telnet window from my laptop upstairs... Oh, and to top it all off, I decided to run a longer CAT5 serial cable up to the lounge, and have a DEC VT520 terminal there - great for nload on the firewall! [22:42] [/Hacking] [permanent link] Mon, 04 Oct 2004Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe. Just a random post... The above came around a Social list at work a few months back... [Apologies to non-english speakers.. who may find the above harder to read than the rest of us] [02:19] [/Random] [permanent link] |
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