Planet Maclab

I'm really quite angry right now: half at Blizzard, and half at myself because I knew that I was going to get something like this and gave them my money anyway.

Starcraft II doesn't support LAN play. This is not just a case of needing to be online and authenticated with Battle.net to fire up a server. That would be annoying but could be poorly justified by the improved integration with your online profile.

No, Starcraft II goes out of its way to make playing on a LAN difficult even when everybody has purchased the game and has logged on to Battle.net.

Suppose you're at a LAN with a bunch of other dudes (or gals, let's be optimistic) and you're fortunate enough to have an Internet connection so that you can all get onto Battle.net. As best I can tell, you have two options for getting in a game together:

Option 1: Invitations

• Go around and find out each other's user names on Battle.net and add each other as "friends".
• Have the host start a private game and then invite all the relevant people to the game.
• Other players accept the invitation.
• Fingers crossed packets will actually get routed over the LAN (this has been hinted at but I haven't tested it.)
  (update: a friend informs me that everything goes through Singapore. Yay.)

Option 2: Public and Pray

• Have the host start a public game, which allows anyone on Battle.net to join.
• Tell the players what map it is.
• Players try to connect and hope they get the right server.
• Host kicks other players who try to join because they figure it's a public game.
• Again, fingers crossed regarding routing.

This is seriously crap.

As the people who are reading this probably know, I help run LANs this year where we don't have Internet. I had a glorious plan to allow people to connect to Battle.net through my phone's 3G connection so that we could get some games happening, but nobody's going to want to go through all the above to make it work. Sure, I'd probably do it because I really like Starcraft but I would feel like a deluded fanatic saying "Hey you should play this game! It'll be great! We just have to do all this bullshit to make it work, but you know you want to!"

It's like a fricking iPhone. Sure, I could buy one and jailbreak it to do what I want. Sure, somebody's going to hack SC2 so it can be played on a LAN eventually. But I shouldn't have to do it. Antifeatures are lame. I may not have bought an iPhone but because of my lack of moral conviction Blizzard already has my money and they don't give a toss what I think from here on in.

I should learn to find Battle for Wesnoth exciting or something.

July 29, 2010 11:15 AM

When I first started playing photography properly I was content to use iPhoto to do my basic post-processing. Now I'm in a mac-less environment and I like to use GIMP to edit things. Unfortunately I wasn't really sure what iPhoto was doing with my photo: I would just tweak the sliders until I was happy. That left me wondering what the "real" edit is to achieve the effect of the "Shadows" and "Highlights" sliders.

Answer: It's all in the levels editor. Go to "Levels..." in the Colors menu and you're greeted with a level-editing histogram.

• Moving the middle triangle in Input Levels to the left is the same as increasing the "Shadows" slider in iPhoto.
• Moving the right triangle in Output Levels to the left is the same as increasing the "Highlights" slider in iPhoto.

And with a bit of tinkering you can work out how to do other things too. Hooray.

July 24, 2010 08:50 AM

Around this time last year, I participated in the Hobart edition of the Worldwide Photo Walk. It was an excellent opportunity to meet other photographers from the area, to explore an area I’d never explored before, and to take photos of interesting things.

Well, the walk is on again this coming Saturday, operating in just about every major city in Australia (and in other countries as well). I seriously recommend getting along to your local walk: it’s a good opportunity to have fun with a camera and the experience is seriously rewarding.

If you’re interested, you can search and sign up for your local walk at the WWPW web site. The event is run by a Photoshop training company, I do recommend opting out of the marketing announcements they offer, as it’s quite high-volume across the year.

July 18, 2010 01:25 AM

On a friend's advice, this week I found at the library and read The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy through the Maze of Computer Espionage by Clifford Stoll. Wow. What a read: a true story about an astronomer-programmer who as a beginning system administrator finds evidence of an intruder and ends up spending the better part of a year tracking him down to West Germany where he's involved in selling US military information to the KGB. Wow.

I think I'm a little behind the times. This book was published in 1991 and it feels like everyone involved in computing apart from me knows about it by now. The fact that the story is over 20 years old now makes the book fascinating for a number of reasons apart from the simple tracing of the cracker. Stoll goes into detail about the lifestyle at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and his own thoughts on the political and social responsibilities of computer network users.

The story is from a time when, at least in academia, computer systems were relatively open. Multiple users shared computers generally in order to work collaboratively. One of his conclusions in the book is that we must work hard to maintain trust rather than put energy into abusing that trust, because of the damage it does to the network and how easily we can work together.

I guess we failed. Not that I was old enough to do anything about it but it's a damn shame to see that that's how it went. It's a fact of online life now that everything online needs to be locked down. Even if you want to be share your data, the more mechanisms you make available for that data to be shared the more software you're exposing which could potentially have bugs in it. And inevitably there are people out there who wish to exploit those bugs, for a variety of reasons. Sigh.

The second interesting point was in his epilogue discussion about the transmission of a worm: a conclusion that computer networks have robustness due to the diversity of types of nodes. A virus for a VAX can't run on an IBM system, etc. Though he couldn't possibly have foreseen it at the time, we're seeing a heavy convergence towards web applications right now. What used to be a diversity of operating systems with standard network protocols is now becoming a diversity of web browsers with standard markup and javascript.

I think he has valid point even though it was made quite a while ago now. The ability for us to have operating system/browser diversity derives directly from open standards and open implementations. Look what happens when there's a bug in Adobe's flash implementation. Oops, everyone's vulnerable. And being closed source doesn't help. Let's keep our standards open.

The final point which I found particularly interesting was Cliff's own change of opinion. Initially he took a fairly loose apathetic view that breaking into other systems for fun could be just playful or even a good thing if it exposed problems. By the end of his ordeal he decided that the very act of messing with other people's systems is damaging simply because of the goodwill and trust which is lost, not to mention the amount of time which people like him have to spend working on problems they wish they didn't have.

A great book. Go read it sometime. You wouldn't have to be a computer person to appreciate it either, but it probably helps. :)

July 17, 2010 10:17 AM

Those who’ve cared to look at my site in the past will know that I’ve been a pretty big fan of PyBlosxom, a lightweight filesystem-based CMS and blog engine. If you’re happy to dig around in configuration files and editors to produce your posts, it lets you do a lot with very little.

Unfortunately, recently I’ve experienced a mini-deluge of Russian comment spam which, under PyBlosxom requires far too much effort to clean up (even with the excellent Akismet spam plugin by Benjamin “Mako” Hill). I’ve used this deluge as an excuse to migrate my site to WordPress, which I’ve been considering making the move to for quite some time.

The resulting site is now up and running at my new domain name (chris.neugebauer.id.au), which is running on my new UK-based Linode 512 VPS. Hopefully this is an excellent excuse to keep it properly up-to-date, especially considering the amount of effort I’ve had to go through to get it to this stage!

July 16, 2010 10:12 AM

So I’ve just migrated posts from my old blog (hosted using PyBlosxom) to my new one (hosted using WordPress). It appears as though Planet Linux Australia (and possibly others) have ignored the timestamps on my migrated posts. Fantastic!

So, if you’re seeing 10-month-old posts from my blog, sorry about that, I’ll try not to do it again!

July 16, 2010 05:34 AM

The political battle of censorship in Australia has been relatively futile so far for those of us against it. By its proponents, issues have been muddled together, sensationalist terms like "child porn" have been bandied about and claims have been made that it's safer for Australian children using the Internet. That last part is supposed to be the official reason for the policy -- or is the one written down, at least. Senator Conroy redefines the purpose of the filter every time he opens his mouth.

Those of us against it are trying to cut through this nonsense and point to the bigger issues. Suppose that they were only out to block child pornography websites. The material is obviously bad. The material is obviously illegal. But it still does not make the filter the right policy because of the level of the trust we put in the Government not to abuse their power now and in the future. (And in reality they want to block "refused classification" material, which is a very fuzzy definition which definitely includes material which is legal to own.)

So can we trust the Government? My instinct says no. However there's nothing like the benefit of hindsight. Gizmodo has recently posted a short article about what's happened in Turkey since the introduction of their filter, including a 3-minute video report [youtube] from Al Jazeera about how badly the situation has devolved. Not only are all kinds of websites being blocked for political or religious reasons, but no progress is being made in the attempt to have the laws appealed.

Could it happen in Australia? You bet. You bet our civil rights on it.

EDIT: Another highly recommended article about the flaws of censorship in general:  The State of trust: it's a one way street

July 15, 2010 11:41 PM

Ooops, I appear to have forgotten to update my blog (as usual), and forgot to mention anything at all about my Thesis or my Honours work otherwise for the past four months. I truly can’t be bothered writing about it at the moment, so I’ll just mention that I submitted it a couple of weeks ago, and that I received a mark of First Class for it. I’m pretty happy about that.

More news at 11!

July 09, 2010 08:02 PM

Recently I was pondering on the Diaspora project's one month report, wondering how exactly comments on status updates were being routed.

Does the person who owns the status update receive the comment on their seed and potentially have the opportunity to review it before it is broadcast? That seems reasonable. Really, though, the comment belongs to the person who wrote it. Shouldn't their seed have the right to send it out to all its peers regardless of what the person who posted the original update thinks?

It's fairly obvious in this case that the status update seed should be the definitive source of any comments. We all appreciate the idea that if the status update belongs to you, then you should have some level of control over what content is associated with it.

The problem becomes more complicated when you take a photo of your friends and want to share it on your seeds, including tags of the identities of everybody in the photo. The way Facebook operates is that even though you own the photo, the user who is tagged has the option of removing that tag, whether or not the photo poster wanted to keep it there. Clearly this is isn't enforceable in Diaspora where you only have control over your own seed.

On one hand, the photo and its tags belong to the person who shared the photo and contributed the tags. On the other, the tagged person doesn't own anything except the identity, but it would be nice if they could have some control over being tagged. How should this system mediate this?

The critical thing is that we're communicating with our friends. I would propose a system like this: your friend's seed announces its policy on photos: (a) Please don't tag me, (b) If you tag me, please don't display it until I've reviewed the photo, or (c) Go ahead, tag me.

When you attempt to tag this friend in a photo it will check on the policy. If it's option (a) Don't tag, then it will refuse to do so (or at least make you jump through hoops. Shame on you for not respecting your friend's wishes). If it's option (b) Check first, it will send away a review request without you having to think about it. If it's option (c) Tag me, it will simply apply the tag.

Not only does this work to allow people to stipulate their tagging wishes, but it falls back on good old human respect to get along. Just because you have the technical ability to do something disrespectful to a friend doesn't mean you should. Conversely, where we can use technology to facilitate flexible interaction rather than dictate policy, we should.

July 07, 2010 01:11 PM

On 5 July 2010, I lost one of my favourites. My Dell Insperion 9100 locked up while playing Deus Ex 1, and failed to POST after a hard power off. Why was it so close to me? Here is a bit of history for all you out there. 2003–2005 was a bleak time for laptops. Getting a laptop with a screen resolution greater than XGA (1025×768) was nigh on impossible, and forget having anything other than an integrated Intel for a graphics solution. Compounding this was that (from memory) laptops all used single channel memory, and while they served as the starting point for Intel designing efficient chips, they were woefully slow compared with their desktop counterparts (Intel Pentium M 1.3GHz anyone?).

In 2003 Toshiba released in very small quantities (so small it isn’t even on their website), the Satellite 5220. 1600×1200, 2×512MB DDR2100 (single channel), nVidia 5600 256MB. While the 5xxx range was one of nVidia’s worst ever graphics offerings (if not the worst), it was streets ahead of the Intels. Added to that, the screen was a gloss, and it remains to this day the least reflective gloss screen I have seen. It also had nice little touches. One of the first laptops with SPDIF, DVD-R (1x), Harman Kardon speakers which put the current Unibody 17″ Mac Book Pro to shame, an touch screen for a track pad (only the Unibodies have a more responsive track pad, IMO), and so on. While it was $6500 with all the bells and whistles, it was only $2000 more than gutless, useless Tecras of the time. It’s unfortunate that the 5220 was only ever a very limited production run. I never owned one, my Dad did. Oh I was jealous.

Almost a year later I learn about Alienware. I was overjoyed. Here was a company that not only made worthy successor to the 5220, it was their core laptop business. Unfortunately, living in Australia made them almost unobtainable, and support out of the question. This is where Dell stepped up to the plate for the first time (at least for me). Those who know me, know that I had spent the past two years trashing Dell. However this was directed almost exclusively at their home desktop computers. Many of my friends purchased Dells for what I felt was outrageous sums of money. Often due to the weak graphics cards in their machines we would be limited to playing games that had been out for years. This annoyed me not because they less capable graphics cards, but because I felt they had been ripped off. So for me to buy a Dell it had to be something special…the Insperion 9100 was.

Weighing in at 5kg, this 2″ thick laptop was perfect for me. It was a laptop of firsts (these are all to my knowledge, so it is quite possible someone pulled a 5220 and got there first):

• first desktop replacement to be mass produced, thus readily available and easy to have serviced
• one of the first laptops to offer 1920×1200¹
• first with 8x DVD+R and dual layer
• first with a Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz, 800MHz FSB and 1MB cache (the FBS and cache particularly)
• first with dual channel 400MHz RAM (and it was chosen to complement the FSB, again this was often ignored at the time)
• first with all three common video outs (DVI, VGA, S-Video)
• one of the first with four USB 2.0 ports²
• and most importantly, the first with a Radeon 9800 Mobile³. And it’s not like the Radeon 9800 was a slouch. It was the desktop gaming king, as the nVidia 6xxx series desktop previews had only just come out.

This is a laptop from 2003 that was playing Half Life 2 a year later, at graphics settings none of my friends could compete with. I carried that laptop for three and a half years before even beginning to think of replacing it. Finally four years later, with shot batteries and significant structural damage I reluctantly bought a Unibody Macbook Pro. While it was better in every way (except for the freaking resolution!!!!), it has failed to grab me the same way the I9100, the way my dear EMH grabbed me. So I guess the I9100 was another first, it was my first. EMH, you will be missed.

1. Ever since moving to 1920×1200, I haven’t wanted to get off (the extra 120px in height is noticeably better than 1080p for desktops, IMO). But I’ll save this for another rant.
2. USB 2.0 had been out for ages, but most laptops had two to three, and believe me the extra port made the difference of carrying around a powered hub and not
3. this was back when laptop cards were as powerful as their desktop counterparts

July 07, 2010 03:28 AM

It began shortly after I returned from the great land of the Americas. Walking into the T-Life store (Telstra phone company outlet) I was greeted by a friendly assistant. After a brief ID check and record collection I left the store, if not proud then certainly eager owner of a Telstra iPad SIM.

So returning to the seats the remainder of Maclab had occupied, I proceeded to wait the 40 minutes it would apparently take for my SIM to activate. On the prompting of a fellow Telstra user, I fired up my laptop, tethered it with my iPhone, plugged in the iPad and updated the carrier settings using iTunes. My SIM began to show some life, but when I attempted to connect to the Telstra network I was naturally rebuffed for having an unactivated card. So quite happy with the state of things I settled back to wait.

An hour later, I was becoming quite impatient. I phoned Telstra, hoping to get them to activate my SIM. ‘Please enter the number you are trying to activate’, ‘Please stay on the line…’. So while on hold, my iPad’s SIM started to work, which in turn lead me to just hang up. Thrilled with the working service, I played and played until my flight. Once home I played some more.

The next day a nice little error message awaited me, ‘No SIM’. How odd. Ejecting and reinserting it made no difference. Cleaning the SIM with an eraser didn’t help. So panicking that it was a hardware fault I put the SIM I picked up in the US back in, to see that, yes indeed it was being detected. Ok, while I seriously doubt with an error like ‘No SIM’, it’s a carrier settings issue, it seemed worth a shot. System>General>Reset>Reset network settings, plug into iTunes, sync and…no new carrier settings. For completeness sake I then reinstalled the OS, no joy.

Well that night I was going to catch-up with a fellow iPad user, so I could test the SIM in another device. So get to the party, and yes his SIM works in my iPad, mine doesn’t work in his. Oh well bed time.

Next move? Let’s call Telstra. But it’s a weekend, and after waiting on hold for 10min I get a pre-recorded message that the call centres are closed over the weekend…THEN WHY WAS I IN A QUEUE? Oh well, Monday then I guess.

Wake up Sunday morning to discover two of our four iPhone SIMs (but with Optus this time), stopped working some time during the night. One came good later that day after copious amounts of resetting and transferring of phones. The other did not.

Monday, Mr Telstra issues me a new SIM and all is well (the first one was faulty). Interestingly the new SIM had a different board layout to the first. Mr Optus then played with the iPhone SIM, and couldn’t get it to work. An hour later Optus finally issued a new SIM for the iPhone. Several hours later it is working too.

Then yesterday my iPhone SIM followed the pattern of the first two iPhones. Fortunately it eventually came good after a day of poking, resetting, and other annoying things. However once I regained the ability to make calls, I lost the ability to launch apps: all my installed apps and some system apps now crash on launch…FORK! The apps were working, then literally a reset later they were not. What now? I guess I’ve got to reinstall the OS again, it’s the only thing that fixed it last time.

So please dear readers, don’t let this happen to you, I’m not sure how, but, just don’t let it happen!

June 25, 2010 01:12 AM

Although this post is much delayed (1 week!), I've finally downloaded the last few snaps from my phone.

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June 21, 2010 04:13 AM

If Country music were more like this I might actually listen to it

CollegeHumor are fantastic!

You Became A Meme
Written By Ben Joseph & Conor McKeon
Sitting at home, cruisin’ round the Internet
You send a link, “funny pic” is what you said
“Lolcat?” Where’s the humor in this, dude?

I’m in New York, accepting my VMA prize
Kanye interrupts, can’t believe that just happened live
He preferred “Single Ladies” to my tune

Next day, top search: me and this jerk.
Remixes, mash ups, message boards gone beserk
Never dreamed one day that I’d wake up and find
That what you know me for is one clip online

Sometimes web geeks make jokes that catch on then won’t stop
My one bad day is now stuck on your laptop screen
I’ve become a meme
I’ve become a meme

You hadn’t been a star since the mid eighties
Someone pretends your vid is Lohan nudity
You’re finally famous again as a lame fake-out
Does it make you queasy?

And you were just a bear in some old jpeg file
Until 4chan said you were a pedophile
Now you just show up when girls are too young
You’re like an evil furry Chris Hansen

You went on TV, wouldn’t say “sorry”
His dad lied for a top news story
Be a huge dick or just play hide and seek
If the web laughs at you, you’ll be famous all week

You see online you don’t need much to be funny
A kid, some cats, they’ll add the irony…
You’ll become a meme.
You’ll become a meme

Oh you were trying to introduce a song, then you nearly lost your mind,
Just before you’re about to crack, you said we’ll just do it live.
They sent the clip around, you screamed left-wing conspiracy.
They only did it for the lulz, but it’s more than comedy…

In a week
I went from country music shows to
Hosting SNL, it’s not hard to see
It’s cause I’m a meme

Your vids, pics, posts do more make then just make fun
We know it’s love or at least free publicity…
You made us a meme.
You made us a meme.

You made us a meme.
Have you ever thought just maybe…
It’s good to be a meme.

June 19, 2010 09:27 PM

Last Sunday we hitched a ride with the AUC guys down to Silicon Valley. It was the same as last year’s tour: Fry’s (the small one) where I bought an SSD and some Altoids; the Computer History Museum, which was smaller and less impressive than last year but they still have the mechanical difference engine which is great; and Apple HQ at 1 Infinite Loop, where I bought a T-shirt, a shirt for work, and a microphone/button for my phone. Finally we returned to San Francisco to check in at Moscone West for the conference.

The first party, Sunday night, not including the Aus & NZ Reception where we chatted up Santa Claus Dr Kim Silverman (one of Australia’s finest exports to Apple) was sfMacIndie which was well attended and had great food. I talked to some German dudes for most of the night, and then was challenged to find a Russian in the room. I watched demonstrations of an iPad case that is highly impact resistant (iPhone screens were perfectly undamaged after hitting the case with a hammer) and a demo of the Cloud Made map technology.

Monday through Friday: this is basically all non-disclosure territory, with the exception of some parties. Watch the Stevenote if you want to know things Apple. But I will say this: there’s a lot of cool new things for developers. And the juice was fantastic as usual.

We were in the keynote queue from 4AM, and were a little beyond where we were last year in terms of position: wedged neatly into the corner of the building. If getting up at 3:30 AM wasn’t enough, I only got to sleep about 1:30 AM so it’s fair to say I was feeling top of the world! Matt had the unusual idea of buying collapsible chairs for sitting on during the queue, and this made things a little more comfortable. I played some Torchlight. We socialised with the surrounding nerds. We acquired free t-shirts. And then around about quarter to 6, I had this brilliant idea. I loaded the immortal Rick Astley up in MPlayer on my 17″ MacBook Pro, hit fullscreen, full volume, hit play, and then started walking up the queue… Yes, I rickroll’d the WWDC queue. You can thank me in the comments.

I went straight to bed Monday night…well, as much as I could. We dropped by a bookstore before heading home and then there was a plumbing problem in the neighbouring room at the hotel so Matt and I had to shift downstairs, delaying sleep further.

Tuesday through Friday are a bit blurry and were quite uneventful during the day. The Apple Design Awards and Stump the Experts on Tuesday night were both great. Congratulations to Aussie developers Firemint for winning two (!) awards. I scored a shirt (again, though this one is XL) and boxed copies of the After Dark screensaver pack. The bash on Thursday night was awesome; the band was OK Go who had donned the conference jacket and made some witty remarks about Apple and the conference. But that’s not the best part. The band’s front man, Damian, hopped off the stage for a number and played…less than a metre from my face.

So the conference wound down and Friday evening rolled around. We hiked to Coit (yes, we were sure to catch a snap of Coit Liquors, ha ha) and caught the cable car back, and then joined the AUC people for the traditional dinner at Buca di Beppo. Tim drank an inordinate amount of root beer, and since Jess’s birthday was recent enough, we got the staff to sing their version of a happy birthday. Finally we cruised over to the Courtyard Marriott where a pile of people were staying, and hung out having a little after-party with the likes of Nick Circosta and Mark Bate, which was enjoyable.

Saturday was a little bit of a “free day” in some ways. After a rather late start at Mel’s diner for breakfast, we headed our separate ways. Tim chose to hang out in the hotel room and read a book. A couple of guys headed out with Bernie, another Australian, for a car ride around the place. As for Matt, Alex, Jess, Andrew, Dave and myself, we all went on a bit of a bike ride.

The ride started near to Pier 39, which incidentally is San Francisco’s quintessential tourist trap. We rode along towards the Golden Gate bridge and Fort Point, had a quick poke around the fort and then rode over the bridge. On the other side of the bridge we headed for Sausalito, and quickly ate a greatly delayed lunch (though it was delicious), followed by a ferry ride back to the other side.

That evening, a few of us went to see a film: Prince of Persia. While hardly impressive in terms of movies, it certainly tops the list of films based on computer games.

Lastly, on Sunday we got up late again (this being such a pleasant change from the early starts during the week let me tell you!) and joined Mark Bate again for coffee in Union Square. This was followed by a trip to Berkeley.

First order of business was to grab some bubble tea, and check out the comic store. Impressive range of American comics! Comparable to small manga stores in Japan. Secondly, we went to the hat shop.

Best. Shop. Ever.

I left with two hats: one stylish brown bowler-ish hat, and one tricorne pirate-style hat. Both of these were unanimously suggested as being awesome for me, and I think I agree. They both fit well. The others bought some hats too: Matt left with a black fedora-style hat, Nic bought seven hats (because he goes through them quickly) and Tim scored a very savvy grey top hat! To complete the ensemble the others bought parade canes and even some fake moustaches. Fun!

Thirdly, we waltzed over to the Indian (as in subcontinent) restaurant for some curry. The menu options for many were quickly settled down to “whatever the hottest thing on the menu is,” but despite this, nobody had big problems eating their meal.

Finally, we cruised around the university campus for a little bit. It seemed familiar…not because UC Berkeley is famous in computing circles, but to me it was because of the smell in the air. Turns out the place is full of eucalyptus trees! No wonder—that gum-tree smell is highly reminiscent of home and of UTas.

After BARTing back to San Fran, we made some further plans for the evening: another movie, and then dinner. Movie was The A-Team, which we all agreed must have been worth the nine dollars entry, even though it was excessively silly and full of explosions. It’s got some great moments, like the bit where they fly a tank.

Dinner was had at the Cheesecake Factory. Yes, they have a huge range of cheesecakes. No, we didn’t just have cheesecake for dinner. Yes, I had a steak too. Yes, the steak was pre-shredded and I would have rather had it in one piece, but didn’t particularly mind enough to not eat the thing. Yes, the Cheesecake Factory has a great view of Union Square.

And now I must post or this will never get done. I’ll do the last two days soon. It’s been delayed a little because the internet here at the hotel was down yesterday, and we have been a bit busy today. So maybe I’ll write it on the plane home…on my brand new iPad! Fork yeah!

See you next time!

June 18, 2010 07:03 AM

Having to support Windows in my day to day job (I'm the Windows administrator) is a necessary evil. I was wondering why my test deployment of Windows 7 was so slow copying files. Turns out it was due to bandwidth throttling, a "feature" since Vista. Windows 7 seems to throttle bandwidth, especially on a LAN and it's based on helping to prevent little or no interruption to audio playback. This can be damn annoying, especially when copy large files across an intranet.

Two registry settings that seem to prevent or alleviate the throttling are:

(DWORD value) HKLM\system\CurrentControlSet\Services\lanmanworkstation\parameters\DisableBandwidthThrottling (create if it doesn't exist and set to 1 to disable and then reboot)

or

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\SystemProfile\NetworkThrottlingIndex (set to a value between 1 and 100 and reboot)

Also another possibility is to disable the MMCSS (Multimedia Class Scheduler) service - from wikipedia: "This service has been implicated in poor networking performance while multimedia is playing", or "Windows throttles the network interfaces while audio is playing in order to maintain audio quality and prevent network interrupts interrupting media playback. By default, this limits the network receive speed to 10% of its maximum - 100Mbps on gigabit ethernet, and 10Mbps on fast ethernet"

The service is is a dependancy in the windows audio service (the dependancy needs to be removed so windows audio can still run) so in regedit,
go to HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Audiosrv, find DependOnService and remove MMCSS and restart.
Finally, in the services control panel, services.msc, disable “Multimedia Class Scheduler service” and restart.

Voila!

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June 18, 2010 06:25 AM

There was only really a 1/2 day today with sessions ending around midday-ish. As a consequence I did a few touristy things, mostly walking.

Stupidly, I walked from my hotel (marker "E" on the map below, Second St) to "Japantown" , marker B, where google had told me there's a good anime shop called Japan Toys.
Aghghg. Around 1 hour of walking later (I stopped at the Apple Shop (near 4th st and Powell) to browse along the way) I got to the shop, only to discover they're mainly into web distribution and so didn't really have much in the way of stock.

All up I walked at least 10km. Distances are deceptive - "only a couple of blocks" is actually a fair distance!

To put things into scale, the second image shows the distance in contrast to the whole peninsula.

A cathedral along the way...

Japantown approaching

A peace pagoda made of concrete at Japantown

Powell St with obligatory trollycar.

Entrance to China Town

Tomorrow is my last day in the USA so I plan to bike ride along the top of the peninsula (Fisherman's wharf etc) across the Golden Gate Bridge and on to Sausalito, catching a ferry back.

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June 12, 2010 02:26 AM

The WWDC bash at Yerba Buena featured Ok Go.  The lead singer, Damian Kulash came into the crowd during their set and stood immediately in front of me and the people I was with.  He made comments such as "we're all [the band] nerds, but not as good as you.. err.. not as well as you as my grandma would say", and "we normally perform at conventions.. I've played to a lot of white people before but usually there are some women in the audience..."

 

 

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June 11, 2010 05:37 AM

So little time!
Heres the app wall, colour-coding and sorting the apps as they are bought from the app store in real time. Not a very good photo as it's popular to stand and watch it in a sort of mesmerized stupor. Although it's really cool, perhaps next time they could drop the icons in a detail and colour coded sort to produce a photo-mozaic of say Steve you can see if you stand back far enough.

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June 10, 2010 06:31 PM

This is all about things I have broken that belong to others, either with my presence or simple interaction. Going to be a short post, but it will be updated as stuff happens (and I remember).

In Vegas:

• Broke the monorail ticket dispenser when I asked for a day tripper
• On the trip down to the Grand Canyon, a friend was using his iPad to run his business (email, organising meetings, etc.). After a suitably long chunk of work being completed, I would ask to borrow the iPad. Every time (six separate occasions) I made this request the iPad would (within ten seconds) go from nearly full signal strength to no network connection. Yes it’s a coincidence, but it annoyed my friend immensely as it prevented him from working for half an hour or so.
• There was heaps more…gah…it will come back

In San Francisco:

• I walked up to the Virgin America full service check-in desk, and the attendant’s computer locked up.
• Get in an evaluator on level five. Press ‘lobby’, proceed to level three, then back to six, then down to the lobby. Another time it got stuck on three for about fifteen seconds then went to the lobby. None of my friends have experienced this without me being present.
• The water pipes burst in the neighbouring room, causing us to be moved to a room with inferior wireless
• My hotel room key stopped working…twice (not counting disabled by the hotel because of room flooding)
• Plastic cup + water cooler = boiling water, and a cup melting in my hands (yes it came out of the blue tip)
• A friend was playing with the eyefinity racing demo at Fry’s, quite happily crashing into walls from some time. I walk up and almost immediately the game crashes.

Both:

• When I touch a light it stops working, but when my roommate touches it, it starts working again
• My roommate also reports I have broken him

Um yeah, more to come. This is actually as much as a place for me to remember stuff that happened—tech fails trigger memory. I have been told this list is rather short (i.e. it’s missing a lot), however we just can’t remember what at the momement. Edits to come!

Update 01 (20100612):

• I went to use the sink in the new hotel room, pulled the leaver to activate the plug, and it broke.
• The iPhone WWDC app refused to be downloaded/installed on my iPhone via iTunes. Short version: had to get a friend to perform Xcode Magic
• The Finder Bar completely broke (and no the missing icons weren’t even clickable):

• Much like at Virgin America, I walked up to the bar, only to see the staff errupt in a hail of activity…their computers just crashed
• When trying to use iTunes to download the WWDC 2009 videos it would start the download, about 140MB would come down, then iTunes would lock up for about a minute

Update 01 (20100625):

It’s been a week since I left America, and I really should have written the extra stuff down, never mind, here is what I remember (yes it’s mostly my stuff, but I don’t remember the third party stuff anymore):

• After the plug for the sink in the hotel room got fixed, it became blocked somehow. This resulted in it taking the better part of an hour to clear. On the final day it refused to empty at all. Seriously, all that went down that sink was water, and soapy water, why did it get blocked!?!
• When I was using an ATM in Pala Alto, I had $X available. I tried to withdraw $Y where $T = $X-$50 (at least), $Z is a multiple of 20USD, and I had withdrawn more than $Z on previous days. Instead of money I got an ‘insufficient funds’ error. Fortunately lowering the withdrawal amount 20USD worked, but according to the ATM statement after the transaction there was still plenty of money in the account…go figure.
• My room card/key: demagnetised a further two times and at one point somehow took the identity of a guest that checked out in 1971
• While touring the lovely business premises of [REDACTED], I walked past one of the employee’s desks, only to witness an application crash…I’m magic!
• Flight 01, San Francisco to Sydney. 20minutes before boarding, on my way to use the ‘facilities’, I get called to the departure gate. Once I get there I speak to two people, neither of whom know anything about an announcement concerning me. So I take a seat, near the gate and say to them call me if anything turns up. Then it is boarding time, so I get in the queue and as I approach the gate I see that they are ripping the ticket stubs off, (apparently the check-in system went down). Ok, this is reasonably common at airports, so I’m not going to claim credit for that…but I hand over my ticket and get pulled out of the queue. Apparently my ticket was ‘flagged’ by a ‘comment’ and I needed to go see someone at the gate before boarding…um wth? After some random smacking of a keyboard (goodness knows what system it was if the check-in system was down) they let me on the plane…I suppose it could have been worse.
• Flight 02, Sydney to Hobart. My ticket stopped working at the international to domestic transfer bus lounge. Then after it was ‘fixed’ it stopped working at the departure gate as I was trying to board the fly. Several system searches later I was added in manually.

Oh well, that will do. More stuff happened, so let’s move on. Cloud and iPad rants coming soon, along with an annoying tale of phone services.

June 09, 2010 06:40 PM

Well, so much for ‘daily report’. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised—a few days into running the site, I’m in a foreign country and I can’t access my server. ‘But why?’ I hear you ask…that or simply laughing at me for not using a VPS. So, I get to America expecting to just buy a pre-paid SIM with a bit of data, stick it in my iPhone and away. But no (at least according to friend), the only two carriers who support the iPhone frequencies are AT&T and T-Mobile. Supposedly AT&T will not let me put their SIM in a non-AT&T iPhone (even if it is unlocked—though roaming onto their network is fine…just debilitatingly expensive). So that leaves T-Mobile. However, T-Mobile only support EDGE. Oh well you can’t have everything, so I keep my eye out for a store.

By day four of the Americas I realised, ‘Oh wait, perhaps I should stop hanging around with my friends in Vegas Casinos if I want a SIM’. I give in and buy hotel internet. That’s when things start to go pear shaped. I try and establish a VPN back into my network (currently I haven’t directly exposed my blog to the internet via SSL), and it just won’t stay connected. After some poking I realise I’m only getting 1/2 the packets through to my VPN box. Google however appears to be relatively fine (99/100 successful pings). So I begin tracing back to my house. In doing so it looks as if the packets are taking four distinct routes: 250ms, 500ms, 750ms, and ‘timeout’ (uneven distribution). This lead me to believe it was a routing problem with the network somewhere. After trying to figure out where very late at night, I give up and get some sleep, after all San Francisco was only a sleep and half a day away, I can get net there right?

The next day, I get to the airport and the free WiFi there works great. I just get through security, fire-up my Windows VM, VPN in, Outlook starts to sync and I get called to board…bugger. Late Saturday I get to my hotel in San Fran, connect to its WiFi and start downloading files at 600KB/s. Try and VPN back home…’s***’. The packets were being dropped again. This time the tracing back to my house made even less sense. I ping Google…’double s***’: 46% (233/506) packet drop. Well it could just be the hotel wireless right? Well of the four of us staying in the hotel, only I was having packets actually drop. While the experience was a bit erratic for the others it didn’t come close to the network issues I was having (slow net is slow != dead net is dead). After trying a few different networks, all of them just as bad, I give up for the night (again it is late).

Sunday, up bright and early to try and beg/steal a seat on the AUC tour bus, and had a wonderful day (thanks Andrew). Then I had a fun time at the Australian delegates bash. I particularly enjoyed talking to Kim Silverman about Alex and voice synthesis—I even managed to show him some bugs I found.

Eventually I get back to the hotel for take two: no dice. After an hour of pure frustration I boot into Windows. I then spend the next 2 hours catching up on mail and ringing parents, because low and behold Windows networking actually works! I then get an ‘early’ night, a few hours sleep then head on out at 0400hrs (local) to line up for the WWDC keynote.

Once we get inside the ‘WWDC’ network becomes available. Unfortunately it also produced a massive packet drop in OS X. So I go back to Windows, where it works as advertised. After speaking to some nice people in the line we come to the conclusion that the most likely culprits were TunnelBlick (SSL VPN Client) and VMWare Fusion 2. Reinstall time!

Later that night I’m trying to back up OS X and Time Machine keeps failing. Ok fine, but it doesn’t tell me that it’s failing—I can just see that it is missing files! Another two hours go by and 10.6.0 is finally reinstalling.

I wake up the next morning to find I didn’t do a clean install (just installed over the top), and that while better behaved, it isn’t perfect—when in a bad mood OS X will still drop approx. 50% of packets, it’s just a rarer occurrence now. Windows still works fine…why?

As a side note, something annoying I noticed on both my iPhone and my MBP is that once I connect to a wireless network, the devices report ‘full’ signal strength, regardless of the actual strength. This is particularly bad as these devices often automatically join a network, and because I never see the strength before joining, I have no clue to the real strength. Then I wonder why the speed/reliability sucks!

So, what now? I need to find time to write up my notes and catch up on the backlog of blog topics that have amassed themselves, so once again…stay tuned.

Oh please forgive the poor gamma (and possibly spelling, as it’s late and I’m tired). Sleeping time: I can’t actually post it at the hotel, I’m not dropping packets, but it seems the bandwidth/latency isn’t quite good enough to establish the VPN.

June 09, 2010 06:04 PM

If you pick a popular session, prepare to queue.. this is the queue for the mission room.. Developing for a recent device.

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June 09, 2010 12:20 AM

Apparently the green ones are nutritious (because they're green), but after eating a whole cup of them..

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June 08, 2010 10:09 PM

Quick test post, wwdc leaves little or no time!
The sessions are great, unfortunately I can't blog about them as there's a NDA. So many people, so little time, so many ideas.

Sent from my iPad

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June 08, 2010 08:35 PM

Quick test post, wwdc leaves little or no time!
The sessions are great, unfortunately I can't blog about them as there's a NDA. So many people, so little time, so many ideas.

Sent from my iPad

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June 08, 2010 08:31 PM

Good evening, and welcome to tonight’s edition of the World’s Best and Most Amazing Blog Ever. First up, we review the V Australia service between Sydney and Los Angeles, as well as the bowl of ramen I ate at the southern food court in the San Francisco Airport International Terminal, and the Holiday Inn at the airport. Finally, there will be an extensive coverage of travels over the last three days at Las Vegas.

V Australia is a recent addition to the Virgin brand (who I recently discovered also offer superannuation through their Virgin Money brand!), providing long-haul flights between select destinations on the east coast of Australia and the west coast of the US. I booked a series of flights starting in Hobart and ending in San Francisco, via Sydney and Los Angeles, spending about 14 hours over the pacific. Like most other things Virgin, flight VA1 was pretty sexy. I was particularly pleased with the food, the legroom (cattle-class), and the deviously funny flight information cartoon.  The one and only one downer was actually supplied by the Virgin Blue flight that got me in to Sydney. This flight took longer than usual, and combined with the laggy international terminal transfer bus (which stunk like my laundry bag) and the positively frenetic pace of Australian immigration and customs meant I had to run the length of the inordinately long duty-free shopping area at the Sydney international terminal, and therefore board VA1 covered in sweat. Not cool.

The bowl of ramen in the food court was acceptable late-night food, and yet nowhere near being in the league of the bowls of ramen I ate in Japan.

After polishing off the noodles at 11PM-ish local time, I caught the shuttle bus over to the Holiday Inn I booked to bunker down in for the night. Sorry to sound like a shill, but I was very pleased with the small things provided by these guys, like a bottle of water, free late checkout, and so on. In the morning I went to their restaurant and had some wonderful blueberry pancakes for breakfast.
That day, my fellow travel companions and I met up back at the airport for lunch and our flight to Las Vegas. After some confusion regarding the correct BART station to meet Paris and Jon at, we settled down for some more food court food and then caught the Virgin America flight to Vegas. Virgin America again has a distinctive and sexy service, with another flight safety cartoon full of wicked little jokes.

Now Las Vegas is known as Sin City–gambling, strippers and hookers, and booze seem to flow quite naturally there. What I wasn’t expecting was poker machines in the airport waiting area, straight off the plane!

I’ll let the pictures do most of the talking here: we stayed in the Stratosphere, the only hotel casino which is in the Las Vegas city proper (the rest are actually in unincorporated Clark County, though still part of greater Vegas). The Stratosphere is so named due to the tower over 300 metres high with awesome rides at the top. After leaving the airport, we basically checked in, found dinner over at the NASCAR Cafe, and went to sleep. The NASCAR Cafe serves very large portions of food like most places we ate, but aside from being particularly proud of this fact, they have a special menu item: the B3 burrito, weighing in at six pounds (!) and which if you can eat the whole thing, you don’t pay for it. Nobody tried it, but instead I managed to eat most of a huge burger and chips.

In the morning we ate breakfast at IHOP (ohgod: cheesecake pancake stack! Lethal!) We also went around on the monorail to some of the major attractions: the MGM Grand, the Excalibur (Arthurian-legend-themed hotel), Luxor (Egyptian-themed hotel shaped like a pyramid), and past many of the other hotels on the strip.

We wasted the most time at Luxor, since we had planned to see Criss Angel perform that night. Luxor had several fascinating things to do. We saw Bodies, a tastefully presented exhibition of plasticised human bodies. Some of us also saw an exhibition of artefacts retrieved from the Titanic. Both these exhibitions are well worth the regular ticket price! As for Criss Angel’s show, I was impressed by the speed of his magic tricks and the theatrics, especially of the Cirque du Soleil performers, but the guy came across as a bit of a wanker and his act seemed a bit repetitive by the end. We had dinner at the Rainforest Cafe, a rainforest-themed restaurant in the MGM Grand, which was fun, especially as Paris paid for all the drinks. The others all had stupid cocktails with excessive alcohol, but I was quite happy with my rainbow-coloured frozen sodas.

The next day we took a guided tour of the Grand Canyon, which is in Arizona, unlike Las Vegas which is in Nevada. This boils down to a five-hour or so bus ride each way. Breakfast was all-you-can-eat McDonalds (the principal reason we suspect that this tour was suggested by Andrew). We stopped at some very interesting places along the way: the Hoover dam (damn we had some bad dam puns going), and the towns of Kingman and Seligman (spiritual home to the longest remaining pieces of historic Route 66).

The Grand Canyon is really fucking massive. The best way of explaining it involves the computer graphics concept of “skybox”: the opposite side of the canyon looks like one (like a flat backdrop!) We learned that the canyon is about as long as the distance we covered in the bus ride (about two hundred and something miles), and about 20 miles wide. I won’t put up too many photos since photos really do not do the place any justice.

After the Grand Canyon trip we had a few hours up our sleeve for dinner and some random activity. Dinner was to be had at the 50s-style diner located in the Stratosphere, which as usual had way oversize meal portions. I had a burger and a killer chocolate malt!
At some point however, the idea was floated to see a topless show as the night’s random activity. Pople staying at the hotel got a two-for-one deal on the tickets, which was a plus. The show was called Bite, and the theme was, naturally, topless female vampires. Out of sheer random spontaneity, we did it—everybody except Alex got a ticket and the eight of us all crowded around a table next to the stage.

What a great idea! The show was absolutely hilarious and weird, with a rocking soundtrack! Judging the faces of the fellow audience members, we seemed to be the only people who had a fun time. Maybe they were trying to get aroused. Who knows? My advice: go for a laugh!

And finally, we had yet another abridged sleep in the noisy, dehydrating hotel room before Alex and I woke up and competed in Google Code Jam online round 2, local time 7AM. Alex did way better than me as usual, but it was a curvy round and neither of us got through to the next one.

After that we went around a lot of other attractions: up the Stratosphere tower a bit, caught a cab to New York, New York to ride the roller coaster (FUN!), checked out the Belagio with its water fountain theatrics and did a bit of gaming (Dad asked for some chips: got you one!). We went into Paris for lunch (second lunch for some) which has a disturbingly cool ceiling which, when you don’t concentrate on it, makes you feel like you are outdoors. We then went through Bally’s and emerged on the other side. Finally we did a series of rather uninteresting moves to get back to the airport and fly back to San Francisco, but not before Matt and I played some single-deck blackjack together back at the Stratosphere. Matt made $50, I lost $10. Compared with the Belagio chips, the Stratosphere chips seemed really cheap and nasty, so I didn’t save one.

After arriving back at San Fran airport, we immediately headed for Palo Alto to collect our large baggage which had been stowed away at Jon’s apartment there. Highlight of the evening was the Chicago-style pizza from a place called Patxi’s. Oh. My. Gawd. That was easily the best pizza I’ve had in years. Three larges for the table had us all full. They took 40 minutes to cook properly (that gives you an idea of how thick they were!) and I think it was worth every minute of the wait and every penny we paid.

June 07, 2010 10:39 AM

WWDC Day 0

bzzzzap transmission begins

Started off on a coach trip organised by the AUC.  After a brief wait in the hotel foyer with the mac-labbers,

first stop was Frys Electronics which is apparently one of the biggest electrical retailers in the US.

I bought a few goodies - my noise cancelling headphones got damaged on the flight over (by me, I must have drifted off and woke with a start when someone coughed - this lead to me knocking the adapter in the headphone socket and shearing the end off), so I decided the flight back would be a nightmare without them.  Cheap $49 Sony ones will do. PS3 games aren't region coded so a game I was after presented itself to my credit card. Annoyingly, Super Mario Galaxy 2 was out, but unfortunately Wii games are region locked so I'll have to wait until July in Aus for it. I bought a strategy guide for it that was cheap though.

Moving on to the Computer History Museum. I'd been here before so I wasn't so snap happy "oooh.. a disk platter... ooooh, look space war" as last time.  It was slightly disappointing that the bulk of the museum was undergoing significant renovations, but it looks like when it's complete it will be quite amazing. Maybe if I get to go to wwdc 2012? The chief interest for most patrons is the Difference Engine No. 2, a working implementation of one of Charles Babbage's designs.  Watching the polynomial calculation progress is quite fascinating, ticking over the different spools, cogs whirring, platters going up and down and passing a carry across. The machine is on loan to the museum by some Microsoft executive who commissioned the device to be built.  His house is not big enough to display the 5+ tonne monster, so it's on loan until he builds a new room to house it.  If that doesn't scream extravagance, what does?

Last up was the Company Store, a store at Apple headquarters at 1 Infinite Loop that sells Apple-branded items. I didn't intend to spend any money here but they sucker you in and take your credit card at the door, giving it back when you depart after some hypnotic episode where you discover you've spent $92US.  Maybe it's the Steve Jobs distortion effect that's infused into all the buildings making you think an Apple-branded mug is a must have item. As is a pen. And a travel mug. And a t-shirt. sigh..

The coach tour ended by dropping us of at the conference venue, Moscone West, to register for the conference.  The only conference goody this year is a baseball-style jacket with WWDC blazoned across the front, and "10" on the back, which replaces a satchel and t-shirt from previous years.  Rumour has it they'll be giving away iPhone 4 during the conference, the chances of which I rate as high as me becoming the next King of England*.

Next transmission begins perhaps from the queue waiting for the keynote - if there's a wifi signal outside the moscone.  Our plan is to start queuing at 4:00am for the 10:00am start.  Anecdotal evidence suggests this isn't keen enough and we'll actually be at the end of the queue, but I'm thinking that's apple-fanboy enough keen-ness for me.

*(my parents are english so mayhap my heritage doth include some royalty, a bastard son of a court dalliance etc. Maybe even the Flemish traders who were perhaps my ancestor's precursors might have raided a few villages to claim some form of monarchical right to the throne.. who knows - it's still a slim chance :-P)

 

bzzzzap transmission begins

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June 07, 2010 01:27 AM

bzzzzap.  Transmission begins.

Day -1 (Saturday)

Finally made it to San Francisco (woo!).  After seemingly waiting forever in the boring immigration line (I'm surprised they didn't take retinal scans or DNA samples!) I managed to stumble my way out to the baggage carousel.  Watching forlornly for 30 minutes to see if my suitcase would decide to stop hiding and appear, some random official wandered over and asked what I was doing. "umm.. looking for my suitcase".  "What does it look like?".. "suitcasy?" She then told me to go over and see the carousel supervisor.  I should have realised after 10 mins that the sinking feeling you get watching other people on the same flight escape from that same immigration queue and see their bags immediately means your suitcase has decided to abscond and leave you to your own devices.

The carousel supervisor had my name on his list.  I should be impressed and feel important but that clinched it.  My suitcase was not here, and not clinging to some crevice in the conveyor belt somewhere.  He directed me to the baggage claims desk, where a seemingly harried looking vietnamese gentleman behind the desk was trying to placate another Australian who was flying on to Britain sans baggage. He was very loud and vocal (the Australian) and using terms like "well, what are you going to do about it?" and "what am I supposed to do now?".  All very understandable but the baggage clerk wasn't helping matters by trying to move him along saying he had to help other people - me.  With a glare from my compatriot, the clerk turned to me.  Blah blah, yes, we'll send the bag to you, TOMORROW night. The local time was around 11:00am. To my surprise though he then filled in a petty cash slip and gave me $100 US "for the inconvenience".  I didn't understand why I was being offered a bribe to keep quiet and shuffle out wearing the same clothes for more than 24 hours, and the other guy who was flying on before his baggage would arrive wasn't.  Who cares!  I recall seeing on those airline reality shows the loud-mouthed passengers doing anything to secure $100 vouchers eg. "my seat was the wrong shade of blue", but I didn't say anything!

I managed in my state of stinky 30-hour underwear to catch the BART to near my hotel, and thankfully, got checked in immediately. This was about midday local time.  I needed sleep but first I had to go buy some clothes for tomorrow. After my zombie-gait meandering along Market Street, I ended up in the equivalent of a "best and less", "Ross" where it seems buying "cheap but quality goods" was a mandate for every San Franciscan to be there at the same time. It doesn't seem there are any normal department stores in the city, unless you want designer clothes (but I just want some underwear!) so this place seemed the most likely to satisfy all my underwear needs.  Hmm.. that sounds a bit dubious.  Anyway, back to the hotel for a decent sleep.

Day 0 (Sunday)

bzzz-tchetch-kerthump.  Oh great.  2:30am, and people staying in the room next door have arrived and want to continue to paaaaaarty.  Lots of "I love you man" and drunken shenanigans.  Maybe I'm old and crotchety in comparison but I want to sleep! I should have called out "get off my lawn" but they may have heard.

Today's going to be much better.  Showered, in new clothes (completely - bought jeans, shirt, socks and underwear with my lucky "please keep quiet" qantas bribe), breakfasted and now sitting here in my hotel room typing this blog entry before going on an organised coach trip by the AUC to Frys electronics, the Computer History Museum and the Apple store at 1 Infinite Loop.

Unfortunately, my laptop charger and ipad/ipod sync cable is in my suitcase, so I only have around 2 hours of battery left.  Hopefully I can take photos and upload later.

bzzzzap.  Transmission ends.

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June 06, 2010 02:37 PM

I love LEGO. It was always too expensive for my parents to buy when I was young so I guess I'm making up for it now.
I've bought several sets* for when my son is old enough to appreciate and play with them. There are some though that I doubt I'll ever let him touch.

This is one of them:

 

This is apparently the biggest set that LEGO make/made (over 5000 pieces).  It took me about a year to build as I had to schedule it around times when my 1 year-old son was not around to eat the blocks.  The set includes 5 minifigs - Han, Chewbacca, Luke, Leia and Obi-wan. It's around 90cm wide so the only place to put it is on one of my office filing cabinets (there's no room at home!)

 

The top canopy/gun turret comes off revealing a minifig sitting in the seat.

 

 

Battle on Hoth sets complement the scene..

 

 

*I will test build them for him in the meantime.

 

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June 02, 2010 01:54 AM

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June 01, 2010 11:43 PM

Only 3 days to go before my flight to SF.. thanks to the AUC and UTAS woo woo!

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June 01, 2010 08:07 PM

This is an extremely fun set to build

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June 01, 2010 12:01 PM

I didn't realise localisation on the iPad with VoiceOver even included regional accents i.e. with the region set as Australia, the VoiceOver voice has a Kiwi accent - close enough considering New Zealand is the 8th state/territory of Australia :-) Sent from my iPad

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June 01, 2010 01:25 AM

The current Dungeons and Dragons campaign, run by me, features 4 player characters. Previously there were 5. Cat is playing a Dragonbord Warlord named Ahmad. Matt is playing a Human Fighter named Camthalion. Michelle is playing a Human Wizard named Kate (a shortening of her character’s actual name). Jared is playing a Human Rogue named Jack. Charles was playing a Half-Elf Warlock named Vincent.

The adventure began as the party arrived in the frozen province of Elden, having traveled up the south road. On their way into Waywyn, they encounter a swarm of refugees, many very unwell, travelling along the road towards Waywyn, from the lands to the east. At the city, the party is allowed in, though all the sick refugees are forced to stay in a camp outside the city walls. Inside the city, the stone is white, the people are happy and life is generally pretty swell. The city and surrounding lands are ruled over by Lord Allairo Andar, who resides in a white castle on the hill.

After only a short time, the players are asked to deal with a few problems concerning a guard officer, an apothecarist and a cleric of Pelor, all of which require the party to trek into the mountains to the north-west. It is quickly revealed by the cleric that those who die of the Blight, a Black Plague-like disease afflicting the lands to the east, rise again as walking dead. The most important of the tasks given to the players involves Callum Andar, brother to the lord, and former paladin of Pelor until his recent death. The chapel initiates in charge of the preparation of his body failed to ward it against reanimation properly, and the ritual burial grounds in the low mountains have been swarmed upon by the undead.

A few hacks and slashes later, the party arrives at the ritual burial grounds and kills many undeads. Along the way they discover a sword with an embossed handle, engraved with vine patterns and an eye on the pommel. The eye opens and the sword speaks aloud, though without a mouth. The name “Wesley” is given the the blade by the party, as the blade does not know its own name. The origin of the blade is still a mystery to the party, though they do know that it once belonged to Callum Andar, amongst many former wielders, and it recently “managed to get rid of” its latest Orc wielder, who it disliked very much. The blade is a magical implement and is being used by the Wizard, Kate. They find the entrance to Callum’s tomb opened, and a dagger stuck in Callum’s chest. The scroll given to the players with which to perform the reanimation ward is cast and consumed but to no effect. The party removes the dagger and returns to Waywyn. After reporting their findings and collecting rewards for other tasks fulfilled, the chapel sends a few Paladins to return Callum’s body and resurrect him themselves. It is revealed that Callum himself has been infected with the Blight, and the only thing short of a cure to the plague stopping him from returning as undead was to bring him back to life.

May 31, 2010 03:56 AM

As those of you how know me will have experienced, I like to bitch when things break. Well I’ve been live for about 8hrs now. In that time I’ve actually been reinstalling OSX on my MBP as it was just ridiculously unstable…but that is a story for later. Right now I’d like to talk about my iPhone.

As part of my OSX reinstall I had to pair my phone with my laptop again so that the magic that is Bluetooth tethering will work once more. So on my phone I go into System→General→Bluetooth and delete the old MBP entry. Then I go to add a Bluetooth device on the laptop, it detects the phone, and the pairing process starts. Having approved the pairing on the phone, and gotten confirmation of a successful pairing in OSX I attempt to tether. No joy.

So then I start toggling Bluetooth off and on, on both the MBP and iPhone. Frustrated I kill the pair on both devices and recreate. Then I reboot both devices…that’s when I really get annoyed. You see, my iPhone has this annoying tendency to crash on boot. No ******* idea why. True I cannot definitively state it has crashed since Apple only show you that useless Apple symbol. But a typical boot time for me is less than 120 seconds. In the past I have left the phone booting for over an hour, just to prove that it was not going to. This time I left it for 10 minutes…twice. On the third attempt it finally booted. Then I get a message ‘Your iPhone has been Activated’…wtf? (sorry I stupidly didn’t screen cap it). And to cap it all off…tethering still isn’t working…Google time.

Matt.

Update 1: I just toggled the ‘Internet Tethering’ setting on the iPhone (on→off→on) and all is well…gah! Well I’m not turning my phone off again…at least until the next thing breaks.

May 30, 2010 12:51 PM

Greetings and welcome to the test post. Or better yet, welcome to The Daily Bug Report (TDBR). This site is the result of my friends complaining that I complain too often! Fed up of hearing my voice they would just rather skim through my complaints, so that they can quickly offer condolences, and get on with their more productive lives…curses!

So dear reader, prepare to be amazed at the sheer number of technical catastrophes that befall me! I will astound you with tales of stupidity, anger, horror and simple bad luck! At least you will get a few laughs at my expense…no seriously, this crap costs me a fortune!

So until next time (and some concrete examples), stay tuned…
Matt.

And yes this is ripped off the about page…shut up

May 30, 2010 06:46 AM

This week I spent my time on a old vineyard near Springbrook, the job at hand was to repair as many sensor nodes as we could. The land has been purchased by the Queensland government to be restored, there are a few patches of rain forest and thick bush land that we have to walk through to get to each node. Besides the suiting up to keep the cold/leaches/ticks away walking around this land is just spectacular and has become my favorite work environment. I have posted some images below to give a idea of the beauty of the land.
Besides trying to keep our electronics dry (laptop, sensor boards when cover removed) the rain didn’t bother me at all, it was more refreshing and relaxing, the wind did get annoying though it seems to get through any amount of cloathing one would put on.
Map of the network is below the images.

Map with sensor nodes dotted around

May 29, 2010 07:34 AM

Battery Pack

Back of LCD, with a Arduino Atmega328 custom daughterboard

Back of battery pack, polo switch with reed switch. Magnet turns on the power micro turns it off again.

Another pic of the micro in place, with the servo in the foreground. Lovely mount job :p

Back of the LCD, and the top of the latch that mates with the servo locking the box.

Top of the box with the LCD, front this time.

Secrut mini USB port hidden on the side of the box, this allows modification of the code and extra power if batteries fail

ohh and the GPS yet to find a place in the box, I’m thinking at the top near the LCD

And that’s a breif walkthrough of my little project.

May 29, 2010 03:27 AM

I’M ALIVE!
Well I think so...
Anyhoo it’s been about a year since I updated, yay!
Well we all knew it would be abandoned anyway so I guess this isn’t really shocking news.

I’m going to WWDC again this year and depending upon tiredness, bandwidth and general laziness I will hopefully make an effort to log my adventures here :) So stay tuned because their might be some excitingness on the way!

May 28, 2010 12:44 AM

We have a tricky problem to solve as we begin to use the Internet on more and more devices: making our data available on all of them. These devices include desktop computers, laptops, phones, tablets, consoles which play movies and music, cars with telnet ignition interfaces, etc. I believe that the only tenable long-term solution is a convenient and secure method for sharing this data peer-to-peer.

Right now Internet users are tending to solve the problem by delegating responsibility for their data to a third party who is supposed to keep it secure and supply it back to the user on request. This way you can upload data from one of your computers and download it (even automatically) on the others when you need it. For things like your files, email and contacts there are services available such as Dropbox, Apple's MobileMe and Canonical's Ubuntu One.

Some kinds of data are more sensitive than others. As a matter of policy I dislike making my data available to other parties unless it's necessary and I do it explicitly. It is well known amongst those who use email encryption that the encryption should be used all the time so as to not draw special attention when you do send something sensitive. This is also one example of keeping your data your own as a matter of course. Another advantage is that you use the same workflow all the time.

Suppose, as has happened before, I need to work with a digital copy of an art piece where all hell would break loose if it was leaked or shared. It would be downright stupid of me to upload it to somebody else's computers where I'm no longer directly responsible for the data. If I don't upload it, it can't leak, so the most sensible thing is not to do so. There's unlikely to be a problem even if I did use someone else's storage, but I don't want to take the risk. Now I need to start using special methods to move the data around such as an external hard drive or scp. How inconvenient. All I really want to do is to easily copy stuff over a network to the other computers without a middle man.

The trouble is it's a pain to set up that kind of service on the Internet right now. It won't really be viable on a large scale until IPv6 takes off in a big way. When that happens every device on the Internet will be individually addressable (and hopefully not excessively firewalled). Over the next couple of years this will become more and more attractive, particularly as the speed of Internet connections increases.

But why stop at ultra-sensitive data? Many of us store things like our email, instant messenger logs and social networking data on other people's computers. Google might even store your music and stream it to you. If we have a convenient method of synchronising our own data on our own computers we may as well do so and thereby eliminate the risks of losing direct control of the data. And we get an awesome backup system for free.

So we have this neat Diaspora thing coming out in a few months. It's going to provide decentralised peer-to-peer encrypted social networking. It'll hopefully be a little like Facebook with absolute control over to whom your data is given. I'm going to love playing with and possibly seriously using Diaspora but I doubt it will deliver enough convenience to steal many Facebook users, at least for a while.

I'm seeing something more here. The Diaspora devs explain that they want to make an extensible framework where anybody can create any sort of application or payload for sharing between peers. I reckon they're seeing a bigger picture where peer-to-peer is a necessary part of keeping our data private on the Internet. Initially, though, they're creating a secure social networking tool. That's a great idea because that's where users are hurting the most right now.

Diaspora or a project like it must succeed. I refuse to acknowledge a future of computing where users are expected to surrender data to others to get their work done on the Internet. It may not matter even most of the time. There is always a place for your own computer, your own data, your own control.

The cloud is getting more convenient all the time. With a little resourcefulness and work, peer-to-peer systems between our own computers can be convenient too. Then we won't have to throw out our old expectations of privacy for the sake of that convenience.

May 26, 2010 06:23 AM

I’m pleased to announce the release of a new version of SquidMan. This new version includes Squid 3.1.1. Please go to the SquidMan pages for more information and a download link.

I’d hoped to include some significant new features in this release, but it’s been trickier to implement than I’d hoped, and there has been little spare time to experiment. The good news is that I haven’t shelved those plans - they will just have to wait a little longer before they can be released.

May 22, 2010 06:39 AM

Tonight I appeared briefly on ABC's programme Q&A which was this week about Internet filtering. I asked of the panellists a question which read:

(John Gilmore famously once said, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." However,) "The Net" is not some robot but the result of how everyone uses it.

Since the Internet is effectively a democracy in its own right, do you believe that any nation should have the right to impose regulations upon it? Could it have its own sovereignty?

On the broadcast the part in parentheses was omitted. As I watched the panellists attempt to answer the question (or dodge the question) I quickly realised that apart from Brett Solomon, the intent of my question was mostly missed. In hindsight I see that by trying to fit my question in a small number of words I obscured my meaning.

Nonetheless the word "sovereignty" in particular brought up some good discussion about how sacred the freedom to do what you like on the Internet is. An on-screen tweet also suggested that it was more like anarchy then democracy, citing /b/. This is a fair point but still not quite what I meant.

I would like to elaborate a little about what I did mean. I do not necessarily think that the following is true. It is more of an interesting thought experiment for me, which is why I attempted to pose it to the Q&A panel.

The Proposal

The Internet is evolving all the time and I consider this to be very much like a democratic process. I'm going to stretch this analogy a bit. Instead of a piece of land on which we live, we have a relatively boring network over which we can make connections between computers using generally the TCP/IP suite with IPv4 and IPv6.  There is a lot of complicated technology which makes it happen but fundamentally that's all we're getting. An empty block.

On one level standardisation is generally democratic. Most Internet standards are developed by working groups with input from the entire industry -- the community and the businesses which run and use the Internet. We have requests for comment, and draft and approved specifications. Best of all, these working groups are doing this work knowing that it has to meet the needs of the stakeholders. Their standard has to gain general acceptance. A political party's policy must also gain general acceptance for them to be elected. Otherwise we go and use a different standard or vote for a different party, or make our own.

Standards are mostly about the Internet at the level of those who implement it. On another level there is a form of democracy in what services Internet consumers choose to use. Lots of people use email. Lots of people use peer-to-peer services. Lots of people use web servers. Lots of people use Facebook. The services which have server and client software, those which are supported, are those which have gained widespread popularity. Nobody is forced to use any of them, but it is inefficient to work against the grain because you cannot communicate with others as easily. This process of being driven to accept what the majority wants is also a democratic feature of the Internet.

The major point where this analogy falls apart is that democratic governments in the physical world can outlaw certain activities. This is not enforceable on the Internet because whatever the "crimes" are, they can be obscured easily. You can't encrypt your stealing of a car, but if someone invented an invisibility cloak that would be a similar effect.

Yet by and large this global community of Internet users feels that the benefits of this freedom outweigh the disadvantages of not being able to outlaw activities. This is where John Gilmore's famous quote applies. He originally made the statement about USENET but he stands by it to this day in a more general sense too. If censorship is applied to the Internet users change which services they use; they change how they use the Internet and therefore its form and features in order to circumvent that censorship. By a process of consensus, users do not want the censorship to happen. If the majority of users wanted to embrace censorship or any other arbitrary restriction, the changes necessary to work around it would not gain traction. People would say, "Stuff Tor. Proxies for rent? Hah, they'll be out of business in no time." More people would block Tor users because they feel that the trouble caused through anonymity is not outweighed by the ability to circumvent censorship.

The Internet community is big. It has representatives in the form of users from every nation. It is a community which is saying in a more-or-less democratic way that Governmental censorship is unwanted.

In that context, who is the relatively small Australian Government to say, "We know better than the Internet community. We should apply blacklisting for RC content."?

It is not even a question of the technical implementation of the policy. It is a restriction upon the Internet community which has by majority decided that it does not want the restriction. But the Internet community is much larger than the Australian community or Government, so there may be an argument to say, "The Internet overrules the Australian Government. No filtering." If so, should national Governments of the physical world respect that?

In saying so it is not suggesting that anarchy should be permitted on the Internet either. Crimes on the Internet are generally crimes in the physical world too.  Let the nation which has sovereignty over the physical space in which the criminals reside and the crimes are taking place enforce the laws of that area. However, they must not disregard the wishes of the (larger therefore more important) Internet community in their enforcement.

Well Then

Am I crazy, onto something or simply logically invalid? I haven't yet decided. Given that the Internet is a shared global resource and medium I think we have to at least settle on the issues of what individual nations may or may not do before we can fully evaluate censorship or national law enforcement proposals.

May 10, 2010 03:11 PM

The University of Tasmania has student wireless Internet access, a network called UConnect. (Great pun.) This network has sucked by varying amounts over the three and a half years I've spent there as a student.

It's some sort of 802.1X beastie. Setting it up on GNU/Linux is mostly a trial-and-error affair. My current settings are WPA2 Enterprise security, PEAP authentication, MSCHAPv2 inner authentication, and an AusCERT-certified identity whose root certificate isn't included in any normal root certificate packs.

They don't actually tell you what the settings are. The current way you're supposed to set it up on Windows or Mac OS X is to run some java-ish program which asks you for your administrator password and proceeds to mess with your settings such that it should work. Furthermore, if you're running Windows and it can't detect antivirus software it forces you to install McAfee Antivirus before it will mess with your settings. But that's okay, because McAfee is awesome.

Nonetheless it can be made to authenticate and have your computer on the University network. At this point you have access to the Internet, sort of. You can make DNS requests, or open TCP connections to destination ports 80, 110 and 443. Previously you had to explicitly go through proxy.utas.edu.au to get your web traffic out, but this year they brought in transparent proxies (edit: Not true. See comments). This is a minor improvement, but still doesn't do much for my IMAPS email, Google Talk, or anything else I want to do.

The general technique I've used for this other traffic is an ssh tunnel to my computer at home, using corkscrew where necessary to get through an HTTPS proxy. ssh -D will set up a SOCKS proxy on the local computer, causing all connections to be made via the remote computer (my computer at home). All I have to do is tell pidgin and Thunderbird and possibly firefox to use a SOCKS proxy at localhost and I can use the Internet how I like.

I wish I could say that having negotiated all these challenges I can relax and concentrate on my studies. This year they introduced a new problem: connections drop out. After some random interval of normally 2-30 seconds most TCP connections will stop having packets go either way. New connections continue as normal. I have no idea what routing problem is responsible for this but it's damn annoying.

Even HTTP requests can be affected by this. Sometimes I'll load a wikipedia page and half the maths images won't load. There is one little bit of respite: if a connection lasts for longer than about 30 seconds, it will tend to live more or less forever. Weird. This gives me a solution to web browsing: I keep on trying to establish an ssh tunnel to my home computer, and once one has managed to stay established for over half a minute, I can start using it to do web browsing through the SOCKS proxy.

This is where I've been at for the last seven or eight weeks but it's getting seriously frustrating killing ssh connections until I manage to establish a tunnel which stays up. I wanted a program to automate this process. Let's make a lot of ssh connections, poke them every ten seconds for half a minute, then grab one that's still alive and start another channel with that ssh TCP connection.

This can be facilitated using the ssh ControlMaster option (-M -S). Each of the simultaneous connections puts a socket in /tmp. Then when I want to use a particular TCP connection I launch another ssh process with -S to indicate the socket to use and also with the -D option which enables the SOCKS proxy behaviour on that connection. Then I want that first background connection to hang around until I'm done with the second, then die automatically.

So I've written a program that does just that: urlyconnect. If you're at UTAS you too might find it useful. I've tested its functionality on Debian and Ubuntu GNU/Linux but I see no reason why it shouldn't run on a Mac. If you use Ubuntu, note carefully the instructions in the README about the required version of OpenSSH.

Well, that's that done. Time to go and do something related to my degree.

April 22, 2010 07:44 AM

Lots of people get units wrong. Please don't be one of those people.

This is a tutorial introduction to getting your computing units right. The history of these issues is covered in extensive detail at Wikipedia.

File or Data Size

Everyone knows that computers store things as 1s and 0s. These are called bits. (Short for binary digits).

All modern computers represent things like letters and numbers with a group of 8 bits, which is called a byte. That is; there are 8 bits to every byte.

Convention is to use a lower case b to refer to quantities of bits and an upper case B to refer to a number of bytes. 220B refers to 220 bytes.

If we want to talk about lots of bytes there are SI prefixes available to us:

• k (kilo) 1,000
• M (mega) 1,000,000
• G (giga) 1,000,000,000
• T (tera) 1,000,000,000,000

So it is perfectly okay to talk about 936 kB, 1.24 Mb, 50 GB, referring to kilobytes, megabits and gigabytes respectively. It is not okay to talk about 936 mb because the prefix m (milli) means one-thousandth of a bit. You can't have parts of a bit. Please don't use the wrong case.

Binary prefixes

Confusingly, often people use terms like kB, MB and GB while meaning something slightly different.

When a computer stores a bunch of bytes in memory it tends to group them into chunks of powers of 2. This is because it needs to be able to give each spot in memory an address and it's easier to build hardware conforming to:

All addresses of the form 000000xx xxxxxxxx are stored in chip 1, 000001xx xxxxxxxx are stored in chip 2, etc.

In this example every chip has 10 bits of address space and can store 1024 bytes. If you were lazy, you would say that each chip stores 1 kB of data. But that means 1,000 bytes, not 1,024!

Similarly, with 2^20 bytes you get approximately one million: 1,048,576. So you can't say that this is a "megabyte" really, because that would mean exactly one million bytes.

There are two main solutions to this problem. The first and most common is to ignore it. This entails using kB, MB, GB, etc. and letting the person reading it guess exactly how many bytes you mean. This works most of the time because usually an approximate file size is good enough. Will the file fit on my flash drive? About how long will this take to download? Near enough is good enough.

But I'm an engineering student so I find this imprecision annoying, and sometimes we need to be explicit about what we mean. For this we have a method developed by the International Electrotechnical Commission:

• Ki (kibi) 1,024
• Mi (mebi) 1,048,576
• Gi (gibi) 1,073,741,824
• Ti (tebi) 1,099,511,627,776

If you ever see numbers like 3 KiB, 2.3 GiB, etc., you know exactly how many bytes they really mean. Better yet, if you always use those forms to represent the powers of 2, you also know that the ordinary SI prefixes always mean powers of 10.

The only downside is that it sounds ridiculous to say "mebibytes" out loud. But hey, it might be cool some day. It's only been around since 1996. If you look carefully, some computer software will express quantities in MiB or GiB. DC++ is an example.

Transfer Speeds

There are two main things to say about speeds. First of all, a transfer speed is how much data you can transfer in a given amount of time. Therefore the speed is an amount of data per second.

When speaking out loud it's convenient to talk about a "one-point-five megabit connection" but when written it should be "1.5 Mb/s".

Secondly, standard Internet connection speeds are quoted in bits per second. When you download files in your browser it usually shows you bytes per second. If you have a 1500 kb/s connection, to estimate your download speed in bytes per second you need to divide that number by 8, which is 187.5 kB/s. In reality it won't be quite that fast, but there's a big difference in the number depending on whether you're using bits or bytes.

Conclusion

I'm not as pedantic as some people. I have a lecturer who will happily write distances in Mm (megametres) instead of thousands of kilometres like almost anybody else would do.

All the same, the chances are you'll run across these numbers quite a lot and if you know exactly what they mean, more power to you. I will also be happier if I am reading something you've written and don't have to make mental conversions.

Finally and most importantly: sometimes it can be ambiguous. There is such a wide range of internet connections available these days that a download speed of 1 MB/s or a download of speed of 1 Mb/s could both be reasonable. If you're working out how long something will take to transfer you can't rely upon common sense to guess the correct form.

April 19, 2010 02:20 AM

This is my newest radio. It's called a Pixie II. It also happens to be the first amateur-band transmitter I've ever made.

These things are pretty cool. It is a continuous wave (CW) (or morse code) transceiver operating at a fixed frequency determined by a crystal on an HF band. Mine's configured for 80 metres using a 3.579545 MHz colorburst crystal. To move it to another band you just need to change the crystal and the L and C parameters of the antenna pi network.

The associated circuit description claims that it puts out a couple of hundred milliwatts. I'm not sure exactly how much power it does produce as it doesn't move the needles on my SWR meter but I intend to do the theoretical analysis sometime.

So what is it? Refer to the schematic. It's a Colpitts crystal oscillator running permanently at the transmission frequency. When the morse key is closed this pulls down the emitter of Q2, allowing it to amplify the oscillator into the antenna. When the switch is open the received AC is multiplied by the local oscillation frequency (direct conversion) and the result is superimposed on the supply voltage and applied as the input to an LM386 amplifier. This amplifier then provides a fixed (!) gain of 200 to the multiplied signal and in my case is attached to a 1 W 8 Ω speaker.

Despite the simplicity of the circuit I'm pleased to say that it really does work. I've tested both transmission and reception with my much fuller-featured Yaesu FT-7B.

There are a few bits missing, which is very much the point. The intention of the Pixie II is to provide the basic operating radio so that the operator can make improvements. In this case I would like to add a proper audio power amplifier with volume control, an automatic gain control for the received signal and some tuning capacitance. I'll need to take some measurements but I'm hoping I can get a stable 20 kHz tuning range with appropriate loading capacitance on the crystal. I could also experiment with an antenna filter with a sharper roll-off.

When I make these improvements, coupled with a decent antenna there's no reason why I couldn't have proper QSOs with this radio or even run it in a contest. Being low power and on 80 metres, it is not going to get much more range than Tasmania unless we get some crazy sun spots so I'm hoping that I'll be able to find some other morse operators within the state. If you're a radio amateur you should build one of these.

Perhaps I should learn morse code too.

April 16, 2010 12:37 PM

WARNING: this post is another one of those posts that contains me being a bit self-indulgent.

There’s a shiny, magical, completely imaginary universe, which does not and cannot exist, despite continual referral from our universe. The word that refers to it is “ideal,” and also its relative “ideally.”

In the ideal world, there are no cockups, and there are no conspiracies. Everybody lives in harmony, harmony always in the ideal lands. Ideally, everything everybody says and does is perfect, jobs get done on time and budget, paperwork does itself, iPads are freely available for everybody that wants one, alien lifeforms find themselves, and the gravy train runs all night.

And we don’t live in that world. At least, I certainly haven’t been.Never has this been more evident to me than over the last month.

Where I really lose in the “ideal world” department is, on occasion, I say or write the most incredibly stupid and insensitive things. For added measure, I occaisionally cock up the apology too. Why? Maybe I’m trying to be funny and go way too far. Maybe somebody sticks a metaphoric needle into a sensitive area of my psyche and I retaliate. Maybe I just haven’t figured out humans yet. Maybe I don’t realise precisely who I’m talking to, or who will overhear, until it is too late.

Whatever the reason, it certainly is not the case that I consciously try to screw things up. Why on earth would I do that? Yet, I accept full responsibility for my actions. It is my fault.

And it’s quite possible that even if I figure out the how and why I cocked up in every instance, and apologise, there’s nothing more I can do about it.

After the most recent cockup, it was pointed out to me by a very good friend that I have been acting passive-aggressively, and that my latest fiasco may well have ended up with somebody wishing I don’t exist. With regards to passive-aggressivity, I had to look up the concept since I wasn’t sure what it meant. With regards to not existing, there’s sweet fuck-all I can do to not exist, and the situation has made me quite depressed.

Sorry maclab, I’m hiding from you guys recently because I’m afraid of stirring the crap up any further, and I’m attempting to not exist. (And I rationalise it further by reasoning that I can’t possibly get any work done over there.)

About passive-agressiveness: sadly this has kinda fitted me recently. I could be stepped on or dominated by a number of people, and the response is not to express my anger or fear directly, but instead as resistance served with a smile,  coated with a thin veneer of (ill-)humour.

For example, I could be afraid that new faces in the crowd are very socially successful, and that I am becoming irrelevant. Why not give them an “endearing” nickname that is actually mildly offensive? (Said person was in a subset of people that already had a well-accepted stupid nickname, so that was a cock-up on two counts.) I should have been standing up for them instead of putting them down.

My very good friend also reminded me of one thing that I’ve now been concentrating on very hard: “It doesn’t have to be that way.”

Thankyou.

I don’t want to be a massive jerk or a passive-aggressive brick sticking out of the wall, or depressed and locked down by fears. Is it just as simple as being something else? I hope so. I hope so so much that I’m declaring the answer is YES.

I’ll be trustworthy, and happy and energetic and full of hope. I’ll stand up for people and listen to them and be a good friend for them and make them a coffee and assist them in their dealing with their problems and tell them I’m here. I’ll focus and get the job done. And I’ll keep the gravy train coming all night if I have to.

This is where I stop talking about it and hit the Publish button.

Harmony harmony always,
Josh

April 15, 2010 02:58 AM

April 14, 2010 05:53 PM

I don't use Facebook any more. I deleted my account (again) because of my increasing concerns about privacy and information retention and sharing. I'd been visiting the website a lot, posting on my wall at least every couple of days and adding comments much more frequently. Then I went cold turkey.

The mental instincts and mindset which I'd developed for social interaction using that website persisted for a couple of weeks. Having gained some offline perspective I was surprised and even ashamed of how I had begun to use Facebook. I would like to write a bit about Facebook and how it interacted with some of my vices.

The Game

I am not naturally a socially confident person. Some of the time I can't even bluff it but mostly I try to make up for it with enthusiasm. If I can't say the right thing, I'll err on the side of just saying a lot. Awkward silences are awkward.

But I know I'm not special. I think social insecurity applies to most of us at some level. However, we geeks have the advantage that it's pretty much expected. We can talk about it and joke about it with geeks and non-geeks alike. We interpret things literally, boy geeks suck at talking to girls, girl geeks suck at talking to boys -- you know how it goes.

The fact is that talking to people can be really hard. Facebook is much more comfortable for me as a geek because it is a website. I understand how the tool works. I am used to expressing myself through uninflected typed text. Most importantly, Facebook necessarily imposes a structure on the way social interaction proceeds. Aaah to have a bit of structure, a bit of logic in this crazy world which is people.

Most of what happens on Facebook is actually very simple. Disregarding application spam, meaningful posts normally take the form of a short textual status update, a link to an external website, a photo album or a larger textual Note. You can comment on any of these, and "Like" any of these, which puts your name underneath it as a supporter of the item.

Suddenly, consciously or not, Facebook is a game to me: to perform my best in the social world I want to optimise quality of posts against frequency of posts. How do I tell if a post is good quality? I see how many comments I get and how many Likes I get.

It's sad, isn't it? I would periodically review my Wall (which shows all my recent posts) and evaluate my performance based on whether I had any posts with no comments or Likes.

At the time I justified it differently. I had a notion that my brain comes up with cool things which I just have to share with the world, but I still don't want to bore everyone. If nobody is Liking my posts then I clearly need to work on increasing my cool-enough-to-share-on-Facebook threshold, hard though it may be.

Bullshit. I was playing a game. A game in which I try to demonstrate to myself that I'm a cool person and comments are the score.

Affirmation

I don't think I'm egotistical. I don't believe that I'm better overall as a person than anybody else. My goal is simply to be a like-able person. It's something I live by and I think it's a good thing.

Because Facebook is easier than real life social interaction for me, I began to prioritise it. I would check and post on Facebook while out and about with friends.

Sometimes I would think of a joke and instead of saying it right away to the small group of people I was with, I would save it to post on Facebook later. Many of those people would see it anyway, as would everyone else on my friends list. Bam, an efficiency gain right there.

Sometimes these jokes would be well-received and I would get the warm fuzzies watching people indicate their approval on Facebook some way or another. "Yes! I'm a good person! I can make people chuckle!" I would think. This in itself is not a mistake. I like to make people laugh and their approval was genuine.

The mistake is having that evaluation of self-worth depend mostly upon a single system, Facebook. The mistake is contorting myself to prioritise it. And it came about because it gives me structure, a quantitative metric for coolness and a sense of control.

Stalking

I don't like the term Facebook stalking. Stalking implies something malicious and dangerous. I'm sure this happens on Facebook but the majority of what people call "stalking" is simply viewing the profile of another user whom you don't know well personally, in order to find out more about them.

From a technical point of view complaining about this is stupid. If you don't want arbitrary people looking at your Facebook profile then you should lock down your privacy settings (as little as you can these days) to restrict access, or maybe not use Facebook at all.

In reality the situation is similar to the letter vs the spirit of the law. People put information about themselves on their profile but even if it's public, you're still creepy if you go and read it if you wouldn't get access to that information in person.

I did some of this contemporary definition of "stalking". It certainly wasn't malicious. For me it was just a low-interaction (safe!) way for me to find out who people are. I didn't do it a lot and the targets were a wide variety of people whose names I'd heard, friends of friends, etc. Nonetheless I have decided it was bad.

I propose a simple litmus test: Would you be comfortable meeting that person and telling them that you chose to go to their profile and learnt the things about them that you did?

In many of my cases the answer would be no. They would probably think I was creepy. If they published the information on a personal website or something like that I wouldn't have any concern at all. It is a problem I talk about a lot: on Facebook people have a perceived expectation of some level of privacy. It doesn't exist but regulating your own "stalking" shows respect to these people.

Friends are important

I've outlined some pretty bizarre thinking which I did when I was a Facebook user. It's fair to say that I feel like a bit of a knob.

It is important to say that I really do appreciate my friends. I don't take them for granted and they deserve as much friendship and respect as I can give them. I valued the things they had to say on Facebook and I was always genuine in my own comments.

I don't want that to be a game. I'm sure my friends would like their comments, both online and in person, to be taken at face value rather than to be unwitting participants in some scheme where I'm trying to achieve some definition of social success.

In case anyone's worried, I'm not worryingly insecure. I shouldn't be. I have many friends and I've had many of them for a long time. It's just that good inter-personal communication is still tricky. Not many people are exceedingly good at it. That's why I was sucked into some of these things which I'm not proud of -- Facebook offered an easier way to manage people.

Who's to blame? Me, I guess, but with these insights in hand I definitely won't make the same mistakes again.

April 11, 2010 05:02 AM

After waiting for 7 hours in line outside the Palo Alto Apple Store -

We were finally let in at 9AM, after meeting Robert Scoble, Scott Forstall, some venture capitalists, the Russian kid who invented Charoulette, an awesome Indian limousine driver and many other awesome people, and were greeted by the Apple Store employees being fanatical -

More photos are on my Flickr page: http://bit.ly/b1AVek
Answering questions on MacTalk Forums: http://bit.ly/c4K9vm

April 05, 2010 12:09 AM

March 31, 2010 07:47 PM

This morning I was lucky enough to go and have a few rounds at Tas Laser Skirmish, which is basically infrared gun warfare in a decent chunk of Australian bush. It was awesome fun, but coming from my fairly extensive experience in the video game equivalents a few things weren't quite how I expected:

• Crouching doesn't necessarily make you aim any better.
• There's only one map.
• (There are at least three game modes though)
• You have to walk or run back to base before you can respawn.
• Going prone is great for not getting shot but almost impossible to fire from in grass.
• No key to hold down to move silently.
• Awesome physics engine.
• Yelling "tangos, dead ahead" immediately reveals your position to all opponents.

On the whole, not too bad at all.

March 27, 2010 04:30 AM