Planet Maclab

Zen's Tumblr: The headline reads: “A wild-long tailed macaque monkey has...

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 06:10:12 +0000

The headline reads: “A wild-long tailed macaque monkey has adopted an abandoned kitten at Ubud’s Monkey Forest in Bali”.

BRB ‘Aww’ing forever.

Zen's Tumblr: A video by Kristian Anderson, a 35 year old Sydney man who was...

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 06:35:47 +0000

A video by Kristian Anderson, a 35 year old Sydney man who was diagnosed with cancer last year and is undergoing chemotherapy. The video is for his wife’s birthday, and features Hugh Jackman and New Zealand Prime Minister John Key.

Thomas: Loading remote URLs from mutt

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 09:33:28 +0000

My email lives on a virtual server and lately I've been accessing it with mutt on that machine via SSH. I really like mutt, but this makes things tricky when someone emails me a URL and it's either awkward to copy & paste (e.g. PuTTY) or I'd like to look at the web page on another machine--often I have my laptop to one side for email while doing other things on my desktop machine.

Mutt uses the rather nice urlview program to extract URLs out of email messages for easy selection. urlview's handler script can also be hijacked to do whatever you want. I've set mine up to generate an HTML file in the server's webspace. This HTML file has a meta refresh tag to immediately redirect the browser to the URL of interest.

Now when I get a URL in an email I hit ^b to invoke urlview, select the URL I want, load a web browser on the target machine and choose my bookmark for my own URL redirector.

To set this up yourself:

Install the urlview package
```
aptitude install urlview
```
Modify /etc/urlview/url_handler.sh to call your own script. I put the following line under the user-configurable settings but before their own handler:
```
/usr/local/bin/sharelink.sh $1
```
(Optional) Disable the http handler so that you don't end up loading elinks or something else on the computer running mutt:
```
http_prgs=""
```
Create a world-writable file in the machine's webspace: (but not world-deletable! The parent directory should only be writable by www-data or root.)
```
touch /var/www/link.htm
chmod 0666 link.htm
```

Create a script to generate that link.htm. In my case I used this following in /usr/local/bin/sharelink.sh:

#!/bin/bash

LINKFILE=/var/www/link.htm
url=$1

cat > $LINKFILE <<EOF
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head><title>Email Link Redirector</title>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; URL=$url"></head>
<body><h1>Redirecting</h1><p><a href="$url">$url</a></body>
</html>
EOF

Coming up with a cool way of retrieving attached files is left as an exercise to the reader.

Zen's Tumblr: likeyoudontevenknow: Ahahahahahaha, yes. Good.

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 12:05:22 +0000

likeyoudontevenknow:

Ahahahahahaha, yes. Good.

Chris: Two-What preferred

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 00:13:12 +0000

Thanks to Antony Green of the AB (friggin’) C (emphasis mine):

The reality of forming government in the newly elected House of Representatives depends on those eight elected members, but the AEC’s total of 2-party preferred vote currently excludes all votes cast in these eight electorates, the eight electorates whose elected members will determine who forms government.

Based upon the published information currently available, the ALP trail the coalition by less than 2,000 votes nationwide, including four seats where the coalition obtained considerably less than 25% of the primary vote. It’s disappointing that the AEC has published such misleading data, but it’s utterly shameful that the nation’s news outlets are pouncing on this. In this situation, a two-party preferred vote is meaningless, and misleading two-party preferred vote even more so.

And now back to your regularly-scheduled programming.

Thomas: Amarok 1.4 on Squeeze

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 07:25:20 +0000

Some good news: it looks like Amarok 1.4 can run in Debian squeeze with minimal fuss by using some of the packages from lenny. This is nice because Amarok 2 doesn't seem to support CDDB lookups yet.

First, most of the dependencies can be fulfilled using the squeeze repo:

aptitude install libtagc0 libtunepimp5 libkarma0 libnjb5 kdelibs-data libarts1c2a libavahi-qt3-1 kdelibs4c2a libpq5 libifp4

Then, grab packages for your architecture from here:

http://packages.debian.org/lenny/amarok
http://packages.debian.org/lenny/amarok-common
http://packages.debian.org/lenny/amarok-engine-xine

http://packages.debian.org/lenny/libmysqlclient15off

http://packages.debian.org/lenny/libmtp7
http://packages.debian.org/lenny/libgpod3-nogtk

And install them:

dpkg -i amarok_1.4.10-2lenny1_amd64.deb amarok-common_1.4.10-2lenny1_all.deb amarok-engine-xine_1.4.10-2lenny1_amd64.deb libmysqlclient15off_5.0.51a-24+lenny4_amd64.deb libgpod3-nogtk_0.6.0-6_amd64.deb libmtp7_0.2.6.1-3_amd64.deb

Nothing's broken yet...

Hooray!

Zen's Tumblr: crookedindifference: “The Planet and the Radio Dish” Taken at...

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 05:47:06 +0000

crookedindifference:

“The Planet and the Radio Dish”

Taken at the Parkes Radio Telescope in New South Wales. Have a look at the full 3D view here!

Zen's Tumblr: emilyapathetic: There is not one thing about this song or video...

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 05:14:16 +0000

emilyapathetic:

There is not one thing about this song or video that I dislike. More music should be as pure and as wonderful as this.

This is a blast from the past. I probably sound stupidly nostalgic and old-timey, but it seems like there was so much more effort and love put into this song than the retarded pop music machine pooper produces today.

Zen's Tumblr: Photo

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 04:43:16 +0000

Zen's Tumblr: fuckyeahstephenfry: whitepajamas: Stephen Fry: What is a taffy...

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 04:37:43 +0000

fuckyeahstephenfry:

whitepajamas:

Stephen Fry: What is a taffy pull?
Rob Brydon: Is this another dig at my forefathers?
Stephen Fry: You have four fathers? The Welsh are weird.

Zen's Tumblr: One of Pixel from a while ago. Wasn’t he the cutest?

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 01:32:04 +0000

One of Pixel from a while ago. Wasn’t he the cutest?

Paris: Book #1; Tumblr

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 19:44:56 +0000

Greetings!

First, our first book is almost upon the world! Rejoice!

Also, I have joined the masses that have a Tumblr account – you can find it at tumblelog.paris.id.au – I will be posting random stuff to it far more often than I post here, and I will be attempting to relegate this blog to ‘serious’ stuff. Onwards!

Zen's Tumblr: At Magnolia cafe in South Hobart, having a fantastic coffee. I am about to walk up to my masseuse...

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 04:33:20 +0000

At Magnolia cafe in South Hobart, having a fantastic coffee. I am about to walk up to my masseuse who lives up the road. I do feel a bit like a wanker whenever I go in to have a massage, but recently my muscles have been aching and my spine occasionally slipping, causing it to crack whenever I stretch.

I am usually a pretty sturdy person in terms of health. While I don’t have the best diet, I never put on too much weight and when I do get sick, I shake it off pretty fast.

However, recently I’ve been having some tendon problems in my wrists and lots of muscle aching. Blech. The rest of today’s agenda: massage, look after stepdaughter, guild raid on Icecrown Citadel.

I can’t complain.

Zen's Tumblr: Very evil indeed.

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 06:16:08 +0000

Very evil indeed.

Bnut: Computer Game Revenue Model 2.0

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 06:00:54 +0000

I was discussing this with Jess on the bus home and thought I should blog it, and I needed a blog to do this, so welcome!

Motivation

Recently I have been discussing game revenue models with my friends, we are basically all in agreement that current revenue models are broken, but have been unable to find a better alternative. The problem seems to be that computer game companies are often forced to charge a lot, and put digital rights management (DRM) in their games. This is all to make a profit in the first few months of sales, before “everyone” pirates them. This discourages patching games, fostering a community and leads to a rift between distributers and players.

DRM put into games is often crippling enough to put off potential customers, or to ruin the user experience or playability for those that do pay for it. Personally I have used cracked versions of games I own for the convenience of installation and usage. When it comes down to it, gamers should have the right to play games they pay for, and DRM often removes that right.

Steam is Valve Corporation’s content delivery and digital rights management software which allows users to buy, download, and play games all from its interface. In many ways it is very convenient as all you need is an internet connection to download and play your games. Often you will need this internet connection anyway as many of the popular titles on Steam are multiplayer online games. The point being that the convenience Steam offers outweighs the advantages of piracy for many people I know, despite its DRM.

Revenue Model 2.0

What I would like to see in future is a content delivery system like Steam, where all games are free, but to use them you would have to pay a monthly subscription fee. This subscription fee would be charged in week long blocks, for each week you use the service. This means that people that game infrequently would not be charged excessively, and hardcore gamers would not be charged more than they would with existing models.

For Gamers

Hardcore gamers would have access to the latest and greatest games for free. This is definitely a win for gamers, as they would have access to every game for free, and only have to pay as they play.

For Publisher

From a publisher’s point of view, they can monitor and manage usage of their games to target customer’s, make new suggestions and foster a community around their games. A fairly open and easy to join platform would make distribution easy and developers flock to the label.

For Developers

Finally, from a developer’s point of view, I would propose something similar to Apple’s App Store model. Anyone would be able to develop for this distributer, they would just have to meet the minimum quality requirements to be associated with the label.

After shipping their game a rather large, say 70% of the monthly subscriptions would be distributed to developers based on the percentage of sales. This percentage would be calculated by summing the hours (or part thereof) that players are using a game, then dividing this by the total number of hours across all games. Once a title reaches a certain level of revenue per user, or it drops off the radar then the developer would be encouraged to release their game for free to foster the

community and to allow removal of any DRM or online restrictions the game imposes.

Implementation

A great way to do this would be on top of a platform like The Unity Game Engine which has a huge following of developers. The distributer would add social tools for community interactions and a unified multiplayer framework. This would mean that a developer can simply import a package then use it to aid their development. When they are finished developing their game, it will be ready to upload and distribute. Likewise by targeting a Unity supported platform like the Wii, or even creating a platform like Apple’s iMac it would be easy to know the system requirements of the users machine. A console like platform also has the advantage that the console itself could be rented as part of the subscription model to ensure that hardware is always up to date.

Comments are welcome, I think this would be a great model, obviously it doesn’t address all the problems with current systems, but it would be an excellent stepping stone to a more open revenue model where everybody happy!

Zen's Tumblr: Also, my hobbies may include board games.

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 05:31:00 +0000

Also, my hobbies may include board games.

Zen's Tumblr: Stuff And Things

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 03:13:30 +0000

I define myself as a gamer, first an foremost. Following that, a coffee lover, thinker, creator, observer, fun-haver and do-gooder. I am married and have a stepdaughter. In my spare time I play computer games (currently: World of Warcraft, Starcraft 2, Heroes of Newerth, Call of Duty 4), design Dungeons and Dragons adventures, watch primarily scifi television shows and play with my cats. These are them.

I work at the University of Tasmania in the Eath Sciences department, providing tech support (monkey fix computer good). Soon, I will be working in Plant Sciences alone. I will be doing technical support for an entire department by myself. Oh my god help.

That’s enough crap for now. Also, I have the Pokémon Theme stuck in my head and now you do too.

You’re welcome.

Zen's Tumblr: "Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people..."

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 02:57:43 +0000

“Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.”

- George Bernard Shaw

Zen's Tumblr: Look at your blog. Now back to mine. Now back at your blog. Now...

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 01:32:06 +0000

Look at your blog. Now back to mine. Now back at your blog. Now back to mine.

Sadly, it isn’t mine. But if you subscribe to my RSS feed and like some of my posts it could seem like it’s mine.

I’m on the Internet.

Doo da doo doo doo da doo doo.

Hovo: Brisbane Pics

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 02:17:42 +0000

The Great White Out

The ferry service was canceled till about lunch time, this placed a huge stress on the busses picking up the slack on the ferry services..

Botanical Gardens

A few pics from the botanical gardens next to the Queensland University of Technology.

On the river

Rock Climbing

Kangaroo Point have a great cliff face, with lights allowing late night climbing all you need is your own equipment and knowledge to tap into this wonderful resource!!

Ekka “Brisbane Show Day”

Few pics from the Ekka, things to point out is Ronald McDonald and Astro Boy!! (Well kinda, it was a PWA match)

Chris: AUC /dev/world/2010 — I’m Presenting!

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 10:34:57 +0000

AUC /dev/world/2010, the Apple University Consortium’s conference for developers working on or with Mac or iOS devices is on again this year, on the 28th and 29th of September, in Melbourne. Last year I presented a talk, and ran the conference’s lightning talks; the conference was fanstastic: the content was easily-accessible to staff and students from across the country, and catered to a very wide range of skill levels and familiarity with Apple frameworks.

This year, I’ll be presenting Awesome Things You’ve Missed in Python, a fast-paced, code-heavy recap of interesting features to hit the Python Programming language in the past few years. My talk is not specific to Apple development, but will have a strong focus on techniques which are applicable to development with the PyObjC library.

If you’re on staff or are a student of an AUC member university (most Australian Universities are, as are a few Kiwi ones), registration is cheap ($100 for students), and all flights and accommodation are subsidised (to a generous limit). If a fun two days of meeting interesting people and learning about development techniques with the latest technology available on Apple devices interests you, get in contact with your local AUCDF coordinator to register!

Paris: Tetris Theme

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 22:01:12 +0000

Pure awesome.

Thomas: Thank a developer

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 14:01:15 +0000

"Thank you for you mail. It always gives me a warm feeling in my heart to see someone using my script"

A lot of free software exists because of the work of volunteers -- particularly the smaller projects for more obscure tasks, often with only one developer. They don't do it for money. They do it because they want everybody to be able to benefit from the work and that happens and that's great.

Occasionally I find some oddball program or script particularly useful and it occurs to me that the developer probably doesn't realise that other people are finding it handy. It's too small or insignificant to have a "community". Sometimes I'll take a minute to send a small sincere thank you email. The developer gets a warm fuzzy feeling and in turn I get a little satisfaction for doing so. Who knows, the developer might even be encouraged to spend more time on the project if they know it's being used.

Next time you find yourself thinking "holy cow this thingy is awesome", maybe a friendly thank you email would be a nice way to express it.

Chris: A Manifesto

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 12:03:32 +0000

I believe:

That I have no right to tell you who to vote for.
That I have no reason to tell you who to vote for.
That my opinion is just that: an opinion.

That everyone’s vote counts.
That voting informally puts your decision in the hands of others.
That voting informedly makes your decision count for more.

That who you vote for is not the same as who you believe should form government.
That all policy deserves the scrutiny of many viewpoints.
That our parliament works best with a diverse senate.

That there is no party who supports all of the ideals of any individual, even those who are members of the party.
That no party knows how to best allocate your vote.
That no party knows who their best candidate is.

That you should question your ideals before you select your candidate.
That you should select your candidate before you select your party.
That your second and third preferences matter just as much as your first.
That you should vote below the line.

That my enemy’s enemy is not always my friend: to be my friend, I need a reason to support you.
That blanket negative policies do not deserve the right to be enshrined in appropriation bills.
That the previous government was deposed for a reason.

That a long-term view is not rewarded by our short-term electoral cycle.
That three-year electoral terms favour fiscal conservatism and that Australia is worse-off for it.
That there is often merit to policies which do not result in an immediate return.

That no party considers my electorate important enough to campaign broadly in.
That at this election, no major party deserves my vote.
That no party deserves my continued support.

That there is a time for conservatism.
That with significantly reformed personnel and policy, the Liberal Party will one day be deserving of government again.
That that time is not now.

That the current government has, for the most part, implemented fundamentally good policy.
That the next government deserves wide-ranging, informed, non-partisan scrutiny.
That this election should be all about the senate.

Thomas: Experimenting with BFS

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 09:46:56 +0000

I was listening to some mp3s in cmus at the same time as compiling gnome with jhbuild when I was experiencing relatively frequent gaps in the music. It shouldn't be my responsibility to juggle nice levels so I decided to try the Brain Fuck Scheduler which is rumoured to be more responsive with small numbers of CPUs than the mainline kernel's Completely Fair Scheduler, which has been used since 2.6.23.

Running off the Linux v2.6.35 tag, here the results of my highly scientific experiment:

Scheduler                           Gap-free playback    jhbuild compilation speed
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS)     Doesn't work         Fast enough
Brain Fuck Scheduler      (BFS)     Works                Fast enough

Precise? No. Complete coverage of factors which I care about? Yes.

The only notable distribution in which it is used seems to be CyanogenMod for Android phones. While sporadic arguments continue around the complicated political and technical reasons for the lack of BFS in mainline, both of which are free software, some users like me are missing out. Maybe one day I'll understand.

Thomas: Bored in Networks Class

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 12:32:13 +0000

Paris: Secret Lab is on CrunchBase?

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 20:24:47 +0000

And where did we get this Unattributed Funding from, and why didn’t someone tell me?

CrunchBase Information

Secret Lab

Information provided by CrunchBase

The joys of something anyone can add to or edit, I guess!

Thomas: Sausage Taco

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 14:16:06 +0000

Just a few minutes ago I was laying in bed dozing off and dreaming about eating a taco when I had the most wonderful idea:

Normally when you're constructing a minced beef taco the meat falls out and goes everywhere and you make a mess. Why don't we just cook up some beef sausages instead and put those in the tortillas before adding salads and sauces?

Bam, said the lady.

Paris: 2010 – Part II

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 03:11:01 +0000

(This post is cross-posted with our blog at Secret Lab!)

So, what’s happening for the rest of 2010?

Jon and I are hard at work wrapping up the author reviews (the final stage of proof reading) for our book, iPhone and iPad Game Development for Dummies – it’s so close to being done and that we can practically taste the day off that we’ll get! We’re also working hard on a really cool article for a pretty prominent technology – stay tuned!

We’ll be starting another awesome book project when the first one is finished – it’s going to be an amazing one, we promise you’ll love it!

As far as client work goes, Secret Lab is working on some amazing games for some very cool Australia, American and Canadian clients – you’ll start hearing more in the next few weeks as the wraps come off the various projects. We’re, literally as I write this, putting the finishing touches on some amazing fitness-based iPhone apps for an innovative new Tasmanian company – we think you’ll like what you see! And there’s so much more to come… stay tuned! Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you want us to build an awesome app or game for you.

We’ll be speaking at, and attending, a bunch of conferences in the next few weeks and months (and years) – so please come and say hello if you happen to run into us! In the short term, we’ll be at (more to come):

/dev/world/2010 in Melbourne, Australia – late-September 2010
Unite 2010 in Montreal, Canada – mid-November 2010
OZCHI 2010 in Brisbane, Australia – late-November 2010
CreateWorld 2010 in Brisbane, Australia – early-December 2010
Interaction 11 in Boulder, USA – mid-February 2011

We’re also running, or creating the material for, a bunch of awesome training workshops! Just finished was Melbourne, Hobart, Brisbane, Sydney and Mountain View (USA) – soon is New York City, Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne, Montreal, and many others! Check out the awesome feedback we got from some of the last few iPhone & iPad SDK workshops:

“It was very good. Best IT course that I have ever been on. (I’m old and have been on lots of courses)”

“This was the best course I’ve done in a very long time. I really liked the fast pace. The balance was very good.”

“High intensity but very useful. Not to mention a ball of fun. The presenters are great – I like the tag-team approach. Keeps the activeone from veering too far away or forgetting something.”

“Loved it, it was very enjoyable. Very easy to ask questions and helpful peers as well as teachers.”

It’s not too late to register for the New York City iPhone Boot Camp either: 13th to 15th August, in New York City – using material by Jon and I!

That’s all for now!

Thomas: The Deplorable State of Commercial Gaming

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 11:15:12 +0000

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.

Thomas: iPhoto to GIMP

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 08:50:02 +0000

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.

Chris: Worldwide Photo Walk 2010 — This Saturday!

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 01:25:14 +0000

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.

Thomas: Cuckoos and Crackers

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 10:17:39 +0000

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. :)

Chris: New Site, New Blog, New Etc!

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 10:12:58 +0000

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!

Chris: Planet Flood — Sorry!

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 05:34:17 +0000

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!

Thomas: Turkey’s Internet Censorship

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 23:41:44 +0000

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

Chris: Honours Etc

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 20:02:05 +0000

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!

Tom: Bringing friendship back to social networking

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 13:11:22 +0000

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.

Daily Bug Report: My first laptop, a fallen hero

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 03:28:18 +0000

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.

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.
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
this was back when laptop cards were as powerful as their desktop counterparts

Daily Bug Report: Four SIM cards down…

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 01:12:07 +0000

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!

Dave: Final day in San Francisco

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 04:13:41 +0000

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

We decided to hire bikes and ride over the Golden Gate bridge on my last day, continuing into Sausalito, a lovely sea-side town in Marin County.

The ride itself is very pleasant and easy, the majority (at least along the shore) is flat.

(Golden Gate bridge can be seen in the distance)

Nearly at the bridge, looking back to the city

Still approaching...

Here it is! View from Fort Point

On the bridge - lovely day, many walkers (on the right hand side).

Sausalto - the bridge is to the right and over the hill(s).

My attempt at becoming a Goa'uld. My newly acquired Apple cap which I wore under the bike helmut left an Apple logo impression on my forehead. I think it had disappeared by the time I got to the airport later on, but if it didn't it would explain some of the strange looks I got.

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The Wintonet: You Became A Meme!

Sat, 19 Jun 2010 21:27:44 +0000

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.

Josh: Pre-WWDC Bus Ride, WWDC’10, Bike Ride, and Trip to Berkeley

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 07:03:42 +0000

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!

Dave: Network bandwidth throttling in Windows 7

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 06:25:34 +0000

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)

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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Dave: Final day of WWDC

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 02:26:00 +0000

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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Dave: WWDC day 4

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 05:37:00 +0000

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..."

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Dave: More updates coming soon

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 18:31:00 +0000

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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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Daily Bug Report: Stuff I have broken—that isn’t mine—in the Americas

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 18:40:48 +0000

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.

Daily Bug Report: The Laptop Networking Saga

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 18:04:49 +0000

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.

Dave: Queuing for wwdc sessions

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 00:20:36 +0000

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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