t b a

Time for me to enumerate a few things that have happened of late (in reverse order of occurrence, naturally), since it now seems like the time to do so.

Uni

I handed in my Computer Science term project today, which, I suppose means that my academic year is now complete. I'm fairly happy with how the semester's progressed, every unit that I studied (including the two that I chose on a whim) has been excellent, which is more than I can say for previous semesters. Analysis (Real analysis to be specific) was absolutely fantastic, and I'll be doing my best to enrol in the follow-up functional analysis unit (I've had it suggested to me by several people, and I'm convinced), and it's certainly made the maths major I'm now enrolled in seem like a very good idea.

As far as I can tell, exams went well, but I won't know for certain until results are released next week (I'm very confident with my two maths units, Graphics is a different story (though I don't recall doing as badly as the lecturer claims the class as a whole went)).

TUCS

In other (though slightly Uni-related) news, TUCS (The UTAS Computing Society) had its Annual General Meeting for 2009 last week, and as well as discovering the joy of barbecued* Woolworths' Quantity Burgers (they're excellent, really!), I was elected society president for 2009. The rest of the exec are also a truly awesome bunch of people, so the future certainly looks bright.

TUCS has run some excellent events in its inaugural year: our tech talks were, in general, wildly successful, amongst other things. Thanks to that, we've become what appears to be one of the most active societies on campus. I'll be doing my best to make sure that we can replicate, or even better that next year. (If you're a speaker, or know any good ones, and would like to give a talk, let me know!)

In related news, we also took delivery of some particularly awesome TUCS-Branded T-Shirts just after exams -- we're particularly happy with how that went and will probably do it again next year.

(*I will definitely be approving funding for a new barbecue for the society... the current one is truly dreadful)

LCA

Last week-ish, I had dinner with some members of the Linux.conf.au organising committee. Though much of what was discussed must be kept under wraps (it's thoroughly exciting, I promise!), I can tell you that the conference is shaping up to be most excellent, and if you haven't already booked your ticket, I suggest you do so as soon as possible!

That is all for me for now, more news as it comes (I hope!)

November 21, 2008 07:41 AM

Well, I've decided to do the Book Meme from PLOA and Planet Debian etc... Just recapping for those of you who haven't seen it yet (not many of you):

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST

And mine is:

It is possible to prove that if such a nontrivial square root of 1 exists, then n is not prime.

-- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Second Edition.

November 14, 2008 07:02 AM

Well I can't pass up a bit of useless fun. It feels like Myspace surveys from back in the day, except with the slightly more intellectual topic of books. Following on from many others on PLOA, my contribution to the book meme:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST

In my case:

While this system limits the bandwidth and matching capability somewhat, it is still a very useful approach.

-- The ARRL 1986 Handbook For The Radio Amateur

November 14, 2008 06:07 AM

Today was an interesting day in world history, to say the least. And while I’m not a U.S. citizen, I do have a few things to say on the subject. First and foremost, thank the heavens all the people that are U.S. citizens did vote the way they did.

What the U.S. needs right now, just like Australia needed last year, was a breath of very fresh air. I don’t think another republican in the white house would have done the country any good. They needed to get rid of George W. Bush. When I got home from work today and checked all my RSS feeds, I was surprised to see the drawer of the Ctrl+Alt+Del web comic (of which I am a fan) make this statement: “It is so wonderful to finally feel optimistic about the future of our country again.” What struck me about this comment was that while I was in the car on the way home, listening to the radio, they were interviewing several people from the U.S.A. And a few of them said exactly the same thing. So it might be that being optimistic is more important that actually doing well (because the US is certainly not doing so right now).

It’s also nice to see that the guy who made president, Barack Obama, is pretty much unlike every other American president for a while: reasonably young, enthusiastic, an extremely good speaker, and most importantly, Black. This will shake up a few people’s worlds, and that can only be a good thing.

John McCain is a decent enough bloke, don’t get me wrong. He just made a few errors of judgement, namely, Sarah Palin. I don’t think she would have made a very good vice-president… at all. Even more worrying is that I have heard reports she might be left the reigns of the republican party in the future. God help America.

November 05, 2008 09:21 AM

My most useful study procrastination for the week turned out to be a repair job I did on my graphics card which had become dust-choked and had bits of electrolyte leaking from some capacitors.

I cleaned it out and replaced the faulty capacitors with a new set. Once more have a reasonable noise level and system stability. I'd been having crashes for a while and it turns out that this was probably responsible.

Nett result: I've hopefully another year or two out of this video card for about $5 of parts and an hour of messing about.

I went on to make a little article with pretty photos and tips for anyone contemplating doing part replacement on these circuit boards, which are pretty fiddly.

November 02, 2008 08:06 AM

Whilst doing some coding today for my semester research project I found a need to check for incoming data on a socket without taking any data out of the stream. Here's the code I came up with:

     
cp.sock.setblocking(False)
try:
    cp.sock.recv(0)
    stuffwaiting = True
except socket.error:
    stuffwaiting = False
cp.sock.setblocking(True)

This code works finely on Linux -- you can only receive data if there is data to be received (even if you want to receive no data). Unfortunately, the code doesn't port to Mac OS -- you may receive as many bytes as there are in the socket's buffer -- if there are no bytes in the buffer, you can receive 0 bytes. Therefore, the following fix is necessary:

     
cp.sock.setblocking(False)
try:
    cp.sock.recv(1, socket.MSG_PEEK)
    stuffwaiting = True
except socket.error:
    stuffwaiting = False
cp.sock.setblocking(True)

So, my question for Lazyweb is: is there a better way to do this?

October 28, 2008 11:06 AM

A question for my interstate readers: Has anyone seen the following lane structure outside of Tasmania?

(If anyone wants to guess what the correct procedure is in such a situation, you're also welcome to do that)

October 25, 2008 02:37 AM

I'm just now finishing the unpleasant task of freeing all the music I bought from the iTunes music store. Against my better judgment over the past few years I've purchased about five CDs worth of music that way. It was nice at the time to have the instant gratification of downloading it and listening to it, but now I want it on a different computer, running (you guessed it) Linux.

Apple, in their quest to make life difficult for people who pay for music, don't allow you to create an MP3 CD of music you've purchased, so I've had to go through the tedium of burning audio CDs, ripping them again and re-tagging them. I don't know if it's technically legal but having paid for the music I have no moral qualms.

I have only myself to blame. But there is a bright side -- the music is now re-encoded in ogg vorbis goodness, and never again will I do anything so silly. I can finally listen to my Dvorak in Amarok comfort. Have you set your music free?

October 22, 2008 01:28 PM

Briefly put, money is the new “Democracy”. Think about it, it provides equal opportunity to social power. It is also completely indiscriminate of human specifics. Indeed, it requires our discriminations in order for it to be useful. This social tool is what it is, a human creation. Just like the sword and gun it is the new form of “it’s not money that owns people, people do.”

The control we have on money is completely one-way. If you wanted to live a money-less life it is as simple as detaching yourself from this specific other. There is no phenomenological value in money other than what we put on it. This is apparent as the amount transcribed to a particular set of money is in a constant flux based on the need of the human. Whatever you buy or sell impacts “economy”. “Economy” is the system that determines the value of an object at any given time. It’s as easy as prescribing how much worth a thing is to the human race. Pick up a chair and understand that comfort is in great demand in our society. Compare it to a rock which has no use to us, hence it has no value. This is what “Economy” is based on, what is useful and what isn’t. What should we spend money (property control) on and what is fruitless to invest in.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate money, I think it is a near-perfect system that compensates for the fluxes of interest in society. I mean, should we really ditch something that has been born out of our cognitive structure? This would be potentially damaging specifically as there is no other clear option. Other than forcing people to adhere to an equally profiting governance. Is it fair to say that this would have come about in a liberal monetary system if we all thought the same way? Money allows for ideology, the system of currency allows for human learning. If there are people starving in Africa or under-paid over-worked workers in sweat-shops then money is not to blame. Of course, this is the usual response to guilt, try and blame it on something that can’t talk back.

Currency is a social institution, hence it can be changed, improved upon or possibly removed at some point.

      

October 16, 2008 10:31 PM

“It is the international system of currency that determines the totality of life on this planet.” (excerpt from Network (1976))

Isn’t that a wonderful quote?

I mean it just completely sums up the state of the world today. That we (humans yes I am bringing humanity to acocunt) have created this …. thing! called economy. Then lo and behold, it’s out of our control! Now how could this have happened? But, wait a second, we should look closer and find that it isn’t completely out of our control. No, nothing that governs our lives and influences our decisions can ever be out of our control. This is a dangerous road to go down, but alas it is already one that many capitalist societies have proceeded to take (completely unawares of course).

I had an argument a few years ago with my sister over the importance of money. I think this was the early stages of my understanding that all was not quite right in the world. I had quite simply said “I do not need money to survive.” Naturally, she found that statement to be utterly ridiculous and proceeded to argue case-in-point that money is necessary for food, water and ergo our basic functions as a living human being. This shocked me, to say the least and I should have developed on my point back then and not leave it as just a generalization. She probably thought I was declaring I am going to live as a homeless person eating scraps out of dustbins. But, what I really meant was that I had understood and corrected my attitude to this thing called “money”. I do not need money to survive. Of course I understand that in the nature of this capitalist society we live in the system of currency is a required path to adhere to in order to have a basic level of living. But, I do not need money, I do not covet money, I do not cling to money and I certainly take care to not attach myself to money. It is simply just a shift in attitude towards recognising that currency is just a system of social governance created by a few men in order to control and surpress the ambitions of the wider community. It is in no way some a priori “norm” that we must blindly accept.

I am to this day completely amazed at the lack of understanding of the so-called “sharemarket”. There seems to be this image of it circulating the media to which the impression derived is always one of confusion and ambiguity. This naturally leads to a complete absence of enthusiasm to try and understand it in basic reasonable terms. Money is and always has been power. It is a non-physical manifestation of power (in regards to physical violence userping control, money does this non-violently). It is therefore important to note that the system of currency is just another form of governance which usually operates in conjunction with the “government” of the country it is operating in. For example, in the United States of America, their Federal Reserve Bank (which is a private operation, none of the board members are voted in, nominated etc) creates money and then loans it to the US government with interest. The government is essentially indebted to the Federal Reserve Bank.

“In summary, all money is debt. And all debt, that’s expressed in dollars, is money. To understand that, is to understand much of what is wrong in our economy. All debt, that’s expressed in dollars, is money.” (Rodger Malcolm Mitchell 2003)

Thus is the control of a debt-based economy, but it can change!

I would like to note that there has never been a Democracy in the fullest sense of the word. Don’t try and cite the Ancient Athenian Demokratia, simply because its directivness was not fully developed. Slaves, non-Athenian citizens (people moved to Athens, living there but not considered “citizen”) and women were unable to vote. This left all male citizens over the age of 18 to participate, around about just one quarter of the population. Also modern representative democracy? Firstly it doesn’t oblige everyone to vote, it’s not about forcing people to vote or not merely making people accept their responsibility. Indifference of good action is a huge negative force. Also, two teirs of the government are quite lacking in “representativeness”. The presidency is one person weilding immense powers of veto, and their party’s legislative powers. They can also nominte supreme-court judges which is another teir of accountability. So the only real spread of representativness in the US democracy is the senate. But of course, with only 100 members versus the millions of US citizens, I fail to see basic representation occuring.

Enough for today, my brain is tired =)

      

October 13, 2008 04:43 AM

LCA 2009. I'm registered. Are you?

October 12, 2008 11:02 PM

A little while ago I gave a few reasons why I don't want an iPhone. I would consider buying a smartphone but I was put off by the very closed nature of the development and application-selling business which Apple runs. After some contemplation I noticed some scary similarities to Trusted Computing. Enter Google Android and the T-Mobile G1.

Android is a largely open-source Linux and Java-based mobile phone software platform and has been ticking away since it was announced in November last year. Now things are starting to get interesting and tangible as they have found a network, T-Mobile, who are going to release a real commercial phone running the Google software called the T-Mobile G1.

For me, Android phones have a significant advantage over the Neo Freerunner model -- I am more interested in having open source software on my phone than open hardware. I think that by and large people are quite willing to pay somebody else to make a nice, well-built phone with good hardware features. If we can then run whatever software we like on top however we like, we have the freedom we desire. It's a parallel to the PC world -- most of us still use a proprietary BIOS (with the exception of a few dedicated people) but run open source software and are happy. The reason this is going to work better than the Freerunner is that now we don't have to worry about the hardware. A manufacturer can design the phone with all the proprietary bells and whistles, make sure it works with the shiny latest version of Android and sell it for a profit, which fits in much more smoothly with the existing market.

To be fair, the Neo Freerunner aims to be the ultimate hacker's phone -- not to be a commercially viable phone for average users (though that may be a consequence of prolonged hacking). I make the comparison from the perspective of an open source user looking to buy a smartphone to use as a smartphone and not necessarily hack it to pieces.

It's worth noting that Android is not yet fully open source including the SDK which you have to use to develop software. The intention is there; the video advertising indicates that Google is not leaving things closed source in order to maintain control or restrict what developers can do -- they want to get things open and accessible. If that proves to be the case we have a very worthy product on our hands. If not I'll be amongst the "what happened to 'do no evil'?" lamenters.

Where does that leave us Australians? Nowhere soon, it seems. The Australian mobile carriers are really not the most innovative bunch and are characteristically taking a wait-and-see approach. I can only hope that once Android-based phones are supported it will be done in such a way that you can swap to another handset running the same software and use it equally well. But who am I kidding -- the hardware manufacturers would be making exclusivity deals with the telcos left, right and centre to get the most money out of a product which people are excited about because of its freedom. To the telco it's just another smartphone to sell. How the phones would (or could) be locked to a particular network remains to be seen.

I for one would be far happier buying a phone which will do precisely what I want with its hardware than one which reports only to the mothership. Bring on the Android phones, I say. It's a step in the right direction.

September 28, 2008 03:54 AM

Upon request, here is some more information on how my file server is coming along. Last week I ordered a a Seagate 1TB HDD (of the latest revision, released a short time ago). It would have been preferable to buy all eight at once, but I lacked the money to buy them all at once, and I need the file server to be up and running.

The choice of brand of hard drives was difficult. Because of differences in platter density (and thus overall size), you can’t mix and match brands. Being the stupidly pedantic person I am, it’s not something I would have done anyway. I first considered Seagate, but the adventures (read: complete data loss) that a few other people at work have had with Seagate 1TB hard drives somewhat put me off. Western Digital was also an option, mostly because they have lower power requirements. This means two things: lower heat (and thus less noise), and a lower overall power requirement. For a server that is going to be on most (if not all) of the time, both these factors are quite important to consider. In the end though, I went with Seagate. I’ve never had any problems with them in my past, and I am hoping that they have fixed their problems with faulty control boards.

Only having one hard drives to begin with means I can’t begin with a RAID 5 array. I currently have my controller set to use my single drive as a JBOD disk. This obviously isn’t optimal, as my RAID controller will have to do an online upgrade of the RAID array. Apparently, this is in the feature set, so I thought I’d take advantage of it. I’ll let you know how it goes. I paid enough for it (Highpoint RocketRaid 2320 for ~$360AUD) that I trust it.

At this stage, it was time to configure my (non-) RAID array, FTP, and Samba. Configuring FTP was fine, the RAID array was tolerable (involved recompiling kernel with a few patches, etc), but Samba was a complete pain in the rear end. In the end, then, I went with Windows Vista Business. I was erring on buying a copy before to use on the server, and problems with Samba and so on just drove me over the edge.

This also allowed me to go back to my original RAID setup. After switching the cables over, I created a RAID 0 (fast stripe) on my JMicron controller for the two 80GB drives. This gives me an extremely fast Vista installation to 160GB of space. After installing the Highpoint management software, I then had my file server up and running, to a degree.

Final configuration involved installing AVG, setting up remote desktop (so I can administer changes from my laptop without having to attach a screen), installing Service Pack 1 for Vista, and disabling a few unnecessary services that slow down network transfer speeds (see this guide). After all that, I now have a decent, centralised place to store all my data. The only complaint is the noise produced by my gigabit switch (of course I had to buy a fan-cooled model).

Pictures coming soon (when I can be bothered finding a working camera).

September 27, 2008 08:12 AM

The 2008 ACM South Pacific Programming Contest Results have been confirmed: my team's come 3rd overall (as expected). We find out whether or not we've achieved a wild card position in the World Finals in December.

September 18, 2008 03:16 AM

Well, yesterday sucked. Not only did I have a cold (which I still have), but two of my computers died: ‘Europa’, my main laptop; and ‘halley’, my spare machine and OS testbed.

Everything was going quite well up until dinner. I had a working GCC cross-compiler (if you don’t know what that is, don’t bother caring), I had my operating system kernel compiling with no errors, and I had some music playing. All was well. Just before dinner, I noticed that when I played Time by Pink Floyd, it was actually playing an ABBA song. ‘No worries’, I thought. I’d seen this before, and a chkdsk had fixed it. I decided to run a chkdsk before bed that night. So I went to dinner.

I came back into the room after dinner, and found my laptop at the Vista bootup screen, asking me to choose whether to resume a normal boot, or run the memory diagnostic. ‘No worries’, I thought again. Obviously, one of my applications had managed to crash the Vista kernel. Not a difficult task. So I told it to resume booting normally. It didn’t. I powered it off, and then back on again. It still didn’t. My heart sank.

So I got out my trusty Vista installation DVD. I was hoping to repair the Vista process to the point where it would allow me to get into safe mode, and find out what was going on. No such luck. The DVD wouldn’t boot. I don’t know much about Vista’s internal boot process, but I suspect it was around either the time it went to protected (32 bit) mode, or into a non-VGA graphics mode. This was bad. I tried a Windows XP CD, and that didn’t work properly either. I don’t know what the problem is, but it’s serious. On Monday I am going to try and send it back to the manufacturer.

At this point, I was frustrated beyond anything. Now, I don’t only have a laptop. As an avid computer hardware collector, I had another working machine. It was my old server and before that, my main PC. Last night, it had Ubuntu server on it (my ISP has a Ubuntu mirror). So I quickly booted it up. At this stage, all I wanted was to get on the Internet (and more specifically, MSN). Unfortunately, Ubuntu doesn’t have a kde-base package (or at least, not one that I could remember the name of). So I sat there for 40 minutes waiting for it to download and install all the KDE packages (including games, useless admin tools and half of TeX Live). When it had finished downloading, I ran ’startx’ (which should, in my opinion, work). It didn’t. None of a number of other commands (xdm, kdm, kde, etc) worked either. Massive Ubuntu failure.

So I tried a Windows XP installation CD over the spare machine. That wouldn’t boot up either. It hung at the point where it loads the Windows components. I tried it with only one hard drive plugged. That didn’t work either. Now came my silliest moment. In anger, I took out the XP CD, and turned off the machine to try and get Ubuntu working again. Unfortunately, I began plugging in the hard drives onto which Ubuntu is installed before the machine had finished turning off. *ZZAP*. And then it didn’t work anymore. I suspect it’s only the power supply that’s dead… but still. Massive human failure.

So now, I have two dead machines. One should be easy to fix (buy new PSU, install fresh Ubuntu desktop, go on MSN). My laptop… well… I think my data has survived, maybe. I’ll let the manufacturer find out. I hate fixing laptops.

September 14, 2008 04:03 AM

For the benefit of those who were intersted, Mehffort is a portmanteau of meh and effort, and is a very popular word in the semester 2, 2008 Maclab dialect of English. It is used to convey one's lack of motivation towards a particular task. In context:

• Me: Paris, help me come up with a witty slogan for the TUCS T-Shirt.
• Paris: Mehffort.

As proud denizens of the Maclab, my ACM ICPC team for this year decided to adopt the word as part of our team name.

September 14, 2008 01:11 AM

The ACM ICPC South Pacific Region was on yesterday, and was great fun (as usual). My team this year, the Mehffort Musketeers consisted of Alex Berry (who'll be competing in the Google Code Jam regionals soon as well), Michael Ford and myself.

For the benefit of people who did the ICPC this year: I solved problem A, C and I; Michael solved B and D, and Alex solved E, F and H. Here's some general commentary on the problems that I solved:

• Problem A was very simple, and the shell of my solution was complete within three minutes of the contest starting. Unfortunately, the entire problem was not defined until halfway through the test data, which led me to finishing it a bit later.
• Problem C, which seems to have been the problematic problem this year (as far as judging's concerned) was relatively straightforward, though I had two rather annoying bugs that took me about an hour to week out... it happens, I suppose. Solved on the first submission, which I'm happy about.
• Problem I was a longest path problem, that was relatively straightforward depending on what sort of algorithm you chose to solve it. I've heard reports of people using the Bellman-Ford Algorithm and failing -- as far as I can tell, such an algorithm would work on problems except where there existed a cycle not involving the endpoints of the path taken in the problem. I used Floyd's Algorithm and had it solved first time. Simple.

As alluded to earlier, we solved 8 problems, and we're currently the only team to do so with the testing data used on the day (this means that we're in a provisional first place), however, there are many teams who are likely to get problem C rejudged, and following that we'll likely be third. More news to come.

September 14, 2008 12:56 AM

It occurs to me watching all the fuss, panic and discussion in the media about the Large Hadron Collider that it's going to be of great benefit to science in general -- not just because we're hoping to find some new subatomic particles and/or the meaning of life, depending on how fanciful you are.

Unlike most other current scientific research this experiment has captured the public's attention because it's big and because the principle is easy enough to understand at a basic level. We're going to take some particles, give them a metric buttload of energy and crash them into each other to see what happens. It's like playing with matchbox cars, but cooler.

If you want to inspire more young folk to enrol in science degrees then encouraging science like this is the way to do it. Boom de yada.

(Also loving the most recent xkcd about the LHC.)

September 11, 2008 01:12 PM

I found this very useful news service today, at HasTheLHCDestroyedTheEarth.com. May you find it informative.

September 10, 2008 11:21 PM

I’m currently in the process of building myself a new home file server, to act as a storage medium for my MP3 music collection, my father’s business document backups, as well as to do compiles of software projects I’m working on.

For this, I’ve basically taken my old desktop computer (sans high-end graphics card) and place it in an Antec rack-mount case. After adding an expensive RAID card and a few hard drives, I have the hardware ready to go (though I am still contemplating the purchase of a PCI-based ADSL interface card).

Naturally, Debian was the first choice of operating system. Although I toyed with the idea of Windows Vista Business enough to almost go out and buy a copy, I decided:

1. It wasn’t worth the $140 just to have the use of Remote Desktop instead of SSH.
2. In the future, I may also want to use the server as an ADSL gateway, wireless access point, compile box, TeX environment, web server, etc. Vista can’t be made to do any of that easily.

Installing Debian was an interesting experience. I originally had the two 80GB Seagate hard drives installed on the onboard JMicron RAID controller (to run in RAID 1 for extra dependability). I couldn’t find drivers for this chipset that my Debian install disc would like. I then changed to using the JMicron controller in plain IDE-compatibility mode. Debian picked up only one hard drive. I’m still bemused by how this is possible: both the BIOS and a UBCD4Win disc pick up two. I then switched the hard drives and plugged them into the ICH9 controller. Debian picked up both of them, and so far is working fine. Although the ICH9 chip on my motherboard (a GA-P35-DS3) doesn’t support RAID, I’m still fairly happy. Anything I really want to keep will be stored on the RAID set managed by the RocketRAID card.

During the install process (and with all these changes of plan), it was great to have one of my Linux-savvy friends, Chris Neugebauer, on hand. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the #debian channel on Freenode. On both the occasions I asked questions, I was just plain ignored. Now, I know they don’t owe me anything, but a simple “Sorry, no idea, you’re on your own” would have been nice.

But apart from that minor downside, both the hardware and software are going really well so far. I’ll probably follow up with another article once I’ve finished further my home network. I still want to buy a few more parts…

September 09, 2008 09:03 AM

So the new version of Debian is to be known as Squeeze, eh?

Does anyone else think of a certain 1970's British New Wave group?

September 01, 2008 11:54 PM

I wrote this a couple of years ago, now. It was exam revision time and I had nothing else to do. Although short, it’s still one of the better pieces of descriptive writing I have done (or at least, I think so. My old English teacher would no doubt disagree). Critisism welcome.

I see the door. It’s just up ahead. Walking towards it, I can feel the heat slowly building on my forehead. The moment is near. As I reach for the door handle, my common sense finally kicks in and my hand pulls back, unsure of what to expect on the other side.

The door is red, of course. All doors with something scary behind them are red. It’s one of the few constants in this universe of ours. The paint is scratched around the edges, especially at floor level. Bare wood can be seen behind the paint, scratched away by dog claws, most likely. It’s a very dark wood, but that could just be age.

I knew I didn’t have to go through the door. I could just turn around and go back the way I came. But that wouldn’t be any use. I had to find out what was on the other side of this strange red door.

Dressed in my black satin PJs, I feel a bit like a Ninja, in the dead of night, creeping around the old house. It’s the fourth night I’ve been here, and the fourth night I’ve come down here to the red door. It could be the fourth night I turn around and go back to bed. But I’m not going to allow it to be so. I have to find out what is behind the red door.

I inherited the house from my now-dead father, who, along with my mother, lived here for the twenty-three years of their marriage. My mother died three years ago now, and my father just couldn’t handle life on his own. He didn’t go slowly insane or anything like that. He just got sad (a vast understatement) when he was here alone during most of the week. I came up and helped him whenever I could, but it simply wasn’t enough.

I moved in here four days ago. I was previously just renting a two-bedroom apartment in the city, using one as a studio for my painting work. I live alone. Now that I’ve moved here, I could have about five or six rooms just for painting, if I wanted. The walk-in wardrobe is larger than the bathroom in my old apartment. I’ve got the place fairly well set up now. I haven’t touched the brushes since I’ve moved in (which is rare for me, I usually can’t be kept away from them), instead I have been cleaning and repairing nearly every horizontal surface in the house, and quite a few of the vertical ones.

But there is still one room I haven’t ventured into. That would be the room behind the red door. I’m not sure what to expect behind there. It could be just another room. It could be the stairs to the basement, for all I know. But I have a feeling it is something much more insidious. Something far more interesting. The colour of the door tells me so.

I’ve pretty much decided now that I’m not going back to bed tonight until I have investigated what’s behind the red door. Like all the other nights, I’m not going to be able to get to sleep. I never asked either of my parents what was behind the door. There wouldn’t have been much point either. By the spider’s webs, it looks like the door hasn’t been opened for quite some time.

After standing staring at the door for several minutes, I slowly start forward again, my brow becoming sweaty again, reaching out for the door handle. Turning it, I hear a loud screech, obviously because the door hasn’t been opened for decades. After turning it open all the way, enduring the screeching and whining of the handle, I turn my shoulder to the door, expecting to have to give it a large shove to get open. Pushing gently with my right hand on the handle, I realise this isn’t going to be the case. It glides open freely.

August 13, 2008 10:33 AM

The semiconductor Olympic team is in a state of flux after a doping scandal in which the entire team tested positive for boron.

"We are very disappointed that members of the team have conducted in this way," an IOC spokesman said today. "As far as we're concerned, they're guilty as charged. This is a result of the large scale integration of our drug testing programme."

The diodes have attempted to rectify their own chance to compete by claiming that the allegations against them are baseless. This has angered the transistor component of the team, who have much to gain this year by competing in the three-legged race.

A senior official explained, "Statistically there is only a 1 in 4001 chance of this happening but the results have been confirmed TO 92 per cent certainty."

The investigation currently continues, despite being met by resistance from the team.

August 11, 2008 12:59 AM

Around the end of the last financial year, I decided it would be a good idea to buy myself a laptop. So I did. I originally wanted a cheap Compaq one, simply because of it’s cheapness. But my local computer shop didn’t have any in stock. So I got an ASUS F3Sg instead. It costs about AUD $1300, and it’s pretty decent. Here’s why.

I’m not exactly a fan of the styling of recent ASUS laptops, and this one is no different. It’s very grey… and has holes and shapes that are perfectly designed for nothing, except getting biscuit crumbs in them. Out of the box it also comes covered in useless Intel, Nvidia and Microsoft stickers (some of which I still haven’t been able to remove). As far as bad points go though, that’s pretty much it.

To start off the list of good points, I’ll start with the screen. It’s a 15.4″ widescreen, with a resolution of 1440×900. That’s as good as the 19″ monitor sitting on my desk, and with the decreased viewing distance, it’s just as usable. I certainly wouldn’t like it any larger, as it would then be quite difficult to get into my laptop bag (and to carry around generally).

The internals also match up to my (still pretty new) desktop. 2 GiB of DDR2 memory, a Core 2 Duo processor running at 2.4GHz, and a 250GB hard drive are all very respectable. The NVidia 9300M graphics chip plays Counter Strike: Source well enough to be comparable to the 8800GT in my desktop. That said, CSS isn’t one of the latest games anymore. I fear that Call of Duty 4 would stress it a bit too much.

Multimedia is okay. The onboard speakers are utter rubbish, but then those that come with laptops generally are. The audio chip is decent, as sound quality improves immensely when a pair of Sennheiser headphones are plugged in. The laptop has an onboard microphone, but I haven’t used it. Any attempt to use it for Skype would likely result in the glorious sound of feedback.

The F3Sg also has a webcam built into the screen. Quality is fine, though when I used the driver that Windows Update found for me after a fresh install, the picture was upside down. The other nice feature this laptop has is a built-in digital TV Tuner. Apart from the fact that Sesame Street has gone downhill, I don’t have much to report on that… it’s fairly ordinary, and suffers from the same problems (bad reception, worse content) that all other TV tuners suffer from.

Battery life is around 2.5 hours on the most conservative setting. Compared to the 5 hours an old G4 iBook of mine used to do, this is pitiful. But the iBook had nowhere near as many goodies. The F3Sg also burns a hole in your pants if you actually use it as a laptop, so it’s best to use it on a table. At 2.95kg, it’s just in the region of being carryable without breaking your shoulder. The large screen (and large battery to compensate) would be the cause of this.

As with all out-of-the-box computers, the included software on all ASUS laptops is sub optimal. Offerings include Nero, Norton Internet Security, and other such horrors. One thing I can say is, though, the drivers are rock solid. In two months I’ve never had any bluescreens or crashes, which is a miracle for a Windows-based machine.

To sum up: As far as Windows-based laptops go, this one is really good. I certainly wouldn’t have it over a MacBook Pro, but then, no sane person would. It has enough power to do all the things I want, and still remains light and small enough to carry to and from work. The only real downside as far as usability is concerned is the battery life. 4 Stars.

August 09, 2008 12:48 PM

Bad ads are one of many things that annoy me when I watch commercial television: normally this is quite infrequently, but due to the large sports event currently being broadcast on my local Seven Network affiliate, I'm being subjected to more than my usual allocation of bad ads.

Few ads are more annoying than Harvey Norman's: bad jingles played to buggery, shoutey voiceovers, etc, etc, etc. Today, I was pleasantly surprised that they've put some effort into a new ad campaign. Their tagline? Nearly 50 years of Harvey Norman. Following the link to their web site, I found that Harvey Norman started trading in 1961, or for those of you who are mathematically impaired, 47 years ago. This leads to two separate conclusions:

1. This is a highly desperate campaign designed to coincide with the Olympics, and will disappear very quickly.
2. This is a highly desperate search for an interesting tag line, for a 6-year ad campaign (with a minor change in tag line to happen in three years time).

This is certainly a new low for Harvey Norman, and I hope that it is removed from my attention as soon as possible.

August 09, 2008 03:14 AM

Doing some report compilation at uni yesterday I received a docx which fortunately loaded in the version of Office 2003 which was running there. I was stunned by how pleasant the typeface was -- "Calibri" was its name, and I made a mental note to look it up later. The bloke who sent it to me obviously had good taste.

I looked up the Calibri wiki page and it turns out that it is the new default typeface for Word 2007. This is all news to me, as I've never even seen an installation of Office 2007, let alone used it. Calibri is good for a few reasons:

• It is a very nice looking sans-serif typeface. Possibly the novelty hasn't worn off yet but it read very well while I was working on the document.
• Word is frequently used to make A4 signs and other small printed notes. Most users don't bother playing with the font settings. "Big and bold, that'll do." A serif font is generally not the best choice for signs.
• Comic Sans might finally stop being abused![1] Most word processor users appreciate that different fonts are available and until now this has happened:
  1. The default typeface is Times New Roman. The user would prefer something sans-serif.
  2. The user opens the font drop-down and scrolls down until they find the first sans-serif font which isn't Arial, because that looks thin and boring, especially on-screen without any ClearType powers.
  3. "Comic Sans MS" is selected. Reader misery ensues. These readers form clubs.

I would certainly not make any sweeping suggestions that Calibri will replace Helvetica or anything like that. Real typesetters with the professional taste and judgment to choose the right face for the job will always have their place. It's a step forward though, right?

[1] I make no guarantees regarding the abuse of bold.

August 09, 2008 02:21 AM

A blog is, on its most simplistic level, an outlet for the thoughts of an individual. They can also provide commentary on current social or political events. Blogs are also used to publish new content: podcasts, essays, and art spring to mind. I want my blog to be all these things.

I want it to be readable and usable to everybody: not just the subset of people who actually know me. That’s what Facebook is for. I want to have content that is worth reading, even if it isn’t a regular thing.

You might wonder why I’m saying this. The reason is simple. Without a written goal, there is no motivation to acheive. And with a published goal, there is even more reason. You can all hold me to it. Or at least that is what my teachers from high school said to my classmates and I. Whether it works remains to be seen.

You’ll also notice (or you will once I point it out) that I switched from Drupal back to Wordpress. There is no good reason for this, other than that it was easier to install Wordpress on my new host (SilentFlame) than Drupal was. And I’d just to like to plug SilentFlame a bit: they give their profits to charity, and their service is remarkable. I haven’t had a real chance to judge uptime yet, but so far it’s been fine.

August 07, 2008 11:45 AM

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Marshmallow, originally uploaded by Christopher Neugebauer.

We randomly found this searching for marshmallows today in the Mac Lab.

If anyone can explain this, it'd be much appreciated.

August 06, 2008 10:57 PM

Those of you familiar with UNIX might know the commands du and ls. For those of you familiar with both UNIX and MS Windows, you might know that Windows has no good way of doing either of those two things. Which is why I have resurrected an old programming project of mine, DirLister.

I wrote DirLister early last year, when I came back to Windows from a Linux-based system, and needed a good way to instantly see what files were where. Basically, it writes a list of all the files in a directory (including those in subdirectories) into another file, which you can then scroll through. Although it’s a GUI tool, it does some of the work of the classic UNIX command line tools.

Recently I’ve downloaded BlitzMax, which is a programming language designed for building games with. It does, however, have a GUI module. It’s based upon BlitzBasic, which is a language I’m very familiar with (it was what I first learned to code with). DirLister was originally written in BlitzBasic.

So in an effort to learn the new language’s concepts, I’ve rewritten and expanded the original version. It now has several options, including one to list the file sizes as well as the names. So here, in all it’s glory, is the new version. May you (probably not) find it useful.

DirLister v1.0 | DirLister v1.0 Source Code

August 03, 2008 11:13 AM

So I was upgrading my Debian installation the other day, and saw the following...

Get:18 http://mirror.internode.on.net lenny/main khelpcenter 4:4.0.0.really.3.5.9.dfsg.1-4 [2339kB]

Rather interesting version number, don't you think?

July 30, 2008 05:28 AM

On September 4, 2006, I wrote the following:

Today, Hobart's first Starbuck's Coffee store opened. I'm going to celebrate by not going!

It seems that I've almost succeeded in my quest to never visit Starbucks here... In the SMH today, it was announced that the Hobart Starbucks will be closing in the near future. I can't say that I'm unhappy.

(If any mainlanders are perturbed by the lack of a Starbucks when they visit Hobart for LCA, may I recommend Oomph Coffee on Liverpool Street as a far better replacement.)

July 29, 2008 12:31 PM

A cute little web game I've played from time to time recently is Type Racer, a browser game in which you compete against other players in real-time to type a short piece of text with a rotating scoreboard and integration with a few social networking sites. It's a very nicely presented site -- Google advertises it as a user of their Web Toolkit.

I'm no expert at web programming, but when a simple online typing game doesn't run quickly enough to be playable on a computer sporting a 1.33GHz processor and 1GiB RAM (a.k.a. my iBook), something must be wrong. Surely. This is on Firefox 3, which apparently is the leading browser in Javascript performance. This could be a result of sloppy code produced by GWT (though Google's description would suggest otherwise) or it could be related to the number of AJAX requests and tests that the game has to do upon each letter press. Whatever it is, it uses all the CPU.

I really don't want to be negative but I'm scratching my head to think of any alternatives for a game like this. Nobody can deny that web applications are becoming increasingly popular and important^{[weasel words]}, but if an interactive typing game is pushing the capabilities of a computer which is less than three years old a reality check would suggest that the approach is wrong. Is this a failure of the protocols behind the Internet? Or are we expecting too much out of browsers?

My suspicion is that we are asking web browsers to do far too much. For most of the stuff I care to find on the web even Gopher's abilities would suffice. Communication? Heck, that's why they invented email, right? ;) Yet for modern online applications the web appears to be the only true multi-platform option which doesn't suck. Flash simply isn't multi-platform and is far too closed for anyone to implement easily, and Java is simply slow -- it's not lightweight enough for most of what is trying to be achieved in "Web 2.0".

YouTube is a another good example -- that almost maxes out the aforementioned CPU. Just trying to watch a little compressed video. Let's not even talk about full screen. There are many other instances of sites which are making do with an apparent lack of suitable technology for delivering their content.

So where does that leave us? Are we doomed to keep making browsers labour under Javascript with stateless requests and building computers and networks to keep up with the inefficient process? Is there another platform I simply haven't noticed? I guess this is (dare I use the term) a Lazyweb plea. This is a problem and I'd like to support a solution, but I just can't see it right now. Does anybody know?

July 29, 2008 09:34 AM

Well, yesterday saw the last episode of Gardening Australia ever hosted by the extraordinary man himself, Peter Cundall. I’ve never been much of a gardener myself (I think my last attempt at gardening produced more rocks than vegetables), but I just want to say, in my own little way, thankyou.

Peter Cundall has inspired tens of thousands of people to take up gardening, and to get out and enjoy the outdoors a bit more. He is also, without a doubt, the most consistently enthusiastic individual in Australia. I have never seen him not excited about something.

There’s an interview with Andrew Denton that gives amazing insight into his life… he’s been in both the British and Australian armies, presented television shows for over thirty years, and stood for election for the communist party and then not voted for himself. An odd man to be sure.

I hope the rest of his life is just as fruitful.

July 27, 2008 11:45 AM

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Neugebauer Chocolate, originally uploaded by Christopher Neugebauer.

I was in the TUU Shop today, and did a double-take as I saw my surname staring back at me (it's in the top left corner of the wrapper).

Why a Brazilian chocolate company would call themselves "Neugebauer" is beyond me -- but I shalln't complain. The occasional ego trip can be healthy.

(Oh, and the chocolate itself wasn't particularly nice. Oh well :()

July 17, 2008 10:52 AM

Just a friendly reminder to you all that Google Code Jam 2008's qualifying round opens today. Code Jam is an individual programming competition, which lets you compete with a number of languages. Qualifying opens at 9AM Australian time, and you have until that time tomorrow to qualify. Good luck!

July 16, 2008 11:40 PM

My 20th Birthday was yesterday, so I'm making amends for not posting about it yesterday by making a note of it today. Notably, I don't really feel any older than any time before, other than a strange feeling of foreboding that accompanies age in general. Or that may just be my stomach. No idea, though I'm sure I'll find out in the ensuing years.

And a brief wrap-up of other me-related news:

• Had a nice, short trip to Sydney in early July -- I will make it a point of not entering New South Wales when State of Origin is on in the future. Went to the Apple Store on George Street far too many times -- free internet is quite enticing when you're waiting for people.
• Whilst in Sydney, I attempted to catch up with SydneyPython in order to spruik my proposal for a Python Miniconf at LCA2009. Unfortunately, the meeting was cancelled, and so instead the SyPy people went to Beer2.0, where we met a bunch of interesting Web2.0 people.
• Uni exams finished in mid-June, with results being released last week. In short, I had my best semester yet at Uni (straight HDs/nothing below 82), and so I'm certainly not regretting the increased workload as far as maths is concerned.
• Semester 2 of Uni is now underway, I've had lectures in all three of my coursework-delivered units (Real and Complex Analysis, Computer Graphics and Animation, Topics in Advanced Mathematics), with only my research project unit to be dealt with. It's looking like it'll be a very interesting semester, with some thoroughly difficult units to be dealt with, so I'm happy about that.

That's all for now. More as it comes.

July 16, 2008 07:35 AM

I just posted the following announcement of my proposal for a Python Miniconf to be held at linux.conf.au 2009 to Australian Python mailing lists. I'm posting it here in case anyone has missed it:

Linux.conf.au 2009 is to be held at the University of Tasmania's Sandy
Bay campus in Hobart, Tasmania over the week of January 19-24; and the
call for presentations [1] and mini-confs [2] is now open.

I am currently in the process of producing a proposal for a Python
Miniconf to be held at LCA, so I thought I should detail my plans to a
greater audience for the purpose of feedback/suggestions.

The miniconf would be a single-day conference on the broad topic of
Python programming.  Broadly speaking, the topics I would like to see
presented would range through:
- Recent developments on Python core (presented to a more
Python-oriented audience than may happen at LCA proper)
- Frameworks and libraries (e.g. Django, which I believe is hitting
1.0 this year)
- Techniques of Python programming (e.g. using advanced/new/etc
features of Python effectively)
- Discussions of Python use in the "real world" (e.g. Industry use,
education, etc, etc, etc).
- Anything else Python-related: please make suggestions! [3]

The intention is that there would be 5 "organised" talks of ~45
minutes length (although if there is sufficient interest/free space, I
could split blocks into 2x25 minute talks), with a 50-minute block of
lightning talks to conclude the event, with the possibilty of some
loosely-organised get-together of pythoners after the day's
proceedings have finished.

If you are interested in participating in the Python miniconf (which
requires you to also be interested in attending Linux.conf.au), please
e-mail me [3].  I would particularly like topics of talks that people
would be able to give (vague/general is fine at this early stage in
preparation), so that I can include them in the miniconf proposal (so
the earlier I receive them the better!).

Thanks in advance for any help that you may be able to offer me.

-- Christopher Neugebauer

P.S. if I have missed any user groups/potentially interested parties,
could you please forward this message on -- I've already dealt with
most relevant mailing lists in Australia, but international lists may
also be interested, due to the nature of LCA as an international
conference.

[1] http://marchsouth.org/media/news/6
[2] http://marchsouth.org/media/news/15
[3] for the benefit of google groups users: chrisjrn [ a t ] gmail.com 

July 16, 2008 07:20 AM

A little while ago I was toying with the idea of buying an iPhone. There's no doubting that they're powerful devices. In addition the prospect of mobile internet through 3G, though expensive and limited is a breath of fresh air in a rather slow Internet access market in Australia; even more so in Tasmania.

I was excited by Jobs' WWDC speech stating that they were going to be $US200 for an 8GB model. Taking for example Optus' pre-paid pricing, the cost of an 8GB model is $729. Perhaps I undervalue mobile phones in general, but I'd take a new PC instead for that price. Looking at the post-paid pricing, the only way to get your iPhone ostensibly without paying for it is by getting a $79/mo contract for 24 months. Or with a $49/mo cap plan, it works out to paying an additional $168 over the two years. That falls below that $US200 mark, but I certainly don't want to spend that much every month on my phone.

I've been concerned by the software development and ethical problems, which are summarised neatly by a recent blog post on the FSF site. Wikipedia also summarises the licensing for software distribution for the iPhone. It boils down to developers being required to pay Apple for a developer license and the software can only be distributed in large quantities to users through Apple's official store or internally in the company which developed it.

If I'm going to spend several hundred dollars or more on a phone which has internet access, I would expect an SSH client at the very least. There is free software available, but it will not be able to run on an iPhone. No doubt some company will produce a commercial SSH client and a make a lot of money from geeks who get their phone costs covered by their company. That's only one example; you're really shooting yourself in the foot to buy such a phone to pay for software which is already available for free on other platforms.

For this reason I'm looking with interest at OpenMoko who recently released their FreeRunner -- an open source phone and platform, for those who blinked and missed it. The main limitations I see at the moment are that it's GSM only, not a lot of applications have been developed yet and that it's also fairly costly at $US399.

Given that it's open hardware and designed to work around the world I'm really not surprised that it works on the GSM bands, though this does relegate it to somewhat slower Internet access. The applications written for it will hopefully open up in the near future. The FreeRunner was only announced a couple of weeks back so hackers haven't yet had much time to write things for it. I expect that their wiki will be updated as development occurs.

As for the price; again, I'm not a big phone user so I'm not going to jump to buy a FreeRunner either. However, if I am looking for a new phone and am considering one which doubles as a computer, the OpenMoko will be on the list. Provided the application scene takes off, you would surely get many more possibilities for that once off cost of $400 than with the iPhone.

So yeah, no iPhone for me.

July 11, 2008 03:24 AM

Last Friday, whilst in Sydney on a short trip, I had the fortune of being asked to go ice skating with a bunch of people from USyd. This required me to visit a large suburban shopping mall.

Whilst the ice skating was fun and thoroughly enjoyable, the visiting of the shopping centre and surrounding parking facilities was one of the most traumatic events of my recent life. In my travels, which has resulted in visiting shopping malls in many different cities, never have I been so thoroughly disoriented in my life. As well as the completely haphazard layout of the centre, which resulted in me not being able to figure any direction, there were (at least) two disjoint car parks, each consisting of 6 levels of confused layout, with only minimal indication to newcomers as to how to identify the location of the car park.

Perhaps it's just that my brain is wired for a small city, but I've never encountered such a deliberately confusing building. Ever.

July 10, 2008 11:54 AM

In a nice demonstration of mates rates I was offered an 80GB hard drive today to replace the 40GB in my iBook. This would be ideal because I would have the space to run OS X for when I need to get my work done and Linux for the rest of time. I never did write about my experiences with Linux on the iBook, but the summary is that wireless ethernet was a pain. In particular, connecting to the university's 802.1X network wouldn't work for me. My laptop is under some pressure to be in a usable state at university so I didn't keep trying beyond a few days.

I'd heard some rumour of the difficulty involved in accessing the hard drive in an iBook, but this is simply ridiculous (57-step guide). There is basically nothing in the laptop which you don't have to remove, and the procedure has many little challenges including a magnetic trap to prevent access to a screw (which sounds remarkably similar to in Artemis Fowl) and fragile solder joints.

This could explain why Apple decided to simplify the process (PDF) for the MacBooks and why the folks at Next Byte were not able to install a larger hard drive for me in-store.

As for the 80GB drive; I politely declined. I already mentioned that I need to my laptop to work and frankly I don't think it would survive that process with me behind the screwdriver.

July 08, 2008 08:01 AM

A band that I've been quite impressed by of late is The Grammar Club, a four-piece rock/hip-hop group from the USA who produce their music collaboratively over the Internet. They relaunched their website recently, and whilst it is a really unfortunate all-flash job, they did provide a nice freebie to celebrate: a cover of Jonathan Coulton's Code Monkey.

If you approve of it, you can download their debut album, Bremelanotide from their website -- it's good!

July 07, 2008 01:15 PM

For the benefit of friends of mine who read this blog, I'll be in Sydney for the latter half of next week visiting friends -- if you want to catch up with me, let me know.

June 25, 2008 01:54 PM

Russell Coker writes on the comparison of costs of Public Transport as compared with that of using a car. I see two key flaws with his argument:

Firstly, the costs of travel that he uses are fairly specific to Melbourne, where there exists a very good ticketing system amongst all forms of public transport, therefore a trip involving a bus to a train station, a train to the CBD, followed by a tram to final destination is all covered within the same ticket, and $2.76 is certainly a very cheap price for this. I believe that this argument only applies to cities with such a system (or cities like Hobart, where there is only one primary form of public transport, with a single supplier). For example, in Sydney, tickets only apply to the provider of transport that the ticket is purchased from: so, a trip involving, say, a bus, a train and then a second bus would require three separate fares (in fact, fares are not even consistent within a single provider -- the Sydney Morning Herald reported earlier this year that there exist more than 100 individual fares for the rail system there. Sorry for the lack of a proper citation -- SMH appear to have removed the relevant article).

Secondly, Russell's argument relies upon a definite choice between public transport, and private car ownership: this is since, as he rightly points out, the cost of registration and insurance tend to be flat, annual fees, that do not depend on how far you travel in the year. Therefore the only way to decrease the "per kilometre" cost of car travel is to travel more. This implies that the choice to occasionally travel by car, and occasionally by public transport will actually increase the total cost of owning a car. At least one friend of mine does not travel by public transport for this reason.

Whist the sole use of public transport may be a viable option for people living near the centre of large cities (such as the relatives I stayed with during LCA this year, the trains were very regular extending well into the night), it is not an option for many others. Transportation here in Hobart into the night is very sparse, and implies either the choice of perfectly timing one's evening to coincide with a once-every-three- hours bus service, or paying for a taxi, which costs considerably more than a private vehicle per kilometre (for example, a trip from the airport to where I live, approximately 15 kilometres will cost $40 -- a cost of $2.66/km). This therefore makes access to a car imperative in many places.

In summary, I'm not surprised by the relative lower cost of trips by public transport, but in a circumstance such as this where not owning a car is a serious inconvenience, the collateral costs that the use of public transport entails makes it a less appealing option.

June 25, 2008 12:06 PM

As many have probably noticed, Terminal.app has issues with the keyboard. I recently experimented with Linux on my iBook before reverting to the tantalising just-worksiness of OS X 10.4 which was on there in the first place. My previous install of OS X had been a good couple of years old, by which time I'd customised everything to my taste. I didn't realise that this had included taming Terminal.app.

In summary, to get Terminal to be sane, I set the following under Window Settings, Keyboard section:

• Use option key as meta key -- this should be checked for doing things like tab-switching in irssi through ssh, or for meta in emacs.
• PgUp and PgDn actually do the opposite of that which you'd expect compared with a normal Linux console. By default, Terminal will use PgUp and PgDn to scroll its window buffer, and you have to hold down Shift to send a straight page up and page down to the buffer, for scrolling in less for example. To fix this, map "page down" to \033[6~ and "page up" to \033[5~, and the shift-versions to scroll Terminal's own buffer.
• Home and End are also munted. I can't remember what the original behaviour was, but it was not good. To get normal behaviour, set "home" to \033[H and "end" to \033[F.

(Thanks have to go to various blogs and forums for those actual codes. They're scattered infrequently across various websites. For those interested, they are defined in a system header file somewhere.)

These modifications make it basically usable for messing about in vim (if you're like me and are not disciplined enough to use the proper cursor keys). A problem remains though: emacs requires C-M-something for a lot of its commands. With the above configuration you can do C-v fine, M-v fine, but if you try to do C-M-v you will end up sending a M-v. The only workaround in emacs is to use C-[ or ESC for performing the meta.

As far as my Google-fu can tell, the combined powers of the Internet have not been able to solve this problem with Terminal. The result is that I'm now playing with a terminal program called iTerm. It's pretty, supports lots of the Cocoa magic, has an awesome full screen mode and works with all the keyboard combinations I want. With no tinkering. My only concerns are that the latest release is over a year old and that there were some reports a couple of years back of slowness. It's seemed pretty solid thus far.

In any case, it's nice to know that there's a modicum of keyboard sanity waiting for me in Terminal if I happen to need it.

June 07, 2008 12:50 PM

I sometimes ponder on the philosophy of keeping cats as pets; mostly two points.

The first is whether it's morally appropriate to pamper something for its entire life. If you do that with a human child, it becomes spoilt and they expect to have everything done for them and they're shunned by society. Rightly so. But it's just what you do with your cat. Has the cat really had a fulfilling life if they haven't had to work for themselves in some capacity? Are the odd challenges like knocking things off the shelf or catching the odd bird enough?

My other thought, as my family cat goes to be desexed tomorrow, is on the sense of betrayal they must feel in such a situation. You spend six months being loved and pampered by a kind family and then one day BAM they stick a needle in you and castrate you. Hence love-hate. It's for the best, but it's still an odd message to send to a cat, I think.

June 02, 2008 12:35 PM

LaTeX is all well and good, except for the fact that its output draws attention to itself as being an obviously-typeset-in-LaTeX document. Given how beautiful your average LaTeX document with default settings is, this is not such an issue except for the readers who are highly familiar with LaTeX.

These horrible readers (of which I am one) will pick at the typeset text and notice every single instance of where you forgot to wrap your powers (e.g., $e^i\omega$) or forgot to use a romanising command (e.g., $sin \pi$).

Then we will circle it, giggle to ourselves at how clever we are and tell the nearest person who will understand what we're talking about.

No, life's not fair, but that's the price you pay for beautiful documents.

May 29, 2008 01:44 PM

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TUCS Tech Talk #1, originally uploaded by Christopher Neugebauer.

As I mentioned previously, TUCS had its first tech talk on Friday (delivered by myself, on the topic of Introductory Python), this is the first opportunity to show off photos from it. I was rather impressed by the turnout (there are a few people off to the side that can't be seen in the frame).

May 05, 2008 03:43 AM

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Upside-Down Man, originally uploaded by Christopher Neugebauer.

On Digg, Today, there's a site that allows you to create silly sketches and swap them with people.

Unfortunately, as with most such things, it's turned into an exchange for Goatse impressions, and phalli.

I got an impression of the latter in return for this, so I figured that I'd share this with everyone.

May 05, 2008 03:35 AM

Disclaimer: I have no formal qualifications in pun theory.

I, like most geeks or semi-geeks, enjoy the grand pastime of making terrible puns. After a while the same old puns become rather mundane. For an example, get some bored geeks started on a pun-war regarding "electricity" or "plants" and you'll hear a well-rehearsed stream of phrases including "current", "power", "resistance", "root of the problem", "stems from", "branches into", etc.

Today I would like to highlight what I call double-puns, because I haven't heard them called anything else. This is where you have a pun which is either self-referential as well, or plays off two contexts at once. I saw a fine example in one strip of Irregular Webcomic. I paraphrase: "I wish you would stop it with the metahumour." "I never metahumour I didn't like.". Notice how he's making a joke based on humour, which is metahumour, which is the topic. +1 hilarity ensues.

I only think of these on about a 6-monthly basis. What I'm really striving to achieve is a good triple-pun. Like a four-dimensional surface, I don't really know what it would look like. I guess it could be a pun based on homonyms which are made to relate to the topic (single-pun), which also indicate some kind of self-reference, or, also means something else which also relates to the topic (double-pun), and one more of either of those (triple-pun).

Poor Contrived Example: you're bothering someone who works at a the RSPCA because your dog went missing; they find it and you say "that's dog-gone excellent!"

1. Level 1: Your dog was gone
2. Level 2: You were dogging them
3. Level 3: Valid emphasis idiom containing "dog"

Yeah, it sucks. I warmly invite anyone interested to join me in the quest for the funny, incidental, triple-pun.

April 30, 2008 11:44 AM

I just stumbled across this photo I took on Mt Wellington (the mountain above Hobart) almost a year ago:

Unfortunately it's not up there any more, but perhaps it was a sign of things to come. :) I'd like to meet the person who put it there too.

April 07, 2008 11:41 AM