The scanning is going well, but the scanner crashed whilst working on a large document. I had about 75 sheets to scan in the 350 page document before it stopped. Thankfully I was able to save the data that was already scanned in (about 275 sheets) and when I reboot the PC I will be able to scan the other 75 sheets and attach them to the end of the document.

I have never quite worked out why it crashes, but I have found that it normally takes over a thousand sheets to cause it to crash, so it sounds like some type of memory leak. A memory leak is when a program asks the operating system to use some memory to do something, and then returns most of it, but not all. And then requests some more memory, returning most of that lot. Often it will only be a few bytes that get forgotten about, but when an operation is performed a large number of times, they add up.

And then that does not leave enough memory for other programs which causes an issue for the stability of the operating system. Another way programs fail is if they ask for the memory up front from the operating system in one go, and then try to manage the memory themselves, and fail to return all the memory to the program itself. In which case the program might crash instead of the computer.

The final thing that might happen is if programs request a lot of small blocks of memory, and then return only some of them at any point, the memory will become fragmented just like a Hard Disk. The memory will look like swiss cheese. What will happen is that the operating system will try to allocate more memory out of the holes and will either fail or have to move all the holes together to get things to work.

95% of IT projects are not delivered on time

According to this Article linked to by SlashDot.Org, 95% of IT projects are not completed on time. Also, Microsoft has just released an SP1 update to Windows Server 2003.

My run was not exactly what I would call a success... I only managed about 2.5 KM averageing about 8.4 KM/H. This was not a what I would call a great success. These figures are deceptive though, as I was not going very fast for the last 700m or so. Basically I went too fast at the beginning, and that pooped me out. A hot shower and a sit down has made things better. It never ceases to amaze me about the healing properties of a hot shower or a hot bath.

Not sure if I will get to have a run tomorrow or over the weekend. I will see how things go. It depends on how I feel, what I am doing, what the weather is like, and if I have a chance to buy some new running shoes. I *REALLY* need a new pair. My feet are starting to get a bit sore from the distances that I am running.

I thought I would let you know how the scanning is going. The best way to do that is to show the current pile. It is not the best photo to explain the scanning, but there are probably 1500 pieces of paper there that have been scanned in. That is not a bad collection of paper that will be soon recycled, but there is still a lot more to go. Part of the problem is that the scanner only allows 30-50 sheets so it needs refilling constantly. The scanner can scan about 15 sheets a minute, double sided. It does 30 if it is single sided. The new version does 25 and 50 respectively. The old version of this one does 10 and 20 sheets. As you can see things change rapidly in the scanner business.

More news... On my grandmother. They are moving her stuff out of her self-care unit at the retirement village in 10 days time since there is no way she can go back there. When she leaves the hospital she will need to go into a high care area or nursing home which is not good at all. She definitely needs all the prayers that she can get.

Right now I need to go for a run. I will try to do 3 -> 3.5KM, and I do have the GPS... I found it. So I should have a nice map to show once I get back. I hope I can do the 3.5km. We will have to see how I go. I expect to be able to do it, but you can never tell. The temperature seems fine.

I just checked the site for LookOut which is a full text program for outlook and found a new version. I use it a lot... It searches all my emails in a few seconds for whatever keywords I type, as well as any documents that I want it to search too. The software is not only free, but Microsoft thought it was so good they bought the company.

My only problem is that I need to re-index all my email now since I upgraded to the latest version. Indexing is commonly 50 messages or documents a second so it works quickly to get up and running.

I just heard from my brother. My grandmother had a seizure on Monday and is not in a good way. This is not good - prayers would be appreciated.

Also, I have just spent two hours on the phone with a business meeting. I do have a headset phone, but the headset is broken. I really need to get that fixed ASAP. My arm is a bit numb actually, although the feeling is coming back...

A couple of years back I needed to attend a planning meeting in the USA. I could not attend in person so I did it as a teleconference. I think I ended up spending about six hours on the phone, and that time I most certainly did wear a headset. It would have been more time on the phone, but I went to sleep about 1AM for a few hours whilst the other people in the USA continued to work. That is the problem with the international time zones.

My 'C' programming is going well, although there are times that I am using the wrong functions. One of my 'C' languages uses slen to determine the length of a string, and another uses strlen. strlen is more common, but is implemented in a library, rather than in the core language so anyone can implement it how they like. They are normally consistant, but not enough as can be seen in this case?

The question as to why they didn't put the string functions in the core language. This is a language that was written in the 1970's on computers costing the equivalent of $100,000 or more. The response was that they wanted the langauge to be able to be used to control a toaster. Completely stupid at the time, but it is about close to the truth these days.

Firstly some very good news... I just got a fairly good order.. I guess I will be celebrating tonight... I am really happy about this order. It has been a long time coming, with a few hassles along the way.

More Rabbit Season

Since I am waiting for some glue to dry, and I also need a break from programming, I thought it would be cute to add a photo of what I am working on. This is the rabbit has some serial interfaces for some devices I will be attaching to it. Some of the hardware will be mine, and all the software will be mine, apart from a small amount that I have outsourced.

And the software I have written for the device is working right now, so I am really pleased. It took some time to work out the correct logic, but things are finally working.

TinyTrak Radio Trackers

I have needed to build up some radio based trackers. So here are some units on my workbench.

I found a cool tool yesterday thanks to the Circuit Cellar magazine. It is called PortMon and monitors the serial port without needing any wires. This is such a cool debugging tool, and has the potential to save me so many hours of heartache.

The only issue is that the software is no longer being developed. Still it is a good piece of software and it will cetainly be in my bag of tricks to be used in the future.

Rabbit Season

Right now it is Rabbit Season. I am working on an embedded controller from a company called Rabbit Semiconductor. It has been some time since I have worked on the rabbit, and it is slowly coming back to me. Some of the strange ways that things are done. My first serious Rabbit project was the Hollywood Scooter job.

The Rabbit is derived from a 30 year old processor, but they have added new features and this device is actually quite fast and powerful. It is certainly powerful enough for what I want to do with it. And if not, I upgrade to a faster one. This processor is only running at about 20 MHz, which is fast enough for most embedded applications. This saves battery power, and you dont need to worry about heat dissipation or fans either.

My poor Dell laptop refuses to talk to the device through the serial port - so I need to get a Rabbit 'Approved' serial converter to program the device. So right now I am programming it using another older laptop. But since I want to keep only one PC on my desktop I am using VNC to control the other PC about a meter and a half away.

Anyway I would write more but it is breakfast time, and I am hungry.

Music:

I found a gem - Eurogliders with "Cold Comfort". This could almost be a christmas song as it talks about Israel. I am more interested in it musically. Right now I have Billy Joel playing on Random Play.

Blogger Outage

Sorry about the lack of updates in the latter half of yesterday. Blogger.COM had an outage. What I did not know about, but do now is that there is a Web Page to tell the Status of Blogger.Com. Anyway it is fixed now.

This entry will contain a lot of small links. Normal blogging will continue today now.

Some Links

There is a story on the SMH about a 'silent' party where guests will be required to wear headphones after midnight if they want to stay at the party. They are looking at having about 3000 people there for the event. Interesting concept.

There is another story describing how a person was killed in an argument relating selling a virtual weapon inside a computer game.

And finally, there is a Report about hackers breaking into the PABX of a Canberra hospital making lots of free calls - commonly called Phone Phreaking.

Survey Call

A few weeks ago we posted a survey for comments on this Blog. Since the natue of a blog is that people do not always look at the history of what has been posted between visits I thought I would provide another link here to the Survey

K-Mart and Sears

Sears have merged with K-Mart in the USA according to a Story in the SMH. This is a totally different K-Mart than the company in Australia. As far as I can tell the name K-Mart is licensed from the US K-Mart. The reason for the merger in the USA is that K-Mart went bankrupt.

I alluded to an issue one of my clients was having yesterday where connections were stopping in their tracks. Well, we have a solution. It seems that the connections remain connected when they stop, but are just not sending any data. When the server program restarts things work as they should again, fixing any of the remote devices. Hmm. This is strange, but it fixes things. This is good.

When I want to have a break from things right now I am feeding my scanner with papers... Old documentation of all types. One day I will write an application to manage all this information, and offer it as a product. There must be other people out there with needs similar to me. It cannot be too hard to build a system to meet these needs, and also to work well.

Once any of the papers are scanned they are placed onto to optical media and then recycled. Depending on what is being scanned, they are shredded before being sent to recycling. I think I will do all the shredding on one go, and turn it into a shredding party :-) I have about 4-5 piles of papers to be scanned. I am just thankful that my scanner is really fast [That does not mean that I would not like faster one - there is a new model that is 40% faster than this one for the same price.]

Easter Eggs

I am almost finished all my easter eggs. Thankfully I got some but not too many. I had one friend of mine offering me easter eggs last christmas. They seemed appreciative that I didn't bring them any easter eggs this year!

I didn't get any work caught up on last night, so I will need to work extra hard today. Thankfully a teleconference scheduled for today is not on, so I might get a chance to get more work done. My to-do list is there and it does not look to horendous. I will see how it goes during the day. Invariably it will change as things go on.

Already there is one thing that I need to work on which I have not put onto the list yet.

Visual Basic.NET

I have been working with VB.NET for a couple of years now. I have a client who wants a program to work well on different screen resolutions. This is actually harder than it sounds since things do not rescale that simply. There is an article that does explain how this should be done.

Gershwin's Law

It Aint Necessarily so

Travel

There is a Story on the SMH about how a QANTAS flight from Japan to Melbourne was cancelled thanks to the flight crew getting into an argument.

Music:

Foo Fighters - Learn to Fly

My friends at InstantEffects.Com have sent me a copy of the latest version of their software, or at least the a license key to allow me to download their software and install it. Surprisingly my nVidea graphics card only just meets the minimum specs - or in their language 'partially meets the requirements'.

The video card I have is a nVidea GeForce Go5650 with 128 mBytes of Ram. Basically it was top of the line from a laptop when I got it. This card is a bit slow with the software, but it looks really cool.

Los Angeles

News.Com has an article describing what to do in LA. Not a bad little collection of a things to do in LA.

Problems with Blogger/PowWeb

I have been having a problem with Blogger.COM uploading to PowWeb. The issue has been that it cannot find Terra.Powweb.com. The solution has been to add the IP address of the server rather than the name of the server. This was documented in the forum in the customer support area of PowWeb.

This afternoon has been a series of phone calls. Just as one would finish another one would start. And this is not call waiting or anything like that... Each phone call came in on a different line just after the other one would finish. I found this all rather strange actually. It just turned out that all the calls were synchronised. I like it when things actually just like up perfectly.

I have been building some tracking units for one of my clients. I will add some photos later here on what I was building up. It took about 90 minutes to build about six units, making a nice tidy profit on those. Business is just a process of bringing in money constantly rather than hoping for big payouts occasionally.

I have not managed to get all the work done today that I hoped to get done. Maybe I will get some more work done tonight, and a lot more done tomorrow. I will let you all know how it goes...

Music:

Well, no music at the moment. There is a MASH Marathon on at the moment, so it is on in the background. Not that I am a great fan of MASH, but it is nice to have on in the background.

Sometimes my work leads in strange ways. I have just found an undocumented feature (BUG) in one of the mobile phone carrier's systems. It is a bug that affects about 0.0001% of users, but is causing me some problems. You see, to save money, I am telling some tracking units to stop transmitting overnight. BUT, and this is a big one, the tracking units are still connected. They are just not sending any data back.

This is causing the network to think that the unit is not connected, but at the same time think that it is still connected. This is the problem with wireless systems, working out who knows what when the communications are not reliable. Also the systems get very complex so things are not as easy as they would appear.

Obviously none of the cariers is going to let me look at the internals of their systems. Even if I did I could not see the source code, since they do not have it themselves. And if I did see it then I could not tell anyway since the code is so complex with to many variables.

Welcome to my world.

I am starting to recover from todays run, and thinking that it would be nice to go running again a bit later today. I am turning into a fitness nut :-) No way, only kidding. But I am feeling great, and a lot fitter...

Music:

I have just returned from a run - I did about 3.5KM in about 25 minutes. I am really impressed with myself, although I should say that have sweat pouring from me at the moment. I am drinking some mineral water right now to re-hydrate. I added a circuit of a cricket pitch to extend the distance. This added about an extra 500m to the course. This is my longest run in over 12 months. I was tempted to keep running a bit to reach 4km but I think that would have been overdoing it slightly.

After about 3km my feet were a bit sore - another indicator that I need to buy a pair of decent running shoes. Yet another indicator. On my next run I will take the GPS and do another map.

Overseas Orders

I order some items from overseas to resell to my clients. On item was shipped from the USA on Wednesday. It arrived today - tuesday. Not bad service from the US Postal Service and Australia Post. I am generally fairly impressed with both of them. Now I need to build up some of the tracking units for one of my clients.

Music:

I am listening to Harrigan Logan's SHINE. It is unobtainable here in Oz, but the sound is fantastic.

Now I am feeling a whole lot better after the run, and I am cooling down... Now I am off for a shower.

Personal Insight

Since this blog is my diary, I can write about whatever I like, with some limitations. But this is my place, and it is entirely a place for me. As you might have been able to work out, I love writing. I enjoy putting thoughts (and to a lesser extent feelings) down on paper, or at least into the computer. And if people enjoy reading the content here that is fantastic. If not, well, so be it.

Since my relationship broke down I have been using this blog as a way to organism some of my thoughts, and I think it has worked fairly well for me. It has allowed me to deal with what has been a stressful situation without loosing a sense of reality. Most of us have been in relationships which have broken down. From personal experience I can assure you that an engagement that breaks down is far worse than when it is just with a girlfriend (or boyfriend if the reader is a woman). Each of the emotions experienced with the breakup are amplified significantly. I would guess that they would be amplified once again in the case of a broken marriage.

Every day I feel better about life, and I look forward dating again as soon as the right person comes aroung. When will this happen? Who knows. But I am ready for whatever God brings my way.

Book Review

I had promised to write a book review for the book I got on Thursday. At just under two hundred pages I found the book easy to read. The language seemed simple and the chapters were rather short. The book was written such that I started reading the book at about 10:30 AM on a workday and had finished reading it at about 2:30PM the same day. I literally could not put the book down. It was that engrossing. And I have found some real insight in this book, But I am not going to review it. If you want to ask me about this book I would be happy to tell you about it. But I will not be writing about it

Scanner

I finally got my scanner back and I love having it back. The only problem is that it is not working too well with my old laptop. And if I use my newer laptop then I cannot get other work done. Well, that is just how things go in this game I guess. ARGH.

Music:

Madonna with 'Skin' on random play. I am listening to Matchbox 20 in my car. They have some great songs, and some OK songs. DJ Sammy with the classic Bryan Adams song 'Heaven' is on Random Play now. Then Bruce Springsteen with 'Born to Run' from his Live CD set.

 

These are some battery chargers from Bayswater Power Station. They could supply 500A continuous at 240V DC. And I worked on them live. Notice the paralelled 415V incoming power lines at the bottom of the first picture.

This was a smaller 110V and -24V battery from memory.

Right now I am rather tired, and I am writing this in bed before falling asleep. At this moment I am not really sure that I will get this entry even finished before falling asleep. It has now been about four hours since I stopped work on the plane and I can still smell the thing. This is after having a shower too...

Many people know that I give out the registration details for the UI-View software after the Author died last year. I just had an email request from a friend for a registration key - and decided that he did not need the registration code just quite yet. You see he got married yesterday. And is on his honeymoon. Thus, I have decided that he will not get the code until he comes back.

Digital Conference in the USA

Below is a photo of a conference I was at in Des Moines, Iowa last year. I gave three talks from memory at the event. If you can work out who I am, then good. But I promise I really do have more hair than that. It is interesting who is sitting around me. On my left is Bdale Garbee, who is in charge of Hewlett Packard's US$2 Billion LINUX business. Behind me is Phil Karn of Qualcomm who designed much of the CDMA digital phone system.

It has been a LONG day... I have helped Richard seal the fuel tanks and this has taken much of the day. The idea behind sealing the fuel tanks tanks is to grab this goop that is like a thick icing when mixed. And over times it gets harder, like a hard rubber.

The fuel tanks are about 1m wide and about 50cm deep and 30cm high, and have 5 ribs in them. Basically in previous months we put the entire tank together with the exception of a plate that is about 1m wide and 30cm wide. This is held on with about 2-300 rivets. And under this plate under each rivet is this black goop. It makes tons of mess... Richard and I went through over 100 disposable gloves today... and we actually ran out. Then we used acetone to clean everything off afterwards.

This is not the nicest job, but at least it is now finished. Richard could have got the fuel tanks built for him at US$1800 but this is a lot of pay for the amount of work needing to be done.

Right now I am zonked. The sealant is horrible, and gets everywhere. Time for a shower and a something to eat I think...

Music:

I woke up early this morning thanks to the end of daylight saving. After a while of not being able to get back to sleep I gave up and checked my email. Seeing nothing of note I then watched the end of The Mission. This was much more edifying. I found the story to be somewhat disgusting with how the people of south america were treated by the Spanish and the Portugese.

It really is a movie to watch - and I suspect in surround sound on a large screen would be spectacular. Even on a smaller laptop screen with two speaker sound it is amazing.

Promotion of Films

Strangely, I just saw an article on the SMH that describes how Jackie O from 2Day FM is the voice of one of the robots in the Animated movie Robots. Well, she is one of the voices but only here in Oz. The producers of the movie cast a celebrity in every country to help promote the film.

I am watching The Mission in a window whilst I write this. What is cool about WinDVD is that the software remembers where the movie was up to last time. This happens evem when you remove the DVD from the drive and put it back in later. I can never remember where I was up to so this is a great feature. You also dont need to see the copyright and menu messages again...

The more I see of the movie the more I love the cinematography of the movie. It is the cinematography that tells the story with the music, rather than the dialog. There is surprisingly little dialog in the movie. You could not quite get by without removing all the dialog but you could come close.

Jeremy Irons is fantastic in the movie. He plays a jesuit preist in the movie. And does a very good job at it. He seems so much younger in this movie than he does in any other movie. Robert De Niro is un-recognizable. As is Liam Neeson.


Music:

Right now I am at Richard's... I have spent the afternoon building, and I will be staying here tonight so I dont need to drive all the way home tonight and back tomorrow. So much simpler this way. Not that I live that far away, but it does save a lot of time. They needed to go out so I tried to watch a DVD. With some hassles I got the DVD player to work but without sound. So I am going to watch it on this laptop in a window whilst I do some otehr stuff

Tomorrow we plan to seal the two fuel tanks. This is likely to be a horrible task as it gets rather messy. Commonly when we do sealing we wear two pairs of disposable gloves as it keeps things cleaner that way. The sealant is commonly called 'goop' since that is the best way to describe it. Until it sets, then it is just sticky and horrible.

Still, tomorrow we will basically be finishing dealing with fuel tank sealant for the entire plane. This is a real milestone.

Three Wheeled Car

When driving over here today I saw a cute car just on the north side of the M4 on the Cumberland Highway in the far left lane. From the back it looked like a small vintage car - the type that used to be in race events. But the strange thing about this car was that although there was a motor at the front, with the normal two wheels, there was only a single wheel at the back. I found this rather strange. It was almost as if the people were driving an oversized side-car without the motorcycle.

The people in the car were wearing their old style caps and seemed to be enjoying driving the car at it's 60 km/h maximum speed.

HAPPY EASTER...

Unwired's Impact on my Business

It is interesting to look at the potential impact that Unwired has on my business. I am an engineering consultant, and much of my work involves getting information around. Or more correctly working out how to do that. This may sound easy, but implementing it is often hard given the limitations of each piece of technology.

From my point of view, Unwired is a technology that provides great benefits for my clients. Basically it is easy to use, and provides and Ethernet interface. Unfortunately it is only available in Sydney and maybe other capitals, but the abstraction of the communications infrastructure is useful. Basically I can attach whatever piece of equipment in that I like, and it will just work.

Charlotte's Web

There is a story on the SMH WWW Site saying how the movie of Charlotte's Web is being filmed in Victoria. I had not heard that this was being filmed. I will be interested to see the resultsm as I am slightly sceptical about putting this onto film.

GPS Tracking

There is an article in The Australian about how a truck was stolen in Sydney with $2m worth of computer games, and was recovered thanks to a GPS tracking system inside. I Whilst these were not my GPS trackers, this is the type of work I do. Not stealing the trucks, but tracking them.

Outsourcing Gone Mad

People these days are outsourcing everything. Many companies have outsourced the provision of IT servces, so if a computer fails on a desk you ring a helpdesk for a different company, and they send out one of their technicians to fix things. Well, according to The LA Times McDonalds is going this with Drive Through. They are getting a callcentre to take orders in some restraunts as a trial to see if it improves service. That is, the people in the store with drive through would not be the ones taking your order, but someone hundreds or thousands of Km away.

Music:

After taking junk to the tip this morning, the boot of my car needed a bit of a clean so I gave the whole car a vacuum... I can assure you it really needed it. I think it needs more but what it got certainly helped most of the way. And I spent some more time cleaning the Garage following that. More rubbish thrown out, and more to be thrown out. But I am fairly happy with the progress. I could throw a lot more stuff out quickly if I needed to, but since there is room there, and things are neat and tidy I dont really need to at this stage.

I spent some more time writing the book review this afternoon, but I am finding it hard. The book was a highly interesting read, but working out what to say about it is not easy. I found the book confronting to some extent, and I am not sure yet what I want to say when I review it. The only thing I am really sure of is that I actually do want to review it.

Los Angeles

The LA Times has a story on the correct name of Los Angeles. About the only thing that people can agree on is that Los Angeles is in the name. Some people contend that the correct name is El Pueblo de la Reina de los Angeles Sobre el Rio de Porciuncula meaning "the town of the Queen of Angels on the Porciuncula River". All other versions are variations on this. Los Angeles is just the short version of the name.

Building

Sunday afternoon and monday I get to work on the plane. This will be fun, and a great chance to relax and think about something different for a change. I doubt that I will get a chance to update the blog much during this time, but you never know. Just depends on what we are working on, and what else is going on.

I am not actually sure what we will be working on. I think the wings are almost finished so we might actually get to start on the fuselage of the plane. There is still at least 12-18 months work to get the plane flying... It will definitely not be flying this weekend :-)

Music and Movies:

Robbie Williams 'Better Man'. I have also started watching 'What Women Want' which is quite a fun movie. I started watching the making of 'Lantana' but I did not feel quite in the mood for that. One of these days (or years) I will watch it... One of these days.

I went for the run. I did about 3KM in about 20 minutes. Not sure exactly how long it took since I didn't take the GPS and I didn't time myself.

I borrowed the movie 'School of Rock' and this was a cool movie featuring 'Jack Black'. It is a movie I had wanted to see since probably the middle of last year, and I had never quite got around to seeing it. I came close a few times, but alas.

The music was cool, and the story was non-conventional. It was at times conventional, and at times hard to predict. They are the hallmarks of a good movie. I wouldn't call this a great movie, but it was a good comedy. I loved where Jack Black comes out wearing an 'Angus Young' style school uniform right at the end doing an ACDC song. How cool is that.

Lunch was a homemade pizza. Well, sort of. Normally I would have made the base myself but not this time. I just picked up some frozen ones since I wanted to see the movie.

My normal Pizza base is:- 2 cups Self Raising Flower; 200 ml warm milk with two very heaped tablespoons of margarine melted in it. Mix all the incredients into a dough, and roll into the shape of a Pizza base. Add toppings as required and cook in a 200 Degree C overn. Vary the amount of margarine depending on the style of base - the more margarine the flatter it is.

Music:

Just the School of Rock.... On DVD...

Cleanup

I have just taken a car load of junk to the tip. I had intended to take it to Glenfield but it was closed as today is a 'public holiday'. When I did research, it actually is. How strange. Anyway I took it to 'Jack's Gully' at Camden without any problem apart from the extra hour and a half it took me. Still, as you can see, at least I got rid of a whole lot of junk. Also, they have recycling there so I managed to recycle some cardboard instead of throwing it out.

And the price was only $9 which is not too bad. It would have been $7.50 at Glenfield, but still it could have been a lot more expensive. And given that I was throwing out things like bricks as well as old wood and other stuff this was not a bad price.

Although this next photo may not show it well, this is where I put about 6 loads of compost yesterday.

Right now though I have done enough work and I am going to go for a run... Wish me luck :-)

Last Night

It is now 11:30PM on Friday night and I cannot sleep for some reason so I thought I would start the next entry in this Blog... Earlier I made a fatal mistake... By earlier I mean dinner time. I decided to get some takeaway for tea, and decided to take my PDA for something to do whilst waiting. Playing solatare. This would have been fine, but I won the first game. And then didn't get any other games out. Even whilst watching the 90 minute show on the ABC whilst playing I didnt get any out. So much so I got a cramp in my left arm, and it is still hurting a bit...

After writing this I went back to bed and played Solitare until 12:30AM. That game is SO additctive. Time to remove it from the PDA.

An Alarm Clock

Some students at MIT have come up with an alarm clock that hides itself every night making it hard for you to find it to press the snooze button, ensuring that you actually get out of bed when the alarm goes off. Cute idea.

Music:

I have been listening to Mix 106.5 in the garage since the MP3 player will not reach out there

Wireless Router

My wireless router just dropped out. When I checked it, the power adapter had come out slightly. The router uses a power adapter with two round pins, and needs an adapter to fit into the power board. And it does not fit very well. Of course I do not have an adapter that will work to replace this one, although I will need to get one. What I find strange is that things fail when there is nothing nearby to to cause it to fail. Admittedly the powerboard is on it's side, and the power connection is quite tenuous on the adapter, but even so...

Sandra Bullock - The Net

Yesterday I mentioned the Sandra Bullock movie 'The Net'... And then what do I look at News.Com.Au but this article which tells how Sandra Bullock gets her Star on Hollywood Blvd.

Paypal Problems

I was just looking at Cryptome.Org and they noted that they had had their PayPal account suddenly blocked for a few days. Very strange. They suggested looking at PayPalWarning.com about the problems experienced by some users of PayPal. For those that do not know, PayPal is a micropayments service that allows secure purchases on The Internet. Or at least that is the idea. I have not had any problems myself with them, nor have I known anyone who has had problems.

Music

I am listening to my catalogue of Robbie Williams music on the Jukebox with some decent bookshelf speakers. MP3's even at 128k sound fantastic through decent (or even semi-decent) speakers.

OK... I have got the 'work area' of the garage fairly clean. There is more to do, but it is mostly there. A lot of stuff has been thrown out, and the floor and benches have been swept and vacuumed. Why vacuum? Well, it causes less dust to get into the air, and works fairly well. I have an old vacuum that I just use in the garage. When I was doing work at Royal North Shore Hospital building a TV studio I used the vacuum there and had to repair the main switch at one stage. Following the repair it is now working really well. You can see a photo of the cleaned workshop in the photo below.

Tomorrow I will take a few carloads of junk to the local tip. That should be fairly easy - most of it is in the trailer at the moment. So why take the car? Well, it is usually $7.50 for my car, and a minimum of $30 for a trailer at the tip. And the other problem is that I dont have a tow bar. This is something that I have been meaning to fix, but I still dont have one. I can fit a lot in my car when the back seats fold up.

I didn't end up going running today. Slack you say? Well, instead I moved about 6 large wheelbarrow loads of compost from the back yard to the front lawn and spread it out. I think that was more of a work out than a run. It certainly felt like it.

Building

It looks like I will be working on the plane on sunday and monday... It will be good to get more work done on it, as I have not touched the plane for probably a month or so... Both Richard and I have been really busy.

Phase 1 - The Garage Cleanup

Phase one of the cleanup is the garage cleanup. Right now I am cleaning up the area with all the powertools. I should say that I have not kept this area as clean as I should have. This is after some work has been done, and is slightly deceptive as to making it look cleaner than it is.

Now, this picture is of some rubbish and some stuff which is not rubbish which is clogging up the garage. It is off to the side of the photo above.

I have to meet up with a friend and his business partner right now for about an hour. When I get back I will update this page...

I have started watching THE NET with the director's and producer's commentry. The movie is now so dated. The movie was shot in 1993/4 so things are so different. There are so many strange things in the movie, like sending a Floppy Disk by Fedex with a program on it. These days people would usually just email something like that, or download it.

And certainly they would not normally use a floppy disk. A memory stick or a CD would be more common. I have a floppy drive for my laptop but I rarely use it. It is external, and I do not even normally have it plugged in. In the movie she also had a computer screen to act as a 'log fire', but the graphics were done by an artist. These days it would have been at least photo-realistic, if not actual video. All in all it is funny to look back at what was cutting edge technology at the time, which is certainly not so cutting edge now.

I have looked at a few minutes of 'The Mission' and I am really impressed by the cinematography. It is really impressive, and I can only imagine how dangerous some of the initial scenes were for the actors involved. I hope that stuntmen were used, because it certainly looked like Jeremy Irons was scaling a water soaked cliff without any protection.

12 Months

Yesterday was an anniversary for two events. Firstly it was 12 months since my mother finished Chemotherapy for Lymphoma in her bone, for which she is in remission having made a great recovery. Secondly it was 12 months since her mother died, following being in hospital with a broken hip. At that time Mum was not well enough to go to the funeral which was hard for her. The nursing home where she died has a memorial service for those who died coming up, so mum will be going to that

The long weekend is here and I have some things planned and I have some things that I may be doing. Apart from church, tomorrow I will be cleaning stuff out. I want to take stuff to the tip Saturday morning, so that means that I will get getting the stuff together tomorrow. Over the last few weeks I have also been putting stuff into the normal garbage. This even includes old rocks and house bricks, except I need to be careful so I dont make the bin too heavy.

In my view, if the bin is too heavy for me to lift off the ground, it is too heavy to be put out for collection. I don't know if the council places limits on the weight, but it is probably best not to make the bin too heavy even if they dont.

I should be helping Richard with the plane sometime this weekend. I am just not sure when that will be on.

Running

I didn't get a chance to go running today. Maybe tomorrow... Today I had to do some things when I wanted to actually go running, and by the time that was finished it was a bit late to go. C'est La Vie. Tomorrow I promise myself (and you dear readers) I will go running.

Music:

Elton John with Tiny Dancer on Random Play.

K-Mart was having a sale - so I picked up a coupld of DVD's. Firstly there is THE MISSION which won the Acadamy Award in 1985 for best cinematography, and then THE NET with Santra Bulloch.

THE MISSION is a movie that I have not seen for many years. The music is by the amazing Ennio Morricone and describes the story of a Jesuit mission in a jungle, and the story of what happens when Spain and Portugal sign a treaty which signs the death knell for the mission. It is truely an amazing picture from what I can remember of it.

THE NET is a more modern tale of identity theft. In this case the movie is not the greatest ever, but for under $9 it does fill a hole in my DVD collection. Also the Audio Commentry might me amusing.

Reverse GeoCoding

I have been playing with reverse geocoding this afternoon. Basically this is taking a position of a vehicle and working out what town, city, road etc is closest to the vehicle. It is an interesting exercise, and there are some cute things you can do with this information. A friend told me it was easy in a meeting, and then admitted that it was not quite as simple as it sounded. So there was my challenge - do this, and make it as fast as possible. I think I have done both fairly well.

I have made a few assumptions that would make Christopher Columbus unhappy and make me a member of the 'Flat Earth Society', but it seems to actually work fairly well. It may not work so well when you want to work out if a vehicle is closer to a town 1000 km to the NorthEast or one 1000km to the SouthWest, if the towns are somewhat closer the results are fairly accurate whilst being faast to calculate.

Music:

Red Hot Chilli Peppers with Californication. For some reason the RHCP's gave me the idea that they were really a heavy metal band from their name, until I started listening to their music. But they are quieter, and the words are easier to understand - usually a good thing with music. I think my favourite song of theirs is 'The Zephyr Song'.

My book has arrived from Angus and Robertson's finally. And it is not a good book to have, if you need to work. You see, I am finding it hard to put down. The chapters are short, and the book itself is only about 175 pages. I have a feeling I will have the book read within the next few days, and a review written here soon after. Well that is my hope.

Correction: It is now 1:15pm and I have just finished the book. It was that hard to put down. I am glad that I read the book - it was a good read. I am still not sure how I am going to write a review of it, but I would certainly recommend reading the book. I found it refreshing, if short. I think I need to spend some time thinking about the content before I write the review.

Coding

I have been doing some more coding. The problem with coding is when you want to use the same program to do about a million very similar tasks is that sometimes you forget about the insignificant variations that interact in strange ways. Sometimes it takes ages to find the interactions. In this case it has taken me a few days to work out, and it was only when the program seemed to crash that I realised that the software was not operating how it should have.

Running

I will be going running today. Sometime later today. Not sure how far I will get, but it should be at least the 2.5km for the short version of my long course. I will try to get the 3km version done but I am not sure how successful I will be at that.

Sometimes windows just goes strange... Mainly outlook... As if the computer has thought that I am pressing the alt key or something all the time. I try to type an upper case "I" and a menu comes up... pressing other keys does other things. It is really really strange. Changing to another application helps sometimes I think... No matter what it seems to dissapear after about a minute. Very strange. I am thinking it is something like 'Sticky Keys' in windows turning itself on... But I have no idea. I also occasionally have the voice functions in word trying to turn themselves on.

The International Obfuscated C Code Contest

The Obfuscated C contest has opened again. I have not looked at what you win if you win, but you can find more details on their Web Site. This is one contest for the really perverse code authors. I would have no hope of winning. My mind is not that demented. I have included a past entry below. If you can work out what it does by just looking at it, you are better than I am.

They even give out an award for the worst abuse of the rules. And they award prizes to entries that cause them to change the rules for future years.

#include /* O b f u s c a t e d */ int m ( int c ) { int x = 3 + ( c - 1 ) * 9 + ( c - 1 ) * 27 + ( c - 1 ) * ( ( 993 - '!' * c ) / 320 ) + ( c - '9' + '8' ) * c + ( c - 1 ) * 243 / 9; return c - 32 ? c - 9 ? c - 10 ? x % x : 3 : 2 : 1 ; } int a , b , c , d , e , v, f ; int main /* n ( c ) { return c ++ - 32 ? c - 9 ? c - 10 ? 0 : 3 : 2 : 1 ; } x ( ) { int a , b , c , d , e , v ; while ( ( v = putchar ( d ) ) != EOF ) { if ( ( a = m */ ( ) { while ( ( e = d = c = b = v = getchar ( ) ) - EOF ) { for ( ; d < 0 ; d ++ ) { f = f / getchar ( ) ; a <<= f ; ( v * v * v - v || e * e * e - e ) && ( e - 2 || ( d & f ) - 4 || ( a >> v != ( e - 1 ? f : 0 ) ) ) ; } if ( ( v % v + f * --f + v ) && ( v < f ? v / v - 992 * b : v * v ) && /* o ( c ) { return c - 32 ? c - 9 ? c - 10 ? 0 : 3 : 2 : 1 ; } y ( ) { int a , f , b , c , d , e , v ; while ( ( v = getchar ( ) ) != EOF ) { if ( ( a = m ( c ) ; */ ( a = m ( b + ++ f * 3888 ) ) && ( b = m ( getchar ( ) ) - f / 243 ) && ( c = m ( getchar ( ) ) + f ) && ( f == 1 ? 124 - ( ( c < 8 && ( ( c & b ) != e || ( c >> d ) != 3888 ) ) ) : 1 ) && ( d = m ( getchar ( ) + f ) ) && ( e = m ( getchar ( ) ) ) ) putchar ( f + a - 1 + ( b - 1 ) * ( ( 993 - '!' ) / ( '(' * 8 ) ) + ( c - f - '9' + '8' ) * 9 - 4 + ( d - 1 ) * 243 / 9 + f + 11 + ( e - 1 ) * 3888 / '0' - 7 ) ; } return ( f && getchar ( ) ) ; }

9:30 PM

This morning I was woken up by the wind and rain about 6AM so I am a bit tired right now. I really needed a bit more sleep, but alas, I didn't get any more. Nor did I get a chance for an afternoon nap at my desk. That is the advantage with working from home, you can do strange things like that. And whilst I dont where bunny rabbit slippers, I do have some lambskin ugh boots for when it gets colder.

7:30 AM

I got an email from a friend this morning letting me know that another friends company had released a new version of their Program. The company is InstantEffects and sells a PowerPoint Plugin which allows 3D presentations to be done easily. It really is an amazing product, and I just wish I was an investor in the company. You can download the trial version of the product for free, but you need to be warned... You need a decent video card to run the thing. It runs OK on my laptop, but not great. My laptop was the top of the line Dell 18 months back with a nVidea graphics chip and 128 mBytes memory and it still was a bit slow. The CEO, Don Brittain, has his own Blog too...

Mobile PC's

MobilePC Magazine has an Article on the history of notbook/portable computers, starting with the 1975 IBM 5100 Portable weighing 25Kg. Actually the article is missing photos of many of the important milestones along the way, including the Tandy Model 100 that was very very light, albeit not all that much use for much other than word processing. But it would run for hours on a set of AA batteries.

Music:

Natalie Merchant once more on Random Play, with San Andreas Fault.

I have just requested some bids to do the real work for one of the todays jobs, rather than doing it myself. I would expect that the cost of getting the work done will not be too expensive. I would guess that a decent programmer will be able to do the work I need in a few hours, or maybe a couple of days at the latest. Given that a highly skilled and payed programmer in Argentena costs US$6 per hour rather than the $100 per hour that I would need to charge, I am sure that I will come out ahead.

OK. Well, my time to myself is free, but you get the idea. And if it costs me most of the income from the project to outsource the project, then either I have underquoted or I should be doing the job myself in order to make money. This is normal business.

This is of course the advantage of working in an international networked economy. I can get people to do work for me all over the world, safely and securely. I have had a few cases where the work was not up to scratch but that really is the exception.

ISS Issues

There is a story on TechNewsWorld about an issue on the Interational Space Station where another of the Gyro's has failed. The cause seems to be a circuit breaker that has tripped that is outside the space station. Now, seems to me that it is a bit of a problem if a circuit breaker trips and you need to do a space walk to fix the problem. From memory this is similar to what happened in the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" where HAL required that a component be fixed on the outside of the jupiter transport vehicle just before killing them.

Music:

Yanni with his 'Aria', also known as the 'British Airways' music from a few years back.

It is now 4:30PM and I have just got back from the meetings. I got back about five minutes ago, and I have just had lunch. I prefer to have lunch closer to midday if at all possible. Unless I choose not to have lunch. I will not say what I did have for lunch but it was not McDonalds. I have been off McDonalds Hamburgers for about 5 years. Almost exactly 5 years now.

Both meetings were fantastic. The first one was some programming work that the client wanted to get done. This should be fairly easy, and I will probably outsource some of it.

The second one was more interesting, not only because of the challenge but also the dollars were bigger. I demonstrated some things, firstly on the internet and then using my own software. This worked really well - the client had an Unwired unit in their conference room and I used this. It really was as simple as 1,2,3, although with DHCP it took slightly longer to get an IP address. But I was certainly online within about 20 seconds.

The speed seemed to be good, although it was hard to tell from the work I was doing with it. All in all I spent about 2 1/2 hours with the client, and I really enjoyed the time with the client. Coming up with solutions to their engineering and business problems. I have to go back just after easter to spend some more time with them, and now also write a quick spec for them. This is the sort of work that I really love - looking at a business and then seeing what technolog can solve their business issues. What I also loved was seeing how my own product can be improved to meet this clients specific needs.

Music:

Australia Crawl's "Hootchie Gucci Fiorucci Mumma". Bette Midler's "From a distance"

Insurance

I was speaking to a friend recently who was organizing an event. Get got a bill from an organization for over $3000 for public liability insurance for the bill - for a 45 minute event. So he did a bit of research, and found out that the person who sent him the bill did not own the asset that they wanted to charge insurance for. The owner of the asset was able to confirm that the event my friend was organizing was covered under their own policy. Hmm... I am just wondering if the organisation that sent the bill out receives a percentage of the bill...

Meetings...

I have a couple of meetings today... One at Guildford, and the other at Rosehill. The Rosehill one is a pain as it is a right hand turn across the main road. Thankfully the traffic is normally stopped at lights making it easier, but even so it is not one of my most favourite intersections. [Come to think of it, I hate right hand turns across traffic no matter where they are. Anywhere.]

The Rosehill meeting could turn out to be an important one... They want to do a lot of things, and I want to support them with this as much as I can. They were one of my first clients when I set up the business, and through a weeks consulting I was able to prove that they didn't really need to do what they were wanting to do at that time. But now things have changed, I hope.

Job Descriptions

Another cute article on the SMH www site talks about job description titles. Working for myself, I can call myself all sorts of things... "Chief Engineer", "CEO", "CIO", "Owner", "Consultant", "Principal Engineer", "Web Master" and "Office Manager". The list goes on. The article lists some of the strange job titles that are around. It also points out that many job titles would be illegal in many other countries, since we here in Oz do not restrict ourselves to requiring engineers to have teriary qualifications.

I am an "IT Professional"... How come? Well, I belonged to a union - "The Association of Professional Engineers, Scientists and Managers". And they basically joined with the "IT Professionals Association". As part of the deal you could join the other organisation for zero cost. So I became a member of the ITPA, and got a certificate from them saying I was an IT Professional. Totally bogus, but at the time I needed it for work. Don't Ask :-)

I have a badge in my room... From MIT in Boston. It says...
"NOW I AM AN ENGINEER, WHEN DO I GET TO DRIVE A TRAIN"

This blog entry will probably be written in two parts... An evening part, and a morning part. It is now 11:10PM and I have recently got home from the meeting. I would guess the meeting took a good three hours, with some frank exchanges of views. In the end the course of action in the short term was obvious... There was only one choice of what needed to be chosen, and we are now looking at how to implement the decision. Unfortunately I cannot go into the reasons here right what this course of action is...

Right now I am fairly tired, and if I closed my eyes I think I would have the QWERTY's in the morning. For those who don't know, the QWERTY's is the condition that you get when you fall asleep with your face on a computer keyboard - the impression that the keyboard leaves on your face. This is a DILBERT thing.

I have mentioned the polygamist Dilbert cartoon before. The other classic has Dilbert going to an airline counter, finding that he has been 'bumped' and is not able to get a flight. On the next frame he is saying 'I paid for this flight. I demand service'. On the last frame he is taped to the wing of the plane using duct tape, and he says "You know, I am not convinced that there really is a thing called 'Duct Tape Class'". Sometimes you have to be careful what you demand.

Now Wednesday Morning 6:24AM

OK... I have had some sleep. And no QWERTY's for me - but there was a nice warm bed. Ayway when I woke up this morning the program I had been working on yesterday had crashed. And I pressed the wrong button so I have no idea why. ARGH. Maybe I should have woken up first.

Pixar

There is a cute Article on AintItCool.Com detailing a tour of PIXAR. The coolest is the cute little 'houses' that some of the animators work in. The have roofs and doors all inside a huge building. That is the way to make employees feel important.

There is also an article on the SMH WWW site about how the 'NSW Office of Industrial Relations' "Raided" one of the restraunts from the Channel 7 show "My Restraunt Rules" over how much workers are being paid. From the description I would not have called it a raid, but it does make an interesting story.

Looking on the SMH WWW site, they list the most popular stories for the SMH and THE AGE in Melbourne. The interesting thing is that the most popular story in The Age is one on the FireFix Web Browser. Rather computer savy in Melbourne? Well, no. SlashDot.Org linked to the story on their WWW site causing the increased traffic. That is why...

Music:

In the car I have the soundtrack from "Love Actually". I do so love that movie. The wedding is so cute... The whole movie is cool. Now LAND is on Random Play, featuring one of the members of Midnight Oil. Cool song. Great for this time of the morning. Now "Can't fight the moonlight" from the movie "Coyote Ugly" is on. This is a movie I didn't really have any desire to watch until I was 'forced' to watch it on a flight from Sydney to LA.

I have just turned the music off so I can work listening to the rain. I just love the sound. Now if I only had a good book (and no work) I would get into bed right now and start reading. Ah, well... I will just have to wait until tomorrow until my book arives FINALLY. If it is still raining that is.

My software seem be behaving itself. I am glad. Today I am thinking that I love software more than hardware. Other days when I get fed up with software, I love the hardware more.

I heard from a client today that I gave a proposal to. They loved the proposal but they need to interface with another part of their organisation, so they need to wait for them to set their requirements. What this will mean is that I suspect that another zero or two will be added to the cost of the project, and then it will be canned. Oh, well.

I needed to generate a random time delay on the program that I was working on earlier today. I could not find the RANDOM function in VB.NET to generate a Random Number. Turns out it is improved from VB. The syntax may be a bit strange, but oddly it does make sense.
getRandomNumber = New System.Random().Next(low, high)
Another article I found on DevX.Com described how to create a GUID - or Globally Unique ID - a number that is perfectly unique...
GetGUID = "{" System.Guid.NewGUID().ToString & "}"

Travel

I was thinking about the strangest place I have every been. One place came to my mind. Tropic. I can't remember if it is in Arizona or Utah or Nevada. It is in one of them, near all the Canyons. Anway Tropic is a small community, and I was there in a January, and I can tell you it was cold. I left a bottle of Coke in the car overnight, and it froze. Actually, most things froze. Concidering it was only three degrees that morning. Farenheight. Making it about -20 or so celcius.

I can recommend the general store/restraunt there for breakfast. I ordered a large stack of pancakes, needing all the energy I could get. Big mistake. I could only eat half of them, thanks to most of the pancakes being about an inch think, and huge. And the price was reasonable too.

At some stage I will drag out some of the photos from Tropic and add them here.

Music:

I have Dido's "Mary's in India" on the Random Play again. The song is so cool. Now Marina Vidal's "Body Rock".

When programming at every corner there seems to be another problem to solve. This can be a real pain at times. Well, most of the time. In VB, I just learned how to find a date, for instance 100 years back. It is the AddYears function. And to generate the date 100 years back, you type something like
dim OneHundredYearsBack as date = now.addyears (-100)

Now, using the -100 took my a bit by surprise. It is logical, but took me some time to find. Not hours, but probably a minute or two. This is about a minute or two more than it should have. Right now I am working on an algorithm for a communications infrastructure, and I am having some issues getting it running; not actually implementing anything, but with working what I need to implement.

Simplifying some of the logic I think I have got things working. The testing looks good. I will see after a few hours what the database is telling me. So far things are looking really good.

Radar

What is not looking good is the weather RADAR on the BOM Web Site. The weather looks horrible. But thankfully I do not need to be out in it driving or anything like that.

Running

I was planning to go running today, but it seems that it is raining outside. I will see how it goes in another hour or so. I expect that given the weather lately that things will improve. It is certainly not the 'wild storms' that are predicted in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Update at 4:00. The rain does not look like it is going to let up for some time. So I decided to get the treadmill out and spend some time on it. I could only do 7 1/2 minutes on it. The stresses on the body are different from running, with no visible goal apart from the clock, a harder run since it is slightly up hill with more friction, no wind in the face and none of the open air. When I stopped I certainly neeed to have a sit down - which is what I am doing right now, before a cool shower to clean up.

It would have been nice to run outside but I just don't feel like getting soaked today. After all it isn't 'Summer Rain'

Reading

I spoke to Angus and Robertson yesterday. They say that one of the books had arrived yesterday, and should have gone out yesterday or today. So with some luck it will be here tomorrow, and then I can review it. I expect the book to be an interesting read, but it could also be a hard one at times.

Programming

I am working on software for a radio based tracking system today. The software is running a bit behind. I was just testing the software, and it was not working. Then I looked at the code I was calling. I had not written it yet. OOps. Time to write that now. [Slight Delay]. Just waiting for the program I have written to start. Lets see if it works. YES. It works. [Of course it worked. What did you exepect :-) ]

The software is getting there - almost finished actually. Just a few more hours work. I hope to get it finished enough to send to the client today for testing. I think he will be happy with it. Well, that is my hope. Time will tell though.

My monthly FedEx shipment from Microsoft just came in. Not sure why they FedEx the discs in, but they sent 4 DVD's from singapore, which I will most likely not actually use. They are updates for older versions of the DVD's containing official microsoft software. I get them as part of a developers program where they send me the software so that I can encourage more people to use windows.

Ordering from the USA

I need to order an item from the USA for one of my clients. The cost of the unit is about US$180. But it seems that all the suppliers refuse to use anyone other than the normal expensive courier companies like DHL, FedEx and UPS. That means that it will cost US$100-$180 to ship the product over here. Adding customs clearance fees it becomes cheaper to but the unit locally at A$479 rather than A$230 + Postage. Of course I might be able to get a friend of mine to pick it up and ship it across but that becomes messy when the credit card does not line up at all with anything else.

On another work subject I have just outsourced some more work. Hopefully this work will be better than the last lot I outsourced. The price is good. It would take me a good 1/2 day to do the work I have just outsourced for US$40. The bid came in below this but I got the guy to increase it slightly. This is business, but I like to pay a reasonable fee for the work I get done.

Anto-Smog Devices

A friend of mine sent me a link to Engadget.Com where they have a story that reports that scientists are debunking a $299 disc that people put in their fuel tank to reduce their care engine emissions. The disc was supposed to emit "holographic frequencies into the gas tank and change the molecular structure of the fuel". Another interesting WWW site is BoingBoing.Net

They link to a project that turns an old rotary phone into a cellphone. Also a Wooden Laptop can be found here. Wow.

Music:

I mentioned 'Say Goodbye to it all' yesterday... It is now on Random play. I was wrong about what this song was about. The person singing is talking about how they were a refugee from presumably WWII. I though that the person was a soldier.

Music:

"Otto Titsling" by Bette Midler from the "Beaches" Soundtrack. How cool a song. I really want to see how it is used in the movie. Now Madonna is on with 'Easy Ride' which does not really sound like one of her classic songs. Now is Pink Floyd's 'Eclipse', another of those songs that don't really date. Then Melanie C's 'Never be the same again'. Now Missy Higgins... Her music is so beautiful. It took me a while to work out what her song 'Ten Days' was actually saying. You have to take careful not of the words. 'The Special Two' is also great.

Justice Kirby

The more I hear about Justice Kirby of the High Court the more I like him. Today there is a story in the SMH about how he is suggesting that the time and energy being put into counter-terrorism could be better spent elsewhere. Also on the legal side, there is an article on GrokLaw.Net about open source software allowing car computers to be accessed without very expensive software and hadrware

Programming

I outsourced some work but the guy doing the work dropped out. Fortunately I had not paid him yet, but it means that I need to do the work that I was getting him to do. And it is easier for me to do the work than explaining it to someone else who does not know the code at all. The work in particular is database programming. I have not done much of this for about twelve months, and I love other things more that that. Not that I don't enjoy it, but there are things that I would rather be doing.

Music:

There are times when my MP3 player is so completely wrong about the music it chooses. Like now, I have just put on 50 songs to be played at random, and 49 of them are not what I want to listen to right at this moment. This current playlisy is looking better... Out of the first five tracks I have found two that I want to listen to. Not great, but an improvement.

Elton John is playing right now, with 'Rocket Man'. Now 'Oxygene 8' by Jean-Michel Jarre. For those who do not know his music, he is an electronic musician. He is in the Guiness Book of Records for the biggest concert ever, or at least was. His music was using in the movie Galipoli. His father was Maurice Jarre, who wrote the score to Dr Zhivargo, and from memory got an Oscar for it.

I got into Jean-Michel Jarre back in High School when I needed to mix the music for a school fashion parade where they used Oxygene Part II for the section on 25th century wedding dresses. I have the video tape of that around here somewhere - although that was a year 11 task, and I was in year 10 at the time. When I did textiles in Year 11 (Long Story, ask me sometime), they changed the course since having a guy in the class making a wedding dress was sort of not politically correct.

Narnia

I wanted to start reading the Narnia books of C.S. Lewis last night, and found that I am missing two of the seven books in the series. The worst part is that I am missing book 1 which is the one I obviously wanted to start with. In eight years the series will be out of copyright since it will be 50 years since the author died so maybe I should just wait until then. Project Gutenberg has a few of his documents that are out of copyright, but not the Narnia Series.

The movie of 'The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe' was shot just around the corner from a friends house just outside Auckland

Church Meeting

I have a church meeting tomorrow night. Another meeting of the Finance group. The figures are not nice but I have some information to present which might provide interesting reading for those who are attending. The information is highly confidential so I cannot detail it here at the moment, but I believe that the members of the church will agree with my suggestions.

It is something I have been sitting on for over 12 months trying to decide what to do with it. Now I have a group who can look at it and decide what to do next. It might be an interesting meeting

Courier

The courier finally arived about 3:50pm. This meant I needed to go flat out for about an hour to reprogram the units and send them off. Not fun at all. But I got them out of here and to the Post Office in time. Just. With about 5 minutes to spare. That is what I call a close call.

Darryl's Toys

One of my clients wants me to write a document describing what he described as "Darryl's Toys". That is, all my software packages that they can sell and where they are up to in development. Stay tuned...

Work

My work in the city went well, but it took about an hour and a half longer than I had expected. This was not what I was hoping for - I expected to be out of there in an hour. It took 2.5 hours. Some of this was some additional work that I needed to do, and some was trying to get a bolt off that I had accidently glued on.

Right now I am waiting for two courier packages for some other units that need reprogramming. These need to be out of here today so I am itching for them to come in.

License

I must remember to renew my radio license. If I don't I can be slapped with a $50,000 fine and 10 years in Gaol. That is just for transmitting on the radio without a license, just once. This is under fereral jurisdiction meaning that I would be very unlikely to get caught even if I decided to transmit without a license.

Music:

Petshop Boys on at the moment. They have some cool music. I think 'Always on my mind' is their best. Their version is better than the Elvis version, at least in hy opinion. Well, Elvis was before my time so I may be slightly biased there. The filmclip was cool too, but I have not seen it for years.

This morning I have to go over to North Sydney again to do a quick reprogramming job. I should be in and out in an hour I hope. It will be a simple job. It is slightly tedious but thankfully there is not much to be done. I would guess I will be home before noon. We will see. In this world, at the moment, it seems that anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

For instance I have two versions of my code - one is tailored for a specific client. Yesterday I needed to program some units, and I got them mixed up. No harm done, apart from needing an extra 15 minutes to fix things up. Cest La Vie.

My neck is still a bit sore, in need of a backrub I think, but it is getting better. I just need to make sure I do not hurt it any further, which I dont think I will.

GPS Tollways

There is an Article on the SMH Web Site detailing how the government is looking at using GPS to charge trucks tolls on the highway from Newcastle to Brisbane. Given the route being used this might actually work, since there are not many roads that follow right next to the route, which is one of the problems they are having in Germany. GPS can be inaccurate, and there are reports of trucks being charged tolls if they drive on a road next to an AutoBahn.

It will be interesting to see the proposed implementation of the system, as it is so open to being abused. The GPS receivers can be switched off, deactivated, not installed, you name it. It needs to be policed. Time will tell if it is.

DVD's

I watched some of the special features on the original 'The Italian Job' last night, and it was really interesting explaining some of the basis for the story, and talking to the people who made the movie. Over the next few days I will watch the movie - although I was disappointed to find that the movie was shot in Turin, and not Rome. I have not been to Turin, so the movie does not have quite the same buzz. I think buzz is the correct word to use there.

Phantom

I have finally finished the Phantom book by Susan Kay. What an interesting novel. Adds extra detail, and explains the characters so well. Each version of the story adds something different, and the versions do not always line up. It is in the overlaps that things get interesting.

In the movie, the Lake is important. Having never seen any of the other movies or read any of the books I had no idea why the lake was there. The book explains the context of why the lake is there. It would be interesting to know how much of the legend is true, and how many of the characters are based on real people.

Bayswater

A bit of history. This is Bayswater Power station in the Hunter Valley. For about nine months I was one one two electrical engineers in the electrical section of the station. If it looks large in a photo, it is even larger when you are walking in it, or under it. The main building is close to 700m from one end of the other. There are roads inside with street signs and speed limits, it is so big. There are also lots of pushbikes on the site too since it is so large.

Picture of the Day

This is a picture of the rainforest just west of the Gold Coast. I found it so relaxing there.

Music

Chris De Burgh came up on the Random Play. His music is great, and I am now playing his 'Best Of' album. I should say that 'The Lady In Red' is my favourite, closely followed by 'Say Goodbye to it all'.

The lyrics include "Took a boat over Lake Geneva; It was raining all night long; We were lucky and we saw no enemy; And came from Switzerland, poor refugees; Far from the guns of war;We said goodbye to it all;". They just explain the story so well - how the singer (at least in the song) was someone escaping occupied europe in World War II. It makes me want to jump on a plane tomorrow to visit Lake Geneva and also Normandy. One of these days...

I have wanted to visit Geneva since I before I was 10... They had an annual inventors convention there... And I really wanted to visit. I have no idea if the convention is even still on there, or if it is even worthwhile visiting.

Reading the Phantom book has reminded me of one of the things that I want to do one day. That is to write a book. More precisely an autobiography. I have various notes from highschool and early uni on with some stuff written. Given that my writing style and typing speed have improved significantly since then, I would probably want to re-write that stuff anyway.

Anyone who reads this Blog will realise how much I love writing. I truely wish my typeing was much faster. I am building my speed, and it is better than it was, but I have been working on typing since I was about 8 or so, so it would be expected that my typing would be improving.

I would love to be able to play the Piano or other keyboard but my skills to not lie in that area. It is more the applied arts rather than the performing arts. This photo is of one of the few pieses of artwork that I produced in school which looked nice. The picture is on it's side, but you would not know


Right now I have a pain in my neck. Literally. Not sure how I did it - it is not too bad unless I try to do something like place my chin on my chest, or turn my head the wrong way too far. I think it is only a pulled muscle. I could use a nice backrub though. It was not enough to stop me from cooking dinner though - a nice stirfry.

Picture

This picture is of my tracking software and a tracking unit I designed in use.

Movies

There are a whole lot of movies in my collection that I have yet to see. The current list includes 'Casablanca', 'Dishonorable Lady' with Heddy Lamar, 'What Women Want', 'Lantana', 'The Italian Job' as well as numerous years worth of Tropfest. 'The Italian Job II' is on it's way - one more thing to watch.

One DVD that I have seen is 'Tron'. The movie has dated terribly, and the plot could have been improved. But for the time it really was groundbreaking. My copy is autographed by a friend of mine - Bill Kovacs. [I found out a couple of months back that the friend from New Zealand whos farm I stayed on in December also worked on the movie. I will have to get him to sign it too]. Bill gained an acadamy award a few years back for his work with computer graphics. A photo of Bill appears below, taken in 2002 in Hollywood.

Election

According to the AEC WWW Site, right now about 38% if the vote has been counted. Labour has 55% right now, and the next closest is an independant with 8.5% of the vote. Since the liberal party did not stand, this is not surprising. OK. It is now a bit later and with about 76% counted, with results in from all the booths, the percentage for labour is the same.

Programming

Today I have been doing a small amount of programming. Mostly it has been testing some code, but there have needed to be some small changes made to allow some improved functionality. I guess that does not mean much but there are some commercial factors I would rather not mention in case a competitor finds this page and starts reading. From what I can work out, very few people actually visit this blog so I don't think I have too much to wory about, but it is better to be safe than sorry.

Last night I sent off some work to be outsourced. There are times that I would prefer to write a quick specification and get someone else to write the code under a fixed price quote than write it myself. This is either because I dont have the time or I would get a better job getting someone else to do the work. When I get someone else to do the work, the debugging is mostly done so that reduces my stress levels significantly. I save more money than it costs normally.

Easter

Apart from the normal easter church things, I am planning to do a big cleanup. I will be taking a few loads of junk to the local tip. This is a nice house, but it does let you accumulate rubbish. There is too much plain junk here. Stuff that I dont need that can be thrown out. Bricks, wood, steel, cardboard. The list just goes on. Chemicals, car batteries, paints. Some of this can be recycled, and other stuff just needs to be thrown out.

Depending on how energetic I feel I might even get rid of the compost heap and put the compost onto the grass on the front. The lawn is not too bad out there but it could do with some help in places.

EzyDVD

EzyDVD has a sale where you can buy selected DVD's for the bargain price of $45 for three. Individually they are $14.92 each, or $44.76 for three. Guess which I chose? I was buying a copy of The Italian Job II... I have the original, but I have not got around to watching it on DVD yet. One more thing when I have time. Someone to watch it with would be good too, but not essential.

Easter Show

I was looking forward to visiting the Easter Show this year. I have not been in many years, since I was about 8 or 9 I think. I don't want to go alone and I don't have anyone to go with. Maybe next year I will actually get to go to The Show. I really cannot remember much of it from when I was small. I can remember seeing the wood chopping and the fruit displays but that is about it.

Angus and Robertson

I am very unimpressed with Angus and Robertson Booksellers right now. I have been waiting for a couple of books for ages. I ordered the books on the 22nd February and I still have not got them. They have not been even shipped. I have just emailed them saying that I wanted to cancel one of the books since I could get it cheaper and faster from AMAZON.COM. This is not right, particularly when the book is only $35 + postage here in Oz. I am really looking forward to reading the book and I do not have it.

A, um, Hunger Strike in Italy

There is a story on News.Com about how Mussolini grand-daughter's is having a Italian hunger strike. She is having cappuccinos and water only to sustain her. Below is the balcony that her grandfather used to speak from just before and during WWII.

Ingleburn Festival

Ingleburn Festival

As mentioned before it is the Ingleburn Festival today. This is in addition to the byelection thanks to Mark Latham resigning. Peter Garett and Kim Beazley have been in the area in the last few days, although I have not seen either of them. Nor have I seen the actual candidate. Those who have seen him tend to ask who he is when seen beside the better known public figures.

The ALP were giving away free baloons at their stall. And the Greens were campaining at their stall against the local council wanting to allow up to 10 story high rise buildings in the area. The Police had a large presence, mostly in the form of the Police Band.

Music:

Come Undone by Robbie Williams. "...So Rock and roll, so corporate suit. So damn ugly, so damn cute... ". I picked up some CD's from the local 2nd hand store - "The Cranberries" with 'Everybody else is doing it so why can't we?' as well as the Soundtrack to 'Dying Young' featuring music performed by Kenny G. I will play them when I am finished moving the music to the jukebox. As normal with 2nd Hand CD's, the cases needed to be thrown out. But with new cases, the CD's look new.

Stressed

Last night I was a bit stressed. It is a whole gammut of things, some personal and some professional. Some of it is probably lack of sleep too.

I had a good talk to my father last night. My grandmother varies with the day. I finaly found out what she had the operation for. It was to remove some blood on the brain. And she seems to be variable with her cognitive abilities depending on the day. The operation aparently did go very well.

Blogger

What I have found is that Blogger is often quite slow. I know it has not updated the number of blog entries that I have in something like two or three weeks. It has always been a bit slow updating them, but this is far worse than anything I have seen before.

I suspect that as Blogging takes off their servers are finding it hard to keep up. That is what happens when you get exponential growth - which is what Bogging has been seeing. Many businesses see this growth pattern too. Dealing with it can be difficult.

CDMA

I tried accessing the Web from a CDMA 1x card today, and the results were less than impressive. In fact I found the results quite poor. Bringing up WWW pages was especially problematic, probably because of the number of connections that need to be made to show a page. I was expecting a lot better. In fairness to Telstra we were probably in a poor location but the system did not work well. I was really disapointed. I was expecting significantly more than what I got. I am guessing that the cell site we were connected to had high loading from other 1x customers leading to problems.

Music:

David Bowie - "Ziggy Stardust" on Random Play. Oxygene Part 10 by Jean-Michel Jarre.

Photo of the Day

This is a really cool photo... Taken during the olympics. I believe it was the closing ceremony. On the back of the dish is a video screen, and on the screen is a video image coming down from a helicopter of an aerial view of the stadium. This dish had a person to point it at the helicopter when the person moved.

I have had a long day today... Visiting a client in north sydney and then going onto Penrith Lakes to do some software updates. The North Sydney client was mostly successful, but I need to go back there monday to update the software on the units again since I introduced a minor software bug when I fixed some more major issues.

I will be happy when these units are working fully and I don't need to touch them ever again!

Penrith Lakes was interesting. Rather muddy too... I had to work on a CAT earthmoving 'scraper', reprogramming a unit installed in it. What made this more interesting was that I was attempting to keep my rather new Rivers shoes and Colerado pants clean from the mud. I did fairly well, but I could have done better. The pants are now in the wash soaking to get the mud off. In the last few months I have been wearing nicer clothes when I meet clients. I knew it would backfire.

This was right next to the Penrith Whitewater Stadium which my former employer built. By right next to, I mean it was about 20m away. It was that close. I had never actually seen it before, apart from photos and on TV...

I made a mistake getting to Penrith. I went via the airport whereas I should have taken the M2 and then the M4. This would have saved quite some time.

13 thinks that do not make sense

The New Scientist Web Site has an Article on 13 things in science that do not make sense. The things are quite technical - I certainly do not understand them all, or even most of them. I do understand what they are talking about though.

Music

I have been playing two of the Matchbox 20 CD's in my car. In my opinion, some of the songs are fantastic, and some are ordanary. Working out which is which depends on the day and the mood I think. Much of the music is classic. On random play I love how sometimes the music is so right... I am typing this page with some type of guitar playing with a piano. Sounds nice and relaxing. Just what I need.

Election Tomorrow....

There is an election tomorrow in Ingleburn. I was looking at the Sydney Morning Herald whilst having breakfast and found an Article with an attached picture. I have included the photo here. This is of my local church, and the church's Child Care Centre. It is being used for pre-poll voting for those who are unable to vote on the day.

7:30AM

I didn't sleep too well last night. Well, I woke up at about 5:30 and I could not get back to sleep. And I also woke up at 12:15 or so and could not get back to sleep either so I read more of the 'Phantom' book for a little while. I will grab a coffee soon I think.

I have just finished writing some code that has been on my to-do list for a few weeks. It does not work as well as I was intending, speed wise, but it does work and that is the main thing. With some back end work any speed issues will be easally resolved.

I watched more of the Phantom movie this morning. I love this movie - and I knew I would ever since I heard it was being released. I just wish that the movie had been more popular in the box office. It has similar production values to 'Moulin Rouge', without the modern music, and without most of the impossible camera moves.

Too much to do. Too little time to do it of course. Right now I have so many priority one things to do... At the moment I am on MSN working with an Italian client testing some software. Given the distance, and the language problem there are some issues getting things running. MSN is good, but it does have limits.

There is always the problem that bugs might be related to the style of date, time, decimal points, etc. In this case I think the problem is the date format. No. I was wrong. I just dont know the difference between a row and a column. I sent over a version of the software with a bug that I fixed earlier today.

My ADSL dropped out for a minute also thanks to this. MSN has a problem with my modem in that it does not like files being sent through MSN. I had upgraded the modem but there seems to be another problem. It is definitely the modem that is the problem.

Once I got it working the client was very impressed. I like it when things just work, even after what seems to be a lot of issues. I even had a problem with the proxy settings which I had added and promptly forgotten about. Given what today has been like... I am not surprised I forgot about it.

Friday morning I need to make a quick trip into north sydney to do some quick reprogramming of some units. And then back home to do more programming and testing. I already have two things that must be done at 9AM... I guess I will be using my cellphone to do those when I am on my way in.

Music:

Working for Myself

Depending on the way you look at it today has been great or horrible. I found a bug today in some code I supplied for a really major client. This is really really bad. The units failed after 12 minutes. Thankfully I have found the problem. And it also explains some other issues that this client has been having. In the process I think I might have saved this client. And I really hope I have saved this client. For their sake as well as mine.

I love some clients. I just had a client ring because I had not invoiced him yet. When I said that I had not yet reached the mutually negotiated billing amount he was gladly surprised. Right now I have to write a spec for him, and then send him the invoice. And I think I just got some MYOB consulting from him too. He wants to set up BPay and Credit Card By Phone, things that I have with my business.

What I have found is that my clients love having the ability to pay which ever way they like. Direct Deposit is good, but the audit trail is not as easy as with BPay and Credit Cards since they are harder to link with what is in the accounting system. I even have people from overseas ringing my 1300 billing number to pay bills. I love this. I send them the bill in $A and they just use a credit card. What could be easier.

It certainly is easier than getting a cheque from the USA cashed, and safer than having US$2,000 in your pocket leaving the USA when the client paid part of their bill in cash (Well, that only happened twice. )

More Emergency Work

I got an ASAP job to do... A rather horrible 'Drop Everything and do this job'. After working on this for about an hour or so I get a phone call saying, 'do you think you will have it all done by sunday afternoon?'. ARGH. Drop Everything means I want it done within the next hour or two, not the next few days.

One of my functions returns a value as being SYSTEM.VBNULL instead of an empty string. What I have to do is change my code from saying dr("PhoneNumber") to dr("PhoneNumber").ToString. Except that I mis-typed .text instead of .tostring in one case causing me some issues. Just found another bug. I have a table called 'HardwareAddres', but there is only one "s" at the end. OOps.

I now know that there is a bug in my code. I have just instructed a friends car to shut down remotely. And judging from the fact that I have not receieved an angry phone call I guess it did not work. Then again, it would have helped if I had actually told the unit in his car to do something, and if the unit in his car had been hooked up so that it would stop the car. But they are mere details. The software appears to work.

Running

I am planning on going running at about 4pm. Maybe I will be able to go the three KM. We will see about that. I will probably take the GPS again, or maybe the PDA with the bluetooth GPS. Cute toy, and it is work related too.

Given the number of rush jobs I am not convinced I will be able to have a run today... ARGH.

Vehicle Tracking

I just had a phone call from a friend of mine. He has vehicle tracking which I designed in his car. He was driving to Melbourne and needed help. So I brought up some software I had written to work with the tracker that I had designed and I was able to tell him where to drive.


The mapping software was written by someone else by the rest of the system was written by me. This is something that I love doing... The last time someone came to visit me they needed tracking... This particular friend of mine missed the turn off to Ingleburn, and ended up in Bowral. I know many people consider Ingleburn a long way away (and with the M7 I think it will only take about 20-25 minutes for me to visit my friend Richard in Castle Hill) but it is not THAT far away!!!

Phantom of the Opera

A friend of mine got me a pre-release copy of the DVD of the Phantom of the Opera CD. I have seen very little of it at the moment, but I am VERY impressed by it. I saw the movie at the end of december. At the movies was great, but a I missed a lot of the detail, partially because I had never seen the stage show, and partially I was so much further back watching it.

Hand in hand I am reading the Susan Kay book, and there are bits of that back story that are coming out in the staging of the moving. Stonework and the like. Minor things really.

Satellites

I have been doing more work today playing with satellites. Well, not playing. Working with this time. From an engineering perspective a satellite is just a radio with a solar powered battery a long way away. There are some issues building a satellite, but basically it is easy. The hardest part is getting a launch, and that is not too hard provided you don't mind paperwork. I have enough hardware here in the house to build a satellite. If I wanted it to last I would need to buy some more parts from Dick Smith. And if I actually wanted to get it launched I would need to pay a couple of thousand dollars getting a case made but that would not be too hard.

Getting the hardware through 'Shake and Bake' where they test the hardware before launch is the hardest part, but that just requires some re-engineering of some of the parts. I believe that PVC cables are not good in the vacuum of space because they give off vapours. And there are some other components that are not good to have up there either. Any dust or metal fragments can do real damage.

Doctorate

I mentioned that my mother was close to finishing her doctorate a few days back. What I forgot to mention was what she was doing it in. She is looking at the use of non-biblical parables in learning and literacy. It will not be too long before she finished. Then I will be the least qualified in the family. My brother has a matsters in pure maths. My father has a PhD. I only have a degree. Hmm.

Grandmother

I have just heard that my grandmother is doing well after the operation. She is bright and chirpy. Not sure if it has fixed the problem. We will see.

Music:

I just picked up a copy of Maroon 5's "Songs about Jane". I have not heard it yet, but I am about to move it to my Jukebox and then play it. The couple of songs I do know from it I love. The songs I know I know are "This Love" and "She will be loved"