Right now I am working on updating my trackers so that I can dial into them and update them over the air. This is actually a really horrible thing to do since memory is limited. Which means that I need to kill off the rest of the software that is running, and restart the device in a different mode.

Then when things are uploaded I need to restart the device to run the new software. All in all this is a real pain, and something that I have been looking for excuses not to do. Then again, I do not feel like having to explain to a customer why I need to schedule down time for his 500 vehicles whilst I fix a minor bug.

That is the way with these sort of things unforunately. I guess I need to just grin and bear it. ARGH.

As a diversion I have been doing battle with Windows. A couple of things do not work really well. The Web Server on my laptop refuses to allow certain connections to it. Anything with a '&' or '%' in the URL. And of course I have a need of this. But it is only in certain cases that this is not permitted. I have not worked out what they are yet. The other thing that I am having issues with is raising events. I am missing something simple there - and I am not sure what. I will look at these later.

Music:

Brandy - Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Suburbia - Pet Shop Boys

I slept well last night - although my neck is sore this morning. I guess that just takes a little time to fix itself up. It is annoying, but certainly not debilitating. A few days and it will be fine.

A watched Roman Holiday last night, and it really is a delightful movie - sort of the genre of 'The Princess Diaries', or 'The Cinderella Story'. It is quite aparent why Audrey Hepburn won the Oscar on the movie - she did such a good job - and seemed to be honestly enjoying herself making the movie.

The scenes around Rome all looked familiar - although I can say that the traffic situation has changed a bit these days. There seemed to be very little traffic on the roads during the movie, although now traffic is a major issue. The pictures were also so clear, and I had to remind myself that this movie was made 40 or 50 years ago.

In many ways Rome has not changed at all, and in some ways it has changed so much. Anyway I enjoyed watching the movie...

Music:

"Oh, What a Night" sung by Billy Joel

I just heard from my father. He was asking if I was free to meet him for dinner tomorrow night. I have not seen him for a little while so I will certainly be there...

My knees are feeling better. I had a hot bath a bit earlier to ease the discomfort in my neck, and my knees were a bit sore with the hot water. Not too bad, just a bit tingly. I could certainly do with that back massage though. The blister on my foot is not sore at all. I do not think it will be wise to go for a run tomorrow but it is basically fine at the moment. My little finger is fine thankfully after tripping over this morning

I guess I did also not get enough sleep last night - about 3pm I was just feeling so exhausted that I needed to grab a short nap. I suspect that half of this was my body complaining about the exercise. I have given my thoughts on this in the past.

I had some more dialog with a new canadian client today by email. The guy was blown away with my software, and basically will be recommending to his management that they send me money as soon as we can get an invoice to them. This is what I like to hear. What impressed him is that I can bring all the different types of technology together for him.

A friend just forwarded me a bizzare www site - you give it a list of numbers in order and it will tell you what sort of sequence created the list. For instance give it "1 2 3 4 5 6" and it will tell you that this is the last number + 1. Give it "1 1 2 3 5 8" and it will tell you that it was part of the Fibonacci sequence where each number is equal to the sum of the preceeding two numbers. Surprisingly though the database was missing simplest sequence of a(n) = a(n-1) + 1, or this number is one more than the last number.

Anyway time for me to cook myself some dinner.

Music:

Lots and Lots of music. Just so much. I cannot even remember what I have been listening to. I do know that I have been listening to music whilst walking around the house. Very impressed with the iPod. There are the occasional missing features, but nothing major. Add to playing now would be one thing. And also viewing music like they are in the directory hierarchy... But I think that is it.

Internet Email can be a pain at times. You can never be sure that someone has actually seen an email you have sent them, unless they have replied specifically to it, and then sometimes not even then. Thanks to SPAM, many companies are doing things with email that cause Email not to be as reliable as it once was. For instance, some mail servers accept all mail no matter who it is addressed to, and then silently delete it. This is too bad if you get the address wrong.

Then if an email bounces, sometimes it will go into my SPAM box under outlook, and I will be wainting on a reply and not know it has bounced.

Alternately some email severs 'Grey List' emails from servers the first time that server connects saying that the server is not available. The idea is that SPAM servers will not try again if the email fails the first time. This is not a major problem...

Even if the email does get through you can never be sure that the anti-spam software has not deleted the email anyway. I know that I never look at my incoming SPAM. I cannot be bothered unfortunately.

Some email's include delivery notifications or read receipts. I *NEVER* send either. They are turned off. Some people like these. Unless you are in a big company with an Exchange server generally I don't use this.

Sometimes I get an email where the first word on the line is changed from "From" to ">From". This is because of an issue with the mail server in the middle somewhere changing the email because it is using the 'From' to work out the start of the next email on the server.

So, why does all this happen. Mostly because internet email uses a thing called the 'Simple Mail Transfer Protocol' called SMTP. The idea that after a short time the protocol would be replaced by a more complex one. That was probably 20 years ago, and SMTP is still the standard.

Email is great when it works. When it does not it is a pain.

I know I have not posted any photos for a little while - and I thought about posting one now, but I decided against it. But I am getting ahead of myself right now.

I really need a backrub for my sore neck. Actually it is around my shoulder blades that needs some attention, but a neck and backrub would be great. And right now I dont have anyone available to give a backrub - so volunteers would be greatly appreciated.

This morning I ran exactly 6km in about 38min 30sec. This is about 90 seconds better than my previous best time for this distance, so I was happy. I started running about 8:15 which was really about 20 minutes too early. It was so much nicer to run from about 9:35 onwards.

Anyway, just around my first bend, with the sun in my eyes, and with the uneven grass hidden in shaddows I tripped. Thankfully I did not hurt myself too badly. Before you start thinking of me as an un-coorindated geek (which I probably am), in this case it was not my fault. Somehow I had tripped over the fanbelt from a car. How it got there is anyones guess. Thankfully the grass was soft so I only managed to graze two knees and hurt my left little finger. It was numb for the next 1500m or so. I am not sure if this was because the finger got cold, or what. Anyway it fixed itself.

About 4km in I started getting a blister on the arch of my left foot. Great. That was the last thing I needed. I did not think I would be able to do the final 500m, but then I worked out that I probably should not run for a few days, and so I went for it. The blister is about the side of a SIM card...

So right now I have two sore knees, and a sore foot, and a sore neck. And as for a photo... well, I have decided in the interests of decency not to provide one. So I will provide a plot of my run...

I think I was tired last night - I fell asleep in front of the TV watching CSI Miami. I have no idea what happened in then end, since I missed the last 20 minutes or so. Except for the final 10 seconds. And you really cannot work out what has happened in a show like that from the last 10 minutes, any more than you can determine what a mechanic did when servicing your car from wantching him close the bonnet.

The other way I can tell I was tired is that my neck is sore this morning - and I can only assume that I slept on it the wrong way, and I was too tired to notice during the night. That explanation seems to be logical at least. I do not know if it is the truth.

I am going to go for a run as soon as I have had breakfast. By then the day should have warmed up ever so slightly and the run will be good. I do not really mind running in the cool. It is running in the wind that I do not like when there is a wind chill cooling everything down - including me. Maybe that is just an indication that it is getting too cold for running in shorts and an old T-Shirt. Anyway I need to get some breakfast

Photo of the Day

Music:

I have now had dinner and a shower, and I am a bit exhausted. The best part was when Richard's wife went out to get some lunch for us, and when she got back we had the back of the fuselage put together which sort of shocked her. Actually it sort of shocked me too.

I also got to see an identical fuselage being built by a friend of Richard's nearby although slightly more advanced in progress, and it was amazing to see. And although it is advanced I can see that it will not be too long until we are up to this stage.

Tomorrow I will go running again - and I will see if I can at least do the six KM. It would be good if I can do more than that, but I will be happy if I can do six Km. I cannot believe how well my running is going. Late last year I was really happy when I could run 2KM. Now I can do that distance in my sleep.

This coming week will be busy... I have a number of things that I want to get done, software to write and debug, manuals to write, and a web site to update. The latter is probably the most important since it is my most important marketing exercise, and is how I therefore make my living.

Just got home from Richards - a great day. Basically we started on the back half of the fuselage, and got most of it assembled for the first time. Of course this is only the start of things since we actually have to do a lot of work now that we have that part assembled. Things like re-drilling all the holes, making some more brackets, dissasembling and reassembling a few times.

Then and only then we de-burr, clean, paint and reassemble, and then rivet it together. Which will probably take a few weekends. But it is certainly getting there - a very satisfying day all in all. Very enoyable. What I am finding though is that I an needing to lie on my back working from below, putting in cleco's, riveting, assembling etc. Since richard has the only shag pile garage in the world this is actually quite comfortable. At least until I lie on a screw or tool or something.

I used the iPod today in the car again - and I am loving it. I suspect that the cassette adapter is favouring the left speaker a bit, but most of the time it is fine. I suspect that the head in the cassette adapter is a bit mis-aligned, and it should be simple to fix.

Anyway time to put my feet up... And grab some food.

Photo of the Day

Music:

It is 7AM on a sunday morning and I am working out if I will get up now and have a run, or not bother. Maybe I should just do a short run - 3km or so. It would certainly energize me for the rest of the day. Or is that tire me out.

Not an official announcement yet, but I have signed a reseller agreement with a canadian company. That was yesterday. This morning I get an email saying that they are getting a sign made for their building with my logo on it. Now, I dont even have a logo on the outside of my office.

To top this off I got an enquiry yesterday just hours after I had signed the reseller agreement from an organization in Canada interested in tracking 500 vehicles. Things are moving quickly. I am slightly stuck since the Canadian distributor is a public company, and this information needs to be advised to their sharemarket. We are planning to announce around June 6th. [Hey, maybe I should get some shares in the company too]

Anyway I really need to get going, and see how cold it is outside... wish me luck...

I will be working on the plane most of the day tomorrow. Richard is starting about 9:00, although I am not sure what time I will be over there. I might go for a run first and thanks to the temperatures it is much nicer if I start running at 9am instead of 7am. Given that I like to run about 40 minutes, and I need a shower afterwards, taking the whole exercise to about an hour.

I have done some vegging out today, watching some movies. I saw Elektra, and also Oceans 12. Both were a bit strange, and took work to follow. I am glad that I have seen the both, but I don't think either would be on my list to buy.

There is an interesting article in the New York Times on how the fight between the Mac and Windows should be fought. It is things like suggesting that things should be hated for their failings, not successes, not to condem things until you try them, and that execution of ideas matter. The real one that I love is that you should not make grandiose purchasing plans based on a guess on future technology - like choosing a computing platform for primary school on the basis of equiping the students for working life. In other words betting what computing will be like in 6-13 years time.

Music:

The only use of the iPod today has been during the run. This was 40 minutes and it was great. I found that some of the music was good for running with and other parts were not. Just depended on my mood and the track. Some music which I thought that would be no good were great for running to.

This morning I did six kilometers - and I am feeling great. I started just after 8:30AM and I ran for 40 minutes which was good going. About on par with previous performances - although I was slightly shorter than my best effort ever. The track is on the GPS but it is more than the same. I worked out that my camera had some AA batteries so I put them in the GPS. I picked up some more batteries when I went out earlier.

I picked up some running shoes today - some new ones. I got a pair at K-Mart marked at $29.99. But they scanned at $20.00 and got a 30% discount thanks to some promotion, making them $14.00. Or less than half price.

I still have not heard from my father after my birthday. No card, nothing. There is probably a postcard or something coming - but I have not seen anything yet. It is his birthday on Wednesday so I sent him a card - and I think he is going away for three weeks on thursday or something. To tell the truth I am a bit hurt by not getting that phone call - it would have been better if he had not said he was going to ring and then did not ring.

Last night I watched Breakfast at Tiffany's - and I am glad I saw it. I don't know if I loved it, but it was certainly a good movie. It was not really what I expected, and it is easy to see how movies have changed in the 45 years or so since it was made. I think this is a movie for a simpler time...

This is a great story where Hepburn as 'Holly Golightly' grows up and finds true love. I think it is really a must see movie - where she goes from being a serial girlfriend who uses guys to finally needing one. The makers used a cat throughout the movie to describe some of the relationships without being overt about it.

I did another run yesterday - this time at about 4pm, so it was starting to get cool and the sun was starting to go down. I could not find any AA batteries in the house so I did not take my GPS. So I did not try to go the 6 to 7km which is my aim. So I decided to build speed. I guess I was doing about an average of 10-11KM for about 2.5km. It was enough, but I think I could have done more... If I had slowed down. Later I will grab some new shoes and batteries and I will go again.

This is really cool. It is a simulation of planes flying in the USA over a 24 hour period. It is cool to compare how the flights move from coast to coast depending on when daylight hits and people want to travel.

Now some technical stuff. I am currently downloading this program from Microsoft. It is what is called a bootstrapper plugin so I can add the .Net framework to an install program. More details can be found here.

Not sure yet what I will be doing tomorrow afternoon - I might be helping richard with the plane - we will see. Just depends on what he has on in the morning, and what time that finishes I think. But we will not be painting...

Sometimes things just seem to work out - I just put in an indicitive price for the client I saw earlier today. I think they will be happy - and I might get a trip to Fiji out of it... I can see the work in Fiji taking maybe 2-3 weeks - after all it takes a lot of effort to supervise an electrician doing a total of a days work :-) And I would need time to relax after that.

Oh, and I need to give a friend a ring - he was at Hamilton Island last night doing a site survey. Not bad work if you can get it. He promises to take me to the next one as a learning exercise. And since I need to look after the technical side of his business in June for a few weeks I need the experience.

I might have another run this afternoon - I think I am up to it - and if I can find batteries for the GPS receiever that work I might actually do a decent distance. Having run this morning though any distance will be decent - or at least that is how I look at it.

I just got home from a job just down the road. I am not sure if what I have done is working, because I found some issues that they needed to resolve first. Things like not having a permament IP address on their ADSL connection. Thankfully Telstra only charges $10 per month for this feature. Talking to them I have more work I can do for them - they want a quote on what is possible for one of their associated companies too... And it needs to be done today.

Then I have some other software to update too - a couple of minor bug fixes. Nothing major, but some tedious things. There are about 5 minor changes in one piece of software I think. Not all that many but enough. Who knows how long each will take.

I went for a run a little earlier - about 8:30... I am not sure how far I went - probably only 4km or so. The GPS ran out of batteries which did not help - without a goal it is harder to run, even having the iPod in my pocket.

Anyway I had better get back to work...

Argh. I woke up early this morning and I could not get back to sleep. I hate it when that happens. After spending some time looking at my email and doing some coding I did go back to bed... and slept for another hour and a half or so...

When I wake up some more I will get going and have a run... Not sure how well i will go, but I will take my iPod, phone and GPS this time. I feel good, so I might be able to do six or seven km.

I had a late-ish night last night - I was chatting to an old supervisor of mine from Pacific Power. We have always got on well, and in order to save money we started a 'Coca Cola Club' similar to many milk clubs in offices. He was telling me that he has $25m to spend at work with Capital Expendature. I just wish he could send some to me. I am not greedy... $1-2m would do me :-)

Engadget has a strange one... This is a combined vest and toy Koala. When you rub the koala on the tummy, it gives a hug-like sensation with the vest, letting you know that your 'loved one' is thinking about you. It is also 'discreet' so that no-one but you knows. The only problem is that the huge vest is a give-away. Also from Engadget comes the iGuy which is a holder for your iPod, but with arms and legs. And it only costs US$35... which looks excessive to me.

Music:

One of the problems with the iPod is that the buttons are on the side, which is not good if you want to skip songs whilst the device is on the belt or in a pocket. Conexus sell a device for $40 that places the remote control on the top of the iPod. I think this is an essential device. They also have a car charger and transmitter for 140 that includes a remote control

I just logged into my gMail account... And found that a friend of mine had sent me a link to the site www.cookingforengineers.com... I have not looked at it yet... But the name sounds cute. I am a fairly good cook anyway - and don't really need the 'Engineering' instructions as I can read a recipe.

I have heard from my mother who has gone to Broken Hill. She took her laptop and has a wireless card for the PC. She has no phone in her room but has her laptop with email and Web access. When she went through airport security, she was asked "Are you going for business?", and replied "No!". The airport security person then said "Then why do you need a laptop?". What a strange question to ask.

I promise I will go running tomorrow morning. Maybe even before breakfast - I will see. I did not get a chance this afternoon as when I got home I had a few other things to do... And I am not one of these people who can go running really late at night. In the past I have seen people out running at 1am when I have been getting home from somewhere - and I could not see the point at that time of night. I like to run during the daytime.

Right now I am watching the Audrey Hepburn movie 'How to steal a million dollars'. Maybe tomorrow night I will watch "Breakfast at Tiffany's" which I have never seen. It is one that I really want to see. My brother has lent be both movies to watch.

Music:

Two songs have stood out on my iPod. They are "Together in Electric Dreams" by Giordio Moroder with Phil Oakey, as well as "Carly Simon" with "Let the river run". The latter was from the movie working girl.

I have not managed to get away from the PC yet... A friend IM'ed me so I am having a conversation with him. So here is more to the blog whist his replies come in.

I spent about an hour at the computer show - I parked under the IBIS hotel and I hate this car park when it is full. The parking spots are too small for my liking. The computer show was not bad... back up to four halls. But most of the stuff was fairly boring. I saw some competition in terms of vehicle tracking, so discreetly grabbed some brochures. Shows like this are always a great source of ideas.

I visited a couple of companies that people suggested I look at... Actually it was three companies now I think about it. I managed to meet my supplier of mobile hardware which was good. The technical support person who I have trained up in many parts of the technology was not there today - he was only there for two days. I picked up a lot of brochures for me to read at my leasure.

Oh, in todays meeting one of my friends complemented me on my handwriting... I should say that this is the FIRST time that anyone has ever complemented me on my writing... Ever...

Music:

Ah... My iPod. I love my iPod. I used it whilst driving today and it was fantastic. I really need to have some velcro or something so I can have it mounted so that I can see the display when driving. Right now I only have it next to the handbrake which is not great. A remote control would be great, but not essential... yet... Remote display would be cute too...

Anyway I think it is time for a bath, and lunch... Not bad for just after 5pm.

Just got home... Long day... Airport to drop my mother there for a flight to Broken Hill... Then a meeting at North Ryde for breakfast... Then Civenex at Sydney Olympic Park, and then Cebit at darling harbour...

A productive day, but rather busy... And travel was not too bad. Actually the roads were fantastic. Maybe it was at exactly the right time - I dont know. But I got to the places I needed to get to without too many issues. The most major was not taking the underpass at balmain on the city west link to go over the ANZAC bridge... But a minor detour fixed that... Here is a partial plot of where I went...


At the Olympic Park I saw the disc from the olympic torch. This was amazing, as I had not seen it up close before - it was quite impressive, although it looked re-engineered from what was used as there were no gas holes. Also it was interesting to see the grove of trees that were planted around it - with one dontated by AHEPA - the local greek education organisation. In Pacific Power I took over the job once of one of the office bearers of this organisation.

There is more I want to say, but I think right now I need to put my feet up and have some lunch...

DasKeyboard have released a computer keyboard that they claim can double the speed of typists. What they do is simple - they don't print any of the letters on the keyboard. Aparently the brain then stops looking at the keyboard for visual clues and works faster at typing. I am now almost a touch typist. But not quite...


A few www sites are noting that the ACCC have told eBay that Australians must pay GST on purchases... Well, not quite. What they have said is that if GST is chargable, it must be included in the price. This is quite reasonable and is what I would expect...

WindowsForDevices.Com has a story about the operating system being used for the XBox 360. Aparently the original XBox uses a variant of windows 2000. The new version uses a variant of that - maybe. The only thing we can really be sure of is that it does not run Linux.

Photo of the Day

Music:

Thursday I will be out most of the day... I am going everywhere. I have a meeting at North Ryde. Then I need to drop in at Civinex at Sydney Olympic Park before visiting Cebit at Darling Harbour. So I will be a busy boy. Not sure if I will have wireless access anywhere - I doubt it unfortunately. We will see.

I have been doing some product testing the tracker, on what happens if it looses cell phone coverage. Unfortunately, there are times here that the tracker does not need an antenna - so I have built what is called a 'Faraday Shield'. It is what keeps the microwave signals inside your microwave oven, and is a way to make sure that signals cannot get in or out.

I have a photo of mine below. This is obviously only for testing, but it works. The phone in the tracker cannot contact a base station no matter what, which is exactly what I needed. And thankfully the software in the tracker is working outside cellphone coverage, and I can prove it now.

My hardware is under the aluminium lid, and you can just see cables coming out to the side. These are for power and GPS. The paper you can see on the right just stops the circuit board from short circuiting.


PC Mag has an article that sounds cool that is really boring on 10 things that you can use an old PC for. The most interesting is a Fishpond. One of the things that I want to do one of these days...

I thought that I had worked out how to change the oil on my car. Use the wheel ramps. Place a big sheet of cardboard under it. Use a tub for the old oil, but place a garbage bag in it to catch the oil. Wear disposable gloves. Well the last bit is where I came unstuck. I did this, and when the oil filter came off it was a bit heavier than I thought it would be. Oops. No problem, except it dropped into the old oil with a bit of a splash. So I needed to get it out.

Which would have been fine, except I then needed to fit the new one, and did the same thing with the new one. Dropping it into the old oil. Not fun. And the splash also got oil onto the cement. Degreaser fixed that. Sort of. The gloves did help keeping the oil off my hands, but they did not actually keep it off other parts of me. Next time will be better.

When I was out apart from getting birthday card for my mother I also picked up the Rob Thomas CD. Rob is the lead singer for Matchbox 20. This CD has maybe a couple of decent songs, and the rest is lacking something. None of the anthem songs of matchbox 20. None of the great lyrics. Basically this is an album based on name recognition, unfortunately. I was hoping for something great. And I got this.

I also went running around lunch time. My left ankle was feeling a bit stiff so I did not go to far, nor did I take the GPS. I did take the iPod, and I loved it. What I would like would be remote controls on the headphones to go to the next track, but I love it. The first half of the run I was holding the iPod, and the rest of it found me placing it in my pocket. Having my hands free is good whilst running. With no GPS I am not sure how far I rang, but I think it is about 3km.

My MP3 collection is getting tidier. I am down to about 5850 tracks. Well, actualy it is a few less since I have the audio CD's from the ABC series on The Olympics called 'The Games' there, and that takes up 21 tracks. I managed to get THE GAMES listed as audiobooks, and the way that this gets done is rather strange.

Firstly they needed to be imported in AAC format rather than MP3 which is what I prefer. This gives them a .M4A extension. So to get them into AudioBook format you need to change the extension to .M4B. Then just get iTunes to Synch them to the iPod. As simple as that. I will have to edit the files to give them a decent description though.

When I was thinking of getting an iPod I saw that there was a program to remotely control it from windows. Now I have one I no longer can find the program. Not that I have been looking too hard - but it is something that I am trying to find. Where I place my iPod is in a place where I have to stretch to use it. So a remote control on the desktop would be cool.

This morning I wanted to know which vehicles were closest to a particular vehicle. I realised that this is a feature that this is a feature that people will use if it is there, but not ask for it since they do not know they need it. So I have added it this morning. It did not take much time as I had most of the code already written. I have assumed that the earth is a perfect sphere to make the maths easier. This is only a problem if you care if the closest vehicle is 6,234Km away instead of 6,237Km away for instance. In most cases it does not matter.

My brother and I took my mother out for dinner tonight - Chinese. The meal was nice, just somewhere locally. It is her birthday tomorrow - I still need to get her a present. I am not sure what I will get her yet.

Talking to my brother the subject of music came up. He was telling me that Tripple-J has a new CD out called "Like a Version" which contains eclectic mixes of songs in different styles. Duncan was saying that Richard Glover on the ABC was wondering what the best new version was - and they came up with the Nine Inch Nails song 'Hurt'. This song was re-done by Johnny Cash just before he died, and was nominated for a Country Music Award.

I am not a huge fan of his, but this song has to be probably one of his best songs ever, and so far out of character, and so perfect for him. The film clip accentuated what the song was saying too. It was ideal as the final song of his career. It is one of those songs where the film clip just adds stuff to the message rather taking away from it. Not one for the permament collection, but a must see none the less.

Photo of the Day

I got a magazine from the USA today. Circuit Cellar is a fantastic magazine, and worth what I pay for it and much more. I have got work from just telling people what I read in the magazine. Anyway for the past few issues the photo below has appeared. You can look at the competition WWW site here. The question is, what is wrong with the photo? It has been photoshopped, apart from the fact that it is shot with a fisheye lens. I have found at least three spots in the photo where it has been edited. See how many you can find. I will post my results tomorrow.

I returned the FM transmitter to Tandy at lunch time - returning it was really simple and painless. I just said that the device would not work thanks to the number of radio stations in the local area running on the same frequency as the device. I am glad it was so easy - I expected some argument as it came in one of those containers that once opened could not be closed.

This morning when I was out, when I purchased the cassette adapter I wanted to use it when I got back to the car. So I asked the shop assistant if I could use her scissors to open the plastic packet. To my surprise she said yes, and commented how hard it was to open the darn things.

I spoke to Vodafone Data Support about an outgoing SMTP server. The reply came back that it is smtp.vodafone.com.au. So simple. I will try it later to make sure that this actually works, but I am sure it will. I expect to get a lot of WOW's from friends when they realize I can take my laptop anywhere that a cellphone works and get access to the net. Yeah, I know... Boys and their toys.

I have some more playing to do with GPRS... So I need to get going - more later.

Music:

iPod music on Random Play. There are 5815 songs on the iPod. I am getting rid of duplicates gradually... So things are going well

I went down to Vodafone to pick up the SIM card. That was a bit of a painful experience. Their IT systems were running slowly thanks to RemoteDesktop being slow. Their phones were running with about a 10 second delay too aparently. Not what you want to hear I would guess - and it makes it hard to have conversations. ARGH. Anyway, after too long I got the SIM card from them.

I connected the PCMCIA card up and it worked as soon as I entered the Vodafone APN and installed the software. It could not have been easier. Well, slightly easier since it needed to upgrade the firmware in the modem but that is all. It worked really well. The only thing I need to set up now is a proxy for outgoing mail... Time to see how good Vodafone Support is...

My home internet is playing up - As far as I can tell it is only the WebProxy on my ISP that seems to have died. I can surf the internet by Logging into a Server in Albury and doing things from there. This is not really the right way to do things, but it does work. I have posted this Post from a computer in Albury... Fun...

I tried out the transmitter for the iPod. It will be going back. When I tried to use it I found that there are three radio stations on three of the channels, and on the remaining channel there are two stations in the far distance. This did mean that the unit will not actually work. So I went to The Warehouse on the way to Vodafone, and I picked up a Cassette adapter, and it works well. I finally have a use for the cassette player in my car - my car came with it and CD, and this is the first time I have used CD.

An update on the album art program. It is looking great. I did not realise you could select all your tracks and say 'Search for Album Covers and Update'. This worked fairly well. I am doing this in the background as we speak.... So much easier than going through album at a tune. Right now it is up to Kylie Minogue with Light Years.

I am about to go down to a Vodafone store to get a GPRS SIM card... It is useful for me when I am out and about to have access to mobile data.... So I am finally doing it. It is not too expensive, and I will see how long I go with them. Their coverage can be good or bad depending on where you are. This will also be a chance to try my MP3 plater out with the FM transmitter... and the new tracking unit out too.

The only way I can sign up to this is through the Vodafone store. I find that this is strange, but I guess that is just how they work things. I will then need to get my server set up so that the laptop can send mail from out on the road...

Music:

Lots and Lots... I have an iPOD!

Updating Album Art in iTunes can be a pain. But there is an answer. It is iTunes Art Importer from YVG Software Services. This is freeware, and works really well. Except that it crashes if your music files are set to be read only. Once I worked that one out things worked well. This program searches Amazon.Com for Album Art, and gives you a selection of possible matches. So far all the first choices have been correct.

It does not pick up on some obscure Australian stuff, but Amazon.Com does not know anything about them. The software could be more stable too, I think. But generally it works really well. Why it takes three minutes to search for Mariah Carey with 'Butterfly' I dont know, neither do I know why it returned about 100 entries. But this software does work well which is all that really matters. And the most serious mistake is switching Led Zepelin and Christine Anu... Don't Ask...

So, how does the software work? Well, PeachPit has an article on how to program iTunes. I have also found This software which allows me to add a 'Now Playing' to my WWW site... Something to look at later.

Dinner was good... It was at the local RSL club - I had not been there in years. Dinner for three of us was only $20. This is really good value. There are a huge number of poker machines there now - far more than were ever there in the past - and they seem to be pulling a lot of money in. And this must be doing horrible things for the local economy.

Photo of the Day

This is not a photo, and is not a photo of mine. It is from a picture site, and took 500 hours in microsoft paint. I think that this is an amazing effort. It is a picture of venice. It really is simply amazing.

Music:

The iPod is really cool. I am getting all the albums updated with graphics. I guess I am about 75% there... I was going to get the iPod running with the FM transmitter in the car this evening but we did not end up going as far from home as I thought we might.

Anyway time to watch Crossing Jordan and update the iPod.

I have just spoken to a colleague in Ettamonga... He is driving up to Sydney, and I would guess he will be up here about 8PM or so. But I knew where he was before I rang him - he had GPS tracking on his car, and I was tracking him. Actually they are now in MULLENGANDRA, which is north of Lake Hume north of Albury.

I will be meeting him for dinner on the way through, and so he said to give me a ring when he got nearby. This is a completely ludicrous thing to say, or would be without the GPS tracking. And he is allowing me to see the position of the car of course. Otherwise it would be a complete lack of privacy.

Sometimes I hate having a conscience... A friend wanted to get me to do a PCB for a friend of his fathers. This would have been fine - and at least a days work at consultancy rates. But when I looked at it I worked out that you can buy a circuit for $50 that does exactly what this one does. And you cannot build it for that price in low quantities either. It would have been a nice payday, but I could not justify doing the work at that sort of price.

I picked up a cheap Belkin FM transmitter for my iPod at lunch time for my car. It will work until I get a docking station for the car. Have I said that I love my iPod? I just think that it is so cute...

I have a few things to do today and I am running a bit behind. My desk has piles of stuff on it, and lots of to-do lists... Hmm. Too much to do. Too little time. I have a PCB to design, some software to modify, some software to write, phone calls to receieve. All the normal sort of things.

So far today I have had about three phone calls, with the first just before 8:00 from a client telling me that he could not get to my server.... Which turned out to be on his end. Then there was a phone call from New Caledonia (and I asked... The weather has been horrible lately... Raining for months). This involved me telling the guy from New Caledonia what I knew of French Telecom - an organisation that makes Telstra look positively client focused.

Then another of the clients rang wanting to suggest some modifications to the software that I am writing for them. Not bad, but I thought I was finished weeks back on this... And then during the phone call to New Caledonia I got a phone call from a friend on my other phone wanting to know if it was OK to come over and get my help with windows programming... All in all a hectic day...

Photo of the Day

Music:

A collection of links. Firstly, there is a story in the SMH about how the government is approving building and upgrading some power stations. One of the plans is to upgrade capacity using Gas Turbines. Interesting. Mostly because these are going to be similar to the Gas Turbines sold off as surplus about 10 years back. The major upgrade is to be done to Mt Piper Power Station. I was responsible for handing the drawings for Mt Piper over to Delta Electricity when I was working for Pacific Power.

But most interesting is the announcement that there would be three stations in the 'Hunter Valley' upgraded. Well, on page 4 of the SMH it showed the location of these on a graphic, on the central coast. Maybe the SMH should employ a fact checker.

Something else that is cute is This add-on for an alarm system. I have to build one when I get some time. Not sure when that will be though.


This is an MIT project designed to detect the wearer's movements and adjust to it. The green with the red looks sort of cute.

And also a story here about how the Stanfard Linear Accelerator is being used to read a parchment of Archimedes.

iPod Stuff

As mentioned in another post I now have an iPod Photo. I ended up getting the 40 GByte model. I did not even known that this one existed until I went to the store. I was intending to get the 30 GByte model, with a free FM transmitter worth $80. But I decided to go for the 40 GByte version without the transmitter for $50. I think the extra 10 GBytes will be useful, either as a HDD or extra MP3 storage. I am using about 22 GBytes for MP3's.

I asked about an extended warranty at Grace Bros MegaMart (Ok. Just MegaMart, but I like the old name). They offered a total of three years for $42 or five years for $92. I went for the three years, and this is cheaper than the Apple one at $99 to extend it to two years.

One thing I have found about iTunes is that it really does not want to run with the files over a network on a server. It is not set up for it. Syncing to the iPod takes a while to start - something like 10-20 minutes. And whilst it is preparing to start it does not say a thing about it working, preparing to do stuff.

The Timezone setting in the iPod is stupid - Given that Sydney and Melbourne are the most populous centres in Australia. The iPod decides that the timezone is Brisbane. Actually there is another setting - Brisbane Daylight Saving Time - which is great since there is no such thing as Daylight Saving in Queensland.

In 'Shuffle' which is 'Random Play' more the HDD does power up for every song. This is stupid. What should happen is that the HDD downloads a number of songs if it is in Shuffle mode, and then powers back down. Another minor point - the Apple WWW site says that the 30 GByte iPod is 16mm thick, and the 60 GByte is 19mm thick. Strangely my iPod is 20mm thick. The width is also out by 1mm. The height is accurate though

Getting the iPod synchronised took longer than I had hoped. It took well over an hour. I have also not found anywhere in the iTunes software to force it to check the catalog to make sure that all the files are still there, and to see if there are new ones.

The other thing is that the version of the iPod driver I downloaded from the Apple WWW site was out of date for some reason. I needed to download a version from another WWW site to get the right version.

I have spent some time when I need a break adding album art to songs. Mostly this involves searching the the graphic on Amazon and adding it with iTunes. Then synchronizing with the iPod later.

Music:

Well this entire entry is on music... But right now I am listening to Dido's Take My Hand. I love this song... I love the words... "...What you feel is what I feel for you...".

I have just got home from Richard's... Which is why there have been no entries today until now. I have only just got home, and it is now 9:10PM or so. I also got up late this morning and did not get a chance to write anything before going over there.

I will write a lot more about my iPod a little later, but basically I love it. It is cool, and it is a great thing to have. It will be better when I have a device so I can use it in my car. But more soon.

At richards we mostly worked on the bulkhead in the fuselage that is directly between the wings. I mean, this is the bulkhead which the wings bolt onto, and holds them to the rest of the plane, so I guess they are a bit important. I was on my back at a time with a lump of metal in my hand whilst richard was above with a rivet hammer backing the rivets. This was actually enjoyable. We also worked on the front firewall but that was not as successful, since we managed to destroy three brackets that we made up... And we only need two. Richard will be getting some more material and we will try again soon.

All in all the plane is going together nicely, albeit slowly. After working on the plane we went out for a birthday dinner, along with Michelle, Richards wife. We went to an Italian place in Baulkham Hills, and I can say that the Lasagne was fantastic.

Anyway that is enough from me for the moment. I will post more soon...

Tomorrow I will be helping Richard with the plane so that we can paint some parts the following weekend. Well, maybe painting the following weekend... We will see...

Last night there was not much on TV, but flicking around the Channels I found that National Geographic Channel had a documentry on H.G. Wells. I know that all documentries make the person they are talking about sound like the most important person of their time, but H.G. Wells certainly did from the description of him. They portrayed him as a persom who came up with the very idea of Science Fiction, placing him in a league by himself.

Whilst growing up I can remember watching a Dr Who episode - now, I was not a great fan - my brother was the fan. Anyway they had this series of about four or five episodes where the Doctor met this character from the end of the 19th century called Herbert George, and showed him the future, and time travel and the like. The doctor's companion at the time was concerned that he had seen all this strange stuff - and the doctor commented that maybe it was meant to happen. And at the end Herbert George gives the Doctor his Business Card, and it then makes sense to the assistant - the card reads "H.G.Wells. Writer"

Music:

I got the iPod... A lot more later

I don't believe it... It is now four months since 'The Split' and it has both gone very quickly and also slowly. Lots of soul searching and thinking. I do miss being in a relationship, but I have definitely moved on - and I feel that I am ready to enter into another relationship when the right person comes along. Who ever and whenever that happens to be. Only time will tell.

Overnight I had a couple of interesting queries with my business. I had a person in Russia enquiring about some hardware and firmware I designed a couple of years back. Unfortunately, I worked out that there is not really the market for this product so I have never placed it into production. I actually 'Open Sourced' the design with the perviso that any commercial use must be licensed.

I also had a query for licensing some of my software in Estonia. I think that this the right country - Much of eastern europe is a mystery to me unfortunately. I know that the Internet Country Code is ES, which has been assigned by the United Nations.

One of my other clients has asked for a 'Site License' cost for some of my software. I need to think about how to price it. And if I do it on a per desktop, or on a per site or per concurrent user basis. So many options. I have an idea on how much it will be but I need to think some more about this.

Music:

Real McCoy with Sleeping With An Angel. Not sure where I came across this Gem, but I love it... It is not really the kind of song I would associate with Real McCoy

I just had a Skype call from my friend Kevin Crossley in New Zealand. He had just had a 'Darryl Smith' from Miami send him a message wanting to be authorised for SKYPE. So he gave me a call wondering what I was doing in Miami. It was not me... It was the guy who owns the site 24p-cinema.com. Kevin does not know who it is, but he now knows that it is not me.

You can read more about Kevin on This site, and also his CD - Ivory Impressions. One of his tracks also appears on New Age V and also other CD's. Kevin also let me know that he will be coming through Sydney in the next few weeks on the way to the USA so I will probably catch up with him then.

When my engagement broke down in January, I stayed with Kevin and his wife on their property just north of Auckland. And I also stayed a night there at the beginning of my world trip in september last year too.

Photo of the Day

Music:

I have basically decided to get an iPod. When I get it is unsure at the moment. I might go over to MegaMart tomorrow and grab one. The one thing that I MUST get is the extended warranty. I hate those things by design, but in the case of an iPod I think it is essential. I am not sure if MegaMart has their own warranty program that might be even better than the Apple one... The Apple one is $99 for the extra year of Hardware which is probably worth it.

The reports I have seen suggest that it is probably better to hold the iPod than have it on the belt. This is what I suspected anyway - and what I do with a GPS and the FM radio at the moment - so I dont think that this will be an issue.

The comments suggest it is better to play an album than random play since the album is queued into RAM whilst on Random Play it is not. The device should be able to work out it is in Random Play mode and cache the next few songs into memory anyway, randomly. That is what I would do if I was designing the iPod.

In terms of software, I have found this utility that allows me to control an iPod from a PC. Sort of cool I think... Not sure how useful it is if I have iTunes open next to it...

I found a strang story on The Age WWW site, about how someone switched the cocaine used to train sniffer dogs in Victotia for talcum poweder. The report suggests that drug dealers might not need to worry too much about dogs at the moment, but that babies are fairly safe if they go missing.

Music:

Deadstar with 'Deeper Water'. It has been a while since I have heard this song. Cool really. In the background I am MP3'ing a few of my CD's. They have dodgy TAG information encoded in them, and no album art. So the easiest way to fix that is to re-encode them. The hardest part is finding the CD's in my archive. And putting them back after RIPing.

There are continuing to be tweaks of my tracker software - little things every now and then. Just changing the usability of what happens when. What happens is something happens when there is no GPS coverage. That type of thing. I need to think about what should happen.

In the case of a Panic Alarm if there is no GPS coverage, I think it should send the alarm without GPS, and then send the alarm again with GPS when the coverage is there, with an updated status of the alarm. That is, if the panic alarm is still pressed, it says so. And if it is unpressed then say this too. In effect, it is 99.99% likely that the status will be the same as the last one that was sent anyway. The only reason that they would be different is if the GPS lock happens as soon as the status changes.

The more I think about it the more I am certain that I want an iPod. I think they are so cute, and so much of a useful device. I just want to make sure I get the best deal for buying one. There does not seem to be much price difference between retailers. Grace Bros MegaMart does have the iPod Photo with a free FM transmitter worth $80 so that might be what I get. I have until May 30 to get that deal so I do not need to race out right now either. Besides which I have a friend here, and I am helping him with some work right now...

Music:

I found the following quote by Chris Martin, musician with Coldplay, on the delay of their latest record affecting EMI's share price... "I think shareholders are the great evil of this modern world."

I just got off a conference call to the USA. I ended up being on the phone for a touch over two hours. This is one of two board meetings a year that actually takes place, with a mailing list used for the rest of the time. It was a call with TAPR, a wireless non-profit R&D organization that has proved that many technologies used today in the wireless world actually do work.

They asked me what sort of Pizza they needed to order for me, but found out that Sydney was not in their normal delivery area. And I was so looking forward to having some.

The call was interesting, although I cannot say much about it. One thing that I did hear an update on was SuitSat - the Satellite in the SpaceSuit that I have spoken about here before. This is almost complete, although I am not sure when it will be 'Lauched'. The satellite is being launched to celebrate the 175th anniversary of the Bauman Technical University in Rusia.

My software for the tracker is getting closer - I made a very small change this morning. It was adding a position report when it connected to the network. But I worked out that this was not really needed since it was already sending enough information back since it had to need to send a position. Small change, but important.

I am feeling a sense of acomplishment about the tracking unit - getting the hardware and software to this stage has been a hard slog, but it is there. Anyway that is enough of a break from work - time to do some more work...

I woke up a bit later than normal this morning. Not that I am complaining - I had a phone call to a friend of mine from Canberra for about an hour, getting off the phone about midnight. We have been trying to catch up for ages, but he and his wife have been all over the place. Very interesting conversation... He is plannig to come up to Sydney real soon now, so we are planning to meet up. He suggested I have a look at the FireFly series on DVD... It is SciFi but quirky - I might wait until I get a bad cold and am restricted to bed to see it given the series is about 12 hours long...

When I checked my Email this morning, I found out that I have a board meeting to attend in the USA... It is scheduled for Thursday night their time, in Dayton Ohio, which means it is about 9:00am my time. I will see how it goes with attending.

Not of very much use to most people is this train simulator. I think it is a hardware plugin for the microsoft train simulator that also has hardware controls, just like the controls for Microsoft Flight Simulator. Also on the Microsoft front, it looks like they are introducing a version of WindowsXP that will work on computers running Windows 95 and Windows 98. I somehow do not think that this will really catch on. Come to think of it I only know one person running 95, and one person running Windows 98.

Photo of the Day

This is an easle I made a few years back from Australian Pine for friends that were going to Kenya with work. I found it with some other photos, and it looks far more stirdy than any other ones you can buy...

Music:

I looked at iTunes last night, and it found some files that were unplayable thanks to the file names being corrupt. So I fixed those and it is working better... I need to get some tags included in some of my MP3's now to get them to apear correctly in iTunes.

I don't believe it... My code is behaving itself - the code for the new hardware. The hardware is mostly behaving itself. The important functions are working. I need to do more testing, but there is little stopping it from running. I need to take some drives with the hardware to test it more, and see how it works in real life. But from what I have seen it is working well. I have made some minor changes, a few lines here and there today, but overall it is what I would call stable.

It basically has all the functions I need, and it is working well. My manual is looking good - It needs more words to describe things, but it is getting there as I mentioned earlier.

I am going over to Richard's probably on Sunday to work on the fuselage for the plane. With some luck we should get enough of it done so that we can paint it the following weekend. Never know... I might even get some birthday cake...

Photo of the Day

I have been doing other stuff apart from work - tidying up and the like. And I came across this photo from a few years back. Well, more than a few years back. As you might have guessed, that is me. Not quite sure how old I was but I know I was very young...

Music:

Dido with "Mary's in India".

I need to remember to speak with a canadian accent today. I am working on a PC in my soon to be distributors office today... So I need to make sure that I get the accent correct, and type any documents up in french and english, which will be a minor problem since I know almost no french, having not touched the lanuage since I was in year 8 at high school. In other words I know the words Merci and Bonjour, and that is about it.

I have been busy working on my tracking hardware and software today. Thankfully things are going really well. The software is not getting many changes and is fairly close to being production quality. One of the cute features is being able to update settings on the server and have them upload to the unit when it next connects. This is amazing. The base product only needs enough settings to contact the server, and from there they agree on what they need to do.

My technical manual for the product is now 17 pages long. It does need a lot more work, but it is close. It is a document that I am referring to all the time, so I guess that means that it is useful. Some of this document describing things that I know in great deatil to people who have no idea what I am talking about without going and confusing them. That is the challenge.

I just found a Story about a trial of technology in Los Angeles to track prisoners and other people on one of their 'Correctional Institutions'.

Music:

INXS with Beautiful Girl. It starts with a beautiful Piano 'solo', followed by a ballard style singing by Michael Hutchence. Another cool song is Private Emotion by Ricky Martin from the Album 'Livin La Vida Loca'.

When I woke up this morning I found that my computer had rebooted. I HATE that - it was windows update that had caused it to happen. There is a solution to this that involves changing a registry entry. This will stop Windows automatically rebooting my computer if I am not here to tell it not to.

Sometimes the MP3 Jukebox plays so well. Other times I find that it really does not suit what I am looking for... I just pressed the Next Track button about 20 times I would guess... Right now I am not totally happy with the track that is on, but it was better than the previous ones. Not that there was anything wrong with them, just that I did not want to listen to them right now. So right now I am listening to a track from the 'Toys' soundtrack, a movie featuring Joan Cusak and Robin Williams. Now it is Missy Higgins with 'The Special Two'

I saw This site and thought it was cute - a battery for the Mac Mini. It is great if you need to build an embedded system where the power supply is not all that great - such as to control a piece of equipment that must keep running. Cute.

Anyway it is breakfast time... More soon...

You know, things would be better if I could count... Despite what I would like, numbers do not normally go
0, 1, 3, 4
And, yes, I did try to count that way a little while back. Needless to say the program did not quite work as desired. Still, it was easy to fix. I just wish I knew how I made such a stupid mistake?

I was just listening to the MP3's and I came across 'Father And Son' from the Celtic Chillout Album... I picked the CD up in London, and I had not listened to all of it. So I found this version of the Cat Stevens song. I don't think it is as good as the new version of the song with Cat Stevens and Ronan Keating. I need to get a copy of it at some stage.

I am trying to debug a problem with some software that I have written... The only person who has the problem is running Windows 98 SE - and I cannot seem to reproduce the problem. I was on SKYPE for about half an hour this afternoon with him and we could not find any solution... So I installed Virtual PC on a laptop, and then installed Windows98 on the VirtualPC. And there was an error thankfully when I ran the software. And thankfully it gave some more information than I was getting from my client. Microsoft has a Knowledgebase Article on the subject - 829558. Searching for it I found a patch that helped.

Bubble House For Sale

I think this is a bit dated and also a bit expensive but it is an interesting piece of architecture anyway. Far too expensive too at about US$3m, but sort of cool.

Music:

Just after I posted the other Blog entry Dido's song 'Dont think of Me' came up. How cool is that with randomness. Now is Bryan Adams with 'Heaven'. Such a classic song - and how can you beat the lyrics of "Baby you are all that I want, when you are lying here in my arms, I am finding it hard to believe, we're in heaven. And Love is all that I need, and I found it there in your heart, it isn't too hard to see, we're in heaven". What more can be said - except that I miss feeling that way.

Photo

My mother is taking my grandmother's ashes back to Broken Hill in about a week, with some other things. She is taking a photo of my grandparents getting a major award back there too, so she asked me to scan the photo - which apears below.

This morning I have done some coding - not much actually. I have been doing more thinking about how to test the tracker, and make sure that all the functions are included. Most are, but there are a few that I have missed out. Just thinking about things seems to work fairly well to search for what I need to add.

One of the tasks is to document things - an instruction manual. Not even to the how to fit the device - more of the capabilities and the configutation paramaters, and even the protocol on how it talks to the real world. I should have the code finished today, apart from some bug fixes and testing.

Unfortunately I need to come up with a test plan of some type - this is an important product and it needs to be correct. The manual is now up to 11 pages, although there is much in it that I will not keep in the final version. In fact it will soon contain all the circuit diagrams and designs so that everything is together, making it more a Technical Description rather than a users manual. Anyway I had better get back to work, and also grab some lunch...

Music:

Dido's great song 'This Land Is Mine' came up on Random Play. Fantastic. I am playing Coldplay in the car right now... Cool.

Right now I am waiting for a server to be rebooted... After a few months it was starting to have a few issues... When it refused to start a 'Service' that I had just uploaded I knew it was needing a reboot. Well, I just found the problem - or one of them. My fault. When I had compiled the Service, I had put it into debug mode, which would not run as a service on the server. Recompile after a minor change and it works.

But the server still needs a reboot and I cannot get it to start that process. There is a crashed copy of Telnet still running, and I have not been able to kill it - it is there but not there - I am not sure why or how. This just should not happen - but it has.

I have been testing the software and hardware, and strange things would happen. The software would work, and then after it connected the first time to my server, it would then connect to a different server from then on... Then I looked carefully at what it was going. The server was sending it new setting when it connected - and I had forgotten about that. Good. That part of the product is 'accidently' tested.

I think it is now time for breakfast... My tummy is starting to grumble, and some time away from a keyboard would probably be good too...

Music:

I need to get a copy of 'Forever Young' aparently by 'Alphaville' which I think I love... Also searching for the performer of that song I found another album that sounds at least interesting - the Best Of Rod Steward... mainly for the song Young Turks, but also Rhythm of My Heart.

Sometimes I have a whole lot of emails when I come in - some times I have almost none. This morning I had one from a PhD student in Athens, Georga, USA wanting some assistance with some of my software. I really could not help him much - I think he wants to track ocean currents from the questions he was asking... I also had an email from Canada with details of a machine I need to log into in order to do some research on a new product..

My poor tracker has been going everywhere... Thanks to some software issues I have had it visiting South America, the coat off africa as well as Sydney... All in the space of a few minutes. Well, I have fixed that problem thankfully...

I am playing with a Trimble Lassen GPS receiver. This is not a bad GPS. I have worked with better ones. It has two outputs by default, one running Trimble's own protocol, and the other running NMEA. I have programmed it to output GPRMC, which is a common GPS output.

The strange thing that happens is that if the GPS loses lock, and regains it, then the speed data is incorrect. I just had the GPS tell me that the speed of the house was a touch over 200 knots, or close to 400 km/h. This is for your normal brick home in Sydney.

I still have not heard from my father. I guess I will hear from him today... I hope... We will see how it goes.

So far I have missed out on one birthday tradition - I have missed out on any birthday cake. Some cake would be nice - MUD CAKE with some cream. YUM. I just love MUD CAKE so much. One day I will post about Pacific Power and Mud Cakes - there is a good story there... One Day. I have been invited to stay a few days with a Pacific Power friend on the Central Coast... With some persuasion I am sure they would love to give me a cake.

I have also yet to speak to my father. I am a bit dissapointed about that - I would have liked to have spoken to him yesterday. I think he is in Thailand, but I am not quite sure. I could call his mobile, but I will wait for him to ring. I think he gets back in the country tomorrow. I have also not heard from my grandmother. Given the condition she is in I am unfortunately not surprised.

Today I have been thinking about how I will write some software modifications - and not doing much of it... It was a task I really did not want to look at since I knew it would get messy... Well, just before dinner I actually implemented it. Took a lot less time than I had thought - and now I just need to debug the code. Most of the code has already been tested - I took the hardware on a 1500 km drive a few weeks back and it worked fairly well... By 'took' I mean I simulated it all.

Anyway I have some testing to do before putting the computer away for the night...

Photo of the Day

Music:

Right now I am feeling a tiny bit tired. This is probably my bodies way of telling me that it really does not like exercise. Before I had lunch I had a phone call from a friend. He was coming over to get some help from me with programming, and I mentioned that I had better have a run before he arrived. His comment was 'You?' I had told him in the past that I was running, but he did not really believe me.

Anyway I am wondering if getting tired after running is a symptom of running - where the body reacts to the re-distributing of stored energy by inducing tiredness. Not sure. Maybe I am just getting old :-)

I certainly do not feel any older now that I have had my birthday. Not at all. If anything I feel younger, and healthier with all this running and exercise.


According to this story in the Daily Telegraph, a persons handwriting is an insight into their soul. There is little detail in the article as probably this is quite a complex subject.

Music:

I have not had much of a chance to listen to much music this afternoon thanks to the number of calls I have had. I love the headset... It really helps and allows me to type whilst I am speaking to people. But listening to music does not all that well thanks to being hard to listen to the music at a level which I can hear the people talking.

It is raining right now - I know this since I got caught in it - and got well and truely soaked. I was out running, and I did not think that the rain would come. It started about 1km from home, and I did not really want to be caught in it as the wind was blowing and I do not want to get a cold.

Anyway I proceeded home rather than continue with the run. I ended up running a respectable 4.8 KM averaging about 9.3KM/H. This is slightly faster than before thanks to the rain and the fact that I did not want to freeze to death. To tell the truth I was not quite soacked but I was fairly wet.

I could produce the GPS plot and add it here but there is not much to show. To tell the truth I was a bit disapointed with my running performance. I did not doo too bad, but I am hoping to get close to the 7 km mark. We will see how I go over the coming weeks.

Following the run I grabbed some lunch and then there was a collection of phone calls. I think there were about four or five in turn. Bssically no calls for the previous day and a half, and then all at once. Just happens that way I guess... Anyway I have some work to do so I had better get going

If you are into computer comics - and I am not usually - this is a good one - talking about a Linux version of Monopoly. This one was linked to from the GrokLaw site.

There is a story on ZDnet asking about foods that should not be placed near computers. Back in Pacific Power, some of the staff were given rather expensive VAX terminals to use. These cost about six months wages at the time... With 21" screens for CAD work. Anyway according to a former workmate, one of these terminals stopped working. The keyboard was beeping as if there was a stuck key.

Well, the desk looked immaculate... But the normal thing is to make sure that no paperclips had got stuck in the keyboard. This would have been fine except when he picked it up and turned it over out poured HOT Ministrone soup. The owner of the keyboard had only reported to the help desk that her keyboard was not working. And had cleaned up all visual clues to any problem...

From a Blog comes this story about an IT guy who is given a chance to fly on the Enron jet just before they go bust. This links to a story about a Network Operations Centre built in a former hotel that is 30 stories high containing servers from many many companies, and full of servers.

And the latest thing for the office building are these handles that change colour depending on if they are locked or unlocked. Cute idea for places like your bosses office, and converence rooms. I think they are a bit too much for my tastes though...

Music:

Just Lots of Random Play... I really want that iPod...

My birthday has been good overall. I would have liked to have shared it with someone special, but it has been good none the less. And I got some presents!!! And I guess some more will be coming later.

My brother gave me a copy of Bill Bryson's book 'A short History of Nearly Everything'. The book looks cool, even if it is the sort that seems to be sold at airports everywhere. If you have not read any of his other books I would advise you to read them. Start with his book on Australia and see if you can put it down. I have a friend in the USA who just loves to quote Bill Bryson... And shares his view of this country.

For some reason I have started at Chapter 14... Seemed a nice place to start. Anyway, I love a quote from Bryson, talking about the location of a visitors centre, and described it by saying "It's slightly in the middle of nowhere". Such cool imagery.

I also got a copy of Audrey Hepburn's Roman Holiday from my mother. Since I have been there she thought it might be a sort of a Holiday Video for me. Alas, no romance for me in Rome when I was there in September... Mum is going to give me something else - I am not sure what yet. That is all the presents at the moment. My father is planning to ring soon. I will probably be going out to dinner with Richard and Michelle sometime this weekend to celebrate.

Dinner at Sizzler's was good... A great time catching up, and the food was good too, although Sizzler has come down a notch in the last few years. It was also a good chance to test the tracking unit. The new software modifications worked a treat. As mentioned I have a whole bunch of mods to make. The first of them seem to be working.

Anyway I think I am going to go to bed and read some of the book

The more I look at the iPod the more I want one. It looks really cool, and given that some people have installed Linux on it makes it even better. Definitely will be looking at getting one

The Music playing right now is 'Jupiter' from the 'Open Space CD'. This is a jazzed up version of the music by Holst, that was aparently used for the Rugby World Cup in Sydney. There is a version of the music by GUSTAV HOLST on the ABC CD 'The Rise and Rise of Australian Rugby, although I am not sure what version this is. The full name of the track is "Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity". The version from 'Open Space' is definitely not the 'classic' version with drums and other percussion in the background.

Looking at the SMH, the Rugby version has been made into an Anthem called 'The world in union'. A subset of the lyrics are below. More details can be found here
Gathering together
One mind, one heart
Every creed, every colour
Once joined, never part
It's the word in union
The world as one
As we climb to reach our destiny
A new age has begun.

I received an email from my father wishing me a happy birthday... He let me know he was going to ring me this evening at some stage. It will be good to hear from him - when he gets back I really need to get over to see him too.

I took the oportunity to go over to Eastgardens to test my new PCB. As you can see from the screendump below, things seemed to work. There is a lot more work to do on it, but things are certainly looking good. There are a couple of minor bugs that I need to fix, but most of the other things are basically enhancements to the existing software.

So I am happy. Things are working... I had better get back to it - this really does need to be finished ASAP.

I have just got back from visiting a friend. I went over to program a radio for one of my clients. Unfortunately the radio refused to program. I was doing this as a freebie, so I don't feel too bad about not being able to program the radio. My friend did have something else for me though - something more interesting.

He needed to visit the airport and solve a communications problem for one of the cariers. They had a mobile radio issue, and my friend wants me to be able to take care of this customer whilst he is away next month. So I got to meet some of the cariers staff and got to spend some time in their operations control room.

This was really interesting, and showed another side to the airline industry - the side that the general public does not normally see. It was also strange going to the airport to do some work rather than go somewhere - and seeing all the other people there who were actually going somewhere. Well worthwhile. My friend asked me if I wanted to spend a day in Melbourne to see the setup down there - and said that I could stay a bit longer down there if I wanted. Sounds fun.

Anyway, more later.. Right now my mouth is a bit numb - I had Thai for lunch and they are continuing to make it hotter for me...

I just got my first Happy Birthday message - an SMS from a business colleague. I guess I will get some more as the day goes on. Oh, and I just had a call from my brother organizing tonight. Sizzler's or Lone Stare probably. We were talking about iPod's... I had not checked out the prices recently. I have a couple of Gift Vouchers that will go much of the way to buying myself an iPod... Unfortunately they are with different stores. Argh. The other thing is that I will ask my friend who I am seeing this morning what price he can get it for me. I think he might be a dealer for Apple too.

I found a cute feature in MSN messenger a few days ago. One of the things that I hated about the product is all the advertising it comes up with when it starts. You can actually turn the extra page of information off by using Tools | Options. Microsoft don't want you to turn it off obviously since they get less advertising revenue, but you can turn it off. You cannot turn off all those extra tabs as far as I can tell though.... You cannot have everything unfortunately.

My new little tracker is working well... Just getting used to all the features and how it is working... And it is working well... I will take it for a test drive later... Over to Eastgardens...

And finally, my father's maths teacher from High School died according to the SMH. Anyone who has done 4 Unit maths would know the Coroneos Text Books... Jim Coroneos has died. I think they are for other subjects too, but this is why I know of him...

Happy Birthday...

It is my birthday today... So happy birthday to me... I expect a fairly quiet day today... Visiting a friend this morning, A friend is coming over this afternoon to do some work, and this evening I am going out to dinner... And I expect to get a few phone calls and emails during the day... None yet though...

News.Com.Au has a story about the Big Island of Hawaii, and why it is a must visit. Having been there myself I agree. I would love to go back at some stage... It is so relaxing... Even with the stresses of work.

SlashDot has a story about the NetDimes which is attempting to study the structure and topology of the internet. They produce some nice pictures and reports, although their site is difficult to navigate to find them.

Music:

One album I need to get is the new one by Rob Thomas of Matchbox 20. I did mean to get it on friday but I forgot... I got some others instead. Frankly I did not feel like paying $22.95 at HMV when I could get it at $18.84 at K-Mart...

This weekend was not as successful with getting things up and running as I had hoped, but things generally are never like that anyway. That is just the nature of the business... Always problems to fix. Right now I am working on debugging some GPRS code. This is stuff that I thought that I had completed a few weeks back, but obviously I had not. I still had some CDMA code in the GPRS part. I got it working, but not fully tested.

Minor stupid things that I have missed... Like the fact that the format of what gets returned by different modems is slightly different, and not checking for these differences. Still that is working now so I am working on getting other things working, and looking pretty.

Anyway it is now bed time... Good Night All.

Junkyard wars just had the final - and their task was something that was close to my heart - they needed to build rockets to bring a large egg back to earth. Unfortunately they were provided with rocket motors so they whole thing was not as hard as it could have been for them. The winner used three smaller motors with a very thing rocket.

This is the sort of thing that I would love to try one day - although I would want to get a bit higher than the 1000 feet or so that these rockets got to. Getting something into Orbit would be more fun - but I am not sure how realistic that goal is. I suspect that using satellites will be my limit rather than actually building one.

Anyway I will keep this entry short... I have some things I need to get done for tomorrow morning, and I would prefer not to do too much work on my birthday.

I am not sure how much this costs, but I think this is really cool. Sort of retro art with functionality. Maybe I will add this to the things I will buy one of these days. On a nice wodden base I think this would be really cool on a mantelpiece.


From a fairly small mailing list comes this link. Basically the somewhat crazy ex-pat is offering to take action figures on a 12 day tour of Italy, and provide photos and postcards. Really good laugh - for the person who has everything. Not for me though.

Another strange site is This one that tells you how to build your own Soft Drink machine for your home. Not sure if I ever want to build one, (or even if it would be a good idea to build one), but it is a cool concept none the less. When I build a house one day it might be an interesting addition to the kitchen - with some limits to stop too much softdrink being drunk.

Not sure what exactly I will be doing tomorrow. Probably visiting a friend at Eastgardens for a little while in the morning. I missed him on friday... Then I will probably be having a friend coming over monday afternoon, and dinner with my mother and father in the evening...

Finally some personal stuff... I have just got back from a run - so here I am sitting down and waiting to cool down a bit - with some mineral water next to me to re-hydrate. Once I finish this entry I will have cooled down and I can have a shower. I only did 3.75km in about 25 minutes. This is about my normal speed but I just did not feel like trying to do more distance. I did sprint for the final few hundred meters which is probably why I am a bit exhausted right now. In addition to feeling a bit exhausted, it was also starting to rain. Enough reasons to stop...

I have been needing to do some work with a Trimble GPS. Now, these devices are not the easiest in the world to deal with. Trimble does not like to distribute their configuration programs unless you buy a developers kit which is almost no use and quite expensive. But the developers kit comes with a cable to program the GPS units from their default settings. This would be fine except that the connector is so small and it runs from 3.3v.

So I needed to do microsurgery to make up an interface cable. Personally I think that the real cable will be worth it in production, but I needed to test this today so that we can get production started tomorrow. To cut a long story short, my cable works.

I have included a photo here, but it really does not show the effort required to make up the cable... Anyway that is it - time for a shower.

Something a bit different.. At least from todays stuff... Here are a collection of links for various things

Firstly, there is a story in The Age about an iPod that exploded when it was put throgh the wash by a childs mother, and then the child started to open it. Without the extensive instructions on how to do this safely, it is not a good idea. The iPod was not designed to be opened.

Next, CNN has a story about the top 30 airports in the world. Sydney International is in the top 10 again... At number 10. It came in at that spot for both the airport in general, and for the Qantas Business Class lounge.

Engadget has a story on GPS enabled tours. Basically self-guided tours with a PDA telling about important things at each spot along the journey.

In terms of information management, one of my friends has suggested I have a look at the Omea software to bring together email, blogs, Instant Messaging and anything else you can think of. Looks cool.

I was speaking to my friend in Auckland on Skype this evening... His horse trailer is almost finished. Finally. Actually I suspect that it is one of those projects that is never finished... Cool really...

Things are finally starting to work. Some of the problems I have been having have to do with the prototype being different from the production board. I changed some things around, for no good reason and this has been causing me some issues. Not every thing was changed for no reason. Some thing were changed for a reason, and this is also giving me some issues.

One of the issues was that I was listening on Serial Port A, and the data was now being receieved on Serial Port D. This took a while to locate. I am still finding all the issues like that but I am happy with how it is going now. I know this all sounds really boring, and to a certain extent it is. Unfortunately it is what I have to work on right now.

IT WORKS!!! IT IS ALIVE!

I just got it to connect for the first time. This is a momentous event. It has taken a lot of work, and money and resources but it is now working. Unfortunately there are some hardware modifications that need to be done to put this into production. Mostly adding some wires, and a coupld of resistors costing under a cent. But it works!!!

Photo of the Day

This if from the tallest building in Melbourne on the 1999 trip when I also went to New Zealand. One of the hardest things about this trip was flying out of New Zealand really early, into Melbourne, and giving a lecture that night. It was fun though. I was staying right in the centre of melbourne which was cool too.

Apart from being the end of the trip, why is this photo in here... Well, a part time job around that time was to actually program those signs. It was fun, and gave me some experience with Windows Programming.

And finally this was in a foyer in an office building in Auckland. Totally impractical, but looks cool...

I am getting somewhere - I think. Well, I hope I am. Right now I am having battles with a GPRS unit. I am not sure what is going on. OK. I have found it. I have found that I have two or three BAD sim cards. Not sure what is going on with them... But I put in another SIM card and the GPRS is working. I am really pleased with this. I could not work it out.

The funny thing is that I am sure that I tried the SIM card in another unit first. I must have been mistaken - my advanced age is playing tricks with my memory :-) or something like that at least.

One of the things that I did manage to do in the last couple of hours was to write some debugging aids. Not sure if I ever need to use them again, but if I do I have them here. I am getting there. Slowly.

Anyway I am on a deadline... I promise I will post more later... And not too much later.

I am busy today working on the circuit board. Mostly it is looking good with a few minor changes needed. Nothing this complex can be done without minor changes needed. I am working on debugging a serial problem right now – it looks like a hardware issue, but I am not sure. I have some things to try…

In a few weeks when the product is released I will post a photo here. I am fairly happy with things, but testing is taking longer than I had hoped. Isn’t that always the way. Unfortunately.

I just need to work through things logically. One thing at a time. Work out what is working, and what is not. And then getting what is not working to work.

Music wise I am listening to Red Hot Chili Pepper’s Live CD… I have listened to Cold Play and Bette Midler already.

I hate it when that happens. I typed up a Blog entry and the Blogging system failed. That is something I really really hate. It means that I need to re-create what I wrote. We I do if I still want to share it all, and I do. So here goes.

My broadband is back. It was out for too many hours – and it was Telstra’s problem, and it was rather local. I suspect that Telstra had an equipment failure of some type in the local exchange and that took out ADSL users. I was beginning to wonder what was going on, since there was nothing on the ISP’s WWW site showing any issues

Today I had a meeting at 2pm over near the airport. What I failed to realize the scope of the meeting. When I got there I realized that what the customer wanted to do was basically ‘The world’. I have often joked about a client wanting the world. This is the closest I have ever come to a client who wants the world, and actually means it. To tell you the truth, my head is still spinning, and the meeting ended four hours ago.

I also picked up the PCB today – the one that I designed. It looks fantastic. Then again don’t all people who design things think the same way? Well, this one is really fantastic. I thought that things were really stuffed up. I mean majorly bad. But then I realized that I had plugged the CPU module in backwards. Turning it around certainly helped. Made things work – and now I can load software into it.

I still need to actually test the hardware and the software, and add some more features, but it is looking fantastic. That is tomorrows job. Right now I am too exhausted to do any serious work on it. And Since I will be working on it tomorrow I will be able to send an email sometime on the weekend saying that we can get it manufactured from Monday. And then I can have my birthday off.

Anyway it is late and I need to get some sleep. Good Night.

ARGH... I just got home and my Internet access is not working. This is not good... I have just dialed in and I am contacting support....

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From Earlier...
I am currently at Westfield Eastgardens writing this – I have a meeting nearby soon, and I needed something to eat first.

I made the mistake of looking in HMV music store – I picked up a few albums on special, They are:
Red Hot Chili Peppers Live in Hyde Park
Neil Young – Harvest
Bette Midler – Greatest Hits
Coldplay – Parachutes

This morning I have needed to do a complete loop. Firstly I needed to pick up a PCB at Kings Park. Whilst there we got talking about Satellites – my supplier mentioned he had been at a seminar and some people mentioned that they had got a satellite built and launched for only $1M, and he thought that this was cheap. I had to disappoint him by letting him know that a friend managed to do the same thing for $10K. Somewhat cheaper really.

Then I dropped in on Richard’s to have a look at the plane – Both wings are together and he has started on the firewall. It finally looks as if this thing might fly.

Then I came over to a friends office at Eastgardens. He was not there and I was hoping to reprogram some radios. Unfortunately my friend had taken the programmer with him to Melbourne for the day. He will be back soon so I might drop in later. Then I have a meeting soon in Botany… And then home.

Photo of the Day

This first photo is of a Hydroelectric Power Station near Hamilton. I arranged to get a tour of this place which was a great way to see the countryside. It was well worth it - very interesting. Particularly so since we managed to see all the parts that would not be shown on the normal tours of the place.

I mentioned before that I did not have many photos of myself during presentations. This is one that I gave in New Zealand - in Auckland. There are about 100 people there which was not a bad turn out - and they all seemed to enjoy what I was talking about. I think I spoke for about 90 minutes, and the audience was enthrawled throughout.

I am not a natural presenter - I have needed to work a lot at presenting and I have got fairly good at it. I can still improve and I do know that I present better if I know the subject matter and I have prepared before hand. If I have a half finished presentation in powerpoint that I have never given before then things will not go as well. Practice makes perfect like all things.