According to News.Com.AU, QANTAS is being taken to the Australian Industrial Relations Commission over their decision to use the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles for crew. They claim that downtown LA is not safe. What startled me was the number of rooms they have booked there on average - 250. That is a lot. But when you work out that there are maybe 10 qantas flights a day through LA the numbers certainly add up. So would the nightly cost even at bulk rates.

News.COM.AU is also reporting that Split Enz is getting back together for a tour. Their last tour as a group was called 'Enz with a Bang!'. Cute name.

I was speaking to the wife of a friend earlier this evening, whilst she sent her husband off to do some jobs. She was commiserating about eBay... She has bought and sold a lot on eBay, and has had no problems until her latest sale. She sold an item at auction, and it sold but the person did not pay. So she re-listed it, and once again the person has not paid. Twice in a row for the same item is a real pain. But it is one of the risks with a site like eBay.

For a computing story, News.COM has a short history of Hard Disks. The part I love is when in 1982 the weigh per GByte of storage went down from 121 KG/GByte to 42 KG/GByte.

Right now I feel like a back massage... For some reason my upper back is slightly sore... I guess I have been sitting down too much today. I think I need a new work chair too... The one I have is getting a bit old - and it is not as comfortable as it used to be. I might whip down to Office Works tomorrow at some stage.

Tomorrow morning I have a chuch meeting - basically to introduce the new treasurer to the church accounts. Not that I know much about them, but I have some idea. The previous treasurer documented so much, and we need to hand all that over to the new treasurer. Not sure how long that meeting will take. I am hoping that it will be quick, but you never can tell. [On the subject of treasurer stuff, I was speaking to a business partner in Trakworks, and he was telling me that his first job was working in a bank, and he started there the same week as decimal currency was introduced. He assures me it was an interesting week to start work].

I have been having a few issues with doing some programming in VB.NET... Not in my TeamTrack application, but in another program I am working on. The issue is that I am trying to add strings to a collection, and it is not working. VB.NET is telling me that the variable is not yet initialized, but I cannot work out what is going on. Whenever I look it is set... When I get a solution I will write it up here.

I think today has been fairly successful. I have managed to get most of the things done that I wanted to get done. Sure, I would have liked to do a bit more driving to test trackers, but apart from that things went fairly well... And not too many interruptions from people either. A good day I think.

I think I have just made a great mistake. I picked myself up a copy of a DVD of Jean Michele Jarre with one of his concerts in Moscow. Jarre is a long time composer of electronic music, and one of my ambitions is to go to one of his concerts. The concerts are realy amazing, with over a million people commonly attending his outdoor events. If you think of someone taking the New Years Eve fireworks with their synchronised music, put them onto most of the buildings in down town sydney, project images onto all the buildings too, and have this all done live for two hours... Well, that would be close to what he is like.

He is in the Guiness Book Of Records for the biggest concert ever at about 1.8 Million people (estimated) for the 150th anniversary of Houston.

Anyway, the DVD is a distraction to me at the moment - mostly from writing here, but also doing other stuff. Thankfully the work day is mostly done so it is not too much of a distraction from anything but it could be worse. Half the reviews rave how good the DVD is, and the other half make all sorts of complaints about the DVD. I think I am on the side that raves how good it is...

When I first bought this laptop I found a piece of 1" high aluminium extrusion and used this with a piece of neoprene to raise up the rear of the laptop so that it would be better for typing ergonomically. With rearrangements of my desk this fell by the wayside. I have now dusted it off, and I am trying again to use it. Generally it is actually an improvement I think, but we will just need to wait until I have been using it a few days to see if things are actually better.

From my point of view there are two problems with eBay. Firstly is that there are too many cool things to buy on eBay, which is part of the charm. The other thing is that sometimes you are not getting to the right people - and the tools for letting people know they might be interested in something obscure are not all that good. Taking a break from other work I found a few tracking units I used in Hawaii for Ironman back in 2002. These are slightly superscened, and I have no use for so many, and want to sell them off. But realistically they would not sell well on eBay. So I need to sell them through other means.

Having said that some things sell that I do not expect to sell. The price of the Calligraphy set I am selling is now over $30. I think I only spent $25 on it a few years back so I am going to make a profit. But I think this is more the exception rather than the rule.

I have released the new version of TeamTrack with most of the DLL's now included in the main software again, but as classes. It seems to be running really well. It seems to actually have improved the performance of the software too which is good. I will see how it goes under load.

Internet Explorer 7 still has some issues... If you (accidently) close the Internet Explorer window, all your tabs close. And to make this worse, there is no facility to save the state of the standard tabs. Firefox does have the ability to save the tabs which is a fantastic feature, meaning that I can open my normal windows automatically if I like. Well, I could if I used Firefox.

Earlier I took the mailing tube to the post office... They were rather surprised at the length, but they were fine about it when I told them it was just under the maximum length - they did however have some issues actually balencing the tube on the scales for weighing it. It cost a bit more to send than i expected but it was still under 1c per KM that it needed to travel. Actually, it was under 0.5c, which probably says more about the sheer size of Australia than anything else.

The programming and testing I have been doing today has gone really well. The testing has all worked, and the programming has been easier than I anticipated. Not that I am complaining - not in the least.

Oh, and I saw a link to This product which is a USB memory stick with a secure copy of MSN Messenger on it with a secure diary. And they are charging a premium for this. Not a bad idea... Basically it is a portable digital diary that can plug into any PC... Sweet.

I am just waiting for some reports to finish running so that I can do some more programming... I could just disable the daily emailed reports, or have the reports run on another machine, but I have not got that far yet. Actually, I think I have. The reporting engine has only changed in minor ways in the last few weeks - so I guess it is time to have it running on my server sitting there churning out reports as needed. I really do need to get the WebServices written allowing people to submit reports - but that will come soon.

Something which I already knew wass that the M7 traffic is lower than when it opened. The road averages about 80,000 journeys a day, compared to about 140,000 when it was toll free. Not that I care. I pay the toll without too many issues... It saves me so much time and it is far more relaxing than driving in the traffic.

I saw an interesting project... An accelerometer using bluetooth. An accelerometer measures how fast objects speed up and slow down. It is something that people are always asking me to add to my GPS tracker, and which I will get to adding one of these days. Until then this is a cute project.

One of my clients is moving back into his house today... I did the communications wiring in it after it was damaged by fire. I am not expecting to hear from him today, but you never can tell... I am guessing there is a 5% chance that I will need to make a short trip over there today. Hope not... I have other things to be doing today - like some more modifications to my TeamTrack software. But what will come will come.

I have a couple of eBay auctions finishing today. One of the items is up to about $50, and the other does not yet have any bids. That second item has a few people watching it, although I am not sure how serious they are. This is development hardware I purchased for a project, and I have some excess hardware. If it does sell I might get rid of a second unit - but I need to wait until the first unit sells. I did have one query asking if the device came with the developers kit so obviously he had done his research...

Finally, the SMH is reporting on the top 20 DVD's of 2005. Not a bad list although I have only seen about half the movies. I certainly do not have all the DVD's although some are on my list... StarWars III is right up there... And I have not even seen the movie. So many movies. So little time...

Just after the last entry the PC got worse... Internet Explorer crashed as well as Outlook. Once these applications die you know that the computer needs to be restarted - it is just better that way. I did a small amount of research and I have found that Upgradable.Com.Au is probably the cheapest for upgrades at $259. The interesting thing is that I can upgrade one chip at a time, so I can buy a 1 GByte chip giving 1.5 GBytes.

I just saw a report on news.com.au about a Defense College building in Canberra partially collapsing without serious injury. This is important since the son of one of my clients started down there on the weekend.

Right now I have some code to document... We are having some issues and believe it is the with another supplier of software... And I need to tell this supplier how our software is working so that we can debug the issue.

Occasionally windows fails in some strange and unusual ways. For instance, at the moment I have the compiler for the CPU on the tracker open. Of course this program has its own icon. However at the moment the windows taskbar right now has the WORD icon associated with the program. Basically I think the PC needs more ram. It has 1 GByte but I do not think that is enough. I will have to look at the manual and see if I can upgrade the memory. I just checked and found that I can install two 1 GByte modules in this computer, so I can actually have up to 2 GByte. eBay has them for about $200, which I am not sure is a good deal. I have no idea at all. So that would be $400 or so to upgrade the PC. I will look around and see what is available.

I checked the local pawn store for an XBox. They had one for only $200. Yeah, sure. I might make an offer for the machine, but I suspect I will be looking elsewhere. I have seen a cool mod chip available here. Easy to install too.

There was a comment in a newspaper that stock market prices are most commonly starting with the number 1. There is logic to this since the prices are commonly percentage increases or decreases, meaning it is faster for numbers to move from starting with 2 or 3 etc than one. A doubling of 1 moves makes it 2. But a doubling of 8 makes a lot more than 9. A graphical description of this is available here.

One of my clients has been suggesting tons of new features for my TeamTrack software - and has even gone as far to purchase a copy of Crystal Reports so he can edit his own reports - and he is totally loving it. Anyway he found an issue with my reporting functions - since my software was saying that Normanhurst to Newcastle was only 120KM where it should have been about 150KM. I found the bug... It was reporting the distance as the crow flies, and not how you drive it. Quick hack and I got the distance correct. Sometimes. There was a minor error sometimes. If the program thought that one of the positions was 0,0 it would add about 15,000 km to the distance. OOps. It was a simple fix to correct that error.

I have also fixed up the size of the install program. It used to be 11 MBytes, and every time there was a new version of the program people will downloaded the large file. Most of this was libraries that was needed by the program. I have now split things with a second install program that installs 8.5 MBytes of library files. And they only need to do this once. WHat an improvement!

With Valentines Day coming up, the NY Daily News is reporting that a popular burger joint in New York is offering Valentines Day meals. You need to recognise that this is a store similar to McDonalds. So for Valentines Day, those who pre-book get met at the door by a waiter in a suit, and shown to a candle lit table with tablecloth and all the trimmings. It is aimed at those people who had their first date at the place, or went their after their prom etc. Nice idea.

I am actually getting things done today... Emails answered and software written.

I just had my first phone call of the day... 12:30PM... That is what I call a quiet day. Not that I am complaining - it is good to have quieter days occasionally. It actually allows me to get some work done!

A friend of mine has sent me a link to a report by Google that looks at what tags and other paramaters are used in web pages. In the past, most people have analysed maybe a few thousand pages. In this case Google analysed over a billion web pages. This is not a bad effort on their behalf. To be viewed properly you need a web browser with SVG support...

I think I have just created two of the worlds most bizzare mailing tubes. I am not sure that Australia post is going to like them, but they do comply with requirements. I am selling some antennas on eBay, and they just fit in with the maximum 1.05m length of a parcel. The only thing is that Australia Post DO NOT sell mailing tubes this long. So I needed to buy two and put them together and then tape them up. This required some 'engineering'. One of the eBay auctions is awaiting payment, and the other is still going. And then I have another two of these antennas available.



I am being sneaky here... I am waiting until one is sold before selling the next one in order to get the best price. I suspect that this is really common on eBay.

The test of my software when I was out looked good. It needs more testing, but at the moment things are looking good. All the trackers seem to be reporting correctly... I have a few more tests to do, and some longer journeys, but I think that will need to wait for a day or two.

One of the unintended consequences of tidying my desk is that I now have a couple of speakers evenly on both sides of my laptop so I am now getting the full stereo effect in music. It really is surprising how much better music sounds in stereo - although wearing headphones is even better.

I have been working on a bug with some software for a while... It is with date parsing. The system can send me data in two different formats. And VB.NET has an issue... I am importing data and it thinks it is in the local timezone, but the data is in UTC, or universal time. This is creating a few hassles for me. The problem is that I have solved this before and I cannot remember how I did it. I do know it was a pain to solve.

After some playing I found the following line...
TimeZone.CurrentTimeZone.GetUtcOffset(Now).TotalMinutes
What this does on the .Net world is returns the number of seconds between UTC time and local time. So if I import data with the wrong timezone I can offset things. So simple... Provided I can work out if to add or subtract from the time...

P.S. Edit 30 minutes later... An issue/Bug..

Firstly I had an issue with the following line
time = Date.ParseExact(mArray(Fields.Time), "dd/MM/yyyy H:mm:ss tt", Nothing)
The tt understands AM or PM. Unfortunately it then ignores AM or PM. Probably something to do with the H in the hour field. But the following code fixed things...
If InStr(mArray(Fields.Time), "PM") > 0 Then
time = time.AddHours(12)
End If

Why isnt programming easy? ARGH!

I have to love some of my clients... One of them was telling me how to use my software in a more productive manner last night, and asked if he wanted to send me the instructions WITH SCREEN SHOTS! Like, WOW. And he did a good job. Now I just need to pull that into the manual. This type of thing makes my job so much easier. I wish more clients would do this for me... Then I would not need to work :-)

The Week Magazine has an article describing the schools of thought on the time front between the Atomic Time and Astronomic Time. Basically in Astronomic Time the time should be tied to the rotation of earth, since earth speeds and slows. This article is a consise description about the advantages and disadvantages of both schemes.

The Globe And Mail has a story of the RIM versus NTP court case over patents. RIM sell the Blackberry mobile device and have been sued for patent infringement. This has turned into a billion dollar problem for RIM who believe that there are no patents for the technology they are using. The story is a rather interesting read.

Back to work for me I guess... Lots of emails to send, and other work to do... The To DO list is certainly getting a strong workout.

I did not quite get as much work done today as I had hoped. There are always distractions. But things did not go too badly. I just need to hope testing goes well tomorrow when I do some field trials. I am having to delay delivery of some hardware which is a pain, but since I am adding some new features my client really is not all that concerned. I get more time, and he gets more features.

I have been watching the pre-release of some episodes of 'Commander in Chief', and I must say that I like what I have seen immensely. This is The West Wing, but with more emphasis on The President rather than the staff; and is also looking at the changes that happen to The President's family as a result of moving into the White House.

Personally I find the concept intrigueing. The idea of a female president, and the issues that this creates for the whole concept - how they have to have a First Gentleman rather than the First Lady, and all that that brings with it. I will certainly be watching this show when it appears on TV this coming month... Much recommended. Anyway I am getting tired... I probably should not have stayed up watching the extra episode...

I hust just completed an Online Form with westnet to increase my monthly download limit. With the type of work I have been doing recently I need the extra bandwidth - and I realised it was probably going to be cheaper this way since I decide to accept charges for excess usage rather than having the internet connection slowed down. And still, even with a slightly increased monthly premium, it is cheaper than my old ISP and I get significantly more traffic.

One of the things I have been selling on eBay is some Orbcomm satellite antennas that are just over 1m long. I used them for a consulting project that went nowhere, and now I just have some of them lying there. So they are being sold off on eBay, at somewhat of a loss. Still, they are better being written off bringing in some money, and I really do not need antennas imported from Italy if I need to do a similar project. What I forgot to work out was Australia Posts requirements for sending these. they will not send items more than 105cm long - and in their packets they are 120cm. So they will not be shipped with their original containers... But in a couple of mailing tubes joined together to exactly the right length. And with some luck I will actually meet the postage I stated in the eBay advert.

I have been working on some code on trackers today. Adding a couple of new features, such as sending a position report as soon as someone goes over a certain speed, and averaging the speed over five seconds. But to test all this I needed to get a GPS lock. Normally I put a GPS antenna out the window, and generally have a few outside for this purpose. I plugged one in, and it would not work even after 30 minutes. Mysterfied I traced the cable. I had not plugged in the GPS antenna at all... Just a piece of wire that went nowhere. OOps. Plugging in a real antenna fixed things...

I think I have fixed another bug. Tracking units were mysteriously also sometimes not downloading their entire history for some time if they had been out of range. I have traced this down to a function that pings the server and makes sure it is still connected. Other layers are supposed to pick up if the link is down but they dont always work. So I had this other code which pinged the server. And what was happening was that if another message got sent to the server before the ping reply then the unit would see a problem and soon disconnect and reconnect starting again. Simple fix, but it took a while to diagnose.

It is surprisingly warm outside... I needed to do some work at the church manse where our new minister had moved in, and needed to climb under the house to patch in some cables. After getting past all the cobwebs (YUK) I was able to quickly get all the phone sockets in the house correctly connected up and the diversion on the church line cancelled. I will need to go back there in the next week to install an ADSL modem and central splitter when they get ADSL on. Definitely time for a shower.

My sales on eBay are going well. I am getting rid of things, and they are actually getting bids which is more surprising. I keep circling the house asking myself if I really need something. And sometimes the answer is NO! Like why do I need a calligraphy set? My writing is not that good. I have no idea why I bought it - maybe as a christmas present or something a few years back. Anyway I am getting rid of it...

It is now time for lunch and then working through some emails and on some trackers...

Unfortunately I have a whole lot of work to do today. Yesterday was mildly successful, essentially getting a consulting job out the door. All that needs to happen is that I need to send the hardware to my client and then my invoice off. And I have a whole lot more to get out the door today with some luck, with invoice, depending on how things go.

The SMH is reporting that Parking Prices at Sydney Airport are amongst the most expensive in the world. They also have a story on how there is a roller coaster very slowly being built at Katoomba... TG Daily have also worked out that plugging USB devices into an Intel Duo laptop will significantly worsen the battery life.

The Applied Materials Web site has a video on how Flat Panels are made. A very interesting video.

The X-Box 360 was due to be released in Australia on 3/March. Unfortunately, Microsoft have just announced that the launch will be delayed until March 23 due to lack of stock. This will also mean that the number of cheap X-Boxes will not be on eBay for a little while yet...

I have mentioned SuitSat before in these pages before... It is a satellite built into an old russian space suit from the International Space Station, and was designed by a friend of mine, Steve Bible, N7HPR. Steve and I serve on the board of TAPR together. I got news today that SuitSat is to be launched on 3/February/2006. The batteries are probably only going to last about four days though, and it is likely to re-enter the atmosphere in about six weeks.

The satellite will be transmitting a beacon every minute - and it should be able to be decoded on a relatively inexpensive radio... I will see if I can manage to contact it...

This afternoon I have been working on a real cool consulting project... Something that pulls together skills in everything from wireless design to textile science. Unfortunately I am unable to post any photos at the moment of the hardware, but I hope to be able to do that soon. Right now I am taking a break from that project whilst some glue dries. Then I need to do some more wiring and test the device. This project has taken a bit longer than anticipated, but that really is not a concern since I quoted in US Dollars and therefore there is no GST.

And I had budgeted in some allowance for the issues I had anyway. With some luck I will get to build another five of these devices shortly, which will provide some more consulting income. And they have provided a 50% deposit. It really is a cool project.

Still I have more work to do that I intended to get done today. I need to get a quote done for the Defense Department amongst others. Given what I have heard about in the past with pricing I am reasonably confident that I will be able to win that particular job.

I have also been doing some programming on my trackers adding a couple of new features, as well as working on a minor bug. I have a few trackers to get out the door this week too, so I will need to get some more nail polish to hold in the screws. I have been told that pink would be the best colour to use this time... I am partial to the dark cherry myself, but I am happy to listen to other people's opinions. :-)

Anyway I had better get some more of the work done if I am to get to bed before midnight...

So let me see... Some running around this morning. The post office was fun this morning... I needed to post off four parcels and pick up one... Three of the parcels were eBay items and one was normal things that I sell. The people at the post office now not only know me by name, but also know the PO Box number off by heart... And would you believe they even let me fill in the 'Office Use Only' part of the customs declaration. I am not sure if you can get accounts at the Post Office, but if this continues I will need to get one I think.

Following that I went to get some other things for some projects - dropping in THE WAREHOUSE on the way. I have been looking for some more furniture for my office, and picked up a couple of 'stackable cubes with shelves for $17 each. Now I have seen them I can see myself getting at least another couple. This however has lead to a rearrangement of my desk. At one stage I had my iPod playing but had no idea where it was on my desk. It was there somewhere. I found it, and now have it in its place. But the rest of the desk is in chaos, but getting cleaner. Also, getting a couple of six way powerboards helped too...

When I was out I heard a Natalie Merchant song that I first discovered probably a week or so back. The song is 'Beloved Wife', and I am guessing it was not written by her. Anyway I guess you would call it a lament... It is telling of a man who has lost his wife of 50 years, wondering how he will cope; but also telling of the love they shared. I purchased this CD in the USA in 2004, and I have been slowly discovering it ever since.

you were the love
for certain of my life
for 50 years simply my beloved wife
with another love I'll never lye again
it's you I can't deny
it's you I can't defy
a depth so deep
into my grief
without my beloved soul
I renounce my life
as my right
now alone without my beloved wife
my beloved wife

It is amazing how some sleep just makes you feel so much better. I was really exhausted last night when I got home, and I really should have just fallen into bed and turned off the light... Instead the laptop got powered up and I found a friend wanted to talk about some bad news he had got. I could hardly say I was too tired, so I kept talking for a while...

Yesterday the plane got most of the top skin on at the rear finally. This is a job that we had all been dreading - there were images of me needing to crawl to the end of the fuselage tunnel holding a lump of metal inches above my head whilst the rivet on the other side was hit with a rivet hammer in a most sadistic manner. Thankfully we found another way. We turned the plane 75% of the way upside down, and I kneeled down and got my body into the back of the fuselage, with some foam between me and any of the plane providing some support.

This was MUCH eaiser to manage... MUCH! There were only a few times where I was thinking that I could do serious damage to myself if I dropped the bucking bar onto myself. The plane would have been protected by the foam... It was my head that was my main concern. I am told I looked rather awkward... I am not surprised... I felt it. I will try to get a copy of the photo to post here...

At times I had my head on the side of the fuselage which really amplified the noise... I am sure that the whole thing was acting as a huge speaker cone. Actually at one stage a truck drove by outside and the whole shell vibrated... I heard (or felt it) inside the fuse, but richard did not seem to hear it on the outside...

Today I have a few slightly sore muscles, but apart from that, I am happy that the job is basically done.

Finally home... And frankly I am slightly exhausted. Well, more than slightly. I am very exhausted. I have spent a long two days working on the plane, and I am now frankly happy to be in my own bed. I want to update this... I guess I will have to wait until I have had some sleep.

Tomorrow I need to spend some time and money at the post office sending off eBay stuff mostly.... Getting rid of junk that I have that other people want.

I am torn between getting an X-Box and getting something else to view files over the net. I like the idea of the X-Box, but there is one feature that it does not have. It does not have a video in feature. There are many PVR's or Personal Video Recorders available which can record and play back TV shows from a HDD, but they have one flaw. Most of them are locked to a HDD, and they do not have Ethernet. Then the other units that do have record, playback and Ethernet are not available here in Oz. All in all it is a real pain. Indications are I think that I need to wait at the moment.

The SMH has a photo of the box that was found by the russians belonging to the british. This box was used to hide secret documents as the UK spied on Russia. Interesting read.

I was doing some programming this morning in VB.NET, and needed to use the random number generator. This was fine, except for one point. I was testing my code, and it would never complete. The code needed to have a number returned, for instance, between 1 and 100. These were labeled by Microsoft as the Maximum and Minimum numbers. However, this would return numbers between 1 and 99, and my code would not work. Hmm. What is going on. It seems that the random number generator generates a number 'LESS THAN THE MAXIMUM'. In the case of an integer that is the number one less. ARGH. Why? How many other people have fallen into that trap? How many other times have I fallen into that trap and now known?

I ended up not going for a run... I worked out it was probably not a great idea if I wanted to actually get real work done today on the plane - in essence I was concerned that the running would tire me out - and I think that was a valid concern. So no great run today. Maybe tomorrow...

Last night I was watching 'Top Gear' from the BBC, and they were wanting to get people to vote on the best 'driving song' ever. That night they were featuring Bat Out Of Hell, performed by Meat Loaf. I quickly found the lyrics with google, and was amazed at how long they were. I was also amazed at how strange the lyrics look when written on paper. Not that you can understand them when being sung, but they look even worse on paper. Just my opinion. Not a bad song though.

When I started up my PC today, I had an outlook alert come up, advising me of an event. What is important about that? Well I set it about two years ago, and I have rebuilt the HDD on this PC since then, and outlook still remembers it. So, what would I schedule two years ago? Well, there is an internet domain about to expire and I was interested in registering it myself. Simple as that.

The SMH is reporting that Air Canada is about to introduce flights between Sydney and LA. This is likely to upset Singapore Airlines since they have been arguing that they should be allowed to operate on that route to provide competition and additional services. The report states that this will happen from 'next year' although I suspect they might mean this year.

I am considering going for a run this morning... I have not been all week, and the weather does not seem too bad... If I get motivated I might actually do three or four KM. We will see how it goes.

I have come to the conclusion that anything can be obtained on eBay. For instance I am a board member of TAPR, which is a wireless R&D organisation based in the USA. Anyway TAPR is now about 25 years old. One of the projects they released about 20 years back is being sold on eBay with a current bid of US$2. I am not sure if this will go up very much - I suspect that it will stay about that price. The person who is the top bidder is one of the other board members, and I think he has only bid so that he can have a complete collection of TAPR products. In this day and age there is no reason for a radio interface for a 20 year old computer.

Low End Mac has a story on the history of Pixar. I have a friend in the USA how was deeply involved in the very early days with working on some of the hardware used by the company. I did not know about much of the history of the organisation despite closely following the company over the years. Also, The Register is reporting that they have found a Flying Car in Western Australia. Well, that is what it looks like. It is probably a sunshade actually... But it is impossible to prove.

I mentioned earlier that I had concerns about a winner of an auction on eBay. Well, I finally heard from the winner, and he had an excuse - and I was pretty dumb for not working it out. Turns out he was in Victoria fighting fires, so it is understandable he was not able to contact me. But now I have been paid so I am happy. I will probably put the proceeds for this to buy an XBox for viewing digitized video files.

I have just been to Parramatta to see the Australia Day fireworks there. This was really good - I got to be really close to the actual fireworks and there was not much of a delay between the explosion of the fireworks and the sound reaching me. I was amazed at the echos - they were really distinct - and it would be interesting to do an acoustic model of the area based on the echo.

Tomorrow we are hoping to get the top skin on the plane. I think there is a good chance of this. But you never can tell. I may actually need to do work too, but I can generally put most of that off until a bit later...

The XBox has now been modded. This was actually fairly simple, with a board needed to be added to the unit. This contained some significant technology on it. I was amazed at how easy the mod was to add... I am a reasonable surface mount solderer, but I am sure that people who have never soldered surface mount before would not have too many issues installing the chip. The thing that came with this mod chip was a PCB that did most of the wiring on the underside of the board without needing actual wires. A quick solder link between the side of the wire board and the XBox PCB was all that was needed. I the chip worked first go. I would like to think that it was my soldering that made it work, but I am not convinced... I think it was just a good product.

Booting a CD-ROM with Linux produced some challenges... The CD-ROM would not boot, so we found a link to a site that included details on how to improve the reliability of the internal DVD drive, and we followed these instructions... And only then did we realise that the CD-ROM and the HDD were both set as a slave when we put them back into the machine due to other tinkering. Once corrected, the CD-ROM booted without problems. We cannot say if our mod helped, but regardless, CD-Roms now do work in the device. All in all some cool hacking!

Happy Australia Day!

News.COM.AU have released a list of fair dinkum holiday destinations here in Oz. Looking through the list there are some amazing places to visit. I really will have to check some of them out... It would be good to climb Mt Kosciuszko, or at least see it... Definitely a summer time activity for that one I suspect... I just need to find the time.

The Sydney Morning Herald have announced their Australia Day Dishonours List for 2006. The list is a hilarious list of who in Australia should be publically ridiculed for things that they have done. INXS was nominated for a Canadian Lead Singer. Rebecca Hewitt was nominated for diservices to poetry for her wedding. And Naomi Watts for saying she is more Brittish than Austalian. A good read.

Anyway I had better get going... The plan for this weekend is to have the top of the fuselage riveted on. This might be a tad ambitions, but we will see how that goes. Something to aim for at least.

Tomorrow apart from working on the plane I have another task to work on... I have to do an XBoxEctomy... I think that is what we are doing. We need to replace the HDD and then add a mod chip to the device. I have never opened up an XBox before so it will be interesting to see the internals. And since all the parts are surface mount I will be needing to use all my surface mount tools to do the work.

Make Magazine has a link to a site that contains instructions on how to convert chocolate into cafinated chocolate. The only way to improve things would be to somehow combine cocoa cola to this... Surely Cafinated Chocolate must be at least one of the five major food groups... And it is probably more than one :-) [One of these days I will actuallt get around to writing down the 10 or so five major food groups.]

The Register is reporting tha Pixar has been sold to Disney for about US$7b. That is a LOT of money. I was quite shocked at how much it was worth. After all, it is a newer annimation studio... And I thought it was one of the smaller ones too...

I managed to get the password to the Advanced Telematics Options menu of the Benefon phone. When I was told about this password, I was also informed that I am not 'permitted to develop a commercial application without a developers license'. Legally and morally this is wrong. The developers license is worth about A$60,000. Since I have developed the software without the need for such a license I cannot see the need to spend so much money. After all I have not used any confidential information to develop the software, and I am not using any tools they have provided.

Now the software is written I just need to put some screenshots on my WWW site... The final piece of marketing. Oh, and if you search in Google for "site:AU benefon", my site is number one. A great place to be!

The more I look at it, the more I love the little ZipIt Instant Messaging appliance. I know a few people who are going to kill for it. In fact, I suspect that if I show it to them I will not get it back, at least without the claw marks on the screen as I suspect I will have to pry it from their hands. The one real issue I have is the keyboard. A few times I have mis-typed things... There does not seem to be the ability to go back characters except with the backspace key deleting the text as you go. Still, it is a product I call insanely great. I really do just love the size!

I have found some hack sites here, here and here. Great descriptions I know... But these sites contain lots of useful information on the device.

The thing I love about driving on the M7 is that it is relatively serene and quiet. The road seems to generate little road noise. I just put the music on, and drive... you do need to be careful though not to speed.

More importantly, my ZIPIT arrived from the states a few minutes ago. This thing is so cute. Imagine a laptop a Teddy Bear would use... That is what I have here... You can see their site here, but they will not sell to the USA. I dont know why. The device runs linux too... I am going to install SSH on it... It really is a nice toy somewhere between a mobile phone and a PDA or laptop.

I am still working out how to drive this thing... I think it has an MP3 player built in too... It certainly has a WiFi card inside. What I did need to do was enter the MAC address into my DHCP server to get it working... And then it just worked. Enter my MSN details (darryl@radio-active.net.au) and things just worked. What more can I say!

1PM and not only am I home, but I have essentially finished the job I was working on as well as had lunch. There are a few things that still need to be done, but they are fairly minor things. And the client needs to get ADSL set up on his line so that I can configure the modem for him. Oh, and the electrician needs to install a power outlet next to the patch panel. The client really loves the simplicity of the panel. I just need to write up the manual for him. So that will be a quick job this afternoon. Well, I hope it is a quick job. Should be. I need to get that into the mail to him so that he has something when he moves in on tuesday.

I am disappointed with one of the buyers on eBay for one of my auctions... This person won the auction a couple of days ago and I am yet to hear from them. I am slightly disappointed obviously. At least I still have the goods :-)

A paper in New Zealand is reporting how David Lange left a number of papers to the country when he died. Now the boxes are opened they contain all sorts of interesting details on how New Zealand has been spying on other countries. And since the ex-Prime Minister is dead there is little that can be done against him, even if the NZ Archives had not given permission for their release.

I am one of those people who tends to wake up at the same time each day regardless of anything else... This is not bad if you forget to set your alarm (yeah, and when is the last time I actually needed to do that?), but can be a pain if you get to bed really late... I think today I will be having to bring on the Cocoa Cola, maybe in the extreme. I have some work to do today at Pymble (again) but there is not much there. I will have to go back in a week or so to finish getting everything set up and finished, but that will be a fairly short visit. Thankfully I have another client on the way who I might be able to visit too.

The UK Phone regulator is investigating phone roaming charges in europe. They are basically annoyed at the huge price differences and are looking at what can be done to improve the situation. I am glad that I am not out of the country all that often - roaming charges would get really expensive.

Finally, the MPAA (motion picture association of america) are the great campaigners against movie piracy. However according to an article, they have been caught illegally copying a DCD. The quote I love is "We made a copy of Kirby's movie because it had implications for our employees" basically saying that it was OK since there was a reason for the copying. This is just as justifiable as saying 'I made a copy of it since it was not in the store yet and I wanted to watch it'...

I am just waiting for a computer to reboot... No, not here. At a clients place. We are having issues with getting some reports to run correctly. It is not the reporting system problem, it is an issue with massaging the data before it gets to the reporting engine. The thing is that it seems to work correctly on my PC, but not on my clients PC. And I was hoping that a reboot would fix the issue. It does not seem to be fixed by sending a new DLL. Nor a new copy of the EXE.

And I have just solved it... The computer was working out if an object was within a certain distance of a point... and the user had made the distance rather small... Too small to account for all the errors, and the fact that normally he would need to park his vehicle 50m from a client site. So nothing was showing up in reports. When I increased the size by 10 times the reports started looking good. I was wondering why things were not working.. I thought I was going crazy. At least this is not a sign for that.

Just before I finally got the code working I finished off the PCB for the client and emailed it across. I do not expect to hear overnight - it will not be looked at until tomorrow... Still, he wanted this ASAP, so he gets it ASAP :-)

One strange thing with the Benefon phone - I have not managed to work out how to change the time. Right now the time is set on 1-August 2005 I believe. As far as I can tell there is no where you can change the date and timer. You can change the format of the details, but not the actual date and time. It is supposed to update these from GPS I think, but for some reason it does not seem to be doing that. Maybe I have not been using it correctly, and have not been using it outside enough, but I would have expected it to synchronise when I got GPS lock initially - since I am assuming that is where time comes from... Or time on this unit comes from as a reference at least.

It looks like there is another hour or so of work on the PCB that I have been working on. New requirements are appearing as we work on the project. More major changes, moving things around. This is like some perverted chess game, working out what the best way to lay out the board. There are tools for auto-routing, but I have not managed to work out how to use them. I plan to on my next PCB. It gets ridiculous when there are so many mods being made...

Anyway right now I had better get some food... Salmon salad I think... If I dont grab food I think I am going to fade...

Must be soon time for dinner... I went out for lunch at a place at seafood restraunt at Pymble, and I really have not been all that hungry; Until now that is. A client rang me to get some more mods done on a circuit board, and he had to escape when his wife let him know that dinner was ready, and asked if I had eaten dinner yet. Well, um, no. Being rather cheeky, I then told him 'Can you send me some over...', and was politely advised that it was 'experimental' and it may not be so wise. On the same token though it was a Neil Perry recipie (the QANTAS Chef) and was not made by Qantas Catering (I did ask) so I placed my order... I somehow do not like my chances of a home delivery.

Just to prove that it really is a small world, one of the people at the meeting today is a mechanical engineering genius. He builds mounting hardware for eftpos systems, and retail point of sale systems and the like. We got talking and THE PLANE came up - it turns out that he is a plane lover. So I mentioned the type of plane we were building, not expecting him to know anything about it. His reply was more along the lines of 'Nice Plane', and the stranger 'I did start building an RV8, but then decided the RV10, (the four seat version) was what I wanted to do so I have decided to delay things whilst I get my license'. Interesting... And he showed me prototype mounting hardware for a small LCD screen... Ahh, Alclad. From an RV8... Oh... Recycling. The other strange thing...

Turns out I have driven past his house too many times to count - He also lives in Castle Hill... Might be an idea to wait for him to build his RV10 before commiting to building one of them... Interesting meeting... Very small world!

No names to protect the guilty... I contacted a company wanting to get an access code to a piece of equipment. They do not charge for access to this part of the firmware. In fact this menu is supposed to be available for users. So I contact the local support organisation for the equipment. Their response was not 'No Problem', or even 'No Hope', it was 'That piece of equipment is more than two years old... We suggest you upgrade it, and we have attached a pricelist'. The price list DID NOT contain a list of the price for upgrade, and they have not yet provided the code I need. We will see what happens tomorrow - I suspect that they are going to stall.

I hate going places for meetings in many ways... It just seems to take so much out of the day. Being somewhere, getting there and back, lunch, and all the other messing around just seems to take time out of the day. So in the end it just seems like nothing has got done. I know this is not true, but that is just how it seems. Actually it is true to some extent.

I got a charger cable today from the UK for my Benefon phone. I only ordered this last week, and once again I was expecting it to take much much longer to get this cable. It was a car charger, which I do not really need at the moment since the phone came with a 240V charger. But I did not know that when I bought it, and the cable was cheap. Actually the cable with postage from the UK was cheaper than just postage from Brisbane. You can find some bargains on the net. Then again A friend of mine bought 2000 AA batteries on eBay, and they all leaked when they got placed into equipment - that became rather expensive!

I have been receiving an eMail list for a while on Computer Aided Drafting issues. This goes back to my Pacific Power days. There was a great quote there today under the heading of 'Spin Doctor of the Moment'. Jonathan Knowles, former Adobe employee now heading up DWF at Autodesk commented that "...I wouldn't fly in an airplane that was designed from a PDF."

Thankfully the RV7 that I am helping Richard build is not built using PDF's... Well, mostly not. Some of the manuals are scanned to PDF, but they are fairly safe. I hope... Maybe we should audit things later this week :-)

Laptops are not the biggest ever area to be concentrated on by people modifying hardware. Actually, there are not many mods available at all. Even less to reduce the performance of the hardware. Nordic Hardware have released instructions on how to underpower CPU's in laptops to improve battery life. Sounds like a cool concept! But I will NOT be trying it on my poor laptop! No Way!

I have managed to get my Benefon phone working - the problem turned out to be the battery - I bypassed an IC Switch inside the battery and put it on charge for a few minutes and things started working. The battery is now up to 20% charged - correction... 23% charged. As yet I have not tested the GPS functionality, so that will be my next step. I also have not managed to change the settings for where position SMS messages get sent since Benefon seem to like to stop people 'playing' and lock users out of this setting. So I have emailed them to get the phone unlocked.

Once that is done I can start having some real fun. It appears that the protocol is slightly different from what I thought... Then again it may be the SMS library. Just checking that. No. SMS Library looks good, so it looks like the protocol documentation is not totally accurate. Simple fix.

On the subject of the SMS control software from the PC, this is now working much much better... If I send an SMS I now only receive one SMS in return. This is fantastic - and how the software should have been behaving to start with.

The SMH is reporting that there have been some complaints that watermarks added to TV channels are causing burn-on on Plasma TV's, and that owners are being warned to be careful of their contrast and brightness settings. This has always been a problem with computer monitors - you can see this on the screens on any railway platform...

They also have an article Suggesting that higher airfares are on the way

Earlier I commented on traffic with the M7 and M2 combination. Traffic was a bit heavy from Brooks road on the F5 to the M7 turnoff, and then was basically at the speed limit up until the start of the M2... Then things slowed down. I was frankly surprised at how quickly the traffic slowed... Much from the Northern Road entrance to the M2 slowing things down. But I was impressed. Coming home I did the reverse trip, and found it even faster. I was having to actively manage the speed I was driving at. The M7 should have a 110KM speed limit, but unfortunately it does not.

The Benefon phone is not working. ARGH. I have worked out that the battery pack is dead. It is not the batteries that has died, but the charging circuit included in the battery. If I put the multimeter on the battery terminals I do not get any voltage at all. There seems to be a device in the battery that has failed. I have ordered a new battery from Brisbane, but I will not get it before Wednesday at the earliest. Slightly disappointing, but understandable. The battery probably failed after the phone was last used. But this has not soured my throughs of eBay. These things happen.

Oh, and I was asked today if I was interested in a couple of overseas trips in the next few months. Sounds interesting... I am waiting to get some more details, but I guess I should be dusting my passport off soon....

My Benefon phone arrived today on eBay. It appears that the battery on it is not charging for some reason. I hope I can get it running without too many issues. The phone is not bad... About the size of a Nokia 5110 but with a GPS antenna... Cool.

I dont think I have mentioned this before... Some people go a tiny bit too far when it comes to fish. This site shows someone who built a 200,000 liter fish tank in his house... That is the equivalent of a few normal house swimming pools. Cool project.


The Wikipedia Foundation have released a competition for the best photos... The results are here.

I loved one of the runner ups... It is available here.

Home at last... I can tell you it has been hot outside. I was drinking LOTS of liquid this afternoon - I just kept filling a used 600 ml coke container with water and pretty soon it would be empty. The main problem was lack of airflow rather than great heat. I ended up doing six hours cabling today... Terminating Cat5 and TV sockets, testing them and making sure they all worked. Half the hassle was finding them.

At one stage I was searching for a cable - and checked east of the 12 or so locations in the house it could have terminated in. No... Didnt work. Try on one of the other wires. No. Try again, just in case I am too dumb to get it right. No luck. Think for a moment... Where could it be... How about behind the door in the same room as the other end of the cable... That is it... Found it! Probably 10-15 minutes wasted by me being dumb.

Still, this was not as dumb as the sign I saw today... It said 'Rego Cheacks'.

Good thing I remembered that this job was on today. I had a phone call from the client when I was almost to his house - it would have been slightly embarrasing if I had not remembered I had the job on today. An associate who was doing another part of the job had totally forgotten until I rang him. Thankfully his job is smaller and he does not need to be here until wednesday. So far I have installed almost all the outlets in the house, and I just need to install the patch panel next. This might be a bit of a pain but I dont think it will be too bad. I will be mostly finished in two or three hours I would guess

It is a bit warm outside... I can assure you all of that. Being in a house without electricity seems to make things hotter. Do does having to have long pants on for safety. Stupidly I grabbed a hot pie for lunch. Not the wisest move, but still, it was food, and it was nearby. I also dropped in at a friends business at lunch time to pick up a few things... And he asked what I was doing for lunch tomorrow. He has organised a meeting and really really wants me there... Guess I am being taken out to lunch tomorrow!

Sometimes I am a bit of an idiot... No! You do not need to agree with me. I was planning to be doing some work last week to finish of a job. Soon after that time was arranged we decided that it would not be last wednesday, but the 23rd. And of course I wrote it down as Wednesday 23rd January. And the 23rd is today. So I am supposed to be working on installing cabling today at Pymble. Thankfully I have not much else on, and it was flexable as to which day I was doing it. But even so I think I should put some time in today over there. Besides, I need to grab some other parts nearby too for a couple of other projects.

I will try the M7/M2 combination I think... See how that is in peak periods. How bad can it be :-) Ok, this is Sydney. But then again, this is not somewhere like Rome which has the worst traffic jams I have ever ever seen. But I am told that much of europe is like this...

Sundays paper had a short story about the mentor that Simone Warne went to as a way to help her through her split with Shane. Rather an insightful article, and personalizes Simone really well...

Intel have been playing with the Itanium processor. I mean messing with the internals, like removing the 32 bit hardware compatibility moving to software emulation. CNet discovered this and got a strange letter from Intel according to The Register. The letter comes from Will Swope who I met back in 2001 at an Intel Sales and Marketing Conference where I was doing some consulting work. Will is one of these people who is really really smart, and knows it, and has the social skills to make fun of it. Smart Character...

The SMH is reporting today that the baggage system at Sydney Airport is still really bad. It seems that performance peaked at the Sydney Olympics, and things have been bad ever since. At the moment they are undergoing a $100m upgrade to ensure that 100% of international bags are x-rayed, and this is making things worse. On January 1 where the temperatures were really hot the baggage system actually failed causing almost all flights to be delayed.

When I was a baby I used to love watching the fish in a fish tank, so I am told. I have no memory of this for some reason! None at all. I still find watching fish generally soothing and peaceful. There is one thing for sure... I would never actually build a fishtank like this. Actually I do not know anyone who would. This tank is about 200,000 liters. That is a lot of water by anyones standards.

And for the person who has built everything comes instructions on how to build a HDTV video projector. Really cool.

I have come up with some rules for eBay.

1. Do not bid on any items until the end. The exception here is when you want the item to appear on the list of bids rather than the watch list.
2. Do not sell more than one item at once unless you want the price to drop. If you run it as a dutch auction you are less likely to have people bid against each other. Sometimes even delay between items so people think you do not have any more left.
3. Use the 10 day option if you have something that you think might not sell well. You want to maximise exposure.
4. Just because a seach for something does not bring up any results does not mean that it will not sell on eBay. And if it does not sell this week it does not mean that it will not sell next week.
5. Having said that, there are some items that will not sell on eBay.

I have just finished watching the first series of MythBusters - and it has been fantastic. It is not surprising that this has been a hit series. If any readers have not seen this show then I would suggest examining this show. Even watersking behind a row boat...

Whilst watching it I have also been tidying my desk a tiny bit - getting recepits and putting them in the right folders and thrown out paper that is not needed. More is needed... As always... Having seen that I am about to fall asleep... I dont normally need an afternoon sleep... But I guess I need one today.

Just checking on some eBay auctions of mine. It is good to see a bit of bidding action... And some 'watching' activity from others. What I am becoming increasingly aware of that there is little use in bidding early on in the process. You should wait until the last minute if you want the best price. This is not the best if you are selling of course.

During the last week I purchased a VoIP phone from eBay. The phone works well even if I needed to do some searching on the internet to find a copy of the manual. And even then the manual was not particularly useful. But the phone is quite good, and it has good quality audio, as well as an extensive address book. A but of GSM interference does get into it but that is not a major problem really. The display on the phone has characters about 1cm high so they are actually legible across the desk. It also displays the date and time having synchronised to a time server which in itself is a cool feature. Yesterday though the LOGIN green LED was flashing all the time. From what I can work out the VoIP provider was uncontactable so the light came on to warn me. Cool.

The headline from a News.Com.Au says it all... 'Slippery when wet for Bon Jovi Jet' which tells the story about how a 707 owned by the group Bon Jovi skidded off the runway in Canada in a heavy rainfall.

I just saw a small presentation on the Net by Applied materials which creates the equipment used by most microchip manufacturer. I learned a few details which I had no idea about in this presentation - and I had done some of the things mentioned in Uni. Quite enlightening. Not for everyone though...

Cool new product - although probably not really useful in Sydney at this time of year - is the Slanket. This is a blanket with sleeves. With this blanket you can sit in bed, on a lounge or in a chair and read or use a video game of something like that without getting cold arms. Given the weather in Sydney at the moment I dont think it will be needed for some time. Cute design though.

PVR's or Personal Video Recorders are becoming popular in many parts of the world. They really have not made inroads into the Australian market for some reason. PVR's record your TV programs to a HDD automatically - rather a cool feature. The problem with almost all these units is that they will only record a single TV channel. So SnapStream have developed their own box that does 11 channels at once. This is probably a bit of overkill in the extreme... But is slightly cool.

Just heard... The Tropical Cyclone off the Western Australian coast has been named after me... Yes. Me. It is Tropical Cyclone Daryl. I just wish they had got the spelling of my name correct!

I was watching a new episode of 'My Family' on the ABC, and I was having a great time watching it. This episode had the two main characters house-sitting in a new 'designer' apartment with no door-handles, voice activated lights and security systems. They ended up actually trashing the place... I am not sure I would have reacted any differently if I was in such a place... They even had an old fashioned chase in the foyer shaped like a rabbit warren.

In the SMH today is an article in the 'PS - Private Sydney' section of the paper about newsreaders. There is a quote at the end of the article that I loved... 'Others don't have it so good. Making economy class look more like first class was Nine's Sharyn Ghidella, who regularly has to suffer the staring hordes in the budget end of Qantas flights, even though she is the airline's official in-flight newsreader.'. I just find it slightly strange that the newsreader would need to see herself on the screen in the economy section...

The SMH also had an article about the proble that has just been launched for Pluto. It turns out that NASA added a small extra payload to the probe - they added some ashes from the man who discovered Pluto in 1930. The widow of the discoverer was there for the launch too. Finally, Alitalia was forced to cancel 130 flights today and warned of delays on other international and internal services as cabin crew and pilots continued industrial action. While a strike that disrupted flights on Thursday and yesterday was suspended until Monday, some staff still stayed away from work, while unions were holding mass meetings. This has been going on for some time, and relates to a desire to rationalize the Alitalia business...

Lawns mown. They took a bit over an hour, but should have taken less time. The starter cord broke once again. Thankfully this time I did not need to look for cord to replace it with unlike last time. This time I just needed to replace it and install it. This was easier said than done since the cord was actually slightly big, but it worked. Well, eventually. The first time I tried it the cord would not retract. So off it came again, but thankfully I did not need to re-thread the cord. Also, despite the appearance to the contrary, the ground was not all that damp. Things are fairly dry out there actually, particularly on the top.

I got the user interface implemented for the Benefon tracking system. You can now right click on some vehicles and say that you want to start tracking. It will ask you how many seconds between SMS position reports, and how many minutes you want it to be tracking, and it will send SMS messages to each of the phones. I have not yet implemented the 'cancel tracking' button... It will be the next one. In some ways I do not want to implement this feature since it would be a way for the system to stop the system working.

After doing the lawns I had a call asking about the firmware inside the Oz-Flarm... There were some reports of an issue, and I just needed to check that out... No issues found thankfully...

The patch panel for the installation job this week has been built, and painted. At least the undercoat has been painted. I also managed to throw some junk out - I found a few tins of paint that were empty or had dried out. I really should go through all the tins to see what to throw out. Still, that is for later. The panel is about 40x50cm, and has holes for the outlets and cables to come through. When I get to the clients house all I need to do is feed through the cables and screw this to the wall. That is far far easier than trying to do the work inside the cupboard where the cables are terminated. Later I will grab some photos and post them - once the paint is dry that is.

Having got into the cleaning mood with paint tins I also managed to put together a bag of old clothes for recycling. How many old T-Shirts and jeans do I really need? They are just taking up space in the wardrobe and in my drawers. I still want to get rid of more but what i have done is a good start.

I have been watching some of MythBusters, and I really love this show. Some of the science is a bit shall we say, um, simplified. For the sake of TV they do not make the text as extensive as they could have. One of the things was dropping a dummy from 50m high from a crane. They were testing if having a tool belt under the person would have helped when they hit the water. They used a sledgehammer which is probably a tiny bit light. What was cool was a wooden cannon that they built. The wood needed steel bands around the outside, and they showed how these were forged - with the hot steel rivets being hit - really hit this time.

Right now I have some lawns to mow...

Long time readers know about the saga of what my first live dog is going to be called - not that I am saying I want one, but if I ever did it MUST be called BYTE. I think that is such a great name for a dog... Byte. I can see problems during training but it would be so cute.

So I looked at some interest at this page which described a project making a RoboSapien Robot Dog follow a lego robot in a bizzare form of catch. Cool project but I really cannot totally see the point. Byte would be a REAL dog, not some robot. Sure it would be nice to be able to program the dog not to chew the furniture, but that is half the fun with dogs.

The electrical wholesaler was a tiny bit more expensive than I had thought, but the client will be paying. Still, it would have been nice to get the price reduced slightly from what I ended up paying. Not much I can do about it though since it was all needed. I need to soon take some of the parts and get them made up into a panel I can install, along with a tiny bit of design work that I need to do too. Probably a good thing I am not working on the plane today then...

I have also been working on the SMS interface to my TeamTrack software. Right now the software will send out a POLL for a set of vehicles and display the positions when it is returned. The next features are to send a command to start tracking the phones every x seconds, and a cancel feature for when tracking is no longer needed. These features should be fairly quick to implement. Some models of the phones do not have the auto-track feature in-built so I need to implement that myself - it will probably just send an SMS out as a periodic event in order to fake the tracking feature - sort of an automatic POLL.

And if I get real energetic I need to mow the lawns. Yesterday evening when I was running I was pretty sure I could see the grass growing in parts. The lawns here are the same. If I wait a few days things will be really really horrible when I then go to mow. So I guess that is one more job. Good exercise though. [And a post script on the exercise, I managed not put on any weight over christmas and new-year. Not a bad achievement. ]

Shopping Time... I have a job early this week at Pymble, and I need supplies. So one of my jobs for this morning is to pick up the parts from the local electrical wholesaler. Should be an entertaining experience. Or should I say a costly one! Thankfully the client is paying...

This afternoon I was working with the SMS based tracking into my TeamTrack software. I did actually get it working this afternoon despite some issues, such as not actually having the SMS phone yet - and also with an SMS control that still has some bugs. SInce I did not have the phone I was sending the position reports from a PC based application from my PC... Just faking the position reports. I actually just sent SMS reports from the phone to it's own phone number - loopback mode.

This actually worked well, apart from a few timeouts in the drivers for the SMS. I ended up getting multiple SMS's sent, and even more received. This I believe is due to bugs in the serial port driver which should be able to be fixed without too many issues. I would send one position report, three would get sent over the air, and five or six copies would be received. Within a few days this will be working correctly I would guess. Tomorrow I will probably be doing some debugging of the SMS driver as well as doing some user interface options for when I actually get the phone.

Right now I am having some time off... Watching a Katie Holmes movie called 'Teaching Mrs Tingle'. Looks like an interesting movies - but It really does seem to pale into insignificance compared to '10 things I gate about you'. I will see how much of the movie I will see... I am starting to get tired.

The weather is beautiful outside - it really is. There is not a cloud in the sky and the sun is slowly setting - and there is a slight wind. And things are fairly quiet. It is the time of day that I like - and I guess the type of day I love too. I would really love to be sitting on a beach somewhere rather than at this PC inside. Still, even inside here it is nice.

So why was I outside admiring the beauty of nature? Well, that is easy. I went for another run. I think I ran about 4.3KM or so. It took me a bit over 30 minutes so I am guessing at the distance. I managed to do another loop of the oval, and take a slightly longer path from the oval home too. I will have to start running more in the evenings since it is so peaceful out there - and is a good oportunity to wind down after a hard days work.

Todays meeting was interesting - it will be interesting to see if it takes of. If it does then things will be amazing... You can never tell. I am seriously thinking who I can bring in to work on some of the projects I am being thrown at the moment... So much work, and so little of me. I could try and clone myself, but I dont know that the world really needs another me!

When I was out today before I put the iPod on I had the radio on - and there was a hauntingly beautiful song on. It was 'Beautiful Life' which in the past had been performed by the 'Ace of Bass'. It is only now that I have been able to seach iTunes that I have found that this is being performed by Tina Cousins. She has two versions on her latest album - I did find the 'Ballad' version the nicest of the two.

It was really hard on the freeway not to just close my eyes and listen to the music. The piano was so clear, and the vocals were amazing. The lyrics are available here. Like many songs, the lyrics are so powerful. I can see why someone like Tina Cousins chose to record this song :-
I just wanna be here beside you
And stay until the break of dawn
Take a walk in the park when you feel down
There’s so many things there
That’s gonna lift you up
See the nature in bloom a laughing child
Such a dream, oooh
It’s a beautiful life, oooh...

I can see how it can happen, but I do not totally believe it. A mueseum in spain has lost a 38 ton sculpture. It is not as bad as it sounds. The sculpture was in storage, and when a new director came in and ordered an inventory it was discovered that the storage company had gone bankrupt six years before. Oops.

The issue of Pherotones has become a hot potato with the Wikipedia entry facing deletion. IdeaGrove and Adrants have entries on the issue suggesting that McKinney is doing everyone a dis-service with this campaign. They point out that a company has made a grand mistake when people stop calling their campaigns marketing and start calling it lying.

According to Billboard, Kelly Clarkson has refused permission for any of her songs to be used in the next series of 'American Idol'. It was the 2002 series of that show which gave her a break into the music industry. It must be hard for someone like Clarkson when placed in that situation since she needs to break away from the show if she wants to be succesful in her own right. In a few years I am sure she will allow her songs to be used, but not right at the moment.

Also on the Music front, Universal Music have announced that they are digitizing a back catalog of 100,000 songs that are not on CD such as Marc Almond, Creme, Nana Mouskouri, Brigitte Bardot, Chris de Burgh, Big Country and Marianne Faithfull. Whilst I may not actually buy copies of any of these, Universal is doing a good job ensuring that people who might have access. The first 3000 songs will be available in February.

Morning meeting today with a new client. Should be a fairly quick meeting, but you never can tell. Sometimes the meetings that you expect to take five minuts take hours. And the reverse is true sometimes too! Then I need to do some serial port snooping working on this SMS project. With some luck my new cellphone will be here today. I am not hopeful but you never know. Then I will have cellphone tracking just like the movies.

Yesterday I had a phone call from a potential client. I have calls all the time about people wanting to track elderly relatives, but this was a new one. They wanted to track a six year old with some developmental problems since he loves to escape from the house at night and go missing. I really did not have much to offer except to suggest that the client contact some nursing home suppliers and see what they had. It must be hard for the parents.

Anyway I had better get going, I have some planning to do for this meeting...

Slight problem with the SMS control. Only minor one. The code to send SMS messages is working, but for some reason it is being a tiny bit too aggressive with the formatting requirements of responses. As an example, I sent four SMS messages to myself. This was fine. Except for the fact that I actually received about 73 SMS replies. Thankfully they are only a cent eact.

I could not work out if this was a receive issue or a transmit issue. So I sent an SMS to my cellphone. And rather than getting a single message I got seven. Count them. Seven. So it is a problem with transmit. The SMS control is not working correctly detecting a successful send and is therefore sending the same message a number of times. Not too bad at once cent per message (apart from any speed issues) but terrible when it costs 25 cents or more.

This should be simple to work out. Tomorrow I wil do some debugging - putting the serial snifffer online and seeing what the modem is doing. Then I need to write a spec to put a number of these modems on the same computer.

I have traced the problem with the SMS control. It has to do with the PIN NUMBER function of the SonyEricsson modems. The cards do not have a PIN number requested. And I should have worked this out a lot faster. When no PIN is needed, the phone will tell you that you need to enter a PUK2 code when you ask if a PIN is needed. This is strange behavior, but when you realise this things work better. Since I need a few other things changed I have just let the programmer know so that he can change the code on his end.

Once this has been changed things will be working a whole lot better. Better debugging capabilities are needed in the server control too. That is a minor thing to improve really. And it will not need much effort.

Oh. Yesterday I asked for a price for a developers kit for some software. They said 29.000 euro for the license, and then 3.000 Euro each year. Fine. 29 Euro was not too bad. Then I found today it was 29,000 euro. That is not acceptable. So I spoke to the Australian customer service person today and was told that I could get much support if needed subject to some limitations. So thanks to google and customer support I have just saved 29,000 Euro. Well, not really. I would NEVER have paid that much, but you know what I mean.

Why so much? I do not know. Probably to restrict access to the information. And stop people like me developing applications that are significantly cheaper than their own solutions...

ARGH. Some issues with the SMS control. I am not sure what is wrong, but the software cannot seem to work out what the SMS Message Control Centre number is. This is strange. It used to work, but is not working now that I have changed to Telstra SIM cards, even when I am using an Optus SIM. Hmm... What is happening?

My VoIP phone arrived a bit earlier. It is actually a nice phone - seems like good audio quality, and only took about 25 minutes to configure. A manual would have helped, but I am not sure how much. The pain of it all is though that I found out that my VoIP provider will only allow one user logged in at once. I guess that means that I need to finally get the VoIP PABX up and running - I will probably do that under Windows but we will see...

I also posted off a parcel to the UK for an eBay purchase. Australia Post somehow decided that a GPS in a small postpack could be classed as a large letter and therefore cost only $1.80 rather than $9.80. The woman at the post office was insistent that it was the correct price - who am I to argue. Sounds really cheap to me - and I normally cannot sell similarly priced articles within Australia for that price. Then again normally my parcels are a bit larger.

I grabbed a couple of prepaid SIM cards at the post office too. $25 including $25 in call credits. That is enough for me to make something like 5000 SMS calls over the next six months I hope that is enough for testing my software. I do need to wait for my new phone to turn up now too... I could have got another two Nokia phones for an extra $50 but frankly I did not see the need. I have enough of them, and it would really be a waste. Hmm. Now all I need to do is get the SIM's activated... How painful can that be... Oh, it is Telstra. Expect the worst!

Home after a couple of meetings. Not sure what I can say about them, but here goes. The first meeting went well... I found a parking spot at the Redfern Shopping Centre. It is amazing how these little shopping centres are still all around the place, and still have free parking. Not even a gate to enforce two hours free. Anyway that got me to within a hundred meters of the cafe I was meeting the client.

I am not sure that I would go to the cafe again. I found the seats to be too hard. They were a matrix of wood and nothing. Not comfortable at all. Actually I would say quite uncomfortable. I guess the meeting went for about 90 minutes, pitching a few ideas and just discussing the entire TV industry at the same time. Turns out that the person I was meeting with knew people in common with me. Not sure what will happen now with this, but we will see. If nothing else it is another contact within the industry.

The second meeting was to look at the circuit board I have been working on for what seems like ages. A few more modifications were needed, and I spent probably a couple of hours working on this. Hmm. Lots of work. Still it will end up taking less time working on this board than making one unit up by hand without the board.

Finally the IP phone I purchased on eBay arrived today after a week... .I am just about to test it... Wish me luck!

I need to pick up a couple of pre-paid SIM CARDS with Telstra today. They offer 1c per SMS between prepaid users, and this will be good to load test the SMS software as well as to test the SMS based tracking phone when it arrives in a few days. I am not sure how reliable the 1c SMS will be, but I cannot complain for the price. Dick Smith also have one that comes with a phone for only $20 more so that might be cool too. Then again I have more phones here already than I know what to do with. Australia has more SIM cards than people. I am one of the reasons for that.

I have done some digging into Pherotones. It seems that the company has its domain registered in North Carolina. I am guessing here but it is my guess that this site is being operated by McKinney Silver for a number of reasons. According to their registration information, they are also registered in North Corolina. But that is is not proof... Not by a long shot. Through some digging I have believe that McKinney Silver have classified this microsite as an interactive client, with job number 7216. I have emailed McKinney Silver to confirm this. Basically this sounds like a grass roots gurilla advertising campaign to me.

Time to get going... Reality TV, here I come!

This morning I have a meeting with a company doing a Reality TV show. Before being scared with the prospect of me appearing on 'Big Brother' or 'Survivor', or even worse, 'Australian Idol', do not be alarmed. I have not been asked to appear on the show. I have in fact been asked to talk to the shows producers as a technical consultant. Not sure of many details at the moment, but I am sure I will find them out in due course. So it *is* safe to watch your TV. At least as safe as it was yesterday at least.

It may not be safe to use your cellphone though, according to O'ReillyNet. They have provided a link to Pherotones which are ring tones which are supposed to make you totally and utterly irresistable to members of the opposite sex. Before putting your hard earned cash on the table ordering the complete collection I should tell you this. I have searched and searched and I cannot find how to purchase these ringtones. There are some demos, but you cannot buy them.

My guess is that this is a spoof... Concidering that I have not found any reference to the 'Auditory Institute' where this was developed except for the site itself, and Iran where the 'Auditory Institute' deals with auditing accounts. Hmm. Now the only question is WHY....

Finally, here is a link to a site in the Netherlands which contains a student's sculpture project in wood. It is hand carved and deserves a look!

The MythBusters show is really cool. Discovery have now released some videos that did not quite make it into the shows - dues to potential liability with the actions shown. Some things are apparently too dangerous or irresponsible to show, and they were afraid of being black-banned from networks I would guess.

News.Com.AU is reporting that the victorian police have ordered that photographers not take photographs of certain pieces of infrastructure. 'POLICE directives about what could and could not be photographed were an abuse of power and should be ignored' the article noted. This was following a report in a Melbourne newspaper today which said a member of the Geelong Camera Club received a visit from police after he photographed gas storage cylinders at the city's Shell oil refinery.

I did a 3-4Km run a bit earlier. Same distance as my last time, although I think that I did it slightly faster. I cannot be sure. I really need to drag out my GPS and start taking it with me again. Until then I just have to guess. True to form, and in line with my guess I got a phone call about five minutes after starting - which promptly got put onto hands free and I kept running for the next five minutes or so that the phone call took. I survived that fairly well.

The second half of the run had very light misty rain falling at times. Once again my glasses saved my eyes from getting much water into them. Still, I can understand why people wear headbands. I have also done 20 situps. I can feel my tummy muscles getting stronger - but it does take time. And requires me to keep at the exercise.

I have started on the SMS tracker... It is fairly easy to do when I look at the details. In the next few days I will be getting a Benefon phone I purchased on eBay which will allow me to get it up and running. Cute fone - has a GPS built in allowing me to be tracked at any time... Hello Big Brother.

ZD Net has a story titled The Essence of a Geek.

The cable for the SMS application worked well. Actually, so did the application, but I am getting ahead of myself here. I got much of the programming outsourced. Frankly I could have done the work without issue, but right now I really do not have the time. Step one was to get the modem working with my PC. I have a heap of SonyEricsson modems removed from old tracking units. They are missing the RF modules, but they are fairly cheap. Power cables for these units are a pain since they use RJ12 like telephones. Then the serial cable needed to be made up too - not too hard; I used a VGA cable for one end and put a DB9 socket on the other.

This would have worked first go except for two things. Actually three things. Firstly, I forgot to plug the power into the modem. Then I forgot to plug the serial cable into the PC. And lastly the GSM module in the phone was faulty. Replacing it was easy, and it now all works. Or the hardware works.

I tried the software out, and it worked first go. Reads out the serial number of the SIM, Signal Level, model of the modem amongst other things. What I really like is the test application that comes with the work I got done. To send a text message all you need to do is
If wrSMS.Open Then
wrSMS.Add("0412929634", "This is a test of SMS Sending")
wrSMS.Close()
End If

Receiving is almost as simple...
If rdSMS.Open Then
TB.Lines() = rdSMS.Retrieve
rdSMS.Close()
End If



Now all I need to do is write the tracking application to go with this.

One quote written, one phone call receieved putting me onto a short list for a Request for Quotes. And about to make up a serial cable. Not a bad effort for a morning I would guess. And it is only just 9AM. What I really need to do now is get the modem running so that I can actually get some more testing done. If it does not work my quote might be useless even if they choose me. When I started making up the cable I got out the documentation for the modem. I found all the information I needed - in two different documents. Unfortunately they did not line up. I am sure that the 2nd document is wrong since it describes a cable I do not have. We will see soon though.

I will probably go for a short run soon too. I know - it does take some time out of my work day, but provided I take my phone with me then I really am not too badly off. It takes dedication to keep running whilst talking on the cellphone on hands free speaker phone - something that I have done in the past. You have to be really careful of your breathing though if you do that - if not you are likely to faint. So kids, do not try this at home. Certainly not whilst trying to cross the street dodging traffic :-)

I am getting some real interest from a couple of my eBay auctions. One for a PAGER RECEIVER and another for some SOLAR CELLS. Both are leftover from an old consulting project and have just been collecting dust. It must have taken me 15 minutes to find the software for the RECEIVER - it was on an old backup and took some time to find it. Actually I found it and did not realise I had found it for another five minutes. Mostly you only need the software to configure the unit, rather than for operational use. This is good since the software runs under DOS!

A friend of mine just MSN'ed me from New Zealand. He is having some issues with his satellite dish - or more correctly the satellite finder for it. This is a device that you put on the lead and will help you actually get a picture. Amazing little device costing under $100 and reduces the pain significantly of aligning a dish. Well, it would if it worked. I have given him some ideas of what to try, and told him that if he cannot get it working I will just have to come over and try it myself!

Overnight I got some software to test... The SMS code I have been waiting for. By the end of the week I should have an SMS based cellphone tracking system up and running if all goes well. Todays job, apart from dealing with other issues, will be to test the SMS functionality - which will involve grabbing a GSM modem out of stock and making up a few cables for it. I do not expect any issues since it has been tested by the programmer - but I like to make sure that I can get things to work too... and then see what changes I need. I have a few in mind already.

Once again the to-do list is expanding. I do get things off it, but rather slowly it seems. Before bed tonight I intend to get a proposal to a client down south of the border. The problem I am having now is that I need to provide a coherent list of the options to the client so that they can choose which way they go. And do this whilst I do not have an existing product. And do this whilst getting to bed at a reasonable time. The good thing about an expanding to-do list is that I am having to open MYOB several times a day to do invoices. This is fantastic. It means that there is enough money coming in - I dont think I have not created an invoice any working day this year which is fantastic.

I made Honey Soy stirfry for dinner. Turned out to be really nice with some penne pasta. It tasted really nice although I think that the penne needed a bit more cooking - it was slightly under done; a few more minutes in the rice cooker would have improved it a bit.

More work... Bids to prepare... Software to write. Hardware to build. I think this year is going to be amazing. I think I finally have a buyer for my SMS based tracking solution. 90% of the software is already designed and running - I just need to bolt it together and write the proposal for the client. Some of the architecture will need to wait unfortunately until I get some documentation back from a programmer I have doing some work for me. I have an idea of how much I want to charge this client - I just need to work on the breakdown for them. But I think it will be a VERY good year...

More exercise, but given the weather it is inside - in the form of sit-ups. I managed to get 30 done, although I suspect that was about five too many.

Earlier when I was out two songs performed by 'The Pretenders' were played on my iPod on random play. They were I'll stand by you and Hymn to Her. I just love these songs - I guess they are love songs, but not quite the normal 'everything is perfect type' but more of the 'I am here for you' type meaning that these ones actually say something. If you click on the lyrics above and read them you will see what I mean. How powerful! What else could you say about lyrics like :-
When you're standing at the crossroads,
don't know which path to choose,
Let me come along, cause even if your wrong
I'll stand by you, I'll stand by you,
won't let nobody hurt you,
I'll stand by you.
Take me into your darkest hour,
and I'll never desert you.
What more could be said about the song?