Today has been a long day... What with finding out about Bill Kovacs and also doing actual work. A friend of mine from New Zealand will probably be flying to the states to go to the funeral, although I will not be able to make it since I have another funeral to go to over here...

The coding I have been doing has involved working on a forms designer for the upgrade to my TeamTrack application. This has been challenging since it has involved learning the details of more of the deep internals of the .NET framework and inheritence.

When I was at the office I kept getting messages about the IP address of my PC conflicting with another one on the network. It seems that one of the machines on the network was not set up correctly. The first thing we tried was to get the Ethernet MAC address and type it into the IEEE database to find the equipment supplier. No such luck. Then I tried the nMap program on it. I asked nMap to find out what ports were open and what operating system it ran. We found out that it was running Linux. That limited it significantly since most of the machines ran WINDOWS.

Once we knew that we looked at other machines, and found that the keyboard switch was the machine that was playing up, and had been incorrectly set up. With a few minor changes it now works well.

According to the SMH, Vodafone internationally have just reported a A$54b loss. This is a LOT of money! Most of this is writedown on the value of assets purchased in 1999/2000.

There is a very important reason why today has been fairly quiet Blog wise. Bassically, apart from being out of the office working, I had some bad news. A friend of mine died last night in the USA. His name is Bill Kovacs, and he is one of the fathers of Computer Graphics.

It's not often that a great soul comes into your life and blesses you with so many gifts of well being. Bill Kovacs' created many things to me and my company. My company (REZN8) was founded with one of Wavefront's first 3D software licenses almost twenty years ago. Bill joined REZN8 in 1999 and has served as a Board Advisor, Consultant, and CTO. He helped create a broad range of visions which has generated unlimited opportunities for REZN8.

But, the biggest thing Bill gave us was his heart. He was the kindest and most loving person I have ever met. He was a friend. He had a love for creation. He gave us all tools to make our dreams become possible. His presence is everywhere in my life and will be missed. We all stand on his shoulders. Bill Kovacs died last night in his sleep.

He was profoundly loved by us all.

Thanks for your love and vision. Paul Sidlo, REZN8

Once again I slept in a bit, waking up a touch before 7AM. Which gives me a couple of hours until I need to head over to Pymble. By then the M2 should (I hope) have cleared somewhat, and the journey should be enjoyable. As enjoyable as a 40-50 minute drive can be anyway.

I have found two links of use for my current programming project, which is resizing and moving forms on a form. The first is from Code Project and is fairly basic. The other one from Mathpath is more comprehensive, but also needs to be extended somewhat... I will work on the code and then maybe release something here in the next few days.

The BBC is reporting that the EU has decided that it is illegal to send details of people on flights from the EU to USA before they arrive. The USA has been requiring this data as a post 9/11 security requirement, and the EU decided that the data protection standards applied. They have until 30/September to work this out though... Until then they are allowed to break the law by sending the data.

Newsforge has a quick look at the FreeNAS software that turns an old PC into a huge fileserver. I might need to look at this software soon... HDD space here is always running out, so I am thinking about storage options.

Telstra wants to send FibreOptic cable almost to the household as a way to increase the bandwith available to houses. But one of the other impacts is that this would provide Telstra with a near monopoly which cannot be a good thing.

In response, IINet has released a paper on the myth of Fibre and how it is not really needed to privide a high speed data service in most parts of the country. Interesting read as it describes much of the technology of ADSL, and the changes with ADSL 2/2+. Another interesting thing I heard is that Telstra are now installing minture ADSL servers in some street boxes with fibre back to the exchange. The interesting thing is that this fibre is often only 2 MBit/sec each way, meaning that two 1500/256 ADSL links will saturate the download connection. The reports I have seen indicate that Telstra have up to 24 people sharing the fibre.

My task right now in VB.NET is working out how to move controls such as buttons at runtime... They should be dragable, but I have not worked out how to do that yet... More work needed.

The stupidity of some people will never cease to amaze me. A man in perth has been charged with a relatively minor crime. I have no idea what he has been charged with, but he deserves more than he has been given. Let me explain...

The man was looking after the baby when the baby got wet. So quite logically, the man decided to put the clothes into a tumble drier. But the baby was also wet, so he put the fully clothed baby into the tumble drier. He then operated the dryer for a couple of minutes! The child got some bruises and some burns, but is expected to fully recover.

Tomorrow I need to spend the day at Pymble doing some project management work for a friend of mine. We are working on a couple of presentations for clients and so I need to be supervising those. It will also give me more of a chance to do some programming, but I will have another programmer I can call on if I get into huge problems, like today with the control stuff.

As a recap... I had some issues with VB.NET with creating a custom VB.NET control. What I worked out was that I needed to recompile the library explicitly. I also needed to ensure that any 'properties' assumed that any variables were set to NULL. This was causing my biggest problem, since loading the control would crash causing bits of code to not be added to the project. The error message I was getting was something like "code generation for property failed".

The Code Project contains an example of a control that someone else has written.

Channel 9 has sued an Online provider of television program information for copyright infringemet. They actually are more concerned that they allow people to jump 30 seconds of adverts with a single button on their digital video recorder. They cannot do much about that so they are doing what they can elsewhere. The IceTV Web Site contains more infromation on the services provided.

I am on the board of my local child care centre. One of the things we have been doing is making sure all our policies are up to date. And adding new ones where appropriate. The latest one is the 'Nose Wiping Policy'. I think (without going back and looking at it) that this just ensures that noses are wiped hygenically, and that carers wash their own hands before and after....

I am certainly not getting anywhere fast with the adding a control to a form. Things are just not working - it is obvious that I am missing something basic, but I am not quite sure what. I can sometimes get the control to work, but I get lots of errors up on the screen, and other times it just does not work. Something I just need to work through I guess. What I am finding is that nothing is initializing correctly...

I am ready to pull my hair out... I will put the error message from VB.NET below, just so that everyone can appreciate exactly how useful this message is...

Code Generator Propert 'Paths' failed. Error was: 'Property accessor 'Paths' Object 'Workflow1' threw the following exception: 'Object reference not set to an instance of an object."

Of course, I have some idea about what the code is behind this, and you would expect that this would give me some hint... Well, not really. That leads more in circles than anything.

Strangely rebooting my server did not help... Right now I am waiting for the technician to reboot the firewall to see if that helps. It is a pain not having the server within an arms reach, but it generally means that I do not need to worry about the maintenance of the server. I just need to worry about making sure my software is running.

On another subject I have just renewed the rego on my car. This was too easy. Last week I got the inspection done. Today I paid the CTP renewal on the phone, and then a few minutes ago I typed in an 8 digit number on the RTA WWW site, and it told me what my rego was, that my CTP had been paid, that my car had been checked for safety, and asking me to pay. Then about 5 seconds later my car was re-registered. This is what I call efficient. It actually took me longer to navigate through the RTA www site than it did to actually re-register my car!

I am just waiting for a server to return to operation - unfortunately this server is the one I use to test my software, so if the server dissapears from the network, I can no longer test the software. This is a HIGHLY networked world we live in, and everything is interdependant. This is great most of the time - when things work. When things stop working, lots of other things stop working.

Case in point, a couple of years ago Microsoft let one of their domains de-register. They forgot to pay. It stopped everyone using a Microsoft Passport from logging in. And of course this was over christmas so there were few people around who knew that this was a problem, and fewer who knew how to fix this. In that case thankfully a programmer worked out what the problem was and paid for the $50 domain renewal himself just to get things working for everyone. Microsoft was really greatful and gave him several thousand dollars worth of software in return. And just to highlight that this was not the reason he did this, he gave the software away.

Also, we had a bit of fun outside this morning... The waterboard came a bit before 8am needing to fix some sewer pipes... Some tree roots had got into the main behind the house, and they were here to clean the pipe out... Their main problem was that the drawings showed the pit in a somewhat different location than it was... Thankfully I was able to let them know where it was.

Just had a phone call about the server... It is up and running - it seems fine. Stranely the server is refusing incoming network connections... Time to speak to the guru's to see if they can offer any suggestions. I am guessing that there is a setting in Windows Server saying how many network connections to accept incoming... Time so investigate...

I am finally up... I guess I slept in this morning until just before 7am. And I needed the sleep really - I did not get to sleep last night until late as I was totally engrossed in Dan Brown's book 'Angels and Demons'. Great read, perfect for international flights I think where you want a book that you just cannot put down. And I had a really hard time putting it down. I would love to tell the plot, but I do not want to spoil it for other people.

What I can say is that the book does have Robert Langdon in it, who is the main character in the Da Vinci code. I am not sure if this is before or after the that book - but I do not think it really matters since they tell totally seperate stories. Just like the Da Vinci Code, this book contains a historical race in the centre of Rome. It also deals with a plot to blow up the Vatican as well as the impact of media on society. All in all a great read.

Right now I have some programming to do... And breakfast to eat!

I have been reading the book 'Angels and Demons' by Dan Brown, who wrote the Da Vinci Code... And just like his novel Digital Fortress, I am finding this book really really hard to put down.

I started reading this book before going to bed a few nights back, and I have only probably 10% of the book left. The outcome looks to be rather predictable but I am sure that there will be quite a few twists in the remaining pages. What I have learned from this book is just how detailed the research that Dan Brown does is. This book is mostly set in Rome, and I am sure that most of the residents do not know most of the things that he has found out about the history of the place. And having been so some of the locations I am finding it even more interesting a read since I can actually visualize some of the locations.

Anyway, back to the book!

I spent some time this afternoon looking for a bug in some code... I eventually found it - the error was that to send an SMS message, you need to send the following commands...
AT+CMGS="0412929634"
This is the message[Ctrl-Z]

The problem was that the Ctrl-Z was being sent incorrectly... In VB you need to send it like
SendText ("This is the Message" & chr(26))
The code was actually something like
SendText ("This is the Message" & "/n001b")
which did not work. I eventually found this by accident... When the modem refused to respond.

This morning may have been quiet, but this afternoon has been hectic. This mornings teleconference never eventuated, leaving me with some time to work on other things. But this morning I spent about an hour and a half with a reseller, and I have some more people ringing me back in a few minutes.

I have been busy debugging code during the middle of all this - I got some software translated from C# to VB.NET, and there are some issues that need to be resolved. This is just taking some time to work though as although the structure has changed, the code still looks like C#.

User Interfaces can be a pain to work on. I am working on one at the moment for an administrative console. What I am finding is that the application needs about three levels of tab controls for the application to work. And this is rather confusing to the user. And you know what the problem is? This is the best way of organizing the information.

Some information needs to be drilled down to, and that makes sense. And sometimes drilling down via a tab control makes sense, but three levels does not really seem to work. That could be put down to not having different colours for various parts of the screen to differentiate tab from tab, but... It would be different if everyone used 1600 x 1050 pixel screens, but 1024 x 768 seem to be really prevalent, particularly in Remote Desktop and Citrix environments where increased screen resolution causes issues with performance - often doubling the latency on slow connections.

So until everyone gets 20" laptop screens I guess I need to keep with the TAB control, and try to just set things out in a logical manner. And although I am working on the Administrator console for an application, I am not working on the details of how it works when you press a button - just the front end. Someone else can do the back end stuff.

And for those who have not heard, Sony has released the price for the PlayStation III. It is going to sell for only US$600! The Reason is that Sony want to use it as a showcase for some new technologies, and this will keep the price up!

I am just waiting for a SKYPE teleconference to start... So until then I guess I have a chance to update this blog...

In the last few days I was speaking to someone and they commented 'Strange Days Indeed', and they were rather surprised when I replied 'Most Perculiar Mama'. I think that the person I was talking to thought I was 'Most Perculiar'. I knew the words 'Strange Days Indeed, Most Perculiar Mama' were from the chorus of a song that I knew, and should be able to recite the name of instantly. Strangely this was not possible...

Doing some research on the net, once I got the spelling of perciliar correct I was able to find the song, and worked out that it was written by none other the John Lennon. This makes it a Beatles song, actually named Nobody Told Me. Some of the words appear below...

Everybody's talking and no one says a word
Everybody's making love and no one really cares
There's Nazis in the bathroom just below the stairs

Everybody's smoking and no one's getting high
Everybody's flying and never touch the sky
There's UFO's over in New York and I ain't too surprised

Nobody told me there'd be days like these x 3
Strange days indeed, strange days indeed
... most peculiar mama

I will probably be programming today... I have some software to debug, but it should not take too much time. The software was working in C#, and I got it coverted to VB.NET. Now I just need to remove the bugs... ANd I also have a meeting at the child care centre to go through procedures. Yuk, but someone needs to do it...

The Guardian has a story suggesting why the iPod is so popular. They put it down mostly to iTunes and iTunes Music Store - basically the organization and purchase of music making the product great - suggesting that the iPod music player is almost incidental. It is the other bits and pieces that go with it.

On the other hand, Tech Blog has a list of the 10 strangest gadgets for the future... Things like a toaster that cooks the toast between two pieces of glass, the self-cooling bear can and the motorised all-terrain skateboard.

And finally, the UNSW has a description of a 6 person chess set. I have not played chess for years, and I am not convinced that this will get me back into playing. Then again I have only ever won one game in my life!

This is a strange world we line in. Friday I was at a job, and a person rang wanting to speak to me about tracking a vehicle. I asked him to ring back in an hour. No problem he said, and he rang back about 30 minutes later. I guess that should have told me something.

Thankfully I was away from the client for a couple of minutes when he rang back early, and told me that he was wanting to get a tracking device installed in his car ( or more correctly his wifes car) as he thought that she was cheating on him. The guy seemed to want something cheap and urgently. Then again most of these cases do. And they are an area I try to stay away from - after all, the market is limited to one per customer. That is no way to make money. I normally forward them onto a competitor, or talk them into a private investigator.

For some reason I never seemt to get the calls from the wife about her husband cheating... I do not know if they try to use humans to do the job rather than machines or what. Guys tend to love gadgets, so I suspect that guys will try to solve their relationship problems with a machine. Women on the other hand I am guessing will use a private investigator since they can do the job with some human input.

I personally cannot really understand the mentality of people cheating on a partner. In this situation they are not treating their partner well, nor are they treating themselves well. I guess my view is that a relationship should always be compared to not being in a relationship, rather than being in a different relationship.

The problem with using GPS to track a car is that not only might it not be illegal, and not only might it make the problem worse if discovered, but it might not actually answer the question that is being asked. So, a car is at a certain address at certain times. What does that actually mean? Does her car being outside a small (five or six shop) shopping centre mean that she is getting her hair cut, or is she having an affair with the butcher (or similar things for guys)... And GPS tracking will not tell you that!

In the UK, the people who look after their VAT has decided to investigate eBay automatically to make sure that the big eBay sellers are registered for VAT. In the UK, second hand sellers are required to only pay VAT on the difference in price between the purchase price and the sale price. According to The Register, they intend to make back far more than the cost of the software.

Over at Developer.COM there is an article on writing 'thin' clients that are run over the internet, but are not using something like citrix or Web Pages. Basically what happens is that forms or collections of forms or libraries are downloaded at runtime over the net (or from a local server) allowing changes to be made at any time. I think this is an amazing technology and is something I will have to look at later.

I have also been looking at forms designers recently to embed into my own code... I have found two pieces of software - the first is on Code Project and is available for free. The issue is that the technology it is written on is a bit out of date. The other form designer comes from Greatis but this costs real money.

Boy, did I sleep well last night... I was doing some reading and I was strugling to keep my eyes open, so I closed them for a moment at 10pm. Next thing I knew it was half an hour later, so I took my glasses off and turned the light off and went to sleep again, not to re-awaken until 7:15. Not a bad effort!

Today after church I will be working on the plane - not sure what we will be doing, but there are a heap of tasks that we need to do, so I doubt that we will get bored. Thankfully most of the really noisy tasks have been completed - things now are more serene, mostly.

Quite often I get ask questions, and give an answer to a friend within 20 seconds by giving them the link to the 2nd or 3rd result in a Google query. Now, I can just forward them This link. I would encourage everyone to check out the name for the link - it is worthwhile I can tell you. On a similar vein, a friend has set up a WWW site to support the radio repair side of his business.. The site is called www.fixmyradio.com.au. I am trying to get him to register www.fixmybloodyradionow.com.au since I am sure it will workwell!

There is an article on the SMH that is almost demanding that cellphones in Australia are able to be tracked quickly. In this case it is because more people are using cellphones for 000 calls. But much of the issue it would appear comes from not being able to tell the city that the cell site is in and then not transferring this to the dispatch centre which has outdated maps.

I have just returned from seeing The Da Vinci Code at the Cinema. I think I liked it - people wanting to see a National Treasure type film will be really dissapointed. I am not sure what the budget of this film was like but it did not look as expensive as National Treasure. But this was more a thinking persons movie. And they didn't seem to waste tons of money on too many locations - the majority of the movie is set in London and Paris with another couple of sites playing more minor roles.

I can understand why the catholic church would not be happy about the film - it put the Catholic Opus Dei organisation mostly in a poor light, although there was some redemption later in the movie for some characters. On the other hand, my view of the priory changed over the length of the movie.

Personally I do not have many problems with this movie - it is a piece of story telling that asks people to ask what they believe in. What is important to them. This was bourne out in the last five to ten minute of the movie. I certainly did enjoy the movie, and was not constantly wondering when the movie was ending. And that is good with a movie that is over two hours long!

My friend from Canberra who I was planning to meet for lunch has needed to cancel. He is running late writing a report so is unable to meet up today. So I have some time free. This morning I have needed to do some project management tasks, working with one of my outsourced programmers answering some questions and doing some administration on the contract. Simple stuff really. He has completed about 30 of the function calls that I need implemented, which makes him about 10% of the way there - actually 40% of the way into this work parcel, but once that is done there are another 150-200 function calls to be implemented.

And if it is as bad implementing them as it was writing them then I feel bad. It is a lot of work, but it needs to be done. And I am paying a decent amount to the programmer, although I suspect that even slaves in Australia would get paid more. Maybe not, but certainly teenagers working in McDonalds work for more money. Welcome to the global economy. What makes it possible for me to sleep at night is that I ask for a quote, and when I get it I increase the price. In otherwords, get a good price but do not exploit the worker.

On another project I was giving some help to a friend who was trying to implement a drag and drop function in the software. Some quick searching yielded a page that described how to do this. It looks so easy to implement... I am sure that there are some gotcha's but it looks easy.

I slept well last night - I went to bed about 10:30 and did not wake up until a touch after 7AM. Basically I am well rested, and ready for a great day in the wide world. I am sure that something will bring me crashing down to earth, but we will see.

In the USA, it seems that the US Government has finally decided it has paid for most of one of their wars, and can now remove the tax used to pay for it. This tax was 3% on long distance phone charges... So, what war was it? The Iraq? No! Vietnam? Nah. Korea? Not even close! And not even World War II or I! It was actually the Spanish-American war which finished 108 years ago.

PC World has an article on the 25 worst IT products of all time. This list contains some classics, such as Windows ME, IBM PCjr, AOL, The Disney LionKing CD-ROM and a heap of others. It really is a wall of shame. Microsoft only had a few products in the list - apple I think had more. Strange.

In the SMH, there is a story about how a 19 year old working in the UK Government has been found with Bomb Making Materials. What is more interesting is other revelations in the article, like how illegal immigrants were working in the imigration department of the Home Office.

I am going to sleep well tomorrow - and given that I am not building the plane tomorrow, I can actually sleep on too. I have to meet a friend for lunch somewhere south - a friend who could not make it to my party last week... Not sure what else I will do tomorrow - maybe look at some tracking units that I have here to repair.

I showed some people the workflow control today, and they were all really really impressed. So much so in fact that they can finally see some more of my vision for the application suite. Everything is starting to fit together which is fantastic. I now just need to write some status reports. I realised today I should probably send weekly status reports to all the stake holders...

There is an article in the SMH about how a school principal has been caught selling furniture on eBay. As far as I can work out, the problem was not that he was selling the furniture, but more that he was doing it publically, and doing it without providing receipts all the time. Of course that does not really make as good a story as saying that a principal was selling on eBay.

Home, Sweet Home!

I am happy to be home - I have been out for most of the day, and it is good to have a chance to sit down and relax. At 8AM this morning I had an email asking me if it would be possible to attend a meeting at Pymble at 9:30AM. Well, I actually had a meeting at 10:00AM at Holroyd so that was not quite possible. But I did manage to get to the meeting about 12:30 to catch the last five minutes of it. Since I am going to be the system architect it was goot to get to part of the meeting.

Pymble was basically project management stuff - asking people how they are going with projects, and telling other people how I am going. Strange assortment of projects. At one stage I was asked 'have you spoken to ____ and seen his _____'. My response was slightly disconcerting. It was actually 'No, and I dont really need to'. I then needed to explain that the interface to what he was writing was all that was important to me - how it works and what it looks like does not matter.

Coming home was quick - the M2 and M7 make things so easy! Going into the city was backed back just before the M2 tunnel where one lane was closed. But going my way it was speed limit all the way. I love those two roads, except for the small speed limit!

Google, it would appear, have about 10 servers serving Gmail. They might well have more behind the 10 IP addresses, with each IP address handling a cluster of machines. Knowing Google's love of distributed programming I suspect that it is more than 10 computers. Why am I mentioning this? Well, Google GMail is technically still in beta. Many people joke that Google is totally and perpetually in beta, despite what seems to be perfect operation.

So, according to The Register, Gmail had an outage for several hours that hit a substantial number of users. What that percentage of people had issues with access to Gmail is unknown as Google is not talking.

I also read on the SMH about how a highschool principal has been caught selling school furniture on eBay. Not that the principal was selling the furniture without approval or permission... It is just that selling on eBay sounds like it is too visible for the government.

I probably should be in bed right now sleeping, but I woke up too early, and like normal when I wake up, I could not get back to sleep. This is strange since I find it normally quite easy to fall asleep, be it in my bed at night, or even at my desk in the middle of the day. Still, I am awake now although I am looking forward to a coffee or something in a little while!

I have a meeting today to show a client some software, and with some luck get their permission to send them a rather fat invoice. Yippee... I was also due to have a teleconference this morning but that was canned due to external constraints. A short MSN with one of the planned participants will fix some of that anyway.

I saw an article in The Register concerning how the Germans want to be allowed to use mobile phone jammers in prisons and for terrorism incidents. Some people have suggested that jamming technology is impractical. Well, it is. But that is not the point. There is enough technology available that, subject to the network deeming that they want to do this, it is possible to locate where a cell phone is, particularly if you have enough towers in an area.

And if you know where a cell phone is you can therefore stop it from operating though intelligent means, like just refusing to connect that phone, or connecting it to the prison switchboard.

I have just finished watching the latest episode of Top Gear, and I was just laughing so much. I am sure I was moments away from passing out or crying - that is how funny I found it. Top Gear is a car and motor racing show with a difference - in this series the presenters get to buy 2nd hand cars and do stuff to them as one of the segments. In this episode they also needed to change their cars into boats, but have them drivable.

During the race, one of the cars was a sail boat, meaning it had a mast. And it kept driving into trees. Another was a camper van that did not have sealants to stop the water getting in. And the third car ended up sinking. Not just sinking, but sinking in water enough shallow enough for the car to flip upside down and for the wheels to stick up like some strange dead animal.

But the winner of course was the little convertable with the sail. It was light enough not to sink, and made it eventualy, only breaking down twice since the twit put floats in front of the radiator causing it to overheat. To be fair so did the camper van, and the same thing happened to him.

Anyway, Top Gear is an amazing show... There is so much humor in it. Oh, and at one stage they were trying to work out if a particular Jaguar was cool or not cool. So they asked the audience and one guy said cool. The compare did not think that this was reasonable so asked 'What part of jaguar do you work for?'... and got no response... And then worked out the guy really did work for the company. So funny...

I had dinner tonight with my mother - it is her birthday today so I had dinner with her and my brother. We went to an Italian restraunt, which generally has great pastas. Well, except for their Lasagne. I am not sure what the problem was with the Lasagne but it was not as good as most other restraunt lasagne that I have had recently. Their menu is also interesting - they list all their pastas under the heading saying that you can have it with ravioli, spagheti and the like. The problem is that Lasagne is als on that list - and I was so tempted to ask for Lasagne with Ravioli... After all, it was on the menu :-)

One of the things that I did get done today was finished a control that will allow me to quickly add workflows to applications. This is just the GUI with some business rules behind it - it allows me to just drag the control onto a new form, and add almost no code... By writing the software in this way, I can simply plug this into the admin program which is about to be written.

I guess this all sounds rather boring, but it really will be saving me a heap of work.

I am glad that I do not live in Melbourne. Down there they have sent a number of bills to users for $96m. This is obviously a mistake. The water company has released a statement saying that about 300 people have had their bills corrected and are getting a $25 discount.

I found something that I have to try.. It is Square Watermellon. What happens is that once the watermellon has started growing you put it into a square perspex box, so that as it gets bigger that it must be square. Sounds like a great experiment to try.

One of my clients suggested I have a look at the GPS Map Edit software that allows me to design and upload new maps to Garmin GPS units. Looks like cute software. I have found out about a spoof TV show called Grime Team. This is a spoof of the Time Team show with Tony Robinson who played Baldrick in Black Adder.

On a similar subject, there is a call for people in the UK who want to appear in a TV Show where the contestants are put into a museum overnight and need to solve a problem, just like in the Da Vinci Code. Cute.

I am feeling great - I have just finished a run and it went really well, even if I have not been running for a few weeks. I ended up running about 2.5-3 KM which really surprised me. I was expecting to only get about 1km done since I have managed to get a bit out of shape. Not sure if I will manage to get any running tomorrow but it would be nice.

I did get my car inspected today. It was fairly quick and painless. No problems found, and the paperwork is done. They dont even give you a Pink Slip these days - just a computer printout. Too easy!

There are some things that should be illegal and/or impossible. And please bear in mind that this is NOT an extensive list. The first is using SKYPE whilst on an international flight using the WiFi and broadband should be not only illegal but impossible. But it is neither.

Another thing that should be impossible us sitting in a shopping centre cafe drinking a coffee doing work. And I mean sitting there with internet access via GPRS. And then there is using MSN whilst on the road - like on a bus using a laptop. And certainly sending a voice clip of the background sounds to prove it is just plain nasty!

And to top it off, having KMart selling protable DVD players with screen and rechargable batteries, and remote control and charger for $129 should be right up there with faster than light travel and comfortable seats in the economy section of planes... Unfortunately (with the exception of the faster than light travel and the seats in planes) all of these have been proved to me in the last month or so.

Dont ask me why, but I just had a look at the memory usage of my computer and I was somewhat shocked. I think somewhat shocked is actually an understatement. I think I fairly well am what would be called a 'Power User', but I did not think I would stress my computer that much. For instance, there is a thing called a 'Page File' which is an area on disk that will emulate RAM when you do not have enough real memory. Well, according to windows Task Manager, I am using about 2 GBytes of Swap File.

This slightly concerned me. So I had a look at memory usage, and peak memory usage. Right now Internet Explorer is using about 550 MBytes of RAM!!! You heard right. This is IE7, so it has tabs, and there are 9 windows open so that I just do a refresh for the sites that need refreshing, or just have the windows open on the sites that I am reseaching temporarily.

What is more is that I found how to add another column to the table - Peak Memory Usage. The peak usage of Internet Explorer is 810 MBytes. I have computers in this house with less HDD space than that! Then comes VisualStudio/VisualBasic at 158 MBytes, Outlook at 118M and Word at 100 MBytes. Just those four programs used up 1.2 GBytes of peak memory, and are using about 700 MBytes right now.

Probably the worst offender in my view is not IE. I can understand why it would need 500 MBytes in runtime - I am telling it to do a lot of work. With plugins like Macromedia Flash and the like memory does get used. But there is a program with 52 MBytes peak usage, although it is only using 25 MBytes right now. And this same program was the 4th highest usage of graphical resources on the machine too. What is this program? MSN Messenger. How could anyone write such a simple program which uses so much memory? Only microsoft I would guess...

It is nice to see Telstra performing well as a company. According to Australian IT, They have forced companies to visit Denver, Colorado to pitch for work. Also, their chief IT Consultant rarely visits Australia, spending most of his time in the USA. Sure, I know that teleworking is possible, but it is far better if the people are at least in the same timezones. Like Denver is something like 8 hours ahead (but on the next day), meaning he needs to start work early for any teleconferences and the like. Or more probably people need to stay late in Oz.

From Germany comes news of a P2P filesharing server that was taken over by police for two months, and all the germans who used the server now face investigation. According to the article, 130 people who were sharing 500 or more songs had their homes searched, and some computers siezed.

And an ISP in the USA is trying to buy a nationwide allocation of frequency in the 2 GHz range in order to set up a national wireless network. They plan to offer free access at 256/64 kbs subsidized by people wanting faster speeds. I do not think that this will work commercially since people will buy two units in order to double their speed rather than paying for access - and I also suspect that they are unlikely to get the allocation...

And finally, MSNBC has a review of Windows Vista and describes it as the worst operating system ever. Sure, it is a beta which is probably one of the reasons why it is so bad, but it should not be that bad. Like taking an hour to install on a machine with 2 GBytes of RAM, or four hours if installing over WindowsXP and then refusing to rebook... I am sure by the time it is released next year that it will be much better!

Tomorrows job is to get the rego check done for my car. Should be a very simple task I would guess... This will be the first rego check on my car - thanks to new-ish cars not needing checking for the first few years of their life. This should not take long at all.

This evening I have been doing more work on the workflow engine. I am very close... I know I have said that for the last few days but I am confident. Really it is just tidying up things, and getting the interfaces right so I can then plug it into the administration program - at least when that is written. But there are some other things to be done before that too.

In order to be able to turn a VB.NET structure into XML, you need to put in front of the definition of the strucure. An example would be

_
Public Structure WorkflowActionsStructure
End Structure

Then you can use one of the following types of functions to convert to and from XML.
Dim parser As New XmlSerializer(WorkflowStates.GetType)
WorkflowStates = parser.Deserialize(rs)
or
Dim serializer As New XmlSerializer(WorkflowStates.GetType)
serializer.Serialize(ms, WorkflowStates)

According to Discovery, a dragon-like dinosaur unearthed in South Dakota has been named "Dracorex hogwartsia" (Dragon King of Hogwarts) with the help of a group of kids at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis.

In the USA, there are finally moves to create an orphan works copyright bill. From what I can work out this makes it possible to use copyright works where due dilligence has been used to find the copyright owner to get permission. If the copyright owner comes forward the damages are a whole lot less than they would have been otherwise... Given that 95% of works are orphaned, the impact is potentially significant.

Home now after a meeting... And again it was one of those fun meetings where I got to brain dump with my ideas. I get a lot out of doing that - giving ideas to other people to then implement. This was not a planned meeting - well, not planned until about 2pm when I got a phone call. Driving right over seemed to be the best option...

One of my clients has just rung, wanting some help with, um, everything. Documentation mostly, and system design. And whilst I have got work on at the moment, I do not turn down more work. I guess this means that I will be doing a tiny bit of commuting to my clients office for the next few weeks.

With my workflow stuff, I have managed to work out how to save the data to XML. I will describe it in a future entry, but it is rather simple to save data in VB.NET. My code at the moment needs some work, but that will be improved in the coming days...

I just created my first real real workflow in the workflow designer, and from what I can see, the GUI makes sense. That is the most important. The Look and Feel is OK, although it does look slightly ugly in terms of the layout of the workflow and the interconnections on the screen.

I still need to get my head around some concepts to do with workflows - I guess the most important is if there can be two possible paths from node for a condition. As an example, assuming a parcel is assigned to a driver, can there be two different rejection paths - one being that the parcel is now being picked up by another driver, and the 2nd is that there is no parcel to be picked up since the person decided that they didn't need to send it. What seems like a simple task is actually more complex than it appears.

Now I just need to work out how to save the layout. My issue is that I want to save the positions of the boxes, and also the paths taken by the paths, but the paths themselves are stored in different tables in the database making things more diffcult to keep aligned.

I have some strange and interesting links. The fist is from the web site Shop Get Organized which have scissors that are modified more like power tools. These scissors have a laser on them to help you cut straight. I somehow do not think that these will take the world by storm. I may be wrong, but I doubt it. Instructables have a design for a LCD Picture Frame that you can build yourself relatively cheaply.

Also a company has released a encrypted cellphone that does not look too bad. All GSM and CDMA cellphones are encrypted, but there are ways to break this encryption. This new phone is unbreakable, when talking to an identical phone. The problem is that the voice sounds tinny, and it takes 10-30 seconds for the phones to agree on an encryption before the call starts.

I think today I will be finishing off the Workflow control. It is looking great. I need to tidy a few look and feel type things, and then integrate it into a control. Also I have to do some more documentation on the larger system it plugs into.

I am trying to get to bed, but it seems that there is an interesting program on National Geographic describing Las Vegas, and the power supply requirements. I used to work for the electricity company, so I am finding much of what is being shown to be somewhat familiar. Things like maintaining transmission lines, talking about electricity generation plants and the like. Really interesting for an engineer...

The Child Care Centre meeting I had tonight was reasonably short. Only a total of just over an hour. This must be a record I think...

I did find something out - I found that one of the people at my birthday party was going to give me a seniors card application... How rude. I am NOT that old... I will not say who it was but the person should have known better.

Something that I have found about dogs recently is that they love to eat their food really really fast. The Strange New Products Web Site have now released a http://www.strangenewproducts.com/2006/05/brake-fast-doggie-bowl.html>bowl that is designed to slow dogs eating their food... Looks really simple, and cool. Now, if I only had that dog...

I found the manual for the foxtel box... It was left on the lounge suite. I have plugged the phone line into the foxtel box, and according to the menu, the phone line is working. I am not sure how often it dials up - hopefully normally never. The interactive TV channels are good, but they do take some time to come up unfortunately. The first thing the installer did when he installed the unit was get the unit to upgrade itself. This took probably 2-3 minutes.

And as I typed this the unit just restarted itself. Not sure what happened there - may have lost lock with the signal - not sure. It is always possible that the decoder just crashed.

The work I am doing on the Workflow is getting close to being complete - the usability is good, and the appearance is getting there too. There are some things I still need to do, but I am happy with how it is going. I still need to change the coloring, and add some layout options. That is my next step. Then I need to make this into a control... and of course pay for the base control too.

Foxtel has been installed - it was rather strange. The person who was installing it was obviously following the standard playbook on how they have to be installed. He wanted to unplug everything and plug it into the AV inputs of the VCR and the TV. I think. It was hard to work out what he really wanted to do.

I know for no real good reason that he did decide to install the SCART connector on the foxtel box to the AV input of the VCR. That was fine, although it would have been so much simpler to have just used the video output as before. Then he did not want to plug in the RF video connector that I use to plug into the other TV's in the house. This was about a 30 second job to connect up the plug, but then it took some time to tune the TV's.

The box did not include an instruction manual... Not surprising since it was rather easy to operate the unit. One thing that I am hoping the unit will do is lock out channels that I do not have access to...

I am home now after the meeting - I thought I was going to be late as I needed to get a couple of birthday presents from K-Mart and send a card off. In the end I arrived at the meeting exactly on time... Or maybe 30 seconds after 10AM which is close enough.

I have foxtel coming 'soon' although I am not sure when exactly that will be... So I have put in a new telephone socket next to the TV antenna sockets so that we will be able to use some of the advanced features. Goodness only knows why they didn't add the CableTV or ethernet for the back link.

I am looking at re-organizing all the parts of the sound system. The turntable does not get used very often so I am thinking of hiding it away, and using the space used by it for other things... But that might have to wait until I find out how big the new cable box is.

I have got something decent out of the workflow engine finally... a screedump appears below. I still need to fix up a heap of stuff, but it is starting to act how it should. The lines are still not behaving, but that is a minor concern at the moment. What is important here is that I can see how things might work.

Not many people are going to see this feature apart from in demos of the software as it really is one of those behind the scenes type features, but it is a selling point. I just hope that it is enough of one to justify the effort I have put in.



I guess it is time to have breakfast now that I have some results...

I slept well last night; well, once i got to bed last night. I was doing some programming and did not want to leave it. Then this morning I just did not want to get out of bed. Not surprising now that it is getting somewhat cooler as winter approaches.

I did some more thinking about the programming I am doing with the workflow - and how I should implement things. Something along the lines of Data Structures and Algorithms = Programs. Get the data structures correct and you are half way there. So the first job is to get some data to play with, and then see how things look. The coder I had chosen contacted me overnight saying he wanted a reply as to what I wanted to do ASAP. So, once I finish here, I will reply back filling him in.

Anyway, I should get going and get that done. I have to leave at about 9:30 for a quick meeting, and then I have to be home for Foxtel to come and do the digital upgrade. Before I go, quick article I just found... Phil Zimmerman has released an encrypted VoIP program that will not allow other people to listen in...

The flowchart control I am using is insanely great. It does some things really well, and then it falls down with other things. For instance you can set paths between nodes to auto-route, but you can only do that on each path, not for all paths. You can select the number of segments to use, but it will use all these segments even if it does not need to use them. This looks yucky.

But the good news is that I think it can do what I need it to. Or it will once I get my head around a few issues... Minor things, like working out how this should look, and how I should deal with hiding un-used entries. Maybe right now I just use all entries, and then hide then later... Ahh, fun and games...

The Blogs on the SMH have a new entry on the Airlines to Avoid. I agree that American Airlines is one of the worst... At least in the first world. Not that they are dangerous or anything - just that they are cost cutting so far. There was a great tip made in one entry...

TIP: always ask your flight attendant at the beginning of the flight for a comment card. they get worried you will give them a bad review so will give you as many bottles of wine as you like.

Ok, so I don't drink, but it sounds like a great idea. Perhaps it is slightly mean too... I usually tend to give positive feedback when I can anyway.

My work on the Workflow designer is working well. Now that I have got my head around some concepts, things just work. It is so easy - So I will probably cancel any more work on the outsourced work and concentrate on doing things myself. That way I will get what I want. Now I just need to do the code!

Tomorrow is going to be hectic. Firstly I have a meeting at 10AM to have some software handed over. Then I have Foxtel coming sometime between 12:30 and 5PM to upgrade the Foxtel to digital, and then a meeting of the pre-school board after that. And in the middle of that I have a heap of papers to read for the pre-school meeting...

I heard back from the Workflow coder... I am not convinced that he has a full idea of what I want, so I am going to send him an email with a possible layout. Well, since I gave him the work I have done more thinking about how this can work. I don't know. He has offered to do more work, but I am just not convinced, and it is not making me feel good. I think I will spend some time working out if I can write the control myself using a commercial control, and I might just offer 50% or 75% to him.

I had to reboot my machine a few minutes ago - this is not something that I normally like doing at all... Machines should not need to be restarted. It is just that the way I run software I think the machine just gives up. It got so bad that the machine would not even shut down properly requiring Outlook to complain when it started up. Things are working again now.

I loaded the new version of MSN Messenger earlier today, and I cannot see any changes. I will look more deeply... And as we speak I am installing the new version of Windows Media Player too... Downloaded from here

I have been looking more at the Workflow thing, and I think I will just pay the guy off probably, and then go for a control like the one I found at Mind Fusion which seems to do much of what I want. The price of the control is only US$250, and that would give me most of what I need. I just need to learn how to drive it. That is the hard part.

Their demo code is somewhat lacking unfortunately. But that is what happens I guess with some of this stuff... Good product, bad example code.

Earlier I was looking for some code for Workflow... and found a strange article on CodeProject.COM. In this case, the article was on how to cheat at Mine Sweeper, by snooping on the mine sweeper code. Rather an insightful article on what is possible. Much of the content is beyond me though.

I outsourced some work to China - some programming for a workflow designer. I got the work back today, and whilst the work looked good for what it implemented, it did not fit my spec or what I wanted. Rather than a Windows GUI, it was a Web GUI, and rather than a graphical designer, it was a text/tables based one. I feel horrible now because I can see that the coder has put the work in, but has just mis-interpretted my specification, and did not ask the right questions.

And this leaves me out of pocket, or him out of pocket - and neither of these is really a good situation. I guess I am too concerned about other people. It would be nice to say 'Here is another $x... go away and do it again'. But the reality is that I am running a business, and that this person has used time to deliver something that is not usable by me.

I have emailed him to let him know, and I will see what he comes back with.. .

---

I heard a story about a software engineering talk a while back. The lecturer was talking about the risks associated with computers. The talk was on the quality of software, and how to plan the process so that there are no critical bugs. He asked the audience which was mostly made up of university lecturers and professors in computer science some questions. The first question was quite simple...

How many of you would have concerns about getting into a plane for a journey if your students had written the software for it?

The speaker was somewhat put off by the response... Almost everyone in the entire lecture hall put up their hand! This was NOT good. Sensing that there was a major problem, he decided to ask the question in a different way. Try to find a way to make this a positive... Who was teaching well? This time the question was...

How many of you would not have a problem boarding a plane in which your students had worked on?

The result surprised the speaker somewhat... Only one hand went up. Out of this one room there was a lecturer who was confident about the processes that he was teaching his students that he would get into a plane if they had done the software. So the speaker did the only thing he could - he invited the sole lecturer onto the stage to ask about why he was so confident in getting into the plane. The answer was not what was expected - he thought it would be things like software testing, and data flow diagrams, and testing. But the response was somewhat different.

He responded that he was very compenent about the ability of his students. He knows their strengths and weaknesses. And he knew that if they had designed the software for the plane that he need not be concerned about it going haywire in the air.

He was confident that the software would not even allow the plane to leave the gate!

I managed to sleep in this morning until about 7:15... This really is concidered as me sleeping in... Although I may be able to convince my body to time-shift to waking up later so that I can go to bed later. Nice idea but there are always problems with trying to sleep in - with clients who start work early and therefore believe that everyone else starts work at the same time.

For instance this morning I woke up at about 7:15, and I had a phone call from a client at about 7:17, and I am not even sure I had put my glasses on yet. Maybe I should turn my mobile onto silent overnight, but then again I will always forgetting to take it off silent. Another case is where I turn my phone off for whatever reason...

A case in point - last night when I visited the hospital, in accordance with some signs, I turned off my mobile. Turning mobiles off in a hospital is a bit of a waste and does not actually need to be done in 99% of cases according to the British Medical Association. Anyway I turned my phone off at about 6PM, and forgot to turn it back on when I left about half an hour later. I didn't realise until several hours later when I was driving home and needed to make a call. The problem I have is that this happens far too often.

Of course my plans of getting to bed early have not quite materialized. I forgot about recording 'Peking to Paris'... This is such a facinating show about recreating driving from Peking to Paris is century old cars. This is just too interesting to wait until tomorrow... So I am watching this now with plans of being tired tomorrow...

Home Sweet Home...

I am really happy to be home after having been out much of the day. First church and then a church meeting, then over to Castle Hill to work on the plane. We really didnt get much work done on the Plane. What we did do was work out that we could actually get the plane out of the garage with the wheels on, and potentially the engine on. This involved some lifting of the plane as we did a three point turn of the plane.

Then following that we ventured to the hospital to see the new son of friends of mine. They were at my party last night, and then less than 12 hours later the new baby was born. The child looks so cute...

There is more that I want to say, but I am a bit tired... Actually I am really tired, and right now I am living on Coca Cola... Thank god for Cafiene!

[12:30AM]I really should be asleep right now, but I am in the middle of talking to a friend, and he has just gone to do something for a moment, so I am here just waiting. I am starting to really get tired - and I really should be getting some sleep, but the chat is too interesting.

The party was great... I had a couple of friends who had to cancel at the last minute...[Seven hour delay as I fall asleep at the keyboard...]

[7:20AM]I am now feeling less tired than I was las night when I attempted to update my Blog here. I was just too exhausted in mentally and physically. Right now I am a bit tired, but some caffene will fix that soon.

As I was saying above the party went really well. One couple could not make it at short notice, and another friends wife and child could not make it since his son cut his foot open this morning and he needed to stay at home. And my next door neighbour needed to work tomorrow so was unable to make it. The car parking situation outside was chaotic. Unknown to me the neigbour on the other side had some friends around, and this meant that the street was filled with cars. I should point out that I live at the bottom of a cul-de-sac which makes things worse.

At one point one of my guests needed to move their car twice to let people out - things were that bad out there... It would have been good to get a photo of all the cars, but I did not realise until most people had left.

The BBQ went really well - everyone was impressed with the quality of the BBQ - surprised at what I was able to buy at Bunnings for the price. This was good... It also surprised me that some people had met before who I did not realise had met before - either because I had forgotten, or in other ways...

There is more I will talk about later... But I must say it was fun.

Short Post... The party went well. People have now left, and much of the cleaning up is done too... I am somewhat exhausted... More in the morning...

Quick trip to the shops to get ice, petrol and Onion. Finding Onion at the shops was a real pain - they were hidden in the freezers, covered with ice. Whilst I was in the shopping centre the rain started pouring down. I hope that it is only a short shower, and this does not continue tonight. If we need to we can always put a tarp over the back verandah or put the BBQ out the front. The rain has stopped anyway so that is good.

Getting the Ice was no problem apart from the ice chest at the service station being locked which meant I needed to get it unlocked first. I am guessing that there is not a huge call for ice in Sydney at this time of year.

Our PM has been talking about using Nuclear power in Australia in the last few days. This is probably a good idea in the long term, subject to some environmental issues being sorted out, mostly with regard to waste. If they can locate the power station somewhere near the woomera range that would probably be a wise idea for any waste. This would also help solve the energy problem in South Australia too. The type of reactor I like is a Pebble Bed reactor that cannot melt down and also cannot have nuclear leaks since the coolant is Helium which is immune to being made into isotopes making it rather safe... It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

I just had a SKYPE from a friend in wondering if I had purchased the Diaries of Mixerman which I mentioned a few weeks back. I had totally forgotten about it, and I have just ordered the book. I love the ability to buy books online. The other thing with buying the books online through DA Direct is that they sell me the books for the price of the book in the USA with currency conversion done. Most impressed.

According to reports in the USA, a tennant has left his rented house with about 70,000 beer cans inside. It was so bad that they sold the empty cans for US$800 for recycling. That is a HUGE number of cans. There are reports that the tennant only drank lite beer, drinking about 24 cans a days!!!

The Space Shuttle is due to soon Take Off on its return to flight. I hope there are no problems THIS time.

Sometimes I do some STRANGE research... I was intrigued about the idea of Natural Nuclear Reactors... So I did a bit more searching. I found Three interesting articles on the subject... All the research suggests that the reactors were putting out about 100 kWatts each for about 150 million years. What would happen is that the reaction would go on for about 30 minutes until the water turned to steam, and then it would cool down for about 90 minutes and water would seep back in... And the process would start again.

The reaction was started when the yield of the important part of uranium arriving in France was much lower than it should have been in one batch. The percentage is the same throughout the world... But in this case there was a lot less U235 than expected, and the french were wondering if terrorists had worked out some new way of extracting it as it was transported. Then they worked out that the reaction had taken place 1.7 billion years before. Interesting...

On another subject, one of my friends posted a link on a small mailing list about the banking system in Australia and how monies are credited and debited. It is really interesting to look at the legal basis for transfers, and how the systems fit together. The issue is of risk in case of collapse of an institution... and when over $100 billion goes through the system each day this is an important issue. The reason for this is that if a bank becomes insolvent then all transactions since mid-night are reversable. And this is a big concern. So systems have been set up to reduce this liability significantly. It is interesting, although too detailed in parts...

Shopping is done... Cake purchased. Meat and Fish too. And everything else. And the lounge room has been re-arranged to fit people. There is tons of food here - like with most parties - so I can cope with people who just drop in... And there are a couple of people who are coming who may or may not have eaten before they arrive. I guess this is the joys of parties.

Whilst I have a few minutes to myself to sit down, I will provide some links to stuff I have found... First, here is a DIY Powder Coating Rig which looks like a great idea. There are times when I build stuff that I would love to get it coated, but this is normally a pain... The paint just sticks to what you are spraying, and then you just heat it. Any leftover spillage just vacuums up. Another thing I found is an article on hollowing out a light bulb for craft.

And finally I was reading an old article and it mentioned natural nuclear reactors. Well, it actually mentioned one... there is only one on earth in Africa. It is a place where uranium decays naturally in the presence of ground water creating a self sustaining reation. More is on Wikipedia

Shopping time... I have come to the conclusion that not only are dinner parties a lot of hard work but they can get expensive too...

My father's cousin was mentioned in todays paper... Strangely enough he was mentioned in the Obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald for John Marsden. I had forgotten this, but back when Garry was the Police Minister he stated that John Marsden was not under investigation. Garry West was a minister in the Liberal/National Party state government a bit over 10 years back.

What always ammused me was that Garry was also my ultimate boss at one stage when I was working at Pacific Power. I am sure almost no-one knew that we were related... Probably better that way. Not that he helped me at all. I had my job before he became minister for energy, and I think he was rather surprised when he found I was working there.

I upgraded my copy of Norton's Antivirus a few days back, and I am now doing a full scan. This is supposed to run once a week, but I always seem to cancel it. Anyway I am letting it run today... It started at 8pm and it is now just after 11pm... and it has scanned something like 475,000 files. That is a LOT. And it has not finished. It will be interesting to see the results tomorrow.

About 10 days ago, Foxtel dropped their digital prices. What happened apparently was that they removed most sport out of the Foxtel package and made it an option. What I worked out was that with these new plans is that it is actually cheaper to upgrade the Foxtel to digital than remain on Analog. This is what I saw as happening when Foxtel Digital was released when it came out.

One of the requirements for Foxtel Digital is that a phone line for voting and Foxtel Box Office should be connected. Not that I intend to use either of these functions. But anyway over the next few days I need to put a phone outlet and socket near the antenna socket where the new foxtel box will go.

I have a few friends who are into scrapbooking, and the associated hobbies. I thought of them as soon as I saw this following Web Site... It is Photo Blocks. They are wooden blocks that have a portion of a photo on the top and can be used as a paper weight or similar. I think it just looks cute. Given the condition of my desk however it is not something that I would use very often...

I am starting to loose it I think... Today I have dealt with Portugal, USA, Canada, New Caledonia, UK and Australia. Not a bad days effort I think. Unfortunately I cannot say too much about much of what I am doing, but much of it is related to my TeamTrack software.

One of my friends asked me about a drawing tool for something. So I suggested a program from Google called SketchUp. This is a free 3D modelling tool. I am not sure that this was what he was after, but it is an amazing piece of software.

Cars Guide on News.COM.AU has a great survey on Cars. And they found a lot of things out. FIrstly, A staggering 87 per cent of Australians suffer from road rage. Only 15% of people agree that car sales people take the time to understand their needs and almost one in three respondents (32%) says that a person's car has changed their opinion of them. But the best quote from the article is that "74 per cent of those people between 55-65 years claim to have done so (Had sex in a car). Singles in comparison seem to be missing out with at 48%"

Today has been rather busy... I raced over to Holroyd to do some work this morning... That was rather quick. Almost as soon as I got back I found out that I had a board meeting to attend... I knew it was on, but not the exact time. Well, I knew the exact time, just not the exact time here. You see the board meeting was in Dayton Ohio.

I ended up doing a teleconference for 90 minutes to the USA. This worked remarkably well thanks to the new conference phone that they had, and also the conference bridge that was donated for the event. One of the other people who was dialed in was saying that they had something like six inches of rain in the last few days. I told him we needed some over here. The meeting went well, but at the end I was invited to dinner tomorrow night in Dayton. Thanks to the international date line I could probably make it, but I have a previous engagement.

The president of the organsisation also was talking about his trip down for the meeting - driving in his convertable he was hit by hail on the interstate. In his words the road just suddenly became white with ice. He had never seen it so bad, and was wondering if we had hail down here in Oz. Um. YES!

Following the meeting I did a heap of cleaning - a real spring clean. Throwing junk out and doing a lot of vacuuming... But the house is now a lot cleaner...

The SMH is reporting that the ANZ Bank stuffed up with a heap of Mastercard transactions last weekend, and double billed people. This has now been fixed, but has been blamed on a tape being run a 2nd time. What amazes me is that they would still be using tapes. I thought they went out ages ago...

Dinner tomorrow night

Surprisingly, I am back home after a short excursion to look at some data loggers I have installed in some trucks. I only needed to actually physically look at one truck, which turned out to be an interesting exercise since it was parked in a garage and needed to be moved. The only thing was that this came with an offer of 'just move it and park it next to your car there'...

I should point out that this was not your normal three or four ton truck - it was a large garbage type truck - a street sweeper which probably weighs 15-20 tons. And it would have involved reversing it out of a garage, and then into a parking spot next to my car. Yeah, sure. Oh, and it is LEFT HAND DRIVE!

Well, the last time I tried to drive a left hand drive car I could not even get it into gear! So I got the mechanic to move it for me. That worked so much better, and it does mean that my car does not need any major panel beating because I reversed a truck into it. Much Much safer!

There are times that I am concerned about the future of the human race. This is normally when I look at the instructions on the Tooth Pick box, or on a tooth brush, but there are examples everywhere. But I was not expecting the reply I got to an email. One example - someone needed to send me a large graphics file. 75 MBytes which is really too big to send via email, and I did not actually need the raw file. So I said, send it to me as a JPG file.

To which he changed the extension to JPG and said that it was still 75 MBytes. Maybe I assumed too much when I suggested he change it to a JPG... Next time I will do better. I promise.

There are some distinct disadvantages to living in a world economy, with timezones. And I have clients in many parts of the world - which means that as soon as I wake up in the morning I get people asking me questions and wanting me to do work. And the same thing happens late at night when I want to get some sleep, and other clients in other timezones are waking up. Thankfully with people usually being awake 16 hours/day, there is overlap where ever in the world the two people are located.

And whilst I remember it, I heard that a horse got itself stuck in mud in a dam in Ingleburn today. Not sure exactly where it was, but I certainly heard the helicopters presumably from the news agencies. Tomorrow I will have to keep an eye out for photos.

I got some work out the door this afternoon - not much though. And I got some small sales, so the day has been productive. This is a good thing. Tomorrow morning I have a quick install job - or more correctly I need to quickly check to make sure some hardware is working. I should be in and out very quickly. I hope. I hope.

I still cannot believe that Telstra sent me the double pass to the movies. I cannot work out why they would send it to me... I hope they do this in the future for me too :-)

ZD Net has a list of the Commandments for IT Departments. That includes things like Thou shalt honor and empower thy (Unix) sysadmins, Thou shalt not outsource mission critical functions and Thou shalt not use nonsecure protocols on thy network.

I know that it is not Halloween, and that it is not anywhere near it. Anyway there is a Halloween site called Balloon Manor. Basically they have created a manor house made out of balloons on a spooky theme. It is worthwhile looking at even if, like me, you are not interested in halloween.

There are times that I get frightened. Such as when a prime minister says 'Read My Lips - Now New Taxes', or when a bank serves you quickly. Or when a phone company does something nice! Right now I think I really really need some protection.

I just got an express post envelope in the post box! Nothing unusual about this, apart from having no return address on it. I did get really scared when I saw the Telstra letterhead inside. What have I done? Did I forget to pay my $500,000 phone bill or something? What is going on?

Read a little further... 'A small thank you from us' it read, and it included a double pass to the movies. And it contained a digitized signature from the head of Customer Sales and Service. There is only one small caveat on it - the ticket is not valid after 5PM on a saturday evening.

Now I only have one problem... Who to go to the movies with.

I am working in Canada today... I have some software to debug, which I thought was fixed. Well, obviously not from the fault report I got. Now I only have one question... Which piece of software has the BUG? At which end. The problem with BIG systems is that they are big and complex. And that means to debug them you need a good idea of what is inside them.

I have been removing some software that I have not been using from my PC, and then I realised that the software provided a DLL for my TeamTrack software. OOps. Even reinstalling the software did not help. Very strange. After a full re-compile and then reloading the form that had the error, things then worked. Sometimes programming is a challenge. Back to debugging the first problem now that my software is now running!

Now for the crazy project of the day... It is a portable NES, or Nitendo Entertainment System.

Music

I am listening to Darude at the moment - it is electronica I guess...

First thing on todays agenda is to get the menu done for the party. Mostly done, but I need to work out how much of things I need. A few people have offered to bring things, so I need to get back to them if I want to get them to bring anything too. Then there are some work related things to do. Maybe more hacking on the MSN thing, and working out a business basis for this.

The ACM Queue has a great interview with AMAZON.COM over the structure of their servers, and how they are put together for scalability. As I move the vehicle tracking forward I will probably need to think more along this line to improve scalability. I really had not thought of splitting up services and databases as much as the Amazon.COM model, but I am hoping it is needed ;-)

Escape on News.Com.Au has some Suggestions on Frequent Flyer programs. Mostly common sense advise, and the tidbit that you often need to book early for seats, and advoid trying in school holidays.

Music:

Simple Plan. A friend was listening to them according to MSN, And I had not heard of them. When I listened to them I recognised some of their music - but the only problem is that the track I recognise the most is listed as 'untitled'. More research required, and I had mistaken for some James Blunt. I find the music similar to Green Day... How I can mix up a band that sounds like Green Day with James Blunt I dont know, but I did.

Late news... Commander in Chief has been killed off... with a final three episodes to be shown. However there is the possibility of a two hour TV movie.

There is a company in the USA called RSYNC. They are a company which will charge you $2/month to access their servers as a network Hard Disk. Basically they will offer you as much hard disk space online as you need, provided you pay for it. But as a way to make sure that the data you send them is kept private, they suggest you encrypt the data. But in addition to that, they have released what they call a canary.

The Canary is a statement that they make once a week that they have not received any court orders to hand over data, and have not been told that they cannot say anything. Users are advised to keep track of this page - and if it is not updated weekly then people know that there is something going on which the owners cannot talk about. Of course there is the potential that the owners might be required to make a false statement, but the system they have set up is quite amazing.

I was also reading The Register about UK government lost more than 1000 foreign citizens who were in their gaols and then released into the community rather than released and deported. Apparently, there is no legal requirement in the entire process of investigation, arrest, the court process, incarceration and release for the nationality of a prisoner to be determined. Strange.

I have managed to get a basic version of messenger to work - although it is not what I would call reliable by any extent of the imagination. But it works well enough that I can use this in a real program.

My version has some features that the real MSN does not have - like actually saying when the person at the other end closes their MSN window. I guess this might have some negative impact, since it would let the other party know that you have closed the window on them and potentially want to finish the conversation.

I did some shopping today for my party... Some snack foods, and some drinks mostly. More things will need to be bought, but the drinks are the heavy thing which makes them the real pain to get from the super market. I also need to finish the menu tomorrow too. I think I have about 20 or so people coming, depending on who gets baby sitters and a few other things. I am looking forward to it. I have a few friends who I have not seen for a while.

As I write more of the MSN interface, I am learning more about the protocol used by Messenger. You can see much of the low level stuff here but that is not the interesting part really. Of more interest is things like the emoticons and the picture that is seen of the other person, or of their avatar.

What happens in the background is that file objects are transferred to show these - which is why sometimes the communications is slowed if the person uses one of of the after market emoticon packs like FunWebProducts or similar. I have not worked out where nudges come from, but that is the least of my worries.

What I want to work out is how to work out if an authorisation is waiting for someone to see online status, and to accept the messages from that person. Since the program will have its own MSN account, there will be no person there to be asked if a random user should be allowed to connect. So I need to do that in code. I guess I will just have to search through the documentation. The problem is that this is all object oriented, which has made the documentation so much harder to read.

As an example I purchased a spreadsheet control a couple of years back - and it came with 10,000 pages of documentation in PDF files. These were obviously computer generated and did little more than list recursively all the possible function calls and a 10 word description of each. But there were probably only a few hundred calls, so there was a LOT of repetition. Thankfully there was a user manual which worked.

This afternoon I have been playing with dotMSN. This is an MSN plugin for VB.NET, so I can now write a program to send and receive MSN messages. For instance I could write a program to accpet MSN messages and then turn the lights on and off in my office. Or send back a humorous quote whenever anyone contacted it. Right now I have written a quick clone of messenger in VB. I can send messages, but receiving will be a little while. Anyone wanting to help me debug can MSN me to my normal email address and I will give instructions.

Some cute links... There is a mayor election in New Orleans, and they have had some debates. The latest one is hilarious... Link.
Last question: There's another flood. You are in a rescue boat. You arrive at a rooftop to find Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie. There's only room for one in the boat. Who do you take?

Landrieu: They both get left.

Nagin: I give them the boat and get on the roof and wait for the helicopter.

And a japanese hospital has done a survey on Kissing and Hay Fever. They have found that 30 minutes kissing reduces the histamine level in the blood. 30 minutes cuddling does not help all that much though. Not surprising really... Anyone spending 30 minutes kissing with a blocked nose will either work out how to clear it of will soon be unconscious :-)

According to The Register, several US companies have been sued by states and cities in the USA over hotel taxes. Sites such as Expedia have been paying the taxes on the wholesale price of the hotel rooms rather than the retail price. This is amounting to millions of dollars. And neither side wants to loose this battle.

I was looking at how I would get to Lisbon in Portugal today if I ever needed to go, and checked some companies. I found a price in Australia that looked good, but I frankly did not care what the price was. I wanted to know how to get there. So I then went to the Expedia web site. And I found that to get to Lisbon you go via Frankfurt, London, or Paris. Anyway the price of the best price in Expedia was more than double the normal prices locally. I was shocked. DOUBLE!

A friend of mine needed to send me some large files, so I got him to upload them securely to my unix box. I did not want to open FTP on this box since it is somewhat insecure. So I created an account on the box for him, and gave him SSH access... and got him to install WinSCP which will transfer files through a filewall provided SSH is open. Works really really well.

I also found a site for showing the current airline traffic over sydney... link. I will soon write a program to superimpose this over OziExplorer maps!

If Dr Seuss Wrote Computer Manuals...

[I found the following cleaning up my HDD... Enjoy]

If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port,
And the bus is interrupted as a very last resort,
And the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort,
Then the socket packet pocket has an error to report!

If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash,
And the double-clicking icons put your window in the trash,
And your data is corrupted 'cause the index doesn't hash,
Then your situation's hopeless, and your system's gonna crash!

If the label on your cable on the gable at your house,
Says the network is connected to the button on your mouse,
But your packets want to tunnel to another protocol,
That's repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall.

And your screen is all distorted by the side effects of gauss,
So your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse,
Then you may as well reboot and go out with a bang,
'Cause as sure as I'm a poet, the sucker's gonna hang!

When the copy of your floppy's getting sloppy on the disk,
And the microcode instructions cause unnecessary risk,
Then you have to flash your memory and you'll want to RAM your ROM,
Quickly turn off your computer and be sure to tell your mom!

I slept well last night - not surprising given the long day, and the fact that I stayed up even later when I started to get tired talking to a friend. Still, it was fun, and that is what sleep is for anyway. Today I have a few things to catch up on after yesterday... Some paper work to do, and some programming. Mostly boring stuff really.

I have been thinking about what to get some friends who are about to have another child... This morning I found one solution... Knitted woolen blocks. But these ones are special. Instead of letters of the alphabet, they are labeled with chemical symbols, and are just a cute idea... Then again maybe not - I am not sure I have enough time at the moment to knit them :-)

I am starting to get a bit tired... WIth the food and the long day I am getting a bit tired... I guess I will have an early night tonight...

One of the stranger books that I have in my library is called the Unix Haters Handbook. This book takes Unix (and by association Linix) and describes all the stupid things about it... And it contains all sorts of strange quotes. As a joke they also included a sick bag at the end of the book. You can actually download the book from the link above.

One of the quotes I love from the book is 'If the designers of Unix built cars, there would be no fewer than five steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none of which followed the same principles -- but you'd be able to shift gears with your car stereo. Useful feature, that.'

My brother was telling me about singer Colin Buchanan's tribute to Beaconsfield. On the day that the miners were released, Colin emailed the ABC and asked about playing a US song. The response from Richard Glover was No; write one yourself. That was at 2PM. By 5:30PM Colin had written and recorded a song and emailed it to the ABC, and it has been a hit. You can actually download it for free from Colin's Web Site, linked to from the ABC!

Dinner was good - chinese. The food was delicious - special fried rice, satay beef, sweet and sour pork, and BBQ chicken. The food was hot and I only wish that I had not eaten as much for lunch. Still, the food was good.

I also saw my brothers new car - a 2001 Toyota Corolla Conquest. A basic Seca hatchback with the long liftback on the back. I think I like the interior of my car rather than his. The only thing my car is missing is a three point seatbelt for the middle seat in the back.

Lunch was good... We went down to Sizzles. It was hard going there knowing that I was going to be going out for dinner too. Their salad bar is really really good, and I love their salads... But knowing that I am going out for dinner was a problem. It meant that I needed to be very careful about what I had. I will probably have chinese for dinner with my brother. He is also bringing over his new car, which he picked up yesterday. Dinner should be good.

Back from shopping - I didnt end up getting anything except morning tea. Borders did not have many books at all in their computer section, and essentially none on the two subjects I was interested in. Still, the selection was better than Angus and Robertson... My home collection of computer books is at least five times bigger than their collection. That more describes how bad their collection is rather than anything else.

There is a new copy of Windows media Player being released tomorrow. FlexBeta has some screen shots. The only warning here - the FlexBeta site is running VERY slow right now!

I have decided what to do this morning... In a few minutes I am going to go down to the local shopping centre - there are some books I want to look at for a project. Shopping for books is always fun! And then come back to Ingleburn to get the mail and out to lunch... I might spoil myself too whilst I am out... Something nice for morning tea.

The SMH has a tiny bit more information on the Copyright Changes. Basically they would allow format changing where you hold the original, but would not allow you to back up a CD since that is not a format change. Backing up a CD to an ISO file might be OK... You would be allowed to record a TV show for you own use, provided you only saw it ONCE! I think this is moving backwards myself...

And the NY Times has an article suggesting that the world really does not need High Definition DVD.

For those who have not worked this out, today is my birthday... So Happy Birthday to me. As of right now my birthday has been pretty boring, but I am sure that will improve. Lunch with a client, and then dinner with my brother, so that should be good (and it will also be an oportunity to see his new 2nd hand car... )

I am not sure what I will do the rest of the day - although I do not really want to do much work. It is my day, and I want to do it my way. Of course there are some things that I will need to do during the day, but I cannot escape that as a responsible adult. I am having my main party on the weekend so that is when I expect to get most cards and birthday wishes...

Dinner tonight was another BBQ... I like my BBQ, and I am getting used to how to cooking with it. Getting cooking times and temperatues correct. Over time I think it will get better - but I just love the taste how it is.

Skype is quite a good program mostly... I just spent an hour on it to Europe, with mostly fantastic results most of the time. Except when the ADSL dropped out at the other end. And of course a few times during the conversation when there was the most horrible eletical feedback. Think of the sound of running nails down a blackboard and you get an idea. Still, even with all this, it was better than making an international phone call.

Anyway, I think it is almost time for bed... For some reason I have been tired today and even needed a 10 minute afternoon nap... I am starting to get tired, and I want to be awake for my birthday tomorrow...

I still have some more things I want to get done today... But one of the things has been at least partially completed... My home office is looking alot tidier. With people coming over this weekend I thought it was time to clean things up!

Some links and some other stuff... Here is a Lego based Rolling Ball Clock. And here is an AirMouse from Cornell Uni...

And Underground Focus magazine has a collection of Some of the best digging disasters ever caught on film. Wondered what happens when someone hits a gas main with a jack hammer? They have some great photos... And finally the SMH is soliciting stories about abuses of carry-on luggage in airliners.