I think one of my best purchases in a long while has been my fancy new iPhone. It was originally a major splurge just because it was cool but it’s so functional and easy to use that I’m using it constantly and looking for ways to get everything on the iPhone. My email has always been IMAP so that got on there pretty quickly and it didn’t take too long to find newsgator’s iPhone rss reader that syncs with NetNewsWire so now my feeds are on it as well. Most recently I’ve found a wordpress plugin that optimizes the admin interface for iPhone. As such I’m happily blogging from my iPhone and there’s one less reason to get out of bed… Of course I suspect the formattingof this post is going to go haywire as various plugins interfere with each other but once I see what happens it should be easy enough to fix. The big downside I’ve found is that while you can add a site to your home screen, whenever you tap it a new safari tab is opened so I wind up with a heap I newsgator tabs left open. It would also be nice to have an icon badge with the number of unread items. The HTML only API is so close to being all you need but not quite. Once you’re in the app it really does feel lie a native iPhone app. I’ve seen a number of sites detect the iPhone and you simply forget you’re still in the browser. The only other gripe I’ve got is that newsgator doesnt remember your login which is stupid and very annoying. That’s not something the iPhone can really control though.

A huge amount of the items that flow through my news reader come from Robert Scoble’s shared items feed. Most I skip, but there’s enough good stuff in there that makes it well worth reading. It keeps me abreast of a much wider range of topics than I would normally read.

The trouble is, Robert doesn’t seem to have as low a tolerance level for crap in feeds that I do. Generally I’ll unsubscribe from a feed if it has:

You might have noticed a distinct lack of posts recently, that’s because I’ve finally followed through on the whole engagement thing that happened a couple of years ago. I took the opportunity to have three weeks off work and detechify (detox for techies) so didn’t wind up blogging while I was away. I must admit it was quite nice to spend the week away on honeymoon without even mobile phone reception on a tropical island. Next time we’ll try not to do it in the middle of winter.

For quite a while we’ve lamented the lack of whiteboards in our office and talked about getting some in. A week or two ago Brett actually arranged it and so I’ve wound up with a lovely big whiteboard above my desk that I happily draw all over. I’ve always been a big fan of whiteboards for problem solving or brain storming sessions, even if I’m working alone. Something about the big open space and ease of erasure makes it so much better than paper.

When an engineer can reproduce a bug they get excited because it means they can be sure to fix it.

When a manager can reproduce a bug they get annoyed because it means they keep running into it.

This is currently the most frustrating part of the transition from engineer to manager. I have in fact submitted a patch on one occasion – it was rejected because it didn’t have tests. Sigh.

It seems every blog post today last fortnight1 has to use the word “malaise” so I might as well chime in. What tipped me over the edge was seeing the comment:

Scoble and Mike – get a life. You peaked.

What’s really amazing about that comment isn’t just that it’s mean and inconsiderate, but that I came across it by reading Robert’s link blog. He’s actually publicizing criticism of himself. Frankly, I wouldn’t be big enough to do that. Maybe A-List bloggers are as stuck up as people tend to assume they are, but I suspect most of them are just normal people that everyone else keeps putting up on a pedestal. I certainly found Robert friendly and approachable when I met him the other week. People need to stop assuming that a link from an A-List blogger is going to make or break their business. The fact is, getting a link from an A-List blogger isn’t as big a deal as you think and it just takes the fun out of it for the A-List bloggers:

One of the things I’ve often found annoying about Brisbane, and to a degree Australia in general, is you just don’t get enough chance meet ups with interesting geeks. So since I’m over in San Francisco at the moment and Robert Scoble invited everyone and anyone to join Tom Conrad and him on the top floor of the Marriot hotel to watch the fireworks, I figured it was worth the walk.

Turns out that only a few people thought of that particular vantage point so when I got there Tom and Robert had secured the best seats in the house. Conversation was great, both Tom and Robert are very down to earth and easy to get on with. We were saved from getting too geeky by Robert inviting over a couple of girls who hadn’t secured good seats but it was good to see some of the stuff put in perspective and get a non-geeks view on things as well.

I mentioned that I was chatting to a reporter after the Java Libre panel yesterday. The article she wrote is now online and it’s a pretty good summary of the key points of interest in the discussion (it skips all the bits where everyone agreed in true reporter style though). I think she did a pretty good job of understanding what I was attempting to say (I elaborated more on that yesterday). We even got an actual link to ephox.com which is unusual.

Just for the record, RedMonk sucks because they didn’t bring shirts to hand out at their unconference….

They told me to blog it…

If you’ve recently upgraded to PHP 5.2.1 (which is included in an upgrade to Debian Etch, the new Debian stable distribution), use WordPress, use the secure admin plugin and are now just seeing a blank page when you view your blog, I have a solution.

Quick Fix

For those who don’t care why this is broken and what I’ve done to fix it, you probably just want to download the updated plugin which works on my server, with my very brief testing. If you see any problems let me know, but be warned that it is very much untested and could destroy everything – make sure you have a good backup and try it on a friends blog first. I strongly suggest you wait until Haris takes a look at this and comments on whether it covers all the original functionality or not – I could easily have missed something critical. I’m also not sure if this works on versions of WordPress before 2.1.3.

Rob Dawson:

I’m looking forward to my second month. One of the more interesting parts is that AJ is coming back from holiday. I’ve worked with some pretty great people over the years, but with very few that have been held in such high esteem by the rest of the team. I’m looking forward to getting to work with him.

I can’t see that attitude lasting too long. :)

After many years of not taking my holidays often enough, I’m playing catch-up a bit this year so I’ve been on holidays since Christmas. It’s been really nice to switch off from work completely, but tomorrow I’m back in the office. Normally about this stage I’d be starting to think of all the things I’ll need to catch up on or get started on etc. This time however I’ve been away so long that I have absolutely no idea what they’ve been working on, where they’re up to or what I’ll be doing next week.

The internet connection started working at my new unit today. Shiny new ADSL2 connection so no more 1500k connection limit for me. Technically my ISP doesn’t know it’s up and running yet so they haven’t activated the VOIP line that’s bundled and the connections capped at 3000k which is what it’s happily connecting at. In the next couple of days that should get sorted out and it will jump up to a cap of 24000k. It remains to be seen how fast my actual connection will be given the poor quality phone lines generally found in Australia.

I’ve just moved my blog and email hosting over to an unmanaged VPS running Debian so I no longer have to fight an extremely outdated RedHat and an awful Plesk control panel to get stuff done. It comes as quite a surprise that I’m finding the software in the Debian stable APT archives refreshingly up to date. Still no PHP4, but I have apache 2 and Python 2.4 (as opposed to Python 2.2 previously) so I’m happy.

Since cruise control doesn’t use a bug tracker – it only provides email lists and I don’t currently have access to my email – I’ll just report this bug here and maybe someday along the way they’ll discover it and fix the problem.

Anyway, my beef is that the cruisecontrol webapp doesn’t work with lynx because it uses a ridiculous JavaScript system to trigger new builds. Now, normally I don’t use lynx as a browser because it tends to be pretty limited, but it would be nice to be able to trigger a build remotely without having to manually parse HTML files and find the URL to ping to get a build to start. At the time I was SSH’d through two machines and then using Hamachi to get access to the actual build machine so it was a little bit difficult to use a standard browser at a reasonable speed.

I’ve found that doing TDD causes me to use, or perhaps just be more aware of using, some useful debugging and programming techniques. As a side note, it occurs to me that debugging and programming in TDD are essentially the same – in either case you’re trying to fix the failing test.

So while TDDing, I find myself asking “What’s different about this case?” in a way that I can’t ever recall before. It’s easier to think like this with TDD because you have a documented, repeatable set of situations to compare between. Sometimes a change you make to fix the latest test will cause others to break and it’s then that you need to determine what’s different about the new case that needs special handling. Developing without TDD, the question I’d tend to ask is “how should this work?” which is a lot broader and harder to comprehend. I still ask, “how should this work”, but it’s usually at the start of a story where I need to get my head around what needs to be done and get an overall view of the problem. Finding the answer usually means a bunch of scribbling on notepads or whiteboards going through the possible scenarios and determining what should happen. While programming, the scope is usually reduced enough that you don’t need to scribble on whiteboards, but I do find myself going over the various cases to narrow the question down to “what’s different about this case?”.
In the end, what it means is that TDD is documenting a lot of what I would otherwise do over and over in my head and getting me to the more narrowly focussed question more quickly. It doesn’t eliminate that mental process, but it does make it easier and provides a safety net for it if I miss a case.

It’s reasonable enough I suppose, but annoying none the less. Everytime a new update comes down through Windows update, it breaks Office 2007 Beta 2 by “updating” some of its DLLs to older versions. Fortunately, the repair functionality in the office installer seems to fix it but it means waiting around for 15 minutes or so while it gets fixed. It would be nice if Windows Update checked that the file it is replacing is the one it expects to be replacing before going ahead – it would avoid all kinds of problems like this.

Recently there was a security flaw introduced by a security patch for IE, this obviously is a really bad thing and something the IE team1 have received a lot of criticism about for some time. Obviously, the IE team took it seriously and tried to find ways to make sure it didn’t happen again. One thing that really bothered me though was a statement in the IEBlog:

In parallel with making the right fix, we have been working through how we prevent similar mistakes from happening again. For instance, we have code-reviewed the past ten months of code check-ins from the developer responsible for this issue.

I’m glad Andy side-tracked into talking about us temporarily dropping pair programming – I’ve been considering the same kind of things but want to see what the rest of the team thinks about it before I say too much.

Slightly off topic, the development speed we’re achieving now is making me wonder if the tradeoffs when developing purely under Pair Programming are actually worth it.

There’s a lot more that has changed recently that has led to our sudden improvement in velocity – not just pair programming. For a start, we’re more focussed on the task because we’re not sharing the support load around the entire team. Plus, the business has really started to understand how difficult it will be for us to get things done so they’ve gotten off our backs about everything else and really focussed on hitting this big scary deadline. We were splitting our development efforts between two or three products and the context switching was killing us.

As part of the process to open source Java, Sun have switched from using codenames for Java releases to just using the actual name. Thank goodness for that. I’m not sure I know of anything more frustrating than attempting to have a conversation with someone using code names instead of actual versions. Was Dolphin before or after Mustang? Which Tiger do you mean, Mac OS Tiger, Java Tiger or Tiger Direct? How hard is it to just pick a version number and use it? Does marketing really need to mess around with that number at all, and even if they do, do they really have to wait until the very end of development to pick a number?

Sam Ruby – Time for a new HTML Validator?:

If people feel that HTML 5 deserves a better validator, I’m willing to invest some time into coding. Are there others interesting in contributing to the coding, the writing up of test cases, or the authoring of documentation?

 Is there a reason we need a new validator instead of just improving the existing one? The source code is available in CVS and there’s some brief instructions on how to contribute. Admittedly it doesn’t look like the easiest project on earth to jump into but it looks possible to do so. Is noone around to accept and apply patches?

Okay, so I’ve converted my WordPress install to use Atom 1.0 and (I think) made using it as the default1, but I’ve got one warning left that I just don’t get:

line 8, column 86: Same-document reference: http://www.symphonious.net/2006/08/13/those-who-still-need-classic/ [help]

... /08/13/those-who-still-need-classic/" />

Now I get that the two URLs are pointing to the same place, but why exactly is this a problem and what URL am I supposed to put in there? Should I just make up a new base URL so that it’s clearly not the same document? The URL is absolute so the xml:base shouldn’t affect it.

Chris Adamson talks about the disappearance of classic support now that Apple has switched to Intel. It’s true, pretty much everyone has moved on from using classic apps, but there was one place I knew I could turn to find people still waiting for their favorite app to be updated: the HyperCard mailing list. Even there though the number of questions about intel are pretty light on as nearly everyone has moved on to HyperCard alternatives or just moved on to something else altogether.

The XP process allows so much flexibility in getting things done but this comes at the cost of focus. I’ve previously talked about how product managers have to be careful they don’t abuse the flexibility in XP, but recently Ephox has discovered the huge benefit that being focussed can be, even when you’re doing XP.

We’ve come up against a very tight, very important deadline for a really big, really difficult new feature and at the same time we lost our entire support department so all support fell into the engineer’s laps. Support is just one of those things you have to do as a software company and our first impression was that the extra support load would reduce our velocity but we’d be able to share the load around the team, get the day’s cases out of the way and get back to developing. What actually happened was the entire engineering team wound up doing support all day and development stopped. Worse still, the team felt drained and tired all the time. We should have been able to get support out of the way faster and get developing, but for some reason we couldn’t.

I found it rather amusing that while filling out my census online it asked me:

Question 59: Can the internet be accessed at this dwelling? To be fair, the options provided to answer included a description of what type of connection you had so the question couldn’t just be assumed, but it’s funny none the less.

I haven’t paid a great deal of attention to the WWDC keynote details – just sampled the various discussions going on. I was however interested in a comment by Ted Leug that Apple were including DTrace in Apple’s performance tools.

I wonder what Sun think about this. DTrace was a key Solaris feature and now it’s coming out for OS X and I seem to recall mention of projects that are porting it to Linux. As a developer it’s nice to see your code become popular so the DTrace team are probably thrilled. As a company though, it’s hard to leverage the benefit of your investment when everyone else is reaping the benefits. Even if Sun get improvements back from Apple, where’s the benefit for them? Apple and everyone else have those improvements too. The ubiquity argument of Java doesn’t seem to apply here, you don’t build on top of DTrace, you use it as a debugging tool. The support business model probably doesn’t pan out either – Apple will be providing support for it themselves and they’re the experts on DTrace on OS X, not Sun.

Mitch Tulloch raises a concern over how large enterprises would react to Microsoft moving to more regular, iterative releases. The answer for large enterprise who can’t handle releases coming out more often than once every six years or so is to only update when they are ready instead of every time there’s a new release.

With Apple, this isn’t a great option because Apple don’t have very long support periods for older OS’s, but that’s not the case with Microsoft – a legacy of the fact that they deal with large enterprise and Apple in general does not. Companies that were running Windows 95 would only have reached the point of having to upgrade, what, a year or two ago? That’s easily more than the required six years between upgrades.

It seems that the world of Java on Mac is always full of drama and gnashing of teeth and Chris Adamson has just the article to really kick it into full gear: Mustang for Mac PPC… any point now?

Sadly, I’m inclined to believe that Chris may well be right – the Java 1.6 release for PPC is likely to be a less than wonderful release as Apple focuses it’s efforts on the Intel release. It’s a given that the Intel release will be better than the PPC release just due to the fact that they now get all Sun’s optimizations for free.

Jason Calacanis’ entry on Wikipedia considering adding a WYSIWYG editor to make it easier for people to contribute strikes a chord close to my heart. The argument that a WYSIWYG editor will cause more work for administrators is quite valid – making it easier for people to contribute will mean more contributions that need to be reviewed and checked. On the other hand though, the benefit of a WYSIWYG editor isn’t just that more people will contribute, but that domain experts in fields other than computing will be able to and be more inclined to contribute. For Wikipedia, that’s a pretty huge benefit – the people who know most about a subject will be more likely to actually be writing the Wikipedia article on that subject.

It’s census time in Australia and for the first time this year, you can complete the census online. Surprisingly, the eCensus is actually very well done. It supports Windows 95 and above and Mac OS 8.5 and above on IE, Netscape or Firefox – and that’s just the official specs. I didn’t think to run it through the HTML validator but I’d assume it would work quite well in pretty much any reasonably modern browser and a whole bunch of not so modern browsers.

A while back it was pointed out that the cool little footnotes plugin I wrote was always using the same ID names to link back and forth. It incremented the number of each footnote in a post, but started again from 1 for the next post. The problem with this of course is that on the main page all the posts are combined together and the footnote links wind up jumping to the wrong place.

So Scoble’s looking for a wiki, seems to have gotten a few popular suggestions. Since he wants it hosted I can’t really offer anything – I don’t have the server space or sysadmin knowledge to handle something of Scoble’s popularity. Despite that, can I recommend that you make the quality of the editor your most important criteria? It will make a huge difference to the adoption rate of the wiki. I’ve discussed this before: Wiki Syntax Considered Harmful and Making Wikis Work.

NetNewsWire’s tabs have overflowed into that stupid little these-didn’t-fit menu because I haven’t had enough time to investigate all the things that I wanted to. Time to blog them and move on until they become a higher priority.

• Solr
  • An opensource Google appliance sort of thing. Looks like a simple way to add search to an application to me – just hook it up to fire events over to Solr and use it to catalogue and search. Seems to provide more power than what I get around to leveraging out of Lucene myself.
• Commons Finder
  • Need to find files from Java – this should be useful. Not sure what I had in mind that it would be useful for but one day I’ll need it for sure.
• Plagger
  • Does stuff with RSS and Atom – not really sure what yet. It originally sounded like a kind of base RSS platform to leverage. Sounds a bit like Abdera plus more but could be completely different. No idea really.
• activeCollab
  • Not sure why I’d need this right now and seems to have a fair way to go, but interesting none the less.

The rest is stuff I need to read or respond to, but this should be enough to get the tabs visible again.

I’m not sure there are many platforms that make installing software more painful than Windows. Linux used to present a worthy challenge but apt-get and similar systems are so common and so comprehensive now that it’s generally smooth. Some of the main annoyances are:

• Clicking next, next, next, next just to get the install started. Are all those screens really needed? Couldn’t we at least skip the welcome screen?
• Icons, icons everywhere and not a scrap of user control. I’m looking at you NetBeans – I didn’t tell you to put an icon on my desktop. And you Thunderbird, why the heck do you feel compelled to add yourself to my quick launch bar? Windows Media Player does the same thing. Rack off all of you. You can put a shortcut in the Start menu under programs and that’s it.
• License keys. Is there anything more futile? Why waste my time with them when I can just use the same key on multiple machines to pirate the software anyway?
• Uninstallers and readme’s in the start menu. Add/Remove Programs handles uninstalling, just give me the product and get rid of the extra crap in the menu. You’ll probably wind up with just one icon left and you can get rid of the folder altogether. Kudos to Microsoft for leading the way on this – Virtual PC has no folder and Office has just the programs in it’s folder.
• No auto-sort in the start menu. Is it really that hard to just keep things sorted by name without me having to do it?
• Unlock toolbar, resize quick launch area, lock toolbar, discover the size has changed because the dividers aren’t shown anymore, repeat the process until you get it to the right size. Anyone heard of size to fit?

I think that covers most of the issues I’ve had. It makes me appreciate how nice OS X apps are to install, even if they do hide the applications folder.

A few days ago I did a clean reinstall of my Windows machine to clean up the mess of partitions and OS boot menus that had developed from trying out different OS’s. While reinstalling drivers, I discovered that my computer came with Norton Internet Security so I figured I may as well install it1, I also discovered an nVidia firewall tool and installed that too. Then I started downloading programs to install – firefox, Java etc. Everything I downloaded was corrupt. I disabled both firewalls and everything was still getting corrupted, even though I could download them on my Mac just fine. Even JavaScript files and applets were being corrupted while downloading.

Leon Brooks picks up on my previous post about motivating via competition, suggesting, if I understand correctly, making cooperation a key to winning the competition. It seems to me that coming up with a system of rules to encourage team work is doing things the hard way. If you want people to work as a team, make them a team. Put them on the same side, all striving for the same goal to get shared rewards.

Competition is a strange beast – it can bring out the very best in people and it can cause teams to gel better than they ever have. Something about having a challenge thrown out with the potential to feel superior really gets people motivated. Sadly, there is a trend to try and use this motivation in the workplace by having awards and competitions between work mates. Instead of bringing the team together though, these competitions tear it apart because now the aim is to be superior to your work mates instead of working with your work mates to be superior over someone else.

Managers and HR type people are big on setting objectives and identifying a key metric to absolutely, without doubt determine whether or not that objective was met – usually tying bonuses to that metric. The problem with this is that people then game the system. If the key metric is lines of code per day, then people write excessively long, complex ways of doing things because that’s what will get them rewarded. If the metric is defects per thousand lines of code, people stop reporting bugs. For any given metric, there’s a simple way to game it and whether or not people realize they’re doing it, they will trend towards gaming the system. Overall, this leads to a net loss for the company because people are concerned about their bonuses, instead of focussing on working well as a team and doing what’s best for the company.

Jeremiah Foster writes about Apple closing the source to the OS X kernel on Intel. I the statement:

Without the ability to modify kernel source serious developers will not touch the Apple platform, maybe that is why the OS X server is not making significant inroads into the server community.

Firstly, serious developers don’t really care about kernel source unless they happen to develop kernels or kernel modules. Most developers, both fun loving and serious, develop well above the kernel level and don’t need access to its source code. Even the link between serious developers and those that are so passionate about open source kernels, that they refuse to use an OS whose kernel isn’t open source is tenuous at best. The kernel is one very small, albeit central, part of OS X and the vast majority of the OS is and has always been closed source.

Someone, I forget who, pointed to an old article on Ask Tog, Keyboard vs. The Mouse, pt 1. I found it particularly interesting to read that:

• Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
• The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.

I’ve always been of the mind that GUIs are faster than command lines for any task which you don’t do often enough to know off by heart. I imagine the same applies in this case – any task you perform often enough to learn the keyboard shortcut off by heart is faster by keyboard shortcut, otherwise using the mouse is faster. Unfortunately, this means that when you begin using a new command frequently, you have to go through a period of slower use in order to learn the keyboard shortcut, after which you should be faster.

I think this is the final episode in my series of responses1 to Alastair’s Responding to Adrian. What’s the aim of diffing HTML, how hard is it and how do you go about it?

The aim is really important to identify. The most common and most useful aim that I see for diffing HTML is to be able to show users what changed between two versions of a document. Since the management of most content is centralized2, this equates to showing the combined changes in each version between the original version to compare and the final version to compare. If you’ve ever wanted to see what’s changed on a wiki page, you’ve wanted this type of diff. If you’re sending Word documents back and forth between people you probably want this type of diff too.

A while back I promised I would get around to fully responding to Alastair’s Responding to Adrian, sadly I’m finding lots of little bits of time to blog but not enough time to reply to the whole post at once. Hence, I’ll have to respond in parts when I get time.

First up, the problem that HTML doesn’t render the same on different systems. My assertion is that generally the differences aren’t significant enough to worry about.

Every fortnight or so the Ephox engineering team lets off steam by taking a couple of hours on a Friday afternoon to do cool stuff with our products using just the publically available APIs. Theres been some cool prototypes come out of it that may be turned into features later on but mostly it allows us to get a sense of what our customers go through when they try to extend or customize our products. You should see a number of improvements to our API appearing in future versions because of this experience1.

Rick Jelliffe holds the poor HTML support in swing up as an example of why Swing should be opensourced. There’s a very major flaw in this argument though: you’ve been able to fix the HTML support in Swing since at least Java 1.3 and probably well before. It was actually designed to be replacable. Just implement your own HTMLDocument and HTMLEditorKit and you can plug it into a JTextPane all you like and render HTML to your heart’s content.

So apparently one of our engineers here at Ephox has been secretly writing a blog and not telling us.

I’m not ready to start advertising the existance of this blog to anyone and everyone I know. I’ll do my best to start posting on impulse though, it should make this whole process easier.

Either way I’m going to try and work on actually getting back into blogging this time, it can’t be too much longer before my workmates discover that I have a blog, hopefully by then I’ve found my style!

Sometime you run into a bug that you can reproduce off an on, and you just get this feeling that it’s because each time you try to reproduce it you’re doing something slightly different and that’s causing it to appear and disappear. I encountered just such a bug today.

The bug report came in, select a word at the end of a list item, hit backspace and the word is deleted correctly but the next list item is incorrectly moved up and appended to this one (as if you’d hit forward delete at the end of the list item with no selection). I’d seen this problem happen with my own eyes, the first time I tried it I reproduced the problem. So I made a change to the code base to try and track down what caused it and all of a sudden the problem disappeared.

It’s not often that Slashdot comes up with something genuinely interesting that I haven’t seen from somewhere else before, but they managed it today. Puritan Work-Ethic, How I Loathe Thee really struck a chord with me:

Nearly every video game since “tank pong” has buried its best content behind layers of work. Unlike any other retail product I can think of, when you buy a video game, the chances that you will actually get what you paid for are infinitesimal. I can’t think of a single game I’ve played where I am confident that I’ve seen every single level; unveiled every coveted secret; unlocked every whatsit and pretty and soundtrack left like kipple by the designers in the dark corners of the code.

When you work with legacy code, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that because you can’t atomically test it that you should refactor it and add tests. This is a mistake. You should write integration tests, then refactor it, then write atomic tests. Even when the refactoring seems simple, it’s still possible to stuff it up.

Most code can have integration tests written for it, even when it wasn’t designed for testing. In some cases the tests may not be able to cover everything but should give you at least a foundation to work from. Just make sure that as you write the tests you note down the things you couldn’t write an automated test to cover and make sure you do add a test for them after your refactoring.

I’ve finally gotten around to upgrading to WordPress 2. Mostly I held off because it was going to destroy my integration of EditLive! for Java (I didn’t bother learning about plugins, just edited the WordPress source code). This time around I’ve integrated ELJ via a plugin, but the plugin API doesn’t make it particularly simple. Why is there no action for generating the editor? Shouldn’t it have been reasonably obvious that people might want alternative editors?

In an effort to reduce the ridiculous amount of time wasted on April Fools day, the USA will be separated from Canada and Mexico and towed westward across the international date line, thus making April fools day start first in the US and letting them post all the pointless drivel to the internet prior to the rest of the world waking up. With the current location of the US, Australians have to put up not only with 24 hours of their own stupid April fools jokes but with an extra 12-16 hours of the US’s jokes the next morning.

I’ve come to discover a really annoying trend among blog statistic services – they all seem to show graphs of vistors by day, week or month instead of showing the past 24 hours, 7 days or 30 days. The difference is quite substantial, by viewing by the past 24 hours you always get a useful graph, by viewing by the day at the start of the day there’s just a blank graph.

Loud Thinking:

Finally, the new economics of dynamic languages like Ruby simply makes reuse a lot less attractive. Since the cost of producing new, original code is so much lower…

Hang a tick, why is new code cheaper with dynamic languages? Sure, you can write the code faster but the vast majority of cost involved in code isn’t spent up front, it’s spent in maintenance. So writing new code hurts because you don’t take advantage of all the money already spent on maintaining existing code and instead incur extra maintenance cost.  Even if the initial cost of writing new code was reduced to zero, new code would still be very expensive purely because of the maintenance element.

Brain Sparks has an interesting critique of the findings from that infamous study suggesting that users make judgments about a web site in the first 50ms. Turns out there’s no evidence in the study to suggest that users will leave your site if that first 50ms doesn’t look good – they’ll just think it’s ugly.

Thankfully, we’re not as fickle as some people seem to think we are.

Chris Pirillo has an intersting list of Ten Reasons Your Next PC will be from Apple. Some of them are the typical, run-of-the-mill reasons you hear everytime Mac vs PC comes up but some of them are really interesting, compelling reasons.  My favorite would be:

4. Knowledge. Don't let platform bigotry get in the way of understanding and appreciating good technology. We all are better for knowing more, and that's something you should look forward to doing – not avoiding at all costs. Bury the hatchet if you think that this still is the Mac you first saw in 1984.

This is the reason I have a Windows machine and a Linux machine to complement my main OS X laptop – it lets me be knowledgeable about the three OS’s and to be able to readily make the decision about which is best for a specific tasks, particularly because swapping OSs for a single task is straight-forward. Of course, if you’re a Mac user, this is an excellent reason why you should should put a Windows box within easy reach and preferably something like Linux, BSD or Solaris as well.

It’s amazing how unobservant people can be at times. A while back Technorati notified me of a new link to my blog from “Pete the programmer from the sink”. I didn’t have time to investigate but figured I didn’t know a Pete from the sink so wasn’t too concerned. As I passed by the WordPress Dashboard again today though it was reporting that link to me again so I decided to check it out. I failed to realize that the user “peteroyle” might just be my friend from uni – Pete Royle and missed the hitcity.com domain where Pete works. Finally just as my curiosity was satisfied and I was about to close the tab, I noticed the gem of a photo Pete has as his blog header and thought – hey, I know him!

Rich Bowen has been posting podcasts of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Simply brilliant! Sadly it doesn’t look like we’ll get to the final stave by Australian Christmas so I’ll most likely have to wait until I get back in the new year to hear the end. All the same, it is a very entertaining reading of one of the classic stories and I can’t recommend you listen to it enough.

Queensland Transport provide an online form to allow you to change your address details:    +5 brownie points

The form pops up in a new window:    -2 brownie points

The new window expands to be full screen:    -4 brownie points

The new window hides the location bar and all other window decorations:    -10 brownie points

The SSL certificate is self signed:    Do not pass GO, do not collect brownie points. Go straight home and tell your mother what you did.

I’ve caught up on the backlog of stuff to write about from the past couple of weeks where I’ve been preoccupied with moving house, mostly by dropping it off the list because it’s just too old to be worth commenting on now. So now I’m off to the Gold Coast for christmas holidays with my darling fiance and her family. It’s a tough life sometimes. Anyway, that means I won’t be posting much here for a while again, possibly until the new year. So merry christmas all!

The Boston Globe:

AT&T Inc. and BellSouth Corp. are lobbying Capitol Hill for the right to create a two-tiered Internet, where the telecom carriers’ own Internet services would be transmitted faster and more efficiently than those of their competitors.

Why does that not surprise me? In the end though this is very bad for consumers who are paying for internet access and deserve to get the best speeds possible for the best price possible for whatever services they want to use it for.

Ben Laurie:

…because it actually affects peoples lives, and not in a positive way: studies have shown that if people believe they are being observed, then they tend to alter their behaviour to match what they think the observer wants to see. I want people to be able to do their thing without fear of consequences from bigots or The Man or even “ordinary people”. None of us are ordinary and the world will be a poorer place if we were made to be.

There are just so many elements to this story that seem so wrong. First a teacher brings porn to school on their laptop. Secondly that students were suspended for accidentally coming across it but mostly that they were suspended for hacking because they answered an obvious question when prompted:

“The hacking involved a dialogue box coming up on the screen which asked which car do you drive,” one of the boys’ parents told the paper.

For the past month or so I’ve been organizing my work life with Remember The Milk, another in the growing line of AJAX todo list implementations. It’s “in beta” (what isn’t?) and shows it at times with the odd glitch. Generally though it’s very nice to use, is free and allows you to set due dates on items.

It’s idea of being able to send you an instant message on any of the networks, email or SMS to notify you when a task is nearly due is great, but unfortunately completely undependable so not yet useful in practice.

Daring Fireball:

NetNewsWire users get a generous transition deal: two years of subscription service to NewsGator online, including synching storage, access to other NewsGator software, and all updates to NetNewsWire released in that time. Considering that NetNewsWire 2.0 was a free update, this makes NetNewsWire 1.0 look like one of the best deals in Mac history — if you bought NetNewsWire 1.0 in February 2003, you not only still haven’t paid a dime in upgrade fees, but you won’t for another two years, either. And not only will the free NetNewsWire Lite remain, but they plan to add synching features to it.

Anyone know of good HTML diff tools that actually work well? For that matter, does anyone know of any diff tools that work well with plain text that isn’t line based, eg: the standard type of text you’d find in a blog entry or a book? I’m guessing a combination of word based and line based diffing might work okay for that type of thing but I haven’t come across much that actually tries to deal with the problem. At least, not in a way that aims to provide a meaningful result for humans rather than just a form of compression for updates.

Scoble: Story about single-play DVDs is false

Ed Bott reports the truth: no truth to Microsoft single-play DVD story.

Yes, the news system can be hoaxed. But, it cleans itself out pretty fast. Bloggers, please include links to original sources and the source where you saw it. Also, correct any post where something false is reported. Help the system clean itself out.

For instance, will Slashdot correct this post?

Ah Scoble, how young and naive you are…  Slashdot holding back on a good ol’ fashioned Microsoft bashing indeed…

It seems that John Dvorak doesn’t like advertising much either. I’ve previously complained about advertising in various forms (1, 2, 3) so it’s nice to see more voices joining the chorus.  In fact, also today I see O’Reilly Radar noting that Ad Skippers Do It With Research.

It is however a shame that Dvorak’s article was so jam packed full of ads, including splitting it over two pages so they could show more ads that most people would have been distracted from his point, which ironically demonstrates his point.

I’ve been playing around with the beta of BlogBeat and recently switched on FeedBurner for my feeds (just the free version). Both systems attempt to show who’s reading your blog and provide some statistics about them. FeedBurner does this by looking at the number of people viewing your RSS feed and BlogBeat does it by looking at the number of people looking at your web site.

In the end, you have to realize that the actual numbers are irrelevant because both these methods are really quite inadequate. What they do show however, is trends and comparatives. You can’t say with any real degree of certainty that 100 people read your blog, but you can say with certainty that more people read your blog today than yesterday or that Wednesday is the most popular day. It’s because of this that I much prefer Blogbeat to FeedBurner, even though I suspect that FeedBurner’s number are likely to be more numerically accurate.  With BlogBeat I can see what links people are clicking on around my website, not just what entries they clicked through to. I can see the window size people use when they access my blog – though I wish that were easier to visualize – and the service has a lot of potential to pull out other data about what readers are accessing on the site, more so than just how many people are reading.

I said I couldn’t be bothered setting up my feeds to use FeedBurner.  I lied, curiosity got the better of me and my feeds to go through FeedBurner.  The URLs haven’t changed, there’s just a redirect in place that flicks things over to FeedBurner.  If for some reason you have trouble with my feeds please let me know and if you really object I can give you the non-redirected feed URL that FeedBurner uses to get my feed.

I’ve been playing with the new BlogBeat beta (as best I can tell, you get invited to the beta by complaining that you’re not in the beta) and it’s interesting to see the traffic patterns with my current very sporadic posting schedule.  The big thing I notice is that pretty much every time I write a post, despite the fact that I publish full text feeds, I see a big boost to my readership. These obviously aren’t people who check my homepage regularly since they wouldn’t know to check the page when I post so they must be RSS readers that have clicked through (BlogBeat doesn’t pick up on RSS readership, at least with the way I’ve set it up).

Scoble pointed to this article by Ben Askins comparing Google’s customized homepage and Microsoft’s Start.com.  Unfortunately the comparison was overly complex and missed some critical criteria, so I thought I’d do my own.  I’ll be using a very simple set of criteria, one criterion in fact.

Does it work?

First up, Google.  As the screen shot below shows, it works.

Now here’s how Start.com looks:

A nice clean search engine interface, but unfortunately no customization options.  It seems Microsoft forgot to do any testing using Safari. Oh well. How useful can a start page be if it doesn’t work in all the browsers you want to use?

I’ve been thinking for a while that I should get a cheap car audio system that includes an aux-in jack so that I could use my iPod to play music in my car (FM transmitters are just too unreliable for city driving and I don’t have a tape deck, only a CD player). Reading this article though makes me wonder if I can just get a car audio system that’s specifically designed for the iPod.

On Friday night while strolling along the riverside at Southbank just like on our first date, I proposed to the beautiful Janet and she accepted.  The wedding bells aren’t expected to actually start ringing until Janet finishes uni in a couple of years but we’re very excited to be about telling everyone how happy we are together.

Okay, lets get this clear, driver signing has nothing to do with security.  It might help stability, but security – nope, totally unrelated.  So when you see Windows developers posting under the title When people ask for security holes as features: Silent install of uncertified drivers, and then talk exclusively about system stability without mentioning security once you really have to wonder.

The security of the system has been breached long before the unsigned driver warning pops up – security is breached the minute the installer starts to run or possibly even by the time the installer downloads.

Ken Coar starts each post with a one-line comment/quip/remark which may or may not be related to the topic of the post.  Apparently Leo Simmons reads them:

Hi, Leo!

This isn’t the only not-so-hidden message to Leo hidden in Ken’s summary and I’m beginning to suspect their up to something.  If only I could crack the devious code their using…

Maybe I need a monacle…  BTW Ken, do you always wear that or is it just to make you look uber cool on your blog (which it does btw)?

I’ve finally got around to changing over most of my mailing list subscriptions to use my Symphonious.net address instead of my intencha.com address.  I think I’ve got them all…  My intencha.com address will continue to work indefinitely though so it’s not a big deal if I’ve missed one, it just means that from here on in I plan to try and send everything from my symphonious.net address so any mailing lists that haven’t been changed over may get caught up in moderation.

Symphonious.net has now moved to it’s own virtual server hosted by eApps.  I think everything is set up right but if you see any problems please let me know.  Sorry for any disturbances caused.

Also, a massive thanks to Iain for letting me use his server up until now (the header image is his too).  The service was excellent – you’ll have to come round for gratitude beer and nachos soon.

So David’s relicensing his blog content – good for him.  One thing struck me:

doesn’t allow any derivative works (I don’t really see the relevance of it in this context, but I’m happy to be persuaded).

In the context of Australian law, with our whole not having fair use like the US, what implications does this have for quoting from your blog?  What if I quote the whole entry and comment on each paragraph?  What if I have ads on my blog – does that make it commercial?  How is the average Joe supposed to work out all this?

The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race

To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn’t the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren’t specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.

My saturday mornings are being consumed by catching up on reading that I put off during the week and it’s starting to get out of hand.  I had the future in-laws, my mother and my little sister over for dinner last night so completely ignored the incoming feeds – this morning there were over 200 new items to flick through and another 20-30 had arrived before I got through them all.  The list of open tabs in NetNewsWire has overflown into a drop down menu all week and after 3 hours of reading this morning I’ve only just gotten it to fit again.  Plus I have a stack of downloads to play with and evaluate.

Hand warmer for geeks – a USB powered device that blows warm air across your keyboard.

The rest of me is quite warm, but I can’t wear gloves and type at the same time.  If you know of one that exists, my birthday is in a couple of weeks so you could just send one now….

It’s really worth subscribing to “kazem’s” cartoon feed for some quality geek laughs.  Occasionally he turns into a bit of a Sun shill (he does work for Sun) but mostly it’s just general laughs from a (software) bug’s life.  Fortunately there’s now a happy little orange icon linking to the RSS feed – it took me ages to find it originally as it was in no way linked (it’s here for the record).

Mostly so I remember this later, this article lists a bunch of good online free (and royalty free) photo archives.

Great to see Ugo Cei joining the side of good, er, those with full text feeds.  Shame to hear about the cause of it but I’ll definitely be reading a lot more of Ugo’s writings in the future – the barrier to entry is now much lower.  There’s no need for me to decide if I’m interested in the post based on a short summary, I start reading and don’t stop until I get to the end or get bored.  Essentially the impetus is now on my to decide I don’t want to read the entry instead of on deciding that I do.

Somehow I got the song Your Feets Too Big stuck in my head and since I don’t have a copy, I went searching the iTunes music store.  I found the original Fats Waller version but decided I liked the version from the new cast of Ain’t Misbehaving, The Fats Waller Musical more and added it to my cart.  Then of course iTunes recommended I buy the entire album (all Fats Waller hits) and after a sampling the various songs I succumbed and bought the lot.  It’s very good.

I may have commented on how great NetNewsWire is a couple of times before (1, 2) but I have to do it again.  If you have the full version of NetNewsWire (as opposed to NetNewsWire Lite), you can easily create and subscribe Feedster searches using File->New Special Subscription->Search Engine.  There’s a range of search engines you can choose from and a bunch of other options in the New Special Subscription that may be useful as well.

I’ve been watching the Harmony development list since just after it’s inception and it’s been very interesting reading when you look at the big picture.  I’ve skipped over most of the technical discussions and focussed more on the interpersonal and inter-organizational topics as well as legal issues etc.

What is clear from watching the posts flow through is that there are a whole lot of people from outside of of Apache getting involved.  There’s also a bunch of people that appear to be completely new to open source as well.  Most of these people will rapidly drop off when they realize they can’t keep up with the amount of email passing through the list, let alone the actual work involved when that really gets started.

Useful little tool for seeing what people are searching for: Keyword Selector Tool

Just dumping it here so I can find it later.

Tim O’Reilly makes some interesting remarks about how to make advertising more useful.  I have to wonder though how much damage has been done by the constant attempts to grab people’s attention with advertising using cheap gimmicks and generally annoying people (popups, flashing images, distracting animations etc).  A huge number of people have become accustomed to just totally ignoring advertising.  I know that I don’t care how good an offer an ad puts in front of me anymore or what the ad does to get my attention I ignore it.  The only message I get out of web advertising these days is that I hate web advertising.

I wanted to be able to have all my RSS feeds combined in the cool (looking but totally impractical) RSS screen saver but sadly it only allows you to select one source feed.

I tried two approaches to solve this:

1. Set up a personal planet planet instance that aggregates all my feeds and point the screen saver at that.
2. Create a combined RSS feed using AppleScript.

Item one I got working but didn’t like the fact that I was then downloading all my RSS feeds twice, so I scrapped the idea.  If however you ever want to create a planet instance that stays in sync with your RSS feeds, use something along the lines of the AppleScript below and execute it periodically.  I’ve snipped most of the paths involved to try to avoid making the lines too long.  A bunch of lines have also been wrapped – the compiler should find them.  It reads the configuration file from config.ini.tmpl, adds the RSS feeds to the end and writes it out to config.ini

Straight from the webblog of The Fat Man, Viva La Resolution.  Funny, funny stuff.  Read the story, listen to the song, live the moment…

For some reason this morning I felt compelled to publish the list of RSS feeds I subscribe to.  Thus, on the right hand side over there (or over here if you’re reading via my RSS feed) is a blogroll.  There’s currently no process to keep it up to date and it might still contain a couple of internal URLs that won’t work for everyone but it should give the morbidly curious a pretty good idea of what sources I’m following.

I finally got around to purchasing a full copy of NetNewsWire and am very happy with the decision.  I never thought I’d like opening web pages in NetNewsWire instead of in Safari (it’s a configurable option) but I’m really starting to like it.  It makes it easier for me to keep pages open for a long time while they wait for me to get a chance to read them while still allowing me to get on with work in Safari without winding up with a million open tabs and not being able to find anything.

I haven’t had a chance to read everything that’s been going around about Jonathan Schwartz’s latest comments about the GPL but I wanted to pick on David Jericho for a moment because his response irked me a little.

The problem with attacking something like the GPL is that it makes the attacker generally look stupid.

And the problem with defending something like the GPL is that it makes the defender generally look like a zealot.  There are multiple valid viewpoints for this argument, suggesting that the GPL is infallible and beyond criticism (which is how I would interpret David’s statement) is a pretty tough argument to sell.  The key difference here is one of philosophy, the GPL was explicitly created to force software to be open and kept that way.  It was created on the belief that all software should be free.  If you agree with those principles the GPL is very clearly a fantastic license and probably is from your viewpoint, infallible.  If however you happen to believe that intellectual property should be leveraged to make money and that this process fosters innovation then you probably think the GPL is bad for innovation or bad for the economy.  Neither side can be clearly proven to be right or wrong at this stage, and it’s quite possible that there will never be a definitive answer.  There are however plenty of opinions going both ways, but they are just opinions.  There are also case studies supporting both sides.  David mentions India and China as examples of the GPL doing wonders for the economy, I’d mention the current economic super powers as examples of traditional intellectual property approaches doing wonders for the economy.

Hadley Stern raises a bunch of questions about how much time kids should be spending in front of computers (and TV and video games etc).  I’m not sure why this is such an issue for people.  Growing up I spent a huge amount of time in front of computers and I’m (at least reasonably) normal.  The key element isn’t so much restricting a passion for computing or even TV and video games, it’s more about encouraging other activities.  Kids won’t enjoy other activities much if they do them because they are no longer allowed to be doing what they really wanted.

It’s been quiet around here of late because I’ve spent pretty much all my spare time at rehearsals for a new play debuting in Brisbane titled The Last Of The Red Hot Irish Lovers which is probably best described as a light hearted drama.  I’ve been put in charge of the technical side of the show – mostly focussing on sound.  If you’re near Brisbane I strongly recommend you go see it, the opening night was tonight and there are shows Friday and Saturday from 7:30 and Sunday from 2pm as well as Thursday, Friday and Saturday of next week from 7:30.  All at the MetroArts building in Adelaide street.  Tickets are available at the door or bookings can be made by contacting me (contact details are in the sidebar).  I think it’s about $15 a ticket or $10 concession.   If you need further info give me a yell.

Pretty much no-one used them.

Yeah it’s right out there in the conspiracy theory side of things but I’m pretty sure that’s the main reason Apple hasn’t been too keen to put engineering time into developing Java wrappers for the Cocoa APIs.  Lots of people thought they were a cool idea and started using them, then one by one they realized it would just be so much easier to use Objective-C since that’s what the APIs were designed for in the first place.  Jump on Apple’s java-dev list and ask whether or not you should use the Java-Cocoa bridge for an application and the advice that you’ll get is to just learn Objective-C and you’ll be much better off.

He’s popping up in a few interesting places of late.  He’s been hired by Sun to work on the Swing team and promptly showed up on the WinLAF mailing list to talk about moving their bug fixes to the Windows L&F into the official Swing codebase for release in Mustang (accompanied by talk of how to make it easier for the WinLAF folks to contribute fixes more directly to the Swing codebase.  Then today he turned up on the Mac Java-Dev list asking questions related to making Java apps look right on OS X.  Then of course he’s behind the Flying Saucer pure Java XHTML renderer which is really quite awesome (it was very strict about standards compliance last I checked so should make even Byron happy).

Well that’s not true, there’s a lot going on in my life – I’ve been really busy, but there’s not much going on in the tech industry and the “blogosphere” that’s interested me enough to post anything.  There haven’t been all that many posts recently that I’ve really read either, mostly I’ve just been skimming everything that comes through the RSS feeds.

Oh well, at least the offline world is interesting at the moment.

When importing entries from MovableType into WordPress, it doesn’t enable trackback pings on the imported entries.  Now I have about 300 old posts that don’t have trackback enabled.  Anyone know how to enable pings enmass?

Oh and yeah, that’s about the most evil thing I’ve found about WordPress so far, overall I’m very impressed but I’d hate to ruin my evil theme for the evening now…

I thought I’d take another look at Skype – we used it at work for a while and eventually gave up on it as it was just too much of a hassle compared to a normal phone call even if a phone call was more expensive.

Anyway, my username is ajsutton so feel free to give me a call so I can test it out.

I have to say, I am really impressed by Robert Scoble’s attitude.  Someone rips into him and unsubscribes from his feed in a highly public and critical fashion and he takes it on the chin and points out how good it is that people can do that to him (and in fact to anyone brave enough to publish their thoughts on a blog).

As someone who has ripped into Robert’s comments before (and knowing me, most likely I took the odd cheap shot at him as well in the process) and being someone that disagrees with most of what he has to say, this is why I keep reading “Scobilizer”.  He can take criticism well and actually learns from that feedback.  Sure he mightn’t go so far as coming to his senses and agreeing with me but you can always tell that he’s thought about it instead of just dismissing it off hand.

Byron and I seem to be heading for another round of make it standard or make it work discussion.  In this case, Byron pointed out that pages on this site are served as text/html instead of application/xhtml+xml.  After some brief investigation, here’s why I’ll be sticking with text/html:

It works.  application/xhtml+xml doesn’t.

Firstly, apparently IE 6 doesn’t support application/xhtml+xml, at least according to http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/03/19/dive-into-xml.html so I’d have to dynamically detect the browser and change the mime type anyway.  I really must start up my PC and check how the entire site looks on IE for Windows for myself - I haven’t bothered as yet.

If you’re seeing this post, you’ve made it through the maze of redirects to the new home of my blog.  If you normally read via a planet or RSS feed, now would be a good time to head on over to the actual site to check out the new design (featuring the Brisbane skyline courtesy of Iain Robertson).

Apologies if previous entries show up as new, the RDF feed has dates in it so hopefully it won’t cause any problems but changes to blogs almost always seem to cause some problems.

If you are finding that NetNewsWire doesn’t update your feeds like it should be and when you open /Applications/Utilities/Console you see a bunch of lines like:

2005-02-24 15:54:24.679 NetNewsWire Lite[371] HTTP download error -- Domain: POSIX Type: error code: 32 -- URL: http://feedster.com/links.php?url=http://www.intencha.com/adrian/&type=rss

and you’re using Privoxy try changing the proxy settings from using localhost to using 127.0.0.1.  Doing so will also fix a problem where Internet Exploreron OS X can’t connect to any sites despite the fact that Safari can connect successfully.

A fair while back I commented on a job opening at Microsoft, noting that my blog would probably work against me in that particular case due to it being so critical of Microsoft.  Robert Scoble noted that Microsoft don’t want to hire evangelists that just drink the company Kool-aid and have no credibility.  He’s right of course but slightly missed my original reasoning.  It’s not so much that I’ve made some negative comments about Microsoft – more that I pretty much have never said anything positive about Microsoft on my blog.  I was supportive in my “Missing The Point” entry about Microsoft’s new interoperability initiative and did defend beta releases which were relevant to Microsoft at the time, but that’s about it.  See for yourself.

I’ve set up a blog to keep track of the books I want to read.  This year I want to do a lot more reading, particularly on technical subjects but also just stuff in general.  The most recent entries are syndicated into this blog over on the right hand side of the main page and RSS junkies can grab the feed.

I noticed today that The Kleptones have released an mp3 version of their broadcast on “The Rinse” entitled “From Detroit To J.A."   It’s not as good as “A Night At The Hip Hopera” but it is definitely enjoyable.  It involves a lot of Motown material but unfortunately they too often took the average lyrics instead of the sensational music.

My pick of the series would have to be “Really Rappin’ Something” mostly for it’s driving baritone sax line.  I must admit though that the use of the music from “Ben” (early Michael Jackson) as the backing for “Revolverlution” was an inspired choice.  I’m not sure where the words over the top came from but they are also brilliant – “The Revolution Will Be Televised”.

For about the first time ever I actually looked at the MT activity log for this blog.  It’s interesting to see the massive amount of spam I’m blocking with MT-Blacklist – between 50 and 100 comments or trackbacks blocked every day.  The HTML entity block (which is now modified to block the use of numeric HTML entities for the letters e and o only due to it blocking too many trackbacks before) is by far and away the most effective – hopefully not too many of the things it’s blocking now are actual ham.  Please let me know if you think you’ve been blocked inappropriately.

Apparently in Britain, cartoon frogs are allowed to have genitals – assuming of course they don’t refer to them in a sexual manner.  This is obviously a great triumph for free speech in Britain and I’m sure the mobile phone ringtones the frog advertises would have been devastated if the frog had been void of genitalia.

It is however somewhat concerning that:

Five parents said they were embarrassed by questions their children had asked.

A little while back, Robert Scoble pointed to a job opening as an evangelist at Microsoft.  An evangelist looks like a pretty cushy job to me – flying around the world to conferences and posting on mailing lists and blogs a lot – something to look into becoming when I eventually get sick of coding all day.

Now by the job description I’d say I’m reasonably qualified for such a position and there’s good examples of evangelizing technologies on my blog.  Sadly, most of the technologies I comment positively about are competitors to Microsoft’s offerings and on a number of occasions I may have gone so far as to directly criticize Microsoft.  There appears to be a blog sized hole in my foot…

Every piece of comment spam I’ve had come through in the past few weeks has tried to disguise itself by using HTML entities to escape letters so that spam filters don’t trigger.  Fortunately, this makes it exceptionally easy to filter out that spam – just block HTML entities.  So as of now, if you type an HTML entity into a comment the comment will be rejected.  If you really need a HTML entity to convey your point, post an entry to your own blog and track back.

According to Reuters, everyone’s favorite former Judge – Donald Thompson – has fronted up to the district court and plead not guilty to 3 felony counts of indecent exposure after his famed usage of a penis pump in court (and other assorted indecencies).  I’m sure the team from CSI will put his DNA sample to good use, though I’d be surprised if there were a big enough twist to make a good episode out of the story.

I finally gave in an bought a 40GB iPod this afternoon.  I intend to use it as much as a hard drive as an mp3 player though I’m already addicted to having music follow me everywhere, so it may wind up changing the way I listen to music – we’ll see how that pans out.

Where it will be useful (and has already been) is when the band is learning a new cover song and we need to find a copy of the song to refresh the memories of how it goes and work out the details etc.  Previously I’d have to go home, burn a CD and remember to bring it with me to the next rehearsal whereas now I can just plug the iPod into the PA and hear the song.  That alone will be worth the money over time and it only works if you can store your entire music collection on the player, easily carry it in your pocket (my hands are full carrying instruments and assorted paraphernalia) and most importantly, be able to navigate the songs quickly and easily.  I don’t know of anything other than the iPod that meets those requirements.  The fact that all my music is already stored, sorted and correctly tagged in iTunes (it’s only taken about 4 years to get there) is a major bonus.

I think I’ve discovered the reason that SpamAssassin has been letting a lot of spam through – the bayesian filter is effectively neutered if you have the net checks on.  Now I’m sure the SpamAssassin team has a bunch of statistics why this is good in the most common case, it’s not working out so well for me.

I live with my spam filters set to throw anything scoring 3 or higher into the spam bucket (I think SpamAssassin’s default is 10) so I’m ruthless with spam and it tends to classify forwarded jokes as spam which isn’t such a loss (it also classifies emails containing flight details from QANTAS as spam which isn’t so good but QANTAS emails look more like spam than the real thing so what can you do?).  Anyway, from what I can tell, SpamAssassin will be a lot more effective for me if I add the following to my user_prefs file:

Currently stuck in my head:

It’s a world of laughter a world of tears,
It’s a world of hope and a world of fears….

And thus Ken Coar must be made to pay:

It’s just the song that has currently commandeered too many of my little grey cells. It’s a different one each morning. So far I’ve been spared it being, “It’s a Small World,” at least.

Thanks Ken…

There was another fire in the building on Christmas apparently.  Power is now back on in the office but there’s no air conditioning.  Since my house mate was kind enough to install an air conditioner at our place, the engineers are coming to my place for the week.  On the downside, sourcing enough desks for everyone will be a bit of fun.

It’s interesting to see the predictions that mobile phone content will take off really starting to come true in a big way.  The television is inundated with ads for all sorts of stupid gimmicks that can be sent to your mobile phone.  Want to know how to be a good kisser?  SMS this word to that number and the nice robot on the other end will give all the tips you need.  The ringtone craze has been going on for a while of course and there seems to be a subscription service being promoted for ringtones these days.  I haven’t seen an ad for mobile phone games yet so Mr Schwartz’s predictions still seem to be waiting in the wings a little (though mobile phone games are definitely pretty big business so I’d expect them to start showing up in TV ads here soon).

Scoble claimed Microsoft was cool because someone else developed an app that ran on it, I pointed out it could have been developed on any OS and then Scoble says:

Ahh, at a higher cost. Which is the whole point of why Windows is used so many places.

Got some figures to back that up?  For someone who doesn’t even know who wrote the software I find it rather surprising that you’ve done a cost benefit analysis of developing that application on different platforms.  Anyone can pull claims out of thin air but you’d have to be crazy to just believe it without figures to back it up.  So Scoble, care to back up that rhetoric?

Scoble thinks that Microsoft is cool because someone wrote a cool application that runs on Windows.  Sigh.  Talk about taking credit for other people’s work.  I’m certain the same application could be created on Linux, Solaris or Mac OS X.  Windows is the boring underlay that just happened to be there, not what makes the application cool.  Maybe Jonathan Schwartz will blog about how the store could have avoided being locked into Windows by writing the application in Java, or RMS might write an open letter about how the application should be opensourced so that the community could improve it and reduce development costs for the store.  None of that will matter in the end though because the RIAA will sue it into obvilion because people are just listening to the music on the in-store computers instead of buying the CDs.

I wound up travelling north for Christmas to surprise my Mum and received a suitable excited response.  It was nice to see the whole family up here as well though the heat is a little much.  I’m up here for the next week so I’ll have to try and track down some old friends and catch up.  I know a few people have discovered this blog so feel free to give me a yell at my parents place.

It’s way behind schedule but my christmas shopping is finally done.  With a little luck the delivery boy will run really fast and cover the 1600km or so to get them to the right people before christmas.  It would be so much easier if I could just email physical goods….

I got hit with some comment spam today which used some rather amusing text to try to hide the links to fraudulent sites.  I’ve removed the comment but the text is well worth saving:

To help determine if you are qualified to be a programmer, take a moment to

try this simple test:

(1) Write down the numbers from zero to nine and the first six letters

of the alphabet (Hint: 0123456789ABCDEF).

Yak points out that the Wayback Machine has a cached copy of Technote 31, complete with the picture of the Dogcow.  Another animal saved from extinction!

It was extremely hot today in Brisbane and my house doesn’t have air conditioning or ceiling fans and I didn’t own a pedestal fan, though the house is very open and picks up breeze well.  Even so, it was definitely time to invest in a cooling device and it was hot enough to convince me to splurge on an air conditioner for my room.  That is of course until I wondered around the beautifully air conditioned store for an hour or two looking at price tags around $1000 for air conditioners that didn’t really suit my needs anyway.  Eventually I saw a pedestal fan for $15 and feeling nice and cool now anyway figured that would do.

Tomorrow night the band will be playing at the Crossroads Christmas Party.  Crossroads is a support group for people with mental and physical disabilities.  The Christmas party is always a heap of fun and the crossroads folk are simply the best audience anyone could ask for.  They dance to every song, sing along anytime they know the words and really show how much they appreciate the music.  It’s definitely very uplifting.to see such joy on people’s faces.   I can’t wait.

A while back I complained that Mozilla didn’t support align on colgroups.  Byron suggested that I should log a bug and his comment suggests that he’d actually searched and found that one hadn’t yet been logged.

I too searched, specifically for the term "colgroup" and out of the 3 or 4 bugs that were returned, none were what I was complaining about.  So I spent the 20 minutes or so that it takes to jump through all the hoops that the Mozilla team want you to jump through to log a bug and gather all the required information, including creating a simple test case etc.  Finally I submit my bug and within five minutes it’s marked as a duplicate of a bug that has been going on and on and on and on forever.  Seriously, it shouldn’t take over two years and hundreds of comments to sort this out.

It would be really nice to be able to subscribe to an RSS feed for a limited time.  There’s two reasons for this. Firstly so that you can subscribe to the comments RSS feed for a particular article you won’t to track the discussion for but then have it drop out of your feeds once the conversation dies down (this might be best implemented as auto-unsubscribe after x days of inactivity).

According to Google, I’m now the Object.equals() guy (for those who read via RSS only, I notice this because of the Google search that displays on the front page).

It seems more and more spam is getting past SpamAssassin and into my inbox these days.  The upgrade to 3.0 hasn’t helped and may have even made it worse (or maybe the spam just got worse in the few days I took to get the database upgraded correctly etc).  I’ve got the required score set down to 3 but there’s a bunch of spam coming through with a score of 2 while I do get random emails from people that score up to 2.5 and shouldn’t be considered spam.

Apparently my Mum has discovered my blog.  Next time I’m home I’ll have to introduce her to RSS so she can save herself the trouble of checking in each day.

I finally decided to empty my spam box today and discovered it had some 13000 messages taking up 140Mb of space.  Spam now makes up 56% of my email which is pretty insane.  The updated version of spamassassin seems to have helped a little but there’s probably still a few getting through and I really don’t think I should lower the threshold any further – it’s currently at 3 whereas the default is 10.

I’ve changed from using the entry ID for the filename to using a "dirified" title.  Redirects should be in place so that all the old links work but if you do find an entry that has disappeared off the face of the earth please let me know.

Also, major apologies to anyone who winds up with every entry in my RSS feed being marked as new because of the change.  I would have hoped that wouldn’t happen but NetNewsWire seems to think they’re all new so I suspect the planet aggregators might as well.  Sorry!

Some time ago I outlined my thoughts on copyright and Byron responded. I’ve been meaning to revisit that conversation for some time but needed to think it though some more. There are no easy answers to the copyright problem and I don’t have any answers to offer at all really. I just wanted to note down some of my thoughts with the hope that others might jump into the discussion and help complete some of these thoughts. Byron’s main comments were along the lines that musicians didn’t need to make their money from CDs and to some extent I agree with that. I had never intended my comments to be particular to any one industry, distribution method or business plan. In fact my line of thought has been along the lines of how to create a complete solution. To create a complete solution to the copyright problem you need three elements:

Every so often an event happens that makes you realize just how globally oriented the world is today. I’ve been watching the results of the US presidential election over the course of the day, getting updates in real time. This in itself is nothing particularly special. The fact that I’m Australian adds a little to the sense of “globalness” but it really struck me when I realized that I was an Australian watching the results of the US election in real time over the web – via the British Broadcasting Corporation. I mean, it wouldn’t have been particularly surprising for me to watch CNN reports flow by my RSS feed about the US election, and it wouldn’t have been all that far fetched to think I might have a web page open that showed the results as they came in. It does strike me as odd that the page I happened to be pointed at for the results essentially formed a triangle that touched the furthermost parts of the globe. Such is life these days…

Sigh, while my comment spam avoidance measures seem to be exceptionally successful, I got hit by my first batch of trackback spam this morning. Nearly 100 trackbacks to various entries. Fortunately they were all for the same domain so MT-Blacklist could clean them all up in one hit. I guess I’ll have to rename the trackback CGI next….

You know it’s going to be a bad day when you get to work and discover the building surrounded by police tape with 3 policemen standing outside and the chairman of the board asking “when did you last do a backup?” You know it’s going to be an even worse day when your response is “since when have I been in charge of backups?” The restaurant above our office caught fire sometime Monday night, fortunately the fire brigade managed to contain the fire to the restaurant so our office only suffered minor water damage to one room. We were however without power for a day and a bit which was a bit of a nuisance but meant we didn’t loose any data or any time setting up systems again. On the downside, the air-conditioning still hasn’t been approved as safe and Brisbane is getting some really hot weather at the moment. Being in an office full of computers with no air-conditioning is proving to be not so much fun.

Until just recently, we haven’t had any real rainfall for quite some time. During such times, one tends to become rather lax about getting washing done because it’s just so easy to throw it on the line whenever and within hours of daylight it will be dry. Sadly, this went someone wrong for me on the weekend. I did a load of washing on Saturday and didn’t get around to bringing it in before the evening dew set in. I then did another load on Sunday and the rain set in just as I finished hanging it out. Sunday night and Monday was heavy rain and storms, this afternoon another storm is on it’s way in and rain is predicted for the rest of the week. Things looked bad for me having clean clothes to wear by the end of the week (I don’t own a dryer). Fortunately, leaving work slightly this afternoon paid off – I got home just in time to get my washing off the line before it started raining. And if you’re wondering why I’d post this here, it’s because I felt I just wasn’t airing enough dirty laundry on this blog…

My Queen CDs are here! Yay! I ordered “Queen – Greatest Hits I, II & III” a week or so ago after getting hooked on both We Will Rock You and A Night At The Hip Hopera and it’s finally arrived. I’m in the process of dumping into iTunes now (Apple lossless encoding so even the purists should be happy) and will then commence burning a copy of the CDs to listen to in the car (CDs don’t tend to like the extremely high temperatures cars get to around here). I don’t particularly care if that illegal in Australia – I want my Queen in an accessible format and I don’t want the CDs to get wrecked. Besides, since I bought it from the US I get the same rights as if I were in the US right? I like that logic anyway. Besides, I just deserve it, I’ve earnt it – it’s my precious.

Ted Leung came out with an interesting comment in relation to the mass of communications mechanisms:

I need a whole display just for communications! In fact, that’s precisely how I use a second monitor when it’s available and how I use my laptop when I’m at work. The second monitor is there just to run the various IM clients, IRC clients, mail and iTunes. Typically I also have NetNewsWire open on the second screen to handle the mass of news/blogs/comics feeds. I don’t really find a second monitor useful for much else – I focus much better on single monitor so switching apps works better than switching monitors and most importantly, having to move the pointer a few thousand pixels to start working with a new app is extremely tedious.

Since someone got me thinking about copyright and related stuff I stopped and thought about which creative commons license I’m using for this blog. I was previously using the Attribute Share-Alike creative commons license, but have now changed to the Attribute license with no requirement to share alike. That seems to fit my views on how copyright should work and how I want this blog to be used fairly well. I did consider public domain but it would annoy me if no attribution was given and I don’t see any real reason to allow it given I would be annoyed. This change applies to all existing entries. Now lets see those creative uses of my incoherent ramblings! Perhaps turn one of the entries into a song? Rap or country would seem to be an appropriate level of quality – take that as you will….

For as long as I can remember there’s been a Yamaha electric organ at my parent’s place – I spent many, many hours playing it in my youth but since I moved out of home noone plays it. Now every time I come home my mother tells me the organ’s had it and broke down long ago. Of course once I plug it back in and actually try playing it everything works as well as it ever did. I’m not sure what I’d do with myself on my trips up home without that organ….

I’m heading up to Ingham (just north of Townsville in far north Queensland) tomorrow for a week holiday and my sister’s wedding. I’ve had to pack the absolute minimum clothing as I’m taking up a huge collection of musical instruments and assorted junk. 2 saxophones, a ton of music and I’m still not sure how I’ll fit my saxophone stand in. I’m borrowing my younger sister’s clarinet while I’m up there to play as the bride walks down the isle so I’ll have the week to learn to play that. It’s pretty similar to the sax and I’ve played clarinet previously without sounding too bad so it should come off okay. I’m more concerned about the rendition of “The Rose” on keyboard I’m meant to do as backing for my little sister while the register’s being signed. Somehow I liked the original idea of having a few musicians involved instead of just me but it’ll give me something to do anyway. Aside from that I need to find out a few things about the bridal party – most of whom I’ve never met – as I’m the MC for the evening and probably should have something half intelligent to say when introducing people. On the plus side, I’m far enough away that I haven’t had to worry about all this until now – everyone else has been madly organizing things for months.

I spent about two years working as a research assistant at Griffith University and quite enjoyed my time there. I spent time working with both pure mathematics lecturers as well as software engineering oriented lecturers, so I’ve got a fairly good grasp and appreciation for the academic point of view and the processes and logic they tend to use. One of the things you notice if you spend time in an academic environment as well as a commercial environment is that the abstract nature of academic thought and reasoning fits very poorly into a commercial context. This is why so many very good ideas that come out of universities so often struggle to be commercialized (and why there are dedicated departments to help inject commercial sense into an academic idea and bring it to market). It’s not that academics are a bunch of nut-jobs with no idea about reality, it’s simply that the values and expectations in an academic environment are very different to those in a commercial environment. For instance, if a mathematics professor is developing software, his prime concern is that it is “correct” and usually wants it to be provably so. A software engineering lecturer’s primary concern will be that the software meets the requirements precisely. In most cases however, a commercial developer’s primary concern is that the software does what the user wants. With contract style work the commercial interests match up much better with a software engineering lecturer’s viewpoint, but with commercial off the shelf software development the requirements are largely unimportant – making users happy and thus buy the product is important. The biggest difference though is not between “commercial developers” and software engineering academics, but rather between mathematicians (or possibly referred to as computer scientists which tend to be mathematicians who specialized in computers) and “commercial developers”. A mathematician always wants everything to be correct (aka perfect) and provably so. A commercial developer just wants it to work, remain working and be maintainable. Sometimes of course, commercial developers are far too slack and could use an injection of the mathematician’s viewpoint, however I’ve generally found the reverse to be true more often. Academics tend to be overly pedantic to the point where it would in fact damage a commercial project. So am I saying that academics are useless or that commercial developers are somehow better? Heck no. Both viewpoints are extremely useful and allow for different types of innovation. Both are required. Just if you ever find you’re in an argument (as opposed to an informative discussion) with someone from “the other camp” give up and walk away – that argument will never be resolved.

I was fortunate enough to be invited out to a friends place to see the fireworks last night. They happen to own the penthouse apartment on the river front with an awesome view of nearly all the fireworks. The fireworks are launched from numerous sites along the river so being able to see all of them is really quite unusual. Better yet though, one of the launching barges is positioned directly in front on the balcony as if it were a private show just for us. That particular barge this year had some issues launching it’s fireworks. There were about three sections where all the other barges launched fireworks in unison but “our barge” sat there doing nothing. Apparently it was unplanned because at the end our barge suddenly started firing off every firework it had missed all at once. A display that was intended to take about 10 minutes was sent up in about a minute flat. Extremely impressive! Also impressive was the dump and burn which was close enough to feel the heat hit you and felt like you could just reach out and catch the plane. I’ve never been overly impressed by fly-bys when standing at ground level at South Bank but from the penthouse it really is quite an experience. Oh, and Iain has photos.

And they did. Went to see We Will Rock You – the musical by Queen and Ben Elton last night and it was sensational. The songs fit into the story line brilliantly and the story itself was interesting and not just an excuse for singing the songs. The constant use of song references as bad puns just added to the experience for me and it was particularly impressive to see the customization for the Australian audience. The lead bohemian was titled after the great rock singer from the past “John Farnam” and when captured he was told – “This really is the last time”. That’s the kind of joke that flowed through the night and all of them went down extremely well. The music itself was very loud and very energetic. Unless you are an absolute die-hard, noone can match Freddy Mercury type of person you’ll appreciate the vocal talent that performed the extremely difficult songs Queen put together. Definitely worth seeing.

Just when you thought it was safe to turn the TV on again, Young Talent Time makes a come back. The worst part is that the Minogue sisters have promised to appear on the show – any hope that some actual talent may be found is lost…

Justen Erenkrantz comments on his day at the ball game and it reminded me of just how arrest happy the US police are. Police seem to be managed on a local level in the US so my experience with the San Francisco area police may not apply US wide. I’ve never seen so many people getting arrested in such a short time. For that matter I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone get arrested in real life before my trip to the US. While I was over there I was seeing at about two people a day getting handcuffed and carted away. Maybe I was just spending too much time with the wrong crowd.

I try not to blog about stuff that comes through the Reuters Oddly Enough RSS feed because it’s easier to just get it straight from them but the last couple of days have seen some pretty odd stories about Germans come through. Today’s was a german man who was refused a passport because he was dead. Apparently his blind ex-wife had reported him as having died in an explosion but had to get her mother to identify the body due to her lack of sight. I guess the husband hadn’t spent enough time with his mother in law. I should also point out that the article doesn’t actually mention he was refused the passport but one would hope that he was at least initially…. And of course now that I reread it a little more carefully – he might have been russian instead of german. They’re both north of here and substantially colder so you can understand the mistake….

Via Reuters:

A German man reported a female chat-line worker to police after facing a phone bill for $7,244 following an all-night flirt session with her She called him unsolicited and told him to call her back saying it would be “a cheap rate”. My favorite quote:

The man said they talked about far more than just sex Suuuure.

This is pretty scary. Read it, contemplate it and remember it when you next come to vote. UPDATE: It would help to format the HTML correctly on the link so that browsers actually pay attention to it…. Sorry about that and that’s to the anonymous commenter that pointed out the problem.

While I was away in San Francisco, my house mate was lugging all my furniture into my new house. The new place is a huge 5 bedroom place on the top of the secondary peak of Mt Gravatt so it has brilliant views ranging from the port of Brisbane and beyond over the sea right around over ANZ stadium and way off into the distance over south Brisbane. Absolutely stunning. The floors are all beautiful polished wood and the whole house is very open and spacious. I’ve still got a lot of stuff packed in boxes in the garage but I’m reasonably set up now. We put in an order for DART ADSL yesterday so hopefully that won’t take too long to come through. TV reception around here is nonexistent (the TV broadcast towers are all on the highest mountain in the city which happens to directly line up such that the mountain we’re on is in the way). All in all though I’m very happy with the new joint.

There’s this thing in business called competition. I know it can be annoying when it happens to you for the first time, but it’s the way it’s meant to be there. When someone enters your particular market segment with a competing product it’s not called “copying” it’s called “competition” or possible “free trade”. Browsers didn’t exist once and now those nasty opensource developers went and copied the idea and have put the original company out of business. And those damn JEdit folks blatently ripping off NotePad which itself was just a rip off of TextEdit which was just a rip off of MacWrite.

“On one occasion, Ms. (Lisa) Foster (Thompson’s court reporter for 15 years), saw Judge Thompson holding his penis up and shaving underneath it with a disposable razor while on the bench,” the petition reads. Say no more, say no more! Via Reuters Oddly Enough.

Apparently there’s a JavaOne Blogger Meetup on Monday. I’ll definitely do my best to get there. I’ve still got no idea where I’m staying or how hard it will be to get home again after having a few beers but I’m up for the challenge. Besides, their drinking advice is superb:

And remember, Atlassian … doesn’t recommend any Australian alcohol starting with ‘F’ and ending with ‘osters'.

I just discovered that every email that passes through procmail is logged (I’d forgotten I’d set it up like that). A quick analysis of the log shows that 62.8% (5473 out of 8655 emails) of my email is moved to the spam folder by procmail (after being identified by spamassassin). There are a few extras that wind up in my inbox but no more than one or two emails a week and I’ve only come across about 5 false positives since I set up spamassassin (most of which are QANTAS’s flight detail emails). That’s a pretty sad state of affairs really. Fortunately, thanks to spamassassin, I use my email completely unhindered.

Rich Bowen talks about his camping trip and it reminded me of something my Father and I used to do a fair bit of – spider spotting. In Australia we have a huge range of different spiders and they are literally everywhere – much more common than most people would be comfortable with. Most of these spiders are really small so you don’t see them in the light of day but during the night spiders are much easier to spot because of their brilliant blue eye-shine. Spider spotting basically involves getting one of those “pencil” torches (2 AA batteries and you twist the end to turn them on/off and adjust how focussed the light is). Turn it on and adjust it so it has a single focussed beam, then hold it just below one eye and look straight down along the beam of light. When you see a spider its eyes will shine back a bright turquoise color. You’ll find them everywhere in the Australian bush, around the ground, on tree trunks, in trees – pretty much everywhere you look there’ll be a bright blue set of eyes looking back at you. Just don’t do it if you’re afraid of spiders or you may never feel safe again. One other thing, Rich writes:

While browsing a collection of stupid pranks (most of which aren’t at all funny) I stumbled across some really great responses to a “10 year old school kid” (who in fact was the prankster) writing in to ask all 100 US senators what their favorite joke was as part of a school project. I think it’s fantastic to see that a number of them replied, but one that really stood out was this one from Senator Jon Corzine from New Jersey. Not only did he take the time to respond with his favorite joke, it was actually a good joke and he took the opportunity to teach this young child about the state of New Jersey. Now whether or not he wrote the letter personally or one of his aids wrote it for him, it’s still great to see that there’s a culture in that office of going beyond the minimum required and taking the opportunities to do good that are presented. Disclaimer: I know nothing else about Senator Jon Corzine, I’ve never been to New Jersey (or the US for that matter) and until I read his letter I knew nothing about the state of New Jersey (which for some reason that noone seems to know, is called the Garden State). For the record, “the garden state” in Australia is Victoria. Who knows why…. They have since changed their license plates to read “Victoria – On the move” to which most Queenslanders add: “to Queensland”.

You are a unique and beautiful snowflake – just like everyone else.

This is either a joke or the most biased reporting I’ve ever come across. If it’s a joke it’s not funny and if it’s biased reporting it’s so overly biased as to be obvious and thus much less effective. Not that I don’t think Blair’s labour party deserve to be voted out but comparing them to Hilter’s Nazi party is way over the top. For the record, the article appeared on the front page of Google News.

Firmly in the “what were they thinking?” category: two menu were arrested and charged with animal cruelty. What did they do? Kill a live mouse (each) by chewing it. The management of the Exchange Hotel where the incident occurred as part of an organized promotion claim “they knew nothing about it”. I’m the sure the expense claim for a holiday weekend on the Gold Coast (which was to be the prize) wouldn’t require any explanation….

David Starkoff points out this case regarding the provision of adult entertainment on Good Friday. David points out how “ironic (apt, perhaps?)” it is that the Common Prayer Book is pivotal in the final decision. However interesting it may be that:

the Almanac annexed to the Common Prayer Book has been regarded as part of the common law, and in consequence would have been received into Australia as part of the common law (Halsbury, 3rd Edition Vol 15 para 611 and Vol 37 para 133) from my exclusively non-lawyer stand point I would have to pick the following excerpt as the highlight of the document:

The musical I’ve been writing has now reached “beta” stage. All the scenes are written, pretty much all the lines are written and it really just needs to be reviewed and cleaned up. Like developing software it’s hard to know exactly when to called it finished. I also have the feeling that I get at the end of most software projects: I know it’s not finished yet and I know things need to be improved, but I can’t quite put my finger on what to work on and how to improve it. Essentially, I don’t feel that the script is ready for prime time and while there are some things that I know still need work there’s a lot of stuff that I just feel that I want to improve but don’t know exactly how to go about it. Part of that feeling is actually not knowing exactly how to move from writing the script into actually starting production. Hopefully the same approach I take with software will work with musicals too: do everything that you can work out needs to be done, write done each new thing you find needs to be done as you find it and when you can’t think of anything left to be done, release it. In terms of starting production I think just arranging some auditions would be a good start – finding a venue is another task I know needs to be dealt with and will likely be difficult. I’m sure it will all fall into place.

It looks like I’ll be moving house at the start of July. Just went to check out the new place and it’s a big 5 bedroom house on top of a hill in Mt Gravatt. Almost 270 degree views out over the suburbs (the missing quarter is the city view) and the place is currently being renovated. Still no lease signed but the owner is apparently a friend of one of the guys I’ll be moving in with. The only real concern is that I haven’t actually met this guy, but he comes on the recommendation of my current house mate and that’s proved reliable in the past. Besides, I’m really sick of living in this tiny little unit with two cars and one garage.

Hey, I’ve hit the number one spot on Google again. Ha! In your face Adrian Sutton!

I went out to the Cleveland District State High School production of “Back To The 80s” tonight and absolutely loved it. The jokes are bad, the songs are bad, the story-line’s corny, the acting is hammed up and the costumes make every member of the cast look hideously unattractive. What more can you want in a musical about the 80s? I was invited along by Rochelle Wheater who played “Tiffany” the female lead and was particularly interested to see her performance as she’s interested in auditioning for a part in my upcoming musical. She certainly didn’t disappoint though I’d like to hear her sing songs that were better suited to her range, and definitely with a better sound engineer – for most of the musical she came across as a fairly weak voice, however in the final scenes of the musical they managed to find the volume knob and her voice shone through quite impressively. The show however was well and truly stolen by Ross Lambley in the role of “Feargal McFerrin III” – the school geek. Brilliant, just brilliant. The character plays a very minor role in the story line but Lambley’s dynamics and expressionism brought cheers from the audience in response to his every line. Particularly impressive was his bass voice (particularly in the second act). It was used to great affect in Video Killed the Radio Star and that number in particular kick started the audience in non-stop laughter. Other stand outs were the voices of Melissa Copson (“Cyndi”) and Tegan McErlain (unnamed singer number 2). Both girls have wonderful strong voices and really got into the spirit of the songs well. A big commendation must also go to Blake Miles (unnamed singer number 1) who sung very well despite being given songs with a range well beyond what should be expected of an adolescent male (Jitterbug in particular). It’s worth noting that he actually managed to hit the high notes quite accurately but was a little weak on them until the final verse of Jitterbug where he absolutely nailed “that high”. As is often the case in musicals the star of the show “Corey Palmer Jr” (played by Liam Flenady) doesn’t get much of a chance to really excel and is instead relegated to the thankless job of holding the story line together. Flenady did this extremely well and took what few opportunities he had to shine and produced enthusiastic responses from the audience. He was in fact the only actor who managed to actually elicit a groan from the audience at one of the particularly corny lines. You have to see it to see how brilliantly the audience was played. It would definitely be remiss of me not to mention how good the band sounded. It was fantastic to hear a full stage band again and they were extremely tight and sounded great. Overall, it’s one of the best nights out I’ve had in a long time. It is an amateur production, some notes are miss-pitched and at times the acting can seem a little stilted, but that all fits so well into the story line and general feel of the musical that I’d be willing to believe it was deliberate. You do tend to find yourself in shock for the first five or ten minutes as you get used to the style of the musical though but once you’re in the 80s groove and are prepared for the corny jokes, you’ll absolutely love this musical. Of course if you don’t like 80s music or corny jokes, this musical is your worst nightmare. Personally I’m a huge fan of both 80s music and corny jokes so I give it a big two thumbs up. Tomorrow night (Saturday 29 May) is the final performance, tickets are only $10 and are available at the door. If you’re anywhere near Brisbane “do yourself a favor” (to quote a legend of the 80s) and go see it. Heck, give me a yell and I’ll go with you.

Tonights news headlines includes “Terrorist Suspect Granted Bail”. I have no idea about the merits of the case or even what the guy is actually charged with, but I think it’s relieving that people charged with being a terrorist are still eligible for bail in Australia. They don’t seem to be in the US anymore.

The lack of entries around here lately has been mostly due to my discovery of City of Heros. Great game – very addictive. Anyway, but get back to it – I’m hoping to reach level 12 tonight….

The word of the day (and it’s a cool word so probably the word of tomorrow as well) is:

gynotikolobomassophilia The love of biting a female's earlobes. It's just wrong when the definition of a word is about the same length of the word itself…. Still, cool word.

Just browsing stuff and came across a list of requirements to become a US Citizen. One of them is:

you must demonstrate an elementary level of English (reading, writing, understanding); Is this right? I always tend to question legal advice from random websites, and this one seems to have the entire purpose of getting you to find a lawyer using their site… If this is right, how is this different from the extremely controversial, and now removed, White Australia Policy? Finally, is it really the case that every American immigrant speaks english? That would suggest to me that there’d be effectively noone in the US that didn’t speak English as I’d imagine someone born in the US would pick up enough over their lifetime to speak at least “elementary english”. There’s still a few exceptions – people born in the US and moved overseas at an early age etc – but that would be an extremely small percentage of the population I’d imagine. Any Americans want to shed some light on this?

A couple of interesting articles I stumbled across today that the lawyerish types (both professional and armchair) might be interested in: Firstly from Radio Australia:

Under the new laws, migration lawyers, instead of their clients, will be personally liable for the cost of cases that have no merit. Billing the prosecution for cases that have no merit sounds like a good idea, but I’m not sure if the lawyer should be billed or not. If the lawyer pressured their client into the lawsuit then the lawyer should definitely be slapped with the cost. However, if the lawyer was a good lawyer who acted in good faith and advised their client as accurately as they could about the chances of winning then it would seem quite unreasonable to slap the lawyer with the fine. I would hate to think that people wouldn’t be able to find a lawyer to take their case just because there was a possibility it would be thrown out as having no merit. Then again, how obviously invalid does a case have to be before a judge throws it out without listening to the arguments? And secondly, from the Financial Times, it appears that it is illegal (in the UK at least) to have unsafe sex with someone and not inform them of any STDs you may happen to have, but the jury must be asked to consider whether or not the victim consented to it (I’m not sure if “it” should be taken as the sex, the unsafe sex or contracting the disease). My interpretation of that may well be out though. The article is about how the original ruling that found him guilty was overturned because the jury should have been asked to consider “the issue of consent”. I’m not sure if that means the entire trial happens over again as if it had never happened or if “the issue of consent” is being sent back to trial. Anyone got any hints as to how this process works? References to Law and Order episodes I can watch to come up to speed on it are appreciated….

Demazin is a wonder drug as far as I’m concerned. I’ve been sniffling and struggling to breathe all week until today I gave up and went to the chemist to get something, anything, to make it stop. He gave me Demazin and some 7 hours later I’m still breathing easy (it only claims to work for 6 hours). Of course, from about the 5 hour mark it seems to make you very drowsy so I’m very much considering just crawling into bed and going to sleep even though it’s now only 4:30 in the afternoon.

I was just wondering what to have for dinner and realized that I just don’t give enough credit to the good folks who keep me fed, so having grabbed a quick bowl of cereal (Sultana Bran for what it’s worth) I came back upstairs to investigate who invented that traditional food of the bachelor – 2 minute noodles. I couldn’t find anything even vaguely related to that, but I did stumble across this amusing thread. Among my favorite quotes:

Just noticed that ever since I moved trackbacks onto the same page as the article (ie: got rid of the stupid little pop-up window), trackbacks weren’t being displayed. Apparently MoveableType doesn’t rebuild the page when a trackback is registered. Oh well, a quick php ‘include’ later, I’ve got the trackback page being included directly and trackbacks should be working normally again. Shame, I did find Brian McCallister’s pseudo-trackback somewhat amusing.

I’ve always been very critical of the fact that private schools in Australia often receive as much or more government funding than public schools and particularly of the fact that it’s getting worse, not better. This comment I recieved in a private email really hit me though:

but as i said… mega mega awesome…. as far as cleveland musicals go coz we don’t really have a budget seeing as it is a public school etc. It’s just wrong that some of the private schools around Brisbane have so much spare cash around that they have professional quality theaters and even full size pipe organs whereas the public schools are struggling to put on a musical at all. There are kids in those public schools that are absolutely passionate about music, arts, theater as well as sport and academia but they aren’t getting the same opportunities and experiences that “rich kids” get.

So I made the mistake of checking out VISA Preferred Seating, promptly followed by QTIX, promptly followed by spending money and wanting to spend more. I’ve booked tickets to go see The Carer staring the delightful Charles “Bud” Tingwell. I very nearly managed to go see it in Lismore on my recent road trip but the uncultured locals didn’t even realize they had a theatre let alone be able to give me directions to get to it. Sadly the fact that noone knew there was a theatre would have significantly improved the chances that there’d still be a ticket left, but alas despite searching every publicly available map in the town and driving around for an hour or two, I couldn’t find the theatre either. The other shows I’d like to see are:

Every so often you come across a system that is just ridiculously stupid. Telstra’s</a billing system is one of these. It means well, but just gets in the way. The particularly problematic feature is the fact that if checks to see if you’ve already paid the particular bill you’re trying to pay and warns you if you already have. That would be great, except for two major flaws: 1. It warns you even if you haven’t paid the bill already. 2. The “I know what I’m doing and you’re just a stupid computer” button, which suggests it will process your payment anyway, just loops you back round to the warning page that you may have already paid the bill before. This makes it impossible to pay your bill online. So I pick up the phone and fight my way through their phone payment system, and finally after narrowly avoiding being bored to death by the slow talking recorded voice, I successfully pay my bill. That slow talking recorded voice then tells me how much faster it would have been if I’d paid online. Sigh.

Feeling sick is no fun…. and daytime TV is really bad.

It’s a long weekend here in Australia for ANZAC day so I’m considering going on a road trip. Not sure where I’m going yet, but my last road trip took me down into northern New South Wales and I’m thinking of heading down that way again – I figure my random selection of which way to turn should take me somewhere else this time (I don’t actually own a map of anything outside of the Brisbane region). I’m considering trying to get to a national park I vaguely remember around there, but I can’t remember the name of it or where it is so I’m not sure how much success I’ll have with that plan. Anyone got any suggestions for places to go for a day trip or possibly an overnighter around Brisbane?

It’s crap. Total and utter crap. When I last depended on Mail.app’s filtering I got practically no spam. Now I get about 3 spam messages a minute and Mail.app hasn’t picked up a single one, despite having been trained on a weeks worth of spam. SpamBayes was handling it perfectly even back when it first started. I’m really not sure how much longer I can put up with this before I’m motivated enough to divert my work email through my home server and filter it with spamassassin.

Exchange takes ages to run the tests over it’s database. I got bored, boredom leads to creativity, creativity leads to parody, parody leads to bad song lyrics, bad song lyrics leads to Yoda. [To the tune of Drink With Me] Sys Admin, rest…. Drink with me, to nights, gone by. Type with me, isinteg alltests. Here’s to exchange servers who went to our heads, Here’s to shitty servers, who kept us from our beds. here’s to them, and here’s to you. Drink with me, to nights gone by. Can it be? The hard drive died? Will we ever get email back online? Could it be your backup’s worth nothing at all. is that file, just one more lie. Drink with me, to nights gone by. To the files that used to be. At the shrine of backups never say die. Let the whir of tape drives never run dry Here’s to you and here’s to me. Do I care if it should die, when I’m not paid overtime? Life without email means nothing at all, I won’t sleep all night, should the server fall Will you work, exchange for me? [To the tune of One For My Baby (And Another One For The Road).] It’s quarter to 3, there’s noone in the place, Cept you and me. So load ’em up, Joe I’ve got a little data, I think you should load. We’re restoring my friend, at the end of a brief episode. Make it one for the server, and one more for the road. I got the backup, put another CD in the machine. Lookin’ so bad. Won’t you parse the DB, simple and fast. I could fix you right now, but it’s not, allowed in this mode. Just make it one for the server, and one more for the road. You never know it. But buddy I’m a programmer. And I’m not a sys admin, no way no how. But when the server, won’t listen to me. Then it’s time to play…. Well, that’s how it goes. And boy I know I’m gettin’, anxious to blow. Thanks for the repair, I hope you didn’t mind my switching your files. But this tape that I found, It must have files, or there’s no hope at all. Make it one for the server, and one more for the road. The long, it’s so long, the long… admin road….

Could it be? Yes, it could. Something’s coming, something good,
If I can wait!
Something’s coming, I don’t know what it is,
But it is
Gonna be great! I’m getting the feeling that good things are starting to happen around me and that it’s all for a purpose. Today I went to my cousin’s sixth birthday party and the sister of one of his friends was on her way to an acting class. My ears pricked up upon hearing this and I pushed my way into the conversation. Turns out she’s quite passionate about theatre, particularly musicals and was very excited when I told her I was planning on staging a musical. We spoke for about half an hour or so and I’m really quite excited about how passionate she is about the theatre. It’s always great to have people that dedicated on any team so I’m really hoping she does wind up involved with my musical plans in one way or another. I’ve also finished the first draft of the musical I’ve been writing. It still needs a few songs to be written but the storyline and dialogue is now complete. I’ll also have to spend a fair bit of time going back over the dialogue to make sure the characters are consistent right throughout the show – some of them change personality a little unnaturally as the show progresses. All very exciting. There’s been a lot of other little things that have been happening lately as well that’s all helping the musical come together. I’m more excited than ever to really push forward with this musical now – I think a lot of good is going to come out of it and hopefully form the basis of a top quality production company.

While reading this article about The Producers, I noticed the following couple of paragraphs:

One of the producers of The Producers, John Frost, says they particularly wanted someone for the role of Max Bialystock, who had a vaudeville or musical background. “Unfortunately, we don’t breed that style of actors any more and we were very lucky with Reg Livermore in getting him for this role, because Reg is probably the last of that breed.” So what’s happened to all the talented musical actors? Have they all gone into television careers? I know Neighbours has a habit of snapping them up – the whole show is basically a stepping stone to move between musicals or pantomimes and a pop music career. It’s certainly quite true that a huge number of very talented stage actors are winding up in TV these days, it’s a shame it appears to be at the expense of the musicals. Fortunately, I haven’t seen the entertaining Simon Gallagher on TV other than in screening of musical productions and surely we can forgive Jon English for All Together Now by now right? Anyway, go out and see a musical – support this wonderful art form (but winge and moan suitably about the high ticket prices too). It would be such a shame to loose this art form.

I found the missing comment emails I referred to earlier. I have a spam filter on my email and it works wonders apparently. Probably should put in an exception for stuff that comes from the blog…..

Or not…. Anyway, my point was – why does everyone else get to play with GMail and I don’t? Bah, Ghumbug.

You know, Verdana is the kind of font that really grows on you. My boss has been madly changing every CSS file he sees to use “Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif” for the past month or so and considering that the content of those files (only default templates) are copied into the users document, it’s been a rather annoying obsession. I’ve got to admit though, I’m kind of getting to like it as you might note from the recent change to “Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif” around here.

Apparently, fears of an HIV epidemic are putting the breaks on porn production in the US for the next 2 months. Does this mean the spam will stop for 2 months too? On a side note, I’m almost afraid of what the “The Google Says” box over there on the right is going to contain for this entry….

For some reason my email notifications for comments have stopped working or at least are intermittent. While I wasn’t watching, a whole heap of spam comments snuck onto this blog. I’ve now installed MT-Blacklist to see if that can fix the problem (it certainly seems to have cleaned out the existing comments nicely). If not, I’ll be disabling comment entirely. It’s such a shame greedy, selfish people have to go and make life difficult for everyone. Let me make it very clear: I will most definitely not be buying my penis enlargement products from any of the company’s who spammed my blog. Hmm, I’m not sure that’s really going to make much difference to them….

The RAM is a coming, oh yeah…. Ordered another 512Mb of RAM for my shiny new powerbook (it currently has 256Mb). Strangely overnight delivery was $2 cheaper than standard delivery. So I should get a happy little package sometime tomorrow. Then I’ll really see what this little baby can do.

aka: Why people think Americans have no concept of the world outside the USA. Sometimes on this big intarweb thingy, we come into contact with people from different countries and they might have different ways of expressing things or even (shock horror), spelling things. Witness this slashdot posting (which has no particularly worthwhile content but a non-american spelling of “gaol”). Note the flamewar that ensues. The first response (regarding the nineteenth century wanting it’s spelling back) is naive yet funny. My response was pointed and uncalled for but providing a at least somewhat humorous correction. Then it all went downhill. How is it that Americans manage to so consistently portray this image of absolute ignorance towards anyone outside their own country (and no I don’t just mean on slashdot…)? It’s like all the support queries that come in at work after people discover we’re in Australia – they all start with “Good day mate!”. How is it that these people can’t learn to spell “Good day” in Australian properly (G’Day)? And don’t even get me started on American actors trying to do Australian accents…. Now if you’ll excuse me I’ve got to go wrestle a crocodile or two… Crikey!

Since my new laptop has bluetooth builtin, I’ve been using my MS bluetooth mouse a lot more. The extra buttons on the side are set up as the Expos� triggers and'7;m now completely addicted to using them. I honestly never thought anything would be able to replace my good old faithful, “Hide Application” method. Where I once used to have a completely clean screen, devoid of all windows but the ones I was specifically working on – I never have absolute chaos with every window I might ever need open. I can happily flick through them with just a twitch of the thumb and a flick of the wrist. Fabulous!

Rich Bowen commented on a local church holding a festival in a local park as outreach. His comments hit home pretty hard with me because just recently I helped organise a festival for my local church.

In other words, the primary purpose of advertising is to lie to the customer in order to get them to find your product attractive. Evangelism is advertising. Advertising is all about getting a message out about something, it doesn’t have to be a product and it doesn’t have to be a lie. For instance, political advertisements don’t have a product, they advertise a philosphy and encourage you to take action about it. Major product recalls often happen through advertisements, they’re not selling you something, and they’re entirely factual. Just because world is so full of false and misleading advertising doesn’t mean that every advertisement is just out to lie to you and get you to buy something.

You know, I can understand Leo being disappointed at my dropping out of his powerbook acquisition scheme but I didn’t expect him to get nasty:

Also, I know need to find a way to stick it to Adrian. There’s but one way: I need the 17″ model now (he got a 15″). I think someone’s compensating for something. The fact that my first comment to my housemate (who owns a 12″ powerbook) was “this should put an end to your computing supremacy” not withstanding. Of course I think Leo’s desperation is getting in the way of his logic now:

Well my new PowerBook G4 is up and running and it’s amazing how much difference in speed there is compared to my old 400Mhz clunker. I’ve only got 256MB of RAM in the new one at the moment (the old had 384MB) which I’ll upgrade once my bank account recovers a bit, but things absolutely fly! I just tried our latest product which does some pretty intensive stuff with XML and is a bit on the slow side on both my development machine at work (700Mhz Celeron believe it or not) and my old powerbook. It flys on this little baby though! The keyboard on the new laptop is better than the old one too, much to my surprise. I loved the only powerbook keyboards, but these new ones feel even better. More “oomph” to the keys. The speakers have improved out of sight as well. I can actually listen to music through the builtin speakers and quite enjoy it instead of cringing at the tinny sound. It’s obviously still not as good as a really nice stereo system but very nice all the same. Mostly though, I’m appreciating all the extra hard drive space. Going from a 10GB hard drive to a 60GB drive really makes a difference. I’m currently in the process of moving my data back off of the external firewire drive and onto the internal drive. The firewire drive wasn’t bad but it’s so nice to not have to plug an extra device in to use your laptop all the time. It also tends to drain the battery. Speaking of battery, it’s nice to have a shiny new battery as well. The one in my old laptop was really starting to get worn out. The other thing I’ve immediately appreciated is having a CD burner in my laptop. I listen to all my music using iTunes on my laptop and all the music is carefully rated and sorted, being able to easily make a CD to listen to in the car using all those ratings is wonderful. I was really starting to get sick of the CDs I had in the car. All that goodness and I haven’t even started playing with GarageBand yet – I’ve been looking forward to getting my hands on it for quite a while.

It seems that Leo Simmons and my plans to acquire powerbooks isn’t working, I went out and purchased a 15″ PowerBook for myself. Sorry Leo, but you can’t have my crappy old 15″ powerbook, it’s most likely going to my Nan. Though if someone does give me a shiny new 17″ powerbook you can have my shiny new 15″…

It appears that there is an epic battle unfolding right in my own back yard. Firstly, let me explain my philosophy on gardening: if it grows, it’s meant to be there, if it dies, it wasn’t. I don’t pay any attention to my garden, there’s enough shrubs and low level cover that they’ve managed to grow up enough to smother most of the nut grass the landscapers so brilliantly put in before I moved in here. So generally, my garden has reached this equilibrium where the strong plants are surviving and the weeds being shorter are dying out. There’s one odd looking purple tree that grew out of nowhere and now dominates the back yard – some people argue it’s a weed, I call it a feature. Anyway, back to the epic battle. A week or two ago I heard a rustling in the shrubbery while I was hanging out the washing. Prodding the shrub in question resulted in about 50 massive grasshoppers taking flight and then promptly resuming their feeding frenzy elsewhere in the garden. Upon investigation it turned out that pretty much every shrub and tree hid a similar infestation of grasshoppers. I mentally noted that I probably should do something to get rid of the grasshoppers before they ate my entire garden but never got around to it. So today I went out to hang out my washing and discovered significantly fewer grasshoppers. It seems the spiders have been having a feeding fest as well. More than a quarter of my garden is now covered in this massive spider web with 5 or 6 grasshoppers hanging in it. I couldn’t find any trace of the massively huge spider that must have created this web and have the strength of overpower my oversized grasshoppers. It turns out that instead of one big spider, there are 5 or 6 little spiders all working together, creating this massively interconnected web that sprawls over about 2 cubic meters (read: a large space in 3 dimensions). It appears the coalition of the 8-legged is having a devastating effect on the local grasshopper population. I love the way nature balances itself out. It saves me an awful lot of gardening effort.

Leo Simmons wants an apple. He suggests that someone buy a nice shiny new 17″ powerbook and send him their old ratty 15″ powerbook. I happen to have an old ratty 15″ powerbook and would love a nice shiny new 17″ powerbook – I can even justify it. I can’t however afford it. So let me offer some mac hater a chance to show just how much they hate Mac’s in three easy steps. 1. Buy a nice shiny new 17″ powerbook. 2. Give the nice shiny new 17″ powerbook to me. 3. There is no step three. I will then quite happily give my old ratty 15″ powerbook to Leo and everyone will be happy. The mac hater can brag to all his friends about how he hates macs so much that he gave away a perfectly good 17″ powerbook to some total stranger because it’s totally worthless to him, I can enjoy my nice shiny new 17″ powerbook and Leo can enjoy his nice ratty old 15″ powerbook.

It seems WhereIs Australia is getting a face lift and much needed usability improvements. Gone are the six clicks to get your directions and cryptic instructions, now it’s replaced with a simple, enter start and end destination (on the one page no less – AND you don’t have to pick the street type from a drop down anymore) and bang you’ve got your results. No more “Did you really mean exactly what you just typed in or were you only joking” page. Better yet, the Wacky Mario Ramp feature has been turned off. For those of you not familiar with WhereIs.com.au and Brisbane’s roads – Brisbane has a lot of on and off ramps that go winding around at all kinds of weird angles and quite often one ramp leads onto another which leads to another. If you were unfortunate enough to have to navigate through such a section (like the rather central Riverside Expressway) using WhereIs instructions, you’d be trying to follow something like: (Straight) South East FreeWay (Straight) Riverside Express Way (Right) Ramp (Left) Ramp (Straight) Ramp (Left) Ramp (End) Destination Needless to say you had no chance whatsoever. Now however you’d get something more like: Turn left at CORONATION DR, BRISBANE Turn right at CORONATION DR [RAMP], BRISBANE Continue along BOOMERANG ST, BRISBANE Turn left at MILTON RD, BRISBANE Much nicer. Sadly, on this trip it leads me straight into a dentists chair. Perhaps getting lost would have been more pleasant.

I just had a phone call that went something like: Receptionist: Hello, Paddington medical centre Me: Hi, I’d like to make dental appointment with John McKenny. Receptionist: A dental appointment? Me: Yes. Receptionist: I’m sorry but John McKenny is a natropath who used to work here. We don’t have any dentists. Me: Hmmm, I think Medibank Private have stuffed up their records somehow then. I think it’s probably best if I don’t let Mr McKenny near my teeth. Receptionist: That’s probably a good idea.

It appears the war of the Adrian Sutton’s is hotting up on Google. (Hint for those that just read the RSS feeds: take a look at the main page) The once unstoppable Professor Adrian Sutton who ruled supreme as number one search result for “Adrian Sutton” has dropped significantly down to third place, though he now has two entries in the top five with his surprise appearance in some meeting minutes. The new kid on the block Adrian Sutton has roared up the charts to take the number one spot just ahead of my own Randomness which held the top spot less than two days ago. I also hold the fifth spot with my appearance in a CVS commit message for FreeCard Stay tuned as this pathetically geeky race continues to unfold!

Crazy Apple Rumors updated the look of their site today in what would have to be one of the most disastrous site overhauls I’ve seen. The all new forums were instantly filled with a whole bunch of people complaining about the new look of the site. Fortunately, Crazy Apple Rumors being as it is, the conversation rapidly turned to the joys of having Masako (the CARS web designer and rumored to be most attractive and feminine) poke you with a fork – apparently she does that kind of thing a lot. It does occur to me however that judging by the general accuracy of rumors at CARS, Masako could in fact be a fat middle aged balding man with no fork. I’m not sure if the thought of a large number of people lining up to be forked by a beautiful woman is more disturbing that them being turned away because the beautiful woman was neither beautiful or womanish. Actually, most disturbing is probably the fact that most of them would still line up for the forking by the fat middle aged balding man with no fork. Anyway, go read the comments, they’re quite funny with the CARS staff all getting involved.

I was going to comment on how good it was to see the Queensland Government trialling E-Petitions, until I noticed the 12 month trial started in 2002 and they just haven’t bothered to update the website since. Sigh. On the plus side, the E-Petitions are still up and there’s one that’s still current, so I guess the trial was considered a success. Good stuff. You can view the currently open petitions here.

The Brisbane City Council in conjunction with the Queensland State Government are building a rather expensive Youth Recreation Centre across the road from the recording studio I record in. There’s very little information available about what they actually intend to do with it but since I’ve been organising quite a few youth activities lately I thought I’d see what the plans were and try to take advantage of the new facilities to make staging youth events easier. I called the manager of the centre who, it turns out, is actually the manager of the sporting complex next door and really doesn’t know too much about what’s going to happen with the youth centre. When he knows more he’ll get back in touch with me, but apparently there’s negotiations with the Policy Youth Club to run the place and provide activities to make use of the new building. No real surprises so far. I thought I’d see what information I could gather from the local council so I call the councillor for my ward Kerry Rea and asked her. Much to my surprise I got straight through to Ms Rea herself, no waiting on hold, no secretaries, no messing around. Then not only was she polite and friendly she offered to track down information on who I should speak to about the youth centre and get back to me by the end of the week. So, cudos to Ms Rea, that’s the way government is supposed to work. I wonder what things will be like after the council elections next Saturday….

Sun released Java 1.4.2_04 – a bugfix release today. Reading through the list of fixed bugs I noticed this one (log in required). Here’s the bit that caught my eye:

Expected results: Java would work for these tests.
Note:

1. Mature teen/TCP, Adult/TCP and Adult/modem are working for the same pages.
2. Mature teen/modem is working when IE option Java: Use Java 2 v.1.4.1_02 is unchecked.
3. Mature teen/modem is working when other JRE version (e.g. 1.4.0_03) The bug is complaining about Java not detecting the proxies that are set by a dial-in porn service. I imagine that was a very well tested bug fix….

Some guys noticed that there’s RFID tags in US currency. All very scary and such, but there’s one quote that shows a bit of a lack of research:

What we resent is the fact that the government or a corporation can track our ‘cash’. Credit purchases and check purchases have been tracked for years, but cash was not traceble until now… Maybe US currency doesn’t have this, but on every Australian bank note, there’s a unique serial number – has been for many, many years. This is used to track cash. It’s simple and effective, banks will often scan the serial number to ensure the notes aren’t on the stolen list and the numbers are capable of being read automatically. RFID tags just mean you can do it at a distance, but have the down side of not actually being able to tell you who has the note or what they’re doing with it because of the large number of notes that are likely to be around at the time (think supermarket checkouts). In other words, your cash transactions are still effectively untraceable.

My house mate informed me this afternoon that the land lord would be coming around tomorrow for an inspection. Hilarity is currently ensuing. It random matters of interest: This was interesting – living muscle tissue powered nanodevices – and I was always told to think big…. ant has proved itself much easier to set up multiproject builds than maven which is kind of unfortunate since maven forces you into performing multiproject builds quite a lot. Might have to create a decent maven plugin to handle multiproject builds automatically instead of manually having to set up the reactor. Combining the generated website and producing a combined distribution seems to be the key to this. Obfuscation is evil. I spent all day trying to get it to work for me. Stripping out unused classes (including in dependant libraries) automatically is also evil but not quite as much so. Someone really needs to slap proguard and retroguard around a bit to share some features. Currently proguard has a brilliant config file syntax but renders itself completely useless due to the fact that it can’t handle resources correctly while obfuscating (still good for jar shrinking though) – retroguard on the other hand can’t handle SomeClass.class syntax (which proguard can) and has an awful configuration file syntax (no wildcards). I had to write an ant task to automatically list all the classes in org.apache.xerces since it really doesn’t like being obfuscated. For the record, we obfuscate whatever we can because it noticably shrinks the resulting jar file size by changing things like MyVeryLongMethodName to a. Think of it as lossy compression for java classes. Tomorrow I plan to spend most of the day swearing about a bug which is causing our applet to stop repainting after a certain point in time. We only managed to reliably replicate it this afternoon and the process of replication is still pretty difficult. On the plus side, we’re still on track to release the product last Friday. :S

Why is it that with such a housing boom going on it’s so hard to find a decent place to rent? My housemate and I are looking for a new place to live, house, townhouse, unit, apartment we don’t care. It just needs to be in a reasonable location (in Brisbane that generally equates to somewhere near the SE freeway, or reasonably close to the city), about 2 bedrooms (one can even be really small), an office and space for 2 cars to park (under cover optional) . The $200 to $250 price point is about right for us. Trouble is, we just can’t seem to find a place that meets even those pretty loose requirements. Well actually we did find one place that looked perfect but it had already been taken. Really frustrating that the real estate agent made me go out there to take a look at the place before they bothered to tell me it was taken too. There’s one other option which has some potential. Have to call the real estate agent tomorrow and find out if it’s taken or not. So, anyone got a place in Brisbane they want to rent to two fine upstanding young business men?

You may remember a few days ago I argued against a comment regarding my GPL vs The World entry. It’s just been pointed out to me that the “MJR” fellow is actually quite well known. I had no idea….

Every so often, FARK comes up with something truly wierd. This is one of those times. A fish that reportedly wedges itself in your urethra. What really got me though, was a short, largely hidden quote towards the end:

There are no confirmed reports of deaths or penectomies–several cases of the latter are thought to have run afoul of piranha. Because if there’s one thing worse than a Candir� up your urethra, ‘7;s a piranha biting it off entirely.

In the comments to my last entry, MJR comments:

Interesting opinion, but harmed by some bugs in the basic ideas. For example, “open source” and “commercial” are not opposites, unless you have some particularly strange definition that you use. At least for the GPL this is completely false. The GPL does not give you permission to sell the GPL’d software. The GPL does state:

You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee. This quite clearly doesn’t say: you may sell GPL software. Thus, GPL’d software is most definitely not commercial software even though it may come on a commercial CD. Section 4 then says:

Weeeeeee! Eclipse is finally usable on my powerbook. M7 hit the streets a few days ago (or that’s when I noticed it anyway) and the performance improvements are quite nice, particularly on OS X. My plans for getting debian installed on my laptop can now take a bit of a back seat as I don’t need a Linux or Windows box to run Eclipse on anymore. This is actually a major relief since my PC has died recently and the state of Java on Linux for PPC is absolutely abysmal. I can’t seem to find a fully complete version of 1.3 let alone 1.4 – in this context fully complete requires a functional JIT. Maybe people should stop winging about Apple taking too long to release new Java updates.

David Starkoff writes:

What I�m getting at is that the primary audience of judgments is not the general public. The general public couldn�t care less. Further, I wonder whether the primary audience�at least at the appellate levels�should be the general public. I think for the most part, they are decisions argued by lawyers intended for lawyers. There is no doubt that the law is becoming more accessible to the general public. The Internet has seen to that, and the Australian judiciaries have embraced it. AustLII is a great resource and media-neutral citations are fantastic. But does it mean that judges should tailor their writing to the general public? I�m less than convinced. I have to wonder, how do you expect people to take an interest in law if all the documents and all the judgements are written in legalese that only lawyers can underst’don’t expect non-computer types to take an interest in the highly technical documents I write, but I might expect them to take the time to read a carefully written, simple to understand manual or overview of the technical information. In other word’can’t expect people outside of your target audience to read and understand your work. If you want the general public to pay attention to legal issues, you need to make them accessible to the general public and that largely involves lawyers learning how to use the English language in more useful ways – ie: in a way in which they can be clearly and easily understood. That is after all, what language is all about.

I haven’t had much time to write lately, but thought I’d point out a few things that caught my eye recently. First up, a little something from Eric S Raymond. Apart from being a particularly poorly worded letter (hint: try being nice to people when you want them to give you millions of dollars worth of source code), it’s full of some really odd comments.

Open source is hardly a zero-revenue model; ask Red Hat, which had a share price over triple Sun’s when I just checked. Last I checked the pricing of shares on the stock market was only an indicator of the value of the company when taken with the number of shares available in the country. Thus, whether or not Sun’s share price is above or below Red Hat’s is largely irrelevant. Nor is Red Hat a good comparison when talking about Java. Red Hat makes money from selling it’s support services, there’s already a massive wealth of professional Java support services and training available that aren’t provided by Sun, whereas Red Hat is the only support provider would consider for a Red Hat server. This is particularly so because you rarely need to fix a crisis in Java itself, but rather in your Java code – Sun has no better knowledge of your code than any other Java expert.

So I need a new laptop. My current, battle-worn, tried and true PowerBook G4 400Mhz has developed a large crack down own side and while it’s still running fine, it can only be a matter of time before that crack gets bigger and eventually the LCD falls off, possibly taking half the ports on the back of the computer with it. So I’m starting to look at laptop options – almost certainly a new Mac unless there’s some insanely great deal on a PC laptop, but the prices for PCs look to be as much as or more expensive than the macs anyway. As such the question really becomes, do I want an iBook or a PowerBook and how cool a laptop can I afford? Since spending more than $3000 is going to be difficult, the iBooks are ahead from the start, but what’s got me baffled is that they are so feature comparable to the PowerBooks. The iBook I’m looking at: � 384MB DDR266 SDRAM (128MB built-in & 256MB SO-DIMM) � 933Mhz G4 � 40GB Ultra ATA drive � DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo � AirPort Extreme Card � Keyboard/Mac OS � 14″ Screen A$�2,586.00 The PowerBook: � 512MB DDR266 SDRAM – (256MB built-in + 256MB SO-DIMM) � 1GHz PowerPC G4 � 40GB Ultra ATA drive @ 4200rpm � Combo Drive (DVD-ROM/CD-RW) � AirPort Extreme Card � Keyboard & Mac OS (default) � 12.1-inch TFT XGA Display A$�3,374.00 So the PowerBook winds up with some more RAM (both machines have been customized from their defaults a little), 77Mhz extra CPU power and a 2″ smaller display that uses the same resolution (1024×768). It costs $800 extra. By the time you go up to the 15″ ‘ok that I really want you’re looking at $4000. Sigh. Powerbo’ also do dual head, but I’ve hardly ever used th’ay, and considering I don’t actually o’rking monitor anymore, it’s probably not going to be all that much use in the future. So I guess the ’s the best deal for me, I’ll wander down to the Apple Store tomorrow and have a play with both to make sure the different amo’ cache and bus speeds don’t make too big a difference, but c’rom a 400Mhz machine that’s still fast enough for nearly all of my needs, I imagine everything will be fine speedwise. Anyone got comments on any hidden benefits of iBooks v Powerbooks?

There’s been a lot of discussion about Microsoft’s shiny new patent on putting multiple scripts into one XML file – all of it saying how ridiculous the patent is. This however, gets my vote as best retort. My view: it’s crap, but most patents are. Time to make people go back to having competition I say.

Gregor J. Rothfuss asks:

what will be deployed 100% first, IPv6, the metric system or Unicode? My answer: the metric system, it’s got a massive head start. They all require America to pull it’s head out of the sand and play nice with the rest of the world though so probably none of them will ever happen. Sigh. On the subject of Unicode – what is with defining a universal character encoding that has so many different forms??? UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-16BE, UTF-16LE, UTF-BE unmarked, UTF16-LE unmarked, collapsed accents, expanded accents. Gah!

Well, I thought I’d download Firefox and try it out for a while (this entry is being written using it). The first thing I notice is it doesn’t look right. Read on if you don’t mind hearing criticisms of Firefox.

Dave Hyatt finally got around to posting to his weblog about the release of Safari 1.2. Some really good stuff has gone into it and congratulations are in order for all involved. Sadly, my most anticipated feature, LiveConnect, appears to be broken. I’ve seen it work when going from JavaScript to Java, but never managed to get JSObject working to communicate from Java to JavaScript. Dave’s blog is actually the first place that I’ve ever seen that actually mentions going both ways, or at least that what I assume he means by:

Fear stuck deep into my heart, a chill ran down my spine… I reread more carefully what I feared I had seen: “I’m going to be a pop star!” My heart pounding – not another wanna be pop star! Please don’t let it be true! My morbid curiosity aroused, I had to investigate – surely there was a painless explanation….

After a few minutes playing with GarageBand Arggg! Could this be any worse? What abomination am I about to subject my ears to? Do I dare click that link? I had to, I had to know just how bad it was. Hands shaking in fear of what I might hear, I clicked…. ba ba, da da da doo doo da My foot tapped, my head grooved. What just happened here? That was actually pretty good…. Is it possible that someone who so brazenly refers to themselves as a pop star could actually come up with a cool lick? What kind of wonder is this so called GarageBand? And how soon can I get a copy? So Matthew when do we get to hear your first complete works?

Interesting article over at O’Reilly about the available Latex editors for OS X. It’s tempted me enough to have a play around. Well actually, the O’Reilly article gave me the knowledge to get started, this article gave me the reasons to do it. Since I’m getting into playwrighting I need to set up an efficient way of getting ideas down and being able to typeset them properly. I’ve currently got a Word template set up but Word X doesn’t seem to handle templates like it should and the layout is something of my own concoction rather than a standard layout. Hopefully I’ll be able to find a latex system to use and just go with that. Besides, you’re just not a true geek until you know latex….

Okay, this is just scary. “SubEthaEdit virgin” – oh boy… Don’t worry Ted, what scares me most is that I understand perfectly. Sadly, I just don’t get enough SubEthaEditin’ in my life – maybe we need to start a SubEthaEdit brothel…..

Someone complained that this blog didn’t look right in IE on windows so I thought I may as well redesign it. The fact that that certain someone is good looking might have helped… So might have the fact that it didn’t look right in Safari either… and the fact that it caused IE 5.2 on OS X to crash… Mostly because she was good looking…. Anyway, there’s been a bit of a redesign, hopefully it should work in all browsers this time. The slight change to the color scheme is quite nice as well. If you do see any problems, give me a yell.

This is a fantastic suggestion from Warren Ellis. Friend of a friend systems should be integrated with instant messaging to become the central hub of your internet community experience. It needs to go a step further than that though – it should integrate with iSync, Outlook, your PDA etc, so that it really becomes the central hub of all your communications devices. It should include the functionality that Address Book now has (on OS X) with it’s bluetooth phone integration. I’d also put the focus on business networking and customer relations more than dating as well. A system that integrates with all your communications mediums, tracks the communication with customers or business partners and allows you to easily view and search that information. That’s a pretty nice tech support/help desk setup. Ignoring some of it’s tracking capabilities scales it back to be a nice business contact tool, and with the friend of a friend thing coming through it still serves as a dating tool for those who really want that. Mostly though, I think I just want another cool toy to play with – the bluetooth phone I recently acquired is just so much fun to play with.

“jbob” comments about how Java and Linux are a good fit for each other, and that better access to the internals of linux would make it even better. I definitely agree that Java and Linux are a good fit, but they are a good fit only because Java provides a platform independant abstraction. Providing access to the internals of linux from Java would remove the biggest advantage Java has over C/C++ because the code would no longer be portable. Ways to make Java programs look and act like either GNOME or KDE apps would be great (particularly if it’s done through the Swing L&F mechanism so it looks right on which ever desktop system you choose), but getting into the internals of Linux – just write it in C and get access to anything you want. One last thing:

Over at O’Reilly Chuck Toporek complains that iSync didn’t support the bluetooth phone he purchased. I think he’s pointing the blame in the wrong place. iSync supports the standard syncing protocol SyncML so it will work with any phone or device that also supports that standard which apparently Chuck’s phone doesn’t. So while I sympathize with Chuck for having bought what is for him a dud phone, I think it’s a bit much to expect Apple to do all the leg work to support every device under the Sun. Afterall, isn’t that exactly what open standards are meant to be for?

In the beginning there was chaos…. Nothing changes really. I’ve finally gotten around to putting a blog online, I’m not sure how long it will last but hopefully I’ll be doing enough interesting stuff this year that there’ll be something to blog about. I guess in the worst case I can just pester Iain from here instead of in his comments.