Headline: We finally put some holes in our flat.

After owning the place since December 2006, and not living in it properly tile August 2007, we finally went out to Bunnings, bought a hammer drill and a bunch of dyna-bolts.

mmmmmm, dyna-bolts - fantastic things.

Dyna-bolts work by using the strongest feature of concrete - compression, to create a nice and strong fixing - which just leaves worrying which breaks first - a 6mm bolt, or the resin climbing hold, or , well, me

12 May 2008 - 12:34 We finally put some holes in our flat.

Headline: My Obsolete Skill : Fixing A Disk Using SuperZap?

I've added an obsolete skill I have to FixingADiskUsingAHexEditor

I recal using a program called SuperZap? on the TRS-80 to repair 90K and 180K 5.25 floppy disks where the File allocation table or even files were corrupted. This would happen either when the disk wasn't used in a while, not looked after quite right, or the drive itself was moved - or even when the weather changed too much.

The task of fixing the disk involved surfing around a hex dump of each page of the disk, comparing the contents of the File allocatio table to where files appeared to begin and end. As the disks where small enough, it was generally possible to recover most work.

Fun extra's were when using FORTH-80 or other variations of TSRDos, NewDos? etc.

SuperZap? used to start with an ASCII animation of a wizard - anyone have a screen capture?

12 May 2008 - 12:30 My Obsolete Skill : Fixing A Disk Using SuperZap?

Headline: Not quite a new bike.

i finally slashed out and got a bicycle work stand - which meant I also bought an XTR disc brake bleed kit.

Thus, I thought I would have my first attempt at fixing my brakes... I assumed that after 3 years or so, the brake fluid would need replacing - especially as I've not used the bike since some time in 2006.

Instead, after reading the instructions on the web, I opened up the reservoirs to find they were still filled with relatively clean looking fluid - so I topped them up, readjusted a few things, and went for my first ride on my LaPierre? in over 2 years...

Twas fun getting lost near the Great North Walk, shame I didn't find any signs pointing me to where they'd like me to ride offroad.

12 May 2008 - 12:29 Not quite a new bike.

Headline: A Nation says Sorry

Today, Australia formally acknowledges and apologises for policies and actions resulting in 200 years of social genocide. The process of reconcilliation that was stalled for the last 11 years, has now been restarted.

It should be an interesting, and hopefully fruitful decade ahead.

12 May 2008 - 12:23 A Nation says Sorry

Headline: testing Crawford's ReadWriteOfflinePlugin

So far, I'm loving it, this Blog post is written on my notebook's copy of the Blog web, and later tonite, it will get synced to the home.org.au server.

The pleasures of fuly functional software are huge

12 May 2008 - 12:48 testing Crawford's ReadWriteOfflinePlugin

Headline: new bike time :)

Pam's brother gave her a beater bike for christmas. A nice sweet steel ~1990 trek 720. And so I've had to find myself something that I am willing to not worry about leaving outside the shops too :).

The result? A blue ~1985 Graecross 'Courier' 10 speed built with hi-tensile steel. As delivered, 14.5Kg, with kickstand, mini-fenders, and importantly, semi-horizontal dropouts (in case you're a normal human being - that means I can make it into a single speed without needing a chain tensioner).

No idea how much weight I can shead, but I think the first real upgrade will be some modern brakes courtesy of ebay, and bar tape to replace the grungy foam grip.

It got me home from the station already - and faster than the train to Hornsby - yes, it was running ~20 minutes late.

First night home, and I've removed about a kilo of stuff from it already - the kickstand alone weighed about 600g - yup, thats right, I'm going all weight weenie, on a bike who's frame weighs more than my other road bike :).

Fotos soonish....

18 Jan 2008 - 13:05 new bike time :)

Headline: Looking back on 2007

For me, its been a fun year - having been in Europe (mostly Zurich) for over 7 months (from 1 Jan 2007 to 16 Aug 2007, with only a 3 week break at the end of Feburary) We have successfully spent more time in aeroplanes than in cars.

Its also likely (due to Switzerlands fantastic rail system) that we have spent more time in trains than in cars... marvelous.

There is continuing evidence that we bring rain -

1. we were in Amsterdam when the Feburary orkan hit europe, stopping all of germany's trains
2. when we cycled across the south of Germany in August, there was flooding and strong rain following us
3. Sydney has just had several weeks of good rain
4. and for the week that we were in Brisbane... it rained - including around 20mm at my parents place - normally the rain goes either side of them

Over the year, I've built install packages for TWiki on Windows, OSX, debian and RedHat? /Fedora, done the builds and tests for the TWiki 4.2 release, updated and improved the performance of TWiki's usermanagement system, enabling Joomla, Trac and OpenID? intergation, and recently started work on adding DTrace probes to perl.

2008 looks to be just as much fun, though it maybe all in Australia!

06 Jan 2008 - 06:22 Looking back on 2007

Headline: Whats worse for the environment?

I was in the local 'organic supermarket' shopping for the Spagetti Bolognaise I was going to make.

I needed Tomatoes, and because there wasn't enough time, was going to use a tin of tomatos.....

I wonder, whats worse, tinned tomatoes from Italy, tinned tomatoes from South America or tinned Tomatoes from the USA. There are of course none from Australia.

In the end, I bought the South American ones. Not only is their eonomic need greater, they are less likely to have government protections on them.

But really. When is it going to become mandatory to add an envronmental impact statement to goods? It'd be really useful to know... did these tons go via the US, which way around the world did they go......

Its a shame that Sydney's so environmentally broken, that getting locally produced food, directly from the farmer, involves driving.

12 Dec 2007 - 01:21 Whats worse for the environment?

Headline: Asus wl-500gPremium with dd-wrt

With our return to Sydney, we've been working towards simplifying and rationalising our computer setup. Initially by replacing 3 computers with the new quad core VMWare server, and now by adding a router with USB support.

As I want to share my printer and scanner to my Linux and OSX systems, I want always on CUPs support, so I flashed the wl-550gp with 'real non-toy' firmware (dd-wrt v23 sp2)

t42p:/mnt/data/sven/asus# tftp -i 192.168.1.1 put wl500g-clear-nvram.trx 
usage: tftp host-name [port]
tftp> 
tftp> quit
t42p:/mnt/data/sven/asus# tftp 192.168.1.1
tftp> mode binary
tftp> put wl500g-clear-nvram.trx
Sent 1585152 bytes in 3.5 seconds
tftp> put wl500g-recover.trx
Sent 3690496 bytes in 8.2 seconds
tftp> put dd-wrt.v23_asus.trx dd-wrt.v23_asus.bin
Sent 3502080 bytes in 7.9 seconds

Next step -

1. enable JFFS
   
2. add USB support, and then USB printer sharing
3. plugin in the printer, and connect to it

I'll report more about the next steps as I get to them.

02 Dec 2007 - 10:59 Asus wl-500gPremium with dd-wrt

Headline: Good Calories, Bad Calories, or the nature of belief...

Stumbling upon a blog post pointing to Quirks & Quarks, I listened to an interview with Gary Taubes, a science writer promoting his latest book - 'Good Calories, Bad Calories'.

Basic premise - that the medical profession has been proclaiming unscientific crap on the nature of weight gain and loss. That calorific intake and output (ie excercise) do not in fact have sufficient scientific basis as to be the core factors in weight gain / loss (or so Gary theorises).

While I don't have the background to agree or dispute his argument, I do wonder about the paralells in the Software industry.

We too, spend a lot of time and effort making changes without first studying the situation, devising metrics to determine the possible success or failure of proposed changes to solve proposed problems.

Instead, we're driven by the propaganda of the manufacturers, telling us that the next version is better, the new language, toolset etc will be faster, without having time to truely benchmark those claims in our contexts.

Returning to weight loss, I've noticed that I'm much more likely to lose weight when I'm in Zurich, than when I'm in Sydney. I'm doing a similar amount of exercise, and I think I'm eating a similar amount and mix of foods. This makes me wonder what is fundamentally different in the foods we eat here...

I suspect, the main difference is the bread. Bread in Switzerland is much fresher, and isn't made with preservatives, and theres much more variety in flour types in Europe.

Sounds like buying a new oven for our flat, and learning to bake bread is going to be important.

21 Nov 2007 - 09:25 Good Calories, Bad Calories, or the nature of belief...