Posted in General at 7:22 pm by TBBle (Visited 298 times)
I'm sorry, due to my ADSL connection at home having spontaneously died, I've been unable to update the site.
So in the meantime, here's a joke to pass the time: ^_^
A frog walks up to the inquries station of a bank branch, and asks about taking out a loan. He is directed to John Paddiwhack, the loan assessor.
Once seated at John's desk, he says "I'm not a customer of this bank, but I'd like to take a $10 000 loan please". John replies "I dunno, we don't usually give loans to random frogs off the street."
"I understand" replies the frog, "but I'm not just some random frog. My name's Kermit Jagger, and I'm the son of Mick Jagger."
"I'm not sure about this, but... well, we'd need some collateral. Being of a famous family, surely that's not a problem?"
"Of course, I understand. I've got this,", says Kermit, withdrawing a porcelin elephant from his pocket, "will it do?"
"Hmm. I think I'll have to see the manager about this...." says John, looking a little flustered, picking up the porcelin elephant and heading to the manager's office....
In the manager's office: "Mr Williams, I've got this frog in my office. He claims to be Mick Jagger's son, and wants to borrow $10 000 with barely anything as security. I mean, I asked him for collateral, but he gave me this... this... I don't even know how to describe it..."
The bank manager replies, "It's a knick-knack, Paddiwhack. Give the frog a loan. His old man's a rolling stone."
Urgh. Drank a lot last night. The last thing I remember was two tequila shots in a row... And then I woke up in my own bed, with my pants on, but no shirt.
I apparently threw up in a friend's car, and my car is still there. >_<
On the plus side, I successfully tested the MSN Voice chat stuff live on the Internet. Well, the other person could hear me, but didn't have a microphone. And it doesn't work though NAT. I have to work out if the MSN Messenger client can do voice chat over NAT, and if so, how.
Urgh, I feel awful. And I still have two assignments to type up.
Once again, instead of doing my very overdue linguistics homework, or even showing up on #pgsm and #solarmiracle to help distribute today's Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, I hacked away more at CenterICQ.
And lo and behold, it can now negotiate an audio conversation with MSN Messenger 6.2. A quick compile of linphone later (quick being relative. >_<) and I could hear my voice coming out of the speakers on the server a half-second after speaking into the microphone on Shane's laptop.
*dances*
Anyway, I prolly should go see what the #pgsm people are up to. Or I could eat breakfast...
Or put breakfast on, and while that's cooking, clean up the patch to deal with actually checking if the user _wants_ to have a voicechat before accepting the offer. And also allowing CenterICQ to cancel the chat when it's done.
"The Australian Idol top 12 is an exclusive club. Only six singers have made it in." -- Australian Idol commercial.
You'd think at first glance, proscriptive grammar would be hard, 'cause that involves telling right from wrong, and such judgements are not simple.
On the other hand, descriptive linguistics seems simple, since all that involves is recording what people are saying and how it hangs together.... Except that everyone time someone opens their mouth, that's more work.
Posted in Programming at 5:01 pm by TBBle (Visited 252 times)
Well, after my successful work a few weeks ago to make CenterICQ not disconnect every time an MSN message was received (much to Shane's amusement, he would send me denial-of-service attacks every chance he got), I've not fixed (partially) the other problem, of not being able to add MSN users to CenterICQ such that the MSN Messenger servers would tell me if they were online or not.
So a reasonably successfuly afternoon. Now I'm hammering away at libmsn's external application support, for webcams and other such things... That's harder, but I think it'll work out. First cut will just reject all requests, but that'll be an improvement over what we have now. ^_^
Posted in Australia at 8:12 pm by TBBle (Visited 460 times)
A kangaroo hit me on the way home today.
For those not familiar with Australian fauna, this is very different from hitting a kangaroo. When one hits a kangaroo, one's grill gets compressed, and if you're lucky, the kangaroo dies. If you're unlucky, the kangaroo gets angry. >_<
On the other hand, tonight the kangaroo hit me. This means it hit the side of the car, then got up and hopped off the road (in the direction it was headed) before the next car got there. (At 60km/h and heavy traffic, this is under two seconds by my count.) It knocked my passenger side wing mirror at a weird angle (but very convinient for parallel parking) but hit the car exactly where I hit the pole in a parking lot, so I couldn't see any other effect in the dark.
I had a near miss the other day with a kangaroo at 100 km/h.
Had to withdraw from Project Yuka (and that's the only mention it'll get here for the moment) and that's a real disappointment.
Am behind on my Uni stuff but catching up.
Watched PGSM Act.44.
Oh yeah, Anna is back in town briefly, had dinner with her last night. Indian (Flavours Of India) and that was really tasty. She's well, in case you're wondering. ^_^
Umm. Yeah, that's about it.
Oh, I bought new jeans. I think stetchy denim is the weirdest thing I've ever worn.... But it's comfortable. ^_^
I promise more frequent updates, but I don't think I'll manage "The good, the bad and the educational" daily... I'll put up Japanese and/or Linguistics stuff instead, as it comes to mind.
The tutorial to make up for the tutorial I missed on Monday, turns out to be during one of my two remaining lectures this week. (And the other lecture is for the same class, so a clash is unlikely)
Something new
Work expands to fill the available time. And the unavailable time. >_<
I don't think this needs much explanation. Suffice it to say, I didn't do this last-night 'cause I got home and was dozing off on the couch within half an hour.... This is at 11:30pm, which is unusual for me. -_-,zZ
Hopefully, with a new kernel, a new driver for the NIC, and 90 minutes of downtime, the server we live on (that's we as in the websites. I'm not living in a sleeping bag in a 40 RU rack) should no longer be up and down like a yoyo.
The problem has been that for several months (since March, I think) the ethernet link would mysteriously stop getting and sending data. The link light stayed on, syslog and kern.log happily partied, but the server fell off the 'net. Luckily, from a previous occurance, I had a cronjob which brings the link down and up (ifdown/ifup if you know your Debian) when the router is absent. This meant that downtime would generally only be 60 seconds long.
This held until last week when I realised the IPv6 stack (yes, we're IPv6 enabled!) was suffering under this relentless onslaught of interface bouncing, and something was chewing up memory every time this happened (up to 20 times a day >_<) such that the all important 6to4-to-2000::/3 (ie the route for everything that's not using 6to4) wasn't being added. I only noticed this when I was setting up this blog, and noticed that there was a significant delay between me hitting the server access button, and actually getting a webpage.
So I called my co-location provider again, given that last time this happened it was caused by them (or their predecessors) moving this server to a different switch. They disclaimed any such knowledge this time, and said they'd look into it. (Still waiting to hear back. @_@)
Rebooting fixed it temporarily, and this weekend I decided it was time to update my kernel from 2.4.21 w/Debian patches to 2.4.27. I did that on Sunday night, rebuilt the scyld rtl8139 driver I'd been using, and off it went. Clean reboot, no problems, but the link was still dying!
So this afternoon I took it upon myself to flick the server over to the kernel-included's 8139too driver. Needless to say, rmmod barfed since the module appeared to be in use by more than one thing, and so I vainly made it reboot on the off chance that would clear things up. Only the reboot died. After shutting down the daemons, so I couldn't ssh back in and fix it at all.
A call to my co-location providers, a 90-minute wait of terror, and we're live again.
The new network driver seems to have fixed the problem.
The only thing that worries me? I only switched to the scyld driver because that fixed the problem the last time this happened.
I'll leave the cron job running, just in case. ^_^
There are disadvantages to a DVD's soft subtitles.
Actually, I only missed one class. If I'd hurried, and skipped breakfast and a shower, I could have made the second one. However, it is a tutorial which I'll make up later this week. Hardly seems worth missing breakfast and being smelly just for one class.
Despite therefore having all afternoon (or at least most of it) available to me, I didn't do the dishes until The Simpsons came on. Happily, it took less than 90 minutes, since there wasn't much in there that needed heavy scrubbing. Although my curry saucepan's looking the worse for wear.
As a reward (and to get me in a settled mood as I have to be at work at 7:30am tomorrow >_%lt;) I finally watched The Godfather Part I on DVD. All was going fine until my terrible sin of skipping the menus punished me by having no subtitles during the Italian-speaking segment in the middle. A bit of skipping around and hitting the 'Subtitle' button on the remote eventually yielded a setting where only the Italian was subtitled, not the English. There didn't seem to be any subtitles for the earlier Italian-speaking scene, which reinforced my feeling that only certain key parts of the dialog in Italian were being translated, and the rest was left to the viewer's imagination. That was a nice touch.
A less nice touch was that I forgot to check the running length on the DVD cover first, and my plans for an early night were ruined by the movie being 3 hours long, plus a half-hour break in the middle. That plus various going-to-bed delays indicates that I proably should have watched El Mariachi instead.
Still, at least tomorrow's MGC night. And only one class to go to. But then there's two jobs in the morning, and I'll be very very tired by the evening, I'm sure.
I bought Damia's Children, despite having 100 pages of Damia still to go.
Bad news
Despite my usual best intentions, I failed to do the washing up, or any of my much-delayed university work this weekend.
Something new
"Time flies when you're having fun" apparently also applies to going into the office on the weekend.
Even though I've prolly got too much to read already, I still bought myself another novel while I was in Tuggeranong on the way to work. On Friday I bought Musashi (only because it was $35, such a bargain! ^_^) but it looks a little thick to be carried around in my backpack at university. It's 2:30am now, I've got to hang out the washing before I go to bed, and I have to be at class at 11am in the morning. Despite all this, I will still probably finish Damia tonight when I go to bed. Anne McCaffery just writes these books where the first 200-odd pages are building up characters, surrounds and suchlike, and all of a sudden you hit the last 100 pages and things start happening and you can't stop reading. And of course, the disappointment that hits you when you finish the book can only allayed by the knowledge there's still another four in the series.
I have a strong suspicion that this is how many science-fiction and fantasy writers work. Certainly others I read (eg. Elizabeth Moon having recently established herself withing my bookshelf with Trading in Danger and the Serrano Legacy series) do the same thing. On the other hand, Douglas Adams only did that in Life, The Universe And Everything, in the Hitchhiker's Trilogy. Then again, Douglas Adams got around the problem science fiction authors all suffered of having the Earth as an easy familiar backdrop by blowing it up in the first few minutes of the series, forever changing the landscape (I'm in a punny mood today) of Science-Fiction Humour. A trick Red Dwarf repeated many years later with equal success. Another author who doesn't do it (or at least not always) is Raymond E. Fiest. The Magician series tended to be two-thirds build-up, one third uninterruptable action (although they were twice as thick as an Anne McCaffery novel) but the Empire series (co-written with... who? Have to check that later.) tended towards each chapter or two having a mini-climax. This has the added disadvantage that I end up reading cover to cover in one sitting. This is not good for my sleeping patterns. >_<
I slept in (having read, obviously ^_^) and jumped out of bed at about 1:30pm. I threw my washing in the washing machine, stuff happened, and got to work at 4pm, confidently expecting to be done by 6pm. Label printing, Windows CE .net wrestling with, and a quick chat to the security guard (who has read Damia and highly recommends the series. ^_^) and it's 10pm, and I'm hungry again. My housemate called me just at this time wanting me to bring him food on the way home, so I bought lots of food (meat for barbecueing the entire week, in fact. ^_^) and some McDonalds.
Now all I have to do is hang out the washing, read for a while, and go to bed, and only the washing up will be there to terrify me in the morning. >_<
At long last, it's happened. A customer (I've not idea who it is. I've not bothered to look it up. ^_^) of Bandwidth Unlimited Pty Ltd has been accused of sharing copyrighted material by the MPAA.
My response, based on various reading of the appropriate websites (I hope >_< ) is tell them we're legally forbidden from either telling anyone if that IP address belongs to a customer of ours, nor may we cut any such Internet connection off without due legal process. In short, we're not gonna do anything they've asked us to. I'm also tempted to ask them not to waste my valuable email reading time with requests for illegal actions... I wonder if I can convince my SPAM filter to deal with that?
Slept in, and missed my personal Iaido/Jodo time. And next week if I make it, I have to share the dojo with a Kendo team full of enthusiasm after today's competition.
Something new
Sometimes, if you ignore a bug, it _does_ go away by itself.
Another Saturday morning, so another episode of PGSM. Even though we're all terrified of what will happen after Act. 50, it's taken nothing from the atmosphere of anticipation and jubliation on Saturday mornings on IRC.
And since I missed the dojo booking this morning, and haven't had my gi pants repaired and couldn't train in Jujutsu this afternoon, I spent the entire day on IRC having fun.
It was supposed to be my first Iaido and Jodo training in more than twelve months. And my first self-directed one in two years. Instead, I read Damia (by Anne McCaffery) until some stupid hour of the morning. >_< On the plus side, it's a good book. ^_^
The other thing I played with today was my work on pulling apart the source code for WinNY that I found on the Internet once. It looks like it's been decompiled from an unpacked executable, and large chunks are missing. The missing stuff is largely the interface support code, but half the software (including much of the network protocol) is done using Winsock callbacks, so I can only decode the first few messages (up to the first rekeying) of a conversation.
On the other hand, the file formats are quickly revealing their secrets to me now. I can now decode a nodelist into the node addresses, and pullall the metadata from a cache file. I actually had most of that already working, but the data I had was giving bad results. So I fired up the English-localised WinNY on my housemate's laptop, which is based on the same version as the source code I had, and found that its cache files would decode fine. So I used them to complete the meta-data extracting code, and apart from the MD5 verification failing, it was good. Then I pointed it at the earlier data from a later version of WinNY, and instead of getting the 'bad key' I was getting before, I got output. O_O!! Anyway, I don't know what was wrong with the old code. It's gone now.
Oh, and in perl, $value & 0xffff doesn't seem to do what a C programmer like myself expects. Happily, $value % 0x10000 does the job. ^_^
NASA: "Hello, NASA";
Me: "Hi! I understand you're sending a Messenger to Mercury"
NASA: "Uh huh..."
Me: "Hey! I just noticed the irony, given that Mercury was the messenger of the gods..."
NASA: "Yes, very good sir. Can I help you with something?"
Me: "Yes. Can you give an extra message to the Messenger? Tell her Nephrite's no good for her, she can do better."
NASA: click. beep beep beep.
Watched two PGSM episodes (Act 41 and Act 42) at long last
Bad News
Dropped two uni courses (Structure of English and Second Language Acquisition) to allow me to focus on Phonetics, Syntactic Structures, and my all-too-big TODO list
Something New
The use of まさか in a non-question sentence. (Also from PGSM ^_^)
Man, it's good to catch up on PGSM. Especially over greasy Oporto's chicken.
I would definately like to have children like Usagi... Or to be more specific, I'd like to have lots of wild monkey-sex with Ikuko-mama. Whether children like Usagi come of it, I'm happy either way.
Act.41 and Act.42 possible spoilers inside the spoiler thingy:
Spoiler Alert
Geez, we finally get the Makoto/Motoki plot half-going... Things start to get good, she transforms in front of him, and he drops the ball. Motoki, you アホ! Perfect moment to reassure her, tell her it's a wonderful thing, and you just stand there with your mouth open. Admittedly, I can understand, I'd prolly stand there with my mouth open if I saw Makoto turn into Sailor Jupiter. But I'd stand there even if she wasn't tranforming so much as just being in such proximity. I'd dopey like that but, Motoki, I expected so much better from you. o_o;
Still, at least I know which part I'd want to play if I was in PGSM. Motoki, obviously. Especially the kissing scenes. (What kissing scenes? Lemme just say, if I got that close to Motoko, I'd... adlip.)
And then there's the issue of The Lunar Looney (AKA Princess Sailor Moon). She's as evil on the inside as Mio looks on the outside. I mean, at least Berryl's doing it for a man (and maybe incredible power, but we all have our vices). The Lunar Looney just likes to make things explode.
I realise that paragraph's not at all fair, but it's my weblog. Naah!
Oh, and Motoki attacking the Nazghuul, that had me in fits of giggles, almost as badly as "Nephkichi". Shame Motoki dropped the ball later on. >_<
It's a shame I had to drop those courses. They both looked very interesting, and I may try and take them during my honours year or something. However, between my ACTEWAgl work, my TransACT work (mentioned earlier) and general laziness, I'm better off concentrating on less. No Centrelink since I'm now a part-time student again, but I should be able to turn over enough to make ends meet.
I don't know who coined that phrase, but I'm sure I've heard it before.
Unfortunately, when your development server is physically distinct from any kind of Internet connection, apt-get becomes more of a pain than a pleasure.
"apt-get --print-uris" helps, but you can't feed it directly to wget. >_<
A USB memory stick loaned from a friend across the partition wall got me both the files I needed, and a nicely wasted hour playing with automounter and the usb_storage linux module. I wouldn't have played with automounter if I'd been trying to use the directory it was monitoring, instead of somewhere it wasn't monitoring... I guess I can't expect it to monitor the whole filesystem incase I expect the USB memory stick to show up at random places. ^_^
Now if only it wasn't so damn hot in here... It's nicely cold outside, and I foolishly wore a long-sleeved shirt-thing.
I had six scheduled for today. Well, actually five and one was repeated. I missed both of that one
Something new
When I fall asleep in class (in the front row, no less) I keep writing, but my writing gets real small.
I've never missed the same class twice in one day before, that was a new and interesting experience.
I also need to use one of my 0.3mm Japanese-writing pens instead of one of my 0.8mm English-writing pens if I'm going to fall asleep, since I can't write that small with an 0.8mm tip and still be able to read it later.
