文字馬鹿: A fool of words

Just a quick note, in the aftermath of the vote to decide where Anthony Towns, Debian Project Leader did something good for Debian, bad for Debian or indifferent to Debian with the Dunc-Tank.

I, Paul Hampson, hereby confess that I too earnt money for doing Debian work, specifically packaging FreeRADIUS and getting it sponsored into the archive in time for Sarge to ship.

Mind you, I didn't earn much money, since Bandwidth Unlimited (for it was they) went bust without paying me much, but they did pay me. And you might argue that I'd been looking for a package to help out with in Debian for nearly three years at that point, and I would have worked on it for free, and that when I was being paid serious money to administer an ISP, I didn't do much FreeRADIUS work at all.

To which I'd say that I'd never have picked FreeRADIUS were I not running an ISP, and I would not have been running an ISP had I not planned to become rich and buy the world's largest chocolate bar from the experience. And I didn't get a lot of my job functions done when I was running an ISP, so lower-priority things (like FreeRADIUS, cleaning my desk, a full night's sleep) were often pushed aside.

I have to say that until I recently became a professional, regularly paid, programmer, I was highly envious of people who get paid to work on Open Source stuff, let alone Debian stuff. Now I'm just envious, although that'll prolly upgrade back to highly envious after linux.conf.au 2007 (or as I like to think of it now, clitoris.conf.au)

This whole thing puts me in mind of my experience at the Sydney 2000 Olympics. I was one of the IT volunteers, and we basically picked up the less-interesting jobs the IBM-paid staffers gave us. At the time I felt a bit put out that I was there volunteering, and these guys were being paid to be there doing nothing that I couldn't have handled. Obviously that was decidedly unfair, and from my days of "I'm as good as or better than anyone else at computers" phase. But the unfairness of my attitude isn't actually the issue, the issue was that I really wanted to be paid to do that sort of thing, and didn't see why others should get paid but me not be.

Now of course I want two things: To get paid, and to do the things I love. I've finally reached the point where I can combine them, and I no longer begrudge those who, through luck, skill or otherwise, get paid more to do the same things, or get access to cooler toys to do them on. I'm envious, obviously. How do you not envy someone who gets to bring up Linux on a 128-way Power5 machine on the quiet? But that doesn't make me unhappy, it just makes me want to strive more, and work harder. One day I'll be the one submitting a paper to Linux.conf.au on some stupendously cool thing I've done. ^_^

Anyway, my short-medium term goal is to leverage the experience of the current MicroForté work, plus finishing my Japanese studies, to go work for a games company in Japan, combining my two favorite pipe-dreams into one, and making it reachable in a little as two years. Maybe I'll be lucky and MicroForté will open a Japanese office or something, or I'll luck out and end up working on a Japanese MMORPG with a Linux client and a measurable dose of serious cool. Or somehow end up programming at Nintendo.... Oh, sparkley eyes! *_*

And a by-the-by, it's two and a half months in, and I'm still totally thrilled to be working at a video games company. I mean, seriously, I'm like all, wow. I thought it was cool when I was working at TransACT, and my testing procedure involved firing up a video stream, and watching it on a TV. I had a TV on my desk, for work purposes, and that was the high-point of my career. Now I don't have a TV on my desk, but when I'm hacking on combat-handling code, part of my procedure involves firing up a game server, and playing.

I'm learning to take my time with things a bit more. I'm now much less worried that I won't speak six asian languages, play the piano, have my name someone in the Linux kernel that doesn't share a sentence with "blame", have invented an entirely new way of interacting with computers, master four different styles of martial art, earn my first dan in three different Japanese weapon styles, hold two masters degrees in disparate subject areas, earn infamy in the Debian community or even the admiration of my peers by 30. Or 40. I'll be pushing it to get there by 50. But the advantage of youth is that you get it when you're young, and only lose it if you let it go.

I guess on reflection, my goal has become to be a polymath ronin... For those familiar with anime, I think I want to be Kintaro Oe when I grow up...

Side-note: I'm now the secretary of the ANU Anime Society. Two days before the AGM, I wrote in an email to the then-executive committee that secretary was the one position I'd never take. Time makes fools of us all. ^_^ Congratulations to Cathy Ring on stepping up to the presidency, and to the other executives, old and new, for stepping up to what I expect (knowing Cathy) to be a hard-driven and successful year coming.

Oh, and someone asked this week about getting the GTO Live Action box set. So here's my AmazonJP links...

Wow. I sneeze, a few months pass, and life turns upside down...

Firstly, obviously no The Other Day's Mews posted. I've got backlogs ahoihoi (although I'm missing about a month from October 3rd through November 11th) which I might have to start cherry-picking just to get them up.

Still, I got my 2006 Mew Calendar from AmazonJP. It was too expensive to ship by itself (shipping was significantly more than the calendar. >_<) but then I decided to buy myself an LPIC I book, and found a friend who wanted some stuff, so it came out quite cheaply. (Pictures and links at bottom of post)

I need the LPIC I book because I'm going to linux.conf.au 2006 in New Zealand later this month, and will be sitting two LPI level 1 exams there. I'm really looking forward to it, I had soo much fun last year. And I've never been overseas before (over strait, technically), so I've now got my first ever passport.

The passport was surprisingly quick to get. I had most of the paperwork already, and put the application in on the 23rd of December, and when I got back from Queensland, it came by registered mail on the 6th of January. And my mother was worried that I'd be hard-pressed to get it before I left for New Zealand if I put it in in December. There's an online tracking system, but I never got to try it, because I was in Queensland, as I mentioned.

I was in Queensland from the 30th of December until the 5th of January. I went up with my mum, step-father and sister for my youngest uncle's wedding. It was a nice wedding (outdoors, on a jetty-type thing the name of which escapes me) at a golf resort near the Gold Coast. And I use "near" loosely. For Queenslanders, it's near. For a Canberran like me, it was half-way to Sydney. It was also very hot, and very humid. I basically did two things in Queensland apart from the wedding, play video games and sweat. I also saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (good!) and Fun With Dick and Jane (also good!). Many of our family members (now numbering 33 in Lyall the clan) had t-shirts and such made up with "I got Lyalled at the Wedding of the Century" and "Lyallfest 05/06" on them. They were very cool, and slightly silly. Which seems appropriate somehow. It was an idea that came up after a little too much booze at the Lyall Christmas Party.

Christmas was fun, visited cousin's new place on Christmas Eve, spent night at Mum's place, visited Dad and grandparents in the morning, backto Mum's for lunch. Roast, of course. ^_^ A nice relaxing time after the hectic chaos of the preceeding two months, and my new job.

Yup, I've gained another new job. I also got rid of two, so I'm actually not doing too badly for a change. At the end of October, Bandwidth Unlimited folded, much to my shock, despair and disappointment. CBIT (note the new category!) bought the customers and equipment, and while I was there getting all the systems transferred over, they offered me the job of Internet Operations Manager for CBIT Internet. From then until now (and onwards into the future) I've been working flat-out with my old BU job, Richard's BU job, and all the jobs we both weren't doing. (Which possibly explains why BU folded...) If that sounds too much, it is. Luckily, CBIT's already been doing Internet (reselling BU since May) so a lot of the sales and management infrastructure is in place, so it's not like I'm doing it myself. And it's a chance for me to reshape all the things that were wrong with BU because I didn't have the time to fix them. The main worry I have with CBIT is what happens if I get into the JET program and leave in July

I applied for JET in December, haven't yet heard if I got an interview. I did spend a hectic morning photocopying and getting signed various documents. The ANU Union's JP was away that day, so it was more hectic than I expected. Happily, the ANU Student Admin had a JP on the front desk who could sign things during quiet periods. So I've applied, and have references from Steve Thiele of TransACT and Ikeda-sensei of the ANU Japan Centre. I think I'm in with a good chance, but then again I always think that. ^_^

My Debian NM application was finally processed to the policy and procedures stage (which is to say, I got a AM assigned to me) in the first week of November. This of course was the week I started at CBIT, so I had to place it on hold while I got things organised there. It's still on hold. I was hoping to have it done before linuxconf, but such is life. I'd still like to submit my next _stage_ by linuxconf, but part of the task is rereading policy. That's a thick thick document, and I'm still working on my LPI ExamCram book. If I get the stuff in, I think I'm in with a good chance there too, although the FreeRADIUS package has been suffering a bit of neglect. Luckily, it hasn't needed a lot of attention, although 1.1.0 is going to be released this week so I'll need to get that uploaded.

I think that's all I've done in the last couple of months. It seemed more at the time. Anyway, I'm back on IRC at nights after nearly two months absense, and I'm now hanging around the Whirlpool Forums particularly TransACT (professionally) and Linux/BSD (lifestyle). ^_^

For Christmas, I scored Red Dward VI, Red Dwarf VII, and The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy movie.. AmazonJP doesn't list the latter two yet.

Things I'm tracking, hoping for good things:

GplFlash2

Open source, GPL implementation of Macromedia Flash 7. The developer has a blog, last updated in July.

Bazaar-NG

Revision Control Software from Canonical, who put Ubuntu together. Successor to Bazaar, which is the successor to arch. Also has a cool set of plugins growing around it, such as bzrk which lets you visualise your branches and then drill down into them, as well a the essential bzrtools.

a couple of bazaar-ng web interfaces

bzrweb (Not yet upgraded to bzr 0.1.1 -_-, you could otherwise see it on my bzr site) and a port of the Mercurial web interface, hgweb which I've not tried since it looks like the repository contains bzr as well, and I'm not clear if that's because modifications to bzr were needed, or what. Also a complete lack of installation documentation, and the TODOs need to be done.

Vega Strike

3d space-flight simulator, along the lines of Wing Commander. Admittedly, I've only run this once on a 3d-enabled machine, and I managed to ram a mining station at full speed as I forgot that you need to accelerate against your line of velocity to slow down. But it looks promising. It already looks good.

Asterisk ('*')

Open-source PABX software. It does SIP, H.323, IAX2 (their own protocol) as well as interfacing to line-interface cards. I've actually got this set up on Keitarou, running SIP, but have no one to call me. I'm supposed to get this ready for voice-conferencing for anime.au comittee meetings... I'm also looking forward to further database integration so I can hook this up at BU and sell cheap VoIP calls. ^_^

IPv6

Anyone who's dealt with me in an ISP sense (especially if you're a supplier ^_^) will know I keep asking about IPv6. Because, dammit, it's the future, it's coming, and the sooner we're ready, the sooner we'll be transitioned. From home, all my machines can connect to Yurika over the 'net via IPv6 with no speed issues (both here and Yurika are using 6to4 which, if more NAT routers supported along with Neighbour Discovery, would allow basically zero-conf setup of an IPv6-capable host such as Windows XP, MacOS X and of course Linux and BSD flavours.

Oh, the horror!

One last thing. Mad props to John Stanhope for posting and defending his decision to post the federal government's latest effort in the war on freedom. It's about time the federal government was reminded that they don't get to keep laws secret from the people. They're not a large corporation answerable only to their shareholders with only the board allowed to know everything that's going on, they're the elected representatives of the people of Australia, and when they get caught trying to sneak bad bad things past the Australian people hoping no one notices, they deserve all the suffering they get. Mind you, I haven't read the draft legislation yet. But whoever the government sent to Lateline to try and dissolve the PR fallout did a pretty poor job. He seemed to be in denial that anyone else had seen the draft yet, evading questions like a minister caught deporting Australians for speaking a second language in question time. I can't listen to question time any more, it's just too frustrating listening to people arguing rhetoric pointlessly and making enormous leaps of bad logic. But I digress.

I had a quick wander through Planet Debian and it took to on to such interesting things as progress shots on a graphical Debian-Installer (Not actually from Planet Debian, but I can't work out where I saw that now), some very funny Sinfest mods (If you're a Debian person..), an absolute dream-sounding job (Yes, those two're the same blog. She's got some good stuff there. Including a capcha that apparently expects you to type ϖ...), A commentary against the patch-management systems that have started be become quite common in Debian, and to which I converted FreeRADIUS as my first post-Sarge task, personally implanted RFID chips, and musical breast implants.

The weirdest thing about that last one is the idea that fifteen years from now, we'll still be playing mp3s. Hell, an observable percentage of people I know are either .ogg or .flac already. I myself stopped downloading mp3s because I've had two hard disks fail from what I suspect was the weight of my mp3 collections. And my laptop only had the most essential 100 Mb or so of mp3s (Cowboy Bebop, Andrew Denton's Musical Challenge and a couple of random bits like the Blues Brothers' Everybody Needs Somebody and Abbot and Costello's Who's On First. And ガガガSP's 卒業 single, but I don't listen to that very often. In fact, I don't listen to any of these mp3s much anymore. My desktop machine's no longer in front of a west-facing window, and I'm not towing my laptop to work in the upstairs basement at TransACT anymore.

I've also ripped my new Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy soundtrack to flac, because either mplayer or copy protection (it doesn't say CD Audio on the cover! Aha! Treachery uncloaked!) means it skips every second in my DVD drive. I don't have a CD-audio cable, so analog isn't an option, but happily cdparanoia was happy to extract it perfectly to the hard disk. Analog mode works fine in my laptop, but I avoid doing that because I'm sure that the laptop's DVD drive is dodgy and just waiting to eat something important.

Oh, and I scored a new TV. Well, technically my dad gave me an old TV of his, but it's an improvement over my old one because it's larger, it has OSD, it has a remote, and it has AV inputs. So I plugged my gamecube in, and played Resident Evil Zero for a couple of hours. I only get Resident Evil Zero out when I change TVs, it seems (it was still in the gamecube from when I was getting my TV Tuner working in Linux) but the TV doesn't do PAL60 so I can't have another burl at The Ocarina Of Time, although I could try and finish Metroid Prime at long last.

On a more personal note, it's looking more and more like the work at TransACT's dried up, and I'm starting to think I should start seriously exploring my Melbourne options. I've got the JET information evening on Wednesday night, so I'll have an idea of how many people I'm going up against.

I prolly should talk more about the Melbourne plan here. As it happens, I dropped out of everything else to focus on BU and TransACT, and now that work looks like it's going to dry up. I can do my BU work as easily from interstate as I do now (technically, I do the work from my flat in Queanbeyan, so I'm already interstate) and frankly I'd like to try living somewhere with trains and other such public transport and try getting a job I actually like (TransACT's nice, but I need a change). So I figure either Melbourne or Sydney fits so far. I've friends in both cities, as well as family in Melbourne, so it'll come down to the job opportunities. Melbourne's main advantages are Cybersource whom a friend of mine mentioned are likely to be looking for people, as well as a project a friend of mine is looking into which I'd love to get involved in. When I thought I'd have TransACT work until the end of the year, I was thinking I'd go to Melbourne in February (after linux.conf.au 2006) and find a five month job until JET blasts off in July. Now I'm thinking maybe I should be looking to go in December/January... The problem with this plan is that I've got a possibly opportunity coming up in Canberra in online shops, and I'd have to break lease on my current flat. And I don't have any savings to afford to be in Melbourne without a job. And it's already mid-October. So I'd better get on with it.

On the "actually getting things done" front, I finally submitted a FreeRADIUS 1.0.5-2 which should clear the logjam 1.0.5-1 became when libltdl3-dev started conflicting with libtool1.4 without warning. I'm disappointed in this back-door method of forcing libtool1.4 out, where either a Replaces in libltdl3-dev or a diversion in libtool1.4 would have allowed the libltdl3-dev/libtool transfer of ltdl.m4 without boning me unneccessarily. As it is, the solution became to drag in the relevant parts of the libtool1.4 package to update the in-tree versions of the files. This is bad, but I can't NMU libtool1.4, and the patch I was given to upgrade FreeRADIUS to libtool 1.5 was unneccesarily intrusive to my mind, and I couldn't distill the libtool parts from the 'change how we build the package' parts.

I've also been actively hunting bugs in packages I'm using, leading to patches to libpam-mount (So I can mount my home directory from Keitarou on Mutsumi from XDM and safe from segfaults due to configuration), lftp (so it doesn't abort when a download finishes ^_^ Upstream didn't use my patch, but it _was_ a minimal -- but not optimal -- solution which neatly explicated the problem, I think) and xmame (so I can use xmame with programs with CHD files). In the process, I also submitted bugs to pam and liblircclient0 which are simple non-crashers that valgrind picked up. I'm so glad I started using valgrind, it's the absolute bee's knees for finding any kind of memory misuse bug which might otherwise lead to a segfault much later. I also used it on libnifi which majorly improved my memory management and stopped a whole bunch of segfaults. ^_^ I also took the opportunity tonight to point out to the php4 team that libcurl3-dev had disappeared during its autobuild time, much as libltdl3-dev broke FreeRADIUS during its autobuild time. It happened a week ago, so I expect they knew about it, but I was surprised to see absolutely no bug about it.

Hmm, time for my daily update... O_O

OK. What happened in the last three months?

I've left ActewAGL now. The projects have been handed over more or less, and therefore hopefully no longer my problem. I hope that doesn't mean they become no one's problem, but I guess I'll not know. Now my only remaining work is for BU.

I've spent the last couple of weeks doing some work at cbit, getting the web interface for the SOAP stuff I talked about below (months ago ^_^) going. They'd started one, but the guy doing the work has now been deployed somewhere else And when I say some work, I mean that took me about a week, and so far this week (it's been short, public holiday on Monday) I've just slacked off in the office, waiting for the web interface to break. Lots of time on IRC and email and it's been a good chance to do some reading. I've been reading up on integrating Linux into a Win2K AD Domain, preparing for my return to TransACT, subcontracting via BU.

I did a couple of months at TransACT, and am currently waiting on approval to do more time there. Working on an interesting project, and a less-than-interesting project. Happily, TransACT's standardised on Debian GNU/Linux as their Linux platform. I like to think I helped that by spreading as many Redhat scare stories as possible in my time there. ^_^ I was originally doing two-and-a-half days a week due to university commitments, but am now available full time...

I enrolled, started, and pulled out again from the ANU. I've finally bitten the bullet, and decided I'm not going to get through my final Japanese studies without spending some time there. I've applied for an eighteen-month deferment so I can do JET from August 2006, and be back roughly in time for semester two, 2007. I'm disappointed, I made a good run of it for the first four or five weeks, and that segues neatly into my next topic:

I had a four-week bout of depression. I basically only left the house every couple of days to buy more food, and when ActewAGL called me up to come in and do the handover. This was two weeks of uni, and then the two weeks of the lecture break, so a lot of lost work-time. Turns out that I'd neatly finished the TransACT pre-approved work, although I didn't discover this until three weeks in. I'm seeing the ANU Counselling Centre, which has been helping, as well as making what changes I can myself, including divesting responsibilities. I knew I had too many responsibilities, and it was highlighted by how good I felt when I went to Melbourne and put everything else on hold for the weekend I was there, during these four weeks.

I went to Melbourne for a weekend, to visit friends -- Anna and Naoko. Phil and Emma were unfortunately out of town at Phil's mother's wedding (Congrats to her) -- as well as visit my sister and see her in the MedRevue. It was really really really funny. I laughed so hard. ^_^
I had a good time in Melbourne, it was nice to be out and about without any particular responsibilities. I saw Sin City -- Yes, I went to Melbourne and went to the cinema, by myself -- ate all kinds of bad for me but very tasty foods, and took mobile phone photos of the places I ate. I need to post them somewhere. I really think that weekend without commitments was a really helpful guide as to how I could break out of the depression cycle I'd gotten into. The only downsides of the weekend were the bus ride from the train station at Cootamunda to Canberra (I enjoyed the train ride from Melbourne to Cootamundra, mind you, prolly more than I enjoy even flying) and the fact that I was out of town for the chibi.au.august05 convention.

Despite my best efforts to avoid responsibility in the anime.au conventions, after my poor performance as Events Co-ordinator for anime.au.05, I became Sponsorship and Vendors Co-ordinator for chibi.au.august05, although I was going to be out of town on the day. I did a pretty pitiful job of that, and probably will go down as the only Sponsorship Co-ordinator who ever managed to get nothing out of Madman for an anime convention. The convention itself went quite well, by all reports, and I'm currently Events Co-ordinator ("in charge") of chibi.au.summer05, in November (No one noticed this discrepancy for about a month. I originally coined the moniker because we were not sure if we were going to be November or December, kept it because it has a nice seasonal sound to it, and overlooked the fact that November is actually in Spring.) This convention's been a lot better organised, in large part because we've given ourselves a month longer to prepare, and because we've picked up a couple of enthusiastic people to look after promotions, volunteers and the website, which were noticably absent from chibi.au.august05 until the week before it was actually happening. Hmm. Now I think about it, the first day I skipped any classes at the start of my depression was the day I met with the just-mentioned enthusiastic people to bring them up to speed on what they'd let themselves in for... Prolly a co-incidence. The meeting was after my skipped class after all. These same people look like stepping up to doing stuff on the ANUAS exec at this year's AGM, too.

The ANUAS has of course been running along like the large locomotive of anime viewing that it is. I've managed to not derail it with a stance of "do as little as possible" which really should have been my presidential election platform. One new thing I've introduced is "Saturday Afternoon Drama", where we hold a marathon screening of a live-action series, one series a month. So far we (and by we I mean I) did Great Teach Onizuka in September (with the movie and OV on October 1st due to a scheduling error on my part) and will be running Gokusen over October 8th and 22nd. I do wish I'd thought of this six months ago, but I was actually inspired during and by the chibi.au.august05 preperation process. The ANUAS AGM was supposed to be tomorrow, but I have been browbeaten into moving it back to the 21st, largely because I completely forgot to check with anyone before calling it. In fact, that's pretty much the entire root cause of the move. Once the ANUAS AGM is out of the way, I suspect my only official ANUAS executive position will be Video Ad Creator.

I've spent a little bit of time knock up video ads, two for chibi.au.august05 and one for the GTO live action screenings. All done on Linux, with command line tools and The Gimp, except the picture-editing for the first "Recruit" video which was done using irfanview. The hardest part was getting them Internet-distributable, which meant finding either Creative-Commons non-NC or Gnu GFDL licensed-content (and you can't mix these two!), although I fudged the music on the first version of the second ad, because it just seemed to fit the pictures so scarily well. Kinda like the whole "Dark Side Of The Moon is a co-incidental soundtrack to The Wizard Of Oz" thing. The GTO one on the other hand was done just out of Google images one night, so I haven't put it up on the web for download. My current project involves teaching myself Blender3D, so I can produce a cooler ad. I've always wanted to get into 3D programming, and I finally completed the first step (putting Debian onto a 3d-enabled machine of decent speed).

I'm now running Debian when I can on my desktop box. The only things I use windows for now are Quickbooks (I've gotta get Quickbooks going in wine, I just haven't bothered yet) and video games. I've got the machine using libpam-mount (with a couple of patches which I submitted to the Debian BTS) to mount directories from Keitarou. I migrated my email from Outlook onto my fileserver with IMAP, and now use mutt-ng for all my email, which is a big improvement. This also means I revoked my old @Pobox.Com PGP key and added the email address to my newer GPG key. I can sync my phone against Evolution, although I never fire up Evolution, and I can print using CUPs happily to my HP LaserJet 1200. The only other thing I can't do on my desktop machine from Linux is wireless multiboot my Nintendo DS, and I'm working on that.

I decided it was time to spend some money, and I was intrigued by a talk at linux.conf.05 about GameBoy Advance programming, and had heard about recent developments letting people launch homebrew software wirelessly on the new Nintendo DS. So I gave in, and bought one. I played Mario64DS for a bit, and bought Another Code while in Melbourne, all the while getting involved in the DS Homebrew community. I played with my Prism54 wireless cards to get wireless multiboot going, and could get the DS to see my machine, but not boot from it. Eventually I got a hold of the rt2500-based card neccessary to use the only existing publically available wireless multiboot software (includes a custom driver for Windows) and found I could get further in the process, but not by much. I had some spare credit at Lik-Sang, so I got a GBA Movie Player v2, and with a bit of futzing about (which I'll document here later) I can now load a homebrew rom onto the CF card I borrowed from Shane and the DS will run it. ^_^ So time to start actually programming again. I've still gotta get some more work done on the WMB process, but I'm waiting on driver developments in the Linux rt2x00 driver project, since right now they can't transmit packets, at least in monitor mode, but progress is ongoing. I've been documenting the WMB stuff in my wiki.

One of the things that made this blog go quiet was the addition of a wiki to my site. Semi-static stuff (like the SOAP stuff below) is now going in the wiki, and I plan to migrate all the stuff from www.tbble.net into the wiki. It's just such a good platform for publishing stuff categorised, without having to code the HTML. I'm now over HTML coding the same way I'm over compiling my OS from scratch -- I did this in 1998, before I'd discovered Gentoo or Debian and got as far as upgrading to the latest libc, gcc and whatever else was in the base Slackware '96 install, when I discovered Debian, found a use for having a linux machine, and wiped it out in an afternoon in 2000.

Now that I'm back updating the blog, I'm going to have to see if I can make time to update all the old old old The Other Day's Mew entries. (Mew's got a new calendar coming, which I need someone to batch into an AmazonJP order for me at some point...) I was actually loading the Japanese text into my blog, but not publishing it because I was having trouble with the translations. This obviously is not a winning strategy. ^_^ Now I think about it, the other challenge to The Other Day's Mew was I was updating from ActewAGL, where I didn't have a dictionary handy, nor Japanese input support to use an online dictionary, and then they changed their firewall to block sites with 'blog' in the domain.

Which brings me full circle in this long rambling story. ^_^

instead, SOAP (or at least SOAP::Lite, which is a Perl implementation of it) seems to have gone in and caused bad words to come out.

This all started because I wanted a programmatic web interface for BU's database, rather than either knocking up PHP pages with mySQL commands, or giving people other than myself mySQL access (or exploring the horrors of SQL stored procedures!!). Having encountered both SOAP and XML-RPC during my travels at TransACT (they use SOAP for some things internally, but XML-RPC for the ISP policy-control interface. I think they've got distinct groups of programmers with similar ideas, but no way of talking to each other... This would explain a lot about the projects I end up doing -- or more to the point not doing -- for TransACT. ^_^) I decided I'd go with some kind of RPC interface where I could knock the back-end up in Perl, and the front end could be PHP or whatever the reseller wanted. I have some vision of a customer control applet regular customers could use at home, but I think that's asking a little too much.

Anyway, after due and careful consideration of my database structure, it seemed obvious that an object encapsulation would be a good idea. So SOAP won out over XML-RPC. As far as interface goes, SOAP::Lite implements XML-RPC too. So this wasn't a consideration. Sure enough, I'm hacking away, rereading my recent Perl-based object-oriented adventures in module creation (the aforementioned policy thingy) and rather quickly manage to produce a getCustomer() function in the BU module which returns a BU::Customer object. I happily assume that since SOAP is supposed to pass objects around, I'll be able to call the functions of this new and wonderful object, and have the code on the server-side execute.

This of course does not happen. (Why "of course"? If it did happen, this post would be titled 'The wonder and glory of SOAP' or something. And have been done about 36 hours earlier. >_<)

Instead, I get an object back with no routines. "Ah!" I hear you cry. "A perl method call is simply a call to the function in the module for which the class was blessed, with the object itself as the first parameter!" (Others amongst you may cry "That's not really object-oriented, it's object-like!". It's a fair point, but somewhat irrelevant. I use perl because I think programmers don't use enough punctuation, not because of any particular programming language construction leanings. I own the Eiffel book, but never read it. ^_^)

Now that that crying has died down, I did indeed try that. However, the SOAP::Lite instance I was using had '/BU' at the end of its URI (which is now called a namespace, apparently) so it tried to call the non-existant function in the BU module. So I instantiated a new SOAP::Lite instance, looking at '/BU/Customer'. That didn't work either, at which I point I realised this was excessive mucking about for what I wanted, and spent a day or two writing a procedural version instead.

I ended up with something like the following:

on the plus side, it's done.

Now I have to go learn perldoc, but that's probably not as hard as I suspect it is. ^_^

Edit: I'm not sure what's wrong with my linebreaks, but they're being ignored. Also, the <code> element produces its own block, so I can't use it inline. I may remove them from the paragraphs in future, in case that fixes the line breaks.

Edit 2: Looks like a wordpress upgrade or my screwing around with modules means I no longer get automatic <p> tags in my text. So I have to add them by hand. And <code> puts <pre/> around its contents, so I have replaced it with <em> inline. >_< Also, the layout here gets boned by the <pre/> and so my right-hand menu gets pushed down to the bottom.

Edit 3: Geshi's breaking blank lines as </p><p> which would be OK if the code was in a <p/> rather than a <div/>...

Wow, what a wild weekend, and yet I did so little.

Slept in Saturday, played with the IPSec stuff more. I got that working nicely, except the wireless card with my laptop seems to have awful signal levels. And the Windows 2000 machine crashes the IPSec IKE daemon (pluto) when it connects. I've posted that to upstream with lots of logs and things, and spent large chunks of last night trying a CVS version to see if it helped.

Back to the chronology. Saturday night was at a friends' place for DVDs and booze. We were joined by a widow-for-a-night from a poker game run by another friend of mine. Those guys also had booze.

And back in the chronology, we had an Anime.au meeting on Saturday afternoon. It looks like the Sunday event's going to happen, and we finally have a date, and should be promoting the heck out of it any time now. ^_^

Skip forward again to Sunday, and I... played with IPSec stuff more. I also had a burl and discovered that Master Of Orion 3 works quite well with Wine, except for the sound.

I also switched World Of Warcraft over to Gamecard billing, but I've paid for a month from March 4th to April 4th, so I guess I have to have a burl at some point... Otherwise I've played a week out of two months paid for. >_<

Also managed to miss both Learning Languages on Monday, and Japanese Lexicon (right now. -_-;;;)

And I've got an assignment due Friday and an assignment due Monday. >_< >_<

I was awoken this morning by my mobile at the ungodly hour of 7:50am. It seems the changes I made last night caused BU to cease to work. Which is weird since I made the change at 1am, and the traffic graphs indicate it was all working fine until 6am. Maybe a daily cron-job decided to rearrange things for me? Either way, it took under a half-hour to fix, another two hours of mucking about with the network to see where we stood on the issue, at which point I decided that rather than go to work and have a late lunch, I'd have an early lunch and spend a long afternoon at work before cruising on to ANUAS.

I don't remember what happened at this point, but I think it involved more mucking about with BU stuff and similar. Or I might have played with the L2TP stuff.

Either way, I agreed to be available at about 4pm, so I figured at this point I'd kick back, watch The Jerry Springer Show, and chat to people on IRC and IM. I was also playing with the L2TP stuff during this, but it was largely kernel compiling so it was "type command, wait an hour" type work. Being on IRC reminded me of my occasional project to create a PGSM Music Video. In order to do this, I obviously need to have seen the whole series. Hence I decided to finall watch my PGSM Special Act DVD.

(The lesson learnt is inside the spoiler tag. I'm sorry, but it's the final scene of the whole show. I'm also gonna talk about the story of Hitch. Yes, I saw Hitch last night. It's good. ^_^)

For reference, the current AMV plan is the Shitenou set to "Knights Of The Round Table" from Monty Python and The Holy Grail. It has the huge advantage of being only a minute long. ^_^

Anyway, Special Act was a surprising DVD, in that there was no omake, and the menu only appears at the end, which has the choice of Whole Movie, or one of six chapters.

As far as the story goes, I enjoyed it as far as I understood it.

Then I got ahold of the guy I needed to talk to to get the rest of the BU changeover done, and we worked through and identified the last of the remaining issues, and he went off to work on them.

At this point I was getting hungry for lunch (being about 6pm) when Shane walks in and says "If you want barbecue for dinner, you'd better go get some stuff, Julia and Bek are coming around in five minutes." Needless to say, (but I'm going to) I did. Sometime over an hour later, Sean, Julia and Rabekah arrived. We barbecued, watched some of the Canturbury VS St. George NRL game, and Shane went to bed and the others retired to Sean's house (across the road) once more leaving me on my lonesome. >_&lt. This I think may point the sorry state of my social affairs when I'm disappointed when people stop watching a rugby league game and leave. I consoled myself with the best of the Melbourne Comedy Festival, and a repeat of The Glass House from Wednesday (Still funny the second time around), and by harassing Julia over MSN when I could. I also at chocolate cookies. ^_^;;;

Those of you playing along at home may have observed that the above overlapped the ANUAS screening. Which is correct. Kaz had the membership stuff, so my presence wasn't neccessary, and I was debating whether to drop in at the end when Shane arrived and triggered the above.

I tried a Cruise Juicy tonight, and it was OK, but too juicy for my taste ie. too much like overstrong cordial. They're also only one standard drink per, which makes them weaker than a standard cruiser.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to plug Television Without Pity as an amusing website of episode recaps for various TV series. The only one they're tracking that I'm watching (largely because the number of TV series I'm watching is down to Battlestar Galactica, The Glass House (these two class on Wednesday night), Little Britain, and Rosemary and Thyme) is Battlestar Galactica. And I'm enjoying it. ^_^

Here's PGSM Special Act. I got this with the 7-DVD box, which now holds PGSM Vol.1 through Vol.7. The second box comes with PGSM Act.Zero, shipping end of March. (Also below. ^_^)

Yay Mew!

It seems my misgivings were somewhat misplaced as far as Prof. Anna's artice on "Happy". Once the Semantics class got to that point of the lecture, our lecturer immediately observed that there is a clear difference between "Happy" and "Happy with X", which was a point I thought was completely ignored in the article. (See yesterday's Linguistics post.)

The ensuing discussion, and the 45-minute conversation with my lecturer (it would have gone much harder if a dear friend of mine hadn't already made me consider the nature of happiness and my relationship to it) highlighted that semantics is _hard_, and emotions is a hard facet of semantics. A psychologist is sadly not much help with this, as their approach to emotion generally involves trying to remove the language component and get at the thoughts, which semantics as we're studying it teaches that language and emotion are terribly intertwined. And this was highlighted in the ensuing discussion of facial expressions, and the difference between Anglo and Chinese expressions thereof. (Interestingly, the issue isn't a difference of meaning, but a difference in description. A Chinese person will describe someone's facial expression by the parts that make it up, while an Anglo person will describe it by the emotion it represents. I also got to show the lecturer horizontal smilies eg. ^_^)

Anyway, the definition of "happiness" my classmates came up with (or rather, "happy" as it relates to "happiness" rather than as it relates to "satisfaction") was something like: (Look, NSM in a blog! -_-)

Something good happened
Because of this, I feel something good
I don't want anything more/else

OK, it's not NSM, but the idea's clear.

On the other hand, my own interpretation of "happiness" is something like

I want some things
I have (achieved) some of these things
I am trying to (have/achieve) others of these things
I am able to (have/achieve) all of these things
Becaue of this, I feel something good.

It was an interesting discussion with my lecturer. A point I made was that I manage my own happiness by maintaining the list of things I want seperately from the things I'd like. When I realised that Computer Science (B.SEng) wasn't making me happy, I evaluated my wants, discovered that a second language, and academia, had crept up my list, and was unhappy until I changed into my current degree, and discovered linguistics. ^_^

Happiness isn't something you aim for, it's the journey you take to get there.

(Emotional enough? You know who you are. ^_^)

Oh, and I've started a wiki for information storage. (As opposed to this. If I do any _good_ explications in NSM for example, that'll go there.) The only thing there is the start of the documentation of my wireless setup, but I'm sure it'll grow. The WinNY stuff will appear there, as will... I dunno, whatever else shows up. Translations maybe.

Today in Learning Languages, we watched a video demonstrating the "Communicative" method of teaching English. It was focussed on making the students talk in English, under a particular situation, in order to acquire a particular function and structure in the relevant social context. It is characterised by having the students freely produce English, and with an almost complete lack of correction (barring recasting of mistakes). The theory behind it is that language can be acquired by practice at a level slightly above the learner's current level, based on the ideas of "Communicative Competence"

This was a marked difference from last week's, where we saw the "Audio Lingual Method" which is focussed on demonstrating and memorising a pattern. This method involved the class memorising and performing a set of lines, with a little bit of work with substitutions into the pattern. Any mistakes are immediately and directly corrected. This method is based on the Behavioralist idea that language is simply a set of habits which must be learnt.

Due to the hetrogenous nature of the class, the native language of the speakers is not given much of a chance to interact with the learning process, which is a shame as both methods provide different approachs to the inclusion of native language in second language learning and acquisition.

Coincidentally, on Monday afternoon driving home from the same class, I overheard a discussion in federal parliament (House of Representatives) on language, and from the hansard transcript, I got the following quote: (Pages 46-51 of the PDF, 30-35 nominally, this quote was page 51/35)

The argument is clearly that the best acquisition of English occurs when you teach as long as you possibly can in the first language. The literature is complete -- it is irrefutable -- in that the longer you teach in their first language, the better the acquisition of English is going to be.

(The debate was ajourned until today, but today's hansard isn't up yet.)

This is interesting, as it goes against all the theories of language learning we've considered so far. Admittedly, we're only up to the 1970's, so maybe we're building up to that point? I'll have to remember to ask Louise about it next week.

On the other hand, there's Semantics. I finallly did one of the readings, which was a piece by Professor Anna about "happiness" and "happy" in cross-cultural context. As I usually seem to find in Prof. Anna's articles, it was mainly a criticism of preceeding work (I've no problem with that per se.) along with what I feel was a fairly flimsy justification for an argument that "happy" in English is untranslatable to other languages, and is somehow disconnected from "happiness". The evidence comes from the fact that English, unlike other European languages, allows constructs such as "Are you happy with the decorations" which has little or no effect on one's situation of "happiness". This however highlights one of the issues I seem to come across a lot in semantics, which is the conflation of a word with a concept. In this case, "happy" w/out object and "happy" with a (possibly assumed) object (happy with/about OBJ) are different, and have different cultural scripts. The intransitive "happy" does to my mind tie directly to happiness. "Are you happy?" can hardly be said to have nothing to do with happiness, although the answering of it is often broken down into a categorised consideration of the various aspects of one's life, which then brings in the transitive "happy". The transitive "happy" can be seen as closer to "satisfied", and as Prof. Anna observes, does not have the "I cannot want anything more" effect that "happiness" does. Even so, I'm not convinced that happiness in English has this facet, either.

So in short, the article's main thrust (Proving English-speakers are happier by asking people if they are happy is flawed beyond doubt) is reasonably argued, but the NSM-ised details for me fall very short of convincing.

I'll put this to my Semantics lecturer tomorrow. It should be an interesting lecture.

I'm finally starting to read the Semantics textbook, hopefully that will hang together better than some of the bits I've read so far. (Well, everything else was done in Cross-Cultural Communications a few years ago, so my memory is somewhat coloured by the negative feelings I associate with that class. >_<)

(I also got the IPSec stuff working with OpenSwan and RSA keys, but not x.509. I moved to isakmpd, but haven't gotten that working with x.509 either. I haven't tried it with RSA yet though. I might go back to OpenSwan, I found that easier to work with.)

I was gonna talk about tonight's MGC screening, but it's 2am and I need sleep. ^_^

After last week's triumphant return to IRC, I wandered back onto IM (ICQ, MSN, YIM) tonight. The only people online were Matt Duggan (who immediately proceeded to make my head hurt with math) and a friend of mine from Singapore, whom I met on IRC last year.

While I was on IRC, gumbaloom sent me his and Aniko's latest Seramyu output, being the Shin Kaguya Shima Densetsu Promo and Fan Event, wanting feedback. Apparently it's been downloaded a lot, but in the usual places no feedback, good or bad, has appeared. I'd like to take this opportunity to say that it was excellent, and I look forward to the finished product. (I already enjoyed Aniko's translation of Kakyuu Ouhi Kourin in February at the MGC, but via a different fansubbing group). I watched another Seramyu, Last Drakul Jyokyoku, unsubtitled a year or so ago and it was OK, but it's _much_ better with subtitles. I highly recommend this when it comes out, and in the meantime, see if you can dig up the CVME sub of KOK. Be warned, KOK is a retelling of Sailor Stars, so if you've not seen it (or read it ^_^) then you might want to finish it first. Which reminds me, I must finish it sometime. -_-;;;

I managed to get a little BU work done today, but skipped out on ActewAGL since I was disorganised this morning, and by the time I left home I would have had to leave work after 90 minutes. So I stayed home, did more BU work, and went in to class. (And was still late. >_<)

Ah! I've finally removed shift-space as a shortcut to activate UIM. Now I don't flick into Japanese input mode every time I type a capital letter and then a space. (Yes, I have poor keyboard habits...)

Only class today was Teaching Languages, and today we looked at the idea that you can't learn a language just by listening to it, you need to apply it to learn it. We also looked at the various stages of word order that language learners master. These are apparently absolutely ordered, which lends credence to the theory that languages are acquired in a certain order, and teaching cannot influence that. Tomorrow we get to watch a class being run based on that theory. (I'll prolly talk about _that_ more tomorrow.)

Anyway, I've got a Japanese Lexicon assignment due tomorrow, and I just spent two hours doing it. I should have done it on the weekend, but I was seriously unassable for most of the weekend, apart from some time spent doing BU stuff. If there are any IPSec experts reading this, I'd love to know. I think I've gotten it conceptually wrong...

Still, at least my bag's packed, my laptop's loaded with MGC screening videos, and I've told the guy I'm meeting at ActewAGL in Fyshwick that I'll be there by 9am or I'll call. I think I'm gonna call, and get to uni by midday.

So, here's some links for things you can buy. Today, it's Seramyu. I'll link in the MGC shows once I actually talk about them. ^_^ (And of course, it's all Japanese. Like PGSM, there's no official English version.)

美少女戦士セーラームーン 新/変身・スーパー戦士への道

Last Drakul Jyokyoku may be that last one, but it looks like it's out of print in VHS, and not yet in print on DVD. Oh well. I've seen it.

Yay Mew!

You'd think Apache's mass domain support would make it easy to host a group of websites, some of which are owned by various different groups.

For example, I'd expect such support to work in the following style:

VirtualHost *:80

<MassVirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot /var/www/%2-/%1
# or even "DocumentRoot /var/www/*/%2-/%1" if I could be so lucky....
ServerAdmin webmaster@%2-
php_admin_value open_basedir /var/www/%2-/
ErrorLog /var/log/apache/%2/%0_error.log
CustomLog /var/log/apache/%2/%0_access.log
</MassVirtualHost>

Which is to say, a MassVirtualHost tag which interpolates the requested Host into its arguments, and if DocumentRoot comes out sensibly, returns it. It'd have to come at the end, since Apache takes the first VirtualHost hit it matches, and obviously MassVirtualHost will match anything... (Unless you also allow some syntax for denying??? Oooh, there's a thought)

OK, I realise Apache 1 doesn't do this, but I'd have thought by the time they developed Apache2, someone would have noticed this deficiency....

Anyway, the Apache (both 1 and 2!!!) mass virtual domain support lets you interpolate two values... DocumentRoot and ScriptAlias. I mean, really! You can't even make ServerAdmin default to something sensible... Actually I suspect it does anyway, as long as by sensible I mean webmaster@host....

I wonder if now's a good time to look at the Apache2 source, and see if it's even possible to get something like this implemented...

Or maybe over Christmas?

Well, I got everything but tbble.com back. ^_^ >_< ^_^.

Oh well...

Also, due to psychotic work commitments I've had to drop my remaining university units. In the process of doing this, I discovered that I'm not enrolled in Japanese Pre-Honours anyway this semester.

遅くてすみません

Good news

The server seems stable. ^_^

Bad news

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

Good news

Washed the dishes. Yes, this is news.

Bad news

Managed to sleep in and miss my classes again.

Something new

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.

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?

Good News

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:

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.