文字馬鹿: A fool of words

Often my weekends start out with grandiose plans of what I might try and get done.

This weekend (and the preceding evenings I guess) saw me produce a Wine patch I was only playing with out of interest but which turns out to affect Warhammer Online, although I didn't know it until after I implemented the patch, and a WIne patch I've been meaning to prototype for a while using XInput 2 to fix a long-standing Wine bug which also affects Warhammer Online.

I also got back to watching Life On Mars, although I've only managed one episode and a bit. It's pretty damned good.

I also decided to make gyoza, as I have fond, alcohol-supported memories of the last time I made them.

I managed to lazy my cooking even more than usual. I'm using a recipe I picked up last time I made them off a site called The Food Palate by Deborah Rodrigo, whom Google has since informed me is from Sydney but both that site and her personal blog appear to have fallen off the Internet, sadly. However, I distilled (with the help of Kirky at work) the ingredients down to this:

Ginger, chives, chili flakes, coriander, garlic, sesame seed oil, soy sauce for dumplings, and gyoza skins

Adding half a kilo of lean pork mince, and about a half-hour, you get:

30 gyoza, freezer-bound

So not as bad as the ugly cake I made recently, but still not spectacular. And unlike the cake, I don't yet know if these turn out to be poison or not.

I expect that they'll be delicious, and not even slightly poisonous. And unlike my cake, I'm not going to try to share them with anyone. ^_^

It could be worse, at least I seem to have not managed to poison my housemate's lizards, Prime and Grimlock, whom I've been feeding while he's away this weekend. I'm not sure how I could get "put grasshoppers into the box" wrong, but I don't think I did. I think they're pretty neat names for lizards, reflecting Mick's inner geek, and his outer geek, although Prime seems to be larger than Grimlock which is to the best of my knowledge the wrong way 'round.

I was going to try and leverage in a rant about characters in children's books with alliterative names at this point, and observe that one of my favorite authors as a young child, Richard Scarry happened to avoid that, but upon actually looking him up, I realise the characters whose names I'd forgotten quite often had alliterative names. The characters I remembered still had non-alliterative names, so it's not as bad as some authors I can't be bothered remembering, but I'll chalk that one up as being disappointed by a childhood memory.

A less disappointing childhood memory turns out to be Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality series. I read the series when I was quite young, and I'm only re-reading the first one at the moment, but it reminds me how good a writer he is, and why I loved his books so much as a child. Also because he's alphabetically early on the shelves. I don't know why I seem to do that. I think when I'm picking a new series, I start at the beginning and go until I've chosen one. So that favours the alphabetically early.

I've managed to get a whole bunch of reading done recently, which is good. Sadly, Borders now wants me to pay $7 on a $14 book to order it in from overseas, and it turns out most of the series I'm following keenly enough to actually order books are on that list, so I may end up having to do an Amazon order. Which is annoying, because I'm also looking for some DS games: Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations appears to be discontinued in Australia and the US, and Impossible Mission never seems to have been released here at all. Along with wanting Race on DVD, I have a fair bit of overseas shopping to do, and the local financial climate is not exactly conducive to that. -_-

Anyway, the above is my documentation supporting why I should not be left alone for days at a time. ^_^

My original plan was to only use the Windows XP 64 installed on my laptop for video games (and then only when necessary due to a Wine disfeature) and Linux for everything else. My World Of Warcraft days actually worked quite well for this, as it played very nicely under Wine. However, as interesting things (ala my previous blog post) sometimes crop up while I'm in Windows, and also as I'm now playing games that aren't so nice under Linux, I've ended up being in Windows more than Linux. And now I've found myself distracted from games playing by, of all things, MMO UI Addon programming, keeping me in Windows even more.

You'd think with my strong awareness of the commercial nature of grind, I'd prolly be trying to get all the playtime I can out of my monthly subscription to Warhammer Online. Instead, I seem to be burrowing my head down into some UI programming in Lua. Like WoW, WAR (or WHO as a friend of mine calls it) uses LUA to implement its user interface and provides a way of adding modules in to modify, adjust or just plain futz with the interface. The big site for WAR addons (like WoW addons, in fact) is Curse Gaming and they even provide a Sourceforge-like site for addon development called CurseForge.

Anyway, why am I doing this, given I managed to avoid WoW addon programming for my entire playing time? Apart from external reasons I'm not going to post here, WAR being brand new is missing a fair few addons. None I can't live without, but one it does lack is DrDamage, which enhances your ability tooltips with the actual effective values of the ability once gear and stats are taken into account.

Part of the issue is that WAR's combat calculations are not fully understood yet. An excellent primer is available at Disquette's Weblog and Warhammer Alliance has a Mechanic Analysis forum as well. I've posted some comments at the former, but the latter requires you to be a "WAR Soldier" before you can post, and I seem to still be a "WAR Recruit", which means I haven't contributed enough to the Warhammer Alliance forums. Ah well.

So anyway, my addon. LibCombatCalcs is my first MMO addon, basically supposed to encapsulate the various combat number mechanics of WAR so that I or someone else can write tools like DrDamage (or RatingsBuster) which magically continue working when they change the mechanics, and which don't need large hard-coded tables of information duplicated across each addon.

It also intends to tie together the seperate sources of combat information into a single coherent stream for other addons to listen to.

Anyway, we're not there yet. What it does do right now is record hits against monsters, and give you a little window with /lcc mobinfo which shows the calculated toughness of the monster (from an unambigous non critical autoattack) and the calculated values for all the subsequent abilities you used, letting you see if my calculations (and therefore my transcriptions of the community's understanding) are correct, and/or where things need tweaks. I'll be using this (and I hope others do too, I don't want to build a level 40 of each class to do this...) to identify the sources of DPS that contribute to each ability.

Anyway, there it is. I'd love to hear feedback about it, preferably at Curse/CurseForge but here is fine too if you hate those sort of sites. You can clone the git repo from CurseForge, and it currently autopackages every commit I push so you can also grab and install the zips.

By the by, this is my first time using mysgit although I did contribute some work to a different msys git effort, and it combined with Console and an updated Vim with some nice colour schemes (I'm using xterm16 at home and work now) makes me a much happier Windows programmer on my laptop.

On other fronts, I've recently been playing with Python-Ogre, hoping to knock out a 3D physics-based tech demo of some kind with it in the middle-term future. (May end up being a Christmas break project...). After my disappointments with 64-bit Python and Pyglet under Windows, I may end up doing it under Linux. Ideally it's cross-platform of course. I've also done some more serious work on my book cataloging software using Elixir, SQLAlchemy and SQLite to turn my collection of text files into a real database. However, there's not a particularly good way of dealing with schema changes that I can wrap my head around, so I've put that on hold while I think about how the data's going to have to look in the long run. And then I got distracted, so it's on the Christmas break pile too.

Holger Levsen wonders what tense people write their changelogs in. Andrew Pollock feels that his tendancy is past-tense.

Looking back over some of mine, FreeRADIUS from a long time ago, and openjpeg more recently, it appears that my preference is to actually write them as untensed fragments. I think I'm answering the question "What does this change do?" from the perspective of the change. This would make sense, mirroring somewhat the comments I put in dpatches (and the overly verbose names that have been known to occur) which are usually the patch talking about itself in the plural. Unless that's the patch _and_ I talking about ourselves in the plural?

OK, so I made it to LCA08 in Melbourne, eventually.

However, I managed to have the following happen on the way:

• Got the time of my flight to Melbourne wrong, arrived at 5:30pm for a flight that left at 5pm.
• Caught the wrong tram from Melbourne CBD to uni accomodation, had to walk from Royal Melbourne Hospital back to the university. This was precipitated by me misreading the tram t
  imetable thingy.
• Failed to wave at a traim outside the uni, meaning it sailed right on past me.
• Locked myself out of my room, the third time I left it. (They've got those dumb swipe-card locks which are always locked except when you've just swiped from the outside, but are open from the inside.)
• Asked on #linux.conf.au about the URL for Planet LCA 2008 while it was in the topic. (Unlike on #debian, not only was I not mocked for this, no one noticed before I did, a while later)

On the other hand, I caught up with Brad, Evelyn, Bek, Jason, Phil, Naoko, Geoff and Ange, all in the one day. That was fun, we had dinner, I stuck my sore feet in the ocean and felt better, and I manged to catch the right trams from the university _to_ the city. Well, lunch with Naoko, the rest with the others. (Actually, that's in reverse chronological order)

The actual conference first day was interesting. I was at the Debian Mini-conf all day, seeing a neat thing about using git for managing packges sensibly, which is something I was trying to figure out when I was packaging Second Life last year, as well as some cool stuff coming into Debian over the next year or so.

After the Debian Mini-conf all went over to the keysigning (I didn't go again this year, I wasn't organised in time) I went to see a presentation about Ingex which is something the BBC have developed to try and take Digital Betamax out of the video production process (since Digital Betamax only works in real-time, as I understand it) with some success so far, and it's pretty interesting.

Speaking of not being organised in time, I only thought today to look at the Tutorials, and both Wednesday's tutorial about hooking up hardware to Second Life and Thursday's tutorial about hacking on lguest require preperation. I was able to grab Jon Oxer at the Debian Mini-conf and get my name put on the one remaining spare development kit, and so now I'm down in the Junior Common Room of Trinity College (no wireless in the rooms yet) updating my blog instead of trying to get lguest running under qemu. I'll have to go dig up Rusty's and Robert Love's instructions from LCA05 preparing for their kernel hacking tutorial that year. Wow. Archiving the old LCA websites kicks ass!

Edit: I actually was dumb on #linux.conf.au, not #debian. As an aside, I managed to lock myself out of my room again later that week.

Good news! Having worked for most of the traditional Christmas break, I'm now going to to linux.conf.au 08 in Melbourne next week, and Game Developers Conference 2008 in San Francisco in late February.

CAPSLOCK CANNOT EXPRESS MY GIRLY DELIGHT

For those of you who don't already realise, my dream job since age six was to be a video games programmer. Having now achieved that, you'd figure I was now in for karmic mortgage payments for a while. And sure enough, having an umbilical hernia become quite painful on Friday night, 28th of December (I was working that day) would certainly seem to be within reach. I'd actually had the hernia for a couple of months, I reckon, but hadn't known what it was or what to do with it. (I thought I was just getting fatter. -_-) Anyway, a mix of mentos, Coca-cola, lifting a heavy TV that week and who knows what else ended up with me spending the night in hospital on morphine. (Well, I dunno if I was on morphine all night. They gave me some) Thankfully, the surgeon registrar was able to push the bits of bowels sticking out back in (before the morphine. -_-) without problem, and no problems appeared overnight, so I'm now waiting for the letter to let me join the waiting list for surgery, and occasionally stopping to push bits of my bowel back through my belly-button.

This means I'm no longer a hospital virgin (not that I really was. I went to hospital when I was three years old or so, to get my forehead stitched up after falling off the wall above our driveway in Oyster Bay, Sydney) but it was a scare that I wouldn't be able to go to LCA this year, having already booked and paid for it, and LCA being my main actual holiday each year.

Also, it was lucky my sister was in town, since when I told her where and how it hurt, her mind went straight to hernia, so she and my mother came over to check me out and took me to hospital, hours earlier than I would have gone myself.

Anyway, early last week I saw the surgeon consultant, and he said I'd be fine to travel, since the surgery was fairly far off in the future anyway ("several months" I believe) and as long as I don't put sustained lateral strain on my abdomen, I'll be fine.

He also said to lose weight, of course.

So yeah, I reckon that the hernia prolly balances out LCA, GDC, my job, and maybe even my paying off of the ATO this year. I hope the universe agrees, 'cause if I'm still in the red for those good things, I'll have to be sure to backup my new laptop before I travel.

I recently was linked to CCG Workshop which is a site where you can play collectable card games (CCGs) online. It's interesting because they have this gatlingEngine software, which apparently runs the game for you using a set of rules in a gatlingML file.

I thought this would be a wonderful chance to document the rules for the Love Hina CCG, which I never finished translating as you can see, but the gatlingDevKit and all the developer documentation requires that you sign an NDA and suchlike.

Discussions on the forum (the developers talk openly on the public forum, so I have an idea what's not under NDA ^_^) indicated the gatlingML files were XML, but when I got one while trying to play a game, it was quite clearly binary.

The first four bytes are !HZL which I thought looked really familiar, but it took a fair while before I clicked that that was "LZH!" backwards, LZH being the compression algorithm used in the LHA family of archivers. Of course, research indicated that none of the LHA family of archivers actually wrote a file with !HZL at the front.

Poking about some more, I noticed that the gatlingEngine is written in Delphi (and is legacy code anyway) and went looking for Delphi compression libraries. Thankfully, the vast majority do PKZIP-compatible compression, and the first one I tried that supported LZH compression was Tlzrw1. (Apologies for the quality of the link, the 1998 link in the read file is dead, and the Wayback machine record for it indicates that the author's page didn't mention the library anyway) So I note that the library in question attributes its LZH code to LZHUF.C which Google duly turns up for me. I change the code a bit to stop assuming a 16-bit word, handle the header at the front, and suddenly I have a utility which can encode and decode files compressed with the LZH mode of Tlzrw1. (Which has been ported to C# and Delphi.NET, Google tells me.)

Now of course someone needs the interest, gumption and skills needed to produce an open-source program that can process gatlingML files and run games from them. ^_^

Oh, and a cool thing: progress bar for cp, courtesy of Chris Lamb via Planet Debian.

Edit: Missing quote put a whole whack of text inside an <a>-tag.

(Side note: Due to 410549, some kind of PHP4/Apache2 bug in Debian/Stable that WordPress 2.1 has triggered, this site's not loading fully. It's apparently only happening on Debian, and upgrading PHP4 to the Dotdeb 4.4 build fixes it, apparently. >_<)

Anyway, here's an entry in my "Why everything that isn't apt sucks" category.

[root@bookcase ~]# yum info kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686 kernel-devel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Setting up repositories
Reading repository metadata in from local files
Available Packages
Name   : kernel
Arch   : i686
Version: 2.6.19
Release: 1.2911.fc6
Size   : 16 M
Repo   : updates
Summary: The Linux kernel (the core of the Linux operating system)
Description:
The kernel package contains the Linux kernel (vmlinuz), the core of any
Linux operating system.  The kernel handles the basic functions
of the operating system:  memory allocation, process allocation, device
input and output, etc.

Name   : kernel-devel
Arch   : i686
Version: 2.6.19
Release: 1.2911.fc6
Size   : 4.7 M
Repo   : updates
Summary: Development package for building kernel modules to match the kernel.
Description:
This package provides kernel headers and makefiles sufficient to build modules
against the kernel package.

[root@bookcase ~]# yum install kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686 kernel-devel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Setting up Install Process
Setting up repositories
Reading repository metadata in from local files
Parsing package install arguments
Resolving Dependencies
--> Populating transaction set with selected packages. Please wait.
---> Package kernel-devel.i686 0:2.6.19-1.2911.fc6 set to be installed
--> Running transaction check
--> Populating transaction set with selected packages. Please wait.
---> Package kernel-devel.i686 0:2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 set to be erased
--> Running transaction check

Dependencies Resolved

=============================================================================
 Package                 Arch       Version          Repository        Size
=============================================================================
Installing:
 kernel-devel            i686       2.6.19-1.2911.fc6  updates           4.7 M
Removing:
 kernel-devel            i686       2.6.18-1.2798.fc6  installed          14 M

Transaction Summary
=============================================================================
Install      1 Package(s)
Update       0 Package(s)
Remove       1 Package(s)

Total download size: 4.7 M
Is this ok [y/N]: Y
Downloading Packages:
(1/1): kernel-devel-2.6.1 100% |=========================| 4.7 MB    00:21
Running Transaction Test
Finished Transaction Test
Transaction Test Succeeded
Running Transaction
  Installing: kernel-devel                 ######################### [1/2]
  Cleanup   : kernel-devel                 ######################### [2/2]

Removed: kernel-devel.i686 0:2.6.18-1.2798.fc6
Installed: kernel-devel.i686 0:2.6.19-1.2911.fc6
Complete!
[root@bookcase ~]# yum install kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Setting up Install Process
Setting up repositories
Reading repository metadata in from local files
Parsing package install arguments
Nothing to do
[root@bookcase ~]# rpm -q kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686
package kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686 is not installed
[root@bookcase ~]# wget http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/6/i386/kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686.rpm
...
11:36:50 (141 KB/s) - `kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686.rpm' saved [17169362/17169362]
[root@bookcase ~]# rpm -i kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686.rpm
[root@bookcase ~]# rpm -q kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686
kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6
[root@bookcase ~]# yum info kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686 kernel-devel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Setting up repositories
Reading repository metadata in from local files
Installed Packages
Name   : kernel
Arch   : i686
Version: 2.6.19
Release: 1.2911.fc6
Size   : 46 M
Repo   : installed
Summary: The Linux kernel (the core of the Linux operating system)

Description:
The kernel package contains the Linux kernel (vmlinuz), the core of any
Linux operating system.  The kernel handles the basic functions
of the operating system:  memory allocation, process allocation, device
input and output, etc.

Name   : kernel-devel
Arch   : i686
Version: 2.6.19
Release: 1.2911.fc6
Size   : 14 M
Repo   : installed
Summary: Development package for building kernel modules to match the kernel.

Description:
This package provides kernel headers and makefiles sufficient to build modules
against the kernel package.

This all started when I tried to build a kernel module for the default Fedora Core 6 kernel on a fileserver at MF, only to find that the version magic didn't match, as I had an i586 kernel but i686 headers. No matter the cajoling, I couldn't get it to install an i586 set of headers, or an i686 version of the running kernel. I gave in and figured that due to a security issue, the old 2.6.19 kernel had been retired and the new kernel (2911) was the only one in the repositories.

Which led me to try the above. Clearly, yum agrees there's a kernel image RPM and kernel headers RPM available, both i686, but bizarrely is completely ignoring any requests to install it. And I mean ignoring, no error, no failure, it's as if I haven't listed the pacakge.

Sure enough, grabbing the RPM directly from the mirror and installing it with rpm worked fine.

And just to keep the hate flowing, the default setup of Yum is awful. There's no Australian mirrors in the mirror rotation, so I was getting 20kB/s before thinking to take away its mirror list and force it to use mirror.aarnet and suddenly getting the full effect of our two-megabit-per-second link. And before I did that, if I changed my mind about an operation that was busy fetching things from the network, control-c would kill the fetcher, and yum would then proceed to try the next mirror in the list. The default installation contains a huge list of mirrors (fetched from the Fedora website) which now I look at it, does start with mirror.aarnet, although it also then tells me it couldn't find any mirrors to match AU, despite having just given me one, and lists mirrors all over the shop. And it certainly never seemed to be using one when told to fetch something.

In Yum's defense, I will say that it survived being backgrounded and kill -9d on several occations. ^_^

Speaking of changing mirrors, it doesn't notice when you tell it to use a different mirror, and won't invalidate its cached metadata, meaning it'll reject the downloaded primary.xml.gz. When this happens, it still doesn't clear its metadata, meaning if you try it again, it'll fail again.

I feel better, having vented that. And I can hardly wait until we can whack this server and make it a nice Debian box, like all the rest of the systems in here (bar one FC4 box which only has one task, but happens to be in the DMZ...).

OK, one more thing. The Yum instructions say you can upgrade Fedora Core using Yum, but don't. And it'll only go one version at a time, and the box was an FC4 box in need of serious love. So I loved having to grab a four-gigabyte DVD to upgrade a server which is actually less than four gigabytes of system... It would have been quicker to image everything but our data, and FTP that to someone who already had the DVD. Except that it had to come back too. And it turned out to have, for a server, an incredible amount of crap on it. (I've this afternoon removed kde, gnome, metacity, cups, evolution, firefox...) This machine is Raided, backed up and was never ever going to be someone's desktop machine. (I hope).

Although I now understand why there are people who want to upgrade Sarge to Etch, and start by downloading the 8-CD weekly Etch image. And in fact I had someone two weeks ago who was going to install Sarge, didn't have a good Internet connection, and was asking if there was a better way than grabbing two DVD images.

In case you're wondering, the kernel module I wanted to build was ppscsi, for a HP ScanJet 5100C. I wouldn't have had this problem under Debian. ^_^

Oh you lucky things, today this blog becomes a photoblog!

Anyway, walking back from LCA07 to International House...

An unusual sign was seen in a UNSW parking area

This is probably what they actually meant...

They are of course referring to the same parking lot. But at least they're not in the parking lot of a department which has a large amount of contact with cars and the like...

Oh.

In other news, I may not have mentioned, but I got a Kodak C310 camera for Christmas. Happily, it is supported by gPhoto's libgphoto2 so I can pull my photos and movies (no sound) in linux

Just a quick note, Reviewing the Kanji uses a little flash applet for testing/reviewing flashcards. I'm pleased to announce that it works fine with Gnash 0.7.2 on my Debian/unstable PowerPC laptop. ^_^

Well, now that I'm back on the 'net fairly reliably, I can post on what I've been doing for the past few days.

Firstly, I was off the Internet because I was flat-out busy on Saturday, in transit on Sunday, and wireless did not arrive at International House until about 11pm Monday night. That time I did spend on the 'net today, at the conference, was spent in a combination of processing CBIT emails since Friday, and wrestling with my wireless network card.

My local build of the d80211 version of the bcm43xx driver got signal, would even get traffic through, but when it tried to reassociate to a different AP (all the APs here are running on channel 11... Although I was sitting next to someone who saw one on channel 1, which I'm guessing was rouge... I also saw some IBSS networks on the same SSID....) it would corrupt something nasty, kick the screen brightness up to full and oops with slab errors in short order.

The 2.6.18 (2.6.18-3-powerpc Debian build) bcm43xx softmac driver didn't crash or anything, but generally performed worse, and when the Debian miniconf's theatre (Mathews A) was full, my connection suffered or would completely fail to dhcp. >_<

On the plus side, the presentations were great. AJ gave us a rundown of debian-devel (ie 12 months of flamewars) and other significant Debian going-ons. Keith Packard produced a whole bunch of neat X things slated for X.org 7.3 (input hotplugging, dynamic output selection and modesetting, which is exactly what I need to get the projectors I keep plugging into to work better than 640x480...). Russell Coker talked about the various security gaps still remaining in Linux.

In non-conference goings on, I was talking to someone on IRC who's gotten Second Life Viewer building under Linux/PowerPC (a previously unsupported platform) and I'm going to see if we can get a .deb built. I've already created an ELFIO package, and have the OpenJPEG source to try packaging tomorrow. I've also sent off an email to the person who ITP'd secondlife-client for Debian already, to see if he wants to co-operate, or if I'm just tooling about.

Speaking of tooling about, I decided it'd be a good idea to upgrade my bcm43xx-d80211 build to something more recent than mid December, but it seems the 2.6.20 workqueue changes mean I can't compile it against 2.6.19 anymore. The rt2x00 d80211 stack has backwards compatibility macros for the workqueue stuff, but I don't really feel like hacking those into bcm43xx, it's already a large and unsteady beast.

BTW, cogito's update could handle resuming better. Although it happily detected it was resuming a failed update, it had to keep refetching the packs. I eventually realised it would eventually time-out a fetch if I didn't ^c it and happily try again, presuming I had in the meantime walked outside or reloaded the driver.

Anyway, so I've decided tonight (while I was still off the wireless) that I'd finally bite the bullet and build myself a custom dscape.git kernel, to see if the pain I keep suffering from the bcm43xx-d80211 driver is just my cheap-ass backport. That was still building when the wireless came up, and then barfed because KConfig happily let me include both the PCI and SoC versions of the OHCI USB host driver, which provide the same symbols. I must remember to file a bug report about that, or at least check linus's git tree in case it's already fixed. (Both drivers recommended yes, but are patently incompatible as they require different endianness of the host interface). I've restarted the make-kpkg, hopefully that'll build overnight and I can try it in the morning.

I also put some time into my Remembering the Kanji book. I was going to do an hour, but after about a half-hour (with a break to configure and fire the kernel build off) I was yawning, and figured I'd prolly left the imaginative-memory zone. I was going to watch some Gokusen but thought I'd take a last wander over to the IH whiteboard to see if the wireless was up. Bizarrely, it was.

So I wandered onto the 'net, checked email, volunteered myself to package Thousand Parsec for Debian, added the Kanji I studied to Reviewing the Kanji (a web site for reviewing the stuff you learn in Remembering the Kanji) and updated my blog.

Which funnily enough, is where we came in

In good news, the pledge drive to raise $10 000 towards a reverse-engineered NVidia DRI-3D-accelerated driver has succeeded. Dave Nielsen, the instigator of the pledge, gave a canned history of the pledge drive on his blog, and handily demonstrated that the free software community are willing to put a little bit of extra cash towards a little bit of extra freedom.

In bad news, the Ryzom.org bid to purchase "The Saga Of Ryzom" from failed developer Nevrax has failed. They were outbid by Gameforge AG. A ray of sunshine is that the project looks like it will continue, and there has already been the suggestion that they instead consider Asheron's Call 2 which closed in 2005 but was apparently quite good.

Co-incidentally, I was in one of the beta tests for Asheron's Call (I don't remember if it was 1 or 2), and today beta-testing applications opened for Tabula Rasa. I don't remember signing up for the mailing list, but I do have a PlayNC account through having purchased Guild Wars, a model I still hold up as being an excellent way to structure a MMOG's income, at least from a payer point of view. Of course, my job here at Micro Forté is as a programmer, not game producer, so my views aren't exactly changing the world... but give it time. ^_^

Speaking of Micro Forté, the Gaming Miniconf at LCA2007 is having Paul Murphy from (MF's MMOG technology development subsidiary, based in Sydney) as a guest speaker. I'll prolly have to sneak out of the Debian Miniconf to see that.

Poop. Paul Murphy's talk clashes directly with Anthony Town's "State of The Project" address. So there you go, first session of LCA2007 (barring keynotes, which don't conflict...) and I've got a scheduling conflict. >_< Maybe this year the recording will all work...

Edit: Someone floated the open-source Asheron's Call 2 idea the day it closed...

Well, it's nearly LCA time again. This is just a quick post mainly to see if my syndication at Planet Linux.conf.au 2007 is working yet.

I've been working at MF (Milestones just seem to come at you faster than the calender would otherwise suggest) and particularly in the last couple of weeks getting a good vector-math workout.

I've also been working at picking off RC bugs to try and help Etch along a bit, since kind of hoped to be upgrading to it in the half of January that's just passed.

I've also been looking for a CMS for the ANU Anime Society to try and resolve the fact that our web admins never seem to last as long as we'd like. At the moment, Joomla! is top of my list for trialling, as I'm familiar with PHP and looks to have the relevant modules (forum, calendar, eventing system that'll need modification to work for screening scheduling). However, I'm open to other suggestions, and will see if anyone at LCA has any useful suggestions.

And of course, by adding Planet LCA 2007, I've had to read it. And I came across ThreatNet, which is a distributed compromised computer identification system. It's actually really simple, you do something to identify a certain IP as a threat (the sample code scans postfix logs for "REJECT: noqueue" which usually comes from "no such user" although I noticed it also comes from greylister at CBIT) and sends that IP address to a nominated IRC channel. I dunno what's next, actually. Presumably, sites can block that IP address as they see fit, and if the responsible parties for the machine become aware of it, they can take action. I'll be adding this to my ever-growing list of things I need to consider implementation of at CBIT.

On the plus side, I recently installed Debian on a Slug with a 512MB USB flash stick, and I'm going to see how Nagios performs on it. If it's up to scratch, I'll prolly shoehorn in a wireless card and see if I can monitor two disparate networks effectively.

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...

Two things...

Wii.com has gone live, along with a news release from Nintendo Japan announcing ship date and release pricing for the Wii.

For those who don't read Japanese and can't puzzle it out (it's up the top, above “ＷｉｉTM”) it'll ship on 2nd December 2006 for ￥25 000. It also says that schedule and pricing for foreign countries will come in the next few days.

Following some links from wii.com back through the Wii page at Nintendo.co.jp we get to see a video of the Wii software lineup, as follows:

I've highlighted launch titles, and indicated by-the-end-of-the-year titles as per the Wii software lineup page.

• Wii Sports
• Forever Blue
• Mario Strikers Charged
• Excite Truck
• Dragon Quest Swords
• Dynasty Warriors Wave (December 2006)
• Red Steel
• Fire Emblem
• Swing Golf Pangya
• Super Mario Galaxy
• Necro-Nesia
• Super Surgery (Card?) Chaos (Tenative name)
• Sonic and the Secret Ring
• Wing Island
• Pokemon Battle Revolution (December 2006)
• Bleach Wii (December 2006)
• One Piece Unlimited Adventure
• Dragon Ball Z Sparkling Neo
• SD Gundam Revolution (Tenative name)
• Crayon Shin-chan (December 2006)
• Tamagocchi
• Introduction to Wii
• Elebits
• Rayman (December 2006)
• Super Monkey Ball Oook Oook Party Great Gathering
• Fishing Master (December 2006) (Tenative name)
• Festival Master
• Furi Furi (December 2006)
• Harvest Moon Wii
• Twiilight Princess
• Colorinpa
• Metroid Prime 3
• Warioware Dance
• Super Famicon Wars W
• Bomberman Land
• The Dog Island
• Wii Music
• Wii Yawaraka Head Training
• Road Cool Domino
• No-miso connecting puzzle Takoron
• Cooking Mama (December 2006)
• Project H.A.M.M.E.R
• Biohazard Umbrella Chronicles
• Twiilight Princess (so good, they showed it twice!)

I count 43 titles there. ^_^

Also, NES games will be ￥500, SNES games ￥800 and N64 games ￥1000.

The Wii Preview slides are a goldmine, and include videos of the Virtual Console.

Did I mention that Zelda: Twiilight Princess is a launch title?

Along with 15 other launch titles, and another 11 titles by the end of the year.

Oh, dude, yay!

Oh, and the second thing...

17:01 <@usotsuki> Debian's definition of "stable" is different from what most people call "stable"

17:01 <@usotsuki> that's good and bad

17:02 < TBBle> Nope, it's pretty much what everyone except computer users mean by "stable". Think about it in the geological sense, for example. Or the chemical sense.

17:02 <@usotsuki> lol

17:02 < TBBle> ie "If you don't touch it, it won't randomly explode"

Edit: Found the Wii software lineup page, and so fixed my video listing above.

Edit: Forgot the AmazonJP link. ^_^

Wow. "Later this week" certainly took longer than I expected.

As of July 31st, I'm a (junior, for now) programmer at Micro Forté's Canberra studio. Two weeks in, and it's the best job I've had so far. ^_^ My first task involved trying out installation of the BigWorld MMOG server system as a new user so we could see what state the documentation was in, and for those who know how pedantic I am, a four-page file called whinge.txt is actually a positive sign.

It's an approximately eighteen-month contract, so I guess Japan and University will have to be put off at least that much longer. Still, I've pretty much wanted to write video games since I was six, learning Applesoft BASIC on the family //c, so no regrets. ^_^

I'm no longer working full-time at CBIT Internet, although I am still maintaining the ISP's servers there.

In celebration, I bought Guitar Hero, which neccesitated getting my Playstation 2 back from Richard, who'd in the meantime bought a PS2 EyeToy. I haven't tried the bundled game yet, but instructions exist to use the EyeToy as a windows webcam, and to use the EyeToy as a linux webcam.

This, plus the request of a nice young lady whom I only seem to face-to-face once every twelve months or so that I install Skype, got me playing with Skype again. Sadly, the 10 euros of credit I bought in 2004 and was unable to use (due to their system failing to transmit voice to the US at the time) have "expired", which annoyed me enough that I was boycotting them. The boycott ended the moment someone asked me to actually use it, mind you. ^_^

Of course, this led me into an exploration of open-source alternatives. On the Skype-protcol side, there's a paper from 2004 looking at how Skype 0.97 talked to the network as well as a recent claims from a Chinese company to have reverse-engineered the Skype protocol. Sadly, the latter is planning to commercialise their results, not publish them.

On the actual open-source side, I've been playing with SIP stuff again. I've had a SIP-based Asterisk server running here (You can try to call me via SIP although I don't always have a SIP client running) for a while now, and I recently got a chance to test it with some overseas friends, but due to poor codec choice, it quality sucked.

On codecs, I have to say that Speex is great and iLBC is awful. Both in voice quality, and for the fact that Speex is free open-source, while iLBC comes with a "no-commercial use" license.

Anyway, with a webcam, I've been toying with video-supporting SIP clients. For windows, the only free one appears to be X-Lite 3 which doesn't do Speex (although its commerical version, eyeBeam 1.5 does) but for my purposes (LAN to the Asterisk Box) I can do G.711 and let Asterisk do the Speex transcoding for me.

Under linux, Linphone has video support (although the 1.35 Debian package is compiled without, and the build-deps to build it wanted to remove texlive in favour of tetex...) which I've not tried yet, but which a brief glance at the source suggests supports H.263-1998. Ekiga, the successor to GnomeMeeting, also supports video, via opal, but only H.261. There's H.263 code there, but relies on FFMpeg 0.4.7 patched to support RFC2190 for its video support. (It's actually FFMpeg's libavcodec that's being used, but very few people make the distinction it seems)

A brief aside on the video codecs at play here. H.261 is the older ITU-T video standard for ISDN, while H.263 was a newer standard which drew from H.261 as well as MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, and which was the default video standard for H.323 computer video conferencing, thanks to things like Microsoft's NetMeeting and the open-source GnomeMeeting. However, along with MPEG technology comes murky and ill-defined MPEGLA patent issues. There's also H.263-1998, aka H.263p or H.263+, which adds some annexes to H.263 to support some more encoding features. For moving H.263 over RTP RFC 2190 was written. However, the stream format defined in RFC2190 couldn't support the data stream from H.263-1998, so RFC 2429 was published. Both H.263 and H.263-1998 can be carried in the RFC 2429 stream format, so in theory everyone should be using RFC 2429 streams, and we'd all be happy. Apparently, NetMeeting only support RFC 2190 and H.263 however, so that's the version that they implemented in Ekiga too (since Opal is a refactoring of the OpenH323 library's media interface, and Gnomemeeting's built on OpenH323. And the OpenH323 H.263 code was submitted by the same person who did the FFMpeg patch mentioned above.) Meanwhile, X-Lite supports H.263, H.263plus, and (according to my SIP debug logs on Asterisk) RFC 2429 streaming.

I spent most of today weighing up forwardporting the RFC2190 patch to FFMpeg, or updating libopal to support RFC2429. I didn't achieve much, but I weighed it up a lot. The final answer was wait for the current libopal refactoring (they've moved the video codec support out into plugins, and rewrote the H.263 code such that it's much easier to _add_ RFC2429 support) to reach my via Debian in some way, and then have a poke at it, if they haven't done it already. If it's not already done, I'm sure that submitted the code to make it work would make me an Open-source Telephony Hero

So to bring us back to the story, I've got a nice little Windows-based SIP client which does video but not Speex and needs to register with someone, a Linux-based client that does speex but which I haven't compiled the video for yet (Linphone), and a both linux- and win32-based client which claims to do Speex but barfs (Ekiga...) and which can't do the current video codec with the current video stream format, and depends on a slight fork of another library to do current video with the old format.

I can see why Skype's so popular...>_<

Incidentally, if you want a non-registrar-requiring Speex-supporting free but-without-video SIP client for Windows, I found PhonerLite seemed to work well. And frankly, if you're going to call me without warning at home, you might not want the webcam to show you whatever my current state of dress or undress is. ^_^

Talking to Chris Smart (of Kororaa) at CLUG's PSIG meeting last Thursday about webcams, Ekiga and kopete inevitably led onto the GPL and the Linux Kernel (he loves to talk about it, really! ^_^) and Chris pointed me at Greg K-H's take on Linux and Binary-only modules, which manages to draw the line between legal and illegal way way back there compared to where we all through we were. (On a sidenote, OLS looks like it would have been tremendous fun. I can hardly wait until I'm a jetsetting conference-attending Linux Kernel Hero.)

I've also been poking at the DeviceScape 802.11 stack for Linux. As well as happily running my laptop's Apple Airport Extreme2 card for the past few months, its software-based Access Point support appears to have progressed to the point at which I can start poking at it for Nintendo DS Wirelss Multi-boot infrastructure, which will bypass all the card-specific hacking people're having to do, as well as let it work on things that aren't RT25xx cards. It seems in the six months or so since I've looked hard at Nifi, a dude called masscat has picked up the ball and run with it, so I've almost 10 pages of forum thread, and then whatever code he's published, to catch up on. I'm pleasantly surprised, I thought with the advent of Wifi support for Nintendo DS Homebrew code interest in WMBing over Nifi would die. So here's my chance to get the dscape port done, and become an NDS Homebrew Hero.

I'm currently reading Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials and it's reinvigorating my love of Perl. ^_^ Shame MicroForté is a C++ and Python shop... Still, it's a nice change from reading The C++ Programming Language, 3rd Edition which I was reading for the six weeks between my first job interview and pretty much the weekend before I started at MicroForté. Of course, this means I'm tempted to spend my free time ignoring all the above ideas, and tooling about with Perl 6 and Parrot Especially with sheer coolness like Z-Code support in Parrot.

And for one final note, the real-estate agent is coming around next Saturday to inspect my flat, so I had to clean up. Luckily, it was mainly a case of emptying all the bins, although I need to run a quick vacuum around the place, it's a bit dusty in parts. I expect this inspection is because my lease expires in the next couple of weeks, and they want to know if they should kick me out or not. Given that I'm not working days in Watson with occasional evenings in Belconnen, I'm looking at moving anyway. Anyone know of a cheap one-bedroomer or two-bedroomer in Watson or adjoining suburbs? I'd like to be able to walk or bicycle to work. ^_^

Edit: Correct misspelling

I'm out of juice

In other news... Finally upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.0.3 and Spam Karma 2.2r3. Also decided to celebrate with a new theme, blog.txt. It's OK so far, apart from the title sizing... Dunno if I'll stick with it yet.

The actual content of this post is twofold... I used CurlFtpFS (A FUSE-based filesystem) to update the site. I chose CurlFtpFS over Fuseftp because the latter consistently failed to handle vimdiff. ^_^

Happily, on Debian, it was easy to set up. m-a a-i fuse gave me the fuse kernel modules, and then grabbing the CurlFtpFS Debian package.

The main disadvantage is that you can't see the FUSE-mounted share from my windows box over Samba... This may just be a permissions thing, as I can follow symlinks across filesystem mounts OK, although I didn't used to be able to.

The other fold is that I finally started my exercise regime. Tonight, about a half-hour on Stepmania, for 14 three-foot songs and a four-foot song. I'm working alphabetically through the list of songs at three-feet, and then my last set of the three for the night is whatever I feel like. And tonight I was in a Bubble Bobble, そばかす and WITCH DOCTOR mood.

Most frustrating song of the night was Beyblade 2000 - Off the Chains, the BPM seemed to be tuned to the rappers, not the actual beats. On the other hand, most frustrating in a good way was Cowboy Bebop - Tank [Para Para mix], 307BPM of surprise steps. Fun. ^_^

Final good news, the author of the Top 10 posts plugins noticed my updates. I was linked from a blog that shows up in the Wordpress Dashboard. ^_^

Meh, a few other things going on, I should be able to blog about them later this week. >_<

Edit: Back to Ocadia. Also, I bought juice. ^_^

Keynotes today from Telstra Enterprise and Government, Disney Internet Group and three parts of the Music-on-your-mobile supply chain (Optus, Sony BMG and Motorola). Telstra E&G's moving their backend to a single converged IP backend, and also positioning themselves as Solution Providers. Which is of course annoying, because that's where I'm trying to take CBIT...

Disney's presentation in particular got me thinking about where I want to be. Their Toontown and upcoming Pirates Of The Carribena MMORPGs, along with all the cool stuff they're doing on Japanese mobiles are very very cool. And of course, I want to be part of something very very cool. I'm sure my chance will come, but I still sometimes wish I wasn't spending half my week slaving over a hot server, and the other half... I dunno... Doing stuff that comes up. I do still want to go into games programming, but at the same time, what I hear about the industry scares me off often. And I'm starting to get older than I'm comfortable being for my position in life. *sigh*

I came back to Sean and Julia's place (where I'm staying in Sydney) and Julia immediately echoed my sentiments about how I should be out there doing cool stuff. I explained to her that I'm both comitted to CBIT now, and also that hopefully CBIT will develop nice and quickly into a platform from which I can do the cool stuff. But even as I type that, I'm not sure it's the best answer. I guess my real fear (and it always has been) is the fear of squandered potential.

Chief amongst those worries is that people I trust to speak directly to me (including Julia and my Dad) are telling me that I should be doing more than I am... Then I start worrying that I'm letting my sense of loyalty and hatred of disappointing people keep me at CBIT when I am currently doing a job for which I am, although skilled, not brilliant. I'm also somewhat less than shining at the other things I have to concern myself with at CBIT (finding new clients, bookkeeping for the ISP part, etc).

Maybe I should focus on getting other staff trained up into my jobs, so I can move on? Admittedly, that's already supposed to be part of my focus. I guess I'll see how that part goes first, and see where I am from there. Maybe one of my projects will come good at the right moment, and I can retire to the bahamas. ^_^

On the other hand, if CBIT goes where I hope it does, then I'll be jet-setting around the world providing my highly-demanded services to clients for fabulous amounts of money by the time I'm 30. Kind of what I hoped would happen with Bubblesworth, were I not so incompetent a businessman...

And on top of that, I wish I was doing something cool in Open Source. I was looking at a Linux-based NAS today (along with various pieces of long-haul wireless equipment, including 802.16 WiMAX, proprietry and meshing) and thinking "Why am I a consumer of this? Why aren't I producing these?" I guess it's not really Open Source, but unless Canonical hires me, the only people I know of paying for Open Source development on a non-bounty basis is CyberSource, and they're a Red Hat shop. -_-

Yup, that's right. I'm in beautiful Sydney for CeBIT. The joys of trains mean that not only am I out of the office for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, but also Monday and most of Friday.

At this rate, all my holiday leave will be spent on trade shows and suchlike. The first three months at CBIT, I spent a week at LCA2006. This quarter, a week out for CeBIT. (Well, actually, that's the Feb-Mar-April quater's week). So now I'm looking for a tradeshow or other event that's both local, cheap and in the next three months... Then again, Clare's MedRevue is coming up, so I'll need to save a day or two for that.

Anyway, CeBIT. Having just spent an evening on dial-up Internet planning my schedule, here's how it looks:

Tuesday

10:15 - 10:55

Hall 6: Telstra

11:05 - 11:50

Hall 6: Disney

12:00 - 12:50

Hall 6: Music

13:00 - 13:45

Hall 6: LG - Mobility/Convergence

2 pm

Stand P1, Hall 4: Digital Broadcasting

3 pm

Stand D50 - Hall 2: The realities of Fibre to the Home

4 pm

Stand D50 - Hall 2: Digital Media and Convergence

5 pm

Stand D50 - Hall 2: Utilities and Broadband Power Line

Wednesday

Morning

Stand J1, Front of Hall 3: Future parc launch

11am

Stand P1, Hall 4: IT Services

12 pm

Stand D50 - Hall 2: Next Generation Networks, IP and VoIP

1pm

Stand P1, Hall 4: Open Source 1

2pm

Stand P1, Hall 4: Venture Capital

3 pm

Stand D50 - Hall 2: Fixed wireless broadband developments

4 pm

Stand D50 - Hall 2: $3 billion for Regional Telecoms

5 pm

Stand D50 - Hall 2: Mobile voice still the killer application

Thursday

10:30 – 10:45

Stand J1, Front of Hall 3: Ontologies and topic maps for smart information use

11am

Hall 3: CompTIA

13:00 – 13:15

Stand J1, Front of Hall 3: Disaster prediction, response and recovery

13:30 – 13:45

Stand J1, Front of Hall 3: Health data integration

2pm

Hall 3: CompTIA

3pm

Stand P1, Hall 4: Open Source 2

12 pm

Stand D50 - Hall 2: The battle between 3G HSDPA and WiMAX

4.00pm to 5.00pm

Stand J50, Rear of Hall 3: The BlackBerry Advantage for Small & Medium Businesses

In summary: All of the keynotes, all of the open-source stuff I can manage, and what time's left for Internet and Blackberry stuff. I think I'll have a short period to wander around the stands too, visit the Linux Australia guys.

I'm also meeting a vendor down here, with luck, so I'm feeling all well-travelled-businessmany today. ^_^

The disadvantage of being in Sydney is I'm on dialup, and also a few hundred kilometres away, so logging in to the office Terminal Server for email is a painfully slow experience.

Hopefully tomorrow I'll find an Internet cafe in the city where I can plug my laptop in and get some work done. ^_^

I pre-ordered Sin Episode 1: Emergence on the weekend. It was cheap (AU$23 or so) and included a Steam version of the original Sin. This is partly my fault, I was hoping for a steamy version of Original Sin... (Sorry if you were hoping for a different original sin joke. ^_^)

I actually own Sin, but I don't know where the CD is. The original box is still on my shelf. So I'm taking the opportunity to actually finish the game, since the new one is set four years later. And it's still as I remember, one of the best-fun first-person shooters I've played... Dragged me right away from Half-Life and its expansion packs. (Although I'm finished Half-Life and Blue Shift now, and I think I'm close to the end of Opposing Force)

A recent topic on Slashdot about The changing value of certifications. Beyond the somewhat inaccurate summarising of the arcticle on Slashdot (certifications still attract a pay premium, they don't actively hurt your career) I think a rather important oversight was made in much of the discussion (ie. that bit which survived my threshhold) --- and maybe this was covered in the original research, I didn't bother trying to track down the report mentioned in the article --- that for some jobs a certification doesn't attract a premium, because it's a neccessity.

Certainly the terms of employment at CBIT require that I hold a certification of some kind within six months of joining. It originally specified MCSE, but they happily let me substitute my LPIC-1. I since discovered that my Windows NT4 MCSE is still valid, so I'm putting the MCSE upgrade on hold to get my CCNA done.

Then a lot of the posters proceeded to confuse certification with qualifications. Having both, I'm amazed that this happens. On the other hand, the people generating this confusion were usually on the "I didn't need stuffy boring university or a do-in-my-sleep MCSD, I just walked in and told them how I've been running Windows since I was six and they hired me" side of the debate.

I'm going to get condescending here. I'll let you know when it's over. I really think these attitudes go hand in hand, and are usually closely followed by "Why won't <large company> hire me as their CTO? I know as much as all these highly qualified lawyers and managers. They'll fail now, and it'll be all their fault for not hiring me," and then later followed by "I've been working this same $30k/year first-level support role for ten years now, because management are too short sighted to realise that I was just too smart to waste three years on a degree."Done with the condescending bit.

And sure, I myself have been guilty of this. I still am, frequently. I think most of us in IT do it to some extent. This is also how we end up with the armchair lawyers, armchair managers, armchair accountants and armchair linguists that pervade our community. (I pick those because I've done them all myself. Ranter, berate theyself. ^_^) It might be a symptom of the type of person who succeeds in IT (self-confident, multi-skilled and widely read/educated) as compared to those who fail (obstinant, unfocussed and arrogant).

So why certify? I do it partly because I love training and learning, and having something to show for it --- Ignore that I waited five years to graduate my B.Sc --- and partly because it makes financial sense. I like to read when I go to bed... It settles me down and clears my mind. However, a $20 novel will only last two or three days. My CCNA INTRO book has taken me over a month to get about half-way into... I think because it's so dry, I can't read more than a few minutes. Either way, good value for $50.

Flicking through Planet Linux Australia as I do when I forget how much time it sucks up... Between the sordid tales of a Power5 lying with a SunFire --- Oh I wish I had a project to throw at them... Where's my multi-threaded Sudoko solver? --- I came across this gem of an idea for a Canberra-wide wireless mesh network. This is something I'd heartily endorse, and help with where I could... I'll have to dig out my old Gungahlin-wireless-mesh plans...

A quick aside: Another Rich Web with PHP talk from Rasmus Lerdorf. The content aside, the template is sweet. The template aside, the content is fascinating.

Another quick aside: Digital cameras have their own digital signature. I'm not sure if this is even vaugely practical for any use, but here's the original article's PDF. Someone in the discussion pointed me at a US Government scheme to convince colour laser printer manufacturers to encode printer identification data onto each page. It's a scary world we live in.

Last aside... Two more links: One to make you cry: Even if the author is being facetious, someone somewhere belives this; and one to make you laugh: Every workplace should have a plan on its books for how to deal with Viking Raids.

But what of the bikinis, I hear you ask... Or would, were I narrating this out loud instead of in my head... And you cared about bikinis more than you care about Sun Tzu... OK. This is an IRC story. You've been warned.

On one of the IRC channels I hang out on, discussion turned to bikinis, and one of the channel regulars (Io) mentioned that she doesn't wear bikinis.

Pseudo-aside: This is Io. I knocked up this image that same evening, as it happens. MSPaint's so much easier to use than The Gimp... I did the whole image in the time it took me to give up the other day on finding a "Draw a square" button in The Gimp.

Anyway, it seemed sensible at this poit to consult with my new TzuBBot. TzuBBot being my Art-Of-War-based-advice-bot. Here's the results.

03:00 < TBBle> TzuBBot: Any advice on the best way to get Io out of Brazil and into a bikini?

03:00 < TzuBBot> THE NINE SITUATIONS: 55. Hence he does not strive to ally himself with all and sundry, nor does he foster the power of other states. He carries out his own secret designs, keeping his antagonists in awe. Thus he is able to capture their cities and overthrow their kingdoms.

03:01 < TBBle> TzuBBot: Any advice on the best way to get Io out of a bikini and into my lap?

03:01 < TzuBBot> THE ARMY ON THE MARCH: 45. If a general shows confidence in his men but always insists on his orders being obeyed, the gain will be mutual.

The TzuBBot gives useful advice so often, it's scary...

Final note: My goodneess, but the move from Yurika to Dino has made this website soooo much snappier!

Yup, still not dead.

The blog and my other site've just moved to a new server. Let me know if you see anything weird. It's supposed to be the same software configuration as the old server but whackloads faster... The joys of Debian/stable. (bzr.tbble.net's hgwebdir.cgi isn't running... No python or bzr on the new server yet, as it's the CBIT Internet shared webhosting server. I'm still weighing up whether to install it or if I can keep it all in the webtree somehow.

I'm now syndicated at planet.linux.org.au.

Oh, one more thing: were-virgin.