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19
Feb
06

Things to do in your loungeroom when you're broke

By TBBle Leave a Comment
Categories: CBIT Internet, Food Diary, LCA06 and Linux

Meh. There’s another weekend spent doing very little. And for a change, this didn’t involve me spending any time either playing video games, or on IRC.

I took a troll through Planet Linux Australia (and also remembered to submit my blog there again…) and came up with the following links, for your eddification and mine:

So what else have I been doing? Well, I played with Google Maps until I identifed my current home, and the CBIT offices, although the latter’s photo is slightly old now, as there’s a sort of overhang thing over the entrance now.

I finished Every Which Way But Dead by Kim Harrison. Happily, the next book in the series is due out in June… Although lord knows how long it’ll take to get here. I also this week finished The Shining City by Kate Forsyth. Sequel also due mid-year, and she’s Australian so I am more hopeful of seeing it before next summer… I prolly should go to one of those ‘enter my books’ sites and record for posterity just how many books I’ve spent my rent-money on.

Speaking of rent-money, I’m at the broke end of the week, so went last night and spent $32 on food until Wednesday. This covered four pot-noodles, five microwave paster dinners, and five bottles of Caffiene-Free Diet Coke. Also some lollies, to cover sugar-cravings. Mind you, I haven’t eaten yet today… Hmm, I’d better do that soon.

Of course, you can’t waste a weekend if you have no plans. And this weekend, I was supposed to finish the new CBIT Internet Customer Administration interface… It’s neat, and AJAXified (using the very neat xajax PHP-based setup) and the only thing I did on this this weekend was fix a problem I was having with Internet Explorer 6 on Windows. I couldn’t do this at work, because I’m developing under Linux on my PowerBook.

OK, I guess that’s not all I did. I spent a few hours screwing with wine, trying trying get IE6 going under Win2K-mode (partly for the AJAX stuff, partly so I could run QuickBooks). I’ve gotten IE6 installed, but it seems to barf when making the AJAX calls, not to mention needing to be Ctrl-C’d when presenting a username/password box.

In the end, I grabbed the IEs 4 Linux script, which installed IE6 in it’s own WINEPREFIX, like a charm. I’m well pleased with it. ^_^

I’m also gonna grab Opera to test the site against. Happily, not only do they have an Apt repository, they’ve also got a public beta program which includes Linux-PPC support. ^_^ This is really how commercial, closed-source software should be addressing the Linux community.

Also, Opera for Nintendo DS. I mean, like, wow.

Also wow, ABC’s podcasts. I wonder if they’ll do video podcasting soon? Not that I’m watching or listening to any podcasts, but…

I also wasted a few hours this weekend watching the latest episodes of TV shows from the US. Thinking about it, I watch: Battlestar Galactica, Boston Legal and House MD. I also watch Dr Who and Tripping The Rift when it’s on… I know that Apple now sells TV episodes over their iPod store, and so I feel like I should be paying something to watch these shows, but I dunno what they’re charging. I’d happily pay 50c per episode. I dunno if I’d pay more than that, though. Maybe if I had a better viewing setup, or planned on keeping the files and watching them again…

I also watched the Casanova BBC Miniseries last weekend. It was really really really good. ^_^ I was kinda iffy about the Heath Ledger movie, but Margaret and David thought it was leave-your-brain-at-the-door funny, and I’m now willing to give it a burl.

Hmm. I wish I was a large software corporation, so I could go try and do what Loki failed to do, but instead of buying the license and selling the game, I’d contract to the publishing houses to port the game for them, kind of like how many Mac-ported games seem to be done. I _really_ want to play GuildWars, but it doesn’t yet work in wine, and don’t want to reboot to Windows to do so. I _might_ give a burl to this partial success report for GuldWars on Wine…

And fun as Battle for Wesnoth is, I’m awful at it.

28
Jan
06

One conference to bring them all and in the summer bind them: LCA End of Days

By TBBle Leave a Comment
Categories: CBIT Internet, Debian, General, LCA06 and Linux

My final LCA06 report from the land of Dunedin, where the shadows lie. Although I’m here until Monday, I doubt my Internet will be working for much longer.

Started the morning at the usual time, which gave me an extra hour of bumming around (reading my LPI book…) before the (10am) keynote of the day.

And what a keynote it was. Mark Shuttleworth (The Ubuntu guy for those who’re playing along at home) gave a presentation about how collaboration works in successful projects, how it doesn’t work in unsuccessful projects, how to get projects to cooperate with each other, and how to get localisation from people who aren’t programmers. And he packed it in hard, leaving a fairly long period for questions. There were of course a few fairly long questions asked, so this was all for the best.

Amongst Mark’s major points were that the barriers to entry for things like bug tracking systems and translations are too high. Anything that isn’t debbugs needs you to register to post a bug, and you lose 50-70% of hits at that stage. Translation systems that aren’t Gnome currently require you to email around .po files, requiring the translator to edit them in plain text, and some even muck about with more esoteric tools. Gnome provides a neat program, and apparently so does KDE, to handle all that for you.

Mark’s other major point was that distributed revision control systems will turn the language of development from mailling lists to patches. A question from the audience pointed out that mailling-list review of patches (eg. linux-kernel mailling list, and we do this on FreeRADIUS-devel too) would probably suffer if people were just branching things, working on them, and then pushing them back upstream… It’s an interesting puzzle, but between this and the translations stuff, I’m the closest I’ve ever been to looking at contributing to Ubuntu… Scary.

For the one scheduled session of the day I went to a talk from Matthew Garrett about projects dealing with the loss of maintainers or pvioltal people, and how they can deal with it. I can relate, since I am both a sucker (I was kind-of the FreeRADIUS 1.0.0 Release Manager), and soon after moved, changed jobs, and basically stopped posting to (but kept reading what I could of) the FreeRADIUS-devel mailing list. I’ve been lucky that FreeRADIUS is a good, stable package, and so I don’t think my long periods of inattention have caused the Debian package to suffer.

After the barbecue lunch and ceremonial shaving of the luminaries (including Rusty’s moustache!), I attended one of the best-of session, about The RepRap, an attempt to produce a low-cost von Neumann Universal Constructor. And not only is this cool as heck stuff, it was heartwarning to see a geek from a different field, and know that much as our interests diverge, we are united in geekness.

It was also good to see that there are good jobs for geeks, doing geeky things for the betterment of humanity. Especially when one of those things is building the world’s largest nanobot.

At afternoon tea, I scored some Ubuntu 5.10 i386 CD sets, which I think I’ll take back to work and put on a desk with “Free! Try Linux without risking your data.” sign on it or something.

This reminded me that I haven’t checked WhirlPool in a week and a half, and I haven’t yet picked up Omiyage… Still, I will have tomorrow and Monday morning to do so…

Also sitting around the link, reminded again to try WorldForge and Thousand Parsec… Also to find the mesa 6.4 packages and see if the r300 driver’s been updated.

And a note about Blender that slipped my mind for yesterday… It’s awful without a mouse. In fact, a two-button mouse would be pretty awful, but shift-F11-touchpad is particularly not an easy thing to do with only two hands.

Went to the panel discussion, which was largely focussed on patents, trademarks, and how best to promote linux onto both desktops and SMEs.

Finally, was the conference close, where prizes were awarded for the programs for drawing the raffle, then the raffle was drawn, and during demonstrations of some of the other programs submitted, my ticket was drawn. >_<. Although I dunno if I really wanted one of the shirts, it looked like someone’d scribbled all over it, and it’d need some heavy-duty washing…

The total money raised for the John Lyons Chair was just over AU$48k, which is a sterline effort. We also raised NZ$1800 or so from the raffle for the NZ version of Kid’s Help line, which is an excellent cause. Hack fest winners were announced, much thanking of those who have sacrificed so much to get this going, including Mike Beattie’s second standing ovation (The only presenter I saw get a standing ovation was Van Jacobsen), which was well deserved.

Mike mentioned afterwards that the photoblog prize had been completely forgotten, so hopefully they’ll judge it anyway, and we’ll have something pretty to look at on the CD. There’s also supposed to be a written-blog prize, but I suspect my abuse of the “Excerpts” box may count against me. Unless the judges share my sense of humour. ^_^

I must say I have had an absolutly brilliant time. I’ve been rushed off my feet, exhausted, tired, I sat my second LPI exam tonight without having read the last three chapters of the Exam Cram book (It still only took twenty-two minutes by the wall clock… I hope I passed!) and on top of all that I’ve been coughy and snuffly when I wasn’t writing in pain from my throat. And I’d do the whole thing again at the drop of a hat. Or preferably a spiral.

Of course, like anime.au (with which I’ve been involved on the other side a couple of times, but which is only one day, rather than six) these things take so much time and effort to prepare, that managing one every year is quite impressive, even though it’s a new team each year. It’s been suggested that 2008′s LCA location be selected more than twelve months out to give them more time to prepare, but for me, my eyes are firmly fixed on LCA07, Sydney. (Their site’s not up yet as of this writing, but yesterday it wasn’t even in DNS. ^_^)

Unless I’m in Japan, of course. I was actually looking around yesterday afternoon in the link, at all these people, these luminaries of my industry and my passion, and wondering if Japan is the right choice… I mean, there’s CBIT now, and I’d hate to leave that. But it’s not what I want to do… And there’s the other project I may have mentioned, which I will be having a meeting about next week, with luck… And yet, having come this far, how can I not go further? Maybe I should be searching harder for Open-Source jobs in Japan, and combine my interests. Sure, I love teaching, and I love teaching languages… But it’s so scary!

I guess it comes down to Feel the fear and do it anyway. And I suspect if I do get to go on JET, as long as I have an Internet connection, I’ll be able to spend more time on my hobbies than I do now. Or maybe not.

A final thought on LCA06… I hope everyone realised the sense of humour it must have take to aware LCA06 to a New Zealand team… ^_^

26
Jan
06

The PowerPC and the PHPassion: LCA Presentations Day 1 Afternoon

By TBBle 1 Comment
Categories: CBIT Internet, Debian, Japan, LCA06, Linux and Programming

Lunch: Spent so much time editing the morning’s post, didn’t get to eat, and then went to two wrong theatres and missed the start of the 32/64 comparison with x86 and Power by Olof Johansson. And they were out of pies so I bought sushi instead…

The 32/64 bit presentation was interesting. I’d seen discussion on Debian-Devel along the lines that PPC64 is slower than PPC, and therefore a pure 64-bit Debian port (ala. AMD64 port) was a poor idea (as opposed to AMD64). Olof presented benchmarks (which supported this) as well as a discussion of the way the both x86 and PPC’s ABI’s differ between 32 and 64 bits. It seems that the PPC64 ABI has actually added more overhead to function calls, and hasn’t taken advantage of an ABI change to improve existing issues, while x86_64 has actually used the ABI change to make more use of CPU registers to improve function calls significantly.

An audience member mentioned that newer toolchains than those tested use a different function-call structure or something and should be more efficient. So maybe PPC64′s problems aren’t insurmountable. Mind you, PPC64 does seem to be mainly targetted at specific applications, rather than overall system support ala x86_64… I wonder how MacOS X on G5 does it? I presume its a 32-bit userland from this…

Following on neatly there’s a PPC presentation on next from Paul Mackerras… I wonder if this issue will be addressed then too?

Either way, it was a quick session, and happily I was _just_ able to follow the stuff that was going on and the following audience discussion… ^_^

And the short session meant I got to eat my sushi before the next presentation

Paul Mackerras (Paulus)’s presentation on Recent Developments in PowerPC

Merging 32-bit ppc and 64-bit ppc64 architectures in the Linux kernel: Lots of duplicate code, ensures both architectures benefit from features, cleanups, bugfixes and drivers etc. So instead, there’s one architecture powerpc which is now the default arch.

This explains why recently building kernel modules on my PowerBook G4 failed, unless I prefixed the make with ARCH=ppc… >_< I noticed rene’s bcm43xx packages did the same thing in debian/rules, so it’s not just me.

Interestingly, Paul said that powermacs are no longer supported in ARCH=ppc as of 10th January. So 2.6.16 I guess…

It’s been a fairly fast project, having been agreed to last July, first hit the tree on 29th August, and by 19th November the PPC64 stuff was completely gone.

During a question from Dave Miller about the PPC handing of OpenFirmware VS Sparc64′s handling I was passed a card to sign for Paul Mackerras’s birthday. I can’t imagine how the people sitting directly in front of him signed it without him seeing…

Further discussion of memory layouts (64kb hardware page support means lots and lots of addressable memory!) followed by a quick round of Happy Birthday rounded out the rather technical session nicely.

I spent the interlude before the PHP5 presentation (ie while everyone else was off getting afternoon tea) finishing the morning’s posting, and jealously guarding my powerpoint.

Rasmus Lerdorfs’s PHP5 talk was quite technical, fast and codery in nature, so I’ll just be noting the cool points I wasn’t previously aware of. The version posted on his site right now is slightly older (marked 2006-01-25) than the one he’s displaying on the screen (marked 2006-01-26).

PHP’s main aspects: Fail Fast, Fail Cheap, Be Lazy. The greatest efficiencies come from solving problems you will never have.

Rasmus said that PHP has the unix philosophy of solving one small problem and solving it well. It’s not a framework, or the complete solution, but it does what it does very well.

AJAX makes this even better because the layout stuff gets moved to the local browser side, meaning that PHP only really needs to serve up the data in a format like JSON or XML, and the client-side UI code is actually run on the client site.

AJAX appears (now that I’ve seen it on the code-side) to simply be javascript in the web browser sending requests to the server with updates and whatnot and dynamically changing the UI without refreshing the entire page. This is good stuff, and I probably would have understood it earlier if I had actually listened to anyone whom I’d talked to about it before now. I wonder if we’ll be talking about this at the Perl BOF tomorrow…

I now also know what MVC means, and why it’s not actually sensible for web applications. But we use AJAX to do something similar, seperating presentation and data (oooh, like XHTML!).

Oooh! A very very useful thing in PHP is the <<< construct. Like the << shell function, and it expands PHP variables that appear inline.

Coming soon from Yahoo!, some kind of useful library thing for AJAX and stuff. ^_^

Hmm. JSON is apparently a Javascript self-extracting object. Neat. And I didn’t even know Javascript had an eval() function…

Man, the CBIT Internet customer manager interface is gonna be sooo cool when I’m done with it. ^_^

PDO is a new PECL extension for PHP5, and part of PHP5.1 which looks a lot like Perl’s DBI. It lets you bind parameters which will also save a whackload of crappy coding on my part… Mind you, I didn’t use the binding stuff in Perl5, but I should be doing so.

Things in PHP5 that make it good for AJAX stuff: XML uses libxml2 and dom now. This gets us XPath and XSL… and SimpleXML! This gives a PHP native object from the XML file….


item as $it)
echo "link}'>{$it->title} {$it->description}
\n";
?>

Huzzah. Two instruction RSS aggregator… I can’t imagine why Planet takes so much code… ^_^

And with the demonstration of http://buzz.progphp.com/ and unsafe search (I wasn’t quick enough on the URL, and the only thing Google will find is an old version of it, Rasmus’s one had images. Images!) it was obvious that this is the future of the web.

OMG! I’m a Web 2.0 convert. CAPS LOCK CANNOT EXPRESS MY FANGIRLY JOY.

Boy’ve I’ve been looking for a place to use that last one. I can’t find the website I saw it on, but as soon as I saw it, I know I had to write it somewhere. ^_^

And then just to finish off (and whet our appetites for tomorrow’s “Fast and Secure websites” presentation) Rasmus pointed us to APC, a PHP Opcode Cache which Yahoo! is happily running on their servers. One server he pulled up has taken 87 million hits in the past few hours, with 20k cache misses. O_O

And then there’s the XHTML problem which I really need to sit down and unblithe my pages about…

BOFs… VoIP. I visited PowerPC, but on consideration this one’s actually more important to me.

VoIP BOF links for my own reference: MacOS X softphone, Platronics nice USB headset which can be bought from Harris Technology.

Interesting things pulled off Planet LCA2006: Gumstix – Small, small small computers; CryoPID – Freezes processes so they can be migrated across ttys and even machines. CryoPID was actually described at the lightning talks at LCA05, and received many oohs and aahs at the time at the idea of screening processes after they’d been started.

After the BOF, went to do my LPI 101 exam. As mentioned, I’ve been studying from LPIC 1 Exam Cram 2, which the LPI’s Books page describes as …the most up-to-date publication reflecting recent changes in LPI exam objectives.. Mind you, it fails to mention that they’ve since (as of October 1st 2005) merged the DEB and RPM exams… Mind you, I hadn’t checked the errata since I was actually only going along to ask a question about the exam proceedure. Having since checked the errata, there’s six pages of corrections, and there’s still some whoppers missing. The above change to the exams, and the fact that Linux doesn’t have an “Archive” bit…

Either way, it took 20 minutes of the 90 allotted, and I feel really good about it. Still worried about the second exam, will prolly put that off until Saturday and push hard to finish the book first.

And another episode of S.O.S watched, as this site was being slow for some reason… It’s so wrenchingly painful to watch, but I can’t possibly stop until I know what happens…

Either way, an excellent day topped off with way too much Japanese food. ^_^

Oh yes. If I get a chance, I must ask Dave Miller at the presenter’s panel about the IEEE 802.11 stacks…

23
Jan
06

Debian bunfights, AJ sells his soul, and Battlestar Galactica: LCA Miniconfs Day 1 Morning

By TBBle Leave a Comment
Categories: CBIT Internet, Debian, LCA06, Linux and Programming

Happily, wifi works in the theatres. ^_^

First up in the Debian minconf was just enough of S2 Ep1 of Battlestar Galactica to remind me of where the Australian TV season’s up to, and probably frustrate those who haven’t already seen it.

Next was a presentation by a Ubuntu MOTU member regarding Debian/Ubuntu collaberation. A bit of interesting information about how Ubuntu’s Debian-collaberation stuff works, a few buns thrown, and a fair bit of jovial back-and-forth. Just what I was hoping for. Interesting link: http://revu.tauware.de/~lucas/versions/ – Version comparisons between Ubuntu and Debian.

Interlude: Coffee, chat, and the next 20 minutes of the BSG episode.

Anthony Towns and his way of trying to get people to pay him to work on Open Source projects. It’s kind of an inverse bounty where he posts what he wants people to work on, and people put up money to what they want done. It involves a Supply and Demand curve pair apparently, but he didn’t post slides… So here’s the link to it: AJ Market. The discussion evolved into a look at “betting markets” as a replacement for bounty systems. The idea is, you bet $x against something being implemented. If it’s implemented, you got your feature. If it’s not implemented, you get your money back, plus money that was bet _for_ it being done. People working on implementing it bet on it being implemented, and share the winnings if it is implemented. Obviously this places a bit of risk on the side of the implementors, but it’s a fascinating idea.

Overhearing a conversation about this while I was packing up, apparently part of this also involves the buy and selling of “bets”, which actually turn out to be more like shares… The idea being that a programmer can pick up cheap shares (eg. because the project’s been ignored for ages, and is seeming very unlikely) and then complete it, realising the full value of the shares. This requires that any initial investments are made on both sides of the bet. This situation would encourage people to ignore things they know they _could_ do until it’s worth it to do it, but at the same time if you want something done, you can buy your shares on both sides, and give away the “will be done” shares to a likely candidate, which gives them an incentive to get it done, as the shares are only on paper until the project is completed.

I’m sure AJ’s blog has more useful information, or will do really soon now. I’m interested, myself. Anyone wanna bet me that I can’t do Linux WMB for things other than ralink cards? ^_^

An interlude in the history of PHP…Rasmus Lerdorf is actually presenting a tutorial onPHP5 behind Web2.0 (AJAX etc) stuff which I’m probably going to go to on Thursday afternoon, much as it clashes with the tutorial on programming Asterisk PABX at serveral levels and the latter is highly relevant to what I’m supposed to be doing for a living.

This afternoon, however, it’ll be the Perl 6 session at the Damien Conway miniconf in Burns 7. ^_^

23
Jan
06

Welcome to your new home in meatspace: LCA Prelude

By TBBle Leave a Comment
Categories: Anime, CBIT Internet, Debian, Japan, LCA06 and Linux

Wow, linux.conf.au 06… Wow. ^_^

My first international trip started inauspiciously, as I came down with Tonsilitis on Thursday night. On reflection, going to see Underworld Evolution instead of finiding a late-night medical clinic was a poor choice, but happily Queanbeyan Hospital’s emergency department was not busy. So I left Canberra at 2am with a prescription for a week’s penicilin and some throat lozenges.

Got to Julia’s place by 6am, and left her with my car. Met up with nearly a dozen LCA people on the same flight in the departure lounge, and had more time together than I expected because the plane was 20 minutes late taking off. I managed to sleep through most of the flight, and in fact only realised we were on the east coast of New Zealand when I realised there was ocean in front of us.

Dunedin’s nice. I stayed at the Kiwi’s Nest on Friday and Saturday nights, basically bummed about and was social with some of the other people staying there. This is probably the biggest improvement over last year, where my socialisation was largely limited to IRC since I was driving in and out from home, so wasn’t really getting involved in the extra-curricular bits.

On the downside, I’ve been largely off the Internet since Thursday night. I did go to an Internet cafe for an hour on Saturday, which was enough time to check my email. Nothing seemed to have horribly caught fire at work, so I’m relaxed. ^_^ Also, the girl on the desk was _very_ cute.

Dunedin is frankly the sort of place I’d love to flee to if Australia’s legal situation goes much further evilright. It’s pleasantly cool (ie. a fan in summer would be sufficient), sufficiently focused (ie. One long main drag of shops) and has a cute girl at the desk of the Internet cafe. What more could I ask for? (Also, a large and apparently quite successful university, and lots of pubs.)

Anyway, on Sunday I moved onto campus, into “Unicol”. It’s nice, but the network wasn’t working last night, so I still managed to not be on the Internet until now. Registration went well, and after a Subway dinner I spent the evening in a pub with some people who’re here hanging around with a friend who’s come to linux.conf.au, discussing politics, sport, comics and animation, Japanese culture, and whatever else seemed appropriate. I stayed sober the whole time due to the aforementioned penicilin. ^_^

I’ve also started watching Stawberry on the shortcake, at long last. It’s been on my hard disk for two or three months, and I suspected it would be a heavy-going drama. Instead it turns out to be a hilarious at times, sad as hell at times (I think it’s going to end sadly, if I’ve guessed the ending correctly. Only seen to episode 3) but both excellent and fascinating drama. It’s really interfering with my LPIC reading… ^_^

Anyway, time to head over to the Debian Miniconf where someone’s suggested to me that we don’t have wireless, so I’ll sign off here.

Oh, and in case anyone’s wondering, my student card is current this time. ^_^

ストロベリー・オンザ・ショートケーキ 1ストロベリー・オンザ・ショートケーキ 2ストロベリー・オンザ・ショートケーキ 3ストロベリー・オンザ・ショートケーキ 4ストロベリー・オンザ・ショートケーキ 5

18
Jan
06

Once upon a time in California

By TBBle Leave a Comment
Categories: CBIT Internet, Food Diary, General, Japan, LCA06 and Linux

Saw “The Legend of Zorro” tonight with Bek and Sean. It was… interesting. A few fairly good fight scenes, with some nonsense in between to bulk out the movie. Bek and Sean commented that the movie could have done with some cutting, although really it was obvious that it had already had a fair bit of scissor-work taken to it. Particularly when one character says to another “As you said, ‘You never see the one you love, you only see what you wish to see’” or words to that effect. Either I dozed off, or they cut the scene where the character in question actually says that. Maybe the actors decided the script was too long and coherent, and decided to adlib a bit. Who knows? It’ll prolly be put back for the DVD, mind you. Then again, they _could_ decide to explore this particular editing path further on the DVD…

The Legend Of Zorro: Zorro rides again in this blockbuster movie! Can Zorro defend the poor, downtrodden Spanish peasants of California from the evil French Count and his soap? Or will the Frenchman’s wine prove too much for our hero?

Anyway, various interesting swordfights and similar. Apparently Catherine Zeta Jones learnt that one-inch punch from Kill Bill Vol. 2…

Previews of Aeon Flux (it looks cool, it had better be cool, or there’ll be much crying and gnashing of teeth), Just Friends (Depressing, given my history… >_<) and Casanova (Looks amusing, but I’d rather watch the BBC miniseries I think. I’m sorry I missed it on the ABC late last year… I don’t suppose anyone taped it?)

In other news, I got to the interview stage for the JET program. I’m not sure why they sent the notice to my mother’s house, but there it is. Interview sometime in February, they’re gonna call.

I got a phonecall from Melbourne yesterday afternoon… If that was JET, I’m confused as to why they called from Melbourne. If that’s someone reading this, call again. I got no voice mail and my phone’s phonebook didn’t recognise the number. ^_^

I have to get the international roaming activated for my phone, on that topic. I’d die without a mobile in New Zealand. I’ll prolly die when I see the phone bill. History suggests I make long phonecalls back to Canberra whenever I travel. On the plus side, calling me costs me 26c flat rate, so I’m as contactable as alays.

I’m all excited about the New Zealand trip. I’ve got all the accomodation worked out now, staying in Kiwi’s Nest about three blocks from the university on the Friday and Saturday night, and at the university for the rest of the trip. I am also worried what CBIT will do without me, as the promised webadmin interface is not ready. Maybe I’ll have a nice productive programming day tomorrow? The fact that I’m working on my blog at 1am suggests not…

On a side note, I think I’ve discovered Smilex… I can eat any one of sardines, tomatoes, tomato sauce, onion, curry powder, chillis, and noodles, but combine then together into a dish, the name of which escapes me (It looks like red sludge with noodles mixed in) and I have an upset stomach the next day. A friend pointed out that he’s allergic to tomatoes, so I wonder if I am too… They’re c

12
Jan
06

The best laid plans

By TBBle 1 Comment
Categories: Bandwidth Unlimited Pty Ltd, CBIT Internet, Debian, Japan, LCA06, Linux and Mew

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

安座間美優 2006年度 カレンダー

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.

Red Dwarf: Series 6 (2pc)
Lpic I Exam Cram 2 (Exam Cram 2)

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