I had to go into the city for a meeting today, at short notice. It was a good meeting, and means that I can do some real work tomorrow... Maybe. We will need to see how it goes though.

I read yesterday that the movie Stealth was out. You need to read the review to find out that this really was not the worlds greatest use for $130m. Thankfully some (very little) of that came to me. I did some custom hardware for the movie to test radio channels to make sure that the microphones would work at a distance. Unfortunately I did not even get to visit the set.

I got an email yesterday from a guy wanting to track 10-50 'Rollers'. I dont know about you but I think Rolls Royce cars when I hear that... Nice job. Unfortunately I asked since I was dubious about someone in northern Queensland needing that number of prestige cars I found out that they were steam rollers. Oops.

And on the subject of 'Data Security' comes this story about how a transit authority server, or 10 of them, were sold for $20 each at Auction with the information still on them, including revenue analysis for Sydney bus routes. Someone commented...

"Just a quick thought; for gods sake why don’t you find the software that controls the trains, modify it … and MAKE THEM RUN ON TIME. "

I have just been looking at Groklaw and laughing about the mess that SCO has got itself into. Basically they thought that they would find evidence that LINUX was infringing on their copyright, and could not believe it when they could find no evidence. Looking at Groklaw once a week or so is an amusing insight into the hightech legal world in the USA.

Looks like someone at the DefCon Hacker Conference is not happy with the HackADay Web Site since it seems to be down right now (Or at least going really really slowly). This is one of the popular blogs in the technology world. They showed how someone had hacked one of the ATM machines in the conference area with the conference logo.

The MakeEZine has some photos of the Bloodhound WiFi gun, used for looking for unsecured 802.11 access points. Not sure how well it works, but the pictures look really really cool.

There is also cool story on CNN about some trial repair efforts on the Space Shuttle. The article is a good read, and describes the techniques they are trialing in case they ever need to fix a shuttle. The stuff sounds like the goop we used for the fuel tanks, only different... And I can certainly understand the issues they had with the stuff going everywhere....

I have just done my tax. It was fairly painless... I now have to write out my group certificate, and then send it in to the Tax Office. Fairly easy really. I thought things were going to be harder. If they had not reconciled between the bank account and the MYOB file it would have been a lot harder.

Interesting story in the Post Gazette about how the USA wants to get rid of leap seconds. Basically atomic clocks are too accurate for the earth, and we need to have leap seconds every 6-18 months to keep the earth aligned with the stars. The US wants to move towards leap hours every 5-600 years. Interesting concept... Make the problem someone elses.

On the travel front, 'Wired' has a story about how insecure the TV systems in modern hotels are, allowing guests with a few hi-tech toys to see other peoples bills and watch any station they like - even premium ones. Also, this blog has a list of the do's and dont's at Disneyland. Cool list.

I have just outsoruced a project. I got a quote that I liked, and now I just need to work on getting a package of information together for the programmer. I have a few hours thanks to the worlds time zones.

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There is an interesting article on the CSmonitor www site about American Airlines. And how they have asked their employees for ideas on how to save money. They have just made their first profit in 10 years... From the article, "And it was a group of pilots who realized that they could taxi just as safely with one engine as with two. That was instituted as policy has helped cut American's fuel consumption even as prices have continued to rise to record levels."

On an IT subject, there has been some talk about the Michael Lynn presentation on the Cisco routers... Many sites have been required by Cisco to take the information down. Cryptome.Org have got a copy of the presentation on their WWW site here

Tomorrow I am planning to get my slightly late end of financial year stuff done. This mostly involves doing a bank reconciliation, and then doing some MYOB reports. Oh, fun...

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I went to Richard's today to work on the plane... Rather a good time actually. Almost nothing went wrong and things seemed to work. We did not do any riveting, but did a whole lot of other things - putting bits together mainly.

We worked on the longerons today - they are the pieces of angle that go from one end of the plane to the other - and we thought that they were going to be much harder to work with. We needed to put a notch in one end and the Dremel tool worked really well on that. Without the dremel things would have been harder. We also put the side skins on as far forward as the firewall, and have the complete floor there apart from the small piece of floor under the dash.

Unfortunately we now need to disassemble a lot of what is done in the mid section, and then drill, dimple and deburr before reassembling and riveting... And by that time I think it will be time for richard to go away on Holidays.

This morning I had an email from the .AN domain. I had to do a search to find that this was in Netherlands Antilles, but this did not help me... It turns out, according to the CIA World Fact Book that this country is located in the Carribean. I will have to email them and see if I can help...

Overnight I got a quote in for one of the pieces of work - this quote was about 50% of the previous quote, so it looks like I might have a winner. The price seems fair, and I am just working out the exact scope of the project, and some architecture issues. Given the price I would guess that he would be able to quickly provide a solution.

I have just emailed the coder asking about some other things - better to get them included up front than wait until later. He might also agree to do those to get the work - who knows. The comments made by the guy seem to indicate he knows what he is doing at least.

Right now I need to log into a couple of databases to add some satellite tracking units to them. One of my clients has just started sending me data overnight, so I now have to tell the database system about these units. Shoud be easy. Just looked at the format of the message - very easy.

Anyway I had better leave and do that... More later

Today's meeting went well - and dispite my fears it did not go all that long. I guess the meeting took about an hour, although it was somewhat late starting. Hopefully I will get some work out of this one. The client seemed really really impressed with the proposal they were given.

I am not sure when I will hear from the client but there is probably three months worth of work for the first page followed by at least two years of work following that. Basically it could turn into a really good job.

Tomorrow I will probably be working on the plane - there is so much to be done. I think we will be working on attaching the middle side skins and also attaching the longerons. This will almost make it possible to sit in the seats. I will have to get some photos from Richard and post thme here.

Oh, and I almost forgot - on wednesday I saw one of the old Pacific Power vans... It was not in all that good condition - and the logo was partially removed, but it was definitely one of the old vehicles from probably the early 1990's. I grabbed a photo on my phone but I have not been able to get it off at the moment...

Right now I am just sitting in my car typing this entry - waiting for a meeting. I have arrived quite early, and the others are running a bit later... So here comes a new entry. I love being able to just sit somewhere and get wireless access... Thank you Vodafone - I am loving GPRS. It is a bit slow, but I cannot complain too much. And being flat rate it is even better

The weather is so fantastic - there is not a cloud in the sky, and a slight breeze. You really would think that it was a spring day instead of a winters day - so glorious, and it really is a pity that I have to be stuck inside.

I just checked my email and found that I have a quote for a couple of the jobs that I want to get done. Both prices are reasonable, but one of them is a bit more than I wanted to pay. Still, it will probably be worth it - I just need to wait a bit longer to see what other bids I get any...

Anway I had better get going - the others should be here soon...

I have a meeting this afternoon near the airport. I am not sure what time it will end - could be anywhere from 2:30pm to 7:30pm based on past experience. I will have to wait and see. I also have a person coming to pick up an IC a bit later today, but before that. Unfortunately the client does not have a programmer for this IC, and I needed to program it up, and is is coming over from Brookvale to pick it up. Thankfully they needed to pick up something from Camden anyway so they will pick it up on the way thought.

They were going to use a same day courier, but that would have been expensive for an item weighing about 2-3 grams.

SysInternals has an article on how to stop useless services under windows, showing how you can actually run windows and use the internet without any services running. Not that this will work in a business environment, or even in most home environments... But it will work.

My Web Site has been well and truely spidered... MSN has visited almost all the pages, and google is getting there. It has only visited 25% of MSN... Still, things are improving. And I am seeing increased hits already...

It is bed time, but I have a project I want to work on and I need to research things. I am really out of my depth with some of this stuff. I asked for a quote from a programmer, and he thought that it might take him up to three months for what I want him to do. I think that a good programmer should be able to do it in a week, and that is at the longest. Still, I would take at least a month.

Tomorrow I might have another look at this and see if I can get anywhere. I have some ideas now, and I need to work out what is realistic. Given how long I have been out of some of this space it might take me far too long to be of use - then again it might take me a lot less than I thought too...

I saw a link to a new beer ad. This one is not being shown yet, but is creating a real buzz aparently. The ad looks cute... and I do not even drink. It is the style of ad that would not look out of place for British Airways, or Qantas... That should give you an idea of the style. Basically I am impressed.

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I have just requested some quotes for some programming work that I need done. I love the global environment. I have worked out what I need by doing a few hours programming. And now that I know enough I have written a spec and I am now waiting on getting quotes in on the work.

I normally am surprised by the value for money when getting work done. Things that would normally take me 2-3 days work might cost me $50-100. That is what I call good value. I could not do the work for that. And certainly in Australia there would not be any chance that anyone could do it.

I got another phone call from a client today - one that I have not heard from for about 12 months... They are doing some work on a project next week and need something changed. I suspect that it might be a movie or something - I will try to find out tomorrow what the project is.

I have just got back from my meeting... It was good, although I needed to install some software after the meeting. That was a real pain. It seemed that everything went wrong trying to install things.

This included WebSharing not working when you right clicked on a folder. This I found was because the web server running was not windows default one. Argh. Then another one was since the program I was installing was listening on the same ports as another program. Also I installed the wrong version of that program - one that was sending data to the wrong location.

To top things off, Internet Explorer was bringing up errors when I tried to do certain things. I could not work out why. Firstly the wrong Web Server started up on a reboot. But the most important one was the IE got really confused, and all I needed to do was restart it... But I spent about 20 minutes trying to find the reason - and restarting IE was all I needed.

Right now I have to to modify one one the programs, and then email this to my client... Then he will be happy... But why is it that sometimes just everything goes wrong?

Anyway time to do some real work...

Yesterday I was out most of the day. Richard wanted to know if I wanted to build, and it seemed like a good idea. This was actually quite fun, just depending on what your definition of fun actually is. We worked on riveting the bottom back half of the fuselarge together which was a lot of work, but was impressive when it was done. After that we then attached the seat and baggage compartment to the rest of the fuselage, but not perminantly.

All in all the plane is getting there. There is SO much done already on this project. And there is so much left to do too.

I just saw an interesting article on converting applications from IE to Mozilla. This is a great overview of the technologies, and I will keep it in mind.

On the other side, microsoft has an article on how to serve images up with ASP.NET. This is something that is often needed, but can be harder than it looks.

But after reading this article, I found out that all I needed to do was have a page_load routine of
Page.Response.ContentType = "image\gif"
Page.Response.WriteFile("C:\temp\junk2.jpg")

Too simple.

This morning I have a meeting to go to... It starts at 8:00... This really is too early. Argh. And after that I am home to do some coding.

Today I am visiting Richard to work on the plane... A break from work, but it will be interspursed with work. Yesterday was a long day and this will be a good time to relax after it... Building is relaxing? Well, maybe.

Yesterday my mother dropped in her draft of her doctorate to her supervisors at Sydney Uni. Now they need to go through it before she then sends it to all the examiners. Then they take a little while to work out if there is anything wrong, and then she besomes a Doctor of Education.

In the SMH yesterday was a strange story... Someone in Sydney hijacked an IceCream Van. At Gun Point. In the middle of winter. After Dark. In Western Sydney, away from the ocean and things like that. I just find this rather strange. And rather strange is an understatement.

What would make you do such a thing? Why? Or am I missing something here?

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Just got home from the board meeting and the other meeting this morning... It has been a long day... Once again the meeting was at Darling Harbour which really is a beautiful setting.

I went to Darling Harbour for lunch and had Sushi. Basically I found the selection of food not all that great, and nothing was labeled... Also the price was not all that great for what I good. Basically I was not really all that impressed with it. Maybe if I went with someone who was able to explain what was on offer, and of there was a better selection then things would have been better

After lunch and before going back to the meeting it was good to walk around darling harbour's cockle bay. There is a Boat Show about to start so the bay was really filled with pleasure craft... If only I had a $5m bank ballance... But it was nice to look from on shore...

A couple of meetings today... Fun... Still, I might get some work out of the first one. I expect to be home really really late tonight - there is a lot to discuss, and I would rather the meeting be finished today rather than continue tomorrow.

Reading Engadget there is a story about extended range 802.11 antennas (Cantenas) being deemed illegal in Sacramento, California. Well, technically I think they are, at least in Australia, and probably in many parts of the world. The way that WiFi is licensed as a radio transmitter is that the unit puts out a fixed power, and is not modifiable. Once you modify it (by using an antenna that did not come with the unit), it technically looses it's approval, meaning you are liable to a $250K fine if you are a business, or a $50K fine for an individual.

When was the last time anyone got such a fine. I dont know that they ever have. The poilice ignore the radiocommunications laws. Well, if you can get people admitting to breaking the Telecommunications (Interceptions) Act on the front page of the SMH then there is something wrong. Particularly if they are the police. [See the publication of information about Wiretaps about the Cantabury Bankstown deal with Liverpool Council]

On the same vein, state law has outlawed radar detectors. These are devices that receive 10GHz and 24GHz radio energy, and give an alarm if they get any. They also give some of this off which is how they can be detected by the police. Anyway a Ham Radio operator was pulled over by the police for using one up near Newcastle. They fined him, and then tried to confiscate his detector, and then fined him when he would not hand it over.

He then contested the case, basically on constitutional grounds. You see, the state cannot make something illegal that is specifically made legal by the commonwealth. This person was specifically able to recieve 10 and 24GHz thanks to his license from the commonwealth. After he brought his license in, the judge asked the police for their license for their radar gun. Their radar was not licensed, and the case was thrown out. Oops.

I have been thinking of how I connect to a web service with Javascript. I did a whole lot of searching for this, and the results I found were somewhat confusing. And somewhat confusing is a bit of an understatement. Half the results referred to a microsoft plugin that is no longer on the Microsoft WWW site in the link given.

Then it struck me... There is an obvious answer - and I have done it before a few years back. I just write a Web page that actually generates JavaScript containing the data from the WebService. That allows me to do things under windows generating the code. And then I just run the code when it is loaded. So simple.

I expect that there will be a few issues when I try to implement this. But I think that this might actually work. But now I actually have got my head around things so that is good.

Tomorrow will be a busy one for me... I have to race off to a meeting with a client, and then quickly get to the city for a board meeting. I hope I will not be late for that meeting - a friend of mine wants me to do some programming... Not sure of the details of the first meeting are yet - But it had better be early since the board meeting starts at 11:00 or 11:30 or something. I had better ask about that one.

I have been doing a lot of searching and reading today. Trying to get a buggy piece of software to work - not my software, someone elses. My software does not have bugs :-) ... I eventually gave up after spending too much time on it. Things do not work properly, but... And some time just mulling things over in my mind. Often with me, I find an easy solution after some time. Or see an obvious solution. Why is it though that the obvious solutions often take some time to work out. Rather strange really.

I have just looked at the Sydney Windows Mobile Users Group WWW site, and they do not yet have up the information about my talk for August. I will be talking on GPS tracking and Display technologies. I gather it will be somewhere at North Ryde. Not sure where yet. I have a lot of work to do on my presentation - I will be starting off at the Olympics and moving forward in time from there.

Google Earth

A few weeks ago I noted I was working on some cool software. I can now tell what the software is. It is the software from KeyHole... More commonly known as Google Earth. I was originally shown this software by a computer graphics Guru back in Santa Barbara back in 2002 when I was over there for a conference. Bandwidth was more expensive back then, and video cards were slower.

The Google Earth software is a free download, and is really amazing. What I have done is intergrated the TeamTrack backend into it, allowing vehicles to be tracked in real time, and the ability to see what a person in a helicopter flying about 500 or 1000 feet above them would see. The resolution of the maps varies depending where you are. For much of Sydney you can work out if your car was in your driveway when the photos were taken.

This first photo is of my driving to Richard's house to work on the plane.

This one is of New Caledonia showing a vehicle, and the mountains. Notice the clouds on the photo. So, not all the maps are great.

And this is of multiple vehicles and their trails in canada.


Some more information, but not much more is available here

One of the problems with developing software is finding appropriate icons. And othe graphics for that matter. But I am more interested in icons for use on toolbars and the like. The occasional graphic really improved the 'Look and Feel' of an application. It makes it easier to use, particularly if the icons are appropriate.

When they are not appropriate you tend to get really messed up, and cannot work out how to drive the application. What makes things worse is that the icons not only need to look good, and be appropriate, but they also need to be self-consistant. That is they need to look like the other icons in the program. This is sometimes the hardest part of this. They also need to be the right size. I have just found some appropriate icons, but they are the wrong size - 20x20 pixels, rather than 32x32. This would make them out of place in the program too.

Looks as if the USA might be having some changes to make soon with Daylight Saving - they are looking at starting it earlier and finishing it later. This is a good idea, but the issue is going to be updating software that automatically corrects for daylight saving time. Should be an interesting experiment. The reason they are looking at doing this BTW is to save oil, and reduce energy consumption.

Strangely it does not look like anyone actually has any research that daylight saving will save energy. It is the argument that is being used, but there is actually no evidence of that right at this moment.

Yesterday I did some programming in the afternoon... Not that I got the work done that I wanted to, but I did do some programming. And I did learn a lot about one aspect of Windows VB.Net. There are still things I need to understand, but it is looking good. What is it they say on School Reports? 'More Work Required'.

Tomorrow I will be out of action for much of the day with a Board Meeting... This will once again be in the city thankfully, so I will not need to fly down to Albury. I have a few other meetings this week... Some are already organized, some are not organised yet.

I just saw a story on the bbc about how Tanzania is a mobile phone hotbed. In a country where only 10% have electricity, 97% have access to a mobile phone. That is quite amazing. People are using it as a business tool for economic development rather than a yuppie toy. It is really an interesting read.

I have been monitoring the crawling of my WWW site for the last day or two, monitoring where the search engines are up to now taht I fixed the Robots.TXT problem. Google is now starting to go through my pages, slowly. It has done a few of them. MSN is going a LOT faster, having indexed probably 75%. Strangely, the National Library must have done about 90% by now for their archival 'Pandora' project. And Yahoo has done a percentage of pages too. My pages are now appearing on MSN, and Google is slowly improving... This is all good news.

Yesterday was exhausting... Working on the plane. Much of the time I was underneath the bits we were working on, lying on my back, with my hands stretched up holding blocks of steel, whist wearing ear-muffs, and whilst richard was hammering on a pneumatic rivet gun making a real racket. I sure hope the neighbours were out...

We were working on the floor to the baggage compartment, and the seats, so I guess you want them fairly string, and I think they are. I am not sure how many rivets we put in, but it was probably 3-400. Not bad for a days work, but it was exhausting. And I was lying on my back most of the time. Still, it is fun, and there is a sense of acomplishment to getting the work done.

At the start we were having problems squeezing some rivets in. Not sure why, but they just would not go in right. Then once we started hitting them with the rivet gun most were perfect. It is not supposed to work that way.

On another subject, anyone who has heard any stories about stupid criminals must check this one out. The guy is arrested for paint sniffing. What evidence you ask? How about gold paint around his nose and mouth.

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I have just finished watching Spooks on the ABC. This is a drama based on MI5 I believe and it really was a cool show. I think the last episode I saw was 18 months ago, and I certainly like it as much now as I did then. The intrigue and outguessing, and the plays are really amazing - giving some idea of the exciting part of intelligence work.

I picked up a new car battery today at K-Mart. It actually fitted this time thanks to the fact that I ignored the book that said that my car should use a particular type of battery. I checked it when I was there again and I had followed the instructions. The terminals were too small. I got a battery the same size with the correct size terminals and it worked well.

I got some interesting programming done as a proof of concept today, but I have a lot more... Could be interesting, but could be a complete waste of time... We will see. Anyway it is bed time... I will probably be building tomorrow but I am not sure at the moment

Darryl

When I was growing up, for some reason I always wanted a turtle... My father had apparently promised me one at some stage, and I never did actually get one... Not sure why I wanted a turtle, but I guess I thought they just would have been a cute pet. I have not thought about turtles as pets for years... I suspect that the last time I even talked to my father about this was when I was about 7 or 8...

So, why am I bringing this up now, given than I am not 7 or 8 any more? Well, I was reading a www site and they referred to a shop online selling special need turtles. That is, these turtles are blind. Turtles are smart and being blind is not too hard for them once they adapt to their surroundings aparently.

I am not sure that I would want a blind turtle, but the idea certainly did intrigue me. I never thought about them having problems like that. And I think that if I ever do get a turtle though it will be a normally sighted version.

I have some programming to do today... Speedup's in my TeamTrack software mainly... And make it more 'threaded'. I have some ideas on how to do this, but some learning might be involved too... We will need to see how it goes...

I saw a friend today. He has just got back from Greece, and made the mistake to use GPRS whilst roaming over there for on his SIM card for internet access... He forgot to check the price before he used this though. He was over there for three weeks, and was using it for his business. This ended up costing him about $3000. He was not impressed at all.

I will not say much on this topic - but today is six months since I split up with my ex-fiance. The last six months have not been easy, but I would like to thank all my friends for their support during this time. I have learned a lot this last year, both about myself and about relationships.

Today I had some car problems when I tried to go out - the battery in my car died. It has been going for a week or so, and is about three years old - the same age as my car. I charged the battery with a power supply so I could go out - and this worked really well. I went to K-Mart to buy a new battery - which was fine - except that the battery terminals were the wrong size. I will return it tomorrow and get a new one. With some luck this one will actually fit the car.

I have not heard from Richard yet - I am assuming that I am building on the weekend... I just have not had that confirmed yet. I expect that we will have a whole lot of the rear end of the fuselage put together Should be lots of fun...

In the strange world of science comes a move to re-engineer the periodic table of elements. You can see what some people want to change it to
check this out which looks cool as a poster but really is not as useful as the table as we know it. Not that I need to use the table at all these days, but if I did then the clasic version would be the one.

On that subject, DesignObserver has an interesting representation of the table which is shown below.


Now that USB drives are so popular, the combobulate site has a whole lot of programs listed that can be run from a memory drive without installing. Everything from a word processor to graphics programs and tons of utilities... Stuff that you really need when you need it.

And finally, James Doohan who played Scotty in Star Trek has died. Not much that can be said apart from saying that he will be missed by all I would guess.

Google has released a new product for the anniversary of the first landing on the moon, something which I can assure you I was not around to see. The maps are not bad, but you need to zoom in on the moon and see what you can see when you zoom in. It is a real must to zoom in...

I have had issues with my Web Site not being indexed by Google. And I could not work out what was happening. It just was not being indexed. Google was visiting the main page and nothing more. I could not work out what was happening... Well, today I started searching what was going on. And I found it.

There is a file that is used by WWW sites say what gets indexed and what does not. And I have two sites... www.radio-active.net.au and radio-active.net.au. Files get put onto the 2nd of these, and automatically gets copied to the www version. So what I do is tell sites like google not to index my normal site, but I want them to index the www version.

What has happened at some time is that the www version got the robots.txt file copied to it by accident, and that caused the everything never to get indexed. Now that I have fixed this problem Google should index the site in the next few days...

Last night I had a phone call from a friend. He asked if I could give a talk at a local PocketPC users group in a few weeks time. No Problem. They have a subject, and I just need to work out how to say what I want to say. It should not be too hard - I have some ideas. Basically I want to make things interesting, and have a natural progression to them.

It has been a few months since I have needed to do a serious presentation so this will be good for me. I do enjoy speaking like that - and even making the presentations. It might also be a good PR exercise. We will see how things pan out there.

I have had some bugs in Canada, but I am working through them. Generally things have worked well. I need to finish off another couple of projects soon too... One is just a proof of concept thing, and the other is a re-write of an old program. The first needs some cleaning up, and the 2nd just needs an email sent, and then some small stuff done.

I have been battleing software this morning - trying to extract an image out of an email message. After some work I have managed to do this. I am just surprised it took so long for me to do. I did no realise how horribly complex normal email messages are. I just hope that they do not get much more complex over the next 30 years.

John C. Dvorak from PC-Mag has an article describing how he feels that the Creative Commons license is, to be frank, bloody stupid as a concept. I think I follow his view on Copyright. He did make the comment that copyright in the USA is too long at 50 years after the author died - and mused that it was stupid that there were troubles republishing a book from 1930 with the photo of a Picaso from 1924.

In other tech news, there are more rumours of an iPod with Video coming out in September. Cute idea but I think battery life will be somewhat limited. The driver for this seems to be the iTunes store selling video clips. I am not convinced.

I have to wonder about some people. this guy has produced his own laptop from an old Acorn computer. That takes serious - well, I am not sure what. It is just serious something.


On the vehicle tracking side, comes news in the USA that a judge has decided that requiring GM to use their luxury vehicle recovery system to spy on people under court order is illegal. They were ordered by the FBI to snoop on the audio inside the car for a criminal case. The case that this was used for has not been released, but the judge was not happy.

And here is something that should not be possible... It shows how to run Windows 2000 on a PC with 32 MBytes RAM, and still have 10 mBytes left over. If only XP could do similar things. I have 1 GByte on my laptop and I still have memory issues...

Not sure what I will be doing today... I have some programming I have to do... and there are some other things I need to get done this week. I just need to decide on what gets done each day.

I have just sent code to Canada. Compiled up and everything. It seems to work, and I hope by morning to know what they think. We will just have to wait and see. My main client over there is away for the week, and I know he will be really happy when he is back.

On a different subject, now that I know what the Harry Potter book says I am about to read it again. I did enjoy it a lot, so I will go though it again. I think I will enjoy it more the second time, and understand a lot more of it. Maybe I should just start at book 1, taking notes. That might tell me even more.

Anyway, Harry Potter is calling me...

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Sydney on a 747 at Night. By Wendy Matthews I think.

You can tell my financial institution is not really set up for business accounts. They do them well, but they have very few of them. They do not charge much either. I bank with Power Credit Union, which used to be the on-site credit union when I was working for Pacific Power. These days they are more of a virtual credit union with few offices, but are based at paramatta.

Anyway, I got a junk main from them today... "Dear Networks Radioactive Pty Ltd" the letter started. It is the first time I have ever seen someone address a compant like that... Given that very few businesses use the credit union I think I would rather them make minor mistakes like this than try to fix things - cheaper that wall all around I would guess.

I must admit I did have some issues with the name on my Credit Card when I first got it for the business, but that was an easy fix.

This afternoon I have been doing some programming, and a quote. To do the quote the client needed some screenshots of what I would be doing, which meant I needed to design and partially implement things. Still, I only needed to implement about 10 minutes of things, and I am sure the client will want it anyway.

And later I need to finish off the programming I was working on earlier today for Canada and deliver it. My client was really happy with the screendumps I sent earlier, and I would guess they will be blown away with what I am proposing when they get to use it. I have been blown away... So I guess they will be too

I have been busy with a meeting this morning, and early afternoon. A good meeting, but as normal everyone was late. This is what I expected, but the meeting went well. It was great to catch up with the people, since I had not seen some of them for some time.

I found this quite cute. It is a osciliscope based clock from a euorpean ham. I think that the project looks quite cool in a retro way.


Case modifications are generally quite boring. This one looks a bit more interesting. A guy has used CNC machining and advanced metalworking techniques to create a computer case that looks great and is highly individual. This is not something that I would want to do myself, but looks cool.
casemod

I finished the book - well, I finished it last night just before midnight. And there was a lot of it to read. I am glad I read it. In the end the story is left a bit up in the air with trouble and tumlt both present and ahead. We, the reader is left wondering where the story goes from here... Although there are some hints...

Hints is not the right word. It is more some really obvious clues... I cannot say what they are without giving away the story, but lets just say that some of the things that Harry must do in the next story are really really obvious.

In this book, Rowling has been using the pensive a lot to explain things. Interesting plot vehicle. It is a great way of telling the history about things without needing to use any of the normal 'muggle' techniques...

The death scene... Well... It was not what I expected really. And it did make sense... I saw why Rowling needed to write it, although I suspect I will not see the full reasoning until the final book comes out. I think that the final book will be bigger than this one. I can almost see it being published in two halves given that she needs to tie together so many story lines, and presumably explain everything.

Anyway I cannot wait for the final book...

I am up to page 484 in The Book... It is getting interesting, and more complex as it goes on. Personally I think there is too much detail in the thing - the whole series. Thankfully this book is shorter than the last one.

My programming is going well for canada. It has taken longer than I expected, and the people over there are not being helpful in me testing things. I am just passively listening to some vehicles and displaying data based on this information. So I cannot complain too much. Besides which it is now sometime in the early hours of the morning there and I cannot really expect them to be doing all that much work can I.

The idea behind the software is to warn when people have been at a job site longer than normal, allowing a control room to check up on them. Quite simple really. But really really powerful.

Anyway Harry Potter is calling me back...

Every now and then I get a chance to read a few more pages of Harry Potter. And I must say that I am enjoying the book. Perhaps too much actually. I do tend to like my books... and I am just taking my time with this one. Not going too fast or too slow with the reading - Just the right speed.

My software for canada is going well, although the person I need to speak to is not in the office at the moment since it is the very early hours of monday morning. I will get to speak to them tomorrow when I get up I guess... Or maybe even late tonight, although that is more doubtful as they are only six hours ahead at this time of year, meaning that they would need to get in at 6am for me to do anything at midnight.

Also, I have somehow managed to get a bruise on my left hand... Not sure how I got it. It is on the top of the hand too, and I have no idea what I have done to myself. Very strange indeed.

This does not give any of the story away... I was reading some over lunch. 'Golpalott's Third Law... States that the antidote for a blended poison will be equal to more than the sum of the antidotes for each of the seperate poisons.

I do so love this... Drawing paralells between alchemy and physics. I cannot remember what Newton's third law is, but I am sure that it was what J.K. Rowling was referring to. Then again there might be some chemistry thing that I have long forgotten that is closer. Who knows. I am just waiting for the book 'The science of Harry Potter' to come out.

And so we are clear, I am not literally waiting for it... I am just expectig it to come out sometime soon. I guess it just has to.

Anyway I had better get more work done. I am doing some programming for Canada. This is fun, although I need to emulate an existing product... More soon.

Last night on cable was a show - 100 songs in 100 years cinema. This show was remarkably good. You can read the list on the AFI web site. The show was well worth watching, and I knew most of the songs. I did not know all of them - but I did agree with most of them being in the top 100. At some stage I will look at the list they used to work out the top 100.

On the legal front, the SCO vs IBM has suffered a setback thankfully with a memo being unsealed showing that SCO knew that there were no copyright infringements in Linux. This is not surprising.

And LinuxDevices jas a story about a US$99 device with WiFi built in running linux in a PDA form factor. The device is designed as a PDA type thing, but also has InstantMessenger built in. So cool...

I have now read 341 pages of the Harry Potter book - up to the start of Chapter 18.

If readers want a the adverts removed from their copy of MSN please email me... I will give you a patched version of the sofwtare in return. It is good with MSN without all the advertising...

One blog I read has a really strange Car modification doing body work. It is almost pathetic. You can see it here. It involves using cardboard to make a normal car look something like a WRX. But not much like it.

In other news, someone has managed to scan vinyl records on a computer and get audio out. You can read more here. Actually it does not work very well, since you need a high resolution of scanning to get good results and any dust will cause major problems.

Harry Potter is going well. 250 pages read. I will probably get 300 read by the time I go to sleep. Just depending how addicted I am to the story. I am enjoying the story, and it is good seeing Harry and company grow up through their school life.

Some people will hate me for saying this... But J.K. Rowling seems to be slightly controlling with her writing. The job of a proof reader is to make sure that things are easy to read and make sense. Take this following example from the beginning of Chapter 2 of the new Harry Potter book.

'An immense chimney, relic of a disused mill, reared up, shadowy and ominous'

The problem is that there is a word missing here, that makes this sound a LOT better.

'An immense chimney, a relic of a disused mill, reared up, shadowy and ominous'

That single letter and the space makes the whole thing a whole lot more readable. And this is the type of thing that a competent proof reader should have picked up. I know that they do not pick up everything, but from what I have heard I would guess that very little proof reading was done.

Right now I am up to page 69, a little over 10% of the way though. I do not know how much I will read today. I will have to see, but I certainly have some other things to do. I did read a chapter last night before going to bed, and then I woke up early so I am a bit tired today - maybe to the point of needing an afternoon nap.

Update: 4:30...

I how now read just over 1/3rd of the book... 207 pages...

I have just got home.... From my brother's birthday party, and from building today. Firstly, I drove to Richard's... And we worked on a couple of things - firstly the firewall. That was a real real pain. The edges were sharp, and none of the rivets were going in straight. I lost count of the number of Rivets that we needed to drill out... It was bad. Eventually we got it basically done...

Then after lunch we started assembling the back of the fuselage. This is basically a big jigsaw puzzle, with pieces that are often tight fits... and they need to be fitted in the right order or things will not work. If you put things in the wrong order then things are a pain since you need to uninstall stuff.

We did not actually install any rivets into the fuselage... Just connecting the parts together. During the week richard will need to spend some time straightening things at the back end. Just minor things to improve the look of the plane. We then did some work on the floor... And put in about 40 rivets there. They all went in well. And very quickly. I guess next weekend we will get a lot of work done on assembling things.

Then I went to Castle Towers to pick up a copy of the new Harry Potter book, and a present for my brother. I eventually got a copy of a book on the history of the Black Box Fligt Recorder. Looks like a really interesting book. Then I drove to my brothers place for his party.

The party was good... Meeting people I have not seen probably since the party last year. Duncan also mentioned that he had finished reading the Harry Potter book at 3:30PM... Not bad for a book released at 9:01am today.

Photo of the Day

Music:

Some more interesting links. Firtsly, ReadyMadeMag has an article on building a green sofa outside. Drew Carey has a billiard table outside... This creates a beautiful green growing sofa. Looks great, but needs lots of watering.


Controlling things on the net has always been something to do as long as the internet has existed. Everything from internet controlled coke machines to toasters have existed. Now from ControlYourJunk comes an Internet Controlled Train Set...

And lastly, here is a fashion statement - a dress made out of a fabric made of old audiocassettes. You can see the picture on PopGadget. Not sure how usable it is as a fabric... I can assure all readers I will neither be making fabric this way, nor wearing anything made from it :-)

You could say I ma a bit tired right now. This is being written at 7:30AM local time, and although I am at home in Sydney, I have not been working here much of the day. Well, I have physically. But I have been doing work in Canada today. That was all electronic of course, I did not really leave home.

Remote desktop allowed me to do everything remotely, as if I was sitting at the computer. About the only thing that I did not do was to see the other people in the office. But MSN allowed me to fix that...

It was really cool getting the things I needed working over there - creating a great showcase of my technology. I will post more details in the next few days, but it really is really cool.

With one of the servers here in Oz I am able to Copy/Past files with RemoteDesktop. For some reason with Canada I am unable to do that. It is a pain to then move files around. So I needed to move files through my WWW server and then onto the Canadian server, and then around on the canadian server. Copy and Past would have been so much easier. I will have to look later and work out what is happening, and why it is not working.

I learned an important lesson today... Most PC's do not have 14759 COM ports. Yes. They normally have 0 -> 2 depending on the type of computer. I had a bug in some code, and was trying to open COM14579: The computer was in Canada and they do not even have that many ports on their servers over there.... .

I just heard that Robert Moog has a brain Tumor, according to http://www.caringbridge.com/cb/inputSiteName.do?method=search&siteName=bobmoog>This site. He invented the Synthesiser.

If you are a Harry Potter fan, you MUST check out THE GUARDIAN newspaper in the UK. They are running a competition to get people to write a 'Death Scene' for Dumbledore in the style of other writers. Ones that they have got include Lemony Snicket, George Orwell, Scooby Doo, Douglas Adams, John Le Carre, The Sun, Dr Seuss and even as version of the Guardian's cricket over by over live commentary . Most are actually amazingly good. Well worth a visit. You would not believe how much I laughed at that one.

The Internet Archive has available for download a copy of the movie 'Plan 9 From Outer Space' from way back in 1958. This is a cult bad movie. By bad I mean production and story and props. It is actually quite watchable. I do not think it deserves the title of 'The worst movie ever made'. That belongs to Chicken Park.

Oh, tomorrow I will be building, during the day, and then visiting my brothers for dinner for his birthday...

Here are some interesting links - at least to me. Firtsly, here is a Turing Machine component made out of lego. Cute, but not really practical. SuperParma has done a review of all the stores selling chicken parmagiana in Melbourne pubs and clubs - about 200 of them. Complete with pictures.

As for an interesting use of technology, This Site in Russia has a keyboard based on intelligent buttons. Under each button is a small OLED screen, similar to a small laptop screen, that is programmed according to the function of the key. Sure, it is likely to be really expensive, but sometimes that is OK, such as in a power station control room or something...


And lastly, a company has started selling computers in old radios. I think this looks so cute - integrating old and new technology.



BlogCadre has a comment on 'weighing' the internet, or using statistics to work out how many users there are on the internet. And WHDH in the USA has an article on making your own Snow Making machine.

There is a review for the horror movie 'House of Wax' on the SMH. This review is not exactly glowing of the movie, and makes the following comment to the Paris Hilton appearance in the movie.

"House of Wax is trashy, definitely, but horror fans will find the second half chillier, nastier and more sinister than the average horror flick. The only pleasure for anyone else dragged along will be the scene in which Paige, aka Paris, gets it."



I think this is so cool. This is a set of taps out of the German company Hansa that I saw on BoingBoing. The colour of the lights change as the temperature of the water changes. Totally useless, to be sure, but so cute. Now, in the morning in the middle of winter you can see how cold the water really is.



Sometimes it is useful to FTP files... And automating this would be interesting. I found a link to a program to allow easy FTPing

I have just spent about a half an hour looking for a bug - a strange one. Basically I had a hierarchy of information, and strange things were happening when I was editing an entry. Other entries would be corrupted. And I could not work it out. It did not make sense. Until I realised that the parent in the hierarchy was being updated instead of the actual item. Easy fix once I worked out what the problem was, but it took a lot of time to work out the issue.

I don't know about you but I hate the advertising in many programs - MSN Messenger is great but the advertising is a real pain. If you have VisualStudio.Net (worth only $1000 or so as an upgrade) you can edit MSN to remove this advertising according to this site. I think this is so cool I will update it soon.

InVentGeek has how to build a video projector. Yeah, sure. Not with the way that they show. They only build a case for an overhead projector, and place an overhead LCD onto it, and they have never worked well. Basically I would not bother with this design.

Music:

Elton John with Tiny Dancer on Random Play

Since my last post I got an email from a client in the South Pacific, asking if I would be interested and available to come to visit at some stage. Um, Well, I thought about that for two or three seconds. What do you think. The chance to visit a south pacific paradise in the middle of winter... You tell me.

I just need to fit this in with other work - and that might be an issue. But I will find a way to do it no matter what. I am looking forward to finding some time to spend on the beach sunbaking and swimming too. Lots of fun.

One of the Blogs contained a link to a think called 'The Argument Chair'. This chair is made from leather boxing gloves, and does not actually look uncomfortable. The chair looks like an interesting piece of industrial design.

I have had a really really busy day. It has been good but it has been busy. I have been working on the code that I got outsoruced. What I did was outsource some of the grunt work to get the software to a professional state. By professional, I mean running as a service in the backgound so that it just works when the computer restarts.

This is how things should be of course, but things are often not that easy. Services can be a pain to deal with since they do not have the user interface to report stuff. So what I now have is two versions of everything - one copy that I can use as a service, and another that is able to run interactively for testing.

Now I need to now update all the documentation. But thankfully how things have been updated the amount of instructions required have been significantly reduced. Anyway that is tomorrow's task.

SlashDot has a link to an Article on building 19" rack servers from scratch. I will look at this a little later since it sounds so cool. Anyway, I have a bug to fix...Just one more bug...

Last night when I was speaking to my brother he let me know that one of his mates got another interview with Google. So far he has had a couple of hour long interviews. This interview will be four hours... There is a catch - They want him to fly to the USA for the interview. He will be leaving here on a wednesday, arriving there 'the same day', and then resting. Then the next day he will be having the interview in the morning, and flying home that evening.

That is right, he will be in the USA for one night. I would expect that he will be really really exhausted at the end of it. They must be serious though...

Also last night I had an interesting dream - which included a lifesize camoflage jigsaw puzzle. And the people who were putting it together were also wearing camoflage... And it got me thinking... It would be so cool to make a jigsaw like this in real life...

Think about it... All the pieces the same shape and size, and hexagonal, with the hexagonal camoflage on the top. And no picture just to make things a bit harder. And the real icing on the cake, about 100 extra pieces, of which some actually fit together just to add that extra challenge.

I have not done a jigsaw for years... But this sounds like an interesting challenge...

Today I am looking at all the code that came in last night, testing it and putting it into production. Things are working really well. Some of this is playing with satellites which is really really cool.

I have just got home from dinner with my brother. I tried to convince him that Chicken Park but for some reason he would not believe me. Apart from that, it went well, and he showed me the new pictures at his place. He now has some quite nice ones on the walls.

I have given him a card, and the present will come on saturday evening when he is having a bigger party [ and by which time I will have actually found him a present]

The trip was also a good chance to test the GPS tracker modifications out. It is hard to test the modifications, and totally verify that they worked but they seemed to. All the data seems to be there which is the important thing. What is it the doctors say? Something like 'Above all else, DO NO HARM'. Well, the modifications that I did seem to fit into this category.

Things are looking good. I now need to do a few more tests just to make sure, but it looks good. Anyway I have just got some outsourced software in, and I have better have a look at that...

Cruising through the normal WWW sites I found a link to this cute article on NetworkWorld that briefly mentions some of the technology used in amusement park rides, and is more on how a journalist can get himself into an amusement park for free to ride one cool ride.

On MSNBC is an article about some wonderful new technology that is soon to make mobile phones and wireless LAN's work at ranges siginifcantly longer than possible at the moment. It sounds a lot like another 'spread spectrum' technique to me... And the arguments are not making sense.

They claim that the base station will be worth about $350K, and the chips are about $6. The problem is that the base station and the chips are effectively the same technology. Maybe not exactly, but close enough. Needless to say I am highly skeptical.

I have been hit with the French change of the decimal point again... They use the comma as a decimal point... And my software does not like this. The mod in VB.NET is
System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = New
System.Globalization.CultureInfo("en-US")

Fairly simple really...

I found a cute article on building a version of Tron here. Actually I have a couple of friends who worked on the movie - and I dont thinking that either knew that the other had worked on it until I told them. One worked on sound, and one on pictures.

And from the 'Strange But True' file in the SMH comes this one - a group of women in france are being sued by the local bus company for organizing a car pool. What could be more stupid than that?

I have more programming on today, and then I am seeing my brother this evening for his birthday.

I need to learn to spell... Or type. I have been doing some programming - and when programming you commonly want to send magic numbers indicating certain events. For instance to verify that something is happened. Car Stopped might be 1. Car going might be 2. Car exceeding the speed limit might be 3. That is a simple case...

A more complex one is using HEX characters, I was using 0xDEADBEEF... The problem is that I typed it in one place as DEAFBEED... I just need to learn to type...

I have just tried to watch Chicken Park which is a complete disaster of a movie. IMDB gave it about 2/10. I think that this score was about right, I could only stand watching it for about 10 minutes. That was enough. Any more would have... It was not watchable. The cover looked like a spoof of Jurassic Park. It turned out to be horrible. Cheaply made... Save your money. Do not bother...

Sometimes I am an idiot... Well, really, you do not all need to agree with me there. But sometimes I am. I admit this freely. And you will see why in a minute.

I have just been doing some mods to the code in my tracker. The reason for the mods are not import - the main thing is that I was making some changes, and trying to get them to work. Well, I had a few issues - and probably wasted about 30 minutes on one particular problem. This was something that I solved pretty quickly once I realised.

I had changed the code to set the Access Point on the GPRS network. And I had it set up for Telstra, and I was using an Optus SIM card. This was a stupid mistake to make, but it is one that I will make again, I am sure of that. Unfortunately.

I was looking a bit earlier at a tracking unit and the thing did not line up with a map. I was getting rather concerned. Things were looking really really stupid. Then I remembered - about a year back a client pointed out that one small map was out... It has taken a year for someone to go back to this small area to find the same problem.

Photo of the Day

Music:

Overnight I got an email from a friend about a board meeting... The email said "Reminder that the DCC board meeting will be on Thursday". What he meant was on Thursday at the end of september. (Un)Fortunately it does not mean I will be flying to the USA this week... Oh, well. I guess I have more time to save up for a few days in Disneyland.

I have a whole lot of programming to be done today. I want to get a few projects completed, and I need to outsource some more work. I have two programs right now that need to be outsourced for someone else to optimize and clean up. Having someone else look at your code certainly improved things. I learn a lot from having someone else look at it, and I find my programming improved because of it.

I should write some documentation, but I am not sure how successful I will be. Maybe I should also outsource that. It might work better. Anyway I should get some breakfast - and then start some serious work...

Photo of the Day

Music:

I really was exhausted. We did a LOT of work on the plane in the last couple of days, and I really probably got slighly de-hydrated too.

Let me start - friday we started at about 9AM by final preparations for all the parts. This included finding some parts, cleaning labels off, engraving labels as required, dimpling, deburring. Etc. Etc. This ended up taking most of the day. By that I mean it took until about 5:30PM or so.

Then we filled up the trailer and the car with parts and went to prepare the parts to be painted. This involved soaking the parts all in acid to begin with. I had done this twice before and had thought about things so I wore some huge gum-boots. I was also wearing dark disposable overalls, and a face shield at various times. I may even have been wearing a breathing mask...

I think it was richar's sister who commented that I looked like Darth Vader. Well, at least my feet stayed dry. The preparing the aluminium started about 7pm. On a night in the middle of winter. The first part involved scrubbing the parts with the acid, then putting them all up on a line. And washing them down. Which is why I was wearing gumboots.

That part was done in the garage, and was not too bad. Part two needed another line to put the parts on... So we went out the back, and soacked each part for about 2-3 minutes in Alodine, and then put the parts on the clotes line and washed them down. This was not too bad, apart from a very slight rain at times. Hey, my facemask kept the rain off me, and the hood from the overalls kept me warm.

We finished alodining just before 11pm, and left about 11:20 after cleaning up.

Saturday was not a day we were expecting to paint, but the weather was good, and expected to get bad so richard was free for the day. About 10AM we headed out to pick up the parts on the way to a friend of Richards where we could spray paint; although a short diversion was needed to visit Bunnings for some more gloves and other stuff.

Then we got set up and grabbed some lunch before starting the painting. We must have done close to 3 1/2 hours of continuous painting. Well, it seemed like that... Richard was the one doing most of the spraying, and I know he had one break... I was mostly just waiting for him to finish with things, acting as an assistant. Spray, Spray, Spray. We did about 2-3 liters of paint I think which is a reasonable amount when most of the parts are a bit fiddly, and need effort.

I think that we went really well doing all the parts in that time period. I know what I will be doing for the next few weekends - Assembling a plane. Richard wants to get all the parts he has put together in the next five weeks and I want to do all I can to help him.

No photos, but I will see if I can find one from the last expedition to post here...

Today we finished painting the fuselage, which was a great thing to get out of the way. There was a huge amount of work done on the plane. Friday was adding primer to the parts, and today it was undercoat.

The paint we were using is both good and bad. We needed to use breathing gear to use it, but the good part is that when you spray it, the paint dries really really quickly. Painting like that last bit is great - what more could you want? You can paint parts, and then just stack them after a few minutes if you have run out of room.

The rain during the day did not help, but there was not much of it thankfully. It got some parts wet, but they were quickly dried.

All in all it was a good couple of days...

Some links...

Fristly, the LA Times has a Story on Lost property at LAX. Interesting read.

Next. WindowsDevCenter has an article on how to get a bluetooth handset to work with Windows. And another site has an article on how to use gMail as an outgoing SMTP server.

But coolest of all is this project to turn an old style typewriter into a computer keyboard.


GMail ast SMTP

I am exhausted... I have just had a shower after spending about 14 hours today working on the plane. Firstly preparing parts for undercoating, and now undercoating.

This undercoating needed to be done outside, and we finished it about 11:20 pm, although there was some light rain from about 8:30 or so. The rain did not even cause us any problems since we needed to wash all the parts off with water anyway.

I will post more tomorrow...

The London bombings are horrible of course. Thing thing that has brought some of this home is that unlike Bali and New York is that I have been to the places that the bombs went off.

When I was in London in September, I was staying on Russel Square in a hotel there. Russell Square underground station was just around the corner from the hotel. Tavistock Square road went past the hotel, and is about 20m away from the entrance to the Russell Square Tube Station.

And Kings Cross Station is only a short walk from there. I used the tube between there and Russell Square a number of times, and when I went to Boston, UK for the funeral I went from Kings Cross Station.

What has been interesting has been the number of photos taken by phones by people, creating an instant record of the situation. The UK is also an interesting place since there are a huge number of closed circuit TV cameras meaning that I am sure that there will be a huge amount of evidance recorded to catch the people who did this.

I will be working on the plane tomorrow - I am not sure that building is the right word. Richard and I will be doing preparation work for painting sometime over the weekend. It will not be fun, but it must be done. The fun things are what happens after that.

This is Really Cool... AndreaPlanet has produced a gigapixel image of Van Gogh's Starry Night. It is actually a photo-mosaic of 210,000 individual photos, and you can zoom in on them on the website above. You actually have to wait for the images to download, but it is really cool.

And something else... A guy has built a heater for his pool using a BBQ. Rather a cute idea I think... I just love it. It is probably a bit expensive to run 24x7 but is nice for special occasions. Nice idea.

There was a report in the paper today saying that this weekend is actually the middle of winter, statistically. There is about a two week delay after the solstice until things start warming up again.

I have just done a backup of my programming directories. This is something that is really important since I do not want to loose work if something happens. Anyway, I just Zipped the lot, and I found that I have over 1 GByte of stuff. Of coursem there was about 200 MBytes of dotNet runtime libraries (total) as well as stuff I did not write.

Still, I think the 1 GByte is impressive in it's own right. There is a lot of work in there, and I will be placing all of it onto CD... With copies placed in a couple of off-site locations... Just in case something happens...

This has got to be one of the more interesting used of Satellite technology. A company has Created a carpet that is embedded with satellite photos.



There is an interesting article on EarthWeb about the DecNet protocol. When I was at uni I had some interesting discussions with people about DecNet. Not a bad protcol, and it is quite powerful. Just that the world decided TCP was the way to go.

This is rather cool. A guy in the USA has developed a little LCD to show GPS data. Quite simple, but cute none the less. I have programmed a similar chip to display my friends live locations on a GPS receiever. This is the AntiTracker on my WWW site, in the APRS area.

In the strange but true category, comes thia LA Times article on how bird watchers around the USA are being harassed because they are doing things that normal people do not do. Like stare at buildings and the like through camera. I just find this a bit strange since I would have though that they would have been the most placid group of people on the planet.

Tonight I watched 'Airport 75' which I recorded from last night on Foxtel. It was interesting to see how things have changed in the last 30 years or so, and to pick up all the strange things that were shown in the film.

The movie started in Dulles Airport in Washington DC. This is an airport I have been to a couple of times, and looked familiar. Dulles was featured in Diehard II. Anyway it was obvious that this was from before they built the other terminals in the middle of the field since the carts for transporting people delivered them to planes, not to the other terminal.

The pilot of a light plane identified himself as 727Z, whereas his tail number was something like N7280Y... In other words the two did not line up at all. Something so obvious. Another thing was that the stewardess needed to use the autopilot a few times, and had never seen it before. She needed instructions, which pointed out that she needed to move a lever to the manual position. The problem was that neither of the two levers were marked with Manual.

Another issue was that a pilot got straight into a light plane and started the propellar without doing any checks, or waiting for his friends to get out of the way. I would have been hard pressed to start a car in the time that he started his plane...

Not a bad movie, but a few technical issues....


Airport 75

Dulles Start

Photo of the Day

Music:

I have been trying to get GPRS working somewhere in the South Pacific... The results are about what I would expect for a monopoly telco. Unfortunately that is. Nothing would surprise me. We could not get the tracker to work, so we asked if ports are blocked. And they said the ports had been unblocked for a few months.

Then I grab some screendumps from here in Oz, and send them to my contact who sends them through... And they check things. No, those ports are blocked. We though you were someone else. You need to have those ports specifically unblocked. Eh. Why would you do that for? Oh... Colonial monopoly carrier. The customer does not have any rights to do anything unless we say it is OK. Oh, I forgot.

Sometimes I just find dealing with such organisations so demoralizing. There is no reason for things to be like that - they just cause those of us that have to do things out of the ordanary lots of pain and suffering - as one of my friends loves to say.

I bought the new Natalie Imbrulia album yesterday. It was quite good. I have only listened to it once, but it will definitely be on the list of things to listen to a few times before being exiled to the depths of Random Play.

Photo of the Day

Music:

I don't think I mentioned this yesterday, but I got a great Optus bill for some mobiles - It was only for about $90 for a month, for about 3 or 4 SIM cards, so it was not bad. But the problem was that it was something like 96 pages long. Not a bad monthly bill.

Most of the entries (85 pages or so) were for when my server died and a tracking unit was trying to connect to it once a minute, incuring a $0.0055 cost. I will take a bill of it later... Looks amazing

I slept really well last night... I think I really needed it for some reason. Not sure why... It looks as if I will be building Friday and probably saturday. Basically it will be a painting exercise. Should be really fun.

I saw This article in the SMH about a poor 5 year old who got left in a Cab by her parents after they had got back from a trip. She was asleep in the back, and they forgot about her. Oops.

Also on the 'Oops' department comes this story in the UK where they were building a tunnel over a railway line. Which is fine, until part of it collapsed. The tunnel is being built so that they can build a carpark over it for a new supermarket.

And a friend forwarded me his Web Diary page on the SMH... Really an interesting read.

I promised to add some photos that I took earlier. These are from my trip to Bathurst today. I am still getting over the trip - I really loved it so much,

These first two photos are from the air over the Blue Mountains. They are of the area near Blackheath and the Hydro Magestic. It is a beautiful area from the ground or from the air.





This photo is of Bathurst, just near the airport.



And this is of Camden.



I am still glowing so much about spending about 30 minutes or so at the controls. I spent most of my time just looking at the verticle speed indicator, the compass, and more important the artificial horizon. Basically I was flying by instruments rather than visuals.

I could get used to flying, but I really do not trust myself. I cannot be sure that I will do the right things at the right time. That is my main concern. I also do not like turbulance, but I could get used to it. As you might guess I had a great time.

I have just got home after being out... And it was fun. Just after lunch I was asked if I wanted to go flying... Yeah, sure. Why not. So we went...

We left Bankstown at aboyt 2:30 flying over Katoomba, over to Bathurst, doing a 'Touch and Go', followed by flying to Camden and doing the same, and followed by flying back to Bankstown.

Just after we had got out of Bathurst, Richard told me 'Take the controls, I want to look at the map' and made me fly most of the way to Camden. It was scary at first, but I am now brimming from ear to ear. Cool really. I am not sure I want to get a pilots license. But I am certainly more confident than I was.

I will post some more photos soon... Right now I have some things I need to do...

The LA Times has an interesting editorial on how AOL was the savior of the 'Live 8' concerts for many people in the UK. MTV it seems concentrated in Philly rather than london, and was running the same stuff on MTV and VH1, and then just showing rubbish.

Stuff like showing Bono introduce the song ONE, but then not actually show it. Stuff like that. The commentator loved how AOL would also say what was on the other streams so he needed to make choices between which acts to see. What cable TV should be without all the overt advertising.

Here in Australia there was advertising but not all that much thankfully. And they put the adverts into the correct places. They did delay the parts by probably 30 minutes or so just to, but that is OK if they need to fit things in.

Today I will be taking a break from a lot of stuff. Not sure exactly what I will be doing, apart from taking a break.

Hmm... I am watching an early 70's movie on Cable - 'Airport'... The movie is a bit dated but in generally it is not too bad. They were starting with some of the more advanced effects and using some of them more than they should have. Apart from that it is not a bad movie.

I just looked on the BBC, and there is an interesting story about Live 8. According to the site, there is a version of Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band sung by U2 and Paul McCartney available for sale on internet music stores. They used satellite to have it available within an hour of the performance.

I hope that Pink Floyd release a CD or something of their performance. I am sure that it would be an instant hit...

I have been working much of the day with VB.Net. Programming is fun - at times. I have some other work to do, and I am trying to work out how to solve a few problems. I have been updating bits of my WWW site too... And general end of year administration. In general more of the same.

Right now I am trying to set the MIME type coming out a WWW server. This would be easy on a UNIX box, but it is not quite so easy under Windows. At least not without lots of documentation. And I do not have this unfortunately.

I do not know if this is real, but here is a photo of an iPod built out of wood. I am not convinced that this would be functional unfortunately. But if you click onto the next photo you can see some part of how they made it. Really cool.

And in late breaking news, the NASA space proble has hit the comet as was hoped. The idea was to hit the comet with a projectile and then sample the stuff that was thrown off. Slightly destructive, but it is the 4th of July - Independance Day...

This morning has gone really really quickly. I have been forwarding some software to a few friends to get their comments, and then they come back saying cool. And then wanting a feature or three. And then I send that around, and they want more. MORE! They want More.

Actually this is what I wanted. Most of the work is now being done all the time rather than on demand meaning that CPU time is reduced when someone wants to see the results. Instead of taking many many seconds the results are basically instantanious. Some planning goes a long way at times. I still do not have a release date yet.

My meeting this morning was postphoned. It will be later in the week, although i am not sure when at this point in time.

Time flies when you are having fun according to the saying. I think it is about right. I have been programming since just after 7am, and just looked at my watch and it is now 8:30. No wonder I was getting a bit hungry.

But the good news is that the software that I have been working on is getting close to being finished for revision 1. I still need to improve some stuff, but I will probably outsource that into some other work I am already getting done. So far it is blowing my mind, and everyone elses. I showed it to a friend yesterday and he could not believe his eyes. It really is that impressive.

I have a teleconference this morning too...Should be fun. I have been waiting for it for ages... Just not sure of the time for the call yet...

My programming is almost to the point where it is where I need it for this stage. Things are looking really cool, and progressing really well with the application. I will probably need to get a bit of work outsourced to make things robust, but in terms of proof of concept things are wokring really well.

I was doing some Web programming under ASP.NET which is really VB.Net. I was getting the HTML that was being generated by my program corrupted. I could not work out what was going on. I could not work out what was happening. Eventually I worked out that there was code behind the blank HTML form that I was using. By deleting the code I fixed the problem. It just took much longer than I had hoped.

I still need to work somewhat with the User Interface to improve how things are presented to the user. Hopefully tomorrow...

Anyway I had a late night last night (Well, 1:30AM, and then an early one this morning (6:30AM) so I am a bit tired... So goodnight to all, and to all a good night.

Right now I am busy doing some programming - working out how to do some stuff. It is looking really cool, and I should be able to release something in the next few days - just depending on the amount of time I have available from other stuff. When I release it, I think I will blow a few minds. I have not been excited about any programming like this for a while. Can you work out that I am having fun.

One problem that often programmers need to deal with is trying to do programming when you do not quite have enough information for what you need to do, and need to work it out. Right now I am working out some user interface and architecture issues.

Basically, what makes sense in terms of how a user interacts with things, and how the application I am dealing with needs to be spoken to. I think I have worked it out, but I need to confirm that it will actually work.

I replaced the light in the kitchen today - a flouro. It took a bit longer than I expected, but not long - probably 20 minutes. The old fitting got too old basically. The new fitting is a low profile one and seems to work much much better than the old one.

I have been playing with software, last night and this morning. And it has been really realy fun. I have emailed a few friends giving them a link to look at, and said, just trust me, just look at this... Don't ask what it does. Just try it.

And some of the people I have emailed have not been really happy about this. And I told them just to trust me, and by enlarge they have told me that they were just blown away. They then understood why I did not want to tell them about it... I just wanted them to discover things themselves.

I just wish I could tell everyone what this was all about... Rest assured that I will be able to tell everyone about this soon. Just not right at this minute. It is commercially sensative. That is the only thing at this stage.

Pink Floyd

I am watching Pink Floyd right now on the Live 8 concert... WOW... Amazing...

I also saw a poster that someone held up saying 'Pink Floyd Reunited - Pigs have flown', a reference to the huge Pink helium balloon pig that they were famous for with their concerts and film clips. Well if Pink Floyd can reunite, anything is possible.

It is now 7AM, and I started writing this at about 12:30 am when Bill Gates just introduced Dido... This was unexpected, and Bill seemed like it was his honor to be there introducing her. And Dido seemed really impressed to be singing there - with the songs 'White Flah', 'Thank You' and finally 'Seven Seconds' the songs in her set.

Green Day performed with the energy that I wished that many other performers would use - and did a great job. I am not a Green Day fan, but they did a good job. Seeing them finish their set with 'We are the Champions' was great.

Duran Duran was cool. They played 'Ordanary World' which I love, along with another song. Roxy Music were good, and Sting is playing right now.

From what I can gather I have missed REM, Madonna, and probably Pink Floyd.

This concert is just so cool....

Live 8 is about to start on TV... I do not know how much I will be watching - wither now or in the morning... I cannot wait for Pink Floyd to play. Bono has just joined Paul McCartney for the beatles song Sargent Pepper's Lonely Heards Club Band.

I did not see much of the pre-show with Molly Meldrum - through choice. Some of that type of stuff add's value, but 90 minutes of it... Get real. It is like the commentry during the New Year's Eve fireworks, and focusing on the people watching the fireworks instead of the fireworks themselves.

The weather in London looks normal... Quite overcast. That is about what I expected. Unfortunately. The joke is that it looks what many people call a 'beautiful summer's day'...

Live Science has an interesting story describing in some detail on why it is hard to tickle ones self. Basically the mind anticipates the tickle and turns it off. More importantly, They have a story on how scientists have found out how ice melts.

I mentioned the 25 questions of science from the SMH earlier. Well, science has the full list of 125 questions to be answered.

Oh, when I was at Richard's I gave him my GPRS card to play with... He really loved it... And wanted the card to try on the bus during this week. Unfortuately I needed it so I have it now with me...

Just got home. The plane is looking good - we did some work on the seats today, but not much else. I don't think we did all that much work - we really ran out of things to do.

Next weekend we will probably be (finally) painting a lot. That might involve some time during the week depending on how things go. Or next weekend. Not sure what. But once all the painting is done we will be busy building for a few weeks and will be making quick progress. I cannot wait....

Music:

Live 8 is on tonight...

Yes, I am building today...

I have not heard from Richard if building is on today... I would guess so, but I have not heard yet. So if there are no Blog entries today that is the reason.

Online I read the UserFriendly cartoon... I loved this cartoon talking about how google is getting into everything... It is such a cool cartoon... I just love it.

Yesterday's ADSL install went really well... I was in and out in 30 minutes. And I did not even need to go into a roof or anything like that. I wish all installs were this easy. Unfortunately they are not. And it was good to do some work that did not involve a computer keyboard for a time...

The SMH has a list of the 25 big questions that might be able to be solved by science in the next 25 years. Reading the Bill Bryson book I am not so sure that they can be solved in that time. We will just have to wait to see how accurate they are.

I have been playing with some software this afternoon. I have not been having this much fun with any of my work for a little while. Right now I have to keep the details quiet on what I am working on at the moment, but I should be able to release the details soon.

It is the type of thing where I was onto the phone with my client, and he was saying 'You cannot do that... It is impossible. You cannot do that'. I thought that was really cool. I have missed that type of feeling being so involved with technology - and it is good to recapture it...

And I am taking ages to write this entry as I am writing it between debug and compile cycles. It really is interesting and fun work... I have to leave this entry here... I see a bug and I am not sure what it is...

Ahh, yes... I noted about how a certain mobile carrier forgot to set up some SIM cards for the correct APN. Seems that even after that they forgot to do even more. My 80 SIM cards were out of a bunch of 300.... They forgot to add the APN to about 20 cards or so... But for the ones they did, they forgot to allocate IP addresses to about 50 of the remaining cards. [Well, to be fair they did allocate about 255 IP addresses which are not bad odds]...

One of the email queries for this morning came from a security company working in the middle east. Hmm... I have asked a couple of friends if they would be interested in doing a site-survey for me, and strangely all have declined. I am not sure what the workcover requirements would be for that type of job :-)

A person in the UK has release a site called GPSdrawing.com which aims to show where he has been during the last few years... acuurately. The owner is also doing drawings by waking or driving with a GPS and looking at the picture that is made by the track.

There is a story about Google Earth interfacing that looks interesting... I will have to read more later.

Overight I got some interesting business leads that I need to chase up... They look hopeful too. Still, you never know how they are going to turn out. We will see how they go. Right now I had better get some breakfast and then prepare for the cabling job this morning...