When I was at the end of Highschool I really wanted to build myself a Synth. Not that I had any actual ability to play at all, nor do I think that I actually had the ability to build the thing. It would have required a lot of work... Probably too much. Building a synth is really a lot of work...

You can read more about the kit synth here. It has simplified building a synth to something much simpler. I dont think I will build this, but it would be cool...

For the bad debters out there [not that any read this blog], comes an interesting letter from one of the phone companies in the UK. They send a letter on letterhead saying that the london bombings would be nothing if the person did not pay up. I am really hoping that it was a hoax, but it might not be. You can read more here

Lastly I just got a nice little thank you from a school student about my WWW site. He was looking for the latitude and longitude of his postcode and found my site... So nice to be appreciated...

I have been busy working on updating my WWW site... There are probably 50 pages updated already... Mostly stuff that will make it easier to update the style of the site soon. There are a few things that have been fixed immediately, like the navigation bar between sub-pages. It now works when there are more than 500 pixel wide. And I should have some more pages uploaded soon.

The weather has been beautiful today. I went running earlier, and probably did 2.5 KM, but I was feeling it at the end thanks to the weather. It was not winter but summer... I went to the post office in sandles and shorts... I love that type of weather.

And I also got news that one of my clients is going to pay me some money. This is good as I did not think that they were going to. I am really glad about this. Now if only a few more would do this too then the world be even better...

And here is a bizzare one. It turns a HDD into a clock. An analog clock. I think it works by turning an LED on and off, and allowing you to see this though the spinning disk through a slit... I might have to build one...

I have just released a new product - the WeatherTrak. This device attached to an automated weather station, and send the data to the internet via GPRS or CDMA. I have placed a page on my Site with some details. More will follow soon. The complete site is undergoing some changes as described earlier.

FinkBuilt has how to build a childs birthday cake in the way of a volcano... Which actually 'erupts' this cool fog. It is actually dry ice in water, but seems really cool. I only wish I had kids to build this cake for. Did I say build... I mean make this cake.

One thing I love is This antenna launching system. It uses compressed air to shoot a tennis ball attached to fishing line. Really cool concept.

Another thing I am playing with is ADSB and wireless comms. Very Interesting. Interesting Implications. Please do not ask any more as I will not be saying anything more about this.

I was just looking at the Daily Telegraph and they have a story with pictures of George and Esther - readers may recall that they were the mathematicians that died within minutes of each other over the weekend. Quite an amazing story really...

This morning I have been working on the template for my WWW site... Minor changes, but it should improve some of the minor layout issues on some of tha pages. We will see how it goes. Right now I am having an issue getting the page title to appear correctly. This might take some time.

The Fergy 8 trip has basically finished... They arrived at Birdsville yesterday and I believe that they are firmly relaxing there now waiting for the races to start this weekend. I have included a screendump from the satellite tracker below. It is quite good performance...

I was speaking to my brother tonight. It turns out his very good friend got a job for Google, and right now is just waiting for a visa to be issued. Not sure how long that will take - but it should be in the next 6 months some time. They were given a time of about 10-12 weeks for their furniture to be transferred to the USA.

There is a site that describes a whole lot of sayings about languages. One of the ones I loved was "English is what you get from Normans trying to pick up Saxon girls." They have a whole lot of other similar quotes too...

I love Kebabs... one of the things I had no idea about was how they cook the meat. this site includes information on how to make your own cooker. Looks interesting...

I have just emailed a friend of mine from New Zealand about this concert at the State Theatre. Rick Wakemen is coming to Oz for his farewell tour.
Rick Wakeman and his farewell tour.

As a session musician for David Bowie, Cat Stevens, Elton John, and Black Sabbath, a prolific solo artist and member of Yes, Wakeman has influenced generations of artists. [Slightly later... Blast... He is not available tomorrow... He has a truck of lime rock, then 2 metres of shingle and 28 metres of sand to be spread around the arena before 2:30pm...

According to the SMH, iiNet releases VOIP service. SOunds like I need to look at it... I am thinking about changing ISP anyway...

Finally, in the SMH there is a notice saying that George and Esther SZEKERES died together in peaceful circumstances at Wynwood Nursing Home, Adelaide, on Sunday, August 28, 2005, at 6.15 a.m. and 6.45 a.m. They had been married 66 years. George worked at the Uni of NSW in the maths department from 1963 to 2004... He was born in 1911, but I am not sure when his wife was born. According to reports, George was one of Australia's great mathematicians.

On BoingBoing there was a comment about the teleporting things... I love the following quote...

"Michio Kaku, a noted physicist and author at City University of New York, said "the only way to use (teleportation) as a secret weapon is to allow our enemies to bankrupt themselves thinking they can produce a teleportation machine."

Sometimes that is the way - where the best way to nobble a competitor is to suggest a certain path for technology that seems reasonable at the time, but you know is going to be a huge big sink for money and resources. I cannot give any examples of this for obvious reasons... But I suspect that this stratergy is oh so too common in business.

I have just seen a story on News.Com.Au about how Australian radio company CODAN may have been selling HF radios to Al Qaeda - and may have sold $35,000 in radios to them through an intermediary. Very interesting indeed.

Music:

I heard 'Together In Electric Dreams' being played in the local shopping center this morning when I went down to grab the mail and return some videos.

The French, according to the BBC have released a list of the airlines that are not permitted to fly into french airspace because of safety reasons. This announcement on the same day as Belguim released their list comes after the British and other EU companies have done the same. Having looked at the lists I can assure you that they are generally airlines that I would not want to fly on anyway... For me there was no great shock that Camaroon Airlines was on the list.

I looked at the Dan Briklin WWW site this morning where there is a really really interesting article about fibre optic internet access being installed to the home. It is a great read - and I am sure that they are using Dan's software to do the economic modelling of this new service... You see, Dan Briklin invented the spreadsheet.

Right now I had better get some work done... So many things to do... So little time...

I have just seen a couple of DVD's... They were Mooseport, and 'The Prince and Me'. Both were good but different. Firstly 'The Prince and Me' was basically a rehash of the old story which a woman falls in love with an undercover prince. I should note here that Julia Stiles really does add something to this movie. Without her it would have not had the same feel to to.

I cannot get out of my mind the idea that this movie is a reprise of the wedding of Mary Donnaldson to Crown Prince Frederick last year in Denmark. In fact the movie was set with a price from Denmark, and given that there are a number of countries in Europe I have the feeling that this is not a coincicence.

Mooseport was a Ray Romano movie, and I cannot get out of my head the Simpsons cartoon where former president bush moves in across the road. This in many ways is a remake of that cartoon. Not a literal remake, but taking some of the concepts. And the idea of a former president needing to go in for a mayoral election is just as surreal as many simpsons episodes...

Anyway right now I need to get some sleep. I woke up too early this morning and need to catch up on some sleep.

The carrier has deduced that 'The SIM card is stuffed'. That is a technical word meaning that there is something wrong and they are not sure what is happening. Good. Neither am I... So they are getting me a new SIM card...

I have been onto 2nd level support with a mobile carrier. Always a fun exercise. This time they are calling me since I tried calling them, and I am not an authorised person on my clients phone bill so my client got them to speak to me.

Right now the issue is that a SIM card is playing up in a piece of equipment. Now, this is not all that strange, but the support people are having real issues sorting out the issue. After some questioning from me, they started doing more research and found an error on their system saying that things were failing because of a 'Mandatory IE' missing or incorrect. I did not understand what they were saying. But google did, and found this part of the Cisco bookshelf.

This seems to be an error with the carrier systems as far as I can tell right now with the setup of the GTP, or 'GPRS Tunneling Protocol'. Until today I did not even know that this existed... Google also found an etsi standard document that describes some of the GTP for GPRS and UMTS. ARGH.

Most interesting is that Ethereal has GTP built in as a protocol allowing it to be used by carriers to debug their systems. I think this is fairly amazing. Then again, that really does make sense... When debugging massive systems you need all the help you can get.

I thought I was going to have to get credit cards cancelled and my license re-issued as I misplaced my wallet... In desperation I looked at my car for the third time, and moved the passengers seat, and there it was... The wallet had slid off the seat under the passengers seat. One of the problems with having a car with a very dark interior is when this happens. Thankfully the wallet has now been found.

I finsihed off a project today for the Concrete Pipe Association of Australia. I was writing some software for them, and have been for months... Well, more correctly I was waiting for feedback... but it is now in production after there were very few comments. The software is used to estimate costs when you are installing concrete pipes... and comparing the cost of concrete pipes with other pipes.

Well, that is now in production so I am happy, with another project out the door. I now need to write it up... One of my outsourced programmers has been really busy today, so I have been looking at his work... It has been really cool... And shows so much potential. I just hope he finishes it quickly now that he is actually working on the project.

Ok... A few things... Firstly after the Fergy 8 thing getting attention, I got an enquiry from Equador. Right now I am thinking that Equador is on the equator in central america. Strangely I hated geography at school, and now find myself working with 'applied geography'. The email from Equador just described the normal requirements for a tracking system. Thankfully with a north american distributor (MountainMobile) I can just forward on the leads for someone else to work on.

I got my new phone card today... Or more correctly the new PIN number as I was emailed the phone card number a few days back, and the card will come in a few more days. It will be good to have a working telecard...

On the subject of Fergy8, I am getting a few hits on my site directly attributable to it... People who found my site by searching for the Fergy8 site... I am not complaining - I am doing support for it, and I am getting PR from it. That is one of the important things when running a business. This Blog is also PR for the business partially too.

I dropped in at the Travel Agency today - the one I have been going to for many years - and picked up a travel brochure from QANTAS for America. I am thinking of spening 2.5 days in Disneyland and then going to the conference. It would be a short trip, but it would be worth it...

This has got to be the most stupid theif ever. He stole a laptop computer from a store selling closed circuit TV cameras.

People interested in laptops should have a look at here. This is a DIY wooden laptop, and looks interesting. I will not be building one though. On the technology front, this is a really cool article on how plasma TV's work... They are sort of a cross between a normal TV and an LCD... And this page shows how to turn an old laserprinter into a shredder.

And lastly, this page on Wired shows how automated software is being used to change the rules of online poker... and how the "bots" are even playing themselves, colluding on who has which cards to better the odds. Interesting... Goes to prove that gambling is a tax on stupidity...

Music:

I have found This article showing how the rating for songs works on the iPod shuffle. It details a lot of statistics, which I basically understand... The shuffle feature on the shuffle picks a new song at random every time, whereas the ipod just shuffles your music when you click the shuffle button... So on the iPod Shuffle you can actually hear the same song twice since things are really random. And this page goes into the statistics on this.

I had a really enjoyable day yesterday when I visited my old supervisor from Pacific Power at Hawksberry Heights... Really great to catch up, filling each other in on what has been happening since we last saw each other in person... Well, emails and instant messages get exchanged, but that is not the same as catching up in person.

When I was over there he got me to install his ADSL modem... SOmething that he could have worked out himself if he had wanted to but it was so much easier just to get me to do it. That way less thinking was involved and Ross had just spent three weeks off work moving his father into a retirement home so was happy to get someone else to do this work.

I just loved the location... So peaceful and tranquil. I am not sure I would want to live there with the bushfire danger, but it certainly is a fantastic place to visit... And you do feel much closer to nature.

When I got home last night I watched 'Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind'. This movie would probably made more sense if I had read the cover before seeing the movie, but I do not know if that would have added anything to the enjoyability of the movie. Working out what the story was became half the battle, and working out what was happening where to whom.

I cannot really say much more about that without giving the plot away and I would prefer not to do that at this stage. Just to say make sure you see this movie. It makes you think...

Fergy 8 Web Site

The main Fergy8 WWW site is http://www.ausgpstracking.com.au/

Today the team are due to head up to the Poeppel Corner Oil Well just inside the Northern Teritory, before heading back into Queensland towards Birdsville. The team will probably be going about 50KM today on their old tractors.

It looks like things will be interesting at the Sydney Airport for the next few days, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. Fuel Rationing has been introduced due to a quality issue with the fuel at the airport. An anti-static component of the fuel was below the level it should have been and this has significantly cut the amount of fuel available for planes.

Also according to the SMH, a person in the USA was sent a credit card invitation to "Palistinian Bomber". The credit card company appologised, but noted that the name came from a list they had purchased... Obviously someone who had been asked for their name and address and who did not really want to provide the correct details to assist a marketing department...

Also in the USA, Business 2.0 magazine with 11 venture capital companies want to give away $50m dollars. Not to spend yourself, but to use to start a company. There are some cool ideas here... like leasing PC's by the month to the elderly. It is the most achievable of the lot on the list... And becomes an issue of economic modelling. Hmm... Interesting concept.

Right now I am preparing for the hopeful onslaught of people attacking the Fergy 8 WWW site when the Australia Allover thing comes to ABC radio this morning on Australia Allover.

I have just finished watching Ladder 49, and Eulogy. Ladder 49 was not what I expected... The flashbacks were disconcerting, and took some time to work out. In fact they made the whole movie seem like a collection of scenes rather than a movie. In a movie things are connected, whereas in the movie the scenes did not seem to really be connected.

Sure the acting was good, and so were the special effects, but there was some magic missing. I do not know what it was, but I suspect it was story. The story was weak. It was there but it really needed more work.

Eulogy was only story... Rather cheap to make except for the actors... In this case Hank Azaria was the most sane apart from his daughter in the film. This is a real indictment of the characters in the film, but made the movie really funny at times. Not all the time, but it showed how the family grew over the weekend after being shown how strange they all were. It would not go and buy a copy on DVD but it was a good movie... I think it was better than Ladder 49...

Anyway I had better go... I have a couple of things to do before bed...

I have just seen the DVD of The Interpreter, and I did like the movie. I am not sure what I expected, and I am not sure if this met my expectation. But I am certainly glad that I saw the movie. It was a great story, set in the United Nations in New York.

This movie seemed to contained everything from spies and intrigue to terrorism and murder. All through the movie I was trying to work out who the good guys were, and who the bad ones were. And who was doing what for which reasons. What I loved was that there were deep relationships developed with the main characters - and you could see the characters develop as the time went on.

Right now I am about to see Ladder 49 on DVD... It was a movie that I wanted to watch at the beginning of the year when the movie was in the cinema, but for a number of reasons I never quite got around to it.

I got some code from one of my outsourced programmers a few moments ago... It is amazing the response you can get when you say that you are cancelling the project... In this case I it looks like the project is finally being coded... It will be good to see it complete and working...

I was speaking to a friend of mine this morning - and I came up with a new product... I am not sure that it will sell many but it is a cute idea. It is something that I have been wanting to do for ages but I have not got around to it...

The product is simple... A GPRS enabled weather station. That is, a weather station interface that uses GPRS to send data back to the Internet in real time with weather data. So that I could place a small text box on my WWW site giving the temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction. I expect that this will only require a few minutes work on the hardware side, and very little work needed on the software side.

The Google AdSense is working well... I am up to the point where today have got US$3.79 so far. With some work I will be able to increase this further - basically all I need is more content - at least that is what I am thinking. I hope people do not mind the adverts on this site too much. Comments would be appreciated.

I need to add some more pages later... I have about 5-10 to add, and a few to update too... Google is checking my entire site at least once a week, so I do not want to disappoint them do I? RIght now I had better get going.. I have some things to read.

p.s. I have some Garmin GPS receivers for sale for $125 each. If anyone wants to buy any, email me.

I expect the Fergy 8 people to reach Poeppel Corner today. For those who do not know, this is the where South Australia, the Northern Teritory and Queesland meet. It is about 50km from their overnight stop, and should be an easy day trip. There are some lakes coming up in that area too meaning that things should be a bit more hospitable.

Monitoring all this traffic makes me feel a bit twitchy with itchy feet... I would love to get into the car with a partner and just spend some time away from the office. Unfortunately I do not have the partner and right now I cannot really afford the time.

I just had a phone call, and checked the progress of the tractor. It is now approaching Jacks Junction in Queensland.

Firstly, it appears that Microsoft has been infected with a virus. Well, according to this site. No, seriously. So what is unusual about this... The virus is measles.

Right now I need to get going... I need to put some washing out and then whip down to the Post Office to post some mail...

I have had a really busy day - I have been at Eastgardens most of the day. It was good to be out of the house, and the office... and the weather was fantastic. It is certainly starting to feel like spring, which is only a few days off. Soon it will be time to stop wearing jumpers during the day... and then even maybe working in bare feet...

I picked up a copy of the movie Sahara today from K-Mart - it was $2 cheaper there than from Sanity/EzyDVD. I saw this movie at the cinema when it came out, and I loved it... Really one of those surreal adventure movies, more of a treasure hunting thing than a James Bond movie... This is of course a movie of the Clive Cussler books... And if you dear reader have not looked at reading one of his books you do not know what you are missing out on.

Sunday afternoon I am meeting my ex-supervisor for lunch and dinner which should be fun. It was going to be saturday, but he has needed to change things arround to recover a bit from moving his father into a retirement village/nursing home. I am not sure what I am doing tomorrow... I am sure that I will have fun no matter what...

Oh... And i have been having some issues with some trackers... Months back you might remember that I had a bunch of SIM cards that were really really screwed up... Well, one of those SIM cards has been having more issues. I rang up support... Turns out there were a few issues with the SIM card... It had been set for pre-paid, and had the wrong APN. I have no idea how that happened... The carriers are really a law unto themselves.

The Fergy 8 people will probably be hitting the NSW/South Australian border today. The whole system is working flawlessly. Lets see how it comes with Sunday morning where the Web Site will be mentioned on the ABC Radio programme 'Australia All Over'... Sunday afternoon I am visiting an ex-boss of mine from when I was doing industrial experience at Uni, and I will have to just keep an eye on things from there...

News.Com.Au has a strange story... A woman is claiming to police that she is Azaria Chamberlain. I will not comment apart from drawing peoples attention to the story.. Which I have not yet seen in the SMH.

Also in yesterdays news, my mother took her thesis to the book binders - and early next week will be handing the bound copies in... Then they get examined within 2-3 months and then she hears back about any changes that need to be made...

One of the things that interests me with language is how people write things that they would say. That is, we might say "Ten Dollars", but write it "$10", or more correctly, "Dollars ten". And people for whom english is a second language might write it at "10 $". Just one of the strangenesses of the english language.

The "Yes Prime Minister" show used to mention 'irregular verbs' occasionally... Normally they would be like Jump, Jumping and Jumped. In the TV show case it was 'The Prime Minister is about to give an off the record briefing to the press', 'His Assistant is leaking documents to the press under instructions', 'The leader of the opposition broke the official secrets act and should be sent to gaol for telling that to the media'...

I am starting to wilt after not getting enough sleep last night... Maybe I will have better luck today, but I have a few things that I need to get done before finally falling asleep tonight. Number one is a whole lot of email to action. Some just needs to be moved to the read folder, but others need to have real work done. How much of that I can get done I am not sure.

I have just moved a lot of the email from today across... Now there are only four emails to action... Not bad really. One that I just saw again is from a coder I get to do work for me. He gives me fixed price quotes. Anyway he emailed to say that he was giving me a $10 credit since the last job was much easier than he thought it was going to be... Nice when people assist like that. I give him enough work anyway...

Tomorrow I need to visit eastgardens for the morning to do some work for a friend... It will be good to catch up with him too... I get a steady stream of work from him... Should be fun... Right now I had better leave this here so i can sleep...

I have been very distracted for the last few hours. Very very distracted... Basically I have been doing some warranty rework stuff... And that has been frustrating at times. It was one of those cases where nothing would work at the beginning... All that was different was that I was using a 3cm extension cable for the trackers. And for some reason nothing was working. Nothing.

Then I looked at the extender, and I found two solder bridges creating short circuits. ARGH. That must have cost me close to an hour. I was starting to loose it... Trying to work out why things were not working that used to work. One of those times when I start thinking about taking up farming... Most of the issues I found turned out to be SIM cards that lost their settings. Unfortunately this is normal in my line of work. Mobile carriers have very poor memories... And settings always go missing.

Things were so hectic that I did not get lunch until 4pm... Yeah, I know... Why bother? Well, I was really hungry. I have had enough now to keep until dinner time.

The Fergy 8 People are well into the Simpson desert... I am not sure where they are stopping tonight... Not many places to stop in fact... It is a prety desolate place out there...

Anyway I have to get going... I have some emails to send out...

The Fergy 8 people are due to leave the Alka Seltzer Bore and journey up 'The French Line' slowly towards Birdsville today. 10km up the road is the Purni Bore, where the water comes out close to boiling point. The entire greenery surrounding landscape has been created soley by the permament flow of water coming out of this bore.

The Sydney Morning Herald has another story about E-Tags and how they can be used to keep track on motorists. This is being done silently in the USA where the tags are read on some roads to measure trip times. There was an article 18 months ago in the Sydney Morning Herald where I was quoted talking about the technology behind the tags. In the meantime, my E-Tag page sorely needs updating too - but is getting a good number of hits.

From the USA comes this really really small WebServer. It would cost about $5-$10 to build. Not a bad effort. Actually, it is an amazing effort. I do not believe how they have got so much technology into such a small package. Thare are calling this the 'IPic - Match Head Sized Web-Server'

I have just got back from the meeting...It is now 11:35PM... I will post more in the morning - but I heard this great story, about how someone was driving from Mildura in Victoria to Adelaide, and the vehicle tracking system was not all that great... It told them to drive to Broken Hill, so they did... That was probably only 1000km out of their way...

It looks like the 'Fergy 8' people have stopped at the Alka Seltzer bore. This area is just on the edge of what I would call a desert. That is Sand Dunes and all that type of thing. The sand dunes in this part of the Simpson are about 4m tall. This is not all that high until you need to drive over them. Also, the dunes become 10m tall to the south.

I have tried out the Microsoft Finger Print Reader, and I must admit that it might work... I have the following comments though... . Firstly the red flickering light is a pain. If you have it off to the side it is horrible... And if you have it in front of you it is just as bad. Secondly the scanner surface is hard to clean. It is the type of plastic that they put over the badges of computer cases.

Microsoft does tell you how to clean it - use Windex, or stickytape. Using Windex on Laptops is a great way to damage the screens so generally I like to keep it away from a computer no matter what. Cleaning with stickytape does work - amazingly.

The other issue with the scanner is that the scanning surface does get dirty... Hey, didn't I just say that? No. By dirty, I mean that you can leave fingerprints on the scanner. Which can then be lifted by using stickytape, and used to create a fake finger with a small amount of trouble.

The biggest of all is that there seems to be a bug with IE7, where the two do not cooperate all the time, and the CPU being used by IE7 goes up to 100% for a fraction of a minute...

I am meeting a client this evening for dinner. This is a client I have been working with for about 18 months, so it will be nice to meet him. I am picking him up from the airport tonight, and then we are going to dinner.

I have just received a parcel from Microsoft... I answered a telephone survey from them a month or two back, and they sent me a parcel with a present in it. It contained, get this, a Fingerprint Reader!!! Yes... A Fingerprint Reader. I am about to restart the PC so that I can finish installing the software. I think this is really nice of Microsoft!

There is no movement with the 'Fergy 8' tractors, so I would guess that they are having the day off, relaxing at dalhousie. What I love is that coming up (when they finally leave) there will be a bore on the left side called the 'Alka Seltzer Bore'. Sounds like a great descriptive name for the place.

The BBC is reporting the funeral of the minister who started the Taize religous community in eastern France. About 10,000 people have attended the funeral of Brother Roger. The 90-year-old Swiss-born theologian was stabbed to death by a Romanian woman while celebrating mass last week.

Photo of the Day

Music:

Strange... The Fergy8 people must be having a lazy day... They have not left their night stop tonight. Right now I have a remote desktop open on my laptop, connected to my server, monitoring things. The last satellite position came in about 2-3 minutes ago, and they have not moved. Well, if I had just arrived there I guess I would be doing a similar thing.

I just read that QANTAS have just increased their fuel surchage on flights, nationally and internationally. I have mixed feelings as to if the surcharge should be just included in a higher price for tickets, or as a surcharge. I have feelings both way. Basically the fact is that fuel prices are too high at the moment, and have been too low in the past.

This morning I need to do some Web Programming for a client. I hoped to get this software done months ago, but there have been a few delays. Now I just need to get a few things tested, and then delivered to the client... There have been a few complications getting things running in this case...

Music:

Katrina and The Waves on the iPod with 'Walking on Sunshine'.

The Fergy 8 guys are preparing to leave Dalhousie today for the Simpson Desert trek today. They expect to take about a week to cross the desert, mostly taking the 'French Line', a trail surveyed in the 1960's by a french mining company. The journey to Birdsville is about 500km... This means that they are intending to do about 75km/day on the backs of tractors...

In The Register this morning comes news of a couple of bumbling burglers in the UK... One of them used his work car to commit roberies, unaware that his movements were being tracked with GPS Tracking System in the car. This, the police were able to tie a total of ten breakin's when they were fially caught.

Ontrack Data Recovery have listed their 10 best data recovery requests on a ZD-Net WWW site. The one about a laptop being run over by a plane is good, but the one that I like is "Construction Calamity
During the construction of a large office building, a steel beam fell on a laptop computer containing the building plans, crushing the laptop.

Now, on CNN comes news that Japan's space agency plans to launch an arrow-shaped airplane at twice the speed of sound high over the Australian outback, probably next month. It is a crucial test of the country's push to develop a supersonic successor to the retired Concorde.

The test follows a three-year hiatus since the first experimental flight of the unmanned aircraft, dubbed the next-generation supersonic transport, prematurely separated from its booster rocket and crashed into the desert.

Music:

I was watching UKTV, and they had a piece of music on one of the shows. I found out it was Una Paloma Blanca... Good to know but I will not be buying the CD...

According to the Australian Broadband site Whirlpool, Telstra and Unwired have just reduced their prices for broadband. The Telstra prices are starting to get reasonable. If the Unwired ones covered anything other than Sydney, then I would get Unwired for when I am away from home for whatever reason.

Then again GPRS works so much better than Unwired around Sydney's urban canyon thanks to the multi-path. What happens is that the frequency used by Unwired is so high is that it gets reflected by almost any object known to man. This means that when you are in a city building, particularly when lower down then often unwired will not work well at all.

I have been thinking about the USA trip for next month... And what I do when I get to LA. What I am thinking is that I fly over to the USA, leaving here on a Monday. Then I arrive in LA on the monday. Then get a transfer to a hotel near Disneyland and have a sleep after checking into the hotel. Afate a sleep, visit Disneyland for a few hours, and then head back to the hotel for dinner... The next couple of days at DisneyLand and Californian Adventure. Then taxi to the conference a few miles away... firstly for the board meeting and then the conference... And then fly home...

I still need to work out details... And see which of my friends are available at some stage to meet up... But it is looking hopeful and fun.

Thai food for lunch... It was good to have Thai again... It has been a few weeks, and it did not seem as hot this time. Still, I managed to drink over a liter of water during lunch meaning that it was fairly hot.

I was doing some Web programming earlier, and I cam across the error "unable to get the project file from the web server" which baffled me. I have solved the problem, but there are a couple of things that I tried. First was to try the hints at DotNet247 which suggested that I create a new 'Front Page Extension' for the Virtual Directory that I was trying to open. I am not sure that this helped. Then I opened the GotDotNet message board.

This site suggested that I go to C:\Documents and Settings\\VSWebCache\ and delete this directory. It was a slightly different directory on my PC, but it worked. I am not sure why it worked, but it did. I am not a FrontPage, nor IIS Guru. I find IIS just strange... Maybe it is just me.

Right now I had better get going. I want to have a run... Probably only 2km.

Music:

The Blue Planet from The BBC, from the Open Space II CD

The Beyond Blue with the Fergy8 tractors are going really well... Last Night the vehicles stopped at Oodnadatta, camping buy the river... Sounds like an amazing place to spend the night. Then today they are unloading the tractors from the trucks. In the next hour they will start out from Oodnadatta, and will be riding to Hamilton, a journey of about 33KM. Then from there they will be taking the Pedirka road to Dalhousie. This is another 60km.

On Fergy 8 tractor I would imagine that these vintage tractors will be going at no more than 20km/h meaning that this journey will take about four hour hours. Well, that is my guess anyway. I dont have any photos I can show unfortunately.

I have just got a new update from the Satellite unit... The new position report is shown on the following satellite image - this shows an aerial photo of Hamilton with the track superimposed.
.
More details with live screens (as mentioned before) are available here

BoingBoing has a link to the Radio Control Plane below that works indoors... Only US$240... Cheap at half the price.

I love this... This Group of comdians decided to do a U2 imitation on the top of a building... Dressing up as U2, and playing a concert... All in New York... And got a whole lot of their friends to act as a 'Flash Mob' to turn up to create the initial crowd... The Police were not impressed as it caused traffic disruptions and that sort of thing...

They have done some other cute projects in the past, like create a black tie bathroom attendant with free soaps and towels in McDonalds... And I think the best is the Synchronised Swimming trial for the Olympics in a pond in Central Park... Interesting site...

>CNN is reporting that Synthesizer pioneer and all around vanguard of electronic music, Bob Moog, has passed away at age 71. Dr Moog built his first electronic instrument - a theremin - aged 14 and made the MiniMoog, "the first compact, easy-to-use synthesizer", in 1964. He was the first to bring the electronic synthesizer within reach of most musicians, and his early work, the "Minimoog" is still highly praised, and often emulated, to this day.

And finally News.Com.Au is reporting that the Paris Hilton Wedding is off... And for a really bizzare reason. Seems that her now ex-fiance had not yet told his parents - And when Paris Hilton went to throw a party for the families to celebrate, well, only one set of parents was in on the news... I cannot believe this... I just cannot...

I saw this a while back... And it sums so many things up... This is a version of the USA Defence level system... This image actually changes character depending on what the terror level actually is. I just think it is so cool...


I lent my Optus calling card to a friend of mine for use overseas. Unfortunately they decided to close the account on me since I had not used it for some time. Then when I rang up the customer service number, from their brochure I found that the number had changed... And this was from their WWW site...

In the end I think I spent about 30 minutes getting the card re-activated... Argh... Too long on the phone waiting listening to poor music...

On Saturday, August 20, 2005, eight intrepid men and their vintage Ferguson tractors started out to cross Austalia's Simpson Desert. The owner/drivers are farmers, contractors and tradesmen from Swan Hill, Shepparton, Walpeup and Young.

With their support teams, the group intends to take eight days to cross 505km of some of the toughest terrain in Australia, The Simpson Desert.

You can be there whilst they trek to the Birdsville Races by checking in on the Tracking WWW site. http://www.ausgpstracking.com.au/

The trip is the brainchild of team leader Des Devereux, a Swan Hill identity who has for 20 years been a tireless organiser of events to raise money for worthy causes.

During the trip the team hopes to attract an interest by the public to raise money for the National Depression Initiative program called "Beyond Blue".

If you have GoogleEarth loaded you can also be there by adding http://202.173.135.68/ge/ as a 'Network Link' inside the Google Earth application and tell it to update every 15 minutes (More instructions available on http://www.radio-active.net.au/web/teamtrack/googlesetup.html)

Radioactive Networks software is being used in the back end to collect the GPS positions, and show them.

The technical details are described on this site - http://www.radio-active.net.au/web/teamtrack/white.html

And until things are fully operational you can see the snapshots on this link http://www.radio-active.net.au/web/teamtrack/live.html

Darryl

P.S. If you see an image on the screen during the event that should not be there [Like a dialog box] please contact me ASAP...

Help Needed - Talk Topic

People...

I need some help - I have been asked to do an 'Intro' talk at the Digital Communications Conference next month. The thing is I do not know what I want to talk on. This is a technical conference with people from people who can barely turn on a radio to vice presidents of some of the top 100 companies in the world.

It could be something like 'Intro to GPS Programming with Visual Basic', 'Intro to Radio Based GPS tracking', 'Intro to Wifi'... I don't know... Hints on what you would like to hear about would be appreciated.

With a couple of good friends of mine in London at the moment, and having visited there myself, I was interested to see this article in the SMH about how to do london cheap. They have some suggestions like buying food in supermarkets and not buying room service. Great ideas. They suggest using the Busses a lot in London. I dont know - I did not take a bus... I used the Tube a lot when I was there.

I actually got a really short message from them today - saying that they had arrived safely and would email later...

I needed to post a parcel to New Zealand a bit earlier... The people at the post office know me so well that they dont mind when I fill in the office use only part of the customs form - where they write down my drivers license details.

The Space Shuttle had problems in it's last mission. It had problems getting launched, and then coming back to earth. In the end it landed in California. Now comes news from The BBC that the shuttle has finally been flown back to Florida on the back of a Jumbo. It had been waiting half way for a few days following bad weather.

I dont think I mentioned this over the weekend, but during 'War of the Worlds' I finally saw the shorts to 'Stealth'... It will be a movie that I need to see, if only because I know I had some small part in making it... I built some equipment that was used to test radio coverage... So I have some ever so slight connection with the movie...

Not quite as much as with the 2nd MATRIX movie... In this film, a power station was blown up... Well, I used to be one of two electrical engineers in the electrical section of that power station... Not that I was working there at the time, but even so I loved seeing it blown up.

I have a few things to do today... Programming as every. I have a piece of software to write to receive SMS messages... I did find a free control to do this but it turned out not to work... And Outsourcing would have worked but this way I will get exactly what I want... Oh, and I have a hardware issue that I need to get solved too...

Tonight I saw a doco on The Da Vinci Code... And I am more convinced than ever that the book is a great work of fiction. I did learn a number of things though - like that Mary Magnelin was not a prostitute as far as history records. There is no evidence for this until about 500 AD... It is interesting to hear what various people believe. Very interesting.

I have found this site that shows how to start a fire using ice. Basically you use ice as a lens to focus sunlight. Works really well. I also found out why when you freeze water why the centre of the ice is white. That is where all the impurities end up as the water freezes. That includes disolved minerals, and more importantly disolved water. Basically the freezing process purifies the water. This works with most liquids becoming solids... I had just never thought about it happening with water before.

Also when Richard and I get bored, I have found a new project to replace the plane. This is a submarine. Looks cute, but I suspect it is also a bit more dangerous. Also I am not sure how useful it actually is.

Once final thing... Here is a house, or more correctly a building made mostly of cardboard. Interesting concept...

Photo of the Day

Music:

I have just finally finished watching the DVD of 'Lantana' - A movie that I have been wanting to see more than a year... and a DVD that I first tried to watch around christmas but I did not get into it... But I have now seen it all, and I think I enjoyed it. It was strange looking at all the interactions between the characters... and working out who was going to interact with who next.

I think it was what you would call a typical Australian drama movie... Up to and including the fact that it really was not a commercial movie. Not that it was not successful at the box office. Just that it was not really all that successful commercially.

There is an article in the SMH today about how there is a lack of men in Sydney. Well, compared to the number of women. I find this hard to believe... As a somewhat single guy I would have thought that there were far more single guys than single women. Maybe I am not looking in the right places...

Some links... A few years back there was a 'Hacker's' Camp to celebrate the release of the book "Hacker's". I have a first release of the book... and a second edition... And an electronic copy. Well, O'Reilly has re-instated the came as the 'Foo Camp'... You can read some of the details here.

On SlashDot comes a review of the book Expert Network Time Protocol. Their review can be seen here. This is one of those books that could be very interesting, or boring, or both at the same time. More for my friend John in the USA who runs the Time-Freqs Mailing list... [And no, I am not a member of that one].

On SourceForge is a .Net Configuration Library. And from Japan comes an article on how to track objects in a room with a laser...

And finally, in the SMH comes an Article on how sound can be used in planes to improve lift, and decrease the speed at which the plane stalls.

Strangely, of all the pages on my WWW site, the fourth most popular is a list of Australian Postcodes. Never in a million years would I have thought that this would have been popular. So, rather than remove this file, I have added a page that includes the postcodes into a HTML page, with some advertising. You can see it here. I have also added a page that contains the Lon/Lat of all the postcodes.

Also the income from advertising on my WWW site is up on the last 24 hours... and is becoming lucrative. Well, as lucrative as A$4 during a 24 hours can be. I do not think it pays for the resources in keeping the site up to date, but it helps. [And the reason that I have the WWW site is not for the advertising income, but for the marketing of my business, and for my personal purposed.]

A friend of mine from New Zealand SKYPEd me earlier, and we got to talk about weather. He was complaining that there was not really any live weather data available for his place. So I told him about FindU.COM and the live weather data on it. Turns out there is a weather station about 5 miles from his house. How cool is that...

War Of The Worlds

There is a song by Queen called 'Radio GaGa'...
"I'd sit alone and watch your light
My only friend through teenage nights
And everything I had to know
I heard it on my radio, Radio

You gave them all those old time stars
Through wars of worlds -- invaded by Mars
You made 'em laugh -- you made 'em cry
You made us feel like we could fly "

I was sure that they were not the Lyrics. I thought said something like 'From War Of The Worlds to Teenage Lust'... But I checked the song and sure enough the lyrics above are correct. So why am I mentioning this song from Queen and my past? Well, apart from the fact that I like the song, as I mentioned earlier I saw the Movie today.

I am not sure what I was expecting, but I know I was not expecting what I got. I must admit to my great shame that I have not read the book. That will come - and i think I even have a copy. Even if I do not I can legally download a copy since it it out of copyright. Anyway...

Without giving too much away this really is the story of a father who does not have enough love for his children, and for children who are somewhat estranged from their father. And the film talks about a journey, both from New York towards Boston, and of self-discovery, and discovering his love for his children again.

There are some obvious plot issues - such as why the only person who can get a car working is from New York near the epicentre of one of the events. And how he was able to drive the car at speed on the freeway. And why he is so intelligent whilst all the other are so dumb...

In the book, the centre was the seperation from the main character and his wife. That was mostly missing in the film, and therefore there was something missing...

All in all an OK movie... But one for DVD

Some quick notes... Firstly I am off to see 'War of the Worlds' this morning. Should be good. There are $10 online tickets, which I will buy in a moment. Not as good as the $5.50 cinema but they did not have anything on...

Also I got a reply about the paper I submitted... The first time I sent it the paper went missing... This time it got through...

And I need to book my accomadation in the USA in the next few days... The best internet rate is US$25 over the conference rate, and that is even when you enter the conference code... So it will be a call early one morning to book that...

I have just finished watching SPOOKS on the ABC... Rather an interesting drama looking at the secret services in the UK...

Many many links right at the moment... Firstly, someone has rendered some of the source code to the Linux Kernel to look like the Tux - the Linux Mascot. The effect is visually quite stunning...

Now, here is a DIY sub-woofer for a home HiFi the size of a hot water system. Aparently it is quite amazing with the sound that it makes, but it is not exactly small. And that really is an understatement.

Then somes one for the high school sicence class.. This is a page telling you how to make some Solar Cells rather simply. They use copper sheet that has been heat treated, along with salty water. I am yet to be convinced that this is a photoelectric effect rather than becoming some type of battery...

There is an interesting piece of animation on the Ben and Jerry WWW site. Ben and Jerry are, for your information, manufacturers of premium ice-cream in the USA. Their site contains a story on how the company is investing in research into thermoacoustics, which is using sound for cooling... I am still not sure how it works, but it aparently it does.

And finally, The Times has a story on how a light plane lost 5 feet of it's wing. Now, they only noticed when the pilot looked at the fuel level and saw that there was no fuel in one of the wing tanks. More correctly the tank was on the ground. What I should point out here was that the pilot was taking the four passengers to look at a 747 and repair it. They you see they were aircraft engineers and none of them noticed the missing wing part.

Oh, and on UKTV on the Sitcom '2.4 Children' there was a cool quote... 'Tools do not like being tidied - they die'.

I got an email from a friend of mine this morning - from the USA. He was telling me how he had managed to contact John Phillips who is currently an Astronaut on the International Space Station. Steve had taken his home satellite station to a local school in Tempe, Arizona, and the pass was quite successful.

He managed to get the story into a newspaper article. Since the Arizona Republic Newspaper is not all that common here in Ingleburn, the link is here

The article does not view in IE7 unfortunately, but I brought it up in Firefox and it was fine. I have attached the photo from the paper. The person on the far left is Steve Bible, a friend of mine.

Long time readers might remember that Steve is one of the architects of the SuitSat project which will also be launched on in the coming months on the Space Station. I am probably seeing steve next month at the conference...

I have placed information online here about the control I have got written to decode the Benefon SMS messages. The code includes a subset of the full phone messages, but it implements enough for our purposes. Actually it implements enough for most users. The remaining commands un-implemented are generally used less frequently than the ones I have included in the library.

I have now come up with a number if issues with Internet Explorer... The new version that is...
* Opening a LINK from outlook opens the link on top of an existing Tab in IE
* Right Click - Open in New Tab causes the Google Toolbar not to be displayed until you go to a new URL
* Selecting and copying a URL is harder... You need to start an 'edit' on the field to copy the URL.
* Sometimes all the text on a page gets selected when you try to copy it rather than the text you want.
* Sometimes URL's are not shown in the bar at the botom of the screen on Mouse Over. This is even on my own pages.
* If you try to close IE it will close all pages. It should ask before closing them.
* There is no way to set the default page for a new tab as far as I can tell. Nor is there a way to say which tabs you want opened when you start the program.
* When you close a tab, the next tab shown is the last on the right side, not the last opened.
* There are no 'Tool Tips' over browser tabs to show the 'title' of a page that is a tab.

Overall I am really happy with the IE7 experience... Now, if they would only fix some of these issues...

The MakeEZine Blog contains a cool idea - with CDMA 1x becoming fast - really fast - and not too expensive, then why not share. That is when you are at an airport or something like that, why not enable sharing on your laptop so that people can use 802.11 to connect to your laptop and then connect to the internet through your CDMA card. Given how much is being charged at some hotspots I think this is a cool idea....

According to Whirlpool, Telstra have just finished a trial of 20 KM ADSL. Normally when they finish a trial it means that things stop working. In this case it means that they will be extending things to other areas... So if you are more than the normal distance from the exchange and want ADSL, there is some hope... At least until Teltra gets sold off...

Today I have some hardware to build - a TNC-X for a client in New Zealand and also an interface board. Both should be fun. I also have some software to test and put on my WWW site... Later today I hope to release a VB.NET control I have had written that decodes Benefon phone messages...

Today has been fun, with some configurations, some programming, and a whole lot of witing... I am in the process of getting the CDMA unit enabled - after some issues. The WWW site is getting more hits, but the Google AdWords is not doing quite as well... I guess that it will improve as time goes on. I also need to add more content to the site...

What I am seeing is that various blog entries saying that I have issues with programming are getting people looking at them - indicating that I was not the only one having the issue. This is good to know in a way... showing that I was not dumb by taking some time to solve whatever the issue was.

On the back of various hacks for electric cars comes this one... This person has managed to put solar cells onto the roof of his Toyota Prius, and this improved the fuel economy by soemthing like 6%.

There is also more information here about turning the Prius into a Hybrid with a charger and extra batteries. Not cheap... All this really does point out how inefficient normal cars are.

The Imsai 8080 was one of the first home computers available. Now, there is a new version. I must admit that I have an issue with the way they have done this, but it does have a sort of ancient look to it. Generally it was fairly cool.

My visit to Newcastle and the central coast tomorrow is off unfortunately. I was looking forward to it - I have not been up there since the end of last year... And that was only a day trip to see a school presentation day. I will have to get up there in the next few weeks, but not tomorrow.

I went to get some things today... Some connectors at Tandy... That was a joke. I wanted a three pin connector. They had four and two pin connectors according to their computer. And then they could not even find the four pin versions... I really wanted the three pin one. Jaycar will have them... Thankfully they are not too far away.

I have been trying to get a CDMA modem connected to the network. Ringing up Telstra is useless. They say to visit a Telstra Premium Dealer, and tell me that the local Retravision is one. And then when I go there they are not... They have not been for about 12 months. That is really useful. Then I ring up again, and I get given the details of another company I have never heard of in Ingleburn as well as Retravision.. Actually I had never heard of the street that this other company is in. Sure, it does exist, but I needed to look at the directory to find this out.

I am about to go and try again. I am not overly confident. Not by any stretch of the imagination at all...

I just read about a program called MaxiVista which allows you to use a second network connected computer as a second screen on Windows. I this this is rather cute. I definitely will need to try this out. It looks 'Interesting'. Definitely worth a look I would guess. I actually found this on Blogs.Msdn.Com which is a feed of Microsoft type Blogs. Interesting read at times.

National Geographic has an interesting Photo the shows a young child stealing natural gas in a huge bag using a tricycle. There is more to transporting the gas than appears in the photo, but it looks cute none the less. I suspect that there is a person carying the bag at the far end out of camera view.

And on the SMH comes news that QANTAS have invited AIRBUS to send an A380 for their 85th birthday.

Anyway work... I have just got off the phone with a client... Interesting talk... More later...

Looks like I will be going up to Newcastle on Friday to visit a client. One the way back I will probably drop in on a friend of mine living on the Central Coast and catch up with things. And since I will not be building this weekend I can actually stay there on saturday if I want to... It will also be good to see their house - I helped them with some of the wiring about a year back.

I still love my iPod... So I was really interested in this site which lists a few mods for the iPod. The coolest is a slide in docking station for a PC. Not that it will work well with a Laptop, but it is cool despite that anyway.

I have been watching a show on the Singapore Ports. I did not realize how much technology went into the ports - It has been a real experience leaning about it all - including how the ports actually work. How the waterways work.

And finally, this site describes the work of a pretty amazing artist. Wow...

I have been really busy this morning... Phone call after phone call... Quite bizzarely I was speaking to an RV-7 builder in Brisbane at 7:30 on the phone... It was really an interesting call... I think it ended up lasting for about 40 minutes... And I have still to draft an email for him... Actually there are a couple of emails to be sent there.

Then I just did my Group Certificate stuff. Slightly late, but that will be fine. It is just a case of getting to these things really. Then I had some more emails... And got the mail...

The mail. I got some of the new tracking units in on the mail. There was a slight design change so I needed to test things. They worked first go. Or they would have if I had been intelligent enough to put the SIM card in when I was moving the GPS and the GPRS device in, along with the processor. Why did I forget that? Who knows. I knew that the manufacturer wanted the go-ahead ASAP, and that was probably it.

The new board looks great. Does all the normal things - and for once has not a single engineering change order on the board. It is basically perfect. But what do you expect... I designed it :-)

Blogger have released a Blogger For Word plugin. I was going to type this entry in it but I have just uninstalled it since it looked quite horrible. The first thing I did was went to edit an old post at random. The first thing was it would not remember wich of the blogs on my Blogger account was the default. I have a couple of others there that I do not use, and it was defaulting to one of those.

Then when I opened an older post in Word it lost all the paragraph information. This is not good enough - and if it does that to an old post then I can imagine how a new post is going to turn out. I do not think so, blogger. The other problem was they asked if I wanted to turn off WORD and my editer for Outlook. This gives spelling corrections and the like. I do not think so. They said it sometimes causes problems with the Blogger plugins if you have use word in Outlook.

I am glad that I am not in prison in Guatemala. According to the BBC, At least 30 prisoners have been killed and more than 50 have been injured during battles between rival gangs in several prisons in Guatemala. "Officials said a fearsome array of weaponry - including knives, automatic rifles and hand grenades - had been smuggled into the prisons... The gangs appear to have coordinated the fighting using mobile telephones, said Guatemala's Interior Minister Carlos Vielmann. "

On the travel side of things, the USA is getting more and more stupif. Earlier in the year Senitor Ted Kennedy was refused access to a flight as a suspected terrorist [against the constitution since he was on his way to congress]. But it is conceivable that he was up to no good. Conceivable. What is not is that babies are being prevented easy access to flights since they are on a No Fly list. I can just see it now... Watch out for the toddler with the hand granade. I have heard of the terrible two's... But I would not call babies terrorists.

Finally, here is a cute weather site... For weather stations. And here is how to write plugins for those USB security devices for your PC...

Ok... Um... Where am I up to...

I need to get some programming done - I could buy a component to do it, but they cost from US$300-US$3000, and I am not really happy about that cost. I want something that I can include into my own software, and distribute as needed... And that was not really offered a