For some reason I am but tired at the moment.. I should have had an afternoon sleep I guess but I had a few phone calls... and I did do the run which took time.. Maybe I will have an early night... I will just need to see how things go... I almost fell asleep watching some TV a bit earlier

Australia has some interesting laws. One of them requires that schools pay a license fee for photocopying, which gets paid to copyright owners. Now, there is a federal court case wanting a fee when students get told to visit a particular Web Site. Obviously the schools are not happy with this. Since web pages are designed to be accesses for free commonly this whole thing is a bit ridiculous.

Also, Montreal Airport is cracking down on laptop users using power outlets. They are claiming it is because of fire hazzards... And according to this story the authorities only backed down when it was revealed that the first class lounge people were using laptops under the same conditions... And if they forced the person to stop they needed to do the first class people and that would not go down well.

I just did a nice little run... 4.57KM which was not bad since it was a lot warmer than I thought it was going to be... and I did it in 33min 13sec. Not a bad effort I must say, although I was a bit slow at 7.25KM/H. Still what matters is that I am exercising, not that I beat records each time. When I had a shower following the run I weighed myself, and I had lost another kg. That actually impresses me more than the running.

My server is now back and running well... It was off the air for too long, but we now have connectivity again, so the world is good. The vehicles are busy dumping their history data into the database and clients are now able to see where their vehicles are. Life if good. And plans are in place to ensure this does NOT happen again!

I have repaired a few trackers today. This is to be expected. Most were just simple things. What I did not expect was that some of the GPS units had locked up - and required removing the backup battery to get them to reset deeply enough. I had never seen this before ever. Strangely doing this to most of the units fixed the issue - something for me to keep an eye on.

I am planning on going for a run in a few minutes... Subject to no major phone calls and the like. I have no idea how much exercise I will get done!

I did something new today. Something I have *NEVER* done before. I buily myself a capacitor... It is one of the three main electronic components, and I have built the other two in the past, but as far as I can remember I have never built a capacitor. It is for a consulting project so I can not say much about what it is for, but I am impressed with myself

I had an email overnight from a friend in the USA. He had been reading my blog, and had seen my post on dog names, and wrote to say that it 'Reminds me of the comic Stephen Wright who named his dog "Stay" just to mess with his mind -- "Come, Stay".'. I dont think I would be that mean to a dog myself... After all, Dogs may rule the world one day.

The Risks Digest details some of the issues with using computers, as I have mentioned before. There was a report in the latest issue noting that students at Canterbury University had their personal details exposed online. Unfortunately this report was submitted by someone in Australia, and the editor had assumed that the Uni was in Australia and ammended to article in that way. OOps. And the report referenced a New Zealand Herald report so that should have been a clue.

I could have slept better last night... I woke up at 3AM and I could not get back to sleep for ages... So much so that I came out to check my email (boring) before going back to bed... I think the email actually bored me back to sleep... Not to friends. Please do not send me really exciting emails in the middle of the night if you think I might not be unable to get back to sleep... It will only make things worse... :-)

Someone has created some cute Lego figures of the Mythbusters hosts. These figures just look so lifelike. Well, maybe not lifelike, but they certainly do look like the real Mythbusters. Any fans of Mythbusters should do themselves a favour and have a look at the link. Really cool.

A friend of mine put me onto a piece if mail software for windows called MailEnable of which a basic version is available for free. I have a few issues with the GUI, such as being required to right click on things to edit the properties, but once you get used to it things do make sense, and it looks like a decent product. It is certainly easier to use than the software on my Linux box.

I just had a telemarketing call from 'Lifestyle Dynamics' which tried to sell me accomadation vouchers. The call was from overseas somewhere... Not sure exactly where... They said that they were a 'Fortune 500' company on the Australian Stock Exchange. I was not sure that there was such a thing on the ASX... A fortune 500 company would be one of the smallest businesses on the Australian Stock Exchange... Needless to say I did not buy anything from them...

For some reason I just feel that I have not got much work done today. I am sure that I have done work... It just doesn't feel like it. I actually did not manage to get lunch today either. Argh. So right now I am feeling a bit hungry... The Register is reporting about issues with Daylight Saving and the Commonwealth Games. Apparently there are some issues with microsoft patches and timezone issues.

The former owner of Domino's has decided to start a University in florida - the first catholic Uni to be started in over 40 years. On top of this he is setting up a community around it, based on his devout catholic beliefs. There has been some minor oposition, but people are generally positive.

Tonight Commander in Chief is on TV... I know I have seen it on before, and I have it recorded, but I plan to watch it again... maybe even with ads... Should be fun. A great show.

My server is due back at any moment. We are just waiting for a bit of paperwork to go though and then things will be up and running again. About time let me tell you. I hate these type of stuff ups. It will NOT happen again... I have some work planned for later this week to ensure that it does not!

I finally found some maps for MidTown Madness 3 on the web. There are a heap of cheats too... I decided for the little time I spend playing games that I would rather have access to all the cars than fix the tasks. So I unlocked them all, and I can assure you that it is fun driving an Audi TT in the wet in Washington DC when you don't care about the damage to the car. In fact I seem to quickly loose the back tailgate to the car - although that might have to do with the fact that I have mastered turning 180 degrees using the brakes.

I finally now, having done some driving in the game understand the line in THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT where Anette Benning complains about being lost around Dupont Circle. In the game I have got lost working out what lane to use around that same intersection!

I have to be rather careful today and tomorrow with my broadband... I am over quota for the month, and since it is for business, I decided to pay $10/GByte excess usage. Right now I am about 1.5 GBytes over. It is a business expense, and $15 is not bad. But I need to make sure that I dont download something like the beta of Windows Vista from MSDN... It would become quite expensive.

One of my tasks today that I want to do is work on some changes to my tracker with how they operate in a networked environment - moving towards a internet stored database of where trackers should send their data. Basically using the DNS system to configure the trackers rather than storing the IP addresses in the device themselves and having them able to re-configure themselves. DNS give a single point of administration, and of course a single point of failure. But I believe I know how to manage that process.

But to do this I really need to register a domain just for the purpose of dealing with the trackers - and then need to get the DNS hosted. Should be fairly easy... But may take some work. A nice job for this morning when I get a tiny bit of paperwork done.

Yesterday I was watching some of Spooks, which is a BBC drama that is shown on ABC in Australia. At one point they were looking for some bad guys, and came up with a company called 'Cardassian Financial Services'. Through some investigation they confirmed that these people were bad guys - but they spent a LOT more time than they should have. You see, a Cardassian is a baddie from the StarTrek universe... One of the big major baddies...

Later on they had been trying to break out of the building whilst being held hostage. They managed to get a hole the size of a person on the concrete work, apart from the steel re-inforcing. But since it was a former team member who was taking them hostage, they decided to cover it up in the end. Why am I explaining this? Well, there was the following exchange at the end...
'How do you explain a hole in the wall to internal services?'
'Mice'
What I loved was how it was delivered in a deadpan tone...

Today my first battle is with Telstra. We have had a connection out since 9AM on friday and we need to get it restored this morning... I cannot believe how slow Telstra are at fixing thier problems when they stuff up!

My mother heard about her doctorate today. She basically needs to do revisions before re-submitting the doctorate to be examined again. This obviously is not a great outcome, and will take some time to fix. Not good. She can appeal this, but it is likely to be better for her to just do what they want. It is likely to be less stressful and it is more likely that she will get the doctorate out of it. But this did mean lunch at Sizzlers to commiserate the decision...

Last night when I was driving home I saw a strange car... I was going to say on the road, but technically it was not on the road. It was going westbound on the back of a truck on the M7... It was a Police Car. What is special about a police car. This one was Black and White. Like from the USA. I am guessing that this car is being used in a movie. I am not sure what movies are being shot in Sydney at the moment though.

The other thing is that this morning I realised I had left my iPod in the car overnight. By this morning, I can assure you the battery was somewhat flat. Now, there are a few different solutions. The correct one is to work out how to wire the interface cable into my iPod, including the ignition power. That way it would stop when the car gets turned off. I just love having my iPod in my car...

The one pain of having the XBox in the loungeroom is that the XBox does not have an ON/OFF switch on the remote control. This is a real pain since it is one of the only remote controls I have ever come across without a power switch. I guess this is because the remote receiver is a USB device and therefore does not get powered until the device is turned on. And there is not much way to fix this unfortunately. Not even with major hacks... Strange really, since this is the pnly issue I ahve with the design. [Well apart from lack of memory on the XBox and some things like that]

I heard about a new product... I will not be betting the family fortune on this one - I would not even bet all the money in my wallet on this one - it is, would you believe a toothbrush a replacable tip so that you dont need to replace the handle when the brush needs replacing. This might make sense if the handle of a toothbrush was not so cheap, but why bother.

And in the UK, someone is selling a number plate on eBay for about 9000 pounds. The license plate is 'HN51 FLU', but there is a minor problem. Bird flu is actually 'H5N1 FLU', so the poor seller slightly dyslexic... Oops. I seriously doubt that there are that many people who would even want the correct license plate.

There is a whole lot of designer water products around. Probably the most over the top is O18 from a company in Chatswood. They are selling water which is derived from apples and oranges, and then purified. Sounds rather expensive, and basically 'over-engineered'.

Mitsubish has a strange report on how LED's can be used to sense the ambient light level. This is strange since LED's are supposed to be output only. I think I understand some of the theory as to how this works, but it really is a bit beyond me. More information as to how this works in practice is available here.

OK... So maybe I am a bit tired... I probably just spent 20 seconds searching for the Internet Explorer window on this PC. I have 12 things running on my PC at the moment, and I could not find IE. What makes things worse is that not only could I not find Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer was the active windows. In other words it was staring right at me!

A bit earlier I was having what must have been one of the strangest MSN conversations I have ever had. A friend of mine from interstate messaged me, from his wifes MSN account. And then she messaged me from her husbands account. And I would say something to one account, and I would get the reply from the other account. And I could not keep up to date who was who. And they would lie if I asked too... I think I worked it out in the end but I am not sure...

Time for bed... The winter olympics is interesting to watch but I really am tired... Tempting to fall asleep in front of the TV... But I think sleeping in a bed is more civilised... Good Night

I love this... This site allows you to do your own Einstein Blackboard Scene!

Today I spent the day working on the plane - we worked on getting the steps installed so that we could actually get into the plane since it is somewhat off the ground. This was a task that we expected was going to literally take all night - or actually potentially all night. I think we had been procastinating on this job for at least six months...

In the end, it did not take all night - nowhere close. I would not be here sitting writing this at home if it had. Things just seemed to work really well installing the steps. Getting the holes drilled into the steps was not too hard, and neither was getting things lined up. Really there is not much to say about this. Most of the rivets just went straight in without issue - I think there was only one or two that needed drilling out.

We also installed the strobe controller unit under the floor in the baggage compartment too. This was fairly simple - with the exception of having to reinstall a nut plate that had failed. All in all it went in really quickly too...

Getting home I just needed to ensure the pain of crossing Old Windsor Road on Norwest Blvd. The issue here is that entering the M7 takes you through a chicane that would be amazing on any F1 course. I am always scared that I will actually cross to the wrong side of the road thanks to the poor markings on the road. Thankfully even if I did cross there is usually no traffic there... But the road is yucky at the moment!

According to PR Newswire, Apple has sold it's billionth iTunes song in less than three years. The billionth song "Speed of Sound" was purchased as part of Coldplay's X&Y album. I have purchased one or two songs on iTunes to see how it works, but that is all.

As a kid I can remember getting into arguments with my brother and cousins about the fair cutting of food. I knew there had to be a better way - and there is. According to PopGadget, someone has released a cutting board with measurements for length and also angles. I can see that the board might be really really popular, particularly anyone with kids I would guess... Maybe a great christmas present for friends...

The Times Online has an article on how Mozilla was contacted by the UK Trading Standards people concerned that people were selling CDs containing the free Firefox software. When told that there was nothing wrong with this, the trading standards person commented that this made her job really hard if people could pay for software that was being given away... The underlying idea that they should not allow this to make her job easier.

I forgot how tiring playing the XBox is... And how addictive it is. The only game that I have is 'Midtown Madness 3', and although I do not play it all that often, I am getting a bit board of it. Really, I dont think I should be playing the games on the XBox because it does make me so tired... Hmm...

I just had the Simpsons on in the background, and they had a clip show. At the end they did a parody of Billy Joel's 'We didnt start the fire', titled something like 'We`ll never kill the simpsons'. They had to change the tune, but the concept was the same. I guess that has to do with royalties and copyright and such. Most of the simpsons episode I saw was pretty boring unfortunately.

Tomorrow I will be working on the plane. I have not heard what we are working on, but I am sure it will be fun. I have to whip over to my father's place beforehand to grab an ADSL modem of mine from him... Since he lives at North Ryde next to Macquarie Uni this should be a fairly small detour.

I hate phone companies at times. When they work it is fantastic. When it does not... Well. You know. Right now I am waiting for a phone company to return a network connection to a server. They 'accidently' disconnected an ADSL line. And it is taking some doing getting it reconnected. I will not mention the name of the phone company to protect the guilty... But they should be hung, drawn and quartered.

I also am now getting mail in on my radioactive.net.au domain. Most of the messages are SPAM that are being sent automatically to the bit bucket. But there are also real messages for the previous user of the domain. This user was getting Heinz recipies emailed weekly to her. The message says that if you want to unsubscribe you need to click on a certain link on the site and they will delete you. But the link does not exist. When I found the option to unsubscribe they wanted the password, which I did not know.

The Lost Password option wanted the name of the suburb which the user was born in. The Web Site does not have an email address or a phone number. I just replied to them saying unsubscribe in large unfriendly letters, and I hope they deal with it. Thankfully none of the addresses getting mail are ones I will want to use so I might as well just reject mail to them...

I have been reading the SMH and it appears that the Ravens at the Tower of London have been placed into quaranteen to protect them from Bird Flu. What interested me was the names - Branwen, Hugine, Munin, Gwyllum, Thor and Baldrick. Hmm. Baldrick. Sounds familiar. Yes. That is the name of a character from Blackadder. These days you can see all about Baldrick in Wikipedia.

The Law Journal in the USA has a bizzare story about cellphone call records in the USA are effectively freely available. Effectively in the USA all you need to do is to say that you want access, provide the phone number and pay money, and third parties will hand over the records. What really shocked me is that according to the article, cellphone records in the USA are not confidential. Thankfully here in Oz they are protected under the Telecommunications Act.

I just had a strange one on a server. A TCP service that I wrote somehow crashed overnight. Not sure what happened, but the TCP service basically stopped accepting any information. What was worse, restarting the service would not stop it. And my supivisor program refused to restart the service too. I needed to manually stop the process, and then the service restarted and everything fixed itself as it should. It has been probably 10 minutes, and things are starting to settle down. I like to see things automatically restart after a failure.

I will have to adjust my server to self-detect problems too, and have a suicide option if it thinks that it is not working correctly. I just need to work out how it should detect that there is something wrong. Like no valid position reports in five minutes or something. I will look into it.

A client was telling me about all the data he has avilable, like all the pubs in the Hunter... and I told him of the FFF system of measurement. Rather than Meters, Seconds and grams, we have Furlongs, Fortnights and Frankins. 60KM/H becomes a more useful 100 214.746 furlongs per fortnight. Or close enough to 100K F/F. I can just see the road signs now. Anyway time to get some work done.

I did go on a run this afternoon - and I did reasonably. I ended up running about 4.7 or 4.8km all up. I think I did it in a fraction under 35 minutes which is not too bad. I was not really up to the 5km, nor to 7KM or more. The distance that I did was far enough. After all I did do the 7km yesterday or the day before so I am still recovering from that a tiny bit. Not much. If the weather is cool tomorrow I might go for another run - We will see.

I grabbed my other laptop out today - the first time since the weekend. My neighbour wants to borrow it tonight so I needed to log in and install software on it. The strange thing was that there was a pink tinge on the screen... Thankfully it recovered after a few moments. For a while there I thought that the screen was totally screwed. But it aint so I am lucky.

Finally, I am watching the british show SPOOKS... This is a great show. Series 4 has the woman who plays Hugh Grant's girlfriend in Love Actually as a unwitting assistant to MI6 who are trying to protect London from a series of bombs. Looks really interesting... And she is doing a great job as an actress in the series from what I have seen

Sometimes it would be cute to have a themometer in the office. Provided you are not concerned about the power usage. This project creates a DVD with a number of pictures each containing a temperature and some graphics. They are accessed by pressing keys on the remote control. But the temperature sensor emulates the remote to choose the correct page based on the current temperature. Cute idea I think.... Not quite as cool as my XBox, but right now I dont have a temperature sensor connected to it either.

MobileMag has a press release for an add-on for Motorola Cell Phones. According to the site, this device allows you to add up to 8 GBytes of Flash Memory to a phone. I am still trying to work out why you would need so much memory on your phone... 8 GBytes. My cellphone has 32 MBytes and I am not used 31 of them, so I think this is slight overkill.

I am looking at doing another run this afternoon. The weather looks fairly good for it, and I am not feeling too bad. I dont think I will be able to go another 7km, but five should be little problem I would guess. Like normal though it really does depend on how I feel when I get out there... And exactly what the weather is like. I am feeling absolutly great from the exercise. Soon I will be able to build up the speed in addition to building up the distance that I am running. But that is a little while yet. When I went to pick up the mail earlier I grabbed some morning tea - yeah, I was being bad. Anyway I found that the morning tea was actually too sweet and filling - in other words I am eating less which is good.

Australian IT has a story about a Western Australian City that has some issues right now with a broadband company that is trying to put up a tower in the town. The council has rejected the tower on the basis that they have not provided the information requested. And now Telstra have started installing ADSL. Sounds like a real mess. I can see a company going bankrupt over this one. The strange thing is that they started installing the units in houses before the base station.

In other words there was no way to test things which sounds realy dumb to me. Something funny going on there. Unless the company intended to go bankrupt as soon as it got it's grants from the federal government.

One of my clients wants to export vehicle data out of my TeamTrack application to a text file for some reason. Not sure exactly why, and I am not sure I am allowed to know why. Anyway, There is a way - export to Access MDB, and then export to TEXT file from there. But this is messy. I then thought about the correct way to do this - use crystal reports to generate a report, and then save this to a text file, or to Excel.

The only problem with this at the moment is that I am having an issue generating the reports when the source data is an access database rather than a webservice. I am not sure what is going on - it could be a scoping issue, or it could be one of many other things. I need to resolve this, but so far I am just hitting a brick wall. I do not seem to be getting anywhere. ARGH. I will look at it later.

I also had a phone call from another client this morning... He was telling me that the GPS system he installed allowed his business not only to keep up with the christmas rush when the other people in his industry were too congested, but it also allowed his company to expand. That is a fantastic cost benefit for my client. And good news since he is looking at buying some new tracking units too!

I have just finished bringing my accounts up to date; the second half of the accounts were a whole lot easier than the first half. I am not sure if that is because I just was up to speed, or what. All I know is that the accounts are done for the period, and I promise to do my accounts once a month from now on. Yeah, and pigs might fly :-) I make that promise every time I do my accounts, and I never keep it. NEVER.

Things are not finished though. I still need to file the paperwork, pay some bills, and do the actual BAS. The BAS takes commonly a minute or two in order to complete. Anyone who says that it takes longer is obviously not using an accounting package or is also adding in the time it takes to keep their books up to date. All I need to do is select the period the BAS is for and say go. That easy. Really is.

I heard a good joke today... Did you hear about the extroverted engineer? He looks at your shoes when he is talking to you.

According to News.Com.AU, AAPT suffered another blow, with a massive network outage halting fixed-line services in Queensland. Water damage at the company's Riverside exchange in Brisbane "has caused wide scale disruption to our residential and business customers in Queensland". From what I can gather this is as a result of maintainence to the air conditioning system. And caused the data centre to loose power with some significant damage.

I have just spent probably three or four hours doing my BAS. Am I finished? Yes. No. I have managed to get it finished to the end of the calendar year, but I still need to do the data entry up until today. That will take a few hours tomorrow I would guess. The worst thing was remembering what deposits were for into my bank account - I know people paid me for things, just who and what for. Normally there will be an invoice, but sometimes they just send a cheque or do a direct deposit without asking me first.

At least now the accounts balance. I am just glad I decided to divide the task in two... So much easier this way. But it does mean that tomorrow the fun begins again. Welcome to my life. So, why dont I get an accountant to do this? Well, most of this stuff needs to be done by me anyway because I would need to give the accountant the data... Fun.

I have not had much success getting my BAS done. I did log into my account and get the bank statement downloaded and printed out, but that is all that happened unfortunately. Some other things came up, like getting trackers out the door. Right now I have almost all of them sent out... But one is misbehaving. Isn't there always one. Just one. I have tried too many things and I am getting nowhere... Well, that is not true. I have worked out that the unit is rebooting for some reason. I just need to find out why, and how.

And some good news... I got a purchase order today for some work. Well, actually I do not have the purchase order, but the client has it in his hand as soon as we can confirm that we can do the work. I am getting a friend to help me with this, so that will make things easier on me. I do the admin tasks mostly, and I get most of the money. That is what I like - a fair division of labour. Too many times I am on the other side of that unfortunately.

I think I am going to have to get rid of the reclining rocking chair out of my office. It is too dar comfortable. Thankfully I can use the laptop in it, and get usable work done, but it is a grand distraction. It is oh so tempting to close my eyes for just a moment and wake up an hour later... Sounds really tempting. Anyway I had better leave it there before I actually decide to close my eyes....

One of the things I have found about debugging GPS issues is that it is VERY hard to work out exactly what is going on. Is the issue because of a satellite issue, an antenna issue, a connector problem, a receiver problem, or a software bug. Working out what is going on can be an issue. Right now I have two GPS antennas and I am trying to work out if one is faulty, and if it is then why it is. This is not as easy as it might sound. With so many variables sometimes things just do not work out as expected. Then you need to do a cost benefit analysis. How much is it going to cost me to work this out?

Oh, the other thinng with GPS is that sometimes it is the angle of the antenna so one more thing to consider. In the end I think I will call this antenna marginal, and basically throw it out. Things will be more reliable that way. And there is less chance that a client will be annoyed when the ^&$*^8 tracker does not work. And given how much these things cost it really is not worth it. The main issue is the fact that I do not have any other antennas in my office... Time to get some in...

Time to pack some trackers up (after the obligitory nail polish) and then back to the BAS!

I made the mistake of watching a show called 'Brainiac' from the UK on the TV this morning... It is a show that is somewhat addictive, but at the same time I have somewhat of a cringe at. Brainiac is sort of a mash up between mythbusters and comedy central I think... Made up of lots of short pieces testing scientific questions... Like will a petrol filled balloon in a microwave oven explode. And which will save you better from a home invader with a crossbow - a loung cushion or a steel wok? Important questions I am sure, but ones where I start shaking my head wondering when I can see the next episode.

This mornings work? Getting some trackers out the door and doing my BAS. The first should be fun... The latter... Well... Lets just say that I could have done this on january 1st if I had wanted to :-)

Tonights meeting was not too bad... Any meeting that lasts only two hours cannot be bad can it - at least when I expected it to be three or more hours long. I really was not sure what to expect. Right now though I am starting to get a bit tired. For some reason I have not caught up fully from the weekend. Some of that is probably the fact that I did a reasonable amount of exercise today. Whatever the reason, I am sure that I will sleep well tonight.

Today I got some of my TAX done... My business tax at least. Tomorrow I will work on more of the BAS... Oh Fun, Oh Joy. I also need to get some new trackers out to a client tomorrow so I guess that will be at the top of my agenda.

Meeting at the child care centre tonight. ARGH. I have some other things I could be doing tonight, like watching TV... I have an idea what I want to get out of this meeting... I will just have to see how it goes... I hope it does not go too late either.

News.COM.AU is reporting that some of the motorways in Sydney are incorrectly detecting some smaller cars as trucks. According to the story, when the cars are too close, it detects the car as a longer car based on the length and says that it is a truck. The report mentions 2m being the magic number. Two meters is too little separation for my liking...

TecheBlog has a a list of the top 10 strangest MP3 players. The Register is reporting that Transprt For London is making available logs for Pay As You Go transport cards available on the net if you know the persons mother's maiden name. This does not sound all that secure.

According to The Business Online.COM, Microsoft is about to release a free VoIP service to challenge the mobile carriers. One assumes this is VoIP over GPRS... And it may as well be running SKYPE or any other VoIP software...

Is this me?


This was created by the Simpsoner. So Cool! And if you try it, send me a copy!

As mentioned a little while back I did a run just before lunch, and managed to do 7KM in 50m 25s. I am pretty sure this is the furthest and longest I have ever run. This was about 8.33 KM/H which is a bit slower than I had hoped, but frankly I do not care. I was trying to do the distance and I did it!!! 7KM is about half a City to Surf Fun Run.

I forget what course I did... And frankly it is hard to work out by looking at the plot from the run without going to each point, which I have not done. I did have a look at the course gradient, and found that it was mostly flat... The details are in the attached photo... But frankly I do not trust it all that much. Looks cute though. I weighed myself when I was having a shower after the run and found that I have lost another half a kilo. I am impressed with myself over that.



When I grabbed my lunch I also grabbed a new belt... I certainly need it... I only have one hole left on the belt... and I can use that one if I need to as well.

Oh... And I got a parcel from the USA today... Some stock that I had ordered... It was sent on the 15th in the USA, and got here today, which is the 21st. That is what I call good service. Now I just need some people to buy the hardware...

7km run in 50 minutes and 25 seconds. WOW.

My BAS return needs to be in by next tuesday which means it is definitly time to do my accounts. This involves entering all my purchases, any payments that have come in through direct deposit or through cheque, and generally getting the books in order. I have decided to do this whilst I am fresh, and I am working through the accounts as we speak. Well, I am having a short break from it to protect my sanity, but I am getting the accounts in order. The pile of un-entered paperwork on my right is getting smaller, and the folder with all the entered stuff on my left is getting fatter... And the pile of receipts where I have paid cash is getting higher.

Seince more than 50% of the receipts are for Australia Post I think I really need to apply for an account with them. It would save so much time...I know I am missing some receipts for some other things - I just need to find them. I am sure they are on my desk here, somewhere. I hope I have not filed them... That would be bad :-)

Doing this work early has its drawbacks... It is too darn early... I just entered an invoice for $245 and tried to say it was paid, but entered the $245 in postage... OOps, I almost had a $490 problem to fix.

My list of possible dog names is slowly expanding. A friend suggested BYTE would be a good name for a dog, and since then I have come up with a few more...

• Byte
• Bit
• Unix

The names Bit and Byte should be clearly obvious. Unix may not be so straight forward. It could only be used for a desexed dog. To understand the reason for this you need to understand the derivation of the word Unix... You can see that here under History.

I am feeling a whole lot better right now - it is 8:30pm, and I am watching last nights CSI:Miami on video... I had been watching Mythbusters at 7:30pm on SBS, and I just could not keep my eyes open... And I fell asleep for at least half an hour. I guess I was still exhausted from the weekend still. I am feeling a whole lot better now after the sleep and a shower. The CSI:Miami episode is an episode I saw when I was in the USA in September. With some luck this will be the last of the shows I saw when I was over there.

I was doing a bit of research about Commender in Chief today, and found that the show has been 'delayed' in the USA for about three months so that they can have all the episodes run in a row. According to the makers they are delaying things since in the past there have been major issues ensuring that the episodes have all been available for showing, and this has caused eratic programming on TV. Thankfully this means that the program has not been canned.

Tomorrow provided the weather is good I think I will go for another run. If the weather is cool I will see about doing 6-7KM. I feel like doing a good run and I think that sort of distance is achievable

I find accounting reports strange. Today I have spent a small amount of time going through some statements - and they were not bad until I went looking for the accounting charges, and found that the numbers did not add up. I had a statement for July to December, one for January, and one for July to January. The problem I had was that the first two statments did not add up to the third. I think I have traced this to an issue with items being backdated after some of the reports were run.

I find it hard to work out how some government entities operate. Some require everything to operate in a set order. Others are slightly more 'flexible'. I am working on one job at the moment - and although I have not yet received a purchase order from them yet I have been shipped some software which will be needed to write the software. By this I am guessing that things are in motion, getting a purchase order approved, but that it is not yet there. As soon as the order comes in I need to then send a whole lot of orders off myself.

Apart from that things have been reasonably quiet today so I have started working on getting my books up to date for my BAS. Happens four times a year, and I hate it. But it is better than waiting 12 months I can assure you... Actually a monthly BAS would probably be a good idea for many small businesses as it forces them to keep the accounts in shape...

I have not had a McDonalds Hamburger for some time... Some of my friends are threatening to take me there to break me.... Well, maybe not after reading this article in the SMH that reports that their french fries contain wheat and dairy products. Not sure how you can actually do that, but they are added to improve the taste... Very Very strange....

Not a bad mornings work. I think I have basically just made about $500 on a small deal doing a bulk purchase... Now I just need to see if I can get a few more people to buy some hardware so we can get the price down lower. I doubt that I will have too many difficulties... I am starting to build up a fairly good list of contacts... My address book in outlook is worth its weight in gold.

Going through my emails, on saturday I got an email from a potential client, who unfortunately afraid that his partner of six years is being unfaithful. From the email I can just sense the hope that his partner is not being unfaithful, but at the same time is wanting proof if she is. He wants to prove that she is not... And wants GPS to do this. And I am torn. I cannot make money out of a client like this... at least without charging too much, and even if I can supply what he needs I am not sure it would be legal. But I can just feel that this poor guy is being torn apart too... I suspect that a private investigator will be his best option.

A few weeks ago I posted some comments about Pherotones. It turns out that this is a marketing campaign for Oasys Mobile of the USA selling ringtones, according to the NY Times. This advertising campaign cost them under US$250,000, and is bringing in over 10,000 users a day to the pherotones site. Oasys Mobile is now giving away the Pherotones ringtones... Ha, they cannot actually work, even if you want them to...

I am feeling somewhat more human than I did yesterday. Sydney was too hot and humid, but the central coast was really nice with the sea breeze. Being under cover when I was up there helped too I think... I got myself to bed about 9:30 last night, and woke up about 6am. I could have done with some more sleep I think but I think with the overnight temperature I was slightly in need of a glass of water. And I am one of those people who rarely needs a drink during the night, so I dont have a cup on my bedside table. And I can just see what would happen if I decided to put a cup there... It would have been knocked over by the 2nd night I can assure you...

Right now I have a couple of days worth of emails to catch up on. I vaguely scanned my emails during the last couple of days and I am sure that there are things there that need my attention. I dont think there is anything glaring, but I may have missed things in my sleep deprived condition.

Oh... Whilst trying to type this entry I had a MSN from a friend and we got talking... And he told me about a conversation he had with his wife... He was saying how he wants to donate his brain to medical research... and her response was
i said i was going to donate my brain for medical research "You may as well, you are not using it for anything else". On that note I think I will finish up...

The show today at Wyong was OK.. It was a bit smaller that last year but not too much smaller. The car boot sale area is getting smaller each year I fear - which is one of the reasons to go up there - to try to grab a bargain. In the end I did not end up buying anything much apart from a CD-ROM and a couple of CD-ROM drives. Apart from that I got some food but that was it. I sold a few trackers but it was fairly quiet. This was good in a way in that it allowed me (and the others) to spend more time with each person.

We also handed out a whole lot less information sheets that previous years which was a bit dissapointing. But then again that might just mean that the market is partially penetrated. Who knows. But it is an enjoyable time up there showing people what more they can get out of the hobby. The same thing with my talk... It was more of a 'here are the possibilities' type of talk rather than a 'here is how things are'.

Also at the thing was the Uni of NSW Satellite guys... Interesting catching up with them... They are still trying to get their satellite a finished as well as a launch date. With the lack of shuttle launches, and in the increase in microsatellite programs at unis they are finding it hard to get a launch. Poor things. I doubt that it will ever fly... But we will see...

Enough foe this entry. It is 9:32PM and it is definitely past my bedtime!

Here is a photo of me during my presentation... It was at 10:00AM today, which is too early for a talk I think... Anyway my talk lasted about 45 minutes with questions which was really good. The people asked questions which were appropriate, and the detail seemed about right. And GPRS worked allowing me to actually sort of demo the software.

The photo is not great, but at least I got a photo for once.



Here is my stand. The laptops were around the wrong way.


More later!

I am now home, and let me tell you I am somewhat exhausted. By somewhat I mean really exhausted. I am not sure how long this post will be, but more will follow soon after I get rehydrated. Put simply building yesterdat was great, and the event today was good, and my presentation went well...

Anyway, yesterdays plane building... We were working on a couple of things - electronic flaps, and inspection panels in the baggage area. We did the initial install of the electronic flap position actuator that sits between the two seats. This required some muching around, but basically just working on getting everything to line up. Not hard really. This was followed by putting a couple of inspection panels into the based of the baggage compartment. This required some design work since it was not on the plans.

We followed this by building mounting brackets for the strobe lights for under the inspection panel. Strangly none of this sounds like it is much work, but actually involved most of the day. Anyway I think I might leave it there... More later.

Dateline: Wyong Racecourse.

I spent three minutes looking at my presentation last night... Three whole minutes. AT least I know what it says... I certainly did not get a chance to edit it. It will be interesting to see how it goes - I am slightly sleep deprived having got up at 5:30 to get up here, and having got to bed late last night under the effects of caffiene.

My car right now is covered with DOG fur... Not inside, but outside... There was hail yesterday and we used my friends dog's blankets to cover the car... So now the blankets are clean, but my car has fur :-)

Anyway I had better get going... Things are about to get started...

New Scientist has a story how it is better to sleep on major decisions. The thinking is that your subconscious mind makes better decisions... and evaluates options better. The Register is also reporting that great dancers may be genetically disposed to dancing and keeping time.


I saw this cute site that lists the "The Many Unusual Looking Buildings On Earth". They have missed some buildings like the new MIT lecture hall...

The SMH is reporting that Coldplay may be splitting.

Finally, chocolate loving gamblers will love this. It is a chocolate roulette wheel, where one of the 12 chocolates contains a really really hot chilli.

I have done some contract programming in the past - and there was an issue with the software during the last week... So I started investigating this, getting the data together to debug the problem. Then something dawned on me - the program was not mine. I had thought that since I was sent the bug report that it was my software, rather than a similarly named product by one of their other contract programmers. OOps. Fixed now.

I think I got one of the quotes I put in this week too... One of the clients actually edited my proposal (with my OK) to make things clearer to those in his management chain. Looks really hopeful. Most of the work is being outsourced though which is not too bad... I will get a percentage...

XM Satellite Radio in the USA have released their current profit and loss figures. In the last 12 months they lost something like US$670m. That is a LOT of money. 80% of this was spent on advertising. The previous year they lost a similar amount. It intrigues me how companies can continue to keep moving like this - spending so much money. The problem is that there are two companies competing in the same space, and neither are winning...

The docking station on my iPod has been playing up on my bench. The left speaker has not been working well... I grabbed some contact cleaner and sprayed it on the dock, and things have improved dramatically. I think some tarnish has built up on the connections - and being a small connector there is no pressure behind it to keep it pressed together. Still, it is working now.

I finally have the three SIM cards set up... It has been a hassle. Firstly not connected, and then when they were connected they had locked SIM cards. And then when that was unlocked the units did not even work then since some dopey sleep deprived engineer placed the wrong settings in the units and had them connecting to Optus instead of Telstra.

Some of my clients are good to me. One of them bought a copy of the book 'Crystal Reports 10, The complete reference' on eBay, and then realised that it was not what he needed - and at 930 pages it was too big for his needs anyway so he is givng it to me. My client bought it for $2 + $5 postage. It ended up costing the pour guy paid $6.90 for postage - so my client is going to send some more to cover the fees and cost of the actual auction. And I get a nice shiny second hand book on Crystal Reports.

Sometimes I love SIM cards. Some times I really hate them. The problem is that there is no consistancy how they are set up. The last ones I got did not require the PIN code to be entered before use. This current batch did need that to happen. And if you put the wrong PIN code in a few too many times you will kill the SIM card until you enter the PUK code. And of course I do not have the PUK code for these sim cards since they are not in my name. And neither does the client. And I cannot ring telstra on their behalf since I do not even know the name of the client since they are being sold through a reseller.

Thankfully this is the business part of Telstra so it will be a case of the end user emailing Telstra and the numbers will be provided. But this is still a PAIN! Personally I like the idea of unactivated SIM cards not having a PIN number, or having a scratch off area with the code. The later are aparently in production but I have not seen them yet. I just need to put all SIM cards in a phone to test them before use - seeing if they have PIN numbers. Welcome to my life...

One of my friends suggested that I have a look at the Audacity Sound Editing Software. Not sure why he thought I might find it useful... I probably will sometimes, but I also suspect that I will not use it very often. But I keep that sort of thing in mind just in case I need something like that in the future...

Today I MUST work on my presentation for Sunday. It is mostly done, but I need to read through it to make sure I know what it actually says - after all I have not even looked at it since September, so if I want to do a good job I had better at least look at it. The one thing I will not be doing is removing my glasses during the talk. A friend suggested that if I felt nervous that I should remove my glasses and then I would not have to deal with all the people.

Only two things with this. Firstly, I do not tend to get nervous when I talk to groups. I have given lectures to 2-300 people with no problem. The other issue is that I cannot see without my glasses, and would not be able to see the screen which would be an issue, since I use the screen as notes. So I will probably not be doing that... Still, I will keep it in mind if I ever do get nervous...

One of my clients from Canada reported an issue this morning (and no, that is not why I am up so darn early... I just woke up just after 5AM for some reason and could not get back to sleep). After some debugging I found the following code which was meant to only run DoSomething once at a time...
If intick = False Then
intick = True
DoSomething
End If
intick = False
WHat it was doing was running DoSomething every 2nd time the code tried to run. The InTick=false should have been inside the If/Then... Quick Fix once found.

This evening I have been watching some more of Rough Science, and I have been really loving it. In the current challenge three of the scientists are making antiperspirants and deodorants... and washing soda and a washing machine. Totally bizzare, and totally fun. Great TV really... Pitty it is not a mainstream program but I am not sure it would really appeal to the general population either. It is really what I would call a fun show though... The washing machine that they made was amazing... it even changed direction during the wash cycle.

I had an interesting phone call from a childrens hospital today... From a GAIT centre... they were interested in tracking children inside as they walk working out how well they walk. I really could not offer much off the shelf, but gave some ideas of where to look for informtion - some keywords and the like. Since I could not offer a product this seemed to be actually helpful... As we talked I did get some other ideas on how to do things... I might investigate some of them later...

Finally... Here is a cute art project... here... An LED enabled paper lantern...

I am torn with the operations of the Child Care Centre... Right now I am trying to do a good job on the board of management, but realistically I am being stymied at every turn. I am trying to get the information so that I can make informed decisions about things, and at every turn I am being obstructed. And this takes time to resolve. I go looking to get copies of the files so that I can work out what is going on, and I get told that I cannot have access for what seems like specious reasons.

This is disconcerting to say the least. My own business has a simpler and more understandable structure. Most small businesses I know of have a simpler structure. I guess I am slightly disillusioned. I suppose all I can do is keep working on what I know about, and keep at it, ignoring any total rubbish that I am told. Trust but verify. And keep pushing... It is NOT supposed to be like this.

Thankfully some things are going sort of OK. I have had a bug report when you export to a database using a FILE BROWSER helper button. When you use such a button to choose a file to save to, the default directory for the application is thrown off. This causes all sorts of issies. It took me ages to find how to correct this issue. And when I thought I had fixed it I really had not... The answer was...
Path.GetDirectoryName(Application.ExecutablePath)
What this does is gets the full path to the executable and then throws away the local filename of the executable. So simple. Well, maybe NOT!

Some days things just happen, and I get really busy... I have not had a chance to thing since I got back from my run... actually since before my run, but that is another story. My run today was really good... I didi something like 5.5KM in 39 minutes. This means I was averaging about 8.5 KM/H. And I felt like I could do another KM at the end of that if I had wanted to. I felt great. I think I ended up doing two loops of the oval, and two loops of the bottom end of the creek. I really like the fact that my endurance is increasing. Apart from wanting to cool down at the end I felt wonderful. I grabbed a screendump out of OziExplorer as proof.


Well it does not prove anything except to me. And in the end that is all that matters - that I am satisfied that I have done what I wanted to do. I feel like running this afternoon, but I know that I should probably wait until tomorrow before going running again - wait until my body has caught up a bit.

Lunch time today I met with a client - great catching up with him. He has been loving my crystal reports functionality, and has been asking for more features all the time. It is bit of a double edge sword. Empower the users, and the users want more. And with him I am getting more feature requests all the time. And this is good in that it helps me improve the product, and bad since it takes time to improve the product. Still I love doing this so I guess it is not too bad!

In a little while I plan to go for a run... Assuming I can find a GPS with batteries I think I will take that with me so that I can test out that GPS to GOOGLE software that I Blogged about a few days back. I just found a GPS... I just need to find some batteries for it. I guess I will steal the batteries back out of my digital camera... The same ones I stole from the GPS to get the camera to work.

Yesterday I was having hassles trying to get a GPS tracking system working. More correctly my client was, and kept telling me what he was finding by eMail, and I kept asking questions. Last night I was going though his last email of the day and I found the results he sent me rather interesting. Firstly the unit was sending out identical position reports every few seconds - down to the time stamp not changing. If nothing else the timestamp should have changed. But each of the lines had a flag set saying that the data was garbage - that there was no GPS lock. So it looks like the two of us wasted half the day looking for issues with software or hardware at the receiver when it was transmitting side.

Quote written... Or at least sent off to a business partner to work on. Sure, there are a few other projects to work on... I have some hardware to get shipped here - I shipped some hardware to the USA and it is not working. So I need to ship some more units. So I need to order them. Correction - I have just ordered them. On the same subject I think I have just some some of the tracking units I ordered today... Sounds like they might be popular.

Instructables has a story on LED Throwies which are LED's connected to calculator battery, and magnet. The LED is then thrown up to the side of a building or something and lasts a week or two, as a piece of public art. Cute idea. Ari Shamir from RSA has determined that a cellphone can be used as a key ingredient in cracking RFID locks. Interesting read of the technology.

The SMH had a couple of money stories in the last day or so... First came a story about a Man at the mint who stole $2 coins, at least $6000 in them... And was caught when he tried to make a major purchase with them. They also reported that since yesterday was the 40th anniversary of Decimal Currency being introduced that the national archives released a press release noting that they had found an old press release advising people not to put decimal currency in puddings as this would make them poisonous.

PointlessWasteOfTime lists the Top 10 SciFi films that were never made. This includes the real Aliens 3, the other three star wars films and the single sequel and prequel to The Matrix. I think I actually agree with the analysis.

Right now I have a proposal to finish writing... I have been waiting a couple of days to finish it, and now I have the data I needed I guess it is time to finish writing it. Great thing is that I can do this at the same time as watching TV...

I think I just managed to get out of a trip to Tamworth. I have been having some software issues, and I think I traced the issue to bad settings. It seems that the hardware that has been having issues did not have the correct settings loaded, and I have since uploaded new settings. I will see tomorrow how this has affected things. I am hoping that things will be much better of course. If not I will just be working through the issues to come up with a solution.

I found an interesting tool on the web... It contains a page that works out the distance between two points on the globe. Seems to work. The numbers make sense at least. They wanted the numbers as Latitude, and Longitude, and I could not remember which was which. I was told that Longitude is the Longer number... Makes perfect sense here in Oz where Longitude is somewhere between about 130 and 155 degrees.

And CNN has a story about how love is a drug as addictive as food and exercise... They suggest that Romance may be tied to reward system that can cause addiction. Interesting read actually... The quote at the end of the article was good... "You can know every ingredient in a piece of chocolate cake, and you still sit down and eat that chocolate cake and it's wonderful, In the same way, you can know all the ingredients of romantic love and still feel that passion."

I came close to thinking I had a major problem with my trackers a few minutes ago. The management console tells me what is happening by VehicleID. I had two units returning data, one with 83 and the other being 88. These units should return data in order, and I was quickly looking at the data and saw that the time went backwards. [Expletive Deleted]. When I then looked more closely I found that it was two vehicles reporting, and one was slightly behind the other one.

And one of my clients rang with an issue - He commented that he could get a serial cable working only when it was plugged into the serial port and the USB port through a serial converter... But unplug from the serial port and the data input into the USB port would die. Really strange. I think that there might be a cable problem there - maybe the ground wire has come off. That MIGHT explain some of the issues. Without going into the clients office it is hard to see what is going on.

A friend of mine just MSNed me asking where to get memory for his DELL laptop... A quick search of my blog reminded me that Upgradable.Com.Au was the cheapest when I looked at this a few weeks ago. I saved us both so much time being able to just simply look this information up - provided of course that the prices have not changed much over the last few weeks, and assuming that the company is still in business.

I have just become a reseller for Scott N1VG's OpenTracker. This is similar to the Byonics TinyTrak III, but includes other features, and is open source. My units will be available in the next week or so, and I am selling them slightly cheaper than the TinyTrak III. My OpenTracker page is here

Today I have a few things to do. I have a presentation to give up at Wyong on Sunday morning at the Race Course (10AM)... This is a Ham Radio and Computer festival for the day... and I am talking on GoogleEarth. Should be an interesting day. I need to get some handouts written so that we can get them printed off. And I have a few other programming tasks to do too... and a proposal to finish writing...

I just needed to place an order in the USA for some hardware to sell on my Website. This involved registering for the web site, which I do not mind about. The problem I had was working out what state to put in. Each checkout basket is different. Some want you to not enter a state if you are not in the USA, some want you to find the I AM NOT IN THE USA option, and some want you to just go away and not bother them. In this one I thought it was the select any option case, but then when I answered the next question which was asking about the country, it changed the state pulldown into a freeform text area. If only the two options had been in the other order.

Not that SONY has ceased production the AIBO robotic dogs - I was going to say Killed Off, but that sounds mean - a programmer has come up with an AIBO for a mobile phone. I think the functionality is limited to total control, but I can just see someone taking this further and turning this into something similar to a tamogochi. Maybe if I got this software I would have a pet dog to call 'BYTE'.

I also found some software on how to run the MythTV linux TV playing software on the XBOX. Personally I am not sure why I would go this concidering how good XBoxMediaCentre is getting. It seems to do everything I need - at least at the moment.

The SMH has an article on 'How well do you know your culcha', which has a 20 point questionaire attempting to show how australian the reader is. Things such as asking the source for "How long can we look at each other down the barrel of a gun?", "Who defeated whom in the final of Australian Idol in November, 2004" and "Whose kiss in a collapsed mineshaft was seen by 2.5 million Australians?". Most people could not work out most of these apparently. I certainly did not manage to work out most of these.

I saw a great project which can read most proximity cards used for security purposes and play back the data on demand to open doors and the like. This just shows how insecure most of the cards actually are.

Finally, GoogleRunningLogs is a cute program that takes GPS logs and uploads them to a web site for use with GOOGLE... I might have to drag out a GPS and try this the next time I go running. Should be some fun.

I have just got back from running, and a small job. Let me explain. About 3km into my run I was feeling great... I felt like I could do another 2-3km. I was feeling great - and everything was on track. I had gone the full length of the reserve with a loop around an oval on the way, and was about to do a return loop on the oval when I got a phone call. ARGH. It was from the church, and they needed a light switch fixed. ASAP if that was possible. Yeah. So instead of doing another loop of the oval and a loop of the creek and maybe a lot more I did a quick run home and then the work at the church after a quick shower.

I suppose I really should get hydrated in a moment - I have just not had a chance since I got back from the run. I can assure you that I do feel a like some type of snack too - something healthy. I had a salad for lunch, and will probably have the same for dinner with some fish or something. Apart from feeling slightly hungry at the moment I am feeling great.

Since seeing Peter Gabriel in the opening ceremony of the Olympics, I have been chatting with a friend in New Zealand about him and the Fairlight Synth. There is a lot more to the story, but as far as I can work out he was about to ship Peter a Fairlight but then had to deliver it to Kate Bush instead... and got another one for Peter. So cool... Although I really did not realize that Kate Bush was in that much need of a synth. Then again, given Wuthering Heights I am not surprised!

Blogger.COM has been unreliable today. Timing out and generally not performing well. This entry is being written in Wordpad rather than with the Web interface since the interface is having problems loading at the moment. I would guess that Blogger.COM is having some issues with expansion, and that they need to upgrade hardware and software to rectify the issues. When it works it works well. At other times it is a pain. It just seems to time out returning the page or returns an error. Still for a free service with no advertising it is remarkably good. Thanks Google.

This morning I needed to send an SMS message on my phone urgently - and when I tried I got an error message saying that the memory was full, and to close some programs and try again. A reboot fixed this. But what was going on? The phone should be able to cope when programs crash or do not return all the memory that they used. I should not need to restart the phone to get it to work. I guess I need to start looking for a new phone.. .I will have to see what is available out there.

A bit later I am planning on having a run - maybe 4km depending on how I feel. The weather is fairly good for running so I dont think that will hold me back. If anything it will be fitness levels holding me back. But I will see how I go. I do not expect to break any land speed records, but I do expect that I will be able to run reasonably well.

I have had some minor hassles with eBay... One of the sellers from the USA thought that the $10 postage was for shipping to the USA, forgetting the AUSTRALIA ONLY on the postage price. I offered to reverse the transaction in PayPal, and just after I had done so he changed his mind. And then paid the additional postage. Total screwup of course... But it was just one of these things that happen with international commerce. His antennas will go out later today... And I am sure he will be happy - he is getting then for a good price.

On the valentines day theme, SomethingAwful has some StarWars cards that are, shall we say, awful. Therefore there is no link. Google is your friend if you want to look for them. I think they are things only a dedicated Star Wars fan would love, and that is not me. I have not even seen Episode 3. I will have to see that, eventually!

Oh, yesterday the domain Radioactive.Net.Au became available after a few years. When I first tried to register the domain I found it was registered a few days before, so I registered the radio-active.net.au. I have now got my original intended domain, and I am in the process of getting it set up. I am not sure how I will use it... Both will probably work in paralell for the moment. I need to think about this somewhat longer.

Being valentines day I thought I might include this photo that I found somewhere on the web a little while ago. It is of a teddy bear obviously, and is titled 'Mad About You'. Too Cute in his little straight jacket. I have forgotten where I actually found it...

Also on the subject of Valentines Day comes how to make heart shaped fried eggs.

The GoogleSightseeing WebSite (Why bother seeing the earth for real) has some pictures of StoneFridge or a replica of Stonehenge made from fridges. In the comments there is also a link to 'Carhenge' also in the USA... Guess what it is made of!

Right now I have a heap of emails to work through from overnight. Seems like things were busy around the world.

Some links ... Monorails.org has a cute instructional article on a monorail for puppies in a back yard. Looks so cute... Not sure what the animals really think of the monorail.

According to the SMH, Philip K Dick is missing. More correctly, his andriod robot is missing after being placed onto a flight and not arriving at the other end. The American science fiction writer whose novels spawned hit films such as Blade Runner and Total Recall died more than 20 years ago. "We can't find Phil," said Steve Prilliman of Dallas-based Hanson Robotics, which created the futuristic robot with the FedEx Institute of Technology at the University of Memphis, the Automation and Robotics Research Institute at the University of Texas at Arlington and Dick's friend Paul Williams.

Finally, Deals Direct has a HP 6365 PDA with GPRS, Bluetooth and Wifi for only $599. The only thing is that it does not have GPS making it an older model. Not a bad price if you are into PDA's...

I had dinner with an ex-boss of mine tonight - rather an enjoyable evening sitting outside just catching up. For some reason it has been well over 12 months since we had caught up... So this was well overdue.

I am just watching 'My Life in Film' which contains the idiot from 'My Family' and 'Love Actually'... They are doing a spoof of Top Gun with a car driving school where the idiot actor cannot pass his driving test. I will grab the guys name later. It is absolutly hilarious... It is Kris Marshall. The episode is actually called Top Gun in tribute to the film. They even used 80's music throught the episode that was similar to that used in the movie.

There is a story on news.com.au about how sending people to gaol Reduces the number of burglaries, but not because people stop committing crimes when they come out, but because the people do not commit crimes when they are inside.

Not sure when they are on, but I know that the Commonwealth Games is coming up. I got a request from one of my clients for some hardware for the Opening Ceremony. I found some hardware off the shelf that will probably do what they need. Actually I have no idea how what they were asking for will be used, but I do have some suspicions. I guess I will just need to wait a little longer and see what happens there.

I am currently listening to Blondie's 'Picture This'...
All I want is a room with a view
A sight worth seeing, a vision of you
All I want is a room with view, oh-oh
I will give you my finest hour

The CIA is trying to get all warm and friendly, trying to take over the hearts and minds of kids everywhere. They now have a blue Teddy Bear called 'Ginger' who can take you on a tour of the CIA. Ginger is named after Virginia where the CIA HQ is located. You too can follow Ginger as she gets her ID photo take, visits the staff canteen and the secure document destruction facility!

I found an Article that shows how the Random Play in iTunes actually allows higher rated files to be played more often than lower rated files. This only works in the random play in iTunes, but not on an iPod itself.

And Yahoo is reporting that a house in the USA was valued at US$400m rather than $110k, and this has caused real problems to the local community as budgets were based on the proposed income from the property taxes. So this has had a flow on to schools and other organisations who have had their budgets significantly reduced.

For once work has been quiet... Only a phone call from a client at 7:30AM asking if I could make some changes to a report sometime in the next 24 hours, and an email or two. So basically I am just catching up on other work at the moment - it is good getting a chance to breathe for once.

I also managed to get in a run - I think I did about 2.5-3km. Short course in other words. It was starting to warm up when I went which is why I did less than I have in the past, although I could have run further if I had needed to. It was probably better not to totally exhaust myself. When I went to go running I realised that I needed to put the belt on my pants in another notch - which is important for a couple of reasons.

Fist, it means I have to wear a belt otherwise these pants would fall off - not a good sight I can assure you. Secondly it means that I am loosing even more weight. When I had my shower after the run I weighed myself and found that I had lost about a kilo in the last week or so. It is amazing what can happen when you eat properly and exercise.

As a diversion from real work I just spent a few minutes working on the XBox, on the forlorn hope that I would find a business use for the device. Anyway, I have managed to do a couple of things which are fantastic. Firstly, I managed to FTP to the XBox. To do this running the EvoX software was simplicity itself - I just needed to type in ftp://192.168.1.101 into my explorer. But this said it could not login, so one of the menus had the option for Login, so entered that with xbox and xbox and it worked. I could then create a directory on the F:\ drive and copy in the files from the new copy of XBoxMediaCentre.

This time this worked, and appeared at once under the AvaLauncher list of applications. Perfect. Actually two copies were there so I ran the 2nd one. It took some time to load, but once it did it worked this time. I was able to go to the setup menu for the network and enter the IP address of my SMB server, and then all my videos and MP3s were available for viewing.

What is cool is the visualizations. As soon as I put a network cable next to the antenna in the lounge room, I think the XBox is going up stairs. This will also stop me from playing too many games. Probably a wise move. Oh, the visualisations are great when playing music too... Anyway, time for a run!

Working on the plane went yesterday - and once again the engine mounts allowing the plane to be rotated more than showed their worth. It seemed as if we were always turning the thing upside down and right way up. I did make a discovery though - if you have the plane upside down, it is MUCH harder to drop tools onto it damaging the plane. But, and I did not find this out, you also have a much bigger chance of dropping things on yourself.

Yesterday we finished getting the weldments installed for the Landing Gear which was really not all that painful. A mildly annoying job really in the scheme of things - but an important job to do correctly. The last thing you want is for the landing gear to fail on landing. The brackets are certainly VERY solid, and I guess this is a good thing.

We also worked on the panel between the back of the baggage compartment and the back of the plane. These two pieces of metal are sort of like a concertina with ripples for strength. This caused some hassles, mostly because the parts were not cut to shape or match drilled. Putting the back on the compartment certainly gave a great feel to the plane. Makes it look even more serious. And also points out how little room there is for baggage!

I somehow did not expect to be waking up at 9AM... And I was not disappointed... Thankfully I did manage to wake up at 6:15AM, which allowed me to get close to seven hours sleep. Maybe not enough to catch up on my sleep from the past few nights, but enough to mean that today I will be feeling a whole lot less tired than I was yesterday - or at the very least will not need to drink tons of Coke.

Watching the opening of the Winter Olympics the other night they had Peter Gabriel on performing the John Lennon song Imagine. Two things struck me about this performance - firstly how much Peter Gabriel had aged... and the other thing was how good he was at performing this song. He is truely a professional performer, and did a fantastic job with the lyrics of this song. You can just tell how much work he had put into arranging this piece of music for the event.

The latest Worth 1000 contest is interesting... It has photoshop-ed photos of what things would be like if Canadians ruled the earth... The one I love is the electric light globe in the shape of the maple leaf. So canadian. I wonder if there is a market for selling them :-)

11:15PM and all is well... Apart from being dosed up on Coca Cola that is. Well, last night I managed to get to bed about 12:15AM and for some reason woke up at 6:15AM and could not get back to sleep. And it is now late and I am slightly hyper. I grabbed a 600 mL bottle just before lunch, a can just after lunch and another on my way home, and although I know I am tired, I feel somewhat energised and wanting to type. I probably should have left earlier, and without the coke I would not have survived. An afternoon sleep would have done wonders I think.

When I checked my email earlier I saw that my USA buyer had completed the eBay checkout for the antennas, paying Australian based shipping charges. The charges to the USA are an extra $30 and it will be interesting to see what his reaction will be... Shipping can be a gotcha unless you are careful with eBay. Most of what I am putting on eBay is selling... I guess the rest is just junk.

I do have more to say, mostly about the plane, but that can wait until tomorrow. With some luck I will surface around 9AM to start work, but I somehow suspect that I will have done at least a couple of hours work by then...

Strange... last night I had an eBay auction won by a person in the USA for some antennas, and now I have to get the price of shipping. The shippings is likely to be more than the antennas, but thankfully I do not need to pay that myself... the package is just over 1m long, and 7cm in diameter so is reasonably horrible to send. I am waiting for the Australia Post web site to load as we speak...

Yesterday in the workshop attending to the plane was fun. Not that we managed to do much since the task we were working on was a real pain. We were working on the landing gear weldments, where they attach to the wing spar. Installing these weldments are like a 3D jigsaw puzzle where you need to keep adjusting the pieces to make sure that they fit.

Part of the fun is that some bolts need to be attached to the bulkhead, but the nuts are somewhat hidden from easy access, so the spanner needs to be placed onto the end of a screwdriver for access. We have got to the point where we can actually work on this without too many issues, but it did take some time. Today the plan is to finish getting these installed.

There is something somewhat civilised about sitting outside in the fresh are listening to the world go by - contemplating life. What is more civilised is when you are sitting there with an internet connection, and have nothing better to do that just write - reflecting on and observing life. Sure it would be better if there was not a dump truck operating across the road, but that is a minor inconvenience, and in a way it is and indicator that things around us do not stop even when we stop.

Just listening to all the sounds is enjoyable - working out what is happening... The sound of the hose washing something down, the sound of a jackhammer in the far distance, a police siren even further away, all mixed in with the sound of a gentle breeze and the occasional car. Sounds of modern life in fact. And then there are the echos, multiplying the sounds and creating new phantom sounds from every direction. I was going to say that the only thing that was missing was a dogs bark or a birds chirp - but having though that I can now dicern the birds singing on this summery day.

Sort of reminds me of Louis Armstrong's What a wonderful world which featured in the movie 'Good Morning Vietnam', but more importantly closed out the TV series 'Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy'. In that series, this song closed the loop between science fiction and reality...

I see skies of blue, and clouds of white
The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.

I noticed when I dropped in at Aldi yesterday that they had 'XB Remote Controls' on sale for only $14.99. Some research revealed that they were actually XBox Remote Controls, and although they are not genuine they are a great deal for that price. So I picked up a couple... I am just waiting to see how they are...

According to Think Secret, apple is about to release a real video iPod. That is an iPod that has a touch screen the entire size of the iPod device - a 3.5" diagonal screen. There are suspicions that it will be released about the beginning of april for the 30th anniversary of the company. If this is true the product is likely to be revolutionary...

And just to prove that people have a lot more money these days to spend on their children comes the Posh Tots web site. For instance they have a great custom 'tree house' for sale for only about US$5,600. This inludes a spy periscope to keep an eye out for tresspasses, and sliding peephole in the door to keep out 'pip squeaks'

Business Week has an article on The RIM Blackberry Case and their workaround. RIM have been sued becasue their blackberry service stores emails on ther servers if the device is out of range. This is in violation of a patent. So they are intending to have emails stored on the sending end if the device is not in range to get around the patent. And thankfully RIM is working on getting the patents overturned.

I read an interesting short article on CNN which mentioned how Target in the USA actually has a crime lab similar to CSI, and offers their services free of charge to government agencies who often are not as well equipped. The lab was actually set up to investigate personal injury in stores, theft and the like.

And time magazine has a story about the five rules when covering the Vatican. Laura Bush is in Italy right now, and the reporter made some interesting comments about the clash of cultures. The one that I loved the most was how the press corp was seperated from the presidential motorcade, and took back streets in a move similar to The Italian Job in a bus, and actually beat the presidential motorcade there.

I just looked up a phrase in Wikipedia - Fourth Estate. I had no idea what this actually referred to. The Fourth Estate is actually the Press. The first estate is the Clergy, the second is nobility, and the third is everyone else, obviously meaning that the fourth estate came at a much larter time.

The setup of the software went really well. There was one hickup installing the serial port driver thanks to windows absolute love for wanting to install drivers for some devices more than once. There are probably two drivers needed for USB to Serial drivers, and both need to be installed seperately and in order. Once we installed the driver a second time things worked really well. We just needed to tell the loader softare which COM port to use and away it went. Sometimes things are just too easy.

It was good having a headset telephone whilst doing the support - it allowed me to be doing some general tidying up at the same time - I guess you might call this multi-tasking. I am just wishing that my VoIP phone had a headset so I could also walk around whilst using it. I really do need to get the VoIP PABX up and running - it will make things so much better here. Right now I have three phones on my desk... My mobile, my cordless with its landline, and my VoIP unit. I will not be able to get rid of the mobile but I can dispose of one of the other two I guess.

I am getting a bit concerned about one of my auctions - for a solar cell. Actually I would prefer to re-list it rather than have the person buy it actually since I think I an get more for it if it is re-listed. But I have not heard from the buyer since the auction was complete over 72 hours ago. I guess I will hear on the weekend - Maybe.

I will be building tomorrow but I will be having a later start. I think we will most likely just be tidying up a few areas that we have been putting off until now, and getting them done. You can only put off things so long, so I guess tomorrow will be a tidy up day. Not as exciting as putting the two haves of the plane together for the first time, or putting the wings on, but important none the less.

Right now I am just waiting for a support call. It was due a couple of minutes ago, and I dont really want to start any work since I know it is going to be interrupted. So I am here, at least for the moment. I will hopefully need to go at short notice.

The call is sure to be interesting - I need to, over the phone, take a client through the steps of installing a couple of pieces of software, and working out how to install firmware onto tracking devices. This would be bad enough if he was a programmer, but this client is not a programmer. So I need to take him through the process of getting everything working and set up. If it goes well it should only take 10 minutes. If something is not working it will take a bit longer than that. Of course I am hoping that it does of course go well.

One proposal has been sent out the door today. Well, I guess proposal is not really the right word - it was three pages of hand written drawings and notes scanned and emailed. Which was really what the client wanted more as a way to remember what we had talked about on the phone rather than wanting a 30 page proposal on glossy paper. There are a few other parties involved so he is also trying to manage the process there, which like many other things has some politics involved.

The other propsal is more straight forward, and has bits added to all the time. I am still feeling my way through the product offering - matching the client needs with what they really need. I am sure that I would be better in this job if I could more accurately read minds. Well, that is not totally correct - it is also working out what the real needs are as opposed to the stated needs. Always fun.

Sometimes in the vehicle tracking industy you seem to get suspicious data that turns out to be somewhat innocent... Case in point - a client was looking at some data of one of their clients... One of the new reports lists the maximum speed and maximum average speed. This report gave a particular journey being 158 KM/H followed by a stop for five hours. My client almost sent a rather interesting email off to his client suggesting the boss look carefully at the driving practices of this person.

Well, thankfully he decided to plot the journey on a map - and found that the journey ended at a local hospital. Those sorts of speeds are cetainly more acceptable in order to get to the emergency room inside a hospital. Just knowing the speeds did not tell the story. In this case not even the suburbs that the journey started and stopped at told the story. It was the map that actually said something.

Memo to Self. Stay away from the XBox. I love it but it does horrible things to my eyes. Even 10 minutes is bad for them - I guess I am staring too intently at the screen. When I am at a computer screen I am not staring so intently, keeping my eyes on the keyboard, and the screen and things on the desk. But when I am playing video games I just stare in one place. So I really need to keep myself away from the darn thing...

Another thing I need to do today is write a proposal for a council for some equipment - we are slowly working on a specification for this work, and then I need to work out the charging. The good news is that I am pretty sure I will get the work provided we can get a proposal that they like. If not then we are stuffed.

The Orange County Register is Anaheim, California, has a 3D virtual tour of Walt Disney's Private Apartment at Disneyland. It is rare to get a look at the apartment, and it is an amazing view into the life of such an amazing person. I would love to get a tour of that part of the park. Actually I would love a behind the scenes tour of the entire place. I think it would be so interesting...

I have a few things to do today... Pre-sales call this morning, and some phone assistance to give for some people doing installs. And I have some debugging and documenting to do. One of my users suspects that there is still an issue with the reporting interface, so I guess I need to look at that and see what the situation is.

I still have not got the trackers out the door. Our friendly telephone company still has not fixed the SIM cards. Why does this not surprise me? There are about 20 million SIM cards. I would have thought by now that they might have got things to the point where they worked most of the time. Actually, I think they do work most of the time - I think it is more when they get something other than the generic phone service to do that they have issues. Telcos... The bane of my life - or one of them at least!

Time to put my feet up... Definitely. I have just put a couple of phone sockets in, and installed an ADSL modem. Let me explain. The first bit involved installing another two sockets in another room in the church manse. This was probably only 2m away from the closest socket, but that is still a long way. It involved drilling a couple of holes in the floor to put a cable in. This was fun in itself as the 2nd room needed a 20cm long drill bit to get through the wood of the floor.

Then I needed to feed the cable through. This is the part I hated most. Whilst under the house seemed to be cool once I got further under it conditions got worse. The height got lower, and the number of cobwebs did not get any better. The cobwebs were the worst bit - I really really hate them. Cannot stand them.

Once I eventually got the cabling installed I needed to install an OptusNet ADSL modem. This was a pain as well. They have a CD to set things up, but it did not set up correctly. So I rang up and I was amazed to get connected within 30 seconds. They said 'you should be fine now' and five seconds later I had a problem.... One where they said I needed to call Optus. This time it took about 15 minutes to get connected, and I think they just told me to try again and it worked.

All in all I think it took me 90 minutes to do everything; quite productive really.

The Child Care Centre meeting went really well. And it only lasted an hour which was good. Decisions were made, and I got a taste of the regulatory environment that the centres operate under. And what seems like useless paper shuffling between departments. There is a theory that as a civilisation matures the size of the government grows to meet the size of the workforce. I certainly hope this is not true, but I certainly can see instances of it in real life.

I did some more playing on the XBOX, although this time I remembered why I do not play too many video games... I tend to get a bit of eye strain when I concentrate on playing the game too much. I just need to relax my eyes I guess... This is not a recent development... I have had it for ages...

I have realised that it is rather a bad idea to have an XBox in your office. Too much temtation to play games. I probably spent another 10 minutes playing Midtown Madness, and I found it hard to escape this and turn the machine off. I think the thing is made to be addictive. I copied some videos onto my laptop HDD and shared the directory. The media player allowed me to play these without issue - and I did like the quality of the video. Now I just need to get the software so that it is logical in the user interface. That is, so I do not need to go through half a dozen strange menus when I start the XBOx in order to use the media player.

On the subject of Midtown Madness, there is a version of this at Disney's Californian Adventure. I think it might be called 'Manhatten Madness' but the concept is the same. In this case it is a roller coaster set up for younger children in small red cars. I was unable to ride any times when I was there last year since it broke down every time I went to ride it. By 'every time' I mean that it would break down as soon as I was about to get into a car! Not good.

I have a childcare centre board meeting soon. Some of what will be talked about there is covered under a confidentiality policy unfortunately. But given that this is my first meeting I am sure it will be rather interesting. I have some ideas on what I want to acheive at the meeting, but we will see what happens. I really do not want to be on the board, but they needed a church person and I managed to convince another man from the church to join if I would. At least I am not alone.

At lunch time at the same time as picking up some Thai, I grabbed a game from the local pawn shop for my XBox. I grabbed a copy of 'Midtown Madness 3' which has to be one of the coolest video games I have played in a while (actually since I do not play many video games this is not surprising). This game is set in Washington DC or Paris, and you get to drive your car anywhere... And it just keeps going - at least in the practice version. Straight up the stairs on the Lincoln memorial, burnouts on the mall, hooning past the whitehouse. All the things I would NEVER do in real life.

I can see why people love the XBox. I think I love it, although I have better things to do with my time than playing games. When I have a chance I need to work out how to access files over the nextwork [Accessing my Laptop is no problem - I worked that one out. Works really well].

And when I am not playing I do have real work to do - I am trying to bring myself up to speed being a conduit between a client and some programmers who have some knowledge that most people assume I have anyway. I guess I must be good at hiding it. Anyway being a technologist it is sometimes hard to work out what a client wants and what is feasable. And then there are the commercial considerations... How much will they pay, and how much will I need to pay out. Oh, the joys of business.

My XBox has arrived safely. Exactly as advertised which is perfect. The box is in a good condition - checking out the serial number I found that it was a version 1 XBox - which means very little actually. It came with a Samsung drive which is good since it reads the best collection of blank media allowing me to load Linux onto the device without too many issues.

I tried to install the new software onto it but I could not get it to work. I think it is an issue with how I am burning things to CD. Using an ISO file correctly formatted worked first go. I am rather pleased. The one thing I have not worked out how to do is look at files on my server. It is on the other side of a firewall, but it is a different IP range and I have not quite worked that out. After all I have real work to do!

From Israel comes news that sending data via SNAIL's is faster than ADSL or carrier pidgeon. The campers did a test, and compared sending files via ADSL, Carrier Pidgeon and on DVD's in the form of a rickshaw pulled by a Snail. And guess what? The SNAIL WON! I guess there are a lot of people who might be surprised by this... There was a statement a few years back that the fastest network in the USA is a 747 filled with CD-ROMS. Lets do the calculations. 100 CD's weigh maybe 1KG. A 747 can carry maybe 100,000KG, or 10 million DVD's. Assume 4 GBytes each (yeah, I know you can get dual layer), that becomes 40 Million GBytes, or 40,000 Terabytes. Divide this by 20,000 (the time of a cross-country flight), and you get about 2 terabytes per second across a country. That is FAST! Of course I have ignored the time to compile the DVD's at each end, and the latency issue (which is extreme at about six hours), but It is still rather fast.

My friends in Canada seem rather happy so I am pleased. Since the back end side had been run by hand on demand my first job for this morning is now to make sure that everything is working correctly and them set this up to automate things. Probably for a few weeks I will have the GUI run on a server somewhere, and then just activate the Windows Service. My windows server has enough other things running on it, so another piece of software is not an issue at all.

For the last few days I have been having issues with the CPU going into 100% use mode. This has been strange, and initially I thought it was Internet Explorer crashing, or Outlook. I have traced it to the inetinfo.exe program crashing. Going into Task Manager and listing the processes lists inetinfo.exe, and normally it will be using about 0% CPU. When it crashes it goes up to 90% or higher. Killing off this process fixes the problem, and it will restart correctly automatically. I think this is one more indicator that I really need to do a complete reinstall soon on this laptop.

Todays SMH has a story about the baggage system at Sydney Airport. Max Moore-Wilton is blaming the issues mostly on too many planes arriving at peak times, like 6am, and has called for the curfew to be lifted. Whilst I hate waiting for bags, I also hate getting to the airport too early, or even worse, having to get to the airport too early to pick someone up.

I got an email message last night informing me that my XBox had been posted. Since it was posted from inside Sydney somewhere I am hoping to get it today. Australia Post generally is fairly good with parcels. And letters. I have just done some more reading on boot disks for the xBox. From what I can work out it will boot CD's provided they have the files in the right spot. They do not need some strange boot sector in order to boot. Basically the XBox is all new to me so I am still on a learning curve.

If anyone ever claims that houses in new housing estates in Oz are all the same you should look at the photo below from Mexico. There are apparently something like 10,000 houses like this in the estate. I am not sure I would want to live there. This photo looks like something from The Truman Show, or something like that. A Hollywood version of reality.

My Family tonight was totally hilarious. One of the characters, Nick, decided to start a business. This being Nick it had to be something really stupid. So he decided to sell eggs. Not chicken eggs, but snake eggs. So he got himself a rather pregnant snake. Yes, a snake. This was fine until the snake needed to give birth when he started making comments like 'remember we practiced this... Remember the breathing'. Only on My Family would you hear such a bizzare statement. The show really was hilarious.

According to the SMH, a crew from the ABC's satirical news program, The Chaser, confronted AWB executive Charles Stott outside the housing the enquiry into the AWB kickbacks this afternoon. They presented him with cheque made out to former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and asking him to sign it. The problem was that neither Stott nor his council recognised them and complained to the court who were not impressed.

Finally, Andrew Carol has decided to build a Difference Engine out of Lego. The Difference Engine was an engineering marvel 200 years ago, until they worked out that they did not quite have the technology to build it. So in the last few years it has been built in the science museum in London. And a part has now been realized in lego!

I was looking in the bookcase and found a cute book that I had forgotten about. It is called Classic Cooking with Coca Cola. There are so many what look like great recipies in it - such as Coca Cola and Walnut cake, Coca Cola Roast (Sprinkle french onion mix over roast beef. Pour over a can of coke. Cover with aluminium foil and cook), Coca Cola Burgers (With Coke in the beef patty and in the sauce), Garlic Beef (Cut 2kg beef into 2" squares. Place 1 clove into each piece; brown in a pan, then put in a caserole dish with 1 cup of coke and 1/4 cup water; cook for 45 minutes in the oven, then add another cup of coke and cook for 15 more minutes and serve with rice), Seafood Fettucini with Coke.

A user of mine let me know that for the third or fourth time in a row that he had forgotten to save a copy of the configuration file for my TeamTRack application when he did the whole un-install/re-install thing. Oops. Thankfully he has now remembered what settings he has changed in the file, but I will need to improve this somewhat.

My client found a minor but in my reports. The report he was testing was detecting seperate trips, and he found that the maximum speed for a journey actually the maximum speed for the day. I forgot to reset the maximum at the end of each journey. Simple fix. Recompile the software. And upload it to the WWW site. The only problem was that it did not upload properly. I found a bug in the script which copied the file and then deleted it. Argh. That is now fixed...

When I was searching for Lyrics to Dido's Here With Me earlier I found another song of hers I did not know about - a song called 'Christmas Day', which is I imagine on a christmas album... Certainly iTunes does not have the song listed. It sounds like a classic story telling story - sort of reminds me half of Wuthering Heights, and half of Grace Jones song The General from the movie Toys. I will definitely keep an eye out for the song...

I first heard her collaboration with Ememen this morning on the song 'Stan'. I could not believe how well integrated the song was with Dido's music. Quite amazing really - I have never been all that much of a fan of his, but this has put the music into perspective certainly. Given me a different view of what he does - which I guess is what the purpose of the song was, at least partially.

Also on the subject of music earlier I came across a strange track by Bette Middler titled To Deserve You which to be honest I could not remember hearing. Once again, the lyrics are so powerful... You can just tell what she is trying to say as a song writer - the message she is tring to convey about how much she loves this guy - and how she doesnt feel that she is his equal.

I didn’t want you to see me like this.
The light of the dawn can be cruel.
How I want, how I want to deserve you.
And if I could be granted a wish,
I’d shine in your eye like a jewel.
How I want to deserve you.

I would die for you.
Could you ever love me that much?
How I want, how I want to deserve you.

I knew it was too good to be true, expecting the certain phone company to actually connect the SIM cards properly. I was contacted earlier to tell me that they were all set up. Well, that is not quite true. They might be set up for voice, but they are cetainly not set up for data. Actually they might not even be set up for voice since I have not tested that. Is it too much to expect a phone company to do things right the first time...

I have been doing some programming today - not much - but it is always interesting. Not on my TeamTrack application but on another project. This project has been fairly easy to write without many challenges which I guess is a real mixed blessing. In some ways I would love more of a challenge in it, but the project is coming along rather nicely. Unfortunately it is mostly a private project, but it has some interesting potential. I still need to think about that a bit more.

The workshop is getting cleaner all the time - I spent some more time this morning working on getting rid of stuff... I have a few crates of items that I really want to get rid of but I can just see needing as soon as I do. This is always the way - It just works that way I guess. Pretty soon I think I will just say stuff it, and dispose of things. There is stuff there like extruded aluminium cases and power cables that I really do not need. The cases were not cheap which is why I have not yet recycled them. We will see.

I just had a client ring... He was unable to get reports out of my software for some reason. Why this was happening we are not sure. But as soon as he tried it with me on the phone he managed to get it to work. Why does that always happen. You might spend an hour working on something and then ring up for support, and then you try it once more, and guess what... It works. Makes your face go red I can tell you. Fortunately it does not happen too often - I tend to spend too much time trying to get things to work (Classical guy problem isnt it? Refuses to ask for help... )

I was chasing up another of my clients about getting some SIM cards activated. I have the SIM cards and his client was needing to get them activated in their name. I am not a dealer for any of the companies and there is no incentive for me to either. Anyway they contacted the phone company and were unable to find anyone who knew what GPRS was in order to get this all set up. This as dispite giving them ALL the information possible - including the internal code for the plan that the SIM needed to be put onto. I just wonder how many people give up on the phone companies. I am sure it is non-zero. It just has to be.

Argh... More work. I just got another order for some tracking units. Time to surprise the client. I should try to get these out the door today! Given that there have been some delays in the past I think he will really enjoy the prompt service! Oh, and at the same time he told me the SIM cards had FINALLY been activated. Took them long enough.

Some good news today... I heard from a potential client in Canada. He is now finally getting some good results from a system that I have developed. It has been a hard process getting this done, but it now seems like the light is at the end of the tunnel. If I can pull this off there is a huge export potential for my software. And so far it is looking good. And if I keep improving my softare it can only get better I would think.

And with some trackers out of the way my office floor is starting to look like, um, a floor. And with stuff on eBay going out the door too my workshop is looking better too. [And on that front I still have more stuff to get rid of. I have a pile of stuff in my office for Auction... And when I find things, or decide I dont need things any more onto the pile it goes. So far the only thing that has not sold is a couple of DVD's. They are now a present for a client]

I have been listening to my iPod this morning, and Dido's song 'Thank You' came up on the random play. This is a song that I have always loved. You can tell from what she is singing exactly what she is talking about. You can just sense the love that she has for this other person - and how just the thought of him makes her feel better...

My tea's gone cold, I'm wondering why
I got out of bed at all
The morning rain clouds up my window
and I can't see at all

And even if I could it'd all be grey,
but your picture on my wall
It reminds me that it's not so bad,
it's not so bad

I want to thank you
for giving me the best day of my life
Oh just to be with you
is having the best day of my life

I had dinner with my brother last night... And we could not find a corkscrew anywhere... Hmm... I remembered the saying 'There is problem no without an engineering solution'. So I found a coach screw, and a spanner and a hammer. Coach screw goes into the cork with the spanner, and then pull it out with the claw of the hammer. It may not have been an elegent solution, but it worked really well.

I also had a phone call from an ex-boss of mine... Arranging a time to catch up with him. He is one of the two coolest bosses that I have ever had... When we were working on a major project we would sometimes come home by taxi - we both lived nearby. Anyway, we would have arguments on the way home - and we would both convince the other of our own points of view at the same time. That is we both cinvinved each other to swap our views.

But the coolest thing was once when I was organising a private consultancy trip to the USA. I was on the phone to the USA at 9AM on a Thursday morning... And I asked them to hold on a sec whilst I put my hand over the microphone on the phone, and asked him 'Do we have much on next week. Any problem with me taking the week off as rosters?'. His response as basically 'No Problem'. It was exactly what I was after... And so about 48 hours later I was on my way to the USA. A month later I did a similar thing, but this time I have him a couple of weeks notice to take two weeks off as annual leave.

I did go for a run this afternoon - the weather was too good not to go for a run. By that I mean that there was a breeze, and little direct sunlight, and the temperature outside was about right too. I think I ended up running about four or four and a half KM - I did what is my normal course at the moment and added a couple of loops around an oval - adding at least a km. I was feeling a whole lot better at the end of the run than I did on sunday, and was almost contemplating continuing a bit further. Sanity for once won.

The running is doing the job - I am generally feeling great. I weighed myself when I had a shower, and I had lost about 2kg since Christmas/New Year. I am slowly loosing weight which is the way to do it. I have been musing about going in the City to Surf this year. It might be time I did go in it - and that way I have something to aim for too. I wonder if I can find a group of people to go in it with me?

I mentioned earlier that I had got a parser written for a satellite job I was working on. Well, that was a wasted effort. It seems that the engineer who sent me the specification totally stuffed up, meaning that I got the wrong thing implemented. Still, it is good to have the code there for the future if I need it. But in this case I do not need it. Argh.

Speaking of Satellites... I am not sure if I have mentioned this but I have heard from the SuitSat guys through a friend... Seems that the satellite has not been behaving itself, and has now probably got faulty batteries. I was just wondering... Do NRMA deliver...

I have got a heap of work off my desk thanks to delivering a heap of trackers to the local post office for delivery to a client of mine. The box should arrive there in a couple of days thanks to 'express post' being not quite so fast in parts of the country outside the capital cities. In fact very little of the land area of the country can get express post the next day. They normally get packages the 2nd or 3rd day. I am glad I am not in that part of the country!

United Nuclear is now selling AeroGel which is sometimes called 'Frozen Smoke'. It is technically made of the same stuff as glass but weighs 1000 times less... They use it on space probes to capture particles for return to earth. It just looks so strange - and it is really hard to photograph. It is also really really strong, and probably close to the perfect insulator. The site above has some great photos of it in use.

The SANS web site is dedicated to computer secrity. They have a story on how the president of the USA recently visited the National Security Agency in the USA, and they had the SANS dshield live page up in the background suggesting that the NSA were actively monitoring computer security, rather than just examining the results of other people monitoring computer security.

This morning amongst other things I have been making up some trackers for a client. One of the steps in the process is to place nail polish on any nuts to ensure that they do not fall loose. Of course I did manage to get some polish onto my right index finger - so if you see a guy with nail polish on one finger in the next little while, well, that is me. Now, where was that acetone? The Polish just lasted for this batch... I need to pick up some more when I go to the post office... I have been told that pink is to be used next time...

I saw a really cute cushion linked to on a Web Site. It is called My Beating Heart, and is obviously in the shape of a heart. But once you hug it, the heart creates a tactile sensation that soothes and comforts. It is designed to remind the owner of holding their favourite pet, or cuddling a loved one. From the site... 'If you'd like to calm down, relax, or even take a nap, hug one of the Hearts. They can also help bring clarity of thought'. They also suggest that you 'Do not drive or operate heavy machinery when hugging a Heart'. I just wish that I had someone to give such a cushion to.

This afternoon I am planning on going for a run. Given that I went running on Sunday and given that it is a bit cooler I hope to get about 4Km done. If I can find my GPS I might even actually measure how far I run!

I have just taken my mother to the hospital for a six monthly checkup for her cancer. Thankfully that went really well. The oncologist was really thorough and does not want to see her for another six months which is fantastic. She said that if it was going to come back then it probably would have by no. So some really great news there! The cancer treatment centre is actually quite nice, and the staff and volunteers there really care. Simple things like offering you a coffee, and things like that.

I did take my laptop with me but I did not get a chance to do much. They were running on time and by the time I had it turned on I needed to shut it down. I did get a chance to compare the SierraWireless GPRS card with my Vodafone one. The SierraWireless one worked so much better - I actually got a connection with it. The Vodafone one would not connect at all. This is despite the fact that I was sharing a SIM card between them. I suspect that this is mostly drivers rather than hardware differences - I will need to have a better look though.

I dropped in at the shopping centre on the way home - and I was really good. I picked up a single book, and it was only $2.50. It was marked at $5 on special, and there was a 50% off computer books in the Angus and Robertson clearence centre. It was a book about language and how it has been affected by the internet. Might be a graduation present for my mother when she finally gets her degree.

I have come to the conclusion that eBay is fickle. I just sold a couple of items on there... One item I got about three times what I expected, and the other I got about half. Actually the second item was a solar cell. This was a 10W version, and I sold a 5W version for about 30% more a few weeks back. Still, it is good to get these out of the house. I have all sorts of old bits and pieces from old consulting jobs - things that I will never need and that have been written off totallty.

I have been reading up on the X-Box and found a fairly good FAQ on many of the things that people need to know about getting the most out of their X-Box. I am looking forward to getting mine, and I might even get a game to play on it... After all, I have heard a rumour that you can actually play games on them... I will have to see if that is actually true.

Overnight I got back the code that I needed in order to save a structure to file on the HDD in VB.NET. The load and save routines are below. The one thing I needed to do was convert my existing 'Collections' into 'ArrayLists'. Fairly simple.

fs = File.OpenRead(fil)
Dim bf As New BinaryFormatter
a = CType(bf.Deserialize(fs), AStructure)

fs = File.Open(fil, FileMode.Create, FileAccess.Write)
Dim bf As New BinaryFormatter
bf.Serialize(fs, a)

I mentioned yesterday that I had some issues with reports. I was getting average speeds that were in the hundreds of KM per hour. The reason is somewhat obvious now that I know. Let me explain... I have two variables - ThisTime and LastTime. And there is a one minute and twenty seconds between them. So to find the difference I used the following...
thistime.Subtract(LastTime).Seconds

This was returning 20 seconds which gave a really fast average speed if the difference was over one minute. The correct thing to do was use
thistime.Subtract(LastTime).TotalSeconds

TotalSeconds is the number of seconds so that 1:20 becomes 80 TotalSeconds. And it is the number I wanted. The numbers then start making sense. As to why I did not pick up on this when I was doing the programming I have no idea. One of the deep mysteries of the universe.

Last night a friend of mine sent me an MSN by mistake... details of a radio direction finder device. It is something that I have had an interest in getting for the business for some time, although I think this particular one has a few issues with it...

I finished the box today... Or at least phase one. It is partially comissioned, but is as comissioned as it needs to be right now. The box contains a couple of SonyEricson GPRS modules. It also has space for another couple of them. Right now though only one of the GPRS modules even has a SIM card in it. This is connected to a TERMINAL server so that I can now connect to it by telnetting into it. Also if I need to I can set the Terminal Server up so that I can dial into the GPRS modem too.



Thanks to the Franson GpsGate software, I now have a COM port on my laptop (COM32:) that connects to my server and allows me to operate the modem as if it were connected locally.

I could not work out how to save a structure to a file in VB.NET, so I have taken the easy way out. I outsourced it... I use a Web Site to outsource software, and just called for quotes. I got a quote and I am just waiting for the code to be written. I would guess that in the next day or two I will have the code so that I can work out how to do this in the future.

A few interesting things... First is that I have a meeting on Thursday afternoon about the child care centre. This is not an organisation I want to be on the board of, and certainly do not want to be on the board of for more than 12 months... But there are a couple of issues that need dealing with quickly... The most important is that the centre is not bringing in as many people as it should... In other words, there are too many vacancies. There are some proposals to fix this, but we will need to see more details. And there are a few issues that need to be resolved before the first meeting too.

The Wall Street Journal has a story about the geeks that go on tour with rock groups. More and more groups such as U2 or the Rolling Stones are taking geeks to fix computer and technical issues whilst on the road - things such as fixing the occasional PDA to working out how to get an X-Box to work. Sounds like some really cool jobs... Almost as cool as mine :-)

Whenever I am in LA, I try to visit a store at Universal Citywalk called 'Things from Another World'. It must have the best collection of movie and comic 'stuff' in any store I have ever seen... It is rather small, but well worth the visit... Well, they now have a Web Site... Although the web site does not do the place justice at all!

I have learned my lesson about what to do if I thing an item has the wrong price. I needed to go to tandy to get some connectors for a project. I know, Tandy is not the cheapest, but I did need the connectors. They were labelled at $7.98... But when I went to the Cash Register I was charged $10. I thought I must have got the price wrong, But I checked it leaving the store. I was right so I took it back to them. It must have taken about five minutes to fix the price on my docket and give me the refund. Argh. Next time I will know better.

Needing to grab the connectors did give me another chance to check out the tracking units on my car. They are all operating correctly now, so it would appear. So tomorrow they will go out to the client with a nice fat invoice. Seems I will be eating next week as well as the week after...


Now I have the connectors I need to install them... Then I will post some more information on the project... Maybe.

Sometimes I am a complete ditz. Yes, me. Friday I was having all sorts of problems with a cable for a box I was building. Now, today I wanted to make things go properly. That is use all the handshaking signals correctly on the RS-232. And I could not get the darn thing to work. Then I tested the cable I was working with last week. It was also now faulty. Hmm. Put it on the test bench. I am only seeing signals go one way. What is going on?

So I trace the signals out. Seems that the return signal does not go where it supposed to. Oops. Look at my wiring diagram. The wiring diagram says things are fine, but the cable does not line up. Neither of the cables line up. Blast. When I tidied up wiring friday night I must have mixed up two wires. And then I copied some of the wires. That would do it! More attention to detail required. Now I can finish building my little box. And it might actually work!

These sorts of cabling problems are a pain. So much time wasted on something which should have just worked. Too many things are like that unfortunately in this world!

Sometimes it is easiest just to outsource work. In this particular case I really did not have any idea how to do the work. I had a HEX based string and needed to split it into Lat and Lon. Much easier in 'C' although I would still have had some issues. Some languages are just better than others for some applications.

I have to go to the post office soon.. I have five parcels to post, mostly from eBay. Tomorrow I will probably have a similar number to send off, subject to payment of course. They are all wrapped... I have a few nice rolls of duct tape that makes it easy to wrap just about anyting. Actually I am sure that I could just use duct tape and send the items that way... It would be strong enough.

Oh, over the weekend a friend sent me a report he has been working on with my vehicle tracking system, and suggested that some journey speeds might not be totally accurate. It seems that it is saying that each journey is between 100 and 300 km/h as an average speed. Well, I do not think so. I think I have a bug in there somewhere. Maybe I should check the math!

I think I have finally located an issue that I have been dealing with for weeks. In the end the issue was outside my control, but I should have detected it earlier. You see, I have been getting a data stream from a supplier. Actually, I lie. I get two data streams. An over view in text format, and an XML detailed version. They should both work. SHOULD. Well, they do to an extent. But I found a strange artifact in the text version. The XML file might have ten items all timestamped. The text file should have a single timestamp with a single piece of data. And it does.

But what it does is takes the first piece of data from the file and lines it up with the last timestamp in the file. I think this is what we call a bug. Actually I am sure it is. Data like this is supposed to just line up. It is supposed to just 'work'. I have also found that some of the data is 'missing' too. From other sources I know that there should be data but I just do not have it.

This all means that one more thing has been removed from my to-do list. WOW. One down. 100 to go :-) Write now I need to write a parser for a satellite ground station... I *HOPE* this is not too hard... It would be easy in 'C', but I will be using VB.NET.

One of the strange things that I have found in Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 is that if there are too many tabs to be seen then there is no indication that there are more tabs off to the side. This might be intentional getting people to view the overview page (Ctrl-Q), which does make more sense the more pages you have open.

ABC News in the USA is reporting of a GPS Golfball that can be shot towards a car police are chasing to track it so that they are not as likely to need to maintain a dangerous high speed pursuit. This also got into the SMH. Cute idea. I guess battery life is poor but who cares?

One of the things that I saw on Makezine last night was a WHeelchair for a Dachshund. Not quite a wheel chair, but more a trolly. The poor dog had some back problems and got the wheels to support his back legs whilst recovering. So cute. Another thing from Make was a 1/5th scale wooden shermin tank that a father made for his son. This tank actually moves, and is made from wood. I think it looks really amazing. I think I would have used rubber tracks, but I just wish I had a son so I had an excuse to build this... Oh, well...

I have a dinner with my brother tomorrow... I dont think I have seen him since early january since I installed his lights... So it will be good to catch up with him. Since he works in a University, I would imagine that things are starting to get back to normal after the quiet of the holidays.

According to NPR, Grandpa from The Munsters has died at the age of 95. Also, EntertainmentEarth.COM is offering R2D2 Mr Potato Head's...

I have just been looking at MakeZine and there are a huge number of cute articles. When I am feeling refreshed in the morning I will investigate these further and provide links to any that are really cool. Judging from what I have seen this will be most of them. I would do it now but I am starting to wilt, and I really need my beauty sleep. Good Night... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.....

I just won an auction on eBay for an X-Box with an mod chip so that I can watch MPEG video streams without needing a PC. The price I got it for was very good. I used Bid-O-Matic which is a free piece of software that places a bid a few seconds before the end of the auction. There are a few things I do not like about the software, but generally it is good for buyers. It is best where lots of similar items get sold allowing you to ignore one auction if the price goes too high and then move into the next one without getting into a bidding war. Of course this is not what the seller wants - and I think eBay needs to run a tightrope between making things good for the buyer and making them good for the seller.

I also watched an interesting Junkyard Wars this evenig - they were building gliders in only 10 hours. Not bad concidering we have spent a LOT more time than that working on the plane, and are nowhere near to actually flying. The flights were not all that long since the hill did not drop off fast enough, but apart from that the planes seemed not bad.

I did go for a run - I did about 3km. At the end of it I was starting to get out of breath. I guess I was pushing a bit harder than I normally did, or maybe it was slightly hotter than normal. Regardless it was a good session. As the days start to get slightly cooler I hope to get more exercise done. But one time I will not be doing that will be tomorrow morning when I need to take my mother to the oncologist for a six monthly checkup. We are not expecting anything to come up, but you can never tell. I think she finished her treatment 18 months back... 2004 was not a good time for her.

I have come to the conclusion I have FAR to many distractions here... FAR TOO MANY. I am trying to go through all my EMail messages, and deal with them all. Each time I do that I find new things that I want to do. Fun things. Distractions. It is not good. Some of the email messages do bring in money so that is at least a consolation...

I have heard from the SuitSat people. It seems that for whatever reason the satellite lauched yesterday is putting out very little power, and can barely be heard on earth. I tried a few times when driving yesterday, and heard nothing. Today I found out that people with pretty good earth stations have been trying and only get intermittent contact with the satellite. Still, my friend Steve Bible who is one of the main engineers on the project got 10 interviews yesterday including one on Fox News.

My car, it would seem, likes the M7. I have maneged to get about 570km out of a tank of fuel. This will be about 47 liters or so, and this is normal fuel, not the high octane stuff. I would have expected maybe 500KM, but not this high. This is good. Unfortunately it does not offset the tolls, but it is better for the environment, and better for my fuel bills.

I did a bit mor programming in VB.NET. I have not yet worked out how to convert a data structure containing data into an XML text stream. There must be a way. Actually, there IS a way, but I do not want the hassle of converting it to an object when this seems just stupid. If I cannot work out how to do it I will ask one of my other contacts...

It looks like it has once again become overcase outside, which can only mean one thing. Yes, it is time for some exercise - a RUN. I will probably only do the 3km circuit, but I may end up doing more depending on how I feel. And I think that will depend on the conditions outside. So we will see.

Ahh, the fun of hardware. There is a light down at the church that has not been functioning for a couple of weeks aparently. Since the resident electrician has left, it is up to me as the deputy to do some of the simpler electrical stuff. Now I should explain that the campus of three small buildings have been built over the last hundred years or so, and there have been various upgrades. There are fuse boxes all over the place, and they are commonly poorly labeled. Or even mis-labeled.

I had great problems trying to find how this light circuit SHOULD have been getting power. I could not work it out. After probably 20-30 minutes I found that there was one circuit that was not getting power - the Hot Water Service. It was switched off. Strange. Turning it on caused another light to come on, but not the light I was interested in. After more investigation I managed to find that the starters in the light had also failed. Ahh, it all works again now!

Time for some lunch, and then I will probably get some work done - some paid work that is. I have enough to keep me going for a few hours! More than a few hours actually...

Last night when I was at the video store I saw two movies which I had some sort of personal interest in. Depending what is meant by the word personal of course. Anyway the first was my self titled movie, 'D.A.R.Y.L.'. So, they spelled my name incorrectly :-) Actually this is a movie from the 1980's about a child who turns out to be a robot. I have not seen this for years. DARYL stands for 'Data Analysing Robot Youth Lifeform'. There is one immortal line in this movie - after DARYL's best friend keeps calling his teenage sister 'Hooker' as a joke. DARYL asks 'What is a Hooker?' For some reason this is never quite explained.

The other cool movie they had there was stealth - a movie I developed some hardware for so that they could do radio surveys for filming. I did not get into the credits as I just developed the hardware for use by a company which was working on the film, and it was a really small job anyway. But I guess it is one for the memoirs.

I had an auction end last night on eBay - for a GPS module I had here surplus. I got an enquiry from the buyer if I had any more... Yes thanks. I can sell you another 14 at that price. Saves me having to keep relisting them. Too Easy. He has even paid for them already. They go out on monday.

Last night was a pain getting onto the M7... There was major road works on Norwest Blvd as they were switching over to make the intersection something that would not be called a rally course to cross the intersection. It looked like they had more people directing traffic than actually doing work. What did not help is that they allowed two lots of traffic in every direction for one lot going south on Norwest Blvd. ARGH. Hopefully it is now fixed.

What a fun and productive day... The plane is starting to look really really amazing. Today we basically finished riveting on the top skin at the back. This just needed some planning as to how to do this - some squeezing, and some hitting. The hitting was a pain, but realistically was fairly painless thanks to the fact that no-one actually needed to get inside the plane to do this. We were thinking that we would need to crawl in the back, but thanks to the stands allowing the plane to rotate, this was not needed.

We also did some riveting along the longerons further forward. This involved placing the plane upside down, and me getting under it. Surprisingly this gives really good access and there is a lot of room in the plane when it is in this orientation. This is one of the easiest ways to access the instrument panel - from what would normally be below.

We also placed the horizontal stabalizer on the back, and this looked amazing. We could not help just looking at the plane and saying WOW... What else could you say... It is now looking like a serious plane!!!

I traced down the problem with the grounds I was having last night... I had mis-identified the ground wire. Therefore there was no ground connection. Simple as that. When I connected the correct wire up, it worked. I wasted so much time on that mis-wiring it is not funny. Welcome to my (engineering) world. Right now I have ignored all the handshaking signals - maybe I should now get them working too. That is the 'Right' way to do things.

Yesterdays expedition to The Warehouse and OfficeWorks went well. The Warehouse had an OK seat, but it was not great. Then I went to OfficeWorks next door and that was the right thing. There was a seat just inside the door that would have been fine, but then I kept looking. Within 30 seconds I found another set of chairs that were fantastic and on special. High back, well padded and fabric. All for only $99. Sold. That was TOO EASY!

Oh, assembly. Manufacturers have learnt something. Provide extra screws. Not that I needed them, but they were there. The only thing I had a problem with was not realising I needed two washers under the chair for each bolt. Without the 2nd washer the bolt just went through the hole. I just wish all construction jobs were that easy!

Short post before bed... I am building tomorrow, so I need my beauty sleep.

But before falling asleep, I need to write some notes. I have just wasted most of an evening seaching for a problem with an RS232 stream. I have *FINALLY* found the problem but it was as much luck as the years of experience that allowed me to track this one down. It was a heisenburg bug. Whenever I searched for it I would not find it since the bug would go away. When I snooped on the datastream things were fine.

When I snooped on one direction of the datastream things were fine. And the other direction. But if I snooped on nothing it would not work at all. I could not work it out. Then I had a thought... What if it was a grounding issue. It should not be that since the laptop doing the snooping is really not connected to anything. So I made up the worlds strangest RS-232 cable... It only had the ground connected. When it was plugged into the snooping cable things would work. When it was open circuit things would not work.

Then I tried connecting this to the RS232/Network interface box (Terminal Server), and when I touched the ground to the case things worked. Seems like there is a gound loop or something in operation. In the next few days I will connect the ground to the chasis inside the box, probably via a 100 ohm resistor. That should fix things.

This afternoon I started on a project. Photos are here... I have not finished it yet though. I am having some wiring issues with this hardware though... More soon.

One of the problems with multi-processing is what is called a race condition. That is what happens when two processes are fighting each other for whatever reason - for instance one process says if a > b then increase b. The other process says that if b > a then increase a. Both are trying to maintain some steady state, and it just aint working. That is a simplified view of this buy you get the idea. When debugging a Race Condition all you can do is help your chances of spotting it, and thinking in three dimensions. What happens if this happens? Could that strange thing affect something else. What seems to happen is that two events that might have a 1000:1 chance of happening then have a 100:1 chance. Well, it is not quite that linear, but that is the general software.

It is the law of unintended consequences. What if these four strange things happen at once. What if the data is corrupted in these four places all at once. That sort of thing. Thankfully, at least in this case I am getting somewhere. I have isolated the problem so that I can be working on it in my office, and I can reliably duplicate the isse. That is the important thing - reliably duplicate an issue. Without that you can never be sure if the issue has been resolved. Of course I need to ensure that my bug fixes do not have similar unintended consequences. Who would want to be a programmer.

I think it will doon be time to outsource the code to someone else... It is starting to get really complex, and although I would not say that I am beyond it... Just might be easier if I got a friend to work only on this code!

I really did not realise how uncomfortable my work chair had become until I visited K-Mart earlier and tried out one of their office chairs. The seat was so much more comfortable than the one in my office - which must be about four years old by now. Over the next few days I will go down to 'The Warehouse' and pick up a new one. In the interim I have placed an old blanket on the bottom which has improved things significantly too. I have also just checked out OfficeWorks and they seem to have some good chairs at a good price too... Maybe I should go shopping a bit later when I am ready to test out the trackers...

I have just checked a couple of auctions I am running on eBay (and yes, I know it seems that every second post has an item about eBay... This will change I am sure)... And I cannot believe some of the prices I am getting for things. A fingerprint reader I was given by Microsoft which is used and sells new for $100 is at $59 with four days to go. Some GPS and GPRS modules that I am selling used and mostly untested has five people watching it, whereas an auction for five GPRS trackers (which is is still worth about $4K except that I dont have cases and do not really want to support them only has one person watching them, even with a $50 start price.

In other words some things get much better prices than I would expect. Others get much lower interest than I would expect... When you are dealing with such a big system as eBay with so many people using it I am not surprised. Oh, and earlier when I was at the Post Office I picked up an Item I purchased on eBay. It was only shipped from the USA on friday. Not bad service!

This may sound really strange but I am writing this in the back of my car. No, not on the back seat. I am actually standing with the laptop on the back parcel shelf, whist I have some tracking hardware in the boot being 'debugged'.

Thanks to the magic of WiFi and Laptops this entry can be written running totally on battery power. So, why am I working at my car rather than my desk? Well, the hardware is in my car, and it is not behaving. And I need to plug the laptop into the hardware before I reset it. Ane I need to give it some time to try to recover. And so I have a minute or three to type this up before I then go and look at the logs...

I got contacted overnight about the item on eBay I was waiting on getting paid for. The buyer has now paid for the item so things are good. I guess that means I will soon be taking the parcel (which is already addressed and packed) down to the post office for sending off. Hey, I need to go to the post office anyway to grab the mail so sending this off is not a problem. [When I was there yesterday one of the other customers had bought the staff morning tea... I guess that shows what the staff at the post office are like - you actually get to know the people who work there].

I think I have worked out how to test the firmware in my tracking units... Basically it involves 'reducing' the amount of memory in the device and seeing if that is causing any issues. Not actually reducing the memory, but reducing the number of slots that it can store position reports in. Minor difference, but an important one - removing memory chips is rather difficult and somewhat destructive. Why do something in hardware when software will work.

I just had an interesting phone call. I had been doing some wiring for a client and the phones would not work. I mean I had installed new phone sockets throughout the house and none of them were working. My client was rather 'concerned' to say the least. Thankfully he worked out what the problem was just before phoning me, and he was ringing to confess. It turned out that the phone plugs were the old 6 pin RJ12 plugs, and the sockets were the new 8 pin RJ45 sockets. There is no problem with using them together but he just had not pushed the plug in quite far enough. Pushing it all in fixed the problem.

I am not sure what happened by overnight my Web Server on my local server here died. After spending some time looking for what was happening I could not find a thing. The Web Server would just not respoond. It happens. Restarting did not seem to help either which was strange. Thankfully restarting the server fixed the promlem making me suspect that maybe something like the TCP stack died. I will see what happens during the coming days and weeks to see if this is something more major. But things are up and running again.

Bug Reports are starting to filter to Microsoft on the Internet Explorer Beta 2. I have had some issues with it - not being able to upload files using a browser, but I do not know if this is related. Could have just been a glitch somewhere else on my PC. My guess is that microsoft will bring out a patch fairly soon to fix some of these issues. That is my hope.

Finally, Western Union has announced that they are no longer offering telegram services. You can no longer go to one of their offices and send a telegram. Not that there is much need these days with fax, email, cheap phone calls and the like. They are now only offering the sending money type services.

The more I see of the show 'Commander in Chief' the more I love it. There just seems to be thr right amount of drama in it, mixed with the right amount of humor, and the right amount of doccumentory. I wouldnt call it as cerebal as the West Wing, bit I think it certainly has the appeal of that show.

The Atari Magazines Web Site has an article from 1989 that predicts 2001, and does a fair job at it. Amazing at how wrong they could get some things in that short timeframe, and how right they could also be. Things such as predicting the media PC and the broadband internet to the home of the phone line. I am not sure that I would have done any better if I had tried. I am not sure that I would be able to work out what life will be like 12 years in the future... Might be an interesting thought experiment at some stage.

Tomorrow it looks like I will be doing some serious debugging of firmware. I have yet to work out what is causing the bug, or the extent of it, but it is definitely one that needs to be fixed. Working out how to fix this will be interesting since it is an intermittent problem - the worst kind of bug.

According to News.Com.Au, CBS has announced that episodes of shows like Survivor will be available direct for the CBS.COM web site. There will be a charge for this service, and it will give access to the show for 24 hours. In order to appease CBS 'affiliates', a portion of the revenue will be shared with the associated stations.

One of my clients has been having hassles editing reports. He has a newer version of Crystal Reports than I have. I only have the version in VisualStudio 2003. When he tried to edit reports today, he got an error message about Crdb_adoplus.dll not being found. According to the Crystal Reports Web Site this is a known issue, and they provide a download to fix this problem. One more complication.

I have just got back from a run. Yes, I know it has been rather warm today, but I did wait until it had cooled down somewhat until going. I probably should have been waited another half hour or so but it was not too bad. I ended up doing about 3km, and that was basically enough for me for the evening in terms of exercise. I did it in about 26 or 27 minutes.

According to SAS.ORG research has been done proving that people are more likely to catch a cold if they go flying than if they had never flown at all. Scientists believe that it is not only the minimal air flow that causes this, but also the low humidity. Actually they believe that the humidity is probably the most important paramater!

WHen I was running, one of the songs that came up was Delta Goodrem's The Analyst. I just love the lyrics - sounds somewhat biographical. Reading through the lyrics you can just understand what she is thinking, and the tune is good too.

It pays to be careful when using eBay to buy stuff. I was looking at buying a U2 Best Of CD. For some reason the price got to $50, which was a price I was definitely not willing to pay. I just saw the CD on sale at Go-Lo in Ingleburn for only $15. And I did not need to pay for the postage either on that.

When I was at the postoffice I got another job out the door... I was hoping to get it sent out a few days back, but I wanted to talk to the client before sending it out. International postage is not that expensive, but the real pain is the delay whilst the parcel goes around the world. So right now the parcel is on its way to Seattle, and we will see how it goes. I was not able to meet 100% of the requirements of the sepcification, but I think it provides enough without doing significant engineering.

Next Task? Well, I had a phone call from one of my clients... He had an engine fail in one of his vehicles and it had a tracker on it - and now is trying to work out what happened to the vehicle in the days and weeks before. The raw data is there for a lot of forensics, but it can be a pain to process them in the reporting engine. In some cases the data has already been filtered out. So my next task is to add fields to the report for things such as the maximum average speed. At the moment the speed field is in Knots. It is probably wise to create a field for speed in KM/H too.

The IEEE Spectrum Magazine has an article in their February issue about the coolest engineering jobs for 2006. Everything from mythbusting to building remote control planes to lighting design. Actually much of this sounds like some of the cool projects I get to do too...

In the wireless world, Australian IT is reporting that Unwired is starting a push into Melbourne. I am sure that they will make a significant impact down there just like they have up here. After all I think that there is a huge potential for the WiMax technology, provided that the number of base stations is large enough [And this is something that has really not happened in Sydney yet. And this lack of base stations leads to throughput issues.]

The ToDo list is done... Working through it I realised a few items had dropped off my agenda... Some projects that need my attention. Now that I have been reminded about them I can now give them the attention they deserve. But that can wait until after breakfast.

Last night I watched the rest of the Jean Michele Jarre DVD - including a documenty called 'Making the steamroller fly'. I found the show facinating - since it described some of his history with music and the development of his great outdoor shows. And how for his first big show on Bastille Day in France he was expecting a few thousand people, and over a million turned up. I certainly am glad that I purchased this DVD. I dont buy too many music DVD's... This one was definitely worth it though... It also filled in some of the back stories as to why certain things were done in certain ways in previous concerts.

The first job on today is to update my to-do list. It is fairly up to date, but there are a few items that I have been meaning to add, some that have been finished, and some that have morphed into new tasks. One task was importing some data into a database for some canadians. Now the task has been morphed into checking this data with other sources and working out if there are any major differences.

Some time, probably this morning I will take a longer trip somewhere to test the tracking units. Maybe down to campbelltown, or into the city. Not sure yet. But somewhere where I can drive fast and slow to make sure that things are operating how I want them to. I also want to test a few more features on the trackers before they get shipped out too...

I think I have found something about IE7 Beta 2. It seems to use more CPU time than other versions. This in turn has meant that my CPU is running slightly hotter... That is what the symptoms say. I am not convinced. The more I think about it though the more I think I need to reinstall all the software on this PC. It has been about 12 months since the machine was installed and I think windows is starting to die under the strain. Or maybe just more RAM will fix thigs.

I got something strange on eBay... I had a person remove a bid on an item I am selling. Thankfully there are still 5 days left, but the person says that they put the wrong amount in by accident. Since they have not put a new bid in yet I am not so sure. Still, not much I can do. On the subject of eBay I am also waiting on a payment for an item I am selling... It has now been 36 hours... I guess we will see what tomorrow brings.

I had a great talk with a friend of mine about movies and lyrics. For some reason the subject of the song Sweet Home Alabama came up, written by Lynyrd Skynyrd. Looking at the lyrics it is clear that this is a song that was written in reply to canadian Neil Young who had just released a sound about the south of the USA...

Well I heard mister Young sing about her
Well, I heard ole Neil put her down
Well, I hope Neil Young will remember
A Southern man don't need him around anyhow

One of my clients reported a strange problem this morning with my TeamTrack software. He mentioned a second login screen... And seeing I was confused sent me a copy. This confused me more than him to tell the truth! You see, this is NOT one of my dialog boxes.

Doing some searching I found that this is probably related to a DLL issue with different versions of Crystal Reports. Normally people get this error, from what I can work out, running Crystal Reports with Access, where credentials fail for some reason. I do not understand that issue at all. In my case it must be a DLL issue since I am just sending a dataset to the reporting engine rather than telling it to log into a database. Since this is the same client who has bought himself a copy of the crystal reports software so he can write his own reports I think DLL issues are most likely the cause.

It was interesting to note about the postal shooting near Santa Barbara overnight. The shooting was actually at Goleta which is where the Airport is... Just north of the down town. I think the best way to describe Goleta would be to compare it like Palm Beach or somewhere like that... Including the gum trees. I got to stay in Goleta in 2002 when I was over there and it really is a nice place to visit, probably the last place I would expect something like that happening.

Finally, Bill Gates was saying in an interview that he has Too much money to tax. Well, not that he should not pay tax, but more that he needs to be put onto a seperate computer system to work out how much tax he should pay. After all, with his net worth a rounding error can wipe off hundreds of millions off his tax bill.

Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 looks nicer, and the features are less klunky than before. However there is one exception... I have worked out how to save the common startup tabs. You actually do it by setting multiple home pages under Internet Options. You put one link on each line. But of course since it is a modal dialog box coming up, you can only add one page at a time. To add more you need to open and close the dialog, or past to wordpad. I chose the latter. It seemed to work really well.

Pressing Ctrl-Q brings up the following window which is a cute feature but it may not be all that usable in real life.


I have managed to hand over the church accounts - only took 90 minutes. Not bad - but I am sure there was a lot I did not explain well. Since I have never been the treasurer of the organisation I was only basing the hand over on notes. And the notes in many cases assumed you knew what you were doing.

A couple of links now... Firstly some Valentines Day cards thanks to Boing Boing. These ones are 'Law and Order : Special Valentines Unit' ones and a few are rather corny. The other link is to a Battery Tab Welder.

February 1... Time to cut up my old credit card... Into about a million pieces. Anyone going through my garbage will have fun if they want the card since it is destroyed. Just checked my wallet (again). I did cut up the correct card :-) Cutting up the wrong card would be a bit of an OOps.

I have just installed the new beta version of Internet Explorer 7, and I am VERY impressed. The rendering of the text is SO much clearer. I am not sure what they did, but it improves things significantly. The text just looks so crisp. You can download the new verson here. If you already have a beta of IE7 you need to uninstall first. But that is simple, apart from having to press the 'Show Updates' button in Add/Remove Programs. It rebooted the computer after uninstalling, and again once it was installed. What I found strange when I uninstalled the beta was that it warned me that most of my programs would not run properly once I did it. Yeah, sure.

Once cute feature is that there is a pane showing thumbnails of all the IE windows open. Very nice. The only thing I have not found is a way to save the common tabs. I am sure that exists somewhere. It just takes some time to find it. Also I need to work out how to get the Google Toolbar onto its own line...

StarWars.COM has an article about the MythBusters who used to work for ILM who did the special effects for the movies. Great read.

Google have released a new version of their Toolbar. This version includes a favourites folder that is stored on the net. Since Microsoft has not managed to have their favourites work in Internet Explorer reliably for some time, this might be a great thing.

News.Com.Au has an article on great driving songs. From the article 'When Bruce sings, "Tramps like us, baby we were born to run . . .", well, you might be stalled in the traffic at the lights, but somewhere in your soul you'll always be free and clear out on the open road. '. What more could be said?

I solved the problem with VB.NET. It was rather simple... I defined a structure like :-
Private structure MyStruct
dim Col as collection
end structure
Normally to use this I need to do something like :-
Dim MyData as new MyStruct
But this was not working properly... What I also needed to do was say
MyData.COL as new collection
Now this works...