I think my TeamTrack application is working fairly well in VisualStudio 2005. The threading seems to be working OK, but there is more to be done. The user interface needs some work, but it is actually working. I have to add things like tool tips, and then make up an install program, and do a lot more testing. Then I can release the software for Beta testing.

There was news a few days back that a spouse having an afair was detected by a bug with removing browsing history in firefox. Now comes news in The Register that a wife was detected by the use of the Ethereal Ethernet snooping shoftware. He found that his wife had been having an afair for a couple of months... Hmm.

Networld World has a story about the person who designed the Internet Router. And as it turned out CISCO's router hardware was based on the code from the first router.

In the SMH, is a story about how some thieves tried to steal a Koala in Queensland. When the Koala decided to scratch the thieves almost to death, they decided to try something safer - stealing a crocodile! I kid you not! Also in the SMH is news that the major five suntan lotion companies in the USA have been sued as a class action for calling their lotion waterproof and sunblock which the litigants call clearly misleading.

I still have not worked out what to do with thread.suspend and thread.resume in VB.NET 2005. I did find another thing when I was searching for a solution for that though - on codebetter.com. The issue is that ay call to System.Configuration.ConfigurationSettings just needed to be changed to System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager. Easy enough, except for one thing. It didn't work. A reference to System.Configuration.dll is needed!

I think that the thread functions might be replaced with SyncLock, but that remains to be seen. Google will be my friend I think for some time until I work out what I need to replace in my code. The reason I need to do something is that when a webservice is called in the background then the application waits until the function returns meaning that the application does not respond in other ways. This is not good. So I am working on threading to improve the responsiveness.

Brian Eno and David Byrne have released their album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts on the Internet. What makes this title interesting is that they have released a couple of tracks with complete multitracks for two of the tracks making it quite east to totally remix the songs. They are also encouraging people to remix the tracks and submit them. I think this is what would be called experimental music. Why are they doing this? Well, so many people have been doing this in the past, and including samples in their own works that they thought they might as well help them. Wow.

On the Makezine site I saw one of the stranger projects... a rug made from an LED rope light... I am not sure how useful it is, but it is certainly something different...

My VB.NET 2005 coding is going slowly. I am changing some user interface elements, and this is taking some time. But I am also finding bugs - some of which are now appearing thanks to slightly different ways that the language is operating. At the moment I get a large number of messages come through when I run the program in the development environment where I catch an exception and ignore it... I now need to look for better ways to write this code so that I dont take a performance hit from the exception... Hmm. Fun and games.

Some links before I start programming...

Computer Graphics World has an article about the digital storage in use at ILM, and describes their impressive infrastructure. Wired is reporting on Daylight Saving issues in indiana. That state in the USA is finally all going to daylight saving time... In the past various parts of the state have been in different timezones. Microsoft is suggesting printing out any outlook schedules before making changes for daylight saving...

In the surveilence world, Spy Labs is selling a surge protector with a GSM phone built in for bugging a company. It ony costs 950 pounds.

And the Federal Government is looking into charges at Australian airports now they have finally worked out that prices have been going up since they were sold off.

And finally, check out this site!

For the last few too many hours I have been working on my TeamTrack application upgrading it to VisualStudio 2005. There were a few hundred issues to be resolved. Not major errors, but in some cases the syntax has been supersceded, or there are new ways to do things, or there are variables that I have not used, or many other things. My code is a lot tighter now. There are a lot of things to resolve, but that will certainly not be tonight.

I was having an issue to do with serialization of the XML Web Service. Things were just not working. I eventually found that I needed to turn off "generate serialization assembly" in the advanced options in the project properties. This was hard to find, and a friend found it for me. There have been other issues - but I have just been working through these one at a time. I still have an error when I close the program down that has to do with an error at 0x0eedfade. Not sure what this means.

Anyway I guess it is now bed time... More tomorrow.

I did go for a run... It was probably too close to the middle of the day, meaning that the sun was shining and the temperature in the sun was a bit warmer than I thought it was going to be. I ended up running about 3km. Not sure exactly how far or how fast - that was not the point. I just wanted to get back into running. I probably should not have had lunch beforehand, even if lunch was only small. Yoght, smoked salmon and mineral water do not really seem to go well together...

I have started working on converting my TeamTrack application to VisualBasic 2005. It runs, but there are some fixes to be made. I am working on the error messages at the moment, of which there are about a hundred or so. That is all it will tell me about, and I have not worked out how to find the 'show me all error messages' button yet. I showed a friend this software a few days back - he had no real idea what I did for a job... He was blown away, when we were sitting having a coffee, and I had my laptop out and I showed him vehicles around the state moving on the map as they moved in real life.

O'Reilly has a short article on how to use vocoders in music. A vocoder is a voice digitizer that allows you to reduce the bandwidth conciderably... Sort of like MP3 on steroids... And it distorts the voice in interesting ways. The old Cylons on Battlestar Galactica used them for their speach.

Finally a useless link... seek.com.au have released their auditor indepenence policy... I just want to be able to refer back to this in a few weeks, so I am posting it here... After all the blog is my space...

As soon as this entry is complete I will be having a run - I have not been for about 10 days or so, and I am looking forward to geting some exercise. It has been too long, but things conspire against running - such as weather and illness. Still, I am fine now. I will see how I feel when I get out there. It is a tiny bit too sunny but I should be fine.

When I come back I am going to finally convert my TeamTrack application to the latest version of VisualBasic.NET. This has been something that I have been putting off, but I now think it is time. There are some user interface elements that I want to add, and I cannot do these cheaply without upgrading. The upgrade is the easiest way to do things. Basically I want to add some toolbars for various applications.

MickeyAvenue produces Disney type fonts. One of their hobbies is going to Disneyland and taking photos of their own fonts in use throughout the park - where they have done things by computer rather than by hand. That would be so cool... Being able to visit Disneyland and saying 'I created that'.

I managed to sleep in this morning... By the end of the week I think I will have adjusted for the end of the coming daylight saving. I managed to wake up just before 7am today... Sometimes it is nice to sleep in....

The 'Globe and Mail' has a story on how some people are sensative to electricity around them. They quote research as indicating that the electricity causes health problems, bad moods and the like.

The Salt Lake Tribune contains a story about how a election official in Utah is rather concerned about voting machines and got someone independant to look at the device. Now, the manufacturer of the machine is going to charge US$40,000 to audit the machine (rather than just reformat the HDD etc) to discourage other people doing checks to make sure that the machine is operating correctly. This is the same type of machine that has been used ilegally with incorrect software in other states in the USA.

I just was looking at a piece of junk mail from our local member... Front page of this insert contains the words '...they would have needed to find alternative child care which is hard enough to find at the best of times.', talking about a child care centre in the area being given an extra 12 months before shutting down when their lease runs out. The only problem here is that there are more than enough child care places in Ingleburn. Two centres the size of the one being shut down could be accomadated in the vacant places in the existing centres. And another two or three are opening this year!

I mentioned earlier about the report on ASIO forcing people to securely wipe parts of their HDDs. Well, I was talking to a friend about this, and printed the report out for him. It turns out he used to work with some of the people involved, and was rather interested to see the report. From what I can gather the fact that this report had been written had not quite gone around the old boys network.

The Register is reporting that Dell has stopped offering full graphics chips with some Inspiron notebooks in the UK, and you have to upgrade if you want the decent graphics performance. They are advertising the slower notebooks as being ideal for multimedia applications.

Anyway, my bed is calling me... I am feeling tired, and if I stay here I will just fall asleep

A few minutes back I had a SKYPE from a friend in New Zealand... He wanted to show SKYPE off to a visitor so he contacted me... His visitor was impressed... Even more so when he was able to use the Skype-Out feature to ring me back on my home phone and ask me to Skype him back. Really cool. Tomorrow morning I need to speak to Canada so I might use SKYPE to call them... using Skype Out.

I found another strange thing about Telstra the other day... Telstra use parcel post for bills when needed. How did I find this out. A client of mine got a phone bill of over 1000 pages... The bill was not for much money, but the number of pages was just so over the top. This was a good incentive to get online billing. What I would like with Telstra would be to get an overview page from telstra, and the details emailed to me.

I just had a neighbour from a few houses up come over and ask for help. His daughter and wife had been spending hours trying to get windows media player working properly with a video projector for the daugher's 21st birthday. Windows media player would come up with a black screen, and nothing would fix it. The video was of the the daugher's life edited to music, and I did hear comments that the party would need to be cancelled if the issue could not be fixed :-)

It literally took me about a minute to fix the problem. Pressing Function F5 a few times fixed the problem. I actually needed to bring the laptop screen so that it was black, and then things were fine. I suspect that if I had looked at the display properties, and checked if the VGA output was video output 2 or a clone of video output 1...

Dinner tonight was nachos... I forgot about the sour cream, but apart from that they were actually perfect. Some salsa with mince on top of diced lettice, cheese and tomato and corn chips was all that was needed. It was delicious...

Finally, something worthwhile buying on eBay. There is a WWII Enigma Machine up for auction. If the price was not so high I would bid on it. With a few days to go the price is already 9998 Euro. I expect it to get at least to 25,000 Euro, which is far too expensive. Nice toy though... Frankly I was also amazed at how many WWII pieces of technology were on sale on eBay.

I have got some work done today... A tracker went out the door - I found some issues caused by the debugging information... Fun. Basically the debugging information was using up too much CPU time and other things were not running properly.

Worth 1000 has a contest of the greatest front pages from magazines... Frankly the best on is advertising the competition which is of the Cookie Monster on the front place of the People Magazine.... A blog on mac.com has instructions on how to put iPod controls on a steering wheel in a manner similar to cruise control. And I am an Angel Chaser.Com has details on how to make a fractal chandelier.

The Richard Hess Web Site shows how to get reel to reel tape recorders to play old tapes feeding isopropyl alcohol to a swab near where the record head should be. The trick is to use silicone tubing, and not use too much liquid, and also to wipe the tape afterwards.

I have printed out a copy of 'Spy Versus Spy: Government Control of Sensitive Information' about how Asio forced people to have their computer HDD's wiped of selected information following being emailed the draft of a book. Very interesting read.

And finally, Hotel Chatter has information on WiFi in various hotels in the USA. I agree with their complaints about some places wanting you to pay for WiFi in rooms seperately from public areas.

The Register is reporting on the latest music sales figures from ARIA. In overview, sales are down of physical media thanks to legal and illegal downloads, and increased choice. Ringtones are up... And strangly the same people who have an issue with paying $1.69 for a song have no problem paying $5 or $10 for a ringtone!

The government is forcing ISP's to offer Spam Protection and also provide reasonable limits on sending mail. Thankfully things such as the reasonable limits is just in the best practice part of the ISP rules... One thing that the best practice rules suggest is that running an outgoing mail server when you have a dynamic IP address is not on, and all outgoing mail should be sent via the ISP. In essence, I think that the code is reasonable.

News.Com.AU has a story on Dating Holidays. I think more correctly it would be an article on what dating holidays are available out there...

The SMH has an opinion piece about how downloading TV shows is going to cause the TV channels to change... maybe adjusting the ideas about prime time and the whole ratings system. They also suggest that companies take care that their IT department is not downloading TV shows, as although individuals might get away with it, companies probably will not.

Argh. Argh. Argh. Does that explain a few things? Let me explain. Point number one... I was having a few issues getting a tracker working. Then I realised - I somehow told it I was using the wrong type of modem... CDMA rather than GPRS. It probably took an hour or two to work this out.

Then soon after I worked this out I started getting some failures on the server... So I scheduled a quick reboot. Which took longer than expected when I needed to install some service patches, and also the server then did not reboot properly. Then when it rebooted one of the services failed to restart. And continues not to run. I have no idea why, but thankfully I have a version that runs with a GUI rather than as a service and it seems to work well.

And then I needed to go to the Annual General Meeting of the Child Care Centre. This was a lot shorter than I thought it was going to take... All in all it was done in about 20 minutes... and then the meeting after it was finished in under 90 minutes. This is what I like.

I have volunteered to go on an interview panel for some new workers at the centre. This will be my first experience on an interview panel, and I am doing this so that I can get some experience in interviewing people.

PositScience has an online test to check the speed of your brain. I have not tried it. I know the speed of mine. SLOW!

Network World has an article describing the 20 most important products of the last 20 years I guess...

CyberWire has a list of the 230 highest paying search items that they could find in Google. If you are wanting to get rich, maybe placing GoogleAdsense on pages which might use some of these words is a good idea. If you are wanting to sign up for Adsense you can do so by clicking HERE and going to the green adsense ICON at the bottom of the page...

Some things SHOULD be illegal. Some things probably are. I am not sure if molesting cars is but it looks like it should be! The WTF section is hillarious as to what people have done to perfectly good cars. As an example, check out this!

WTF is the section to look at ricecop.com where you can see pictures of cars like this one! I am glad it is not RED like mine!



Finally on the subject of cars is a story about an armless driver in New Zealand caught speeding without a license.

According to The Register, Apple have just released a Disney movie on iTunes. Is is suspected that the movie download service will be released for Apple's 30th anniversary later this week. The movie download costs just under US$10.

In japan, the government hopes a free science magazine will add chemistry to young lovers' dates. The magazine called Science Walker" will be packed with packed with scientific topics that young people can chat about with their sweethearts while on dates. They plan to print 1.1 million copies. I kid you not.

The Ben Hammersley blog describes some of the most expensive WiFi in the world. The Victoria Park Plaza hotel charges 15 pounds a day for guests, but charges people who use meeting rooms 10 pounds for 30 minutes, or 48 pounds for 24 hours. In the lobby non-guests are charged 3 pounds for 30 minutes, or 6 pounds for two hours.

Finally, Fat Caterpillar has a story on the chaos of Daylight Saving here in Oz now that it has been extended by one week...

I have just got home from a meeting... Before the meeting I decided to spend an hour extra working on the plane - trying to fix the problem with the canopy alignment. Unfortunately I dont think we got anywhere with the adjustments after about an hour. If we were to start working on the canopy frame now I think that things would have been a whole lot better. Starting again would be good. The meeting went really well... Lots of paid work out of it. Lots of brainstorming and documenting things. And then programming. It sounds really really run.

The SMH is reporting that a Desperate Houswives video game. Hmm...
News.COM.AU has an article that notes that Mobile cheating in exams 'on rise'. This is not a surprise.

I love the photo on the News.Com.AU home page. It has an industrial relations related poster from a demonstration... One side is "I.R. laws are good for workers", and the other side says "The world is flat"... Cute.

Some cool links. Firstly, is the Wikipeda entry for Top Gear. It provides a lot more interesting trivia on this great show! They also have a page on Brainiac. The stuff they have there must be seen to be believed! And I found out about another program called Brainiac History Abuse which highlights modern-day activities you can do (with varying degrees of difficulty) while wearing a suit of armour, Historical medicinal remedies,
historical battles illustrated using fruit and vegetables , "fixing" an everyday problem with unnecessary force, such as opening a vending machine or a locked car using a battering ram and the like.

The show always ends with an item in which a caravan gets blown up. In diference to the theme, they use a "historical" explosive for an everyday task (e.g. a WW2 depth charge to unblock a toilet).

A friend pointed me to an exploit to compromise a system using sendmail. This one takes about two hours commonly per attempt... But you can have many many paralell operations going at once.

And MediaWatch is fun. There are two papers in Northern NSW... One has been copying the Gig Guide from the other one for ages... Down to the point where the original started playing games... 'Tree Stump, Broken Head: Flagrant Plagiarists' was one they came up with... And then also 'Monica Attard Orchestra' playing at 'Auntie's Bar' as a reference to MediaWatch Itself.

There is a review of the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood in Escape in News.Com.Au. This has been one of the great hotels for ages, although I have never stayed there since it has quite frankly looked yucky from the outside. It is an indictment on an area when the Holiday Inn appears to be the nicest hotel around. When the Kodak theature was built, there was a hotel built as part of that which looks nice, and now they have renervated the Hollywood Hotel. Might have to stay there next time I am in the area.

News.COM.AU is reporting that Optus might be having significant reliability issues in the near future as capital expendature is witheld from the organisation due to lower profit figures and flatterning growth. I would guess that the only reason that Telstra are not having such issues is that they are much larger, and with size comes some natural capacity to cover any issues. Not that they are not happening, but more hide them.

EZPrezzo has a photo of an amazing model made of lego of a soccer stadium. I have no idea where the stadium is but it might actually be at LegoLand. Regardless it is a pretty amazing sculpture. Also on the subject of sculpture and art, artist Pro Hart is very sick with Motor Neurone Disease, and is currently in a critical condition in hospital.

I managed to sleep in this morning... I really needed it having stayed up late two nights in a row watching The Simpsons on Foxtel. At least that it was self inflicted I guess... I think I am still waking up - I woke up at 6AM and then promptly fell back asleep thankfully, and had more than an hours more sleep after that.

Today the first challenge is to get a tracker out the door. Well, that will probably need to wait until the afternoon since I need to get some information from a supplier before I can do that. I have a meeting this afternoon anyway so I will not have any problems with putting it in an express post packet on the way to the meeting, and the client will have it first thing tomorrow.

Anyone wanting to have a look at the parts of the plane we were having an issue with, and the some photos can look here. This is not exactly the plane we are building but it is close. The problems with the frame are identical.

And just like the author of the WWW site, we put the perspex canopy on the plane yesterday for what I think was the first time. It looks impressive, and just like a real plane... Then again I think it has been looking like a real plane for a LONG time.

Finally home after spending the afternoon building. I think we ended up doing about eight hours working on the canopy frame. For those who have no idea what I am talking about, this is the five pieces of metal welded together that keeps the perspex canopy attached to the plane and in shape. After all this time working on it We really did not get very far. Actually it is in a similar condition as when we started, albeit with a few more dents and scratches where we tried to bend the frame into shape.

Anyway, after about eight hours we gave up for the night. Enough getting nowhere for my tastes.

The Instructables site has details on how to make a pop up card. This looks like a great idea for people into scrapbooking... And for the person who has absolutly everything in the gift deparment, and who love chocolate, comes laser etched chocolate bars. Laser etching is normally used to engrave pictures and writing onto metalic objects... Putting it onto chocolate might be the ultimate decadence.

Having done a LOT of riveting recently working on the plane, I was intetested in seeing these plastic rivets for use with cardboard structures. I have a slight feeling that these are not structural for use in planes, but for other earth bound designs for children I am sure that they are more than adequate!

Countries have national anthems. Now, thanks to the bizzare eNthem, for the budget basement price of US$499, companies can now have their own anthem for use in lifts, and for music on hold. Is it just me or does this sound slightly strange?

Watching STEALTH was similar to what I expected, but different. It was good to see the movie since I did some hardware to be used by the producers of the movie on location. Given that was my interest, I was actually dissapointed that they did not have more of the australian scenery inside the movie.

The camera movies were quite amazing... going from the cockpit of one plane to the cockpit of another. I can only guess what something like Top Gun would look like with this type of visual effects. I am dissapointed that the movie did not contain any of the making of...

I have seen some movies today... I wanted to visit the cinema but there was nothing on that I wanted to see. I want to see 'V for Vendetta' but it was not on anywhere locally.

So I borrowed some movies from the video store - 'The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants', 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' and 'Stealth'. Each was good in its own way. Sisterhood was the first movie I saw... It was a good movie - something a bit different from the normal action type movies - actually it was exactly opposite from all the action movies... The story was good, and the cinematography was fantastic. What else could you say about a movie filmed on location in the USA, mexico, Baja California and the greek islands.

Actually after watching this movie, I think should be booking a holiday to greece... It looks so amazingly beautiful. I am sure there are similar places in Australia, but the architecture is not quite the same. I can see this movie being studied for the HSC and the like. Much recommended...

There are times when I wish I had a girlfriend. This is one of those times. I found a great great project, and I would love to have someone to build it for... They are LED ear-rings. The instructions are on instructables and describes the jewelery in detail. Silver does not go well on about half the population, so I would need to work out how to gold plate the parts. But in the right setting I think they could be cool...

In what must be one one of the more interesting fraud cases, NEC has found an employee who it would appear created something like US$300m in fake purchase orders from the company for 'food and drink'. As if that was strange, things get even worse... He would create fake purchase orders to get paid, and then bill customers for fake products that never get delivered. And the customers paid. This was apparently some type of 'round trip' fraud, whatever that means.

In the USA, photographers are being punished for just taking photos. This can be seen in this news story about how a photographer was detained for several hours for taking a photo of some flags outside a courthouse in New York State.

And CIO have a Map of the Internet on their Web Site. Well, the USA parts. Not by geography but a logical map...

Tomorrow I actually have a saturday off from working on the pane. I have yet to decide what I will do... Maybe go to the movies or something else. I dunno. Might be fun not to plan anything yet, and just to see how things go.

Don't ask me how I know, but I have found that the British Archives have an online course on Beginners' Latin. Now, the ony language I know is english, and I have no desire to learn latin. I just thought it was interesting that they would have a tutorial on their site for people wanting to read some of the older historical documents, like the Doomsday Book. As to why I was looking at the british archives... Well, it was linked to from another site regarding cryptography...

During the week Microsoft have decided to go with truth in advertising... So instead of being released in 2006, the next version of office will be released retail in January 2007. The eWeek article has more information on the subject.

The Mother Jones Web Site has a really biased view of the world of Intellectual Property. As an example they cite a press release that states that a large archive of 11 million photos has been placed into a bunker below freezing after only 250,000 of the images were scanned. What they did not mention was that this was done so that the images did not deteriorate. Argh.

One of the things that I have always thought about NRMA Roadservice since they split that they should start selling insurance again. Maybe they will, according to the latest reports from the SMH. They also have a review of V for Vendetta from the writers of The Matrix. Looks interesting...

Recycling - Before and After.

The entire 616 pages were scanned on both sides before shredding. That means there were 1232 scanned images recorded in PDF files - taking about 300 MBytes, or 1/2 of a CD-ROM, or about 7.5% of a DVD

Why is it that I sometimes seem to get nothing done during the day? It just seems to happen. Maybe it is days when I get fewer than normal emails and phone calls from clients - I dont know. Anyway it sees to happen occasionally.

I finished shredding my Telstra bills today. I managed to fill a garbage bag with all the shredded material. It takes up a huge amount more room shredded than it does before shredding, and I am not sure that anyone would be interested in who I phone, but I guess it is good practice to destroy the documents. I would love to get a photo of the shreaded paper on my floor but that would make one hell of a mess. So it will go into the recycling bin as it is, after I have taken a photo to prove what it would look like. I will be posting a photo soon...

This morning I need to do two freebie computer repairs. Our minister's computer needs to be set up so that her old PC can see the Internet. And the sound is not working at the Child Care Centre on one of the Children's computers. Should be an easy fix.

Firstly, it looks like both political parties are looking at requiring ISP's to do porn filtering. Since the filters have been notoriously bad in the past I initially thought that this would be a bad idea. Then when I remembered that I have friends with young children who used the net. And I realised that a most parents would not have filters installed for whatever reason. Provided that the level is adjustable and you can opt out I am beginning to think that it is not such a bad idea.

Also, it appears that Encyclapedia Britanica does not contain more errors than Wikipedia, as reported in Nature. In fact, it appears that Nature is at error, not providing complete articles for review, editing them, using the Children's Encyclapedia and the like in an apparent effort to distort the study. And they got caught!

You can get anything on eBay. Well, Almost. Now you can buy a slightly damaged combat helicopter. Just what every dictator needs... Thanks to The Register for linking to that.

BenQ is reporting that an apple iPod phone is coming - one that really works. Manufacturers are scared that if this takes off that parts will not be as available as they might otherwise have been. Ouch.

I didn't get around to going on a run today. I really did not feel like it - I wanted to go, but just felt that it was probably not the best thing to do. Maybe tomorrow, but I will see how it goes then. Right now though I am feeling a bit tired - not sure why. Maybe I should have an early night... But I have a few things to do before bed too...

Now some links. Firstly, Instructables has a story about how to repair CD's. Basically the way to fix a CD or DVD is to use Brasso to polish the surface. So simple.

And news.com.au is reporting on a Electronic Health Records in the hunter region. The NSW government has quietly decided to require some people to opt out of electronic health records rather than opt in. The interesting thing is that they decided to start with the elderly - the exact people who would not be tempted to opt-in with electronic records since as a group they would be incined to be suspicious of electronic things. Hmm...

I started putting together my files for tax, and realised how much paper I had. More specifically I worked out how much paper I had in Telstra and Optus bills. So I decided to get them all together, and found myself with something like five inches of paper. All A4 double sided. I do have a photo and I will put it online soon... But I decided to scan and shred these bills. That is a LOT of pages let me tell you.

I also saw a bit of brainiac at lunch time - and one of the strange things they did was place a champaign bottle in a microwave oven. This DESTROYED the oven - totally. It did far more damage than I thought it would, probably due to the fact that it is made from thick glass, and that takes a LOT of force to destroy.

First piece of news... SonyEricsson and Wavecom have decided to combine forces on their M2M produts. That is Wavecom have purchased the GSM/GPRS modem division of SonyEricsson. I think that this will be good for SonyEricsson who have had insanely good products, but which I think have been under-resourced on the software end of thing. It does provide a small amount of uncertainty for hardware suppliers, but I imagine that the existing hardware product line will be with us for some time. [NOTE: Wavecom is a nasty name to type. Most of the times I included it in this entry had it spelt with a trailing 'e'.]

XYZ Computing has a story on how to build a small personal video recorder and playback device like my XBox, but with the video capture side. Cute... One day.

This mornings job is to do some programming, and to get my Tax Return ready for my accountant. I know which will be more interesting, and it is not my Tax Return. Still, it must be done. My business one is very simple to get together. The personal one is more of a pain... More documentation is needed... Still it should not take more than an hour for both.

According to StopBadware.COM which is a corporate anti-spyware company, KAZZA installs spyware when it is installed without telling you, and is hard to completely uninstall. I know these two statements are hard to believe, but that is what the report says. Strangely Sharman Networks, the owners of KAZZA dispute this claim.

Slashdot.ORG asked their readers to come up with questions to ask a reader in Jordan. The responses are quite interesting, since I was supposed to be there next week and I have done some reading about the country.

And the SMH is reporting that the NSW government has lost another court case over fixed speed cameras. According to a newspaper report, I believe that this case relates to not providing the correct digital fingerprints on the photo used to gain a conviction. What I find really bizzare is that the RTA will charge you $11 for a copy of the photo but it does not contain the authenticating number at all... You can only find out about that by going to court. Strange.

I am thinking of going on a run tomorrow at some stage. I will not go too far since I am really still recovering from the minor case of the flu. About 3KM should be an easy run without pushing my body too bady. That is, if it is not raining; because just as I was writing that last sentence a real big downpour hit. One moment it was all quiet outside and the next it was fairy heavy rain. I do not plan to go my best time or anything like that tomorrow... Just get the exercise done. And then build the distance again over the coming week or so.

I love listening to the rain... Nothing quite so relaxing... And given weather conditions at the moment in sydney we have not had enough of it. The sound is so soothing, and I also love the smell of rain too...

Right now though I am having lots of trouble keeping my eyes open... More in the morning about brainiac!

When I went to the post office today I had a parcel waiting for me. Unfortunately it was a COD parcel being returned - an eBay sale for a fingerprint reader. I have placed the auction back on eBay and I will see how it goes. This time I might actually sell the item to a person who will pay. Whilst we are on the subject of eBay, The Register found an auction for 50 milion pounds in used notes.

The GeigerPod.. an iPod that looks like a Geiger Counter. Scientists in Japan have managed to build glasses for a house fly.

Something cute on instructabes... LED's for a fridge. They look really cool, but look like a lot of work... Might need to look at it... Might make an interesting product.

Today's probably fraudulant email... for a product that I do not sell...

I will like to purchase LMR 400 coaxial cable for an urgent projects in Nigeria, Africa.

Please kindly attach and send proforma invoice stating the quotation 1000meters price and shippment cost to Lagos Airport Nigeria and your mode of payment.

Unfortunatly not even worth a reply...

The IT industry has gone too far... here is a video card with 1 GByte of RAM. Most of my servers do not have that much ram. Things are going insane.

News.com.au has a strange story about practices in Saudi Arabia, specifically in regard to sale of clothing. There has just been a decree that all womens aparel MUST be sold by WOMEN, in order to maximise the job oportunities for Saudi women. This is probably a good idea, but I think that the real reason has to do with Islamic law where there is significant segregation between men and women. What is more interesting is that no clothing shops have any change rooms to try on clothing at all.

This is cool... A drawing of a new cruise ship and it took something like 750 hours to draw. That is quite amazing. There is so much detail in the drawing, and to recognise that it was done before the ship even existed is quite amazing. More soon

So much for getting programing done... I have got hardware done but no software yet. Well, apart from what is needed to get some hardware working. I find it strange how people change things for no reason. For instance, Maxon changed the strng that gets sent when one of their modems connects. They changed it from "TCP CONNECT" to "TCP_CONNECT". The underscore is a minor change, but software does pick up on that.

They also added a paramater to the AT$$IPCFL command called TCP. If this is set at 0, the TCPIP stack thinks that it should be a server rather than a client. Now, thanks to NAT gateways, most people will be using this as a CLIENT, or using it to connect to another server. So why not make that the default? I have NO idea. I am sure there is some logic, but I cannot see it :-(

I heard about an interesting organisation in the USA, and from all accounts their museum is facinating. It is the US Naval Cryptologic Ventrans Association - the group that worked with code machines and code breaking, generally in WWII. They have a museum in Florida.

Sometimes I hate blogger... There are times when I create an entry and post it, and then nothing happens. More correctly, it comes up with an error message. But What I tend to do when I submit the page is to just then go onto doing something else without checking to see if it completed OK. With my last post I used two closing link tags and this did not work all that well!

There is a story in the SMH about how John Cleese said "If you wish to kill yourself but lack the courage to, I think a visit to Palmerston North will do the trick". As a result, Palmerston North is unhappy, and have http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/palmerston-norths-comeback-to-cleeses-crack/2006/03/21/1142703358757.html>offered a free trip to New Zealand to prove that the place is not boring. I can remember visiting there when I was about six, and cannot remember much of the place.

I was looking at info on Hugh Laurie [Balckadder/House] the other day and found the following quote on raising his daughter: "Girls are complicated. The instruction manual that comes with girls is 800 pages, with chapters 14, 19, 26 and 32 missing, and it's badly translated, hard to figure out.".

Slashdot is reporting to the world that the Labour Party wants to put content filters on all ISPs rather rely on parents loading software onto their PC. Adults would be able to 'Opt Out' of the filter under the plan. Given how unreliable filters are I am not sure I would trust them to work for children using the Net. Hmm.

According to NEWS.COM.AU, Telstra is investigating upgrading its Bigpond Cable to faster speeds as a way to get around some regulatory hurdles. They note that the speed of the new version of cable would be 100 MBps, or 100 times the standard ADSL rate in use in Oz. The problem is that this 100 MBps is shared with lots of other users... maybe hundred or more other people.

And todays SMH is also reporting that the Lane Cove Tunnel may open in december, unless it is pushed back as requested by the premier to improve his chances in the election when the other streets get narrowed.

Enough of this... Time for breakfast, and then work. Programming... fun!

I will probably be adjusting my internet download limit for next month. I think I need more bandwidth for my link - some of my business activities are bandwidth intensive meaning that I need to increase the allocation.

According to News.Com.AU, Optus is having a few issues with their data centre at Mascot. It would appear that there are no UPS's at the data centre, and that there are no plans to fix this until next year. And SingTel has cut off funding which is why it is taking them so long to fix things.

I have been watching more of Brainiac, and I am loving it... This show is just crazy... I would call it Mythbusters of Steroids. Much recommended. I also have to do some more programming tomorrow... VB.NET stuff rather than the C that I have been concentrating on during the last week

I have been fairly slack today writing in my Blog. Not that I have been too busy, but more that I have been distracted with other things. Like finishing the Clive Cussler book I have been reading. As expected it was a great book, and it was good to see the batton passed to the younger generation in terms of the main character. In this edition, Dirk Pitt's son is also named Dirk Pitt... And they expained his sudden appearance in the collection of books as being an illegitimate child who the father never knew about. Nice to have a self-consistent book - in other areas the author would have inserted the son and made you think that the son had been there all along...

I also had a short afternoon nap - I am still recovering from this flu, and just felt really really tired... So I had a seat in the armchair in my office and I was quickly snoozing - until a friend MSN'ed me and woke me up... Bastard.

As the days go on I think it is getting less likely that I will be visiting Jordan next week... I think the odds are approaching zero. Funnily enough I think I would be happy to go if I had a phone call from the client right now asking if I could go.

What is it with the MTV Australia Video Music Awards? Seems like everyone is trying to give away tickets to them. I got an email from SANITY MUSIC yesterday and they were giving away tickets. And NEWS.COM.AU were advertising tickets through in2mobi.com.au through a reverse auction process. And Qantas are giving away 200 double passes according to an email today. Seems that everyone is giving away the tickets...

And the OCLC have produced a list of the 1000 most popular books in US libraries. Some I am not surprised about - like Garfield being #15. Number 4 is Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri... And I have never even heard of it.

I have done some more debugging, and I think that I have tracked down the issue to a hardware problem. Somehow the hardware external to the processor module is causing strange problems to the Rabbit processor. I find this VERY strange. I am not sure what is going on at all. Time to put in a request for technical support... Ha. As if they are going to be able to help me. They generally have been little help in the past. More soon.

I am tracking down the watchdog problem... Seems it could be related to the version of the compiler I am using... and related to writing to FLASH memory. Still working through this though... Sometimes I hate the RABBIT processor!

One of the things about Clive Cussler books is that he appears in all his books. That is, there is always a 'Clive Cussler' character in every book who the main character, Dirk Pit, ALWAYS meets up with. They can never remember his name though when they try to tell someone else about this character they meet up with. This book is no exception. Cussler is a plot device in the extreme - who just happens to appear just as he is needed.

I got an itinery today from my father... He is off to china in the next week or so, and looking forward to the holiday. I am sure he will bring back many interesting stories.

This afternoon I was doing some programming on a Rabbit controller... and something strange is happening. The unit has a 'Watchdog Timer' that is designed to restart the device if the software stops running. The problem is that the software seems to be acting as if the watchdog timer is triggering when the software is correctly operating. I just cannot get my head around what is going on. At this point I just need to describe what is happening as STRANGE! I have a few ideas to try out tomorrow...

I have also been reading more of Clive Cussler's 'Black Wind', and it is one of those books that I am finding hard to put down. Clive writes a good story... The one thing you need to watch is that you should not expect the story to be too believeable. If you expect it to be believable then you will be dissapointed. These books are larger than life - escapism in the extreme.

I am starting to get tired... I may end up going to bed early tonight... I did try last night but the book was too good... I knew I should not have picked it up!

Last week I had a programmer in to look at my code. He added one line of comments to one piece of code! Here it is... added to the original!
if (strstr(line, "#PONG,") == line){
. // What do I do?
. // Have a bath.
}

You have to admit that I get some strange comments left of my WWW site. Some of this is Comment SPAM, but others... Well, if you can work it out then you are better than me. The text was
email: h_ha_38362@yahoo.com
comments: application geographic information system in the radioactive and application remote sensing in the radioactive and application gps in the radioactive
It just gives me a headache reading through that. I cannot work out what they are wanting, or wanting to know, or wanting to sell. It is beyond me totally! I cannot work it out.

MSNBC is reporting on a cheap Cellphone that is not available in the USA because it is too cheap and therefore the cellphone companies cannot use it to lock people into phone contracts. After having read this article I am even happier that I live in Australia. Phones might not always be the cheapest, but at least the carriers only lock people in to using their SIM for a short time, and do not actually kill functionality in phones.

Today has been fairly quiet - although I do not know if that is because I wanted it to be quiet because I was recovering from some minor flu symptoms, or if it has just turned out that way. It does not matter either way. All that matters is that things have been a bit quiet which is what I needed. I probably did not get quite enough sleep last night but I am sure that I can improve things a bit with a nap in a little while.

I was reading the latest issue of Circuit Cellar - a magazine for electrical engineers - one of the better ones. Anyway, the editorial at the back gave the derivation for the term 'Patent Troll'. Despite this being a rather rude term for the people or companies that sit on patents until somone else implements the idea and sues them, this is a polite term. The libelous term was 'Patent Extortion' and a lawyer in the USA got sued by opposing counsel for using the term. I dont know about you, but I think that being called a PATENT TROLL would be libelous in itself.

I have just had an early lunch of Thai food, and it was HOT. I had three big glasses of water and really it was still not enough. I will go up and grab some milk as soon as I finish this to counteract some of the chilli. It did taste fantastic though... And it forced me to drink a lot of water which is probably good for me too.

From the letters section of todays Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) in response to the story last week about the Obesity Virus... "I contracted the Obesity Virus when it jumped species... In contracted it from a Caramello Bear"

And I was just mean to a friend. I had providied him with a link, and told him it was a warez site, full of illegal software. I gave the url as http://127.123.54.82, and he clicked on it, and commented that the site said 'Under Construction'... I then let him in on the secret. Any IP address starting with 127 is a loopback address. Normally they are written as 127.0.0.1, but any combination should work.

I am feeling a whole lot better today. Not that I was feeling all that bad yesterday, or that I am feeling 100% today; but I am feeling a lot better. I still have a tiny bit of puffiness around the eyes but that is about it. I guess I have dodged a bullet this time, and I will not be getting a full dose of the flu. I guess the vitimans and the rest did their job. I have to just assume that since there is no way to prove it. Today I will probably take it easy - no 15km runs, or anything like that. Not even a 3km run. I just need to give my body time to recover. I might grab Thai for lunch as it always seems to help...

Onto some links. Mythbusters is a classic show. Fans of the show might be interested in checking out Robot, a magazine about Robots. But the article I have just linked to is by the Mythbusters as they put together a robot kit purchased from Radio Shack (Tandy in the USA). Great read.

Also, Google was sued by the US Government, being asked to hand over a heap of data - all search requests for a week, a list of pages searched and the like. They then tried again by limiting this somewhat. In the end the judge ordered google to hand over a list of 5000 random pages.

Finally, the Clive Cussler book is good. I read some of it last night, and it is one of the books that I find hard to put down. A great read!

One of my friends just asked me a great question. How do you uninstall old versions of Windows Messenger. Well go to 'Start | Control Panel | Add and Remove Programs'. Then on the left side there is an option which says 'Add Remove Windows Components'. And in that list there will be the version of Windows Messenger that was included with windows. It can be unselected, which will remove it. If that does not work there are some ideas here.

The good thing about having a laptop is that it can be used around all around the house. Everywhere. And right now I am about to start reading so I am just adding this entry lying on my bed before I start doing some reading. I can just put the laptop on my legs with the keyboard almost vertical, and the screen definitely vertical and have full internet access.

Right now I am feeling tired, but I think the flu has moved on a bit... I just need to be careful that I don't get a sore throat. Provided that does not happen I should be fine. Tomorrow I will get some lozzengers to make sure it does not progress further on. Working for myself I cannot afford to be sick right at the moment.

Anyway I need to get going... and put this laptop off to the side and get some more relaxing reading done...

I have just got off the phone with a Matrix Stream from Canada who have produced an IP Television Set Top Box and entire IPTV server system. I guess you would call the whole thing VOD or Video On Demand over ADSL. Sounds like some interesting technology, although I think we discussed more about the entire film industry more than the MatrixStream technology... Stay tuned for more later about this company.

Some links... Firstly, someone has released a full size keyboard for the iPod. The eToychest site has details on the next six inductees to the Walk of Game. One inductee, Sid Mier, is actually a friend of a friend.

And finally, the SMH has a story on a hairdresser offering Dad's courses in kids hair. They are aimed at divorced fathers who now need to get their daughters ready for parties on their weekends where they have access. Great idea - and probably a great thing for all dads, not just the divorced ones.

Now, after a sleep and lunch I am feeling a bit better. I am still feeling slightly flu-y though. So in order to relax I have been watching some TV... in this case it is Brainiac - a show that should in some ways be highly illegal. One thing they showed in the latest episode I saw was soap in the microwave oven. What I did not expect to happen was for the soap to foam up like whipped cream. Looks rather cool!

I picked up a copy of the Clive Cussler book 'BLACK WIND' earlier which I am looking forward to reading it... Maybe after this next episode of Brainiac...

I was going to be working on the plane this afternoon... but now I will not be... I am not feeling 100% - I think half of it is a Coca Cola induced insomnia, and the rest is a minor touch of the flu. Anyway I think having a restful day is probably a wise idea. Watch some TV, read a book. Whatever. But above all else relax...

Yesterday we mostly worked on the fuselage of the plane. There were a few pesky rivets that we needed to install. The first were on the top of the sill where the canopy will eventually sit. Amazingly, despite the horrible lack of access underneigth the rivets, these rivets went in amazingly well. I dont think we managed to stuff up any of them which was really good.

Then we installed the armrest which was simplicity in itself... It just worked. Then we installed some rivets at the bottom of the plane near the armrest. These were much harder thanks to the fact that the rivet gun did not actually fit - the stem was too short to hit the rivets. Placing a long piece of steel into the rivet gun allowed us to rivet the parts in.

The other thing was that we had undercoated some of the tail plane on the skin when we originally put them together. The propblem is that the pant used on the skins does not really adhere to the undercoat - so I got most of the job of using paint stripper on the undercoat to remove it. Not a bad job... Just a bit of work...

Finally home... I have been building all day, and the plan is to build tomorrow... I am tired, but I thought I would provide some links before bed... Firstly, Epson in Japan has released a series of laptops with DISNEY art on the outside... Just right for the childrens market... C-Net is reporting that Digital Rights Management is reducing the battery life of MP3 players by up to 25%. And Wired is reporting on Green Beer. But what sounds the most interesting is that Sydney RAP group THE HERD has released a version of REDGUM's 'ONLY 19'. I will have to find a copy of that and give it a listen.

I am looking forward to a good day building today... Working on the plane. I have no idea what we will be doing, but I am sure it will be fun. Something different at least, rather than sitting here at home working. I can be at a friends house working :-) I will not even guess what we are working on today... That way I will not be dissapointed, surprised or dissapointed.

There is a movie called 'The Skulls' about a secret society of the same name at a University in the USA. I think I would call the movie disturbing - not quite a horror story, but suspenceful. What I did not realise until it was pointed out in the SMH was that there is a real society at Yale Uni, called the Skull and Bones. Very little is known about the society, but George W. Bush is a member... The bit I like about the article was noting that the only reason he is a member is that his father and grandfather were members.

The Tom's Hardware site has a story about the history of the movie TRON. This was a classic 1982 movie that did not make much of an impression at the box office, but made an impression on the whole movie industry with its use of computer graphics. Sadly this history is missing details of two of my friends who worked on the movie independantly - Bill Kovacs who did computer animation, and Kevin Crossley who did sound.

Finally, ExtremeTech has a excert of one of their books, 'How to create RFID access to your front door'. Might be one to check out.

I have a few links in this post... Firstly, DeviantArt has a great Poster on how the US Government spends money... With lots of pie charts and the like to indicate how money is being spent comparatively.

I found a cute blog about a lawyer in the UK. One of the pages tells the story of a woman who wants a divorce on the basis that she will get half the house if she can prove that her husband is a not being faithful. At the end of the story the lawyer works out that the woman actually lives in a council flat, and does not own the flat and therefore will not be getting half of it. She was using the divorce to get herself half some property!

And according to the SMH, the Australian Government has ordered the shutdown of a SPOOF SITE called johnhowardpm.org. This site contained a satirical appology for many things associated with Australia and Iraq and Afghanastan.

Finally, Philips has ordered a recall of about 11,000 plasma screens thanks to a power supply problem that could cause major probems. The main reason it is not a total disaster for them is that the case is made from fire retardant material...

Apart from work things today I also got to do some playing... But what sort of playing? I got to pull apart the washing machine. The machine was leaking water during, and I worked on fixing it. Pulling the back off I expected the outlet hose to be leaking, but it wasn't. This caused some problems searching for the problem.

After some search I found that the washing machine was only leaking during the spin cycles. Pulling the top off the washing machine I found a seal, and it seemed to be not in the greatest condition. So I used some silicon sealant on the seal... And I hope that fixes it... I need to wait until it all dries to test it.

I thought I was going to have a problem with one of my clients... They just messaged me to tell me that they had just receieved their bill from Telstra for some tracking units. Now, when I get this type of message I normally think of some four letter word, and wait for the complaints when I hear that the dumb carrier has placed the SIM cards onto a plan that costs them $1000 per unit each instead of $5 per unit. [Yeah, so you think that doesnt happen. Sure...]

In this case it was a different complaint... More environmental... The fact that they just got a 150 page bill for $19.80. That is not bad going! Thankfully most of the carriers now allow ONLINE billing... No more cutting down trees at will... at least not quite so many I would guess...

There are times when I wish I was a drinker... Right now is one of those times when I came across the following site - mmurph @ Mac.COM... It describes a cocktail machine - an automated one. You tell it what you want to drink, and how much you want to drink, and it mixes it for you. The only thing it does not do is work with carbonated drinks... Well, there are other web sites showing how to do them so that you can have Coke on tap. I am not sure I like the software... I am sure that it can be done much better. Some cute graphical application would improve things significantly.

I have been looking for a VB.NET application to try in VS.2005, and that might be it... An improved user interface to a machine like that... Not that I would build it, but even so just doing the software would be uber-cool, and probably bring me up to speed with the latest version of VisualBasic before I need it for a work project.

A couple of links... Firstly, some failed international Uni students have started a hunger strike in Australia. And News.Com.AU is reporting that Telstra have outsourced mobile distribution to Brightstar. From personal experience, Brightstar does not have the worlds greatest stock control unfortunately. Bad move for Telstra!

According to Reuters, NorWest Airlines (Also known as NorWorst Airlines), are going to charge $15 if a user wants to be sure that they get an aisle seats. It had to be NorWest airlines. This is an airline that will cancel flights because of a huricane 1000 miles away... Think that this is the only US airline doing these types of things? American Airlines and Delta got rid of pillows on their domestic flights last year. And most airlines have stopped free meals for flights under three or four hours.

Amazon.COM have released a WebService that provides HDD space for the price of only US$0.15 per GByte per Month. This is an interesting service. For about US$2 per year you can have remote backups, or a secure area on the net where you can store your database...

Lastly, DefenseTech is reporting on some of the politics and technologies with Improvised Explosive Devices in Iraq and Afganastan. Many of these devices are actually based on cellphones and with limited external hardware being used to explode an attached bomb when someone calls the phone. The bomber had better hope that they do not accidently have someone ring them when they are installing the bomb...

I hate not having access to my normal PC. At the moment it is on the other side of the room being used by a programmer whilst I need to use my old DELL laptop. This machine is only 1 GHz making it a bit slow by todays standards. Still it is a good workhorse. More memory would be good but at the moment I use it so rarely that I have not bothered with spending the money. Frankly I have no need since I mostly just use a terminal emulator anyway which uses so little CPU and memory. Same with Remote Desktop...

I decided that I would install MSN Chat on my server since it is the place that I am most likely to have access to when I do not have access to my main PC. This was fine until it decided that the random picture for my chat sessions was the horses... The person I was chatting to told me they had taken a screenshot, but some blackmail got that deleted... I hope. And the picture has been changed. Something more respectable. In order to find out how you will just have to chat when I am using MSN on the server...

I am expecting a phone call from the states in order to talk about this client... Any minute... I think he will be pleased that I have something finally working... A few more steps are needed, but it is at least a step in the right direction

Things have been relatively quiet today... Not sure that I have got much done... Well, actually thinking about things I have got some things done. Firstly, I got to a project I am doing for a client in the USA, and finally got a solution for him. For weeks I have not been able to show much for my experimentation. Now I have FINALLY got something. My multimeter mostly does the right things during testing. Not always but mostly. There are some manufacturing issues to resolve, and some other hardware issues, but things are on the up with that project.

Then I have been playing with a modem. Without going into specifics it is for a special project. When I went to use one of the features in their firmware it did not work. Ringing technical support revealed that the reason I did not get it to work is that the firmware is the wrong version for what I wanted - and that they do not normally load in the correct firmware. Not sure why... It should not make any difference to anyone if the firmware has these extra features. Might be a licensing issue. Anyway the modem now needs to go back for a firmware upgrade.

This post will be mostly links... Firstly comes a site called Turn Your Head which makes a wood flower stand or candlestick holder or something. But what makes this site/service interesting is that they make this out of the profile of your face... Or of the face of your baby or something like that. Nice concept...

The AutoPortal is reporting that Google and VW are working in a revolutionary vehicle navigation system for vehicles. News.COM.AU is reporting that some US$1 billion dollar notes have been siezed in the USA. They seized 250 of them. The only problem was that there were no such things. The biggest US banknotes ever were US$10,000...

Now onto the bizzare... The Government is looking at requiring licenses to boardcast video or Audio on the net. This would make Australia one of the few places in the world that this happens. I have not yet got my head around the reason for this.

And I just found out the definition of the word GRANGE... It is actually a farm attached to a monastary.

I have been very busy today...

This morning when the rain stopped I did a short run. 4.1KM at about 8.9 KM/H. Not sure exactly how long it took but you can do the math! I was fairly well exhaused after that - not particularly out of breath but exhausted. I have the GPS log but it is more of the same. It was a bit humid really to be running - the temperature was not that bad.

Long time readers have known that my mother has been working on her Doctorate in Education for some time. Well, just after new year she found out that the examiners had decided to not pass her. Well, one examiner from Stanford said it was groundbreaking work. Then two locals who did not really know the area decided that it needed a lot of work to bring it closer to their view of the world. So the uni decided to take the view of two over one, even though they colluded on their reports and did not include the third person - which was the normal practice when there is collusion.

After a couple of months my mother has heard about the results of her 'unofficial' appeal, and they want lots of changes in areas that she does not want to make changes. I got the fax when I was out earlier and had my laptop on whilst grabbing lunch (I get my faxes emailed to me). The response was basically not only did your appeal fail but we have a huge list of things we want to change... and by the way, blame the examiner who said that you should pass since he should have written a longer recommendation.

As you might guess, her response was 'Stuff You'. She has decided to pull out, but will not be telling them for quite some time. ARGH. I am sure that the Professor from Stanford will not be happy when he sees what they said about him!

I have some issues using sites like Google Video which allow videos to be stored on their site. The Live Actions Simpsons trailer was on one of these sites... But the issue is that it is really hard to save the actual file. That is where KeepVid comes in. This site takes the URL that I would normally view the file and create a link that can be saved. Cute idea.

Wired has a story about ThePirateBay site in Sweeden. This site is a search engine for BitTorrent files and facilitates people illegally downloading movies and the like. The article explains how they are able to keep operating despite lawsuits and other legal action, Basically they can do it since they do not actually hold any copyright material themselves

In a few minutes I have a teleconference, and following that I will be going for a morning run. I would be going for the run right now if I could. I am feeling fairly good, and the conditions outside are favourable. So I should be able to get a decent amount of exercise done.

Some links... Australian IT reports that Telstra is concerned with the accuracy of the 000 address data. They suspect problems with 500,000 records. They are also reporting that the Federal Police have captured a potential terrorist with the use of mobile phone records.

The Selling on eBay was down earlier this evening... with any clicking on the SELL link yielding 'Http/1.1 Service Unavailable'. It is now fixed...

I had a friend doing some work for me today... Doing 'C' programming. The only thing was that he needed to use my main PC to do much of the work. So no email, Instant Messenger and Internet Explorer favourites. You do not realise how much you rely on things until you do not have access to them. Thankfully there is a web version of MSN Messenge, and I have web based access to my eMail so things were not as bad as they could have been...

I have a friend over to do some heavy duty C programming so I have been relegated to one of the other tables in my office. It does feel a bit strange not having my normal desk to work on. The shadows and the lighting is all very different - and I don't think as nice - as my normal desk. Normally I have a light coming from the side so that I do not get shadows on the keyboard or screen. In this case the angle is such that the keyboard is fairly well shaddowed by my body.

The one thing that is good is that this desk is slightly shorter than the one I normally use so it is slightly more ergonomic. Or it would be if my footstool was under this desk rather than my other one. Simple fix though.

One of my former bosses gave me a ring today - he is looking at getting me to do some work. From how he described the work things should be 'fun'. I might even need to have a flight or two in a plane... It should be an interesting exercise. I just need to make sure that I have enough experience to be able to write the report.

I have just added another 512 MBytes of RAM to my laptop... Actually I added 1 GByte but needed to remove 512 MByte to install it. I am pleased with how things are at the moment (in other words the computer is running) but I will need to see how it goes in the longer term, to see if the extra memory has helped things. Personally I cannot see why it would not have helped... My machine now has 1.5 GBytes of RAM. This is significantly more RAM than my first HDD.

Time to start VisualStudio and see how things perform then. Actually, things are running a huge amount better. VisualStudio starts almost immediately. And running programs starts a whole lot faster. Yes. Things are working well. I wish I had got more memory ages ago... Like always I would still like a faster computer but the memory certainly helps.

I will give more reports in the next few days. Sometimes it takes a few days to work out if the changes are worthwhile. One good thing is that the PC seems to be running a bit cooler. Anyway time to go. I have a phone call to make.

I hope to get a run in sometime today. Just how far I run depends on the weather really... I hope to get about 5km done... That sort of distance is easy for me know... I can do it without any trouble at all, although I find it easier in the cooler weather.

I don't have the link but there was a news story today about light plane that crashed in Victoria killing the pilot and his 10 year old son. It was a horrible story, but what makes it worse is that the plane that crashed is actually an experimental plane. Not like the one that Richard and I are building, but experimental none the less. It would appear that the engine was not running properly for some reason - maybe the pilot selected the wrong fuel tank, or maybe the engine was not properly maintained. Who knows.

The NY Times has a story about buying properties on eBay, and some of the problems. These are things like the description of the property being totally bogus, and also the seller suggesting a handyman to bring the property up to scratch who did no work. Sure, the properties were only worth about US$10,000 or so, but it would appear that few people actually check on the property they are buying.... If I was buying such a property I would look in the phone book and get an independant opinion of the property... But that might just be me...

I was looking at Discovery and found that Lonely Planet and Discovery have produced a show on the Middle East, including Jordan. I will have to see if I can see this as soon as possible. Also on the subject of Jordan I was speaking to a client today, and he was also saying that he really really wanted to visit Jordan. He had recently visited Syria and was surprised at how safe it was. The comment was made that I was fairly safe since I was Australian, and was not american. Lets hope so.

The Physorg.COM Web Site has a story about applying a mathematical model to the social dynamics of people and their interactions. Looks impressive bit I am not sure exactly what it is all about.

I managed to get some programming today - although I did not really find the problem that I was looking for. Tomorrow I have a friend coming over to give me a hand on going through the source code, and re-arranging the code to make it more maintainable. It will cost me some money, but I have been wanting to outsource this anyway.

For the video games out there comes the C64 DTV which contains 30 Commodore 64 video games built into the joystick complete with the computer. Not a bad deal for only $30. What is more interesting is the story in the
NY Times about the designer. The article makes interesting reading.

The debugging is still going on. I have an idea how I can fix things, but I am yet to test it out - it is just a hunch at this time. Of course the fix may well make things worse... you never can tell without much testing. As soon as this blog entry is finised it will be time to run another test... Unfortunately much of what I am doing to fix the problem is just meditating on what the solution might be... It is rather hard to actually actively find the answer.

Dave Gilmour from Pink Floyd is releasing his third solo album this week acording to the SMH. Unlike his previous albums where his wife was just a song writer, on this album she plays the piano. What is special about this... Well, she only learned to play about 12 months back. It will be very interesting to see what it is like.

Also on the music front, I heard James Last with Goodbye My Lover on the radio this morning when I was getting the mail. I just love the song... You can just feel the emotion in the song. Just read the following excert. You feel that he has let you into his mind and his heart, and are being alowed to feel what he feels.

You touched my heart, you touched my soul.
You changed my life, and all my goals.
And love is blind, and that I knew when,
My heart was blinded by you.

Phase one of the testing is done, and unfortunately I did not find the issues I was searching for. I didn't think that I would, but sometimes when searching for bugs you need to start at a known point. That is what I have done here... Now I can move on searching in other locations. This I hope just needs methodical work. Documenting things as I go.

I have been thinking about the communications infrastructure being used in the world at the moment... Things are only working because the costs are so low to move information. My ISP is based in Western Australia. I think they have a server to connect to the Internet in Sydney, but all the authorisation packets need to visit WA. Theoretically email that goes to my next door neighbour, also using ADSL, will be sent around the country. It will travel thousands of KM to go a few meters. The only way that this works is that the comms links are fast and reliable and cheap.

I need to stop these late nights and early mornings. I was planning an early night, but then a friend of mine needed some programming help so that delayed things somewhat. Simple stuff, but we managed to get the problem solved without too many hassles thankfully. And then this morning I woke up too darn early, and trying to get back to sleep just did not work. So I guess I will have some coffee or Coca Cola during the day.

I have some debugging to do today... I have to find what I am assuming is a firmware issue between a few systems that I am working on. So I guess I will be using microscopes and tweezers to find things. Sometimes it is a pain trying to find intermittent issues.

IBM in their library has an article on the standards of Unix, detailing the issues with standardization, and the like.

As part of my potential overseas trip I have been offered a trip to Petra. The response from a former workmate of mine was 'My goodness......if you don't take LOTS of pictures I'll be very cross!!'. Actually, I am now a whole lot happier about things after speaking to him. I will have to ask if he wants to swap jobs for a week... Judging from the way he was talking, he would be prepared to go into Iraq if he could visit Petra. And I was thinking of not going to Petra...

Today I hoped to get some work things done... In the end though I did not really get around to it... Realistically I needed some down time, and I actively used the time for that... Like having an afternoon sleep in the lounge chair. It was so refreshing. Now, whilst typing this I am watching Mission Impossible II on DVD...

This afternoon I finished reading DROIDMAKER which was about bits and pieces of the history of ILM and Lucasfilm. Great book - one that was really hard to put down. At times it was hard reading the footnotes, but they did make the story more readable. I have a couple of friends who were not mentioned in the book, but who were on the sidelines of many of the events in the book. I will have to suggest that both of them get copies.

My mother is still having battles with her uni over her EdD Doctoral degree. They are just seeming to stall things in the appeal process. It is the sort of thing that I have see far too often... Policy Documents not being made available until you ask specifically for them... only after you know to ask for them. Sounds like a few too many businesses unfortunately...

Who says that Electrical Engineering is boring... Well, this is what must be called 'kitchen Science'. I have found an article on the net about how to measure the speed of light with chocolate chips. Well, it is a simplification, but it seems to work, according to the site. Time to get some chocolate and find out. Yumm...

It looks like NCR is about to have some fun with industrial relations. Their technicians have threatened to go on strike.... I have not quite worked out what it is over, but it is potentially going to cause some issues with repairs to DELL and Apple computers, ATM's, baggage systems at the airport and the like.

For those that love Motorcycles, check out this one... Running on compressed air. Not sure what its range is...

After church today I want to my brothers place to give him a hand with removing some rust from around the door frame of his unit with an angle grinder. It might seem a bit brutal to use a grinder for that type of purpose but it works fairly effectively, and in this case was the appropriate technology to use.

Right now having done that and getting totally covered with iron filings I am feeling a bit tired... Some of that I guess is related to the fact that I got to bed sometime after midnight... The rest if I would guess related to waking up so early this morning. I have no idea why but I just could not get back to sleep after waking up sometime before sunrise.

I am feeling a bit happier about the possibility of going to Jordon... I still have a whole lot of questions to ask... I have to do some research on possible flights, and I will certainly be pushing my client to send me Business Class... I don't think I could cope with this particular job without the luxury of business class for the flight. We will see what happens...

So much to write... Where to start... Yesterday I spent a long time working on the plane. This was really fun, but I did get home late and the Blogger server was down earlier in the day too. So no updates... And then last night I did not actually get a chance to update the Blog. So here is a short update with more later.

Yesterday on tha plane we worked on installing the landing gear weldments and some conduits. The conduits were easy to install, and quick. The weldments were a real real pain. The only good thing about them is that I have got used to installing them, and it is now much easier to install them than it was the first time. That being said it is probably 45 minutes per weldment to install.

This would have been fine except that once we had installed them we realised that there was a small piece of plastic work in the way. Which meant uninstalling the weldments, and then reinstalling them. YUK. A comment was made along the lines of 'arent you glad that this is the last time we are installing these'. Then almost immediately we discovered the plasticwork issues. ARGH. Overall we got a lot done, but there was certainly frustration involved... The plane is looking serious...

In the cool gadgets arena, This site shows how to add a clear case to a USB memory stick. The clear resin is available from hobby stores... Guess I need to go shopping... Also from the Net... The Retro Thing blog has a list of the Top 10 Retro Computers. The one I love the most is the Authentic ZX81 Kits...

It looks like the Italian Prime Minister is finnally in some trouble after prosecuters adviced that they are set to lay corruption charges against him. The prosecutors believe they have enough evidence to show that in 1997 a payment of $US600,000 from a Berlusconi company to a Mills bank account was in return for the latter testifying on behalf of the Italian tycoon.

DVD Recorders are starting to come down to about the right price. I just saw a NU-TEC brand at Woolworths for all of $169. And that included a TV Tuner and USB socket for MP3 playing. I was really impressed by this - and it is rather tempting as a way to digitize videotapes that I have... All I would need then was a decent video recorder to play back old tapes...

There have been some reports that the M7 Motorway in Sydney is about to bring in a time based speeding fine. That is, it measures the time your journey takes and issues a speeding fine if you exceed the average speed by more than 15%. I have just looked on their Web Site, and they are reporting that this is a hoax!

Some links... LiveScience has a story about how Sandia National Laboratories have managed to get a record for the hottest temperature ever recorded - at 3.8 billion degrees. That is many many times hotter than the surface of the sun. The main problem is that whilst they can repeat the experiment at will, they have no idea why the result is so hot.

The SimpleTalk web site has a great article on contingency plans for consultant programmers. How to bring people up to speed before they need to be, how to ensure documentation is maintained and that backups are made.

Soon it will be time for bed. For the past few nights I have been getting to bed late and waking up early. Not tonight... As soon as I post this I will be turning off the TV and getting some sleep...

According to The Register, SCO spent about US$8M last quarter to earn about US$30,000. Not exactly a great business I would not think... Which is why they have gone to court accusing everyone of violating their copyright with using LINUX.

A friend of mine has sent me a link to The Helichair. This is not a chair for a helicopter... Well, not really. It is actually a remote control unit that allows you to control a remote control helicopter whilst sitting down... Cool toy!

I was going to go running this afternoon, but the weather was a bit warm for it. I really waned to go running, but it was not to be. I needed to do some thinking and running would have been the ideal for that. I spoke to the client about my trip to Jordan, and needed some time just to think. I think it is proposed that I stay in the Four Seasons, which looks like a fantastic place... And then visit Petra and the Dead Sea afterwards. But I am yet to be convinced that it is safe. I still need to speak to more people before making a decision. And i need to do it quickly.

I know it seems like I keep going on about this, but it is on my mind and it is something that I need to resolve. WikiTravel has information on Amman... Looks like an interesting place...

So it would appear is Pakastan, where flying a kite is concidered to be a bad enough to be charged under terrorism legislation... Hmm... Nice to see that type of legislation being used to stop legitimate acts of terror!

Things have been busy this morning... I have been working on a few projects... And this has involved running around town a bit. When I went to get the mail today things were not quite as easy as normal... There was a parcel in the post box. The only problem was that the hinges of the door to the box meant that the parcel was too big to extract so the post office staff needed to collect it from the box for me. A card would have been so much easier.

Then I needed to get some parts... A Fibre Optic test kit, and a conductive pen. The pen was tested first, and whilst it is marketed as being conductive I cannot actually get it to work... I guess it will just place it on the clients bill as an expense... Pitty since I was hoping for some good things from it. Since it does not work I might need to go to a hobby shop to find a replacement...

The FibreOptic experimenters kit was for the same job, to work out if I could detect bending in the cable. The answer was that I sort of could... But the plastic fibre-optic was not really the right type for what I wanted to do... I guess I need to look around for a replacement...

On the GPS Front, villagers in the UK are complaining that satellite navigation systems are suggesting that people sometimes go through the centre of their village on the way to the local airport as a way to get around congestion on the main road.

In an interesting twist in the USA, a service has been started up that allows people to swap CD's online. This is such a cute concept - they charge $1 per CD for the exchange, and $0.49 for postage. Surprisingly they mentioned that they expected some issues from the Copyright police, but claimed an exemption under the US Copyright Act. After all why should you have to pay royalties twice... There are times that I find the legal system really weird.

A textbook in Victorian schools has caused some contraversy by comparing The Crusaides to September 11. Interesting comparison, although I am not convinced it is entirely deserved. I guess he who wins gets to write the history.

I spoke to a Uni student today... Doing Electrical Engineering at the University of Newcastle... He is working on his thesis and is working on defining a project for it. Something to do with time measurement with GPS, and some applications. I expect to hear from him again - should be an interesting exercise. It has been a while since I assisted in any planned way in a thesis...

There was an armed holdup in Sweeden... And this one was strange. You see it was at an airport, and they held up a plane that had just arrived from London. The plane was robbed as the passengers were waiting to alight. There is no news of how much was stollen from the plane.

According to the SMH, Former 'Talking Heads' frontman David Byrne's imagination took to the podium at the Adelaide Festival of Arts... With just a laptop and screen, he quickly began to play with, subvert and question the PowerPoint tool used to deliver 30 million presentations every day. A global theatrical phenomena, as Byrne called it.

I had a programming issue with VB.NET. I was getting an error for distance. In VB.NET it was being dispayed as -1.#IND although in CrystalReports it was shown slightly differently with a J in the answer. I believe that IND stands for INDETERMINANT. The equation I am using that causes the problem is :-
temp = Math.Acos(p1 + p2 + p3) * 6378
When I added up p1, p2 and p3 I got a response of 1.0000000000000002
And that is the problem. ACOS only allows -1 to +1, the software refused to work properly. Adding some error checking fixed the problem!

For those interested in where I might be going, you can check here. This travel advice from DFAT is 'slightly' concerning. I would get to do a tiny bit of sight seeing, but that brings with it additional dangers. I am not one of these people who must live on the edge, and that is why I am torn. Something for me to work out.

Something that might improve my thought on this would be laughing gas. I have just found how easy it is to make. Too easy in fact. Basically you can generate it from amonium nitrate, with not too much work. I do not think I will be trying it at any time soon... Even if it does sound cool!

Music:

One piece of music I love is Belinda Carlisle's 'Mad About You'. You can read the lyrics here... I did not realise how simple they were. Sure, the song was on her first album, but even so... The film clip is cool too...
I'm mad about you
You're mad about me babe
Couple of fools run wild aren't we
Pushing the day into the nighttime
Somewhere between the two
We start to see

I am a member of the Microsoft ISV program. That gives me access to a few programs that Microsoft runs. It also places me on the distribution list for some strange stuff. Like a fingerprint reader for answering a survey. But yesterday I got sent some antipiracy material - the sort that gets sent to computer stores. This parcel contained a number of A3 posters, some stickers, and a pad of about 1-200 A5 leaflets with a fake ELVIS on the front saying 'Don't be fooled by a copy'. For me most of this will go straight into the paper recycling...

Today I was thinking I was going to need to go for a drive to do some testing out of cell phone access... But then I realised that I could build a room here that has no cellphone access... If I put a huge amount of foil on the walls, door, roof and floor. Now I just need to plan the testing that I need to do. Now, that is the challenge.

The SMH has an opinion piece describing how useful most of the commonwealth games events are useful to humanity... Notice I said MOST. For instance runnig, high diving, swimming and the like. All except for the Race Walking. Having seen the 20KM womens race walking during the Sydney Olympics I think I have to agree...

Escape on NEWS.COM.AU has a review of cool things to do in London.

I am promising myself that I am not going to have a late night tonight. Two nights in a row after midnight is enough for me... Three is probably not a good idea. After finishing this entry I will be sending an email and then get some sleep. Having Mythbusters on in the background is not getting either task actually done.

The email has been sent, but it was not written in the way that I would have liked to... I knew what I wanted to say, but I really did not know how to say it. I am being asked to go on a strange trip, and I have some real concerns about it... I have read the DFAT report, and it is not good.

Tomorrow I think I will go for a drive with my laptop working on debugging some hardware... I need to test some hardware outside GSM range, and the most reliable way to do that is to get outside GSM range... Funny about that... Still, finding such an area around sydney might be slightly problematic. I will see how it goes tomorrow...

I am watching the 2nd series of Mythbusters right now... And it is as hillarious as the first series. Actually, I think it is much funnier than the first series. Right now I am watching the first episode of the second series, and it is just a review of some of the past experiments - doing experiments again. The show really needs to be seen to be believed.

I spoke to a client of mine who is also building a plane just like the one I am helping to build. The problem was that they sent the engine from the USA. But the company was dispatching two of these engines, and both had different engine mounts. And guess what happened. They got shipped out with the wrong engine mounts. Now my friend needs to remove the engine mount from his engine and send it to the USA, and get a new mount. The only problem was that the cables were nicely tied to the mount so there is some work to do.

Short run... The weather was too hot for it really... I did manage to get about 3km done in about 18 minutes - I ran a but faster than normal, but definitely not as far or for as long. No GPS plot... I have misplaced the handheld.

Apple is leaking like a sieve at the moment.. The rumours of the iPod Video II, or whatever it will be called are coming out daily. So much so that MacRumours.COM have released a few photos of mock-ups of the full screen video iPod on their Web Site. Not that this product exists... Yet. But It should exist soon. Nice to see how people spend their time.

I have been meaning to write some reports for my TeamTrack application today, but I sort of got distracted. Thus I have not had a chance. I want to do a report listing which days vehicles were running, and print summary information on them. This should be fairly simple to do - I have most of the data I need already, but in slightly too much detail. So I just need to compress the data down to daily summary information.

Later depending on th weather I will go for another run. Right now I am to the point where a 5km run is quite easy. That is a good condition to be in. I now need to build speed and build distance. Not sure of the correct order for those... I tend to find that building speed just tends to tire me out more. So I guess I will be more buildng distance... Which in itself is problematic when I start getting board of where I am running... TIme to find a new course.

I need to stop doing late nights... Another night of going to bed after midnight. And this time I did not wake up after 7:00AM unfortunately. And it was not as if I was either relaxing or doing any of my own work either. Initially I was giving a friend a hand with some of his work... Doing a tiny bit of research into a problem that I had seen solved before... And then I did some work for improving procedures at the local pre-school. Neither of which were particularly successful last night. AS of this morning... Well, I have some solutions for my friend at least.

I just saw an article on Harvard's Internal Network. I did not realise that harvard would have 120,000 users and 250,000 IP addresses in use. That is a LOT. Then again they have a medical school and a hospital system and the like. And over 1000 buildings. And managing this network seems to be a well automated task for a large number of people... Guess that is the way the world is moving... This network is larger than most companies in Australia. In fact there would be only maybe the NSW government or the federal government who would approach that size...

Tomorrow I have a relatively free day - that is I only have the things to do on my to-do list as opposed to any meetings or other scheduled things on. I have some work I want to do tomorrow with the tracker if I get a chance... Basically making it more resillient. Not that it has issues at the moment... Just some functions to improve central administration of the trackers. It will probably entail registering a new domain just for my trackers... Easier that way.

The Register is reporting that the next iPod is probably being released in the next month or two, and will have a four inch screen. Not sure if this will come off, but it seems logical. Personally I think the sports iPod should be the next off the production line, but I do not know if it is even being developed as a concept. Last time I went running I was concerned my iPod was going to get damaged with the rain.

Tomorrow I also need to think about a trip... DFAT advise against it, in their normal language expecting the worst. I just need to do a risk assessment and see what I come up with. This is the same DFAT that put out an advisory for perth a year or so back... Hmm... we will see

I can now confirm that there are some strange people in Idaho. The following is a quote from a resolution from the IDAHO State House... 'WHEREAS, any members of the House of Representatives or the Senate of the Legislature of the State of Idaho who choose to vote "Nay" on this concurrent resolution are "FREAKIN' IDIOTS!" and run the risk of having the "Worst Day of Their Lives!"'.

And if you think that is strange you should read the rest of the resolution... Basically it was a 'feel good' resolution which included statments that thanked people who did things for Idaho. I just love the use of the words 'Freakin Idiots'.

On my XBox I love using Midtown Madness using an Audi TT. Today I saw one on the road, and recognised it immediately. The TT is a sort of back the front two seat care - one that I think looks really cool, but also looks entirely too exepnsive... It goes into the 'If I won a few million dollars I might buy one after some other stuff' box.

I am now at home after a day out. Rather than spend today and tomorrow at meetings for a half a day each I mananged to spend up until now at both meetings working on various things. A better use of resources all around realistically... Tomorrow is now free rather than being tied up with other things... So an uninterrupted day of work.

Going over to north ryde this morning I saw a woman in the right hand lane on the M2 at Windsor Rd going slightly slower than the traffic in the left side... So after a little whils I overtook her, and she looked like she was talking to someone - probably on the cellphone. She was actually doing about 15km/h under the limit and there were no cars in front of her. When I had passed her I looked back and I actually saw a book of some type on her steering wheel. I could not work out if she was reading from it or writing in it... In any case it was rather dangerous.

Earlier I mentioned the up with Unix Commands... Here are their uses...
gawk - pattern scanning and processing language
grep - print lines matching a pattern
unzip - extract compressed files in a ZIP archive
touch - change file timestamps
finger - displays information about users
mount - mount a file system
fsck - check and repair a file system
gasp - Obscure text to graphics converter
yes - output a string repeatedly until killed
umount - unmount file systems
sleep - delay for a specified amount of time

With the exception of gsap, these are all standard UNIX commads available on most LINUX and UNIX machines.

I have been in a meeting this morning, and saw the following on a coffee cup.... The 2nd line just contains unix commands...

[Root@EverythingLinux /root]#
gawk; grep; unzip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; gasp; yes; unmount; sleep;

I have only just woken up... I needed it since I got to bed at about 12:30am since I had some work to do before going to sleep. Thankfully I was able to sleep until just after 7:00AM which was fantastic. I really really needed it. Now I have to get a few more things before I drive over to North Ryde for a 9:30AM meeting. [Which reminds me... I need to charge my iPod. I forgot to pause it yesterday when I was building so the battery might be getting low.

I will have to work out a way to improve this... Having the iPod shut off automatically when the car engine is turned off... That sort of thing. How hard can it be? I am an electrical engineer, and I am building a plane in my spare time. Should be simple... We will see!

The Sun in the UK is reporting that Sky One TV has done a real version of the trailer for The Simpsons to publicize the new season. The people are real people this time, and not yellow figures. Interesting concept... They did a good job too.

I am now home after being out most of the day... Church this morning, followed by a meeting and then some time working on the plane.

So, what did we get done on the plane I can hear you all ask. Well, some important stuff. Firstly I increased the size of some holes going across the fuselage between the wings from 1/2" to 9/16". This might sound easy, but it provided some hassles since the UniBit drillbit normally used would not fit into a drill and still have clearance to make the hole. So I worked out how to use the unibit in a socket set and this worked, albeit slowly.

I then removed both of the steel weldments holding the landing gear in place. These needed to be cleaned up before final installation - which might get done next week. Then we spent some time putting in eight rivets on the top of the golden bulkhead on the side of the plane. This was a tiny bit of a pain, but was not too bad.

Then we spent some rivets at the front end of the top rim of the fuselage. Some of these rivets were a real pain, but thankfully for once I got to use the rivet gun... So much easier... Anyway, it was fun... More later.

Skype 2.0 has a limit of five parties in a conference call, unless you have an Intel Dual-Core processor. This was for commercial reasons rather than for technical reasons - with Intel paying money for this marketing. So it should come as no surprise that someone has released not only details how this works, but what changes are needed to patch the code to remove this limitation.

Many eBay users will know that a good photo helps getting a good price for whatever you are selling. Taking professional photos can be rather hard, what with getting the lighting, backdrop and focus correct. So, here comes a Lightbox that helps you take great photos. Assuming that you actually use your camera...

And I have spoken about the United Nuclear company in the USA before. They sell things like AeroGel which is very light glass filled with air, and other cool chemicals. They have just announced that they are being sued for distributing chemicals to people without an explosives license. Things like powdered zink and aluminium. And sulphur, permanganates and nitrates. Sounds rather geeky I know, but I can remember using these in chemistry at Highschool to make fireworks for science night.

I have been speaking to a friend up in Brisbane... His house is currently being absolutly pounded with rain. It would be nice for the rain to be sent down here for in order to fill up all the dams and also to improve the water table which has fallen significantly due to the drought. When running I can see how little water there is in the creek, which is probably at least partially related to the water table as opposed to something like development.

Right now I am having issues logging into one of my servers... Certain versions of windows only allow a couple of remote desktop sessions. And unfortunately someone else has logged into the server, and stayed logged in whilst killing off the remote desktop meaning that I am unable to log into the box. And since I am do not have access to the administrator account (even though I have admin rights) I cannot login and log off the other sessions... If I need to log in I will ring up the administrator and get access...

News.COM.AU have notified us all that the ABC have put their phone calls out to tender. They have 1800 mobile phones, fixed lines, 1800 and 1300 numbers... And make about three million local calls a year. That is a lot of phone calls. Looks like Optus or Telstra is getting a new contract!

This morning apart from working on the tracker I also spent some time working on some hardware for a job I am working on. I basically just needed to make some leads and send them off to the programming team I have doing the work. Quite simple really... But I did find something out... The hardware I had purchased for this job was built by the same company as my GPRS tracker. I was somewhat surprised about this...

Groklaw has a story a about a senate enquiry into technical protection measures that would stop people copying DVD's and the like. Basically the senate enquiry realised that there are some issues that need to be resolved to protect consumers...

Brainiac... Some things should be illegal... One of these is seeing if you can walk on custard. Yes! Custard. And to prove that it was real they emptied a backyard swimming pool and filled it with custard mixed in cement mixers. Sure enough once the custard set the person was able to walk across the custard, but once they stopped they started to sink. So much so that the person had big problems getting out once his legs went into the custard down to his knees, even with the help of people outside the pool. I just do not believe that anyone would actually do the experiment. What I am wondering is what they did with the custard afterwards.

I have just edited the code for my tracker - one of my clients asked if I could get the power consumption even lower, and I promised to see what I could do. I found a way to do it - when the tracker is in IDLE, it goes into LOW POWER mode until something happens. In low power mode, we run the main processor at 32 KHz instead of 9 MHz. This has the result of reducing the amount of power used when running on battery power. Now I just need to fully test this, but it seems to be working well.

Of other news, some organisations are banning Google Desktop Search since it allows you to store the search indicies on the google server. The feel that this is a significant security issue.

I hate an organisation called ECOLIFE... They are sending me a lot of SPAM. Right now I am getting it through my own domain and also from my new Radioactive.net.au domain where I have redirected any incoming email to my new mail email address. I am thinking of killing off the email for the domain for a few months to kill off most of the SPAM. I just need to get around to it. Right now though I have a few emails to get through... and then some programming to do, as well as getting some hardware out the door hopefully before mid-day so it can be express posted to get to my programmer first thing monday morning.

I also need to get a quote out this morning for a TV production company. Standard GPS technologies... [Done]. Given that the entire TV production industry in this country is stretched for cash I am not sure they will go for it... I hope they do for a number of reasons - being involved with a cool project is certainly one of the reasons.

Finally, also in the SMH is a story about a case in the UK where Dan Brown is being sued over copyright infringement by people who think that his book is too similar to their own. The only problem with the people suing is that copyright does not cover an idea but simply the expression of an idea... And they are trying to get it to cover the idea. Strange

I am home today... I have a few things to do - to catch up on... I might be building tomorrow afternoon but we will see.

The SMH has a set of three articles describing the disaster of the selloff of bankstown and camden airports. Lease terms are being made much shorter, and rents are significantly more expensive. Interesting read.

The SMH also has an article about Dale Begg-Smith who won the Gold Medal at the recent winter olympics. But far from being an article saying wonderful things about Dale, the SMH looks at the company he runs which peddles Spyware.

Still no news from my New Zealand friend. I am guessing he managed to catch an earler flight and was not able to ring beforehand. Just a guess on my behalf. With some luck I will managed to see him on the way back in a few weeks.

Escape in News.COM.AU has an article on some of the offbeat, unusual strange travel destinations at the moment. This includes the SEX AND THE CITY TOUR in NY, DA VINCI CODE WALKING TOUR in PARIS, COOKING IN TUSCANY in FLORENCE and JACK THE RIPPER TOUR in LONDON. Sounds like a cool tour to take world wide.

Telstra's competitors are currently analysing their plan to roll out fibre to the hubs . Presently Telstra have said they will only do this if they are not forced to share. The competitors are saying that Telstra will do it anyway.

A friend of mine sent me an email containing a few footpath drawings of Julian Beever. Once I did a search I found his site which contains a few more of his amazing drawings. Unlike most people who draw in chalk on the footpath, Beever draws in 3D, so that if you look at the drawings from the right angle it looks like the objects really exist. From other angles things just look rather strange.

I just saw mention to a cute store in Hollywood - Meltdown Comics. Not that I am hugely into comics (I have not bought one for years), but more that these sorts of stores have other cute things for sale. Definitely on my list of places to visit in LA next time I am over there.

I still have not heard from my friend. He was due in at 8AM, and initially was not answering his phone. Now it goes straight to voice mail. My guess is that he has caught a different flight, but I will just need to wait and see.

I have not heard from my New Zealand friend yet - I am guessing he is at the Airport waiting to arrange his ticket to the USA. Because of the type of ticket, he is on standby regardless of how full the plane is generally. When you are paying what he is paying for a ticket you expect these type of things unfortunately.

Something Awful has a list of covers for non-approved choose your own adventure books. The one I love the most is Shrodingers Cat, with two endings... I am guessing that at the end of the book the cat will be alive or dead. [Unless the cat has escaped from the box in disgust, but that is not normally an ending for the cat]. Shrodinger's Cat is a quantum mechanics thought exercise that is taught in highschool chemistry.

Anyway time to find Kevin's Cellphone number to see what is going on...

There has been news about london banning an anagram Map of their rail system. So here is the CityRail map...here

They have anagrams for all the stations... except Rooty Hill, Clyde and Pymble... I like Gay Manor just near blacktown, Crimson Death in the north west, Camp Latrine (Martin Place), Irrational Rotten Pain (International), Casual (Casula), Acne Valley, A Pimply Rock (Olympic Park), Wasted Me (Westmead), Died Soon, Hen Trip, Good Winks, Sell him Rum, and We all Raft...

Right now I have the video clip for Alphaville's Forever Young on the TV whilst I am typing this. The advantage with being able to almost touch type is that I can multi-task at least to some extent where at least one of the tasks does not need too much thinking. Filmclips are nice to have in the background - and most of the ones I am looking at I have not seen for ages if at all....

Anyway I really love the alphaville song... If anything it is sung about an octave too high, and the song is too short. I am just thinking who would do a great job at doing a cover of it... DJ Sammy would be OK... Maybe Bryan Adams, or one of the other male performers with a powerful voice. And I think the powerful voice is what the Alphaville version is missing.

There are times that I feel that I have not got any work done. And then there are days like today that I am sure that I have not got any real work done. For instance there was a meeting this morning about a marketing exercise. Lunch time there was an hour long meeting at the preschool which I cannot go into, and then there was a debrief followed by a run and very little other work. Argh.

I saw the first episode of Brainiacs from the UK earlier this evening, and I am loving the show. Actually I am amazed at the experiments that they show on TV. I cannot beleve that they do the experiments that they do... And cannot believe that they get away the experiments that they do. Hillarious. One of the more bizzare was putting dynamite in the centre of kebab meat roll to see if it cooked it faster, and I dont think it did.

I am starting to get tired... Right now I am watching the West Wing on the ABC and I am not sure that I will be able to keep my eyes open. I woke up too early this morning, and I should have tried harder to get some more sleep. I think that I will sleep much better tonight because I am much more tired.

Short run today... 5.1KM and 37m10s. That means I ran about 8.233KM/H. I am sure that I could have done better but I had a couple of phone calls in the middle which caused problems with my breathing. Which in turn caused issues with my stamina.

I was well on my way to do about 5.5KM, but it really started to rain, and I did not feel like having a waterlogged iPod. I was not sure that the extended warranty would actually cover that. Maybe I am being a but paranoid there... Who knows. But I would rather be safe than sorry.

I got a book in the mail from AMAZON.COM yesterday called 'Droidmaker' which is some of the history of George Lucas and his company Industrial Light and Magic. Not that I am a great fan of StarWars, I love the inside stories behind the pictues. How things work and how things got done. That sort of thing. The book is probably one of the best researched books I have in my library judging from the few pages I have read already.

It seems that whenever a person is mentioned, they have a footnote saying what movies they worked on. The index at the back includes copious amounts of information. And there are panels talking about interesting stuff which is a distraction from the main story. I was not expecting the book to be quite so long either - at about 500 pages or so. I made the mistake of reading it last night before bed, and before I knew it an hour had passed.

I will report more on the book as I work though it... Right now I am enjoying it after finding little to sink my teeth into in the authors introduction. Thankfully things really improved from there on.

Quick Link: United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appears on TV showing how she keeps fit whilst having one of the most powerful jobs in the world...

During the night I had a Skype chat from a friend in New Zealand letting me know he will be in Oz from 8AM until 3PM or so this afternoon, and wanting to know if I want to do lunch. Sounds cool. He is on the way to Phoenix, Arizona for the memorial service for Geordie Hormel. Now, why does that name sound familiar?

Well, Hormel foods are the people that brought us SPAM. And Hormel was the heir to the food empire. But that is not why he is important. He owned the famous 'The Village' recording studio in LA, that has been used by everyone from Pink Floyd to REM, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Elton John to the Nine Inch Nails. Doing a bit of research I found out some more information here. All I can say is that I am impressed.

[Correction: 7AM. He will be here tomorrow... ]

This is so cute... a DIY Hoverboard... Basically a personal version of a hovercraft just larger than a skateboard. Built using a small petrol leaf blower, and some wood and some other bits and pieces... I am not sure I will build it, but I am really really tempted...

I have just finished building up my first OpenTracker. Since I am now the Australian Distributor of this device I thought I had better build one so that I could see what they are like. I am quite impressed. They have a lot in them, and are not too hard to put together. I think they have more parts than the TinyTrak II, but it is actually cheaper thanks to some competition. Soldering the board is a bit harder thanks to the ground plane that has been used, but its presence probably improves the performance if anything.

The other reason I was building one is that I had just got a nice order for a number of tracking units and I have one less of that model in stock than I need so I thought I would ask the client what they wanted. On the basis that either this client or one on the future will want a built unit I soldered some up.

Last night I got a strange email from a colleague... What makes this strange was that it was a virus, and it was supposed to be from Phil Karn who is a former board member of TAPR. But I know it did not come from him or anyone I know since this email address stopped getting used a few years ago by Phil because it was being used to send Virii. You see, he wrote some of the dialup networking code used in Windows, and provided it for free provided he was acknowledged. And the acknowledgement included his email on every windows PC... and there are virus programs that seach for email messages on someones HDD... And I got sent one of those...

There is a story on News.Com.Au about an armoured car robbery in Sydney at the QANTAS facility at the airport. According to the report two robbers stole a cool $1m in cash. I did look at selling a tracking system for use in such situations, but in the end there were significant issues to overcome - including liability and reliability. Interesting.

ExtremeTech is saying why Windows Vista wont Suck!. Basically the two bit ones are improved memory management, and never powering down - just going into low power sleep mode... With all the other changes I guess I should be looking at replacing my laptop at some stage in the next 12 months. And from engadget comes some new products from Apple. They include MacMini intel, but it now has a remote control allowing you to use it as a media centre PC similar to my XBox. They are also releasing an iPod Boombox, and iPod leather case...

Anyway, back to programming... Some reports to write in Crystal Reports...

I am not totally sure how useful this is, but WikiPedia is now available as an 800 MByte eBook for your iPod. I dont think there are any pictures in it reducing the usability slightly, but this sounds like a cool toy for when you are on the go. I might have to look at this.

Australian IT is reporting that the ATO is preparing a system rewrite in Cobol which is becoming a dead language. They are planning to write the front end in .NET from microsoft, but the backend systems will be COBOL. Some senitors in parliment are not happy about this and believe there are better languages to be used moving forward, particularly at the $500m cost.

They are also reporting that final testing of the Tcard Smartcards for use in NSW will be started soon, and then they might actually be able to roll the system out. The Smartcard system has been plagued by problems from the outset including lawsuits over the successful tenderer. Given past experience I would not hold my breath.

This morning I have some programming to do... Bug fixes mainly, but it is programming. Now that systems are up and running I can get that work done...