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