I think I am in the wrong profession. I get sent a magazine called InsideGNSS which is about GPS type technology. With any other industry you are likely to get photos and pictures of things that are visually appealing. As an example in the trucking industry they have photos of young women adorning the trucks. In the travel industry the magazines contains photos of tropical beaches and beautiful scenery. But not in the GPS industry.

The issue of this magazine I got has an overview of a scientist working with GPS in aviation. In what is I hope a spoof of the magazines perchant for providing body measurements, this magazine provides a text box which proudly notes 'Van Dyke's Coordinates 39d 38.921N 077 08.231W'. And then there is the 'GNSS Album' containing 'Images and Spectral Signatures of the new GNSS signals'.

After getting a trade magazine so nerdy as to provide those type of features I think I need to get a new job!

Right now it is 7AM and I have been up for only a few minutes. I was tempted to stay in bed a little longer, but last night I forgot to put a parcel out for the courier to pick up this morning, and so I needed to get up to organize that. One of the good things about winter (and perhaps the only good thing) is that it gets light later... At least this is good when you are trying to sleep in - it is not quite so good if you need to get to work or something. Anyway I have found myself sleeping later for the last couple of weeks or so.

The burn on my hand is not too bad, although I think it needs a small bandage to protect it from infection. I think it will be fine in a few days. I do not expect to get much sympathy from one of my friends for burning myself on my soldering iron. A few months ago he managed to burn himself on my soldering iron and makes sure I do not forget...

I found a Logging Library for .NET. Not many people will be interested in this, but nLog looks useful for me.
The SMH has a hilarious list of some new ways to leave your lover... They also link to DearJohn.COM which rights hilarious breakup letters for you.

Right now I have a 10AM appointment at Pymble for a days programming, and I have some things to do first so I had better get them done.

I mentioned earlier today that I had managed to burn the knuckles on my left hand on my soldering iron. Thankfully the burn is not hurting - not even the low level pain that I was expecting for many more hours. I think the very limited swelling has gone down, and the redness only extends about a mm from the extent of the burn itself. These are really good. Right now it looks like some type of birth mark. And it is not sore to touch which is even better.

On another subject, according to News.Com.Au, a Canadian grandmother has surprised members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in British Columbia who are operating a gun amnesty. The old lady dropped a missile launcher into her local police station. She and her husband reportedly found it when they were renevating their house in 1973 and were afraid to hand it in. Ouch.

Ouch. I think that is the best way to some it up. I was doing some warranty work on some tracking units today and I managed to hit my knucles on my left hand with my soldering iron. I now have a very light surface burn about 5mm by 15mm. It is painful to touch, but most of the time it is fine. That will teach me - although I am not sure what it will teach me. I tended to burn fingers on soldering irons when I was much younger so it is unusual for me to burn myself.

Two things on my agenda for today... FIrst is that I have a heap of programming to do... Maybe not a heap, but I have enough to keep me going. And I have some warranty work to do on some trackers. With some luck these will be easy to fix and get out the door back to the clients. We will see.

According to the BBC, a German man is attempting to set up a new airline. This airline will only fly between Duesseldorf and Tokyo on 747's with an 'All Business Class' service. But that is not what is most interesting about this airline. The thing is that Smoking will be allowed in all the 150 or so seats on board. The man, a former stockbroker, is seeking the start-up cash for Smintair - Smoker's International Airways. link

The SMH is reporting on how the TAXI's charge 10% extra for CabCharge and Credit Cards. I take taxi's so rarely that I had no idea that the surcharge was so high. 10% is a lot. Part of the reason for this is that the Taxi companies in the past have been able to force EFTPOS machines from a particular company onto their drivers. This is changing thanks to a competition tribunal which is allowing drivers to choose whoever they want. Not before time I would guess...

Finally home after a day mostly working on the plane. Well apart from a few work emails and phone calls that is. Surprisingly, things were generally quiet today, and I was able to get the work done on the plane almost uninterrupted.

We installed the 'Air Conditioning' external vents today - which involved riveting pieces of plastic to the plane sandwhiched between the external skin of the plane and our hime made washers. This was less than spectactularly effective. It works, but it could have worked a whole lot better. We also wired up the Joy Sticks with the wiring to control various plane systems. As there is a spare button I am trying to convince Richard that we should label that button FIRE to launch a missile attached to the wing of the home made plane :-)

Working on the plane is actually surprisingly tiring. It is either that or the drive home. Right now it is good to put my feet up, and in a few moments watch some TV...

I had a good day yesterday... In the morning I wrote I was battleing the international transfers system. Last night I had a call from the Banker in London to work out how to get the money to my account. What we agreed was that Australian Dollars would be the easiest, as I could not work out the correct intermediary to use. Personally I do not care if the money is in Australian Dollars or US Dollars. It will all be the same when it reaches my business account anyway. [Paypal is different... It has seperate legers for each currency, and only does the conversion when needed.]

I also sold some tracking units through a reseller which is good too. These ones are slightly different, and so I have been working on a new driver for the units. This has taken some doing, but it is close to being done. I am quite impressed with the protocol, and I am finding it fairly easy to use. Now, if only they could improve their documentation...

Today I will be spending some time working on the plane... I have got through much of the things I wanted to do so I have some time up my sleeve. Not that I do not have other work to do, but that by working in evenings etc I can catch up.

Some links now... There is a new WWW site that predicts airfares in the USA. It is in Beta, but it will suggest when the best time to book and travel will be. Also, France has released a competitor to Google Earth... Although I suspect they did this for national pride.

Some links...

The SMH has a list of the 8 things that men do not want woment to know. I am not sure I agree with the lot but it is a good read. News.Com.AU is reporting that J.K. Rowling has decided to kill off two characters in the final book of the series. I needed to do some currency conversions earlier today... and XE.COM.AU is one of the sites I use to work out the exchange rate.

And finally I have been having some issues with getting the runtimes installed for Crystal Reports 10 and VB.NET 2005. I found This page that says what to do... The install is located in “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\BootStrapper\Packages\CrystalReports”.

Right now I am learning more than I even wanted to know about International funds transfers. I am trying to get funds into an account from a client in one country via a bank in another country. Of course each are in different timezines and speak different language, although thankfully all concerned speak English. I actually had to look on the map to see exactly where one of the locations was, and I most certainly had never got an email from there before. Interesting experience to say the least.

I have just seen an article about eBay which proves that your chances of winning an auction decrease with every bid. I sort of knew this anyway... The worst thing you can do is enter into a bidding war... Except for the seller that is :-) And Boeing is evaluating it's in-flight Internet Access since it is not profitable. Mostly because none of the US airlines have introduced it, and many other airlines who have do not have power in economy seats.

Right now I am feeling a bit tired... It is 1:49 AM and half time in the World cup match between Australia and Italy. From my point of view Australia and Italy are fairly close with their performance. Australia seems to be not making enough shots on the goal, and Italy is spending too much time on our goal... Just my opinion anyway.

Australia Vs. Italy is on tonight, so I will get setting my alarm for about 12:55AM. The Game starts at 1AM and I want to be ready to see Australia thrash Italy. Or as is more likely, for Italy to thrash Australia. I think this will be a really interesting match to watch - and I expect to see the Italians underestimate the Australians. I guess I will have to wait until tonight... By this time tomorrow morning it will be all over!

I was quite shocked with the fuel economy of my car on Friday. I was doing some errands, and needed to refil my car just before I came up to the shell service station on Lane Cove Road. I have heard the place described as THE MOTHER SHIP in reference to 1950's SciFi movies.

Anyway when I filled up I found I only needed about 40L of fuel - I guess that is what happens when you fill up as soon as the light comes on. But what was more interesting was that I had done 550km. This is about 7.3 L/100Km. Quite good really.

For some reason I woke up at 5:30 this morning, which to be frank to too darn early when I have no reason to do so, particularly in the middle of winter when things are getting a bit cool. After spending some time not being able to get back to sleep I am now up and contemplating how many emails I can get through... I know what they all say, but I have not dealt with them so they are marked as 'unread'. And there are too many of them.

Yesterday on the plane we worked on a few important things. Firstly we installed the rudder cable covers at the rear of the plane - two small pieces of aluminium that need to be pointed out to be visible and held on with four rivets each. We also removed the rollbar, adjusted the size of the feet and cleaned up the 'shim' we were using to angle it before installing it permamently on the plane. Superglue helped to keep the washer with the nut. Too easy.

Then we installed the foot pedals into their position. This was not too hard, but it would be a pain to do if you had to move them closer to the pilot for ergonomic reasons once the plane was complete. And we did some rivets on the front of the plane up the top too... So very very slowly items are being taken off the to-do list.

Anyway time to get some work done... More later.

Sometimes I am a bit dopey. A friends brother has just returned from Overseas, and was away for his birthday. So he is having a birthday party now that he is home. Having somewhat of a poor memory I was going to ask when his birthday was, apart from the fact that it was 'some time back'. I almost asked when it was, but I did not get around to asking.

Driving home I became somewhat glad I didnt ask when his birthday was. I remembered when it was. He shares the same date as me!

Working on the plane today. Not sure exactly what we are working on but I suspect that it will be in the centre of the plane, around the seat area.

There are predictions that international mobile call prices could 'tumble' according to a press release from a company that will soon be offering better mobile pricing. They do it by offering numbers in the country that you are in that forward direct to a number in Australia. I think that is how it works. I am not convinced that it will cause the mobile charges to significantly drop.

Some links. Travel in News.Com.AU has a list of some of the more interesting pubs in london. These include some rather historic places... with some bargains listed too. The Government has also approved a structural seperation of Telstra into a wholesale and a retail business to provide transparency to their competitors.

And Microsoft is installing a large number of Linux machines around their offices world wide to handle WiFi accesss... So much for Linux not being suitable for the big time...

I have been down to Camden for my first flight even in a Van's RV plane. I mostly enjoyed the hour long flight, although there were times that I would rather have been elsewhere - generally when the plane was making hard turns or the like. During those times I would certainly rather be in a 747... Going at about 171 knots is amazing - this is about 300 km/h. I dont know that I would trust myself to fly one of these planes, but I will definitely fly in one again.

Some days I am sure that I am going mad. Other days I am confident I am. I am not sure which case today falls into, but it is one of them. I am trying to send some data from my computer out the network port. This should be simple. I wanted to send two packets out. One for instance contained the value 1, and the other contained the value 2. So I write some code, and it does not work. Even worse, when I use Ethereal to check on what is happening I find that I am sending packets containing '2' twice. This SHOULD NOT be happening.

Dim Buffer(1) As Byte
Buffer(0) = 1
Send(Buffer, d.RemoteEndPoint)
Buffer(0) = 2
Send(Buffer, d.RemoteEndPoint)

And it was sending both as '2'. Very strange. When I changed the VB.NET code to the following things started workng.

Dim Buffer(1) As Byte
Buffer(0) = 1
Send(Buffer, d.RemoteEndPoint)
Dim Buffer2(1) As Byte
Buffer2(0) = 2
Send(Buffer2, d.RemoteEndPoint)

Since SEND is getting the packets 'By Value', I should not need to do this. Not sure what is going on, but it is a BUG!

Things are finally going my way with this new hardware - the driver seems to be behaving itself, but a lot more code is needed. Basically more protocol stuff needs to be implemented but the data seems to be being parsed OK. Part of my problem at the moment is that I am trying to work out what the software needs to do... Like, I know on a high level, but the low level needs work.

Some links. First, Charles Darwin's Tortose died at Australia Zoo in Queensland, aged well in her 160 decade. Kalashnikov who designed the AK47 rifle has come out against cheap knock offs of his famous rifles. And the XBox Linux site has an article on the 17 Security Flaws in the X-Box.

And finally, here is a conversation of a poor person who tried to cancel their AOL subscription, and did not have much success...

I have spent most of today on what I would call an entirely useless exercise. I traced the problem I was having down to the manufacturer of the equipment I am writing a driver for. They have written a software driver that allows you to monitor the packets coming from their unit, and display them on your screen. Unfortunately, the application only displays the heartbeat packets, and not the actual data packets. This is despite screen dumps which says otherwise. They will be getting a carefully worded email this evening. Once I have finished writing the driver that is!

Although we did not win the match (we managed to draw the match), we really should have won the soccer. Australia really did dominate the game. We was robbed... Maybe not, but we should have won. After watching the game I was able to get another hours sleep which was good... Not sleepy at all.

Some links. Roger Waters, one of the founders of Pink Floyd has Sprayed Grafiti on the West Bank wall in Israel. He scrawled 'No Thought Control' and 'Tear Down The Wall' in a hommage to his Pink Floyd album THE WALL.

Also, the government is going to provide free internet filter software to parents so that "...there is now absolutely no reason why any child in Australia should be exposed to unsuitable content online,". The problem is that filtering is not a perfect technology, and parents are not always sure what they want their children to see. This morning I heard a report from a three year old who told their grandmother to upgrade to broadband as dialup was too slow!

Australia Vs. Croatia in the World Cup is on right now... Apart from the scoreline at the moment (0-1), Australia looks like they are playing a far better game... I did set my alarm for 5:00AM and I have been enjoying watching the game... More later.

I have had a busy, frustrating and somewhat productive day today. First thing this morning I had an appointment at Eastgardens to program some IC's for a friend. Normally this would be a simple task, but not today. First thing was that one of the ICs started heat up... In fact so hot that I almost burnt my finger on it. I then found that the IC socket was not aligned correctly, and killed the chip. What I did not realize for a few hours was that it killed a 2nd chip at the same tine. Anyway I programmed the chips and they would not work... Or they would slightly work. Nothing I could do would fix things.

That is until I for some reason removed the faulty chip and the device mostly worked - and replacing it fixed the problem. That might sound simple, but there was probably a couple of hours work in that. I also tried to connect to the wireless network at the same time but it did not seem to work. Eventually I gave up and used my wireless card through Vodafone which worked well.

Then I whipped over to Pymble. I was planning to go over tomorrow, but there was some time today after the previous job. This turned out really well - and I was able to brief a colleague on some work - showing him how he should look at the problem, and how he should start. This was fun, and probably took 90 minutes or so.

The other thing that happened today... My Video Recorder failed overnight. It was just the clock working this morning, but when nothing responded and i power cycled it which stopped it working totally. Probably a power supply problem... Maybe... I might have a look at repairing it... But I picked up a new recorder anyway.

I have come to the conclusion that I do not like Qantas Club. There is only one thing worse than being stuck in Qantas Club for six hours... and that would be being stuck somewhere else for a similar amount of time. Qantas was unwilling to put me on an earlier flight - which is their right. When I checked in their comment was 'If your flight was fuller I would have put you on an earlier flight, but it has 50 spare seats!'. Argh. Still, getting some work done, and watching DVD's was good. If I had known I would have stayed in Melbourne CBD, but I wanted to get back sooner if I could. Now I know.

Then the flight was about 20 minutes late leaving because of crewing issues. Not sure exactly why. But when we took off they said that we would be disembarking at 10:05, and we were. I was home at 10:50... Not a bad run.

Strange link of the day. The federal government is legislating what a fish is!

There is a new version of MSN Instant Messenger available that contains better support for file sharing, video conferencing and the like. You can download it from here.

And according to the SMH, people in the Sydney CBD are going to be asked to have an emergency pack in case they are trapped in the city for any reason. Not sure what is supposed to be in this pack, but it is probably a good idea. If only for major transport events when the train system just stops, or a sudden transport strike...

I am now sitting in the QANTAS CLUB in Melbourne Airport for a flight at 8:30. And it is only 2:30 now or so. The meeting I was down here for finished early so I have a few hours to spare. So I visited Sanity and grabbed some DVD's to buy. And in a few moments I will start watching one.

For some reason I dont tend to have much success in staying in places in Victoria. Right now I am stying in a motel in the outer suburbs of Melbourne, and I am guessing that this place would get three stars on a good day. I did not choose it, and I have stayed in worse. But it is fairly basic. Thankfully there is a reverse cycle air conditioner that although being a bit noisy works fairly well, keeping the room above freezing. And there is an electric blanket, and also enough power outlets so that I can use the Laptop in bed on mains power.

And there is a small 15 shop open air shopping centre about 50 meters away which will be my destination for breakfast I think a bit later this morning when things open. This places is still FAR better than the last place I stayed in down here south of the border. In that case the remote for the TV had flat batteries, so they needed to be shared with the air conditioner, and the phoneline in the room did not work one bit. [In that case I had internet access through dialing up to Ozimail using my cellphone - to the only number I had on my PC... Tumit. ]

It will be good to get home tonight... My flight is at 8:30pm, but I am hoping to get onto an earlier flight if I get to the airport earlier... We will see

Let me explain todays flights... Now, pay attention, for I will only say this once! I was due to catch a 9:30AM flight to Melbourne arriving at about 11AM. When I checked in, the machine asked if I wanted to change to one of the earlier flights, giving a selection of three. So I chose a flight 30 minutes before the one I had planned, at 9:00. But when I was in the Qantas Club lounge we found that many flights were delayed leaving Melbourne due to Ice!

So I was hearing lots of news about the 8AM flight boarding at about 9:15 whereas my flight was totally ignored, since it was later than that. But just after the official boarding time of 8:40 the PA says that it is now boarding, and eventually arrives at Melbourne about 10:35. I suspect that the 8AM flight would only just have left Sydney airport at that time - so it would appear that QANTAS schedules were totally screwed up. I caught a later flight and arrived earlier. Strange.

The flight was totally full, with only one spare seat. I was in the 2nd last row, which was rare for me. I am normally much further forward. And I can assure you that I like being further forward too! Much quieter.

Right now I am sitting in the Qantas Club in Sydney Airport waiting for my flight. When I did the checkin, I was asked by the computer if I wanted to go on another flight. Thankfully I did choose one. Because now all the Flights from Melbourne are being delayed thanks to ice. Over all it will even out. I will have to remember that lurk - being able to change to an earlier flight. Saves some money.

I am presently working on Vodafone 3G wireless card, and I have had a few issues getting it running. This is the first time I have tried to use this card in Anger since I reinstalled everything on it. Unfortunately the PC suddenly turned itself off a number of times when I was trying to access the wireless card. This happened about four or five times. I fixed this (I think) by using the external wireless card. So right now I am downloading the driver for the much slower backup wireless card I have. For some reason I forgot to download it when I was installing everything last week.

Since i have reinstalled my Dell laptop, the PC seems not to want to restart correctly if I close the lid. If I select Standby on the Shutdown menu things seem fine. I probably need to find a patch somewhere, or a setting. Regardless it is a pain, but I can live with it.

The work today went well. I am about to test the hardware - cross your fingers that this will all work. My first trick is to set up my Firewall to forward the packets to my Laptop. And then set up the tracking unit and start playing!

My flight tomorrow is at 9:30AM - I was thinking of dropping over to the ID Service branch but I did not realize that I needed a signature before doing this, so I will get to go to the airport at some leisurely time in the morning, and probably have breakfast there. And given that it is only one night I will probably just park at the airport and expense the parking charges.

Phrase of the Day...
I was talking with a friend about computers, and somehow the subject of Harikiri came up - or the ritual japanese art of suicide. It is interesting to see what people think a word like that might really be. It happens all the time in rock music songs (As an example I thought that Green Day's 'Another Turning Point' was 'Another Turnip Boy' for some reason). In this case the response was 'Hurry Curry'... Which I surmised to be some bizzare form of gastroenteritis! Then again maybe we have come up with a new slang term for the illness :-)

The job in Holroyd was really quick. In and out in about 10 minutes. And most of that was getting the various tools I needed out and waiting for the soldering iron to heat up. I wish all jobs were this easy. Then again there would be no challenge in that. Tomorrow I am off to the Airport to go down to Melbourne for the night. I have a meeting down there, so I will be out of the office for a couple of days. Thanks to email and cellphones I will be in contact.

Today I am off to Pymble via Holroyd. Pymble should be fun - I think it will mostly be a planning session where I need put my thoughts onto paper to be implemented. Then the implementation will be someone elses problem! Oh, the life as a consultant. Plan something, and then leave the implementation to others.

Last night someone sent me a link to some Uni students I think doing something really really stupid. They were throwing a bowl of Liquid Nitrogen into a hotel swimming pool. The effect was great, but I think carrying a bowl of Liquid Nitrogen may have been the most dangerous thing this person ever did. After all, a single drop is used by doctors to remove skin cancer. Imagine what a large mixing bowl would do if you tripped?

The BBC Film Network has a hilarious short movie called How to tell its over in 90 seconds. One of the ways is when you find a dead pidgeon on the kitchen table and are told that it 'is a metafor'. Worth a look if you are on broadband. The BBC is also reporting that the Socceroos are using software to gain advantage in the world cup. Unfortunately it looks like there is not enough advantage gained.

Back from working on the plane. We spent time working on the centre console area between the seats - putting about 14 nut plates in. This took a surprising amount of time. Then we worked on getting the elevator at the back working properly. It works but does not really extend far enough up. This requires some work, but frankly we were too exhausted to get much more done.

Not sure if I mentioned it yesterday but I picked up a copy of the third 'Late Night Moods' album. This is a great collection of easy listening music - ideal for long trips late at night. Not quite as good as the previous ones but still a great compilation none the less.

Overnight I was thinking about the programming I have been doing working on writing a UDP GPS listener program. I am getting my head around things - some of the concepts that the hardware people are using are unfamiliar to me. But I have worked out, at least in my head how I need to do things.

I was also thinking about Posidon last night. On one scene they have a couple of fans on a pipe - one at each end. The fans can blow from left to right or right to left. Open a hatch in the middle and the air blows out. But change the direction of the fans and it sucks instead of blows. This should not happen. Unless one of the ends of the pipe was clogged which it was not... I guess this is what is called 'Hollywood Science'... Stuff which looks good in the movies but that does not quite work so well in real life...

The Discovery Channel has a list of some of the greatest accidental discoveries, including X-Rays, Velcro, Post-It notes and Popsicles. The Washington Post has a list of some of the tours available of DisneyWorld.

What I thought would be a really easy task is becoming a pain. I am now synchronising my iPod and iTunes with my collection of music. This is the first time I have done this since the rebuild. The main killer is the fact that my music archive is on a network drive, but it is not mapped to a drive letter. I think the exact syntax on the network share as the PC sees it is slightly different, so my iPod might be getting a new blast of music from scratch. That will NOT be a fun process - over the network is not all that fast, even at 100 Mbps.

Since getting back from the cinema I have been working on a UDP GPS program. I have a TCP one, but I have never tried UDP before. It looks fairly straightforward - I was caught on a few things such as being too specific with binding IP addresses, but apart from that there were not too many hassles. My next trick is to start implementing the protocol. The impression I get when I read the documentation is that it is written for people who are using it as a quick refresher, rather than people who have not seen the protocol before.

This is fine, I do the same thing. But is does make it a bit harder on the poor old programmer who needs to implement things. Normally if I want to be mean I can say 'Not my problem', but in this case it is!

I am back from seeing Posiedon... Which I must say was an interesting movie. At the outset I was amazed at the opening credits - this is a ship that I would love to go on a cruise on - well, apart from the fact that it eventually sinks. I dont think I am giving anything away with that statement since that is the whole point of the story. The designer of the ship spent some time to get the ship to look like some sleek modern racing car - with the upper births with their own private balconies.

The story was generally similar to the original film - with most of the key scenes copied. Some characters have been changed, but overall it is a copy of the original. Emmy Rossen who played Christine in the Phantom of the Opera was great in this movie. Then again you would expect her to be. The dissapointing thing with this movie I guess was the ending. I think the last couple of scenes needed a tiny bit more work, but apart from that it was an enjoyable show.

The one thing I would not suggest is watching this before going on an ocean cruise... I suspect it will give you nightmares, although then taking the cruise would be a great exercise in aversion therapy.

Off to see the movie Posiedon.... I can remember seeing the original when I was younger and I will be interested to see if the new version lives up to the original. Personally, I cannot see how it could not live up to it. I am just wondering if this will ever put me off going on some type of cruise ship... I have never been on one, and would like to one of these days.

Over the last week or two I have been working on a product for a company in Thailand. I have been having some issues getting the software to work as the data did not quite line up with the specification. Anyway, last night I was provided with some demo simulation software, and today I was able to get things running in about 10 minutes or so. Well, maybe a little more than 10 minutes, but I decided to move away from SerialPort.NET to the new serial control in the 2.0 .Net framework. This is so much superior than the SerialPort.NET control, including having timeouts.

I am not sure what I will be doing tomorrow... I am not working on the plane so I might go to the movies, or maybe I will do something really really boring like do some work. I still have things to catch up on after being sick so I might do some of that. I will see how it goes.

I found a great spoof site - link - for laser eye surgery. The front page should be a give away... Never trust an eye surgeon with glasses. Well, that is not a 100% rule, but it is a good idea that this is a spoof. They supply a device to do the surgery at home for only $99. I am sure that I would not trust my eyes to a piece of plastic that costs that much, when the professional equipment probably costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The SMH has a story on a bunch of people who are waging war on a company that is using Dodgy practices for marketing. They ring mobiles once and then hang up, getting people to ring back telling them that they can get free ringtones, if they spend only $15-20 on a 1900 number. Under the telecommunications act the carriers can simply designate that they are causing issues for the phone network, and they must stop this conduct. Of course they are getting too much income in!

User Interface design is the bane of my life. I have a notebook here with lots of sketches. And I draw what I think might work before I go about implementing it. And since I do not have a tablet PC I have to do this with pen and paper. It works remarkably well. One of the challenges is maximising screen real-estate. Wasting space on a cluttered screen is a real problem. What makes it worse is when I have only a small amount of additional information to show - which ironically is often harder than when I have to display a lot of data to the user...

There is a company called 'TurnItIn' who has a business of fighting plagarism in Universities. But thankfully not all Universities use TurnItIn... They use other ways to detect plagarsim. And in these places it is easy not to be caught... Have a look here at a list of the simple rules to ensure that your cheating is not found out. The best one is where people copy text from other places, and leave the formatting alone. Like, dont you think the Uni would notice the blue text you copied in the middle of all your black text. And the font is even different....

Amazing... What cannot seem to be solved late at night takes only a few minutes in the morning. I have been working on a forms designer, and it just would not work. No matter what I did, I could not drag the controls onto the form. It just would not work. Then this morning I found the issue... I was activating the control before setting everything up... Changing the order fixed the problem, and I am well on the way to having usable software.

Some links. I have found a document on how to Troubleshoot ASP.NET 2.0. And the SMH has a story about how Qantas is putting up the prices of Frequent Flyer trips, to the point where it is almost cheaper to pay the commercial rates. And B3ta has a collection of Possible Road Signs.

I have some more programming to do this evening - A modified forms designer. It is mostly complete, but I need to put in a few more hours. Then I will be able to integrate this into an administration program I have been working on.

I have some friends who are into scrap booking... Which is why my ears picked up when I saw the Rainy Day Project Web Site. They show a Zyron personal cutting system device being repaired. I had not seen this toy before. This device cuts out shapes from paper, felt and the like to the required shape for scrap booking. I had not come across this before, and if I was doing this sort of thing I would pay the US$200 or so...

One of the Web Comics that I read is Piled Higher and Deeper. Their latest issue describes the problem of the World Cup.

For most of today I have been doing programming - well, that and fighting computers. It is SO infuriating when things do not work when they are supposed to. Things are supposed to 'Just work'... And so much time is wasted tracking down what should be minor issues. Aand then the only way you can solve the issue is to check things that should be crazy, and you almost do not do because checking it will be seen as totally crazy. But on the other hand when you do check it, suddenly you find the issue!

Now some links... Google has hidden one of their new data centres in Plain Sight. The buildings are huge, but it is just that no-one talks about it. And ultra-secretive Google is not talking themselves. And the head of RIM has come out attacking 'Unlimited Wireless Plans' suggesting they are bad for innovation. Actually, they are bad for RIM's business model, but they are not bad for innovation. Ultimately there is not enough mobile bandwidth so he is partially right, but he is somewhat biased.

Escape.News.Com.AU has a review of the Cheap Airlines in Europe and tells you what to watch out for... One that I did not realise was that each flight is seperate, and if you miss one flight because your previous one was caught with bad weather you loose out!

Safari 4x4 has an article on Arc Welding in an emergency. The only thing is that they suggest using 3.5mm rods, whereas 2.5mm might be better running from car batteries. Cute idea though...

I am a *COMPLETE* idiot at times. My radio-active.net.au Web Site that is hosted here has had some issues today. More correctly, it was down between 8:50 and 2:50.. Or put another way, it came back after six hours down. Any why was it down? Well, let me explain.

I only have one IP address... and I wanted to have two web sites connected. So what I did was assign one of the WWW sites to port 80, and the other to port 81. And the port 81 one was on a different machine. So I created a firewall rule to route packets through to this box for port 81 requests. The way I did this was create an alias called 'EightyOne' that contained the value 81 to be used in the rules.

So what value did I put in EightyOne? Every value between 1 and 65535!!! This pushed all my WWW traffic to another Web Server, but there was no Web Server on that machine on port 80! After close to six hours I found this. And Fixed it, by putting the value of 80 into the variable EightyOne!!! This led to the same problem.

I eventually rebooted my linux box once, my Firewall two or three times, my ADSL modem once... All because I was dumb... I just wish I could count.

My external WWW site is down at the moment... and I cannot work out why... I am talking about the radio-active.net.au one, and not the www.radio-active.net.au which is hosted elsewhere. I am literally tearing my hair out!

Another strange dream last night - In the dream I had my wallet stollen in a street fair in Ingleburn. If that was not strange enough I was talking to Ghandi when I was there, but he looked like Eddie Murphy. I guess that is what you get when you sleep in...

I have just installed more onto my laptop - this time I needed to install my Laser Printer - a network device. Strangely though to install it you just need to say that it is a LOCAL printer, and then you need to tell it to 'create a port'. And then things just work. This was strange to work out the first time, but it is now simplicity itself.

What I was having problems with last night was getting some Web Services to work, and install. These are connected to a database, so the server really needs to be on the same machine as the database, and then I can write software to connect between the two. I have a windows box that is ideal for this. Except for one thing. I only have one IP address, and I want two Web Servers. Apache Web Server can be programmed to forward to another server but this is a real PAIN. The easier way is to place the server on a different IP address, and change the software that connects to it accordingly. This is SIMPLE.

Except for one thing. I am using ASP.NET 2.0, and I thought this was installed with Version 2 of the .NET framework. No Way! I need to install VisualStudio or some other software for that to work. And the 18 GByte C:\ is getting remarkably small... Still, after some cleaning it fits...

I have been fighting with Microsoft all day! ALL DAY! I am getting almost nowhere. I have seen unhelpful error messages from Microsoft before, but a simple BEEP before using up 100% of the CPU on a program called 'inetinfo.exe' is a new low for them. I need a holiday... Actually I do not know what I need... Unfortunatly a holiday will not actually fix this issue.

I will describe more of this in the morning... Once I have some sleep!

Oh... And my wireless routers are sick. Not well. Dunno why... Might be a bad port on the hub or the firewall... When all three routers I have here have major problems there is something else wrong... It is more than a router being bad.

Microsoft never ceases to Amaze me. I can think of no other company that is so inconsistantly inconsistant. Case in point is SQL Server Express 2005 that comes free with VisualStudio 2005. This is a cut down version of the database for people who are doing development work. People like me.

Microsoft did release a version for the previous version of SQLserver, and it was called MSDE. And if you wanted to administer this there was no GUI. Of course since then it would compete with SQLserver. Now comes 2005, and they did provide an admin program. Except I cannot work out what it is supposed to administer. I think it just says how an admin program can connect. That is it. So they dont want me to be able to use this unless I am a guru. That is fine.

Then I search for instructions. And guess what? I find them. Not only that, I find a fairly good admin program here for free from Microsoft. Now, why didn't they just provide this with VisualStudio? Who knows! All I know is that I have wasted ages sorting this out. Welcome to my life!

I could not work it out this morning when I installed Apple iTunes. iTunes had picked up exactly where I keep all my music files on the Network, and I could not work out how. After all, the area I keep my files is not a normal place to store music files. It was on a server I had never even contacted with this newly installed laptop. I was beginning to think that maybe Apple was storing my settings on their server or something.

After a lot of thinking I worked out what I had done. When I finished reinstalling everything I copied the files back to My Documents. And this included important things such as the My Music folder. And of course iTunes had recognised this and used the settings when it restarted. Apple was not trying to be big brother... Things just worked.

What I am finding with this computer newly installed is that software is working as it is supposed to... Well, mostly. My Vodafone 3G card works well. Outlook is running well. InternetExplorer is only using 140 MBytes of RAM. The world is good. Much over due I think...

This is probably going to be a boring post... More news on reinstalling everything mainly. My poor laptop is getting back to normal. Programs are getting installed and getting removed from the list. My files are getting returned. The world is good. It does amaze me how much time it takes to reinstall software - and much of this is because some pieces of software insist on restarting the computer. I am sure that they have a good reason for this, but it still gets anoying.

A friend just MSNed me and I said I was still installing software... His depressing answer was that it takes days.... I guess I am about 50% through the install.

Right now I had better grab some breakfast as I have a teleconference at 7:30 (assuming that SKYPE actually works after the reinstall) followed by a trip over to Pymble to do som real work.

It is now close to midnight, and I am fairly close with getting the system up and running correctly. I have a lot of things loaded on, Office and the like. I have email working. After a few attempts, I have Internet Explorer 7 running too... The one thing I have not managed to get running yet is my Modem. Not that I use it often, but it is good to have there, and I need to send Fax messages from time to time too.

I have lost count of how many times I have rebooted this machine... It is too many. I am starting to really get tired now... I need my sleep. Good Night

Backing up my HDD will have taken about five hours when it finishes soon. That is a LONG time. Soon it will be time to reformat the HDD, and then reinstall EVERYTHING!!!

Quick Link. The US Government is buildng one of their biggest emabasies in the world in Iraq. It will end up costing close to $1b. Link

There are reports from around the world of a 'Teacher Proof Ringtone' that cannot be heard by anyone (suposedly) more than about 18 years old. The first report I saw was in The Register which provided a link to a sound that seemed to be background noise from a room. I actually felt a bit unwell after hearing it - similar to motion sickness I would guess - but I did not hear the tones.

Then I visited the NY Times Site, and I found an article there which provided an MP3 of the ringtone, and I definitely heard it this time. The tone is around 16 KHz, and was sickening to me. This is about the same tone that some older TV sets make when they are starting to fail. I certainly hope this tone does not catch on as it really is anti-social.

For the last stage of this backup, I am using a program called Abakt which is free to copy all the files. SyncToy did not like the length of some of the filenames and paths, so I am trying out this new program. I will report how it goes.

Backing up a HDD is a LOT of work. I am moving something like 70 GByte of data to a HDD... And taking multiple copies of some of the data. Then there is the need to copy some of the install CD's to HDD to save time in installation. In one case, copying files to the HDD has decreased the install time from about two hours to about 20 minutes. And copying the files to the HDD probably only took 10-15 minutes too. So this is a worthwhile investment in time.

My next stage in this process is to backup my Desktop, and then to back the entire HDD up. Then reformat the HDD, install XP, then the XP service pack, and the work through my list of software. I will probably start with Office and MSN, if only so that I am contactable again by electronic means...

I cannot believe how long it is taking to format this HDD. It has taken about an hour to format the 250 GByte HDD, and it is not even finished yet. I expect it to take probably another 15 minutes or so. Then the backup starts in ernest.

Some links - in 1956 Walt Disney provided a message to 2006... You can read the letter he wrote here.

But probably more important, and of more use is the fact that Google has released a new version of Google Earth. This new version is also available for LINUX, which is really amazing. Then again, since they have it for the Mac, writing a version for Linux is not that much harder. I will be using the winodws version... The new version looks amazing... With rendered buildings available in 3D also.

I sometimes like simple problems. Except when they require me to drive 40 minutes each way to fix a dumb problem. Thankfully today I also needed to make a small hardware mod, which meant my trip was not totally wasted. Otherwise I am sure that there are punishments for a client who does not check that a plugpack is fully pushed into the wall socket. Then again, I guess my bill will be punishment enough :-)

Also whilst I was out I picked up another 250 GByte HDD. This will allow me to quickly (yeah, sure) rebuild this PC so that it runs at a decent speed. So right now I am formatting the HDD... and this is taking ages. As soon as it is formatted I need to make a few copies of relevant data onto the HDD, and then do a big reformat on this PC. Normally I would have had another computer to play with whilst the rebuild is on, but I have needed to lend that to a friend of mine as his laptop has died... So I will not be as productive for parts of today...

I would like to be able to say that I slept well last night. Unfortunately that is not the case, and I cannot even blame watching the world cup on this. Actually I cannot think of anything to blame - I just did not sleep well. I woke up in the middle of the night and had a big problem getting back to sleep. I have no idea why. So, I am a bit tired today - I eventually woke up at 7am. I only have one appointment on - a visit to some garbage trucks.

This was one of the things that I did dream about last night. Or was it a nightmare? In the dream I drove the garbage truck on a test drive, and then half way through I was reminded by someone that I dont have a license for the things, and therefore should not be driving. Strangely (as if dreams about garbage trucks were not strange enough), I forgot how to drive the truck at that stage, and had to find someone to drive it back. OOps. After all, how can you fotget how to drive an automatic vehicle?

The SMH has a story about how an Australian pilot had to ditch a plane in the Pacific and survived. Quite an amazing story. And they also tell the story about a two brothers (10 and 6) who borrowed their grandmothers car to visit their grandfather 120 KM away, and were only picked up when they were noticed by other drivers on the freeway, 80km into their 120km journey!

Home, Sweet Home! I have been working on the plane building for the last day and a half and I am not back home. It was really really productive today doing the building - with the floor being installed today, as well as much of the elevator controls - that is the part of the flight controls that makes the plane go up and down. If it did not appear so before hand, it certainly a plane now.

Last night I saw X-Men 3, and there are some questions I still have about the ending. And these will not make sense unless you have seen the movie, so don't worry about spoilers. The first one is who was the man playing chess with, and is there any significance to the chess pieces. And the other thing is what does the touch mean - does it mean control or surrender... Three questions that might be resolved in a fourth movie.

I also saw a review of a new movie last night - Sione's Wedding which looks like it is set in New Zealand. The movie looks rather cool, but it remains to be seen if the reality will meet the publicity...

Most of the time IT Glitches cause real problems. In one case there are actually some advantages to the failure of an IT system. At the end of last year, Cadbury had a glut of chocolate due to accidentally over-ordering product, which coincided with new years resolutions to loose weight.

Google has released a new service - Google Spreadsheet, and unfortunately it seems that this one will go down next to Google Video - that is, it needs more work.

Wired has a few articles of interest... First is a job application for the Department of Homeland Security with some questions from an interview.They also review a CD Swapping site. The main reason that I went to the Wires Web Site was to see the article on GNUradio, which is a project of some friends of mine. TAPR (of which I am a board member) I believe invested some money in the hardware presented in the article.

I have just seen the third X-Men movie, and I should say that I am somewhat dissapointed in the show. I was expecting it to be somewhat longer and different to the movie that was presented to us. The movie ended up being just over 90 minutes long, and whilst the special effects were good, the movie was just missing something. And it is not as if they did not put the effort in on the special effects either - you could see that they had - but it is almost as if they used special effects as a way to not have to think more about the script. Put simply, the third installment is not much different to the second installment.

On another subject, a friend is trying to extract some data from a dead Laptop HDD and needed some advice. There are some tricks to getting data off a HDD that is about to die. The first is to use a USB HDD interface. The reason for this is that it is easier to disconnect the HDD for it to cool down. You dont need to restart the PC, you can just unplug it. Then the next trick is to copy the data off before trying to fault find... Just get the data off whilst it is still running. Use a program like Microsoft SyncToy maybe (a free download).

And if the HDD will not work, sometimes tapping it, or cooling it will help. This even includes placing the HDD in a plastic bag and putting it in the freezer for 15-30 minutes. Not a good idea normally, but sometimes this type of thing will get a faulty HDD to work.

I know that a whole lot of people are alergic to a whole lot of things, be it dust mites, woolen jumpers, milk or even Pets. OOps. Did I say Pets? Seems that this might not be so much of a problem in the future with a company in the USA breeding a Hypo-Allergenic Cat. The company, Allerca, originally tried to use genetic engineering to produce cats that have a certain gene that produces cats that produce lower allergic responses. But for unknown reasons (except maybe they were playing God, and God won), Genetic Engineering did not work.

So they went for Plan B. They bred cats, and then tested to find the ones with gene, and then bred those together, and so on. Over many generations, the cats produced were actually hypo-allergenic. The cats will be available in the USA early next year, for the bargain price of only US$4000. Small price to pay for those who until now have been stopped from having a pet.

Also today comes news that Microsoft has announced the .NET framework 3.0. Well, this is actually .NET Framework 2.0 with some add-ons that mostly still exist, so it is a majority marketing. Still, nice to see things moving forward.

I finally got to have lunch with my father and his wife to celebrate our birthdays. It was great to catch up - I had not seen him since before he went to china which really is too far back. He brought me back a miniture bottle that has been hand painted... But painted on the inside. It is quite amazing. I have no idea how much they cost, but I would be amazed if they cost what they should have... The sheer detail inside. Once it was pointed out what they were I was amazed - It looked like a cheap trinket until it was noted that they were hand painted. Wow.

I do not understand marketing people. They decide to change formulas for washing products on a whim, and may or may not tell you about it. A case in point. Go down to your local shopping centre and have a look at the Palmolive Dishwashing Liquid. Great Stuff. The stuff we are interested in is 'Palmolive Original'. It is fairly plain what this stuff is like, isnt it?

Well, um, err. Not quite. It seems that the public has no idea about what is in the container. They have added a label on the bottle stating "The Original Improved! New Formula. New Fragrance." I kid you not! On the one hand we have the label saying it is the original formula, and on the other hand it says that it is changed. WHAT IS GOING ON HERE? Has the world gone completely nuts?

I had an SMS from a friend in the middle of the night - and then an MSN this morning letting me know that that his HDD had failed overnight. Unfortunately the HDD contained some work that was being done for me. Anyway, one of the problems with Windows is that there has not been much in the way of decent backup tools out there - particularly free ones.

That was until Microsoft released a program called SyncToy. It allows you to backup stuff in an intelligent way. I use it quite a bit, and it works really well.

Finally, the SMH contains a what is supposed to be the worlds funniest joke... It comes from The Goons in the 1950's.
Michael Bentine: I just came in and found him lying on the carpet there.
Peter Sellers: Oh, is he dead?
Bentine: I think so.
Sellers: Hadn't you better make sure?
Bentine: All right. Just a minute. Sound of two gunshots.
Bentine: He's dead.

A heap of links this morning...

Firstly, a member of the Privacy Committee of the Department of Homeland Security was dared to try to fly without ID from San Francisco. What the guy found was that although he had his bags checked more carefully than everyone else, he actually spent less time in lines waiting to get through security. Not a bad effort really. CNN is reporting on a hotel that offers to store your mobile devices away from you so that people addicted to connectivity from their phones or laptops can 'detox'.

Escape on News.COM.AU has the story of a Brisbane Couple who won a Vogue competition to visit 12 hotels around the world - top hotels that is. But the thing is that the wife then wrote about it, and it has just been published in a book called 'Absolutely Faking It' which sounds like a really interesting book.

Finally, ZDNet has a heap of stories on the IT behind the Soccer World Cup.

There are a couple of links in the SMH that I found interesting. First is one about the Split Enz and their reformation. To tell the truth, I have not read the entire article as it is too darn long. It is actually a review of the concert at the Entertainment Centre last night - I really should have gone from the review. Looked great.

The other link is a review of an album by a band called Adem. I am not normally the type of person who takes notice of reviews of albums in the paper. Actually, I am not sure that I have ever purchased an album thanks to a review, b