Plantagenet Penguinista

Bounced off the Launceston airport, which like many airports in Taz is some tens of km outside the city it serves. In fact, it ought to be called Perth Airport ’coz it’s only 3km from Perth, Tas. One can pretty much picture the resulting confusion. (-: Anyway, collected #1 daughter & mother-in-law AKA Mardie, then stayed overnight near Swansea, then down to Honbart. Went for a tour of the Cadbury factory, then wandered up Mount Wellington to play in the snow. The next morning, took the littlies across for a play with the council’s steam tractor, then up the mountain again, then downtown for pizza, then a long drive west. The blanket speed limit dusk to dawn is 55km/hr for the last 200km or so to Queenstown. Nice scenery in the mountains, & a powerplant with an impressive array of feeder pipes. But drove through very few of the towns (Tarraleah & Wayatinah were a few km off the highway, for example). The road Queenstown to Tullah was icy & slippery but ...

OK, so this birdie is bigger than it should be, & lived in Peru & Argentina — kinda tropical compared with Tux’s competitors from today. Once more, we see that there is definitely room for imaginative people to start in science, & that no matter how good your theory is, it should be broken one day. Behaving unexpectedly well, & appearing in new places seems to be something of a trait for Linux, so I’m partly tempted to ask them to rename this fellow Ubuntu, Debian, Mandriva or something like that. Maybe the genus, instead of being called paleogenetics, needs to be called gpleogenetics?

OK, that’s now 4 machines brought up to the latest edition of Mandriva, over a ’phone line. Two of them were kickstarted by a CD, the others not. Can’t say I’d recommend it to people in a hurry, but it is effective. It would even work for a satellite link, as long as you have a big enough data quota (look at around 2 to 5GB for a full-ish system, no CD). Now, off to traipse around Tas. Picking up family in Launceston, then across to Swansea, down to Hobart (to visit mountains & a chocolate factory) then back here to home. Add to that an excursion up to Rocky Cape plus some local sight-seeing, & I won’t have much time left for typing. Oh, yes, & shopping in Burnie tomorrow. No, hang on, that’s “today.” Oh, one more thing... you don’t even need a remote DNS system to do these updates, as long as the beasties are reporting stuff to you by email. The email will have little electronic footprints in it to say how it got to you....

I read Michael “crash” Carden’s blog entry about lights for his bike in Canberra. Luxury! Canberra gets cold and dark for much of the time that I’m crossing town Owe... kaye... how much black ice does Crash have to cross? Snow? Does he get hit by a truck, or some drunk/looney in a 4WD ute if anyone makes a mistake? The nearest town to me is 15km away over Black Mountain, which has a well-earned reputation as being the most lethal section of the Murchison Highway. As I’ve mentioned before, some Gummint bright sparks want to take that town’s hospital away for economic reasons. The next hospital is 56km away, over road which is at least as lethal — and might get taken away as well — & the next is 120km away in the opposite direction or ~230km round trip. Hello, politicians, is there anybody home in there? Reality calling? Which of you will ride — injured & bleeding — in an ambulance run by overworked volunteers for three...

There are plenty of interesting people hereabouts, but the place doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, socially. I recently ran across a mention in a mining advert which might explain why. The mention said that the mine in question had adopted a “drive in, drive out” policy for employees, thus saving themselves the cost of establishing a community presence. Those people have to live somewhere , so if the mine isn’t paying for the community, then someone, somewhere else is. The people working at the mine really are hirelings, they clearly don’t belong there. This means that there is no committment to the area at all. No development. No growth. No value. No progress. I see echoes of this here in Tullah, where we have a fine football field that occasionally gets used for cricket. That, as far as I can tell, is it. We have Wee Georgie Wood, a steam loco, running around on his little track. The people who maintain him come from Rosebery and other towns. No identity...

They evidently haven’t given up completely on the Gummint schemes, as they’ve just emailed me a link to their new Satt plans .

I’ve been looking at satellite broadband, since Telstra have refused to install a DSLAM in Tullah’s telephone exchange. Telstra seem to be asking about $250 a month for 2-way satellite, so they’ve priced themselves right out of the market. It looks like Clear Networks will take up the slack this time, since BorderNet have decided that the latest government remote access plans are simply too complicated for them to undertake to support. Meanwhile, I’ve used a CD to update one machine (which axed about 4/5 of the downloading, bringing the machine up after a single night’s WestNet dialup) & brought my laptop’s updates into line, also with an overnight run. That’s almost good enough to make ISDN seem worth trying.

Rolled down to Rosebery today to convince Dr Lulu to help untangle some Centrelink paperwork (a perennial process which I hope to interrupt shortly) & on the way back (at 12:15, so midday) noticed some frosty bits on the side of the road. These even included a frosty road peg, as well as chunks of maybe 3 or 4 acres of frosty bushes & trees. So I stopped to take some photos. I did get some nice shots of the little waterfalls, which are still running fine, but... The result was a new lesson in black ice. The road looked normal, & I drove over it OK, but standing on it was an invitation to suddenly sit down & wonder what had just happened. It wasn’t even shiny, not with the trees etc behind it to block a sunlit sky as a back-light.

So here we were swanning our way serenely along the Murchison Highway, & I pulled over to check the pictured red ute. It turns out that not only did the driver walk away, he’ll probably be able to drive the thing once the oil’s settled in properly & all. I stood on the edge of the road and took an area shot as well, then stepped well clear of the road as I could hear another ute driving up the hill towards me. And I’m glad I did, because as this bloke came around the corner, he managed to get his tyre to straddle a thin belt of nearly invisible ice sitting just on the left edge of the road, then went all wobbley. At one stage, the ute was aimed directly at me, but the driver very carefully (& quickly) fought the wheel to get his steerers aimed along the road again. The steerers found a grip, which sort-of made things worse, because the ute swung around so it was now aimed directly at my car, containing my wife & kinder. Mr Driver worked his wheel hard a...

Have you ever wanted to own a good-quality computer game? Give Paul a call on 0408133915 to ask him about his huge collection. He’s closing up his shop (CannonFire) in Rosebery & moving up near Burnie to get married. As well as more than a cubic metre of games, he’s got a few computers & monitors for sale as well. The games, he can mail out — or probably drop off anywhere between Rosebery & Burnie. They’re a huge collection, more titles than I can possibly remember, genuine originals complete with packaging & holograms etc. He tells me that they start from $5 apiece, but they range on up to top-level stuff, too. Oh, yes, Paul started life as a sandgroper, and so did the engineer (of the stick-welder type) who dropped in while I was chatting with Paul in his shop in Rosebery. The shop & quite a nice house are for sale as well. If you prefer digital comms, try Paul’s business name @ WestNet.com.au as he is taking his ADSL from Rosebery up ...

This bloke says very little that’s worth saying, but this is one of those few items: Mr. Gates was right in 1991: patents are bad for the software industry. OK, so Microsoft is chasing & supporting patents now because...?

OK, can you imagine upgrading Windows 3.11 to XP? Now can you imagine it being done while the system is being used ? Still on the ball? OK, now can you imagine the update being done not from a CD but over a dialup modem connection — still being used , & with the dialup link also being used? Clinging in there? OK, while the update is happening, we’re also updating Office, Exchange, SQL Server, IIS & everything else we can lay paws on . Bear in mind that the system is still being used . Now imagine the risks & consequences of inviting a virus or spyware widget aboard midway through this process. Pick a time when the old boot routines have been deleted & new ones are about to be installed, so a bluescreen spells a permanent death for the system. Remember that dialup link? We’re pulling down about six gigabytes of data here, so the system has to survive these changes going on for about a week . That’s pretty much what I’m doing now, updating a M...

I was casually reading the PostgreSQL FAQ, looking at neater ways of extracting DATABASE & TABLE definitions than multiply JOINed SELECTs across pg_* system tables, when I ran across this little snippet: To uniquely number rows in user tables, it is best to use SERIAL rather than OIDs because SERIAL sequences are unique only within a single table. and are therefore less likely to overflow. SERIAL8 is available for storing eight-byte sequence values. OK, so here I am hypothetically wanting to stick more than 4 billion objects into my databases. Firstly, let’s think about such a table, with lines of text packed into it, an INTEGER (well, SERIAL) & a VARCHAR for each row — averaging, say, 60 characters per row. That’s 4 billion times 69 bytes, or roughly 280GB in one TABLE . A ‘SELECT * FROM’ would take a fair while. Well... that’s OK, I can buy a disk that large, & there’s those SERIAL8s to play with, to give me 16 billion billion item...

Now it’s called “FrameUs” which is a system which builds frameworks for applications. The prototypical bits I’ve got going so far are all web oriented, but the structure I’m adopting opens itself to use in a graphic or even text-based GUIs (er... would that be a TUI?). The bottom-line idea is to write all of the little fiddly bits of a typical book-keeping application into FrameUs, so all one has to do for a new application is code any chunks which are unique to this specific situation. Conceptually, I could hand this to Joe Random Book-keeper who knows what (s)he’s doing in book-keeping terms & isn’t terrified of a computer, then stand back to let him/her design the database (actually, modify existing tables) & modify or write a few reports in his word-processor. The application is data-centric enough that I can’t see any problem with running it from a LiveCD which can then self-install. The whole thing can be expressed in ASCII s...

Driving past the Murchison River’s entry point to Lake Rosebery today, I saw... ice! Not huge chunks of it, maybe a handful or twenty, up to about 1m across & maybe half of that tall. The cool made our Toyota Camry’s radiator run about 10 dial-degrees cooler than usual, for the first time I’ve ever seen it do so. Then all of the way up the hill to Rosebery, marvellous little waterfalls splashing down the face of the hill to run under (or around) the road. I met one bloke parked across from a waterfall, tanking up his Land Cruiser’s radiator from it. Apparently, he does this “all the time”. In Rosebery itself, there’s a creek running along the main road on the uphill (Hospital) side, which was quite delightful to photograph, what with scores of little falls & rapids. That’s the first time I’ve felt honest about using the word “pretty” to describe anything in Rosebery. (-: Got some nice bread from the Rosebery baker...