Plantagenet Penguinista

Jan has found a neat house for my Dad to purchase here in Albany. With several other competitors in the wings, his purchase offer was accepted literally within 5 minutes. For the risk of what you might call technical reasons, I’m not yet able to buy my own house, so this is being bought as an investment & will be rented to me. The house is not quite as large as I’d ideally like, but is very well fitted out & comes with a few really neat gadgets such as a super-efficient reverse-cycle style water heater. It also has (important for Albany) ADSL2 running (at high speed, it’s near the exchange) from a provider who is not Telstra, which will allow me to move my on-line services into the house, simplifying things for the people in whose house the server currently lives. The current owners are quite a unique contrast, & I was impressed to see how very well they do as a couple. Jan really knows the area, really knows what works, & has come up with some good id...

...without an update for the kernel. Also, it fails to install wvdial by default. Stuffing this lot onto a Flash stick works for me: libuniconf4.4_4.4.1-0.2ubuntu2_i386.deb libwvstreams4.4-base_4.4.1-0.2ubuntu2_i386.deb libwvstreams4.4-extras_4.4.1-0ubuntu2_i386.deb libxplc0.3.13_0.3.13-2ubuntu2_i386.deb linux-image-2.6.32-9-generic_2.6.32-9.13_i386.deb wvdial_1.60.1_i386.deb You need to make your default user a member of the dip group else wvdial can’t run pppd. For Virgin (Optus) this needs to be pppd’s options file: lock noauth noipdefault usepeerdns -chap This needs to be in the pap-secrets file: ppp * ppp At that point wvdial works from the shell (but under [K]Ubuntu, spits some weird rubbish as kind-of progress messages, which don’t happen under Mandriva). You can then plug in any valid stick, without config changes, as authentication seems to be done by the stick itself.

They seem to have learned a few things from ( not cloned) Firefox, plus it picked up the cookies, bookmarks etc from FF flawlessly. Chromium is generally smoother & faster than FF, except for actually scrolling the page contents up & down. The visual design is excellent... nothing too jarring, but a few logical changes like enclosing both of the Back/Forward buttons within a single rounded-rectangle border-line (which looks pretty much like the rounded-rectangles enclosing each of Reload, Home & the URL field) & overflowing excess bookmarks into a right-aligned Other Bookmarks folder. Oh, & making the tabs look a bit more like individual objects (angled sides etc) which makes them easier to rapidly distinguish. This is Chromium 4.0.256.0 (32803) running under Mandrive 2009.1; to install it on that (or 2010.0), run this as root: urpmi.addmedia --mirrorlist http://eugeni.dodonov.net/rpm eugeni 586 ...then... urpmi chrome ...which is a few seconds’ work over Virgin M...

Rest easy. The US National Debt has been officially-officially pegged at over USD$12 TRILLION ($12,000,000,000,000.00). A former Comptroller General stated as fact last year that it had really topped $60 TRILLION, which is more than the entire world’s Gross Domestic Product. About USD$480,000.00 per household. Which is probably not all of the debts (guesstimate around 3× to 5× that). Which means it will be repaid when? The budget shortfall was predicted at $1.6 TRILLION but worked out to "only" $1.4 TRILLION, which means that they are spending USD$180,000,000.00 per hour more than they earn. Hey, I want pay-rates like that! (-: It’s not a wonder that President Obama wants to sign away all political/financial/religious rights (so, responsbility) to the UN at Copenhagen... but why is Prime Minister Rudd just as eager? It becomes increasing obvious that free-as-in-price means about squat. Free-as-in-available will, I think, come to mean everything — not just i...

Albany is mid-council-chuck-out at the moment, which has yeilded 2 free PCs. With FOSS, one simply ensures that the hardware itself functions (playing digital Lego ® until it does), then bung in a CD, install, done. You don’t have to scrawl down serial numbers, count licenses, anything. KISS at work!

...because next month it goes. Copenhagen is not about climate change (which is a furphy anyway, Dad’s twin, a serious geologist, has done the maths — everybody’s maths — & if anything, our next climate change will be a mini ice age — last winter was the worst (& strangest) the USA has had in a long time). The treaty at Copenhagen is about putting the UN in charge of everything (finances, politics, religion, etc), & no signatory can back out without first obtaining the consent of every other country, many of whom will be getting payments because Australia are signatories. Mr Rudd, of course, is eager for his government to be neutered. Are you? The treaty makes no mention of votes, elections, democracy at all. Signing your life away with a vengeance: insurance companies, eat your collective hearts out. There will be no more Free software. Or free speech. Or free philosophy, morals... name it. There will be no more free anything. The time to wr...

Early this year, I noticed that P&N-brand diet drinks did odd things to me. I often became grumpy or confused for no apparent reason half an hour or so after drinking them. They (even many of the non-diet flavours) contain Neotame, an Aspartame derivative, thank you Monsanto. So I no longer drink them. Currently chatting with a Queensland-based ex-truckie, ex-bikie, who is literally dying of Aspartame-based effects consequential on drinking heaps of diet drinks while trucking. His liver & his kidneys are failing. Endless odd pains & tweaks here & there. Not good. This (Texan) crew are quite big on the whole Aspartame thing. Bottom line: if you value having a life (or even value your life) don’t touch the stuff.

I’m currently reading this in bunches. It’s a neat little book by a living-in-England Irishwoman diana beaver , which is focussed on ways people learn, but ventures a fair way into real Neuro Linguistic Programming. There is some controvery about NLP since the two founders (Bandler & Grinder) argued with one another & ceased working with one another, but a key factor in this book is that the author often gives small examples which one can test... & they work. Last year, I figured out the principal reason for me going through school with a genius-level IQ but getting only slightly-above-average results, then falling into IT & finding it to be paradise: I’m a visuo-spatial learner. Where someone with photographic memory would take away a detailed image for life (& a decade later be able to recall serial numbers, signatures et al ), I take away the patterns, the connections, the network — which is IT. So... in general learning/communication mode...

Last week, I drowned (completely immersed) a Canon A480 still-cam (which of course also takes minor videos) in Fortescue Falls while trying to take a video clip of same. Since the water is very close to pure there, I hauled out the batteries, the SD card, then flicked it as dry as I could. Carried it open-handed back to Forrestfield, then rested it on a shelf, panel-door open, for 2 days. Tried it. The electronics seemed to work fine but the optics were not. Massively over-bright & fuzzy. Frowned, hauled the batteries out while it was still powered on, leaving the lens extended. Left it to dry for a few more days. Jammed it into a case which went into a coach to Albany with me. A few days ago, without much hope, I switched it on again. Joy! It perks worfectly! (-: So... I used it for dazzling some Yankee friends with a morning video clip of Little Beach, using a real camera stand (-: eleven minutes of peaceful bliss, set to gentle wave noises! :-) & with some stills from around...

New toy: Suzuki Sierra. Sold to me(-ish) for $2500, happy with that as the Red Book price is $4500. Now getting accustomed to: the habits/skills of driving again more transport choices having more photogenic spots within reach It’s all good! (-:

You have a small business with 20 people using computers. Let’s have a look at some pricing. Basic server with Mandriva Linux 2009.1: $1100.00 Cost per seat: $55.00 Includes office software & a virus scanner. (No virus scanner is actually required). Basic server with MS-Windows 2008 (5 CALs): $3500.00 CALs apear to be about $200 a seat (Edu would be about $45), so... 15 more CALs for the above: $3000.00 Nett: $6500.00 Cost per seat: $325 Does not include any office software or virus scanner; you could, if you enjoy constant naysaying, try installing OpenOffice for free. A PC for each seat is $502, plus screen ($180). These workstations do not require a virus scanner, but each instance (user) running on an MS-Windows 2008 server does. The workstations can be set up to run MS-Windows XP (guessing that an OEM version could still be grabbed for about $150, Vista would be a bit breathless, don’t know about MS-Windows 7), so would require a virus scanner each, but there is no ...

I did no programming today. (-: I discussed Internet connections with a realtor & with a doctor in the course of using their services. The result will be that the realtor saves at least $31 a month & gets a faster connection, the doctor saves $23 a month & also gets a faster connection. I filled out a DASS test, got 10 for D, 7 for A, 17 for S. The doctor after the doctor testing decided that the moderate A was directly due to my VSO’s influence, the dangerously high S was the result of certain pressures of which most can soon be removed, the high-ish D was a consequence of the S & again was high-ish rather than very high due to VSO. I began updating postal addresses. From Medicare, HBF, GP, Hudson Henning Goodman, others. I composed some Fathers’ Day thankyous. They will need to be vetted by legal eagles before being sent, but they will get there, they will be assuring & comforting when they arrive. The weather here was cantankerous. Started off fine, then g...

“Keep It Simple, Sweetheart“ sounds easy enough to do, but in many ways, this is not a simple world. I do, however, enjoy simplifying things. (-: Facing this rotten, ancient C program, having it segfault after a few minor changes for no obvious reason, I began to feel a bit stupid. So... what happens when “ We believe that we are stupid? ” The curious thing about this belief is that it has been inflicted upon us by somebody else. We would have no concept of stupidity if someone had not told us about it & applied the adjective to us. So reckons Diana Beaver, an educational researcher. After discussing life for a bit with someone I seriously value, in which I learned that being “The Crazy Grandpa” is acceptable, but that I am very much not stupid, I decided to apply KISS. It wasn’t working. Why not? I’d made only a few changes, so the reason is likely to be simple. Back to the basics. I sat down & pored through every line of code I...

...will be until tomorrow. [ VSO == Very Significant Other ]

The easiest way to do that turned out to be writing HTML, then feeding that to a converter. The downside is that a 48-page report works out to be 700kB of HTML, which htmldoc chokes on & silently dies. So... a bit of re-engineering now to start a new temp text file (shut down & restart <html> & <body> tags in between), spawn htmldoc with a bunch of them instead of one file with throwing a <!-- PAGE BREAK --> directive in at the end of each page. Extra victory: I have one report spitting contents into a <table> tag. It looks much neater & more elegant.

Varth Dader Earlly Nilliterate Make mine a Penne Arabiata So the shirt would read, but for a lack of fabric paints. I’ll be attending a sci-fi themed birthday party for a nephew tonight. (The meal reference is from the Lego parody of the Death Star Canteen)

47,300 lines of C (plus 6,800 lines of headers) should not take a full day of effort to get to compile, yet compile it does... & even seems to work. The few sections I tested on my laptop (running Mandriva Linux 2009.1 rather than SCO Unix 5.0.7) behaved flawlessly. Now if the rest proves to be working, we’re poised to actually change a few things, to the immense relief of their staff. Driving a terminal ( any terminal other than strict VT-100B at 24x80 (or x132) would be good) via ncurses rather than from hand-coded printfs to “\33[%d;%dH” would be fantastic. Then we could axe the proprietary terminal program they’re forced to use under MS-Windows (was even Windows98 in one case until the day before yesterday). Printing (eventually via PDFs &) CUPS will mean that they can use the hp laser (which does only wordprocessing now) for reports & documents like reminders (A5 sized) & invoices. This replaces a dodgy, ageing impact printer (again, hand-...

I have an application, written (by someone else) in C, running on SCO OpenServer 5 Unix, which I need to convince that Linux is a better thing to do — amongst other things, it is much easier to find people to maintain such a system, plus significantly easier to find matching hardware with drivers. Plus when SCO finally bites the dust, major support questions arise. It is written, mostly , in very old-style C. No function protoypes at all. It was compiled, it seems, with an ancient version of gcc, which should make things easier. The compile shell-scripts are a bit cumbersome, don’t refer to any particular breed of shell, have about zero error checking, use obsolete/defective options. Never mind. Some definition files were copied in wholesale from the SCO Unix system files. Never mind about copyrights. Erase. We’ll use modern, intrinsic-to-system ones. Terminal (text screen) handling is absolutely hard-wired into the code [ printf("\33[%d;%dH", row, col); ] for a VT-10...

In an ongoing sign that our government has no clue, especially during times of recession, they have still failed to return funding to the Belmont Business Enterprise Centre . At their monthly get-together last night, I won a neat little book: Small Business, Big Opportunity . Numerous small businesses are nurtured by BEC; for example I am giving a free consult to an inventor this morning, last night met an IT consultant who uses their services, originally based his consultancy on my ideas. The rest of my life has been... interesting. Much unrelated trauma amongst friends, some very good (hello G & E O), some very bad (hello, K & S D). The best woman in the world is struggling to get a short sale completed but is otherwise irrevocably cute. Accommodation is a bit dodgy-future but looking good at the moment. I should have my MDL back next week (courtesy of an RPH Neurologist, my GP & the DPI, is that enough acronyms?). My son turns 10yo next month, it would be good if I get a...

I’m currently looking at ramping my consulting business back up again, then at developing & extending it in different ways, perhaps into different areas. The business has featured outright programming, plus installation & support of Open Source systems (often servers). It is amazing how much a Linux-based server does not cost when compared with an MS-Windows-based server, even when dedicated entirely to providing MS-Windows focussed file & print services ( SMB ). It is also amazing to behold how little maintenance & support is required for a Linux-based workstation, either simple web/office functions or operating MS-Windows-aimed (or even MS-DOS) applications through WINE . A major advantage is, of course: no viruses. At all. Nor spyware. Plus the option of automatic updates. Applications typically included out-of-the-box will amount to the equivalent of at least hundreds of dollars’ cost in non-Open applications. For larger networks, it is quite simple to m...