starfox

When writing instructions, at least check that they make sense..

2010-01-02T09:14:39Z

I bought a solar powered sensor light today from Bunnings, and the instructions contain the following phrase:

"To charge batteries, expose the solar panel to direct sunlight for 36-48 hours."

Unfortunately the light didn't contain a ticket to Norway or Antarctica so it might be a bit difficult to carry out these instructions. Does this void my warranty?

Taiwan Trip

2009-11-23T11:42:17Z

Last week I went to Taiwan for a friend's wedding. Taiwan was interesting, and notably Taxis there are completely crazy. I thought taxis in Singapore and Malaysia were pretty bad but they don't really compare. Traffic lights are optional, when they're not just blinking amber and when walking on the sidewalk you have to be careful that a scooter doesn't run you over.

Notably though, Taiwan has less engrish than Japan. ^^

I've started to go through my photos, but i've started off with the food pictures which are here. Food in Taiwan is really cheap! More to come later.

Windows 7 Whopper

2009-10-26T14:03:24Z

How could you go wrong with 7 beef patties...
Aah Japan...

A friendly reminder if you're in WA

2009-10-25T03:39:37Z

Check if your PC's clock is set an hour later due to the lack of daylight savings in the state.

haruhi S2

2009-08-08T02:06:50Z

omgomgomg conclusion lol

haruhi S2

2009-07-13T12:34:29Z

Gaaah why are episodes 2, 3, 4 and 5 the same?? -_-

chicken chicken chicken

2009-05-23T00:46:49Z

This clip's a bit old bit if you've been to a scientific / technical powerpoint presentation you should find this funny, especially the questions at the end:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL_-1d9OSdk
And the paper for it: http://isotropic.org/papers/chicken.pdf

Power Tools

2009-04-28T11:48:48Z

I bought one of these today: Karcher K236, it's great for cleaning things and washing your car. It's also awesome because when you pull the trigger there's recoil on the trigger gun! mwahahaha the power!!

VMware Server 2 and upgrading to CentOS 5.3

2009-04-13T05:49:46Z

Tech note for anyone having problems with VMware Server 2 after upgrading to CentOS 5.3.

If you upgrade a CentOS 5.2 install with VMware Server 2 on it to CentOS 5.3, you will find that xinetd gets upgraded and /etc/xinetd.d/vmware-authd mysteriously disappears. This stops the remote console from working ("There was an error connecting to the specified server: Network failure: Can't connect to server: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it.").

Unfortunately it looks like the xinetd.d entry is added by the RPM installer and not by vmware-config.pl (boo!), so the only way to fix it is to manually add back /etc/xinetd.d/vmware-authd. To do this, copy /usr/lib/vmware/configurator/authd-xinetd.conf to /etc/xinetd.d/vmware-authd, and edit /etc/xinetd.d/vmware-authd and add back your port and server. Mine looks like this:

# default: on
# description: The VMware remote access authentification daemon
service vmware-authd
{
    disable         = no
    port            = 902
    socket_type     = stream
    protocol        = tcp
    wait            = no
    user            = root
    server          = /usr/sbin/vmware-authd
}

While you're at it, add this line to the service stanza to be a bit more security conscious:
only_from = xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/24

Now restart xinetd (/etc/init.d/xinetd restart) and the remote console should work.

speakers!

2008-11-29T13:11:20Z

Testing my speakers (same plan as on Zaph Audio plan 17) at the moment. They sound pretty good so far!

(These were a lot of work.... Jarrah is super hard to work with.. i mean that literally too)

and this is why I don't like C++

2008-04-16T04:59:02Z

template <class T, void(T::*member)()> void* ThreadHelper(void* p) {
    (static_cast<T*>(p)->*member)();
    return 0;
}

*sigh

cool video

2008-03-24T11:13:50Z

Watch carefully!

seirei no moribito

2008-01-23T12:02:26Z

Just finished watching seirei no moribito. This anime was awesome and was one of the best that i've watched for a very long time!

If you haven't watched it, it's definitely worth a look. Makes me wish i could read the subsequent novels in the series, but that would be rather difficult with my lack of Japanese :)

Started work at Raytheon last week and it's so different to my previous work at ISS Group. Raytheon has a crazy amount of process in software development, whereas at ISS they had a lot of trust in us to just do the right thing and get code inspected and reviewed only if we thought it was necessary. I suppose a lot of that was due to the team that I was in at my old work: my colleagues were all excellent and knew what was worth shortcutting and what wasn't...

I miss having a proper IDE though..... sorry unix people but vim is crap. I want to be able to do things like go to definition, find references, auto-fill in interfaces, run unit tests and invoke extract method. Those things really boost productivity and i'm finding that dropping to the console and typing in 'grep -Iinr ClassName *' quite annoying.

Driving a Car in Perth? Learn2Merge!

2008-01-02T17:20:36Z

http://learn2merge.net/

If anything have a read for the stereotypes :)

finished university

2007-12-09T02:44:31Z

Yay i'm done with university (finally).. ^_^

Wii works with USB keyboard

2007-11-05T06:15:21Z

This journal update is also posted from my Wii. Looks like you can plug in a USB keyboard and use it from the Wii's web browser ^^ There's still some dumb things, like pressing enter on the keyboard doesn't click the OK button on the screen, there's no such thing as text selection and highlighting, and Nintendo's assumed that all people running the European OS have a UK keyboard (whereas Australia uses US keyboards). @ and " are swapped and £ isn't # thank you very much.

I should really get back to studying. Formal methods boo..

Anjunabetas volume 5

2007-10-31T06:28:14Z

Received Anjunabetas Volume 5 in the mail today and it's a two disc album mixed by Above and Beyond. It's a really good set of CDs, especially Chuck & Twist - Battery Life, which has the following vocal sampled in it:

Your laptop overheats, and that causes reduced performance and lower battery life.

Quite random.. ^^;;

lolz

2007-10-28T08:55:07Z

zip files are evil

2007-09-30T03:36:31Z

If you have draconian IT people at your workplace which insist on scanning outgoing zip files and want to make them suffer, email someone this file:

http://www.unforgettable.dk/
The file contains 16 zipped files, which again contains 16 zipped files, which again contains 16 zipped files, which again contains 16 zipped, which again contains 16 zipped files, which contain 1 file, with the size of 4.3GB.

If your IT staff have an email scanner that recursively unzips zip files then scans them, this file will make their scanner fall over. More cuts from the website:

So, if you extract all files, you will most likely run out of space :-)

16 x 4294967295 = 68.719.476.720 (68GB)
16 x 68719476720 = 1.099.511.627.520 (1TB)
16 x 1099511627520 = 17.592.186.040.320 (17TB)
16 x 17592186040320 = 281.474.976.645.120 (281TB)
16 x 281474976645120 = 4.503.599.626.321.920 (4,5PB)

So unless your IT people have a recursive email attachment scanner, they'll need 4.5 petabytes of storage space to check out this guy. Not to mention, they'll need a lot of processing power to scan 4.5 petabytes of files :)

fedora core 7: samba doesn't completely work out of the box

2007-09-15T04:26:48Z

Summary: If the (almost) default samba install on your fedora core 7 is broken, you probably forgot to start the nmd system service. For some reason, smb and nmd are now two services and you need to start both to have working samba.

Installed Fedora Core 7 on my desktop after deciding that I didn't really like Ubuntu. One thing that's annoyed the crap out of me is that in previous versions of Fedora Core and RHEL, you could get samba to work out of the box (although in a very limited way) by just changing the workgroup parameter to whatever your workgroup's name was and doing "service smb start". That started the samba (smb) and name service daemons (nmd), or at least i swear it used to.

Now if you go "service smb start" it just starts the samba daemon. Your computer listens on all the right ports, but there's no name resolution. It looks like samba's broken, and you spend lots of time pouring over the configuration file, finding no problems (because there's nothing wrong with the configuration file.. duh). Then you search on google groups for the same problem, only to find people saying "hey nmd is it's own service now".

GAH.

Why isn't there something which is just a meta service called 'samba' which has no purpose other than to coordinate startup of both smb and nmd??

Diseconomies of scale

2007-09-06T13:22:07Z

Bigger is better? Not sure about that one but bigger certainly costs more. At work we now have a new super shiny quad core xeon with 4gb ram and set up in RAID 5 to host our virtual machines. That's great because before we had a 2gb single core raid 1 desktop machine doing the same job, so there should be a nice speed boost. But because we needed more processing power, more ram, more io speed we ran into problems.

Problem 1: Don't patch things unless you need to.
It's surprising how many things carry forward from medicine into software engineering. In medicine, it's generally considered that things like preemptively fixing a problem before it becomes pathology can be harmful unless proven otherwise (eg. people don't have their tonsils removed these days unless it's absolutely necessary because it immunocompromises you to some extent). This also applies to IT stuff: you shouldn't patch things unless there's problems. Preemptively trying to counteract a problem can lead to more problems.

Our IT guy had been smart and done his background reading and found out that VMWare hosts can have clock synchronisation problems, but he'd missed that if you install VMWare Tools the problem goes away. So in the debian install he's done, he's followed people's (bad) suggestions to disable apic and set the clock mode to pit (periodic interrupt timer). What happens if you disable apic? Well the module that handles interrupts across multiple CPUs disappears and so do your additional CPUs!

The poor IT guy spent a good few hours trying to figure out why debian was only seeing one CPU.

Problem 2: Out of address space.
Did i mention that it has 4gb of ram? Well, that's true and not true. It has 4gb of ram in it, but only 3.5gb is usable. Since it's a server motherboard, it has onboard video. Unfortunately the Intel people that built the board thought that shared video memory was an okay thing to do (you cheap bastards). What happens if you have shared video memory? Well, you need to map the shared video memory to some address space. What if you've used up the whole 32 bit address space with ram? You're out of luck: the video memory has to be mapped somewhere. You lose some ram.

Now that seems ok, because you could just map the last 8mb of ram or so to video memory? That's not so bad. Bad luck again: you can't do that. The video ram has to sit on a boundary that the north bridge can easily address. It turns out that on this board, you have to set the memory boundary at one of the 512mb intervals, so because of that you lose 512mb of ram. So now we have a 4gb server with only 3.5gb addressable ram. Boo.

You can solve all of this by going to a 64 bit memory addressing system, but i've heard of performance problems running 32 bit vmware guests in a 64 bit host and we've decided to stay away from that situation at work. Previously we had 64 bit fedora core with VMWare server on it, and the old IT guy had to do bad things to Perl to make it happy enough to start VMWare server.

lolololol

2007-08-31T13:35:44Z

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/trio-googled-atm-blasts/2007/08/29/1188067168459.html

"how to blow up ATM machines" right... ahahaha

Gluten Free Food

2007-08-09T15:42:22Z

Hi LJ land, I hope someone can answer this as it'll save me a lot of running around...

We have a student / employer expo on monday and I need to provide dinner for someone that has coeliac disease, so the food has to be gluten free... Where can I buy a gluten free meal in Perth?

professional protesters

2007-06-30T05:21:44Z

Apparently you can make a living being a professional protester these days.

Profit Calculator

2007-06-14T13:10:41Z

http://nymag.com/news/features/2007/profit/

Here's a nice article about where profits come from in several different industries and occupations. Includes a museum, a drug dealer, a sex shop, financial firm and drug company.

Good procrastination stuff ^_^