Blog

1 Jan 2001 (updated 1 Jan 2001) »

life

It’s great not using computers for days at a time. I’ve managed to log on and check my mail so irregularly, that it’s started to annoy some of my friends who seem to expect near instant response.

house cleaning

I’ve archived 140 MB of e-mail from the last six months and cleaned out all my folders. Then to top it off, I defragmented my hard drive.

I’m sure you’re all impressed with that.

new year’s

Had a great time at lukem and his wife Inger’s last night. Got totally wasted on evil “champagne cocktails”, which, okay, involved sparkling white wine but also involved vodka and cranberry juice, and a later more evil one involved alcholic raspberry cassis. This inebriation saw me trying to make Inger the world’s smallest G&T, as she gave me a shot glass. It dawned upon us both that she wanted a shot of gin to add to the tonic, not a 30 ml G&T.

Domain Chandon, the Australian outpost of Moet and Chandon produce excellent sparkling white wines. I’ve been a fan since going there for vintage in 1995 or 1996 (memory’s a bit fuzzy :-). They have excellent tours and have great grounds for a little picnic or staying in their buildings for totally hedonistic afternoons. Bring a designated driver.

These last two days, I bought and helped drink three bottles of their 1997 Vintage, and quite frankly for $AUD26.95 (about $US13) it was damn close to the 1993 Moet and Chandon which set me back $80 (about $US40) we had for dinner tonight with my family. If you’re ever in this part of the world, you owe it to yourself to get some and savor it. Excellent, and even better if not pissed.

26 Dec 2000 (updated 26 Dec 2000) »

schoen: HHGTG

Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in Java.

Enjoy poetry only works in certain places.

family

I think my mum is losing it. People shouldn’t retire unless they have something to do.

Not good.

hackery

Paper is being worked upon. Very late, 6 pages and counting, and I still don’t like it.

cats

My cats are both outside and being fed by various people. I wonder what my little furry ones will think of me when I get back.

sleep

I’ve been affected by insomnia since my uni days (about 12 years now). I need about 3-4 hours sleep every night and I feel crap when I manage this amount. Mostly I sleep 4-6 hours most nights, getting to sleep around 2 or 3 am and arising at 8 for 8.30 am. I’m doing this cycle as I type, and haven’t had more than 5 hours of sleep per day since Saturday (it’s now Wednesday morning).

Occasionally, I sleep 10+ hours when my body can’t take it anymore. This is usually on the weekends, but recently I slept in for the first time in a very long time on a work day. I got up at 10.45 am, and went directly to the Christmas party. Not good.

That wasn’t the first time that I thought of getting some drugs to manage sleep, but bugger that. I’ve tried all the tricks: various alcohol “nightcaps”, exercise before bed, chamomile tea, setting the alarm for 5.30 am (through to 7 am), going to bed only when I am tired, getting out of it as soon as I wake. You name it – if it didn’t involve prescription drugs, I’ve done it. Getting up as soon as I arise for the first time (if you have cats, you know that the little buggers love to wake about anywhere from 4 am til 6 am and nudge you or put a paw on your nose or crawl under the bedsheets; to me that wake up nudge is not a real wake up) doesn’t work either – I just end up being real tired the entire day through.

After turning 30, I decided to forget all about the sleep issue. I don’t really miss that extra 2-3 hours, and I get to read a whole lot more, I usually recuperate on the weekends. I’ll manage.

21 Dec 2000 »

unhappy families
Last Sunday, my cousin’s wife of five weeks, Sang, was riding her motorbike around a double bend, and didn’t make it around the second one. Gordon, my cousin, and the other rider did, but it was too late.

That tragedy was compounded by the fact that I didn’t even know my cousin had been married, let alone been engaged for over two years.

My cousin, his parents and my parents

It’s the first time all of them have been in the same room, or even spoken to each other in real time in over six years.

My parents and his parents had a petty argument about six years ago (the details of which are long, tedious, and intrinsically snobby), which resulted in the family not speaking to each other.

My message to you all in this frivilous season is life is too short for this sort of shit. If you’re in the same boat as me, go and see your family now before it’s too late.

16 Dec 2000 »

hackery
Not enough time. Need 30-40 hour days. I have nearly hacked WinVNC to use a far more secure API (LsaStorePrivateData() if you’re interested) rather than stashing passwords in the registry. But due to aforesaid lack of time, I don’t have time to finish this, and the patches I posted to the vnc- developer list got stripped by a bloody-minded automated de- MIME thingy.

life

off on annual leave for three weeks, but…

work

Not enough time. I still have 3 (largish) documents to finish, time sheets and an extensive expense claim to submit. All before Monday 9 am. Might get some sleep soon, but…

cars

helped a friend buy the right car today. Took two and a bit test drives. Got Adrian (who was just along for the ride) and Rebecca to sit in an Audi S3 (like my friend Luke’s) for a couple of ticks. Very nice. She bought a Subaru Forester. Faux off-road 4wd’s make my teeth ache, but compared to the real thing that are also never taken off the road, this is only a minor twinge compared to the complete fscking arseholes who believe the road is theirs to hog, add a pedestrian killing bull bar (which will never touch the sweet flesh of any of our bovine friends), and steal my average mass-based safety net via their superior mass (and thus momentum) when they plow right through my baby car.

time

Need more time.

14 Dec 2000 »

hadess: Xfree86 on ppc
4.0.2 is out soonish (like dec 15 is code build day). 4.0.2 fixes a number of known PPC-isms as well as introduces a bunch of new servers and features, whilst improving the stability of the 4.0.x code base.

4.0.2 is not just a point release. I recommend this release for all of you who are still sticking to 3.3.x for whatever reason.

I’ve said it before, but 4.0.2 will kick ass and take names.

13 Dec 2000 »

pjf: going, going, gone…
Paul, just in case you’re stuck, the deal with those sort of letters is:

be brief – one, maybe two paragraphs of a couple of sentences each maximum
do not slag anyone off or burn bridges
just say “You’ve been wonderful to work for, but I need to …”
do not waste effort stating the reasons you’re moving or tell them what you’re doing next
be factual; include the last date you are going to be there and be firm about it
I like to tie my finish date to pay runs so there’s a _last_ pay which should contain all your accrued benefits and you never need to return once you’ve packed your desk.

Two weeks is the minimal acceptable period, four is typical. They are legally required to send you a group tax certificate within a short time of you leaving. Make sure you get it. I didn’t a couple of times, and it’s never stopped giving me grief.

If you have personal stuff that you really care about, take it home Thursday night (this includes data!), just in case your employer has a selectively enforced “escorted off the premises” termination policy. I’ve seen people go this way, and it’s never pretty. Bring any stuff you have at home they own back in on Friday morning. They usually give you like 5 minutes to pack your desk in these situations.

Just remember, this letter is business, not personal – even though personal reasons are the reason everone does stuff.

Good luck!

6 Dec 2000 »

hackery
Need to work on my paper for http://linux.conf.au

MCSE

Almost finished. Soon I’ll be a win2k MCSE. Next week is my last exam. I might even study for that one.

work

Top class blocking going on by a major vendor preventing me from getting on site at the data centre. They made me sign an NDA in an effort to slow me down some more. I had it signed in record time. The delays make me very happy as it allows my schedule to settle to just “punishing”.

2 Dec 2000 (updated 2 Dec 2000) »

deekayen: World AIDS day

Deekayen, there is no point in classifying how you got a particular disease. In South Africa, 20% of the population has HIV/AIDS. They are all not gay or junkies (which you seem to have trouble with), and they have a terminal illness. For some sub- Saharan countries, this could be a end of country event in a few years. AIDS does not respect your immoral repugnancy.

Unlike you, I have lost friends and acquaintances to AIDS and it is not a pleasant way to go.

Personally, though, the people who came up with a no weblog day are missing the point. The thing you want to do on an international AIDS day is communicate. PRACTICE SAFER SEX! IF YOU MUST INJECT, DON’T REUSE NEEDLES! is what we should be shouting from the virtual rooftops!

1 Dec 2000 (updated 1 Dec 2000) »

hackery

I have to do the following things:

study for the rest of my MCSE exams
write my paper for linux.conf.au
work on the gtkada program that this paper references
write my slides for said paper
work on miscellaneous SAGE-AU stuff, like the Code of Practice and a working web site

Things I’d like to do

Play tekken tag team tournament and ssx on my playstation2.

Which will win?

The religion thing

A reference site for all these philosophy related things: Yale’s Philosophy Resources.

Occam’s Razor says that the simplest explanation is most likely to be the correct one.

Religion is about beliefs. Science is about observable facts which lead to theories (some which can be modified as new facts come in, and some that are invalidated if facts fail to back that theory either by direct or indir ect means) or they just remain facts until something can explain them.

Many theories with models can make suggestions about observations, which can be then verified through repeatable experiment. Good examples of the latter would be gravitational lenses, or Higgs bosons, both essentially unprovable at the time that the associated theory was written.

Some theories are too well backed by observation to be anything but, well, proven. Some theories have little edges that can be tinkered with (quantum mechanics and classical mechanics, for example), but all theories preclude a deity by the dint of Occam’s Razor. $DEITY is just not necessary.

The problem I have is not that people have deeply held religious beliefs, but they try to push them onto others. The worst offenders are those pushing “creationist science” (an oxymoron, in my opinion). Most creationists working to promote creationism as a first-class cousin to evolution as we know it today use incredible sophistry, faulty logic and word games to “prove” their point.

There are no observable facts* that back up the Christian creation myth. There are plenty of observations that fill our current understanding of evolution and biology (and RNA chemistry, which underpin gene therapy and …).

Check out this paper as it could summarize this thread quite succinctly. It’s an interesting read and proves that people who are into philosophy more than us have already been there, done that, got the t-shirt.

* observeable fact: a red ball is a round sphere that has a surface that reflects light in certain wavelengths that appears red to a human eye. This round ball, if dropped in a vacuum on the planet earth will fall towards the centre of the planet at the rate of 9.8 m/s/s. The elements of an observeable fact cannot be argued as they are reduced to their smallest elements.