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| Greg's diary |
| December 2007 |
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| Saturday, 1 December 2007 | Dereel | Images for 1 December 2007 |
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Summer's here! In fact, it seems that it's been here for a while, and the temperatures are still what you'd expect in midsummer. The Ballarat Courier confirmed the concerns with the main headline “Hot days, little rain”.
That was the least of our concerns today, though: we still don't have anybody to bale our hay, and more rain is forecast for tomorrow. Yvonne spent most of the day telephoning around and getting rejection after rejection. Finally, round evening, Damian showed up and told us that he could do it—on Tuesday. It seems that some minor part of his tractor has failed, and he won't get a replacement until then. Oh well, it's been rained on once, and that heavily. Hopefully the rains tomorrow, if they eventuate, won't be as bad.
Watering the garden is still a bit of a kludge, and I somehow managed to get myself thoroughly wet a couple of times. Yvonne took Pam Hay to the station today, and also did some shopping, bringing a hose fitting with taps, but we really need proper pipes.
David Yeardley and Fifi Wulandari came back from Singapore in the early hours of the morning, and they came to dinner this evening, meaning more cooking. Also did some beer stuff, and somehow those things took all day.
| Sunday, 2 December 2007 | Dereel | |
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Quiet day today. Caught up on some brewing stuff—I'm brewing weaker beers lately, hopefully with as much flavour as before.
A couple of days ago I received a message from Jack Roehrig, who also makes kimchi. He had a number of issues with my recipe, which I need to think about, but one of the things he said was that real Koreans don't put solid salt on the cabbage: they put it in brine. I've seen recipes both ways, so I suspect that Jack's information is only one way to do it, but he goes on to say that the cabbage then isn't rinsed, just pressed out, since otherwise the fermentation won't proceed. That's demonstrably not correct: otherwise my kimchi wouldn't work at all. But Jack's approach has one advantage, if you salt it for the correct period of time, that the resultant kimchi won't be too salty. It might also be sourer. So today I started batches made both ways; we'll see how it works out.
To the Yeardley's for dinner. Chris is a board member of the American Saddlebred Horse Association of Australia, and they're currently being sued by Andrew and Rosemary Mackay—they let their membership lapse, but now the want to be members again, and they've made themselves so obnoxious that nobody wants them back. Recently I was spammed by somebody calling herself Antonia Munoz, making all sorts of ridiculous claims. There's not much point showing the original message, since it was completely misformatted, but my reply contains the entire original text. There's a good chance that the legal fees will break the bank of the ASHAA; that would at least be one way to ensure that the Mackays don't get their way. But what a load of nonsense the message was:
> Andrew and Rosemary have taken lengthy measures to avoid this matter > going into the Supreme Court of NSW to no avail.
What nonsense! They started the proceedings, and it seems they went straight to the Supreme Court. Sometimes I'm baffled by people's stupidity.
On 15 April 2008 I received a phone call from Andrew Mackay asking me to remove this entry. Read the link for more information.
| Monday, 3 December 2007 | Dereel | |
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My wireless Internet link went down this morning, for the first time in over 3 weeks. That's a record. As usual, it didn't recover, and I had to power cycle the modem, restart the program and manually connect, though it is configured for automatic configuration. What a mess! Then somebody discovered that I had moved to Queensland, as a traceroute out shows:
=== root@eureka
(/dev/ttyp5) ~ 97 -> traceroute
freefall traceroute to freefall.FreeBSD.org (69.147.83.40), 64 hops max, 40 byte
packets 1 ugliness (192.109.197.172) 0.459 ms 0.193 ms 0.227 ms 2 172.18.112.195 (172.18.112.195)
304.321 ms 128.644 ms 129.804 ms 3 172.18.70.14 (172.18.70.14) 109.955 ms 129.110 ms 129.997 ms 4
CPE-61-9-210-8.qld.bigpond.net.au (61.9.210.8) 129.916 ms 118.829 ms 129.940 ms 5
TenGigabitEthernet7-3.woo4.Brisbane.telstra.net (165.228.107.193) 129.975 ms 118.245 ms 100.013 ms 6
Pos0-0-0-0.woo-core1.Brisbane.telstra.net (203.50.6.202) 120.024 ms 119.747 ms 118.919 ms 7
Bundle-Ether2.chw-core2.Sydney.telstra.net (203.50.6.1) 140.096 ms 123.073 ms 139.884 ms 8
Port-Channel2.oxf-core1.Sydney.telstra.net (203.50.6.2) 149.915 ms 127.696 ms 290.371 ms 9
10GigabitEthernet6-0.syd-core04.Sydney.reach.com (203.50.13.34) 129.652 ms 130.043 ms 138.614 ms 10
i-5-0.paix-core02.net.reach.com (202.84.143.205) 304.261 ms 288.626 ms 300.025 ms 11 202.84.251.98
(202.84.251.98) 299.814 ms 276.011 ms 299.837 ms 12 yahoo.paix05.net.reach.com (134.159.63.22)
299.956 ms 288.628 ms 299.992 ms 13 g-1-0-0-p151.msr2.sp1.yahoo.com (216.115.107.79) 301.968 ms
g-0-0-0-p141.msr1.sp1.yahoo.com (216.115.107.51) 307.552 ms 287.807 ms 14
ge-1-42.bas-b2.sp1.yahoo.com (209.131.32.35) 302.665 ms ge-1-47.bas-b2.sp1.yahoo.com (209.131.32.53)
288.182 ms 288.619 ms 15 freebsd.org (69.147.83.40) 299.996 ms 288.861 ms 300.031 ms
Didn't do much in the day. Started trying to make some wooden frames for the garden beds, but decided that the wood wasn't good enough, so we'll have to buy some.
| Tuesday, 4 December 2007 | Dereel | Images for 4 December 2007 |
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The phone rang early this morning, and we didn't get it before it rang out. Whoever called also didn't bother to leave a message. Later I got a call on my office phone, but it stopped after 2 rings.
None of this would be unusual, except today was the day that Damien was supposed to be coming to bale the hay. He didn't. Yvonne spent all day trying to find somebody, to no avail. It looks as if the hay will be left to rot.
Didn't do much work, apart from a bit of pruning in the garden. I wish I understood this better.
| Wednesday, 5 December 2007 | Dereel | |
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Still nobody to bale the hay! Damien, who promised to come yesterday, is completely unreachable, and we can't find anybody else. It looks as if we're going to have to let it rot.
I've already noted that the weekly series of garden photos was a lot of repetitive work, crying out for a programmatic solution. Today I finally did something about it and changed all the HTML pages into one PHP page which reads a list of dates to look for photos, and displays them in either “tiny” form (actually 300x225) or “small”. I've recently discovered that you can set the width of an image as a percentage of the window size, which makes the rendering breakage less painful. For the time being I'm rendering the “small” images with 100% width, though it should be easy enough to be able to select that. Unfortunately, there's no way to describe the corresponding height, so links to specific images don't work the way they should.
| Thursday, 6 December 2007 | Dereel | Images for 6 December 2007 |
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Still nobody to bale our hay! And rain promised for this evening; we've given up hope of getting it baled, and are planning to put a lot of Chris' horses on the paddocks to eat it up before it rots.
I have another translation to do, this time into German and about something I know marginally more about: instructions for network configuration for an embedded device running Microsoft. Nevertheless, it's not straightforward:
I have to use Microsoft “Word”. What a pain! Apart from having almost no editing functions, it has a spelling checker, but it took me 10 minutes trying to tell it to use the German spelling checker for this document. Sometimes it did it, then reverted when I saved the file. In the end, set the default to German, and that seemed to work.
The document itself is strange, and it includes statements like:
Supported Operating Systems: Any Server O/S that is able to host a Windows XP client.
What does that mean? We've established that it's TCP/IP, so the real issue is not whether the client is running “Windows”, but which services it needs. After a lot of head-scratching, including whether they really meant running their software on the server “O/S”, I have come to the conclusion that the server simply needs to provide SMB-style file systems to the device. But how can the average network admin know that, or the average translator translate it?
Communication with people in the Microsoft space is a pain! Again and again I get thin kind of message:
Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2007 17:12:10 +1030 To: Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@lemis.com> Subject: Re: word document for translation into English X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.752.3) Is it possible to have the document early next week On 06/12/2007, at 2:09 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: >On Thursday, 6 December 2007 at 9:09:20 +1030, translation bureau >wrote: > >>Greg, here is the document for translation in Word. > >You say in the Subject: header: > >> word document for translation into English > >You mean German, right? > >>Could you please give me some ideas as to when it will be completed. > >As I've asked two times now, when do you need it by? It shouldn't >take long, but I won't drop everything else unless it's very urgent. > >I've taken a look at the document, and it's suboptimal even in >English. The indentation of the numbered lists on the first page is >different, and some of the terminology is redundant. I plan to fix >these problems on the way. Should we pass them by the client?
Yes, this is Apple, not Microsoft, but to quote Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, “there's small choice in rotten apples”. In this case, the translation bureau has chosen to put a partial reply at the top and append my entire message, including two questions left unanswered, one for the third time. I'm sure this is related to this illiterate habit of leaving the message separate from the reply. By contrast, the mangling of the date of my message is not a problem; it was in fact sent at 14:39:58. The MUA has adapted the date to the local time zone and then left out any indication of which time zone is intended. On Microsoft I could understand that, since the system has a very shaky idea of time zones, but Mac OS X uses the same time zone scheme as BSD. Why do they throw their advantages away to make themselves Microsoft compatible?
A couple of days ago I talked about breeding mushrooms; today I found we actually are doing so:
What is it? On the face of it, it's an Agaricus Campestris, which we also had in Wantadilla, and this is a particularly good specimen. But is it maybe Agaricus Xanthodermus, which is poisonous? They look pretty much the same except for the yellow coloration they get when damaged; and look at that yellow spot. Chopped the stem off and it didn't really go yellow:
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But it should have gone pink, and this is some nondescript colour in between. I wonder if this is a hybrid.
| Friday, 7 December 2007 | Dereel | Images for 7 December 2007 |
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Letter from DCITA today, thanking me for my enquiry (what enquiry? Probably something I did months ago) about broadband services, giving me a “Locator ID” and a list of ISPs who might be able to help, the latter with a reference to the invalid URL http://www.dcita.gov.au/broadband_guarantee. I wonder if the timing (just after change of government) is significant.
I suppose it's par for the course that 15 years later dcita.gov.au has gone away. In fact, according to Wikipedia, it went away 5 days before this diary entry. The acronym stood for “Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts”. It seems that, as of 2022, it's the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. No arts for you!
Spent some time looking at that and discovered that neither Gobush, Bluemaxx nor LISP were on the list, and that those who were had very competitive prices. In particular, Chris had told me yesterday that Bluemaxx are putting up their prices, but I found two suppliers, .Aussie Broadband (yes, with leading dot) and Wideband, who offer significantly higher data volumes for less.
Interestingly, of all these ISPs, only Aussie Broadband survives, though it has lost the leading dot. Wideband is now part of Aussie, and the others seem to have disappeared altogether.
Spent some time investigating that; the offers are so similar that I suspect the same provider behind the two of them, but Wideband has a more legible web site, so applied for a service with them. Also discovered that I was 400 MB over quota on my last month's bill with Telstra, despite extreme measures, so decided to take a higher-volume (and higher speed) tariff until the satellite stuff gets installed.
We've finally given up on having our hay baled, and Yvonne and Chris brought 6 horses over to eat up what's left, with another 6 scheduled to come tomorrow. Over to pick up some watering containers until we can move a spectacularly heavy cast-iron bath.
Also did a bit of work on the translation. I've found some related Microsoft documentation in German, which makes it easier to decide on terminology, even if they've carried bad language one further by translating “folder” (itself a stupid word for “directory”) as “Ordner”, which means “file”.
We still have an enormous backlog of garden work to do, including pruning. A couple of bottlebrushes seem to have consisted only of dead wood:
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Did some rather radical pruning, and now the tree looks like this:
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I don't know if it will survive, but if not, it needed replacing anyway.
| Saturday, 8 December 2007 | Dereel | Images for 8 December 2007 |
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Into the office this morning to discover that a TV recording had failed last night. Tried again and found that it still wasn't working; even after rebooting, I couldn't record anything. After quite a bit of searching, discovered that it was only one channel, PRIME. Their coverage is only marginal at best, and it looks like it has got worse. But it brings home how difficult it is to determine this kind of problem with the tools available!
So now I have more bandwidth, and a faster connection. But not much. Before upgrading the speed, I was getting 30 kB/s upload speeds. Today I tried uploading the photos of the house and got (excerpt):
big/bottlebrushes-1.jpeg
1342540 100% 7.26kB/s 0:02:56 (xfer#53, to-check=73/127)
big/bottlebrushes-2.jpeg
2094740 100% 18.10kB/s 0:01:51 (xfer#54, to-check=72/127)
big/dam-ne.jpeg
1686786 100% 12.90kB/s 0:02:05 (xfer#55, to-check=71/127)
big/dam-nw.jpeg
1011360 100% 6.73kB/s 0:02:26 (xfer#56, to-check=70/127)
...
big/garden-e.jpeg
1820825 100% 42.02kB/s 0:00:42 (xfer#59, to-check=67/127)
big/garden-s.jpeg
1572833 100% 41.30kB/s 0:00:37 (xfer#60, to-check=66/127)
big/garden-se.jpeg
1893354 100% 43.23kB/s 0:00:42 (xfer#61, to-check=65/127)
rsync is not very accurate with its times; it reports speeds of several MB/s for very small files, even over dialup lines. I suspect that it starts and stops counting at the wrong time, but these files are big enough that the inaccuracies shouldn't have any effect. If I can get 43 kB/s on some files, there's something seriously wrong with 6.7 kB/s. Is it network congestion (not my link) or poor quality on my link?
Somehow spent half the day writing up diaries and taking photos. The PHP pages save hours of time, but I'm still tuning them. The real question I have now is how to represent the larger-scale photos.
Chris, David and Fifi along in the afternoon, bringing Chris' sister Melanie, husband Tony and 4 month old son William, who live in Melbourne. They didn't stay very long; I suspect they wanted to get back to civilization by nightfall.
| Sunday, 9 December 2007 | Dereel | Images for 9 December 2007 |
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Our swallows are growing up much faster than I thought. They're flying a lot, though they evidently still need to be fed:
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More work on the translation today. The content is trivial—how to set up a network—but it's all in the Microsoft environment, and the German has some surprises. The Microsoft term for an exported file system is a “share”, which is much more ambiguous, though I don't think it quite makes it to my list of bad language. It's confusing enough, anyway, that the German word is almost completely unrelated: “Freigabe”, which really means “release”. Maybe “share” does qualify for bad language after all. In any case, one way and another this translation is a lot harder than the last one, though I know the material much better.
In the evening, ate an omelet with the Agaricus Campestris that I picked a few days ago. I've had this suspicion that they're not as harmless as is claimed—in particular, they give me loose bowels. That's not exactly dangerous—sauerkraut does the same—but certainly something to consider. They don't taste so spectacular that it's worth the trouble.
| Monday, 10 December 2007 | Dereel | |
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More work on the translation today. You can't really translate instructions for using computer software if you don't have a copy of the software up and running; in this case it's the German version of Microsoft “Windows”, and it's a real pain.
And then a thought struck me: is is the German version? Certainly the servers would be, but there's a possibility that the client operating system would be the English version. This is such a pain!
Lamb biriani in the evening, made a little easier by using meat that I had frozen last time I made it. But somehow this dish seems to get more and more difficult every time I make it.
It's been a while since I have had much to do with AUUG, though I still “maintain” parts of the web site. Over a year ago it was clear that the organization was dying, and I sent some messages to the board suggesting that they wind up in an orderly fashion. I think I upset a number of people by doing so, and indeed they held two conferences after my message. Kirk McKusick tells me that the last one, in October this year, wasn't at all bad.
But last month there were only two or three members on the board, not including a secretary. They sent out a notification for the AGM on Wednesday, 12 December, the day after tomorrow, and asking for applications for the remaining board members. I replied offering to take the the position of secretary and got no reply. When I reminded them, I got a reply suggesting that they didn't need me; maybe I have upset somebody, though I don't know how.
Yesterday I contacted them again and wrote:
You know, of course, that I've been suggesting dissolution for some time, at a time when people didn't want to admit it. But now that the time has come, far from saying "I told you so", I'm having second thoughts. I think we should donate all AUUG's assets to the Lions Chair and then carry on as a non-financial institution. No membership fees, no money to look after; in principle, just the name, the web site and the mailing lists. I suggest the John Lions chair because it seems to be the most obvious, but that's certainly a matter for discussion.
Let's consider the alternatives.
Close down:
Lots of hassle. In particular, I suspect that we're going to have to produce complete financials, and there are all sorts of bureaucratic hurdles to jump over.
Irreversible. If we close down, that's the end, once and for all.
Non-financial institution:
The money we have goes to a good cause.
We don't really need to do anything immediately. But in the mid-term we can set up pages for on-line membership applications and things. I suspect that people will come out of the woodwork who so far have been scared off by the membership fee.
If it doesn't work, we can still take the alternative.
With this in mind, I don't intend to renew my subscription. I'd be happy to be a board member and come to the meeting, but it doesn't seem logical to pay membership for an organization that is planning to shut down. If you take the second alternative, I'd also suggest that you refund the memberships to anybody who has renewed just to be able to attend the meeting.
| Tuesday, 11 December 2007 | Dereel | |
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Still no reaction from the board of AUUG, so today I sent out a message to the AUUG mailing lists:
From Greg.Lehey@auug.org.au Tue Dec 11 09:45:02 2007
Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2007 09:45:02 +1100
From: Greg 'groggy' Lehey <Greg.Lehey@auug.org.au>
To: AUUG Talk List <talk@auug.org.au>,
AUUG Announcements List <auug-announce@auug.org.au>
Subject: Don't close AUUG down!
The following is part of a message I sent to the AUUG board a couple
of days ago.
On Sunday, 9 December 2007 at 12:35:25 +1100, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
>
> You know, of course, that I've been suggesting dissolution for some
> time, at a time when people didn't want to admit it. But now that the
> time has come, far from saying "I told you so", I'm having second
> thoughts. I think we should donate all AUUG's assets to the Lions
> Chair and then carry on as a non-financial institution. No membership
> fees, no money to look after; in principle, just the name, the web
> site and the mailing lists. I suggest the John Lions chair because it
> seems to be the most obvious, but that's certainly a matter for
> discussion.
>
> Let's consider the alternatives.
>
> Close down:
>
> - Lots of hassle. In particular, I suspect that we're going to have
> to produce complete financials, and there are all sorts of
> bureaucratic hurdles to jump over.
> - Irreversible. If we close down, that's the end, once and for all.
>
> Non-financial institution:
>
> - The money we have goes to a good cause.
> - We don't really need to do anything immediately. But in the
> mid-term we can set up pages for on-line membership applications and
> things. I suspect that people will come out of the woodwork who so
> far have been scared off by the membership fee.
> - If it doesn't work, we can still take the alternative.
>
> With this in mind, I don't intend to renew my subscription. I'd be
> happy to be a board member and come to the meeting, but it doesn't
> seem logical to pay membership for an organization that is planning to
> shut down. If you take the second alternative, I'd also suggest that
> you refund the memberships to anybody who has renewed just to be able
> to attend the meeting.
>
> What do you think?
I have received no reply. On an earlier occasion I volunteered for
the position of secretary. The way that this was handled suggests
that I have offended somebody in the current board; they didn't reply,
and when I reminded them of the offer, I was told that my services
were not required. I'd like to make it clear that I have no knowledge
and no intention of any offence.
As a result, it looks like I won't be at tomorrow's meeting. In view
of the intention to dissolve AUUG tomorrow, I can't wait for a
possible reply from the board. This is also why I'm abusing my
ability and copying auug-announce. My apologies to anybody who is
offended by this.
So: for tomorrow please consider transitioning AUUG to a non-financial
institution as described above. For those of you who don't know, I
should point out that the main web server (www.auug.org.au) is run
free of charge by Internode. About the only costs I can see are the
$20 odd per year needed to renew the domain.
Discussion welcome.
Greg Lehey
Past president, AUUG Inc.
That got a lot of mail, much more than I expected it. Most people appear to have agreed with me, though the current board says that, while on the one hand they haven't currently finalized the secretary, they have all positions full, so they don't need me. In the followup I also suggested to postpone the AGM, but it appears it must happen this calendar year. Hopefully something will come out of it.
Into Sebastopol with the Commodore (car), which looks like it has brake problems, and looked for a garage to service our cars. Just before Christmas is a bad time, but in the end settled on Vic England, in Albert St., who probably won't be able to look at it for a couple of days.
Back home and worked on the translation. One of the unpleasant things is that it's in Microsoft “Word”, and so I got to know “Word” better than I wanted. It did change my opinion of it, though: it's much worse than I thought. It also managed to hang twice, and then I discovered that, though there's an auto-save feature, by default it only runs every 10 minutes. The minimum interval is 1 minute. I think I've lost more data from “Word” today than from Emacs (which is also not as stable as I would like) in the last 5 years, and I'd guess that it takes 3 times as long to write a document with “Word” as with Emacs.
| Wednesday, 12 December 2007 | Dereel | |
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How I hate Microsoft! There are many reasons to hate Microsoft, of course: their company politics, their pricing, their smothering of other companies—but somehow that's all the same, and it's not what worries me. What annoys me beyond belief is that they've changed the way a generation thinks about computers, and made things worse in the process.
It's clear that I've been using Microsoft products—“Word” in this case. This is the first time I've had to do anything non-trivial with “Word”, though I get the impression that, in fact, doing anything useful with “Word” is non-trivial. Getting the final page of my document translated and proof-reading it took half the day. Then Yvonne took over and made many changes, and I had to apply them, taking up the other half of the day.
Yesterday I said that it takes 3 times as long to write a document in “Word”. I think I was generous. By evening I was in such a bad mood that Yvonne offered to do all the translations and let me review them. I think she's probably right.
| Thursday, 13 December 2007 | Dereel | Images for 13 December 2007 |
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Into Sebastopol early this morning to do some shopping. ALDI has opened a new shop (“store”) just opposite Safeway today, and we went in looking for bargains; got a battery driven replacement for the tyre pump that I threw away in disgust last month. They had the rather novel idea of a small brass band by the checkout:
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While we were there, checked up on the Commodore, which had been left for service a couple of days ago. The brakes were done, but they were having difficulty finding a brake light switch, so over the other side of town to Ballarat Holden to get one. These VT Commodore brake light switches are remarkably unreliable. We've changed at least 3 in the last 8 years; apart from that, the car has been remarkably reliable.
On the way back stopped off to look for some soil, then I dropped Yvonne and took the switch back to Vic, then off to buy some tyre valves: I have had an idea to use the new tyre pump to pressurize the garden sprayer, which uses a manual piston pump to generate the pressure. All I needed was a tyre valve.
Finally back home and put the valve in the sprayer:
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That worked well. The tyre pump did not. Some of the stuff you get at Aldi is good, for example the UPS I bought recently. But this pump is a toy, not a tool; after a minute of pumping I had less pressure in the sprayer than with two strokes of the piston. That'll have to go back.
In the afternoon a phone call from Natalie Williams for a magazine interview about brewing beer. I suppose it's a sign of the times that the magazine is The Senior.
| Friday, 14 December 2007 | Dereel | Images for 14 December 2007 |
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Natalie had some problems with my photos yesterday:
the pix I have downloaded are poor quality for reproduction in The Senior.
That's not the problem of the photos, of course; the ones in question were 2112x2816, enough to make an image of up to 18x24 cm at the 300 dpi that she asked for. Sent her a reply telling her how to get the bigger versions, and then it occurred to me that she's probably not the only person to have that kind of problem, so decided to add it to my photo “about” page. That was a mistake: in the process I ended up restructuring things and moving them down a directory level, causing all sorts of issues in the process. That had to happen: the main directory is full of files called http://www.lemis.com/Thumbnails-20071214.html and http://www.lemis.com/Photos-20071214.html, but I had underestimated the amount of work it involved. Much of it will be replaced anyway when I rearrange my index pages, but in the meantime I fear there will be some breakage.
Chris Yeardley's birthday today, and had dinner over there. Fifi took a number of photos which I must publish.
| Saturday, 15 December 2007 | Dereel | Images for 15 December 2007 |
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Continued with my conversion of the photo web pages today, and made considerable progress. The main photos page is now in PHP and reads a list of photos from a separate file, which will ultimately save a lot of space when I'm finished. That took most of the day, and in the process managed to use 1.5 GB of memory while trying to display the large version of the photos (the link leads to the small version), thus completely hanging firefox. Clearly I shouldn't try to display all 50 MB of JPEGs on a single page.
We now have water and hay (on the ground—Grrr!), so we have 12 horses from Chris to eat it up, much to Yvonne's pleasure. She grabbed my camera and went took a number of photos:
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| Sunday, 16 December 2007 | Dereel | Images for 16 December 2007 |
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More work on my photos today. I should never have started this transition, but I did manage to get things looking a lot better. It's clear, though, that I'm going to have to do a lot of work before I have something with which I'm happy.
We still need more attention to the garden. In particular, we're planning wooden framed elevated garden beds. Over to Chris' place and borrowed a circular saw, then cut some old fence posts (about 2m long) into two lengthways; two sets of them will give us a square bed of 4 m². Lots of sawdust.
Into town in the evening to pick up Yana, who had come with Vline, the ridiculously named Victorian train service, in a “coach”. I know that a coach is one of the components of a train, which makes sense, and my dictionary confirms it. But the time table talked of trains and coaches as something completely different. Turns out that the coach was really a bus. I know the English use the term (more specifically, for a chartered bus), but that was never the case in Australian. I'm left with the impression that Vline is doing everything it can to confuse people.
While in town, returned the toy air pump to ALDI and bought a larger compressor, which also doubles as a jump start station. It doesn't work either! In particular, on both units, the air pressure gauge doesn't show anything unless it's pumping (and I have my grave doubts about the accuracy then), so I can't use it for its prime purpose, checking tyre pressures:
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Another toy. I am getting quite annoyed about this.
In the evening, Yana and I played around with photos of the sun setting through the gum trees. We ended up with very different results, which I need to think about:
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Yana wanted to use a web browser to access her mail (what an idea!), but somehow everything went wrong:
1006 54963 1 0 96 0 23468 10644 lockd D p0- 0:01.13 firefox-bin
This one isn't firefox's problem; Yana's home directory was on eureka, and NFS got itself confused to the point that a kill -9 wouldn't stop the process. I'm not sure why eureka isn't running lockd, but I'd probably have to reboot to fix it, and I don't want to do that.
About there I gave up. What a mess!
| Monday, 17 December 2007 | Dereel | Images for 17 December 2007 |
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Yvonne into Ballarat to take Yana to the station to catch a train to “Southern Cross”—the new, obfuscatory name for Melbourne Spencer St station; clearly the latter name was too understandable. While she was in town, she returned the second toy air pump from ALDI, then off to look for something stronger. By the time we had reached a total price of $120, gave it up as a bad job.
More work on the PHP scripts, which look like continuing for some time. Also work in the garden. Some of the plants are looking quite unhappy, and we're now in the position where we either plant them or let them die.
| Tuesday, 18 December 2007 | Dereel | Images for 18 December 2007 |
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Despite the availability of sufficient water, some of our plants are not looking very happy, notably a couple of the hebes. Decided that it was time to plant them into the ground, prepared or not, and started a hedge to the north of the house. Getting them out of the plastic pots was difficult: the roots had penetrated all the drain holes, and it was almost impossible to disentangle them. These are small ones; the bigger ones were much worse:
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After breaking some off, gave it up as a bad job and left some of the bases in the ground.
Of course, that might not be the only problem. The unhappiest looking ones also had white spots on the surface of the root ball:
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That looks pretty much like some fungal infection; hopefully the new environment will solve that problem by itself.
Back in the office, got a call from Yana, who was in Ballarat. She had not been able to work out our phone number and thus warn us before leaving Melbourne. Into town to pick her up, in the process stopping in to buy some garden soil—6 m³ of it. To my surprise they're able to deliver tomorrow.
On the way home, dropped in at the car accessory place in Sebastopol, where I got an electric tyre pump for only $20, only half of the price of the ALDI toy. Took it home and confirmed that it works. Thank God for that, and no thanks to ALDI.
Spent some time working on the frames for the garden beds; they're a surprising amount of work, and by evening I had only done half of them. Well, it's not as if we could just put the soil straight in them anyway. Looks like being plenty of fun for days to come.
| Wednesday, 19 December 2007 | Dereel | Images for 19 December 2007 |
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The garden soil arrived today, so we had plenty to do spreading it around the garden. Didn't get much else done.
A while back on IRC, we were discussing the merits of digital TV broadcasts compared to analogue. The following frames are from the same broadcast, one in digital and the other in analogue. They're both 576i (i.e. 720x576, 25 Hz interlaced). Even without increasing the resolution, the difference is obvious.
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The contrast in the analogue version (second) is higher, but the image quality is much worse:
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| Thursday, 20 December 2007 | Dereel | Images for 20 December 2007 |
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After ripping out the purple daisies from the flower bed at the south of the house, we were left with not very much of anything. Gradually some plants came through; one was obviously capeweed, another shoots of the purple daisies, and a third one looked like weeds, but there was also a fourth one which I decided to let grow before making a decision. A good thing too: it proved to be heartsease (wild pansies, or as the French call them, savage thoughts (pensées sauvages)):
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Today was the day of the satellite installation, and three people showed up to do the job.
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Things progressed relatively well until they came to adjust the LNB, which was done with a laptop in my office, shouting up to the dish. You'd think that they'd have invested in a wireless relay. Round then it appears that the weather has a sense of humour: it started raining heavily, depositing 20 mm in 2 hours. Apart from the discomfort to the installers, it altered the reception enough to make adjustments almost impossible.
Finally they were done, and I was left with a functional connection via Microsoft. The “modem” is an iCON IPX-3200, given to me without any reasonable documentation, not even an admin password. Tried connecting to it from eureka, which gave a very different picture from the “Internet Explorer” view:
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The first is with “Internet Explorer”, the second with firefox. Clearly the second is completely broken: most of the text is missing. Mac OS' safari has the same problems as firefox; this appears to be a device designed to work only with “Internet Explorer”. Even on Microsoft, firefox shows the same breakage. Finally got some connectivity and called it a day.
Yana has a new lens, a 90-300 mm telephoto. Played around with it, comparing the results with my old Tamron. The Tamron (second photo) doesn't stack up well:
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Possibly I need more lenses after all.
| Friday, 21 December 2007 | Dereel | Images for 21 December 2007 |
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Into the office this morning to find that I had no connectivity via satellite beyond ping. nmap told me that I had no TCP access at all to ozlabs.org:
=== root@eureka (/dev/ttyp4) /var/tmp 96 -> nmap ozlabs.org
Starting Nmap 4.11 ( http://www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) at 2007-12-21 09:32 EST
All 1680 scanned ports on ozlabs.org (203.10.76.45) are filtered
Nmap finished: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 1457.640 seconds
Using the wireless gateway, it looks like:
=== root@eureka (/dev/ttyp4) /var/tmp 97 -> nmap ozlabs.org
Starting Nmap 4.11 ( http://www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) at 2007-12-21 09:58 EST
Interesting ports on ozlabs.org (203.10.76.45):
Not shown: 1670 filtered ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
21/tcp open ftp
22/tcp open ssh
53/tcp open domain
80/tcp open http
81/tcp closed hosts2-ns
443/tcp open https
465/tcp open smtps
873/tcp open rsync
993/tcp open imaps
995/tcp open pop3s
Nmap finished: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 151.643 seconds
What a pain! Did I need a login? Was it something to do with my network configuration? Painstakingly reconfigured things once at a time, once again rejoicing in the fact that Microsoft forgets any static configuration if you choose to use DHCP instead. With Microsoft, and after rebooting the router, was able to get connectivity. Tried again with the Apple, which appeared to do the same, after I discovered that only some Mac OS X programs respect /etc/resolv.conf, and others require you to mess around in this horrible GUI to do the same thing that you could do much more easily with a
cp -p /etc/resolv.conf.sat /etc/resolv.conf
Finally connected the modem back to eureka, and once again it worked—up to a maximum of 7 TCP connections! Sitting at each end of the satellite link (eureka and ozlabs) I could clearly see that an ssh connection setup worked fine once; the next time, the packets that went out to the modem didn't arrive at the other end. If I dropped the first connection, the second worked immediately, but then I couldn't reestablish the first one; clearly there was some limit, and I strongly suspected the NAT in the modem. Finally called up Wideband support and reached Brendan, who was surprisingly helpful. He told me that the default password for the modem ADMIN (yes, shouted) login was operator, after which I was able to view the network configuration—only with “Internet Explorer”, of course. IE showed the URL for the network configuration page, so I was able to compare it with firefox (also under Microsoft this time):
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All the information on the firefox page is wrong, and it seems that NetBIOS and ICMP are both enabled and disabled! How can you trust something like that, even when it looks right?
To his credit, Brendan admitted that he didn't know the answer and that he would get it and call me back—and he did, relatively quickly! The news is that they do, in fact, restrict the number of TCP connections (why, and how?), but that the limit was 200, and that there should be no limit for NAT. I can't see that there should be no NAT limit, but it's clearly not the current problem. Suggested to Brendan that there was some problem to resolve. Shortly after that the link went down, and after that and after rebooting the modem again and setting up my firewall to keep pain (Microsoft box) off the network, things worked again, though I have my doubts that my problems are over.
| Saturday, 22 December 2007 | Dereel | Images for 22 December 2007 |
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It was a warm night, and I had to turn the air conditioner on to be able to sleep comfortably. Round 6 am I woke up, looked outside, and saw something unexpected:
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The horses had broken through the provisional fence. Woke Yvonne, who quickly sorted things out, fortunately without my help. That was all the more fortunate because it started to rain relatively heavily while she was doing it. Before I got back to sleep, though, I had to address the fact that the camera didn't display the aperture in the window; later I discovered in the EXIF file that the aperture wasn't reported at all:
Exposure Time |1/25 sec. FNumber |f/0.0
The resultant photos were also underexposed. Further investigation showed that the camera didn't know anything about the aperture, and no settings seemed to apply. Removed the lens, wiped the contacts with my finger, and all was well. It was clearly some kind of contact problem; hopefully this won't happen too often.
Unfortunately, the rain was probably the cause of another power failure, this time tripping the circuit breaker that serves the office, so I had to go out in the pouring rain to the switchboard and turn it on again. And all that before 7:30 am!
It rained all day—more like a European November day than an Australian midsummer's day. Yana left for Bendigo to visit my mother, and I found another agaricus campestris, which Yana didn't want to take with her. That may have been as well; when I looked at it later in the day, it had changed colour:
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That's a decided yellow tinge, something that agaricus campestris should never have. But it smelt OK, and it doesn't show the typical bruising of agaricus xanthodermus; it heightens my suspicion that it's another related species; certainly the Wikipedia page shows enough of them. So I think we'll give up eating any agaricus out of the garden.
Spent most of the day trying, without success, to get my satellite link running reliably. Collected a lot of information for Brendan at Wideband; possibly it will be of help to other people in the same situation. The satellite modem (“terminal” or even “Consumer box”) is an iCON IPX-3200. It is directly connected to one computer. Version information is:
D, PACBM4_010_001_G001-P000_SSA_052 Firmware D 0012 SID SID-4.0.0.5 MCP MCP-4.0.0.1 Nettgain SG NG kernel version 056
I've already mentioned the broken HTML that this box generates. The real problem, though, is that the number of available TCP connections decreases significantly over time to a point where it is useless. Rebooting the modem works for a brief period of time, but I've had to do it three times in two days, and I find that unacceptable. Today at 12:30 I was down to 2 connections, as displayed by netstat:
=== root@eureka (/dev/ttyp5) ~ 266 -> netstat -afinet | grep 168
Active Internet connections (including servers)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address (state)
tcp4 0 0 192.168.5.101.61260 po-in-f91.google.http SYN_SENT
tcp4 0 0 192.168.5.101.64224 po-in-f91.google.http SYN_SENT
tcp4 0 0 192.168.5.101.57117 rr.pmtpa.wikimed.http SYN_SENT
tcp4 0 0 192.168.5.101.58843 72.52.195.188.http SYN_SENT
tcp4 0 0 192.168.5.101.52598 72.52.195.188.http SYN_SENT
tcp4 0 0 192.168.5.101.58617 rockhampton.oz.o.ircd ESTABLISHED
tcp4 0 0 192.168.5.101.60378 ozlabs.org.ssh ESTABLISHED
The SYN_SENT connections are attempts to set up connections; they all fail. On another occasion I have monitored the connection between the computer and the modem, and also via a different Internet connection at the remote site. The packets go out to the modem, but they don't arrive at the other end. If I drop one of the established connections, things work correctly, but then I still can't establish another connection.
After rebooting the modem, everything seems to work for a while. Here's one example immediately after rebooting. The TIME_WAIT are sessions that are closing normally.
=== root@eureka (/dev/ttyp5) ~ 267 -> netstat -afinet | grep 168
Active Internet connections (including servers)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address (state)
tcp4 0 0 192.168.5.101.51016 washingtonpost.c.http ESTABLISHED
tcp4 0 0 192.168.5.101.53863 a-61-9-129-152.d.http ESTABLISHED
tcp4 0 0 192.168.5.101.60988 washingtonpost.c.http TIME_WAIT
tcp4 0 0 192.168.5.101.61654 209.170.113.6.http ESTABLISHED
tcp4 0 0 192.168.5.101.62071 nwk-www.apple.co.http ESTABLISHED
tcp4 0 0 192.168.5.101.56726 c18-news-xw-lb.c.http TIME_WAIT
tcp4 0 0 192.168.5.101.56715 a-61-9-129-144.d.http ESTABLISHED
tcp4 0 0 192.168.5.101.51787 c17-sha-redirect.http ESTABLISHED
tcp4 0 0 192.168.5.101.62793 199.239.136.200.http ESTABLISHED
tcp4 0 0 192.168.5.101.50323 ozlabs.org.ssh ESTABLISHED
tcp4 0 0 192.168.5.101.59999 ozlabs.org.ssh ESTABLISHED
tcp4 0 0 192.168.5.101.50768 rockhampton.oz.o.ircd ESTABLISHED
All this suggests to me that the modem has serious software problems. I've asked Wideband to give me a firmware update, which they're going to do. In the meantime, turned the thing off again; it's a good thing I have an alternative.
| Sunday, 23 December 2007 | Dereel | Images for 23 December 2007 |
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Satellite networking problems
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Once again the satellite link had hung itself up this morning, and it continued at regular intervals during the day. About the only thing I could establish is that it doesn't seem to make much difference whether the link is in use or not; it hangs anyway. This makes it less likely that the problem is a NAT issue or related memory leak in the modem. Hopefully we can get the situation sorted out quickly.
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Filling the garden beds
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Spent the afternoon filling up our new garden beds. We had lots of plants that needed planting, but it proved that most of them were trees or bushes that didn't belong in the garden beds, so at the end of the day we had relatively little in the beds:
I revisited this entry on 25 April 2010 and again on 21 November 2011, based on other notes I had made. The photos are original, though the first was stitched together later from two others taken at the time. The photo appears to have been taken from the south-east corner of the house.
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I numbered the beds left to right, “top” (i.e. further away) to bottom, as viewed from the lounge room (to the left of the photo above):
It seems that I started numbering the beds from 2. I don't know why; I can't recall planning another bed which would have a better claim to be numbered 1.
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Bed 2: Acacia acinacea at rear, arum lilies, unknown red-flowering shrub.
The “acacias” proved to be some kind of Eucalypt, and they grew like fury. We pulled them out again on 30 November 2009.
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Bed 3: Unknown native plant with blue flowers.
We still don't know what this was. It didn't do well, especially as the birch behind it grew, and we removed it in November 2011.
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Bed 4: Olearia ramulosa (in very poor condition, see second photo) at back, arum lilies.
The Olearia did, indeed, not make it.
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Bed 5: Ginger-like plants, oregano front left, basil front right.
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Bed 6: Unknown native plant with blue flowers centre rear, Acacia drummondii left and right, Grevillea thelemanniana in front.
The unknown plant was a Westringia, which was removed on 21 November 2011. The flowers were closer to white than to blue, and there weren't many of them.
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Bed 7: Succulents, two different kinds. Yvonne is already thinking about changing this bed.
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Bed 8: Ginger-like plant with dark leaves (Cannas), arum lilies, Pultenaea daphnoides at rear. The left-hand “Pultanea” proved to be some kind of Eucalypt and grew to an enormous size.
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Bed in shade at east (what we later called the cathedral): ginger-like plants left centre, left front and centre front.
Some of the plants look pretty unhappy; hopefully they'll survive.
| Monday, 24 December 2007 | Dereel | Images for 24 December 2007 |
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A bit more work in the garden today, but most of the time was taken up with preparations for Christmas dinner this evening. That was novel because Yvonne and were doing (most of) the cooking, but dinner was at the Yeardleys, and we ended up making several trips back and forth to pick up things we had forgotten.
Had a fun evening:
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Mushrooms are still the order of the day:
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| Tuesday, 25 December 2007 | Dereel | |
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Up this morning to discover that Yvonne had caught the cold that Yana had picked up in Melbourne, and was feeling pretty bad; she went back to bed, but I had to pull her out again soon when I found a horse that had broken through a fence and was lying down on the other side, and wouldn't get up. With memories of seven years ago still alive, we went over there and found that there was nothing wrong with the horse. There was with the fence: there's no power on it. More work to do, some time.
Spent the day working on my photo scripts. The previous iteration of the Photos.php script handled three different sizes: “thumbnails”, “small” and “big”. In each case, it loads all photos for the day. That's fine for “thumbnails” and “small”, but for “big” (which currently can be up to 3648 x 2736 pixels) it ended up using up so much memory that it brought the system to its knees—not to mention the bandwidth involved in loading up to 40 MB of images. So finally got a new script, Bigphoto.php, that only shows a single photo, alternating between fitting the width of the screen and full size. It works, but there's plenty of work to be done yet, including error handling. First, though, I need to look at the old photos between 2000 and 2003, which don't fit into the directory hierarchy.
A bit of work in the garden, got half of my hops in the ground. Not too early, either: they're not looking happy.
| Wednesday, 26 December 2007 | Dereel | |
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Today Chris and Kelly Yeoh were supposed to come by, but Yvonne was still feeling pretty terrible, so we decided to put it off until tomorrow, thus also postponing our visit to Maffra to see my father and aunt Freda.
Yvonne hardly got out of bed all day, somewhat putting a damper on things. Despite intentions to the contrary, I spent a lot of time working on my photos, discovering what an incredible mess the photos of the year 2001 were. It's also quite difficult to fix, since I changed the timestamps of the images and sometimes put them in the wrong directory. By the evening I had only done about 5 months, but hopefully the rest will be easier.
My satellite link is still effectively non-functional with the gradual loss of TCP connectivity. It's now been 5 days since I originally reported this problem, but I still don't have the firmware upgrade promised on Saturday—something that should be available immediately on the net—and I can't stay on the net for more than two hours before I lose TCP connectivity. Admittedly, the problem could hardly have happened at a worse time.
In the meantime, I've confirmed beyond reasonable doubt that it has nothing to do with my system. Here's what I did:
This makes it fairly conclusive that there is nothing in my network configuration that is influencing this bug. The problem must be in the IPStar area; either the modem is defective, or they have misconfigured my connections. Only IPStar can confirm which of these two is the case. Sent another message to Wideband asking them to get the problem solved.
| Thursday, 27 December 2007 | Dereel | |
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Yvonne up this morning looking marginally better than yesterday, but still not great. Chris and Kelly Yeoh were due to come today, but in view of Yvonne's condition decided to postpone; they'll be back next month for linux.conf.au, so we may see them then.
For similar reasons, decided to postpone my journey to Maffra to see my father, which had originally been planned for today, and which we had then postponed until tomorrow. That's bad news for Yana, of course, since she will be leaving on Sunday, but she'll be back in late February, so we could do it then.
Did a little bit of tidying up, as had been my plan, but mainly still worked on the photos, this time addressing photos in the year 2000, of which there seem to be surprisingly few. It's annoying how I didn't pay attention to the time stamps in those days, and just sorting through the photos proves to be an issue.
Also a call from Gary at Wideband to tell me that he was escalating the problem with IPStar, and that he'd stay in touch. It's nice to get a call back and know that somebody is working on the problem, but it would be even nicer to have a solution. It's fairly clear that Wideband have little influence on what IPStar does.
| Friday, 28 December 2007 | Dereel | |
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There's still plenty of work to do in the garden, but the weather is getting hot again; today it hit 35°, and the forecast is for continuing hot weather until the New Year. As a result, spent most of the day indoors; somehow I'm still spending more time in front of a computer than I had intended.
Got a call from Peter at Wideband to tell me that they had turned off BST, something I had never heard of before. It seems reasonable, but it turned out the be the same situation as before: after a couple of hours, I lost TCP connectivity. I'm quite happy with the amount of effort the Wideband people are putting into this problem, but it seems that IPStar don't care too much. I don't see a quick end in sight.
| Saturday, 29 December 2007 | Dereel | Images for 29 December 2007 |
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The weather's still stinking hot—today we hit 39°—so spent most of the time in the house, still working on old photos. I seem to have all of 2001 done now. Hopefully the rest will be easier.
On the topic of state of the art, Diomidis Spinellis wrote a report aboout the latest Sony Ericsson Kyy0i mobile phone: it seems that the software has a memory leak, which the manufacturer addresses by requiring that it be rebooted every day. Sheesh!
| Sunday, 30 December 2007 | Dereel | Images for 30 December 2007 |
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Up early this morning to see Yana off back to Adelaide. Spent some time in the garden; we really need to get our Hebes planted before they die on us. I'm not looking forward to that; there are another 30 of them, so we'll end up with a hedge along the edge of a fence to the south horse paddock. And that will require daily watering at least until the autumn.
The bottlebrush that I pruned so radically 3 weeks ago seems to have decided to survive. About a week ago the first suggestion of shoots came out, and already that suggestion has become a real shoot, and many more are coming:
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The photo shows a section of stem about 10 cm long.
Thinking about Diomidis Spinellis' comment on embedded software yesterday suggested that I should write a review of the IPX-3200 Internet satellite modem, so did that. In the process, discovered a comment in the documentation:
Remote Management... Options include menu-driven command line interface and web-based monitoring (by using http).
I've already commented about the impossibility of using http, but what's this command-line stuff? Ran nmap against the box and found:
222/tcp open rsh-spx
/etc/services tells me:
rsh-spx 222/tcp #Berkeley rshd with SPX auth rsh-spx 222/udp #Berkeley rshd with SPX auth
Never heard of it. A quick search of the FreeBSD source tree showed no mention of it beyond the entries in /etc/services; the same applied to NetBSD, and there was no mention at all in the 4.4BSD source tree. So what is this thing? Spent some time on Google looking for any evidence of its use, without success.
Also considered how to access the modem without the help of “Internet Explorer”, and used Ethereal with some success. Came across the following exchange, which somehow sums up my opinion of the software quality:
T 192.168.5.100:8080 -> 192.168.5.101:2394 [AP]
HTTP/1.0 200 OK.
Date: Thu, 29 Jun 2006 13:24:22 GMT.
Server: Boa/0.94.13.
Connection: close.
Content-Type: text/xml.
.
<Return>
<BytesRecievedFiltered>1125180.0</BytesRecievedFiltered>
</Return>
So it returns the number of bytes “recieved” (the kind of misspelling which makes it extremely difficult to find things) with a resolution of 0.1 byte, or 0.8 bits. The time's also interesting. There doesn't seem to be any way to set it.
| Monday, 31 December 2007 | Dereel | Images for 31 December 2007 |
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The old year certainly went out with a bang, not a whimper: at 8:30 this morning the temperature was already 26°, and it climbed through the morning at 4° per hour, trailing off in the afternoon to finally hit 40° in late afternoon. Annoyingly, the air conditioners couldn't cope, and the temperature inside the house hit 28°. I have already complained about the terrible temperature control that these Fujitsu units have, but this is the first evidence that they're underdimensioned—something I can't blame Fujitsu for.
Doing some more thought about BST, and it occurred to me that I can set it from this end—if I have Microsoft “Internet Explorer”. So if they turned it off from the other end, did it save the configuration? The sequence of events on Friday was:
The problem is, did the reboot also turn on BST again? It's too late to know now. When I looked, it was turned on. Turned it off, rebooted the modem and tried again. This time I was still able to set up TCP connections 12 hours later. So maybe we have progress after all—again with no thanks to IPStar.
Also a couple of messages about port 222, the rsh-spx. James Andrewartha writes:
Have you tried just telneting to port 222 and seeing what you get?
I did try this the other day, and got:
$ telnet sat-gw 222 Trying 192.168.5.100... Connected to sat-gw.lemis.com. Escape character is '^]'. Connection closed by foreign host.
My normal way to answer these questions is to go back and try things out. But when I ran nmap against the modem this time, port 222 was no longer open! I can only guess that it decided to close it when port 8080 (http-proxy) was opened. I'll try it next time I have to boot, but right now I'm just so happy that it's still running.
James continues:
Is the documentation for the IPX 3200 online anywhere? Googling for it just returns your website and a bunch of results in Thai.
I don't think there is any documentation for the IPX-3200, and I'm not even convinced that this intended interface works. Next time I talk with support I'll try it out.
David Adam writes:
You might like to try the -sV switch to nmap(1), which will probe the open ports and attempt to discover what protocol is being spoken by the server on the other end - a bit like file(1) for network sockets.
That's going to have to wait, of course. He also suggests:
I've never heard of rsh-spx either, but two things spring to mind... Have you tried running an RSH client against the port? I know BSD rsh(1) doesn't take a port number as an argument, but some firewall redirection magic on your client machine make that easy to bypass.
In fact, NetBSD rsh does have an option for the port number, and I had been intending to try it. In NetBSD, the old entry in the BUGS section for rlogin(1) has also been removed:
BUGS
The rlogin utility will be replaced by telnet(1) in the near future.
That particular statement appears to have been added in 4.4BSD. And yes, indeed, it's no longer very likely.
One effect of the hot weather was to attract birds to the bird bath:
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Got a number of photos, though as this one shows (taken with a 210 mm telephoto, corresponding to 420 mm on a 35 mm camera), I need a much longer focal length. Spent some time looking at what's on offer—there's a 650-1300 zoom on the market, but I need to convince myself I can afford it.
The beer fridge has been giving problems. It keeps icing up:
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I've had some trouble with the carbon dioxide line, which has been stuck over the edge of the door, but that shouldn't have cause that much of a problem. To be monitored.
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