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Still, that means that we have a considerable quantity of water in the tank, about ⅓ of the 50 m³ that they hold:

A couple of days ago I discovered that there was a discrepancy between a photo file on my photo disk and on a backup disk. Which was wrong? Today was time to make backups to the other disk, so clearly it was time to investigate before overwriting the good version. A good thing I did, too: most of the contents of the file on my primary disk was replaced by binary zeroes, exactly the scenario that I suggested a couple of days ago.

6617089 is not a number that immediately jumps out and grabs you. But it's 2048 × 3231 + 1. The 1 is a fencepost obfuscation on the part of cmp(1), so this is really the start of a 2048 byte block, the default fragment size of FreeBSD's UFS. Investigation showed that the zeroes continued for many sectors.

So now I have a valid version. But how many other failures have slipped through the cracks? And why are files full of binary zeroes so common? Is it a FreeBSD issue, or (more likely) something to do with the way disks work? In any case, time to write a program to search for large consecutive binary zeroes.

Somebody posted this today:

Amusing, yes. But it does beg the question about the use of the punctuation at the right. It's not until you run into weird bugs that you realize that they're on your side. One of the issues that (not only) I still have with Python

Yvonne off with Chris Bahlo to Camperdown this afternoon for a seminar. And once again they had issues with the car not running smoothly, though this time Yvonne tells me that no “Powertrain” indication appeared. Who can repair this without spending most of his time scratching his head?

Yvonne bought a new bread pan last week. Today was the first time I used it. I started with the same all-rye starter that I made last week, the one that over-reacted.

Today was different. First, I needed a number of calculations just to get the quantities right, but the dough behaved completely differently from last time. Last time it rose so quickly that the top of the loaf separated from the rest. This time it took over 6 hours to rise. That doesn't seem to have anything to do with the pan, more with the temperature. I need to do all this under controlled temperature, something I'll postpone until we move house.

Call today from Kevin, the support manager of Aussie Broadband, addressing last weekend's outage. He wasn't able to help; despite the claims on the web site, they really don't have any real support at weekends, at least not for “residential” customers. Apparently they do for business customers. Does that makes sense? A two day outage will annoy any VoIP user, whether business or residential. But Kevin promised to get somebody from the business team to contact me to talk about pricing. That's good, because they don't have anything about National Broadband Network for business customers on their web site. He also promised to bring it up at the next management meeting. Hopefully they'll reconsider: apart from that, they're very good.

During quite a long discussion, Kevin's frustration with the NBN became evident. They don't have any support at weekends either! And he's seen the same bureaucracy that I have: “Remember Telstra 25 years ago? These people are worse”. And it seems that this silly 30 minute power down is really required by the NBN, and that they're inclined just to ignore a request if any ı has not been dotted or any l not crossed. That's a pity: it greatly detracts from the idea of the network, and is fuel for the advocates of the free-for-all that we had before.

Also discussed the O'Dea's problems with connection to the NBN. They need an antenna mast to conenct, and that seems to be something that the NBN bureaucrats don't understand. Aussie has done things like that before, but only with their own (WiMAX) towers. Still, he's noted the fact, and maybe Steve will get satisfaction from them.

The quality is barely acceptable. One of the clips doesn't close properly, the whole thing is very flimsy, and the cloth (folded) is very wrinkled.

And how does it work? I don't know yet. The thing is much larger than I expected, and I can't find anywhere to erect it. If at least the cross bar were easily shortened, things would be a lot better.

I'm selling my Tektronix 555 oscilloscope, but first, of course, I want to get better photos of it. Spent some time playing around with my new lighting stand, and finally managed to make it narrow enough to fit in the space I've chosen for the moment:

Started off with photos of one of the CA plug-ins. It wasn't easy. First, I just put it on the muslin:

As I feared, it was impossible to remove the creases. Went looking and found some DIN A3 paper to put underneath:

But the paper is still too small, and I had joins in it, as well as the muslin protruding at the top:

Finally I had something that looked reasonable:

But only at first sight. The plug-in looked completely clean when I started, but there's dust, cobwebs and some stain on it. These photos bring out all the minor details that you just don't normally see. And, worse, there are shadows! That's not completely surprising given the nature of the illumination, but it's certainly undesirable. Cleaned the plug-in and put my mecablitz 58-AF-2 on top for bounce flash off the ceiling. This is the configuration shown in the photo above.

And the results? Unexposed! DxO Optics “Pro” can extract some detail out of the shadows, but it's unexposed by at least 8 EV. And that with the same exposure and the same studio flashes as before. What went wrong? They definitely fired, so at first I thought it might be a problem with the (wireless) synchronization. But even after dropping the shutter speed to 1/60s, I couldn't get any image. Wikipedia is your friend:

Before the actual exposure one or more small flashes, called "preflashes", are emitted. The light returning through the lens is measured and this value is used to calculate the amount of light necessary for the actual exposure.

So the pre-flash set off the studio flashes, and the mecablitz was too weak to expose at all. So what do I do? Clearly under these circumstances it would be possible to run the flash in manual mode at full output, but what difference would it make? I still need to find a better approach.

I've seen this before. BigPond is too stupid to distinguish digital signatures from spam. So they reject messages on the mere suspicion of spam. Is this in their users' interests? A good reason for any BigPond user to choose a competent mail service provider. I'm still amazed how incompetent everything to do with Telstra is.

We've been planning to eat more beans for some time now. Too long, in fact. Yesterday I cooked 300 g of white beans for use in soup (and for the record they weighed 840 g after cooking). But their “best before” date was a year ago, and it shows: they're rough and crumbly. So now I'm looking for something else to do with them, possibly patties like masala vada.

In the meantime, though: is it worth cooking dried beans? They're not even overly cheap, about $5 per kg, though of course that goes a long way. But if you buy pre-cooked beans in cans, they're going to be cooked correctly, and though they're more expensive (how much?), the overall increase in food prices is barely noticeable.

Spent a considerably amount of time today trying to get better photos of the Tektronix 555 oscilloscope. I failed. Clearly bounce flash with the mecablitz 58-AF-2 was too weak to make any difference. But how about a mirror below the unit to reflect flash up? That required lifting the plug-ins a little, so got a thick paperback and put them on that. After all, I can crop later, right?

Wrong. I suppose I could white out the area with some other software, but the plug-ins overhang, and the title of the book reflected in the bars:

Yes, I can wrap the book in paper, but there's another issue: No obvious difference in the shadows. Here yesterday and today:

If anything, today's results looked worse. What next? Ring flash? Normal daylight? The light tent that I bought years ago and hardly used? Why is this so difficult?

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I still can't bear to throw them out, but clearly it's time to get rid of them. In the meantime, into the new shed they go.

Managed to clean out more than half of our part of the container:

What's left is at the back. On the right is nearly all Chris' stuff, and the cartons in the front are empty. It's surprising how little space the cartons take up in the new shed:

They should be ready in the middle of next week, and then they'll be back at the end—he estimates six weeks.

Six weeks! That would put us in the new house at the end of April at the very earliest. We were hoping early April at the latest. Duncan has been very cagey about telling us any dates, and of course Mark doesn't have to be right. But he has no reason to distort things, either. So maybe we should be looking at early May. This thing is taking forever!

The real issue taking photos of the Tektronix CA plug-in is the length of the knobs, up to 25 mm for the ones with the red centre. It's clear that any lighting from the side will cast a shadow.

So: completely equal lighting from all sides would do it. But how do you do that? I still have the options of the light tent, which previously has not been overly successful, or the ring flash. In principle the ring flash would be the solution, but the pane reflects. Tried it anyway today and got (with a previous attempt on the left):

As expected, the shadows are gone, and there's a reflection, though not as bad as I had feared. It's interesting how much better the adjusting screws for gain adjustment and DC balance are. But in comparison, I think it still looks worse than previously.

Where to now? Combine ring flash with something else? I suppose it's time to go and grab the light tent.

More playing around with the photos of the Tektronix 555 oscilloscope today. First, a combination of ring flash and studio flash. The studio flashes were set at full power, and I modified the ring flash power from ¼ to 1/16:

The first is a little burnt out in places; the second shows shadows again. It's similar with the front panel. I can't get rid of the shadows without burning out.

There's another issue as well: perspective. I'm looking at the middle of the plug-in, so I'm seeing the lower knobs from above and the upper knobs from below. It's enough to be irritating. This was with a 50 mm lens (24.4° diagonal), which isn't that short. But for the fun of it I tried it with a long telephoto (effectively 281 mm, or 4.4° diagonal). That required ambient lighting and an exposure of 5 seconds. Here the attempts from 2 days ago, yesterday and today:

Is that better? I think so. It's not as brightly coloured as the first flash attempt, but that may not be wrong. Ended up taking a whole lot more images like that. Now to clean the dust out of the mainframe and take that too, and I'll call it a week.

I somehow seem to have missed the announcement of the Leica T. Once again Leica have astounded me. A horrendously expensive camera with nothing to recommend it, neither image stabilization, speed, ease of use nor choice of lenses. Here a comparison with the Olympus OM-D E-M1 and Yvonne's Olympus OM-D E-PM2. Some of these are from Digital Photography Review, others from the March edition of c't Digitale Fotografie:

Only 7 years later, Leica appear to have forgotten about this model. The link I had (http://en.leica-camera.com/Photography/Leica-T/Leica-T-Camera-System) no longer works, and neither does the search function at https://www.en.leica-camera.com/. The Wikipedia link also no longer works.

Yvonne's camera meets or exceeds all the Leica specs, but cost $270 instead of Leica's $3,600. I don't have a comparable AF speed for the E-PM2, but I'm sure it's considerably less than 0.7 s. And the lens? Hard to find useful test results, but c't Digitale Fotografie states that the Vario-Elmar is considerably worse than the 12-40 Zuiko Pro.

There are many other specs, of course, but these are the ones that stand out, and I can't be bothered to follow the others up. Can the Leica do HDR bracketing? Who knows? But the E-PM2 can. The tests suggest that the Leica is not the easiest camera to use.

And the number of lenses available? The 4 for the Leica is pretty clear. Why can't it use their existing lenses? The 139 for Olympus is conservative; it's the number of Four Thirds system lenses available from B&H.

All in all, typical Leica. How do they manage to sell cameras like this at any price, let alone at the inflated price of this camera?

So: why do I even bother to mention it? They have done one thing right: they haven't broken the sensitivity scale. According to ISO 12232:2006, the light sensitivity of a sensor can be measured either logarithmically (effectively decibels, according to the previous DIN 4512) or linearly (according to the older ASA standard). In each case, the steps are decibel steps, representing the tenth root of 10 (10↑0.1) or a linear factor of approximately 1.258. Here's a comparison, showing how the ASA values were approximated:

For each 10° increase, multiply the linear version by 10. 20° ISO is 100 linear. 38° is 6,400. 41° is 12,500. And so on.

But that's not what the industry has been doing so far. Most manufacturers have been misled by the close relationship between 3° and linear 2. Starting (I think) with 40°/10,000, they're deviating from this scale. Instead they're going by powers of 2 and doubling, so now they're writing 12,800 instead of 12,500 for 41°. We've even got as far as 58° (400,000 linear), which they're selling as “409,600”.

This is silly. In particular, it tears the linear scale apart. Add 50 to the sensitivities and you get:

The problem here is that the relationships no longer hold true. Some of the values have diverged, others haven't. I'm guessing at some of these values, of course, since nobody has actually shown any except 50°/53°/56°. But clearly it's time to recognize that the scale has nothing to do with powers of 2, and return to the powers of 10. And that's what Leica appear to have done. I wonder whether they'll be successful.

In passing, of course, it would make sense to finally depart from the linear scale altogether: it's becoming more and more unwieldy, while the logarithmic scale still looks sane. But I don't see that happening any time soon.

Yvonne wanted to see how the house is progressing, so over to take a look. The painters are progressing, and the doors are now hung:

That photo also shows how much brighter things are in the other room (the “studio”). They've removed the protective coating from the windows:

And of course the walls have been painted. It makes a big difference.

The other thing that caught our eyes was the number of touch-up spots on the wall:

It seems that they're normal, but in this case they're excessive. Mark confirms that it's a pain. This is what some of the not-yet-retouched areas look like:

A couple of days ago we moved out half our content of the shipping container, and today was the day for the rest. We managed half. There are still a few cartons in the back, which I'll need to sift through before taking to Stones Road: I suspect that at least half will stay here pending a garage sale, and most of that will subsequently be discarded.

It's interesting to note the effort required. Theoretically, picking up heavy boxes and putting them on a trailer should be about as difficult as taking them off the trailer and putting them in the shed. In practice, the latter is much easier. It must be the pain of accepting that I have to throw the stuff out.

On IRC today, Jürgen Lock pointed us at this comparison of network costs around the world. He's in Germany, but the take-home message, at least for me, was:

Telstra .... charges some of the highest transit pricing in the world — 20x the benchmark ($200/Mbps).

So why hasn't the National Broadband Network changed that? I had thought that the geography was part of the problem, but the same article also says:

Given that Australia is one large land mass with relatively concentrated population centers, it's difficult to justify the pricing based on anything other than Telstra's market power.

My main reason for disliking Telstra was their extremely poor support. Maybe the pricing reflects the cost of their inefficiency.

Yvonne and Chris have finally got me to agree to go riding again. This morning, without fail. So we had breakfast, I did my morning admin stuff, and they went off looking for pallets to put under the hay in the hayshed.

A little later, a call from Yvonne. Come along and take a look. A box that she could convert into a tack room:

It seems that they were shipping crates used for shipping equipment for the Mount Mercer Wind Farm:

This one is smaller than what Yvonne needs, but Doug (Braddy) tells her that there are many more, and he is looking for one 2.2×3.9 metres in size, which would work well. Price? $100, and $25 for delivery. We'd still need to put a front wall in, but you can't beat that price.

Doug also runs the Dereel Men's shed, something I've never understood. Currently it's all in one of his sheds:

Doug did a good sales pitch, and so got new members—Yvonne and Chris! I'll hold off until I've taken a look.

Also bought a number of planks that had been reworked as raised garden beds. Again, at $10 the prices are really good. Now to work out what to do with them.

Taking the photos of the Tektronix 555 oscilloscope has been surprisingly painful. But enough is enough. Tried again today with flash and the long telephoto lens, this time concentrating on the mainframe. Moving the lens further away also allowed me to put the flash units closer together, with good results. Here my five tries of the CA plug-in:

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The first was just with studio flash. The second was only with ring flash, the third with a combination of ring flash and studio flash, the fourth with ambient light, and the fifth, like the first, with studio flash only. Yes, the shadows are still there, but they're much less obtrusive.

Took photos of the entire scope, plug-in by plug-in, and the mainframe with and without plug-ins.

They're all on the Tektronix 555 album page.

From time to time while walking the dogs, they go off into the bush. The densest kind here is Acacia paradoxa, also known as Kangaroo Thorn. And it breaks off, so we continually have to remove prickly stuff like this:

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It's been nearly 18 months since we had to put down my mare Darah, and since then I haven't been on a horse. In fact, since Darah was sick, it seems that it has been nearly 3 years since the last time I noted in this diary that I had been riding.

I bought a new riding helmet months ago, but I got the feeling that Yvonne and Chris didn't want me to come with them—it wasn't for the lack of a horse. Then they wanted to go riding yesterday, but spent the time looking at shipping crates instead. Still, finally we got round to it today. Chris gave me Smokey, an American Saddlebred stallion that we're looking after (and who is for sale!).

Saddling him was fun:

Off into the forest.

Riding a stallion is always interesting because he had to be kept away from mares. So of course Yvonne and Chris both rode mares (Carlotta and La Tigre respectively). Things went well enough apart from an encounter with some small boys on bicycles at close quarters, which worried both Smokey and Carlotta. But somehow it's a completely different feeling from Darah, perhaps in part because of the saddle. Chris was encouraging: “You'll never find another horse like Darah”.

Yvonne's photos of the ride didn't come out quite as she had intended. Here's one of them:

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What went wrong there? 12 different copies of one image, all mutilated. It's a combination of these silly “Art Filters” and the ease with which you can change the settings on Yvonne's Olympus E-PM2 (or, for that matter, my Olympus OM-D E-M1) while riding on a horse. All you need to do it pick it up wrongly, and you've set all sorts of nonsense. All the fault of touch screens.

The only good thing about the touch screen is that you can deactivate it. On both cameras, setup menu J, “Touch Screen Settings” allows you to turn the bloody thing off. Maybe Yvonne will like the camera better now.

Over to the Stones Road property in the afternoon to let the dogs run. Now that the fence wire and the horses have been removed, there's no reason not to let them run around. Well, not much. Zhivago and Leonid immediately headed for the dam and got themselves soaking wet. But not my Nikolai—he stayed out.

Well, for a while. I think he must have headed for the water tanks instead, soaked himself and then rolled himself in the sand:

What a mess! Of course we left them in the dog run until they had dried out. It wasn't until some time after 20:00 that Yvonne let them in again. And it was a good half hour later before we noticed that they hadn't come into the lounge room. Out to the kitchen: door open again, dogs run away.

But they weren't far, and came in almost immediately, panting heavily. Leonid soon recovered, but Nikolai yelped a bit and carried on panting. Felt him: another yelp or two, but not related to where I touched him. In the end called up Pene Kirk, and she told me how to take his pulse (on the inside of the thigh, from the front). My best guess was 150, and that after 10 minutes!

Over to Pene's, and she checked him out. After 30 minutes he was still panting, though not as much. I had been worried about heart issues or snake bite. His heart was OK, and as Pene put it, if it had been a snake, he wouldn't be standing any more. Her concern was that it could be bloat, apparently Gastric dilatation volvulus. And that's serious, and it's known to affect dogs like Borzois and greyhounds. But she couldn't hear any typical symptoms, so she gave him an injection just in case, and we took him home again. He carried on breathing irregularly for a couple of hours, but seemed to be on the mend. I'm going to have to read up on bloat.

On the way home picked up an unexpected treat for the dogs: a rabbit had run out in front of the car and killed itself.

Spent the night worrying about Nikolai, but it seems we didn't need to. He was fine the next morning, and ready to consume last night's rabbit:

In the evening to Stones Road again, and found how he managed to cover himself in sand:

First attempt at bean patties this evening, roughly based on masala vada. Not an unmitigated success: I had cooked the beans soft, and they were easy to crush, but they needed something to hold the patties together. Also too much salt. On the other hand, it shows promise, something to do with beans that are too old to eat whole.

Caught Nikolai coming out of the dining room licking his lips this evening. What had he been eating? We had put all the meat away. But not the salad:

This was a Khoriatiki salata, with Feta. Until Niko got at it.

Yvonne dragged me out of bed this morning to tell me that we were off the net. It took me a while to understand, but in to the office, and sure enough, we had been off the net for hours. The usual thing: DHCPDISCOVER going out, no reply. Called up Aussie Broadband support, spoke to Kylie, who relatively quickly connected me to Jerom, who is (ahem!) 3rd level support.

He confirmed that they were receiving the DHCPDISCOVER and replying correctly with a DHCPOFFER. But that reply never made it back here. Shades of last month? In any case, it's not acceptable. Got him to transfer me to Kevin, the manager, who told me that it was part of a more general outage, that the problem was within the National Broadband Network, with whom a ticket had been raised, and that hopefully things would soon come back to normal.

They weren't. The outage lasted all day. And it seemed to be limited to customers of Aussie Broadband (more specifically, the address block 180.150.4.0/24).

That gave me an opportunity to revive my network status page. I had been through three iterations: firstly ADSL, then satellite, and finally HSPA. And when the NBN arrived, I thought I could stop. It seems that I was wrong.

So I frobbed the old scripts, and to my surprise discovered the relative reliability:

Less reliable than satellite! And look at those average outage times! Satellite outages were mainly short, whereas the average NBN outage is 103 minutes, and the longest (admittedly not the fault of the NBN) was well over 2 days.

How can this happen in a modern network? Bureaucracy, it seems. Everybody I have spoken to confirms that they're really hard to deal with, and being a monopoly, they don't need to justify themselves. Not quite what we were hoping for, and possibly an argument for the current government's deemphasis of the network.

How many people were affected? Hard to say. CJ called me in the evening to tell me that his phone (VoIP via Aussie Broadband) wasn't working. How many other people didn't notice until then, or at all?

While I was grumbling about the network outage, Yvonne, who had been riding with Helen Miller, came in with the news that Helen had fallen off her horse and had probably broken her wrist. That required somebody to drive her and her horse back to Enfield (in fact, just round the corner from the property in Inglewood Drive that we nearly bought two years ago). So off back with her, and gave her instructions to go to the Ballarat Base Hospital and have it looked at.

She called back in the evening: it looks like she'll need surgery, but first a cat scan tomorrow. And I thought Friday the 13th was supposed to be the unlucky day.

It's interesting to note where the tiles come from:

I spent some time in Kuching nearly 50 years ago. Looking at the map nowadays shows me how much it has changed. Jalan Kong Ping didn't exist at the time; probably the whole area was virgin jungle. How times change (not to mention the length of the road, which on the map looks to be only about 1 km long).

Jesse, the tiler, has just bought himself a beagle puppy, and he was really impressed by our dogs. Yvonne gave him lots of tips, and he played around getting them to sit on command:

Time to change my ISP, I'm afraid. Whom should I choose? Internode has the best reputation. They offer a similar product as Aussie Broadband: 300 GB per month for $75 compared to 250 GB per month for $60. The price difference is real: I never use 250 GB, so the additional 50 GB from Internode are of no interest.

Called them up and got the usual message, that I had a wait of between 5 and 9 minutes before I could speak to anybody. Accepted the offer of a call back when somebody was available. And the call back came almost immediately, followed by a 6 minute wait before I was connected to Alex. He wasn't prepared for my questions about reliability, of course, but gave me the impression that they did have real techies available over the weekend. Went through the usual stuff, and was in the process of signing up when he told me that I would have to reconfigure my “router” with a new user name and password.

At first sight that's obvious. But what user name and password? You don't need that for a DHCP connection to the National Broadband Network. Are they using PPPoE on the NBN? He went and checked. Yes.

He couldn't tell me why, of course. But he also didn't understand my objection. How much overhead does PPPoE create? It depends on the packet size, but for small packets it can be as much as 10%. Why should I choose that? Why did Internode choose that? So, at least for the time being, I backed out of the contract.

It wasn't until some time later that it occurred to me that PPPoE might also have an advantage: no DHCP problems. Apart from Aussie Broadband, I have also had short-lived NBN contracts with Exetel and SkyMesh. Exetel uses PPPoE, and SkyMesh uses DHCP. Exetel had no problems with connection setup or maintenance, while it took SkyMesh 2 days to configure their DHCP server correctly. And the current problems with Aussie also appear to be related to DHCP, as was the longest ever outage last month. But by then it was evening.

But not everything is going exactly according to plan. I had already noticed the rough join between tiles and the skirting board. Duncan tells us that this is normal. I can't recall ever seeing it before, and next time we're in town, we'll have a look at their display home to see what that looks like.

There are also a few less-than-perfectly laid tiles:

And in the kitchen there's a problem with the ornamental tiles:

Shouldn't that row have been between the top two rows? What does it say in the contract? Nothing. But the plans from the contract have been updated to show the location:

But why didn't we have to sign off on that?

In any case, there seems to be a further issue: the row looks like it's upside-down:

Duncan is going to have to clarify that.

As if that wasn't enough, there's a 3 cm gap below each door. That seems excessive. When the flooring goes down, it'll drop to 2 cm or maybe a little over, but that doesn't seem right. Duncan, of course, says “that's the way we always do it”. Another case for the display home. Back at our home, took a look: yes, there's a 2 cm gap where floors are carpeted, because of the rail underneath. But where there are wood floors, the gap is about 5 mm, as I would have expected. Until proof of the contrary I'm assuming that they forgot to adapt the door size to the flooring.

Don't the roof colours of house and shed match well? In fact, the shed has a plain galvanized iron roof, the same colour as the walls. The colour is just a reflection of the sky.

Network connectivity came back this morning at almost exactly midnight. I had traced the network since about 8:30 yesterday, but of course by the time I stopped it, we had about 200,000 packets and a 235 MB trace file. All that interested me was the time up to the restoration of service. How do I do that? With Edwin Groothuis' help discovered the wireshark “export” function. You can specify a packet range, in my case 1-8212. And sure enough, it saved a file with just those packets.

Tried to read it back in again.

The file "/home/grog/public_html/Day/20150313/offnet.trace" isn't a capture file in a format Wireshark understands.

Huh? It's a plain text file!

How do you save it as a capture file? At least with the old version I'm using (1.6.8), you don't, though it appears that newer versions might.

More head-scratching. Then Peter Jeremy suggested using tcpdump:

And sure enough, that worked. What did I see? I had started dhclient, which zeroes out the IP address of the interface, but then reinstated it, so I had both DHCPDISCOVER and ARP requests going down the line. What was coming back? Nothing, you'd expect. But that's not quite what I saw. My local interface is aussie-gw.lemis.com, and I've reverse mapped the zone for other end so that I can call it radiation-tower.aussiebb.net:

What's all that? Microsoft stuff, of course, but how did it find its way to me? It continued at irregular intervals all day long. Most of the IP addresses don't resolve (it's Microsoft space, after all), but the one that does suggested that it's in Europe, and the others seem to be scattered round the world. The last recognizable PTRs returned by traceroute are:

I assume that means Québec and somewhere in China respectively.

Finally connectivity came back. First ARP:

That's interesting, because I thought that I needed DHCP to create a routing a path to the other end of the National Broadband Network cloud. But it took my dhclient a little longer before it reacted:

In the meantime, things weren't silent. The NBNS requests exploded, now coming from port http:

The first of these also appears to be in China, and the second in the USA. But why am I getting these requests from source port http? And why only since connectivity came back? They're not really targeting me (and I'm not replying), so presumably they have been coming all the time, and until the net recovered they weren't getting through.

In principle I was replying, but since I didn't have a MAC address, I couldn't. But that's what firewalls are for.

Whatever it was, the raises more questions than it solves. I'll do some more thinking.

One thing that hasn't changed is the poor response to DHCP requests:

Given that this seems related to the problem, it's high time to find out what's going wrong.

More work on my network status page today, without making it really pretty. One thing of interest is the “TCP speed” plot, in blue:

This shows the reciprocal of the time it takes to load a small document from the other end of the world. It's surprisingly constant. But for some reason the value increased round 10 March. Looking at the raw log data shows:

The second column is the time in seconds for the transaction; there really was a step change there.

Also kept an eye on the DHCP traffic. Yes, we're still running into timeouts:

At 17:42:59.151418, after 47 requests over 22 minutes, dhclient gave up on the DHCP server with which it had been registered and sent a total of 11 requests out on the broadcast address. Like the before, none was answered. Seven minutes later, at 17:50:07.634879, it gave up with requests, dropped its IP address, and sent out a DHCPDISCOVER request. As in every case I've seen, the response was immediate: two responses, in fact, after 61 ms and 69 ms. This looks like exactly the same scenario I discussed last month. Given the experience of the last week, though, it's clearly imperative to fix the problem.

It's been a while since Yvonne last baked a Soufflé, but she hasn't lost her touch:

The photo was taken a couple of minutes after it came out of the oven.

Also a new data point for roasting Kassler. Today we had a very small one, about 280 g. And it took 28 minutes at 180° to reach 74°.

Autumn is upon us, but I'm consistently surprised how many flowers are only now coming out.

Unlike last summer, this summer was relatively cool. The first signs of autumn are becoming evident:

I've forgotten what these bulbs are, but they're certainly looking a lot better than last year (first photo):

One of the Acacias in the row of bushes in the south is in flower:

I can't recall it flowering at this time of year before.

And the climbing rose (“News”, I think) is really spreading now:

So is the Clematis maximowicziana:

On the down side, compared to last year the Bromeliads and Gasteria aren't flowering. Nor is the Xanthorrhoea quadrangulata, which looks as if it may be a once-a-lifetime bloomer. Here it was last year:

This year it's pretty much the same, but without flowers. In particular, the same flower spike is still there.

And this grass, planted years ago, is also flowering nicely:

And the winter-flowering Hellebore seems to have made it through the summer:

Somehow I'm not keeping up with the work I need to do for moving in to the new house. The news that it could be little more than a month should spur me on, and today I spent a fair amount of time planning for things. Jim Lannen can do the final fit for the electrics on Friday, but will I have things ready for him? Where are the lights? Where is the UPS? I can't even decide which UPS to buy, nor how long it should run at full load. At least I now have a list of what lamps we need:

Some of the exterior wiring could be a problem:

We had been planning to put coach lantern style lamps outside the doors. I can't see how we can do that with the way the cables have been laid.

Earthworks invoice from Warrick Pitcher today. Needs to be scanned and sent to CVI. All went well—but where was the image? Tried again, and again it didn't appear.

This is Epson software under Microsoft. Had it decided to store the image somewhere else? Spent some time looking for the configuration menu which specifies where the document should go. Where is it?

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It proved to be this meaningless icon:

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Selected that and got another confusing menu:

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Only three choices of location: My Documents, My Pictures, or anything else. And it was set for My Pictures. Where's that? After some searching it seems that the correct pathname in Microsoft is c:\Users\grog\Pictures. No My to be seen (and, surprisingly, no spaces in the path name). But they should be going to eureka:/Photos/scans, mounted via Samba, and I had some recollection that I had created something like a symlink to store it. But where was it? Tried tree-climbing (entering pathnames would be too simple), but discovered that all my Samba file systems were inaccessible. Why?

My fault, of course. The other day I discovered that half the world was accessing my Samba server, so I added a firewall rule, which blocked a surprising number of requests:

Looking more carefully, though, I had mistyped: 192.19.197.0/24 instead of 192.109.197.0/24. I thus effectively blocked just about everything. OK, that can be fixed. But what's wrong with this picture?

• The scan program issued no warning or error message whatsoever, although it was unable to save the image where I had instructed it.

• Something—Epson or Microsoft? Who can tell?—appears to have broken the symlink.

• My attempt to reconnect the file systems failed without any explanation.

That's going to be a corner window.

The shed is making slow progress:

And I hope that this is the state of the brickwork before cleaning:

It certainly looks untidier than ours did before being cleaned.

Into town today for a number of house-related things. First to Beaumont tiles to get copies of the documents we had signed, not helped by the density of the personnel. But as suspected, yes, we had signed off on the arrangement of the tiles, but not on the orientation of the decorative frieze. And they confirmed that there was no obvious way. So JG King should have asked us. Looks like a case for negotiation.

Then to Bunnings to finally get some lamps for the house. It's still like pulling teeth. Moved on to Masters, where we found all except for the lamps over the bathroom mirrors and two of the outside lamps, which are complicated by the way Jim has done the wiring through the bricks. I'll have to talk to him about what we can put there.

Then along to look for the JG King display home in Lucas. Sign of the times: it had been sold. Signs pointed further west, so followed them, and sure enough found a couple of new display homes. We wanted to compare door heights and the transition between skirting boards and tiling. The transitions in both display houses looked normal, but the gaps under the doors were still too big:

Still, that's 14 mm, not 30. How big will the gap be when the floor is laid?

The receptionist in the garage recognized us, and thought we had been there before. Yvonne recognized him too: Bernie Massey, who had only been with JG King for 3 weeks. But two years ago (almost to the day) he was working for Harcourts, and had sold us the wrong plot of land in Enfield. Hopefully he'll make a better fist of it as a house salesman. While discussing the incompetence of JG King's admin staff, I mentioned that they sent me the wrong plans. It was on the tip of my tongue to say “so you should fit in well here”.

Back home past Stones Road. Still no sign of any activity this week. And it was necessary: today was excessively windy, and the outside door that had been wedged in place had pushed its wedge out, and had been banging in the wind:

Looks like we need a new door.

In passing, I hope they're going to improve on this skirting board:

The black toner for our Brother HL-3170CDW laser printer is running low. I've had it for 8 months, so it was to be expected. Took a look on eBay and found the toner cartridge (TN-251) for $25.30, including free postage. While in town, dropped in at Officeworks. Yes, they had it in stock—for $129!

That's ridiculous. OK, the cartridges on eBay are almost certainly replacements, but they have the chips, and there can't be that much difference in quality. The printer cost $249, so this single cartridge costs more than half the purchase price. A complete set of 4 would cost more than double the purchase price. Nobody can tell me that these prices aren't inflated. And what good does it do for Brother?

Up early this morning to go over to Chris Bahlo's property with her to meet David Grigg of BREAZE about solar electricity. He didn't show. While waiting, noted that Simonds don't put tubes on their downpipes:

I suppose that the brickwork can take it, at least in the short term.

In the afternoon Doug Braddy was supposed to bring her one of the shipping crates we were talking about last week. He didn't show: his truck had broken down. And for those two appointments she had taken the day off work.

To be fair to David, the fence looks OK. How did that sheep get in there? Clearly it was having difficulty finding its way back.

So finally today was the day to go shopping in Melbourne. Up early for a start at 8:00, loaded the oscilloscope into the car, while Yvonne went off to walk the dogs. She didn't get far: somebody's Clydesdale had got out and was annoying Smokey. Woke up Chris to deal with the issue, but the Clydesdale had moved on.

Discussing the matter at breakfast, it seems that the horse belongs to the Yeardleys' neighbours. They seem to suit each other.

Somehow as a result of this, Yvonne decided not to go to Melbourne. I'm not happy.

I've been finding that SpamAssassin has flagged more and more legitimate mail as spam lately. The reason is always the same:

Lately, though, I've noticed that even well-known senders are getting flagged like this. That's serious because I have set my maximum score to 3, so just about anything else will cause it to be classified as spam. It really hit home when my system classified local mail as spam. Clearly time to weaken the score. Went looking and found, in /usr/local/share/spamassassin/50_scores.cf:

Huh? That's also where I set the required score. What's going on? Read the man page, which confirmed the location. Looked for alternate 50_scores.cf files, but didn't find anything appropriate. Time for ktrace. spamd is a Perl script, and what I found was:

What's the difference between DEF_RULES_DIR and LOCAL_RULES_DIR? Have they changed things so that the other .cf files are only read from the latter? And why doesn't the man page even mention the second directory? And there I found no mention of DNS_FROM_AHBL_RHSBL at all. It seems to have been built in at install time, though nothing in the trace gave any hint. So I put the appropriate line in /usr/local/etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf, and sure enough, it worked. But why do I need to run ktrace to find this? And why is the man page wrong? This is an old version of SpamAssassin, so it's not worth following up, but it's clear that there's yet another reason to accelerate the system upgrade that has been waiting for over a year now.

But why is everything being classified as spam anyway? Went looking at dnsbl.ahbl.org. Nothing there! http://ahbl.org/ says little, and leads to http://ahbl.org/node, which also says nothing obvious until you read down a couple of (undated) items:

I'm winding down the public DNSbl services of the AHBL.

This means the dnsbl.ahbl.org, ircbl.ahbl.org, rhsbl.ahbl.org lists are all going away, as is the public lookup/removal tool.

So it's just not there any more, so SpamAssassin fails hard by flagging all mail as failing the test. What a pain!

• Viewport not configured (3,000 pages). It seems that this one is simple. Just add this line in the appropriate place:

      <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
  

• Small font size, also all 3,000 pages. Huh? I deliberately haven't specified any font size, exactly for this reason. But I followed the link and discovered:

  Use a base font size of 16 CSS pixels.

  Why? There's a long discussion of pixel scaling, so CSS pixels aren't real pixels. But why should CSS have to say anything about the base font? Tried setting it just for the fun of it, and it didn't make any difference on my screen.

• Touch elements too close. What does that mean? I don't have any steenking touch elements. But they mean links, of course:

  This rule triggers when PageSpeed Insights detects that certain tap targets (e.g. buttons, links, or form fields) may be too small or too close together for a user to easily tap on a touchscreen.

  Now things are getting complicated. Yes, I have lots of links on my pages. That's a feature, not a bug, and moving them further away would make the page unwieldy. On the other hand, I have difficulty accessing the pages on my Android tablet. I blame this on the tablet, not my pages. Still, a lot of this depends on the viewport, though I haven't seen any difference after adding one.

• Content not sized to viewport. Well of course not; I didn't have one. It's just surprising that this only refers to 2,688 of the 3,000 pages. But the recommendations all seem to apply. As the TL;DR says:

  • Do not use large fixed width elements.

  • Content should not rely on a particular viewport width to render well.

  • Use CSS media queries to apply different styling for small and large screens.

  Modulo viewport I'm doing all this already, and the text of my diary scales nicely on even a very narrow display (though the headers don't).

I copied the list above from the Google web site. It proved to be invalid HTML.

So I should probably consider widening the gap between links, but only for toy displays. I certainly don't want to mess up the links on a real display. And before I do anything, I'll see what difference the viewport makes.

Now we just need them to clean up the mess around the house and we can start thinking about a garden.

This weekend the Golden Plains Arts Trail is taking place. Yvonne tells me that there are 99 artists in 30 locations around the Shire, but you wouldn't find it (or very much else) on the web site. Still, she's participating, so she was up and off to the Dereel Hall early this morning. I went over later to take a look:

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Admittedly, it was only 10:00, but I was the only visitor. Yvonne told me in the evening that they had had several hundred visitors, but no sales. I'll be interested to see how tomorrow turns out.

Our failed trip to Melbourne had a consequence: we didn't have enough to eat. While Yvonne was doing her arts thing, I went into town and bought some food. Also stuff for the house: coincidentally ALDI had a “3000 W” generator:

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It's not until you read the fine print that some discrepancies appear:

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And on the box it's another story again:

Still, I've seen that before, and was even expecting it: my last ALDI generator (“2200 W”) was rated at 2 kW. And 2.7 kW is exactly the rating of the UPS I intend to buy, so it sounds like an ideal choice. Bought the last two—exceptionally, not in case one fails, but because Chris wanted one too. Also bought some outside lamps and infrared sensors at Bunnings. Now we just need lights for over the bathroom mirrors, but we're not decided on what they should be. All the lights had power plugs, not quite what I'm looking for.

Start time End time  Duration   Badness        from                    to
                     (seconds)
1426893625 1426895771   2146	  0.005	# 21 March 2015 10:20:25 21 March 2015 10:56:11
      

Another 35 minute outage! What caused it? The trace is confusing:

The first three requests are for a lease renewal, which is finally granted in the fourth packet at 10:06:48.566402. And then there's nothing until 10:56:10.524430. Why not? The lease duration is 60 minutes, so the client should have sent out a new request at 10:36. Why didn't it? It seems it did:

Presumably the ARP information had expired by the time it tried. So the lack of communication wasn't obviously related to DHCP this time. And when the connection was reestablished, a renewal request was enough. Yet another problem? When will they iron out these issues?

Some months ago, when I was complaining about Facebook, Peter Jeremy (a Google employee) suggested that I use Google Plus instead. I signed up, took a look, and found it confusing. It also didn't address the issue that I don't like the concept anyway. So I forgot about it again.

Then today Peter was analysing the display of my web pages on mobile devices. I asked him for screen shots, and got the reply:

So I went looking. I didn't find anything useful, just lots of input from people I've never heard of about topics that don't interest me. After 10 minutes following all the links, I couldn't find anything “shared”. Peter couldn't tell me either. Why hadn't he just sent me the images by email, like God intended? In the end he did, but why didn't he do that in the first place? Android makes it difficult, while “sharing” is apparently easier—when it works.

While looking round Google Plus, found this page:

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Those are recent places near Dereel? I don't know any of them. I didn't even know there was a tavern in Sebastopol. Followed each of them up:

 

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The upshot: I've never heard of any of them, and none are anywhere near Dereel. One is in St Austell, which I last visited about 45 years ago, one in Sebastopol, California, which I last visited on 12 December 1996, one in San Francisco, which I last visited on 10 February 2002, and one in Berlin, which I last visited in 27 December 1969. What's recent or local about any of that? Somehow Google's personalization leaves a lot to be desired.

Over to the Stones Road property in the evening to take the dogs for a walk, and bumped into Garry and Diane Marriott, who are back again on their way to Darwin. Discussed a number of things, including a hedge between the properties. Diane has long ago planted some flowers there, including Hebe and Salvia microphylla, all looking very unhappy without enough water, so we'll water them with the bore water. Another tree, also very unhappy, was making the best of it:

Garry tells me it's a Kalamata olive. All of this should pick up well with a bit of watering.

We've been married for 30 years! And for that, of course, we ate beef filet. Yvonne had wanted to do Tournedos Henri IV, but because of the Golden Plains Arts Trail she didn't have time, so we chose pepper steak instead, at least for Chris and me.

Last time I tried this, the sauce was far too watery. So I reduced the liquid by 50 ml. The result? Still too watery. The only other liquid in there is cognac, currently 30 ml. It's not clear that it makes much difference to the taste, so next time I'll reduce it to 5 ml.

It's interesting that they changed date format between the two jars. I had half expected them to have changed back, but it seems they haven't.

The older jar has got so hard that I couldn't get anything out of it. I don't suppose it's too soon to throw it out.

As planned earlier this week, I bought some cheap toner for my laser printer. How do you install it? Easy, in principle. But there's a little problem. Here are the new cartridge on the top (still with protective cover) and the old one below: