Call from Simon at Telstra complaints today, referring to the complaint I put in
last week.
First, he wanted me to give him my date of birth to confirm who he
was. I pointed out that “security” is a two-way thing and asked him how I
should know who he is. His reply: “I'm Simon from Telstra”. He refused point
blank to give his date of birth, and said that he would close the case if I didn't
give him mine. This infuriates me, but the information is available on the web, so there's
no security issue.
Simon then claimed that I wanted Telstra to configure some settings that are outside the
scope of my support. As I suspected, “Rome” didn't understand the complaint
enough to formulate it correctly:
Wants to configure postfix email client using outgoing and incoming mail
server mail.venus.com.
I had already commented on the fact that he didn't understand the difference between clients
and servers, and I had repeated, forcefully and several times, that this had nothing to do
with postfix, nor with incoming mail. I am continually baffled by the complete lack of
knowledge of these people.
I got very little out of Simon in a phone call that lasted 75 minutes. I pointed him at the
terms and conditions of service (http://my.bigpond.com/pond/oct/Part-A.pdf), which he agreed was the contract we
had. I then pointed at the FAQ stating that Telstra
does block port 25. He asked how many messages I sent at once, and I told him that didn't
make any difference: the problem was in their network. He then came up with the amazing
claim that they don't support customers using networks. I asked him what they did
do, but he didn't have the understanding to answer that question.
Clearly he was confusing networks in general with LANs, but even then it doesn't make sense:
the device that they sold me, 3G21WB, has the
buzzword title “BigPond Elite Wireless Broadband Network Gateway”. If that's
not for LANs, what is it for? I asked him where in the contract he found that claim, and he
put me on hold for some time and came back with a page http:forward/forward/telstra.com.auforward/customer-termsforward/home-familyforward/bigpond-servicesforward/additional-servicesforward/index.htm, which he claimed was also part of the agreement. I asked him where in the contract
there was a reference to that supplement, and of course, once again, he wasn't able to tell
me.
And once again he continually told me I should contact BigPond premium technical
support, who would solve the problem for me. I told him that a third party can't do
that, that the problem was in Telstra's network (whatever that may be), and he said that
they could contact Telstra under those circumstances and do something about it. I pointed
out that the problem has already been identified, and he said that he was neither willing
nor able to do anything about it.
Since I had him on the line, I asked him why my service had been disconnected last Friday. He told me that my connection was
still up and running, and that I should contact Telstra Premium Support. I had to walk him
through his notes before he finally found comments from Matt last
Unable to use network due to pending return status. Was hoping to use existing modem
until replacement came.
I asked him once again how Telstra Premium Support could help there, and he came up with
some nonsense that I didn't listen to. He explained—again—that Telstra
deactivate USIMs when they send out a replacement. He didn't have an answer to my
question why they do this, only that normally the equipment is defective, so it
doesn't make any difference. But last week Obbie only sent out a replacement because I told
him I had another modem which worked.
There's still no excuse for this behaviour, and it has cost me another month with SkyMesh. I told him I expected Telstra to pay for
that, and he conferred with his superiors about this, but came back and said
“No”. They're prepared to offer 3 days refund on my tariff (never mind that it
will be at least 5 days), but that's all. So it looks as if we're off to the TIO again. What an appalling company!
Sent a message to the
German Olympus Forum about the battery problems I've
been having, and got an interesting reply from Reinhard Wagner, the forum
moderator. He suggests that the problem is that the material used for cheap batteries can
be old. It makes sense to extrapolate that, since the BLM-1 battery is no longer used in
any new camera, they're probably selling off old stock. Not a pleasant consideration.
The message I sent to the
German Olympus Forum was in German, of course, and
many people I deal with don't speak German. So, once again, I put Google Translate to work. Translating natural
languages is a very complicated issue, and you can't expect things to be perfect, but the
results are amazingly bad:
Original:
So richtig glücklich getroffen war die Wahl wohl nicht.
Translation:
The choice seems not to have been a happy one.
Google:
my day was taken as the choice is not well:
Where does this “my day was taken” come from?
Original:
Sie hatte nicht dieselbe Ausdauer wie die anderen beiden.
Literally:
She had not the same stamina as the other two.
Translation:
It didn't have the same life as the other two.
Google:
You not had the same stamina as the other two.
This is just plain grammatically incorrect. Batteries are feminine, so you say
“she”, not “it”. The German word “Sie” can mean
“she” or (formal) “you”; the verb inflection (usually) determines
which is intended. In this case the verb is “haben” (to have), and the form
“hatte” means “had” in the singular 1st or 3rd person; for
hysterical raisins the word “Sie” meaning “you” is in 3rd person
plural, so “you had” would be “Sie hatten”. The n at the
end is missing, so it's clearly “she had”. And the word order is neither
English nor German.
Original:
Aufgeladen, in die Kamera gesteckt, 36 Aufnahmen gemacht. Dann war das Teil tot.
Literally:
Loaded, in the camera stuck, 36 shots made. Then was the part dead.
Translation:
Charged, put in the camera, took 36 shots. Then the thing was dead.
Google:
Charged in the camera put, recordings made 36th. Then there was the dead part.
It's not clear where the ordinal th comes from here. The translator could almost
be forgiven with the second sentence, though I would expect it to do better than that.
Original:
Aufgeladen, in die Kamera gesteckt, 750 Aufnahmen gemacht. Dann war das Teil tot.
Literally:
Charged, in the camera stuck, 750 shots made. Then was the part dead.
Translation:
Loaded, put in the camera, took 750 shots. Then the thing was dead.
Google:
Charged, the camera plugged in, recordings made 750th. Then was part of the dead.
This one blows my mind. The only difference from the last example is the number. And
the translation is completely different. How can that happen?
The whole thing makes me wonder how Google Translate works. I suppose I should investigate.
Gradually the rain is subsiding. Last month we had
92.8 mm rain in Ballarat,
not that much more than the average 67.1 mm, but it seems wetter than usual. Today was
bearable, though, and I spent some more time on the greenhouse, finishing the glazing on one side. I now have only the other side and
the roof to go. 40% done? Still, it means that I can put things in the greenhouse and
they'll be out of the wind, so moved a lot of stuff there from other places. The thing is
already looking useful.
In the process, found a clue to the age of the greenhouse, and more particularly when it was
dismantled. A little over 17 years ago:
Finally I've found time to replace the dying disk in dereel. Why did it take so
long? I want to get it right, of course, but there are other issues, including the location
of the computer, in a corner of the room behind my monitors. That makes it almost
completely inaccessible.
I've though in the past of moving the machine, so today I finally did it. It's still behind
the monitors, but at the other end, where I can get at it relatively easily. Putting it
there turned out to be much easier than I had expected—in the past I had pulled
muscles and damaged things trying to do this kind of work—but putting in the new disk
wasn't as easy. The machine already had two SATA disks, and the power supply had 4 PATA
power connectors, but only 2 SATA connectors. So I had to copy the data to a USB disk and
then back again to the new disk.
I had already copied most of the data (about 650 GB) to
the USB disk, so the obvious tool for getting the rest copied was rsync. For some reason, I always make a mess
with rsync options, and today was no exception. The disk contains many source trees,
including the complete BSD sources, and they
have many broken symlinks or symlinks pointing to the /usr hierarchy. And
the rsync invocation included the -L (“transform symlink into referent
file/dir”) option, which complained loudly about the broken links and merrily copied
the files from /usr in the latter case. Finally found what I think are the correct
flags:
=== root@dereel (/dev/ttyp4) /src 19 -> for i in *; do echo --- $i ---; rsync -Hzav --partial --delete-after $i /mnt; sleep 1; done
The sleep 1 is to give me a chance to interrupt the operation if something goes
wrong; otherwise it's almost impossible to get a ^C in there before the
next rsync starts. But that's just theoretical: I had made such a mess of the disk
that I decided to start again with tar. And, of course, that took all day.
I've been meaning to finish the greenhouse for
some time, but there are always new things that get in the way. One of them was the plants
that we bought over the weekend, which really needed to be planted, so did some of them.
Planted the Corydalis and
the Clematis recta near the
corners of the verandah:
The buds that are showing are clearly not of the same type as the ones we already have.
This must be one of the cuttings we got from Nancy Brewer last year. They're looking surprisingly happy; I think I'll plant
them in front of the garage.
Today was David Yeardley's 60th birthday, so we cooked a birthday dinner for him. Main
course was Tournedos Henri
IV. It went OK, but not without some hiccoughs. In particular, the Yeardleys arrived
late, and the friteuse decided to turn itself off in the meantime (why do they do that?).
And, of course, it didn't say anything. Lights still on, display still showing set
temperature (190°). By the time I twigged, the temperature had dropped to 110°.
Fortunately it didn't distract from the taste.
Off to Ballarat to meet with Peter
O'Connell. While I was at it, returned the power monitor. I had expected some issue, but
when I told them how it performed, they took it back with no problems.
In town also picked up the replacement wireless modem.
Back home, connected it up and got a signal, briefly. But it didn't even try to connect, or
at least, it didn't log the fact. The 3G9WB logs the
entire PPP connect script, but this thing said nothing and also didn't connect.
Decided once again to try a direct connect between the modem and pain, my Microsoft
laptop. Last time I came to the
conclusion that the problem was that I had to be using DHCP, and I wasn't. But that's easy
enough to change, so did that and tried again, and this time I didn't get the warning about
static IPs. But it still didn't find the modem:
How do I “ensure the power light on the front of the network gateway is a steady green
colour”? It's blue at the moment. Clearly yet another indication of incorrect
documentation. On the 3G9WB it's green, but they don't sell that one any more. Further
experimentation showed that pain had somehow got an IP address in the
range 169.254/16, the one that the installation had complained about last time.
How is that even supposed to work when the modem has the fixed address 10.0.0.138?
I wasn't able to communicate, anyway. After a while the modem lost its signal, so gave up,
took the USIM card out of the device and put it in the 3G9WB, which still had a signal and
made a connection, but couldn't authenticate:
Nov 3 14:36:32 pong-gw pppd[480]: Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/ttyUSB0
Nov 3 14:36:34 pong-gw pppd[480]: Modem hangup
Nov 3 14:36:34 pong-gw pppd[480]: Connection terminated.
That almost certainly means “PPP login refused”. But why? Did they change my
password, or have they really restricted the new USIM to only work in the modem they
delivered? The only way to find out is to call Telstra “Technical support”.
Did that, and found that the brain-dead voice menu understands “Technical
Support”, so got through relatively painlessly this time. Spoke to Vin, who wanted to
know whether the other modem was Telstra or BigPond. I was surprised about that and asked
what the difference was; it seems that there's a separate Telstra service. Possibly they
have less brain-dead support. Up to about 2001 I had a dialup connection called
“Telstra BigPond Direct”, with service people who knew what they were doing.
Even in those days, “Big Pond Toy”, as I called them, were brain-dead. Asked
him for contact details, and was given the number 125111. He then wanted to know whether I
had a prepaid or postpaid “plan” (i.e. tariff). I told him I didn't have a USIM
for the device, but he kept trying to tell me that I was probably connecting to a different
network, and that he would check for outages. I had to ask for his supervisor before he
broke out of the loop.
He did then decide that maybe the problem was with the password, so he reset it for me, but
I still couldn't connect with the 3G9WB, so it's beginning to look like the USIM really is
locked in this time. He did, however, say that he was going to escalate the issue and get
somebody to come out and take a look at the problem on-site, so maybe we will get something
this time.
A little later a call from Au (female), who walked me through some of the stuff that I had
already done with Vin, but which (it seems) he forgot to document. Frustratingly, the 3G9WB
lost its signal too. Is there a second problem here?
In retrospect: if I had known what a problem this was going to cause, I should have just
kept quiet and used the 3G9WB. Now, after
four weeks of trying, I still don't have a connection,
So finally I had the complete, up-to-date contents of /src on my USB drive.
Connected up the new disk in the computer, partitioned it and built a new file system. But
what newfs parameters? Somehow the whole program is upside down: instead of saying
how many cylinder groups and how many files you want, you have to say how large each
cylinder group is, and either average file size or number of bytes per inode, which sounds
pretty much the same thing to me. In addition, there are various dependencies that mean you
may not get what you ask for. Played around and came up with the following invocation,
which sets a volume label src, soft updates, average file size 64 kB and one
cylinder group per 500,000 blocks (256,000,000 MB):
Unfortunately, all those parameters didn't make any difference; that's exactly what you get
if you go for the defaults. I need to investigate this in more detail. I thought that at
least the number of inodes could be influenced, but that I have is:
Baking bread today. In the evening added some flour
to the existing dough, and the (electronic) scales went crazy, going up and down as I added
flour. OK, I knew how much I had put in already, so I should have been able to restart the
scales, weigh the result and calculate how much I had put in—if I knew the
weight of the mixing bowl. I had actually looked at the weight in the morning, and thought
of writing it down, but I didn't. I seemed to remember that it weighed 424 g, so calculated
things based on that, but the resulting mixture looked pretty thin. Added a little more,
and it looked OK, but it brings back to me how important it is to know the weights of
everything.
No call back from the Telstra technicians today, but I did get round to following up on the
concept of a different Telstra offering. And yes, it exists: it's called Internet Direct, or maybe Telstra Business now, and it appears to be the successor organization to
“Bigpond direct“. I'm sorely tempted to try them, but I should first give the
current clowns a chance to get their act together.
More investigation of the parameters to newfs today, helped by some code-reading by Peter
Jeremy: the option I need for inodes is really -i. The option that I
used, -g, sets (struct fs).fs_avgfilesize, which is only used to control
directory inode allocation. It's not obvious to me why that should be different from the
number of inodes.
More work on the greenhouse: put some panes in the rear wall. I'm gradually getting to the
end of my materials: there are only 12 large panes left (we need about 18), and the rubber
seals are also running low.
I will have to get some new ones to finish the side. The “glass clips” that I
bought 3 months ago are also running low.
That annoys me particularly, since I probably only need one more, and I probably could have
got it for no additional price at the time. I've decided to put in everything that I can
first. Then I'll be in a better position to know what I need.
Over the last couple of months, despite all good intentions, we've bought lots of plants and
not planted them. Some of them are looking none too happy as a result. Today planted some
rather sorry-looking Alyssum
and Petunias:
Baked my bread today, and finally had a chance to weigh the mixer bowl. I recalled
correctly: 424 g. So I ended up putting 55 g more flour in the bread than was needed.
Fortunately it doesn't seem to have made much difference to the bread.
While we were in the garden, there was another brief power failure. It didn't seem to do much harm. Now
we have most things on UPS, the 2-second kind of failure is just a question of resetting
lots of clocks.
Spent most of the day in the garden today. More greenhouse work, and ran out of the metal
strip for the clips. It proves that my guess as to the amount of strip I needed was wildly
inaccurate. I had bought 4 lengths (of about 90 cm, a metric unit) in the assumption that
that would be enough, and even a couple of days ago I thought that another strip would be
enough. But today I calculated rather than guessed, and discovered I'd need another 4.
Yvonne was in town and picked them up for me. To be on the
safe side, we got 5—as I guessed, still for $5.
I now have all the side panes in that I can fit; I'm missing a couple of lengths of glazing
strip, so I can't do the last one. Also symbolically put in a roof pane, but I think now's
the time to count what I have and buy what I need.
Also did some repotting. I've had a couple of seed trays in the bathroom (lightest place)
for a couple of months now, but after moving them to the greenhouse they're outgrowing the
trays. Potted 12 tomatoes, of which 3 will stay in the pots in the greenhouse, and also a
rather sickly looking Lonicera that I
think is the same as the others that I found a couple of days ago.
The weather last weekend was so bad that I didn't get round to doing my monthly flower photos, and, surprisingly, only a few new flowers
seem to have come up since the end of September. Some of the prettier are the combination
of deep purple Clematis
and Nasturtium:
I had never known that Nasturtiums could climb that high—they're up to 2.5 metres.
Even more surprising is
our Camellia japonica, which we
bought full of buds last month. Some of the buds have
flowered, others are still closed, but a large proportion have fallen off. Today I found
out why. It's developing new buds:
I make my photo backups on two external USB disk drives, which I use alternately. Recently
I've seen a couple of issues that are potentially worrying. First, there are error messages
from the disk driver:
Nov 5 10:20:26 teevee kernel: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): READ(10). CDB: 28 0 0 0 0 bf 0 0 10 0
Nov 5 10:20:26 teevee kernel: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): CAM Status: SCSI Status Error
Nov 5 10:20:26 teevee kernel: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): SCSI Status: Check Condition
Nov 5 10:20:26 teevee kernel: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): UNIT ATTENTION asc:28,0
Nov 5 10:20:26 teevee kernel: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): Not ready to ready change, medium may have changed
Nov 5 10:20:26 teevee kernel: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): Retrying Command (per Sense Data)
OK, a drive can spin down, and indeed the medium had changed. But why the log messages?
The disk wasn't mounted (this was, in fact, at mount time), and I can't recall seeing them
earlier. Is that something to worry about?
The other one looks more ominous:
Nov 5 10:20:29 teevee kernel: WARNING: /Photos was not properly dismounted
That calls for an fsck, which I did. No problems, but especially on an archive
device it's unnerving. Is it possible that the device “bounced” on the mount
request, went offline and immediately online again? But then I would still need to repeat
the mount request, and I didn't do that. To be observed.
The promised technicians from Telstra didn't
contact me today, but I did get a call from Robert , the case
manager for the incident. He makes a more sensible impression than his predecessors, and he
even gave me his surname, a first with Telstra, but the lack of organization is showing
badly: it was about the same thing that Simon called me about on Monday. About the only thing that I got in addition was the claimed
subject of the complaint: “T VoIP not
working”: “Customer wants to configure postfix email client using outgoing and
incoming mail server mail.venus.com”. How can anybody be so stupid? I
didn't mention VoIP. And, for the record, it works fine on the Telstra network.
There's not much he can do, of course, until the technicians deign to attend to the problem.
I got connected to Telstra on 20 October 2010 and disconnected on
29 October 2010, nine days later. It'll be at least 10 days after
disconnection before I get reconnected—an up time of less than 50%. Robert tells me
that the issue has been escalated to level 3, the highest they have. He has offered to let
me terminate the contract early with no financial impact, as if this were unusual in the
circumstances, and even not to charge for the time without service. I still think
I'll let the technicians do their thing.
Yvonne found me in the garden before breakfast and told me
that the Nottles were having a garage sale in preparation for moving out, and that we should
go there immediately. A garage sale is nothing unusual, even in our area, but this was
directly across the road, the second one in the same house this year. It's amazing how many
people have lived there since we moved in: the Nottles are the fourth, and soon, presumably,
we'll have a fifth.
Last time we didn't find much to buy, but this time we
ended up with a surprising amount of stuff, including furniture, tools, shade cloth and a
couple of shelves that will fit well in the greenhouse. Also got a butane-fueled
flame-thrower that's supposed to be good for weeds. My preliminary attempts don't confirm
that. Hopefully I haven't spent money on a white elephant.
Garden photo day again today, and I'm still experimenting. I've added a new panorama of
where the “cathedral” used to
be. It's deliberately not taken from the same place as the old ones, but this comparison
will give an idea of how things have changed:
This causes two problems: the movement is seldom as bad as this one, and it usually just
makes things look unsharp, and it also makes it very difficult to stitch the results
together. This one (which should have been part of the verandah panorama above) was so bad
that I had to discard it; surprisingly I still managed to get a 360° panorama.
But do I need HDR? My previous experiments say “yes”. But they're also based
on a constant exposure, and typically the panorama from in front of what is now the
vegetable patch had very poor shadow detail without it. What happens if I let the camera
determine exposure for each component image? Tried again today:
Which is which? Initially there doesn't seem to be much difference, but in the shadows
round the fence, in the background to the right of the fence, and the verandah of the house
it's clear that the HDR image (below) is better. There's not much in it, and the lack of
sharpness detracts from the results. Maybe I should decide for HDR or LDR depending on the
wind.
One way and another managed to take 398 photos, a total of 7056 MB, and the work directory
for the day, with all the intermediate images, came to 8619 MB. And it's been less than two
years since I filled a 1 GB CF card for the first time! But that was before panoramas and
HDR. And the difficulties stitching the fuzzy HDR photos kept me busy until dinner time.
Even then I had to give up on one of them. A whole day!
Those were the new shelves I bought yesterday. I wouldn't have expected them to blow over.
Fortunately, the glass they landed on was broken already. That was about the only positive
side of things. Things kept blowing away in the wind, and my tools kept disappearing. I
wanted to mount the doors, and that needed some adjustment, but I couldn't find appropriate
spanners: the bolts were mounted in such an unfortunate place that I couldn't get normal
tools around them. Spent nearly an hour trying to mount the doors, and in the end gave up.
The only thing I really “achieved” was to wash the 5 panes of glass I needed to
complete the doors. I'll continue when there's less wind.
Instead looked at other things I needed to do round the garden. We still have lots of
plants that need planting, and we identified a few places for plants. Also planted a number
of seedlings into pots, and finally planted
the Mesclun lettuce and the few remaining
basil plants in the vegetable garden, which still isn't looking very happy.
Finally took a look at the irrigation system, which was in need of it.
The Osteospermum at the south-east
corner of the house had grown over the tubing, pulling a union apart at the corner. And
there were plenty more things to lay, notably in the south and in front of the verandah.
There's still plenty to do, but at least I have achieved something.
It's been well over a year since I last committed to the FreeBSD source tree. But today I got a mail message from
Ulrich Spörlein asking why setchannel didn't get installed. I was going to write
back and ask “why ask me?”, but checked and discovered it was a program I had
committed four years ago as part of the
still-uncommitted cxm driver, and since forgotten. Time to remember some things
again. Started bringing my test machine up to the current version, not without
difficulties: I had put it in a USB housing for my laptop experiments, and swamp, my
test box, didn't like it. And in addition I had difficulty changing /etc/fstab after
installing it as an ATA disk and booting it, so the whole affair took over half an hour just
to get the machine booted.
That was nothing compared to the build, though—5 hours, 38 minutes. This is an
Athlon XP 1700+, not a ball of fire, but a whole lot faster than the 50 MHz 80486 that I
used for my first FreeBSD systems, and there the build only took about 1½ hours.
The WITNESS code has a lot to answer for.
What do I do in the garden now? The greenhouse needs glass and rubber “glazing strip”. Did some counting—I need a total
of 31 panes. Now I need to call around to see where I can get the cheapest supply. The
glazing strip is less obvious: I have some that doesn't fit anywhere, probably because I
used shorter ones where they should have gone. It looks as if I don't need very many,
though.
In the meantime, I had plenty to keep me busy. The mesh in front of the garage needs
shortening, and started on that, but it's a fiddly business, so gave up after doing about
half of it. Turned my attention to the corner south of the verandah, which started off like
this:
We've decided to remove
the Osteospermums (Cape daisy) on
the left and allow the other succulent to cover the area.
The Salvias will also be cut back, and the
Irises will go altogether. To make
up for it, we'll plant the Echium in the
corner. Again, got about half-way and stopped.
Last year we planted a number
of Lobelias, all of which died for
reasons we still don't understand. But they self-seeded vigorously, and now we have Son of
Lobelia. Yvonne planted them to the east of the Japanese
Garden, while I laid the irrigation, which this time was particularly annoying.
There's no label on the thing, and I have little idea what it is. I can't find any mention
of it in my diary. I suppose we could just plant it and see what it does, but where? The
dark foliage suggests that it wants at least part shade.
There's so much to do in the garden! And I did so little. The weather was surprisingly
warm, with a maximum of 30.4°. In the greenhouse I measured 33.4°. I need to think of how
to attach shade cloth in front of it.
Put a few more panes in the greenhouse. I now have all the walls complete, though one of
the panes is cracked and needs to be replaced when I get the new glass cut. Also more
attention to the wire mesh in front of the garage, but still didn't get it finished.
The Lonicera (honeysuckle) on the north
side of the verandah is flowering:
I've been running my TV receiver with only two tuners for some time now, but today I really
needed all three. Did some more playing around and finally established which physical tuner
corresponds to which device. Results: the USB tuner at the end of the antenna daisy chain
is /dev/dvb/adapter0, the second (/dev/dvb/adapter1) is the one at the right
of the motherboard (looking from behind), and the third (/dev/dvb/adapter2) is to the
left of the second. I wonder if there's a way to reassign them. I have a suspicion that
there are issues with the USB tuner, possibly because it's at the end of the daisy chain.
Did some recordings on all three, and confirmed once again what I have experienced before:
there's some loose connection somewhere that hangs up the system when I move the antenna
cables. I wish I could find what it is. Tried tidying them up a bit, and hopefully things
will now be a little more stable.
Yvonne bought a self-supporting hammock at
ALDI yesterday, and this evening I decided to
assemble it. It's obviously intended as a portable unit: it includes a carry bag. So you'd
think it would be easy to assemble and disassemble. It's not. The instructions don't help,
of course, but I followed them as best I could and ended up with something like this:
I had to unscrew the two cross-bars in the middle to insert them at all. The two end pieces
are intended to fold up and become the ends, but they don't. The instructions don't say
how, but clearly the axial rods in the middle are turned out of form by 90°. There's a
strap at each end which looks as if it's been completely misplaced:
There's also a strange method of attaching the end parts: a plastic sleeve limited by a pin
that is not just too big, but held in place by a plastic-enclosed nut on the end that
doesn't screw all the way down. If you do, you just push off the plastic part:
This must be one of the strangest constructions I've ever seen on sale. One thing's for
sure: if I ever get it assembled, I'm not going to disassemble it unless we decide to return
it.
More planting today. It's becoming clear that a lot of my laziness over the last couple of
months was a consequence of the injury to my leg a
couple of months ago. Now that it has healed up, I'm getting more work done, and by
no means too soon. Finished the work to the south of the verandah, planting the new
Echium and Geranium dissectum, and also old
Daphne that we had planted
in the cathedral area a couple of years
ago, and which didn't look at all happy there. Here's the way it was before, and how it is
now:
Planted some rather sorry-looking petunias to the left after taking this photo. They
wouldn't have shown up anyway. Also planted the everlasting daisies (what's the botanical
name? It could be Rhodanthe or
Xerochrysum) in the garden to
the north of the house:
Once again we had a clogged water filter, this time in the bore pump. That's only 12 days
since the last time. And the stuff in it looks different from the way it used to. Here
photos taken 18 months and 12 days ago:
In the past the sediment seems to have been sandy; this looks more organic in nature. I
wonder what goes on down there 50 metres underground. It's also interesting to note the
change in appearance of the filter itself. I should find a better way to clean it.
Spent more time playing around with the ALDI hammock today. No luck. It's possible that it has been put together incorrectly, and that
these straps are in the way. But the more I look at it, the more I think it's just plain
dangerous, so it'll go back.
How do you enter non-standard UTF-8 characters when using X? “With great
difficulty” is the obvious answer. I can remap the keyboard for a very limited number
of characters, or use the only marginally documented“Compose” key to convert chords
into characters. And that's about it at the X input level. Then I can write Emacs
macros to do pretty much the same as the compose key, with the advantages that I know what
the bindings are, and I can generate any character I want, while the compose key limits me
to some undocumented subset.
Then there are web sites like Wikipedia,
which offer a clickable menu at the bottom of the edit pages, offering a number of more
common alphabets. Under the circumstances it doesn't work too badly. OpenOffice also has something similar. Wouldn't it be
a good idea to have something like that as a keyboard for X?
Did some searching, and so did some others on IRC, but we didn't find a real keyboard. What
we did find were programs like gucharmap and KCharSelect, part of KDE. Tried
installing gucharmap, but ran into problems with my out-of-date ports collection. I
didn't dare to try KDE; every time I do, I run into some other dependency problem.
Decided to try it on cvr2, my Linux box. Had trouble there too:
Err http://au.archive.ubuntu.com intrepid/main Packages
404 Not Found
Err http://au.archive.ubuntu.com intrepid/restricted Packages
404 Not Found
Err http://au.archive.ubuntu.com intrepid/main Sources
404 Not Found
In fact, it found nothing. If I have this right, this URL resolves to http://au.archive.ubuntu.com/pub/ubuntu/archive/dists/, and there's
no intrepid there. Is this a problem with AARNet, or is my installation so old
that I can no longer get updates? Discovered that I already had the package installed, so
tried running it—it even has online documentation! But it doesn't seem to need it:
it's fairly clear what it does, right?
So I clicked on a character. Nothing. Clicked on another. Nothing. RTFM:
3.2. To Create a Text String
To create a text string in the Text to copy field, perform the following steps:
Select a character set from the Script or Unicode Block list box.
Insert characters in one of the following ways:
Double-click on a character button in the Character Table tabbed section,
to insert the character in the Text to copy field.
Click on a character button in the Character Table tabbed section, then
press Return to insert the character in the Text to copy field.
Click on a character button in the Character Table tabbed section, then
drag the character to the Text to copy field.
Click on the Text to copy field to give focus to the field. If a text
string is already in the field, click on the text string at the point where you
want to insert the character. Press a character key on your keyboard to insert
that character into the field.
What a complicated method! I can understand that the text has to be created in the same
window, which is a disadvantage of the implementation, but why double click or click/enter?
More importantly, though, it doesn't support IPA, which is the real reason I wanted it. But
it's not the most recent version, so maybe they've fixed it since then. I'd still like to
see something more integrated with the X server.
The temperatures were high again today, over 34°, and I didn't feel like doing very much.
Finished off the mesh in front of the garage, just in time it would seem: the hops I planted
there are attacking everything in sight, and I had to cut one of the roses free from them.
Apart from that, tidied up some of the Arum lilies that Yvonne had cut down yesterday. And
that was about that.
Instead did some research into “everlasting daisies”, and came up with an
interesting page explaining
that they're all Australian, and that there are two or three different genera: Rhodanthe, Xerochrysum and maybe Schoenia. By comparing photos, it seems
that ours is a Xerochrysum bracteatum. Here photos from the page and from the mother plant last
week:
The “interesting page” was http://asgap.org.au/APOL2009/may09-2.html, but it seems that
asgap no longer wants to know about
Xerochrysum. The first photo below is from Australian Native Plants Society, but it
doesn't look very much like my flowers.
My Telstra BigPond service has now been
non-functional for nearly two weeks, and I've been back to satellite for that period. And
now the satellite is playing up again. Between 10:34 and 12:22 I had no less than 10
dropouts, a total of nearly 17 minutes. Why? Took a look at the Microsoft “Internet
Explorer” display, the only browser that the modem supports, and found that the modem
link was up, though the connection was down. That seems to contradict what SkyMesh say. Took a screen shot, and during the
processing found something interesting:
Signal strength and EsN0 were both normal, but now the status was no longer
“Messaging” (connected) but “Logging Off”. What does that mean? It
suggests to me that the other end initiated it, not an indication that there's anything
wrong with the modem. And a lot of the time when it was connected, the package loss rate
was ridiculous:
=== grog@dereel (/dev/ttypo) /var/tmp 50 -> ping www PING www.lemis.com (203.10.76.45): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 203.10.76.45: icmp_seq=2 ttl=55 time=2706.503 ms
64 bytes from 203.10.76.45: icmp_seq=3 ttl=55 time=1705.457 ms
64 bytes from 203.10.76.45: icmp_seq=4 ttl=55 time=727.115 ms
64 bytes from 203.10.76.45: icmp_seq=7 ttl=55 time=764.967 ms
64 bytes from 203.10.76.45: icmp_seq=10 ttl=55 time=753.931 ms
64 bytes from 203.10.76.45: icmp_seq=15 ttl=55 time=685.339 ms
64 bytes from 203.10.76.45: icmp_seq=19 ttl=55 time=642.429 ms
--- www.lemis.com ping statistics ---
30 packets transmitted, 7 packets received, 76.7% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 642.429/1140.820/2706.503/725.863 ms
And that was all. For the rest of the day the service was OK. I really can't see how they
can blame this on the modem.
ALDI had some power monitor sockets on
special today, so Yvonne brought back three of them, costing
less than half what the non-functional system from Jaycar did. They don't look too bad: they do pretty much what I expect, and they
even measure and display cos φ. I'll see how they work over the next week or so.
Lee and Ray Nottle only moved in across the road in late February, but they're moving out again tomorrow, heading for retirement in the
Dominican Republic.
Invited them over for dinner. They've got a lot ahead of them, but everything seems cheap
enough there, with the possible exception of health care. But then, they've never been sick
in their lives, and they're not planning to do so now. I hope things work out for them.
Ray proved to be a good Chris substitute in one area:
Woke up at 4:00 and noted an irregular noise which proved to be the shower dripping.
Tightened up the taps (old-fashioned rubber washer things), but it wouldn't stop. In the
end hung the shower head by its cord (which conveniently didn't quite reach the ground) and
put a cloth underneath it to stop the dripping noise.
But why did this happen? I suppose I'll have to take the taps apart and see if there's any
dirt in there, but it's still strange that it starts hours after the last use of the shower,
and that the drip intervals are different from one to the next. That doesn't make sense to
me.
I had just about got back to sleep when there were a couple of very loud thumps on the roof.
Out onto the verandah to find two possums climbing down the northern pole, confirming my suspicion that they got up to
the roof that way. Chased them off, and Lilac came
along and wanted to go into the house, where she started meowing at the top of her voice.
Put her in the laundry and was about to go back to sleep when a stray cat came past outside
and meowed for a while before moving on. Why do these things all happen at once?
Last night was the last night the Nottles spent in their house. Now the beds are gone, and
they're spending their last week in Australia in a caravan park. They still had a lot of
stuff left over for the garage sale, free to the first takers, so over and picked up various
odds and ends, including a few gardening books and some cement waterproofer. The latter
will come in handy for the pond.
As if to make the point, CJ and Sue came by this afternoon to have a cup of tea and discuss
the plans for the concreting. This mainly means buying cement and “cement mix”,
a term that seems to mean “gravel and sand mix”. It still looks as if it'll be
a while before we actually get anything done: the weather started off being pretty hot
(32°), but by evening it had dropped to 14°, and later in the night we got considerable
rain.
We'll need at least 4 dry days in a row to do the work, so it could be a while.
One of the problems I've been having with my vertical panoramas is keeping things in
position. The big issue is the screw that holds the focusing rail to the L bracket, on the
top left:
In this configuration, the weight of the camera and the flash are too much for the little
holding screw, and the whole thing sags as seen here. Yes, I can tighten up the
screw—I have used a little pipe wrench for this purpose—but I'm wondering if the
screw itself has the tensile strength. It's very possible that the screw will snap, leaving
a thread inside the focusing rail. Clearly what's needed here is some auxiliary support, so
put one together out of some offcuts of the floor of the verandah:
It's quick and dirty, and it requires a new piece of wood for each angle. But with the 9 mm
wide angle lens, you really only need three angles, and one is the angle in the first photo
(wood length 0 mm), so I only needed two pieces of wood, though it did take me a while to
trim them to the right length.
The real question, though: do professional adapters do any better? I've seen lots of
complaints about the stability of expensive brackets. I'd be really unhappy if I bought one
and discovered that it was less stable than what I have now.
It's been a week since I last heard from Telstra
BigPond about my non-functional network connection. I had planned to get back to them
on Monday, but the technicians who were supposed to contact me by the end of last week still
haven't shown any sign, so I decided to wait a little longer. No response. As of this
morning, I have had the “service” for 23 days, 14 of which were without service.
And then I got a call from Jarrod Taylor. No, not a support person. A colleague of Bob
Lynch, the situation manager. But Jarrod is also the situation manager; clearly the term
doesn't mean very much. And again he wanted to talk about “Customer wants to
configure postfix email client using outgoing and incoming mail server
mail.venus.com”, though I had told Bob that I could live with that. No mention
of the fact that my service is disconnected. I suspect that all my problems have been
lumped together in one report, and that's the first paragraph.
Last week Bob Lynch made a sensible impression. Jarrod did not. I explained to him, as I
explained to Bob last week, that the report was almost completely unrelated to the problem,
and that blocking port 25 was not my main concern, that the lack of service was, and the
fact that they had disconnected me for procedural reasons was breach of contact. I had to
explain it three times, and the third time he told me that my service was up and running.
I told him that I no longer wanted to have anything to do with their shambles of an
organization, and that I wanted the refund that I had been offered last week. He said he
couldn't do that. I pointed him at http://tinyurl.com/bigpond-mobile, which he entered and then said “that's not relevant”. On further
investigation it proved that Telstra blocks tinyurl.com, and he wasn't able to access it. He also told me that the problem is
certain to be a minor technical issue at my end, and that he would get technical support to
contact me.
Finally I got it through to him that I had no connection at all, and he said something like
“that's not a serious problem”. He again offered to get the technicians to
contact me, so I gave him until this evening for them to do so and left it at that.
20 minutes later he called back. He had spoken to a techie, who said “there's nothing
to do. His operating system doesn't support the connection”. I wonder what he said
to the techie. venus.com? Or is the techie another of these script-book toting
idiots with whom I have had far too much to do?
In any case, he's prepared to refund everything, even the time when I used the service. So
I'm back in the same position I was at the beginning of last month, but at least I still
have my sanity.
More cleaning up, once the rain let off a bit. After that, things seem to work properly. I
wonder if I should plan in a weekly or monthly attack of fly spray.
The first photo I took of the weather station was with my Olympus Zuiko
Digital ED 70-300mm F4.0-5.6 set at the maximum focal length of 300 mm, mounted on a
tripod and with image stabilization. The result (here an excerpt) shows clear camera shake
(first pair of photos below).
How could that happen? Took a look at the camera settings. Yes, the image stabilization
mode was IS. 1, stabilization in both directions. About the only unusual thing was the
indication at the bottom: Focal length 800 mm. But that's supposed to be only for manual
lenses, and the EXIF data shows that the camera knew the focal length of the lens. Could it
be a bug in the firmware anyway? I tried resetting the manual focal length (yes, you can do
that even when an Olympus lens is fitted) and tried two more shots with focal length set to
10 mm and 300 mm. No difference. Then I turned image stabilization off. The result wasn't
perfect, but it was better. Here with IS (first pair of images) and without IS (second
pair):
Why should that be? For the fun of it, took the same photos with my old Hanimex 300 mm
lens. There the results were more what I'd expect. Again, the first pair stabilized and
the second pair unstabilized:
Image title:
Weather station Hanimex 300mm 11 stabilized detail 2
So image stabilization helps with non-Olympus lenses, but it really seems to be worse than
useless in the case of the Olympus Zuiko
Digital ED 70-300mm F4.0-5.6. What's the problem? The fact that the lens doesn't
have a tripod mount doesn't help, but it can't be the reason.
Somehow managed to find enough of a lull in the rain to take my weekly house photos. Now I
have the wooden brackets for the panorama bar, I can get more consistent results. But I'm
still having difficulty with the verandah panorama. It's much higher now, but I still have
discontinuities. Here last week's “full” (360°) panorama, and then this week's:
One thing that is becoming clear is that my positioning is not as accurate as I thought: I
should probably position the camera so that the beam above it is straight. But the
discontinuities are irritating. More manual playing around needed.
Over to the Yeardleys for dinner, another roast beef. David has a new toy, a mini Yorkshire
pudding pan, which seems to work quite well once you sort out the timing.
It's been weeks since Yvonne and CJ put up the wire mesh in front of the garage. The intention is to let various
climbers climb up it and screen the garage from the garden.
There's nothing new in this. Over two years ago we put
up the fence posts and
planted Wisteria sinensis
and Wisteria floribunda, held
up by wires. It wasn't a success: the Wisteria sinensis died, and the Wisteria floribunda
has never flowered. I think it's too windy for them. Then last year I planted some hops,
which showed some activity round the poles, but it could hardly be called a screen. Now we
have the mesh, and I'm hoping to grow all sorts of things in the long run. In the short
term, though, I want something that will grow quickly. The hops are still there, and now
they have the mesh, they'll definitely spread. In between, despite relatively heavy rain, I
transplanted a number of Tropaeolum (Nasturtiums, which they aren't) and one of the Lonicera that I couldn't identify the other
day:
That proved to be a cutting from CJ's friend Sue. She calls it a firecracker. It'll be
interesting to see how it flowers. We only have two of them, so planted one here, and I'll
keep the other for the north end of the garden.
Yesterday's less-than-perfect panorama of the verandah got on my nerves, so spent literally
a couple of hours with Hugin trying to
make it better. On the way I worked out a procedure that should make things less painful:
This particular panorama was stitched together out of 24 individual images. I started
with the saved project file from last time, and then go through each set of control
points using the click box at top right. For the image on the left, it shows which
other images are connected, and gives some indication of how good the fit is:
If I understand this correctly, this means that the last three images are connected by
14, 4 and 6 control points respectively, and that the first is a very bad fit. I can
now go through the images, starting with the first on the left and selecting the ones
with which it is connected on the right. That's faster than going through 24×23 images,
but still takes up a lot of time.
panomatic creates lots of dubious control points, so dubious that Hugin's auto-fine-tune function
can't recognize them. I've decided to throw them all out.
Hugin also doesn't always automatically recognize the control points I give it. I have
to fine tune them myself, requiring a 200% enlargement of the image. I still need a
“fit to window” for normal processing, and switching between the two takes
time (about 5 seconds) so I've taken to setting the ones I need approximately, then
switching to 200% to adjust them all at once.
After a few hours, I was done. Was it worth it? No. Here's the automatic version followed
by the manually stitched version (run the cursor over an image to
compare it with its neighbour):
If anything, the new image was less well stitched than the old one. More head-scratching to
do. The interesting thing is that the easy-to-recognize features like the beams are the
most obviously broken ones. I wonder if I've made some mistake or misassumption with the
panorama bracket.
More work in the garden, and got a reasonable amount of weeding done. Also looked at the
area south of the verandah. In autumn 2009 I planted a lot of bulbs and corms in the area
behind the “old succulent patch”. Last spring the spring flowers bloomed
nicely:
The bulbs weren't a significant issue. But over winter that changed. The few Watsonias I
planted seem to have multiplied 20 fold, and they were even encroaching on the unhappy
looking grapefruit to the right:
Decided to transplant the ones on the right, and removed some. Some? There are hundreds of
the things. It seems that each corm sends out runners that create new corms at a distance
of about 20 cm, creating a circular pattern that's barely visible in this photo:
So I didn't replant the bulbs. They're too big to go along with other plants. I'll let
these ones bloom this year, and then I'll put them where other plants don't have to try to
compete with them. They do have one thing going for them: where they grow, there are no
weeds. So maybe I should put them out in the areas which we've been trying in vain to keep
weed-free.
Took a look at the Olympus' German web site today—what a mess! Why do so many German companies, even more than elsewhere, seem to
think that the purpose of a web site is to show how clever they are, rather than to inform
people? Finally found what I was looking for (documentation downloads), but
was interested by the home page, which seems to have copied an idea I took in winter 2009:
Our garden work spree continues. It's amazing how many things have grown like fury over the
past 12 months, notably in the last winter. A mystery bush has popped up in the middle of
the garden, just behind where we're building the pond. I don't know what it is, but it
didn't look unpleasant, so I left it there. A year ago it was only a tiny little thing
(behind the canna), and
even six months ago it wasn't that big, almost completely hidden behind the cannas:
But somehow during the winter and early spring all that changed, and it completely
obliterated the view behind, even of the Paulownia kawakamii and the
arums. So it had to go, and while I
was at it, I removed another small clump of watsonias on the right:
The one in the centre is a potato. We've never planted potatoes there, but some popped up a
couple of years ago and proved to be a particularly uninteresting variety, so I pulled up
all the remaining tubers—I thought. The bed has been there since April 2009, when we called it a rock garden. Maybe
that's a better name for it than “middle succulent bed”. But in that time, it
has had only natural rainfall, and every time I see a potato sprout, I pull it out. And
still they keep coming.
The irises in the left and right corners expanded beyond recognition. The variegated ones
on the left also looked quite unhappy, and the ones on the right are a kind that we want to
reduce, so we replaced both of them with various succulents:
Yvonne spread the variegated irises in many places, so that
we can see where they feel happiest. The others go to Chris, who should now have enough
plants to completely surround the house. Yvonne also started replanting the Euphorbias in the north garden, which is
the next candidate for thinning out.
I wasn't very happy with the “before” and “after” photos of the bush
removal above. They were taken from the same position and at the same focal length
(according to the camera and the EXIF data), but the magnification seems different. And
inevitably the view is slightly different.
But that's what photographic software is all about. I need something that will adjust the
size and view of the images to match. But what? Earlier this year I tried align_image_stack, which proved to be useless for
more than two photos. But that's all I wanted here, so tried it again. It did something,
but it was completely wrong; about the only thing it got right was a yaw correction.
Off to try hugin, which is as good as
undocumented in this area. It found the control points with no difficulties, but it
obviously didn't understand what to do with them, and produced a really strangely distorted
“result”, possibly still thinking it should be a panorama:
So I revisited a tutorial that I had seen before, but the instructions (“click here”)
don't match the software. Followed them as best I could, and at some point hugin went off
and did a lot of intensive calculation. I would have thought it was looping, but it
produced sensible-looking output in the terminal window:
What does that mean? When will it stop? It went on all evening, maxing out one CPU, and
without showing any sign of stopping. Clearly it's not a viable approach, but I'm
interested to see how long it will run.
For our circumstances we've been doing quite a bit of work in the garden this week, but
today for some reason it slowed down. Did a little weeding round the bird bath and a little
pruning, and that was it.
It's interesting to notice how some of our plants seemed to miss out on flowering last year;
possibly it was the weather. We bought a Strelitzia reginae2½ years ago. It flowered once shortly after purchase, and that was it.
Last year it was looking pretty sorry for itself and didn't bloom at all, and this year the
foliage isn't any better. But now it's promising no less than 7 flower spikes:
On the other hand, my uncle Max gave me an ornamental Japanese maple for my birthday
two years ago, and despite being planted in quite a
protected position (something I wouldn't have thought necessary), it has suffered badly.
For a while I thought it was dead, but now some leaves are coming up around the base:
So what do I do with my HSPA networking? Apart from terminal incompetence on the part of BigPond, there's still the issue of
signal strength. Clearly the antenna is the clue to that. Three years ago it would have been difficult to erect it in a high place, but since
then we've put Ethernet into the garage and also some posts in front of it. Today headed
off with the intention of mounting the antenna on the side of the garage, but there's a lip
in the profile which makes that difficult, so decided to put it on one of the posts in front
instead:
The modem is the white thing to the left of the power points. It's on the other side of the
wall in the second photo.
And what difference did it make? Difficult to say. Previously I've been measuring the item
called Signal Strength on the modem's web page accessible
by Diagnostics/NextG™ (I suppose it's typical that it doesn't have real
URLs). Last month I measured -94 dBm
without the antenna and -89 with. Today I was getting values typically round -86 dBm, but
ranging between about -83 and -90 dBm. Based on that, I'd guess the signal is about twice
as strong (3 dB). That still translates to 2 bars on the graphical display, but if it stays
at 2, I suppose things are OK.
But is that the correct thing to measure? More careful examination of the page shows a number of other signal-related parameters,
including RSSI, Quality (Ec/lo) and
RSCP. They don't move
synchronously. Which should I be looking at? On the face of it, I suppose it should be
RSCP.
In any case, it would be good to log this sort of thing. The modem's idea of logging is a
little erratic: it logs startup and shutdown at priority LOG_EMERG, but it doesn't
log signal quality at all, not even when it loses connection. And unlike any other device
I've used, I can't write a script to retrieve the page and scrub it, because the programmers
don't believe in URLs. The only way I could find was to run tcpdump and filter
things out:
=== root@dereel (/dev/ttyp6) /var/tmp 48 -> tcpdump -A -s 1460 host pong-gw | tr \\r ' ' | grep dBm tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v or -vv for full protocol decode
listening on re0, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 1460 bytes
And yes, the   without the ; are original. Removing
the \r is necessary because, for some reason (presumably sloppiness), the web page
includes a carriage return in the first line. But what a mess! This is a good example of
where access to the source code would make all the difference.
Also packed the old 3G21WB modem to
send it off tomorrow. They've told me what to send: modem, power supply and Ethernet cable.
Not USIM. Not USB stick with their broken software. Not even the box in which it came. It
wouldn't have fitted, something that we've seen before.
It seems that Telstra only have one size of envelope for these things.
My hugin run continued through the day using 100% of one CPU. By the evening it had
used 30 hours, and it seems to have started again. I don't need to use it, so I'll keep my
eye on it and see if it ever finishes.
Somehow the energy we developed over the last week or so is subsiding, but I did have enough
left over to do some more weeding. In addition, the December issue of “Burkes
Backyard [sic]” arrived today, with the along with the diary item
“harvest potatoes”. So I suppose it's high time I planted them. Somehow the
vegetable garden doesn't seem to be taking off; possibly these drip lines that I put in
aren't providing enough water. Time to try the mini-sprayers again.
While pondering that, decided that it was high time to plant some more herbs, and did
coriander, dill, basil and also some radishes. In addition tried propagating some cuttings
of Hibbertia scandens.
I had done some hardwood cuttings in May, and they all died. But it seems they propagate
best from softwood cuttings at this time of year, so I may be luckier this time.
My hugin process is still going,
maxing out a CPU all day long, but producing output that suggests that it knows what it's
doing. By the evening it had used about 50 hours of CPU time. Probably I should stop it,
but I'm curious to know if it will come to any conclusion.
More garden work: it's getting dryer, so it's high time to finish my overhaul of the
irrigation system. Spent considerable time replacing the sprayers to the north of the
verandah with drip line. Based on what I've seen in the veggie patch, I'm not sure they'll
be sufficient, but the dam water is discolouring the weatherboards on the house. In the
veggie patch did the opposite: added a sprinkler round the herb area. I can always remove
it again if it proves superfluous.
Round the Ginkgo tried a ring of
drop line connected via a 4 mm hose. I don't know if the hose has enough flow rate to
supply all the drippers. There must be 16 of them, for 32 l/hour, or a little over 0.5 l
per minute. I'll keep my eye on them. Also put in individual drippers for the grapefruit
to the south of the verandah, and to the Strelitzia reginae, though I'm
not sure the latter really needs one.
The Lonicera are now blooming
happily. But the flowers seem to have two colours:
I've ranted a couple of times about the function of the Compose key in X, and the
fact that it's not documented. Today I made progress. Yes, it's still not documented, but
with the help of Callum Gibson and Peter Jeremy I've found out a key issue.
Apart from the lack of documentation, the main problem was that only some of the key
bindings worked. My Emacs runs in UTF-8, so it can't be that, and I was able to cut and
paste any UTF-8 character from another window. But when I tried entering things like
subscripts and superscripts (₁¹₂² and so on) with the Compose key, nothing happened.
I should have been able to compose them with the
sequence Compose_1Compose^1Compose_2Compose^2.
The issue seems to be the locale with which Emacs gets started. By default, it gets started
by the window manager, which is started with the X server on initial login. At that point
no locale was set, so it must default to some 8 bit character set. And even after I tell it
to use UTF-8, the input appears to be limited to 8 bit characters. When I started it from
a uxterm, I was able to enter these characters. On further examination, it seems
that the key here is the environment variable LC_CTYPE. Now I have the following
in my ~/.bashrc, and all is well:
export LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
This will presumably also apply to the window manager once I log in again. And until proof
of the contrary, I'll assume that I can then use the codes described
in /usr/local/lib/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose.
Photo day again today, and spent some time trying to understand what went wrong with the
verandah panorama last week. One thing was clearly the windy weather last week. Today was
much better, almost no wind. Took a closer look at the macro rail I'm using as part of the
panorama bracket, and discovered that it's really two separate and identical macro rails
screwed together, with a camera mount on top of the second one:
This offers possibilities that I need to consider. Compared to panorama brackets, these
rails are dirt cheap, about $40 for the lot. The screw holding the two halves together is
clearly a ¼" thread, and possibly I can use a longer screw to attach an adjusting slide
to the vertical bracket.
A more obvious use of the horizontal slide is to adjust the angle of the camera along with
the wooden blocks I cut last week:
Also did some more thinking about parallax, and found the misassumption that I had made last
week: the entrance pupil must be above the vertical axis of the pan head. Nearly every
tripod head guarantees this, but only when it's horizontal. Tilt back or forward and
the position can vary enormously:
That's not such a serious issue once I know it: that's why I have the additional hardware
for vertical panoramas. The entrance pupil is held at the pivot point where the macro rails
are mounted... Wait a minute! That means that moving the horizontal bar also introduces
parallax. My considerations above are invalid. What a pain these things are! But the idea
of an adjustable rail would still work. I just need to find the correct hardware.
Despite that issue, I got my panorama correct today, and that completely automatically.
Here last week and this week:
On the other hand, despite my careful positioning, I didn't get the rafter in the middle
quite correct. It must require positioning to within a couple of millimetres.
In the middle of today's photos, my new battery gave out again, this time after only 285
photos. The recharge worked for a while, but then terminated with the usual flashing red
LED. That's three batteries in a row! What's going on here? Took the opportunity to
update my battery page, but I still
don't know what to do. One thing that occurs to me is that since I started buying these new
batteries, I haven't charged my old batteries much. Is there maybe really something wrong
with the charger? The fact that the batteries hold so little charge and fail so completely
in the camera speaks against it, but who knows? Maybe I should buy a charger/battery
combination and see if that works.
While examining things, discovered that the battery still had charge, so put it back in the
camera again and took a number of photos. Maybe it'll recover after all, but based on my
recent experience I'm not optimistic.
Today was warm and there wasn't much wind, perfect weather for spraying weeds. Did a fair
amount of that, including the west side of the house, to which so far we have paid no
attention at all. I think we'll plant some bushes there, and we have plenty of candidates
for transplanting.
The ornamental vines on the verandah are also in need of attention. Pruned them a little
and trained some along the wires I put up last year, but I'm going to have to put up some
new ones as well.
Today was photo processing day, so I finally gave up with my hugin instance, which has been running flat out
since Tuesday:
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT STARTED TIME COMMAND
grog 31744 91.3 17.9 644320 558216 pb RN+ Tue03PM 5445:44.15 hugin
That's over 90 hours of CPU time. All the while it produced output that suggested that it
knew what it was doing, but clearly that's too long. I've recently had material from
DxO promoting the merits of their DxO Optics Pro package,
including claims of “HDR” from a single image. The results certainly look interesting, and
they offer a free trial, so today I downloaded the image, all 207 MB of it. It only runs on
Microsoft or Apple, of course, but potentially I could get it to run under Wine. Tried installing it on pain, my Microsoft
laptop, and it promptly asked me whether it should install .NET, so clicked
“yes”. To my surprise, it was already on my system, and it installed without
problem. But “Optics Pro” couldn't start, claiming that it needed to install
DirectX 9, which required a download from the net.
Round about here it occurred to me that now would be an excellent time to back up the
Microsoft partition on the machine (it also has a FreeBSD partition, so I can just boot that and copy the partition image to another
machine), so started that, which ran until the small hours of the morning.
Brigitte Heyer (yet another German) and Margaret Yarra visited Chris for the weekend, so we
had a fuller than usual table, and took a number of photos, including Lilac keeping Nemo in his
place:
Brigitte is a clairvoyante, and
does character analyses based on something called Destiny Cards, a methodical categorization of
people based on their birth date and a relationship to a particular playing card:
That brings home to us that both the Arum lilies and the Erysimums no longer look right in that position. The Arums are too big, and the
Erysimums, which once were a blaze of colour, are gradually looking tatty. Here a month ago
and today, after removing half of them:
On the other hand, we like the colours, so we thought of replacing them with Pelargoniums, which we have in both
white (really climbers, but I think they'll do well as a kind of ground cover) and a similar
purple colour:
They're getting to be too big for that bed anyway, so they had to come out. Decided to
remove half of the Erysimums and transplant a couple of Pelargoniums to replace them. But
that didn't work: despite the volume, there are only a couple of Pelargonium bushes. So I
broke off some branches and planted them in the ground. If they die, we have plenty more.
If they survive, it'll be a good thing to know.
In the meantime, Yvonne took some cuttings of the white
Pelargoniums to propagate. They're still very small, so it'll probably be autumn before we
can plant them in the garden.
Also finished work on the vines on the verandah, at least for the time being. We now have a
number growing along the cross-members.
I've commented in the past about Flickr and why I don't like it. But that doesn't mean
that it doesn't have advantages, and potentially one of them is being able to display photos
one at a time. My current photo arrangement either presents the ones I want to show, like
in this diary, or on a page per day display that can be quite large. On 18 April 2010 for example I had
169 photos, which take a while to
load. I do have a page to display a
single image, but there's no connection, so I can't use it to browse through a
collection of photos.
Well, I couldn't. Spent some time today changing that, in the process tripping over my
particularly baroque display code a couple of times. I still haven't decided how to handle
image size, but it's looking a lot better. I still need to decide whether it's an
improvement or not.
My backup of pain was finally finished, so installed DirectX 9 on the machine and
restarted DxO Optics
Pro. It said it couldn't run, and that I probably needed to install DirectX 9.
Clearly an error message made without checking. In addition, I got a couple of these:
Not the kind of thing that gives you warm fuzzy feelings about the software, though maybe
it's normal in the Microsoft space. I suspect the real issue is that the installation
on pain is too old, or that the machine doesn't have enough memory. I should try
this on somebody else's Microsoft machine.
While writing up yesterday's discussion of
batteries for Olympus cameras, did a few checks, and discovered that battery number 5
is showing signs of life again. That's exactly what happened with battery 7 over the last
couple of days. I wonder what it all means.
In the evening, sitting on the verandah, I left an empty beer glass lying around for a
while. It seems it wasn't empty enough. A hover fly settled on it and stayed there long
enough for me to take some photos:
Somehow I always come up against the same problem: things aren't sharp enough. Part of the
problem here was that I was using the Olympus Zuiko Digital ED
50mm F2.0 Macro lens, which can't come close enough, so these photos are heavily
cropped. But it seems that I always run into this problem. It's not focus: the fly is
pretty much uniformly fuzzy. I still suspect diffraction.
My camera battery problems are anything
but over. As expected, my battery 7 died today after only 54 more photos—a total of
657 since I got it. I wish I knew what to do.
I suspect that Piccola has been helping the
appearance here. Took a couple of photos of the brushes, without achieving anything that
really pleased me:
According to Wikipedia, the stamens are generally free in Callistemon but grouped into bundles in
Melaleuca. Now I have to find a Callistemon brush to compare with, but I don't have any
good specimens right now.
The weather was hot again today, though not as bad as yesterday—top temperature was
only 33.7°. Some of the plants are showing the effects of inadequate watering, so spent
some time putting in drip lines round the wind break in the north garden and round the dog
run. Not the most pleasant of work, but it should make itself worthwhile.
Sjömansbiff for dinner today, not the first
time. And not for the first time I tripped over not just the language of the recipe
(Swedish, which I can only just read), but also over the quantities. How big is a big
potato? It depends on the country. After moving to Germany from England in late 1972, I
discovered that it would take about 5 German potatoes to make a British potato. Based on
today's results, I think a big Swedish potato must be about twice the weight of a big
Australian potato. I've changed the recipe accordingly. The good news is that it tasted
very good this time.
Somehow I didn't do much today. I don't even know why. A little garden work, including
tying up some of the roses climbing up the south side of the verandah, and that was about
that. Maybe it was the weather: it wasn't as warm as forecast, only mid-20s, but the
humidity was high, and in the evening we got still more heavy rain.
In the afternoon went with Yvonne walking the dog, the first
time in months. Although my leg injury feels pretty well healed up, it's clear that I can't
walk as fast as I used to. Hopefully that'll improve in the next month or so.
We had just got to the end of our property when I saw some flowers growing in the middle of
the bracken. Just getting to them was difficult; we had to approach from the lagoon. They
appear to be yet another kind of bulb. It'll take a bit of extraction, and I don't know if
I should do it now or when they finish flowering. But after they finish flowering, I won't
be able to find them any more.
Started watching a documentary film today which I had recorded from SBS, and discovered the end of a cooking programme at the
beginning of the file. I recorded it a month ago, so I can no longer find out what it is,
but the bloke appears to be Australian, possibly naturalized, and it appears that it's an
SBS production. He was cooking something that looked like a pot-au-feu:
Now the next bit for me is quite bizarre in the recipe. The idea of things like, you
know, onions and celery is fine. That just gets chucked in. The next thing is the
weirdest, and that is this little boy here, turnup [sic]. Because the French
consider turnup to be pig food.
And this bloke wants to be a chef cook! I don't know any cuisine which uses turnips as much as the
French. And indeed it's almost essential in this dish. No wonder we don't watch cooking
programmes much any more.
Who was it? I don't know. I watched the entire credits, and even discovered that I could
buy the nonsense at Dymocks book shops, but
there was nothing to say what the programme was. That's clearly sloppiness on the part of
SBS, who obviously want to sell their second-rate programmes.
We had 24 mm rain overnight, though the temperature wasn't too bad. Did some more weeding,
and took another look at the vegetable patch. The weeds seem to be coming out faster than I
can spray them. I wonder if I should just plant the potatoes and put up with the weeds, at
least for this year. Also planted some more Thai basil, which Yvonne had brought back. Hopefully the slugs won't eat this lot.
Did some work on the verandah again; I wish I knew how to deadhead these petunias. Took
some photos of them:
I'm trying to collect the seeds from the flowers, but what do they look like? Last time,
long after the event, I found little black spots. What I saw on the leaves is quite
different:
Are those rods seeds, and if so, are they weeds or seeds of the petunias? And are the
insects (about 1 mm long) attacking the plant, or have they been caught by it? The last
photo suggests that the insect isn't there of its own free will, and it looks more like a
housefly than a sucking insect. More observation needed.
While taking photos, battery 2 finally discharged. And I recharged it with some trepidation but without difficulty. Also
tried recharging batteries 6 and 7, which have been showing no voltage. Number 6 came out
“fully charged”, still showing no voltage, and the other showed a charge error,
but after that had some voltage to show for itself. I really must learn more about the
insides both of the batteries and the chargers.
Watching a TV documentary today and found a clever trick to supply multiple statues in the
space required by a single one. You take one statue of the body and several interchangeable
heads:
I suppose nothing shows the problems that my leg injury did like the fact that it has taken
me until today to plant this season's potatoes. They should have been planted two months
ago at the latest. It wasn't just the leg problems themselves, but all the preparations,
including setting up the vegetable garden, getting the soil in a condition in which I could
plant them, and putting in the irrigation.
I've finally given up on getting the soil in condition, so today I just put in the
irrigation and planted the potatoes. I hope I got it right: they've been lying around for
months, and I no longer knew which were the “Dutch Cream” (which I wanted) and
which were the Kipfler (which I didn't). We'll see in a few months' time, I suppose.
Last month it rained so heavily that I didn't get round to taking photos of the flowers in the garden, as I had done at the ends
of the previous three months. Now another month is coming to an end, and it looks like rain
for the rest of the month, so did it today.
Surprisingly, there wasn't that much difference from the end of
September. The Alstroemerias and the succulents are in full bloom, and the Gazanias are coming—even the ones we
picked up only two months ago will soon be flowering:
Many of the native plants are also flowering, including the Alyogyne, which I think flowers just about
all the time. We have a problem with the Callistemons, though: the birds like the
brushes, and they seldom get as far as full bloom. For some reason, they're not as
interested in the Melaleucas:
The Crassula “Springtime” that flowered so nicely, well, in spring, subsequently looked almost completely dead. I didn't take a
photo of it, but it was almost just because of laziness that I didn't pull it out. But it's
picking up. It still doesn't look good, but it's so much better than before that I have to
assume this is normal. Here two months ago and today:
The Loniceras are going well.
It seems that the flowers of the one on the verandah really do open white and then go
yellow. According to this month's issue of “Burkes
Backyard [sic]”, they're Lonicera japonica, which they
claim is a weed. I haven't seen any substantiation of that. The other one is from Sue, the
“firecracker”. It has typically Lonicera-like flowers, but they're arranged in
a circle instead of alternately.
The roses are really blooming well, even the ones that Laurel Gordon gave us as small plants
only a year ago, “Gruß an Aachen”,
“Monsieur Tillier” “News” and “Phyllis Bide”:
The “Lili Marleen” in the north bed is also looking as happy as I have seen it,
and the maltreated climbing rose that I moved around a couple of times is now also in bloom.
The Icebergs climbing the south side of the verandah are producing an amazing number of
blooms. Somehow the photo doesn't show the effect of roses, Clematis and Tropaeolum well until enlarged:
Inevitably, some plants look less happy. The Meyer lemon in the greenhouse is
looking much better than it did, and is now in flower, as is the second grapefruit
tree south of the verandah. Maybe the denser surroundings will be more to its liking. The
Calendulas look surprisingly
unhappy, probably because of the weeds around them. That's another task. The newly planted
Hosta is clearly looking burnt.
It's behind a shade barrier, but the sun is getting high enough now that we really need to
put in a shade cloth roof.
The old saying goes that a weed is a plant in the wrong place. A lot of my weeding activity
confirms this. There are many weeds with names I don't know, like these:
The first one is only marginally a weed, since it has pretty flowers. The second is also
not so serious, since I don't see many of them. But the third is very invasive. It
produces runners under the surface of the soil and spreads quickly. It's the one I've been
fighting in the vegetable patch.
Apart from them, though, there are others. The first of these is everywhere, and I'm
continually removing them. The second pops up all over the place too, and produces enormous
flowers.
But all of these are garden plants. The first is Betula pendula, a silver birch.
We've kept a lot of these seedlings and planted them in the ex-cathedral, but there must be hundreds of them. The
second is Calendula, which we
have planted at the east end of the garden, but which would take over the entire garden if
left to its own devices. The third is a strawberry, and on the fourth there's a Viola tricolor and a Borage. In addition, there were lots of
Forget-me-not and
Oregano seedlings, but they seem
to have finished their cycle for this year.
In fact, after revisiting this entry 10 years later and reprocessing the images, in
particular adjusting white balance, the result looked quite difference and by no means
unusual:
Election day again today, this time for the state of Victoria. Off to the Hall,
where I filled out all 27 boxes on the ballot paper for the upper house before I discovered
that I only needed to do the first 5. But who does it the hard way? A single number above
the line is enough to vote the way some specific party wants you to. And that's what seems
to happen. It's interesting to note how many people take the “How to vote”
cards from the people outside. The two people in front of me took one from Labor and one
from the Liberals, which I suppose makes for some kind of balance.
Once again it shows unsharpness. Why? I had thought it might be diffraction due to the
aperture, but the photo in Wikipedia was also taken at f/22, with a 60 mm lens, not that
different from my photo, and it's not nearly as fuzzy:
When I was a pre-teen boy in Melbourne, I was a chemistry geek. I knew it all, as you do at
that age. And a couple of things have stayed with me all my life: a disdain of the
Imperial system of
measurement, and a rejection of old-fashioned names for chemicals. But both are still with
us, and if you want to buy potassium sulphate for the garden, you have to ask for “sulphate of
potash”. Australian gardening magazines go one step further and spell it in the
American way, “sulfate of potash”.
I bought some sulphate of potash recently, and as usual, read the analysis on the packet.
How about that: it contains potassium sulphate. It's easy enough to calculate the analysis:
the molecular weight of K₂SO₄ is 174.259, and the compound contains 2 potassium atoms
(molecular weight 39.0983) and one sulphur atom (atomic weight 32.065). So it should
contain 44.9% potassium and 18.5% sulphur. But that's not what the analysis says:
“As potassium sulphate” suggests to me that it's counting the molecular weight
of potassium sulphate, not the atomic weight of potassium. And that should be close to
100%. Similarly, “as sulphate” suggests the weight is relative to the SO₄
group. But the values they give are slightly lower than the proportions of the elements.
Why? If you take the relationship between potassium from my calculations and what's on the
analysis, it would suggest that the product is only 92.5% pure, which sounds low even for
this kind of product. The relationship of sulphur is close enough to be plausible. Are
there other salts in there as well? Or have they just messed up their calculations?
It rained most of the day, so I wasn't able to take my weekend photos of the garden, but I
did find time to plant the “Mini Rose” in front of the bathroom window.
David Yeardley is back in town again. Chris and David came over for dinner and we stayed up
later than I have done for a long time. I was supposed to write something disparaging about
Chris in this diary, but I forget what it was.
Yvonne went off to a dog show early this morning, and somehow
I didn't wake up until past 10:00. The weather has been cool, wet and windy again, but
somehow I found time to take my weekend photos, with the exception of the dam.
And that was about all. For some reason, I had completely lost my appetite, and missed out
on lunch altogether. Had the equivalent of lunch in the evening, watched a bit of TV, and
then to bed. What a day!
I've been connecting to IRC using the bip proxy and the ERC client, part of Emacs, for some time now. And there seems to be nowhere
in the ERC configuration where I can enter a bip password. The bip password
consists of three parts: bip user name, real password and an identifier for the
channel, separate by colons: something like grog:FOO:mychannel. And to enter it,
you run the function erc, which prompts you for the information.
By chance today I found that the resultant invocation got stored in the redo buffer:
Armed with that information, I was able to write an Emacs macro to do all the connections
and reconfigure my bip for the channels I wanted. But the change in configuration
seems to have confused it: I changed the listen port for bip, and on restart I got:
28-11-2010 03:00:47 [linux] Connecting user 'grog' using server irc.hacker.com:6667
28-11-2010 03:00:47 [blug] Connected for user grog
28-11-2010 03:00:48 [linux] Connected for user grog
28-11-2010 03:00:49 [mychannel] Connected for user grog
28-11-2010 03:01:23 [mychannel] backlogging: #mychannel
28-11-2010 03:01:23 [mychannel] backlogging: grog
28-11-2010 03:01:23 [mychannel] backlogging: irc.freenode.net
28-11-2010 03:01:23 FATAL: list_remove: item not found
This last message really was fatal. I wonder what caused it. It's clearly
configuration-related, because I was able to revert the old configuration and continue, but
I don't understand what the problem is. More investigation needed.
Another power failure round 8:00 this
morning, just as I was getting up. Only a short one. Then, almost immediately, a power
failure. Only a short one. Then a power failure, and that lasted. Off to call them up,
and by the time I got through, they had registered the fault. Expected time to restore
service: 10:00. It's always 2 hours. But that meant we couldn't get breakfast. Off into
the car to head into Ballarat, but at the last minute the power came back, after
“only” 40 minutes.
One of the consequences of the power failure was that I had to shut down dereel, at
least cleanly for once. When I brought it back, my recent changes to the environment took
place across the X server: all my shells had LC_CTYPE set to en_US.UTF-8.
That seems reasonable enough, but it completely messed up my command line editing. Why? I
can understand that the characters have different meanings in UTF-8, but the shell should be
able to intercept them and interpret them correctly. I can't specify environment variables
in the window manager config files, so I'll have to restart the window managers themselves
with the environment set.
Spring is coming to an end, but it's almost as cool as at the beginning:
mysql> select min(outside_temp), avg(outside_temp), max(outside_temp) from observations where date > "2010-8-30" and date < "2010-9-10"; +-------------------+-------------------+-------------------+
| min(outside_temp) | avg(outside_temp) | max(outside_temp) |
+-------------------+-------------------+-------------------+
| 3.2999999523163 | 10.051952587295 | 18.10000038147 |
+-------------------+-------------------+-------------------+
mysql> select min(outside_temp), avg(outside_temp), max(outside_temp) from observations where date > "2010-11-27" and date < "2010-12-1"; +-------------------+-------------------+-------------------+
| min(outside_temp) | avg(outside_temp) | max(outside_temp) |
+-------------------+-------------------+-------------------+
| 9.3000001907349 | 12.534751368515 | 18.39999961853 |
+-------------------+-------------------+-------------------+
So our gardening activities are still pretty slow. Removed lots of weeds and even more
oregano from the north bed, and
also transplanted our Camellia sinensis, which had been looking quite unhappy for itself. It was
definitely getting too much sun and possibly too much wind. It's now in a pot on the
verandah, where it'll get less sun and hopefully not too much wind, and no longer looking
quite as unhappy. Here a photo taken a year
ago and now:
One effect of the cool weather is that the windows are shut again, and in the bathroom a
butterfly got caught between the window and the fly screen. I opened the window and tried
to move it out, but it didn't want to go. So I got some photos:
They're not very good, but it's a real pain to take photos like that. It's a good thing
that the butterfly was too cold to move. Somehow there must be an easier way. It's almost
impossible to get close enough. I had to turn the camera round the other way on the macro
rail, and even so I could barely get close enough:
More investigation of batteries for my camera found somebody who advertised a pack of 5
original Olympus batteries on eBay, and who
offered me lower numbers at what looked like excellent prices. In the end chose two for
$25, paid the money, and then got a message back saying they're not original after all.
They offered the money back, but they claim they're OK, so I'll try them anyway.
That was somewhat confused by the fact that all messages from China via eBay come twice: one
somewhat mutilated, and the other very mutilated. But this time I got three, and it took me
a while to realise that they were from two different sellers. The seller of batteries 6 and
7 now has a new supplier, so we'll give it one more chance. It looks like I'll soon have
received 6 new batteries since the beginning of October.
Another camera battery in the mail
today. This bloke in Melbourne may have problems getting good batteries to me, but he gets
them fast. Hopefully this one will be good: it's the 4th battery I've had in two months.
David and Chris Yeardley came along this morning to take a look at plants that we can give
them. While they were here, David took a look at the greenhouse, which he gave me over a year
ago. Work has been on hold while I try to work out how to attach shade cloth, but he
found a few details I hadn't recognized. He came back later with some more components, not
without further surprises: a number of screws and glazing strips that are now largely
redundant, 13 of the missing 7 arch gussets that I commented about in May, and also some brackets for hanging up shade cloth, and another
of the brackets that we had been puzzling about since that time. It's a door track support.
The second one was in better condition, and the inscription is more clearly legible:
So where do the remaining 6 arch gussets go? At the ends? I suppose it's possible. Looks
like I'll have to get back to work again.
They also took some of the tomato plants with them, and plenty of birches. Decided that it
was probably warm enough to plant the other tomatoes in the vegetable patch, so did so,
first finishing off the remaining dripper line. That required testing, of course: this
particular circuit has the largest number of drippers on it, ranging from the north side of
the driveway through the “cathedral” down the east side of the garden almost to the greenhouse, and even before this
addition it used enough water to keep the pump running continuously (in itself a good idea;
starting and stopping increases the wear). So turned it on and let it run, and after a
minute or so the pump stopped.
That's just what you'd expect of pump overload: it could no longer deliver enough pressure
and just gave up. But it wasn't like that: the pressure cell was at full pressure. Circuit
1 just didn't seem to work. Checked at the control unit. Yes, voltage going out. Circuit
2 didn't work either, and neither did circuit 3. Just for the fun of it, carried on
checking. Circuit 4 did work.
All these circuits are connected to the control unit by a single cable. The solenoids for
circuits 3 and 4 are in front of the verandah. In fact, I take the view to the verandah photos from
exactly above the junction box:
The control unit is in the garage on the left, and other two are further north at the end of
the path to the right of the verandah (a straight line). Took a look at the junction box in
front of the verandah and found that one of the common wires had corroded away, so circuits
1, 2 and 3 had no connection any more. Took 20 minutes to fix that. How I hate commercial
junction hardware! There must be something better.
After fixing that, yes, we still have enough pressure to run the sprinklers, so all is well.
We now have a total of 11 plants: one Roma, one “Burkes Backyard Italian”,
whatever that may be, two cherry, three “Totem”, three “Salad
special” and one “Burnley surecrop”. Most of these are from Burkes Backyard magazine,
where they came as a free gift in the September issue, and I have one each of the last three
in pots for growing in the greenhouse.
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