Telstra never fail to amaze me. Today, as promised, I got a bag for returning the antenna, atypically supplying not one but three different postal addresses in three different states:

The antenna is the rod at the bottom. Again, there are no instructions for how to fold it. Instead, I got a letter regretting that I'm canceling my Big Pond service and asking me to return my modem, ADSL router, Wi-Fi adapter and cables, but not the wireless modem or the antenna. At least, though, it gives me a chance to send them something in writing, so I'll do so, along with those components which fit in the bag. Sheesh!

In the afternoon, much work in the garden, and also spent some time trying to sort out my sheet music. Played a recorder for the first time in months, maybe the first time this year.

Also made further process with my temperature controlled fridge. A number of things had impeded progress, but finally I had everything in place, with the exception of a network connection. The fridge is now inside a galvanized iron shed, making wireless an issue. But not much of one, as it seems. Despite the shielding, I was able to connect with the outside world with 802.11b:

This worked even after I shut the roller door; there's a 12 cm gap at the top, enough to let 2.4 GHz wavelengths through. Paradoxically, the signal dropped out when I closed the curtains in the evening, so ended up putting a second AP in Yvonne's office. To be improved on.

More brewing today. brewer crashed for unknown reasons last night, leaving the heater on, and by the time it rebooted, the temperature of the water had risen from the target 14° to 23°. Managed to get that down again pretty quickly, but it's certainly a concern.

It turns out that 14° is still too high for the method I'm using. I'm taking three cans of “home brew” wort concentrate, mixing them with 6 litres of boiling water and adding a kilogram (should have been 1.5 kg, but I got caught short) of Coopers “Brew enhancer 1”, which is mainly dextrose. There were 40 l of water in the fermenter, to make a total of 54 litres, and I had expected the resultant temperature to be 18°; in fact, it was a little over 22°, so I had to cool for a while. Next time, if I still do things this way, I'll set the temperature to 10°.

More work in the garden, and also sorting out music. Found music that I didn't know I had, including stuff which must have belonged to Sue Fortescue—I certainly have no use for a Richard Strauss horn concerto.

Chris Yeardley in in the afternoon with some wine:

It's becoming clear that Telstra's wireless broadband software has even more bugs than I have noticed before. Maybe it's something to do with the recent update, but I've seen:

• Relatively frequent dropouts, which the “connection manager” neither notices nor (obviously) recovers from.
• Under these circumstances, it's also impossible to manually disconnect. On one occasion I got the message “please reinsert your modem”. They don't say where, but I can think of some useful targets.

While it was down, decided to upgrade the software on boskoop.lemis.com, the Apple machine: after all, they claim to have included bug fixes. Got the machine up and running, and it took about 10 minutes before it paniced. I can't see any improvement there. Called Big Pond technical support, where Said told me that a Macintosh is not like a real computer, and that nobody had ever complained to him about this kind of problem before. I suggested that maybe he had only just started working for Telstra. He took a bug report, which I suppose will end up in /dev/null like all the others.

During unpacking, found some small ornaments, including porcelain horses that had been packed particularly well:

Finally finished unpacking the music room—in other words, it looks no more untidy than average—and managed to actually make some music for probably the first time this year:

APC (“Australian PC”) magazine is still being sent to the old address in Echunga. Why? I renewed the subscription just before leaving Echunga in June, clearly indicating my new address on the renewal form. When that didn't work, I tried their web site, which didn't give me an opportunity to mention any subscriptions. I called up their phone line and spoke to Colin, who couldn't tell me how to do it either, so did it verbally. Why are web sites so continually out of sync with the rest of a company's business?

Yvonne's computer, lagoon.lemis.com, has been causing concern for some time:

Oct  4 03:06:27 lagoon kernel: ad0: TIMEOUT - READ_DMA retrying (1 retry left) LBA=4214171

Most of the time it doesn't get as far as reporting them in the log file; we come in in the morning to find that hit has crashed or hung. Interestingly, it then gets half way through the boot process and can't mount the root file system because of disk errors. Only after power cycling will it reboot.

Clearly that's an unacceptable state of affairs. What's causing it? On the face of it, the disk, but we're getting timeouts, not the more typical I/O errors, so I suspected the IDE controller: in my experience they're particularly flaky. Dragged out a case with a new (well, different, but faster) motherboard, and put the disk in there. Now it's working again, though every time you change a motherboard, you need to reconfigure X, because xorg.conf contains information about hardware that shouldn't really be there:

    VendorName  "nVidia Corporation"
    BoardName   "NV11 [GeForce2 MX/MX 400]"
    BusID       "PCI:1:0:0"

But I suppose you have to have some way of identifying the boards. In the process, increased the resolution from 1024x768 to 1400x1050, something that Yvonne took some getting used to. Part of the issue is that there are so few X fonts. More investigation required.

Mainly tidying up my office today, which involved a lot of catching up on financials. Yvonne went shopping and brought back some curtain rails, something that I haven't dealt with before; in particular the lounge room will benefit from that. It's east-facing, behind a verandah, and the curtains covered half the windows even when open:

By the simple expedient of widening the rail, we're able to open them completely:

At a later date we'll put something more sophisticated in.

When we moved house, I wasn't able to transfer my telephone account with Call Australia, so I closed it. I was left with a credit balance of about $25, which was duly mentioned in the closing statement, along with a payment date of 3 September. Did I get the money back? No, just silence. Today I called and was told that I had to apply in writing to have the money refunded. I think I'll get a solicitor to do that for me; what kind of nonsense is that? And why did they wait for me to call before telling me that? I've seen this attitude—“We'll pay our obligations if you really, really insist”— from US companies, but this is the first time I've seen it in Australia.

I've been asked to participate in a research study about the treatment of type 1 diabetes, and the first thing is to find out if I'm eligible. I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes for reasons that didn't make particular sense to me at the time; certainly no tests were done to determine whether I have type 1 or type 2, and I assumed that none exist. It turns out they do exist, but the doctor couldn't be bothered to perform it. That's what I needed to have done today; it's a blood test to determine the presence of antibodies against the protein Glutamic Acid Decarboxylase (GAD), which are specific to type 1 diabetes.

A blood test's not a big thing, right? Of course not, but in this case I was sent a pathology request for a specific laboratory, Gribbles, though all they needed to do was take the blood sample and send it on for analysis. And for some reason Gribbles don't have a surgery in Ballarat; the closest are in Colac and Daylesford, both about 70 km away. I had decided instead to couple it with other things I had to do in Melbourne, and today was the day.

The pathology request didn't list any locations in Ballarat, but I later discovered that they do, indeed, have one. I should have checked the web first.

In preparation, though, followed up on some thinking I had been about my leaky gas cylinder. In the past I have been wrong in my assumptions about where the gas was leaking, so this time decided to put it in a bucket of water and see where the bubbles came from. Surprise: they didn't! After immersing the cylinder in water, it no longer leaked. My best bet is that it was the plumbing tape on one of the many joints:

The people who supplied the fittings recommended plumbing tape, but it's not a good match for gas. My assumption is that it swells a little when it gets wet, and that's what makes it watertight. For the moment at any rate it's also gas tight.

Finally off to Melbourne, again via Geelong, but this time tried some little country roads, cutting across on Bakers Bridge Road south of Bannockburn to Steiglitz road, then via a place with the unlikely name Lovely Banks on Purnell Road, which should have led me to the Prince's highway—but the road has been interrupted by the construction of the western bypass. Still, a little detour got me back onto the Prince's highway just before it became a freeway, and I was in Melbourne even faster than last time.

First to Grain and Grape in Yarraville to buy a second tape and fittings for my beer kegs. They had everything except the smallest item, a T piece to connect the gas hoses to both kegs. They'll send that on by mail when it arrives. I gave my drivers license to Colin, the bloke who was serving me, so that he could copy down me name and address. He looked at it and said “You're Groggy!”. Seems I'm well-known round there. He then dragged me upstairs to show me a computer problem that had been reported to them: somebody had broken in to their web site and was using it for a phishing scam. I'd like to blame Microsoft for that, but in fact the whole thing was running under Linux, Apache and PHP—and, I suppose, MySQL, though that's not relevant to the compromise. Renamed the directory and recommended that he report it to the police. Certainly the web hosting company will have to do some explaining.

As if that wasn't enough, Rod, the other bloke there, showed me another phishing mail that he had received, from Yahoo!, asking him to reply to the message with user name and password, or lose his mail account. The interesting thing is that the message really did come from a yahoo.com account, making it look much more plausible. Of course, yahoo.com is only for users; Yahoo! themselves use yahoo-inc.com. But how many people know that?

Finally on, and first to Gribbles, located conveniently almost on top of the Footscray Market, where I also wanted to go. Was seen to immediately, and I was out of the surgery within 5 minutes.

I don't know when I was last in Footscray, if ever, but it would have to have been before I left Australia in early 1959. The place has obviously changed a lot since then: now the majority of people are Vietnamese. The market is a lot smaller than the Queen Victoria Market, and though they have lots of Asian foodstuffs, I don't know if it's worthwhile coming again. I suspect we'll alternate a couple of times and see which we prefer. Today, at any rate, found some turmeric root, which I plan to plant.

Took a slightly different way back home, via Lara. To my surprise, it was no shorter, but there was almost no traffic. I didn't time myself, but it must be much faster than going either by the Western Highway or Geelong, and certainly it's good 15 km shorter than going via the Western Highway.

Spent most of the day in the garden today, tearing out large sections of a daisy-like plant that is all round the house:

It's quite pretty, but there's just too much, and it was completely overgrown. Took the mess over to Chris' place, where she intends to plant it round her house; I expect that she won't have any trouble.

My success with the carbon dioxide cylinder was short-lived: it's leaking again, this time under water too, and it's clearly coming from the valve. My guess is what I thought a year ago: the valves aren't designed to be gas-tight towards the outside of the cylinder. More head-scratching.

More garden work today, and also a lot of scanning. This Epson “Perfection” 4990 Photo scanner seems to do a better job than the Canon scanner I had before it, but it's far from perfect. In particular, it offers dust reduction and other compensations when scanning film, but you first need to do a preview, and after the preview it resets all the features. While scanning the parameters are not displayed, so it's only after half an hour of snail's pace scanning that I find that the whole thing was useless because I forgot to set the parameters again. It also offers a 48 bit mode that I suspect would be useful for underexposed photos, but then it stores them in 24 bit JPEGs. Possibly the pitiful excuse for documentation has it hidden somewhere, but you'd expect a “user friendly” GUI application to offer it somewhere on the menus.

In fact, the biggest issue was probably the documentation. The scanner can, in fact, do what I was looking for. It just makes it hard to find.

More garden work and scanning; both take a lot of time, and I can see this happening many times in the near future.

This is a first take of the page that I now maintain here

Had some financial matters to deal with, and Helen Maggi wasn't in at work today, so spoke to Sue Meaney instead. She called me back later saying that she couldn't “open” a mail message I sent her.

What follows is a long rant on broken software terminology. If it's too boring, I'll summarize at the end.

How I hate this stupid terminology! It's not Sue's fault, of course, and I don't suppose I can do much about it, but why do people use the term “open” when they really mean “read” or “display”? It's clearly not English, and it's also not correct usage of the computer term; the meanings of open and read are clear enough. This is one of the many changes that have been made in the last 15 years, presumably in the mistaken assumption that using incorrect terms makes it easier for non-technical people to understand. I've been getting increasingly fed up with this stupidity, and so I'm starting a page about bad terminology. Here are the first candidates:

open -- open or create a file for reading or writing

Get rid of that security!

But that wasn't Sue's problem, just a rant that had to come on my part. Sue was using Microsoft “Internet Explorer” to read mail, a thing I've never tried, but I've seen the same problem before.

The issue here is how Microsoft handles email. Nearly all Email today uses MIME, the Multipurpose Mail Extensions. They allow messages to consist of multiple parts with different purposes. The purpose is described by a header with the name Content-type:. The message I sent to Sue had three such headers:

Content-Type: multipart/signed; micalg=pgp-sha1;
    protocol="application/pgp-signature"; boundary="hHiQ9nAwW5IGN2dL"
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Type: application/pgp-signature

The first header (continued onto a second line) describes the message as a whole. It's multipart/signed, which contains two other parts: the first is the message itself (which, in fact, simply said “Thanks, Sue”), and the second is a digital signature confirming that it could only have come from me.

So what was Sue's problem? Microsoft, of course. Microsoft doesn't believe in Content-Type:; indeed, the message that Sue had sent me contained a PDF attachment, which should have a Content-Type: of application/pdf. Instead, what my MUA saw was:

Content-Type: application/octet-stream;
    name="10-08-2007(2).pdf"

application/octet-stream gives no information at all about the nature of the attachment, simply that Microsoft hasn't tried to mangle it. How can I know what it is? I have to guess, based on the name specified. It ends in .pdf, which is the insecure way Microsoft uses to identify file types. MIME allows this, but it's operating-system specific, so it's not a good idea. There's still no excuse for not supplying a valid Content-type:.

But things get worse. My signature doesn't have a file name, because it's not a file. Microsoft doesn't like that. I've seen this problem before when submitting expense reports. Here's a writeup with screen shots that show the problem:

Message from Ingrid Goethe today: she had difficulty with the expense report I sent her yesterday. I had sent a lot of attachments, including plain text, a couple of PDFs, and some PNGs of scanned-in receipts. As usual, I digitally signed my message. Here's how mutt saw the result:

 

Image title: muttoriginal Dimensions: 739 x 195, 120 kB Dimensions of original: 739 x 195, 120 kB Display this image: thumbnail    hidden   alone on page Display all images on this page as: thumbnails    this size Show for Thursday, 5 January 2006: thumbnails    small images    diary entry

The left-hand column shows the structure of the message and the description, usually the name of the file from which it was attached. In the case of attachments not associated with a file, there is no description. The right-hand column shows the MIME type, the encoding and the size.

Ingrid's using Microsoft, however, and it had a completely different view:

Image title: Microsoft rendition 1          Dimensions:          856 x 128, 60 kB Make a single page with this image Hide this image Make this image a thumbnail Make thumbnails of all images on this page Make this image small again Display small version of all images on this page All images taken on Thursday, 5 January 2006, thumbnails          All images taken on Thursday, 5 January 2006, small Diary entry for Thursday, 5 January 2006

 

Note particularly that the digital signature, which didn't have a name, has been called ATT00036.dat, and the lack of MIME information, It might appear that the icons associated with the names are derived from the MIME type, but that's not the case: they're derived from the “extension” of the description.

The first problem was looking at 2005-11-MySQL.report, a text/plain attachment. Microsoft completely ignored the MIME type and said:

 

Image title: attachment 1 Dimensions: 362 x 195, 46 kB Dimensions of original: 362 x 195, 46 kB Display this image: thumbnail    hidden   alone on page Display all images on this page as: thumbnails    this size Show for Thursday, 5 January 2006: thumbnails    small images    diary entry

This abuse of the word “open” gets on my nerves, but why didn't it just display it? On pressing the Open button, another message was shown:

 

Image title: attachment 2 Dimensions: 415 x 262, 60 kB Dimensions of original: 415 x 262, 60 kB Display this image: thumbnail    hidden   alone on page Display all images on this page as: thumbnails    this size Show for Thursday, 5 January 2006: thumbnails    small images    diary entry

“To open this file, Windows needs to know what program created it.”. What nonsense! It's none of “Windows”' business what program created it (it was, in fact, an awk script). The important thing is that you need to know what kind of data it is. That's what the MIME type is about: it's plain text. You can select Select the program from a list (never mind that this assumes that the program that created it can also “open” it, not the case for awk) and select Notepad, and it will be displayed correctly. But how is any recipient to know that when “Windows” hides as basic information as the MIME type?

It's interesting to note that this nonsense is also one of Microsoft's most avoidable security issues (or at least, it was last time I looked): since Microsoft ignores the MIME type, you can send an executable attachment with a name like foo.txt, and it'll merrily execute it for you.

That wasn't all, though. As shown above, Microsoft also not only hid the MIME type of the (anonymous) cryptographic signature, but assigned the bogus name ATT00036.dat to it. Ingrid then tried to open it and was greeted with the message:

 

Image title: attachment 3 Dimensions: 413 x 180, 42 kB Dimensions of original: 413 x 180, 42 kB Display this image: thumbnail    hidden   alone on page Display all images on this page as: thumbnails    this size Show for Thursday, 5 January 2006: thumbnails    small images    diary entry

It seems that the ending .dat is special for Microsoft. So why use such a name for an attachment that doesn't have a name?

This problem caused both Ingrid and myself several hours of pain. If Microsoft “Outlook” would just adhere to the standards, there wouldn't have been any problem. It's this kind of nonsense, and not Microsoft's predatory commercial policy, that most annoys me about Microsoft.

Summary

To summarize, Microsoft has shot itself in the foot here:

• First, it ignores MIME types and insists on an operating-system specific name. What if the operating system uses different names? For example, if I send a JPEG image as photo.jpeg, where Microsoft expects it to be called photo.jpg? Maybe it knows this exception, but I'd guess that it won't know them all.

• Microsoft attempts to “recover” from the fact that the attachment doesn't have name (and ignores the fact that it doesn't need one) by assigning a name, in this case ATT00036.dat.

• This doesn't help at all, of course, because the name is unrelated to the content.

• Worse still, though, it has chosen a name that it considers special, and which it refuses to display (or “open”, as it calls it).

So now it's been three months since we moved in! Things don't look as bad as they did a month ago, and I updated my pictures page to show how things have progressed. The most important two things aren't visible, however: we have an Internet of a bearable speed (albeit with terrible reliability and high cost), and air conditioning.

The air conditioning isn't perfect, either. I've already seen this in Wantadilla: the units have all modern whiz-bang technology to get an efficiency factor of 4 (use 2400 W to produce a heating output of 9600 W), but the temperature control is abysmal: they measure the temperature of the return air. In Wantadilla the system was ducted, and it didn't work too badly, but here it does: I can set the temperature in the lounge room to 30°, and that's what is measured just below the ceiling, but at our height it's only 22°. We'll need to look at external temperature probes.

Spent the day much as yesterday: scanning photos and doing a little garden work. I think I've had enough of scanning for the while.

The sun was shining brightly this morning and the weather suggested that we should take a look around the countryside, so off to the coast to visit parts of the Great Ocean Road. First to the Twelve Apostles. The last time I went there it was pouring with rain, but today the weather was excellent, and I got the first opportunity to use my new telephoto lens in earnest:

Then on to the Great Otway National Park, which I hadn't really taken much notice of before, but it's very interesting, and a marked contrast to the coastline. Stopped off at Maits Rest and took a walk:

Then into Apollo Bay for lunch—fish and chips, total cost $21 for both of us. Last week I spent $22 on a kilogram of tiger prawns and a dozen oysters. Eating out is so much more expensive.

Another Telstra firmware upgrade today. I suppose it's typical that the installation process started up a Microsoft “Internet Explorer”, though my default browser is Firefox, and presented data without proper certification:

 

Image title: warning 2 Dimensions: 468 x 246, 18 kB Dimensions of original: 468 x 246, 18 kB Display this image: thumbnail    hidden   alone on page Display all images on this page as: thumbnails    this size Show for Wednesday, 10 October 2007: thumbnails    small images    diary entry

I suppose it's normal enough for this quality of software for the documentation to show a picture of the standalone modem (with the antennas incorrectly aligned) and then ask you to eject it and reinsert it:

Slash or virgule?

Got a message from Thomas Maynard regarding yesterday's diatribe about punctuation. He writes:

The hairs on the back of my neck began to rise as I read today's diary entry: when/where I went to school your "slash" was my "virgule."

That's the first I've heard of this usage; virgule is the French for comma, which certainly makes it at least as confusing as referring to the hash symbol (#) as “pound” (which for me is £). I followed Thomas' links to Wikipedia, which as usual contained interesting information. It seems that virgule is a use of the slash: “to indicate a line break when quoting multiple lines from a poem, play, or headline”. The Chicago Manual of Style refers to it as Solidus (“also known as the slash, slant, or virgule”). The Ausinfo Style manual also refers to it as solidus (“also known as a diagonal, oblique or slash”). It doesn't mention virgule. To confuse the issue further, Wikipedia has a separate definition of solidus, which I suspect is related to typography.

Thomas also confirms my suspicions that the backslash is new: according (again!) to Wikipedia, it was introduced in 1960. In any case, in this context, I'll go with the ASCII definitions, since we're talking about computer characters.

Into the office this morning to find that the wireless Internet had disconnected again and not tried to reconnect, despite the settings asking for that. Reconnecting worked, up to a point: I got an IP address and a gateway, but I couldn't transfer any data. Tried calling BigPond's “support” line, despite my recognition that they don't know how to escalate network problems, but while waiting the network connection finally came back.

Clearly I need to improve on this. Decided that today was the day to try out Quozl's Maxon on Linux instructions. That meant installing Linux on a new machine, of course, and there again the limitations of the network made themselves known. Six months ago I would have downloaded a DVD ISO from Internode's mirror server, but the only free downloads I get from Big Pond are advertising, and downloading a 4.7 GB ISO would cost me $700. Instead, took a look at the free DVDs I get with my subscription to APC; last month they distributed a complete Fedora 7 distribution.

That was easier than it sounds. The distribution, only about 2.7 GB—is that really all it is?—was a single ISO file. But: there's a limit of 2 GB on files on ISO 9660 file systems, and accordingly my FreeBSD system refused to access it. The Apple didn't have quite that problem: it just reported that the file had a negative size, and couldn't access it either.

So maybe Microsoft ignores this bug? Who knows? The Microsoft box I have here has a CD drive, but no DVD drive, so I couldn't try it out. Decided to put that into the “too hard” box.

Abandon security, all ye who bank here

I've opened a new bank account, and after far too long I finally got a PIN, sent by separate mail to ensure security. Until then, I wasn't able to access the account.

Somehow banks are still stuck in the 14th century when it comes to security. They offer phone banking, but that hardly offers any security at all: I have the following potential exploits:

• Somebody could intercept my mail and get all the details.

• Somebody could tap my phone line and steal the details of the account while I'm on phone banking, easy enough in Australia, with roadside posts like this one:

  
  

  Image title: phone line 5          Dimensions:          2112 x 2816, 1259 kB Make a single page with this image Hide this image Make this image a thumbnail Make thumbnails of all images on this page Make this image small again Display small version of all images on this page All images taken on Sunday, 13 May 2007, thumbnails          All images taken on Sunday, 13 May 2007, small Diary entry for Sunday, 13 May 2007 Complete exposure details

  
   
• If I use the PIN, which I don't get to choose, I have to write it down somewhere. That's why they supply a card with the number on it, which most people will store in their wallet, an ideal target for theft.
• Even if I commit it to memory, but key it in in an ATM booth, people can steal the digits by checking the keypad. A 4 digit PIN has only 24 permutations—if all the digits are different. Otherwise there are even fewer permutations. My PIN—chosen for “security”—has only 2 digits, which corresponds to 14 permutations.

So it looks like I should use web banking (or “Internet banking”, as they call it), which I find gives more control anyway. I read the booklet, which didn't tell me how to register. Followed the help pages and finally found out how to do so, though the terminology on the registration page was different from the terminology on the letter of acknowledgement; the registration used the term “Account Number” where the letter uses the term “Investor Reference” (and reserves “Account Number” for a different purpose). Finally, I had to enter some security information:

• A password. The one I chose was rejected because it contained characters other than letters and digits. What kind of security constraint is that? Why do people do these stupid things? I replaced it with a comment about the stupidity of the system, which it accepted.
• My date and place of birth. Both of these are on my passport and my German driver's license, and the former is also on my Australian drivers' licenses. They're also available on the web and as part of the FreeBSD operating system distribution. In Germany, they consist of part of the standard identification parameters for people. How can this possibly be used to identify that it's really me?
• My mother's maiden name.
• Number of siblings.
• A school I went to.

Nowadays, all of the above information can be found on the web. I've long since taken to using fictive data for everything except my date of birth. But how can bank security people allow such nonsense to be perpetrated in the first place?

We have a license to sink a bore (for ground water)! A good thing too. The drought shows no signs of abating. In the last week we had 6 mm of rain, and Ballarat had only 3 mm—and that's an above-average week.

Continued today with my intention to install Linux on a box to replace ugliness as a gateway to Telstra's wireless network. Found a DVD with Fedora Core 6 and tried installing that. It failed, twice, just hanging during the installation. I already suspected that there's something wrong with the motherboard, but it manifested itself only by infrequent hangs of the disk controller that required power cycling to fix. I haven't seen anything like that before, and it reminds me of the pain I have so frequently seen with installing Linux.

Gave up on that and installed Ubuntu 6.10 instead. That worked, but gave me almost nothing. A 10 GB partition has plenty of space for the entire distribution; why are even things like xterm and sshd missing?

In any case, that gave me enough of a system to access the DVD to copy the Fedora 7 image—except that it told me that no medium was present. Only after rebooting did it acknowledge that yes, indeed, there was something there. And it was able to read this 2.7 GB file, which both FreeBSD and Apple refused! I wonder if there's some extension to the file system spec to read files of this size.

Burnt a DVD and installed Fedora 7, which didn't hang, though it would be easy to have thought otherwise: the installation took several hours, and when it was done, it wouldn't let me log in, claiming incorrect password. I was able to set that in single user mode, but I'm still left wondering why Linux installations are such a pain.

Watching TV didn't get me away from technical problems. teevee paniced again. Now I'm taking dumps, I can see that each time it's in select:

#6  0xc086dd1a in calltrap () at /usr/src/sys/i386/i386/exception.s:139
#7  0xc0693450 in clear_selinfo_list (td=0xc562e900) at /usr/src/sys/kern/sys_generic.c:1078
#8  0xc06928b0 in kern_select (td=0xc562e900, nd=0x8, fd_in=0xbfbfed20, fd_ou=0x0, fd_ex=0x0, tvp=0x0)
    at /usr/src/sys/kern/sys_generic.c:799
(kgdb) f 7
#7  0xc0693450 in clear_selinfo_list (td=0xc562e900) at /usr/src/sys/kern/sys_generic.c:1078
1078            TAILQ_FOREACH(si, &td->td_selq, si_thrlist)
1079                    si->si_thread = NULL;
(kgdb) p si
$2 = (struct selinfo *) 0x7fffffff
(kgdb) p td
$3 = (struct thread *) 0xc562e900

This looks as if si_thrlist has somehow become corrupted; certainly the value 0x7fffffff for si is suspicious. In the other dump it had the value 1. I've already noticed a number of problems with the USB connection for the remote control spontaneously disconnecting and reconnecting:

uhid0: at uhub1 port 3 (addr 2) disconnected
uhid0: detached
uhid0: DVICO DVICO USB HID Remocon V1.00, rev 1.10/1.00, addr 2, iclass 3/0

I wonder if there's a connection here. These messages were coincidentally the last in the message buffer in each case.

As if that wasn't enough, it looks increasingly as if my projector is on the way out: the discolouration that I had noticed 2 weeks ago is becoming more pronounced. High time to look for a repairer or a replacement.

Quiet day today. I had intended to catch up on my reading, which I did up to a point, but in the process found some photos taken in July 1994, and ended up scanning them in. Also did some gardening work and did some searching for a new projector. It's a bad time: two years ago I predicted that projector prices would tumble, but they have barely changed. But now 1080p projectors are appearing, at prices I can't really afford. What to do? Buy an 800x600 projector and wait for the 1080ps to drop in price? Bite the bullet and buy a 1080p projector anyway?

After yesterday's reminder by Chris, finally got out of our lethargy and went riding, Yvonne on Carlos and Chris on Caruso, a horse she's breaking in. I went on ahead, on Darah of course, and got as far as the south end of the Swansons Road airstrip before it became apparent that nobody was following me. Back, with some concern, but they had just decided that Carlos and Caruso had had enough.

In the afternoon, more plans for the immediate future. The grass is maturing far too early, and there's every chance that we'll have to mow hay before the end of the month. Where do we put it? In the shed:

That again means that we need to put in the planned container or second shed where the pigsties are currently, so they need demolition. Got started, but despite the flimsy structure, pulling them apart wasn't that easy:

Summer is here! Suddenly, almost without warning, it's warm, and we were almost at the point where we had to turn the air conditioners to “cool”. And, of course, we have problems with water. There was supposed to be a 4 day rain period at the end of last week; in fact, we got nearly 2 mm of rain, not enough to make any significant difference. Roll on the bore.

Spent a lot of the time trying to organize things. Followed up on the repair to my projector. The Panasonic web site gave me the phone number of two repairers in Ballarat. Called the first one, who said that he didn't do such repairs, but gave me the number of David McGlinn in Ringwood (9780 9319). Called up there, and they said they'd call me back when they got the prices. That they did. The prices are not good. It seems that there are two possible causes of this kind of image problem. One is, as I expected, the LCD panel, but there's apparently a set of filters in front of the panel, and they can fail with the same symptoms.

The cost of repair is very much dependent on what has failed. You need to change the filters anyway, which would cost about $500. Then you can find whether the panel needs replacing, which would cost about another $1500. For that price you can (almost) buy the successor model.

The whole thing is clearly a gamble; if it's only the filters, the repair might be worthwhile. But there's a new Acer DLP projector out there with slightly less specs (also 1000 lumens, 720p, better contrast (2500:1 as opposed to 2000:1) but not as wide a zoom lens and a couple of dB more in fan noise) going for $1000. Decided to take that track; hopefully all will be well. That way we can still use the Panasonic if anything goes wrong with the Acer.

Also looking for containers for the pigsty. Called up Royal Wolf, who told me that I can get empty shipping containers for between $2500 and $3200, depending on length (20' or 40') and condition. That sounds reasonable, but putting a window in one costs another $1900, and a second window costs a further $1300, both of which seems completely excessive, and their “site office” with door, two windows, insulation and electrics, comes to about $12,000. I think I can resist that, but there are still decisions to be made.

For some days, we've had some crows hanging round the east side of the house. I've never liked them: in Wantadilla they chased away the magpies and ate the duck eggs. Today we found out why they were here, I think:

That appears to be one of the swallows that nested outside our dining room window:

My guess is that the crows were looking for the young that had hatched a few weeks ago, since both the parents were dead. And the crows are gone.

How I hate crows!

Had intended to go into town today, but couldn't get all things arranged on time, so spent yet more time scanning photos—how I hate the way negatives are packed. Also decided to take another look at the pigsty, and continued demolishing it. The number of nails is phenomenal. Despite all precautions, managed to put one through my sandal and into my foot:

Off to the Ballarat Base hospital, where they saw to me in record time, giving me a tetanus injection—I wonder when the last one was—and put on a bandage. Hopefully nothing else will be needed.

As the result of my foot injury I was not particularly mobile today, and certainly had no intention of continuing to demolish the pigsties (though, as I considered, if I punctured my foot again in the same way, I at least wouldn't need to go to the hospital).

Found other things to do, helped by the arrival of our new data projector, an Acer PH530. Like the Panasonic, it has 720p (1080x720) native resolution. It came with all sorts of accessories, including a case and an HDMI cable—but no instruction manual! That's on the CD. Instead, they included a “quick start” guide that is almost as long as the instruction manual because it's in about 20 different languages. Strange.

Plugging in the projector worked, barely. For some reason it took quite a while to display an image, and when it did, it was very jumpy. It seemed to think that the image was a 1024x768 format, though in fact it was 1280x720. Took a look in the real instruction manual, which I had downloaded before purchase. It told me to adjust frequency and tracking settings, both of which made no difference. Looking at the specs showed that the signal was well in spec. The projector claims to handle up to 100 kHz horizontal and 85 Hz vertical, and my signal was 60 kHz horizontal and 75 Hz vertical. The next page in the instruction manual shows that this is what the projector expects from an iMac DV signal, which is 1024x768.

The same table showed that it expected a 1280x720 signal to be 45 kHz/60 Hz, so set the X server to do that, and it worked perfectly. Interestingly, the image on the Panasonic PT-AE700E was also much better at this frequency. I get the feeling that the specs are less than completely accurate, and that I should stick to the frequencies that they describe in the documentation.

So how does it compare to the Panasonic? The Acer cost me $965 on eBay, while the cheapest current Panasonic model (PT-AX100E, much the same as the PT-AE700E except that it has 2000 lumens instead of 1000) costs $1799. By contrast, I paid about $2300 for my old projector over 2 years ago, and repairing it could cost as much as $1900. Hopefully models like Acer will spearhead a further drop in prices; currently the 1080p projectors are still very expensive.

The Acer is considerably smaller than the Panasonic; I suspect that the new Panasonic models are the same size as the old ones. To make up for it, the Panasonics have lens shift and a really wide range zoom. The Acer doesn't. As a result, the image we get from the Acer in our narrow lounge room (3.6 metres wall to wall) is considerably smaller than the one we got from the Panasonic, and it's offset vertically. I don't know how they expect that to work when mounted from the ceiling; presumably it needs to be mounted at an angle.

Some reviews I read before purchase suggested that the contrast was not all that it should be. I forgot to check that, but I'm sure I would have noticed if it had been bad. I suspect that Acer might have had quality control problems early on, since all the complaints were from owners of some of the early models.

The other issues were noise and heat generation. The noise doesn't seem to be any worse than the Panasonic, possibly slightly better, and I'm pretty sure that it generates less heat, though maybe that's just because it blows it out to the front instead of to the side.

Apart from that, there's the remote control, which includes mouse buttons and a nipple, only usable if connected to a computer by USB cable (not supplied). I don't have things set up in a way that could use that, but it's a clever idea. Pity the remote control looks so tinny.

Yvonne off to Echunga today to help Diane Saunders celebrate her 60th birthday, while I stayed at home to keep an eye on the property. It's getting really dry already. So far this month we have had only about 6 mm rain, and the paddocks, intended for hay mowing in a month or so, are already looking so dry that we may have to mow now. And still no reply from the bore contractor; we really need that water!

That's not the only matter which gives us the feeling that we're on the edge of civilization here; only 100 km from Melbourne, there's almost no infrastructure. But Google Maps has reinforced the impression. They've added higher definition maps, which stop 5 metres from my lounge room window:

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That's our house to the east of the road, Kleins Road, which they don't include in the hybrid representation at this zoom level, and which they persist in misspelling “Kliens Road”. I wish I could find a way to get them to stop. At least Googlefight gets it right.

I've included a static image here, since I expect them to increase the high-definition coverage. It's interesting to note the line from the shed to the west-south-west. I wonder what that is.

Summer seems to be here already! I currently don't have an outside thermometer, but the temperatures must have been in the high 20s, and for once I was able to use the air conditioner in earnest.

Didn't do too much all day. As a result of the heat, had to collect a lot of water from Chris—when will these bore diggers finally establish contact? We could really do with them now. Also a bit of pruning; it looks as if, despite all wind, it's more comfortable in the garden than it was in Wantadilla.

Yesterday was warm enough, but today the temperatures went up over 30°—summer already seems to be here, and the garden isn't liking it at all. Instead of rain, our rainfall measurement beaker contained something more reminiscent of biblical plagues:

I have been asked to do a technical translation from German into English, so spent a fair amount of time about that. It's about ophthalmology, not my own field—I even still have difficulty typing the word correctly—and so I needed to look up many terms. The last time I did something like this was in the early 1980; how much easier it is nowadays with the web! In particular, Google is very useful here. Also came across Dict.cc, which seems to be of some limited use. The main problem is that the translations are far too general, and I wouldn't want to rely on them.

Fake cassoulet for dinner again, as often when Yvonne's not here. I didn't have enough beans, and also not enough sausage, so ended up putting in a bacon hock, which had the interesting effect of changing the consistence of the other meats as well. The result wasn't very authentic, but it didn't taste too bad.

My foot is healing up nicely. What a pity that I forgot to take my allopurinol pill yesterday, and now I have an attack of gout on the same foot. sigh.

The weather has changed completely since yesterday. The temperature must have dropped by 15°, if not 20°—high time I got an external thermometer—and it drizzled all day. Thank God for that!

More work on the translation. I'm learning more about eyes than I ever wanted to.

More work in the house today, helped by the cool weather. Made my way through most of the translation, did some accounts, and somehow managed to get through the day with very little to show for it.

Yvonne back in the evening with lots of food. When we lived at Wantadilla I had thought that the variety of food in Adelaide was OK, but that Melbourne would be better. So far we've found no evidence of that, and Yvonne had bought a whole lot of food at Standom, an Adelaide manufacturer who also supplies the delicatessens in the Queen Victoria Market.

Yvonne also brought an unmarked CD-R from Yana containing the photos of the last barbecue at Wantadilla. Mounting it on the Apple showed that it claimed to be a studly HPPhotoDisc, containing nearly 400 files all with ALL CAPS FILE NAMES. Found most of the originals—in a directory called ORIGINALS—and discovered that they were all, without exception, mutilated:

convert: Premature end of JPEG file `IMG_1644.JPG'.
convert: Corrupt JPEG data: premature end of data segment `IMG_1644.JPG'.
convert: Premature end of JPEG file `IMG_1645.JPG'.
convert: Corrupt JPEG data: premature end of data segment `IMG_1645.JPG'.

In addition, of course, the file time stamps had been changed to the time when Yana burnt the CD.

Sometimes I despair about modern software.

Another day spent arranging photos. How much simpler things are now that we have digital photography! I still have a number of negatives which don't seem to fit in anywhere.

Also on with the translation, and finished the first draft. It's amazing how simple words are so difficult to translate. What's the English word for punktförmig? For Erkrankung? The first means “point formed”, i.e. a like a dot, and the second is generally translated as “disease” or “illness” (but that's really Krankheit, a different word). In desperation, finally got out my German dictionary, which as expected was of no help. You'd think that big dictionaries would try to convey more of the mismatch between similar expressions in even closely related languages.

While talking about mismatches: I've been discussing cassoulet with Thomas Maynard over the past couple of days. He sent me a recipe with the comment

I think I\222d trust any of his recipes.

As I replied:

I don't think I'd trust this one. It doesn't seem to have much to do with the spirit of cassoulet. No unprocessed meat, no couennes, no croute, no fat. Instead he uses olive oil and add mushrooms. He even calls it a stew. Beans and sausage, sure, but not cassoulet.

The extenuating circumstances here are that this is “fast food”, so maybe the lack of croute is understandable, but it doesn't explain why the ingredients should be changed in this manner.

Tom then sent me back another recipe. This one is better, but some of the ingredients astonish me, such as Genoa salami.

Unfortunately this recipe has rotten in the course of time.

I also found more cassoulet recipes in Connaître la cuisine du sud-ouest by Francine Claustres, which also contains recipes for confit. It's an obvious place to look, and I'm surprised I didn't do so before. It agrees with me that more beans are necessary, and comes quite close to my own balance of beans and meat. To be investigated further.

The Bureau of Meteorology seems to be more accurate with its forecasts for Victoria than for South Australia, but today they made a big mistake: instead of the hot, dry weather they predicted, we got 2.5 mm of rain, which nowadays looks like a lot. I can live with that, but I fear it's going to be too little, too late to save our hay crop.

More work on the translation, comparing it with another paper in English, and was pleasantly surprised by the small number of corrections I needed to make.

Fujitsu air conditioning: broken by design

We've had our air conditioning for a month now, and on the whole it works well. Looking at the relatively technical brochures that Fujitsu print about the technology of the air conditioning units themselves, it seems a real shame that they go and break it with some of the most stupid decisions on room temperature control.

Measuring the room temperature is more complicated than it seems. In fact, there is no such thing as “room temperature”; the temperature in any room with air flow varies greatly from one place to another. So clearly the place where you measure it is of great importance. It should be clear that the place to measure it is where the occupants of the room measure it—ideally on the surface of their skin, but a good approximation is close to where they are.

Instead, Fujitsu measures the temperature of the “return air”, the air being sucked in to the interior unit for heating up. The best you can say about measuring there is that it's not as bad as measuring the output air, which necessarily needs to be warmer. But when heating a room by air convection, no matter how the heat is created, the hot air tends to rise to the ceiling, and that's where the return air is.

This makes it almost impossible to control the room air temperature. We like to have the temperature round 21° in the day time, and for some reason which I haven't completely investigated, we get this by setting the temperatures on the units to 19°. But in the evening we like it one or two degrees warmer, and we just can't get it! The highest setting of the thermostats is 30°, and when we set that, we end up with the air at the ceiling warming up to 30°, after which the units cut out. I've measured the air temperatures in the room at this point; they show a strong temperature gradient, dropping to about 17° near the floor, and hitting about 21° to 22° in the vicinity of the arm chairs, barely warmer than when the thermostats are set to 19°. Clearly an improvement in air flow could help, but equally clearly the temperature control just doesn't work, because Fujitsu has chosen the wrong place to measure the temperature. I'm sure the engineers are very aware of this, but it's marginally cheaper to measure in the wrong place, so I'd guess that this is another triumph of marketing over sound engineering. Once again I'm reminded of the joke attributed to Josef Weizenbaum:

A policeman saw a drunk searching for something under a lamppost. “What have you lost?” the policeman asked. “ My keys”, said the drunk. The policeman then helped the drunk look and finally asked him: “Where exactly did you drop them?” “Over there”, responded the drunk, pointing toward the dark street. The policeman then asked: “Why are you looking here?” The drunk replied: “Because the light is so much brighter here.”

Before I get mail telling me that maybe the units are not powerful enough: that's not the problem. The thermostats cut out completely (an extreme situation for an “inverter” system), and the measurements indicate that this is because they've achieved their goal temperature.

My translation is finished, so I spent most of today proof reading it and changing it. Nothing world-shattering, but it's good to remember how much time the last 20% takes—as much as the first 80%.

Bush's tropical Gulag

I don't often comment on politics, and the general opinion amongst people with understanding appears to be that George Bush Jr is not such a person, but this one was just so stupid that I have to comment.

In a speech yesterday he claimed that Cuba was a tropical Gulag. Clearly he doesn't understand what a Gulag is (or was). He was referring to the “normal” way of life in Cuba, not any prison camp. But there is a prison camp on the island of Cuba where human rights and dignity are abused, but it's not part of the "socialist paradise". It's run by the US government in Guantánamo Bay. Indeed, that's exactly the term that Amnesty International used in a report published a couple of years ago.

I see that I'm not the only one to pick up on this; it's obvious. The thing that's so really stupid is that neither Bush nor the people who helped him write his speech considered this point an issue—or did none of them think of it? Guantánamo Bay is a disgrace to the USA, and you'd expect that they'd do anything to avoid mention of it.

Looking at current US policy, I'm really glad that I'm at the end of the world. US policy really worries me; the biggest externally visible difference between the USA and Nazi Germany is that the USA has no meaningful opponents (no, I'm not suggesting that US citizens are subjected to the same indignities that some German citizens were subjected to in the Nazi era, just what we see in the rest of the world). Under those circumstances, it's a good thing that presidents are limited to two terms.

I've been asked to write a foreword to Dru Lavigne's new book. It's like pulling teeth! I've been thinking about what to write for several months now, and finally Jeremy is getting tired of waiting. Spent some time on that, and came up with something that I'm not too unhappy with.

Cooking in the afternoon, lasagne al forno. That requires ragù bolognese, not the easiest of things to make. Took some photos and planned to write up the details later.

Yvonne spent some time tearing down more fences, and returned carrying a large heap of chicken wire. After cutting her loose, found out why:

Then she went out riding with Chris Yeardley, who, not to be outdone, got off her horse to examine the newly graded surface of Browns Road. Fortunately she doesn't seem to have done herself much harm.

lagoon was down again today! Only a little over 3 weeks since the new motherboard; looks like I was wrong about what was failing. It must have been the disk after all. The good news is that the motherboard I'm now planning for the gateway machine is probably OK after all.

I'm running out of old disks. After some investigation, decided it was time to buy another job lot of 20 GB disks on eBay. It's surprising how few there are, but I found something that looked OK.

Also, as planned, wrote up some more recipes: lasagne al forno and ragù bolognese. Why do the Americans write lasagna? They don't write spaghetto or macarono.

Finally the last part of my beer keg system has arrived: a T piece for the gas input line. Now I can connect both kegs to the gas at the same time. That doesn't sound like much of an advantage, but that way I can let the “new” keg get up to pressure gradually, reducing the risks of under or overcarbonation—I hope.

Back to brewing again today. I'm trying a new wrinkle: use standard “lager” (i.e. light malt) kits and add my own caramel malt, in this case a Joe White 40 EBC caramalt. I'm also using a new yeast, Wyeast 1728 Scottish Ale. I got a year's use out of the last sachet of 1768 English Ale, and it's time to try something else.

Making a 57 litre batch has its own problems: it weighs the best part of 60 kg. How do you move the fermenter, and where do you put it? I solved the first problem by moving it half-full and filling the rest in later, but the weight proved too much for the grille I put it on. During pitching it made an ominous cracking noise and bent through. That would have been OK if it had stayed that way, but what guarantee do I have of that? And I can't move it for at least a week at the earliest. Grabbed some bricks and propped it up for the moment:

I'll think of something better after I've racked this brew.

Broken by design, part 4711

Wyeast have “upgraded” their web site. I don't know why; it looked fine before. Now it looks terrible:

Look at those headers! They overflow all over the place. There are wide margins on either side, and text wraps around to fit in the artifically constrained area left. The form in the middle is so small that it needs a scroll bar. But of course, maybe this is indicative of the fact that the web generation can't read more than 3 or 4 lines at a time. Why do people do this? It makes any industry migration to higher resolutions almost impossible.

Apart from these issues, their yeast list, which used to be on one page, is now a list of badly formatted links, all of which you must follow if you want the comparison that you had before on a single page:

The problems here are of course that web designers have developed a life of their own, one unrelated to the experience of previous centuries, and probably unrelated to anything except the limited experience of the web designers themselves. 2048x1536 displays? We don't need no steenking 2048x1536 displays! Let them use “Internet Exploder” at the standard resolution of 1024x768, like Bill^WGod intended!

The real culprit appears to be Locus Interactive, whose own web site is just as broken:

The “Zip code” field of the feedback form is just one more indication of the disconnect between the web design world and reality. Wyeast is a company which does business round the world—David Logsdon was in South Australia a couple of years ago—but the form doesn't ask for a country, just a zip code. I wonder what they'll make of 3352.

O tempora, o mores!

Peter Hansteen is writing a book on pf, and I've been asked to review it. Of course I'm way behind on my schedule, so spent much of today going through the book. It's partially in my own interest: I've been meaning to use it for years, but the man page for pf is dry enough that I need something better. First there was the tutorial—that's why Peter came to Australia 2 years ago, and to Ottawa last year—and now there's the book.

In the afternoon, finally got over my laziness and continued to demolish the pigsty. With the exception of one corner, where we need to remove a dropper, it's all on the ground now. Time to call the scrap metal people.

Not much to report today; continued looking at Peter's book, did some work in the garden and finally removed the old swing and slide that was under the trees. With a bit of irrigation, that area will be quite nice in summer.

Power failure this afternoon, the first of any length since we've been here: 12 minutes. Clearly this is a different kind of failure from the ones we had in Wantadilla. It also demonstrated that the batteries in my ancient Liebert UPS are not up to scratch: with only two machines (ceeveear and teevee) and no monitors connected, it didn't hold out the time.

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