There's no exit button hidden behind the scroll bars on the deliberately-too-small window.
You have to enter a post code to continue at all. How I hate that! From time to time I get
questions like that about Germany, and I keep forgetting valid post codes (typically
something like 6000 used to work
for Frankfurt am Main), but the
new 5-digit post codes don't seem to like ending in 0000, so I always have to look for
something valid. For what it's worth, 3000 is a valid post code in Australia
(Melbourne CBD). But what do Bunnings expect
by insisting on knowing where you are?
Finally got round to the remaining work that needed to be done to install the new version
of teevee, my projector driver (or “front end” in MythTV-speak). It wasn't much, but it was still
irritating. First found a disk to put the “production” version on: I want to keep the
current version for updates. It proved that about the only drive I had was the old photo
disk, with 1 TB. That left plenty of space on the /home file system for videos, so
moved all non-films to there. Now I have plenty of space, nearly 50% free:
Installing things went OK up to a point, but only so far. The good news was that the
old /spool disk (where I kept all the videos) was
a SATA drive, so I don't have to worry
about PATA until I find a DVD drive
to put in there.
Less positive was the fact that I couldn't find a disk cage for the case, so currently the
disks are lying on the floor of the case. And for some reason I ended up without a few
configuration files that I could have sworn had been on the tv2 incarnation. Nothing
serious, but one of the reasons I've taken so long with the changeover is so that I could Do
It Right. In addition, we seem to have problems with the sound driver. It seems to hang
itself up from time to time, and for some reason changes of volume don't “stick”. The
latter may be a problem with mplayer:
I can modify the volume with the appropriate commands, but as soon as I press any other key,
the volume goes back to the original level.
One distinct advantage: my first ever gigabit Ethernet link:
Today's the first day of spring, and the weather was relatively mild. More weeding, and
also attended to the Salvia “Phyllis
fancy” that we bought at Lambley Nurseryfour months ago. I had repotted it in a much
larger pot, but to my surprise it had already grown through the additional soil and formed a
big mat of roots on the outside of the pot. Clearly high time for planting:
Also did a fair amount of weeding. Things still don't look good, but I don't feel as
hopeless as I did last year. And just as I was finishing, Yvonne decided it was time to transplant
the Tree fern:
We bought the tree fern almost exactly three
years ago, along with the Gingko
biloba. The latter has done well, but the planting conditions for the tree fern weren't
ideal. First, it was in the Cathedral,
which no longer provides shade, and secondly the soil was very poor, mainly gravel, and in those days I
didn't pay much attention to that kind of problem. So it's clear that we needed to do
something, but I was still pondering what.
It seems that our tree fern is almost certainly
a Dicksonia antarctica
(interesting name). Found a Gardening
Austrayaarticle on the subject, which in fact we saw on TV almost exactly a year ago. The
most interesting thing about it was that they confirmed that now is the time to do it. But
they wanted to saw through the trunk and replant just the trunk, 50 cm (not 45 cm!) into the
ground. That would leave nothing of our tree above the ground. So decided to dig up as
much of the roots as I could, which was quite an effort, and left the fronds on. The
articles I read are not in agreement about whether they will die off or not, though with the
roots there's more hope that they will survive. We'll see. Certainly they look pretty
yellow now:
Off to Ballarat yet again today, for
what proved to be just a blood pressure measurement that showed that the medication was
working and my blood pressure was normal. It's certainly nice to have appointments, and I
was in and out of the clinic in 20 minutes. But with the drive to Ballarat it's still a
fair chunk out of the morning, and stopped by at Formosa Gardens to see what caught my
eye. They now have Leucospermums of
various kinds at prices I can afford, including a variety of
the Leucospermum
conocarpodendron “Mardi gras ribbons” that died last spring. I wonder what the
connection with Shrovetide is:
We've been looking for people to remove trees for us all week. We had called four of them,
of which only two called back and made appointments, and one of them, Graham was a no-show. Today the other, Dan, came along and took a
look. To my surprise, it would only cost $100 to remove the last remaining tree in the
Cathedral. So we'll definitely go ahead
with that.
The cedars along the road are another matter. The big one under which we park our cars
would cost $2,000 alone. And there are several others, so we're probably looking at the
best part of $10,000. That's way beyond our budget, so at least for the time being they'll
stay.
On IRC, discussed the volume control problems that I reported yesterday. One possibility appeared to be
the sysctlhw.snd.vpc_autoreset, which, I'm told, is new. To quote:
<AlephNull> And FreeBSD now always resets sound volume on open to match leenux brokeness.
There's a sysctl to fix it but I don't recall the name.
<callum> hw.snd.vpc_autoreset=0
<callum> I think
<Darius> sysctl hw.snd.vpc_autoreset=0
<AlephNull> mplayer closes & reopens the sound device all the time.
<Darius> depends if it closes the mixer device or not
That sounded reasonable, and I confirmed that hw.snd.vpc_autoreset was set to 1, so
set it to 0 to see what happened. No change. You can reset the volume, but the next key
press sets it back to the old value. I suppose I should investigate why.
The Bureau of Meteorology predicted strong winds today, and for once they weren't wrong. We recorded the
highest-ever wind gust, 42.5 km/h. Looking at the values, it seems that all the strong
winds have occurred in the last 3 months:
mysql> SELECT date, time, wind_speed, wind_gust
FROM observations
WHERE wind_gust > 30
AND date < "2011-6-1"
ORDER BY wind_gust DESC; Empty set (0.89 sec)
It seems that the winds are getting stronger. Or maybe it has something to do with the
location of the weather station. I used to have it mounted like this:
The tower on the left is the temperature sensor, which I moved closer to the ground on
11 May 2011. The paddles behind are the wind speed sensor. It's
not easy to see from this photo, but it was mounted well clear of the temperature sensor.
But possibly it interfered with the readings anyway.
As a result, didn't do much in the garden, just a bit of weeding. Also planted some new
seeds: Papaver nudicaule,
Gaillardia pulchella “Red
plume” and Solenostemon
scutellarioides (Coleus “rainbow mix”). The Papaver (poppies) are supposed to be
planted in flowering position, because they don't like being transplanted. In today's winds
that would be hopeless, and I'm hoping that the trick of planting in egg cartons will
nullify the transplant shock. Certainly
the Ipomoeas are looking a lot happier
than any did that I planted directly into the bed.
I'm not sure whether the Papaver nudicaule have been described correctly. According to
Wikipedia that's “Iceland Poppy”, and they don't come in red. But the seed package contains
the supplementary information “Flanders red”, which suggests it should
be Papaver rhoeas. We'll see, if
any of the seeds bloom.
Because of the weather I took my weekend photos yesterday, and was able to get the
processing done by midday today. And again they went up to the external site at a snail's
pace. Once again the modem had fallen back
to HSDPA mode.
Again, looking at the network stats, it's easy to guess that it started earlier in the
morning (where the red peaks fall below the bar):
A couple of days ago I did my first-ever
measurements of file transfer speed from ceeveear, the TV tuner box,
to teevee, the projector driver, using gigabit Ethernet. The results, about 47 MB/s,
were only about 4 times as fast as using 100 Mb/s. There was also a significantly larger
variation in speed. There are a number of reasons why this might be, including disk speed,
buffering and encryption: I was
using scp. Edwin Groothuis
suggested that I would get faster results without encryption, so today set to to find out
how to do that with Linux (which is what cvr2 runs).
On BSD I'd
use rcp, but on Linux that
proves to be a double symlink to scp:
In the end used ftp, which doesn't seem to
have progress indications under Linux. But the results were barely different:
5608484868 bytes sent in 140.04 secs (39111.9 kB/s)
4166209540 bytes sent in 78.85 secs (51596.6 kB/s)
So probably it's a combination of disk speed (I'm not sure how old this source disk is, but
maybe that's all it can do), network stacks and application design. As I said, I'm happy
enough with the speed.
Peter and Vicky Dilley over this afternoon with some of the beer that Peter started
over 2 months ago. It was a stout, but done
without roasted barley, which considerably changed the flavour (none of this acrid
bitterness that you associate with stout). Still, not bad beer.
Chris Yeardley along for dinner this evening, as usual for Saturdays. We try to find a
bouquet of flowers from the garden for the event, and today we ended up with last year's
last rose and this year's first tulip:
Another season, more filter cleaning. Today did the filters of the water pumps. Not
surprisingly, the bore pump (for irrigation) was clean, but house water was pretty filthy:
I've been on Facebook for at least two years, and I've never found any use for
it. But then, in many ways it's like IRC,
and lots of my “friends” use it, so today I decided to leave a window open and watch things
go by.
I still don't understand what it's good for. One of my objections to most web-based forums
is that it's in reverse chronological form,
which destroys just about any connection between the articles.
If you're reading this in what appears to be reverse chronological form, it's not my
fault. I write this diary in chronological order. RSS aggregators have their own view of
the world and usually turn things on their head.
To Facebook's credit, it doesn't use reverse chronological. It uses some randomized
variant, which completely destroys any connection between the articles.
I suppose my Facebook “experience” is greatly coloured by my “friends”. I'm amazed how many
different languages crop up there, many of which I can't speak. I counted English, Malay,
Greek, French, Russian, Danish, Italian, Chinese, Arabic, Swedish, Japanese, Magyar, Polish,
Portuguese and one language that I can't identify. Neither can Google Translate: in one item I read einakaye joftetoon kheili behetoon miad, which Google claims is Indonesian (though it
was unable to translate even a single word) and Poshte Daryaha shahrist ghayeghi bayad sakht!, which Google considers Filipino. The
first is most definitely not Indonesian, and I don't see any resemblance between the second
and Filipino. There are also Arabic comments in the thread, so I suspect this is romanized
Arabic.
Strangely, there weren't any German articles there. Is this because the Germans tend to
post in English?
Malay is a particular problem. I used to speak it years ago, but then three things have
happened to make life difficult: time went by and I forgot; the
Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka
changed the language while I wasn't looking; and people have developed some shorthand that I
don't recognize. For example, this mixture of English and Malay:
Otw back to kl. Now at dungun, brenti minum jap. Charging hp plak wat hal. Batt ada half
lg..
The first sentence clearly relates to a return
to Kuala Lumpur, and he's currently
in Dungun, stopped to drink a jap,
whatever that is. Charging battery, which still has half charge (assuming “lg” to mean
“lagi”, "more"). No idea what “wat hal” means.
And what about the content? With IRC you interleave different discussions, and it can be
difficult to follow. That's easier with Facebook, which separates things into threads
(chronological!). But for some reason texts are much more cryptic. Facebook seems to be a
series of reports and comments, not at all the same thing as a discussion.
It's a year ago today that I injured myself
taking my weekend photos, effectively putting myself out of much action for the entire
spring. Today I'm in much better condition, but after the mild weather of the last few days
it's clear that spring is well on its way. A couple of days ago
this birch had no leaves at all:
I had transplanted them all into plastic pots, and the chrysanthemums in particular were
already quite large. Getting the first one out of the pot was very difficult, and I ended
up leaving half the roots behind. It seems that the roots had sunk into the plastic and
wouldn't let go:
Even after soaking in water and running a knife around the inside of the pot, things weren't
much better, though I did keep the root ball at the bottom:
What's the other? It grew from seed, so maybe it's one of the others that didn't germinate,
either Impatiens
or Anchusa capensis. From the Wikipedia
page it doesn't appear to be impatiens. Is it anchusa? The page doesn't help much. I
suppose I'll have to wait for it to flower.
But that's only a small number of the seeds I have. The poor yields don't help, but I have
many more seeds that hadn't even been planted yet. Got another 6 egg cartons, and this time
wrote numbers on them: they get too soggy for a label to stick, and the writing has to be
large, so it's better to write large numbers on them. Today planted:
A couple of days ago I had trouble with
mplayer resetting the volume when I
pressed any key. The suggested remedy was to
set sysctlhw.snd.vpc_autoreset to 0. I set that, both immediately and
in /etc/sysctl.conf, and it made no difference.
But that was a couple of days ago. Since then I have rebooted teevee, and now the
volume control works as expected. So: is this a thing that has to happen at boot time? Or
at some other time which I didn't pass? I suppose it's too late to find out without
investing a fair amount of effort to repeat the situation. At least it works.
What doesn't seem to work all the time is cutlist processing. I run my programmes through a
script which extracts the cutlist from the mythtranscode database, and when I play
them back I use the -edl option. The cutlist looks like this:
This is an “edit decision list”, conveniently not described in the man page. Instead it
provides a URL, broken
over two lines to obscure the correct spelling, to describe it:
See http://www.mplayer-
hq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/edl.html for details on how to use this.
The first column is the start time into the stream, and the second is the end time. These
are the times that get skipped. The third parameter is 0 for skip or 1 to just mute the
sound. They're not always accurate: the commercial detector sometimes fails to recognize a
commercial, and in such a case you may want to skip backwards. But that doesn't work in the
case where the EDL starts at 0, as above. Instead, the process just hangs and has to be
stopped. The problem is probably related to this comment:
-edl-backward-delay <number>
When using EDL during playback and jumping backwards it is pos-
sible to end up in the middle of an EDL record. In that case
MPlayer will seek further backwards to the start position of the
EDL record and then immediately skip the scene specified in the
EDL record. To avoid this kind of behavior, MPlayer jumps to a
fixed time interval before the start of the EDL record. This
parameter allows you to specify that time interval in seconds
(default: 2 seconds).
Another power failure today. Nothing unusual, and as usual I tried the light switch in the
dining room. And the light went on. Further investigation showed that the circuit breaker
for my office, which also happens to be the breaker for the kitchen at diagonally opposed
end of the house, had tripped. That, too, has happened: we have lots of power consumers in
the kitchen and laundry. But this time none of them were turned on. So what's the problem?
To be observed.
Much of the garden work is pending the removal of the last tree in the cathedral, but one item is a prerequisite: we need to
move at least one of the Azaleas planted
round the trunk. Since it's now full sun, we ultimately need to remove all three of them,
which is a pity right now, since they're in bloom. We've established a location to put
them, to the north-west of the house and in the shade of
the cedars that we're
planning to have removed. Spent some time cleaning up the bed, which was completely
overgrown, and also did a bit of other weeding.
Gradually spring is coming, and the climbing plants around the verandah are shooting. Took
the opportunity to prune the Clematis “Perle d'azur” (or is that, as I've seen, “Pearl
d'azure”?). In the process accidentally trimmed some new shoots, so cut them up and planted
them in toilet rolls.
The seed trays are still not looking very happy: of a total of 14 egg cartons, only three
are germinating. It's relatively early, though—I planted 6 of them only yesterday. But the petunias in the hanging baskets have
greatly enjoyed the winter in the greenhouse, and they needed cutting back. I've already
established that petunia cuttings strike relatively well, so trimmed some bright red ones
and made a total of 13 cuttings. At least this way I know what colour I'm going to get, and
the trimmed flowers make a nice decoration:
Graham along today to look at removing
our cedars, whatever they
might really be. He's a lot cheaper than Dan, and could do the lot for $4,000. Still a lot
of money, but his depiction of what happens to them in a bushfire is worth thinking about:
if they get lit, it's goodbye house.
Also a call from David, who works with Dan. He'll be along here on Thursday to cut down the
last Cathedral tree. Despite the weather,
finished preparing the bed for transplanting
the Azaleas. I'll do the transplantation
itself tomorrow after further research.
Chris Yeardley is doing a university practical about contributing to “Open Source” projects, and I had an idea which
would span the BSDs. It occurred to me that
I don't have any NetBSD system running.
Downloaded an ISO image and set up a new virtual machine under VirtualBox and tried to install under it. The nice
thing is that you can define the image as the CD-ROM device, so there's no further messing
around. Of course it has this horrible graphic tree-climbing interface, but that's modern.
Installation was less that successful: the installer crashed into the kernel debugger,
apparently as the result of a failed system call. Did a bit of looking around and found a
bug report, but according to that it
should no longer happen on NetBSD 5.1. It looks as if some VirtualBox setting might be to
blame, but I can't find anything which relates to what they're talking about. It's
certainly not helped by their dual reliance on too-short text fields and inscrutable tiny
icons:
I particularly dislike the path names for the ISO image. The allows you to
select various other options, including climbing the directory tree in search of the ISO
image. But I can't find anything similar to that for the VT-x/AMD-V settings. So for the
moment that's in the “too hard” basket. To be revisited.
Into town today to see the doctor yet again—the fifth time in two weeks. Today was the day
to cauterize the lesion (solar
keratosis) on my forehead, a process of spraying liquid nitrogen on it until the doctor
thought it was enough. I was expecting some complicated equipment, but it was just a little
hand-held cylinder with a spout on the end, not very different from what I use for throat
sprays. And at the end there was no difference to be seen. Back on Monday (sixth time!) to
see how it worked out.
While in town, stopped at Formosa
Gardens, bought some gladioli,
and walked around looking for inspiration. Didn't find anything, but I did find this (the
best I could get this horrible Nikon
“Coolpix” L1 autofocus to do):
Clearly it's not the same, but the leaves smell similar. Investigating Nepeta more
carefully, it seems that this is also “catmint”, a plant that we already have and which
looks quite different, and that I've already seen plants like this. But there's more and
more reason to think that it might be a different species of Nepeta.
One of the things that grates every time I read Gardening Australia magazine is that they write “sulfur” instead of “sulphur”, and “sulfate” instead of
“sulphate”. That's so American! I've been meaning to vent my irritation for some time, but
of course the only authoritative dictionary I have is the Oxford English Dictionary, which is really authoritative for
the UK, not Australia. Australia, a country of a little over 20 million people, has its own
dictionary: the Macquarie
dictionary. The big one is about 5% of the size of the OED, but still costs more than
I'm prepared to spend, and neither of the local libraries has it online. So today I dropped
into the Ballarat library to take a look.
The volume they have is only 2 years old, and apart from a fold in the title page, looks as
if nobody has ever used it—quite in contrast to their Oxford English Dictionary, which
predates the building: it's the first edition, 1933. Surely they could buy something more
up-to-date.
But looking in the dictionary, I found both spellings: “sulphur” is a kind of butterfly, but
“sulfur” is the preferred spelling for the element, because—they say—that's the universal
spelling. Ugh. For me it's still “sulphur”, but I suppose I can forget my rant to
Gardening Australia. The claim in the dictionary is still wrong. Just about everywhere in
Australian usage, it's “sulphur”. I wonder if they have the obfuscatory terms for vegetables in there as
well.
The four plants on the left are the ipomoeas, and the others are sweet peas. The middle 4
are from commercial packaging, the 4 on the right from an eBay purchase. The difference in vigour is clear.
That's not a condemnation of eBay; the ipomoeas also came from eBay.
David is coming by tomorrow to cut down the last Cathedral tree, so spent a considerable amount of time transplanting
the azeleas, in the process also planting
some of the sweet peas and ipomoeas to climb up the back:
That accounts for two of the three azeleas. I was going to plant the remaining one in front
of Yvonne's office window, but I discovered yet more gravel
only a few centimetres under the surface. How many of the garden beds are like that!
Mañana.
David along this morning to cut down the last Cathedral tree. During the discussion of how to do it, a misunderstanding became
clear. Dan, the boss, is a climber: he climbs the trees and cuts down convenient sized
bits. David doesn't climb: he fells the tree in one, and that would have severely damaged
the Schinus molle (pepper tree) to
the south. So we postponed; presumably it will be Dan in the end.
Interestingly, David claimed that the pepper tree was an Australian native, coming from arid
regions. I had always thought that it came from America, and the species I link to does,
indeed, come from there. Is there another similar tree native to Australia? There
are Tasmannias (note the double n), but
they don't seem related to this tree.
Got around to digging the gravel out of the south bed, the part in front of Yvonne's office. In general, I assume that making a relatively large
hole through to the soil is enough.
But azeleas have very shallow root
systems, something that became evident when I removed them from the Cathedral. So this isn't the ideal place for them.
After some discussion, planted a Canna
there instead, along with
a pelargonium that we had planned for
the location (in fact, replacing a very similar pelargonium that Yvonne had removed some
time ago), and put the azelea on the east side of the house, where we had planted
a Delphinium “Völkerfrieden” last
year, which had completely disappeared. It wasn't until I removed it that I discovered
something like roots and a subterranean part, possibly rhizome-like. Was it trying to come
back? In any case, replanted it a little way away. We'll see how the following areas
develop:
We've decided to eat less meat and more vegetables. At the moment we're thinking of novel
bean recipes, and today I started three different things: frijoles cocidos for Mexican food,
some chick peas for a salad we found in
Bonniers Kokbok, and some white beans for a dish with smoked sausage that Yvonne
wanted to fake.
Did a bit of research on the sausage dish, and it gradually dawned on me that we have one:
cassoulet. And Yvonne hates it.
Discussed it with her, and it seems that it's really only the
couennes (pork skin) that she doesn't like. So we faked a cassoulet, which didn't
turn out too badly. In fact, it looked surprisingly like one of the images in Wikipedia:
Maybe we should just scale things down a bit rather than making enormous quantities that
take several days to eat.
A few days ago I woke up in the middle of the night with a realization: writing programs has
become so complicated that it's no fun any more. I was about to write a comment at the
time, then I discovered that Eric
Allman had beaten me to it. At least it was a confirmation that I'm not alone.
Once upon a time programming was easy. You had an idea, you wrote it down, you debugged it,
and it usually worked. But those were simple, kiddie programs, right? To do anything
serious you need lots of code, and what's easier than to use code that somebody has already
written for this purpose—a library?
The idea is good, but it presupposes good, simple, well-structured code. There's plenty of
that around—look at the standard C library for an example. Simple interfaces,
straightforward functions, and still it makes the majority of any C program:
=== grog@dereel (/dev/pts/7) /tmp 10 -> cat > hello.c main ()
{ printf ("Hello, world!\n"); }
=== grog@dereel (/dev/pts/7) /tmp 20 -> cc -c -o hello.o hello.c hello.c: In function 'main':
hello.c:2: warning: incompatible implicit declaration of built-in function 'printf'
=== grog@dereel (/dev/pts/7) /tmp 21 -> cc -static -o hello hello.c hello.c: In function 'main':
hello.c:2: warning: incompatible implicit declaration of built-in function 'printf'
=== grog@dereel (/dev/pts/7) /tmp 22 -> size hello.o hello text data bss dec hex filename
52 0 0 52 34 hello.o
163571 7952 36392 207915 32c2b hello
So the object code from my program is a total of 52 bytes, but it blows out to about 200 kB
when you include the library. Is this reasonable?
I'm not going to even address that question. What really blew my mind recently was the size
of some of the recent libraries:
=== grog@teevee (/dev/pts/4) /usr/local/lib/gcc47 6 -> size libstdc++.so libgcj.so text data bss dec hex filename
976642 36424 87088 1100154 10c97a libstdc++.so
40881742 9265944 453864 50601550 3041e4e libgcj.so
No surprise that the C++ library is one of the biggest, but it pales by comparison
with libgcj, the runtime support for the GNU Java compiler. 40 MB of text!
The file itself is an order of magnitude larger, because it's not stripped:
=== grog@teevee (/dev/pts/4) /usr/local/lib/gcc47 8 -> ls -lL libgcj.so -rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 187858200 Aug 9 19:19 libgcj.so
The size isn't directly the issue. System memory has increased much faster than executable
size, even with this incredible bloat. But how do you understand such an incredible
body of code? How do you interface with it? How do you program with it?
Then other questions raise their ugly heads: does anybody really understand this body
of code? Do the authors? How well does such a paradigm fit what you want to do? How
well-designed are the interfaces? The original C library has its strangenesses. The larger
things get, the less likely it is that they'll be consistent, and the less likely that
they'll do what you want to do. This is a particular problem in contributing to existing
projects: even if one big library happens to be really good, the sheer number of competing
libraries means that you're unlikely to know this one, so you first have to learn it.
The result: the original idea gets bogged down in bureaucracy. Finding what you want to do
is obscured by multiple layers of indirection, and I get the impression that they frequently
involve badly-designed C++ classes. In many cases, there's a simpler alternative: give up.
It's no fun any more.
This is nothing new. In the late 1960s there were similar problems (can you say
“OS/360“?). In many
ways, Unix was a reaction against this
complexity. Recently Warren
Toomey revived a binary-only version of the First Edition of Unix. I participated in
the sidelines, and we were all astounded how simple things were. We only had object
files, but they were so easy to understand that it was easy to patch them. You couldn't do
that with modern objects.
Achieving this clarity took people with vision, and they're no more common than they were
now. It's sobering to think that Unix was written by people in their 20s, and today
is Dennis Ritchie's 70th birthday.
There are many more people in the industry today, but the overall quality hasn't changed
much.
Since finishing the greenhouse in April, I've come to use it more and more. But that's like
the man with a hammer, for whom every problem seems to be a nail. I've been doing my
propagation there too. But things don't always work out. I've had a number
of salvias strike, grow a little bit, and
then die. Now it's happening with some rose cuttings:
I've been wondering for some time what's wrong. There's enough moisture, but it gets cold
at night and quite hot in the daytime. I'm gradually coming to the conclusion that the
problem is the heat (or sunlight) and not the cold: greenhouses aren't really intended for
propagation. So it looks like I need a shade house.
Another plant that points in this direction is a plant which I know as “Easter cactus”, but
which looks very similar to the current image on the
Wikipedia Holiday Cactus page,
which describes it as “Thanksgiving Cactus”, though the image title is “Christmas Cactus”:
According to that page, it may be a
Hatiora or
a Schlumbergera, though the images
don't match. Anyway, it's not looking happy. The leaves are yellowish instead of dark
green:
Since it's an indoor plant, it's reasonable to assume that it's getting too much light. Put
it in the shade area to the north of the verandah, in the process discovering that it's in
bloom—on the shade side:
As planned, made a chick pea stew today
according to a recipe in Bonniers Kokbok. Didn't taste bad, but I don't know if I want to make it again,
though Yvonne was more positive.
Two recording attempts last night failed catastrophically. One recorded nothing at all, the
other file was only about 20% of the size it should have been.
Tried again today and found that things were little better, if at all. Reception on
SBS was OK (I didn't try last night), ABC was pretty terrible,
and 7mate was useless. Shut down the
machine in the middle of the trial recordings to check the cable connections. After
rebooting, the same programmes continued recording, but on different tuners. The problems
stayed with the channels, not with the tuners, so I can stop suspecting tuners and cables.
At least we've clarified that, though it's interesting to note that when all these problems came to a head, it was SBS with
which I had problems. I wonder how much this has to do with the transmitters. In any case,
there's good reason to hope that things should improve significantly if we cut down the
trees to the west of the house.
I still don't know the biological name for the conifers growing to the west of the house, up
against the road. People call them cedars, but there
are hundreds of varieties,
and they're clearly not the Toona
ciliata that is also known as “Australian Red Cedar”: that's deciduous.
Whatever they are, they're big and flammable. We're seriously concerned that, if we have a
bushfire, they could make a difference between survival and loss of our house. It'll be
difficult to bring up the $4,000 that Graham wants to cut them down, but I think we're going
to have to do it. Spent some time looking at the area and deciding what to do, including
adding a couple of new photos to my weekly exterior
photos. The first is of the driveway under the cedars, and the second shows them
taken from the other side of the road:
It's difficult to imagine what things will look like when they're gone. Things won't be
completely open: there are
other melaleucas
and acacias planted underneath them.
They're struggling, but a bit of light and soil moisture might make all the difference. But
we should look to replacing the trees with others, smaller and less flammable.
I'm still trying to understand what I've done wrong with the upgrade on teevee. Yes,
it works, and I can watch TV somewhat better than before. The previous processor and
graphics card had difficulties with 1080i material and sometimes with 720p as well: the
images were sometimes jerky. I don't get that any more.
But there are other things. It looks like every time I reboot the machine (daily for this
one), I have to unload and reload the sound driver. If I don't, mplayer just hangs. Why? In general when I'm
watching TV I don't feel like kernel debugging, so so far I'm just putting up with it.
Another issue, which I can only blame on myself, is that many configuration files are wrong.
Again, I don't understand why, but it's becoming clear that my version control leaves
something to be desired. I'm gradually working on this one, and I still need to investigate
why the menu-based shutdown doesn't work any more.
There's another new thing on teevee: firefox now behaves strangely. It's the latest and greatest firefox,
release 6, and somehow I've managed to lose the old configuration. So I get the default,
lots of unrecognizable icons and the “Home” icon way off to the right. And at least for the
moment I'm putting up with tabs, because that way firefox doesn't crash nearly so
often. But when I click on the “Home” icon, I get both the home page and another tab with,
apparently, what firefox thinks I need. Here before and after a single click (this
really needs to be enlarged):
Ten years ago the Americans got a taste of the horrors
that happen around the world on a daily basis. Doubtless a terrible event, and one that
could have brought into perspective the horrors that happen on a daily basis in many
countries. But no, it was a uniquely American experience. Even the term they attached to
it, “9/11”, doesn't translate outside the USA. As a date, it means 9 November in most
countries.
That doesn't mean that I have the slightest bit of sympathy or understanding for what
happened. The results have been uniformly negative: it killed lots of innocent people, put
the economy in turmoil for a while, and led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands more
people in countries with names the invaders don't even try to pronounce correctly and
which were for the most part as unrelated to the event as the USA itself. Increased
military spending has crippled the US economy. Increased thugsecurity presence
at airports has made air travel a nightmare, and it's one of the reasons I don't travel any
more. In principle, the terrorists have won. “9/11” was just the start.
Do people in the USA understand that? No, for the most part they don't. I wouldn't be
surprised if some of them thought that this opinion is attacking the USA.
TV reception is still pretty flaky. Another indication that it's nothing to do with my
antenna system is that the radio in the bedroom, which has only a piece of wire as an
antenna, had almost impossibly bad reception this morning—until I turned the bedside light
on. And then it got much better. How can that be? It's a low-power fluorescent light, but
that shouldn't make much difference. I can't think of any reason why it should have made
any difference at all, let alone an improvement.
Took another look at my problems with firefox on teevee today. Apart from this irritating double window
opening, there are lots of settings that I don't want to have to change again, not to
mention saved passwords. Possibly there's a point-and-click way to import them from another
instance, but I don't know how, and I'm not sure I want to know. Instead took a look at the
files that firefox maintains. They're in a directory ~/.mozilla/firefox, and
include at least the file profiles.ini contains an overview of the available
profiles. By default it contains something like
The Path starts with some random character string, in this case 7v0n6ir5.
I added the rest myself, of course, keeping the beginning in case it had some meaning (it
doesn't). The whole thing is a the name of a subdirectory in the same directory.
So I changed my profiles.ini to include a new directory (with the more neutral
name display-0), and copied the entire directory from dereel
to teevee. And that worked, mainly. On restart, I came up with the correct
settings, as far as I can tell, and this window:
“Your Firefox is out of date”. But it's the latest version, 6.0. Have they brought out a
7.0 already? Followed the link “latest and greatest version” and got another screen:
”Your Firefox is up to date”! And yes, it's repeatable. My best guess is that the first
test is checking something in the configuration and coming to the conclusion that it
must be version 5.0, which is what I'm running on dereel. But why? It should be
trivial for an executable to check the version information stored in itself.
I've been baking German-style sourdough rye bread for over 2½ years now, and it has settled into a consistent, repeatable style. Time to
experiment a little? It's relatively heavy: a loaf uses 1.3 kg of flour and 960 ml of
water; after baking it still weighs over 2 kg, and the pores are relatively small.
I started off using very little water indeed: 1 kg
flour and 490 ml water. Maybe it's time to try the effects of more water. So today I put
in 1000 ml of water, which did cause a significantly higher loaf. But the proof is in the
eating, and that won't be until tomorrow.
My problems with rat traps aren't over. After the abortive
attempt with cages, I bought a different kind a
month ago. It has a tube with bait, a trigger and a tensed rubber ring set off by a
trigger when the rat goes in:
The rat enters through a tunnel from the right. The green strip is the ring, the trigger is
the black strip just visible to the left. There's no bait in this trap, but it would be
further left.
In principle that all makes sense. The problem: there once was bait in the trap.
Something, possibly a mouse, has entered, eaten the bait and left again. The problem with
this trap is that it makes assumptions about the size of its clients. You can understand
why people use rat poison. Refilled it and put it up on the roof, where I hope there are no
mice.
We're not the tidiest people in the world, but there are basic issues that we have to
address, like the number of spiders in the area. Finally we have a big brush to remove the
webs. Clearly it was necessary:
The clematis and climbing roses on the
south side of the verandah are looking very happy and growing way beyond the roof of the
verandah. Did a bit of pruning, and also planted some of the rose clippings (Iceberg
cultivar). I hate throwing these things away...
Into town again today to have the lesion on my forehead inspected. As I had suspected, the
cooling last week hadn't been enough, and he repeated the application. At least it stung a
little this time.
A couple of weeks ago we had decided that the quality of fresh “hamburger” meat was not up
to our expectations. Yvonne wanted to buy a press
for Steack haché, but the only ones
we could find (on the French eBay) were very
expensive. The offer on Australian eBay was strange: the cheapest (including postage) were
from the USA and the UK, and included some kind of spring arrangement (this image from
one of the UK
sellers):
They cost a little over $12, including postage. By comparison, In Australia, a
straightforward plastic press costs $25 (including “free” postage). On the other hand,
there are a surprising amount
of Tupperware presses on the market,
including many used ones, all more expensive than the press from the UK. They come with a
minimum of 6 moulds: it seems that they're intended for freezing, quite the contrary of what
I wanted to do.
But the Tupperware variety has the advantage of no moving parts. It's not clear what use
the spring is in the presses from overseas, but it's clearly a potential point of failure.
In the end, I had decided on a used Tupperware set from Australia: if I don't like it, I can
(apparently) always sell it again.
It arrived today. It's pretty much what I expected: a handle for pressing the hamburger, 6
containers, and a cylinder for the handle, for no obvious reason. It limits the diameter of
the hamburger, from an already marginal 10.5 cm to 9.0 cm:
It proves that real meat also shrinks more than the fatty stuff people use for hamburgers,
so in the end our cooked hamburgers were only about 7 cm across—far smaller than we wanted,
and only about half the size of a steack haché. Still, making the patties was
straightforward (once I discovered which way round to put the cylinder), and the results
tasted—unsurprisingly—better than commercial ones.
I've received a couple of questions about the rat traps I mentioned yesterday. It's made by
Nooski (“Kills everytime [sic] —
guaranteed”). Here are some more photos. The trap part is separable from the tunnel, and
it contains a lever to release the green rubber ring, presumably over the neck of the
rodent:
This also shows the bait in place
(some Crystal malt and a bit
of Appenzeller cheese rind).
I can't recall the cheese being so close to the opening, and I wonder if a mouse got it out
that far and then gave up. But there are no tooth marks.
The flowers in the greenhouse are telling me that it's spring. Last
year's petunias are blooming well, as are
the ones I grew from seed in April. Time to them out to the verandah again. Only moved
some of them: it's not clear when the correct time is. For example,
the salvia “Phyllis fancy” that I planted
at the beginning of the month is not looking
as happy as I expected:
Some of the tips of the leaves are shrivelling and browning. I have no concern about it
surviving, but clearly the weather wasn't greatly to its liking. It looks like we're in for
warmer weather in the next few days, so I'll probably slowly move things out of the
greenhouse.
More playing around with the configuration on teevee today. I'm getting there:
firefox now works correctly, though it
still keeps telling me that it's out of date. But I've run into something very strange: the
fvwm “move window” function now latches.
On other systems, and previously on teevee, I can move a window with the
combination c-a-mouse-3. Hold button 3 down, move the window, release.
But that no longer works on teevee: instead, it latches, and nothing happens until I
release the button. Then I can move the window and click somewhere when I'm done.
Why? I'm very sure I haven't changed anything this area. In fact, I don't think I've
changed anything in this area in this millennium. And that's the problem: to fix it, I need
to learn the details all over again. What a pain!
Why does turning the bedside light on improve the reception of the bedside radio? It can't
be the light. So I checked that: remove the globe and try again. Yes, it still improves
the reception.
Why? About the only conclusion I can come to is that the active (live, phase) conductor
runs through the house and acts as an antenna. When the power is on, this allows the wires
to act like a secondary antenna. That's still a little confusing, since the switch is in
the cable, not on the wall, but it seems to make sense. Maybe it's the lampstand itself
which works like an antenna.
TV reception is still terrible. Last night I
tried to record two programmes. One had no content at all, the other was so bad
that mythtranscode failed at the beginning. And today I found another “empty”
recording in progress. Tried a second tuner, and it recorded—badly, but with some
content—while the first tuner continued to find nothing.
Experiments with femon, a program which doesn't even seem to be known to Google—all hits I found related to a plugin based on it—showed
that the signal was, indeed, very weak. It's difficult to compare, because the output
values vary from tuner to tuner, and in some cases they're only 8 bits:
=== root@cvr2 (/dev/pts/1) /recordings 16 -> femon using '/dev/dvb/adapter0/frontend0'
FE: Zarlink MT352 DVB-T (TERRESTRIAL)
status 1f | signal 984f | snr 8c8c | ber 00070bec | unc 000025ed | FE_HAS_LOCK
status 1f | signal 95df | snr 8c8c | ber 00070bec | unc 000000dd | FE_HAS_LOCK
status 1f | signal 96df | snr 8b8b | ber 00070bec | unc 0000111c | FE_HAS_LOCK
status 1f | signal 932f | snr 8f8f | ber 00070bec | unc 00002fcd | FE_HAS_LOCK
status 1f | signal 95df | snr 8686 | ber 00070bec | unc 0000313f | FE_HAS_LOCK
status 1f | signal 95cf | snr 9393 | ber 00088246 | unc 000007fc | FE_HAS_LOCK
status 1f | signal 959f | snr 8888 | ber 00088246 | unc 0000388c | FE_HAS_LOCK
status 1f | signal 991f | snr 9595 | ber 00088246 | unc 00000ae8 | FE_HAS_LOCK
status 1f | signal 964f | snr 8e8e | ber 00088246 | unc 0000000d | FE_HAS_LOCK
status 1f | signal 96bf | snr 8c8c | ber 00088246 | unc 00002577 | FE_HAS_LOCK
status 1f | signal 9ccf | snr 9696 | ber 000802a8 | unc 00000000 | FE_HAS_LOCK
status 1f | signal 995f | snr 9595 | ber 000802a8 | unc 00000000 | FE_HAS_LOCK
status 1f | signal 98cf | snr 8989 | ber 000802a8 | unc 00000000 | FE_HAS_LOCK
status 1f | signal 96bf | snr 8c8c | ber 000802a8 | unc 00000000 | FE_HAS_LOCK
status 1f | signal 98ef | snr 8888 | ber 000802a8 | unc 00000005 | FE_HAS_LOCK
status 1f | signal 919f | snr 8c8c | ber 0003809f | unc 00001bef | FE_HAS_LOCK
status 1f | signal 95ef | snr 8282 | ber 0003809f | unc 000025b9 | FE_HAS_LOCK
status 1f | signal 938f | snr 8383 | ber 0003809f | unc 00000578 | FE_HAS_LOCK
This is ABC 1, and the quality is pretty
terrible, but bearable. But what do the values mean?
signal is presumably the signal strength. It's clearly not a full 16 bits,
because the last nibble is always f. The rest could be OK.
snr is the signal-to-noise ratio. It's clearly only 8 bits, repeated.
ber is the bit error rate. It seems to be almost complete nonsense. Seemingly
random values repeat, and they suggest that there are hundreds of thousands of errors
per second, far more than a tuner could report.
unc are uncorrectable errors. The values are not as ridiculous as
the ber values, but they still don't give any direct information.
As if that weren't bad enough, each tuner has its own way of reporting these values. About
the only thing I can hope to rely on is that the first 8 bits of signal say
something, and that the reception is good if ber is 0.
And the empty recordings? Both from the USB tuner. It seems to have wedged, not for the
first time. But it seems to have wedged in the analogue part: it was still functional,
and femon returned signal values starting with 3; anything below 8 is
effectively “no signal”. I can't be bothered with this thing any more. I disconnected it.
When we really need three tuners, I can connect it again.
Years ago I had a propagation area to the north-east of the house, between two sheds, once
the toy ALDI greenhouse self-destructed,
almost exactly three years ago:
After I got the (real) greenhousea year later, I pretty much abandoned it: it's certainly
not warm, and by now it was overgrown with knee-high grass. But it could easily be
converted to a shade house: all I needed to do was to dig out the remaining flower pots from
the undergrowth, mow the lawn, and then put some shade cloth over the top. The shade cloth
will have to wait, but at least it looks tidy now:
It's only been a couple of days since I noted
that programming is no fun any more, and observed how bloated modern libraries are. That's
nothing new, of course, but it seems that more and more people are sitting up and paying
attention. Today the draft schedule for next year's Linux.conf.au was released, and I found a paper by Rusty Russell: “Bloat: How and
Why UNIX Grew Up (and Out)”. He takes the example of ls(1): in the Sixth Edition it
was 4920 bytes, on the current version
of Ubuntu it's 105776 bytes—and he
hasn't mentioned the dynamic libraries. Looks like a presentation worth visiting. At the
very least I don't need the fake beard, and the sandals shouldn't be an issue.
I'm dragging my feet on cutting down
the “cedars”, of course.
The next step should have been to call in the CFA to take a look and make some recommendations. That's as simple as calling 1 800
240 667 (or take a trip down memory lane and call the TTY line 1 800 122 969), and I should
have done it on Monday. But there's also the option of going by the web, and despite my
previous negative experience with the CFA web
site, decided to do that.
What's it like? Much improved. And much improvement still needed. The URL in the
documentation is wrong, of course: it's http://www.cfa.vic.gov.au/,
the home page for CFA, not even the same web server, and you need three (mainly unnecessary)
hops to get to the right place. The correct URL is http://cfaonline.cfa.vic.gov.au/mycfa/Show?pageId=siteAssessment, far too long
to type in.
As of 10 February 2016, this link is still there, but it's broken. Yet another
indication of the uselessness of this web site. Maybe it's this one, found thanks to Google.
No, I hadn't, but clearly that makes sense, so I went through it. It would be too much to
expect it to be valid HTML, and of course it's not, but even apart from that it's strange,
particularly the navigation. They have a Next button at the bottom right most of the
time, but sometimes it's an Exit button that otherwise looks identical:
And yes, the text in the first detail image is truncated. It's by no means the only place.
There's also a Menu button that takes you back to the menu (second image) and
a Back button that also takes you back to the same menu, at least every time I tried
it. And then you have to go through the whole thing all over again, made more difficult by
the fact that the Next button doesn't necessarily take you to the next page: instead
it usually adds a couple of lines to the current page. On the other hand, if you don't
press Next soon enough for its liking, it moves on anyway. And there's also voice
output to annoy you. Instead of being able to just read the thing, you have to have it read
it out to you.
That's not as bad as it seems, though: although the voice text is not identical to the
written text, it's not truncated like the written text frequently is:
The individual parts of the questionnaire appear to have been written by different people
who don't talk to each other. The first section ("Defendable Space") appears to make
significant assumptions about the nature of the terrain (no open space, for example). All
that comes later in the assessment, but it makes it very difficult to relate to the first
part.
There are many missed opportunities to link to appropriate detail information. The text
below the first image is a detail of that image:
“For information on preparing your house for ember attack, please visit the CFA
website [sic]”. Then you have to search for the term, which doesn't provide anything obvious. Maybe it's this one, which provides protection for Microsoft users only. Or maybe it's
this
one, 82 pages of PDF text which you have to search. After some searching, I still
don't know where I should be looking. Why can't they write “For information on preparing
your house for ember attack, please click here”? My guess is because they can't find it either.
The second one reads “Do you ... know ... what to do if your house catches fire?”. The lack
of further details implies the continuation “Bad luck. We're not going to tell you”.
By comparison, it's almost traditional to reject correctly written phone numbers. This
one's different because I wrote it as the Australian standard (03) 5346 1370. The
web software removed the spaces but kept the () around the area code, and then
complained about it. That's not an issue with the CFA alone. Why can't web forms accept
conventional formats?
The examples above are with firefox on FreeBSD. Given the importance of this
information, it should run on any standards-compliant platform. That doesn't include
Microsoft of course, but it's more likely to work there. I checked it on Microsoft and
Apple and confirmed: yes, there are no truncation issues with Microsoft “Internet Explorer”.
They do that by refusing to honour requests for text size change, so people with poor
eyesight or higher-resolution display won't be able to read the text. On Apple, with
“Safari”, it just overflows the window:
Increasing the window size doesn't necessarily help: once the text is large enough, the
buttons at the bottom don't appear. And there are no scroll bars. You're lost:
This window had the same resolution as the “Internet Explorer” window. Was the message
warranted or just a misassumption? Hard to say, since firefox hung on the very first
screen.
As a government agency, the CFA has an obligation to everybody in Victoria, not just those
who use computers and software the way their “webmasters” expect. At the very least they
could have done a fraction of the testing I have done. Probably the explanation comes early
on in the questionnaire: they offer to give you forms to download and fill out by hand.
They still haven't really understood computers. I only hope they can fight fires better.
The weather was relatively warm and windless today, so did some weed spraying—and
immediately it started to rain. Not much, but possibly enough to nullify the effect.
That's frustrating: probably it didn't make any difference, but I can't find out whether it
made any difference for at least a week, so probably I'm going to have to repeat everything.
Also planted the Ipomoeas
and Lathyrus odoratus from the
egg cartons into the bed in front of the fence in front of the garage. Egg cartons look too
flimsy for seedlings that resent transplanting: they fall apart. I think I'll use toilet
rolls if I can identify any further area which needs them.
I don't know what it is, but the large buds suggest that it's not a weed. I can't find any
indication of planting something there. Maybe the flower will help identify it. Also found
what I had thought were multiple “Cathedral” trees, but which prove to be only two:
One had sprung up in very little soil in
the “bunker” to the north-east of the
house, and I found the other one when tidying up the shade area. I still don't know what
they are either, but I suppose we should plant them somewhere.
Over the last few weeks I have bought a number of plants and also planted seeds and
propagated other plants. With spring coming, it's time to decide where to plant them.
In the past this has meant going into the greenhouse, looking at what's there and deciding
where it might go. The problem with this approach is that I don't have an overview: not all
plants are in the greenhouse, and I don't have information about the conditions they want or
how big they will get. I have all this information in my diary, for example for the plants
we bought at the market at the end of last month. So I
could just print out the page, right?
Well, there's a problem there of my own making. That's part of the month's diary, and
it's long. How long? That depends, but at least 30 pages. Clearly a candidate for
selective printing, something I should think about. In the meantime, though, all web
browsers offer an option to print only specific pages of a document. That's straightforward
enough for a PDF document, but what do you do if it's a web page? What's the starting page
number of that entry?
Decided that it would probably be easier just to print the document to PDF and then print
from xpdf. Did that and came up
with the most horrible PDF I have ever seen:
How did firefox manage such a
mess? It's clearly deliberate, because the marginal markings are OK. I've seen this before
when printing things out, and blamed it on the printer drivers on boskoop, my aging
Apple, to which the printer is connected. Clearly that's not the problem. And clearly the
output quality is unacceptable. I should look at the causes, but on this occasion I just
wanted to print out the pages.
So: tried it on the Apple, with “Safari”. If there's a way to print to a file there, I'm
clearly too stupid to see it. But there's a “print preview”, so tried that. And the text
seemed tiny, at least because Apple likes to present windows smaller than they are. In this
case, though, the text was less than half the page width. Increased the text size until it
looked like this:
That's clearly too large. But the resultant printout was tiny! It used fractionally over
half the width of the paper, though the text is slightly wider in proportion. The text
itself was in about 7 pt.
OK, this is an old version of “Safari”, but not that old, and I wouldn't want to bet that
the latest version does it better. Why should the text width on the screen have any effect
on the dimensions of a printout on paper? And why do none of the browsers have typical
metrics like (real) font size? The “page setup” just gives me the options of “Settings”
(not really an option, just “Page attributes”) and a scale factor, which in my case is
100%. But what does that mean? As usual, the “Help” is no help:
Type the percentage you want to reduce or enlarge the printout in the Scale text box.
Percentages are relationships. What does this percentage relate to? This has been an
ongoing problem for as long as I have used scalable printers on computers, about 25 years.
Is it really that difficult?
Into Ballarat again today to have my
lesion looked at. That makes 7 visits to the doctor in less than 4 weeks. By contrast, in
the previous 3 years I went only 5 times: 21 August 2007,
9 January 2008, 10 September 2008, 18 May 2009 and 28 January 2010. What a difference it makes to
be able to make an appointment and get in and out quickly!
Still, I'm not going to see this doctor (Mina Gurgius) any more. It turns out it's his last
day in Ballarat. He used to work
in Kaniva, but he moved
to Melbourne and thought he could
comfortably commute to Ballarat. He has now discovered that's not the case, so he's moving
to a practice in Melbourne. My next appointment isn't for another couple of months, by
which time there should be a replacement for him.
This one shows the buds on a single plant in a big pot; I think the label at bottom left is
an image of what it should look like when it's in flower, but of course I messed up the
composition on this horrible toy camera. The original shows bright red inflorescences. I
prefer the appearance to that of the other Leucospermums I saw two weeks ago:
The problem is the size: clearly this is a well-grown plant in a big pot, and they want $60
for it. The smaller ones only cost $18. And then I found a Leucospermum Cordifolium in the
same size small pot for only $13.
Why the difference in the latter two prices? Except for the flower colour, they're pretty
much the same, and judging by the labels they appear to come from the same grower. I can
think of two possibilities: either they just don't have enough of the strange coloured ones,
or they're more difficult to raise. Either speaks in favour of the Cordifolium. But
unfortunately the small ones are all yellow, and I want a red one. Off to Dahlsens, a place I normally don't visit, to see if
they had any. Their plant department has gone very much downhill since I was last there,
and the only Leucospermum they had was the same as at Formosa, but looked stressed and cost
$2 more. It'll be a while before I go there again.
One of the things that I haven't been able to do with PHP is to conditionally process page text. Part of this relates to the display of
individual topics. For example, this entry starts with:
texttopic() checks the topic ("c" in this case, for computers). If it
isn't set, it suppresses the article. That could be simple:
<?php if (ontopic ($topic))
print <<< EOF
<p>
One of the things that I haven't been able to do with <a href="http://www.php.org/">PHP</a>
is to conditionally process page text. Part of this relates to the display of individual
topics. For example, this entry starts with:
</p>
...
EOF;
But that's not the code I use. Instead, that paragraph reads:
<p>
One of the things that I haven't been able to do with <?php href ("http://www.php.org/",
"PHP"); ?> is to conditionally process page text. Part of this relates to the display of
individual topics. For example, this entry starts with:
</p>
The URL is generated by a PHP function call. So this method would require recursive
evaluation. I've been looking for a solution for a while, without success, and I haven't
really wanted to annoy Rasmus
Lerdorf with this kind of question. But today I did so, and came up with a couple of
interesting recognitions:
Firstly, there's a function eval() that evaluates PHP code. It's apparently
considered dangerous because people use it on other people's input, something reminiscent of
this xkcd cartoon:
But that's not what I need. Instead, Rasmus suggested a syntax I've never seen before:
<?php if ($allowed): ?>
text
<?php endif ?>
It seems that this is old, pre-C-like syntax, and the same could be written:
My article yesterday about printing out web pages from firefox aroused some interest. After some
investigation, it proved that yes, indeed, there's something in my profile that causes this
horrible distortion. With a vanilla profile, it produces legible output. It even fills the
width of the page by enlarging the text accordingly:
Now, instead of the tiny 7 pt text that I got from Apple, I get enormous 14 pt text. And
this time, on the positive side, it's independent of the display size. On the negative
side, the only way to influence the size seems to be to use percentages again. Why can't
there be a mapping between the HTML font size specifications and point sizes?
In addition, it seems that firefox always creates bit map images. The result was
that my diary for August produced 26 MB of output.
It's difficult to compare with commercial offerings: I haven't found a way to print to a
file with Apple or Microsoft. The latter might allow me to do so if I were to install a
real printer, but that seems to require their own network rather than
a TCP/IP network, and I don't want to get
involved in that. Tried it with Opera and also
got a bit-mapped output, which, however, only used 9.5 MB. On the other hand, that looks
like a bug, not a feature. I think it crashed before completing: I couldn't read it with
xpdf:
=== grog@dereel (/dev/pts/22) ~ 11 -> xpdf output.pdf Error: May not be a PDF file (continuing anyway)
Error: PDF file is damaged - attempting to reconstruct xref table...
Error: Couldn't find trailer dictionary
Error: Couldn't read xref table
I could at least read the PostScript output, which is about the same size. It stopped on
about 6 August 2011 after doing some strange formatting down the side
of the file. So presumably it crashed. It also doesn't display all the text, maybe because
of a font issue.
In summary: it's broke. I don't know of any way to print a reasonable-looking document from
a web browser. Is it really that difficult to do it right?
Mail from Tom Maynard today, suggesting a solution to my problems identifying plants in the greenhouse: use a smart phone
and a web browser to display my diary in the greenhouse. At least it would get around the
breakage with web browser print output.
But why a smart phone? Because I will have some mobile coverage in the greenhouse.
Theoretically I could use a laptop, but then I wouldn't be able to make phone calls with it.
In fact, I don't have mobile coverage in the greenhouse, thanks to cranks like the
“Dereel Anti-Tower Alliance”. I do
have 802.11 coverage, and I did consider
using a laptop. I didn't, mainly because of the light: it's difficult to recognize anything
on modern displays in bright sunshine. But it would have been a solution. The high-end
devices have a maximum display size of 640×900, compared to a display size of 1024×768 or
higher with a laptop. And I've found that even a single 1920×1200 display is cramped. So
it's not for me.
And assuming I did have mobile coverage? We can still hope. But it's more expensive, and a
smart phone with such “high” resolution will cost me about $800. For that I can buy a
laptop and a phone and have money over for a night on the town. The real advantage of the
smart phone is the size and the fact that it has multiple functionality.
So why did Tom suggest a smart phone? It clearly fits his lifestyle. It doesn't fit mine,
but I'm apparently in the vast minority. What's the attraction? My best bet is that people
can use them when commuting, at least in countries like Australia where there's reasonable
public transport. In other cases, people seem to frequently be under way and need net
access. For them, smart phones are almost certainly a good idea.
But looking at the sales figures, they're the biggest thing since sliced bread. Why do they
sell so many? Clearly lots of people are on the move, and this caters to it. But that
begs the question: why are they on the move? One of the advantages of the Internet era
should be that people don't need to go anywhere to meet up with other people, or to do their
job. I personally stopped commuting over 20 years ago. Somehow smart phones seem to be a
symptom of the failure to adapt to the Internet age.
They're barely recognizable at the moment, of course, but it's good to keep record of where
they went. They're marked by bamboo poles, only visible in the enlargement. From left to
right they're
Felicia angustifolia, the
painfully syntactically incorrect Coleonema
pulchrumaureum, which I think I'm going to have to call Coleonema pulchra, and
the
Convolvulus sabatius:
Also attended to the drippers in that area; over 50% of them were clogged up. No wonder
some of the seedlings were looking less than happy.
Put more hanging baskets on the verandah, and did some trimming. Petunias seem to propagate
relatively well from cuttings, and since there are continual cuttings, it looks as if I will
have quite a few in the course of time. Also tried propagating
a Alyogyne huegelii branch
which had been broken off in the wind.
Chris Yeardley to dinner tonight as usual. Yvonne had
decided on Bœuf en croûte, a French
adaptation of what is called Beef
Wellington in English. How long do you cook that? It's covered
in duxelles and then wrapped in pastry,
so I was expecting a long time. In fact, it was finished far more quickly than I had
expected. After 30 minutes the temperature was already 60°, rather too high. I'll be more
careful next time.
Yesterday was very windy, so I postponed my weekly
garden photos (which, for no good reason, I've called “house photos” in the past)
until today. Today was less windy, but to make up for that, the light kept changing from
overcast to full sun. One such transition hit me while taking the critical verandah photos:
first, there are 72 individual images, and 24 of them are with full power flash. Even with
fully charged batteries, the flash recycle time goes from 5 seconds to about 12 seconds by
the end of the session, or about 4½ minutes. And by then the time I got round to the end,
the first image had changed:
How do you handle that? The image is composed of two rows of 12 merged images, bottom row
first, so I repeated the bottom row (the second image above is the first of those images).
Then I made two different panoramas, first with the first 12 images, then with the last 12
images, in each case with the same top row (middle 12 images). I was fully expecting the
first to be badly exposed, but in fact it didn't work out so badly:
Finally got round to sorting out the irrigation in the ex-Cathedral. Not that much work, but for some reason
surprisingly tiring. At least now everything has a dripper, and I don't seem to have any
leaks any more. Next step is to cover the bases of the trees with weed mat.
So finally the (PDF) brochure for Ballarat Gardens in Spring is complete, and it's
up on the web site. And, apart from a brief mention on the home page, that was all. There's a general
feeling amongst friends the that PDF documents are enough, but it's clear to me that the web
is for web content, so set to writing a couple of pages.
That's not as simple as it sounds. The current home page for the friends has a number of
validation errors, and as an HTML file it needs to contain all its invariant markup as well.
I started some time ago to convert the stuff to PHP, but was by no means finished. On the other hand, I didn't want to publish anything that
didn't validate, so spent a lot of time first completing the work I had done. In the end,
it took a large part of the day to get the two pages up and iron out some of the
strangenesses in the Google Map. But hopefully
I now have a framework that will work for other pages too. And for that I'll be going to
town tomorrow to show it to people.
I've only just come to terms with the strange way that one of my firefox profiles prints web pages, and now
I find that the same profile has developed other issues: the display fonts seem to have
changed. The larger fonts on my diary have shrunk. Here “before” and “after”:
This isn't due to explicit differences in settings: the “old” version is the profile that I
derived from what has now become the “new” version a
week ago for teevee—thus the difference in format. So something has changed,
but what? Looking at the font preferences, both are set identically. Somewhere there's
bitrot in firefox that is almost impossible to find.
In that context, it's interesting to note more and more “blog” posts expressing
dissatisfaction with not only firefox, but other browsers as well. In an article
titled Browser
Breakup,
Tim Bray complains about “Safari” and
notes that he uses three different browsers. He doesn't complain about firefox, but
having to use more than one browser is condemnation enough.
Spring seems to be coming earlier than usual this year. The birch trees in the eastern
garden have as many leaves as they did at the beginning of October last year, and today the
temperature hit 28.1°, much higher than we had in all of September last year:
In preparation for going to the Friends of the
Ballarat Botanical Gardens this afternoon, spent the morning removing birch seedlings
(Betula pendulis) from the
garden, in total about 30 of them. Also took a seedling of the Cathedral tree and both a seedling and a branch of
another mystery plant:
On the way into town, nearly drove into the back of the car in front of me when he suddenly
stopped while leaving the roundabout in the
middle of Sebastopol. That
proved to be because three tiny dogs were running around on the street. Got out and tried
to help others catch them. Finally caught all three: two which might have been long-haired
Chihuahuas and
another black-and-white one which looked something like a
tiny Jack Russell Terrier.
The Chihuahuas had collars with identification on them, so one of the few people remaining
called the number on them, and they were able to give us the name of the dog, but neither
the name nor the address of the owner. Finally they told us we could drop them at any vet,
so off to the Ballarat Veterinary Practice,
nominally in Sturt St, and on my way to the
Botanical Gardens.
They're not really on Sturt St at all; they're in a side street, and in the past I've had
difficulty finding it. But what's a GPS navigator for? Yes, it had the information, and
took me straight to Alfred St. North, 5 streets and
650 metres away.
It took me more than 5 minutes to find the correct place, where they happily took the dogs.
It wasn't until we were done that I realised I had forgotten to take any photos.
At the friends, gave the birches to Yvonne, who identified the mystery flowers as “Locust”,
and effectively a weed. It looks as if it could
be Robinia pseudoacacia, but
the leaves are wrong. She wasn't sure about the “Cathedral” tree.
The two people I really wanted at the meeting were Julie Bradbury and Jenny Burrell, but
they both weren't there. Instead spoke to Liz Gilfillan, Helen Vincent, Mike Sorrell and
Raoul Dixon. People are concerned about what we would call version control, and so they
wanted separation of responsibilities. The result: I get the responsibility, and we'll ask
Jenny to do the layout things, at which she's better than I am.
On the other hand, Mike wanted to write web content (a term I had to explain) too, and I
wanted to show him. We went to the computer (directly connected to the ADSL modem), and I
put in a switch that I had brought with me. No connection to the modem. Much further
investigation showed that the modem was not talking to the network. It had LEDs
marked Ethernet and USB, and both were on, even when nothing was plugged in.
Microsoft's confusingly spelt ipconfig told me simply “Media State . . . Media
Disconnected”.
Called up TransACT support and got
connected pretty quickly to Mavrick. Told him that we had no Ethernet connection and he
said “No worries, we'll sort that out. Open a browser and go to 192.168.1.1”. I
told him a couple of time that I had no carrier, but he insisted that I try it. Surprise!
It didn't work. Finally I told him about the LEDs, and he said “OK, the modem is fried.
You'll need to get a replacement”.
That proved to be simpler than I thought. He told me I should get a free replacement, and
TransACT has a (relatively large) office in Mitchell
Park, Ballarat. Off there, one of the few times I have been to the place of business
of an ISP, where they told me—not surprisingly—that I would have to pay for the modem or
commit to another year's line rental, neither of which I wanted to do. Told her that
Mavrick had told me I could get one for free, so she called him up
(in Canberra), and he confirmed he had
said it. So I got the free modem after all.
Back to the Friends and installed the modem. Total time since identifying the problem: 40
minutes. But of course I needed to configure the modem, something I had been told I
wouldn't need to do, so called up the support line again. After 1 minute I got the
information “your call will be answered by the next available consultant”. And then, a few
minutes later, the first of many “Due to an unprecedented influx of calls we cannot answer
in a timely manner. Press 1 to leave a message”. That wasn't what I wanted to do, but
after a total of 20 minutes (on mobile), I finally tried it, only to get a further message
“You cannot leave a message now, mailbox full”. A couple of bad points to TransACT. I'll
have to try it some other time. It's also interesting to note that I did not need to
provide any authentication at any time. The only information they needed was the name of
the subscriber and the account number.
So: an unusual and not very satisfying day. We'll have to configure the modem next week.
People are, perhaps correctly, confident that nobody will notice.
Called up TransACT support again today,
starting at round 11:00, when you'd think that they'd be relatively quiet. Once again I
progressed in the queue to the next available representative after about 1 minute of
waiting. And once again I got the “Due to an unprecedented influx of calls we cannot answer
in a timely manner. Press 1 to leave a message”. It took them 40 minutes to answer my
call.
That's clearly too long, and they apologized. It seems that the other support person is
studying law and had to go for an exam. But what's a reasonable time? I think that it
would have to be under 10 minutes, probably under 5. I wonder if there are standards
somewhere.
The information I wanted was sensitive: user name and password. Clearly the consultant
needed some kind of authentication. He asked me for the address or
the ABN, both which I don't know. I told him
to check whois and send me the information to the email address specified there, but he wanted the ABN.
That's OK, though: it's in the whois information, so I was able to read it to him.
Yet Another Useless Security Check. So far I have not provided TransACT with any
information to authenticate myself, and yet I have a brand new ADSL modem and the
information I need to set it up. O tempora! O mores!
In passing, it's interesting to note that Liz Gilfillan was probably right when she said
that Tuesday next week would be soon enough to set up the modem. Looking at the usage, I
found:
Again I didn't get much done today. We still have lots of plants to plant, but apart from
some random weeding, I only planted
a Banksia ericifolia at the
south of the eastern bed (next to the bamboo rod), and
a Primula that I had picked up at the
Friends yesterday:
To the University today to attend my first
lecture in decades, and possibly the first ever about Computer Science. Sasha Ivkovic is
doing a class on “Open Source”, and
Chris Yeardley suggested I came to listen.
First, though, to Gays to
buy some timber and shade cloth for the planned shade area in the garden. Paid a total of
$75, which seems more than reasonable.
Getting from there to the University proved
much slower than I had expected. It's less than half an hour from Dereel, and I was expecting about 5 to 10 minutes,
but in fact it took 25, and I was late (something I hate). Doubtless Chris
will give me hell on Saturday. I had intended to just lurk, but Sasha saw me and asked me a
number of questions on the topic. He wants me to come back and do a presentation of the
matter from my point of view, which I might do if anybody is interested enough.
The students also have a practical to
do: CVS. I suppose
for people using Microsoft, it must be something completely different.
I've already mentioned why a smart phone
is nothing for me. But Chris Yeardley has just bought one, a Samsung<mumble>. I had
lunch with her today (it's amazing how expensive the university cafeteria is) and she
showed it to me. Talked about the complete lack of security in my contacts with TransACT, so decided to show her the whois
entries. That's not easy, for reasons unrelated to the smart phone: getting
plain whois information on line is not easy, as I discovered while writing
yesterday's diary entry. The majority seems to be oriented towards selling domain names at
three times the going rate rather than giving information. For example, http://www.whois.com.au/ gives this emetic search form and results:
It wasn't until later that I noted the whois link, but that requires yet
more input, including a Captcha. And
this tiny keyboard makes things ten times worse. Chris had some kind of terminal emulator
on the box, so we tried that, with results that were half to be expected. By chance I had a
copy of c't with me in which there was a
report of Apple getting an injunction to stop Samsung selling their Galaxy Tab 7.7 tablet, because they allege that it violates Apple's look and feel.
So it's clear that we should take a photo with that background:
That also shows how tiny the display is. Not all applications have such small text,
but so far Chris has not found a way to enlarge it.
In summary: after playing around with the thing for a while, I'm no closer to wanting
anything like that. I consider a good keyboard, something I don't have to look at to
operate, to be absolutely essential. None of these devices can offer that. This tablet
also has a GPS receiver, which of course didn't work in the cafeteria, but we did check for
the location of the Ballarat Veterinary Practice, and it got it almost right—after far too much messing around. Possibly there are
easier ways to do things, but you need to learn everything from scratch. Life's too short.
I've been looking for a small
red Leucospermum
cordifolium for some time now. I had found them in big at Formosa Gardens, and they also had small
yellow ones. I later asked if they could get me a small red one, and yes, maybe they could.
But on the way into town I stopped by another nursery on Main Road. I've been there before, but for some reason they don't show up
in any lists, neither online nor in the phone book. In this case, Google Maps Street View comes to the rescue:
So they're Pearson's Nursery, and the address appears to be 730 Geelong Road. With that information, I was finally
able to find it on Truelocal: the
address is 728 Main Road, though both Google
Maps and my GPS navigator want to call it Geelong Road. In any case, they did have a red
Leucospermum cordifolium, and despite their sign saying “lowest prices in town” (partially
out of focus on the Google street view), they wanted $3 more for it than Formosa did.
Still, there's the “bird in the hand” consideration, and the example I found looked very
nice and will hopefully flower in the next month or so, so I took it.
Next off to the Botanical Gardens to set up the ADSL modem that I had picked up on
Tuesday. There was really not much to set
up: this appears to be a really bare-bones modem. Enter user name and (new) password as
given to me on the phone, press “Connect”. Got a message saying “Connecting in 30 seconds”,
counting down until 0, then the message “You are ready to connect. Press Connect to
connect”. Same again. And again.
Looking at the modem display, the PPP LED was out. Was this the modem's way of
saying “PPP authentication failed”? What a pain! I didn't have a phone with me, and we
know how difficult it is to contact TransACT support. I considered going to the Robert Clark Centre and calling from there, but first
I considered an alternative: it seems that the user name was also the mail user name. What
if they hadn't changed the password after all? Tried the old password (which, fortunately,
I had checked yesterday), and it worked!
What a pain TransACT is! And they didn't tell me that resetting that password would
also affect access to the email system, so in fact it's just as well they didn't. So far
I've been saying about the ADSL connection “If it ain't broke, don't fix it”. Gradually I'm
coming to the conclusion that it's broke.
While returning the key at the Botanical Gardens, accidentally dropped my car key. Nothing
serious, but the remote control no longer worked. Given that my car is 20 years old and has
260,000 km on the clock, I'm not too worried about that: I still have a key. But the remote
control proves necessary to disable the burglar alarm. The result: I drove all the way home
with the alarm going off. I was able to disable the acoustic alarm, but every so often it
set off the emergency flashers. Somehow that's stupid. Fortunately, I have a second remote
control, so apart from the drive home there was no problem.
On the way home, stopped in at Midland
Irrigation and picked up some tap fittings for the shade area. Just a couple of
connectors and the tap itself. Total cost: $68, almost as much as the timber and shade
cloth. Somehow that seems wrong.
Started working on the new shade area today. There are two things to do: supply water and
put up the shade cloth. The water proved to be more of a problem than I thought, since the
pipe needs to go along a stable wall, and there's a water tank up against it. The water
tank needs to go, but currently it has 1000 l of water in it, so I need to use up the water
before moving it. Instead put the tap near the pump at the end of a short piece of pipe.
I'll move it later when the tank is empty.
Putting up the joists was even more frustrating. Some of the timber to which I need to
attach the joist holders is so hard that I couldn't hammer in the nails. Tried screws, with
similar problems. Tried pre-drilling the screw holes, and the drill bit got stuck in the
wood, and I had to remove it with a mole wrench.
That was enough frustration for one day, and I gave up and planted
the Leucospermum
cordifolium in the far east garden:
That required much weeding; this is one of the most overgrown parts of the garden. It was
relatively easy, though, easier than when I tried two years ago (last year I was
incapacitated by my accident at the dam): the
thick grass had taken over and made it impossible for anything else to grow. So: why am I
removing it? I've seen similar things where I did some weeding to the north of the main
garden area a couple of months ago. The area
that I easily weeded then is now completely overgrown again with many smaller weeds. I
think I'll just pull it out and leave it there as a loose mulch to stop anything else coming
through.
Yvonne's new camera has given up the ghost, after only four months. “Lens error”, apparently meaning a
mechanical problem with the lens extension. It jammed with the lens extended, and nothing
can get it to come back in again. Called up Canon technical support, once I fought my way
through their obstructive web site—the “support” page had no support, just a link to
“support”, which pointed back at itself—and was told to bring the thing to Canon service.
That's a particular problem because we bought it in Hong Kong, and we will have to send it
back. Tried to contact the seller via eBay,
but their horrible web software didn't want to know about it: after all, it was four months
ago. Sent off a “general query”, but by evening didn't get a reply. Why do Yvonne's
cameras always have problems? The last one was also only a year old when it died with
similar symptoms.
Today was day for taking photos of the exterior of
the house. It's gradually becoming a routine, but that gives smaller things the
opportunity to irritate me. Today it was the flash unit. Apart from the fact that it takes
so long to recycle, a set of (NiMH) batteries barely survives the 24 shots I need for the
verandah
panorama. Last week I recharged the batteries after the shots, but although I didn't
use them after charging, today the unit claimed “low battery” after only a couple of shots.
I've found that things are better if I charge the batteries the night before, and
potentially it's an indication of the quality of ALDI's “according to our stringent quality specifications” rechargeable batteries.
They work well enough in less demanding situations, so maybe they're not designed to deliver
the current that the flash unit wants. I should probably buy some elsewhere.
But where? How do I find good batteries? What about Lithium? As usual, went to eBay and looked there. Yes, there are rechargeable
Lithium AA batteries on the market, with a nominal voltage of 3.7 V. That's hardly likely
to be compatible with devices expecting 1.5 V AA. If they were at least 3.0 V there would
be a possibility of replacing two normal batteries with one Lithium battery, but that
doesn't seem to be the way they do things.
But then I found something I've never heard
of: Nickel-zinc batteries.
They seem to have an internal resistance of 5 mΩ, compared to 50 mΩ for NiMH batteries, and
they have a nominal voltage of 1.65 V. Is that acceptable? I've already established that
brand new non-rechargeable alkaline batteries have a voltage of 1.6 V or so, so probably the
1.65 V wouldn't be a problem. But freshly charged the NiZn batteries have a voltage of 1.8
V, which is possibly a little high.
Everything I read says that they're suitable for the purpose, and I suppose that the exact
voltage is not as critical for battery-driven devices as it is for mains-driven devices, but
it would be nice to have some confirmation before I destroy my flash unit. In this
particular case, the option of trying them in a cheaper unit doesn't help: working in one
device is no guarantee that it would work in another.
Got a reply from the seller of the IXY 200F, regretting the problem and enclosing a form to fill out—in Microsoft
“Word” format. Under the circumstances, decided not
to complain about that, and moved it to boskoop, my Apple, to process. That their
application “TextEdit” can handle it, up to a point. I found it extremely difficult to
avoid overwriting invisible markup. I wonder if that's the case for the real Microsoft
“Word”. In the end, attached it to the reply, but also put up a web page as well. Hopefully they'll be able to
read my reply.
Today's the last Sunday in September, time for a stock-taking of flowers in the garden. This year we have a whole lot of
new flowers that weren't there before, along with some plants that have bloomed for the
first time. In particular, the Echium
(first two photos), which we bought last
October, is only just coming into bloom, but it's already very pretty. Other plants
are more recent. Here
the Felicia angustifolia, which
we bought last month:
In addition, the Japanese Iris,
which we've had for over 2 years, is finally flowering profusely, and
the Corydalis has weathered the winter
nicely. It has been blooming almost since we got it, and it has also self-sown a number of
seedlings.
We planted them years ago, when the Cathedral was still looking healthy, but they never quite won the battle with the weeds. This is
the best they have ever bloomed.
A number of Grevilleas are in bloom,
including one that we brought with us from Wantadilla,
which has been hanging around doing nothing for the last 4 years, and which has now been
overtaken by an Acacia. Then there's this
Grevillea longistyla × johnsonii “Elegance” thing which we bought in Bendigo 2½ years
ago, and some of the plants we planted in the south bed a
year ago:
Then there's the question of annuals or perennials. According to many sources, such as the
ProFlowers
Flower Guide, they're different kinds of plants. But we have a number of annuals
which are several years old. The Alyssum
has straggled through the winter and is now coming back:
I've had a recent mail exchange with Rapinder Adekola, clearly
a Sikh. But he signed his name “James”. It
proves that the mail address was that of his wife. I'm reminded of the recommendation
of Guru Gobind Singh to
dispense with surnames and just use the title “Singh” or “Kaur” depending on sex. The
current misunderstanding clearly a good reason: you can't normally tell a Sikh's sex from
his or her given name.
Over to visit them this afternoon. They've just arrived from England and are waiting for
registration (Rapinder is
a General Practitioner, and
James is a computer expert). Rapinder is still waiting for the Medical Board of Australia to give her a license
and James is still investigating the computer market here. Interesting people, but it looks
as if they won't be here long once they get their work sorted out.
For some reason I didn't mention the fact that James is not a Sikh: he's from Nigeria.
When I arrived, he greeted me and said “I suppose I don't look like what you expected”.
I: “Noa, I was expecting a Sikh”.
I've mused about smart phones a couple of times recently, and I've had a pretty active
discussion with various people, notably Tom Maynard. I don't need a smart phone, and others
can't live without them. What are the real issues?
On the positive side, they're an incredible amount of computing power, and particularly
communication power, in a small package. People on the move can do all sorts of things with
them. Tom uses them for navigation (of course), looking up bank balances, restaurant
critiques, weather forecasts, and even for making phone calls. But I can do all except the
last without a smart phone.
My issue is that they're clumsy to use. In particular, the small size makes a real keyboard
completely impossible, and the small display places extreme constraints on its use. But
there are docking stations such as the Motorola lapdock that work around at least these problems. They have software called
Webtop that looks almost like a real computer.
I don't think that that quite cuts it yet. But look at it from the other perspective: how
about taking out the heart of a real computer and hiding it in a smart phone case? Say, a
really fast processor and lots of memory, along with either a slower processor or heavy
power-saving modes for saving power on the move. Then, instead of expanding the smart phone
when needed, you could compress (and maybe slow down) the real computer when needed. The
restrictions of the smart phone format don't go away—I can't see how they ever will—but
they're not permanent. I can imagine that in a few years there will be something like that.
Looking back 10 years later, it's clear that I was wrong. On the contrary, the
constraints of mobile phones have been applied to devices that don't have the problems
that the constraints try to work around. But the Motorola lapdock is a thing of the past,
at least because Motorola didn't bet on the Android bandwagon.
The link above returns “Uh oh! The search you're looking for is nowhere to be found.”.
Maybe I haven't waited long enough.
Last month I received an invoice from
American Express for a credit card
which had been cancelled in March. At
the time I decided to wait and see what they would do.
The good news: they didn't try to deduct the sum from my also cancelled direct debit
authority. Instead, they sent me another invoice, including charges of $30 for late payment
and $2.60 (!) in interest.
So far in the fast few months I have caught two rats in a total of 5 traps. The latest one
is still a virgin. But in the garden, I saw something interesting hanging over
a Grevillea
rosmarinifolia bush:
The dead climbers are hops, “Pride of
Ringwood”, for what it's worth. There are warnings about this kind of hop (“Don't stand
motionless next to a Pride of Ringwood”), but that relates to their rapid growth. In this
case, my best bet is that the rat tried to jump from the roof of the garage and got its tail
caught in the bines:
Yvonne has another theory:
a possum did it. They have hand-like paws
which could conceivably manipulate the tail, but I don't see a rat holding still while it
did it.
I've been dragging my heels—again—calling the CFA for a site inspection. I registered on
the web nearly two weeks ago, and I had come to
the conclusion that they don't believe in the web. But no, today I got a phone call, and
somebody will come by on Wednesday.
More work on the shade area today. Somehow everything is ten times as complicated as it
should be. Still, now I have the brackets in place, and I need Yvonne to help me measure the joists.
Instead addressed another area where I wanted shade cloth, this time really as a wind break:
to the left of the north verandah of the house, next to the car parking area. That showed
that these fancy plates I have for attaching cloth are not ideal, and I'm going to have to
get some other way to hold it in place. It's holding, but it looks ugly:
We've been involved at a distance with the horse breeding activity at Olivaylle for some time now. They started
breeding Paso Fino
and Paso Peruano horses over ten
years ago, and for a long time Chris Yeardley was in charge of the stud. But she left five
years ago, and Jorge de Moya is getting old. He's currently in America, and there's a good
chance he won't return.
He started closing down breeding activities over a year ago, and we visited them in
June 2010, where he was astoundingly
generous and gave Yvonne and Chris a horse each, of their
choice. At that time he had about 85 horses for sale. Of those, 58 are still left, and they have to go soon.
It's clear that they're not asking much for them.
But who wants to buy a horse at the moment? Wrong time of year, wrong financial climate,
and wrong breed. Of the horses, 5
are Pura Raza Española, and 5
are Australian Stock
Horses, and there's a good chance that they can get rid of them. But there are also
three Paso Peruano stallions, 11 Paso Finos (probably the majority of the breed in
Australia), and 33 Paso Criolla (which I call Paso Doble): crosses between Paso Fino and
Paso Peruano. Many of them are excellent horses, but there are also many young, untrained
horses, and there are very few trainers in Australia who understand anything about them. It
doesn't help that Len and Sue Giddens' new horse registry doesn't want to recognize the Paso
Criolla.
What's left of the herd next month will be sold at the sale yards
in Hamilton next month, and
we're seriously concerned that a large number of them will end up as dog food.
What can we do? With proper training, the horses could fetch a lot of money. Chris is
buying three and will pick them up this weekend. Yvonne wanted to do the same, but even at
the prices they're asking, we can't afford it. It's sad to see it come to this.
I have two, maybe three Mecablitz
electronic flash units, made by Metz, one of the
oldest names in electronic flash. My oldest one was a two-piece system with a charger hung
over the shoulder, made some time in the 1950s. They've been around for ever, and their
name is almost synonymous with electronic flash.
Currently I want to know whether my latest one
supports Nickel-zinc
batteries. It's a Mecablitz 58 AF-1 O digital, already 2 years old, so obviously the
product description has been removed. I have a choice of the description of the
barely different replacement or a download page for new firmware. Clearly I can't find any information about which
batteries it supports. But I probably couldn't anyway: the description of the replacement
model doesn't say anything either. Maybe Metz hasn't heard of NiZn batteries yet.
OK, that's what support lines are for, right? Fought my way through their web site looking
for support. Somehow German web sites seem to be particularly clever in the way they make
you click all over the place to find what should be obvious. It's so difficult that I had
to start all over again looking for it to write this article, and it took me 5 minutes to
realise that I had to select “Kontakt” at the very bottom left, and none of the menus at the
top. Then I found:
The phone number is accessible only from inside Germany (even excluding neighbouring
German-speaking countries like Austria and Switzerland), and they want € 0,24 per minute
even for product enquiries! Further searching showed that they had a web form to fill out, all of two lines of 21 characters:
This is all in German, of course, because they don't offer any support in other
languages.
Germany was once the world's leading producer of photographic equipment. Where are they
now? Where
is Rollei?
Minox?
Edixa?
Voigtländer? I've had this kind of
treatment from Edixa decades ago, when they still existed. How long does Metz have to go?
Over a month ago, Yvonne got me to order two books from
AbeBooks. They were sent by “Priority Mail
International”, which in my experience takes a little over a week. But the books didn't come, and according to their web site
(which didn't disclose the tracking number), it could take up to a month. Today the month
ran out, so I sent them a message asking them to hunt down the books.
Then out for breakfast, where Yvonne told me that the books had just arrived.
That's terrible! Admittedly, AbeBooks had taken 4 days just to send them, but why
pay for “priority” when even “First Class Mail” (the
cheapest) can take only a week? I don't really
see any difference in the quality of service between the two. In fact, even before this
example my experience of “First Class” has been better than “Priority”.
Yvonne into my office this afternoon to say that the cursor
on her display wasn't moving. After confirming that she had tried a bigger hammer, checked
and found that the system had frozen. After reboot, /var/log/messages showed lots
of:
That's from my USB-connected photo backup disk. I thought the USB problems were over and
done. High time to debug the hot plug issues with
the eSATA adapter that I bought
months ago, but in the meantime needed to do a backup. So ran fsck and discovered
that I had a big lost+found directory. Since I do my backups with rsync, I didn't need to worry about that: just
blow it away and run rsync again.
And the system froze again. This time no console messages. Is this the
dreaded soft updates memory issue?
Possibly, and there's no reason for soft updates on this drive anyway, so tried to turn them
off:
So clearly tunefs reacts differently from, say, fsck when given a mount
point. fsck looks up the device in /etc/fstab; tunefs appears to get
the device name from the specified directory name. You can't reset soft updates when the
device is mounted (that's why the superblock update failed), so what it finds is the
underlying file system, in this case the root file system.
I'm still not convinced that all is well with the backup disk. One of the problems is
that rsync normally considers files to be the same if the file size and modification
timestamp are the same. After a crash, that's not necessarily sufficient.
Running rsync with the --checksum option would probably take longer than
just starting from scratch, so I suppose I should rebuild the file system. But I'll wait
until I have something faster than USB before I do that: even at a sustained 50 MB/s,
writing 1 TB of data takes nearly 6 hours.
The shade cloth I bought was considerably longer than needed; I had intended to use the rest
for the west end of the north verandah. But now I think I might cut it to size as an
entrance, so that we can cover it completely on hot days.
Once again I had problems with the tack strips. They're 1.25×5 cm, with 8 barbs to go
through the shade cloth into the wood, and come in packs of 5:
The problem is that they're considerably wider than a hammer, and hammering them in tends to
knock in only one side. Unless the wood is very soft, you end up with something like this,
on the west side of the north verandah:
That worked quite well, except that the cloth was wider than the advertised “metric” 1.8
metres (the resemblance to 6 feet is purely coincidental), so we had to bunch it a bit on
the right. I'll replace the strips on the verandah with something similar in full length.
A visit from some people who know Yvonne in the afternoon,
Martin and Kylie Godwin. They're thinking of renting the house across the road, the one
belonging to the Nottles. That would make the 6th set of occupants of the house since we've
been here: we never met the first ones, then there was Judy in late 2007. After that, the
owners moved in and stayed until January 2010, when they sold to the Nottles, who moved in on 25 February 2010 and out again on 11 November 2010. Then
Kirrilee and her partner moved in about 6 months ago. We didn't know that she was moving
out until we heard that the Godwins were thinking of moving in. He's a farrier and she's a
horse trainer, so they wouldn't be the worst of neighbours.
Nobody on the lists seems to know anything
about Nickel-zinc batteries,
but everything I've seen suggests that they're worth trying. Bought 8 batteries and a
charger on eBay. I'll try them out on my
power-hungry Nikon
“Coolpix” L1, which wouldn't pose such a problem if it were to die.
Also finally got round to sending an enquiry via their web form, which displayed about a quarter of the short text:
Peter Jeremy has pointed me to the triangle at bottom left of the input field. Pull on it
and it expands the field. But that's not the point: like so many mainstream “applications”,
which frequently open windows that are far smaller than the content, the default size seems
to say something about the intentions of the programmer.
This was written during the German night. To my surprise, and to their credit, I got a
reply written at 9:40 the same morning. They can't recommend NiZn batteries, but they're
currently testing them in their laboratories, and I should ask again in November.
That says a number of things: firstly, they know what I'm talking about, since they're
testing them. The “can't recommend” means exactly that: they haven't gained enough
experience with them yet. And having to ask again in November suggests that they don't
maintain context after answering a query; it would be better if they would say “we will
reply again when we have finished our testing”. Still, it addresses my main concern: is the
voltage too high? It seems reasonable to assume that this reply says “no”.
Kevin Brown from the Country Fire Authority along today to take a look at the property. He seems to know what he's talking about, no
buzzwords or other nonsense that has upset me about the CFA in the past.
The good news: nothing too much wrong. A few tips about what to look out for, and that was
about that. We should keep an eye on the verandah, and any other unpainted wood, since the
rough surface can make it easier for it to catch fire. And the Cedars? Well, firstly
they're Cypresses, not Cedars. And yes,
they can burn, and if they do the house is probably gone. But there's plenty of free space
on the west side of the house, and the probability is relatively low. On the other hand,
they have had plenty of cases where Cypresses have protected the buildings behind from
strong west winds.
So the Cypresses might be able to stay. I wish I had a clearer statement, but that's life.
In the end I'll still have to make up my own mind.
He also took a look at the trees to the south, and the overhead power lines. He suspects
that we're in for even more power failures this summer.
As if to prove Kevin right, had another power failure at 16:42, while I was watching TV.
Once again the UPS on the projector cut out; I'm going to have to put something bigger
there. And the one on Yvonne's computer also failed. It's
over 4 years old, and I suspect the batteries have reached end of life. Still more
expenditure required to protect ourselves from Powercor.
The weather was pretty terrible today, and I spent most of the day inside, but did manage to
get some shelves put in the shade area. A couple of years ago, David Yeardley bought the
same kind of toy greenhouse from ALDI that we
bought three years ago, and which catastrophically
self-destructed three months later:
David had had the good sense not to try to erect it, but the shelving is usable, and he gave
it to me a couple of months ago. I'm still using the old shelves, but they're pretty
overloaded, so put the shelves together and effectively in the same place as the ones I put
in three years ago (first photo):
Wed Sep 28 23:00:13 UTC 2011
11:00PM up 1095 days, 29 mins, 1 user, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT STARTED TIME COMMAND
root 11 99.0 0.0 0 8 ?? RL 28Sep08 1320690:02.75 [idle: cpu1]
root 12 98.5 0.0 0 8 ?? RL 28Sep08 1337418:49.99 [idle: cpu0]
I've spent my life with high-availability systems. Even in the early 1970s, we
had UNIVAC 1108 multi-processor
systems that, despite weekly maintenance, maintained uptimes of several months: long
live graceful degradation.
At Tandem Computers we could
even get a year or so, and some bugs we chased were complicated by the fact that they
survived reboots of the processor on which they occurred. But this is the first time I've
personally seen an uptime of three years, though as I write this, one of the FreeBSD cluster machines has an uptime of 1310 days.
And security? The machine doesn't have much to exploit. I'd rather run the risk of an
exploit than lose the chance of making it to 4 years' uptime.
Moved most of the seedlings and cuttings from the greenhouse to the shade area. It's
amazing how dry some of them were, although I water them profusely every day. And today it
was grey, overcast and moist. Hopefully they'll feel better in their new position.
One plant that gives me cause for concern is our dwarf Meyer lemon tree. We've had trouble
with it in the past, but it really came back to life last autumn when I put it in the
greenhouse (first photo, taken on 20 April 2011). But
then we saw yellowing leaves, and now I see (pot on the left in the middle photo):
There are lots of flowers, but it's losing all its leaves. Why?
Did some ambient light measurements in the shade area. Today was particularly cloudy and
dark, and I got the following results. The values are in lux, taken with my incident light
meter:
vertical
horizontal
Garden 1
20,000
5,000
Garden 2
18,000
6,000
Greenhouse
10,000
3,000
Shade area
1,300
800 - 1200
It's really difficult to get accurate measurements; even the slightest movement of the
sensor changes the values significantly. But what I see here is that the greenhouse is
about half as bright as outside
(1 EV, which surprises me), and
the shade area about 12% to 25% as bright as in the greenhouse (3 or 2 EV). That's in line
with the 70% reduction that they claim for the shade cloth. I'll keep observing things.
I took my monthly garden photosa few days ago, but since then I've
found a couple I have forgotten, and a few others have popped up.
The Paulownia kawakamii isn't
quite in flower yet, but it's trying, as is the
red Mandevilla:
And to my particular joy, both
the Delphinium “Völkerfrieden” and
the Clematis recta are growing.
Only a couple of weeks ago I had thought that both were dead, but the Clematis in particular
is growing very rapidly:
We've been meaning to contact CJ Ellis about cutting down the low branches of the Cypresses,
but we didn't need to: today he arrived with a gate he's been bending back into shape. He's
been off sick for some time after falling off a motorbike, but seems to be back to his old
self now. Hopefully we can also finally get the garden pond finished.
They're predicting lots of rain tomorrow, so took my weekly photos today. The rain is
welcome: after “the drought broke” (and caused severe flooding) in the summer, things are
drying out again, as indicated by the dam. When we moved in there was hardly any water, and
regularly every summer it dried out completely. But at the end of August last year the two
halves joined up, and shortly after that it overflowed into the lagoon. It stayed that way
into the new year, but since then it has gradually been drying out again. Today we have a
clear division into two halves again. Here a year ago and today:
A letter from the CFA today, which proved
to be a “report” on Kevin Brown's site visit yesterday. I was positively impressed by Kevin
himself; the report, though, is typical CFA. They write “Advice provided in this document
relates to this property...”, but it appears to be a five page computer-generated extract
from various CFA guidelines with only minimal relevance: “Cut tree branches that are
overhanging your house” (there are none), “You must have access to a dedicated, independent
water supply of at least 10,000 litres...” (Kevin knew very well that we had two tanks of
22,000 litres each), “Replace your water tank with a tank made from non-combustible
material” (they're made of concrete). Sadly the bureaucracy is coming through again.
There's some interesting stuff in there, but it would fit on less than half a page. I've
seen in the Microsoft space that people have difficulty replying to a mail message with more
than one point of interest. Who would read this stuff?
Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a
“blog”, and there is
deliberately no provision for directly adding comments. It's also not a vehicle
for third-party content. But I welcome feedback and try to
reply to all messages I receive. See the diary overview for more details. If you do
send me a message relating to something I have written, please indicate
whether you'd prefer me not to mention your name. Otherwise
I'll assume that it's OK to do so.
allows you to
select various other options, including climbing the directory tree in search of the ISO
image. But I can't find anything similar to that for the VT-x/AMD-V settings. So for the
moment that's in the “too hard” basket. To be revisited.
