2004 Blog
Tsunami Damage - Unbelievable
image from The Australian
Weekend Update
- Added NZ Ski trip diary entry and photos from 2002.
- Misc web site updates, not all online yet.
- Caught up with the family.
- Christmas eve at the Pink Door... not. Keeping with tradition Ruwani
arranges for us to go somewhere closed
. - Christmas at the senior citizens place next door where Ruwani does volunteer work.
- Nice drive in the rain.
- Finished reading The Ringworld Engineers.
My Place
Check out this arial photo from terraserver. Ruwani and I live in the pinkish building with the round and square holes in it. Make sure you zoom out, it's pretty amazing!
"In their behaviour towards creatures, all men [are] Nazis"
Curiously two different paths led Ruwani and me to the same authour. I had seen Peter Singer on C-SPAN a while back promoting a recent book release about Bush, this was before the elections. Afterward I did a little research and decided to buy a couple of his books: One World and The President of Good & Evil.
Ruwani has been reading many books on food and health which touched on the topics of animal abuse in the food industry. Going further down that track she decided to borrow Animal Liberation from the library which is also by Peter Singer. Everyone should read it.
Welcome Palm Tungsten T2
I've wanted a PDA for quite a while but wasn't too interested in the
cost . However, recently there have been some older Palm PDAs
going pretty cheap on Craigslist so I
decided it was time. The main attractions to me are really just the calendar
(syncing to my work calendar via Evolution+Exchange connector on Linux) and a
todo list. These capabilities are there in even the most basic Palm models.
Of course I got a little greedy and ended up buying a used Tungsten T2. It has been kept in great condition and includes a 128MB SD card so I can store photos, and MP3s. Yes, this plays MP3s!! Actually, I'm quite impressed with the capabilities. In the screenshot below it's running an SSH client connected to a work computer running "top". Internet access is via a bluetooth connection to my laptop!
Having the Palm sync to Evolution, sync to the standard Palm Desktop running on Windows XP inside of VMware, and configuring bluetooth for network access wasn't so easy so I plan on putting together a little guide.
The only downside is Solitaire .
"Apricots stuffed with Tabouli"
I met up with Greg, Norma, Spew, Jen, Erik, and Amy last night for dinner at a Turkish restaurant in London. Most of us had serious servings of yoghurt with lamb. Erik and Amy got some kind of sampler that consisted of about 50 little dishes taking up most of our table space.
It's weird so many of us are now living overseas, but still nice to meet up with people I haven't seen in quite a while.
Tate Modern
Spew, Jen, and I visited the Tate Modern international modern art museum yesterday. There was some really cool stuff like Raw Materials by Bruce Nauman. This exhibition consisted of a number of speakers placed throughout the Turbine Hall. So you walk around and hear various voices saying things like "THINK, THINK, THINK", etc... Watch the vid below, it's scary.
Ringworld's Children
A couple months ago Ruwani and I went to a 2nd hand book sale and picked up a copy of Ringworld's Children by Larry Niven for $1. Since I was on the road this week I took it along and finished it thanks to a couple long flights. Having never read any of Larry Niven's books before I didn't know what to expect, but the Ringworld story is pretty amazing. I think I might pick up the original Ringworld and read that too...
I'm heading to London next week and I'm taking George Orwell's classic 1984 and One World by Peter Singer
Goodbye 560x
Goodbye to the old IBM ThinkPad 560x. After serving me well since January 1999 I have finally sold it. Maxed out at 96MB of RAM and with only 233Mhz of POWAH it was a tad slow but still worked pretty well and I had been using it on and off up until today. I think I'm going to miss it.
Mt. Saint Helens
Ruwani and I went to see Mt. Saint Helens today. It was a great
drive and nice to see the mountain up close but little action apart from a bit
of steam. And it was cold . Check out the photos.
US No-Fly List
The latest edition of Cryptogram came out a few days ago with this piece on the US No-Fly List:
Imagine a list of suspected terrorists so dangerous that we can't ever let them fly, yet so innocent that we can't arrest them -- event under the draconian provisions of the Patriot Act.
Cryptogram is a great monthly newsletter by Bruce Schneier covering computer security, although he finds himself discussing larger security issues such as the recent Olympics in Greece and US security. If you haven't subscribed yet then I suggest you do so.
Las Vegas!!!
Ruwani and I are heading off to Las Vegas this afternoon. Ian will be meeting us there and we might also meet with some of his work colleagues. It's a long weekend so I'm not returning until Monday afternoon. Unfortunately Ruwani's stay is up and she'll be returning to Perth after Vegas :( Hopefully she'll be back in about a month.
Flying home
I'm flying home from a week in Dallas working on the new company demo: Netcool Solutions Showcase. It was a tough week with crazy hours but I enjoy working with the other guys in a group - most of the time I'm working on my own at home or in the field.
Busy busy
It's happened yet again, too much going on to bother updating my diary
. We've been travelling all around the place trying to make the
most of the summer in Seattle. I've have added photos for most of our
trips:
- Anacortes
- Seattle Japanese Gardens
- Mt. Rainier
- Snoqualmie Falls
- (old) Road Trip: Moving to Seattle
- (old) Berlin
Laptop Battle!
Ruwani found out there was a laptop battle at Chop Suey last night so we decided to check it out. The setup was 16 contestants in groups of 2. Each contestant got to play for 3 mins and a panel of judges (or more often, the crowd) would choose a winner. The 8 remaining continued to battle until a winner was found.
Highlights: one guy dressed in a purple velvet waistcoat (no other
tops), big bling, and brought along 2 dancer girls dressed as pirates! His
music was pretty terrible but he had a lot of energy, the outfit, and PIRATES!
Another contestant was introduced as "this guy doesn't even have a laptop" and
he didn't. He came out with a gameboy (original) with light kit and plugged it
in. LOL awesome .
Vanvouver & Victoria
On Saturday morning Spew and I headed out toward Canada. Unfortunately Ruwani had to remain behind as she's waiting to hear back about a visa extension and couldn't leave the country :(. We had only planned on visiting Vanvouver but a few people recommended we check out Victoria so we stopped by on our way back (not quite that simple though).
We:
- Saw the famous steam powered clock in Old Town. WOW
- Walked through Old Town to China Town into 'Crack' Town which, for some reason, wasn't on our tourist map.
- Hired scooters and rode around Stanley Park. This was a lot of fun, I
think I need to buy a scooter . (video 1, video 2)
- Ate japanese and hotdogs, typical Canadian food =)
- Saw 2 really crap and 1 decent comedian at Yuk Yuk's comedy club.
- Saw a live band, one guy had serious hair. (video).
- Completely botched Sunday's trip to Victoria since you need to take a car ferry to/from Vancouver Island to get there and back.
- Spew insisted in parking in a carpark when there was plenty of free street parking, only to get a parking ticket. lol!
- Listened to Clarence Carter's Strokin' on the radio. After 2 days
of absolute crap on the radio this was a welcomed relief. If you've
never heard it before then try to. In private .
Spew's in Town!
Pretty boy spew is in town (see pic) for the next couple weeks. Good timing considering Ruwani and I just moved to Seattle!
that's
him in the scoop
So on Friday night he came to our place and we had some dinner and a few drinks at the Pike Place Brewery then headed out on the town. Not much happening there, don't think we headed in the right direction, but it was still good to catch up with him.
Spew crashed at our place then on Saturday we did some touristy stuff like headed up the space needle.
US terrorism mania
The stuff going on here gets crazier all the time, I love the recent article posted on slashdot about using cell phone jamming to prevent terrorists detonating bombs remotely. A thread from the comments section:
It's a good thing that I've got my cell phone handy to call 911 in case I see possible terrorist activity! Oh wait...
If you're at an event important enough to warrant one of these devices, I doubt the authorities are depending on citizens' 911 calls to tell them about emergencies. The police have this nifty gadget called a radio.
Good thing the terrorist can't get those, or they could remote detonate bombs event with their cellphones jammed!
Bulk Travel
I've been doing a serious amount of travel for work the past couple months including San Fransicso, Long Island, Baltimore, London, Helsinki, Chicago, and Detroit. It's not letting up any time soon either, next weekend I'm off to Berlin for the Micromuse EMEA Users Conference and then Stockholm following that. I have a week back in San Diego before heading to Dallas for 2 weeks to, finally, do my NCC training.
No real photos to show for all those trips unfortunately. I spend most of the time on site, travelling, or sleeping that I don't really get a chance to look around.
US Robotics Courier V.Everything
Now this is an ugly modem, I like the look of the old Netcom Smartmodem better but apparently this is the hardcore modem to have. I don't really need a modem though, but decided to pick up this piece of history on Ebay for $17. A new one goes for $289.95!
San Onofre Beach Walk
Ruwani and I met up with Ian to walk around the San Onofre beach and cliffs. San Onofre is a little south of San Clemente and about the midway point between where Ian and I live. Ian found a site that mentioned the walk.
Congratulations Mum & Papa!
My parents had their 30th Wedding Anniversary party this weekend and I
popped back over to Australia to suprise them! It had been about a year since
I last visted Australia so well worth the effort and my parents loved it
.
2.6.1 on the T40 Updates
Looks like I was wrong about the AGPGART thing. 2.6.1 splits the driver portion into a separate module and I wasn't loading it. For the Thinkpad T40 it's called intel-agp.
I'm not sure what I changed, but I unpacked the same VMware any-any patch the other day and it compiled and inserted the kernel modules OK. VMware is working again although there seems to be some networking issues to the host OS. I haven't had time to look into it yet.
An additional problem surfaced, for some reason my USB mouse stopped working
in Quake3!!! Yes disaster . It was working after moving to 2.6.1
then the other day it suddenly broke when I was playing around with the
psmouse_proto=imps kernel option. The cursor is 'stuck' in the
top left-hand corner and won't move. Clicking the right mouse button seemed to
register but that was it. A bit of searching on the 'Net suggested upgrading
to the 1.32b point release. That fixed it.
2.6.1 on the T40
I've been sticking to 2.4.22-ac4 for a while for lack of anything better with adequate support for my laptop. With the release of 2.6.0, and shortly after that 2.6.1, I decided to give 2.6 a go.
I love the new make config stuff, it seemed to guess most of the options I wanted. I started off using ACPI instead of APM as I had been doing with 2.4 but decided to switch back to APM cause I couldn't be bothered configuring scripts to handle all the power events. I liked the no mess Fn+F3 to toggle the screen and just closing the lid to suspend-to-RAM etc...
Unfortunately APM led to the first problem, resuming was causing a kernel Oops with something to do with the psmouse. It was also causing my USB mouse to die. Trying to restart the USB subsystem after resuming would hang and the mod utils would become unusable (e.g. lsmod would hang). The only way I could get it to be friendly was to unload the psmouse module and turn off USB before suspending. Kinda crappy IMO :( I might try out ACPI again and see whether I can get that to suspend and resume OK.
Problem number two. I can't get VMware to build it's kernel modules, even with the any-any patch that I found out about when googling.
Problem number three. After recompiling the fglrx kernel module it still didn't want to play with the standard agpgart for some reason. I ended up unloading agpgart and using the internal fglrx agpgart method:
Option "UseInternalAGPGART" "yes"
The good is my laptop feels a lot more responsive!
T40 BIOS Update
I upgraded the BIOS in my T40 today thanks to some instructions on Alexander Clouter's T40 page. I'm now using BIOS revision 2.11 and Embedded Controller revision 2.04.
Update the Embedded Controller first, and then the BIOS as outlined in the README files. Alexander mentioned doing it the other way round.
The cool thing is Fn+F3 (toggle screen on/off) works! In the console (no framebuffer) or in X.
NYE in New York!
Ruwani and I spent the past 4 nights including New Years Eve in New York city!!! Tons of pictures. Ian was there too so we met up a number of times including for NYE. Let's see, what else did we get up to:
- Walked around Central Park
- Visited the Guggenheim Museum
- Visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Saw the Statue of Liberty from Battery Park
- Did a lot of walking
- Had dinner at The View, Marriott Marquis at Times Square up on level 48. Pretty nice view up there.
- Did not see the ball drop as we were stuck in crowds too far away around the corner.
[ see entries for: 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, misc ]
