jason

Bit of a Crash

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT

I was out last night on a ride and was almost home after about 40km when I had a bit of a crash. It was dark so I was checking my speedo while passing by a street light when I realised the kerb was curving right and I was heading straight into it - then bang! Thanks to the speedo check I know I was travelling 36kph at the time .

Very lucky for me I went over the gutter into some vegetation between the road and footpath. So I got pretty dirty but not hurt, I didn't hit anything hard at all! That was me, but my rear wheel hit the gutter pretty hard and was bent a little. My brifters were pushed out of position but that was an easy fix. Still need to fix the wheel but I have a spare (from Ruwani's bike).

VMware Workstation on Ubuntu 8.04

Thu, 08 May 2008 14:34:00 GMT

Well I ran into a problem with VMware Workstation (v6.0.3) since the kernel modules wouldn't build on hardy. Thankfully Igor Guerrero Fonseca has already solved the problem and his fix worked for me. Take a look at his blog: VMware 6.0.3 in Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 kernel 2.6.24.

Upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04

Sun, 04 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT

I upgraded my desktop from Ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04 on the weekend. I'm pleased to say it was a non event and everything is still working . Thanks to the iiNet mirror it only took 21 minutes to download the 1311 packages (install said ~1GB worth) - nice!.

Perth Freeway Bike Hike 2008

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 22:30:00 GMT

Sunday saw me up early for the Perth Freeway Bike Hike and what a day it was!

I rode to Bull Creek station to get the train down to the 60km start but the trains were 100% full and the platform was 100% full too - i.e. no chance. Without a car I jumped back on the bike and headed south. On the way down I managed to flip my bike over, took a graze to the elbow, all while having a phone conversation! (also the cause of the stupid move which resulted in the flip).

At approx 7:12 I rolled into the A group starting area just in time to hear them counting down and off I went again. My plan was to catch up to Graeme since Ron and Phil mentioned he was up the front but by the time everyone got out the starting area we were spread out over a km. I was pushing hard to move further up until I met some other guys going the same speed and we kinda formed a group. This may have been the 2nd or 3rd big group out of the A starters - many riders joined on and we had a pretty big pack all the way to the end. We were really moving although I think with better co-ordination we could have pushed a little quicker.

A few times after people would wreck our pace line the guys behind would surge and surround us leading to some scary situations.

In the end I finished in 1:27:56 averaging 40.3kph over the 59.06km.

After 21km + 59km we had a short ride to Ron's place and enjoyed a long relaxing breakfast before heading home (+46.33km). So all up I would have done approx 125km for the day.

Blog Neglect

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 17:35:00 GMT

It's a new year and I haven't blogged for months - but we've been busy:

Felix is now 10 months old, already! He's crawling around everywhere, standing up, standing and moving around holding onto things, his top 2 and bottom 2 front teeth are through and he's bigger. I need to upload some more current photos.
We were in Sydney for Christmas with my family. It was great to see everyone again.
I was in Melbourne for linux.conf.au 2008. This was awesome as always with too many talks to see but thankfully most were recorded. Go check them out. Ruwani and Felix came along as we stayed with Ruwani's sister who took the week off. There are plenty of great vegan and vegan friendly restaurants in Melb which was nice.
I finished out 2007 with 3000km on the bike. That was pretty good I thought, although many months were a bit weak due to laziness and/or travel. This year my goal is to double it to 6000km.
Our house is finally moving along. Site works are complete, the slab is down and they are preparing to start the (rammed earth) walls. Exciting stuff and I'll put up photos of the progress soon.

Sleeping: Shot with my old 2MP Canon IXUS - rather grainy and poor white balance. I only just found the battery charger after about 2 years!

Downloads Broken in Firefox

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 12:30:00 GMT

For a while Firefox downloads had been broken for me. The download dialog was always empty and most things I tried to save didn't end up saved, although some did - weird! It didn't appear to be due to any plugins and a bit of googling suggested something may be screwed up with my profile. However I didn't want to delete my profile.

Some more googling and I came up with Ubuntu bug #29102. Unfortunately it's a bit vague but one of the suggestions to delete the download.rdf file in your profile (leaving everything else as-is) worked for me. Yay!

For reference, this is Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty) and Firefox 2.0.0.8, although this has been going on for a bit so at least one prior revision of Firefox and maybe more.

PAWS website re-launched

Sat, 06 Oct 2007 16:55:00 GMT

We re-launched the PAWS website last week. Even though PAWS has been around for quite a few years the website has been sorely lacking.

PAWS is a Perth based not-for-profit organisation dedicated to People and Animal welfare and supporting the vegetarian and vegan community. They have a resource center in Northbridge where you can learn more about what really happens to animals in our society as well as a cruelty free store with vegan food and other items are available. They've just launched their catering service for events too - so last week saw them at the Pride Festival serving up awesome vegan meals which turned out to be very popular.

For those new to a vegetarian or vegan diet, or just curious, the website will be home to a growing set of restaurant reviews, recipes, and links to other like resources. To be announced soon will be a weekly PAWS meal night open to anyone to come along and eat by donation.

Of course the website runs on a Linux host and built on top of my Perl web framework. I just need some more time or help to convert some of their Internet cafe terminals to Linux too . Let me know if you're close to Northbridge and want to help out!

Greenhouse Gases - What Can I Do?

Sat, 01 Sep 2007 09:30:00 GMT

When it comes to global scale problems you can often feel alienated - what can I do as an individual? Despite the Australian Government being extremely slow to move on this issue I'm happy to say that as an individual you can do a lot. In fact you can probably reduce your own greenhouse gas emissions by 50% fairly easily from today.

The single most effective thing you can do is significantly reduce animal based food, especially meat. Changing to a vegetarian or vegan diet is even better. Why - it's an energy cycle thing and growing animals is a very energy intensive (and water intensive) exercise. The UN reports that rearing cattle produces more greenhouse gases than driving cars. Plenty more on this issue - just search.
Next is signing up for 100% green power. You don't have to wait, sign up now or switch to a provider that supports the National GreenPower Accreditation Program. Yes, it'll cost marginally more but can be offset with some smart electricity use reduction such as CFL lights, turning things off, solar hot water systems, etc...
Drive less. This one will save money too. Walk to the local shops and even the major supermarkets may be within a 20min walk. You'll be surprised to find walking there and back (plus shopping) will be a similar round trip time over driving cause you don't have to worry about parking and traffic. Commute to work or school by bus, train, or bicycle.

It's great to see Russell Coker on Planet Linux Australia researching on the environment and sharing his findings with the wider community. At least I find them very interesting.

There was a great 6 episode series called the Carbon Cops on ABC a short while ago. I think it's finished now but visit their website for some good information and tips on reducing your greenhouse gas footprint.

Now serving application/xhtml+xml

Sat, 25 Aug 2007 00:15:00 GMT

I've updated my site content and code to deliver pages using the "application/xhtml+xml" MIME type for browsers that support it. In the process quite a few things broke and I think I've fixed them all, hopefully .

A benefit to me, as the designer and responsible for content, if the page is invalid XML (XHTML) then my browser will spit out an error. So no need to run the w3 validator for the most part.

Ubuntu Linux on ASUS M2NPV-VM

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 10:30:00 GMT

I've recently bought myself a desktop computer and wanted something super cheap with low power usage. A laptop would have been a better choice power wise but certainly no where near as cheap. The ASUS M2NPV-VM is an all-in-one motherboard supporting AMD processors and includes on-board video (GeForce 6150), and here's the diff between most of these types of motherboards, including DVI out! In addition it's got the usual USB, Firewire, GigE networking, and up to 8GB of RAM. I bought the lower power 65W AMD x2 4800 (2.5Ghz) CPU although I run it at 1GHz since everything seems pretty much just as responsive, including the odd game of quake3 (on linux).

I don't have a power meter to measure actual power draw but when I get one I'll post up the results.

The great thing with this new system is that Ubuntu Feisty just works straight out of the box. No messing around at all except to switch to the binary NVidia drivers.

Suspend to RAM even works and I can resume OK. This is a little flakey though, but probably due to the NVidia binary drivers. Sometimes the screen will be messed up and switching to VT and back won't help.

If you take a look at the manual it doesn't explicitly say up to what resolution the DVI out supports (it only mentions 1920x1200 for VGA). I can happily say it does support 1920x1200 on DVI too which is a big relief otherwise I'd need another vid card (and extra power draw).

Update 2007-08-16: looks like there are some other issues with suspend to RAM. On resuming one CPU core is no longer responsive to powernow, i.e. it's set to maximum speed and you can't change it. I use the system all day and just power down at night so not a big issue for me for the moment anyway.