The Road Goes Ever On

Thanks to Mikal I now can map where I've been. This is very cool.

create your own visited states map

create your own visited countries map

As you can see, I have lots of the world still to go :-)

travel/chicago | 31 Dec 2004 | #

Interruptions

This article titled, Life Interrupted, hits the nail on the head. Life is so busy - I find myself multitasking continuously, and it is far too easy to get nothing done. In computer squeak, the cost of task switching, which involves saving registers out to memory and then paging in a new chunk of memory to do the new task, can result in thrashing if we switch between tasks too often. And that's a apt term for life in this new century.

What I have been doing for about 7 years is blocking out chunks of time in my calendar so as to get things done - i.e. achieve what is most important in my day. Even a colleague known as BoyWonder (to everyone around him but ignorant of the label himself) says that "You need to make sure you achieve some progress every day, despite all the other pressures." He's right on this one.

It's hard though in a day job with a mandated Outlook/Exchange email/calendering "solution", where the default set up bothers you on every email arrival, and people just book you for meetings all day and through your plea-for-sanity "Do not disturb" bookings. They get very offended when I don't turn up to their meetings, but hey, my booking was in there first! :-) I'm of the opinion that think these tools have a net negative affect on communication.

Sometimes I have to go a step further and cut myself off from email all day and place police-style ribbon across the front of my cube to discourage visitors. Interruptions are greeted with, "Which part of Go Away don't you understand?" Of course some smart alec (Hi Kevin!) hangs a Do not feed the Penguin sign on the ribbon, but that's fine - I can finally get some work done and I'm far less stressed at the end of the day.

tech/misc | 31 Dec 2004 | #

Photo Tidbits

Thinking about photography today - found this great Photo Tidbits site.

photos | 30 Dec 2004 | #

Love my tripod

I'm enjoying using my SLIK U9000 tripod - inside shots without flash are now possible, and the results aren't too bad either. It's very easy to use, lightweight and the quick-release mount bracket isn't too bulky on the camera. So I've re-read a pre-review of the E300 again - makes me really want one. The time will come shortly when I'll just have to upgrade to a DSLR.

photos | 30 Dec 2004 | #

2004 Summary

Well, it's a week before New Years' and a couple days from Christmas. Time for navel gazing and reflection.

What did 2004 involve?

The conference kicked the year off and was a huge success. We followed up with a week down at Christies Beach to veg - and boy did I need that! It took me more than 2 months to recover from LCA2004, and more than 6 months to tidy up all the loose ends. I was still feeling the effects later in the year, so we took another holiday, this time driving to Melbourne for what seems to be an annual pilgrimage.

I really came to appreciate lots of LinuxSAers more than ever (due to their conference involvement) - G and L - you are amazing!

I ended up going to the USA twice for work - for 3 weeks initially and later for 6 months bringing the whole family.

I sat on the Linux Australia committee and saw lots of cool things get achieved. I've been to Sydney (Media training), Melbourne (Committee meeting) and Canberra (Ghosts of Conference Past) for Linux Australia this year.

I said goodbye to many friends due to a downsizing workforce, and saw lots of hard work not rewarded.

I moved shadowfax from running Red Hat / Fedora to Ubuntu. This was not a small change - I've been running RH since 5.0. I started to run my own server at home.

I made submissions to our government on the farce that is the AUSFTA.

I wrote and was published in Australian Developer Magazine and IDM.

I've taken up photography as another hobby.

I probably wrote more lines of code this year than last, but I still felt like I wanted to write more. I spent a lot of time playing with C# under the .NET CLR (at work) as well as Mono (at home). I didn't make any real progress in trying to transition to paid open-source development as a day job.

We bought an iPod - which meant having to think about free software ethics as applied to music distribution.

Got to visit Willow Creek which was an eye-opener. Didn't get around to visiting Moody Bible so that's delayed until early next year. We've settled at Harvest for our time in Illinois.

It's been a very busy, but very worthwhile year. Goal setting for 2005 coming soon.

tech/misc | 23 Dec 2004 | #

World's Best Chocolate

In my mind, there is now a change in the world's best chocolate - Haigh's Mandarin Creams (item 237) have been replaced by Harry and David's fruit chocolates - especially the raspberries. Yummmmmm :-)

travel/chicago | 23 Dec 2004 | #

Finally fixed PyBlosxom RSS renderer

What had been annoying me for ages was that the RSS renderer for PyBlosxom was incorrectly inserting <link>$url</link> instead of <link>$base_url</link>. Finally fixed it as it causing complaints from readers of planet.linuxsa.org.au - the bug was in <install>pyblosxom-1.0.0/Pyblosxom/blosxom.py

While I was at it, I listened to suggestions and increased the refresh time for that planet to hourly, as well as dropping the feeds from LWN and /.

meta | 21 Dec 2004 | #

Marshall Fields

We went to the Marshall Fields downtown store on Saturday to soak up the Christmas spirit a little. Marshall Fields is sort of like John Martins in Adelaide used to be (before David Jones took it over and closed it down :-( It's a traditional old-century department store - warm and friendly service in a big austere building. They have animated puppets in the shop windows, telling the story of Snow White - quite elaborate. Along with a thousand other people we had a look and J enjoyed them I think.

Of course it was cold standing outside viewing the decorated shop windows - on the way in to downtown we saw from some billboards that it was only 6F (-14C). Brrrrrr.

Inside there's the World-famous Walnut Room - nice place to eat - but there was a 4 hour waiting time to get a table - sheesh. Inside the Walnut room there's a 45 foot Christmas tree - an annual must see for Chicago residents - this year its modelled on a 1960's Whitehouse tree - which ties in with the Jacqueline Kennedy revival that's going on right now in Chicago.

So a nice Saturday out - albeit cold sans snow.

travel/chicago | 21 Dec 2004 | #

LCA2005 Registrations Open

As sjh says, registrations for Linux.Conf.Au 2005 have opened!

So here is your action plan:

1) get time off from work between Apr 18 and Apr 23, 2005

2) Register

3) Convince your boss to pay, or just pay from your own pocket

4) Start counting the days

The only complaint I've got is that LCA2005 could do with more promotion - we've got to start telling people that LCA2005 is only 17 weeks away. Mailing lists, news groups, news sites etc all need pinging.

tech/linux-australia/lca2005 | 18 Dec 2004 | #

Planet LinuxSA

Planet LinuxSA went live today. Woohoo!

Email me if you want your feed added.

tech/LinuxSA | 16 Dec 2004 | #

Icecream on a cold day

Last weekend we went to Chicago Premium Outlets in Aurora, IL to shop. Much like DFO in Melbourne, but bigger and having the disadvantage of being individual shops outside (i.e. not under one roof), meaning that visiting on a day that's around freezing is not pleasant (coats on, walk 3 metres, coats off - all day long).

Nonetheless we did well and bought Christmas presents for ourselves, and "saved" money doing so.

We had to try Cold Stone Creamery since it came so highly recommended by the locals here. Very yummy - I'll add my recommendation - pecans, rich vanilla icecream, caramel and chocolate sauces. Mmmmmm.

P.S. I never got around to describing last weekend. We went to the Shedd Aquarium which was pretty good. Baluga whales in huge tanks for you to see, obscure fish and corals for viewing, kids play areas. The only beef I had was the price - like USD 62 for a family of 4. Throwing in parking (USD 12) and shared lunch meals (USD 17), it proved an expensive day out, but I guess you've got to do these things while you're so far from home.

travel/chicago | 16 Dec 2004 | #

Javadoc^WVisual Studio "auto" documentation

A article saying that the Visual Studio / .Net environment improves productivity since it allows you to incorporate design documentation inline with your code that gets automagically extracted when you need it.

How is this anything but an evolutionary step from Javadoc? I mean, javadoc was included with jdk 1.1 (was that released in 1998?), so it's not a new concept.

I really dislike people and groups that try to re-write history.

tech/code | 16 Dec 2004 | #

It's Official - Linux has fewer bugs

Well, it's official - according to the latest research Linux has fewer bugs than proprietry offerings.

Linux, it is claimed, has about 0.17 bugs per 1,000 LOC (Lines of code).

Most proprietry software has about 20 to 30 bugs per 1,000 LOC.

Intuitively, this makes sense: 1) "Many eyeballs make most bugs shallow" - the open-source process encourages bugs to be found and fixed. 2) Most of the developers writing the Linux kernel are doing it for fun, not to pay the mortgage. As Brian Kernighan says, "Do what you think is interesting, do something that you think is fun and worthwhile, because otherwise you won't do it well anyway." Without the pressures of deadlines and bad managers, developers write better code. 3) Simply put, the kernel hackers are smart people. Hang out on lkml for a while to see the intense thinking that goes on in finding solutions to hard problems - I'm often in awe.

Linux now wins in bug count, internationalisation support, security and TCO. The only 2 remaining obstacles are shrink-wrap applications availability and ease-of-use. Ease of use is being addressed by projects such as GNOME. It's only shrink-wrap applications being available down at the mall that's a hindrance. That's a business model thing - a challenge, but also an opportunity. If someone can crack that there's big profits to be made, and the chance to grab a large chunk of the market at the start.

tech/linux | 15 Dec 2004 | #

flurries

Today is cold.

On the way to work the temperature was about 20F (= -7C) with a wind-chill taking that down another 4 or 5 degrees Celcius. That's so cold that your hands sting if you're not wearing gloves.

Strangely enough there's no snow just flurries being carried by the 40mph (64kph) wind.

travel/chicago | 14 Dec 2004 | #

Of Silver Bullets and HIGs

Today I stumbled upon the legendary No Silver Bullet essay by Fred Brooks via the C2 Wiki. As I've been looking for an online version of this article for years I'll bookmark here.

On another track, AJ muses on zoomable user interface design, which reminded me to finally bookmark these sites:

• Jeff Raskin,
• Tog,
• Joel on UI design,
• The Apple MacOSX HIG, and
• GNOME's HIG.

tech/code | 11 Dec 2004 | #

Tripod

Shhh, I shouldn't really know this, but I'm getting a tripod for Christmas.

I can't help but know, because I selected and purchased it, but it's really a present from S to me.

I'm getting the Slik U9000, which seems like a nice middle of the road sort of tripod - not a professional Bogen, but something that should stretch my abilities and help me get better with my photography. Of course it will be meet my needs if I get a DSLR someday - maybe this one (Wake up Michael - as if!) I do already have a telescopic tripod, which has been great, but I've outgrown that - so I'll put that one aside for travel.

Along the way I found a nice series of articles on tripods, and some reviews of the U9000 (as well as a better description).

photos | 10 Dec 2004 | #

How to pick an American

If you are ever not sure whether you are talking to an American, ask them to say the word, "Emu".

If they are Australian, they would say, "e-MU" (as in the Greek letter)

If they are American, they would say, "e-MOO" (as in the cow)

travel/chicago | 09 Dec 2004 | #

Not again!

Last night the fire alarm went off at about 2am.

This is now the 4th or 5th time in 8 1/2 weeks. Not happy Jan.

Each time it has gone off it has been in the middle of the night. Only once was it not a false alarm - someone burnt some toast or something. Given that it is freezing or below outside and we have 2 kids under 4, we're not going to stand outside for 30 minutes until the fire dept give the all clear for us to return to our beds. We're now just doing what everyone else in the building is doing - ignoring it. It won't be long before we sleep through the sounding of the alarm.

We've talked to neighbours and it seems that once every fortnight there is a false alarm - and this has been going on for over a year. The appartment block managers try to sound concerned, but they don't do anything about it. They get "someone in to look at it" but the situation doesn't improve. Even the fire brigade don't bother rushing here anymore, and they only send a couple of guys, not a whole squad.

If there ever is a real fire in our appartment block hundreds of people will die because of "the boy who cried wolf".

So we're in a bind - I can demand the corporate housing company to move us to another location, except that we like it here except for the false alarms - there are facilities that keep S and the kids occupied since they only have the car 2 or 3 days a week. And moving would be hard - we'd have to get in professional movers and pack up our stuff again, change our address at banks, the state department, other bills etc. and all that for just another 4 months. It hardly seems worth all the effort. Our safety comes first, but this is ridiculous.

travel/chicago | 09 Dec 2004 | #

Little Heads vs Big Heads

Joel again writes the truth with Little Heads vs Big Heads, quoting the great article You need Developers, not Programmers.

Basically you need people who love developing software, not just doing it as a day job. I've commented on this before, and so has Joel, specifically about interviewing for the right people.

I guess one of the first signs of a developer mindset - do they have a junkcode directory, or a public code respository? How about a useful blog showing a history of thinking-outside-the-box?

tech/code | 07 Dec 2004 | #

Sanity returned

Geoffrey has heeded the call to split the LinuxSA mailing list in 2 - the main technical list "linuxsa" and "linuxsa-talk" for everything off-topic.

Thank you Geoffrey - some sanity returns to my mailbox!

tech/LinuxSA | 03 Dec 2004 | #

Smart search

On some blog this week I read about repeated failures in UI design - mistakes that keep getting made in multiple OSes multiple times.

While I can't find that article again (bookmark Michael, bookmark!), the author mentioned that sorting of strings in a pull-down or a list-view was typically broken - multiple spaces, common words such as "The" and "A" shouldn't be considered when sorting etc. He held up iTunes which did a better job.

So I wrote some code last night to do it. Wasn't too hard - I'll make it public once I clean it up some. A good break from my day job which right now is reading and writing documents :-(

tech/code | 02 Dec 2004 | #

Generosity

When I published my Christmas 2004 wish list I did so as a bit of a joke. I mean, who would just buy you something because I publicly mentioned it?

Well someone did. I'm now the owner of Secrets and Lies by Schneier. The person who bought it for me wanted to remain anonymous, but they forget about the billing address associated with the order :-) If Amazon had labelled it as a gift, I wouldn't have looked - but it sort of surprised me that an Amazon package turned up unexpectedly in the mail. I won't name the generous person here except to say thank you K for your generosity.

This is an interesting example of how small and interconnected the world has become. I'm sitting in Chicago (UTC-0600), my wish list on my blog sitting in Adelaide (UTC+1030) was read by a computer geek somewhere in the world, and via Amazon (NY state?) they purchased and shipped something to me. I find that really weird, but also really cool.

tech/misc | 02 Dec 2004 | #

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving was last Thursday, and we were blessed to be able to spend it at the Zehner's with their family.

After getting lost (due to Michael not being able to follow directions) we arrived at their beautiful traditional American 2 storey to find a snowman sitting out front. We were greeted by the 2 boys and 2 dogs of the family - Cameron, Jack, Ruby and Max (you can guess which way round).

Tom and Julie gave us the grand tour of the place and introduced us to the rest of the family. Tom, while pretending to be a graphic artist, is really a geek from looking at his desk full of computers.

For Thanksgiving dinner we had 2 big turkeys, green-been salad, sweet potato baked dish, salad, along with scone-like dumplings and all the appropriate condiments. That was followed up by pecan pie and the traditional pumpkin pie. Boy, was there too much food!

We had a great time, and got to spend the holiday with some very nice people and felt part of the American tradition that is Thanksgiving. That was so nice of you Zehner's to invite us. We were so tired that we just stayed home for Black Friday - the day after Thanksgiving.

travel/chicago | 01 Dec 2004 | #

Drivers Licence

After 3 hours of waiting in lines, sitting a multiple choice exam, and doing a driving test in very light snow, I now have my Illinois driving licence.

This means AVIS will let me keep our rental car, and I won't have to catch taxis. And I got the licence with 5 days grace period left :-)

travel/chicago | 01 Dec 2004 | #