iPod Freeze - addendum

I made a msitake - the 40Gb iPod I have is a "Click Wheel" model, not a "Touch Wheel". Fortunately I'm not the only one out there who found the Apple support instructions misleading.

Just glad it's back and working :-)

tech/misc | 29 Jan 2005 | #

iPod Freeze

My 40Gb iPod froze during a sync to iTunes. It's only 3 months old.

Grrr. So I try the documented Apple procedure for reboot - Toggle HOLD, then hold down MENU and PLAY/PAUSE for up to 10 seconds.

Problem is, the iPod stays frozen.

So now for the undocumented reboot procedure, via here thanks to Dan - the resident Apple guru - toggle HOLD, then hold down MENU and MIDDLE BUTTON.

So now to cancel that help desk call at Apple, and recharge, since the iPod has been on for the last 4 hours.

tech/misc | 29 Jan 2005 | #

Have you registered for LCA2005 yet?

Have you registered to attend Australia's number #1 Linux and Open Source conference Linux.Conf.Au 2005 yet?

If not, you should do so NOW. Why? I'll give you 5 reasons:

1) There's only 2 days left for early-bird registration and you save AUD 230 on professional registration that way;

2) Rumour has it that the conference is well over 1/2 full already (filling faster than previous years);

3) There's only 11 weeks to go until it starts;

4) Andrew Morton, Robert Love, Eben Moglen, Ted T'so, Keith Packard and Bdale Garbee are all coming; and

5) Linux.Conf.Au will not only make your brain melt from overload, it's an aweful lot of FUN!

There is only one response possible - register now! :-)

tech/linux-australia/lca2005 | 29 Jan 2005 | #

Progress and Goals

Besides the last 6 days when I've been in Florida on holiday, I've been on track 100% for the last 3 weeks.

Today was 202.5/4.5/45 - goal is 176/7.5/80. I have until September to reach it.

exercise | 28 Jan 2005 | #

Linux desktop demos

Nat's created some cool demos showing Mono and Beagle. Cool.

In other news, returned from Orlando and DisneyWorld. Overwhelming whirlwind tour - I don't know whether I can blog it all in under 50 pages.

tech/code | 27 Jan 2005 | #

Offspring

photos | 21 Jan 2005 | #

How not to build a mail client

Microsoft Outlook is really bothering me. It's my company mandated communication tool and it sucks.

Reasons why Outlook sucks:

1) It is very hard to change between connected and disconnected states. In fact, Outlook often gets itself into a state where no matter what you do, it ignores your attempts at going online if you've been working offline. Even stopping and restarting it doesn't help. The only recourse is to reboot.

2) When you are offline, client-side filtering rules are *designed* not to run. i.e. you can't filter your mail if you are working offline. This means that it won't filter email that you have manually retrieved - meaning that you have to manually wade thru spam and manually sort the ham into the appropriate folder, or reboot your computer and restart Outlook for filtering to work. See 1) why you can't go online easily.

3) When you are offline, you can't turn vacation on. From 1) you need to reboot, start Outlook, and then say you're going on holiday, then you can shutdown and walk away. Talk about unnecessarily delaying your attempts at going on holiday!

4) The auto-viewing of messages is a great virus trap. No more need be said.

5) Long distance syncing between client and server is incredibly slow. My Exchange server is in Australia and I'm here in the USA, and it can take up to an hour to retrive less than 50 messages every morning. In contrast, I can offline IMAP email between my Australian-based server and my Linux laptop here in the USA in a couple of minutes - and I'm pulling mail from lots of mailing lists. Did I mention that the company network bandwidth is greater than what I use to sync my personal mail? I guess I need to upgrade Exchange / Outlook to remove some of those NOPs.

Outlook is a great example of how not to design a communication tool. The Open-Source community should be thankful that Microsoft have done such a poor job, because they had the chance of doing something great before Evolution raced past it in speed, usability, functionality and security.

tech/windows | 21 Jan 2005 | #

New Car

After the last incident the rental company agreed to give us a new car. In fact, it's a "free" upgrade from a mid-size to a full-size car - free in the sense that I'm not paying the difference in rental charges from a mid-size to full-size - not-free in the sense that we'll pay more in gas (i.e. petrol) during use.

They gave us a Chevy Impala. Nice luxurious car, everything that opens and closes, but it's so retro! If I didn't see the 2004 car manufacture's plate and the 4000 miles on the clock, I would've thought it was made in the 70's from looking inside. Think Holden Statesman Caprice in the 70's. That's the interior of the 2004 Impala.

travel/chicago | 20 Jan 2005 | #

Politics in January

Well, the silly season hasn't finished yet. Or at least no-one told the politicians.

Now that Afghanistan and Iraq are subdued, it appears George dubya has his eyes on Iran. What's next? Take India and Pakistan because _they_ are playing with missiles? What then? China? I thought the cold war finished over 10 years ago? Do I now have to consider a move to Africa or some other non-target region? This isn't a move towards peace, this is a move towards war. *sigh*

In other news, Latham goes and it looks like he'll be replaced by a joke.

tech/misc | 19 Jan 2005 | #

LinuxSA Jan 18, 2005 Meeting Announcement

Hi all,

Time for the LinuxSA January Meeting announcement...

The usual details:

  When:   7:00pm-9:30pm (doors open 6:45pm) on
          Tuesday, 18th January, 2005
  Where:  Senior Secondary Assessment Board
          of South Australia (SSABSA)
          Boardroom (1st floor)
          60 Greenhill Road
          Wayville SA
  Cost:   FREE
  Who:    Anyone and everyone.
          No pre-registration necessary.

Presentation:

  Geoffrey D. Bennett will be giving a talk on vim. The talk will make
  much more sense to you if you are already somewhat familiar with vi
  or vim -- if not, run vimtutor (presuming that you have vim
  installed), and complete the tutorial.

Pizza:

  After the meeting, please join us for pizza at San Giorgios (cnr.
  Frome Street and Rundle Street in the city).

For more information:

  Email:        organisers@linuxsa.org.au
  Web Page:     http://www.linuxsa.org.au/
  Mailing List: linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au
  IRC:          #linuxsa on irc.freenode.net

tech/LinuxSA | 17 Jan 2005 | #

frequent-flyer points

Today I looked into cashing in frequent flyer points to go to Linux.Conf.Au in Canberra in April, but alas there are no award seats available! What use is a frequent flyer program if you can't book seats 3 months in advance to a non-tourist, but high-volume traffic location?

travel | 15 Jan 2005 | #

Cold Snap and Cars

This morning it's 5F (which is -15C). Cold enough to make bare flesh ache. Thankfully we have scarves, coats and gloves. I'm wanting to find a balaklava in the local stores.

Major inconvenience from this was that the driver's side rear door on our car wouldn't shut once opened. The problem self-corrected after driving around with S holding the door closed with the heaters on full-bore for 20 minutes. Hoping that we can swap the car over - this is just too inconvenient. J enjoyed sitting in the front though :-)

travel/chicago | 15 Jan 2005 | #

Search Tools Compare

MSN Search


Lookout Search


Google Search


Beagle Search

As you'd know from other posts I've made, I'm playing around with Dashboard and Beagle, so as the proprietry world started copying the GNOME project's efforts, I was very keen to see what they produced.

Taking eat your own dogfood to a new level, I decided to install Lookout, MSN and Google Search on my work Windows laptop simultaneously. Despite having 3 indexes of everything now, and suffering from slowness when resuming from hibernation (when the MSN decides it needs to reindex everything *sigh*), I can at least now see how they all compare.

After a month of running all these search tools and comparing against Beagle (running on shadowfax, my Linux development laptop) my thoughts are that Beagle still has a few rough edges, but is just as quick and amazingly presents a better user interface (due to people like tigert over at Novell). Beagle does have some bleeding-edge dependencies (including rml's inotify that hasn't made it into the kernel yet). And Beagle, using Mono, leaks memory. But besides these things :) Beagle is doing pretty well - I look forward to it becoming part of mainstream distros.

So what's left to complete this is to compare against the Apple offering once it becomes available later this year and once I get access to a Mac :-)

tech/code | 12 Jan 2005 | #

The Right Thing

IBM today shows that it's not just a company that talks up open-source, but that really contributes back. They have opened up 500 patents from their vast portfolio for free use in open-source software. And they just haven't limited it to some OSS licence that gives IBM some monopolistic benefit - any OSI approved open source licence as of 11 Jan 2005 benefits from this gift.

Thank you IBM - much appreciated.

tech/IP | 12 Jan 2005 | #

Wisconsin

Travelled north for an hour or so into Cheesehead-territory to have a look around to see what we could see.

Went into Milwaukee and found a confusing mess of off-ramps and roads towering over high rise buildings. Would have helped if I had brought a map along. Drove along the lake and almost got bogged in snow when someone tried to rear-end our car.

After that little experience, we headed south again on highway 43 South, which is also known as 94 East, which just confirms my earlier complaint.

Stopped at The Brat Stop, which is nice but dated family restaurant filled with normal ordinary country folk, not the city dwellers that you find in Chicago. Nice place with value food, most men wearing Trucker Hats, and TVs everywhere tuned into the only game that matters out here this time of year. We had a good feed and a nice break. I'll have to update the map for our weekend travellin'.

travel/chicago | 11 Jan 2005 | #

Voting now open.

Voting for the executive of Linux Australia is now open.

So go and vote for Geoffrey :-)

tech/linux-australia | 08 Jan 2005 | #

Sweet Home Chicago!

Chicago is a pretty city - and hugin is no fun to build.

travel/chicago | 08 Jan 2005 | #

Australian Made

One of the nice things about being here at the Schaumburg facility is that there is a nice gym available for almost nothing[1]. I've been trying to run 3 miles every day or other, since the weather hasn't been conducive to anything else. I'm really enjoying it.

Like the three-headed goat and hab, I recently dug out a Cold Chisel CD to listen to. Bow River, Goodbye Astrid and You've Got Nothing I want are all good for running, especially on my iPod.

It's great to be able to break the work day up by exercising, which is really only possible if you have the facilities available at work. Too bad when I return to Adelaide that won't be the case :-(

[1] Nothing if you are a US employee, USD 20 if you're me :-(

tech/misc | 07 Jan 2005 | #

Snow Storm

Over the past 36 hours we've had a big snow storm which deposited about a foot of snow, in what was our biggest snowfall so far.

This morning I got up, waited for the heavy snow to stop, took some photos, and then gave a big sigh when I saw the car. Unfortunately my employer wouldn't spring for undercover parking, so when it snows there's a big job to do. On the car itself was a layer of about 10cm from bonnett to boot (from the hood to the trunk for the Americans reading :-) which isn't too hard to remove with an ice scraper.

The big deal was the snow between the car and the road. With a foot of snow covering the ground, it meant I had to move about a cubic metre (meter) of snow via snow shovel so I could drive the car. 40 minutes later the car could be driven - my hands were frozen but the rest of me was very warm.

Getting to work was a trial too, with traffic moving ever so slowly on the I-53 and quite a few accidents on the way (fender-benders). From leaving my front door to sitting at work has been almost 2 hours.

travel/chicago | 07 Jan 2005 | #

A Book Problem

I have a problem.

They say the best thing to do is to confess it. Well, there you go - I have a problem.

:-)

I love to read books. I love to visit book stores. This weekend, the Davies Expeditionary party of 2004/5 have been suffering from the common cold, so instead of doing the tourist thing, we visited bookstores. Oh oh. On Saturday we visited Barnes and Noble which was a quiet relaxed store with broad subject coverage - with some especially nice photography books. On Monday, we visited Borders which was equally nice, having some rarely-stocked books on Linux and Open-Source.

There's nothing quite as relaxing as grabbing a bunch of books, sitting down in the in-house cafe, listening to piano jazz, sipping good coffee and eating a toasted sandwich, on a cold winters day, and reading. Ahhhh. Out of the 4 day weekend we just had, we got to do this twice. Ahhhh. One of the best perks of spending time in the USA.

Without self-control I could have easily walked out with 20 books. I only bought 3 :-)

travel/chicago | 04 Jan 2005 | #

Christmas 2004

Christmas Eve was at the Zehner's, where we had a wonderful American time. Just like in Australia we stood around the BBQ, cooking up some food - the difference being that it was about -10C - brrrrrr! The Zehner extended family were very kind to us, inviting us in and making us feel very much at home over a big meal. Carol embroidered some beautiful Christmas stockings for J and B, and the Zehner's filled them with American-style toys such as a slinky and Jacks. J and B just loved it! On Christmas Evening we went and visited Jon and Sara Yun, which we know from Harvest. The Yun's were also very generous, inviting us into their home for a meal and making us feel very much at home. We had a great time. The evening was capped off with light fluffy snow - meaning that we did get our white christmas! We felt very blessed over Christmas. More photos available.

travel/chicago | 04 Jan 2005 | #