ajft

That's it! Tomorrow the evil rear wheel from hell comes off my bike. Yet again I had to wrestle with it for quarter of an hour, letting it down completely in order to pull the valve far enough out to clamp the pump on to pump it up!

Life got a bit lighter once I'd arrived at work. Two more copies of the Nigerian business scam arrived today! I must be truly blessed.

I couldn't resist! Standing on the corner waiting to cross Church street, right next to the "forward bicycle box" that Bicycle Victoria is oh so proud of having introduced to Melbourne's roads. Up comes a car, but does he stop? No, the driver goes straight over the bike box and sits half across the line at the front of the intersection. Not just any car mind you, this was one of Victoria's Police. Just a little more evidence that maybe what Australia's cyclists need isn't more shiny paint markings on the road, its a change in the attitude of the motorists.

The officer in the passenger seat wasn't really happy, but he couldn't quite figure out what I was doing taking a photo of their car. He made some whitty comment about my courier bag making it look like I was wearing a seat belt, I added that it didn't have an airbag fitted, then left before I could be booked for photographing policemen without their permission.

Surprise, surprise, BP hasn't replied to my email, despite the assurance that they would do so within five working days. I'll try a written enquiry tomorrow...

A Bund dinner at Mexicali Rose. Despite the photo being solely of beer and other beverages, we did have food as well.

I made a concerted effort to get my head around some of the XML and XSLT things that I should know and mocked up a first draft for a redone photos page. It still isn't quite all there, but PHP, XSLT and Sablotron sure beats assorted static includes and text files.

Stupid Device of the Day

[http://www.orgasmatron.com.au/frameset.htm]

poorly named toy.

Miscellaneous Starwars sadnesses

[http://www.toysrgus.com/images-conce/chewie-family.html]

[http://www5b.biglobe.ne.jp/~mbsf/sworde.htm]

[http://www.deskmod.com/]

[http://www.dotvoid.com/]

It was a sleepy Sunday, as a result of last night neither of us got out of bed before noon!

I decided to attack my unsorted photos and finish putting them in albums, so I jumped on the bike and headed off to buy another album from the photo shop on Swan Street. It was shut, so was the other photo shop on Swan Street. Halfway home I thought I might as well visit the one on Bridge Road, he'd made a hash of my last photos, but maybe buying an album was ok. He didn't have any. One last chance as I tried the shop in the Richmond Plaza, only to find that they were also shut on Sundays.

The gods must be against me, I came back home and put the rest of my photos from 2000 and 2001 into the existing albums, discovering that I didn't really need a new album after all. I must do something about scanning the outstanding APS films though.

Late in the afternoon it was time for some exercise and a little exploration of the far side of the river bank. The natives appeared friendly, and the architecture impressive. We had tried to walk down along the river from Hawthorn Bridge to Swan Street, but found ourselves stopped by private property in several locations. We did find a number of very impressive sized old mansions. A back alleyway as a short-cut turned into a dead end, but the gap in the fence at the end lead into the rail embankment, a brief scramble through the bushes and we could scurry through a hole in the wire fence and back out onto the street. Somewhat further along we finally did get back down to the river, at Power Street Reserve, the park which we'd both been thinking of in the first place! With our breath fogging the air, wet elms all around and people everywhere walking their dogs, it had the feel of a winter's afternoon in an English park.

If only there was a public right-of-way along the river we could have made it the rest of the way to the Boulevarde, but as it stands the private schools own the river frontage, so we could either walk east all the way to Glennferrie road then back along the bike path bridge, or retrace our steps to Swan Street. We chose to go back, stopping to peer in the windows of Watermark Appartments, the appartment development on the old tramways depot. Interesting to see the old depot under the new apartments, we're wondering what they'll do with it. Not so impressed to see apartments with windows at street level, two metres from Power street, with only a single pane of glass between them and the traffic!

sigh. I'm getting sick of either the lights or the wiring in this place. Just replaced two bulbs, one in each bedroom, and then discovered that one in the entry foyer has blown. There's 24 bulbs in the place, I've replaced at least nine in nine months, and two work only intermittently!

Cold, damp and foggy morning. It reminded me of Canberra winters.

After briskly doing the rounds of the Richmond market, stocking up on vegetables and dodging small children and wildly erratic grandmothers with trolleys, we adjourned to a newish café to try out their breakfast.

Via Ponte; not a very original name for an establishment on Bridge Road, but the staff are friendly, the fire is warm, and last weekend we found that the coffee and pasta were good. The breakfasts were just as good, bacon, eggs, toast, sausages, tomato and coffee all for under ten dollars, and friendly service. Definitely a place to become a regular customer at!

In the afternoon a walk in the vague direction of the Botanic Gardens ended up detouring all along the river and turning into an exploration of Birrarung-Marr, the new riverside park between Swan Street bridge and Flinders Street Station. Looks a little forlorn in the cold of winter, nobody knows its there yet, and its still partly landscaped. We played around the Federation bells, but they're designed to only be played by the official mechanism from underground, so the only sound they made was a dull thud when Jo accidently walked into one of them.

Along the way we saw the last four minutes of a football match at Olympic park. The most interesting part was trying to work out exactly what we were seeing, since the only bits visible was the back of the crowd and the tops of the goals. Apparently it was Melbourne Storm losing an ARL match to the New Zealand Warriors.

Another first, since the walk into the city had made us thirsty, we stopped for a beer at Young and Jackson's, something we'ld been intending to do ever since I'd revealed to Jo that I'd never been there.

Finished off the day by a late night out to see the Black Eyed Susans at the Tote. Embarrassment on both sides when neither of us could remember exactly where the Tote was, it not being on our regular list of venues, but we found it where we guessed it would be, then had to endure several hours of the thickest smoke in a venue that I've been subjected to for some time. Having had a large dinner with a couple of glasses of wine, we started out tired. Arriving there around ten-thirty and the Susans didn't start until nearly midnight, so when they called it quits we were quite ready to hurry home. Even so, it was a good night, the support band was excellent, and the Susans played well.

There's a scary letter to the editor in The Age today. Entitled “Time to get rid of the two-wheeled killing machines,” its from a guy who has apparently written many times before. Apparently everytime there's mention of motorcycling in the news, he has a rant and want's them off the roads completely.

Slack me, nothing here.

Finally attached the 5¼” floppy drive to an old MS-DOS machine so that I can attempt to read my old Flex-formatted disks. Not having much success, but I seem to be on the right track with anadisk.

In a desperate attempt to use up the last of the vouchers for discount meals before they expire at the end of the month, Jo and I went out to dinner at Ghurkas in Carlton. Strange to be going to a non-Italian restaurant on Lygon Street though! I'd forgotten just how pushy all the touts for the Italian places were, we'ld only just walked around the corner when the first one stepped out of his doorway, blocked our path and tried to push us inside his restaurant. The place was packed, the food was excellent, and we both ate far more than we should.

After waddling out of the restaurant it was off to see A Beautiful Mind at the Nova. A disturbing movie, now I want to know more about Mr Nash.

Well, after being shouted at yesterday, I've sent off my enquiry to Mr BP asking them to explain themselves and tell me exactly which law it is that requires me to dismount from my bike before filling it…

Thank you for communicating with BP Australia. Your feedback will help us to provide a more valuable, responsive, and reliable internet service in future. A customer service representative will respond within 5 working days.

Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets on whether they will respond within 5 working days, or whether they'll be like the last bank I wrote to who never responded. On the other hand, maybe 5 working days is four calendar months…

It was wet, it was cold, it was miserable, and all I wanted to do was to fill my bike with petrol on the way home. I called in to the BP service station on Ferntree Gully Rd, the same as I'd done any number of times in the past. Pulled up to the pump and put the nozzle in the tank, waiting for the pump to be switched on... and waited... and waited...

Eventually the attendant walked up from his counter to the door and stood there and shouted at me that I had to get off the bike. I asked why. “It's the law he,” shouted. I asked what law. “It's the law, in case you spill petrol on yourself, catch fire and sue us,” he shouted. I asked what law. He told me it was “the law,” and to “get off the bike.”

I told him to get stuffed, put the keys back in the ignition, and rode off to the next nearest servo, where not only was the petrol 2c a litre cheaper, where I could be served sitting on the bike the same as for the last sixteen years, but where I could have a friendly chat with the owner.

Congratulations BP, that's one less customer.

A couple of interesting programs that I'd seen mention of in the past, they popped up on /. today.

[http://www.etherpeg.org/]

EtherPeg, macintosh only.

[http://www.ex-parrot.com/~chris/driftnet/]

Driftnet, an opensource equivalent.

[http://www.inter-mezzo.org/]

InterMezzo — another candidated in my never-ending quest to keep everything synchronised, yet another reference to yet another distributed file system.

More suggestions about moving mail around, cos suggested isync or mailsync.

[http://www.gigaspaces.com/]

maybe if I could actually get some JavaSpaces stuff to run on any platform, I'd be able to investigate further.

I discovered the wonders of fetchmail today. Must get around to setting up one IMAP server and then slurping all my older mail into it, especially stuff from the myriad of mailing lists.

For slurping old mail from an IMAP store somewhere:

fetchmail -a -p imap --folder folder-name --user me \
  -m "/usr/bin/procmail -d %T" mailserver

Or just use a $HOME/.fetchmailrc a bit like:

poll mail.domain proto IMAP user ME mda \
  "/usr/bin/procmail -d %T" fetchall folder folder-name

Also got my digest split up and stored as individual mail items. Use procmail recipes of either:

| formail +1 -ds >>undigested-folder

to store on local folders, or:

| formail +1 -d -s $DELIVER undigested-folder

for folders on an IMAP server, where $DELIVER is the wrapper script around the Cyrus deliver program.

The time had come to fire up the Honda after its two weeks of rest. Unsurprisingly, the battery was so flat it could barely light the dashboard lights, so I had to play the jumper lead game. The new battery is getting further and further up the priority list...

After successfully managing to get to work without getting myself killed, I took a long lunch and rode into the city to join in the protest against the new $AU50 "safety" charge being added to motorcycle registration as part of the state budget. All the tasks that this money is earmarked for are suitably wishy-washy, and most of them have to do with all road users, noticably the ones in cars who keep on driving into things that they don't see. I'm no good at guessing crowd numbers, but there seemed a lot of people (and bikes) there. Everyone gathered at 222 Exhibition street, TAC headquarters, and assorted media photographers ran up and down filming us all, then at noon we rode around into Spring St, parked and there were many speeches regarding the "safety initiative". It appears that neither the government or the opposition could be bothered to send a spokesman out to address the crowd, which may say something for their attitude to this latest revenue raiser.

[http://bigmouth.here-n-there.com/]

all praise the singing fish.

[http://www.linux-usb.org/]

time to see if I can make my RoboCam work on wyvern.

Seeking here and there, I found that I needed the following to install the kernel modules for the USB camera:

depmod usbcore
depmod ov511

mount -t usbdefs none/proc/bus/usb mounts the USB filesystem so I can look and see what is attached... A VIA USB HSB rev17 for starters!

The LifeView RoboCam™ is really just an ordinary OV511 camera (USB Id, Vendor=05a9, ProdID=0511), so most software should work. I tried gqcam, xawtv, streamer with moderate succecss, then used imgstamp to stamp the image and upload it. Nothing is quite automated yet, but its a start. Certainly better results than I've got from the support from their company, the provided software for Windows XP fails to install and the email they sent responding to my request basically said “can't help you, it works for us, except in much worse english.

[http://www.thedirks.org/v4l2]

Video for Linux 2.

webcam

Please be patient. I'm experimenting with a USB camera connected to either my desktop PC at work, or a laptop provided by my work, both of these run some form of Windows software that grabs hold of images. The main part of the experiment is to find a seamless way of uploading these images to ajft.org.

I haven't found any free Windows software that will do what I want in an unobtrusive manner, nor can I get the USB camera to work at all under Linux on my home machine. Any hints or suggestions would be very welcome!

To add an extra degree of difficulty, once I installed the drivers and software for my digital camera on the laptop, the USB camera has stopped working completely.

There's a chance I can use the Digital IXUS 300 as a webcam, but that would definitely require me to buy an external power supply for it.

2002-May-14: Latest news is that with a bit of experimentation, I've managed to get the LifeView RoboCam™ working under Linux. Still needs work to automate the snapshots and uploads.

Will I, won't I... to ride the motorbike or not... My arm is probably up to it, but only if all of Melbourne's motorists behave themselves and nobody does anything stupid in front of me. Chances of that with slightly wet roads, not high enough. So its back on the trains and buses.

Sitting in an empty shiny train, I took a picture of it, one of the stupid things that is easy to do with a digital camera. There's no waiting to finish a whole roll of film before developing it—click, instant gratification and more stupid snapshots than you can poke a stick at. This then came up in discussion later in the day, the pros and cons of digital and 35mm cameras. After spending on average, $30 per roll for film and processing of my APS camera, I'm quite happy most of the time with the digital. The only times I wish for an SLR would be taking close-ups, or long exposures, or all the odd things.

Attention passengers; the 6:15 train to Flinders street has been delayed and is expected in five minutes...

Digging around looking for ways to read the Flex floppies into wyvern. There seems to be a standard format for Flex disk images to be held in, which is "DSK". The best approach I've found seems to be a combination of anadisk.exe and ana2dsk.exe, both of which are MS-DOS programs. Oh well, if it works, I'll be happy! Quite a thriving community of Flex users out there, tending their old machines or running their software on emulators like flexemu.

[http://www.roadtoadventure.net/]

maybe I should enter some of my photos in their competition... maybe not.

I finally sat down and attacked the old pile of 5¼” floppy disks this evening, albeit not very successully. Most of them are unlabelled, there's a mix of DSDD, DSHD and even some SSSD disks in there, some were written by MS-DOS, some were written by Flex. I managed to read most of the 1.2M and some of the 360k MS-DOS floppies.

Other success story of the day was getting the sound working again on wyvern, the modules that need to be loaded are, in order: soundcore, sound, ac97_codec and es1371. Once this was done, all the annoying beeps and blurts from the gnome desktop are back, and I can play mp3s.

Yay! I've finally managed to drop off my tax papers... only a few months late.

More fun on public transport this morning. I'm not surprised they can't count tickets when the bus driver was just waving people on, regardless of whether they had a ticket or not. The one this evening had an interesting habit, all the tickets that students bought, he'd put into the machine so they were cancelled, once out on North Rd, the tickets that the new passengers bought were just handed to them, consequently two out of three just put them in their pockets and got a free trip.

I seem to be getting somewhere with installing plan9 onto my laptop, slowly, step-by-step and with a lot of assistance from mailing lists. I've got the partitions set up, formatted, just can't get the network card to work.

Stuff

[http://xine.sourceforge.net/]

open-source video/DVD player.

Two trains and a bus and I still managed to get to work in just over an hour, the gods must have been smiling because all three of them met up with minimal waiting.

Its fascinating how many people the bus driver can cram into his bus, the three people squashed between the windscreen and front door looked a little uncomfortable!

I wonder how many times I'll have to relate the story of how I managed to injure my arm?

IBM's Robocode looks like fun to play with.

A sunny day, sitting at home, my arm in a sling and not able to do anything.

An odd thing happened while I was updating this — a guy climbed up a ladder and stared in at me through the window, is very odd typing while someone cleans a window 1m away. I knew there was something I was meant to do this morning; close all the windows to make life easier for the window cleaners.

[http://www.dotico.com/]

pretty icons, found them while following up something else.

Enough of this, I should be using the time wisely to complete last year's income tax, as a timely reminder from the accountant pointed out.

The Salvation Army don't want my old couch. Should I feel insulted? After many years sterling service we've replaced it, I rang them up yesterday and the truck just came to visit. The driver took a brief look at it, poked it, and pronounced it dead. Suggested that the best thing I could do would be to dump it down the street one night.

Amazing, I think I've actually managed to complete my tax for last financial year. All I need to do now is get it to the accountant.

A walk up the road to fetch some drycleaning, I thought the weather was warm, it wasn't until I stopped in at the Dover on the way home that I found out that with a maximum of 28.1°C, today was the hottest May day since sometime in 1905.

In other interesting news, a couple of old school friends caught up with me via email. I haven't seen Ralph and Denise since 1982 at Hawker College, but somehow they found me, and read about last Friday's mishaps. I think they'll laugh when they see what happened on Saturday.

Snippets from the newspaper

[http://www.samsonite.com/]

Bluetooth Briefcase. A lovely shade of iMac™ translucent blue.

[http://www.robocop.com/]

Robocop, surely one of the silliest movies of all time. Who can forget the magnificent robot, ED209.

[http://atomfilms.shockwave.com/af/content/atom_147]

Seventeen Seconds to Sophie. A stop-motion film of a pregnancy.

[http://www.cycho.com.au]

Cycho — Stop-motion plasticine animators.

[http://www.uwb.org/]

Ultra Wideband networking.

[http://www.superscape.com/]

Superscape; 3D graphics engine for current mobile phones

A morning visit to the doctor became a bit of a saga. Not open at 8:30 when I arrived, by the time nine o'clock came about, five people were waiting, all pushed past me to be the first to the desk. One of the doctors called up sick, so we all had to wait for the other, and I hadn't been before so there was a mighty filling out of forms before I could get near him. Extra excitement because my Medicare card expired about 18 months ago and I hadn't noticed. When I did get to see him it felt like it was: “What can I do for you, you need surgery, I'll book you in to a specialist at St Vincents, here's a certificate for two days off, goodbye, next.”

Checked my mail for work and did what I could while typing with one hand in a sling. Mused some more on the idea of building a dual-CPU Athlon PC. It seems expensive, and I've got nowhere to put it!

[http://www.tweakers.com.au/]

Experimental cooking, a two-year-old's birthday party, dinner with friends.

While I sat around all morning feeling sorry for myself, Jo took over the kitchen, making mysterious smells and creating an interesting batch of Capsicum Dip/puree.

Young nephew Jack thoroughly enjoyed his second birthday party, making the most of all the attention he was receiving, not to mention the toys and cake.

Then to unwind, a barbecue with MarkO and Leslie and a chance to go "Ooh" and "Aah" over their rejuvenated floor, now that they've completed the removal of the evil carpet and the restoration of the floorboards.

Three new CDs, a new pair of wheels for norky bike, a trip to the markets and a dislocated arm. Bugger! Not quite what was intended for today.

It all started fairly well; our first real weekend at home since before Easter. A walk up the street to the Richmond markets, then an enormous brunch at Blue Heaven, sitting in the sun in the courtyard in feeing more like late summer than nearly winter.

Part two of the day's shopping started along Swan Street, looking for birthday presents for others and CDs for us, and finding a new bike store along the way. Melbourne's first concept store, the guy proudly told us. Looks just like a shiny new bike shop that only stocks Specialized brand to me.

Off into the city to visit Gaslight, pick and choose three CDs each and a pair of tickets for Conrete Blonde next month. I got Do the POP the new double compilation of 70s-80s Australian garage rock and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club's B.R.M.C, Joey picked up the new Billy Bragg, England, Half English, Concrete Blonde's Bloodletting and Nick Cave's No More Shall We Part.

Stepping out the door we were on our way down towards JB Hifi when we spotted a bike store, stepped inside and there was a display rack of wheels. Checked closer and they seemed to be what I was after. Instant decision time, five minutes later I was walking out the door with, finally, a replacement for the 'orrible rear wheel from Hell (or Devizes) in the form of a pair of Mavic Crossrides.

The arm? Well the full story will have to remain shrouded in mystery. Suffice it to say that at ten to midnight while lying in bed, I put my arms up to cuddle Joey, she leant down on my upper arms and everything went horribly wrong. She called the ambulance, I lay with my arm off the side of the bed how the hospital had put me once, while we wondered how long an ambulance at midnight on a Saturday would take. Managed to lift myself up on the cushions and there was a very loud clunk as my shoulder went back. Jo called up again and cancelled the ambulance, and the two of us sat in bed and drank a large mug of tea each while I held an ice pack to my arm. Bugger!

Sorry Mate I Didn't See You — it ought to be grounds for instant revocation of a motorists license. Yep, I was knocked off the bike this morning. I stupidly thought that the driver of the stationary vehicle waiting to enter Glennferrie Road, the one who turned his head and looked towards me, had actually seen me. From a standing start he drove about 50cm and got me side on; his first words on leaping out of the car and coming to see me lying on the ground, yep, you guessed, “Sorry Mate, I Just Didn't See You.” Total damage - a cut on my shin where the number plate got me and a big bruise on my bum where I hit the concrete. I was too amazed by his stupidity to bother getting his license or rego. details.

I rode up the Boulevard on the way home to see the police helicopter circling over Richmond again, spotlight shining down. Was nearly tempted to go off chasing it to see what was going on. A good thing I didn't, I found out later that they were searching for a gunman who had tried to hold up one of the bakeries on Bridge Rd.

We spent the early part of the evening sitting in the Bridge reading the music papers with a few beers. Tiredness overtook us, so that was the extent of the socialising, but it started the thought processes on the path of new CDs and time to see more bands....

I'm feeling quite virtuous, this is four days in a row that I've managed to get up early enough to cycle to work. The usual fun and games getting around the horde of foreign students between Glenferrie Rd and Hawthorn campus of Melbourne Uni.

Fog.