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Below are 20 journal entries, after skipping by the 20 most recent ones recorded in Stephen Thorne's LiveJournal:

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    Wednesday, August 31st, 2005
    12:21 pm
    An interesting observation made today.

    An iTunes song in the US goes for 99 American Cents.
    The Australian Dollar goes for 77 American Cents.
    An iTunes song goes for 1.2857 Australian Dollars.
    With GST, the consumer would pay 1.4143 Australian Dollars.

    This is not far, not far at all, from apples catchy new advertising gimmick:

    The #i music download store
    Just $√2 a Song, Plus Generous Personal Use Rights…
    Tuesday, August 23rd, 2005
    12:51 pm
    bah
     learn the difference between unicode and utf-8.

    please.
    Tuesday, August 16th, 2005
    1:47 pm
    Temptation overwhealmed me. I had to do the quiz.


    My computer geek score is greater than 98% of all people in the world! How do you compare? Click here to find out!
    Friday, July 8th, 2005
    12:09 pm
    building buildings
     I recieved a few responses to my offer of the use of my machine, I'm now running the OSX buildslaves for gstreamer, xiph (ogg/vorbis/speex/theora), twisted and buildbot itself.

    Fink sucks, but it seems to kinda sorta work okay once you get past the stupidity of fink stopping doing anything and telling you to run another command to continue (fink install svn; fink build python24; fink install svn; fink build svn; fink install svn; etc). It's insane, but I don't know enough about fink to know why either.

    I've been told to try darwinports, but I'm hesitant to break what I already have running. :)

    Talking to warner, I'm excited about the concept of a metabuildslave, which will proxy slave requests through to arbitary slaves based on their capabilities. I.e. having a half dozen OSX buildslaves, and the metabuildslave proxying requests through to the one that is up and idle. It will allow people to donate machine time even if they decide to turn their machine off for the night, or go on holiday for a week. :)

    imajica, dude, email me for your shell.
    Tuesday, July 5th, 2005
    5:17 pm
    Tee Hee
     PHP. Isn't it the best programming language, like, ever!

    Look! You can even execute arbitary code in 9 lines of XML! Just set up an application that uses PHPXMLRPC like PostNuke, Drupal, b2evolution or TikiWiki, and fire off a request that looks like this:
    <?xml version="1.0"?>
<methodCall>
<methodName>test.method</methodName>
    <params>
	<param>
	     <value><name>','')); phpinfo(); exit;/*</name></value>
	</param>
    </params>
</methodCall>
    Volla! You've now written your first php program!
    Monday, July 4th, 2005
    10:14 pm
    They finally made it.
     they finally made it - it's called the "LiveDrive". It's essentially a wifi enabled pda with a 4gig harddrive.

    Of course, what I'd prefer is something larger, less screen, 80 gig harddrive, and the battery life required to make it work for extended periods, but you've gotta go with what the market will accept I guess ;).

    I can live over ssh, but there are times when I want to transfer large files, and it's often a procedure reduced to burning to dvd or cd those files that are just a little too large. The LiveDrive is the drag+drop to pda-type-device alternative.
    Thursday, June 30th, 2005
    11:41 am
    ppc buildslave
     Hiya.

    I'm willing to let people use my Mac as a G5 buildslave. Is anyone interested in such a thing? It's a grunty machine that's quite under-used. I'm more than willing to set up a buildbot buildslave for people to use to build/test whatever.

    I'm currently running 10.4 'Tiger', and it's a dual 2ghz G5.
    Wednesday, June 29th, 2005
    8:11 pm
    Music
     We don't have a problem with piracy mass copyright infringement.

    We have a problem with it being too hard to gain access to copyrighted works without infringing the rights of the copyright owners.

    I don't own an mp3 that doesn't infringe copyright - In my country, ripping 18 tracks of a CD you bought in the shop to a format you can play on your computer is infringing copyright 18 times.

    We don't have a problem with infringement because it's too easy to copy. We have a problem because it's too hard to pay.

    (Cred to El Reg for this meme)

    Current Music: Goodbye-The Corrs-Borrowed Heaven
    Monday, June 27th, 2005
    10:01 am
    eyes in the sky.
     I live here.

    Where do you live?
    Monday, June 13th, 2005
    10:06 pm
    just having some fun
     I hate the way things work on the web. you write something cool, and discover that browsers hate you.

    Anyway, for your chatting displeasure, here's something I knocked up
    Thursday, June 9th, 2005
    9:27 am
    crazy code of the day
     Find what modules depend on what, usage is python depends.py modulename. Requires that you have the 'graphviz' package installed.

    import sys, os

def graph(module):
    output = []
    output.append("digraph G {")

    __import__(module)

    allmods = sys.modules.values()
    depends = {}
    for name, mod in sys.modules.items():
        if name.startswith('__'):
            continue

        for x in dir(mod):
            if x.startswith('__'):
                continue
            deps = getattr(mod, x)
            if not deps:
                continue
            if deps in allmods:
                output.append('"%s" -> "%s";' % (name, deps.__name__))

    output.append("}")
    return '\n'.join(output)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    modulename = sys.argv[1]
    g = graph(modulename)
    file("%s.dot" % modulename)
    os.system('dot -T svg %s.dot -o %s.svg' % (modulename, modulename))


    output looks like this (or in png if you can't read svg).
    Tuesday, June 7th, 2005
    6:17 pm
    Public Service Annoucement

    A few things that you might have missed if you were living under a rock.

    1. Today, and for the rest of june, Santa^H^H^Htan will be poviding free sleigh rides at "He'll Love It" Ice and Snow Amusement park
    2. Debian Sarge has been released.
    3. Apple is going to use x86 chips from '06 onwards.
    4. The pig migration has begun. Flocks of pigs are flying north from their roosts in melbourne to winter in darwin or PNG.

    That is all.

    Sunday, June 5th, 2005
    9:38 pm
    The Story.
     I've been meaning to do a writeup of how I won a dual powermac g5 at linux.conf.au for a while, and I guess it's about time I sit down and do at least a short version.

    First of all, I've gotta thank IBM again. Big blue ran the hackfest at lca05, providing servers to test on, and providing the prizes. Greetz also go to imajica for saying "why the heck not" and my darling wife elspeth for lending me her laptop (ibook) to actually do most of the hacking on, also to LCA05-Head-Organiser-Steve for letting me into the conference center where the laptop was being held hostage on wednesday night.

    :)

    Okay, so what I did was, I wrote an AI that would play this game called 'spellcast'. I'm not giving links because they're all old and none of you have the gear requried to play this game. The thing is, the game was written way back in the days when people wanted to play games in unix labs, where you had a lab full of x-terminals (i.e. phsyical machines that talked X11 to a big server). So the 'normal' way of doing multiplayer games was to have a single process running on the server that would export to multiple X11 displays.

    I'm quite familiar with this because I had an x-terminal at home a while back, and tried playing spellcast between the linux machine and the x-terminal. I've also been involved with 'nettrek', which is the sucessor to 'xtrek', which used the same technique before moving to udp/tcp connections and the ''internet''.

    The game is quite simple. You play a 'wizard' in quite the same manner to 'Magic: The Gathering', and each round you make a gesture with each of your hands. A sequence of gestures ('palm, wave, point' etc) makes a 'spell'. Spells are things like 'Cure Light Wounds', 'Lightning Bolt', 'Ice Storm', 'Summon Giant', 'Finger of Death'. The more powerful the spell, the longer it takes to cast.

    Chris Yeoh hacked together a server that implemented all the rules for the purposes of the hackfest. It talked TCP/IP to allow clients to connect to the server, the client would learn what the other players's hand wavings were every round, recieve notification about what spells get cast, respond to queries about who is the target of a spell if the player casts one, etc.

    There was a sample of the networking code given in form of a fully featured API, that simply stabbed every round. Written in C++.

    There laid the path to winning the contest. I hate C++, but I can read it. I started tuesday, hacked tuesday night, wednesday night (most of the night), and every spare moment of thursday before submitting my Twisted/Python reimplmenatation of the networking code minutes before the deadline on thursday midnight.

    I had a really nice reimplementation of the networking code that worked really well. Was robust, didn't crash, and could probably do with a bit of a refactor.

    And a little set of expert systems that did a few trivial things. "Cast Resist Cold, Cast Icestorm Heaps" was one expert system. Another was "Cast Summon Giant, Repeat".

    So I submitted my code, that was a nice reimplementation, and didn't crash.

    So I won. The contenders were buggy as all hell and segfaulted or made erroneous decisions, targetted the wrong things etc. Despite being very well written AIs that did BFS AI thingys that would kill my teensy expert systems every time, they lost because mine wouldn't fall over.

    I won because I wrote it in python.

    Have I mentioned that a G5 weighs about 20kg? They're heavy to move.

    Current Music: Make The World Safe-The Whitlams-Love This City
    Tuesday, May 31st, 2005
    7:36 pm
    Okay Molecule
     This rocks: Silly Molecules

    Including 'Arshole' and 'Penguinone'.
    Sunday, May 22nd, 2005
    5:07 pm
    puzzle
     Morning Folks.

    ( Puzzle For You :) )
    Thursday, May 12th, 2005
    11:12 am
    duty
     still waiting for duty to be paid....

    this is sucking away my life!

    myyyy liifiifffeeee.
    Wednesday, May 11th, 2005
    7:54 am
    Hackfest Summary
     Okay, looks like things are finally getting sorted.

    I've yet to write up what I did when I wrote the program that won me my new G5, but here's a bit of a summary of what happened when I won it.

    First of all, at the conference, they gave me an award on a piece of paper, telling me to redeem my prize by contacting Amanda from Terraself Solutions over in the states. Terrasoft are a 'value-added' apple reseller.

    Amanda kindly explained that a sanely configured (read: 1gig of RAM) Dual 2ghz G5 was sitting in her office waiting to be shipped. It was even pre-configured to dual boot OS X 10.3 (Panther) and YellowDogLinux. Terrasoft are the folks who release Y-HPC, the high performance computing version of yellowdog. The kind of thing you'd use if you had a dozen racks full of X-serves and wanted to turn them into a cluster.

    So Terrasoft shipped me the box, gave me a UPS tracking number. This is where it gets interesting. UPS stopped the parcel twice because they didn't have my phone number. The first time I phoned them up and gave them my work phone number, which just happened to be a 1300 number.

    After they stopped the package a second time because they didn't have sufficient contact details, I rang them again, and this time they asked for my mobile number as well. I was more than happy to oblige, and gave them that. To my knowledge they've not rung the 1300 number once, but rang my mobile 3-4 times. Probably due to misconfigured phone system that doesn't allow people to ring toll-free numbers. dunno.

    Okay, so the package got out of UPS's hands and into customs. Great. That's wonderful. Customs stopped the package and asked for duty on it. Just for those who've never imported anything before, be aware, duty isn't payable on the value of the item. It's actually payable on the Value of the item, the amount you pay in insurance and the amount you've spent on freighting the item.

    Fortunately it's only GST you pay on that, so it was 10% of the CIF (or Cost-Insurance-Freight) *plus* 50 odd dollars in "Other Charges", i.e. "We opened your package to look at it and now you're going to pay us for the privelidge". In a country like Indonesia or India we would call this a "Bribe Money". *plus* $9.95 to UPS for a "Security Charge". Again, I mentally classify this as "Bribe Money".

    So anyway, this is for a prize, so I contacted IBM and they offered to pay the charges, so I've passed the details over to them. Hopefully I'll get the package in the next couple days.

    The tragedy is, I'm going to be plugging the G5 into a 15" CRT. I bought that monitor new with my own money way back in '98 or something. I think I'm going to have to spring for one of these 19" CMV monitors.. They're only $500 or so retail now....

    Anyhow, that's the computer-import saga. I have far more respect for computer wholesaler's now ;).
    Tuesday, May 10th, 2005
    2:18 pm
    sadness
     Apparently, while UPS says '5 working days' for delivery of parcels from Loveland, CO to Brisbane, QLD, they don't make any promises about how long it will take to get through customs.

    According to my boss, who is quite well versed in such things, its probably going to take 2 weeks to get through customs.

    Blast.
    Thursday, May 5th, 2005
    8:14 am
    h2g2
     I saw hitchhikers guide to the galaxy.

    I liked it, it was everything I expected and more.

    I just want to say something for those who haven't seen it yet - the movie is obviously the first in a series of movies, and only covers some of the events from the tv-series/books/radio-plays.

    I kinda think that's important, just so people don't think "bah, what about thatthingthathappenedinbook2?" when it feels like they're 3/4 through the movie and there's too much ground to cover in the last 30 minutes.
    Tuesday, May 3rd, 2005
    8:55 am
    gvim hack
     I hate trying to open a file to edit and getting that rude message that says I've already got the file open. So I wrote a script to fix it.
    ( I present to you, the script )

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