…nor an adequate topic for an entry. Still, it’s the dominant thing on my mind right now. Yurgh. I just plain need to get to bed earlier. Daylight savings isn’t helping.

Since my last post much hath transpired. E and I are up and down like yoyos, and I have questioned my sanity all too frequently. Much harm have I done in my stupidity…

Still, life goes on, even when one feels little desire for it to do so. Life, like a government or food poisoning, doesn’t care if you want it or not.

I have relented in my fervour for the motherboard mentioned in the previous post. Various people seem to be having considerable pain getting it running under Linux, contrary to VIA’s claims. I am rather holding out hope for something pentium M based, or just for a nice quiet case like this one.

This is my second attempt at this post, and delayed by several days from the first attempt. I keep trying to write a post and having my session time out on me, so that I go to save and it says “You can’t post here, stranger!”. Very very not-good.
This time for sure.
Firstly, I have fallen deeply in love with a hardware gadget, and am consequently probably going to build Trouble 2.0 around it: The VIA VT-310DP. VIA very quietly manufacture a series of computers around a CPU called the EPIA. These computers are ultra-low-power, and conform to a very small size-standard called mini-ITX. This one in particular is fanless, incorporates two 1GHz CPUs, SATA, DDR-400 support, dual gigabit ethernet ports, and in-CPU hardware-accelerated crypto… which is supported natively in the Linux Kernel and in tools like Apache and OpenSSH! Wheee!
In lay terms, this means that this little beastie will speedily and comfortably do all the things that the new trouble needs to do, without making any noise, using about as much power as a fluorescent light-globe.

In other largely unrelated news…

• I am going to Donovans tongith with E and K & Y. This is courtesy of my lovely voucher, thanks to the intensely boring people at Dimension Data. Sorry Joanna and others at DD, if you’re reading this: I am still deeply thankful for the voucher, but the talk was a sales schpiel, and it really didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. More respect for your techie customers, folks!
• The Laptops have finally been settled, and should be arriving on Monday, all things being equal.
• Ubuntu Linux 5.10 (the oddly-named Breezy Badger) is out! It doth appear to rock real damn hard. More comments on this when I’ve given it a decent try.

I am so damn tired! There is no sense to this: I spent much of yesterday asleep, went to bed very early last night, and slept soundly enough. I couldn’t get up this morning though… never have I so thoroughly abused the snooze button! E and I helped Minx and Cainbits move house on Saturday (their new house is divine and glorious, we wantss it, preciousss!) and we were justifiably exhausted on Saturday night, but it can’t still be effecting me now, surely?
In light of the news that my household will be going its separate ways, I am faced with the prospect of carving up trouble.net.au and fully separating it from its siamese half-twin sietsma.com. This is going to involve money and time, especially if I want to achieve any of my long-held desires with regard to reducing noise, points of failure, power-consumption, maintenance overhead, etc. Right now, the hottest contender is either some kind of SFF PC or a Mac Mini with a bunch of firewire external disks.
In completely random news: I copped some kind of bluetooth attack this morning on the train! I was sitting, minding my own business, playing solitaire when this guy wearing extremely dodgy clothes (see: smelly, falling to bits) got on the train with some kind of middle eastern pentatonic music featuring a rapid hand-drum and an oud playing loudly from the speaker on his phone. I, among others, gave him a dirty look and he turned it down very slightly, but then continued fiddling with his phone. This is no big deal: commuting on the train one becomes accustomed to incessant mobile-phone ringtones, and everyone texts from the train. It’s what SMS is for.
What happened next may have had nothing to do with this guy: I started getting “bluetooth file received” messages on my Palm and my phone. Fortunately, both are configured to prompt before accepting any such file, but the moment I clicked “no”, a new one would arrive. Someone was either trying to spam all the bluetooth devices in the train, or else their phone was carrying a bluetooth virus. It is also possible that someone was actually toothing on the train. I had to turn both my phone and Palm completely off to still the continuous beeping. Nasty!
Finally, the inevitable doom of my 30th bithday continues to loom. Now only ten days of my precious twenties remain, and I still have no idea how to celebrate my birthday, nor any invitations of any kind. Argh! Maybe I should spend less time blogging and more time planning.

sweet (swēt) adj., sweet·er, sweet·est.

giant ~ > df -h .
Filesystem             size   used  avail capacity  Mounted on
/dev/dsk/c3t4d0s6     1008G   500G   499G    51%    /export

Firstly and foremost, apologies for the absence of either new posts or a blog to post them on for the last week or so. Last Saturday, Trouble got attacked through an XML-RPC vulnerability in these very blogs and turned temproarily into a Spam relay site for some evil mofo Brazilians. If you were a recipient, my heartfelt apologies for your pain. I killed the server immediately, and Korny staunched the security hole last night, so now we’re back on the air. Yaaay!
In the intervening time, apart from tearing my hair about the server and experiencing deep inner doubts and uncertainties about my competence as a sysadmin…

• I went caching again with Miss S. We found two caches and one DidNotFind, and a merry time was had by all, except E, who had to work.
• I got sucked into a terrible vortex at work as a certain anonymous wine-and-spirits-warehouse in which our CEO has a stake went through another growth spurt. To give credit and blame where due, the CEO is a miraculous salesman, seemingly capable of appeasing the most ferocious wrath with a few well-placed words. A capable manager he is not. Far too much of this project has been “organised” in the sense that people have been told what is needed from their respective departments on or after the date when it was needed, and no attempt has been made to schedule anyone’s time. Bloody awful.
• Some news which probably isn’t blogworthy yet has reached me which means that my life is about to change again; The one remaining bastion of sanity and stability to which I have clung for many years is about to get up and shamble off, and this has left me understandably shaken. More discussion later, when it’s official.

Played an immense game of Arkham Horror again yesterday with Korny, Cainbits, Minx, Salay, and both the salient Bennetts. This time we failed dismally and were consumed by Yig. Oh well, that’s Cthulhu mythos I guess.
Today went caching with E and found this one. The GPS was useless at first but E retrieved it by the simple expedient of taking out the battery and putting it back.
Now I’m At Work again. Grmph. I get Tuesday off in lieu, but on a beautiful Sunday afternoon this doesn’t seem like any kind of compensation.

Today I took a day off and once again attended the Royal Melbourne Show with E. We had a most excellent time, and were fortunate enough to witness a good half-hour of the domestic-dog-trials, and even to get some video. (spaniel border collie apologies for the odd format and low res)
After the show, E took me to a familial duty long overdue: a trip to visit my grandmother in her nursing home. It was pretty scary for me: she has always been fiercely independent, and sufficiently cunning and devious that there was always some clear yardstick by which I could tell that she was still basically all there, however her body might have been falling apart. The deterioration has been sudden however… I don’t think she knew who I was, and in the course of fifteen minutes conversation she explicitly gave the current date as three distinct (and different) times, all before my birth. She recognised E though, as that lovely girl from Ballarat. At one point I think she mistook me for my father, which was weird.
The whole event left me feeling sad and horrified for her, but also chilled with a sense of my own mortality. The knowledge that one day all that I am now will fade and be utterly erased throws the significance of the time I have into sharp relief.

My happy shiny GPS arrived!
To recap, it is an i-Trek WondeProud BT-77 based on the nemerix chip.
It is a tiny black box about the size of a matchbox. It weighs very little. It charges in about an hour, and runs on one charge for at least 18 hours, as advertised. It came with a USB charger cable and a lighter-socket-to-USB adaptor. Nifty! It appears to work absolutely flawlessly with my Tungsten T2, using GeoNiche, which I have yet to register.
There turns out to be a slight trick though: The GPS will run, as I said, for 18 hours on a charge, and has no “auto-power-save” mechanism. GeoNiche, while connected to the GPS, suspends the Palm pilot’s normal power-saving mechanism. The Palm, as many readers are doubtless already aware, does not run at full-bore for 18 hours on a single charge. Not by a long shot.
This morning I caught the Palm right on the verge of going completely flat and dumping its contents. Another time I might not be so lucky. Need to remember to turn it off…
Finally, in a complete random bloop of titanic proportions: Wednesday morning saw me going to a seminar entitled “Why do I need a SAN?”, which turned out to be a not-veiled-at-all IBM sales schpiel for their latest RAID boxes. Ho-hum. But at the conclusion of this ‘seminar’, there was a business-card raffle for a $250 dinner at Donovan’s. And I won. That never happens…

Many things have happened this weekend, I’m sure, but I am having real trouble remembering any details at all. This should probably disturb me more than it does.

Oh well, none of that matters, because this morning I bought a circular saw! Wheee!

That is all… SCREEEEEEE

If, as happens at University, beginning together does not necessitate ending together, to which are we more joined? Those with whom we end, or those with whom we begin?

Also…

I have come to the conclusion, after a couple of years of daily close analysis of the subject here:

…that ordinary (non-sports) cars accelerate on a curve which begins at a lower poin than the acceleration curve of the leaping human body. That is to say: a human and a car starting their acceleration from the same point, at the same instant, the human will outdistance the car, if only for the briefest fraction of an instant. This difference is inherent in the fact that a comfortable domestic car will only accelerate at a certain maximum on intitial clutch-traction, simply for the comfort of the passengers, whereas a startled human being can leap considerably beyond their own threshhold of comfort in extremis.
I have also concluded that the duration of this fraction of an instant is about the same as, or slightly longer than, the human reaction-delay; the two-hundred milliseconds or so which elapse between the detection of a threat and the most basic and reflexive of reactions to it.
This, I would assert, saves lives. This factor means that when I stand a few feet behind a car which has overrun the line at an intersection, and the driver of said car reverses suddenly to avoid the cross-traffic, I will usually outpace the car for exactly long enough for the driver to realise his mistake and apply the brakes, missing me by millimetres.
It is also a factor which __does not apply_ to many serious sports cars. As I have experienced in my brother’s (currently non-functional) RX7, sports cars can also accelerate at rates that substantially exceed human comfort. This implies that they can probably outpace a human being from a standing start over very short intervals of time indeed.
Not, I might add, that I have anything against sports cars. I don’t think anyone is under the illusion that they are entirely safe.
In other semi-news: I have finally lashed out and bought the aforementioned GPS. Now it only remains to see if the damn thing works.
And, lastly, I am proud to announce that I have FINISHED the User Registration / Modification script. You can now register yourself as a new Trouble user here and modify your user account here!