Tue, 20 Jan 2004 - Holidaying at home
Going back to Adelaide for the Christmas and New Year holidays is kind
of like taking a holiday from being an adult. Food magically appears
for dinner, and clothes are mysteriously returned washed and
ironed. Rather nice to have for a while.
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Mon, 19 Jan 2004 - LCA 2004
LCA 2004 was really great - I enjoyed it much more than the last
Australian linux conference I went to in Sydney a few years ago. The
Adelaide weather was surprisingly mild, only really reaching the high
twenties, so didn't manage to roast any of the overseas visitors. In
fact it was a little bit cold for the big Dunkfest where Linus finally
managed to get dunked in a big pool of water. There were many great
talks during the main conference and from what I heard the mini-confs
went well. I attended some of the Open Source in Government
conference sessions and it was especially interesting to hear the wide
variety of views on electronic and internet voting. I can understand
and agree with the opposition to internet voting, but don't really
understand why anyone could be opposed to voluntary electronic
voting.
Setting up the machine for the hackfest proved to be rather eventful.
I picked up Anton from the airport and drove him to the local IBM
office in Adelaide. After unpacking the machine and plugging it in,
it didn't want to boot. Decrypting the error messages, he discovered
the service processor was claiming that there was no memory in the
machine. Obviously this couldn't be true so much fiddling with various
settings followed. Finally after about an hour he disassembled the
machine to discover that in fact the box was shipped with no memory!
Luckily Hugh was flying in that evening so a machine in the office was
stripped and he brought some in.
We decided to take the machine down to Adelaide Uni and finish off the
install the next day. It was seriously heavy. I'm not sure that
transporting these largish machines in the backseat held down with a
seat belt is the approved method but it worked rather well. Yet
another trip where the value of the machine was more than the car that
was carrying it. Getting to the loading bay in computer science turned
out to be a little more difficult than expected - someone in the last
ten years since I'd visited the uni had the bright idea of installing
a whole lot of metal bollards which blocked off access to computer
science from Victoria drive. And there was no way we were going to
carry this box any further than we absolutely had to. Anyway more on
the hackfest when I get time to write it up.
Arrived back in Canberra last night, and Anton is staying at my place
until he finds an appartment again. Just after getting back he
received a call from Qantas letting him know he left his passport on
the plane. About 30 seconds later my phone rang and before answering
it I jokingly asked what I could have left on the plane - it turns out
I left my book on the seat, luckily with the boarding pass inside it
so they could track me down.
[/travel/adelaide]
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Sun, 04 Jan 2004 - Another Tivo Install
My parents and I bought my brother a Tivo for Christmas, so it was up
to me to set it up. Most of the initial setup was very easy, though
getting the guide data onto it proved frustratingly
difficult. Telnet'ing to the Tivo and transferring small files worked
fine, but larger file transfers to the Tivo froze. Large file
transfers from the Tivo also worked ok. We initially thought that the
serial cable was faulty as the ppp connection would drop if you played
with the cable a bit, but a second cable had the same transfer
problems. Played around with various ppp and rsync options for a
while, before finally setting the mtu of the connection to
200. Although its slow in transferring files, it will now at least
eventually get the guide data onto the system.
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Sun, 04 Jan 2004 - Winking Baby
I'm back in Adelaide for a few weeks so I've been spending a fair
amount of time with my niece and nephew, Catherine and Peter. Peter is
about 11 months old and after a few days of trying I've managed to
teach him how to wink. Its very cute, but he's not yet doing it often
enough to get a photo of him doing it.
[/travel/adelaide]
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Sat, 03 Jan 2004 - Annual Groggy BBQ
Off to
Greg Lehey's place
for his annual Christmas/New Year Hacker's BBQ. A smaller turnout than
normal, but had the standard FreeBSD vs NetBSD vs Linux
discussions. Looks like Greg has also been doing lots home brewing, so
there was lots of beer to sample.
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