Chris's Random Ramblings

Sun, 19 Dec 2004 - Back to Square Rock

Took some woman up to Square Rock, one of my favourite walks around Canberra. Beautiful day, beautiful weather, beautiful company.

Accidentally lost a water bottle over the edge in the strong winds. One day I'm going to have to hike to the base as I bet there's lots of cool stuff down there.

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Fri, 19 Nov 2004 - Building LSB Compliant Applications Want to know how to build LSB compliant applications? Go buy a copy of this book. It was written by the developers of the Linux Standard Base.

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Sun, 19 Sep 2004 - Bike lock bug It appears that most U-shaped bike locks that use a circular key are vulnerable to being very easily opened using a biro. Apparently the manufacturers have known about this problem since 1992 but haven't done anything about it. And people complain about security in software.....

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Sun, 19 Sep 2004 - Dehydrated Mulch Getting enough mulch for my garden has in the past been rather annoying. The only access to the garden is through my house and I don't have a front garden, so I can't get it delivered by trailer. But normally it takes several trips to the garden centre in my car. I was wandering around a hardware store and discovered dehydrated mulch. Comes in a nice small block, but when water is added is equivalent to a 60 litre bag. What will they think to dehydrate next!

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Wed, 19 May 2004 - Ballestas Islands A later (8am) start today and a chance to catch up on sleep. I think I'm finally over the jet lag. The boat ride up to Ballestas Island (supposedly a mini Galapogas island) passed a Nazca lines like drawing on the side of a hill. It wasn't however made by the Nazca people, but believed to have be made by Spanish pirates.

The island was full of birds, penguins and seals. Even saw some very cute baby seals. On the way back we saw a group of dolphins briefly, though they disappeared pretty quickly when another boat went past. A long drive back to Lima after which I took the opportunity to explore part of Miraflores in the afternoon. Much like any western city except lots of armed guards with bulletproof bests outside of the banks. The good news is my ATM card works here.

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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.

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