The Well-Rounded Sciolist

Mont Albert Florist

2006-10-03T21:14:00.000+08:00

I was speaking to my dear friends George and My that now run the Mont Albert Florist and they are definitely doing a great job. I have seen their arrangements and they are certainly first class.

Mont Albert is a suburb in Melbourne Victoria, so I am on the wrong side of the country at the moment to be a regular customer at the moment! If you are in the area then pop in and tell them Troy sent you :)

oh dear...

2006-08-12T08:45:00.000+08:00

More than six months since my last post - better start posting again before this blog suffers total bit rot!

Macs with Intel

2006-01-12T15:52:00.000+08:00

The new Intel Macs are now out and there is already talk of home to install Windows on them.

Based the Apple documentation, they use Intel's EFI instead of the standard PC BIOS. This means that Windows XP 32 bit will not stand a chance, but Windows Vista is meant to support EFI so it looks like that is worth a try (well for anyone that wants to run Windows on their Mac).

Summer starts now..

2006-01-06T21:31:00.000+08:00

OK it is 9:30pm and it is still hot - looks like summer has finally decided to start!

Just a second...

2006-01-02T14:30:00.000+08:00

A friend of mine is quite interested in accurate time keeping, particular with reference to NTP - a protocol for various time servers to synchronise time. Apparently we got an extra "leap second" added between 31-Dec-2005 and 1-Jan-2006 and he has written a detailed assessment of how the leap second propagated through the NTP network.

The short answer is "not as well as it should have", but I recommend that you look at the article to see the point illustrated graphically.

One Man's Junk...

2005-09-19T15:44:00.000+08:00

I found the following from last year when sorting through my old sent items at work - seemed funny enough to relive :)

My council is having one of those "collect any junk from your verge" weeks, so I dutifully piled all my best junk up on the verge on the weekend. I clearly beat anyone in the street on sheer quantity, the competition was just a matter of who had the best quality junk.

Well the early bird scavengers were cruising already on Sunday, crawling past with eagle eyes. Some had trailers hitched, others made do with back seats and roof racks. I remained calm well encountering the junk collectors, I was sure that a sales pitch would scare them off.

Sunday was quiet - just got rid of power cord for a Commodore 128D - he was clearly tempted by the actual computer too, but he settled for the cord only.

Monday after work and the pile looked no different except an old briefcase was gone - depression was starting to hit.

Tuesday after work and I realised that some major sales had been made - no need to doubt the high quality of my junk. Some of the highlights:

IBM P75 with no RAM, no IDE cables
IBM P75 with no RAM, no IDE cables, no IDE drives
Commodore 128D + joysticks
Commodore 9 pin dot matrix printer
Mac LC630 with no RAM, no floppy, no CD, no memory, no drives
17" monitor that probably didn't work
2 hubs without power supplies
1 rack mounted hub
1 bag with busted zippers
2 dressing tables with drawers
1 very old chair

Interesting, I had gained two shovel heads - obviously someone thought that my junk was so good that they had to make space! No interest in the old trampoline frame and the fake wood look colour TV?

Strangely my neighbour resents the scavengers going through his junk - some people are weird don't ya reckon :)

ps - speaking of junk, as of today, I am no longer an e-bay virgin!

Katrina and New Orleans

2005-09-04T10:09:00.000+08:00

I was aware that Katrina had devastated New Orleans, without actually being aware that Katrina had devastated New Orleans.

I got put onto the Interdictor blog by a link from slashdot. This guy is with a hosting company that has basically refused to allow the circumstances to stop them - apparently their disaster recovery plans are much more comprehensive than any I have ever prepared!

Of course, it is the human side of it that has the most impact. From yesterday:

Three days ago, police and national guard troops told citizens to head toward the Crescent City Connection Bridge to await transportation out of the area. The citizens trekked over to the Convention Center and waited for the buses which they were told would take them to Houston or Alabama or somewhere else, out of this area.

It's been 3 days, and the buses have yet to appear.

Although obviously he has no exact count, he estimates more than 10,000 people are packed into and around and outside the convention center still waiting for the buses. They had no food, no water, and no medicine for the last three days, until today, when the National Guard drove over the bridge above them, and tossed out supplies over the side crashing down to the ground below. Much of the supplies were destroyed from the drop. Many people tried to catch the supplies to protect them before they hit the ground. Some offered to walk all the way around up the bridge and bring the supplies down, but any attempt to approach the police or national guard resulted in weapons being aimed at them.

There are many infants and elderly people among them, as well as many people who were injured jumping out of windows to escape flood water and the like -- all of them in dire straights.

Any attempt to flag down police results in being told to get away at gunpoint. Hour after hour they watch buses pass by filled with people from other areas. Tensions are very high, and there has been at least one murder and several fights. 8 or 9 dead people have been stored in a freezer in the area, and 2 of these dead people are kids.

The people are so desperate that they're doing anything they can think of to impress the authorities enough to bring some buses. These things include standing in single file lines with the eldery in front, women and children next; sweeping up the area and cleaning the windows and anything else that would show the people are not barbarians.

The buses never stop.

Before the supplies were pitched off the bridge today, people had to break into buildings in the area to try to find food and water for their families. There was not enough. This spurred many families to break into cars to try to escape the city. There was no police response to the auto thefts until the mob reached the rich area -- Saulet Condos -- once they tried to get cars from there... well then the whole swat teams began showing up with rifles pointed. Snipers got on the roof and told people to get back.

He reports that the conditions are horrendous. Heat, mosquitoes and utter misery. The smell, he says, is "horrific."

He says it's the slowest mandatory evacuation ever, and he wants to know why they were told to go to the Convention Center area in the first place; furthermore, he reports that many of them with cell phones have contacts willing to come rescue them, but people are not being allowed through to pick them up.

Addendum: Bigfoot just called to report that "they" (the authorities) are cleaning up the dead bodies at the Convention Center right now.

And from today:

The city is starting to feel more secure now. Much larger military and Homeland Security presence and many fewer civilians left. Of course with this added security comes additional dangers like hyper-suspicious, armed authorities. If you watch the cam or walk the streets, you see that almost every civilian is approached, evaluated for threat potential, then either patted down or left alone. The disconcerting thing is that these authorities always have their guns at the ready and look like they're enjoying intimidating the people. Two of us have already had guns aimed at us by police -- Brian by the Federal Cops guarding the Boggs Federal building while we were waiting for the resupply, and me when we were delivering the router to City Hall.

Don't get me wrong, some guys are more professional than others. You can tell the ones who took the job because they wanted to bullies and who took the job to protect and serve. That's one thing a catastrophic situation does -- it sifts people's true personalities out.

Blog about home building

2005-09-01T22:17:00.000+08:00

I decided to blog about building our new house because I thought that it might be useful to others. Because it is a bit specialised, I decided to pt it into a separate blog.

Now I have two blog that I don't update regularly enough :)

PostSecret

2005-08-23T12:56:00.000+08:00

I was having a browse through the Feedster Top 500 blog list and found PostSecret.

The site is described as:

PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail-in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.

It truly is fascinating.

Feedster (Test)

2005-08-22T21:41:00.000+08:00

Just trying to figure out how Feedster works.

No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster

Splogs - how I hate thee

2005-08-21T16:57:00.000+08:00

I decided to click "Next Blog" a couple of times to flag the obvious splogs (spam blogs).

I was astounded that about three quarters are obviously spam!

I just hope that this new feature at blooger.com doesn't just lead to an arms race with the spammers :(

[Updated] Obviously a sample size of twenty or so is too small. The next twenty or thirty were an even split.

VS 2005 disabled Dr. Watson for Windows?

2005-08-21T15:36:00.000+08:00

I thought that I had disabled Dr Watson manually, but it appears that the VS 2005 debugger actually gets in instead of the old Dr Watson (based on this).

I don't remember whether I elected to send data to Microsoft during the install?

I re-enabled Dr Watson using the information at
How to disable Dr. Watson for Windows, so hopefully I haven't buggered things up :)

The mouse and the three year old

2005-08-08T15:26:00.000+08:00

A couple of months ago, I set up an old original iMac in the lounge room for the my three year old son to use. It has been absolutedly facsinating watching my son interact.

Previously when he used my Powerbook I had noticed that that first thing he learnt were the keys that always had the same effect. He knew that if he pushed a DVD into the slot, then soon enough he would get to watch a movie. He would like to listen to his Play School music or whatever in iTunes, and soon learnt that F4 and F5 controlled the volume and that F11 exposed the background picture of himself and his younger brother. He would use the right arrow key to skip any songs he didn't like, but this only worked if iTunes was in the foreground. The most bizarre thing is that I learnt this keyboard shortcut from him, so I have no idea how he learnt it :)

Now that he has the iMac to play with, he has become an expert with the mouse. He knows how to click (although not to double click) and he even knows how to click and drag (although he does this with two hands!).

Recently I noticed that he leap up to the table when he noticed my Powerbook was not being used, used the trackpad to select iTunes from the dock and then clicked play to start the song playing.

I think that I was almost eighteen before I first touched a mouse and it only had one button and even had a wire!

VS2005 Beta 2 Crashes

2005-08-06T14:55:00.000+08:00

In my two weeks using VS 2005 Beta 2 (Microsoft Visual Studio .Net 2005 Beta 2) I have had the IDE crash twice.

The first time I restarted VS2005 I was pleasantly surprised that a dialog sprung up apologising for the inconvenience and offering to restore the unsaved changes to the files that I had open during the crash. Very flash, I was impressed!

After the second crash, there was no offer to restore files. I am assuming that I had only recently manually saved, so it hadn’t done an auto-save yet perhaps?

Unfortunately Microsoft hasn’t learn anything from my crash experiences because I forgot that I had disabled the Error Reporting Service. I had disabled all services that I deemed non-crucial because I was trying to bring my memory requirements down to the absolute minimum. I had better remember to re-enable it next Monday just in case:)

Porting VB6 to VB.NET

2005-08-05T21:04:00.000+08:00

I recently started to breathe life back into some old VB6 (Microsoft Visual Basic 6) code that hasn't been touched for a couple of years. The binaries have been used continous since then, but no-one had touched the code since the original developer left the organisation. Because it is a administration tool that is only used internally we have been putting up with the list of well known annoyances.

Against the advice of our other wise minds, I decided to attempt to port the application from VB6 to VB.NET (Visual Basic .Net) so that I could take advantage of a couple of the updated features. There are a few places where multi threading will be invaluable - currently the application performs some long tasks that make the user wait for it.

The application is far from trivial - the project involves 43 classes, 26 forms and 4 module files that total up about 1100kB. It also takes advantage of some of the companies old VB5 libraries which had been ported from VB4 themselves. The project depended on four of our COM servers and about six Microsoft COM servers.

Oh yes, and I have never coded with .Net before.

Apparently yes, I am crazy :)

Anyway I started the porting using Visual Studio .Net 2003 the start of last week. I would sift through the errors messages after the vb6 import wizard had done its magic and then go back to clean up the VB6 code where appropriate. Unfortunately more than half of the forms simply failed to convert with no clear indication of what was wrong (it did seem to correlate with forms that used comdlg32 or tabctl32, but that may have been a red herring?)

I decided to try the vb6 import wizard in Visual Studio .Net 2005 Beta. Thankfully this appears to be much improved as every file got converted! There was still something like 250 conversion errors and warnings, but this also appeared to be better than VS2003 managed.

In the last week, I have managed to refactor most of the backend classes. I am not sure whether the front end forms is going to be the easier or harder part. I will comment on this in a later post.

Anyway, the take home story is that VS2005 appears to have greatly improved the VB6 import wizard.

Apple Multibutton Mouse?

2005-08-02T21:54:00.000+08:00

How to ask a question

2005-07-21T16:21:00.000+08:00

Microsoft have just published an interesting knowledgebase article titled How to ask a question.

Definately the first time I have seen them refer to the acronyms "RTFM" and "STFW" :)

Total DNS Control with GoDaddy

2005-07-10T09:57:00.000+08:00

I just transferred a domain to GoDaddy and by default the DNS was still pointing to my old registrar and using their MX records. Unfortunately the result was that e-mail to this domain appeared to disappearing into a blackhole.

Obviously I knew that I had to point the MX records of my domain to GoDaddy's mail server (I had a response from their support telling me this as well), but I couldn't see the facility to do this. Some googling revealed that I could make the changes in the "Total DNS control" control panel, but this did not display for my domain.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I needed to change the nameservers from "custom" to "parked" and then the "Total DNS Control" controls suddenly appeared. Very intuitive!

So if you are with GoDaddy and "Total DNS Control" is hidden, hopefully google will lead you here, because ceratinly none of their FAQs are any help.

My name is Troy and I am...

2005-06-03T10:44:00.000+08:00

This morning at 4:00am the baby woke early and my wife told me to go continue sleeping in another bed while she tended to him. As I walk (stumble?) to the other room I pass my computer, so I check my RSS feeds and e-mail.

Sad.Sad.Sad. I am sure that even the people of the world that have RSS running through their veins during the day (Scoble are you there?) have better things to do at 4:00am

Hello, my name is Troy and I am an information addict.

New MS Office document format is open XML

2005-06-02T12:51:00.000+08:00

Apparently the next Microsoft Office for Windows and Mac is going to use an open XML based document format. As Brian outlines:

Open Format: These formats use XML and ZIP, and they will be fully documented. Anyone will be able to get the full specs on the formats and there will be a royalty free license for anyone that wants to work with the files.
Compressed: Files saved in these new XML formats are less than 50% the size of the equivalent file saved in the binary formats. This is because we take all of the XML parts that make up any given file, and then we ZIP them. We chose ZIP because it’s already widely in use today and we wanted these files to be easy to work with. (ZIP is a great container format. Of course I’m not the only one who thinks so… a number of other applications also use ZIP for their files too.)
Robust: Between the usage of XML, ZIP, and good documentation the files get a lot more robust. By compartmentalizing our files into multiple parts within the ZIP, it becomes a lot less likely that an entire file will be corrupted (instead of just individual parts). The files are also a lot easier to work with, so it’s less likely that people working on the files outside of Office will cause corruptions.
Backward compatible: There will be updates to Office 2000, XP, and 2003 that will allow those versions to read and write this new format. You don’t have to use the new version of Office to take advantage of these formats. (I think this is really cool. I was a big proponent of doing this work)
Binary Format support: You can still use the current binary formats with the new version of Office. In fact, people can easily change to use the binary formats as the default if that’s what they’d rather do.
New Extensions: The new formats will use new extensions (.docx, .pptx, .xlsx) so you can tell what format the files you are dealing with are, but to the average end user they’ll still just behave like any other Office file. Double click & it opens in the right application.

I think that this is exactly what the FOSS crowds have been asking for, but I think that they have seriously underestimated how difficult it is to compete with Microsoft even if the playing field is level.

[Updated: Just fixing up my HTML]

Firefox and Thunderbird Packages

2005-04-03T14:51:00.000+08:00

ZettaServe (my work) have created and published Windows Installer (MSI) packages for Mozilla Firefox 1.0.2 and Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.2.

It is a demonstration of a new online packaging service that we have called zPackager. We think our quality is top notch and this seemed like a good way to let people see for themselves (I don't mean to sound too much an advert!)

And yes, you can blame me personally for the name :)

Integrating OS X with Active Directory

2005-03-22T14:48:00.000+08:00

I was going to blog about my experiences integrating OS X 10.3 Panther with Microsoft Active Directory, however there doesn't seem much point to go into details now that Tiger is just around the corner, so I will just mention a quick overview.

Firstly, do not even bother trying if the Windows domain name is something like company.local. Mac OS X will get terribly confused as Rendezvous uses the .local suffix to represent resources on the same subnet, so it will not make DNS queries. There is apparently a workaround but it looked too scary for me.

Secondly, run "/Applications/Utilities/Directory Access" and select the "Active Directory" option. Configure your domain name and forest (the forest is the top level of a set of domains - if you have one domain only then enter it as the forest as well).

When you click Bind and supply appropriate credentials, a computer account is created in Active Directory which means that there is a trust between your computer and the active directory domain. This means that you can log onto your OS X client using your Active Directory user anem and password. Cool!

Backup Trama Institute

2005-03-10T12:54:00.000+08:00

I don't care if they are trying to sell me something - John Cleese is great in the Institute for Backup Trauma.

And don't forget that he says not to press the third button!

Thanks to Dan Glover for the link.

Trawling through the archives

2005-03-09T14:27:00.000+08:00

For some reason I have been gradually reading through the blog archives of the drunkenbatman. I have got about halfway through (he has done 500 posts!), and it is really quite fascinated to see the blog change over time.

It is also interesting that I have come across a post that I remember reading at the time (about a year ago), without actually remembering what site I had read it on.

Firefox was so close!

2005-03-08T14:26:00.000+08:00

I was so close to making Firefox my default browser in OS X, but today I found a flaw too annoying to ignore. When I right click on a link, the context menu appears on the primary display of the computer, not the second display that the firefox browser window is in.

When I get time, I will check if it is a reported bug.

Rice Bag Stitching

2005-03-07T20:47:00.000+08:00

We eat enough rice in our household to buy it by the bag - seriously 20kg bags.

The top of the bag is stitched together in that clever manner that when using the correct technique it can just be cut on one end and pulled off. With the wrong technique you need to basically cut every second stitch.

In the past I have not paid enough attention to what I have been doing, so it is usually a hit and miss affair as to whether I impress myself with a quick opening, or whether I get myself frustrated enough to consider just hacking a whole in the side of the sack.

Well today was different. I actually check how the stitch works and am convinced I have worked out the right technique. I suppose that I will know for sure next on the next bag.

iPod

2005-03-05T15:45:00.000+08:00

I still love it :)

I have a 4th generation 20Gb. I bought it when they had a cash back offer when you bought a Powerbook and an iPod together. Obviously I bought the iPod because of the Powerbook, not the other way around.

I think that should make this a long term deal - though I suppose they still sell enough iPods

FileMaker Pro 7 Hassle

2005-03-05T14:52:00.000+08:00

[Updated after I installed a browser that supported compose mode]
Many moons ago, I created an application for my parent's business. Originally it was created using some old version of FileMaker Pro (FMP) - maybe 3 or 4? - and has been upgraded a few times over the years. They had been using it with FMP5 for awhile, but decided that FMP7 would be a better host to live in the wonderful world of OS X.

The most recent upgrade was not the painless upgrade that I was used to - I had to get in and fix a bunch of things manually. At the time I was not sure if this is because my parents skipped a version of FMP, but it later become clear that it was more likely to be because version 7 appears to be a major rewrite of the platform.

As it turned out, I got most things in order relatively quickly - the only total road block was a particular report that gathered data from multiple related tables using multiple portals on a single layout. The report was an utter mess in FMP7 - I suspect that I was getting stung by a FileMaker Pro bug (specifically this bug or something similar).

The real irony is that one of the big reasons that this report was one of the big reasons that I didn't finish porting the application to 4th Dimension. FMP has always made it really easy to throw together reports that are clever about how much paper they consume.

Back to FMP7. The only workaround that I could figure out was to write four different reports, and then print them in succession as if they were one report. The downer is that a short report that may have previously only taken a page or two will now always take a minimum of four pages. This is probably what I could have done in 4D?

Now, don't get me wrong - I am happy that FileMaker made the big changes that got made in version 7. When I first developed the application (or more specifically first did some maintenance on it), I shook my fist at not being able to easily separate the application logic and the data. In my mind, this single feature alone made the whole upgrade worthwhile - it was also half the reason I considered the jump to 4D. I am also realistic enough to know that big changes increase the chance of bugs (and googling about implies that not too many others have needed the feature that I was relying on).

What actually annoyed me the most, is that I don't think that the response that I got from FileMaker Australia's support was adequate at all. Initially my parents had been dealing with support directly to get the application upgraded and they really just didn't help them at all. It was only once my googling (I decided that I can use this as a verb if I was using google.com[.au]) turned up a link to the unresolved bug that they admitted "As it is a known issue it is actively being investigated".

I asked for a recommended workaround, but gave up waiting after a month.

To top off the agro factor - when my brother rang up to get a status update, he was told "you support on this purchase has expired". Personally I think when someone has active issues open, you need to follow them through until completion. Granted after my brother hassled them a bit, they did give him license keys to down-grade to FMP6, but I had already sorted out the dodgy workaround in the meantime. A touch too little, a touch too late guys :(

What's going on here then?

2005-03-04T17:27:00.000+08:00

Shall I create a new blog that specialises on a fantastic new niche topic or technology that isn't covered in sufficient depth? No don't think so.

Shall I create a new blog that informatively collects related information from various sources and presents it is a nicely structured manner? Not very likely.

How about I just type about the bunch of unrelated stuff that I seem to encounter every day? OK, sounds like a plan.

Does the world need anymore blogs? Hey look over there, it's Elvis!