I really have to feel sorry for the people who run Tan-Y-Bryn, self-contained accommodation in Hobart, Tasmania. I booked this place for the second half of January next year because it looked so well-priced for such a great place to stay while we're at LCA as well, as the week we'll just hang around Hobart afterwards.

Unfortunately for both of us, it seems they forgot to note somewhere on some booking site that they were full for that period, and they got a booking through some high-handed booking organisation who said they were liable for AUD$1000 if they refused it. So they cancelled on me, as the easier & cheaper option. A step that wasn't taken lightly, to read the agonised e-mail they wrote me in the small hours of the next morning.

It is nice to see someone apologising for their planned failure to consider Linux users. It's ridiculous that they even have to. It seems to me that these people have spent way too much effort on making the logo and menus scroll in from the left and right of the screen, and not enought effort on the actual functionality of their website.

I fail to understand what benefit they have gained from using the Pizza UI for their logo & menus (yes, really) rather than using simple links - or CSS-based menus, if they needed fancy. The page layout doesn't actually need anything more than simple text links. The logo (thankfully) does nothing after it's page-load scroll. For extra 'fail' marks they substitute graphics when I initially arrive with Javascript disabled (and wearing my tinfoil hat) but the graphics give me the appearance of a menu without actually performing a useful function.

After 11 years 1 month and 28 days it's time for me to farewall Catalyst IT. While this is something that I've been working towards for the last couple of years, my reasons for leaving don't reflect any large dissatisfaction with Catalyst, but rather my own disinterest in fulfillling a role which is deemed appropriate to an executive director of the company it has become. As well, it is Catalyst's current and continuing success which provides me with the opportunity to fade out, like the cheshire cat, without the need to have strong plans.

I do believe that the use and understanding of free and open-source software in New Zealand has matured to a point where there is the potential for an independent to make a few dollars reviewing or planning for open source projects in corporate and government areas. I hope I'll find out.

And a great big thank you to every one of you — staff, clients, suppliers and friends — who has made Catalyst such a fantastic place to be a part of. It really will be a hard act to follow.

:-)

Today has been a beautiful one, enough to persuade even me to visit the Big Blue Room. Some extensive rearrangement of the local greenery happened after Max lost one of his toys in a tree, and many scratches later I was able to relax in the knowledge of a section somewhat spruced up. That tree that blew down a couple of years ago has been appropriately dealt to, a drain has been uncovered, much moss, ivy and branches removed as well. The weather forecast for tomorrow is for similarly coloured skies, so the industry may even continue for another day!

In other blueness and greenness, when Fraser finally got dressed this morning he loudly proclaimed that he was "all in blue" so I said "Let's have some music to match, then" and we spent the first half of the day playing only tracks with names ending in "Blues", which sourced such a delightfully eclectic set of artists so that this afternoon we moved on and I found that music with the word "Green" in it's name might provided us with even more exotic entertainment to round out a great day of blues and greens. Tomorrow, Max says he wants to hear some Reds and Yellows, so I guess we will carry on there! I might cheat a little and leave the 'w' off yellow :-)

Last week I installed Ubuntu Gutsy onto Heather's laptop. While Gutsy seems to be an easy task for most situations, installing it onto a Pentium 366 laptop with 200M of RAM and (particularly) an 800x600 screen was harder than it perhaps should have been.

I'm sure that most installations these days aren't 800x600, but the graphical installer in Gutsy seems determined to make this painful. I had to move the toolbars to the sides of the screen, and then I could see the top half of the buttons on each page. It was like the page was sized for 600 vertical pixels, but the designer had forgotten about toolbars and title bars - not that I could see any screens in the process I followed that needed more than 5/6 of that screen anyway. Eventually I got it installed, and it even seemed to run OK once we booted into it. That's "OK for a 200M P366 with an 800x600 screen" though.

Looking around at the price of a new laptop made putting up with that sort of performance a whole lot less palatable. The Acer Aspire 5310 (with free RAM upgrade) was $898 at Dick Smith, with a $99 cashback offer. A quick google shows that it's using the Broadcom 43xx wireless which isn't even close to being the best, but can be made to work with Linux. Everything else seemed likely to work, so we bought it.

Installing Gutsy on it was nearly trivial, though I had to install bcm43xx-fwcutter on a different PC (my laptop, which is running Debian, in fact) to get the firmware for the WLAN before I could get the wireless working. I'm surprised that Broadcom still don't make that firmware publicly available somewhere, rather than forcing people to jump through the sort of hoops that would get them wanting an Intel chipset next time.

Anyway, everything installed very easily, and the laptop is working quite nicely. Strangely neither sound, nor suspend to ram are working out of the box. They're not so important in this case fortunately, but perhaps in due course I'll try and get them working and post some details about it.

Much harder has been getting the fabled 'cashback' from Acer. I think I now know what I'm being paid $99 for. Firstly the only way to get your cashback is by registering through a webpage. Heather's first attempt to do this resulted in an error from our proxy about a malformed request, so I got called in. I tried registering using on my laptop, but couldn't even get to the cashback page. I then tried using IE6, with similar results. So perhaps it's my PC? I tried using a different PC, with the same result again!

We tried ringing them up, but they were absolutely determined that (even after 20 minutes on the phone) they were not going to accept that information over the phone. So the only way to get the cashback from Acer was via their thoroughly broken website. Even their Contact Acer page is broken in firefox just showing a blank. Firefox users need not apply.

Eventually, while spending some time in front of Heather's main computer (which had made it all the way through to submitting their on-line form before failing) I realised that the error she was getting was a proxy error from some in-form javascript submitting an invalid request, so I disabled the proxy, the form finally worked, and I managed to apply for the cashback. Now we just have to send the printed form in, along with some blood from our firstborn, the ashes of my grandmother, various barcodes, receipts and toenail clippings and we're sweet. They say they'll send us some money within 30 days. I think we should maybe frame it or something. I just know I'm going to feel really inclined to take advantage of cashback offers in future.

In Other News: DVD Slideshow

Meanwhile I've been playing with DVD Slideshow which seems to be just what my parents have been after for a while, so they don't have to keep their favourite photos on the camera to be able to show them off on someone's TV. It's great! At least it is great now after I changed all the calls to ffmpeg to add a 'k' after the bitrate parameter. But that's Open Source Software, I guess. I'll send a patch to them... :-)

I need to get some photos printed so my aunt (who hasn't discovered the intarwebs, and isn't likely to, since she's over 80) and I figure that I should upload them to someone who can courier them to her.

The problem for me is that she lives in the United States, a country I have rarely visited and know very little about. Perhaps someone reading my blog does though, so if you know the best way to get photos delivered to someone in Philadelphia who doesn't have internets, please send me your recommendations.

Thanks,
Andrew McMillan.

After much wading through possible names, none of which really excited me, I have finally chosen "DAViCal" as the new name for my CalDAV server that was previously called RSCDS, or the "Really Simple CalDAV Store".

In the end, I chose DAViCal because it:

• seems easy to pronounce.
• combines the 'Cal' and 'DAV'.
• returns < 1000 results on google.
• doesn't make me cringe.
• didn't have a domain name registered.

That was about the hardest part of preparing for the 0.8.1 release, and now that I've done that I should manage to make the changes to the packaging, though I have no doubt that the old name will appear in all sorts of places for a while yet.

Choosing names is an important business, and I should know that from the length of time we spent agonising over names for our children, discarding all sorts of things because they had silly abbreviation collisions (like the "Royal Scottish Country Dance Society" :-) Even then, I think we got the kids names wrong, and the big one should be called "Thumper" with the little one called "Sly", but perhaps that's just a temporary annoyance and in time the names that we registered for them will fit them better.

I also recall Grant once saying that you should never use the word "Simple" in the name of your project, and he should know. DAViCal is no longer particularly simple, although I have attempted to hide the complexity from the user as far as that is possible, and will continue to do so.

Once I get out version 0.8.1 of DAViCal I will finally upload it to Debian, proper. This version has some important enhancements to its DAV spec compliance which are going to be needed by some future versions of Mozilla, and probably other things too, so it's important to push it out as soon as possible now.

I followed the advice of the lazywebs a while ago and bought myself a phone (Nokia 6100) on the local auction website then went around to the local Vodafone dealer and bought a SIM card for it.

When I signed up I ticked the box saying "Enable Global Roaming" and now that I'm travelling I realise I should have actually confirmed that happened before I left the country, because it didn't happen. Now I'm sitting in Melbourne with only the (free :-) Wifi to keep me company.

So looking at the Vodafone site, it appears that I could dial "777" to enable global roaming. Apparently I should have done that a few days ago, because it sure won't work now. Perhaps this "Manage Your Account" thingy will work? A period of perusing pages of FAQs follows, and I eventually conclude that it would work.

Except that when I try and register for the service I am told that my phone number is not valid. Yes, I moved my old number across to Vodafone, about the same time Brenda was lamenting the inadequate preparation Vodafone did for Mobile Number Portability, and while the actual phone has been working, Brenda did note back on April 1st that "you can't use the website to manage your account". Two months on and it still isn't possible, which is pretty poor really - you would think Vodafone would be actively encouraging people to move across to their network.

So I'm effectively phoneless until I get to Edinburgh and can buy a SIM card.

At least I can still get on IRC and ask someone to call Heather and tell her why I'm not phoning.

I have just received the most bizarre share purchase offer I've ever seen. It seems some weirdo company called Colonial Capital Corporation wants to pay about 60% of the market rate to buy my shares in Tower Australia Group.

I only have these few shares because of some insurance policy I used to have, and probably I should have sold them years ago, but to be offered 60% market value seems pretty insulting. I wonder how many suckers will be fooled?

A quick search for CCC shows how well-recognised this David Tweed asshole really is.

Good to see that Wikipedia has a pretty thorough write-up on the guy. Maybe someone has some pictures of him that they could upload there as well, so we can recognise him in the street. The Melbourne Age can help out a little on that point, as can the Sydney Morning Herald though he always wears sunglasses, it seems.

The registered office of the Colonial Capital Corporation (NZ Company no. 1891726) is "Andrew James Kennedy, Level 2, 6 Clayton Street, Newmarket, Auckland". I guess if you know that person you should make sure they are aware of the kind of amoral shyster they are fronting. It seems that particular location is a "virtual office" that you can rent for only $120/month from the "Auckland Business Centre Limited", Ph. 09 522 7130. I wonder if Mr. Kennedy takes phone calls, and what company name he gives when he answers?

A previously infamous company also with David Tweed as sole director is National Exchange Ltd (NZ Company no. 1559669). The office for that one was at Suite 102, 63 Remuera Road. No name associated with that, but the constitution is pretty much a license to ensure any funds get offshore as quickly as possible, and a Google search suggests that the address generally has some very dodgy businesses associated with it.

We go to the library every three weeks. Since we don't have a television in our house there is a lot of reading going on. For myself I don't get out many books, spending far too much time in front of the computer to really read stuff. I make an exception for Neal Stephenson though, and I just finished "The System of the World" this morning, so it was time for me to switch to lighter stuff. Terry Pratchett, I think.

My son is demolishing books though! He just finished reading stuff like:

• Winston Churchill and his great wars
• Scottish place names
• The Lonely Planet guide to experimental travel
• A wild ride through the night : suggested by twenty-one illustrations by Gustave Dore
• MacBeth : man and myth
• Fables Aesop never wrote

Time for something lighter? No fear! When we left he could scarcely lift his backpack full of the following:

• Maddigan's fantasia
• Mind-boggling buildings
• The last of the sky pirates
• The curse of the Gloamglozer
• Freeglader
• The stormin' Normans
• Gorgeous Georgians
• Who stole the black diamond?
• Who shot the sheriff?
• Who is the prisoner of Portcullis Castle?
• 501 TV-free party games for kids
• The seeing stone
• The field guide
• Stopping for a spell
• The limerick
• Scotland
• Scotland's Highlands and Islands
• The price of water in Finistere
• EARLY people
• A short history of nearly everything

Well, in fact the last one didn't fit in his backpack, so he had to carry it. At least he had to carry it for a little while until Heather pinched it off him and started reading it herself! That's the way it is in this house though: Max read the Terry Pratchett that I'm on now about a month ago, and I'm sure he'll run through those and start pinching the books Heather or I took out. I don't suppose that reading list would be unusual in a 15 year old (if they liked books :-), but for a 9 year old it constantly continues to amaze me.

Meanwhile Fraser (who's 6 now) isn't so up on the reading thing. He's getting there, and can actually read better than most in his class at school. Never mind: he still listen's avidly as I get through one chapter a night of "Tears of the Giraffe" by Alexander McCall Smith. It's so good that the other folk don't mind listening either, even if they have all read it themselves.

Flying home from Auckland the other day I discovered that women don't have noses. At least that was the case for the little representations on the safety sheet in the seat pocket in front of me. Wherever there was a little picture of a man, it would be a person with a nose. Where it was a picture of a woman there would be no nose.

Odd, and yet somehow it worked.

I shall now have to spend some time staring more closely at people's faces, so if you see me looking at you strangely over the next few days please don't get upset: I'm just trying to work out whether you have a big nose, and why a picture of a person without a nose should look more like a woman.

OK. I am now used to being harrassed by my son, Fraser, about how "that man looks like you daddy" when we visit the toilet at the local mall and are "faced" with endless picture of the backs of people's heads.

Fine. I'm used to that now.

Now Heather is accusing me of "male-pattern blindness" as well. On Saturday I spent 10 minutes searching through the back of the fridge for some paté to no avail. I'm sure I looked for it on Sunday as well, but today she pulls it out and waves it at me purporting that it was at the front of the refrigerator all along.

I'm not convinced.

Grant reminded me today about the sad story of Craig Shergold (or here, of course).

It must be such a pain to be the target of this sort of thing, and yet it continues. I recently received a sad story about someone supposedly suffering in Auckland, but how am I to know if it is true? If I even enquire about it's truth I may be contributing to the problem!

I'm sure that many people receive more of these than me, perhaps because I have historically come down pretty hard on people near and dear to me who have forwarded me these sorts of things. Over the last ten years my approach has softened somewhat: I have switched to forwarding them, by return e-mail, the following warning (I have no idea where I got it from - I certainly didn't write it):

*********************************************************
WARNING, CAUTION, DANGER, AND BEWARE!
Gullibility Virus Spreading over the Internet!
*********************************************************

WASHINGTON, D.C.--The Institute for the Investigation of Irregular Internet
Phenomena announced today that many Internet users are becoming infected by
a new virus that causes them to believe without question every groundless
story, legend, and dire warning that shows up in their inbox or on their
browser. The Gullibility Virus, as it is called, apparently makes people
believe and forward copies of silly hoaxes relating to cookie recipes, email
viruses, taxes on modems, and get-rich-quick schemes.

"These are not just readers of tabloids or people who buy lottery tickets
based on fortune cookie numbers," a spokesman said. "Most are otherwise normal
people, who would laugh at the same stories if told to them by a stranger
on a streetcorner." However, once these same people become infected with the
Gullibility Virus, they believe anything they read on the Internet.

"My immunity to tall tales and bizarre claims is all gone," reported one
weeping victim. "I believe every warning message and sick child story my
friends forward to me, even though most of the messages are anonymous."

Another victim, now in remission, added, "When I first heard about "the
sulfnbk.exe virus" and Good Times, I just accepted it without question. After
all, there were dozens of other recipients on the mail header, so I thought
the virus must be true." It was a long time, the victim said, before she
could stand up at a Hoaxees Anonymous meeting and state, "My name is Jane,
and I've been hoaxed." Now, however, she is spreading the word. "Challenge
and check whatever you read," she says.

Internet users are urged to examine themselves for symptoms of the virus,
which include the following:

The willingness to believe improbable stories without thinking the urge to
forward multiple copies of such stories to others a lack of desire to take
three minutes to check to see if a story is true T. C. is an example of someone
recently infected. He told one reporter, "I read on the Net that the major
ingredient in almost all shampoos makes your hair fall out, so I've stopped
using shampoo." When told about the Gullibility Virus, T. C. said he would
stop reading email, so that he would not become infected.

Anyone with symptoms like these is urged to seek help immediately. Experts
recommend that at the first feelings of gullibility, Internet users rush to
their favorite search engine and look up the item tempting them to thoughtless
credence. Most hoaxes, legends, and tall tales have been widely discussed
and exposed by the Internet community. Courses in critical thinking are also
widely available, and there is online help from many sources, including:

Department of Energy Computer Incident Advisory Capability at

http://www.ciac.org/ciac/

Symantec/Anti Virus Research Center at

http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/index.html

McAfee Associates Virus Hoax List

http://us.mcafee.com/virusInfo/default.asp?id=hoaxes

Urban Legends Reference Pages

http://www.snopes.com/

Wikipedia on Urban Legends

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_legend

Datafellows Hoax Warnings

http://www.f-secure.com/virus-info/hoax/

Those people who are still symptom free can help inoculate themselves against
the Gullibility Virus by reading some good material on sources, such as:

Evaluating Internet Research Sources

http://www.virtualsalt.com/evalu8it.htm

Evaluation of Information Sources

http://www.vuw.ac.nz/~agsmith/evaln/evaln.htm

Lastly, as a public service, Internet users can help stamp out the Gullibility
Virus by sending copies of this message to anyone who forwards them a hoax.

(line of asterisks here)

This message is so important, we're sending it anonymously! Forward it to all
your friends right away! Don't think about it! This is not a chain letter! This
story is true! Don't check it out! This story is so timely, there is no date
on it! This story is so important, we're using lots of exclamation points! For
every message you forward to some unsuspecting person, the Home for the Hopelessly
Gullible will donate ten cents to itself. (If you wonder how the Home will know
you are forwarding these messages all over creation, you're obviously thinking
too much.)

*********************************************************
ACT NOW! DON'T DELAY! LIMITED TIME! NOT SOLD IN ANY STORE!
*********************************************************

A wee bit dated now, perhaps, but as Pete Bulmer said when I pointed that out to him "Are you kidding? That stuff circles the internet for years. People don't get any smarter ... and if it is dated, that just makes it more poignant."

Indeed. So I've dusted it off, cleaned up some of the links, and pasted it up here where more people will be able to refer to it - and in the hope that you can retaliate with it next time someone tries to infect you with the gullibility virus.

I've been trying for a long time to find something that will match my music needs, but I think I give up, so I have finally decided to release my "Adorno" music server out into the big blue room.

Some people suggested Amarok, but while it does have some web interface plugins they really are Teh Suck(tm) for all-the-time use. Using Amarok over an SSH connection seems to soak network bandwidth to the max, as well, and is quite sluggish. Amarok is nice, but I don't play my music on the computer in front of me.

I looked at SlimServer, but it requires me to run some Java doohickey on the music player which (surprise, surprise) expects the server to have a GUI.

I looked at MPD as well. This is probably the closest thing to something I could use, and if I hadn't already written my own music server years ago I would probably go with this. As it is I have something which kind of works, and which has records of the last 20,000 odd tracks I have played. It only really has a few bugs, which are minor enough to have not been fixed for a couple of years, so I should just get stuck in and do the work.

What crystallised this chain of thoughts for me was yesterday, when everyone got a wee bit excited about the Catalyst IT group on last.fm I decided to finally sign up for an account on there. Of course if I had an account, I had to have some way of actually putting my playlist on there...

... 10 minutes later I had managed to find the Audio::Scrobbler library, and an hour later I had hacked the support for it into Adorno. Looking through the code of the music daemon component of Adorno I realise it ain't that bad. There are a few improvements it could do with, but the basic approach works just fine.

So I'm now listening to Charles Mingus, and it's all being scrobbled up to (by?) last.fm, although I guess strictly this isn't all going to be my choice of music. Under pressure from one of the shorter members of the household I have been known to play "The Wiggles", "Buzz O Bumble" and other stuff I am heartily sick of, but which he continues to adore.

So now I had firmly committed to releasing my code, I had to get rid of the revision control on there (I was using Darcs, since that's the project I was starting when I wanted to try Darcs out) and replace it with Git. I don't think there is any value in retaining all my old history so I just moved the _darcs directory out of the way and "cg-init" in the root of the project.

Then back on my laptop, I just clone from the remote project root and start editing away. Eventually I decide to "cg-push" and my changes go back into the project root on the music server. Except, of course they don't: they go back into the .git directory in there and when I ssh in and run cg-status in the project root it wants to undo all my good works! I think that's a bad Andrew for even thinking of doing something so stupid! So I'm now using "cg-reset" to put my code into operation on my music server. Ouch!

Oh well, I guess that means that Debian packaging must be early on the list :-)

This week I had to visit Queenstown to do some work for a client. Queenstown is surrounded by beautiful landscape, and I had great weather for the flight from Christchurch to Queenstown, including being able to very clearly see Mt Cook, Lake Hawea, Wanaka, Mt Aspiring, and the Crown Range from my window seat. So it was extremely frustrating that my camera batteries only lasted until Christchurch.

When I got to Queenstown I realised that I had also forgotten my sunglasses, but I didn't need them for long as I was soon back to wrangling the computer programs into the right shape. All was "mostly working" at the end of the first day, which was the kind of progress I had hoped for so I celebrated with a very nice dinner at Tatler which was bizarrely nearly deserted. Such a restaurant in Wellington would have been packed any night of the week, I feel sure. I wandered around Queenstown after dinner wondering how they manage to retain that small central core for something which is so incredibly touristy. Touristy without being tacky. Well, not too tacky anyway. It's quite impressive that they have managed to hide away all the industrial areas somewhere that I didn't see.

The next two days the weather was increasingly wet with two very nice breakfasts at Joe's Garage to start each day off. I didn't mind the weather too much as I was inside working ... until the time came to leave on Friday. After a couple of hours wait my first flight was cancelled and I was bumped to a later flight, which was also cancelled so I got moved to one on Saturday afternoon. I've had to cope with travel disruption so infrequently that I was really quite flummoxed for a wee while. I called up one of the people I had been working with, and he was kind enough to invite me for dinner while I figured out what to do (thanks Craig - it was much appreciated).

The next morning dawned. Wet. Again. And I really didn't trust that 1:00pm flight to actually get out. The forecast was for Queenstown to partly clear, and then close in again, but I get the impression that this airport is closed a lot more than most, and from the flight path in I'm not altogether surprised - although it felt like we could touch some of those peaks, I think I would rather not do so, thank you very much, and I'm sure the pilots feel the same way.

So I hired a rental and drove to Christchurch, rebooking my flight en route. Unfortunately I took a wrong turn at Cromwell, I think, and it took a lot longer than it should have (via Dunedin) so I got to Christchurch just barely before my flight left, very flustered.

A long day, but at least I get to sleep in my own bed at the end of it :-)