If you noticed the extended period that this website was offline for I heartily apologize. Thankfully the number of people who were holding their breath waiting for it to come back up can probably be quantified only with a new branch of quantum mechanics so I think I’m pretty right 
The outage was caused by our recent move to new digs, and the corresponding relocation of our ADSL service. But I am happy to announce that everything is now set up the way I want it with approximately 5Mb/sec downloads, and if you are reading this page you know that the upload speed is sufficient for the small tasks I ask of it.
Well, more news and such once I’m used to posting again.
I saw this piss funny comment on slashdot under the “Japan McDonalds distributes USB virus” article. This is very geeky, if you don’t find this funny then you probably have a life off of the internet.
In A.D. 2006
Meal was beginning.
Customer: What happen?
Slashdotter: McDonalds set up us the free mp3 player.
Slashdotter: You get virus.
Customer: What !
Lawyer: Main bank account turn on.
Customer: It’s You !!
Ronald McDonald: How are you gentlemen !!
Ronald McDonald: All your passwords are belong to us.
Ronald McDonald: You are on the way to obesity.
Customer: What you say !!
If you are like me and are using firefox you’ll probably have noticed that your desktop has become a bit more cluttered now that all your downloads are being sent there. I’ve recently been cleaning mine up and finding some pretty wallpapers from deviant art to brighten things up a bit. I’ve managed to remove just about everything from there except the bloody recycle bin – thankfully there is help at hand.
Undeletable icons on the desktop are controlled by entries in the registry at :
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Desktop\NameSpace
in my case I’m trying to remove the “Recycle Bin” and the “My Bluetooth Places” which can be achieved by deleting the following keys
{645FF040-5081-101B-9F08-00AA002F954E} - Recycle Bin
{6af09ec9-b429-11d4-a1fb-0090960218cb} - Bluetooth Icon
Thanks to Daniel for the info.
I’ve just managed to get my automatic pinging of sites such as technorati working withm my new permanent link structure and I noticed that when my posts were showing up in technorati they would be called something like “Permanent Link to Gentoo emerge”. Obviously not a huge problem as they are actually showing up (step in the right directionTM) but it doesn’t look very professional.
I think I’ve fixed this up by editting my current theme to remove all instances of “Permanent Link to” in the titles. This post is mainly to check if it has worked or not.
Update: That seems to have done the trick.
This is I think the start of something really big. As of today (14-July-2006) users on MSN Messenger and Y! IM will be able to add each other to their contact lists and pass message between the two networks. I personally only have ever had one friend (hello Leah) who used the Yahoo client but I know that there are a lot of people outside of Australia who do – I personally use MSN and Google IM and cant wait for the time when all these networks will be able to talk to one another.
In Australia the majority of people (at least that I know) are running MSN but when I was living in the states it was quite incredible the number of people who were using AIM as the their one and only chat client and had never thought about logging on to MSN (even though it comes pre-installed on their computers). A friend recently pointed out to me the possibility of using a Jabber based client (like gaim, or google talk) to connect to a jabber gateway such as http://www.jabber.org.au/ which then does the connection to various networks for you. While this is a step more sophisticated than all-in-one wonder client like trillian, which could connect to multiple networks at once, it still doesn’t provide the ability to have a single online identity with which other users can communicate.
In many ways the current situation is very much like the early days of email when individual ISPs had their own walled gardens and communication between them was unthinkable. I think that the breaking down of these walls will also help propel IM into a much more useful communication tool. Imagine not being able to email a potential customer because he was on a different email network to you. I think it can only do good things for IM clients aswell as people realise they don’t need the addition bloat that go with the latest versions of the proprietry clients (I’m looking squarely at AIM and MSN here).
A long time ago I was headed overseas for the better part of a year and I decided that it would be a good idea to set up a blog to allow me to post my incoherent ramblings while travelling. I decided that it would be a good idea to set up a blog using the same service I use to read all my various feeds, unfortunately bloglines is much better suited to displaying blogs than it is to creating them. Unfortunately I didn’t realise this until I had a fair number of posts in my archives there, then when I started shopping around for a new service I realised that there was no easy way to export my archives to a new service.
I set up my wordpress blog on my home server with the dread thought in the back of my head that I would have to write a html scraping script to run over my old blog before importing into wordpress. Thankfully it didn’t come (quite) to that and I thought I’d share with you my solution for the ugly bloglines lock-in problem.
- Get this bash script which will rip down and dump the bloglines xml-feed into a single file
- Put the script somewhere you can execute it. If you don’t have cygwin or linux installed you can probably execute it from your hosting company server (if they give you shell access)
- Run the script by giving it your user name and the range of months you were active on bloglines for: ie ./genBloglines.sh -u yourUserName -sm 1 -sy 2005 – this will get everything from Jan/2005 to the present month
- From the wordpress admin panel choose the Import option and choose import from RSS feed
- Select the file generated by my script (default is bloglines.xml) – you might have to download it to the local machine if you’ve run the script on your hosting server.
- Voila – you are done
Since I started hosting this site on my own machine I’ve been curious about what sort of bandwidth I’m actually getting. I have iiNet ADSL2/2+ connection which can theoretically give me a connection of 24,000Kb/sec – I think that all involved would be very suprised if I actually managed to get that much but the results were pleasant nonetheless. I am using the ozspeedtest site for my testing and it seems to be fairly closely mirror what I’m able to get when downloading ISO from the iiNet ftp site. I’d be interested to hear what anyone else on ADSL2 is actually getting and whether it is worth upgrading the modem to try and squeeze a bit more speed out of my connection (I’m currently using a D-Link DSL-500).
Test run on 10/07/2006 @ 6:45 PM
Mirror: Optus
Test type: Cable (15MB Test)
Your connection speed:
kbps: 6146.09
KB/s: 768.26
Mbps: 6.15
and according to my modem
| |
Downstream |
Upstream |
| Line Status |
ADSL Link Speed |
7616 kbps |
1024 kbps |
| SNR |
5.0 dB |
0.0 dB |
| ATEN |
26 dB |
17 dB |
| Line Error |
ADSL layer |
FEC |
0 |
0 |
| CRC |
0 |
0 |
| ATM layer |
HEC |
0 |
0 |
| Frame Counter |
795 |
1139 |
This says to me that I’m getting almost the entire 8,000Kb/sec bandwidth allowable by ADSL 1 and could probably benefit from a new modem…. just have to reconcile that expense with the new stereo amplifier and new computer that I also want If anyone has suggestions for good but cheap modems I’d love to hear them.
