Found this theme after my last theme exploded as a result of the content management system upgrade. Anyway, I was getting bored with the old one :P Enjoy the new look and I will beaver away at the backend getting all the little bits and pieces ported over to the new look and feel. It will take a while as I'm on holidays now, so don't expect much until the new year!

Ordinarily I don't make a big song and dance about stupid decisions made by politicians - I've come to understand the average polly has the intelligence of a lobotomised amoeba...but I digress.

Many have heard me lament the short-sighted, wasteful policies implemented by various Ministers for Communication (particularly Senator Alston) under the previous regime in Canberra. I hate to say it, but the incumbent administration has truly exceeded even my worst imaginings. Everyone on this list knows the Internet, and has come to rely on it one fashion or another so I think it prudent to at least make you aware of the level of stupidity the current government has stooped to.

The run down of what is proposed

Read it, and make your own choices. Take it from me, being someone who has worked at the ISP level for a company that hosted all of Telstra's wholesale ISPs and hosted all of TransACT, AAPT and Telstra-Clear NZ, this is a bad policy for all Australians. Even if you ignore the policy, or moral standpoints, the technology to implement this simply does not exist. The outcome will be millions of tax payer dollars wasted on grand ideas, with questionable motivations, to attempt something that can only be achieved under the draconian levels of government oversight and intervention seen in places like China, Burma and North Korea.

I always thought we lived in a democracy populated by intelligent people able to make their own decisions. I DO NOT need the Australian Labour Party, or any other political party, to dictate what is and isn't appropriate for my children or myself.

Please read the link above and if you are motivated to do so, please contact the minister with either your support or objection to his proposal. I have added a block that is persistent across my site to drive as much traffic as I can to the fight against this policy. If you are in a position to do likewise, please consider it.

Some people may have noticed the 12 hour gap in the weather graphs. This has now been fixed and came about because of small API change after a routine update on the monitoring system. The API change resulted in me having to recompile spine from the Cacti Monitoring System. For the curious, cacti does all the polling, SNMP does the actual monitoring (via some phunky scripts I wrote) and the graphs are generated every hour then uploaded to the web server at the co-lo. So consequently debugging such a convoluted system can be a little time consuming :P

49 truly inspired reasons why it is a great thing to be male. Those with a sharp sense of political correctness and not a funny bone in sight, feminists and other such men haters, can skip this one.

I've seen a lot of posts about how to get Compiz+Emerald working together in Kubuntu that involves a lot of poking around and creating scripts etc. However, there is a "better" way that is from what I can see, the K/Ubuntu preferred method. First some background. Like may others, I wanted to get Compiz and Emerald all singing and dancing on my desktop system at work but was frustrated by the lack of integration with GUI management tools - specifically with regard to getting Emerald to start at login. The general sequence of events goes like this:

1. Install restricted drivers and "nvidia-glx-new" package (or the closed ATi driver package).
2. Install every *compiz* package available (including ccsm)
3. Install every *emerald* package available.
4. Turn on desktop effects in KDE and specify to use a 3rd party config tool.
5. Configure Compiz to your taste with "ccsm"
6. Run "emerald --replace" to get rid of kwin/metacity

Lovely! Kudos to the package maintainers for making it this easy :) However, when you log out (reboot etc) and back in again, the compiz compositing manager starts, but not emerald! Why? Well the simple answer is that Emerald was never ASKED to start. So the better question is; why wasn't emerald asked to start? The answer to which is buried in a wrapper at /usr/bin/compiz-decorator. Basically this script is called by compiz when it starts to start your preferred window decorator (have a look in the "Window Decorations" configuration in CompizConfig Settings Manager, ie, "ccsm"). A few posts I've seen have suggested replacing this "compiz-decorator" with "emerald --replace" but this removes some of the fall-back/redundancy provided by the bundled script. This got me thinking - there must be a way to tell "compiz-decorator" to use Emerald...and there is!

If you open /usr/bin/compiz-decorator (it's a shell script, so any old text editor will do) and scroll down a little, you will find this block:

# start a decorator
if [ -x ${COMPIZ_BIN_PATH}emerald ] && [ "$USE_EMERALD" = "yes" ]; then
    DECORATOR=emerald
elif [ -x ${COMPIZ_BIN_PATH}gtk-window-decorator ] && [ -n "$GNOME_DESKTOP_SESSION_ID" ]; then
    DECORATOR=gtk-window-decorator
elif [ -x ${COMPIZ_BIN_PATH}kde-window-decorator ] && [ -n "$KDE_FULL_SESSION" ]; then
    DECORATOR=kde-window-decorator
elif [ -x ${COMPIZ_BIN_PATH}kde4-window-decorator ] && [ x$KDE_SESSION_VERSION = x"4" ]; then
    DECORATOR=kde4-window-decorator
fi

Notice the check to see if "USE_EMERALD" is set to "yes"? Well, scrolling back you will find a section like this:

if [ -z "$XDG_CONFIG_HOME" ]; then
    test -f $HOME/.config/compiz/compiz-manager && . $HOME/.config/compiz/compiz-manager
else
    ...etc...

Ok - so now we have the two pieces of the puzzle; firstly why Emerald isn't being to start and what files are read to get the instructions in the first place. So the final resolution is dead simple. All we need to do is create a file "$HOME/.config/compiz/compiz-manager" and populate it with "USE_EMERALD=yes" like this:

echo "USE_EMERALD=yes" >> ~/.config/compiz/compiz-manager

Voila. Log out and back in again and you'll see Emerald start :) Best bit is this modification will make the start-up consistent across upgrades of K/Ubuntu, and will work regardless of your choice of Gnome/KDE/XFCE etc. In other words, it's desktop environment neutral which is what makes this approach a little different to most of the others I've read online that seem specifically geared to one window manager/desktop environment or another. Also note, you can over-ride any of the variables in "/usr/bin/compiz-decorator" using additional declarations in the local ~/.config/compiz/compiz-manager file. This could be handy if you want to play with development versions of Emerald.

Some people may be aware that my old ISP decided to increase my monthly access from $120/mth (paid quarterly in advance) to $500/mth!! Consequently I told them to shove it and went with the only real alternative in my area...Telstra Wireless 3G. It's expensive at $130/mth for 10GB but it's fast and reliable (surprisingly fast actually)...which is a LOT more than I can say for my old ISP. As anyone who had mail hosting on my old server knows, if my link was down for 2-3 days a month then it was good month. If the speed was anything over 2-3Mbps, it was fast for a change (they promised me 12Mbps...but it never happened). Compared to the new link which is routinely over 3Mbps and never goes down...it makes me wonder how the heck Fish Internet are going to survive with their price gouging, poor service, next-to-no-customer-support, service offering. Couple that with the dragon who answers their phones (yeh, good luck getting past her!) I hope they go the way of other $#!t-house ISP's - down the proverbial gurgler. Good bye, and good riddence to them; they'll never get another cent out me and I'll make sure to tell everyone who can't get ADSL in our area to give them a wide berth.

So seeing as I no longer have a static IP (can't get them on Wireless 3G) and the small bandwidth quota, I decided to move all my hosting off-site and use the same provider my employer uses. Actually, I'm piggy-backing off their hosting account (with the boss' blessing). So this site is now on a faster server sitting in a data centre somewhere and I don't have to monkey around with it to keep all the lights blinking...that's someone else's job! Yay!! Everything is back up and running, including the galleries, but the weather stuff will take me a little longer to sort out. The problem with the weather is that the weather station is sitting on my desk at home (with the sensors outside) and the server is sitting in Sydney somewhere. Consequently I've got to figure out a sensible way to get not only data but the graphs (which are generated on my server) onto the hosted server. Real-time updates aren't going to workable but I'm thinking sensor data every 3 minutes and graphs every 15 minutes. We'll wait and see :)

For those who need help setting up their e-mail, I will be updating the support page in th next day or so. Right now though, there are some lawns that need to be mowed!!

A frined of mine sent this to me via e-mail and I just had to add it to my funny anecdotes :)

1. NUDITY
   I was driving with my three young children one warm summer evening when a woman in the convertible ahead of us stood up and waved. She was stark naked! As I was reeling from the shock, I heard my 5-year-old shout from the back seat, 'Mom, that lady isn't wearing a seat belt!'

2. OPINIONS
   On the first day of school, a first-grader handed his teacher a note from his mother. The note read, 'The opinions expressed by this child are not necessarily those of his parents.'

3. KETCHUP
   A woman was trying hard to get the ketchup out of the jar. During her struggle the phone rang so she asked her 4-year-old daughter to answer the phone. 'Mommy can't come to the phone to talk to you right now. She's hitting the bottle.'

4. MORE NUDITY
   A little boy got lost at the YMCA and found himself in the women's locker room. When he was spotted, the room burst into shrieks, with nude women grabbing towels and running for cover. The little boy watched in amazement and then asked, 'What's the matter, haven't you ever seen a little boy before?'

5. POLICE # 1
   While taking a routine vandalism report at an elementary school, I was interrupted by a little girl about 6 years old. Looking up and down at my uniform, she asked, 'Are you a cop?'
   'Yes' I answered and continued writing the report.
   'My mother said if I ever needed help I should ask the police. Is that right?'
   'Yes, that's right,' I told her.
   'Well, then,' she said as she extended her foot toward me, 'would you please tie my shoe?'

6. POLICE #2
   It was the end of the day when I parked my police van in front of the station. As I gathered my equipment, my K-9 partner, Jake, was barking, and I saw a little boy staring in at me. 'Is that a dog you got back there?' he asked.
   'It sure is,' I replied.
   Puzzled, the boy looked at me and then towards the back of the van. Finally he said, 'What'd he do?'

7. ELDERLY
   While working for an organization that delivers lunches to elderly shut-ins, I used to take my 4-year-old daughter on my afternoon rounds. She was unfailingly intrigued by the various appliances of old age, particularly the canes, walkers and wheelchairs. One day I found her staring at a pair of false teeth soaking in a glass. As I braced myself for the inevitable barrage of questions, she merely turned and whispered, 'The tooth fairy will never believe this!'

8. DRESS-UP
   A little girl was watching her parents dress for a party. When she saw her dad donning his tuxedo, she warned, 'Daddy, you shouldn't wear that suit.'
   'And why not, darling?'
   'You know that it always gives you a headache the next morning.'

9. DEATH
   While walking along the sidewalk in front of his church, our minister heard the intoning of a prayer that nearly made his collar wilt. Apparently, his 5-year-old son and his playmates had found a dead robin. Feeling that proper burial should be performed, they had secured a small box and cotton batting, then dug a hole an d made ready for the disposal of the deceased.
   The minister's son was chosen to say the appropriate prayers and with sonorous dignity intoned his version of what he thought his father always said: 'Glory be unto the Faaather, and unto the Sonnn, and into the hole he goooes.' (I want this line used at my funeral!)

10. SCHOOL
    A little girl had just finished her first week of school. 'I'm just wasting my time,' she said to her mother. 'I can't read, I can't write, and they won't let me talk!'

11. BIBLE
    A little boy opened the big family Bible. He was fascinated as he fingered through the old pages. Suddenly, something fell out of the Bible. He picked up the object and looked at it. What he saw was an old leaf that had been pressed in between the pages.
    'Mama, look what I found,' the boy called out.
    'What have you got there, dear?'
    With astonishment in the young boy's voice, he answered, 'I think it's Adam's underwear!'

Modern computers have at their heart a piece of equipment commonly referred to as the "Central Processing Unit" (CPU). This is common knowledge and regularly used as the final determinant factor in a computer's performance. The reality of a machine's performance, however, is a much more complicated equation. Like many devices, the overall performance is a measure of the sum of parts that compose the system. Similarly, a single poorly performing component can undermine, or even negate, the performance of the other components. Using blindingly fast CPU's in a system with very slow memory will result in a computer that is well below accepted standards. However, fast components are becoming very cheap and offer other advantages beyond the initial design goals of the component in question.

For instance, most people are unaware that their video card has a highly specialised processor call a "Graphics Processing Unit" (GPU). The GPU, unlike the CPU is designed for a set of very specific calculations; usually matrix transformations using arbitrarily precise floating point numbers - usually double precision floating points, but not always. The GPU typically runs at a slower clock speed than the CPU and uses a very fast, purpose-built memory subsystem of its own too. Combined, the video card's GPU and memory are capable of some truly mind-boggling calculations. Here's where things get interesting; many facets of science and "non-graphic" mathematics use exactly the same type of calculations the GPU was designed for. In fact nVidia has even released a programming framework (called CUDA) to leverage their GPU's for doing things other than playing games. Researchers in Belgium at the University of Antwerp, have now been able to build a system, capable of super-computer speeds, using commodity graphics cards totalling eight GPU's!

For quite some time now, I've considered the role of the general purpose microprocessor, aka CPU, rather limiting. As stated before, a single component doesn't in itself determine how fast a machine will be, but a single component can certainly determine how slow a machine will be. I believe the time is coming when to move beyond current performance limitations, the computer industry will need to utilise specialised processors for specialised tasks. Given the generalist role a CPU must undertake, by design it is a compromise to balance performance across a broad set of tasks, consequently it will never excel at any specific task. However, if the CPU could offload particular tasks to other, external, processing units specialised for that particular task the overall performance of the system would increase significantly. We have already seen this in limited ways with the advent of hardware-based storage controllers, dedicated graphics processors and I would argue the advent of the northbridge for direct access to various busses that link the core of the system together. Prior to the separation of the CPU and northbridge, all input and output (I/O) to any device was forced to go through the CPU. With northbridge controller the CPU could be freed up and many devices are capable of direct communication and data transfer.

In conclusion, I look forward to future of the CPU; whether it's a Intel "Core", IBM "Cell" or any other processor. However, what really interests me, is the rise of the specialist processor and how we as programmers and system engineers can find new and innovative ways to implement them to augment and enhance overall system performance in specialised ways.

Credits:

• Image of computer system above: http://fastra.ua.ac.be/images/pic_internal.jpg
  While you're there, check out all the images and screen shots etc. of this tiny super computer

Yesterday from about 2pm to 8pm Aust EST, my ISP had some serious routing problems. This, unfortunately, isolated my network from vast tracts of the Internet for the duration. Some people could get to my site, whereas others could not. As far as I know, locally TPG, Internode and IInet subscribers would have been unable to reach my site, but Optus and Bigpond subscribers could. International ISP's seemed to be very hit-and-miss. I have no idea what went pop for my ISP, but it was intensely frustrating! Apologies to anyone who had mail problems with my site or couldn't access the web site.

It's taken a while but the cost for gigabit ethernet is finally down to a point that I considered justifiable. So I lashed out (sic) and bought a 5 port Dlink gigabit switch. This then connects to my 8 port 10/100Mbps switch/router and ultimately the Internet. The machines on the Gbit switch are simply my home server, Nat's desktop, and my Mac Mini. I've also run a patch cable for my Macbook Pro for the odd occasion I need better-than-wifi speeds. The wireless access point hangs off the 8 port 10/100 switch as it will never do better than 54Mbps, so there's no reason to waste a gigbit port on wifi! All in all it's been a relatively straight-forward transition except for Nat's desktop. Her machine would only sync at 100Mbps on the 5 metre CAT5e cable between her and the new switch. So I went out today and bought 6 metres of CAT6 from Dick Smith Electronics (AUD$10 all up) and crimped the ends myself. For a similar pre-made CAT6 cable, they were asking around double what I paid (thieves!).

The results have been what I expected. Loading photos and large files from the file server is now a LOT faster. I especially noticed the difference when browsing the file server in "thumbnail" mode; it was as fast as it would be if running locally. The Time Machine backups for my Mac Mini are now super fast to the file server too which is great as the system (the Mac Mini) bogs down a little while it does the backup. Basically, with the consumer-grade hard drives in my server, I am now limited by the speed of those drives and the CPU power in the clients far more than the network fabric. It's nice to know that as I develop this network any gains in the server speed will pay off for the clients on my LAN.