ajft

  Total: 2512.5km
  Today: 49.61km

As we were leaving this morning we passed a familiar-looking cow at the side of the road, but thought nothing of it. Phil — driving out half an hour later — realised that it was the dairy cow that belonged to the farm and had escaped onto the road, so he stopped, caught it, and then managed to lead it several kilometres back to the gate. Judging by the way he looked at lunch time, he had the most energetic morning of us all!

The hilight of today's riding was the six kilometre descent from Gentle Annie, several hundred metres vertically, down from the rolling hills to the dead-flat coastal plain.

Gisborne was working itself up for the New Year's celebrations. Being a coastal town it's always popular as a holiday resort, and as the eastern-most city in the world, they are the first to see the sunrise of the New Year, so its become a bit of a ritual for some surfers to go there.

Where?

Glen Innis station , Gentle Annie , Gisborne 38° S 178° E

>

  Total: 2463.0km
  Today: 83.24km

We woke to grey skies and a howling wind — not very inviting weather for cycling. Breakfasted in Phil's room then the four of us packed the bus and drove the 30 or 40km up from the lake and down over the ridge to the end of the gravel road. We stopped at the spillway to look at the view, but the wind was really funnelling in across the lake so nobody wanted to stay and look around for long.

Started riding at Manapapa bridge around 10:30, a much earlier start than yesterday, and we made good time along the valley to Frasertown. The tailwind for the last 5km along the valley was great.

Morning tea in Frasertown consisted of chocolate bars from the only shop, then back on the road, up and down the valleys past sheep, cows and goats, with a few deer and pigs for variety. The lunch stop at Te Reinga falls was a nice spot, worth the detour down and climb back up. The falls had a permanent rainbow over them, just visible from the lookout and track. More a steep cascade than an actual waterfall, the vegetation around the lookout blocked most of the view.

After lunch there was about a 10km climb out to Tiniroto and beyond, then a great swooping descent, made a little more exciting by the gravel on the corners at 60km/hr! Both Jo and I have recovered from the plane trip, are feeling a little fitter, and are starting to have a good time.

The weather ended up quite hot, we were expecting more cold winds after yesterday, but I had to change out of my fleecy top at lunch time — one of the benefits of having all your clothes in a van, if it had been inside my panniers I might not have bothered unpacking! Glen Innis station B&B is in a beautiful spot, just up above the river across with fantastic views of the hills lining the valley. They have a huge vegetable garden and flower gardens. The house is surrounded by lavender and the lady running it is falling over herself to be friendly. She seems to believe that anyone from “the city has never seen a farm before and doesn't know which part of the cow the eggs come from. The invitations to come and see the chickens and watch the house-cow being milked were so overwhelming that we thought we had better keep her happy!

Dinner with the four who ran the place was roast home-grown lamb, and the conversation ranged through the farming and tourism part of their business, and covered a theme that we were to hear frequently, of more and more people leaving the land, with large companies buying up farms to bulldoze and plant conifer plantations. Presumably better than logging native forests, they all still believe that it leads to rapid erosion and wastage of the land, but massive profits to the overseas timber companies.

Where?

Waikaremoana , Frasertown , Te Reinga falls , Tiniroto 38° S 177° E , Glen Innis station

  Total: 2379.7km
  Today: 61.26km

We woke to a mostly clear sky. Sleeping in late and unpacking the bikes meant that we didn't get away from Paengaroa until about 10:30 for the drive down to Rotorua.

Parking the bus and trailer in Rotorua at lunch time on a Saturday wasn't easy, but Phil found a spot while Jo and I made our first visit to a New Zealand bank.

Then back on the road for the drive to Murapara, a quick look around the tourist information centre, and on to the riding.

Thick vegetation all around us, the roadsides were covered in plants that only grow in gardens in Australia. No birds or animals anywhere, just the odd dead possum. Derelict cars dumped at the side of the road, derelict cars being driven past. Most cars are full of Maoris, nearly everyone waved as they passed.

The town of Ruatahuna was shut. Supposedly our lunch stop, the motel/shop/petrol station was closed until further notice, so we set up the barbecue and had an early dinner on their lawn. Every dog in the town within earshot barked from the moment we arrived until we left.

Jo called it a day here, 47km of hilly dirt roads were enough. I rode on for another 10km, about two thirds of the way up Taupepe saddle, but by then it was getting dark and I was very tired, so I gratefully hopped in the bus when they caught me.

Amazingly, we had avoided the rain all day, and made it to Lake Waikaremoana in time for sunset, a cup of tea, a much-needed shower, and bed.

Where?

Paengaroa Rotorua Murapara Ruatahuna Waikaremoana

“Beef or Chicken? the hostess asked me on the plane...”

With apologies to Mick Thomas. The airline staff were handing out the meals, Jo looked at me, smirked and uttered the line, then, as I nearly doubled up with suppressed laughter, the large, walrus-moustached hostie repeated it.

A midnight landing at Auckland, two staff to process 400 passengers through imigration.

A call for Duke and Tritschler to go to the baggage desk — but it was only a book that someone else had left in the plane near our seats.

The customs staff weren't, then were, then weren't, interested in checking our bikes.

Outside the airport and we met Phil and Julianna, then began the arduous three hour drive to Te Puke. The full moon on the left was shining on enormous storm clouds, then clear sky above us, then another huge storm over to the right, complete with lightning and torrential rain. Not an auspicious start to the weather!

We hadn't even reached Auckland when three cars shot past — boys out on a Friday night. Travelling at least 120km/hr in the wet, the first tapped his brakes, the second slid a bit but recovered, the third slewed straight off into the wall, sparks and glass everywhere, then bounced diagonally back across the road in front of us, then off the side of the road to the left. Two minutes later, lights and sirens started up ahead of us as the police took off after the first two.

Nearly five am and we crawled into bed as the sky was just starting to get light. Off to sleep with the rain on the roof, roosters crowing outside the window, and no real idea of where we are!

Where?

Auckland, Paengaroa

Friday, nearly the end of the year, and so much seems to have happened. Lots of things that I won't be writing here, some I will.

Reading some more of Gerald Durrell's biography I was struck again by what a larger-than-life character he was, I'm glad I got to visit the zoo in Jersey, even if I did have misgivings about it at the time.

As the first stage of our trip to New Zealand I spent the morning packing the bikes in boxes—and foolishly forgot to measure the boxes, so my bike (the larger one) ended up in the smaller of the two boxes. Didn't realise until I'd nearly finished, no wonder Jo's was the easier of the two to pack!

The bags are packed, everything looks far too small with no panniers, no tent, we even left the airbeds at home once we re-read what can be supplied by Phil.

Melbourne's weather has finally fined up after the last few days of rain and wind, it is starting to feel like spring, rather than the middle of winter! I'm curious what the weather in New Zealand will be, neither of us is looking forward to a fortnight of cycling in the rain.

I've got my new toy to play with, I'm happy now. Canon Digital IXUS 300. It's a millimetre or two thicker than the APS camera, but the same size in the other dimensions. All I've got to do now is learn to use it properly!

[http://www.tvgohome.com/]

odd stuff

[http://www.steves-digicams.com/]

I think I'm going to get a digital camera to take on holiday.

[http://photo.net/]

A photo site

A pair of CDs from the market at Uni.

Stephen Cummings: Lovetown
Johnny Thunders & the Heartbreakers: L.A.M.F. Revisited.

Amazing, that last one was still in the original shrink wrapper from HMV!

[http://www.qni.com/~nyztyz/tenzo/tech/mod.htm]

Putting H4 globes in place of original 55/60W in a VFR

[http://www.electrexusa.com/honda.htm]

source of aftermarket voltage regulators.

[http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~edwinnew/reg-rect.htm]

possibly non-existant.

Aha! ^Q^J to insert a newline into the XEmacs minibuffer. Trivial, but it's been bugging me for a while.

Lest this journal turn solely into a day-by-day account of idiot motorists and their life-endangering activities, I'll try to add a few other bits 'n pieces as they occur to me.

An interesting selection of alternative news websites, accompanied by the quote: “And, of course, when I want to see the latest line of bullshit, I go to CNN or the NYT.”

[http://www.orlingrabbe.com/homepage.html]

[http://www.rense.com/]

[http://www.antiwar.com/]

[http://www.prudentbear.com/homepage.htm]

[http://www.emperors-clothes.com/]

Not a daily service, but well worth visiting regularly

So many car doors, so few motorists with brains.

There we were, riding up Swan street on the way home. Suddenly Jo yells out “lookout,” I screamed out “Door!” Yep, both passengers in the taxi (Vic. M-3561) had decided that sitting in the lane of stationary traffic was enough, so without indicating, pulling over to the side of the road, or obeying any other form of road laws, they'd just thrown open both left-hand doors and got out. Jo made it around them, I couldn't swerve far enough without hitting her wheel so I ran into the back of the calf of the rear passenger. Both passengers then started screaming at me to watch where I was FW#$%%%ing going and get off the F*#W$@#$%ing road. Taxi driver meanwhile had driven off, caring only that he'd made another fare in the minimum possible time.

A first apparently, a motorist in Chicago who deliberately ran down and killed a cyclist has been charged with murder. It'll set a precedent, and in one way I'm pleased with the verdict, but it sure is disturbing reading about the case ... especially knowing the number of times I've exchanged words with motorists after they either try to “scare me” by going a little close, or just don't look and don't care.

• [http://www.chicagocriticalmass.org/mcbride_main.html]

... and today's motorist of the moment award goes to the driver of the metallic green hatchback in Richmond. Why? I hear you ask. Well, I couldn't work out why he was having so much trouble making it around a right hand corner from a standing start, then as I went past I realised that he had a bowl of cereal in his lap, spoon in his right hand, and was driving with his left.

Something happened to summer! Yesterday was looking great, woke up today and it was gray and rainy from start to finish. Felt more like December in England than December in Australia. What to do on a day like that? Sit inside and read and fiddle with the PC, try to find out why, ever since it was “upgraded” by my employer, it won't run for more than a day or two without shutting itself off.

I did manage to get out of the house for an hour at lunch time, long enough to walk up the street in the rain, listening to the cars splash past. Poked through the second-hand CD shop and came away with two old Church disks that seemed to fit the mood of the day.

The Church: The Blurred Crusade
The Church: Gold Afternoon Fix

Something must have re-sparked my interest in Plan9, so I downloaded and installed it on the spare 4G partition on niflheim. Unfortunately I discovered that once it was installed it had somehow clobbered the boot record so WindowsXP now won't boot.

[http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/]

Plan9

[http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/]

Inferno

[http://mapage.noos.fr/~repo]

[http://einstein.ssz.com/hangar18/]

sigh discovered today that a person I know has just spent the last six weeks in hospital after being driven into by a drunk driver while out cycling. Apparently the driver simply fell asleep and ran into them. This didn't put me in the best of moods for a quick jaunt in from Clayton to East Melbourne to attend a product demonstration. Then along the way I met:

1. A motorist travelling slowly who started to veer into my lane as I passed; surprise, surprise, he had the Melways street directory open across the steering wheel and was reading it.
2. A motorist travelling slowly in the right-hand lane; sure enough, when I pulled over and passed her I saw she was deep in conversation on her hand-held phone.
3. The piece de resistance, a small truck travelling slowly in the middle lane and gradually creeping into the left; as I past him I noticed that the driver was on the phone, using a hands-free kit, but was holding his credit card in his right hand and appeared to be reading out the numbers to whoever he was talking to.

Can someone please shoot the lot of them!. Oh, that's right, I forgot. According to the police speed is the number one cause of “accidents,” it couldn't possibly be the total carelessness of the majority of the morons out there.

Paid the rent. Receipt Number N540115072711. I can't remember if anything else happened today. Something must have happened somewhere...

TODO: I neeed to automate some of my monday morning updates and instalations. I'd look at playing around a little more with Narval if it wasn't so appallingly slow and (so-far) unusable.

[www.Xemacs.org]

editor of choice.

[www.cygwin.com]

utilities to make Windows2000 bearable.

SNMP MIBs:

• www.somix.com/software/mibs
• www.inotech.com/mibs/foreview.html

With much groaning and moaning we dragged ourselves out of bed this morning, applied sufficient coffee to achieve basic humanity, then made our way to Spencer St station in order to catch the train. Steam locomotive R711 of the South Western Railway Society was there in all its hissing and shrieking glory, ready to take us to Echuca and back.

It was a very long day. Four hours in the train to get up to Echuca, four hours of paddle-steamer trip and touring Echuca, then four hours back home again. The four of us spent most of the train trips snoozing, nibbling on assorted picnics, and giggling at the array of people we were sharing the train with. Everything from ordinary families to extreme train-spotters.

Where?

Melbourne, Echuca

Last things first. Considering the early start tomorrow, going out to see an 11:00pm show might not be the smartest thing in the world, but knowing what a big fan Joey is, I'd booked tickets to see Mick Thomas in the Spiegeltent. We turned up around 10 and sat around with a drink, watching the queue grow longer and longer. Eventually we joined it, wondering, along with everyone else, why nobody could get inside. Finally, at about 11:10, a car pulled up and someone ran inside carrying part of a drum kit. Coincidence? Maybe, but the queue started moving immediately!

Mick remarked during the set that it did seem bizarre to be playing in a venue he's been in before, but with a view of Melbourne rather than Edinburgh out the window. With an appreciative audience he proposed taking the Corner Hotel or Cornish Arms and audience, and transporting them to Prague or Beijing.

[http://www.packinheath.com/]

[http://www.counterpunch.org/]

The motorists ... the motorists.... This morning there was the lady who unsuccessfully tried to peel and eat a banana with one hand while trying to drive her mercedes with the other. If she'd only looked before swerving into my lane I wouldn't have had to blast on the horn. Now she's probably going to tell everyone about the mean biker who appeared from nowhere, and how dangerous motorbikes are.

Then in the evening someone drove into someone else, but managed to completely block the Monash Freeway inbound so that everyone had to be diverted off at Toorak road and crawl bumper to bumper through Hawthorn and Richmond. If I'd had a book of tickets I could have made a fortune, since every second motorist stuck in the traffic was on the phone, frantically calling: “Hi honey, I'm stuck in traffic and illegally using my phone, don't be mad when I get home late with a $165 fine.”

Laugh of the Morning: There I was, sitting at a set of traffic lights waiting my turn and watching the traffic go by. A non-descript, two-tonne truck caught my eye, company name COPE and slogan Fragile Cargo Specialists emblazoned on its side. As it rounds the corner BANG up the kerb, then BANG back down again. I wonder what fragile cargo it was carrying...

I've scored a win with Telstra. After battling last week through their voice mail system and a myriad of menus in an attempt to change my address details, only to be told that it must be done in writing, I duly sent off the change of address form. Today I rang up to see if I could get a statement for the last financial year and the operator changed my address details while I was on the phone!

Looks like Joey and I can both get the time off in January, so I've booked our bike ride with http://www.scenicroutes.co.nz/.

The Monash email system has been unwell, so half the staff are sitting around with a “we can't do anything without email” expression on their faces.

In keeping with the weekend's views of flora and fauna in the bush, an interesting article in New Scientist on John Warmsley, a rather radical conservationist who is actually doing something.

[http://www.warrawong.com/]

Warrawong Earth Sanctuary.

Joey's birthday seemed a great success.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the cold wind and torrential rain early in the day, we spent a wonderful five hours at the Healesville Sanctuary. Dodging a few brief showers was infinitely preferrable to dodging the hordes of tourists and screaming kids that we could have met.

One of the most interesting events was during the daily raptor display. The first keeper wasn't sure whether they'd be able to get through the three birds normally displayed, since the wind was gusting strongly and they were concerned that they might “lose someone” should they decide to fly off a few kilometres downwind. Firstly a hawk, then a Barking Owl were brought out. The highlight was the male Peregrine Falcon. As soon as he flew up above the trees, a wild pair appeared and started attempting to drive him from their territory. The keeper was amazed, he claimed he'd never seen a wild pair nearby, and was quite concerned that the Sanctuary's bird would be injured. Eventually the wild pair departed and the Sanctuary's bird reappeared from where he'd hidden in the branches.

I was wishing I had a decent digital camera, or even an SLR to take some photos of the birds, as it is, there should be a few good pictures on the current roll in my camera.

Where?

Healesville

Stupid, stupid me. It was wet and cold all day yesterday, you'ld have thought I'd take a hint. No, foolishly I hopped on the bike this morning and didn't put on my wet-weather gear. Ten minutes later I was soaking wet, freezing cold, and thinking about going home to change!

MLP

[http://www.scenicroutes.co.nz/]

Phil advertised a two week ride in NZ in late December, early January. Looks interesting, I've always wanted to ride in NZ and Joey seems keen, especially since she's likely to be out of work at the time.

Another episode in the saga of attempting to buy an outdoor table. I'm starting to think that businesses just don't want our business.

Summoning up all of our courage, Jo and I drove off on a wet Sunday afternoon to do what every couple does—go furniture shopping. We tried another Barbecues Galore store, but they didn't have the table we saw yesterday, in fact they didn't have any small tables. We guessed that because we were out in the 'burbs now, and its un-Australian to live anywhere other than in a big box of a house with 1/2 an acre of concrete and lawn, only big pieces of furniture for big aussies can be sold.

Then we tried Ikea, now its probably five years since I last stepped through their doors and now I know why. A carefully designed coralling system so that the customer can't go to the section they want, but must be herded sheep-like through the entire store. I found the whole thing insulting.

qLast on the list was Freedom Furniture, a few tables visible, but nothing small. Then as we were leaving Jo spotted one buried under a pile of other stock. We tried valiantly to get the staff to show us one, they weren't interested. Eventually they shifted half the stock off the table, but as I pointed out to them:

If I can't see it, I'm not going to buy it.

note to shop: minimal wage == minimal interest

MLP

[http://www.havi.org/]

Stupid me, I thought it would be easy to buy a small table for our balcony. Just walk around a few shops, check out a few prices, buy one and go home....

Lots of ornate cast iron tables with curlicues and tile or glass tops.... Lots of huge tables that wouldn't fit on the balcony.... Finally a suitable table in a Barbecues Galore store. Now the fun begins.

We've picked the one piece of stock with no price-tag. Mr Minimal-Wage Saturday Casual Staff doesn't know the price. Nobody else in the store knows the price. He rings another store and nobody there seems to know the price. He gets off the phone and quotes us a price. Unfortunately this seems to be a wild guess, he doesn't look comfortable with it, and since its more than a larger table from the same manufacturer in the same store, we treat his guess with the disdain it deserves and leave.

Election day... Bah! After the quality of the electoral campaigning over the last few weeks, I don't think any of the politicians are capable of running a school fete, let alone a country.

MLP

[http://www.vic.greens.org.au/]

Victoria state greens party

[http://www.greens.org.au/]

The national Greens party

[http://www.democrats.org.au/]

Australian Democrats.

[http://www.australianbicyclelobby.com/]

not only one of the longest domain names I've seen, but a coalition of cycle groups raising political issues. Noticably absent is Bicycle Victoria.

[http://www.ross-anderson.com/]

Ross Anderson, author of Security Engineering. Higly recommended reading.

Strange, I can't find anything important happening on the date 9/11, I wonder what all the Americans are on about?

MLP

[http://blog-java.sourceforge.net/]

Java servlet-based blog. Came from the enormous list of blog resources at http://www.larkfarm.com/wlm/roll_your_own.htm.

Well, I didn't want to cycle to work today, but the mountain bike and the motor bike conspired against me and so I had to. The Honda started, ran for thirty seconds, then died when I turned the headlight on, trying to restart it the battery was too flat to turn it over. I really must try and fix that dying battery and voltage regulator.

Still raining, still grey, still miserable. Welcome to Melbourne Spring-time.

[http://www.groundeffect.co.nz/] — ordered some new bike nicks for me and a winter jersey for Joey. We've both been meaning to do this for weeks. Pity that they won't turn up in time for this weekend's Deadly Treadly Tour.

I think I've got Niflheim re-installed and operating under OpenBSD now.

Every day the “shared path” that I ride along brings new and interesting challenges. Somedays its the dogs, other days the ankle deep mud, today, an aggressive pedestrian.

Walking towards me on the wrong side of the path, eyes on his feet, shirt and suit jacket unbuttoned, tie half-undone, two large armfulls of parcels, he nearly walked into me as I stopped on the bridge. He glared at me and demanded that I ride around him. I politely pointed out the law required that he walk on the left. He threw his belongings on the ground and screamed that he'd had a bad day and I could F####ing well ride around him. I sat there. He threatened to move me if I wouldn't go around him, so I carefully rode around him leaving as large a gap as I could. As I was leaving there was another torrent of abuse about my attitude etc. Hopefully he was in a better mood before he next got into a car or met his wife or children at home.

TODO: Since there's a date-of-birth record in my copy of bbdb, wouldn't it be nice if Xemacs' calendar could extract these and give you warning of upcoming events. Oh bugger, it's in the bbdb TODO list already!

It rained heavily again last night, so this morning the cycle track was covered in mud and crap and Gardiners Creek was flowing strongly. In the last few days I've seen so many birds that I thought I'd keep a list of them somewhere.

Sneaky. Not sure when this happened, but TRAMP stopped working sometime recently. A bit of digging and I've found that the format of its filenames has changed from /r:host:/path/file to /[host]/path/file.

I've ordered Joey's birthday present—finally—but I'm not writing down what it is in case she reads here. :-)

Why do organisations make it so hard to change my address?

The Winesociety: I couldn't login to their website for some reason. After calling them, it turns out that my email address had been chopped off at 28 characters. That was updated, then when I successfully logged in I found that I must provide them with my date of birth as proof that I'm over 18. The fact that they have already given me a membership seems to be irrelevant!

St George Bank: Everyone hates banks by definition. After spending 15 minutes on hold last night I gave up in disgust and called again this morning. The address change I put through a month ago, together with the phone-access number, appears to have vanished. This morning I managed to get my address changed (again). I guess I just wait another month to see whether it worked this time.

[http://www.iriver.com/english/]

an iRiver MP3 player?

[http://www.steves-digicams.com/]

or a digital camera?

[http://www.slowfood.com/]

Mentioned on RRR's food show, about local groups resisting the globalisation of foods and food sources. eg Nestlé, McDonalds

Grabbed a whole pile of references to do with Java and Jini after I finally got around to reading some more of Core Jini.

Another day riding to work, another day watching the aftermath of Melbourne's motorists driving into each other.

MLP

[http://www.netbeans.org/]

NetBeans — Java IDE

[http://www.adm.monash.edu.au/magpie/archives/monpix]

MonPix — Monash online pictures archive. Not easy to search, or at least, I can't find things by the search terms I choose, but it does have some interesting material accumulated at the University.

A spot of finger trouble and I've accidently nuked the debian linux installation on niflheim. Maybe its time to consider one of the BSDs. [FreeBSD], [OpenBSD] or [NetBSD].

A bit of site news, updated to a more reasonable style sheet that doesn't seem to waste so much space, but still looks good. I've finally got around to getting PHP4 and Apache working under Windows so I can test as well as author pages.

Part or Service	price
Race prep clean and lube.	$AU84.95
Ritchey Fuzzy Logic headset	$AU95.95
Shimano gear cable	$AU5.75
Shimano gear cable	$AU5.75
Brake cable	$AU5.00
DT Spoke	$AU1.00
Shimano HG chain	$AU67.15
Total	$AU265.55

the list of places that I've had excellent meals at.

[http://www.gillmusic.com/]

Andy Gill Music. I came across this website while searching for a Gang of Four's Love Like Anthrax. Its been in the back of my mind this last week, a joke in poor taste.

[http://www.alertbox.com/]

Current Issues in Web Usability.

Last night was spent at a Billy Bragg concert. I've always liked his music, but never been a huge fan, some of his political rants seem too simplistic, too one-eyed. I was surprised though, in concert he was quite humerous, played really well despite the acoustics of the Melbourne Town Hall, and delivered three encores to a very appreciative audience.

I just found a quote that I think sums up my thoughts on a huge proportion of the email that I receive, and regrettably, on some of the email that I send:

Look at the culture of email. It's alright to slap people around via email; it's alright to send careless, half-decipherable messages for no good reason; it's alright to contribute wholesale and without any thoughtful hesitation to the message overload of your fellows; it's alright to fire off responses without having read the message you are responding to. Use email as vacuously and irresponsibly as you wish...

My latest photos have returned from Kodak, unlike the last lot, they are of a decent quality and the scans are bearable. Obvious conclusion, Kodak knows how to develop and scan films, one-hour photo processing shops do not!

Another useful Novell TID:

10053872

NW5 GUI using XWindows

[http://www.pandromeda.com/]

MojoWorld — artificial world. Just another bit of MLP from slashdot.

Should I have another rant about motorists yabbering on their mobile phones and not watching where they're driving? Probably not, its all getting a bit depressing. I was amazed at the guy who drove alongside me for 15km yesterday, sitting in the right-hand lane, holding the phone to his ear and talking the entire way!

Maybe I could rant about the constant chatter and background noise in our open plan office, but that wouldn't get me anywhere either.

10024591

What is a SLP DA (Directory Agent) and Scope?

10058095

The Relationship Between SLP DA Objects and Settings

10025313

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) about SLP

10027163

Configuring SLP for a NetWare Server

10014466

Configuring SLP for a NetWare Client

10014868

SLP Console and SET Commands

More on Melbourne's drivers... Or should that be “Moron; Melbourne's Drivers. There just seems to be something about the mentality of smokers that can't conceive of the idea that dumping a lit cigarette out the window of a moving car is firstly littering, and secondly, bloody dangerous to the motorcyclist behind who cops a facefull of it. Congratulations to the lady driving RAV4 Vic. rego QPF-206, you get the idiot of the day award. On second thoughts, congratulations to the Victorian EPA for having a downloadable litter report form.

NT security, and a good reason to not give people the ability to boot your locked down workstations from a floppy disk. An article, and the tool — linNT.zip — referenced to reset Administrator passwords after booting from Linux.

I've dropped off my latest film to be developed. I think I've learnt my lesson after the last fiasco, so I've sent this one off to Kodak.

[http://www.counterpane.com/]

someone reminded me of this today. I urge everyone to read Bruce Schneier's special issue regarding the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Bacon and Eggs for breakfast, good company. Now if only my parents had good coffee, it would be perfect!

Spent the morning in Bungendore, visiting one of my favourite shops/galleries, the Bungendore Wood Works Gallery. If only we had the money to buy the pieces that we like... and the mansion to display them!

A quick visit to a winery that I've been meaning to go to for years, Lark Hill didn't have any larks in evidence. If there were any, they'd been blown into the ocean by the wind over the vines. Its only 2km from my parents' house, so after eight years it was about time to visit and sample its wares!

Then donning our disguises, Joey and I drove around Canberrra for the afternoon pretending to be tourists. There was an icy cold wind howling through the trees, so sitting in the car in the sunny spots was quite enjoyable. Felt bizarre to be visiting places I hadn't seen for years, we drove up the street where I lived from 1969 to 1983 to look at the house, so many things the same, but also some changes. The huge old gum tree was cut down, the garden turned from a semi-jungle to a flat english-style lawn.

From the top of Black Mountain we leant into the wind and laughed at the fiction coming from the security staff. According to the security staff there is an incredible danger of dishes and aerials dropping like autumn leaves from the tower, while there seems to be no problem with the general public walking past equally high buildings in the center of any city. Here is my somewhat cynical version: Prior to building the Telecom Tower, the trees around the carpark were trimmed down, and dotted around the place were sundial thingies pointing to places of interest, the view from the top was excellent and many tourists and locals drove up there to look around. Once the tower was opened you could wander around its base for free, roughly two stories off the ground, or pay an entry fee to go up to the observation deck to see the sites. Simultanously, the trees were allowed to grow up and block the view from ground level. A little while later the base was cordoned off, citing “safey reasons”. The more cynical might wonder how many tourists were making use of the free view. Now there is a sign stating that the entire concourse is a hard-hat area (which must be a pain for the staff there), all except for the entrance way where paying tourists come in!

Quiet day evaluation CA's eTrust anti-virus software. Unfortunately it seems to all rely on a vast infrastructure of Microsoft Windows networking, manual entry of usercodes, and manual duplication of the organizational structure already present in the NDS.

It had to happen eventually... I was halfway home, flying along the Gardiners Creek bike path and I met Marko coming the other way. Luckily we were both on the left hand side, unlike some of the riders I meet each day — Marko's a remarkably solid lad, I'd hate to hit him head-on at the speed we were both going.

Went to see a movie last night, The Bank. Lots of laughs throughout and it certainly touched a common feeling of anti-bank sentiment in the Australian public. Famous quote “I just don't like banks.”

[http://www.crikey.com.au/]

A bit of activism, some interesting reads, the odd rant.

Distributed Computing: book on the Grid by Kesselman and Ian Foster.

I thought I'd put this lot in a couple of days ago when something about the NSA Secure Linux popped up on slashdot. Random OS links:

[http://www.nsa.gov/selinux]

SeLinux — NSA's Security Enhanced Linux

[http://www.cs.utah.edu/flux/fluke/html/flask.html]

Flask — Flux Advanced Security Kernel

[http://www.cs.utah.edu/flux/oskit]

OSKit — a framework and a set of 34 component libraries oriented to operating systems

[http://www.cs.utah.edu/flux]

Flux — The Flux Research Group works in software systems

[http://www.ucch.org/peds-www/is/cscott.html]

Cory L. Scott — Microsoft NT security information.

[http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/winlog/]

Windows NT Event Logging — the Oreilly book. Must add it to the list of books to get.

[http://www.intersectalliance.com/projects/WinNTConfig/index.html]

WindowNT Config — step-by-step approach to locking down Microsoft operating systems.

[http://www.intersectalliance.com/projects/Win2kConfig/]

Windows2000 Config — step-by-step approach to locking down Microsoft operating systems.

I ache all over! As Marko said during part two of the War Against the Mattress, if we did this a couple more times we'd get really fit. As it is, two days of furniture and box moving, then unpacking and repacking bookcases, has left me feeling several hundred years old.

I would add a reference to the café where we had an excellent steak dinner last night, but for some reason I can't even find them in the Telstra white pages, or in citysearch. Maybe I've imagined the whole thing? Does Saratoga really exist? Ah, maybe if I'd remembered that it was called Saragossa I'd have had more luck...

MLP

A couple of pages about the Daleks:

[http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/grahamwalters/dalek_fr.htm]

Dalek Extermination Page

[http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~mimrie/dalek/daleka.htm]

Dalek Resource WebHome

A bit like Christmas... now that the flat is full of boxes of things, we've had to spend the entire day unpacking them, sorting the contents out, then finding places to put it all!

Hopefull the final campaign in the War Against the Mattress has now taken place, with one bed taken apart and moved into the spare room, and the other bed being assembled and the evil mattress placed into its final resting place.

A day of lifting and lugging. With the aid of a few close friends Jo's remaining boxes of belongings and pieces of furniture were stuffed into a car and a van and transported back to the flat.

The most exciting part of this was the great War Against the Mattress, a battle in at least three parts. As per some requirement known only to the mattress-makers guild of Australia, there were no handles on the mattress, so Marko and I maneuvered the recalcitrant beast out of its upstairs lair and convinced it to wobble earthwards without getting caught on any of the picture hooks in the stairway. The other two then joined in to poke and prod it into the back of Leslie's van, where it expanded to fill all available space.

Back at Richmond it took the combined efforts of three and many powerful swearwords to extricate it from the van, then before it had time to realise what we were doing, Marko and I chased it up the stairs and into the bedroom where it stood, looming ominously over the other bed.

A much needed beer was then consumed!

A purely reactive day. More anti-virus work to be done, more datafile updates to be downloaded and configured. The sooner we can dump this 'orrible product the better.

Cycled to work and guess what, another driver tried to flatten me where the cycle path crosses Malvern road. I'm getting sick of this sequence. Stop, wait, light goes orange, wait, light goes red, wait, cycle path light goes green, start to ride across intersection, stop and scream abuse as maroon Commodore NCI-033 drives straight through the red without slowing down.

More time spent analysing virus-detection logs, attempting to automate the production of reports from them.

The Networks group are commisioning Statscout to monitor all our devices via SNMP, as a result I can take some of the traffic monitoring out of the ITS MRTG graphs.

More predictable Melbourne drivers. Today it was raining in the morning, therefore someone had driven into someone else on the Monash freeway, therefore traffic was banked up from Clayton back to Toorak.

A day of electronic bill paying... and a little gentle stirring of large organizations. After trying to pay my Citipower account via the online B-Pay system and being told that the company didn't allow credit card payments, I can then call a toll free number and pay with my credit card.

I've been asked to analyse our logs to provide a summary of the number of viruses (virii?) detected on various platforms. Major hassle is that procmail hasn't been running on silas for many months, so the email logging from Vet was turned off in May. I turned it back on for version 10.3.7.0 on September 10.

[Millenium]

Microsoft Research's Goals for future operating systems. Interesting thoughts, too bad that what comes out of the product department seems to be somewhat diluted by the marketing department.

Today we have another shining example of Melbourne's finest drivers. Silver Holden Commodore, (Vic. QKU-199), at first I wondered what he was doing, attempting to drag me off from the lights on Dandenong Rd. Then I realised as he swerved in at me: the left-turn only lane didn't apply to him, and it was more important for him to ram the motorbike out of the way so he could go straight ahead and on down Dandenong Rd at 110km/hr in the 80km/hr zone.

More success in my never-ending battle with PSGML, SGML and Xemacs. I've finally discovered how to set sgml-parent-document in order to correctly edit SGML fragments from within Xemacs.

Mayhem in the office all day, the combination of air-conditioning installation, broken security alarms, and just general Friday-ness resulted in more than usual levels of interruption.

[http://memepool.com/]

Interesting collection of information.

Interesting postcard arrived in the mail today from Joey. The New York city skyline... that'll need adjusting on the next batch of cards.

[3D Flight over Switzerland] Using an ActiveX plugin, so it only works under Windows IE at the moment.

Finally got to see Moulin Rouge this evening, lots of sound and light and colour, and I loved the songs made of other song fragments. An audience of seven, three couples and me, and one of the couples talked incessantly the whole way through!

Work

We're running into problems with the MRTG monitoring of the NetWare servers. Every five minutes; 136 statistics, 104 of which involve invoking a perl interpreter means we're hitting process limits and time-outs on the server. I've upgraded to MRTG 2.9.17, but it looks like it'll need a re-work to use rrdtool.

Two successes. A good day. They're not even in the same league though.

First, Joey called from Vermont and we spent half an hour on the phone. Despite all, she's having a great time, saw some whales near Cape Cod and is now in the forests, where she's seen a skunk and is now on the lookout for mooses.

Second, with a little fiddling and help from http://my.gnus.org, I've got both IMAP and HTTP traffic out of wyvern to be tunneled via SSL.

Too tired to go out four nights in a row, so the Cruel Sea will have to wait for their next visit to town.

Sat down to try and get my home PC to use Linux kernel 2.4 and was halfway through fiddling about when the power supply just upped and died. I guess that means I won't be getting that going anytime soon.

MLP

http://www.garmin.com/

The eTrek was mentioned as being a useful GPS to own.

Nearly impossible to get anything done this morning. The open plan area is getting more and more noisy.

Musical MLP

[http://www.davidbridie.com.au/]

David Bridie

[http://www.thedavegraneyshow.com/]

The Dave Graney Show

[http://www.hughcornwall.com/]

Hugh Cornwell, ex Strangler

[http://www.kraftwerk.com/]

Kraftwerk

A miracle! The pothole on Forster Rd near the Nott has been filled in. That pothole has been a feature of my trip to Monash for the last five years, I can remember being driven through it on my way to a job interview here in April 1996!

.

I wonder how many more ETLAs I can come up with this week for titles of the day's entry?

http://www.snmplink.org/

http://www.winsnmp.org/

http://www.wtcs.org/snmp4tpc/

Ugly colour scheme, but lots of information on SNMP for the Public Community. Predominantely Windows and NetWare.

Decided to log all the odds and sods regarding moving into the new flat.

Work

Another stunnel problem with the laptop. After booting it up in a standalone configuration and then plugging it in, I had to issue a net stop stunnel, net start stunnel in order to make it connect.

NAI Antivirus mirror, two problems;

• It hasn't been updated since it was first established.
• Monash's FTP server demands an email address for anonymous ftp login.

TODO

TODO: Get NAI datafiles mirror working. Update Virex documents

.

Still digging around trying to find out how to author documents in Docbook format, then export them as HTML with a common look and feel. So far the DSSSL and XSL stuff looks to have a steep learning curve!

SGML for NT

A brief tutorial how to set up a free SGML editing and publishing system for Windows NT.

The Debian SGML/XML Howto

http://www.docbook.org/

The main repository of Docbook material

TODO

TODO: Add instrumentation to the Registrator(s) so it can be monitored by MRTG. Count outstanding transactions and make it available via SNMP?

More MRTG mods, after queries from the Faculty of Law, added the network traffic from ITS-MENZ3 to the things that are monitored.

[http://www.cryptoapps.com/]

More interesting stuff, predominately Cryptographic Appliances as the name implies.

A series of articles from IBM's developerworks on redesgning the Gentoo web site using XML and XSLT. In four parts [1] [2] [3] and [4].

Vet updates to South Africa are working again, now that I've created the $HOME/.ssh/authorized_keys2 files for the cruxnds account.

Stunnel: Just had stunnel crash and sit there, I had to manually issue a “net stop stunnel then “net tart stunnel to get it going again

The experimental stunnel to the proxies takes a further step, we now have it running on one of the real proxy machines. CJW to ask the security group to test.

Another afternoon with me holding the hotline phone, another day where nobody calls it, preferring to pick random names and numbers out of the air.

[http://www.mrtg.org/]

MRTG, one of my favourite pieces of software

Updated the main server status page and MFS07 details that had changed.

Ross the plumber called this morning. I called him back and went through the following conversation:

I was there six months ago wasn't I?

No, it was actually April last year.

Aren't you on the ground floor on the corner near the garage?

No, I'm on the first floor.

I'll have to arrange a time to come and take a look at the place.

A plumber came and looked at the place and took a report back about a fortnight ago.

I'll refer it back to the Agent. Goodbye.

Citipower will connect the electricity on Friday ($25 fee vs $189 for the weekend). Their records show that it is already connected, so it will just be a matter of changing it over.

Telstra will move the phone across at 9am on Saturday morning. The only problem could be if the line at the MDF in the garage has been reused. They are assuming it is free and so everything will be simple. If the line has been reused, it will require manual intervention and at least a week delay.

Tramp, Tramp, Tramp...

Another work day, another vet update (v1436). Each time there's one of these it reminds me to make more time for the NAI replacement...

More success on a secure front. On Win2k, TRAMP is now successfully working under Xemacs with cygwin scp.

• The Tramp makefile wouldn't work, so manually did a byte-compile of all the lisp files manually.
• Cygwin is OpenSSH v2, so it uses v2 keys. Needed to created a $HOME/.ssh/authorised_keys2 on silas. This explains why Teraterm was working with the public key, but Cygwin wouldn't. Teraterm is v1 only.

Visited the local photo developer who sent my films off to be badly scanned and expressed my dissatisfaction. Unfortunately with the language gap between us we didn't really get anywhere, so I left with $30 which he swore meant he was operating at a loss (despite charging me $60 initially), and with no CD. I guess in future I'll stick to Kodak's developing and scanning.

I think I've got the docs pages to use a two column style that nicely mimics the three column one of the blog. It looks fine in Mozilla, IE6 beta is problematic, the style sheet I've based it on has an ugly hack to get around bugs in IE5.5, maybe they've been fixed in 6...

Using srvany.exe I've got stunnel.exe running as a service on Win2k.

Surprise surprise — 16:58 and the real-estate agent calls up. She wants to send a potential tenant over tomorrow. Stupidly, I relent when the carrot is offered — a reduction in rent if the new tenant moves in after I move out.

Carried my camera around with me all weekend since I'm trying to finish the roll of film, if it wasn't so expensive to develop APS I'd probably just get the half roll done.

While I was trying to take a photo this morning of a king parrot that came to eat on the window sill I found that the battery is flat. They don't seem to last long, and at $AU19 a time, certainly add to the costs of the pictures. I desperately had to laugh when I found that even the batteries have a URL on their case. Step right up to http://www.energizer-e2.com/ to find out all about them!

Jo and I spent the afternoon trudging through the mud in the Otways. A brief attempt to visit Cora Lyn Cascades was aborted when we discovered that the creek was well over the track, and there was a metre of debris choking the valley from storms earlier in the winter. The cascades look far more impressive now than during the summer when most people see them, with only a trickle of water over the rocks. Erskine falls was similar, not quite a torrent, but a definite waterfall.

After much scratching of head and pulling of hair, I think I've got blogmax mostly working using a 3 column style sheet. Ugliness still abounds, but with changes to the elisp code, the templates, and the stylesheets, I think I'm getting there.

To avoid some of the problems with the current web proxy configuration there's a proposal to tunnel the HTTP traffic from client machines to the proxy servers. Stunnel clients are available for most platforms. On the Windoze side the tasks seem to be:

• Turn off all the log output.
• Run the stunnel as a service.

  [http://www.stunnel.org/]

  [http://www.openssl.org/]

  Freely available versions of the Secure Sockets Layer.

A simple matter really, just notify the Real Estate agent that I'll be moving out in 28 days...

• Call agent, the phone is engaged.
• Half an hour later, call agent, leave voice mail message
• an hour later, get a call from a different agent “didn't you remember that Kirsty is no longer your agent?” (Oops, obviously I didn't). Get the fax number to send in the notification.
• Send the fax, it fails, either I wrote down the wrong number or Colleen gave me it wrong.
• Look up Biggin and Scott's webpage to find the correct fax number. It isn't listed, but they do give the office phone number.
• Call the office, wrong number, seems that the website has incorrect info on it. “We get a lot of calls for them, goodbye!”
• Look up Biggin and Scott in the whitepages, call their number, get the fax number, which is one digit different from what I had. When I tell them that their website is wrong I get, “Oh yes, we know about that.”
• Yay, success, after two hours, four phone calls and two fax transmissions, I think I've let them know!

Well well well... A quick email exchange with the author of the package and it seems that I've found a bug that causes blogmax to fail in Windoze Xemacs 21.4. A new version has been provided and it now seems to work. Now its just up to me to see whether I can make it work for me.

I'm not sure what the coefficient of friction between hail-stones, a wet road, and worn motorbike tyres is, but I think I came very close to finding out on the way to work this morning. Terrible weather, made me want to go back home and curl up in bed.

Later on, yay, real-estate agents, one of my favourite life-forms. In typical pushy real-estate agent fashion, the 1st of September is barely acceptable, we are expected to be able to terminate our current lease on zero notice, pay a month's rent as non-refundable deposit before tomorrow lunch time, and to sign the lease in the agent's office, at their convenience.

Of course we don't have much choice, so we accept.

[http://dotgnu.org/]

The DotGNU Project: DotGNU will be a complete replacement for the .NET strategy - it will not be a Free Software implementation of .NET.

[http://glish.com/]

Some very stylish material, including a lot on CSS and styles.

I checked out the photos that I picked up yesterday with a view to putting them here on the site. Well, there's some good news and some bad news.... Good news is that most of them scanned ok; bad news is that instead of one roll of 25 and three rolls of 40 prints I've got one roll of 25, two copies of 39 of one roll, all 40 of the next, and only 36 of the last roll. They only printed three of the four index pages for the CD cover too. Congratulations to Malvern Photographics, 90 Glenferrie Rd. Malvern. (03).9509.0199, I wouldn't have thought it too difficult to scan each roll, once, completely.

Jo telephoned to query how long it is likely to take to process our application and we got told the following:

• The landlord wasn't expecting applications so soon as he didn't expect the premises to be repainted so quickly.
• Since we've asked to move in on the 8th of September, which is "a fair delay", the application must be referred to the landlord.
• The landlord is interstate and the application can't be processed until he returns.

Now to me it looks like some of them are mutually exclusive, but I'm no real-estate agent, so I guess we have to wait. Surely if they weren't expecting the premises to be ready until September, the fact that we want to move in then should be acceptable?

Brrrr! Seven degrees and it feels like its going to snow.

Work work work...

Our NDS is growing and slowing, we're using new features on top of old hardware, more features on top of old software.

The Workstation Objects keep a history of users who login to them, in a student environment this grows and grows.

Mr JRB's SETNAME is going into the weekly cleanup, with a:

SETNAME * /o=Workstation /a=WM:User_History /d /x

Now this could be a bizarre house moving experience, potentially the world's shortest. Joey and I went to look at flat number two, next door, and decided that it looks pretty good. Just like number one — only twice as big — and not twice as expensive!

Norky bike was ready for collection from the shop, Freedom Machine, revitalised after its sojourn in foreign places.

UK and France: Six weeks riding around the UK and France.

In possibly the easiest house-finding experience of the century, Jo came home early to see a "to let" sign hanging on the balcony of the flat next door to mine! Not expecting it to be big enough she rang the agents and found out that it has two bedrooms, and we can inspect it tomorrow at 9am.

Five o'clock in the evening, just about to leave and there's a phone call; ITS-CAUL1 has stopped responding on one of its interfaces and the switch is reporting more errors on that port than for most other ports at the Uni. A little digging by myself and Biggles and mysteriously it appears that the switch has been changed from 100M full duplex to autoconfigure, which never does.

Spent the day at a Novell OneNet presentation. A bit about NetWare 6, a bit about all its components and a fascinating bit about network security and protocol analysis.

Oh no! Back at work at last.

Several thousand emails to sort through, fourteen voicemail messages.

Please enter your security code. Bip Bip Bip Bip. You have fourteen new messages, press one for new message. Bip That message has been stored for too long and been deleted, you have thirteen new messages, press one for new message. Bip That message has been stored for too long and been deleted, you have twelve new messages, press one for new message... Bip You have no new messages.

...I wonder what's happened in the world of computers, networks and Monash in the past two months....

End of my trip, nothing much to do but wander around the shops half-heartedly thinking about duty free toys to use up the last of the spending money. MD and MP3 players here and there, but none caught my eye as being just right. The P