ajft

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 Polar S710 heart rate monitor looks pretty good, but while it supposedly exists, none of the shops have seen one, one of the bike shop staff confessed to me that he doesn't believe that any have been brought into the UK yet.

Just to top things off, it started to rain on me, back home at a brisk walk, just in time to avoid the downpour that it became.

Where?

Reading.

Last night I lay in bed reading until around three, so this morning I slept in until nearly eleven — so much for going away and doing anything today!

Rang Jo at noon, having completely forgotten that it was Friday night in Australia and she might be out. She was home and we could have talked for hours, both of us excited that I'll be coming home soon.

Later in the afternoon I headed into town along the Kennet, deciding to go and see a movie, hopefully a better one than the last time I tried! Swordfish was on; Hollywoodised computer hackers, action, car chases, etc. All good silly fun. There was a very slightly twisted plot, a little reminiscent of the Usual Suspects, but it was not explored in any great detail, explosions and chases being easier on the audience's minds.

Finally having a chance to catch up, Liz and I sat up half the night drinking wine, watching TV and talking. Talking about family and relations and us and Jo and me and how things have worked out. The wine and the TV had us in fits of laughter; an intentionally funny Billy Conolly special, followed by an episode of "The Equalizer" with acting so wooden that we were in hysterics.

Where?

Reading.

Woke to a cool gray day and light showers — the heatwave has broken, but obviously not with the semi-tropical thunderstorms the forecast had us believe.

Late in the morning I scurried into town in the drizzle to pick up a postcard for Tuesday (oops!) and then hopped on the train to Bath. I can't make sense of the ticket prices, they seem one of the eternal mysteries of this trip. Some seem quite reasonable, others ludicrously expensive. Yesterday was £8 return to Oxford, today is £20.50 return to Bath, and all the tickets have different names "Cheap Day Return", "Supersaver return"... whatever they all are. Not even the staff seem able to figure out which one I should buy in order to get to where I want to go for the cheapest price — maybe that's the idea.

Spent the afternoon having a more leisurely look around Bath than the last time I was here, cathedrals and old buildings, museums, shops and redevelopments. The optimistically placed deck chairs sitting by the river in the drizzle.

Where?

Reading, Bath.

I thought of packing up some clothes and heading up to Derbyshire to visit relatives, but it all seemed too much effort. Instead I decided to go to Oxford for the day. Caught the train there and spent an afternoon walking around and being a tourist.

Magnificent old buildings and shops. Stopped to recuperate with a beer in a lovely little pub called 'Old Tom' with its tiny beer garden overgrown with flower pots, petunias and fuschias. Saddly the barman said he might have to remove them due to insurance concerns of drunk patrons either falling over them, or damaging them!

The trip home was slow due to a typical British train problem. The express that I was on got stuck behind a "stopping-all-stations" local train, along the way the air-conditioning stopped working as well, so it was a hot, slow, tedious trip back to Reading. However, unlike my last train trip from Oxford to Reading, at least nothing ran into us!

Somewhere along the way I saw an add for an interesting bike ride. £250 for 8 days along the Nile! 10-17, or 17-24, February 2002. See www.mencap.org.uk for more details.

Where?

Reading.