ajft

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.

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.

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.

[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!

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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

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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?