ajft

Checking on drivers from http://support.asus.com/

BIOS

203 453.17kB

Audio

V6.0.1.5334

LAN

V6.186.1103.2006

Modem

M:V1.8_D:V6.11.13.1

TouchPad

V9.1.5.0 11.32M

Wireless

V10.6.0.46 3.61M

Video

V8.33 CCC 113.8M

What on earth is there in a video driver that makes it 113M in size!

Installed drivers

Video

ATI Mobility Radeon X2300

  8.33-061220-040818
  2D — 7.01.01.569
  3D — 7.14.10.0464

After a serious hour or two's use of the newish (now two months old) laptop, I've decided that some of the bugs are too buggy and need sorting.

• ASUS auto-updater shows a blank window with blank pop-up items
• ASUS single-sign-on is appalling slow, and more of a hindrance than a help.
• Norton Security Centre just appears to suck in general

The last one is pretty much a given, I think that's the general feeling everywhere regarding that product, but I thought I'd let the three month free licence run its course and get some experience using the product — the three months can't end soon enough.

The first two seem bizarre, you would think that in a laptop where the vendor ships the vendor's programs on a machine where the vendor installs everything that it would work... stupid of me to expect them to ship software that actually did anything!

The ASUS support forums seem pretty hopeless, no presence from ASUS, just a bunch of postings from people with problems and no solutions. Not to mention a user interface which doesn't seem to distinguish between read and unread messages, and a really annoying tendency to open every single link in another window.

On my second attempt I managed to lodge a request about the laptop, no idea if they'll respond since I can't give them the serial number because I'm at work and the laptop isn't. The support request form doesn't seem to work in Firefox so I had to go find a Windows machine with IE and retype the damn thing. At least they give me a response code to follow up on:

Case Code :WTM200705311451226266

Our system has received your mail enquiry. ASUS Technical Support Engineers will be responsible in replying your mail within 48 hours on Mon~Fri (except public holiday). If you have not heard any response from ASUS TSE, please check for mail reply status from the link below. Thanks very much.

http://vip.asus.com/eservice/techmailstatus.aspx?ID=WTM200705311451226266

The second of the two houses built on the block next door is full now, I'm not sure how many people have moved in but they had all their friends helping unpack the truck — the only way to move house, the more friends the better!

That makes two houses with three car spaces that now contain somewhere between six and eight people and who knows how many cars... I guess parking in the street could get even more shambolic than usual if they start parking out the front where customers of the singing school park illegally.

More rubbish though; just like when the people in the other house moved in, they've bundled up all their house-moving rubbish and dumped it out on the footpath — its in a bin — but they've picked the council green-waste bin, and they've put it out four days early. Seems to be a common problem; “chuck it out on the street, not my problem any more.”

I don't know if it is a result of the drought, general changes in the bird population, or me just being more aware of what lives where in Melbourne now that I've lived here for ten years!

For the last few weeks, I leave work nearly every day on sunset and there is an enormous flock of crows or ravens in the trees and buildings around the north-east corner of the campus. They whirl around, screeching and cawing, resting for a while then rising up to swirl around in an enormous flock for a minute or so. Very noisy, very strange, a little like something from Edgar Alan Poe.

I tried to photograph the birds against the sky as I left this evening, the light was too low and all came out blurred...

More fun and games with Telstra; phone, email, phone — no, yes, no.

Seems to be differences in the emphasis in the email and phone calls as to the whether it can be relocated (email from sales department) and who requests and pays for it (support and faults department)

Today's call, I stated the same question as last Friday and was again told verbally: The lead-in cable is Telstra infrastructure and neighbours are forbidden from touching it ($50,000 fine if they do so).

I then explained that I'd received an email from Telstra stating that our lead-in cable would have to be relocated, and that the neighbours did have this right:

  Thank you for your email dated 18/5/07, regarding your lead-in cable.

  Your lead- in cable will need to be removed or relocated onto your own property. Your
  neighbours do have the right to remove this cable as it is on their property.

  For more information on this matter please phone us on 13 22 00.

Telstra staff on the phone said "Huh?"

I expressed my concern that this appeared to be the opposite of what she'd just told me, and of what I'd been told on Friday. She discussed this with her supervisor and returned to state that:

• the cable can be relocated, if arranged between neighbour and Telstra
• as we have not requested the relocation, we will not be billed
• the neighbour cannot pass the Telstra bill on to us

Aw crap, what are they playing at? We found the following unsigned letter with quasi-legal wording in the letterbox today:

  16th May 2007

  Owner
  XX XXXXXX XXX
  Oakleigh Vic 3166

  The Residents
  XX XXXXXX XXX
  Oakleigh Vic 3166

  Dear Sir/Madam

  It has come to our attention, that you have a Telecommunication wire, trespassing
  across our property. As we have never given you permission for this to happen, we
  want it removed.

  We noticed that you already have a pole outside your house, which would be more
  suitable for that wire to be attached to.

  We will therefore give you seven (7) days from the date of this letter to remove it
  from its orginal site and have it re-attached to the other pole. If that has not taken
  place by the expiration of the deadline, then we will be removing it ourselves and any
  cost that is born as a result, will naturally be passed on to you, so it will be in your
  best interest, to act promptly.

  We thank you in advance for your anticipated co-operation in this matter.

  Your faithfully

  OWNERS

The cable they're talking about is the Telstra phone cable, it has quite possibly been there for forty years! I was fairly sure that there's nothing wrong with it, but rang up Telstra anyway to check.

It caused a bit of fun and games with the enquiries line, not your routine query it seems!

Yep, the Telstra cable is Telstra infrastructure, and in a magnificent quote “The infrastructure can go where it wants.” Any "issues" that they have with it are between them and Telstra and they should contact Telstra about it.

The cable can be relocated if they wish, however the costs will be born by them, not by us and not by Telstra.

Of course, none of this could possibly have anything to do with the fact that we keep asking the building company to come and finish fixing the fence that they half took down months ago, now could it...?

Quite amazingly, the TAC has finally decided that their 100% obsession with speed being the cause of all collisions is not the be-all and end-all of road safety. There's a new campaign telling motorists to — shock horror — pay attention and put the phone down, stop fiddling with the radio, stop playing with the children and DRIVE THE BLOODY CAR WITHOUT KILLING PEOPLE.

A good start, but sadly reality intrudes. Another day, another ride to work, another dickhead in a 4WD on the phone on the road.

There I was sitting at the lights at Dandenong road and North road. There he was sitting next to me — big shiny BMW 4WD, (rego. Vic. SUB-116), chatting away, SMSing away. I point and shout out 'put the phone down', he swears and gesticulates and swears some more. The lights go green and I ride off, then he roars past, swerving in to give me a scare.

All the campaigns in the world are meaningless when the vast majority of Australians believe its their god-given right to do what they damn well please the instant they get in their little metal boxes.

You think that we're being shafted by Telstra and the government now? Just wait till they've finished bending over backwards to pat each other on the backs with this one. At least some people are prepared to analyse the name caling and full-page fora and against ads in the papers and look into why Telstra wants the government to "rein in the ACCC" (that rogue regulator) and let Telstra have monopoly access to $9Billion worth of not-yet-built broadband network.

From Charles Wright, the final paragraph sums it all up:

Selling out to Telstra

:

No government in Australia's history has demonstrated a fraction of the contempt for the electorate implicit in virtually every thought, word and deed of the Howard Government. No Prime Minister has been able to get away with mouthing one lie after another, while doing precisely the opposite of what he pledged. No political party with any conviction or the slightest claim to integrity could contemplate the shredding of principle in such a fashion. What a truly shameless mob they are.

Seems that May is bike month in America, not only that, but in Motionbased's blog I get a mention as one of the two runners up for logging the most number of "commute" bike rides for the year. Hardly record breaking distances with my 5km ride, but there would have been another month's worth of entries if the Edge 305 hadn't been off being repaired for all of January!

Interesting that the second, wamble, and third, ajft (me), are both Australian, while number one, mallfellow is in the US.

Fun and games over the weekend attempting to get the Motionbased software working on the home laptop. Minor problem is that the laptop is running¹ Windows Vista, major problem is that http://www.motionbased.com is almost unusably slow.

Downloaded two updates, but had to leave prior to installing them:

MBAgentInstall_release_2.3.0.1.exe

Existing version 2.3.0.0

Garmin-USBDrivers_221.exe

Existing version is 2.2.0

I managed to read data from the Edge 305 and upload it, but couldn't login to the website, either the password is wrong or its just timing out.

---

1. Of all the verbs in the English language, "running" doesn't quite seem appropriate when applied to the speed of Vista; I think I'd prefer anything from the following list: walking, crawling, meandering, dawdling....

Thread: last next

After yesterday's V/Line farce, what wonders would the train home bring? At least we'd be spared the platform announcements, Garfield's station is rather sparse — a small half-enclosed shelter on an open platform is all the protection you get, there's a timetable pinned up away on the other side of the line, and a confusing sign telling us that the trains travel through Garfield on either the left or the right... depending on what time of day it is!

Prior to 2pm on a Sunday they drive on the left, so platform two was correct — although this was the same platform we arrived at yesterday!

We sat in the sun and waited... and waited....

Yay, a minute or so after noon and the train appeared, we're not sure whether it was meant to arrive at 11:41 or 11:51 so I've no idea if it was ten or twenty minutes late.

There seems to be a constant amount of stuffing about that has to be added to any trip I make on the trains, it just isn't worth it for a trip of only an hour!

That's enough from the both of you V/Line and Connex, stop appologising for the lousy service, please just fix the damn train system!

Oh well, “it seemed like a good idea at the time”. Famous last words... Jo and I decided to catch the V/Line train out to Garfield to visit friends for the evening, a chance to try these shiny new purple V/Locity trains and see what all the fuss is about and whether they live up to the gov'ments hype about the “fast rail” service or the opposition's “farce rail” retaliations.

So far I'm tempted to go with the latter. A month ago my first ride on one was appalling; a two-carriage train put on from Geelong to Melbourne in the school holidays, crammed in so tight that people sat in the aisles and were packed sardine-like in the exits. Today we only had to endure a 50 minute trip that started life 45 minutes late! By the time we finally got on the train in Caulfield we could have been comfortably sitting at Mark and Lesley's house if we'd chosen to drive... and it wouldn't have cost anywhere near $12.20 in petrol!

Quarter past four we left home for the suburban train back to Caulfield, to then sit and wait on platform four — the V/Line trains always use platform 4... Then there's the announcement that it is running late and will use platform 2, so we troop down through the underpass and the stench of greasy fried things and up to platform 2. From about five to five until quarter past we had at announcements at ten minute intervals telling us that the train was having mechanical problems and that it had “just left” Southern Cross station.

Bah, hardly a great start to the evening.

Once (finally) on the train it was comfortable and quick and a pleasant trip, but the stuffing about that accompanies it will make me think twice...

The evening's company, the food, and the red wine were as good as ever and its always good to catch up with friends... but next time we'll drive the car.

From http://www.hunlock.com/blogs/Attach_icons_to_anything_with_CSS

A few days ago, while using stumble-upon, I stumbled on a site which showed how to conditionally append icons to the end of hypertext links using css. What made the article interesting was that it used CSS conditionally. For instance...

a[href $='.pdf'] {
   padding-right: 18px;
   background: transparent url(icon_pdf.gif) no-repeat center right;
}

Finally done it! The home PC has been thrashing for ages with “only” 512M of RAM and more and more greedy software.... Another 1G has been on the cards for quite some time. The catalyst was Jo deciding to finally buy her camera, which then needed some memory itself, and a trip to CPL for a 1G SD card for her, and 1G DDR 3200 DIMM for me.

A healthy 1.5G now, and no swap in use, yay.

Attempting to import photos into my Ubuntu system with f-spot, the import window opens, but contains the text:

An error occurred in the io-library ('Bad parameters'): Could not find USB device (vendor 0x4a9, product 0x30f2). Make sure this device is connected to the computer.

Something is definitely wrong with the permissions, my account can't read the camera, but root can:

ajft@fafnir:/dev/bus/usb$ lsusb
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 05a9:0511 OmniVision Technologies, Inc. OV511 WebCam
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
ajft@fafnir:/dev/bus/usb$ sudo lsusb
Bus 005 Device 017: ID 04a9:30f2 Canon, Inc.
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 05a9:0511 OmniVision Technologies, Inc. OV511 WebCam
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000

I'm beginning to suspect that my computer system that has been through three hardware boxes and Redhat to Debian to Ubuntu upgrades has quite possibly got some oddities in the group memberships!

Solution was to add my account to the group plugdev (in /etc/group). I wonder how many other groups user accounts get placed into in Ubuntu that my pre-existing account isn't in?

Five or six annoying phone direct marketing calls in the last week and I see a notice about the Do Not Call register, I've decided to register the home number with http://www.donotcall.gov.au/. Here's what happens afterwards:

You have successfully registered 1 telephone number(s) on the Do Not Call Register.

Your registration expires in three years on 4-May-2010.

How long will it take before I stop receiving phone calls?

It may take up to 30 days for telemarketing agencies to recognise your registration and stop calling your number.

What can I do if I still receive calls after 30 days?

It you are still receiving telemarketing calls after 30 days, you can lodge a complaint.

Who can still call me?

Registering your number on the Do Not Call Register will not stop all calls to your number. There are some limited exemptions which enable certain public interest organisations to make telemarketing calls. Exempt organisations include charities, religious organisations, educational institutions and political parties.

Companies with which you have an on-going business relationship will still be allowed to call your number even if it is on the Register. For example, it may be reasonable to expect to receive a telemarketing call from a financial institution, utility, service provider or telephone carrier if you have an existing account. You may request the business to stop calling you at any time.

Oh yay. Seems to be a toothless piece of garbage, I've got a bank account with X, so they can still call me whenever they feel like and try to sell me insurance or anything else, and every exempt organisation — not to mention overseas ones not bound by Australian laws — can still call.

An exciting morning, first we woke to the very unusual sounds of thunder, hail and rain on the roof — all very welcome in the drought and with Melbourne's water storage dipping below 30% of capacity for the first time in 40 years. Next, Jo went out to pick up the newspaper and came back in with the news that a train had derailed itself just out of Oakleigh station, right outside our front door.

Connex sent out their SMS warnings that no trains were running between Springvale and Caulfield, and with thoughts of how hellish the replacemenet buses would become I offered to drive her the 5km to Caulfield.... Its a very long time since I've driven anywhere in morning peak traffic and yet again I'm reminded why, creeping and crawling along, fifteen minutes stuck in a log-jam on Murrumbeena road, people hooting, people swearing, people pushing in. One of the major annoyances was sitting in that logjam while the boom-gates on the level crossing were down and watching three trains full of people go past from Oakleigh to Caulfield — these were the trains that Connex had told us didn't exist!

Finally got Jo to Caulfield, then re-entered the maelstrom and crawled my way back to Oakleigh, ran inside to get the bike and tried to refresh myself on a routine ride to work. An hour to drive the 5km to Caulfield and back, then fifteen minutes for me to ride the bike the same distance to Clayton!