Adrian Tritschler's stuff
My website, an agglomerative mess, probably half-eaten by a grue
© 1984 - 2026 Adrian Tritschler
Adrian Tritschler's stuff
My website, an agglomerative mess, probably half-eaten by a grue
© 1984 - 2026 Adrian Tritschler
![Journal for [2003-06-18 Wed]](https://ajft.org/img/default1.jpg)
Journal for [2003-06-18 Wed]
More pollution; today it was petrol flowing down Gardiners creek, it all seemed to be coming out of a drain in the golf course, maybe they overfilled a lawn-mower… It was enough to annoy me about yesterday though, and send off an email to the City of Monash asking them to clean up the crap.
Gotta love it: An extract from “High and Mighty,” Kevin Bradsher’s book about 4WDs (SUVs) in America.
![Journal for [2003-06-17 Tue]](https://ajft.org/img/default2.jpg)
Journal for [2003-06-17 Tue]
Damn. Spent way too long trying to get cwm running on the WinXP laptop only to get bitten by Windows. The authors have two files URI.py and uri.py in the same directory, Windoze still only allows the one.
Monash city council seem to be doing their bit to increase the amount of litter in the City of Monash. Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to gather up the abandoned shopping trolleys that were lying in Gardiners creek and drag them to the side of the path.
MLP
http://rdfweb.org/foaf/: Friend of a Friend http://norman.walsh.name/: Norman Walsh’s private page. RDF and XML. http://relaxng.org/: Relax NG
A winters day
Rain, cold, wind, winter.
Coffee, soup, read the paper, listen to the radio.
…do last year’s income tax.
State your answers
Here’s a challenge for our American friends: How many of the Australian states can you name? This morning Jo mentioned that Australia’s states had such boring names, while American ones were at least interesting. As a result of that we started naming them — eventually managing to remember 49 of the 50… I think we forgot Delaware.
Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware District Of Columbia Florida Georgia Hawaii Idaho Illinois Indiana Iowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina North Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Utah Vermont Virginia Washington West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming
Good news for cyclists — for once
Man jailed for car-door attack on cyclists
A car passenger who attacked a group of cyclists for fun was yesterday sentenced to 15 months’ jail. The Tasmanian Supreme Court was told Stephen Leonard Campbell, 43, was travelling a car driven by his learner-driver son when they approached five professional cyclists on Hobart’s East Derwent Highway in March last year. “As the car overtook the cyclists, the passenger opened his door, deliberately striking the third cyclist with it, Justice Alan Blow said.
Journal for [2003-06-13 Fri]
Sufficiently weird quote in [9fans], I just had to preserve it for posterity — I hope it makes it to the fortunes file.
No, I won’t be bringing either the Harley or any guns, since apparently, I can get a pass without them.
Coincidence. Last night we were discussing strange kids names that parents choose — we’ve recently heard of Atticus. To me it was a reminder of Roman generals, to Jo, of Atticus Finch — Gregory Peck — in To Kill a Mockingbird.
Priceless moments
Bike riding — it sure does provide rich and varied experiences… this morning’s priceless moment started with me watching the small truck drive out of the discount tyre place in front of me, slowing as it turned to drive off in front of me, then me hitting the brakes and swerving as it launched a brand new truck tyre out through the open rear doors. Tyres are round, they roll really well!
Bicycle Path Antics
The perfect end to the day… There I was, minding my own business, riding home along the bike track under the Citylink tollway when all of a sudden a girl heading the other way yells out “Slow Down!” I rounded the curve to find a Volkswagen Golf stuck at the bottom of the track, nose up to the bollards that are designed to prevent motorists from driving in to the bike track.
Engrish/Gibberish
The laughter abounds. It seems that recently, every time I try to look at an Australian product website, I find that they’ve been written by a demented 10 year-old who would fail basic English.
Q. Can I divide partition the Anypak Drive?: A. Of course you can, just like any other drive. However due to a bug in Windows, it is recommended that for stable use, you do not partition the drive.
Vending Machinations
The vending machine up the hall decided today not to give me any change. Nothing special there, but just this once I had my phone in my hand and decided to call the 1-800 number to report it faulty… Deadly seriously, all my details were taken, details of the fault with the machine, then a promise to have it seen to, then a promise to send me my change in the mail!
XF86configuration notes
With a minimum of effort, XF86Config now appears to be managed by debconf. Magic command to reconfigure everything is:
dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86 Key points to remember are that the RivaTNT video card has a driver type of “nv.”
Ride along the Great Ocean Road
Give a man a Subaru Imprezza WRX and he thinks he’s a world rally champion… until he slides it backwards off the Great Ocean Road and leaves it hanging over a cliff. One of two great Kodak Moments(™) that I should have taken a photo of today — the other being the road sign: “In Australia, DRIVE ON THE LEFT” — I guess a few too many international tourists stop at the lookouts and then drive off on the wrong side.
Journal for [2003-06-05 Thu]
Fourth day of riding in to South Melbourne for a course at Excom — learning all about Windows XP (or at least enough to be dangerous). I could get to enjoy this — out the door, down to the end of the street, right turn onto Swan street, ride to the end, right turn onto Alexandra parade, through the tunnel and onwards along City road, then, right turn onto Montague street, stop.
MLP — Bookmarks for [2003-06-05 Thu]
EventID.net: Windows NT/2000/XP events and descriptions.
Unstable Debian unstable
Bah! Debian unstable is living up to its name for me. Following whatever my most recent updates are, Evolution is refusing to run, just crashes on startup, and after downloading the tonne of DEBs that is KDE, it generates a crash when starting, then gives me a neat-o blank screen with a pointer. Maybe having Gnome and KDE on the one machine is a bad idea — certainly for anyone not owning a 100G hard disk.
Girlfriends?
Shocking news! I found out that random people actually read some of the pages in here. One of Jo’s colleagues complained that I’m out of date — as a married man I shouldn’t have a link to my girlfriend.
Debian woes
Three dud floppy disks and one good one, a quick download of the Debian rescue image — mine seems to have vanished — and finally wyvern is back on the air. In the future I must remember to get these sorted out before fiddling around with partitioning!
Boot off the rescue floppy, rescue root=/dev/hdc1, login and run lilo, logout and restart. Back to where I was on Saturday morning…
circle has been giving me grief on the Debian unstable.
Journal for [2003-05-31 Sat]
Time to rearrange a few partitions on wyvern. Three hard disks — all nearly full! I thought I’d use the spare 6G on hda and try installing an extra OS… stupidly forgetting that lilo is writing to hda2. All was well until I restarted… Oops! Do you think I can find a rescue floppy anywhere around here…
dsk size hda 10G hdb 6G hdc 20G
Gibberish this is
Browsing through the latest Australian Personal Computer (June 2003), there’s a review of a bunch of bare-bones mini PCs. The Shuttle systems still look attractive so I thought I’d look up more details on the importer’s website. Assorted pages that won’t display at all, HTML delivered as MIME type text/plain, so browsers don’t interpret it, nothing validates, and PDF files that don’t download from their ftp server at all. Oh yeah, then there’s the Yoda-speak on the pages that you can read…
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A new toy... The One-wire weather station from AAG Electronica
denis-colnago
Dennis' Colnago, stolen at 2 days old
Journal for [2003-05-28 Wed]
Coughing kept me awake all night — the last time I remember looking at the clock it was nearly 03:45! Then I finally managed to fall asleep… As a result, today I feel like crap and not capable of going to work.
Bike theft Dennis just had his brand new Colnago stolen — two days old and someone broke into his house and took it. Sounds suspicious to me! Here’s the picture and the email he sent around, if anyone sees it…
The revenge of the furniture
I think I moved just a little too much furniture over the weekend. Wine racks and washing machines seem to have taken their toll, I’m feeling a little frail this morning…
Journal for [2003-05-25 Sun]
Another productive day around the house. Yet another attempt to buy a present for our wedding photographer fails — but I relented and picked up a photo album for myself. Then spent half the afternoon putting a whole bunch of unsorted photos into an album … at last. Pictures from ‘93 to ‘96 — from my trip to the UK [1][2] to just before moving to Melbourne [3].
This evening we drove down to Moorabin, checked out a washing machine and dryer, man-handled the washer into the car and drove it back home again … tomorrow the dryer!
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Wine rack, a wedding present from Marion
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Wine rack, a wedding present from Marion
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Big bike, little bike, matching greenness
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The only way to keep the chocolate biscuits safe in the cupboard
Journal for [2003-05-24 Sat]
Shopping day, a new wine rack to show for it, and Baudalino transfers itself from the list of books I might like to buy, to the list of books I’ve bought but haven’t read yet….
Journal for [2003-05-23 Fri]
The funniest SMS message I think I’ve ever received: “I cant believe you’ve padlocked the chockie bikkies. Not happy jan.”
It all came about earlier in the week; Jo had come home early feeling sick, a chocolate biscuit and cup of tea were part of the home-remedy. I jokingly mentioned that I’d have to lock the jar to ensure that there were some left for me — later that night I stumbled over this old padlock — Jo’s old padlock — and snuck it into the pantry.
Where to for dinner?
First you think that it would be a good idea to go out for dinner, then you get your mind firmly set on going out to a particular place for dinner — then when you get there you find that for inexplicable reasons, they’re shut. Why is it so?
Umalulik seemed like the place for dinner, we’d been meaning to go there again ever since first trying them out. It was not to be — shut, no idea why.
Journal for [2003-05-21 Wed]
Visited the Caulfield campus of my illustrious employer today. Walking across one of the paths on the way out we had to pass between a group of flagpoles on which fluttered a collection of bedraggled-looking flags of various countries. The Australian Aboriginal flag amongst them — but flying upside down. A sly dig using the international distress signal, or was it just a clueless idiot who hung the flag?
MLP Debian Mentors: providing a repository of untested debs for a whole bunch ‘o stuff.
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More crap dumped beside the bikepath -- a dozen old mattresses this time
The day of the mattress
Mattresses galore! Last night I thought there were only four — either the things have been breeding overnight, or there really were eleven mattresses dumped at the side of the road yesterday. There’s getting to be a lot of rubbish dumped in that area.
Amazingly, sometime during the day they’ve all been cleared away. Riding past in the rain this evening it was as though the mattresses had never existed….
Journal for [2003-05-19 Mon]
W32/Palyh-a and gullible people — just the combination we need to make my Monday fun-filled and busy. I got in this morning in time to find that the wheels had fallen off the world while a new Windows worm has hit the University. Staff everywhere just blindly executed the attachments — a disappointing state of affairs given the publicity surrounding the number of viruses that propagate via email. Around noon our anti-virus vendor supplied us with an update and we set about mopping up.
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Gaudi-esque lamps in a laneway in Melbourne CBD
Journal for [2003-05-17 Sat]
Saturday morning — Richmond markets — coffee at Blue Heaven.
Catch a tram to the city to visit the jeweller — finally I have my back! Two weeks without it seemed forever, now I have to get used to wearing it all over again, not to mention the reaction that’ll happen at work when people start asking why I wasn’t wearing it when I first got back from our honeymoon….
About
ajft looking stylish and black
…The Owner
There’s not much more I can add to who I am.
…The Site
Vanity site? Technology experiment? Learning tool? Blog? Journal? Diary? Photo album? I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you…
I experiment. I play. I write and I take pictures. Some of the site is organised around topics, other parts are organized by date, then there’s always the cross-references between them.
Its all been here a fairly long time. Like the papers on my desk, or the books on the bedside table, the pile just grew… and it all grew without much plan or structure. I try not to break URLs, so historical oddities abound.
Long ago it started as a learning experiment with a few static HTML pages, then I added a bit of server-side includes and some very ugly PHP. A hand-built journal/blog on top of that PHP, then a few experiments in moving to various static publishing systems. I’ve never wanted a database-based blogging engine, so over the years I’ve tried PHP, nanoblogger, emacs-muse, silkpage and docbook before settling on Emacs Org mode for writing and jekyll for publishing. But the itch remained… I never really liked jekyll and the ruby underneath always seemed so much black magic. So now the latest incarnation is Org mode and hugo.
…The ISP
- Hosted by @cos