FYI: Breathalyzers
I was driving home from Coffs Harbour and got pulled over by the police.
Just a random breath test. He asked me how I was going then count to 5. This confused the hell out of me. The last time I used one of these machines was in primary school when a police officer came in and gave a speech.
Back then you had to blow in a tube for about 5 seconds so I was expecting to do the same.
But you basically just talk over this machine and it picks up your blood-alcohol level.
I don’t know if these machine were just in NSW or if they have been deployed across Australia.
Just thought I’d share.
Google no longer loves me
A search of “pimaster” is no longer showing this blog near the top of the search listing.
I blame myself, I really haven’t had anything to add to the world of the Internet. I’ve gone from updating my blog 4-6 times a month to barely 1 a month.
I blame work. Oh, which I haven’t posted about.
Back in May I started work for Majitek. I joined the Product team and was looking forward to a maintenance/feature improvement sort of development. I was hoping to see how problems that I’ve had come up in the past had been solved in their products.
But it was not to be.
The product I am working on really hasn’t reached a mature level. We are still trying to work out how to solve certain problems.
There are some good days, but some are frustrating.
I’ve started a few little things to tinker with, but haven’t really got around to finishing anything. Which sucks.
I’ve been enjoying the company of friends a lot more than I used to. It’s good in breaking up the weeks, but also takes time away from just sitting in front of a computer.
I’d love to update this clog more, but we’ll see how we go.
I’m still with the TF2 clan I joined back in early 2008, http://mofoclan.forumotion.com/forum.htm
I’ve also been posting a bit on twitter https://twitter.com/the_pimaster if you are into that sort of thing.
CSS awesomeness
I was forwarded a link today at work that I just have to share:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/css/gallery/slide1.htm
Yeah, it looks that bad in a modern browser.
But at the height of awesome (*chokes*), in IE 3.03, there is some magic-fu.
Finally, a result for the Compact Flash card
Since I had some plans canceled yesterday, I decided I had enough time to re-shuffle my disks around, put the CF card first and install XP onto it and see what would happen.
As expected the install took a lot longer to complete that a standard disk. I wasn’t really expecting 4-5 hours though.
It was when I got into Windows that my heart sank though. Trying to install the drivers for my system was extremely slow. Loading IE (which starts the driver installation) was slow. Trying to check out where the bottle-necks were was slow.
Basically the CF card was being hammered nearly all the time. I managed to move swap onto a real disk and “Program Files”, but couldn’t get my “Documents and Settings” reliably moved to another disk. I don’t think it would have helped enough though.
So I timed a fresh boot from start up to shutdown on the CF card and it took nearly 8 minutes.
I re-installed onto a standard disk and did the same task in a minute.
It isn’t a complete failure though. The animation during Windows XP was noticeably faster on the CF card compared to a standard disk. So there is hope for booting from CF. It was just everything after that that was slow.
My next task is to install *nix to CF and find out if it can be tweaked to boot with all haste.
Compact Flash to SATA
My XP install has become fairly slow and I want to move away from my RAID 1 configuration because it is not offering me anything I actually need.
So I figured the easiest way to transition all of my data is to have a free disk, a disk with all my old content and another disk for my OS.
Solid state disks have been making their rounds and I thought it would be cool if there was a SATA to CF adapter that allowed be to boot of a generic solid state media.
Now I have an 8gb solid state disk for my OS.
I opened up Nero (as it is the only thing I know that has some sort of disk speed test) to find out what the performance was.
15MB/s as apposed to the ~65MB/s I was getting for my other media. I’m fairly sure that is only a read speed (the only thing that is important for buffering before burning to cd), but it is as expected. I’m hoping the speed of CF cards will pick up in the future.
I’m hoping the seek speed comes into play when the OS is finally loaded onto this thing, but it could take a fair amount of time to do the actual install.
I’ve got a game on tomorrow night, so installation will have to wait till at least Thursday.
Slightly excited by Trac installation
Every now and then I pop onto the byteclub twitter feed and was surprised to see that we are edging closer to a SCM being installed.
I’m not sure what we are going to put on there but I take it we are still going for the theory that if we build it, they will come.
In other news that should be announced on a blog, I’ve started work at Majitek. Currently just doing java webapp work which isn’t far off what I was doing at Hyro. New faces, new processes. I feel like the take up is a little slow but I’ll get there.
Blog finally backdated to 2006
Phew, I think it is all done (except for a few video posts). I have copied and pasted every post that dates back to March 2006. It would be kind of nice to get the posts from uni days, but I believe that is long gone.
It’s kinda funny reading over the old posts and comments.
I’ve left some of the linking out because it was related to the old blogs.
Random thinking problem from irc
Seen this little beauty on irc today
Divide prices of items between two people in the most even way possible, so if they get a fridge for 100 bucks, tv for 250, and a couch for 400. ONe person would have to buy the fridge and tv, and the other would buy the couch. What would be the best way to sovlve this problem?
by “thefalling”
It sounds like it has come straight from some course work but it lead me to an interesting wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapsack_problem
My response was to sort the costs starting with the highest price with one person, switch to the other person and keep adding until they have paid more, then switch back to the other person and continue.
I’m currently doing some reading to find out if there is a better way to do it and whether my method is actually correct.
My other suggestion was to work out all possible combinations and determine which comes out the closest. Obviously brute force could cause performance to go out the window, but since the suggested size of items to be included was small, it is _a_ solution.
I’m interested in anyone else’s thoughts on it. I’ll put up a reply to this if I find anything intriguing.
Getting around to the import
I’ve finally missed my old posts enough to import them.
Unfortunately the RSS import was close to useless. No problem, I’ll enter them manually.
Fortunately, I mirrored my blog when tyler.byteclub.net was up, it just a matter of copy’ing and paste’ing.
A response to my anti clean feed letter
So today I was excited when I received a letter from the office of Stephen Conroy.
But I was disappointed when I got a fairly flat letter.
I wanted to put this up because I don’t think many people that wrote a letter would have put their return addresses down.
I guess I need to do some work to find out if the filters in UK, Sweden, Norway and Finland are mandatory or by request. I would like to say that I think a clean feed as an optional feature from an ISP is an awesome idea. But I fear if we give them an inch on the subject, they will just keep running with it.
The interesting bit about the letter is that they think they can control the content on the Internet like they can control movies and games. All I can think of is my .NET lectures, if all you have is a hammer, all problems start looking like a nail.
Another interesting note is the “live trial” mentioned so that they can be sure that the performance issues are as minor as possible. Who conducts a live trial starting 24th of December. Most of the technicians that would implement the features would want to be on holiday. Families usually try to get away for Christmas and there are lots of things to do outside. I also thought I heard that the live trials were no longer going to be live, they were going to be tested by a task force and not citizens. GAR!
From their FAQ:
Parents rightly expect the Australian Government to play its part in helping protect children online.
Really? We expect the government to assist in babysitting our children? Do parents really just want to have kids so they can palm the responsibility off to someone else?
I love their use of numbers. ACMA has a blacklist of 1300 URLs. Performance may be an issue at 10,000 URLs. Who hands them this information? I mean if I add some GET parameters to the URL, does that mean I can get past the filter (ie. ?filter=lame). All you have to do is get a couple of domains pointing to the same server and you are increasing the number of items on the list. Hell, even subdomain (somthing.domain.com) would cause chaos for whoever needs to look after the list. Regex and wild cards do I hear you say? Is that why people are getting upset at the potential for overfilter. Oh sorry, you’re freely hosted webpage on cute kittens is hosted on the same domain as someone who shows a nipple, bad luck for you.
Anyway, I’m hoping to get the letter from Stephen Conroy out to the nocleanfeed people or even the EFA. Whilst it would be cool to have them link directly to this post, I think they could do a better job of disecting the letter. I just feel let down by the government.
Please note that I have no problem with the letter being used on any other page. A link back to me would be handy so that people knew where the letter originated from.