Michael Fleming’s Networked Mind

…. but not without dramas.

The move wasn’t as smooth as expected. The actual furnishings/equipment move was fine, but the technological move was not.

Thanks to the wonders of the monopoly telecommunications company here (Telstra) who, despite being privatised and made to compete with other carriers treats the public that funded their infrastructure with utter contempt, took over a week to supply me with a landline phone at my new apartment. Ergo I had no net connection aside work and only my mobile phone (cellphone to you Yanks) to keep in touch with people.

It was another four days after the landline got connected before Internode (my ISP) could get my ADSL2+ connected at the DSLAM. Again, because Telstra own the infrastructure (the exchange the DSLAM is housed in) a Telstra contractor had to do the work.

Only they fucked it up. It was another five days before Internode could get Telstra to return to the exchange and correct the fault (the ‘node tech and I determined - correctly - that the DSLAM port had been mis-jumpered). I even went so far as to talk to Telstra directly about the fault, but because I was not the one submitting the fault I was told not to call about it, despite it being on my line and affecting my job.

(If you are one of those charming folks in Telstra/Teletech callcentres: Fuck you. You piss and you moan that your customers abuse you, but you hung up on me twice, yelled at me, lied to me and had the hide to call ‘node to bitch about me rightly keeping you on your toes. This is on top of the crap I used to get at Webcentral due to your laziness and selfish desire to fuck over my team to keep your own KPIs in order. You fully deserve the shit you get from customers and the rest of the industry for your disinterest, rudeness, incompetence and sheer fucking arrogance. Burn in fucking hell.)

They eventually got it sorted - they never told me or Internode (I told them!) I just came home from work with line sync. While I was happy to get some access, the speed is lacking - around 8000 down/846 up. Considering the distance from the exchange I should be seeing more than that (~12000-13000). From some auditory investigation it sounds like I have noise on the line..

On the upside: I have as of Monday got my Fedora 8 repository up and running, it’s almost fully populated and ready to go and you can find it in the usual place

It’s a little delayed due to a) the above move b) getting an F8 install here to work with and most importantly c) the lovely (and loving) Meisha keeping me happily distracted from all things geek I couldn’t wish for a more wonderful lady and I love her dearly

Still keeping the “aww that’s schweet” theme going, a huge congratulations to my friend and former work colleague Vesna on her engagement. You know who to grab as the wedding photographer and try not to wear the poor lad out on the honeymoon. Happy for you Ves!

The lease on my apartment here in Fortitude Valley has expired and my landlords have opted not to offer me an extension (well, they DID but then rescinded it after I agreed to it, lusers). I’ve not settled on anything else as yet - still going over a whole raft of units / apartments close by - but I hope to have something settled in the next few days.

This will probably mean that I and the site will be offline for a few days once all is confirmed, as I’ll need to get Internode to relocate my connection to (hopefully) another Agile ADSL2+ exchange. If you mail me during this time don’t panic, I will get it (I’ve got a box at work acting as a backup)

In other matters:

I’ve finally been convinced to sign up for Crack^H^H^HFacebook by my old flatmate Steve. It’s actually not bad especially compared to MySpace and the developer APIs are tempting. Plus more of my old friends and colleagues are on it - as well as fewer spammers, whiny emo kids and creepy stalkers.

You know my name, have a wander over - there’s even some photos of me as a sprightly 19 year old music student.

Fedora:

I’ve been packaging like mad again - updates to the Courier suite, ndoutils and some Perl packages. Last night’s upgrades pulled in mock 0.8.4 and it’s damned noisy. I tried compiling an mt-daapd nightly release and it failed on all arches and versions - unfortunately the logging is cranked up so much I can’t see where or why under all the debug cruft *sigh*. I’m sure I’ll suss something out.

I’ll elucidate more later (all this househunting + work etc. has left me exhausted) but I’d like to finish up with a plea to my old friend Tina Wallmann to please cheer up and remember you will always have people around who care and want what’s best for you.

Michael.

Not much of this is going to be coherent, but here goes:

Metafilter posters can be cuttingly funny:

“When I think of Sydney I think of the Crocodile Hunter and Paul Hogan jousting against each other in speed boats, while Yahoo Serious referees by drinking himself into a coma.”

(in a thread comparing Melbourne + Sydney. Posted by a Yank of course* ;-))

I picked up a nice cheap 19″ LCD monitor to replace the serviceable 17″ CRT (that I picked up off a mate for $15, probably ‘cos it was hot). Works great, clarity is excellent.

However: Microsoft - ClearType sucks big albino donkey balls. Freetype with hinting on Fedora (via Livna) shits all over it in terms of readability. Nice try but no go.

All my machines are now Fedora 7 (just as F8Test3 is due to go out the door.) but at least I won’t get caught when FC6 end-of-life hits.

Green tea with ginkgo biloba = good stuff but doesn’t help posting journal entries when you’ve had a crap day at work and no sleep the night before.

Other stuff can wait until it’s worth going into in detail.

- MF.

* Noone here gives a flying fuck about Yahoo Serious here anymore.

Why yes, it has been a little while since I’ve posted anything of note. Hope the quote from Sean tided over the tragics who just couldn’t stay away.

There has been quite a bit happening, most of it good.

Dad has come back from Bangkok after his stem-cell operation and the results have been excellent. He’s got far more energy than before, is far more capable physically and mentally - it’s also done wonders for his state of mind and self esteem (he’d been losing the will to live prior to the op, I must admit. Not a pleasant thought..)

To those who doubt the uses of such research or think it’s an offence against their invisible sky person, I say toss your bias aside and look at the wider research. Not all is fetal - Dad’s procedure involved the use of some of his own healthy cells. It was done under local anaesthetic all in the space of an hour and most importantly it has worked - the man has been suffering for years and at this stage it’s lessened that suffering significantly - and that’s the most important thing.

I also had the all-too-brief pleasure of meeting up with my old friend Tina Wallmann at the Regatta Hotel the other week, which pleased me no end as I’ve not seen her for at least a couple of years. It’s always great to see her and I’m proud and impressed by what she’s achieved over the years I’ve known her. Sadly she’s moving to Sydney so our meeting may be the last for a while. You will be missed terribly up here by all of us that have known you.

It was also nice of her to introduce me to her friends Michelle and Lynda (who won 3rd @ Miss Regatta, congratulations and well done). Nice girls and I wish them well; if they stick with modelling they’re well set as they’ve learnt from a master (mistress?) of the art.

I’ve not been to the Regatta previously (Toowong is a little out of the way for me, but it was for a friend so the effort is worth it) but it’s a good pub, well presented and spacious, drinks not too pricey either. If you’re in inner-western Brisbane it’s worth a visit.

I’ve not spent too much time at the PC of late - reading in my quieter moments, visiting family or just getting out and about. I’ve done a little bit though.
I have been impressed by Eclipse Europa for PHP (PDE) and Perl (EPIC) development - no I’m not a Java developer - and am using them heavily especially at work where I sorely need them.

My ADSL2+ has been rock solid and quick, a boon to folks grabbing my RPMs and browsing the site in general.

Speaking of RPMs, I’ve not built too many lately as the new release of RPM (4.4.2.1) has caused a hopefully temporary glitch vs rpmdevtools, so no builds until this is fixed and my local mirrors sync. I have new arpwatch and asylum packages waiting. Good news is that perl-Geo-IP has finally passed review and will be in the main Fedora repository Very Soon Now.

I’ve also purchased a camera, finally - A Canon PowerShot A550 (on Russ’ advice) primarily for the Miss Regatta Final (but the shots were fairly poor, I should have RTFM) but it will come in useful elsewhere of course. I also replaced the old and busted webcam with a little QuickCam IM; Linux users should try the gspca driver as it works quite well with it.

One for the lazyweb: I’m looking at a new monitor when my pay comes in: suggestions for a 19″?

sean: it’s kind of like you stuck your head in a concrete mixer, that’s full of midgets with drum kits and now your complaining about the banging, you daft fucks

My friend Sean, on a customer who has every single Windows non-info-level event log entry emailed to them - and then complains to him about the amount of mail they get from their monitoring system.

China tells living Buddhas to obtain permission before they reincarnate

Apparently if you’re a living Buddha (ie pretty much anyone, potentially) and you happen to reside in China you need a permit before you can reincarnate(!)

Um, yeah, that’s going to work out really well.. Think of the logistics much?

What if the permit is non-transferable? (being a bureaucracy you just know they’ll fsck that up)

How are they going to know? If you look at the concept properly there’s no guarantee you’re coming back as a human - could be a flea or a shark or an insurance salesman. Are the PRC going to ask them for their papers?

It’s like they’ve been taking lessons from the Australian Tax Office.
Good luck with *that*, ya tools

I was a NANAE (news.admin.net-abuse.email, the Usenet anti-spam frontline) regular back when Sanford Wallace decided - with great fanfare and all manner of self-aggrandisement - to cease email / usenet spamming. $DEITY knows how many cyberpromo-sourced spam messages I  got back in the (pre-DNSBL pre-Bayes pre-anything-but-procmail-filters) day.

Those that thought he’d just lay low for quite a while and keep on spamming were of course dead on the money.  Once a lying, thieving scumbag, always a lying thieving scumbag.

Now this - he’s been banned by court order from MySpace. I’m no fan of Murdoch (I believe News Limited own MySpace now) but a cage-match to the death between the two would be something I’d pay to see.

Enjoy the (lack of) fruits of your dishonesty Spammy…

Sorry to readers / visitors again for another extended outage. This one is again not my doing but this time there’s been a happier ending.

I elected on Friday to churn my ADSL service to Internode (a fairly large ISP here in Australia) as they provide a decent service and I get a discount as a member of the System Administrator’s Guild of Australia.

Their advertised turnaround time was 20 days(!) so I’d put in my intention to close my current DSL service (see previous posts) in 30 days as required by contract. The story of what happened there has already been posted below

This time, I dropped off-air at around 11 (or so Nagios told me) - I actually went home to check the console to see a bunch of CHAP password errors. Opened my ticket with WC and added that I’m offline again, can someone have a look. Of course, they have no idea.

As it turns out, Telstra had switched my line over to the Agile DSLAM used by Internode some time that day - but noone told me, Internode and Webcentral. I only cottoned on when a reboot of my router saw it train using ADSL2+ modulation and a line speed of close to 18Mbps. A call to Internode got me the login details needed, some IP config changes, tickets to update DNS and voila - I’m back baby at a much swifter speed!

So this tale has a happy ending.