Julien Goodwin

Melbourne International Comedy Festival 2009 - The Preview shows

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 04:06:26 GMT

Once again I'm going to try and post about all the shows I've seen, although given that I'm seeing over two dozen I'm not even going to try one post per show. So here's the five shows I've seen in the first three days of the festival presented in cronological order. All of these were preview shows so had a few rough edges which generally just added to the enjoyment.

Goth v Nerd - A short double stand-up show, if you read PLOA or wear anything best described as "shiny & black" you're the target audience.

Sort of the Rings - Another short parody re-telling of LoTR, with audience partiticaption and helium orcs.

Otis Lee Crenshaw (Rich Hall) - American stand up followed by comedy country music. If you watch any of the comedy shows on TV you've probably seen Rich before.

Collingwood Club Therapist (AKA Ben Coussins the musical) - This one is only really for the footy tragics, particularly of the Collingwood persuasion, but "Ben Coussins the Musical" is just *classic*

Highly Sus - This one is more for the legal/criminal tragics, three perps, are they telling the truth or are they "Highly Sus"

All five shows were quite entertaining, and if you think they're up your alley (and you're in Melbourne) you should certainly make the trip.

Tonight's show is Heath Franklin doing "Choppers F%@#ing Bingo".

Bookshelf Speakers

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 12:39:14 GMT

This week I've upgraded the turntable in my second hi-fi setup at home (my main setup has yet to get a 'table, mainly as I haven't got around to getting a proper pre-amp for it) with an old Systemdek IIX, one modifed with a Rega (RB-300) arm and Grado (8MZ) cartridge, and, after a stylus replacement on the Grado (which cost more then the entire 'table setup) I now have a very nice system which has been home to some lovely John Coltrane LP's that had just arrived.

Unfortunatly this upgrade now reveals that my Auratone's have gone from being a nice compliment to now being the obvious element holding my sound back.

So now I'm looking for new bookshelf speakers (and possibly a sub) to replace[1] them.

The current contenders (roughly from least, ~$1k/pair, to most ~$3.5k/pair expensive):

Dali IKON 1 (w/Dali IKON Sub)

PMC DB1+

Tannoy Autograph Mini

Fortunatly both PMC and Tannoy have local dealers from who I should be able to get a trial.

Much as I've always wanted a pair of PMC's I always thought they'd be at least the IB2 or above, not the "dinky" ones.

If there's anything people think I've forgotten that's bookshelf size, and < 5kg each I'd love to consider them.

1: Not that the Auratone's are going, they will just move into the studio as a comparison monitory (which they should have been from the start).

Need LP storage

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 14:19:14 GMT

I'm after some form of shelves for my record collction (99% 12", with just a handful of 7"s). I've got too many for milk crates and want something I can actually flick through and keep in (semi-) order.

Any ideas?

Parallell loop execution in shell scripts

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 01:10:26 GMT

Dear lazyweb,

Is there a way to have for loops (or any loop for that matter) in shell run in (controllable) paralell?

I'm thinking a makefile hack could work, but for given the several hundred iterations it would get ugly.

Ahh, stupid meme's

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 12:17:10 GMT

So here's the latest.

Yeah, I guess I might post about LCA some time after I make it back to Melbourne (oh, and am sober, which seems to be rarely at LCA outside of sessions)

"transcoding to OGG"

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 09:48:44 GMT

Russell,

You should know better then to say "transcoding to OGG". Ogg is the container, you can have almost any codec.

At least the video codec often implies the audio codec, MPEG video usually has either an MPEG1 audio layer 2 or layer 3 (what we know as MP2 and MP3 audio). MPEG4 either uses the old MPEG1 audio or "AAC". "Ogg" Theora and Dirac both usually imply Vorbis for the audio layer, being the only general-purpose high-quality audio codec in the Ogg family.

But some containers like Matroska are completely agnostic and if all you know is that a file is in "Matroska" format you really know nothing.

Even "Quicktime" has had many meanings (as a file format) over time. For many years it implied video encoded by a Sorenson codec, although just like Ogg and Matroska (and AVI etc) that's not the limit. Recently as the basic Quicktime container has become the official MPEG4 file format new Quicktime files are almost always MPEG4 or H.264 video, usually with AAC audio.

And now to see if I can drink this information out of my head.

Everybody loves 6' tall speakers...

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 10:28:45 GMT

At least when they're in someone else's living room.

However my very own pair of Magnepan Magneplaner MG-II's arrived today along with a nice Bryston (3B ST) amp to drive them.

Here's an image from Wikipedia to give you an idea just how big they are:

(Those are MG I's, but the design & dimensions are almost identical at 72" tall, 24" wide)

You can't really tell from that photo but they're only about 5cm (2") deep, about the same as an LCD TV and weigh less then 10kg.

What you can see from the photo is the very 1970's design, fortunatly the drivers can be easily removed and put into a new case which I'll probably have to do just so they don't get thrown out at the next hard rubbish, which would be a shame, because when driven by the Bryston (or better, a valve amp as I tested at the store when I bought them).

Now all I have to do is not give in and buy that nice looking Pro-Ject 6 PerspeX turntable (or worse, the model that for an extra US$1.5k comes with a cartridge).

SSD's - Not Just Yet

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 10:57:26 GMT

It's time to upgrade my laptop HDD, for once because I've run out of space and not because it's dead (although given that I've had the laptop for a year tomorrow and the drive's about the same age, it probably is on the way out).

I was hoping to get the 160GB Intel SSD, however they're not available in Australia, and to ship one from the US would be ~$1700 which I can't justify.

So a 160GB Seagate 7200 is now on order.

Suggestions for a new laptop backpack

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 05:45:02 GMT

My beloved old "Targus Sport Deluxe Computer Backpack" recently celbreated its fourth birthday, but, much as I love it, is starting to get a frayed base, and other serious wear marks.

I know I need to replace it, but the problem is that I use every single bit of space in the pack, at least some of the time, and the biggest missing feature from current packs is the top flap which I use to hold my headphones (AKG K271) when I'm not wearing them.

I'd also prefer something with an integral padded laptop space instead of a removable slip case which appears to be the current hip feature that many otherwise nice bags have.

At this rate I might have to just give up and order one or two out of retailers spare stock.

Goodbye Cisco

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 00:49:31 GMT

You've now joined Extreme Networks on the list of companies that I will not recommend or buy from, at least until you accept that copyright law applies to you as well as your customers.

It's a shame, you made quite decent products (although JunOS is so much better it's not funny).

Re: Best speakers I've seen

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 11:35:03 GMT

Jon,

I can't believe you forgot Keith (Packard) and B'Dale (Garbee). Anthony Baxter's also good value, although I don't go for the heavy python internals stuff (I do regret missing this years "what's new in python" installment).

And you're pretty good yourself.

I'd go further then just Tridge, I've found all the Samba core team to be great people who have given great talks.

Van Jacobson is amazing, but only because I care about the subject (networking).

Arjen (Lentz) is always good value, always teaching me something new (and often reminding me of three things I shouldn't have forgotten), for that matter so's Stewart Smith.

There are a few more people who have always been good value of the years:
Andy Fitzsimon
Donna Benjamin
Pia Waugh
Leslie Hawthorn
Jono Bacon
Dave Airlie
Ted Ts'o
Vik Oliver (Mr RepRap)
Steve Ellis
Geoffrey Bennett
Rasmus Lerdorf
Adam Kennedy

(And yes, I too will be missing a whole lot of people)

In short, if you're going to LCA and you don't want to see multiple talks at once, several times a day, you're not trying.

Dear OpenOffice...

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 10:03:45 GMT

Today's feature request is for Impress.

(Disclaimer: Still running v2.4 as that's what's in Lenny)

I'm writing the outline for a fairly long presentation (of the 4-hour tutorial variety) and some way to mark sections in the outline view would be nice as I'm going to be well over a hundred slides before I'm done.

Looking back at my last Impress rant thing have certainly improved, the only thing that's still really lacking is better transitions (they're still not smooth in v3).

OO should ship with some better templates, although there's enough decent ones on the web these days that it's not a big issue any more.

Thank you Qantas

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 13:54:58 GMT

Your flights is under 24h of departure, you cannot change flights

I'm sorry, you didn't even get a native English speaker to *check* things these days?

(That snippet is from the view a booking page of the Qantas site, probably only seen when the last segment of a booking is within the next 24 hours)

Off to OSDC

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 06:49:36 GMT

Just about to hop on the 767 to Sydney, if anyone attending the Google hack day sees this can they SMS me which pub everyone's gone to?

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

People who I owe a beer (or $BEVERAGE) to

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 11:26:53 GMT

In no order, this limited time offer applies until I forget I made it. You want to claim, remember to badger me (preferably when we're at a pub).

Donna Benjamin & Peter Lieverdink - For many things

Arjen Lentz - OSCON ticket, and being an all around great guy

Lev Lafayette - Haven't seen you in too long

Daniel Stone - caveat: must come and get it, you know where I live

Anyone from the Samba team - for being awesome people

B'Dale, Keith, Dave (Airlie), Ted T'so - ditto (plus giving awesome talks at LCA)

Pia - 'cause she's well, Pia

Stephen & Elspeth Thorne - More people I haven't seen in a while

Steven & Cherie Ellis - 'cause I haven't been bothered to make the trip to NZ this year

Stormo - another haven't seen for ages

Joxer - yet another one, where has everybody gone

Ryan Verner - never did have that post-LCA party

Paul Fenwick & Jacinta Richardson - do I need a reason?

Damian Conway - I think there's two bottles of wine with your name on them still at my old job (from LCA06)

(Despite generally being awesome, Google employees are excluded from this list as they're probably still recovering from the alcohol poisoning from Leslie's last party)

Can you tell I'm procrastinating packing for OSDC?

Anyone got a spare LCA bottle?

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 03:27:17 GMT

Mine's developed a leak and I don't want to buy one that doesn't promote everyone's favourite conference.

Today's Wikipedia Humor

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 12:05:49 GMT

Comes from the "Telstra" article, where there's an image of a payphone, labelled "A typical Telstra payphone", nothing special, but the genius is it's a vandelised payphone.

This post brought to you by Laphroaig, everyone's favourite Islay single malt. For those days when you've boxed up and said goodbye to an $80k server.

Stable VMware Workstation in 2.6.26

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 11:54:08 GMT

After over a week of bashing my head against a wall I think I've finally got VMware (Workstation 6.5) running solidly under 2.6.26.

The solution appears to simply be to lock it to a single core:

for proc in `pgrep vm`; do sudo taskset -p -c 1 $proc; done

In this example I'm using pgrep to find all vmware related processes, and taskset to lock them to CPU#1 (the second core on my laptop), as I run only single-core VM's I don't have any issues there.

I've no idea what changed in 2.6.26 to make this necessary, but this might help someone out there.

Update: Talked too soon, locking to a single core has helped, but things still stutter on occasion.

Longplay record recycling

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 13:25:22 GMT

Longplay record recycling - Langspielplatten Verwertung
Originally uploaded by gynti_46

On the one hand it's beautiful, on the other, such a waste of (admittedly probably trash) vinyl.

David Barrett at 200 f/1.8

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 05:47:28 GMT

David Barrett at 200 f/1.8
Originally uploaded by LapTop006

New toy showed up today, a Canon EF 200 f/1.8 L.

Shiny.

A proper test will have to wait for another day as I get to spend this weekend inside a datacenter.

Oldest debian box?

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 10:22:35 GMT

I think I found ours this afternoon, I was installing a new test (2.6.24) kernel on it and noticed that update-grub found some very old kernels, the oldest (2.0.36) has a modification date of July 1999 which must be close to a record (and as far as I can tell is the systems install date).

Given the date & kernel the box was probably installed with the then-new Debian Slink (released in March that year).

That means the box has been in production (yes, with one hardware refresh) for over nine years.


sncrtr1:~# update-grub
Searching for GRUB installation directory ... found: /boot/grub .
Testing for an existing GRUB menu.list file... found: /boot/grub/menu.lst .
Searching for splash image... none found, skipping...
Found kernel: /vmlinuz-2.6.24-1.editure.1-686
Found kernel: /vmlinuz-2.6.20.3-p3
Found kernel: /vmlinuz-2.4.31-myinternet.1-p3
Found kernel: /vmlinuz-2.4.29-myinternet.2-p3
Found kernel: /vmlinuz-2.4.29-myinternet.1-p3
Found kernel: /vmlinuz-2.4.26-myinternet-p3
Found kernel: /vmlinuz-2.4.25-myinternet-p3
Found kernel: /vmlinuz-2.4.21-myinternet-p3
Found kernel: /vmlinuz-2.2.25-myinternet
Found kernel: /vmlinuz-2.2.23-myinternet
Found kernel: /vmlinuz-2.0.36
Updating /boot/grub/menu.lst ... done

An "I work for the man" review of Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother"

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 20:13:53 GMT

Posted several days later, but just copy/pasted from what I wrote on the flight.

I'm writing this from my economy class seat on a Qantas flight from Melbourne to New York for the HOPE conference. As the flight was delayed by over three hours (which may cause me to miss my connection to New York, either way it will be tight) so I'll soon (well, in another nine hours) get to experience some of the sights & sounds referenced in the book, both from the US Government & the hackers fighting against them.

I come to Little Brother with a different perspective then most as my day job is to run large-scale systems that filter web & e-mail for primary & high school students worldwide (>2 million direct users) so anything that allows students to bypass our systems would of course be considered a bug.

The concept & use of pervasive tracking presented in the novel is both depressing and seemingly quite likely. I really do hope that schools don't get forced (won't somebody please think of the children!) into some version of this. Working with schools I know how tight the purse strings are, and, at least in Australia, I feel confident that this wouldn't get deployed unless & until legislation was padded requiring its use. Simple surveillance is more likely, and less objectionable as the "but everybody else is doing it" excuse will hold some sway here.

The sad fact of life is that w15t0n's father would be extremely common, as we've seen in America, with so few people objecting to the erosion of their civil liberties even when presented with some solid evidence.

So from my perspective could ParanoidLinux work. In short no. The problem is it's easy to do cross-comparisons of an aggregate of users and do exactly the sort of profiling suggested in the book. The mere act of overwhelming the data collection systems is data in itself.

Xnet on the other hand could work. There's practical problems with NAT's etc, but there's absolutly no reason why it couldn't work, especially when a net like that actually scales. TOR itself is an example of the concept, a closer one might be FreeNet.

However, there are simpler solutions that would actually work. IP-Over-DNS does actually work most of the time. I only know of a few cases where people have created intellegent caching DNS implementations that block IP-Over-DNS. However if you have a server available, just having SSH listen on port 443 works just as well most of the time as people very rarely ensure that the port someone does a "CONNECT" to is actually HTTPS.

As for myself, all of my important communications are encrypted via SSL or PGP, with keys verified wherever possible. While I don't encrypt my laptop's hard drive I do use encrypted swap to hopefully ensure data I keep stored encrypted (like the backup passwords for several hundred servers around the world) can't be easily leaked. I do also gain some small measure of protection by running a 64-bit linux, instead of something where government trojans might be more easily available.

So will I buy the print book? I'm not sure; if I happen to see it in a shop, probably, but otherwise I guess not. On another hand I'll certainly be recomending it to people.

Touring NYC

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 02:36:20 GMT

Arrived last night into JFK, I tried the AirTrain to Jamaica then the Subway to Penn Station. Went well and I'd suggest it to anyone (well, anyone who has the self confidence to board a foreign subway by themselves at 10PM).

Two things the Melbourne system has that the NYC one doesn't are "next train" boards and breaks that don't squeal painfully at every stop.

On the other hand the New York system clearly works well with a huge number of passengers, and I've not had longer then a five minute walk to a station. If you're in New York I strongly suggest purchasing the unlimited MetroCard, it just gives you the freedom to go where you want.

This morning I took a recommendation from an old friend of mine (Albert Ullin on the off-chance anyone reading this knows him) and took the Circle Line's 3 hour long water tour of Manhattan. It was an excellent voyage, and I managed to fill up a 4GB CF card with the photos (the flickr upload will have to wait until I get some decent bandwidth). I managed to get some decent shots of all five of the man made waterfalls, and also more helicopters then I normally see in a year.

After the tour I went to see the Citicorp Tower to see if the building was as impressive in real live as in photos. Unfortunately shops have been built around the base making it seem like just another skyscraper, really disappointing.

I dropped by the 5th Avenue Apple store where there was a very large line of people outside waiting to buy 3G iPhone's. I went in where it was also very busy and picked up the Shure add-on to allow using any headphones as a headset.

Then I walked across to Central Park where I had a nice relaxing (well, no it was 30+ and I was sweating like hell) walk across the park to the natural history museum where I caught the subway back to my hotel.

By the time I made it back HOPE preregistration had started and I headed on down and got myself my RFID badge in preparation for what should be an excellent time.

This evening Fog Creek Software (Joel Spolsky's company) had an open house with plenty of food, wine and good conversation. I got some nice shots of the offices, and saw with interest the plans for their new offices which are no longer slanted.

On my way back to the Hotel I walked past B&H photo, but they had just closed for the day. I guess I'll try again some other time.

It was only once I had walked back to the hotel and was chatting with some of the HOPE people that I finally got a genuine New York welcome (well, sorta), I've been in the city for a day now, and finally heard someone tell someone else to "F#$% off".

Arrived in NYC

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 04:01:16 GMT

31.5 hours door-to-door, about three hours later then expected thanks to a three hour delay leaving Melbourne.

Off to be a tourist tomorrow, then HOPE.

iPhone 3G, the first few days

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 13:45:44 GMT

In just seven hours I start my two week trip to the USA for HOPE & OSCON.

Before I left though I thought I'd give my impressions of my new iPhone 3G.

The purchase experience was fine, although it did take nearly a half hour per person, which meant I was waiting around the Optus store (North Melbourne, great staff) for four and a half hours. Oh well, that's the early adoptor penalty I guess.

Unfortunately the number porting didn't go so well, taking six hours for the incoming to switch, then a further four hours before I was able to make outgoing calls.

It synced first time with iTunes 7.7 (x64) on XP x64 on VMWare 6.5 beta on Debian Lenny (AMD64, on my Thinkpad T61), something that really surprised me.

In the hand I actually slightly prefer the old iPhone, but there's really not much of a difference.

The biggest downside of the phone would have to be the UI for the phone functions, fairly awful. What tips it over the edge to awful is the extreme latency between selecting a function and being able to use the touchscreen again, at least with my old phone when that happened the display would freeze, making the wait obvious.

The UI for the rest of the device is fairly good, which does mostly make up for it (at least for me, I make few calls).

One big downside is that I can't point the internal calendar app at my Google Calendar, I would have to sync it via iTunes + Outlook (or through the Exchange mail option). While that could work for my personal calendar, my team also uses Google Calendar to schedule team events.

The App store works nicely for free apps, however the two pay apps I attempted to purchase (SignalScope & SignalSuite) refused to download and only this evening was I able to download them via iTunes.

Lastly the network. I switched from Vodaphone to Optus with this change, and I'm not that impressed by the coverage, added to that the iPhone's tendency to not reconnect to 3G networks if you're coming from a non-3G area and the net effect is the iPhone + Optus appears to give noticibly worse coverage then my old Motorola A780 + Vodaphone.