For the longest time, I put up with the time and date of my entries here being wrong. I thought that I looked around to find a solution, but I must have dreamed the whole thing. I found an old pointer from 2003 which provides the simple solution.

On top of my config.py now lives:

# Start out by setting the correct time zone for the owner
import os
os.environ['TZ'] = 'Pacific/Auckland'

I can’t believe I put up with that for as long as I have. It’s almost embarassing…

Someone really should do a study on the psychological effects of listening to white noise for prolonged periods of time. I can’t quite describe the feeling when I take the headphones off, but it’s very strange. Which means that my testing of this variable delay is going relatively slowly.

I just got a message from ihug regarding the activation date for my broadband account.

We’re waiting for Telecom to activate ihug broadband on your phone line so that you can start enjoying your broadband connection. This should happen on 06–04-2006. This is a tentative date that Telecom has given us and is subject to change (if Telecom do change this date we’ll email to let you know).

The clock on my computer tells me that it is currently 30–03-2006. It’s a whole week to flip a switch? Tentatively? Sure, this process crosses corporate boundries, but this isn’t even an on-site call.

It’s hard to imagine whay so many people put up with the crap that Telecom deals out. There’s a reason why I wasn’t willing to sign up for broadband through them. In my mind, it wasn’t even an option.

I’ve chosen and subscribed for a new ISP. There are a few options for the Wellington area, including wireless and cable options. After having a brief look around at the providers and the pricing tiers they offer, I ended up going with ihug with a 2Mbps downstream rate¹. I had been with ihug when I first got connected in Auckland. Interestingly, my username still exists on the system, so I was unable to retake the username greg.bodnar. Not a bit deal, but somewhat annoying.

It’s worth mentioning that I was in the process of filling in the forms for a competitor, but backed off at the last second. There were just too many things about them that gave me a bad feeling. The terms of service were harshly written, including that they have the right to charge you for anything they consider reasonable. Combined with the their payment options, which draw directly from the account without the opportunity for individual authorisation, meant that they could take your money and not have to justify it without legal proceedings. It may have been a practical non-issue, but for $5/month I’d rather go with someone who doesn’t make me feel like I’m getting ripped off at every turn.

I opted out of the offer for a free modem. Even with the Act Now offer, which requires an 18 month subscription minimum, I could do better than what they’re offering. I’ve got one desktop and one laptop which will need more or less persistent connections, and there’s a wireless DSL router with WPA encryption that I’ve got my eye on to do the job. It’s not even too expensive. I should have enough left over to replace the failing CDRom with a DVD drive of some sort.

They say that the process can take up to 3 weeks. I don’t see any real reason for that. Activation of DSL isn’t a technically demanding task. Getting through the queue might take a bit of time, after processing the paperwork, but I should be up and going soon. Which means that I’ll have to get that DSL router on the order toute de suite.

¹ All the plans they offer are at the same bandwidth, 2Mbps downstream and 128kpbs upstream. The difference in plans is based on monthly throughput.

The weather in Wellington has been less than stellar since arriving here a few weeks ago. There have been nice moments, but they’ve been relatively rare. For being early autumn, the wind has been bitter and driving, carrying a lot of rain with it. It’s a great test of how resistent my new flat is to cold weather.

Given that I haven’t had to bundle up to stay warm, I’d say the house is handling the weather fairly well. It could certainly be worse. But it’s definitely made one point clear: when the wind roars outside, it whistles inside. Both the front door and a top floor window are prone to whistling. There doesn’t seem to be an obvious draft coming through, but there’s something about high-pitched whine that makes the mind feel a little bit colder.

I’ve noticed this in other forms. On a cold morning, when a house is just as cold inside as it is outside, the act of walking outside makes it feel warmer. It’s as if the mind thinks that it’s okay to be cold outside, but not okay inside. On the other hand, lighting a candle in a cold room seems to warm it up, even though it provides a negligible amount of heat.

In the end, I’m glad that I can’t hear the whistling wind from my bedroom. I don’t think it’s a good idea to keep candles light at night.

I can’t quite figure out what had happened, but procmail+bogofilter stopped stripping spam from my inbox. My best guess is that I had overflowed something. When I opened junk_mail in mutt, there was nearly 10000 messages in there, for over 30MB of data. Deleting things based on a date pattern was the fastest way to purge the junk. Since bogofilter needs to be trained with bodies of spam and non-spam so that it can differentiate the two, I didn’t want to get rid of the lot. Of course, a 15 day sample is still well over 500 messages, which is probably enough. I wonder if it’s worth putting together a script or something that can be called from cron to remove everything older than 15 days. It probably wouldn’t be too hard. Someone probably has already done it.

In any case, spam is once again being diverted away from my inbox and my world is a better place for it.

I moved into the flat, in practical terms, on friday. I’ve had the better part of the weekend to get the feel for the place and to make myself at home. The first hurdle: figuring out where the switches are for each of the lights and appliances. I think I’ve got it mostly figured out, but I have no idea what the neighbours think of all the flashing of the lights on and off. Counter-intuitive, however, is the notion that there is an electrical switch for the gas stove.

I’m pretty happy with what the house has to offer. The kitchen is quite functional (put to the test already), and having gas to cook with is a dream. The dishwasher is nice, but definitely not necessary. There seems to be an unlimited number of decks on the houses in this block. For having 3 floors, 5 decks seems a bit overkill, but I’m sure the plants will love the combination of shelter and light throughout the year. Admittedly, the deck off my bedroom is barely more than standing room, but last I checked, potted trees weren’t known to jump around all that much. The only real downside is that when the patio doors are open, any airplanes going in or out of the airport are pretty obvious.

The tricky part comes next. I have to find a way to fit all of my stuff in the space left over. There’s a bed that I’ve made up and am sleeping on, but it will get shifted out when my furniture shows up (soon, I hope). The room isn’t too much bigger than the bed, but there is potential. There’s tons of closet space, which means that I don’t need to clutter floorspace with drawers and such. A pair of alcoves surrounding the deck are a mixed blessing and calls for some creative use. I don’t know the measurements for each of the pieces of furniture, and I might not be lucky with things just fitting.

Aside from the settling in, there are a lot of things that I need to get done. I’ve started notifying friends and businesses of the address and phone number changes, and with my new address I can get library access and get a new internet service provider. The list seems to go on and on, but there is and end to it, and it’s not too far away.

The transition went faster than I expected, and the shift has already been made. However, Sourceforge only allows subversion accesses over a SSL connection and the version of svn compiled on sapheron.org doesn’t have ssl support built in. Blame my laziness when I built it ages ago. I’ll have to get that rebuilt before I can get access to the svn server.

Beginning with my little snafu last week involving an errant cvs update, I’ve noticed a few errors filling the log files. It doesn’t seem to happen every time a request is made, which is why I didn’t notice at first. However, there are several errors every day, so it’s far from isolated.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/home/greg/lib/cgi-bin/pyblosxom.cgi", line 82, in ?
    p.run()
  File "/usr/home/greg/pyblosxom/Pyblosxom/pyblosxom.py", line 166, in run
    blosxom_handler(self._request)
  File "/usr/home/greg/pyblosxom/Pyblosxom/pyblosxom.py", line 856, in blosxom_handler
    renderer.render()
  File "/usr/home/greg/pyblosxom/Pyblosxom/renderers/blosxom.py", line 320, in render
    self._processContent()
  File "/usr/home/greg/pyblosxom/Pyblosxom/renderers/blosxom.py", line 270, in _processContent
    output, current_date = self._processEntry(entry, current_date)
  File "/usr/home/greg/pyblosxom/Pyblosxom/renderers/blosxom.py", line 228, in _processEntry
    if entry["date"] and entry['date'] != current_date:
  File "/usr/home/greg/pyblosxom/Pyblosxom/entries/base.py", line 232, in __getitem__
    return self.getMetadata(key, default)
  File "/usr/home/greg/pyblosxom/Pyblosxom/entries/fileentry.py", line 108, in getMetadata
    self.__populateData()
  File "/usr/home/greg/pyblosxom/Pyblosxom/entries/fileentry.py", line 162, in __populateData
    entrydict = eparser(self._filename, self._request)
  File "/usr/home/greg/pyblosxom/Pyblosxom/pyblosxom.py", line 909, in blosxom_entry_parser
    entryData[meta[0].strip()] = meta[1].strip()
IndexError: list index out of range

I can see how some malformedness can cause a problem, however. Here is the offending block:

    # absorb meta data lines which begin with a #
    while lines and lines[0].startswith("#"):
        meta = lines.pop(0)
        meta = meta[1:].strip()     # remove the hash
        meta = meta.split(" ", 1)
        entryData[meta[0].strip()] = meta[1].strip()

At the beginning of a file entry, there is a section to provide metadata. Lines that begin with # will be marked as metadata containers, which get passed into the dictionary entryData. If a malformed line were passed in, such as:

#MalformedLine

it could not be used to form a key/value pair to insert into the dictionary, and the above error would be raised.

There was one recent change that came through this file:

1.75         (willhelm 11-Nov-05):     while lines and lines[0].startswith("#"):
1.74         (willhelm 11-Nov-05):         meta = lines.pop(0)
1.74         (willhelm 11-Nov-05):         meta = meta[1:].strip()     # remove the hash
1.89         (willhelm 28-Dec-05):         meta = meta.split(" ", 1)
1.76         (willhelm 12-Nov-05):         entryData[meta[0].strip()] = meta[1].strip()

I don’t want to just randomly screw with the checkout unless I have to, so my apologies if you get random errors. I will try to get this fixed up, but the first step is to clean up how my installation is organised. A recent posting to the pyblosxom-devel mailing list indicates that the repository is about be moved from cvs to svn. This move would be a push to get that management in place so that I can screw around without causing damage like this.

In the meantime, I guess I’ll just have to track down any files that might have offending metadata lines and fix them without redating the entries.

News is going around about the release of Harmeet Sooden and two other hostages. It’s great to hear that Harmeet is okay, and must be a relief to everyone who knows him. As someone with an honest intention to help a situation, to do something he believes in, it is horribly ironic that Harmeet was held hostage for 4 months.

The article mentions that Harmeet required medical attention after his rescue. I hope he recovers quickly and is able to hold onto his hope for a better world. It seems to be a relatively rare trait these days.

I might be oversimplifying the whole thing, but I think Adobe is turning out to be counterproductive in terms of encouraging secure use of computers on a day to day basis. I agree that software should be patched quickly to prevent network-connected computers from getting attacked. However, the update process that I’ve experienced with Acrobat Reader has pissed me off to the point where I had to shut off the mechanism to automatically check for updates.

Towards the end of the work day yesterday, I opened a PDF file within a browser windown. Sometime after closing the window, a popup dialog interrupted my work saying that new updates had been downloaded and were ready to install. Fine. Go. The process went on for some time in the background, eventually requesting that I close my browser. Okay. That’s reasonable. It went on for some time again and asked for a reboot. Since I was getting close to the end of work, but was still busy, I selected Reboot later and went about my work. This morning, I started up the computer and proceeded to log into my shell account to check mail. About 10 minutes later, I was interrupted by another popup dialog, saying that Acrobat Reader needed my attention. A message, in another dialog box, was telling me that I had to reboot my computer to continue the installation process. Didn’t I just…?

In the end, I was asked to reboot my computer 3 times to upgrade from 7.0.5 to 7.0.7. Before the last reboot, I had already gone into the settings and disabled automatic detection of upgrades. The process robbed me of about half an hour in total and annoyed me enough to write about it, and that was a minor upgrade. Do they expect me to do this when 7.0.8 comes out? I don’t think so.

One last question comes to mind: Is it possible that the reason that one needs to reboot several times during the upgrade of a page renderer is the same reason that there are security issues to fix in the first place?

It’s hard to say what was going through my head when I was typing cvs up within my pyblosxom checkout directory. If I had a sensible layout to my working directory structure, it wouldn’t be such a big deal, but my live weblog draws its internals directly from my cvs checkout location. There were quite a few changes made between my last update and this one, but at least they have been small changes. There were only two files which came up as conflicted, which made fixing relatively quick.

Things seem to be in fair working order again and I hope no one else saw the 500 Internal Server Error. The lesson learned is that I really should pull the live code a layer away from the surface so I don’t do that again. Of course, if I had time to do that, I’d probably spend it playing around with CherryPy instead.

I went skating with a few others this morning around Oriental Parade. One of the hockey players that I had met before teaches a skating class which practices on the weekends with a bit of a free skate. While we were out, we were talking about ways of turning 180°. Russell is able to smoothly change direction without lifting either his heel or toe. The motion is pretty damn graceful, and seemed well and truely beyond my grasp. After they all left, I spent a bit of extra time working this through my head, looking it it from physical and physiological points of view. The problem comes down to offsetting the wheel height from the ground. Russell had even said that he has to wear down his heel and toe wheels a bit, so he doesn’t feel like he’s stuck skating in straight lines all the time.

The K2 skates that I’m wearing are a longer track than normal recreation skates, and with the wheels I’ve got on there, I have no chance of rockering without artificially wearing down the outside wheels a bit. I guess I’m just stuck with having to lift heels and toes to get the skates to spin around. It might not be as pretty, but it will work. On the plus side, with the extra practice, I can turn around to both sides now.

If I ended up getting sucked into playing inline hockey, the short track skates will be much more maneuverable than mine and be adjustable in all the right ways. I’m kinda getting the feeling that I might just end up with a different pair of skates for every occassion. This could get expensive.

I’ve been looking for a more permanent place to live since before getting to Wellington. The place that I’m in is okay, but only when considered to be short term. The impression that I get is that if I were to start cleaning, I wouldn’t stop until someone died. That seems a bit dramatic, so it’s better to not even begin. And since I don’t want to clean it, I just don’t make a mess of the place. Which pretty much means that I don’t live there. Cause and effect.

I looked at two places on Saturday. The first was yet another place at Greta Point and the second was just up the hill from Parliament. I knew from the start that the first place would be acceptable; it’s a good house in a good location, and the room that I’ll be in should be enough space for me and my stuff. When I saw the adverisment for the second place, the language caught my attention. I really wanted to see the place. And when I got there, I wanted to live there. The girl who owns the house is an Australian with a definite no-bullshit attitude. I wanted to live with her. But it wasn’t meant to be. She got back to me a day later with a text-message version of the PFO[1].

Something is definitely better than nothing, and it will be nice to arrange for my stuff to be shipped down from Auckland. I’m sure my plants are missing me (Julie insists that she’s actually watering them), and I’d love to have more than the 1-week supply of clothes that came down with me in the car a couple weeks ago. And then there are all the fringe benefits of having a mailing address, such as getting stuff shipped and getting public library access.

¹ PFO stands for Please Fuck Off and refers to the generic form-letter style blow-off that one gets to a job application when the company just doesn’t want to expend any courtesy of human contact.

Let’s all take a moment, not just to celebrate St. Patrick (who was he, anyway), but to celebrate the fact that nearly every place you find people, you find an Authentic Irish Pub™ and can get pissed with other people celebrating the very same fact.

It’s a day later.¹ I’ve had a chance to sleep off the ego-hurt of the fall and the real hurt had a chance to set in. The bits of least worry have taken over from the bits of most worry. I guess I did put some weight on my left wrist when I came down. There seems to be a bit of a rotational sprain that has made its to the forefront of my consciousness. There’s an in-house doctor at the office on friday’s, which is perfect timing for me. I’ll get him to double check that it’s not too serious and to slap my wrist (the other one) for not wearing my guards.

On the plus side, I’ve also noticed a fair bit of hamstring soreness (the good kind of soreness). I’m not sure what about the new wheels could have changed, but the muscles have definitely been used more than usual. Kinda cool.

¹ There is an entry sitting on my laptop that needs to sync up to the server. It’s dated for last night and will get there eventually. Although it will be visible after this one, it actually comes before it. I don’t mind manually messing witht the timeline… In short, the new wheels went on, I had a decent skate, a close call, and then a fall.

So much to say, and no clue where to begin.

There is danger inherent in new anything on skates. Putting a new brake pad on changes the action required to use it, for instance. Changing these wheels out changed nearly everything. At least I knew to expect some things to be unfamiliar. I could see that going from burned out 76mm wheels to shiny 80’s was going to change my height and feel different, especially changing the distance between the brake and the ground. The higher density wheels actually feel more resilient, like they’re a little less prone to erasing themselves, but harder to corner with at the same time.

I started out with an easy, feel-good skate. It was a chance to refamiliarise myself with the concept of everything. And knowing that my brake was going to be less useful, it was a good chance to work on my ambidexterity, t-braking and turning evenly to either side. Not even, not yet, but it’s a bit better. It was envigorating, actually. I felt like I was going through the whole learning process over again.

After getting a decent feel for the responsiveness of the 80/85A’s, I wanted to take them for a bit of a road run. They felt great. I don’t know if it was the larger wheels, or the density change, or the smaller bearings, but I felt like I was flying down the waterfront. Even when I got to the nasty bits¹ of the footpath, it didn’t feel horrible. At least, not at first.

More or less on a whim, I decided to see if I could make it out to the airport easily. The short answer is no. Not unless you’re in a vehicle. The roundabouts discriminate against pedestrian traffic (I was staying to the footpaths at the time). I did manage to get there in the end, but I don’t think it was particularly worth the effort. Not for fear of 70km/h traffic, including buses that aren’t especially capable of avoiding running me over.

I’ve been asked many time how to deal with pebbles on the road. I’ve always responded non-chalantly, saying that if you’re going fast, the rock will shoot out to the side and you’ll barely feel it happen. That’s only true if the rock hits the left or the right side. But if it hits down the middle, it can get stuck. Odds are in your favour, generally, but luck was gunning me down. The pebble managed to get stuck in between the housing for the brake pad and the new, larger wheel at the back of my right foot. I ground to a halt (involving a sprint on some grass), and proceeded to wrestle the little bastard out with a piece of plastic I found on the ground (always carry a skate tool!). The damage to the rock was minimal. The damage to the wheel, luckily, was more cosmetic than anything, nothing more than a shallow channel down the middle of the surface. Everything rolls as normal.

After getting back into town, somewhat disillusioned, I decided to grab a quick bite to eat before heading back up to the house. A lot of downtown Wellington is flat enough to skate around without problems, but I’m still unfamiliar with a lot of the surfaces for that certain level of unconscious knowledge. I was still holding my drink in my hand, intending to ride up a curb after crossing a street, and I don’t know what happened next. There was a fall, that was for certain, a slightly painful one. I think I caught an edge of something, but somehow, my right side came down first, elbow and hip, and a bit on the left knee. Scratches only. More damaging to the ego than the body, and not even dirt on the clothing (MEC gear rocks.) I’m going to have to take a stroll through there again sometime soon and see what it is I actually caught and make sure I don’t do it again.

I’m actually pretty pissed about the fall. It doesn’t happen to me. It’s not that I’m too good to fall down, but I just don’t. I can always catch myself or avoid it. Maybe I’m cocky about it, maybe not. 4 falls in nearly 4 years still isn’t a horrible average. All told, I was pretty lucky. No wrist guards at the time and I was holding a glass bottle when I hit the pavement. List the ways I could have been hurt, and I’ll give you a near-identical list of how I wasn’t.

¹ I’m certain that city councellors think they’re doing a stellar job maintaining the footpaths. I’ll do my best to beat them with a stick the next time I meet them. The nasty bits of the footpath along the waterfront are worse on the way back. Being against the flow of traffic, it’s not as easy to go on the road/cycle lane, and we’re stuck with the nasties. I wonder if they care that some of the sections are actually too narrow for a wheel-chair to pass, which, of course, also makes it incredibly difficult to skate on, especially when you lose so much energy to the rough surface. These councellors should get out of their cars more often and see what they’re actually responsible for.

In a desperate attempt to take longer between buying cycles for new wheels for my skates, I ordered a round of 80mm 85A wheels from Sk8, which is an online/mail order company from Christchurch. What I didn’t realise as I was ordering, was that the new wheels use a smaller bearing than I have available. The standard recreational skate bearing is denoted 608, whereas this smaller bearing is a 688. A more detailed explanation can be found at skatefaq. Needless to say, more work was required to get the new wheels rolling.

After a bit of research and asking of questions, it turned out to be quicker and possibly cheaper to get a set of 688 bearings sent out than to try to replace the wheels. Sk8 provided a set of Mission™ bearings and spacers on a one day turnaround, which should get fitted into the skates tonight. I’m not sure if I’ll have a chance to go for a skate tonight, but I’m supposed to take a look at a flat near the waterfront tonight, so I’ll be in a good location for it if I have the time.

Doesn’t mean you should.

I was rather sick yesterday and went to see the doctor. I had the flu and, quite possibly, a throat infection. The cool part was that the doctor said that he was hesitant to give me any medication for anything. Far too often, doctors seem to quick to hand out little pills to anyone who sniffles, coughs or looks a bit cross-eyed. This is a nice change. I’d like to know that when I actually need some form of medication, that I won’t be resistant to it and neither will the germs that I’m trying to stop.

I think there is a bit of a statement to be made in that I couldn’t name my regular doctor, but I could name a regular physiotherapist, chiroprator and massage therapist.

Note to self: Random Number Generator Modulation isn’t the same thing as Ring Modulation. Stopping my brain from expanding RNG into Ring would have saved me a lot of confusion.

I’ve always wanted one, but I never assumed that I’d be in a position for whatever company I’m working for to have one lying around, and that they decide that I should have it. I’m talking about none other than the MAudio Delta 1010.

I have a feeling that I’m due for another round of gear lust. It’s been a while since I’ve gone shopping for music gear.

It always surprises me just how much I forget about how to use Matlab in between times that I use it. I think part of the problem is that I wasted so much time working on microcontroller software that I had lost track of any sort of numerical simulation tools that I would use for DSP work.

I’ve started back to work after a wonderful 2 month break. I’m finding myself a victim, however, of Job Cool-Factor Syndrome. My first task on my first project took me to the Steinberg developer pages to get a copy of the VST audio plug-in SDK. How am I a victim? Well, somehow I found myself drawn to the library to sit down with some technical papers that I’ll eventually be using to create audio effects. Who puts in voluntary extra hours on their second day of work?

While I was peeking around Real Groovy, I ran across the coolest thing I’ve seen in a while: the CD single for Bitches/Molly. When you find something like that marked at 40% off, don’t turn it down.

Thou shalt never leave freshly skated skates in a closed car on a sunny day.