woollymittens's Blog

Re: Australia

Ha! I think I learned more from this than from my immigration manuals. :)

Re: Getting to the forum

If you use the FoxyProxy addon for Firefox, the impact of using a slow proxy will be reduced to just the sites that need it.

http://foxyproxy.mozdev.org/index.html

It'll at least help in keeping the unblocked sites going at their normal speed.

Re: Sydney Meetup

My outlook for making it to Australia before year's end looks grim. =/ My paperwork has been on hold for almost 6 months now.

Re: iPhone connectivity

I'm writing this dressed in a bear's pelt. Outside is my mammoth, saddled for my daily commute.

Why am I dressed like a cave person? Well, you see. I'm the last person on Earth to not actually have a cell-phone. This simple fact dates me at around the stone age.

It's not that I don't want a phone, but from the very start those telco contracts have seemed to me like the worst kind of one sided strangle hold. They demand a two year commitment and a fancy voice and data plan, but step one foot over a national border and they send a bill that would require a second mortgage on your house.

They charge more for a megabyte of data trafic, than NASA charges per gram of equipment launched into orbit. http://www.howstuffworks.com/space-elevator.htm

Re: Twitter - Even wierder than you think it is

Don't forget all the sailing enthusiasts we all got following us after mentioning 2 schooners.

At least that was funny.

Re: Political support for the great Australian internet filter seem to be floundering.

Oh, how typical. I go off on a rant about internet filtering and see what my home country does:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090722/0224075620.shtml

A private company of record industry lobbyists has won a court case against the PirateBay. The judge decided that all of the internet traffic from the Netherlands should be filtered to keep Dutch people from going to that website.

This sets a dangerous precedent in which any and all lobbyists get control over state censorship.

Mandatory internet censorship passes testing stage with great success.

The trial of the government's proposed mandatory internet censorship was concluded to be a great success.

According to the participants of the limited trial, which only tested a small blacklist on an even smaller group of volunteers, there was no slow down and plans to scale the system up to the whole nation are going right ahead.

http://www.arnnet.com.au/article/312354/isps_give_clean_feed_filter_technical_green-light

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/07/25/0049217/Australian-Net-Filter-Gets-One-Step-Closer?from=rss

Please remember that any joy you're feeling when you hear of the "national broadband network" is probably just propaganda to shut you up about the censorship issue.

Three strikes and you're out...

It looks like Australia is going to get its own version of the three strikes law for alleged copyright offenders.

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/07/15/1251201/Australia-Considering-P2P-Three-Strikes-Law?from=rss

What it boils down to is that your ISP will have to act as a private policeman for the publishers. There's several things severely wrong with this, that are evident from the French implementation of this law.

- It takes three accusations to cut you off from the internet for a year on any provider.

- The accusations don't require proof. Any false positive will do.

- The ISP will have to pay for all this policing themselves. Extra costs that the subscribers will have to cough up.

- There is no legal recourse. All disputes will be handled by a private ombudman appointed by the publishers... guess how fair that will be.

I fear that however much we protest, the music corporations will eventually buy this law, like they did in France. Together with senator the honorable mister Conroy's porn-filter, I am left wondering why the authorities are doing their best to stifle the only growth economy left?

Making your laptop really really fast with an SSD drive.

Since I sold my pimped up EeePC and my new Acer Aspire One doesn't take 2.5" drives, I just had to subject my Macbook Pro to a cruel experiment with the left-over solid state drive (SSD) from my netbook.

Sadly it's only 32GB in capacity. Hardly enough for the OS and the applications, let alone my user profile and all my movies and music. But even 32GB had set me back about 150 euros (about $300 Aus).

With some help from the Twitterer @HiryuSingh I figured out how use this expensive little spare-part. His suggestion was to move the user-folder to an external disk.

The option to do this is hidden behind several grave warning in the "Accounts" settings in the "System Preferences"...

... after right clicking on a user and choosing the "Advanced options".

Since this was a fresh install on my SSD harddrive I made new user called "woolly" for myself and I changed the Home Directory of that user to another harddisk named "Machintosh Home".

I had to manually copy the home directory to that drive before I could log in to that account, so you can't do this trick when you're logged in as the user you are trying to move.

Of course an external disk is always going to be slower than an internal one and I wanted to be sure that I was actually improving things.

USB is the slowest option of all and I would not recommend it all for this purpose. It only showed transfer speeds of around 30MBps.

        Drive Type        Freecom Mobile Drive XXS
    Disk Test    29.47   
        Sequential    35.58   
            Uncached Write    39.76    24.41 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Write    55.37    31.33 MB/sec [256K blocks]
            Uncached Read    18.36    5.37 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Read    67.75    34.05 MB/sec [256K blocks]
        Random    25.15   
            Uncached Write    8.33    0.88 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Write    90.37    28.93 MB/sec [256K blocks]
            Uncached Read    61.62    0.44 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Read    85.55    15.87 MB/sec [256K blocks]

My second choice was an external Firewire 800 drive, which managed about 50MBps.

        Drive Type        LaCie Rugged FW/USB
    Disk Test    55.74   
        Sequential    78.49   
            Uncached Write    75.13    46.13 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Write    97.46    55.14 MB/sec [256K blocks]
            Uncached Read    51.07    14.95 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Read    128.06    64.36 MB/sec [256K blocks]
        Random    43.22   
            Uncached Write    17.16    1.82 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Write    95.01    30.42 MB/sec [256K blocks]
            Uncached Read    66.70    0.47 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Read    114.35    21.22 MB/sec [256K blocks]

In trying to get the most out of an external drive I also ordered a eSata housing and placed the Macbook's original harddisk in that. It also benchmarked at around 50MBps.

    Disk Test    53.84   
        Sequential    79.98   
            Uncached Write    85.62    52.57 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Write    85.59    48.42 MB/sec [256K blocks]
            Uncached Read    54.44    15.93 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Read    120.80    60.71 MB/sec [256K blocks]
        Random    40.57   
            Uncached Write    16.54    1.75 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Write    63.37    20.29 MB/sec [256K blocks]
            Uncached Read    71.63    0.51 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Read    119.08    22.10 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Firewire 800 is good enough then.

Now let's have a look at how the internal SSD drive performs:

Results    211.91   
    System Info       
        Xbench Version        1.3
        System Version        10.6 (10A411)
        Physical RAM        4096 MB
        Model        MacBookPro5,1
        Drive Type        OCZ-VERTEX v1.10
    Disk Test    211.91   
        Sequential    198.22   
            Uncached Write    224.62    137.92 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Write    215.29    121.81 MB/sec [256K blocks]
            Uncached Read    123.89    36.26 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Read    332.11    166.92 MB/sec [256K blocks]
        Random    227.63   
            Uncached Write    78.47    8.31 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Write    339.87    108.80 MB/sec [256K blocks]
            Uncached Read    1855.35    13.15 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Read    742.46    137.77 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Over 100MBps... say what? Helmsman, engage ridiculous speed!

Mac OS X boots within 10 seconds. Photoshop is ready within 3. Starting Firefox doesn't even leave enough time to blink.

Sure. My datafiles are on the external disk, but at 50MBps, that's still on par with an internal harddisk, which would push bits around at about 60 or 70MBps at best.

Would I recommend doing this yourself? No... not with a 32GB SSD. Wait until 64 or 128 becomes affordable. But I CAN wholeheartedly confirm that running your OS of an SSD drive is well worth it in regards to speed. I can certainly not get used to normal loading times again.

Re: Charity begins -a-t- -h-o-m-e- bloody far away.

I really have no idea what the situation is there. I assume they've got a cable-modem, possibly with a built in firewall to which I will have no access.

SSH certainly isn't my strong point. Not much of Linux is to be honest.

I like Knightwise' take on it though. With his "Killroy 2.0" idea, he proposes that I would make them large independent of the hardware they use. I like the idea of making a bootable OS on a flashdrive over here that would be easy to back up and install over there.

What I still do need to find out though is how to make a "custom" distro for them with all their email and account information filled in.

New Zealand beats the honarable mister Conroy to the punch...

... be it in a rather sneaky way. New Zealand now has their very own internet crippling filter.

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/07/14/1330239/New-Zealand-Introduces-Internet-Filtering?from=rss

We can only wait until reports of false positives and unfiltered true positives start flooding in.

Re: A Cover Flow Image Gallery Made in Javascript.

Hey thanks. That's wonderful. If you ever need anything scripted for anything, just let me know. This stuff is my hobby as well as my job and I am looking at about 7 months of boredom ahead of me.

Re: What are you saving up for next?

@Tom125 - Ha! Nice one. If that's what it takes to get a visa, I'd rather try Canada. :)

@herne - Yes, but you still live in Canada. :)

@erice - In NL, nothing is free. Typically Dutch: Every public utility is privatized AND taxed... that way the state can claim they provide it and corporations can ask what they want.

Re: What are you saving up for next?

Don't make me tell you that my sucky streethouse in a suburb without even a garden cost me A$417400. And that's the cheapest I could find.

And no... my standard of living is not higher. Only my bank-manager's is. :P

What I am saving up for? Well: 

Not cheap... so worth it.

Now is anyone looking for an overpriced green house in Europe? 

Re: Toodledo

Task management and planning are an absolute disaster where I work now. There's three people in charge of what I do and none of them talk to each other.

I tried showing them the link to Toodledo, but somehow their consciousness if on another plane of existence.

Any ideas how I can make the idea of actually using a planning tool other than an excel sheet on their desktop appealing to them?

A Cover Flow Image Gallery Made in Javascript.

I made a reasonably easy tutorial about creating a "cover flow" effect for a photo gallery using Javascript for someone and put it on my website. Maybe it'll come in useful to someone here too?

http://www.classbehaviours.com/default.aspx?id=an-animated-effect-driven-by-the-scroll-position&mod=meta

Charity begins -a-t- -h-o-m-e- bloody far away.

It's not a technical question so much as a social problem.

First the situation: 
My mom has a boyfriend... from Turkey. Turkey is (for all intents and purposes) the second world country and not a big ugly bird in this case.

Sedat has a family and a highschool aged kid there. He works his balls off to finance her education and even went as far as buying his family a PC for homework and communication.

Now the problem:
They keep installing garbage on that Dell Windows machine so neither homework nor communication gets done. It's been fixed 4 times now. You probably know how fast Windows gets shafted by teens and how Turkey probably is the Wild West for virusses.

This is where it clicked:
They don't need Windows. They need granny Linux. Like Knightwise came up with:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuForGrandma

What it boils down to is that I, probably at some point this year, will be shipped there in a vegetable crate with a bag of CD's. 

It's an 8 hour flight there, so it'll be an (unpaid) "vacation". My last one in Europe, pending my plans to move to Australia.

I'm only likely to go there once ever, so it must never break. I want to put enough Linux on that PC to let them Skype and type out stuff. 

Here's where your help would be very much appreciated:
What do I need to know about setting up remote accessing and security to not have them end up with a fancy Dell brick? What Distro is most likely to survive? I'm thinking Ubuntu.

I would love it if you guys could give some pointers, as this is quite a risky little adventure I'm trying to pull off.

If I fix it, I'll be the hero and linux will triumph. If I fail, then they'll end up screwing around with virusses and trojans until someone's credit card gets stolen or worse. 

AND IT'LL BE ALL MY FAULT.

Re: The Definitive Guide to Laptop Stands.

Brilliant find tom125. Oddly enough I was just about to post something eerily similar.

My multi-functional laptop thingomatic.

It starts out flat as a pancake.

So you can use it as a leg protector.

But it also folds open like this.

So you can put your laptop on it to get the thing at eye-level.

The little netbook makes for an awesome little third screen to keep track of my mail on.

It appears to be rather a rare specialized thingy though. The only website I found, doesn't actually sell the darn things to anything but corporations.

http://www.bakkerelkhuizen.nl/index.php?l=en

Does anyone have equally useful stands that are easier to come by?

Re: What are you saving up for next?

I got the A5 Intuos one: http://www.wacom.eu/index2.asp?pid=245&lang=en

I had tried the smallest first generation Graphire at my last employer, but that was less that useful. I had concluded back then that it was just me being unable to adjust to working left-handed again, but apparently my boss was just too cheap. 

This one works wonderfully.

The Definitive Guide to Laptop Stands.

I think the stand is more expensive than the netbook.

Re: What did you make of your Netbook?

I finally after three rather impulsive buys, ended up with the netbook I can live with. The 9" Acer Aspire One. The 9" Asus was from before the Atom and a disaster. The 10" Asus is just too bulky to casually throw into a bag.

I'm not likely to buy any Atom based netbook on a whim anymore now. Instead I could be seduced by an even smaller and flatter "Snapdragon" netbook, which will have an ARM CPU instead of Intel.

Of course it won't run anything remotely "Windows", but I like my Linux well enough. The ARM is the sort of CPU you find in Mobile phones and requires no cooling and a lot less power.

http://www.umpcportal.com/2008/12/arm-core-snapdragon-netbook-demonstrated

I don't know why my boss bought this...

... but somehow I can't fault him for it.

Re: What are you saving up for next?

Oh lucky you! Well, I'm saving up for my ticket as well, though when I'll get to use it is wholly in the hands of the Department of Immigrations.

It saddens me to miss the July AGP meet up. I hope there's a lot more in the future.

The lowest I've seen tickets from Amsterdam to Sydney for was about 900 euros with Virgin Atlantic. I hope that kind of bargain remains.

My last big purchase was a Wacom tablet and it was a really nice toy to invest in. It put the fun back into my cartooning hobby.

Have it any way you want it...

The kind of filetypes I get sent as a web-developer are astounding. Clients send every kind of obsolete file you can imagine. "Yes... our company logo is in fact Amiga IFF, that's not a problem right?"

This website might ease you pain a little. It converts just about anything to everything:
http://www.convertfiles.com/

Handy to have around for when someone manages to send their audio-clips in .AU format wrapped in a tar-ball. :)

Re: This is cool

What is it? *O.o*