Problems in a sue happy culture

20 years ago, nobody would sue anyone in Australia, but these days the lawyers have won and insanity pervails. I went to the local hardware store and explained that I had found that a cupboard in my house was painted with lead paint which I wanted to remove and asked for help on which air mask I should use. The helpful man at the store immediately said he could no longer help me as lead paint was involved, apparently BBC hardware was sued by someone who had asked for help with lead paint and consequently contracted lead poisoning. I explained that I was fully aware of how dangerous lead paint was (hence why I wanted to remove it from my house) and just wanted to know how the gas masks work, not how to remove lead paint. No go, he couldn't give me any help. Fortunately he then looked both ways and whispered "you get what you pay for" That told me enough, ie buy the expensive mask as it will provide much better protection. But it also highlighted to me how liability laws mean that one person gets to dictate it for all of us these days. Coincidently friends of ours also had to remove lead paint from their house and did indeed end up with one person having lead poisoning, a very serious illness. The litigation laws are breeding a lack of knowledge and help when it should in fact be exactly the other way round.

Posted at 11:30PM Jul 18, 2008 by oz in General  |  Comments[1]

Acrobat reader for Solaris x86 on it's way

One of the last outstanding pieces for Solaris x86 is finally on it's way it seems.

http://blogs.adobe.com/acroread/2008/05/adobe_reader_on_solaris_x86_co.html

Still a bit of a wait but at least we know it's in the works now. A big thank you goes to Adobe.

Posted at 09:10PM May 19, 2008 by oz in Solaris X86  |  Comments[1]

Firefox 2.0.0.14 available

Seems the latest version of Firefox is available, ie:

What's New
==========

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/2.0.0.14/releasenotes/#whatsnew

Downloading
===========

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/2.0.0.14/releasenotes/#contributedbuilds

http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/2.0.0.14/contrib

Posted at 03:16PM Apr 22, 2008 by oz in Solaris X86  | 

New version of Adobe flash available

As per:

http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash&P2_Platform=Intel

Has the Solaris x86 version, but it's available for Sparc as well.

Posted at 08:43PM Jan 30, 2008 by oz in Apple Newton  | 

Photos from Switzerland

I said I would post some of the photos from Switzerland and I've finally gotton to it (we are currently on a stopover in Tokyo and I can't sleep due to jetlag.) The first photo is the type of view you get while walking along (rest of the family is walking ahead of me.)

and the second photo is of the mountain we were able to walk up.

Posted at 07:12AM Jan 15, 2008 by oz in General  |  Comments[3]

Time in Holland

Seems hard to believe that we only have about 5 weeks to go before heading back to Australia. We've had a great time walking in the mountains of Switzerland, eating stroopwafels in Sparkenburg etc but now the countdown starts. In the meanwhile it seems my son has started his own blog on http://informationmegahighway.blogspot.com (shameless plug for him here.) When I look back at wa I was doing at his age, it was worrying about my casette tapes not working in my Exidy Sorcerer (a 64k z80 computer from long ago.) It's enough to make me jealous.

Anyway, when I get a moment I'll post some of the photos from the trip.

Posted at 08:43AM Dec 11, 2007 by oz in General  | 

Back in the Netherlands

It hardly seems like three years have gone by, but we are visiting the Netherlands again, this time for a 4 month stint. I'll simply be working from the Amersfoort office as my current job role is such it doesn't matter what time I work.

Anyway, a couple of intersting urls, firstly it seems that Shang Shin is doing one of his courses for Sun Identity Manager:

http://www.javapassion.com/idm

I have done the J2EE course he offers and found it both effective and flexible (I could work it around all the other demands on my time.)

The other one is that:

http://www.dot.tk

is offering free domain names (in exchange for inserting a small add banner at the top of your web page.) My children were very happy to be able to get their own domain names (as their father is way too stingy to buy them one.)

Posted at 05:32AM Sep 14, 2007 by oz in General  |  Comments[1]

Dhcp info

I have a number of times that (while using DHCP) when I first boot up that DNS isn't working. The resolv.conf file is missing or has the wrong values and I hate having to fix things by hand, so i decided to scipt the DNS setup using the information from DHCP (via the dhcpinfo command.)

#!/bin/ksh

IFDEV=`ifconfig -a|grep ":"|grep -v lo0|cut -f1 -d:|grep -v "ip.tun"|grep -v "inet6"|cut -f1`

GATEWAY=`/sbin/dhcpinfo -i $IFDEV router`
DNSSERVER=`/sbin/dhcpinfo -i $IFDEV DNSserv`
DOMAIN=`/sbin/dhcpinfo -i $IFDEV DNSdmain`
MASK=`/sbin/dhcpinfo -i $IFDEV 1`

echo dev=$IFDEV gateway=$GATEWAY domain=$DOMAIN mask=$MASK

cp /etc/nsswitch.dns /etc/nsswitch.conf

echo "nameserver $DNSSERVER" >/etc/resolv.conf
if [ "$DOMAIN" != "localdomain" ]
then
        echo "domain $DOMAIN" >>/etc/resolv.conf
        echo "search $DOMAIN" >>/etc/resolv.conf
fi

The logic for figuring which interface to use isn't very robust, but it works in all the setups I use.

Posted at 10:53AM Jul 27, 2007 by oz in Solaris X86  | 

World Wide Newton conference

As a die hard Newton user, it's not often you have an eventful week for your PDA except for this week. The World Wide Newton Conference was held in Japan (curse the timing, I'll be passing through Japan in Spetember) and there were actually major announcements, ie:

Hiroshi's wireless networking package has not only dropped the licensing cost, but been open sourced:

http://www.ff.iij4u.or.jp/~ngc/eng/newtwave.htm

A replacement for the old Newton Toolkit has been developed, so you can write Newtonscript code on a modern platform:

http://code.google.com/p/dynee5

The Einstein Newton emulator has been open sourced and improved:

http://code.google.com/p/einstein

The MacOs X binary for Einstein is at:

http://einstein.googlecode.com/files/EinsteinPlatform2007.7-MacOS_X.zip

Good to see people draging the platform into the 21st century (and a special thank you to Hiroshi as I use his wirless network card driver almost every day.)

Posted at 09:27PM Jul 11, 2007 by oz in Apple Newton  | 

find command

Seeing as some people seem to be posting their handy find commands, I thought I'd add mine:

find . -mount -ls | awk '{ print $7 " " $11 }' | sort -n

which will list all files in & under the current directory and sort them by size, very handy for finding where all the space went.

Posted at 11:08AM Jul 11, 2007 by oz in Solaris X86  |  Comments[4]

Holidays

Just back from a week relaxing at a place called Lake Conjola. A small out of the way place where the tourists haven't yet discovered, some friends of ours have a small cottage on the lakeside (you literally walk at the door an hop in a canoe.) We've been before but this time we saw the dolphins playing in the surf (catching a wave an surfing in each time) and everyone's backyard seemed to have a kangaroo in it. The beach must be 10km long with nobody else in sight.

Posted at 02:55PM Jul 08, 2007 by oz in General  | 

Uncyclopedia

Had a good laugh today reading the uncyclopedia entry for Java at http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Java

Posted at 07:57PM Jun 21, 2007 by oz in Java  | 

Comments

Some wag pointed out that trading wireless support and decent screen resolution for a shiny apple logo wasn't such a clever trade :-> 5 years ago he would have been completely right and I would have walked away with my tail between my legs. But Sun is treating Solaris x86 as a serious product these days and I only bought the Mac because I could see that these probs are being looked at (and in the meanwhile MacOs is simply a more familiar Unix based environment than Windows can ever hope to be, with or without Cygwin.)

Why not Linux then? (an trust me, I'd use Linux ahead of Windows any day.) Well, that's a good question and would be fine for many people but I need to test things that I'm proposing to do on Solaris Sparc based servers so Solaris x86 on my laptop is a perfect starting point.

Posted at 10:34PM May 16, 2007 by oz in Solaris X86  |  Comments[2]

Back again

If you're wondering why it went quiet for so, my old Toshiba Tecra S1 finally died completely, the screen no longer works. As I had no laptop to play on there wasn't much to write about until now. The replacement is a Macbook Pro (I like the dual core 64 bit processor with 2g, plus the size & general quality of the construction.) Getting Solaris x86 to run on it was a bit of a challenge, but after following the instructions at:

http://good-for-nothing.org/page.php?17

I was able to get it going. At the moment wireless doesn't work (even though the Atheros chip is support) but the ethernet does so it's not a great drama and the screen is limited to 1024*800. This is early days though and I'm sure with the way hardware support is improving in Solaris x86 these limits will go.

Posted at 12:53PM May 16, 2007 by oz in Solaris X86  |  Comments[4]

Solaris 10/Sun Studio DVD Kits

Looks like free Solaris 10 Media Kits are available including a Solaris 10 6/06 DVD for SPARC and for x64/x86 as well as a Sun Studio 11 DVD with all of the latest and greatest tools and compilers, ie:

http://www.sun.com/solaris/freemedia

Posted at 10:51AM Nov 23, 2006 by oz in Solaris X86  |  Comments[1]

Firefox 2.0rc3 contributed builds now available on mozilla.org

Firefox 2.0rc3 contributed builds on Solaris10, Solaris 8/9 is now available on mozilla.org

Download Page and Location
==========================

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/2.0/releasenotes/#solarisbuilds http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/2.0rc3/contrib/

Posted at 05:10PM Oct 20, 2006 by oz in Solaris X86  |