Sandstorms through Sydney

I've cleaned the cars, washed the windows and vacumed the red mud from the bottom of my pool, so of course now they tell me that another dust storm is going to blow through Sydney. When I pluck up the energy I'll post some photos, but it's pretty easy, just imagine everything red and dusty and you'll get the idea (and everything under a thin layer of dust/mud.)

Posted at 07:28AM Sep 26, 2009 by oz in General  | 

Just a test

Just testing using the Scribefire extention in Firefox to publish to this blog (from www.scribefire.com) Seems to be an easy and portable solution.

Posted at 07:32PM Sep 01, 2009 by oz in General  | 

t shirts

For those who might want a free tee shirt, you might want to look at:

http://developers.sun.com/community/softwarelibrarycontest

The catch is you have to write a review to get the tee shirt.

Posted at 10:44AM May 13, 2009 by oz in General  | 

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]

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]

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  | 

Next SOSUG meeting

The netx SOSUG meeting will be next Tuesday (23rd May), ie details at:

http://opensolaris.org/os/community/os_user_groups/sosug/nextmeeting

As always, be there or be square :->.

Posted at 03:31PM May 18, 2006 by oz in General  | 

Government Censorship

The Australian Government has apparently taken to censoring a website that did a parody of our Prime Minister, ie

http://www.smh.com.au/news/breaking/government-shuts-howard-spoof-site/2006/03/17/1142098638843.html

This is the same government who wants to relax the media ownership laws so that just a few people will be able to own all our television and media without any good reason to do so (other than a few media barons wanting this.)

Apparently free speech isn't an Australian value anymore :-<.

Posted at 12:35PM Mar 17, 2006 by oz in General  |  Comments[1]

Windows XP boots on Apple Mac

At last, some has proof

Windows XP boots on a Macbook

Posted at 10:15PM Mar 09, 2006 by oz in General  | 

Next SOSUG Meeting

The next SOSUG (Sydney Open Solaris Users Group) meeting has been set for the 25th of Jan.

Date: Wednesday, January 25
Time: 6:30pm
Location: Sun Solution (formally iForce) Centre. Ground floor 33 Berry
St, North Sydney

See http://opensolaris.org/os/community/os_user_groups/sosug for a link to a map and full details.

As they say, be there or be square :->

Posted at 05:44PM Jan 19, 2006 by oz in General  | 

Government Luancy

I have avoided any political comment up to now, but I could not help vent over the situation in Australia (in the state of NSW actually.) The current government decided to build a desalination plant to help supplant the water supply recently, signed the contracts and then started doing the community consultation process. The kick is that they have said that no matter what, they will build the plant. So why waste my tax dollars on a consultation process where the results will be ignored anyway ? (thats my rant for the year :->)

More details at water-plant-workshop-walkout

Posted at 12:41PM Jan 19, 2006 by oz in General  | 

Sydney OpenSolaris Users Group meeting on Monday

As Alan Hargraves has already pointed out, the next meeting will be on Monday 17th at 6pm. Details are:

Date: Monday, October 17
Time: 6:30pm
Location: iForce Centre. Ground floor 33 Berry St, North Sydney

Speakers
--------

Bryan Cantrill - Bryan is in Australia this week to (amongst other
        things) present a tutorial and plenary at AUUG and do some
        customer visits. He will also present at SOSUG.

        Bryan is a senior staff engineer with the Solaris Kernel group
        and was recently recognised as one of the top innovators under
        35 years of age.

James McPherson - James recently gave a customer presentation on ZFS
        and has agreed to give the presentation to this group. I've not
        seen the presentation, but from all accounts it went very well
        when he first gave it. James has been "playing" with ZFS for
        quite some time, particularly with a focus on usability and
        folks simply doing silly things with it to see how it holds
        up.

        James currently works in the Leadville driver group.

Be there or be square as they :-]

Posted at 05:20PM Oct 13, 2005 by oz in General  |  Comments[0]

Sydney OpenSolaris Meeting

Well, as Alan posted last night was the first Sydney OpenSolaris group meeting and by all accounts it went well.

Peter Lees did a rundown on what OpenSolaris is (and is not)

Brendan Gregg did a good talk around how Dtrace replaces all traditional performance tuing tools by running a nasty script on his laptop and then using both the old tools and dtrace to troubleshoot the problem to show the pros and cons. He also did a brief introduction to the Dtrace tools repository. (which can be found at Bigadmin

Alan Hargreaves then followed up with a look at how static probes work in Dtrace and then as a Surprise showed off Looking Glass running under Solaris x86! (using the pre prelease Nvidia driver of course.) I don't think I want to know how he got Java3d to run on his laptop.

A raffle was held to give away a copy of the Cluster blueprints book and the Solaris10 media kits were handed out (plus pizza and beer to finish off.) I'm certainly glad I went along and it was good to chat to people outside of Sun who are interested in Solaris.

Posted at 09:08AM Jun 01, 2005 by oz in General  |  Comments[1]

Nerds

Apparently I'm a Nerd (my wife and children will attest to this.)

But at least I'm not a Nerd god like some other people who post around here.

Posted at 02:34PM Feb 06, 2005 by oz in General  |  Comments[0]