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| Greg's diary |
| November 2013 |
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| Friday, 1 November 2013 | Dereel | Images for 1 November 2013 |
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Spring arrives at last
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Topic: general, gardening | Link here |
It's been quite a cool spring so far:
0.85° may not seem much cooler on paper, but it certainly did in practice. But today, exactly at the beginning of the third month, things picked up, and I was even motivated to do a little garden work, mainly weed spraying.
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Washing machine problems
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Topic: general | Link here |
Somehow I get the feeling that God doesn't want us to wash our clothes. Firstly a couple of days ago a fallen branch destroyed our clothes hoist, and now our relatively new washing machine is falling apart:
That panel on the side of the drum should be attached. It's not clear what its purpose is, but getting it back in was difficult: there are hooks on the side that fit into slots on the drum, and it looks as if the housing round the top of the drum needs to be removed to get it in:
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Yvonne tried to find the local repair people via the Samsung web site, but it redirected her to Germany—another clever site, evidently. So she called up and had to give all her personal details before she could even get the name of the local repair people, Barclay's Appliance Centre at 2 Traminer Court, Wendouree, phone 5339 9034. Yes, they could send somebody out to look at it—$88 for the first half hour, plus about $75 travel time (this was calculated slowly at the rate of $1.50 per kilometre travelled, which doesn't make much sense). But $163 is a significant part of the purchase price. Considered taking it in in the car, but I was told it would take several days to look at it. Clearly people aren't interested in providing good customer service.
So I tried replacing it myself. It's not quite clear what it's even there for. I thought it might leak if I didn't put it in correctly, but it stayed there for several washing loads. I don't think we're done yet.
| Saturday, 2 November 2013 | Dereel | Images for 2 November 2013 |
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Radiation Tower: finally!
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
The Radiation Tower is finished! Or at least, that's what Yvonne found in Facebook:
I can't check myself: it seems I've been removed from the group. And of course the coverage map doesn't show any change, but what else is new? Hopefully it'll be installed before my current month of wireless coverage ends on the 20th.
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Pizza tandur
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Our first experiments with the ALDI pizza oven showed that the thing is incorrectly designed, but also that it can reach temperatures significantly higher than the 250° of a typical household oven. Just the thing for tanduri chicken? Certainly worth trying.
It's not just the chicken that gets cooked in the tandur, of course: there's also the nan. In principle that's made the same way as a pizza, between the hot gases and the ceramic side of the tandur.
How to do that in the pizza oven? Like a pizza, you'd think. That has the added advantage that the cooking nan doesn't fall off to the bottom of the oven. But these things are hot, and there's a considerable danger of injury or scorching if you do it wrong. In the end I came to the conclusion to use two pizza stones (not the one supplied with the oven) and heat them on the upper shelves, then to use them alternately on the top shelf while grilling the meat on the middle shelf, with only a drip pan at the bottom:
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How did it work? Not an unmitigated success. The first surprise was how quickly the oven heated up without the bottom pan. Then getting the nan onto the stone proved less than successful:
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Apart from that, it was difficult keeping the oven warm once the drip pan was in place. A clear disadvantage of the metal construction is that the oven cools down as soon as you open the door, and it was difficult to keep the temperature above 250°. The nan didn't bake well, so I tried the others in the electric pizza ovens, first warming the tray on the stove:
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None of the results were much good:
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It's not clear how much the style of cooking had to do with that. The nan just didn't rise, and it doesn't look right. Probably time to review the nan recipe. On the positive side, the chicken didn't come out too badly, though I think it would benefit from higher temperatures. Clearly a lot of experimentation in the near future.
| Sunday, 3 November 2013 | Dereel | |
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Quiet day
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Topic: general | Link here |
Somehow didn't do anything worth mentioning today. A lot of Coursera videos, and that was about that. I suppose it had to happen some day.
| Monday, 4 November 2013 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | |
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NBN letdown
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Topic: technology, general | Link here |
On the dot of 9:00 this morning, called up Exetel (1300 393 835, Option 1), spoke to Bernie and asked her to reinstate the order that they rejected last month. Yes, indeed, they still had all the details, but they'd have to reenter it manually. Their problem, I suppose, since they were prepared to do it.
But of course the NBN info still showed no service from the Radiation Tower, so they couldn't accept it. Called up the NBN and spoke to Adam, who told me that the tower was indeed not in service, but some people, notably in Browns Road (which goes past the edge of Chris Bahlo's property) already had service. So the map was correct there: that must be from the Rokewood tower. And for us still no radiation. Sent an email to my contacts on the project team and got the reply that the tower was complete, and that Ericsson are now performing the integration and commissioning phase of the equipment, which could still take 1 or 2 weeks to complete. Damn!
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Old fogey certification
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
It's been 1½ months since I applied for the Old Age Pension, and finally Centrelink (the confusing name for the Australian Social Services department) have taken notice, sent me a letter asking for more information, including this gem:
... a full copy of the current Centrelink schedule for you and your partner's income stream products.
Huh? Called up Centrelink and fought my way past this horrible voice non-recognition service and was told that I was in for a 25 minute wait. For the first 10 minutes I was bombarded with advertising and ring tones that gave the impression that somebody was about to answer, but then it went quiet. Too quiet. I think I was disconnected. What a pain!
The other questions were easier, so I gathered up my stuff and set off to Ballarat in a somewhat edgy mood. What a strange place Centrelink is! It took me a while to realize that the woman standing in the middle of the large room holding an Android tablet was in fact the receptionist. She took my details—nice that the tablet was able to identify me and what was needed—and told me I was in for a wait of 52 minutes. Not 51 or 53, but 52, as she confirmed. And the strange people Centrelink attracts!
After about 35 minutes I was called, and Lana took my information and explained that the “income stream products” were nothing to do with Centrelink: it's my superannuation. So I'll have to get that forwarded to them. All the rest was fine.
But then there's the German pension application, which Centrelink also has to process. I've been dreading it, but she filled it out for me, which also has the advantage of lending a certain authority to it. And she was very friendly about it, got things done quickly—as I said, faster than waiting on the phone for an answer. So all done bar the income stream products!
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New DxO release
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
A couple of weeks ago DxO released version 9 of DxO Optics “Pro”, of which they said, with amazing chutzpah:
DxO Optics Pro is now even faster
That's of a photo processing package that is an order of magnitude slower than any other I know. Still, any speed improvement is good, so today I decided to try it out.
The user interface has changed: previously there were the relatively understandable tabs “Organize” (climb trees to find the files you want to process), “Customize” (select what you want to do with them) and “Process” (produce the corresponding output images). Now the “Process” tab is gone! You can still search for your photos (I use a shell script to link them to the same place each time), customize them (maybe it is marginally faster). And then? All I find is a new, buzzwordy function “Export”, to places like Flickr, like all the “Pros” do.
But that's the new, obvious word for “process”. You can also export to an application, whatever that may mean, or even to disk. And so modern terminology seems to prefer “export to disk” over “process”. O tempora! O mores!
It also offers a new, higher image quality, “PRIME” (capitalized to show how leet it is in comparison with the “High” quality), so I tried that. Now that there's no processing window, I can't see what's going on, but finally it finished—89 images processed in only 8 hours, 33 minutes and 39 seconds (513.65 minutes), or 11.54 minutes per image! Admittedly, the two cores reduce that to 5.77 on average, but it's still nearly 12 minutes if you want to process only one image. Previously it took about 50 seconds.
The issue, of course, was “PRIME”, possibly an acronym for something indicating beyond-glacial slowness. When I tried it with “High” quality it processed the images in 61 minutes, 13 seconds, or about 42 seconds per image. That's marginally faster than release 8, which took 74 minutes, 45 seconds, or about 48 seconds per image for the same images. The user interface also seems to be a little faster—now changes in sliders show their results in less than 5 seconds. That's still much slower than the immediate response of other packages. It's still by far the slowest package I know.
And the results? To be compared.
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More bad language
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Topic: technology, language, opinion | Link here |
So today I've had two different new examples of bad language: “income stream products” and “export”. What's wrong with them? They're bad in different ways.
“Income stream product” is clearly intended to be very specific. Presumably “stream” implies continuous, relatively even income, and “product” is some kind of wrapper. But that's a guess. To be specific, it also needs to be completely understandable. Presumably the people at Centrelink know exactly what it means and how it differs from other jargon terms that would sound the same to me. But unless you can look it up in a dictionary, they shouldn't be using it when communicating with the general public.
You can find “export” in the dictionary, of course. The Oxford English Dictionary has (as always) multiple meanings:
... Latin exportāre, < ex- out + portāre to carry.
†1. trans. (gen.) To carry (things or persons) out of a place; to take away, carry off. Also fig. Obs.
2. a. Comm. To send out (commodities of any kind) from one country to another.
Surprisingly it doesn't describe any usage in software. But it's easy to see how it could
be used to mean “transfer to a different place”, for example a different computer system.
Clearly that's the intention implied in DxO Optics “Pro”'s “Export
to Flickr”. But “export to disk”? By default it writes back to the
same directoryfolder where the
input image resides. What does that have to do with exporting?
A discussion on IRC suggested that it's called exporting because it involves a loss of image quality. That doesn't make sense to me. Potentially it originally meant “save in a foreign format” (or, from the program's perspective “take out of my sphere of influence”), which would make marginal sense, and the loss of quality could be understandable if the quality of the conversion is sub-standard, like Microsoft “Word” creating HTML output.
But that's not what DxO does: yes, there's a loss of quality involved in any processing, but the output formats are a subset of the input formats. People pointed out that other software also uses the term “export” instead of “process”, so I suppose DxO is just trying to be modern.
But the real issue isn't even that it's a gratuitous change in terminology. Producing output images from DxO isn't primarily a question of where they end up: it's the processing that is involved. That's particularly evident with DxO, since it can take over 10 minutes to produce a single image. That's clearly (inefficient?) processing, not moving data from one place to another. So it's just plain misleading to call it “exporting”.
| Tuesday, 5 November 2013 | Dereel → Geelong → Dereel | Images for 5 November 2013 |
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Looking after racehorses
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Topic: animals, opinion | Link here |
Today was Melbourne Cup day again, so even on IRC we were talking about horses. Callum Gibson ventured the opinion that racehorses are particularly pampered, and he was astonished when I said that they were mistreated.
OK, mistreatment is maybe excessive, but they ride the horses before they have finished growing, and they expect the utmost from them. Callum said, “yes, but athletes do that too”. Sure, but there are two significant differences: the athletes make a conscious decision, and they're adult. There would be an outcry if somebody put an 8-year-old in the same disciplines as adult athletes.
Horses are generally mature at age 5 to 6 years. Today we saw an example: one of the horses in today's race, Verema, broke her cannon bone and had to be put down. She (or “it”, as the article puts it), was only five years old, and had been racing for 1½ years. And it hardly got mentioned. Somehow that's typical of the abuse the animals have to go through.
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To Geelong again
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Topic: general | Link here |
Off to Geelong again already today to have my biannual gum checkup. I should have thought of that before we set off last week.
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Navigation apps revisited
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
The journey to Geelong was useful for another purpose: another comparison of OsmAnd Maps & Navigation and the Nav N Go in my dedicated navigator. It was interesting:
OsmAnd Maps took well over a minute to calculate a route back home from Geelong, a distance of 80 km. There's clearly a lot of room for improvement there.
When it did, it was a very different “shortest” route than what Nav N Go calculated. Initially it was also 1.8 km shorter. But it completely missed the short cut around Rokewood. Nav N Go missed only part of it. With all the optimizations in place, I was able to save nearly 10 km, not a bad saving over that distance.
The OpenStreetmap maps are much prettier than the generic commercial ones. They're also much more accurate, as far as they go. For example, the shortest short cut round Rokewood goes along Geggies Road and another road whose name isn't clear. OpenStreetmap claims that it's Boyles Road, but Google Maps claims that Boyles Road is further south. And Nav N Go maps put a kink in Geggies Road north of the side junction. Here Nav N Go and then OsmAnd for comparison:
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The blue line on the upper images shows the actual path traveled, and the white line to the west is where the maps claim that the road runs.
The non-existent roads in Dereel are missing; clearly the maps have been created by people actually driving down the roads rather than copying them from the official, but misleading maps.
On the other hand, some things are Just Plain Weird. When I got home it showed me at the correct place (note the flag and star on the left of this image), but it wanted me to drive another 4 km in a circle to get back to where I was:
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There's a slight discrepancy between the location of the target and the current location, but this display with the loop was present long before I arrived home (from the south). Clearly there's a lot of work needed on this program. But somehow it seems as if the two complement each other; if only I could work out how to make the most of them.a
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DxO Version 9: more experience
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
While at the dentists, read the documentation for DxO Optics “Pro” version 9. This stupid bad language still gets on my nerves, but it seems that they've done a lot of improvement on the package. To be tried out when I get the time.
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Web server down time
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Stephen Rothwell updated our communal OzLabs weather server today, while I was in Geelong. It didn't take long to find that things didn't go well for http://www.lemis.com/. Error 403 (“Permission denied”) on all pages. Contacted Stephen and discovered that I hadn't read his warning letter closely enough, and that I needed a configuration change. Fortunately that didn't take too long.
| Wednesday, 6 November 2013 | Dereel | Images for 6 November 2013 |
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More DxO investigation
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
As planned, continued today looking at the new DxO Optics “Pro” version 9. It's certainly interesting.
The first thing I needed to do was to process the images from the GPS navigator as part of
the article on GPS
navigation apps. I couldn't be bothered to mount the camera on a tripod, so I took the
images hand-held with the camera sensitivity set to 36°
(3200) ISO. That
created quite noisy images, just what I needed to try their new “PRIME” denoising, a term that proves to stand
for Probabilistic Raw IMage Enhancement. One thing's sure:
it's slow. And when processingexporting a second image, I discovered:
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I had to wait for the first image to complete before I could start the second, presumably
because of some limitation in their processingexporting logic. So much for dual core. It took
nearly 30 minutes to process both images:
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And the results? Varied. On one pair the results were very pronounced. Here first normal processing, then with “PRIME”. Running the cursor over either image shows the other one:
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The problem there was that the image wasn't 100% sharp, so I tried again. This time the results weren't as obvious:
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It's clear from the bars in the display at the bottom that “PRIME” hasn't been able to recover everything, but on the whole it does seem to do a very good job. Time to try on some other, older images, like the blue moon panorama I took nearly 4 years ago.
And apart from that? Yes, the interface is noticeably faster, without being anything like fast. Once the thing hung itself up on me. Some old bugs still seem to be present, like swapping the preview and result window on cropping and perspective correction. Once it even put one above the other (normally they're side by side). And at least one “fixed” bug has reverted: at least sometimes in the crop tool, the frame in the move/zoom window disappears, and you have to leave the tool to reposition the full-scale image. And they still have this horrible, not-fixable default fixed aspect ratio in the crop tool, which you have to disable Every Single Time. And it still can't handle a 2560×1440 display: the browser window doesn't display anything, and you're left with whatever was on the screen before:
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On the other hand, they've added more new bugs and misfeatures than just the export function. Previously you could compare between the corrected and uncorrected image by clicking on the “Correction Preview” button. Now you have to press Ctrl-d. But that repeats, so you can only see the original image for a fraction of a second before you end up with a back-and-forwards display of each image.
In addition, it's almost impossible to find the name of the files to which the images are
“exported”. The names have three components: the base name of the image (for Olympus,
something like PB065521, a “suffix”, which has nothing to do with Microsoft-typical
“extensions”, and which is typically something like_DxO, and then of course an
unspecified extension. But then it's clear that
a JPEG will get an extension
of jpegjpg, isn't it?
But the suffix isn't so obvious. What if you want to create two different versions of the same image? Clearly you can do that by selecting the suffix. But how? Ah, that's “advanced”:
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Why do people do this? Why can't they just tell you the name? And there's no reason not to display the “advanced” settings all the time. The space is there. Of course, it would be nice if they removed this meaningless “dpi” setting.
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Modem comparisons
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
My wireless network congestion continues, though it's currently not as bad as it has been. But Internode support have sent me a new modem to see if that will make any difference. Yes, it did. It's a Huawei E3131, and my system doesn't recognize it:
In particular, it doesn't create any device nodes, so I can't use it. By contrast, the old E1762 reports:
So I put it in dxo, my Microsoft box, and finally found a way to install the software that is also on the stick. It works. Interestingly, it gave me the shortest ping time I've even had with this connection, only 45 ms; previously I considered 65 ms to be good, though today I got 63 ms. It seems that a considerable part of the latency is in the device itself.
But what does this prove? Nothing, of course. Currently the connection is relatively free of congestion, so the fact that both modems perform similarly means nothing.
In passing, it's interesting to note that the Microsoft software applies some settings to the device that stop it reporting status via its status port. The modem was in a powered hub which I had connected to the Microsoft box. When I was finished, I just connected the hub toe eureka, my FreeBSD box, and connected again. It worked, but the statistics didn't: first I needed to power cycle the modem.
| Thursday, 7 November 2013 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 7 November 2013 |
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Comparing DxO PRIME
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
As planned, spent some time converting the photos taken on 30 January 2010 with the new DxO Optics “Pro” version 9, including the blue moon with the ice-age-glacial “PRIME” denoising functionality—53 minutes for 7 images! And the results? It's still hard to say. The original images were processed with ufraw, not the best software in the world. DxO gave generally better-looking results. But there's not that much difference in the noise. In sequence are the image as processed by ufraw, the same image as optimized by Ashampoo photo optimizer, DxO with the “High” profile and DxO with the “PRIME” profile. These images are best viewed in the “big” size (original crop): click on each image to enlarge it. Running the cursor over either image shows the other one:
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The differences in the crop are due to the fact that ufraw uses the complete sensor data and doesn't correct for lens distortion. Clearly the original processed image was far too dark, and Ashampoo compensated. It's not clear that it did a worse job with DxO. But the real difference is between DxO “High” and DxO “PRIME”: almost nothing. That's not what I was expecting.
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Doctor and haircut
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Topic: general | Link here |
To the doctors Yet Again to have my skin looked at, and on the way finally had a haircut. It was at the end of the school day, and the crossing supervisor who push-started me two months ago was on duty just outside, so I went to thank him and offer him $10 for his help. He refused, but at least I had the chance to thank him.
At the doctor, nothing special, but it seems that there are new rules in place for monitoring diabetes, so I'll have to come back next week and have the once-over.
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Black cars: danger
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
I may have made a mistake buying a black car. People tend to overlook them. Today on the way into town I was driving along the Ballarat—Colac road in Cambrian Hill (just north of Napoleons) when a Commodore pulled out of Laceys Road (which Google misspell “Lacys Road”) about 50 m in front of me. I managed to lock all four wheels:
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This photo was taken looking in the other direction; the end of the skid mark is closest.
Fortunately I got out of the skid and managed to swerve to avoid him—by this time he was blocking the entire lane. Clearly he hadn't seen me. But this was in perfect visibility. Maybe I should have run into him and had the car replaced with something of a different colour.
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Hydronic heating quote
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Topic: general, opinion, Stones Road house | Link here |
Received a quote from Pivot today. It's amazing. It doesn't include any radiators, nor the installation. Instead he quoted for a solar hot-water system, which we already have. He attached a brochure for radiators at least 1.6 m high! Radiators should go in front of windows—how do they expect that to work? And I had already criticized the height of the 40 cm radiators. And the oven? No details. Time to look elsewhere.
| Friday, 8 November 2013 | Dereel | Images for 8 November 2013 |
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More GPS navigation apps
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I still haven't found a good Android navigation app. I'm going to Melbourne tomorrow, so it's a good test. Spent some time looking for other apps, and came up with a package I can no longer trace. It has some other name somewhere, but it just identifies itself as “Navigator”. I had thought that it was NavFree, but the description in the toyshop looks very different. It's also based on OpenStreetMap. Is the navigation any better?
No. It was almost impossible to enter the details of where my cousin Mick lives (it didn't believe that the street number existed), and finding the South Melbourne Market took me 5 minutes offline. Nothing for the car. And I had thought that the OpenStreeMap maps were prettier than the ones for my GPS navigator. Surprise, surprise. Both rendering and accuracy seem to depend on the app. Here two comparisons, first of the area around here, then of the area round the South Melbourne Market. On the left “Navigator”, on the right OsmAnd Maps & Navigation:
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The maps supplied with “Navigator” seem to be an order or magnitude worse than the ones supplied with OsmAnd. In particular, it's difficult to locate Dereel at all, let alone the streets. And of course I couldn't use the same maps across apps.
Then there is Wheris®, which is online. It didn't look bad—but it only works in portrait mode!
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Why is it so difficult to find a good navigation app?
In passing, it's worth observing what a pain it is to take a screenshot with an Android tablet. You press the “power” and “volume down” buttons at the same time, without touching the screen and without turning the device. They really could have thought of something easier.
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Measuring pH
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Topic: general, animals, opinion | Link here |
We should be measuring the pH of Zhivago's urine, but when I tried to do so a month ago, the pH meter had gone crazy. So I ordered a new one. After a month, it still hadn't arrived, so I arranged a refund. Then yesterday it arrived. Time to pay for it? Not so simple: it doesn't work. It started off by showing the pH of water as 12.5 or so, so I tried adjusting it. After that, it went completely crazy, alternately flashing out-of-bounds values (I assume) and just counting up 0.2 pH at a time. In fact, pretty much what the old one had done. Is this something to do with inadequate moisture on the element? What a pain!
On the other hand, now the old one is working! It needed adjustment, which isn't surprising, but it works again. Somehow there's something here that I don't understand.
| Saturday, 9 November 2013 | Dereel → Melbourne → Dereel | Images for 9 November 2013 |
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To the Big Smoke again
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Topic: general, food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Off to Melbourne today, mainly because my cousin Michael had invited us to a barbecue—the first time I've seen any of the family since my father's funeral, and the first barbecue in over 5 years.
On the way, we stopped as planned at the South Melbourne Market. Free parking, they say. And yes, they're not completely wrong, but you have to know where it is. There's plenty of paid parking too. After circling around several times, finally found the park house in Market Street and off into the market.
People had told me that the South Melbourne Market is much better than the Victoria Market. Maybe that expectation was half the problem: we were greatly disappointed. It didn't help that the place was so crowded that we could hardly move, and we didn't find nearly as much choice as in the Victoria Market. The prices were also significantly higher than I recall in the Victoria Market, though possibly that's because it was a Saturday. Finally found a cheese shop selling Gruyère, and asked the salesman what other genuine Swiss Cheeses they had. He offered me a Jarlsberg. I pointed out that that's not any kind of Swiss cheese, and asked if he had Appenzeller. He produced an Emmentaler, and even after I pronounced it very clearly, he didn't seem to understand.
That was enough. We looked in passing at some sorry-looking almost-fresh sardines, and decided to go to the Prahran Market instead. But how to get there? I knew it was pretty much on the way to Mick's, and we had two GPS navigators running (OsmAnd Maps & Navigation and my dedicated GPS navigator). Based on the pain I've had with OsmAnd in the past, I didn't even try to search there. And the GPS navigator didn't know Prahran Market; on a less specific search I found the Prahran Market clinic and hoped that it would be close.
How I love Melbourne traffic! Both GPS navigators took me down St Kilda Road, which has a strange 4 lane structure: the inner lanes are straight ahead only, and you have to first move across a nature strip to the outer lanes before you can turn. And the navigator I chose put me in the inner lanes without the option of leaving before my left turn into Commercial Road. And the traffic! I think I'd go mad if I had to live here. The 4.5 km took us about 20 minutes. Fortunately my guess was right: the clinic is right next to the market.
In the market, found a little of what we were looking for: sardines (cheaper and better than in the South Melbourne market), also Spanish Mackerel and cheese (still only Gruyère). The Prahran Market is in the middle of the Yuppie part of town, next to the most expensive kitchenware shop I have ever seen (The Essential Ingredient), so it says something that the prices here were lower than at the South Melbourne market. But I think that experiment has shown that the Victoria Market is probably the best after all. Just a pity it wasn't open today.
Mick lives straight down the road from the Prahran Market, another 4.5 km and 25 minutes. But finally we found it, and met up with all the old faces again. My sister Bev was here from England, along with husband Jerry and daughter Alice, both of whom I have not seen since my father's 80th birthday, over 10 years ago.
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The funny thing is how people don't seem to have changed. And most of us were over 50, at least 3 of us over 80. How time flies!
| Sunday, 10 November 2013 | Dereel | |
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The day after
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Topic: general, photography | Link here |
Spent a lot of the day processing yesterday's photos. And in my diary I referred to other occasions where I took photos, and looking back on them, it was clear that they needed improvement. Somehow spent most of the day doing nothing in particular.
| Monday, 11 November 2013 | Dereel | |
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Lawn mowing and water for the horses
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Topic: animals, general | Link here |
Yvonne started mowing the lawn today. She didn't finish. The mower got stuck in gear again, and also jammed against the border of a raised garden bed. The gear issue, which I don't seem to have mentioned before in this diary, has been repaired once already, but possibly a little too superficially, and I was half expecting it to happen again.
As it happened, CJ came along to look at laying some water pipes to the north paddocks—we're agisting some of Chris Bahlo's horses there, and they need their own water. About 140 m of piping needed.
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(Re)Learning programming
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I've been programming for nearly 45 years now, but I've always been interested in programming languages, and so a couple of months ago I signed up for an online Programming languages course from the University of Washington.
It's been interesting. One of the things about programming languages is that each has its own way of doing things. Yes, you can write FORTRAN in any language, and Rasmus Lerdorf has told me “Programming in PHP is simple. Just write C and put a $ in front of the variables”. But it's not that simple, and the course shows idioms that I wouldn't have thought of myself.
Finally we've passed SML, a language I'll probably never use again, and moved on to Racket, an obfuscatory name for a dialect of Scheme. I should be at home there, but I learnt all sorts of interesting constructs that would never have occurred to me without the course. Certainly an interesting experience, though it's still not clear how to debug the stuff. Still, I can see cases where I might use it again.
| Tuesday, 12 November 2013 | Dereel | |
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Positive NBN news
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
We've all been more than a little unhappy about the direction the new Australian government is taking with the National Broadband Network, as I've commented repeatedly in the past. And so far there seems to be no sign of a change of direction—until today. Now it seems that Simon Hackett is joining the board of the NBN. That's hopefully good news. Simon has a much better understanding of the issues than most of the people on the NBN, very much including the current government. Hopefully he'll be able to maintain his viewpoints. Certainly the public opinion is very positive.
| Wednesday, 13 November 2013 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 13 November 2013 |
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Laying the pipe
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Topic: general | Link here |
CJ along this morning with his tractor to lay the pipe for the water troughs in the north paddock. Apart from the abysmal weather—we had 19 mm rain last night—he ran into other problems, literally:
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When I got back from town, he was gone, presumably to repair the tractor.
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Still more pension pain
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Topic: general | Link here |
LEMIS (SA) Pty Ltd ceased trading in 2007, but I've been too lazy to close it down. And now with my pension application it has come back to bite me: not just LEMIS, but also the Lehey Family Trust need to be described. Into town to see Peter O'Connell, who is in a flat spin before Christmas. The good news: LEMIS had a balance of $100 6 years ago, and that's gone, so there's not too much to do. But he ended up spending an hour going over all sorts of strange financials relating to the superannuation fund. By the end I was no longer sure what was going on, but hopefully we'll have things ready for another visit to Centrelink after my doctor's appointment tomorrow.
| Thursday, 14 November 2013 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | |
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Age-related things, next instalment
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Topic: general | Link here |
Into Ballarat Yet Again today for blood tests and another diabetic programme assessment. I had one nearly 2 years ago, and I hadn't been overly impressed. But Dr. Majid tells me that things have improved, and so I did another one.
The most surprising thing was that they kept coming and looking for me while I was doing the blood tests (and, for some reason, an ECG that they had thrown in for good measure), though my appointment wasn't until later. I didn't even get time to eat my breakfast sandwich before they pulled me in and did the assessment.
Was it worth it? No. Yes, things have improved somewhat, and now I could get free physiotherapy treatment if I needed it. Good to know if the need arises, I suppose. But random measurements of blood pressure and sugar seem a waste of time when I have regular blood tests. And she said “Your nutrition is good. BMI of 25”. What does that have to do with nutrition? At least it shows that I'm not (quite) obese. Once again I'm left with the feeling that this programme is a poor copy of what the doctor does anyway.
To add insult to injury I forgot my morning allopurinol pill, which must be taken on time, and I had to get a prescription for more. And that was a problem in itself, because Yvonne had picked up some for me just yesterday, and they were reluctant to give me any more.
After that, Centrelink, stopping off at PPT to pick up some documents. This time I had to wait longer and got an officer (John) who, though friendly and helpful, wasn't as prepared to do all the work for me as Lara had been last week. So now I still have one form to fill out and somehow find proof that I stopped trading 6 years ago. I'm reminded of the adage that you can never prove the absence of a bug, only the presence.
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Tools for Android
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I'm gradually making friends with Android, but it's not easy. Under the surface it looks almost like a real machine:
Apart from a completely ridiculous number of “file systems”, there's this problem that df outputs values in so-called “human readable” form—for some definition of “human” that doesn't include me. I'd rather see the results in megabytes:
Other things look strange too:
The trouble here is that it's BusyBox some of form or another, a stripped-down version of something approaching the GNU tools, ideal for a bare-bones machine. Compare it with the Control Data 7600, the supercomputer of 40 years ago with which I like to compare modern machines, and also adagio, my first BSD machine of a little over 20 years ago:
| CDC-7600 | adagio | Android | ||||
| Cores | 2 | 1 | 4 | |||
| Processor speed | 36 MHz | 33 MHz | 1200 MHz | |||
| Memory | 4.3 MB | 16 MB | 1024 MB | |||
| Storage | 2.4 GB | 325 MB | 20 GB | |||
The specs for Android are the exact specs of my tablet. Memory for the 7600 is the maximum possible. I'm guessing at disk storage (say 8 disks of 3330 calibre. Wikipedia says they're 200 MB per pack, but I recall 300 MB). So it's no longer appropriate to call a tablet a “minimalist” machine. In particular, it has much more memory and storage than adagio. So why are the utilities so bad?
I've spent lots of time looking for better tools, so far without success. The toyshop lives up to its name, and the GNU project only mentions it to rant about freedom. So far I haven't even been able to find software development tools to do it myself.
On a slightly different tack, it seems that Android apps are deliberately castrated. I've found Flightradar24, which is quite interesting, but which seems to have timing problems in my network. It offers lots of information about flights, including current position, altitude, speed, source and destination. And they have an app for Android. Installed that: only flight number is available. For anything else you need to buy a paid app. But why? One reason is that the web site doesn't work well on Androids. Expand the map beyond a certain point and the other information disappears:
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But that's still so much better than the app:
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That's the only information displayed. All this information, displayed in the browser, is missing:
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Add to that the emetic advertising, continually goading you to upgrade, and you wonder why you bother.
| Friday, 15 November 2013 | Dereel | Images for 15 November 2013 |
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Garden flowers in late spring
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
The middle of the month again, time for the monthly garden flowers photos. One of the biggest surprises are the roses. I haven't exactly pampered them, but they're all looking surprisingly happy, including at least one that I really had meant to throw out, and which haven't seen blooming for years (the first one below):
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Even the Iceberg rose that I bought two months ago is flowering:
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I had planted some morning glories to fill the gap until they grew, but so far they haven't shown any signs of germinating. Somehow they're particularly unreliable.
The other surprise was what appears to be a poppy:
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I did try to grow poppies not far from there very early on after arriving in Dereel, and I tried again a couple of years ago, but this is the first time I've actually seen flowers.
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Microsoft bashing, 15 years on
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Mail from Bob Nelson today, who had dug out an old copy of The Complete FreeBSD, third edition. He was concerned by a couple of things I said about Microsoft.
Now it's not exactly a secret that I don't like Microsoft, but nevertheless it was interesting to see what it was that concerned him. The first was a reference to Microsoft's “Operating System” Bob thought that the quotes were inappropriate. But in the context, no, they weren't. I was referring to “Windows” 95, which was not an operating system at all, but a graphical interface to MS-DOS. Calling it an operating system would be like calling X an operating system. In fact, the Wikipedia entry for “Windows” contains a very similar statement:
Windows 1.0 is not a complete operating system; rather, it extends MS-DOS.
The same applies to “Windows” 95. This passage is no longer in the last edition.
The other issue he had was the statement, also no longer present:
If you like Microsoft's “Windows 95” environment, you might prefer fvwm95, which is similar. Before you do, however, consider the advantages of other window managers: Microsoft's environment does not scale well.
That is correct. On each display of my X desktop I can have up to 30 windows. fvwm can handle that quite easily. My current Microsoft Vista desktop only displays 10 icons, after which I'm not sure how I can find the rest. But that's one of my long-running rants that doesn't just relate to Microsoft.
Then, of course, Bob asked me if I actually used Microsoft. At the time I published that edition (17 May 1999) I did not use Microsoft at all. Since then I've been forced to use it because it's the only viable platform for lots of photo processing software. And as I've continually ranted, I still don't like the interface. But it's no worse than other commercial software that uses these paradigms. The fact that Apple has a BSD-like system underneath the glossy exterior is not overly relevant, because they do everything they can to hide it.
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The pipe, finally
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Topic: animals, general | Link here |
CJ back today to finish laying the pipe for the troughs in the north paddock. It took him all day, with help from Yvonne. But now it's all done bar the fittings at the end:
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Pizza oven, try 2
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Another attempt to cook pizzas with the pizza oven today. My infrared thermometer still hasn't arrived, so again I had to guess how hot the slab was. By the time the oven temperature reached 204° (it's too leet to show 200°), the slab was so hot that I couldn't leave the pizza on it long enough for the crust to brown. But at least I didn't burn them too much this time.
I find my opinion confirmed: putting the stone at the bottom of the oven and heating from underneath is Just Plain Wrong. Next time I'll put the round stones on the upper shelves and see how that goes.
On the positive side, found a better way to put the pizze in the oven, without buying a ridiculously expensive peel: put them on the underside of the metal pans for the electric pizza ovens with a bit of maize flour to help them slide.
| Saturday, 16 November 2013 | Dereel | Images for 16 November 2013 |
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DxO release 9: faster after all
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
I've commented in the past both on the glacial speed of DxO Optics “Pro” and the chutzpah they had to claim that release 9 is “even” faster. My own tests confirmed only the former allegation. But over the last couple of days I've processed a large number of photos with release 9, and yes, indeed, it's notably faster. Here the times:
| Release | Image count | Time | Time per image (s) | CPU Time per image (s) | ||||
| 8 | 128 | 109:13 | 51.2 | 102.4 | ||||
| 9 | 108 | 56:56 | 31.6 | 63.2 | ||||
| 9 | 60 | 37:34 | 37.6 | 75.2 | ||||
| 9 | 67 | 38:06 | 34.1 | 68.2 |
On average, that's roughly a 33% speedup. All these times are elapsed time on a dual core machine, so the real processing times are double the elapsed time (last column). And despite the speed improvement of release 9, it remains glacial.
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Local cooling
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Topic: general, gardening, opinion | Link here |
Global warming is real, there's no doubt about that. But on a local scale, things look very different. Last month, New South Wales had record high temperatures and bushfires. But here it's a very different situation. Spring is coming to an end, and we're still running the heating most of the time. Last month was on average 0.65° cooler than the seasonal average for October, and so far this month has been 2.1° cooler than previous years:
| Sunday, 17 November 2013 | Dereel | |
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Comparing DxO releases
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Comparing the processing times of DxO Optics “Pro” releases 8 and 9 also gave me an opportunity to compare the images themselves. They should be the same, right? Well, I've been applying the “Artistic HDR” profile (which they call a preset), and they seem to have fine-tuned that. The results are most visible in images with a lot of white, but unfortunately I didn't compare any of them, and given the processing time, I'll put it off for some other time. But even in more normal images some differences are obvious.
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There's not much in it, but the version with release 8 is somewhat brighter.
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New insights into leprosy
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Watching The Nun's Story on TV this evening, and looked up Leprosy on Wikipedia. It reports an amazing insight:
The most widely held belief is that the disease is transmitted by contact between infected persons and healthy persons.
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Strange mail issues
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne mentioned a couple of problems with mail today. One was her own fault, but the other puzzles me. w3.lemis.com refused a message to Chris Bahlo with a failed A record lookup:
How could that happen? w3.lemis.com is also ns1.narrawin.com. It took a long time to sink in: Yvonne had misspelt the domain name.
| Monday, 18 November 2013 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | |
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Maintaining household goods
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Modern appliances are remarkably reliable. A good thing, too. In the olden days if something broke down, you could take it for repair for a fraction of the replacement cost. That's still true, but the fraction is getting larger. Currently I have three appliances that have minor problems:
The washing machine, which we bought for $595 nearly 3 years ago. Earlier this month some panel on the inside of the drum became detached, and I couldn't reattach it. I've already established that a repair would cost 27% of the purchase price, at the very least. It doesn't seem to do any harm if it's not there, so it's not going to be replaced.
The display on our oven. I bought it for $399 4 years ago, and it was probably too much. Now several segments have failed on the clock. Fix it? Not a chance. Even if I could find the component, it would be prohibitively expensive.
The internal light in our microwave oven has burnt out. How do you replace it? There's no obvious opening to get at it, and dismantling microwave ovens is something to be very careful of. Take it to a repairer and it will cost at least $50—and that for an oven that probably cost less than $200.
But wouldn't it be nice if the designers thought about these little things?
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Attending to the house
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Topic: general | Link here |
Gradually there are more and more things to do around the house, things to which I should be paying more attention. There's the water trough in the north paddock, and also I need concrete for the new clothes hoist. Into town today to buy some bits and pieces, attending to other details at the same time. For once things went relatively smoothly.
| Tuesday, 19 November 2013 | Dereel | Images for 19 November 2013 |
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ABS survey
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
While I was in town yesterday, somebody from the Australian Bureau of Statistics came by and told Yvonne that we had been selected for a Survey of Income and Housing. She left a letter, which proved to contain a “Web Address”, numerical user identifier and password, containing upper and lower case letters, digits and a special character. I was to go to this “Web Address” to say when it would be convenient to conduct a survey of unspecified duration.
Do I want to do this? This kind of bad language raises prejudices which too often prove to be justified. They were today, too. The link tried to do some clever trick that failed, and produced the message:
The interview should be started in a new window. This window can be closed.
Some browsers (like Google Chrome) minimize pop-up windows, usually at the bottom of the window. Please check if this has happened. If this is the case, you can drag this window into view with your mouse.
If for some reason the interview did not show up in your window, you can try and start it by clicking here.
The here link was to javascript:document.location='BiPagHan.asp?PopupBlocked=true&js=yes&sh=' + GetPageHeight() + '&sw=' + GetPageWidth() . I have JavaScript enabled, and it worked. No idea what they were trying with the first page.
First thing I have to do is change the password, from something like s?fPF8qX (conveniently 8 characters to limit the number of allowable combinations) to my choice of something like No Way Jose!. But that's not allowed:
