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| Greg's diary |
| September 2026 |
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| Tuesday, 1 September 2026 | Dereel | |
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26 years!
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Topic: history | Link here |
It's been 26 years since I restarted this diary online. In some senses it's hard to fathom: over a third of my life.
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Goodbye clutch
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Somehow Clutch doesn't seem to be worth it. It's completely non-intuitive, nothing like Emacs, and everything I try seems to run into a different issue. Possibly it would be useful if I could get it to work, but I spent a lot more time today writing up yesterday's pain. Time to move on to something else. The latest version of phpMyEdit should be easier, but somehow I didn't have the energy today.
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Time for Bruno to go
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Topic: animals, opinion | Link here |
I was really hoping that Bruno would behave better now that he has the option of going into the dog run any time he wants. But he wants to go in and out continually, and he doesn't want to spend that much time with us. He is now spending the nights with Mona, but that's not really enough. There are plenty of people who want him; the only issue is whether they will be happy with him. He goes.
| Wednesday, 2 September 2026 | Dereel | Images for 2 September 2026 |
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ALDI pastes: not what they used to be
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Cooked fake Phat Thai for breakfast this morning, using the ALDI paste that I've been using for nearly 10 years. It was never anything spectacular, but in that time it seems to have deteriorated considerably. I still have a couple of sachets left, but when they're gone I'll look for something better.
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Mona accepts Elena?
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Seen this afternoon:
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Mona still hasn't made friends with the dogs, but she's gradually accepting Elena's presence. Larissa is still another matter: she's too enthusiastic for Mona's taste.
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phpMyEdit: Still inconvenient
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
After giving up on Clutch, the next choice is phpMyEdit. I'm pretty sure it's what I'm using for some tables, like the freezer contents and expenses, but that seems to have called itself MySQL Table Edit.
They don't make it easy. To get it, they give the URL https://www.phpmyedit.org/article.php?download. That gives a web link phpMyEdit.tar.gz, not something that I can download with fetch (and thus know where it has gone). Follow the link, and it's all in Slovak! Never mind, there's a link at top right: phpMyEdit-5.7.1.tar.gz, but I can't load that either, and in any case, the real link is http://opensource.platon.sk/projects/download.php?project_id=5&package=phpMyEdit&force=1.
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/25) /var/tmp 62 -> fetch 'http://opensource.platon.sk/projects/download.php?project_id=5&package=phpMyEdit&force=1'
download.php?project_id=5&package=phpMyEdit&fo 87 kB 150 kBps 01s
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 89,809 2 Sep 12:03 download.php?project_id=5&package=phpMyEdit&force=1=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/25) /var/tmp 65 -> file download.php?project_id=5&package=phpMyEdit&force=1
download.php?project_id=5: HTML document, ISO-8859 text, with very long lines (1368)
Dammit, it insists on being loaded by a browser. But at least it loads the file—if you're using firefox. Chromium refuses:
From http://opensource.platon.skChromium blocked this download because the site isn't using a secure connection and the file may have been tampered with
And yes, the last sentence isn't terminated.
But I can't find the tarball in ~/Downloads. Have they changed the name? Look at the files in the directory by modification date and find:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/25) ~/Downloads 74 -> l -rt
...
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 89,809 2 Sep 12:03 Unconfirmed 685893.crdownload
drwxr-xr-x 194 grog lemis 10,752 2 Sep 12:06 Gemini
drwxr-xr-x 80 grog lemis 33,792 2 Sep 12:09 Downloads=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/25) ~/Downloads 75 -> l -rt Gemini/
...
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 89,809 2 Sep 12:06 phpMyEdit-5.7.1.tar.gz
For reasons that firefox has to explain, it downloaded it to ~/Downloads/Gemini! At least the file name is sane. How I wish these toys would understand file system hierarchies!
So, how do I install it? Put it somewhere sane and untar it, clearly. Any instructions? You have to dig for them. In phpMyEdit-5.7.1/doc/README I find>
3. Using a browser, run phpMyEditSetup.php to log on to your MySQL server.
And where's phpMyEditSetup.php? One level up. From there on, things worked relatively normally, but I got the messages
Notice: Undefined index: db in /home/grog/public_html/phpMyEdit/phpMyEdit-5.7.1/phpMyEditSetup.php on line 65
Notice: Undefined index: tb in /home/grog/public_html/phpMyEdit/phpMyEdit-5.7.1/phpMyEditSetup.php on line 66
And on every entry I got the message
Deprecated: Function set_magic_quotes_runtime() is deprecated in
/home/grog/public_html/phpMyEdit/phpMyEdit-5.7.1/phpMyEdit.class.php on line 3100
Looking at the sources, it seems that this package hasn't been updated for nearly 20 years:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/45) ~/public_html/phpMyEdit/phpMyEdit-5.7.1 32 -> ls -l
total 1
drwx---r-x 2 grog lemis 512 17 Sep 2007 doc
drwx---r-x 2 grog lemis 512 17 Sep 2007 extensions
drwx---r-x 3 grog lemis 512 17 Sep 2007 images
drwx---r-x 3 grog lemis 2048 17 Sep 2007 lang
-rw----r-- 1 grog lemis 120963 16 Sep 2007 phpMyEdit.class.php
-rw----r-- 1 grog lemis 20791 16 Sep 2007 phpMyEditSetup.php
That's a lifetime ago! It's much older than the MySQL Table Edit that I wanted to replace: that's 7 years newer, though still 12 years old.
Still, I was able to access my table. But the fun wasn't over: some fields were empty. It seems that in its present form it refuses to display fields that have any non-ASCII character (here UTF-8, like “Cosina Voigtländer Nokton 60mm f/0.95”). I'm sure that that can be fixed relatively easily: start by digging for the documentation. The README tells me
phpMyEdit comes with extensive and exhaustive documentation in SGML, HTML and PDF format with huge amount of options, possibilities and information described. It is available for download as a separate package from phpMyEdit homepage or its project management page
What it doesn't say is where. But the real issue is the reason I went looking in the first place. I already have MySQL Table Edit, but to change anything I still need to select the record, get a new display, change it, save it and reposition on the main page. And that's so slow.
WHY isn't there anything useful out there?
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Chromium or Firefox?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
It's been well over a month since I decided to transition from firefox to chromium. And it's still not done.
I'm not sure that it ever will be. Yes, chromium doens't have some of the strangenesses of firefox—it has different ones. I don't like the way it navigates: if I press c-R to refresh the display, it also repositions to the top of the page. And somehow the search function is even worse than firefox, though this may be a matter of habit. But then today I had the case where chromium refused to download a file without warning me. At the very least I should have had the choice.
I've tried alternative web browsers in the past, but more and more they're getting so complicated that none would do it right. For the time being I'll use two browsers in parallel to work around their individual bugs.
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Heavy duty packaging
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Yesterday I managed to destroy the clock in the kitchen, so today Yvonne bought a replacement. Nothing overly interesting, except that I needed a screwdriver to unpack it: it was screwed on! Here the back of the clock after removal:
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Not only was it screwed on, but the screws tapped holes in the back of the clock body.
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Chicken wings again
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
I'm out of pre-cooked chicken wings for nasi lemak. Today I had another 2 kg to cook.
In the past I have cooked them sous vide, but somehow I don't like the idea much any more. It's single use plastic, and it's messy. Why not just use the same marinade in the cooker without the plastic?
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Cooked them initially at 50° until some juices had run out, then at 80° for a total of 6 hours:
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I won't know until tomorrow whether that's enough.
| Thursday, 3 September 2026 | Dereel | Images for 3 September 2026 |
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Chicken wings ouvert
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
Deep fried my chicken wings this morning. They were perhaps a little firmer than in the past, but I can't make up my mind whether that's a good or a bad thing. As expected, the broth had gelatinized (here slightly torn in the middle):
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And there was much less broth than I had experienced in the past, only about 480 g instead of 800 g. Is that just because of the lacking sous vide cooking?
It was also the first time that I used my new single-egg frying pan. It was an experience. First, I pre-heat the pans before I put anything in them. But this one is so light that it heats up almost instantaneously on the induction cooktop, in a matter of seconds. So the egg frothed up:
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Worse, though, is how to get the egg out of the pan. I tried it with a silicone spatula, which worked, but...
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I'm not sure how to avoid that. The egg was so slippery that it wouldn't stay on the rice. I'm reminded of a restaurant example in Singapore:
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Should I learn from that?
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More flash exposure discoveries
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Topic: photography, food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Taking photos of the chicken wings presented more challenges than I expected. I take my kitchen photos with studio flash, and I've established the exposure needed for each area of the kitchen. The cooker was in the brightest area, near one of the flashes, and my exposure for that is f/16. With electronic flash the shutter time is almost completely irrelevant.
But the result wasn't what I expected:
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Even at f/11 it wasn't much better:
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Of course, that's the way they came out of the camera. After normal postprocessing they were almost indistinguishable:
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But in that cooker f/8 looks more appopriate.
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Spring flowers
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
There's not much to like about our garden, but for a few days a year the north bed looks good:
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| Friday, 4 September 2026 | Dereel | Images for 4 September 2026 |
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More bank account pain
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
The Unix Heritage Society is an interesting organization. We're registered as a charity in Victoria, but nearly all our expenditure is in the USA. We clearly need a bank account, and as an Australian organization, it should be in Australia. But transferring money to the USA costs money just for the transfer. Who charges the least? I went through this exercise five years ago. The cheapest was “Wise”, formerly (and more understandably) “Transferwise”, and the most expensive was the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, who would have charged fully 5.4% more than “Wise”.
What's the situation today? After considerable research, I still don't know. Five years ago I was able to establish the exchange rates on which the banks based their charges, but I can't find that any more. All I was able to establish was that most banks charge 3% fees over and above an unspecified exchange rate; only CBA charges 3.5%. But are they all based on the same base exchange rate? One thing is sure: despite advertising to the contrary, “Wise” will not accept us as a customer, so it looks like we're going to have to bite the higher fees.
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More weather station pain
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Checking the weather this afternoon, discovered that the weather station had stopped logging. What a pain this device is. Into the lounge room, where it's located, planning to hard reset the device. But that wasn't necessary:
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I'm reminded of old cartoons showing cleaning ladies pulling the power plug on a computer to plug in their vacuum cleaner.
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First tomatoes of spring
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Topic: gardening, food and drink | Link here |
I never cease to be amazed how late our tomatoes ripen. I'm told that they should start yielding in early summer (December, say), but in practice we don't get much before the beginning of autumn (March). But today was the first time that I picked some after the beginning of spring:
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We've had late tomatoes before, but not this late, and not this good. And they were bitter.
| Saturday, 5 September 2026 | Dereel | Images for 5 September 2026 |
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Goodbye Bruno, take 2
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Topic: animals | Link here |
It's been 2½ months since we gave Bruno to the Sayers. That didn't work out, and they returned him 2 weeks ago. Now that the dog run is cat proof, I had hoped that we could keep him, but somehow he has changed. In any case, I grudgingly accepted Yvonne's desire to rehome him again, even though he was just making friends with Mona again:
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Still, Emily Binks came again, this time to pick him up, and Bruno was happier:
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She brought some bribes with her:
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Hopefully that will work out. Once again we have a two month grace period.
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Impromptu Chinese dinner
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
We changed our Saturday night dinner at relatively short notice. What did we have? Asparagus and “Peking flavoured duck breasts”. Neither very difficult to make. I have developed a relatively simple recipe for asparagus and prawns over the years, and we've already eaten the duck, which just requires heating, and found it good.
But it's so much! Admittedly, only 100 g of asparagus after trimming, but the same amount of prawns. What do you eat with the duck? In the end I tried “roti” “wraps” with the duck, and sure enough, we only ate (most of) one of the two breasts. But I must have spent more time thinking about it than preparing it.
| Sunday, 6 September 2026 | Dereel | |
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More MySQL edit pain
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Mail from Michael Hughes, suggesting that I try phpMyAdmin for editing MySQL tables: “it lets you browse the database and double click on a column for a record to edit it in place. You can also check multiple records and do an edit. This will bring up a new page and you can edit all the records at one time”.
It still requires selecting the columns, not quite what I was looking for, but it's worth a try, though the name suggests a strong similarity with phpMyEdit.
First, find it in the Ports Collection, preferably a package. phpMyAdmin? No, that's too simplistic. OK, how many ports can there be?
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/1) /var/log/www 363 -> pkg search php | wc -l
3632
That's over 60 pages of listing! More searching and came up with phpMyAdmin5-php86-5.2.3. The usual installation, including
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/1) /var/log/www 370 -> pkg install phpMyAdmin5-php86-5.2.3
New packages to be INSTALLED:
...
phpMyAdmin5-php86: 5.2.3
talloc: 2.4.1_1
Installed packages to be REMOVED:
samba423: 4.23.8_1
talloc243: 2.4.3
tevent017: 0.17.1
Once again ports to be removed rather than upgraded! And in this case, it removed a newer version of talloc (is that Tridge alloc? Yes, it seems). OK, I know why I did this on dereel rather than a machine I really need. And I can always reinstall samba:
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/1) /var/log/www 371 -> pkg install samba423
Checking integrity... done (1 conflicting)
- talloc243-2.4.3 conflicts with talloc-2.4.1_1 on /usr/local/include/pytalloc.h
New packages to be INSTALLED:
samba423: 4.23.8_1
talloc243: 2.4.3
tevent017: 0.17.1
Installed packages to be REMOVED:
talloc: 2.4.1_1
Done! Now run it:
=== root@dereel (/dev/pts/1) /var/log/www 372 -> phpMyAdmin
su: phpMyAdmin: command not found
Oh. Where is it? The message printed after install showed nothing of use, and neither did the pkg-plist. Why don't these messages point at some kind of documentation? In the end I had to ask Google Gemini, which came up with a surprising list of actions necessary, including reconfiguring the web server: it seems that phpMyAdmin is only accessible via the web. Completed the tasks and tried to access http://dereel.lemis.com/phpmyadmin.
Go away, kiddie
This server is not a toy, and you can't break in to it. Go and play in somebody else's sandpit. We will report the following information to your ISP:
URL http://dereel.lemis.com/phpmyadmin
Remote host hydra.lemis.com
Remote IP 192.109.197.129
Client Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/143.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
Oh. That's mine, hidden somewhere in the 404 document. It can only happen when the path name doesn't exist.
FOOL! You wrote http://dereel.lemis.com/phpmyadmin, not http://dereel.lemis.com/phpmyadmin/. Try that and get a completely different result:
Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function filter_var() in /usr/local/www/phpMyAdmin/vendor/slim/psr7/src/Uri.php:271 Stack trace: #0
/usr/local/www/phpMyAdmin/vendor/slim/psr7/src/Uri.php(106): Slim\Psr7\Uri->filterHost('dereel.lemis.co...') #1
/usr/local/www/phpMyAdmin/vendor/slim/psr7/src/Factory/UriFactory.php(114): Slim\Psr7\Uri->__construct('http', 'dereel.lemis.co...', 80, '/phpmyadmin/', '', '', '', '') #2
/usr/local/www/phpMyAdmin/vendor/slim/psr7/src/Factory/ServerRequestFactory.php(96): Slim\Psr7\Factory\UriFactory->createFromGlobals(Array) #3
/usr/local/www/phpMyAdmin/libraries/classes/Http/Factory/ServerRequestFactory.php(92): Slim\Psr7\Factory\ServerRequestFactory::createFromGlobals() #4
/usr/local/www/phpMyAdmin/libraries/classes/Common.php(87): PhpMyAdmin\Http\Factory\ServerRequestFactory::createFromGlobals() #5
/usr/local/www/phpMyAdmin/index.php(40): PhpMyAdmin\Common::run() #6 {main} thrown in /usr/local/www/phpMyAdmin/vendor/slim/psr7/src/Uri.php on line 271
OK, I tried this as a simpler solution to the problems I've had with Clutch. But Clutch looks as if it would be better if I could get it to work. I'll continue there, if I don't just give up.
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Bloody VicRoads again!
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
It's time to renew the registration for Yvonne's car. Today I received a renewal notice. The most important line:
No concession discount has been applied
Can't these people do anything right? I've been fighting this terminal incompetence for nearly a year:
And this is still a problem. What do I do? First step will be a formal complaint, I think.
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Wine too sweet?
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
I've been buying wine online for coming on 8 years now. The original experience wasn't positive, but I've come to like it. Originally I bought it from McLaren Vale Cellars, but they have been getting progressively more expensive. Recently I found a new supplier, Dozendeals, who are considerably cheaper. Recently I received two cartons of red wine at only half the price of McLaren Vale, and I don't think that the McLaren wine was better. Maybe it's related to my fading sense of taste, but my taste is not that bad.
But today I found a wine that didn't match my palate: Eyre & Vine, too sweet for my liking. Not a real pain: it's not that bad, and they have other wines at the same price which I do like. But how do I keep track of these things?
| Monday, 7 September 2026 | Dereel | |
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Braving VicRoads again
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Nothing for it, I need to contact VicRoads. Login.
Sorry, there was an error trying to log you in. Please try again in 10 minutes. If you continue to experience issues please call VicRoads on 1300 650 266.
Now doesn't that look like a known problem? I tried again in 10 minutes and continued to
experience failures“issues”. OK, this kind of web site delights in forgetting
passwords. Let's reset it. At least that worked, but I still couldn't log in with the
password that I had just set.
Is it maybe browser-related? That was with chromium. How about firefox? Yes, it seems so:
We're sorry - an error has occurred.
That's not the same message that I got with chromium. Why not? In any case, I discovered that you can send “feedback”, and did so:
I have been trying for over a year to have concessions applied to both our cars. Every attempt finally works after hours on the phone, but then the next time the concession is removed again. Please ensure that our concessions are applied to ZWT400 and YLS189, as promised many times. Please respond by CoB Friday, 11 September 2026.
I also note that your login system appears to be broken. After resetting the formerly correct password, it still doesn't work on Chromium, and the message produced suggests that the issue is know ("please retry in 10 minutes"). On firefox I get the message that the password I had just set was incorrect.
And at least that message got through to a certain level:
We’ve received your enquiry, and your reference number is RLS00335366.
That was an enquiry? Let's see if anything comes of it. Otherwise it'll be a formal complaint over the weekend.
| Tuesday, 8 September 2026 | Dereel | |
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More TUHSI stuff
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
What is TUHSI? It's The Unix Heritage Society Inc., a not-for-profit association incorporated in Victoria, Australia on 22 April 2026, registration number A0128836T, Australian Business Number 47 295 586 494. It is a recognized charity, registered on 4 May 2026. It provides a legal framework to deal with donations made to The Unix Heritage Society (TUHS) and to ensure that they are spent furthering the TUHS objectives.
That's easy to write here, because I spent much of today writing it up in preparation for publication. It's surprisingly difficult. When it's done and the committee accepts it, I'll move it to the TUHS site, but currently it's easier to write it here.
And in that connection, we need to hold an Annual General Meeting (AGM) by the end of November. We've decided on 21 November, and so we need an agenda. That's bureaucratese. Can Google Gemini help? Yes. And it came up with a number of things that I hadn't thought of. Do they apply to us? Off to read the Rules. Some do, some don't. One that I didn't expect is that all committee positions must be declared vacant before the AGM, and then elected. That will almost certainly be the same people, but we need to follow the procedure.
And then I discovered that we have to hold 4 committee meetings per year. The Rules distinguish between the committee and the membership, though for us it's the same. So some time before November we need to hold a committee meeting.
Somehow all of this doesn't make much sense any more. 25 years ago AUUG did have multiple committee meetings, and they were expensive, having people flown in from all over the country and requiring overnight accommodation. But that was before the days of online video conferencing (which the Rules allow), and we had already established that we (TUHSI) would communicate by email, something that we could have done in AUUG as well, but about the quality and quantity of which I continually complained. So what do we do with our committee meetings? Establish an agenda and agree to accept the content of our email? Somehow we're living between two worlds. It's still work.
Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a “blog”, and there is deliberately no provision for directly adding comments. It's also not a vehicle for third-party content. But I welcome feedback and try to reply to all messages I receive. See the diary overview for more details. If you do send me a message relating to something I have written, please indicate whether you'd prefer me not to mention your name. Otherwise I'll assume that it's OK to do so.
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