I've been keeping a satellite link statistics page for some time now, and the results have been less than encouraging. Satellite links suffer from high latency, of course—a round trip ping is limited by the speed of light to 480 ms. But that doesn't mean that the packets should get lost, and the latency I really get out of the link is much higher. Here's what I've seen in the last 24 hours:

This is a good day, but lots of pings are failing, and the average time to download a small web page is 2 seconds (1 / TCP speed). I've also had a ping -a running for the last few days. The -a option means “beep if a packet is dropped”. The continual beeping got on my nerves, and I stopped it:

Look at those times! An average of 1.18 seconds round trip time, more than double the already slow 480 ms that the laws of physics impose, and well over 10 times what it would be with ADSL. How any packet can take over 5 seconds to get from here to Canberra and back is beyond me. Where has it been hiding? And 3.4% packet loss is Just Plain Unacceptable.

Now that it's a little cooler, did some more work in the garden. The Calendulas that we pulled out less than 2 months ago have come back in force:

We had already planned to plant some in the back of the garden, up against the paddock, in the hope that maybe the kangaroos would develop a taste for them and leave other things behind. Today I uprooted 25 seedlings from the patch (see where they came from? No, I don't either; there must be a couple of hundred there), and planted them along a dripper line:

They're not looking happy yet, but they're tough as old nails, and I suspect they'll make it. If not, there are plenty more there, and I can be a little more gentle with them.

Yvonne also got into the act: we have a Grevillea rosmarinifolia up against the verandah, and the whole time we had been building the verandah we had been considering removing it. It's prickly, and unlike most Grevilleas it doesn't flower very long, and the flowers are hidden by the foliage. So next spring we'll put something else there, probably creepers that really grow. Yvonne thinks we might be able to transplant the Grevillea, and despite my doubts I suppose it's worth a try, so today she had a go at pruning it in the hope that a pruned tree would be more likely to survive transplantation:

Also some random photos in the garden. The Chlorophytum comosum we planted in pots a few months back are looking good now:

The birds are using the bird bath more, but somehow I don't have the right background for photos:

I should probably plant something behind the bath.

As expected, the Calendulas that I planted yesterday recovered well overnight:

By the afternoon it was warm again, and they were looking decidedly less happy, but I'm fairly confident that they will survive.

Somehow felt restless and didn't do very much all day. Finally got round to looking at the tutorials on the DVD that came with the digital photography special; they don't look too bad, but boskoop, my old 400 MHz G4 Apple, is clearly too slow to display them. Managed to get them to display on this flaky combination of FreeBSD, firefox and Flash—at least for the moment.

Also took a look at the software on the DVD. There's a new version of Ashampoo Photo Optimizer. I have been using version 1 for some time and find it quite useful. I had already considered upgrading to the new version, but some of the advertising made it sound less interesting. Trying it out today confirmed that impression: it now offers brightness, contrast and gamma adjustments, but without any kind of numbers, and other software already does that. And it has even more of a toy interface than the previous version. Conceivably there's something there of interest, but I can't be bothered going through the pain of mangling the interface.

ANZ “Internet“ Banking—the horror, yet again

A few bills to pay today with ANZ's emetic “Internet” Banking. I've complained about this before, but it still infuriates me every time I use it:

• I have to enter the sum as a number of digits, followed by a decimal point and two more digits. The customary commas every three digits, for example 1,234,456.00, are not allowed. But that's the way the sum is displayed on the confirmation screen.
• The dates must be entered in an ambiguous format with obligatory redundant leading zeroes. For example, today's date is not, as you might expect, 2 February 2009 or 2 Feb 2009, and also not 2/2/2009: it must be entered as 02/02/2009. Today's one of the few days where the format isn't ambiguous: is tomorrow 02/03/2009 or 03/02/2009? You might say “We're in Australia, so 02/03/2009 is correct”, and in this case you'd be right. But firstly ANZ presumably has many American customers, who might make mistakes with this format, and secondly this same web site has other Americanisms like reverse chronological listing. So why insist on such a stupid format, and what earthly use are the leading zeroes?
• Two of my bills were for car insurance, which I pay by a system called BPAY. For this I need a biller code and a reference. For RACV the biller code is a 13 digit number, printed in the format 12345 1234 1234. It makes sense to split up a number like that: it's easier to see if you make a mistake. But this horrible ANZ software refuses to accept the spaces: you must enter a single 13-digit number. It's non-trivial just to check that you entered it correctly.

Even more email strangenesses

I've been railing about email problems for over a decade now. My original checkin of the email tidiness page was in April 1998:

Ten years ago I thought that people might listen to my suggestions about how to communicate more effectively. Now I know they won't. Email messages which look more like random junk are more prevalent than ever before, and I've had people who couldn't find what they were looking for in the mess they created. Send two questions to somebody in the Microsoft space and you can expect that they will answer only one.

One thing that I've become more and more aware of, though, is the inability to reply to the people who are involved. It would seem that the Cc: header is unknown in the Microsoft space—but it's not. All Microsoft and Apple MUAs seem to be able to handle it well, even if Apple manages to put the text Cc: at the bottom of the box it builds to make up for the tiny window it uses for the response. So why is it? In the last couple of days I have had several mail exchanges with various people, where it's clear that all involved should be kept in the loop—and in every case the responses I have received have been addressed only to me.

You can't blame this on the software vendors (indeed, much of this behaviour is not the fault of even such emetic MUAs as Microsoft “Outlook”): both “Outlook” and Apple's mail offer equally simple buttons “Reply” and “Reply All” [sic]. This seems to be a case of following the sheep in front of you. But it's really amazing that almost everybody in the Microsoft space seems to do it.

The weather's changed again, and now it's almost “foggy” (visibility less than 1000 metres):

CJ and Sue along today to chop down the fallen branch:

It's a lot more spacious now.

I've been using the term “Microsoft space” a lot lately, and today I spent much of the day trying to define it. It's not easy; about the only thing that I can say is that I use the word “Microsoft” in recognition of the leading part that Microsoft has played in establishing this view of computing. It also includes Apple and much of Linux, and it relates to some of the things I mention in my paper Why I hate OpenOffice. It's also much longer than I intended, and I probably need to sit back and think about what I want to do with it.

Also spent some time listening to the tutorial on the GIMP on the DVD from c't's digital photography special. The information is not bad, but it's a pity it relates to GIMP 2.4, while the software version on the same DVD was 2.6.

More chopping of branches off the conifer, this time not because of any danger, but because it looked funny. Also more work on protecting the flowers from the kangaroos; our Gazanias are looking unhappy again.

Another power failure in the middle of the night! I'm beginning to seriously consider solar power as at least a backup.

Up early to go to Melbourne to do our quarterly shopping and pick up Carola, who was booked into the Hotel Spencer, a backpacker's hostel. First called up the hostel, where we were told that she wasn't booked in. I asked if they had the correct spelling of her surname (Schlanhof), and they looked again and found the booking, but said that she hadn't arrived. So what were we to believe?

Off to Melbourne and to the hostel, in Spencer St. I suppose it's normal that that kind of place is a dump, and this one lived up to it. After a while Yvonne found somebody, they checked the room where Carola should have slept, and nobody was there.

Off to the Queen Victoria Market, which was just round the corner, and called the number (in Austria) that we had been given by the hostel; potentially it's her mobile number, and I got voice mail. Then (on the third attempt) Carola got through to Yvonne and told her she was at the backpackers, and confirmed the address (475 Spencer St).

Back to the hostel—still no Carola. Decided that the value of 475 might be a variable and headed south. On the way, Yvonne got another call, from a German speaking man, who told us that she was on the corner of Spencer St and Flinders St. Down there and picked her up. It seemed that she didn't know she had ended up in the wrong hostel.

It would be nice here to give links to the “My map” that I created for the day's destinations. But somehow there are a lot of straightforward things still missing from Google Maps, and this appears to be one of them. I wish they'd fix them before taking photos of every street on Earth.

Back to the market and did some shopping:

Then out to Mediterranean Wholesalers in Sydney Road, Brunswick, where the harmony was less than perfect: Yvonne had bought a liqueur called “Perfetta Armonia” there on previous occasions, but they no longer carry it. From there to Footscray, having dinner at a Vietnamese place on Hopkins St called (I think) Dong Que. The food was acceptable, but barely—Yvonne's “seafood noodles” had only three pieces of squid and nothing else.

Then across the road to the market, where we were sorely disappointed. The fish was uninteresting and not the freshest, and the vegetables were downright bad. I found some completely soggy ginger in one place, but nothing much that we really wanted to buy, except—accidentally—some green tomatoes. Green tomatoes are Mexican, and normally you wouldn't find them in a south-east Asian context; but here they were on offer as “ripe” tomatoes.

Home, annoying ourselves that the APCO petrol station in Lara had been offering petrol for $1.069 a litre on our way to town, and on the way back they had gone up to $1.279. We should have struck while the iron was hot.

In the evening, dinner on the verandah—the March flies are here already, unfortunately.

For Carola's sake a wallaby, presumably the one we saw on Monday, showed up, and it was even joined by a kangaroo, the first time we've seen both kinds of animal together:

Early to bed.

Huevos rancheros for breakfast today, making clear how horrible these Safeway tortillas are. They're so tough that you can't even cut them with a serrated knife, and I ended up using a pair of scissors:

I really must start making my own.

Carola is an energetic person, and her main intention here is riding, so despite the heat (mid-30s) off into the forest to make our horses sweat:

Only later did we realise that it was a day of Total Fire Ban, and we weren't allowed in the forest—I think: I can't find any regulations that forbid riding during a Total Fire Ban, but it does make sense.

It was too hot to do much outside today, so spent some time playing around with the idea of using a single source file both for my diary and the RSS feed. There's really only one file with two different names, and the code recognizes what it has to do in the time-honoured way, by the name. It required surprisingly little code; hopefully I haven't introduced too many bugs.

This page is going away. I've been creating it manually for some time, but now I have an automatically generated version. Please subscribe to that instead. If you have any problems with the new version, please let me know.

Another stinking hot day—about 45° and thus nearly as hot as last week. In Melbourne it was even hotter, a high of 46.4°, compared to only 45.1° last week. This is also apparently the highest temperature ever recorded in Melbourne, if the Bureau of Meteorology is to be believed.

Total fire ban and a warning of conditions similar to those of Ash Wednesday. Another chance to check out the appalling quality of the DSE bushfire site. One of the fires reported appeared to be at the Australian Equine Behaviour Centre (reported as “Clonbinane Equestrian Centre”), run by Andrew Maclean. Kept a careful eye on that one, for at least half an hour, after which it disappeared from the list! What a disaster! And the site is so slow, probably because of the continual refreshes that it performs, and navigating it is such a pain! The only good news was that there were no fires in our area, and that by evening the temperature had dropped to under 30°, though not as suddenly as in Melbourne.

Part of the fire danger today was the result of the high winds, which made themselves felt in the garden. They were so high that Hugin was not able to create one of my panorama shots: presumably the leaves were too different from one photo to the next.

Round midday I turned on the sprinklers again (normally they run in the small hours of the morning), but that wasn't enough, and a couple of hours later some of the plants were looking decidedly limp: jasmine, tomatoes and even the Cape daisies, so I gave them another go.

Spent most of the afternoon cooking—somehow I had underestimated how long it would take. Carola is a near-vegetarian (she also eats fish), so I did a lot of Indian and Malay food, including writing down a recipe for ikan goreng and not yet writing down a recipe for deep-fried cauliflower.

Also tried out the rice cooker again, this time with Basmati rice. Complete disaster: it stopped cooking in the middle, leaving the rice just a little cooked, and I had to complete the operation manually. I suspect that the dish wasn't properly seated, and the temperature sensing mechanism decided that it was hot enough. That unreliability makes it worse than useless.

In the evening, Diane Saunders and her friend Lynn arrived from South Australia to spend a couple of days; on the way they passed a serious bushfire near Horsham. Lynn is thinking of buying a horse from Chris.

This page is going away. I've been creating it manually for some time, but now I have an automatically generated version. Please subscribe to that instead. If you have any problems with the new version, please let me know.

Finally it's cooler, and the news came trickling in about yesterday's bushfires. The warnings were correct: the situation was not only as bad as Ash Wednesday, it was a lot worse; by the end of the day we heard reports of 75 deaths, compared to “only” 47 in Ash Wednesday, and the number is sure to rise further.

Barbecue today—it was a seems that Total Fire Ban, but seems that Total Fire Bans don't include gas-fired barbecues close to a house, so we were in the clear. Apart from Carola, Diane and Lynn, the Yeardleys came along with some friends from Singapore, so for the first time we had a really large number of people—11—on the verandah.

That's not counting the flies, of course. We engaged in a typically Australian pastime:

Watching TV in the evening—“Rain Shadow”, apparently the last episode. It's not a very good series, but it was filmed in Callington, not far from where we used to live. In this episode, somebody went to great lengths to make a fake map with new names for all the places in the area, including Mount Barker, which they called Blackford—not once, but twice, with different levels of renaming:

Other places are Slate Hill (Wistow), White Flat (Kanmantoo) and Paringa (Callington). It's amazing that they'd go to such trouble for what was presumably a low-budget series.

This page is going away. I've been creating it manually for some time, but now I have an automatically generated version. Please subscribe to that instead. If you have any problems with the new version, please let me know.

Another bloody power failure! This is getting to be really annoying.

Off to Sovereign Hill today for the first time. CJ and Sue are volunteer participants and got us in for half price, and were happy to show us around. That was quite worth while: CJ knew all the things that were worth seeing, and dragged us from one to the next at the right times. On the other side, of course, he also knew the people running the place, with some unexpected results for Carola, caught panning for gold without a license and clapped into irons:

Normally it's only the staff who get this kind of treatment.

One of the more interesting things I discovered was that Lola Montez, better known in a Bavarian context, spent some time in Ballarat and caused quite a stir here as well. Saw a reenactment of the case where she whipped the editor of the Ballarat Times:

There's also quite a collection of old steam machinery there, a thing close to CJ's heart:

On the way out, Yvonne managed to cause a stir by tripping over a box in the main street. The methods of treating her scratches seemed a little draconian:

All in all, though, a surprisingly pleasant experience. We're by no means done, but we'll wait until the next visitor to see the rest.

This page is going away. I've been creating it manually for some time, but now I have an automatically generated version. Please subscribe to that instead. If you have any problems with the new version, please let me know. Please also unsubscribe this feed, so that I can see when I can change over.

The weather has certainly changed in the last few days. On Saturday, we had 45°; today it was only 16°:

Into town to talk to Peter O'Connell today, taking Carola with us to do some shopping. After that along to Avalon Nursery, only to discover that they are closed on Tuesdays. To Mount Buninyong instead, braving the drizzle to climb up the lookout tower; even from the top, there's no panoramic view. A little disappointing.

Jason (I think) and mate from Skybridge in this evening to install a new, improved satellite modem—I thought. What they brought with them was another IPX 3200. I told them to take it away again, but they told me that they had already registered the changeover with IPStar, who had closed for the day a few minutes earlier, and they couldn't get any other modem to work until tomorrow morning at the earliest. Contacted Wideband and spoke to Matthew, who told me that the new Beta software (RC 018), not exactly reassuring terms, was much better than before, and that they had had no more problems with data corruption. So they installed the thing. At least it seems to work—so far. We'll see if this problem with the BST is still there. One way or the other, I'm not at all happy, and I made that clear when signing the docket.

Jason told me that the web server now worked with other web browsers than Microsoft “Internet Explorer”, but I can't see any evidence of that. Even with “Internet Explorer” it doesn't work right, but then my “Internet Explorer” appears to have been installed without my permission by Telstra's wireless software, and for some reason it kept bringing up the wireless menus, though there's no longer an interface there. What a mess this Microsoft is!

This page is going away. I've been creating it manually for some time, but now I have an automatically generated version. Please subscribe to that instead. If you have any problems with the new version, please let me know. Please also unsubscribe this feed, so that I can see when I can change over.

Into the office this morning to discover that the satellite modem didn't hang, at any rate, but the display suggests that the connection is now even slower:

It's difficult to see, but it looks as if the “TCP speed” has dropped slightly after the installation.

The reliability of the link is also not significantly better. On installation, I started a ping to my external web server, and stopped it about 18 hours later:

Those duplicates look like a worry; I haven't seen them before. And there's still 2.7% packet loss, and the average ping time of 1.28 seconds is really unacceptable even on a satellite link. I think it's time to find an alternative to this form of Internet access.

The temperatures are still low—today we had a maximum of 15°, which is 32° less than the all-time high only a couple of weeks ago—and the bushfires are gradually less of a threat. They've brought a surprising number of people out of the woodwork, though: yesterday Yvonne's sister Vera wrote to hear what was going on, and today I got a phone call from Conny Wölk, with whom I worked about 15 years ago. He's now in Switzerland, half retired. He reports of a surprising number of top-notch people we know who are disillusioned with the current computer marketplace (and that's what it really is!) and have found alternative things to do.

A bit of work in the garden, and planted another 30 calendulas. The others had done quite well. Now only 30 more to go.

This page is going away. I've been creating it manually for some time, but now I have an automatically generated version. Please subscribe to that instead. If you have any problems with the new version, please let me know. Please also unsubscribe this feed, so that I can see when I can change over.

I've had many occasions recently to complain about the SBS web site. One ongoing problem is that the link for the “Regional” programme took me to a page for Tasmania with the emetic, space-embedded URL http://www.sbs.com.au/schedule/2009-02-12/SBS Tasmania. OK, I can guess past that breakage, and I've been downloading a page http://www.sbs.com.au/schedule/2009-02-12/SBS Regional instead. But lately that hasn't been working; I get a page with three sections saying “No program [sic] data available”.

Today I called up SBS by phone (not an easy number to find; true to webmaster form, never the twain shall meet. For future reference, the number is 1 800 500 727) and was told that there is no difference between the programmes in various parts of Australia. That begs the question why they make this distinction in the first place; possibly it's yet another indication that web masters live in a parallel universe. She told me that she would report the problem; I won't hold my breath to see it fixed.

To the Yeardleys for a barbecue in the evening, somewhat marred when we left by the discovery of one of their cats lying dying on the road.

This page is going away. I've been creating it manually for some time, but now I have an automatically generated version. Please subscribe to that instead. If you have any problems with the new version, please let me know. Please also unsubscribe this feed, so that I can see when I can change over.

Off early today to the Great Ocean Road. After some discussion, didn't go to Otway Fly, but tried Melba Gully instead. It's a bit run-down, but quite worth visiting. I think I've decided I don't like the commercial atmosphere of Otway Fly, but it's not clear whether Mait's Rest or Melba Gully is better. Melba Gully probably wins because it's much easier to get to. One annoying thing was the mention of “Triplet Falls” on the information at the entrance, with no indication of where it might be:

There was also no mention of the place in any of the maps, nor anywhere else we looked. It wasn't until I got back home that I was able to search the web and find the Visit Victoria Triplet Falls page—another one with a URL not intended for human consumption. It's just on the other side of Lavers Hill, on the road to Beech Forest—even the “Visit Victoria” page refuses to divulge how far. So if we want to see it, it's another good 180 km round trip and a bit of searching.

Then on towards the 12 Apostles, finding a wildlife park on the way where Carola could finally stroke her wallabies:

This is now the third time I've been to the Apostles, and it's gradually becoming clear that there's not much to see there. They're very impressive, of course, but they don't change much. Took the opportunity—again!—to take photos with my new telephoto lens, this time another one. The photos aren't bad, but with the exception of better clarity on some shots, they're not much different from last time.

Then on to Port Campbell for lunch—at 15:30—and got some fish and chips at a place called “Splash” on the east side of the main street—the food was considerably better than what we got at Apollo Bay 18 months ago.

Back via Camperdown, and again up to Mount Leura to take a look around the surrounding countryside. This time the weather was good, but it's surprising how difficult it is to find a lookout that doesn't have some obstacle somewhere in the 360° view.

Back home to process the photos—once again hugin didn't like my panoramic photos, and I'm going to have to investigate how to do it manually.

My fears about the new satellite modem have confirmed themselves: it's showing the same problems of TCP hangs that I've seen from the very beginning. My link monitoring software shows:

This is a very specific issue: I'm unable to set up new TCP connections, but existing ones, even to the same site, work with no problems. ping speeds (ICMP) and UDP are also unaffected. Looking at the raw data for the same time, I see things like:

The time 75.01 is the time it takes for the TCP connection attempt to time out; currently my scripts have a bug which makes it difficult to determine when the connection fails, but they did here. There is a difference, however, in this behaviour: it recovers from the situation. With previous firmware revisions, only a reset would help. Now you just need to wait for 20 minutes of no network access, and Voilà! it comes back again.

What a crock!

Matthew's promise of less data corruption also doesn't seem to have come to fruition:

Called up again and spoke to Nathan, who wasn't able to access the modem either. He promised to investigate and send me mail on the outcome. He also came up with a new excuse for some of the breakage: “The web browser CGI was written for Microsoft Internet Explorer”. So it's not a bug, it's a feature. The sad thing is that this probably means that people have no intention of fixing the bug.

This page is going away. I've been creating it manually for some time, but now I have an automatically generated version. Please subscribe to that instead. If you have any problems with the new version, please let me know. Please also unsubscribe this feed, so that I can see when I can change over.

Photo day again today. For the first time since we've been here, the dam is completely dry:

High time for more rain.

More pain with the satellite modem today. How can anybody install such a load of junk? Called up Wideband and spoke to Jay, who told me that the firmware version I had (RC 018) was not the best—in direct contradiction to what Matthew said on Tuesday—and that they would install RC 029 on Monday. Who knows if that will bring any improvement. I am getting thoroughly fed up with these people. At the beginning they were helpful, but it's unacceptable that such basic problems as continual loss of connection and the inability to communicate with the modem are still with us after over a year. And this excuse “the modem is designed to work with Microsoft ‘Internet Explorer’” is an insult to any normal definition of interoperability. I've never seen a site on the web that would only work with “Internet Explorer”. I think that one way or another, a formal complaint is necessary.

Also mail from Peter Nicholson, enclosing a graph of data from his IPStar link. He's with Aussie Broadband, arguably a different ISP, so the comparison of his data (left) with mine (right) is particularly interesting. Unfortunately he doesn't have the TCP data.

Both these graphs are from the same time frame, so you'd expect the dropouts to be the same. But they're not, not by a long shot. In particular (and rather unusually), I didn't have any link dropouts during that period, while Peter had 15. So maybe this does have something to do with the ISPs after all. I wish a few more people would send me their data.

Spent most of the afternoon cooking Indian food. More attempts at masala vada, with some improvement over the last time I tried.

This page is no longer being updated. I've been creating it manually for some time, but now I have an automatically generated version. Please subscribe to that instead. If you have any problems with the new version, please let me know.