Stu's Rusty Bucket

Monday, August 23, 2004

A day out

Today, Darryl came around to my house and we went out for a drive.  Last time I was home we went down to the Mornington Peninsula. This time we went to williamstown.

Williamstown is a really pretty town on the other side of the bay in Melbourne. This is where the royal victorian yatch club is, and was once Melbournes bussiest boat builind yards. Only two or three naval boats are here now.

So anyway, we walked along the pier and noted a lot of yellow starfish had infested the bay, probably coming form ship ballast. Another ecological disaster in the making??

So we walked around williamstown, had lunch and decided to go up to the observation deck of the rialto. (The rialto is Melbournes tallest building.)

After paying 12$aud a person, we got a turbo lift to the top 60 floors or something in 10 seconds. WOW its an awesome view, since nothing blocks it in any direction. I took quite a few photos.

Then we were to home. And of course I left my fleece and camera in the back of his car… doh! so photos wont be posted till after the coming weekend.

Sunday, August 22, 2004

Programmers, RSI and Raving about Work

Found a nice little article on RSI and alleviation, while I was checking out some development articles.

Alleviate RSI the Hacker Way by Jono Bacon—Chances are, if you use a keyboard for several hours a day you’ll eventually experience repetitive strain injury. Thankfully, it’s possible to avoid or alleviate the symptoms with exercises, breaks, posture, and software. Software? Jono Bacon explores free software to help save your tender wrists.

The article mentions WorkRave, which will popup and pester you about your work habbits and try to get you to take breaks and so forth. I think I will investigate this, and save myself from RSI from programming!

Saturday, August 14, 2004

Linux on the Laptop

I have come to the conclusion that FreeBSD on my laptop wont be as… forthcoming as Linux. :( This sucks a lot, but Linux has far better ACPI and other laptop support mechanisms than FreeBSD right now…

I just have to work out what distribution I want to put on it… since none support BSD rc style and all support the crap SysV Init system. bleah…

*** reminder to self links ***

http://users.pandora.be/nespa/fujitsu/amilo6820.html

http://linux.toimii.net/AmiloD8820/

http://tuxmobil.org/

Load of generic…..

Watched start of olympics opening ceremony. yawn. turned it off.
Saw the last 10 minutes (came to it at the right time!) saw the lighting of the needle by the Greek WINDSURFING olympic medalist.. mm Windsurfing is a competative sport?? hmm

I guess you have to fight the other guy and knock them off the windsurfer? I dont know.

Wonder if everyone at the olympics gets free ouzo?

Was also fiddling around with C# tonight, made a StrongNameKey for myself. Managed to create a shared assembly and use that in a project…

I dont kinda get how I have to add a reference in the project for my assembly, then ALSO add a

in the code as well… but it works… so nyeh.

I need to upload some photos this weekend too....

The more I play with C# the more I like it… but with a 2.0 spec in beta AND a .Net Framework 2.0 in beta… shesh.. Where is the stability.. couldnt we have lived with 1.1 framework for a few more years.. Let businesses get used it, start using etc before sliding in a totally new version under the radar.

Wednesday, August 11, 2004

Bushwalking

Going bushwalking with my mum tomorow. Should be cool. Nothing long or that. couple of hours round the bush. Check out some waterfalls, which may not be very exciting with the drought n all… Should get some good photos too.

Going to a place called Sherbrooke Falls, in the Dandenong National Park / Dandenong ranges. About 30 minutes drive from home I think.

Looking forward to it.

Friday, August 06, 2004

Billy Idol

This is cool. Been surfing the Worth1000.com site. They run photoshop competitions.

I liked this one the best. (Quite safe to view in the workplace!)
http://www.worth1000.com/view.asp?image=89963

Switching to FreeBSD

I have a deep urge to move wholesale from windows to FreeBSD. Before I can do such a thing, I need to catalogue all the programs I use under Windows and find equivalents under FreeBSD.

Having been a FreeBSD user on and off for years, Im quite familiar with most of whats available. However I was never a KDE or Gnome user, only a console user.

KDE and Gnome represent a big change in using FreeBSD for me, and many of the windows apps I use have similar programs… with caveats of course…

My aim is to avoid Wine and the CrossOver suite of apps.

General

Email
I have switched some time ago from Outlook 2000, after being a Eudora Pro user for many many years (I resented the yearly upgrade for nothing fee), over to using Mozilla Thunderbird.

There are several other apps that look very promising, one of which is Sylpheed-Claws. Then there is Evolution (an outlook knockoff), KMail etc.

The only other concern is what do I replace Mailwasher with? Something that deletes spam from my server without me having to download it.

Browsing
Being an advocate of Mozilla Firefox, there is no reason not to use this on FreeBSD.

FTP
I am a registered user of CuteFTP Pro, and use the SSH ftping to upload stuff to my host. FTP is a basic thing, so Im sure there is a valid FTP client in KDE or Gnome. I need to lookup GFTP.

Instant Messaging
Very rarely do I IM, but when I do, I use ICQ and now AIM. All I know about IM clients under unix is the interopability edginess with them, Like AOL shutting down access to non AIM clients, etc.

Other than that there are plenty of IM clients.

Palm Desktop
This will be one big sticking issue. The replacements available are not compatible with my Tungsten E. The TE has a new format memo and address book and other enhancements.

Office
Needless to say, Office 2000 is my workhorse. Excel, Word, Access. I know I can get away with Gnumeric and probably AbiWord or OpenOffice Word. My biggest concern is what to replace Access with? What are my options for integrated forms/database system that I can program?

Imaging
ACDsee 6 is my app of choice for imaging. Thumbnailing preview, full screen display. Simple editing/rotating/redeye/resize/format conversion. Compiling photos into Albums, adding comments etc. Handling digital camera EXIF data.

Here again, I am lost at what I replace it with.

MP3 Music
Winamp 5 has no contender. Especially now it has a music library integrated with it. There are a plethora of MP3 players.

CD Burning
Nero 6 and CopyCD complement each other well. I need to find out whats good on KDE and Gnome for creating .ccd images/.iso images and for general burning.

Development

Code Editor
On Windows I use SCiTE. Its not perfect, TSE Pro is my ultimate editor, alas… So I use scite. There is a GTK version for unix so that will probably do me. I will copy my configuration files over to keep my current colour settings for code editing.

Compilers etc
I already use gcc under Cygwin for a lot of my stuff, along with nasm. Obviously this is a no contest with GCC under unix.

For work, I use Visual Studio 6 and some VS .NET 2002.

Testing
I use VMWare Workstation a lot. Unfortunatly the Windows license is not transferrable to unix, and I dont think I will pay out for another license just to use it on another platform.

As far as free alternatives go, Bochs is severly lacking and not really up to scratch for many things. The alternative, Qemu looks very promising.

More VHS throwout

Another VHS throwout day.
(OK so I missed a shelf yesterday...)

Chinese
On The Run
Legacy of Rage
Bless This House
Dating the Enemy
Young and Dangerous I
Young and Dangerous II
Young and Dangerous III
One Armed Boxer
Hand of Death (minor Jackie Chan)
Eastern Condors (Jackie Chan)
Dragon Lord (Jackie Chan)
Once Opon a Time in China 2 (jet lee)
The Blade, Tsui Harks.

Japanese
Gappa : The Triphibian Monster
My Secret Place (one of my fav movies!)
Tampopo
Secret Chronicle, Prostitution Market
Weather Woman 2
Neon Geneis Episodes 1-26

American
Labyrinth
True Romance

Thursday, August 05, 2004

Throwing out VHS tapes

Cleaned more of my cupboards out today.
Today was VHS throwout day.

All these were tapped of our multilingual TV station.

-- Chinese --
(All movies have english Subtitles, and are in original chinese.)

In the Line of Duty 1 : Yes Madame
In the Line of Duty 3 : Force of the Dragon
In the Line of Duty 4 : Witness
In the Line of Duty 5
In the Line of Duty 6 : Forbidden Arsenal
City on Fire
Prison On Fire 1
Prison On Fire 2
Naked Killer
The Killer

Erotic Ghost Story 1
Chinese Ghost Story 1
Chinese Ghost Story 2
Chinese Ghost Story 3
The Big Boss - Bruce Lee
Enter the Dragon - Uncut - Bruce Lee
Police Story 1 - Jackie Chan
Police Story 2 - Jackie Chan
Project A 1 - Jackie Chan
Project A 2 - Jackie Chan
The Young Master - Jackie Chan
Armour of God - Jackie Chan
Twin Dragons - Jackie Chan
Once Opon A Time in China 1 - Jet Lee
Beach of the War Gods

-- Japanese stuff --
(All with english subtitles in original Japanese)

Sumo Do Sumo Dont
Teppanyaki
Weather Woman 1
Godzilla

-- Anime --
(mixed. japanese and english).
Porco Rosso
Ninja Scroll
Lupin III : Castle of Cagliostro
Patlabor I
Wings of Honniamise
Akira
Ghost in the Shell
Kimagure Orange Road TV Series : eps 1-6
Kimagure Orange Road Movie
Street Fighter 2
Space Adventure Cobra

-- Other --
Heathers
Black Rain
The Maxx episodes 1-7
Aeon Flux Epis 1-5, 8-10
Big Trouble In Little China
Ferris Buellers Day Off
Split Second
Batman Returns
Sneakers
Terminator 2
War Games
Robo Cop 1
Robo Cop 2

Robotech TV (ALL EPISODES! all 3 “series”, roughly 80+ episodes.)
(this is the harmony gold cut n paste “Robotech").

Wednesday, August 04, 2004

Subversion

I never liked CVS. It was such an ugly hack. connecting to servers. updates. blah. So I thought Id try out Subversion.

My first doubts were requiring Apache2. That was a big misconception, since it has a local server that doesnt need it! sweeet.

I remember trying to setup a pserver.. blah.. in comparison subversion was no hassle. Another plus!

svn import
svn update
svn delete

oh its niiice. I like it. Currently Im reading the free O’Reilly SVN handbook. It has been a bit of an eye opener.

From my quick tour of using it, I’m very impressed. Already has it beaten my anti-cvs position down.  This will definatly be migrated to my working laptop post-haste!

branching. merging. cutting releases. very sweet.

“Branches and Tags are cheap, so use them liberally”

Tuesday, August 03, 2004

Culture

I think this weeks Cat And Girl was cool.

I am wondering how ross is doing adjusting to US culture with his deeply British cultural background.

Which reminds me, I have to buy some more real tea to send joy. =)

Sunday, August 01, 2004

A cry for images

Since people are fighting for some photos, here dagnabiit. This is all your getting for a long time yahea.

This is katy, aunt faye, laura, uncle leigh, me.

My dads-dad, me, my dad.