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Hello,

Long time no write. It's not that I haven't had anything to write about, but I've been lazy and using facebook too much.

Tash will be back in the country tomorrow, and I'm taking her out to dinner. Just Tash and myself. And however many other guys are taking their Valentines out for dinner. But I digress...

Having Tash go overseas has led me to find out some more about my computer. I've finally got the webcam going again, in a more sensible and sane manner. I'm not really overly impressed by ehci_hcd, but I'm over it now - I'll just ensure that if I have a USB device that is going to play up because it doesn't like the USB2.0 mouse-pad hub that I have, I'll just plug it into the USB1.1 hub. Seems to work a bit better. It *would* be nice if the system would just recognise that the device is *not* a high speed device and use the uhci_hcd driver, but it's stupid. Typical computer.

Anyway. The garage is up. The driveway extension should be poured tomorrow, and then we can wait for 5 days before driving on it. The plumbing of the drain across the new driveway section, down the side of the garage and to the storm water system is done - if not completed by covering the pipes and affixing in the down pipes from the garage. But, hey, at least I can organise to get the Certificate of Occupancy for the stupid garage.

Oh, yeah. The gate is now back on the hinges, and able to be opened/closed. It's not looking the best, and we might have to consider replacing it anyway. I've got some ideas from Stratco, and some indicative costings, and included getting information for the other small gate and a new pergola. Looks like another $3000 or so, and that involves me putting it all up myself. *sigh*

I'm still considering what to do with the old paved section of courtyard. I can probably re-pave it, using the current pavers, but there will be a large amount of digging involved, and I don't know if I could be bothered. I feel like it may be better to get it all concreted (and stencilled, if necessary) because then it will be done professionally. At least I have found out that you can get an excavator (albeit a not so big one) in to the backyard, but that made a mess of the current pavers that are there. Something else to fix up.

Curtis is being rebellious at school, it seems. I don't know exactly why, but I don't think it has anything specifically to do with home life at the moment. I can't be sure, but it seems like he isn't completely happy. He told me this morning that Chris M keeps beating him up, and he in turn beats other kids up. I'll have to follow this up, I suppose, so that it can get sorted out. If this is the problem, it may be able to be sorted out relatively easily. Curtis has been back at school for 5 days (out of a possibly 6), skipped out on class on 2 afternoons, and threw his drink bottle at another child before biting said child. So, he received an in-school suspension, after I had decided to exclude him last Friday to ensure problems didn't happen then. Not an auspicious start to the year, I would say.

Anyway, enough procrastinating. I *HAVE* to get the lounge room, at least, clean before tomorrow evening. And since I'm not going to be home for most of tomorrow, that means I have to do it today (and ensure I get enough sleep tonight!) so that I don't have to worry about it.

Till next time. Mind you, if I could be bothered working out how to get the procmail rules working and a program to create my blog entries properly, I would have more of them up here... (maybe)

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What a farce.
Well.

We now have a garage that consists of 3 walls, a roof, and a partially mounted rolladoor. Only one out of two.

I probably should have been updating this on a more regular basis, but I didn't think I needed to until today. The whole farce started when we finally received the approval back from ACTPLA (the first farcical entity in this debarcle) and when I looked at it and noted the conditional approval that was put on it, I was unimpressed. I was even *less* impressed when I called Corey and informed him about it, and he told me that the copy that they had received from ACTPLA did not have said conditions on it. And why the hell should we need a brick facure on the garage anyway?

Anyway. Enough about ACTPLA, for the moment.

So. We get Totalspan (Donovan Trading, in this case) to put in a request for reconsideration of the conditions for the approval. I thought that things would just start to progress from there, because the shed needs to be built the same way anyway, even if it needs to have a stupid thing put on the front of it. Could I be wrong? Oh, yes....

After about 3 weeks (from memory) I finally hear back from Corey saying that ACTPLA had not yet informed them if the conditions had been reconsidered, but they were going to start construction of the slab anyway. They were just going to put a small footing at the front for "just in case" and we could work that out. Sounds fine to me.

Next thing. The concreting guy comes in, and I discussed with him what we were looking for - to get the section between where the shed goes and next door to be scraped so we can put pavers down there (eventually), and to put a small extra bit at the back for a water tank. Sounds simple? Well....

The ground is levelled. The section where the pavers will go is scraped, and looks relatively good. The section for the water tank is done. Yay.

Next thing to be done (the next day, from memory) is to mark up where the concrete is going to go. I am reliably informed that someone would come out and check that everything looks like it should be. Cool.

Then Tash comes home and says "I don't want it there, that would be stupid. Dind't you tell him that?" Err. He has decided that the water tank would go at the back (correct) on the side (err, not correct...) closest to the house (what the? That would just be stupid! How will we walk around?) I was expecting (well, that was a mistake..) that he would have put it in the middle. But, no.

So, when the concrete arrives, we tell the concreter not to do the water tank section, because it is not what we thought it was going to be. He's reasonably OK with that, but was annoyed that I had "misinformed" him of what we wanted. So sorry. Maybe he should have read his plans a little better. Because...

We come home after the concreting has been done, and realise that there is a distinct drop between the height of the pavers (which we originally had) and the top of the concrete slab for the garage. Guess which one is lower? Yes, you are correct, the garage slab. And it is not a small drop of maybe 10cm, it's more 30cm.

More to come. We are currently supposed to be having Curtis' birthday party in our new garage - which is not complete. The next installment will show how inept the company is at project managing the actual construction of the garage itself. (Note: the two guys who are actually in the process of the construction itself I have no issue with, but some other things......)

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How do I make Smiths?
Have you ever wondered where your children get some of their ideas from?

I was in the kitchen getting a drink, and Curtis asked for the peeler. I asked him what for, and he told me that he wanted to make some "Smiths".

Looking around, I noticed that there was an small, old, wrinkled potato sitting on the cutting board. I realised that he meant that he wanted to make some potato chips! Showing Tash the potato, she explained to Curtis that "Smiths" was the brand name of the chips that they had been eating for morning tea.

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More on converting to toppy .rec from divx
Well. Maybe I was a bit premature at thinking I had everything right.

It would appear that I have unsynced sound and video. It would probably have been appropriate to have *checked* the mpg file before re-appending the TS headers. *sigh* I'll have to try it again, I suppose.

Well. I would have - but I've lost my laptop. Tash appears to need it more than I do...

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Converting from DivX to a Topfield rec file
Well. How strange. I've managed to get further than I expected with this type of thing

I first went searching (again) for some sort of web page which would help me. I found this page and attempted it. I also found that this discussion showed that ProjectX should be able to insert the Topfield headers into the stream. Woo.

So, I gave it a go. Working with the laptop and connecting with putty to gandalf and fizgig, I managed to do the first attempt at transcoding. Then, using mplex (cos tcmplex has been renamed and remodelled) I got a single mpeg2 file which I used ProjectX to transform to a TS file. It sort of seemed to work... So I transferred it to the toppy. Bingo! Invalid file.

*sigh* More research required, apparently. So, I found this page and said to myself, "hmm.... aspect ratio may be wrong somehow..." so... I went at it.

Yay! Some success! err... where is my sound, I ask myself? I checked the mpg file, and yes, it is there. However, after using ProjectX to put the TS headers back in, I think it's somehow missed the audio track. Why?

How frustrating. It just does not seem to want to work. There are no obvious errors from ProjectX, however even trying without outputting to ac3 still gives video, but no sound.

Anyway. Here's the commands that I have used (with some semblance of success) for posterity:

russell@gandalf:~/vids$ transcode -i test.avi --export_prof dvd-pal --export_asr 3 -o test -D0 -s2 -m test -J modfps=clonetype=3 --export_fps 25

russell@gandalf:~/vids$ mplex -f9 -o test.mpg test.m2v test.mpa

Oh, and to get ac3 output, ensure -y ffmpeg is in the transcode command (usually after the test.avi bit)

Yay!! Success!! I had to fiddle with the sound mode (i.e. I pressed the sound track button then went through all the options, and eventually went back to AUTO), but eventually it started to have the soundtrack! Stuffed if I know why, but at least that means that I can do this. Now... to convert lots of things back to .rec so I can watch them on the tv....

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Pavers... Pavers... Pavers...
I think I'm going to start dreaming about pavers...

Hopefully, I have done the second-last movement of pavers for a while. I'm currently waiting for the builder/concreter to come so we can discuss exactly what Tash and I want, and he can get the bobcat stuff done. *sigh* He did say between 12:30 and 13:00 (now 13:14...) but I'm not going to complain that much...

I've also done a transfer to the savings account, and we can actually fund it. Yay! Although, other funding is going to be *very* tight for a little while. Maybe Tash will stop spending money?

I have now got all the pavers from behind the gate moved, and all the pavers which I had so nice and neatly laid next to the neighbours house moved. Unfortunately I was in a bit of a hurry, so most of those have simply been thrown down towards the back of the yard. What else can I do though? It's not like I have infinite time available on this...

Oh. I've also started to set up an easier way for me to do blog entries (maybe). I should be able to do this via an email thing and just dump it, but that would be too easy... err... wait. That sounds like a better idea. Procmail, here I come. :)

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Moving day.
Well, moving pavers, anyway. I was a bit stupid last night (this morning?) and didn't go to bed until 05:00. My own fault. For some reason, I'm a little tired today, and rather un-enthused about doing much...

At least I have moved around 100 pavers though. So far. And, paid a couple of bills (good), and had another look at the bank details (not good). So, a little bit has been done today. Nothing else as yet, but I should get through another 200-300 pavers (with any luck, more, but I can't do everything!) Oh, and I also have started to fill up the waste skip with junk from the backyard.

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More What The?!
I think I've got ldap working properly again! Yay!

After getting sick of things not working, I've decided to look again into some documentation. Looking at this Linux.com article I went through most things again (like, dpkg-reconfigure after ensuring the packages were actually installed on server (fizgig) and client (gandalf)) and made the configuration "sane". I attempted to log in again with a different user (using Curtis' login which I recreated) and everything showed up in GDM where it was supposed to. Success?

Maybe. I'll have to ensure everything else is working properly. However I think the major problem I was having is that I had screwed up the administrator password on the ldap server - and it wouldn't see the backend. Cross fingers.

Still don't know what the problem with Samba is though. Why the heck it would have started to segfault I've got *NO* idea. I hope I haven't got a corrupted executable, but that is seeming to be what the problem might be. Maybe purging and re-installing may work? I don't think so though, as I vaguely remember doing something like that already. *sigh* again.

Bah! Why do the nagios plugins need smbclient? Why is there so much interdepency? :( It just makes things hard. Obviously I didn't do a full purge, otherwise I would have realised this...

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What the?!
I got a phone call on Monday, which was really surprising. The builder had come to visit, and he wanted to put the bobcat through the area the slab for the garage is going to go!

Do you think we are ready for that? Hell, no.

Anyway. So I've taken three days off work, so I can move the stack(s) of pavers that we picked up from Cate and Craig, and then look at clearing out the patio area so we can take down the pergola. Then we can get the builder to come through and scrape the ground ready for the slab.

Oh. Forgot. We still haven't put in the request for reconsideration of the conditional approval for the development. Like, why in the world do we need to have a brick facade on the garage? There is already one garage, and one (partially enclosed) carport in the street which are just colorbond. So, I have taken photos of not only our house (and the fence that the garage is replacing) but the two houses next door, and the two other houses which have the colorbond structures. Totalspan are going to put in the request with these photos for evidence and we'll see how we go.

Actually, speaking of taking photos, I've *finally* figured out why the upgrade to Etch was screwing with my ability to see the camera (and other USB devices) or at least read/write to them without issue. There is still the problem with ehci_hcd which I can't figure out, however I believe I may have found a workaround for that (it worked, once for the camera at least, but there are question marks about it working over a reboot situation) but the major problem is that udev rules for libgphoto2 (not sure of that package name) use a group of "plugdev" - which I wasn't aware of. I suppose I should look more closely at the rules that new packages put into udev, shouldn't I? Or, should it just do what I expect and use the "disk" group (or camera, or something else which makes more sense)?

*sigh*

I suppose I should go and do some more work now.

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Flash - why?
Why does every damn new site need flash 8 (or greater) and why is it so difficult to install it on iceweasel?

I mean, come on. You download the installer, install the thing, and then.... nothing. I suppose I'll have to wander around and look for some other comments on how to install new versions of flash on iceweasel under debian.

*sigh*

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Stupid apt-proxy!
I don't understand this. I had it working perfectly, then for some reason it has just stopped. Or, should I say, it just stops!

Halfway through an update, and it just seems to hang, for no apparent reasons. There are no comments (which make sense, anyway) in the log file.

I do detest having to restart things for no reason.

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What to do, what to do...
I'm at home today. Second day of the week. I'll be at home tomorrow, as well.

Curtis is "sick" at the moment. He was complaining of a sore throat on Sunday and Monday, and then on Tuesday when I took him to the doctors he was diagnosed with slightly inflamed tonsils. Antibiotics just to ensure it doesn't get worse.

What happens when Tash gets home? I get in trouble because he has gunk in his eye - conjunctavitus. *sigh*

So Tash takes him back to the doctor, gets the prescription for antibiotic eye drops, and he gets two more days off school. Of course, because Tash has just started a new job, she doesn't currently have her leave entitlements, so I get to have two more days off from work.

Should I do something around the house? Possibly... but there isn't much incentive when I asked Tash to do a little bit yesterday, and she did absolutely nothing...

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Would you call this over reaching?
I came home last night from work, and Curtis told me that he had a surprise for me. I thought, "Well, OK then..." and waited for the surprise.

But first, a bit of background. We have been reading to Curtis for most of his life, and he enjoyed it. Then, while he was in full-time daycare he learnt to read - but continued to tell Mum and Dad that he couldn't read. Even though we knew better. He would continually read out letters (usually in inappropriate situations), but reading? No way.

So. Now that he is in Kindergarten, he has had to recognise that he can read, and let us know - otherwise he would have been "failing" his "homework" (the last two terms has been home reading with the child's parents). So he has been borrowing books from the library, as is encouraged by the staff.

Would you like to guess what he came home with last night?

Natasha encouraged Curtis to show me the "surprise" before he went to bed, and finally he agreed. Out comes his library bag with a big bulge in it... and then he shows me... "Lord of the Rings - Fellowship of the Ring" !!!!!

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Time to put mail on the inside...
Well. I've finally decided that I should be moving my mail server from the firewall (which should be a firewall, damnit, nothing else) onto my old firewall/web server/mail server/all and sundry...

Anyway. Just tried to do port forwarding. Came back with "relaying denied" messages. Time to look further. Later. So, I've backed it out for the moment.

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Out of the mouth of ...
Our boy is strange. He went and damaged his new bed that we bought him (yes, it was a few months back, but it is still new...) with a stupid little duck thing with wheels that he calls "Flippy". As both Tash and I were upset, the duck thing was confiscated, before I went into his room to see what the problem was.

After Tash had told Curtis that she was very unhappy with him, she left the room. I then asked him what three things he wanted for his birthday, which is coming up in November. This was the response....
"I want a Transformer... and a Barbie..."
There was about a 30 second pause, and then...
"And a duck which goes in the bath, a rubber duck which goes in the bath."

Don't ask me, I've got no idea where these came from. Oh, the Transformer I can understand, that's been on the agenda for a few weeks now, but the duck was just out of the blue...

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A funny to start the day...
So. We go to bed last night, and Tash complains that Curtis stole her alarm clock. This means that I have to ensure that she wakes up so she can leave for work on time. Not a problem.

Tash gets up, and I decide to help her out with getting the car started so that she can just basically drive away. Ice on the car is really annoying! Can't wait until tomorrow! Anyway, while I am standing at the front door working up to going out into the -5 degrees (C) temperature to start the car, I hear a "BOO" from the hallway.

Do I get blamed for encouraging Curtis to scare the willies out of his mother, while she is on the toilet? Of course I do.

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Hmph. Now, it's all about apache...
Why can't an upgrade go smoothly?

I finally decided to upgrade from Sarge to Etch on my webserver. However, I hadn't really considered all of the issues - and I'm going to get constantly trapped by apache2...

I had thought I had all my virtual hosts back online - but I'd forgotten about my blog. For some reason, the developers have decided to turn off all the virtual hosts, and return the default settings. Why? No idea. It's not what I woudl assume is supposed to have happened, as far as I am aware, an upgrade is supposed to keep the current configuration unless you tell it otherwise. But, on two servers I have upgraded, that's what's happened.

Anwyay. Now I've fixed up my blog host, I can start upgrading it again. Apologies to anyone who's missed it (now lkely would that be?!) and that I haven't updated it since January, but there you go.

Oh. Tash had her hair cut again last Saturday. 6 months between cuts!

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Lilo - is there anything it can do (right)?
When am I going to learn? When running lilo, if you have done anything with aptitude, then before you reboot run lilo. Otherwise, you spend the next two hours trying to figure out what the hell is going wrong with the rescue scenario..

Anyway. Step one: find your Knoppix CD. Boot up, mount up the root disk, link devices to the proper places... then get an error when you run $(lilo -r ).

*sigh*

Ok. Find the other CD. Same deal.

*scream*... *swear*

Go online and find the Debian installer CD. Try again, without any instructions. More swearing involved, lots of reboots. Go back online, look up the error on google. Get some ideas....

Anyway. I finally got to work again properly. Here's the deal...
* Boot to rescue mod on the debian installer
* Go through the options until you can find somewhere to go {back}, then choose the rescue option from the menu.
* Select your root partition to mount it on /target
* go to VT2 and press enter to enable the console
* chroot to /target
$(chroot /target)
* Run lilo to reinstall it
$(lilo) * Get the following error because you haven't fixed it up from when you were playing in Knoppix:
Fatal: raid_setup: stat("/dev/hda")
* Ensure you have your original device node (If you didn't back it up before playing, it's not my fault and I'm not about to go through making a new device node...)
* Move your copy of the device node back over the link you created under Knoppix
* run $(lilo) again and ensure the lilo re-configuration works properly
* reboot

Yay. Now I only have to deal with the fact that Tash will be annoyed that I rebooted without telling her. Not that she will understand what I had to go through to get through the reboot process (again), but anyway. Hopefully now I can get Diablo working again!

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More interesting video editing.
Well. Finally got VMWare set up again, and installed a Sarge system onto a workstation. Configured all the pertinent information (like NFS, NIS, XFree86) to ensure I had a base system I could work with..

Open up Mpeg2Schitt and get the previously demuxed files that I couldn't view the video of on Xorg. Wait for them to finish indexing etc. Click on the "can't work out what audio format" button, then click play - Wallah! Video. So, I am going to have to point the finger at Xorg. *sigh* Not that that is going to help me solve the issue.

Well. At least I can go and get the pxe file for etch, and start to try that. It might even work better than the sarge installer that I have, I just have to consider whether I want the beta or the release version.

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It's all in the cut...
Tash had decided to book in to her hair cut. I thought this was fine, as she hadn't had a cut for a while.

I don't know what it is with girls, but it seems to take them ages to find a style that they like, which of course they can change to be something else by simply having it straight, curly, up, down, or otherwise; then they decide that they need to go for something else. Thus, a cut and style.

Tash had decided to go online and work out what would be a good style, and ended up having a number of photo style pictures that she was going to take. The one that I liked I equated to having it look like Jessica Alba, who is one of my all time favourite actresses (who cares about her acting?! :) She mentioned Alyssa Milano, which to an extent I could see the resemblance, but I was sticking with Jessica.

So. Tash takes that picture, and off she goes. I put Curtis to bed, and have my dinner, then am sitting in the corner watching the Aussies put the boot into England (again) when she comes home. I was wondering why she was sort of hiding around the corner in the entryway, and then when she had finished locking the door and putting the keys away etc, she came into sight - and "What have you done with my wife? You're wearing the same clothes as she went out in... wearing the same jewellery..."

She reckons she looks like Selma Blair. I'll have to put up some photos of her to see if anyone else does as well.

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Annoyances
I've got a Topfield. I've got an NSLU which I've been able to make into a unit to connect my Topfield to my network, and download/upload files as necessary. I *did* have it working that I could use Mpeg2Schnitt under Wine, to edit the mpeg files that ProjectX had demuxed.

Yes, I said did. I have upgraded my workstation, and for the life of me I can't figure out what has changed so that I can't do it anymore.

Choices: Wine itself, the Mpeg2Schnitt program, or Xorg (instead of Xfree86) - which one is most likely? I don't know. It would seem that Xorg may well be the culprit, but I don't know how I'm going to work that one out - unless I can get Xfree working on my fileserver (which is a problem in itself...)

Symptoms: Open up the Mpeg editing software, and open up an m2v file created by ProjectX. This will automatically pull in the mp2 file which relates to it. Then, hit the play button and although the slider starts to progress and the counter starts to increase, there is no video displayed. Error messages from wine show in the console[1], but it means nothing to me... Oh. And I tested this on the same machine, running Win2k *shudder* and it worked properly - even giving me sound! (which, of course, I can't get under Linux execution (never worked, so I'm not *too* concerned about it))

I suppose one way to try it would be to set up a Sarge installation on this box, and try there.. I'll see if I can do that. If I can, I suppose I'll have to submit a bug report, but it's going to be a bugger to explain :(

[1] fixme:d3d:IWineD3DDeviceImpl_GetAvailableTextureMem (0x1140020) : stub, simulating 64MB for now, returning 64MB left
fixme:ddraw:IDirectDrawImpl_SetCooperativeLevel (0x1adfb0)->(0x10022,00000008)
err:ddraw:IDirectDrawImpl_SetDisplayMode Width=0, Height=0, what to do?
fixme:ddraw:IDirectDrawImpl_CreateSurface Wanted to get surface dimensions from window 0x10022, but it has only a size of 0x0. Using full screen dimensions
fixme:d3d_surface:IWineGDISurfaceImpl_Blt Can't handle DDBLT_WAIT flag right now.
fixme:ddraw:IDirectDrawImpl_RestoreAllSurfaces (0x1adfb0): Stub
fixme:ddraw:IDirectDrawImpl_SetCooperativeLevel (0x1adfb0)->((nil),00000008)
fixme:d3d:IWineD3DStateBlockImpl_Release Releasing primary stateblock

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The trouble with child minding...
is that you can't really do anything for yourself, while you are minding the child{ren).

Due to some issues, I have had to take a couple of weeks off work to look after Curtis. I decided to spend some time on the computer, ostensibly to upgrade my workstation from Sarge to Etch. So I wasn't really watching what Curtis was up to.

Oh. Some history. It seems that every time we go to Sydney we go to Ikea for "stuff". The last time, we got some large cushions and cushion covers, in white (amongst other things) which Tash is rather fond of. So, what happens when you have given a child a write-on, wipe-off writing book and trained him to use the whiteboard markers on it so he can practice his alphabet letters? He uses the whiteboard marker on the nice new cushion covers. Luckily (for me) only on one of them. And do you know how to get whiteboard marker off fabric? Well, you are doing better than me if you do...

Now, we are watching Superman Returns, which we borrowed from the local video shop. As usual, Tash wanted to do her nails while she is watching TV, and so she went to turn the light on next to her chair. She looked at the light bulb, and started laughing (of course, interrupting the sound track of the movie, but that's OK because it's not like Curtis can stay quite for more than about 30 seconds...) and then showed me the lamp. Curtis had not only drawn on the cushion cover, but also the light bulb!

Tash's comment about it? "It's a zebra!"

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Happy New Year!
It's been a while since I've written anything, and there's been a bit which has gone on. Christmas, New Year, travelling, visiting family, yada, yada....

Ok. Wow! I didn't realise that it was over two months since my last writing! <mental note\>Resolution: write more stuff onto the blog. Also get it to work properly.</mental note\> Anyway.

I have the joy of being home for the next couple of weeks, looking after Curtis because our old Family Day Care carer decided that it was better for her to put on her new charges from the first week of January. Means that I had to take holidays (luckily I had enough) so that I could do it. And what happens the first day? Tash decides that she wants to have the car, so not only do I have to entertain Curtis but I have to do it by myself, without leaving the house (unless I walk or ride...) This could be interesting, as I have no idea of what to do with Curtis in general, let alone while I want to watch the cricket and do bugger all else...

Anyway. History time.
We basically just did work and little else up until Christmas, besides very slowly cleaning up the house. We also took down a rather large garden shed, with the view of putting it up in our backyard. Of course, we didn't really do things the right way and measure out where we wanted to have it, so we just took the shed down from its location, then transported it home to our place. When we got it here, I took the bottom rails to see if it would go where Tash wanted it. Guess what? It won't fit there. So, now we have a (used) full size shed, in pieces, sitting in our backyard, which we are not going to be installing. *sigh* At least we got a number of good size concrete pavers out of it, which could come in quite handy at some stage. <mental note>Remember that at some stage in the next few days that the pavers have to come inside the yard so they don't get knocked off... </mental note>

We have the house in some semblance of order now. Due to the fact that we traditionally hold Christmas Eve for the family at our house, reality is that we spend the last few weeks (read: days) cleaning up to have the house in a state where Tash is comfortable with having people over. As a result, the lounge room, kitchen, dining room, bathroom, and Curtis' bedroom are actually clean, and the lounge room has been reorganised to have things in different positions. It looks good, actually, although we may still have too many pieces of furniture, or at least the wrong shape/size...

Ok. Christmas was a case of clean (see above,) host Christmas Eve, travel up to Sydney via Bowral to pick up Tash's cousin Annette who is currently back in Australia for a short time (she lives in Budapest at the moment), have dinner with said Annette and her boyfriend (and his father), go to Mum's house for the night. Boxing day, drive around Blacktown trying to find a bakery and some hot chicken, which we found at a Kebab shop (the chicken) and in Lalor Park (have to remember that the shops at Lalor Park appear to be open on boxing day!!), then go and visit the family at Cheryl's place. Spent most of the time there, and then went to watch Casino Royalle in the Gold Class at Parramatta. There were some issues with it, but I would be prepared to pay the premium cost again, but would try to get in at a better (read: cheaper) time where it was less busy.
A busy 27th consisted of wandering around Westpoint Blacktown, then hurrying out to the Mean Fiddler - which was a lot bigger than I remembered - for lunch with Nicole, then drive over to Croyden to spend some more time with the Schneiders. Dinner consisted of going back to Lalor Park, and getting pizza - which I had seen when we went there on Boxing Day, and wanted to have.
Thursday was even more busy... We packed up the car, said goodbye to Mum, and then drove off to Ikea. Shopped around Ikea, bought stuff (>$200) and had both breakfast and lunch. Then, we drove down the coast to Bermagui where we stayed until New Years day (there isn't much to comment about Bermagui, except the rain and the quiet...)

Almost missed the garbage collection this morning. I wasn't expecting it to be picked up just after 9am, so I just had to run out and put a few things in there. Since Natasha's nice Christmas present to me was a book about cleaning, that may be a bit better over the next few months...

Anyway. I'm going now.

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More stuff to learn..
Just finished putting a new entry in for Alicia's blog. Grumbled a bit about the spelling errors (yes, I know, she is an ESL so I've got to consider that..) and decided to use the spell check function on Linux. 'ispell'. Didn't realise it was quite as easy as I was expecting from the command line...

Anyway, since I had such success with her last entry, I decided to go through the whole lot. Pretty good idea, there were things that I had missed... So now, it should all be back up to date without spelling problems! I also touched the files back to their original time stamps, so things shouldn't be out of order (I'll check that).

Anyway.

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xml2tgd.py update
Yay. I decided to try and get Toppy-Web working properly with the EPG, and found that when I (finally) actually got the channels to show, they were out by 10 hours. *grumble* So I had to go back to trying to get the tgd files to end up in localtime, instead of UTC. *sigh*

Interestingly enough, it made the python code a bit cleaner, when I finally figured out that I would have to use the timegm function from the calendar module. It's all well and good to have localtime(), gmtime(), and mktime() in the time module, but why haven't they put timegm() into time as well? It would make sense to me, but at least I found it and the EPG data is now correct.

One funny thing was, because I didn't read how mktime() and localtime() worked properly, I ended up with the times showing as 20 hours *before* they were supposed to be showing. So, Saturday night's 6:00pm news was showing up as 20:00 on the 20th! Quite frustrating when I didn't realise that the day was one back from where it should have been.

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Am I losing my mind?
We went out this evening, to have a family dinner. Judy and Heinz have come down from Sydney, so we met up with Allen and Morgan, Albert (Pama), Lynn and Ivan, and of course Judy and Heinz. It was a pretty good evening all up.

The problems hit when we came home. Natasha was saying that she was in the mood for SingStar (the Playstation game) so she informed me that I would have to get the Playstation back out of the bedroom. Pretty simple. Problem is, that the Singstar game is MIA - well, in storage anyway.

I'm sure that I put the game in it's box, and all the Playstation gear went to the bedroom. But, do you think that we can find it? Of course we can't. So now, we are searching everywhere.

Yay! Natasha has found it. Apparently she decided to look in the 'study' - which is still a complete mess even 22 months after we moved in - and found a bag which had all sorts of stuff. From quick appearances, it looks like it was a bag of stuff which we had to move out of the lounge room really quickly, as we were madly cleaning up for some sort of visits one day...

All this, mind you, after we went out to the other side of town this morning, at 7:30am, to dismantle a large garden shed so we could bring it home. Joy! We got there about 8:10am, and we left at midday. So about 3 and a half hours of drilling out rivets, lugging around sheets of metal, holding up sides or roof parts, or moving them around... and now I'm tired. So, I think I'll leave her with SingStar and head off to bed.

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Funeral for a friend.
Hello. Today is a little sad, as we said Farewell to a friend and work collegue.

Jo Kucharski was a long serving ACRES employee, who was unfortunately diagnosed with a brain tumour last year, and passed away after 13 months on Friday 29th September. Today a good number of family, friends and work colleagues joined together for Jo's funeral. Although it was a little sad, it was good to see so many people coming to say farewell.

Leave me alone if I'm going to ramble a bit.

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What a ripping time it is...
Trivia night is on Friday next week. So. Natasha wants to change some of the video clips (and probably audio, as well...) so I have to figure out how I can do that for her. Fun, fun, fun....

Well. The other thing that we have to do is to find out just *what* she wants. So, I'd better find that out, and then I can get on with what she wants.

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blosxom flavour problems...
Yay. I've discovered what the problem is - now I just need to work out *why*. Shouldn't be too hard, I just had a thought...

The apache error log showed me that when I was attempting to look at http://www.oxyoss.net/blog/index.index it was having problems finding .../blosxomindex.index - apache configuration, methinks. I'll have a go and see.

Hmm... this may be interesting. Changing a ScriptAlias directive in apache. And, *yay*, it worked! I had originally had the ScriptAlias for http://www.oxyoss.net/blog/ just pointing to the blosxom script - one simple putting of the / after the script name. I probably shouldn't have done it that way, but oh, well :)

Yes, that worked. I was setting up another blog, and checked removing the line with the blog/ directive - and it worked properly. I probably should do things the easy way first, and then start experimenting - but that would leave life boring. :)

Oh. Good. It also fixed up the permanent link problem I was having as well. Now I can set up some categories, and use those like other people have done.

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Apt-listbugs looks broke...
Tried to look at installing the xmltv package. First, aptitude tells me that the packages I want to install are possibly insecure - hey, did I update aptitude?

Oh, great. I've just remembered that I'm attempting to start upgrading the workstation from Sarge to partial testing (ie Etch) - and had forgotten. Ok. Let's find out some details about secure apt from google ...

Yay. Info. Thanks, Joey, what you wrote up was a bit illuminating. But, where do I find out the key numbers to import? *sigh* At least the one mentioned was reasonable enough, and now I sort of know what I'm doing. (Apologies, I have moved on from the website Joey has written up, and don't have the URL handy.)

Next... hey, apt-listbugs doesn't seem to want to connect!? Argh! (fiddles around) No joy. I'll put in a bug report and see what happens. (For info, see bug# 389903)

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Blog entries
Hello to all who are looking.

Yes, I know, there are broken links. As I still haven't completed setting up blosxom properly, the permanent links and the other index pages don't currently work. I'll get to them as soon as I can.

Notice that I haven't said much recently? Well, here's the thing... I'm busy, but I'm also lazy. Having a blog is great, but remembering to write anything in it is sometimes a little .... err... where was I? Oh, yes, a little difficult. It isn't like I have a bad memory, but when it comes to having to clean up, look after Curtis, being out of the house because of work or other things, watching TV, fixing up the toppy, etc., etc., the blog has become (like most other things) something that I don't pay too much attention to. Maybe that could change, I don't know, but hopefully I will be more proactive at setting out my thoughts.

Even then, are my thoughts so necessary that I should write them all down? Should I just get a diary instead? Hmm...

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electricity is annoying...
We've moved the fish tank. I decided today that I'd plug in the light - and tripped the ELB. Nice. Now, have to ensure all the computers came up properly, as everything runs off the one grid...

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and... some success! (at work)
I've finally gotten the import process working for direct downlink imagery. Well, basically, anyway. There's still quite a bit to go, but at least I have the basics in and working. If I can get the cataloguer to work for all satellites, then I'll be able to say that TERSS format archiving is complete! After that... RCC, followed by ACRES. *sigh*

I've got more ... erm... incentive is the wrong word, even though it almost fits. Bah! (googles - then wikipedia...eh? No entries?... hmm... ) oh. Motivation. Anyway. I've got more motivation to do stuff with the computer. What can be slightly annoying is when I reboot, and greylisting doesn't restart. I must look into that and ensure that it restarts at boot. Probably forgot to put in an update.rc command for it.. Done! Almost the same as chkconfig for Fedora, but slightly different. Why there can be so many different ways of doing something, is an interesting question, but it makes it a bit of fun when you are using cross-flavour releases.

I almost can't wait for Etch. I've done some of the upgrades using bpo (see last entry) and Firefox and Thunderbird look pretty good. Xorg I don't know about yet - I'll have to flog it for a while to see how it goes.

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Upgrading the workstation
I run Debian boxes, exclusively at home. I've been running Debian since potato, and have upgraded through woody to sarge. Time to look at upgrading my workstation to etch, sort of...

I'm going to start off by using backports.org to update some reasonably critical parts, like XFree86 to Xorg, the mozilla products I use, and some others. Interesting times. Aptitude just decides that it is going to ignore the upgrade to Xorg... So here we go, lets start pinning just to get the upgrade happening. I'll let you know.

Hmm... the Xorg package in bpo is experimental? How nice. Well, it means that things will be interesting if theres a problem. I was of the assumption that the bpo version was recompiled for sarge from the testing sources - but maybe I'm wrong here. Hopefully it's going to be OK.

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Furniture removal.
Lets see. A couple of weeks ago I picked up a few fish from a work collegue, who was heading off overseas. We currently own 1 x 2 foot tank, and 2 (different) 4 foot tanks. Of course, the "show" tank that we own was outside, and the other 4 foot tank was inside. So, before we went out to lunch for a birthday celebration, we had to swap them around. Now, we have the stand for the old tank outside, the "new" tank set up in the right spot, and the old tank itself sitting on the dining room table. Hopefully we can get it moved outside soon and start using the table again.

Requirements for the new tank: external filter, gravel, water. Another heater? That should do. Then we can look at putting most of the plants in there, and eventually move the more agressive fish (read: Pearl Guarami pair) into the 4 foot, and stop them from beating up the tetras. The catfish are fine, they just hide all day. Maybe they will be able to come out and we'll be able to see them then!

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First working version of xml2tgd.py
After being annoyed with ToppyGuide (an xml file to .tgd file conversion program I picked up from around the web) not working properly, and not having the source code to see why the heck not, I decided to rewrite it in pyton. Although it wasn't fun to start off with, after about 2 weeks of on and off development, I've got a beta version working.

Testing is fun, though. At least I've got the specs of the .tgd format, so I should be OK with it. Of course, I can't be sure of the output until I send it off to the Toppy and run the EPG tap.

Developing on the laptop while watching TV is fun. We've watched Prime, followed by Blade. An interesting difference in style between the two movies.

Looks like I've got it working now. The interesting thing that I've found when the EPG tap reloads, is that it seems to get confused about times. I believe I've got the GMT offset correct, because the times on the programs are correct, but it always seems to want to change and see the programs about 10 hours ahead of the current time... If I can be bothered, and it annoys me more, I'll get to that. But at the moment I'm not worried at all, as at least I can again see a greater array of upcoming (and previous) programs on most of the channels. It would be so much easier if the cnannels would just do the simple thing and send the EPG data through the broadcast, instead of just Now and Next...

Anyway. It's early (in the morning, and I haven't been to bed yet) so i'm off.

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what a boring day.
Work. Trying to get things done, and because of infrastructure limitations, I get told I can't do things the way I want to. Anyway.

At least what I wanted to get done I did, mostly. It's not like I can just focus on what I'm programming on, because I'm still in support I get asked to fix things all the time. But, being able to get some stuff done at home is a big bonus - I don't know how much work I would get done at work if there was some things that I couldn't get done at home. Even with the TV watching while I'm working, as long as Curtis isn't annoying me I can concentrate on getting what I want finished.

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Progress...
I'm making some progress on my xml2tgd program. Interesting stuff. Learnt about making a struct_time, and then playing around with it, then trying to figure out how to find the duration in minutes from the start and stop times ... All very fun. Not. But at least I've succeeded.

It's a wonder anything got done today. With a Star Wars marathon on Showtime, what did we do today? Not much... a couple of loads of washing, a little bit of programming, fish feeding...

Yay. I don't understand this hole face mask thing. Natasha's got one on, and I asked her a question - and she was really struggling to stop from laughing. Something to do with the fact that it would have ruined the mask, I suppose. Oh, well...

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automatic update
Just decided the best way to get my blog automatically updated. I'm setting up a cron job which will take any files in a specific directory, and move it to where it is supposed to be. Cleanup could be interesting, but I'll get to that later.

Hmm... so far so good. But what I don't understand is that the date on this entry is out - it should be for Sunday, but it's being shown as Saturday. Even with timezone differences, this doesn't make sense - it's after 11:00am EST, which is already > 00:00 UTC ... *sigh*

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rewriting xmltv to tgd files
This sucks. I've got an xml parser in python, but one essential thing I need is to get the duration - which is the stop time minus the start time. Easy? No.
For some reason, the xml elements are put into my list as unicode - and then I'm lost. I only found out about the unicode bit when I decided to go googling - and then couldn't easily find anything which was available to translate a number which is stored as unicode, back into an int for processing. argh
Well, actually, I was pointed to the unicode problem when the exception was telling me about "unsupported operand type(s) for -: 'unicode'" - big hint. But don't let me know what is supported. That'd be too easy. Time to sleep on it I suppose.

Natasha is annoying. Not only does she not care about sports, but she doesn't care that I might actually want to be with her instead of having her watch a movie that starts at 10:30pm and goes until after midnight. Makes me not want to watch that movie at all now - even if she reckons I would have liked it...

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