Renovation hell

We're in the midst of renovation mode at the moment. The ceramic tiles in the kitchen and the carpet throughout the rest of the house is coming out, the floorboards will be polished and then the new kitchen will go in complete with lovely new stainless-steel appliances with a DISHWASHER! We've been without a dishwasher for about 18 months now and let me tell you it was really hard to going back to hand washing dishes again after becoming reliant on technology to do it. :)

In fact, a large part of the reason why we started the kitchen reno's was because we wanted a dishwasher. :)

Currently just under 50% of the ceramic tiles are up so the kitchen looks a little like a disaster zone. When that's done there's going to be some walls to pull out of the way before the floor polishing dudes can work their magic. We have to have everything out of the house for at least three days for that, including us, so that will be a logistical nightmare on its own.

It will be happy days when it's all done -- pulling up ceramic tiles is murder. :)

Cole, tips and noises in the night

Our PM told the Cole inquiry that he was sure he had not been told of the misappropriations that the AWB had been up to in Iraq. He's a shrewd pollie, so either he is lying through his teeth or he had made sure there is no paper trail leading back to him. Either way it has been silenced in the news so the apathetic Australian news media have forgotten about the whole deal and as usual no one in government will be accountable for this.

We went to the tip today. Ooops I mean "recycling centre". A tip is a tip is a tip. It had the wind I remember as a kid, but it had far less seagulls. It also was staffed by delightful people who were only too pleased to help -- I think they needed to take a break from drinking tip juice. We were dumping various junk left from the previous tenants of our house, including an abundance of cardboard boxes. We also cut down some trees in the yard that were in various stages of diseases or decay before they infected other trees or fell on various structures. It's always sad cutting down trees, but it had to be done and it was fun to use a chainsaw. It reminded me of the original "Doom" when we would have chainsaw deathmatches. :)

It has been extremely windy tonight. I got up as the creakiness and scrapings caused by various wind noises stopped me from sleeping. Not that I normally have problems sleeping, it was more that I wanted to find out what the noises were and if something needed to be done about them before something came crashing through the window of something equally as disastrous. Needless to say, my paranoia was unfounded and all it was probably was a tree scraping on the guttering or something as simple as that.

I can't recall...

It seems to be the defense of many a politician in hot water. In the 80's, we saw Ronald Regan using it using the Iran-Contra affair.

Yesterday it was the Deputy Prime Minister's turn to front the Cole Inquiry into the AWB paying bribes to the previous regime of Iraq and he fingered the blame elsewhere. Today it was the Foreign Minster's turn . Both basically said the same thing, "I can't recall reading specific memos or cables". These are senior ministers the Government of Australia and they can't recall basic events. Do we really want people who are not accountable running the country??

Thursday it will be the Prime Minister's turn. I wonder if he can't recall either...

We can rebuild him -- we have the technology

I've embarked on the rebuilding-my-unix box project here at home. I've done some more troubleshooting and have discovered that it is indeed the hard disk that is faulty. What's worse, it is the /usr partition on the hard disk and unfortunately that's where all the user accounts are which means that I have lost anything there as it was not backed up. Before all of you fall over yourselves to comment "I told you so" -- I already know. :)

Oh well -- a time to start fresh. :)

I have an 80GB disk to rebuild with, and I have decided to stay with FreeBSD, but I have experimented with a few new FreeBSD projects that have surfaced recently designed to make FreeBSD usable as a desktop OS. These distro's are built on FreeBSD and have all the gui's sitting on top to make them usable "out-of-the-box" so to speak.

Desktop with BSD ain't gunna happen just yet...

PCBSD was my first choice, and it seemed promising. It installed without incident, (albeit slowly -- the guys who created the CD should be smart enough to realise if a CD has to seek from one side of the CD to the other it can take a LONG time!) and then I rebooted -- "can't find boot" it says. After some forum searching It seems it wants to live on the primary IDE controller, which is not the most efficient place for it to live in my system. After I installed it on the primary It told me "can't find kernel" -- the joy. I can't understand why it's so finicky on hardware considering its based on FreeBSD v6.0. That was enough fluffing around for me.

DesktopBSD was tried next, but that annoyed me before it even had a chance to install. It seems the installer does believe in partitions on the hard disk and wants to use the entire thing. This is great for the newbies who want to try it out, but they're seriously restricting their user base. It was based on FreeBSD v5.5 which is a stream that may go away soon in the future also. It booted, and displayed a the gui KDE interface, but the one huge partition didn't sit well with me so...

I dismissed the BSD distro's as gui "fluff" and installed good old FreeBSD -- v6.0. It installed (not with a pretty gui), booted and ran. It took a bit more work to configure, but if you factor in the troubleshooting of the distro's it would've been easier to just go with it in the first place. It's still not configured as a replacement just yet, but it is booting and ready for the finishing touches.

The linux distro's are streaks ahead with the desktop situation. A work colleague has SUSE linux on his desktop -- it allows him to do all his work -- even to the point of connecting to the Novell servers, and without all the extra fluff that needs to be installed on a WinXP machine such as virus checkers, firewalls and the extra things that work likes to run in the background of PC's to try and maintain a semblence of control.

I think I'll be doing the same soon.

Traffic flows

Traffic flows are fascinating if not frustrating. I'm sure this is taught in Civil & Geo Engineering, and I am sure there is a branch of mathematics or statistics that specifically deals with this. For example, there's a 2km stretch of freeway that I daily travel on that invariably is busy. The stretch is straight, and there are no on-ramps or off-ramps. There is no valid reason why it should be busy, but it more often is than not. It only takes one driver to slow down some and gawk at something by the side of the road for the flow to be reduced and a ripple-effect made to all the rest of the traffic.

April fools jokes and time zones

April fools jokes are great and can be quite amusing when done well, but time-zones really can cause havoc with the whole deal. I'm reading the usual newsfeeds this morning, it's April 2nd here in Oz but April 1st in the USA, and I'm confronted with a pink slashdot and umpteen articles about "OMG Ponies!". The content is questionable -- really guys is this the best you can do? Can't you at least present the pink page to me dependent on my local time? I should patent that idea -- an amazing concept!

I had my boot hard drive fail in my FreeBSD router here at home. It's the first real hard drive failure I've really had to deal with in a semi-important machine as this machine acts as a NAT router for the Internet, dhcp & dns server for the local hosts, and web proxy to keep traffic down. I had to turn off the FreeBSD machine and try and bring up a semblance of Internet normality using my WinXP/Games machine and Internet Connection Sharing. I have to say it doesn't work anywhere near as well, with my mac "falling off the net" if it goes to sleep -- never happened pre-ICS! Ugh.