I install quite a number of internet gateway machines for one of my clients. While eventually he will probably move to using an ASUS EeePC [1] or something similar, the current plan is to keep using desktop PCs (unfortunately server-class machines make too much noise). P4 machines use an unreasonable amount of power and don’t seem worth getting second-hand. P3 machines are the most power efficient machines that have been commodity PCs (with keyboard and monitor), see my computer power use document for an example [2]. So what I would like is to get a dozen name-brand P3 systems at a reasonable price. Currently the only companies I can find selling such machines are charging ridiculous prices (such as $300) with the aim of reaming corporations who want to complete a set of old machines rather than upgrading them all. Most online auctions etc are selling P4 and Celeron 2GHz as the minimum hardware. The Celeron machines are better than P4 (at around 50W) but not as good as P3 (at less than 40W). If you read this post and are in Melbourne, Australia and have a name-brand P3 desktop system that you want to sell then let me know. If you have any suggestions of how to buy such machines then I’m interested in advice.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/01/23/asus-eeepc-as-a-router/


• [2] http://doc.coker.com.au/environment/computer-power-use/

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No, the king id not dead. Still, congrats to Steve. And yes, I was wrong in that I expected more people to vote 111- or equivalent (perhaps those people didn't vote at all instead?) About voter turnout: In Switzerland, everybody is really, really happy when 49% of the population does vote. Usually, we have participation between 30 and 40%, sometimes even lower, IIRC in one case it was as low as 26% all issues were so non-controversial (usually, it's referendums (referenda? referendi? referendumthingies) on factual issues and no elections, though, so the comparison might not be entirely fair.)

I don't think any of these are mine, but this needs to be published to the general public (at least until it rests on AlumNit).

Poo Alliterations
- The Earl of Excrement
- The Duke of Dung
- The Prince of Poop
- The Sultan of Shit
- The Father of Feces
- The Matriarch of Merde
- The Steward of Stink
- The Dignitary of Dangleberries
- The Grand Poohbah of Grand Poo
- The Tyrant of Turd
- The Shogun of Scheisse
- The Baron of Bowels
- The Cardinal of Crap
- The Director of Dump
- The Surveyor of Stool
- The Lord of the Log
- The Crown Prince of Cow Patties
- The Royal Archbishop of Road Apples
- The Duchess of Droppings
- The Princess of Poodie
- The Legionnaire of Loaf
- The Supervisor of Stinkers
- The Pharaoh of Floaters
- The Magnate of Manure
- The Tycoon of TCPDumps
- The Czar of Czesspools
- The Mogul of Bowel Movements
- The Ruler of the Runs
- The Dean of Diarrhea
- The Royal Ringleader of Rump Raisins
- The Denizen of Doo-doo
- The Emperor of Evacuations
- The Headmaster of Horrible Odors
- The Titan of the Trots
- The King of Klingons
- The Big Boss of Bum Beans
- The Taskmaster of Turtleheads
- The Supervising Sovereign of Sewer Serpents
- The Colonel of Colon Cobras
- The Nobleman of Number Two
- The Top Dog of Toilet Twinkies
- The Kingpin of Keester Cakes
- The Shepherd of Sea Pickles
- The Head Navigator of Heinie Nuggets
- Rectal Representative
- The Commander of Cow Pie
- The First Mate of Fecal Matter
- The Creator of Cloth Touchers
- The Protector of Porcelan
- The Theologian of the Throne
- The God of Grunts
- The Small Insignificant Yodeling President of Shit in your Pants
- The Diaper Destroyer
- The Loader of Loincloths
- The Pontiff of Plum Pudding
- The Daiymo of Dysentery
- The Master of Montezuma's revenge
- The Squire of Squirts
- The [Weaver] of [WvLog]s
- The Primary Contact of Pudding Cookies
- The Best Producer of Brown Puddles
- The Senior Partner of Steaming Piles
- The Fine Baker of Fudge Brownies
- The Sheriff of Stench
- The Don of the Deuce
- The Torrid Putrid Tainted Pervert of Two-Ply Toilet Paper
- The Sacred Monarch of Skid Marks
- The Main Scientist of Microfeceological Studies
- The G.I. Joe of Gastro Intestinal Journeys
- The Premier of Polyps
- The Brigadier General of Bedpan Gold
- The Plunger Pilot
- The Specialist of Splashers
- The Foreman of Fake Farts
- The Ambassador's Under-Secretary of Astounding Unearthly Scents
- The Old Man and the Sea of Odiferous Monsters in the Sink
- The Bafflingly Blunt and Blasphemous Bearer of Big Bad Beastly Booty Burdens
- The Crisp Pungence of Chain Pooping
- The Goddess of Groundhogging
- The Burly Bobby's Brief Battle with Brim Blasting Bowel Bombs
- The Nasty Neighbour's Noisy and Nefarious Neglect of Normal Nasal Niceties
- The Judge Jury and Executor of Jolly Jumper Excrement
- The Forwarder of the Forwarded
- The Wizard of the Water-closet
- The Grunting Lobber of Great Logs
- The Annoyingly Arrogant Architect of Awful and Abhorrent yet Amazingly Aerodynamic Anal Atrocities
- The Dark, Dangerous and Delusional Dealer of Death-Defying Doses of Disturbingly Decadent Dung
- The Shakespeare of Sinfully Smelly and Supremely Scary Scripture with Soggy Stains and Screaming Splashes
- The Wise but Weakened Warlord Whose Willful Wrath Was Wholly Wrought With Wicked and Wretched Winds from Within
- The Languid and Lackluster Legend of the Little Log from the Loo and its Lavish Life of Luxury in a Lasagna
- The Kahuna of Kaka
- The Emergency Evacuator of Enraged Entrails
- The Squire of Sultry Stinknuggets
- The Deadening Discomfort of a Dearth of Dumps
- The Far From Favourable Fragrance of Four Fragments of Fantastically Fresh Feces
- The Principal of Prodigiously Putrid Pellets
- The Markedly Morose Maintenance of Maniacally Mounded Midden Movements and Mostly Meaty Meals Mysteriously Made Mushy
- The Crass and Cranky Coroner Connecting Clues Concerning a Cornucopia of Casualties Caused by a Crude Cluster of Completely Contemptible Colon Concoctions
- The Thinking Thoughts of a Thinker
- The Horrible, Hubristic Heathen Hoarding Hoary Humps of Hideousness Hailing from His Huge Hairy Heinie in His Harmfully Heady Hovel
- Inane Writings on Irritated Wreathing of the Incubator of Wrath
- That Special Numbness from Sniffing Noodled Stink Nougat
- The Moral Sanctity of the Mystery Shit
- The Ornery Opressor's Opulent Outpost Overseeing the Ordinary Occupants' Outrageous and Ongoing Observance Of an Occasional but Offensive Orgy Of Offal
- The Rector of Relief
- The Rectal Regurgitator
- The Shit Squat
- The Smelly Surprise
- The World Wide Wisdom
- The Slayer Supreme of System Shock

I’ve just been reading about oil deterioration when deep frying [1]. Apparently frying food can cause the production of Acrylamide [2] which causes cancer, is a neurotoxin, and does other bad things to your body. Deep frying in a vacuum [3] is a solution to this problem as the lower temperatures reduce the formation of the bad chemicals (and also increase the life of the oil thus making for cheaper fried products). Of course this means that deep frying in a pressure cooker as KFC does probably gives a result that is a lot worse for your health [4]. For some time I’ve been avoiding KFC due to concerns about the treatment of the chickens. I have been regularly eating fried chicken from a local store which looks and tastes very similar to KFC so presumably is cooked in the same way. I guess I’ll have to stop eating that now. I wonder if toast is also bad in this regard. I expect that sausages would be a problem when cooked on a BBQ. In other health news I’ve been reducing my meat consumption and I’m considering trying to entirely avoid farm raised animals to restrict my meat consumption to game meat, this should be good for my health and is also a lot better for the animals and the environment.

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep-frying#Oil_deterioration


• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylamide


• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_fryer


• [4] http://www.kfc.com/about/pressure.asp

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I've made a new release of the chronicle blog compiler. There are a couple of minor changes to the variables exported to the theme templates, as contributed by MJ Ray, and a new spooling system. This works in a simple fashion, and allows you to queue up posts. For example If you write a new entry containing the psuedo-header "Publish: 20th April 2008" and you have a crontab entry containing this:

  chronicle-spooler
    --spool-dir=~/blog/spool/  \
    --live-dir=~/blog/data/  \
    --post-move='cd ~/blog && make upload'

It works as expected. When you call this on the 20th April the file will be moved from ~/blog/spool into ~/blog/data, and your blog will be rebuilt & uploaded. The implementation was different than the original suggestion, but is nice and clean, and can be used to do other things with a little bit of effort. Anyway if you see this entry the spooling system is working! ObQuote: 30 Days of Night.

My legs hurt. It hurts to sit. It hurts to stand. It hurts to walk. $DEITY knows what it will feel like to ride my bike. How did I do this? It wasn't some bizarre biking accident. I was laying cables under the floor between the two offices at the opposite corners of my building yesterday. I lifted three floorboards and four carpets and drilled one hole. Afterwards, I rebuilt some shelves. How did that hurt my legs??? Today is Blogger Appreciation Day [UNOFFICIAL] so I'd like to thank Steve for Chronicle which is now powering this blog instead of the old homebrew. Meanwhile, messages that came in while I was AFK included a strange one from Paul, Steve being elected as Debian Project Leader (well done!), 'Free Software in Ethics and Practice' - Richard Stallman, Thursday 1st May, Interview: How a hacker became a freedom fighter From New Scientist Print Edition, Understanding Design & Computers: Notes from an Introduction to OpenMoko, by Ole Tange for UKUUG Finally, in a cycling and cooperatives cross-over, this article on Hammond's crash also mentions the other two Brits, who ride for cooperative teams. I watched the race, but didn't see much of them.

This should be a reply on Hughsies blog, but I don’t want to create a livejournal account. Richard, please move to blogs.gnome.org! In response to Jason’s comments: Hey. I’m a Debian/Ubuntu kinda guy and I think PackageKit is a hell of a lot better than Ubuntu making ubuntu-only solutions like gnome-app-install. It’s DEFINITELY not a NIH, there was nothing that gave us this kind of capability at all before PackageKit started. Everyone knew what was needed to be written and Richard was the guy that jumped in and got it started. Also Richard wasn’t working at Red Hat when he started PackageKit and has worked with every distro he can on this. Jason, stop the Stop Energy. Update:
I though I might jump in and say a bit more on this problem: It really comes down to the question of whether a backend should ask questions of the user. Richard thinks that they shouldn’t, mainly because every time he’s seen backends ask questions they aren’t ones he knows the answer to and so, by inference, most people don’t know the answer to. These questions shouldn’t be asked in a user-friendly system.
However ‘These questions’ are actually multiple classes of problems and simplistically dismissing these is really just asking for failure in solving the problems correctly. Before I go any further, let me note that debconf has multiple levels of verbosity that it can ask questions at. Most Debian based distros just ask the highest priority questions. It should be noted that a PackageKit backend should allow a central administrator to set default values for any of these setting however. Lets break down some of the kind of questions asked though debconf:

• Configuration file overwrites
• License agreements (cf suns jdk packages, flashplugin-nonfree, etc)
• Technical questions, like whether to start a daemon or not
• Lots of other things?…

Some packages also use stdin/out to really make sure you know what the hell you’re doing, like kernel packages, but i think that’s somewhat outside of this scope of this problem. Those kind of things should just fail unless you’re doing leet-super-admin work So the question really comes down to asking the user sensible questions that they a) know how to answer and b) care about. The point I made to Richard on IRC is that this is actually a difficult and multi-faceted problem and just hiding these problems won’t help in solving them well, so my take is that PackageKit should allow asking of questions, probably via a dbus interface, have a debconf frontend that channels questions by this channel, and then let the Ubuntu and Debian guys get on the case of forming projects and policy to help fix the problem at source. Update 2:Richard pointed me to this FAQ entry which explains why even handling debconf questions is hard.

Habits control our choice sometimes more than we would like to admit… New mobile phone Since about two weeks ago I’ve a new mobile phone. The Nokia E51 will replace my slowly dying Nokia 6130i. I knew I needed a new mobile phone when my 6310i started to turn off itself shortly after I turned it on. I needed up to about ten times switching it on to make it stay on. Sometimes it already switched itself off before I could enter the PIN. Looks like a loose contact, but I never figured out where it is. Although I know about Nokia’s behaviour in Germany, I still had to buy a Nokia, because after using a 6130 (the GSM 1800 only clone of 6110 and 6150), a 6210i and the already mentioned 6130i over the last decade, I got so used to how Nokia mobile phones are navigated and how you type with Nokia phones (blank on 0, point and comma on 1, case changing on #), everything else (especially those with blank on 0 and case changing on *) would be worse than the half-dead mobile phone, I’m currently using. Spoilt for choice So which Nokia? For a long time I refused to buy a mobile phone with a camera or radio in it. But since the E70 was no more available (and is said to have quite buggy software) and the E61 has been replaced with the E61i, there are no more smartphones without a camera, at least not from Nokia. But I also found some useful uses of camera phones. After a while I could track down the number of choices to four: Communicator E90, E61i, E65 or E51: The picture above shows that the main differences of those models is size: Although having a QWERTY keyboard on the phone would be nice (for ssh, Jabber, the web, etc.) and the E90 being only slightly bigger than the 6310i on the paper, the size difference to the 6130i is more than only noticeable since the 6310i tapers off at the top. Besides, for the price of an E90, I get an E51 and an EeePC together… (Thanks to maol in whose blog I read about Sizeasy.) The E61i also has a (very small) QWERTY keyboard and is primarily only much wider than any of the other phones. It even has no bigger screen resolution than the E51 or E65. (Only the no more available E60 – a normal monoblock smart phone like the E51 – had a better resolution: 352x416 pixel instead of 240x320 pixels.) And since I usually carry my mobile phone in my trouser pockets, width matters most. So I had the choice to either get a phone which is too big for my trouser pockets or one without a QWERTY keyboard. The I remembered those foldable external keyboards for PDAs. There are at least three different makers of foldable bluetooth keyboards said to be working with Nokia Symbian S60 3rd Edition phones, so a QWERTY keyboard on the phone itself was no more important. (Only passwords will need to be entered over the number keypad since I don’t want to broadcast them… ;-) The choice between E65 and E51 was made easier by their reviews (E65, E51) at Xonio: The E65 seems to have not that good standby and phoning times while the E51 seems to be quite good regarding endurance. I looked through the usual shops around Z¨rich HB: Swisscom Shop, MobileZone, Phonehouse: All had the same prices (about CHF 250 for a two years contract at CHF 25 per month), except that Phonehouse had no E51 available in the shop. Interestingly digitec had a much lower price (CHF 100 for the same contract) and the choice of color (the shops always only offered one color), so I ordered a black one there. Converting a prepaid card to a postpaid contract isn’t that easy I wanted to change from a prepaid card to a postpaid contract, both at Swisscom, so I already own a SIM card. But digitec only offers new contracts including a SIM card or contract renewals, but no switching to a contract with keeping the number. And a new SIM card costs CHF 40 extra in their online shop. So I called their hotline and asked. The answer was: I need a new SIM card since prepaid SIM cards can’t be converted to postpaid SIM cards (but can be used with different providers). When I came to the shop, the employee needed three tries to fill out the Swisscom form for the number migration and still did it wrong somehow. No postpaid contract acknowledgement from Swisscom after two workdays. So I called their hotline. They told me, the wrong SIM card number has been entered and I need to make digitec to enter the correct one. A few days later back at the shop they were overextended. After a while an internal e-mail was on the employee’s screen which clearly stated that in case of prepaid to postpaid conversions (and a few other cases) no new SIM card must be given out and if this happens too often for the same employee he will be charged the CHF 30 a new SIM card costs digitec… (So they have a 25% margin of every sold SIM card…) About one hour after they closed their doors (I was there about ten minutes before shop closing time) Swisscom had accepted the contract changes and I had a credit note of CHF 40 for the erroneously sold SIM card. And the mobile phone became even cheaper than in all the other shops. :-) New gadget, new features So after a week, I can say that in general I’m quite happy with the new phone. It has a nice web browser, an IMAP over SSL capable mail reader and a feed reader, it can connect to the internet via WLAN and the 240x320 resolution isn’t as bad as I expected. I already have a Symbian port of PuTTY on it and sshing into my workstation works fine, even if I currently only have the phone keyboard and T9 as input device and helper. I also have Opera and Opera Mini installed, but to my own surprise the included web browser from Nokia (said to be based on Apple’s HTML rendering engine WebKit which itself is based on KDE’s HTML rendering engine KHTML) is way better, especially in navigation, even although Opera Mini 4.1 caught up a little bit in comparison to Opera Mini 4.0. (Hey, and you hear that from a web browser fetishist and Opera fan!) The only thing which currently really bugs me on the builtin web browser is that even an enforced updating of my feeds sometimes just results in nothing. Maybe a firmware upgrade can help… As barcode reader, I have installed the i-nigma Reader. (The Quickmark QR Code Reader download just showed the content of something which seems to be a Windows DLL instead of downloading it. *plonk*) It’s amazing how fast the i-nigma Reader recognizes a 2D barcode from Semapedia on my laptop screen. Of course I also have ScummVM on my new Symbian phone. I will also play around with Amora which turns your Symbian S60 mobile phone into a remote control for your presentations on Linux (or any other unixoid operating system) running laptop as soon as I managed to get an amd64 Debian package of it. (Currently there seems only i386 packages and no source packages available, but this may be due to the “Show all downloads” link gives a server error…) Oh, and many thanks to foosel since I found Amora in her blog. BTW: Any recommendations for a free (preferably free as in DFSG) Jabber and/or IRC client for Symbian S60 3rd Edition? I already downloaded and installed Gizmo5, but somehow it refuses to work each time I try to create an Gizmo account. Accessories Since the E51 has no QWERTY keyboard, I ordered a Nokia SU-8W Foldable Bluetooth Keyboard at Brack. It was a little bit bigger and thicker than expected, but OTOH the metal case seems to be very stable and robust. Since this keyboard is designed to fit on Nokia mobile phones it also has the two Nokia typical soft keys and the middle select key. So nearly all phone functions can be used with the external keyboard, even turning off the phone’s key lock. Only locking the phone’s keys again doesn’t work via the external keyboard. Additionally I equipped my E51 with a 2GB microSD card. Probably a bluetooth headset for driving will come once, too. What the Nokia 6310i did better than the E51 There are a few things which are annoying regarding Nokia’s UI consistency over the years. That the backspace key is no more the right soft-key is ok. It took me only five tries to get my e-mail account setup without hitting the abort key (no “Do you really want to abort?” questions ;-) instead of backspace key. But what’s really annoying is that the menu navigation via number keys only works for the first level and no more for all levels. So no more “menu 4 4 4” to switch to manual network selection. It’s also annoying that you (or at least I ;-) can’t enter phone numbers as the recipient of SMS directly anymore, at least those SMS never reach their receipient neither do I get an error message. Same counts for the missing acoustic acknowledgment of locking the keypad. You only hear pressing the first key but not even the second key anymore. And if you press the volume keys on the side of the phone, you also have neither acoustic nor visual feedback if you pressed them hard enough so that the volume changed. The 6310i had visual and acoustic feedback. The alarm clock in the E51 seems to be artifically castrated: After having pressed the snooze button two or three times there is no more snooze button on the right the soft key anymore. With the 6310i you could press snooze as often as you want. Only disadvantage with the 6310i in regards of the alarm clock: the snooze time was much too long (10 minutes)… Oh, and what’s also annoying is that I can’t move over the whole addressbook of my 6310i in one piece but have to send each contact via bluetooth or infrared and then the E51 even get’s the contact names mixed up: ‘Beckert, Axel’ becomes ‘Firstname: “Beckert,” Lastname: “Axel”’… Great! I have to edit nearly all contacts manually… The cut and paste feature helps here, but it takes about one to two dozens of key clicks to copy the whole content of a filed into the clipboard… The E51 can run several applications at the same time and that you can switch between them any time. While that’s generally a nice feature I started using quite soon, it’s sometimes annoying that you have to wait up to a second or so after you’ve chosen some menu entry until you can do anything further. Also the screen often flickers while loading applications, showing them, then showing only the background, showing them again, etc. … but finally I already got used to the new mobile phone so much that I already have the feeling that my old 6310i became more thick since I have the E51. (Won’t think about how thick the about ten years old 6130 feels now compared to the slim E51… :-)

This should be a reply on Hughsies blog, but I don’t want to create a livejournal account. Richard, please move to blogs.gnome.org! In response to Jason’s comments: Hey. I’m a Debian/Ubuntu kinda guy and I think PackageKit is a hell of a lot better than Ubuntu making ubuntu-only solutions like gnome-app-install. It’s DEFINITELY not a NIH, there was nothing that gave us this kind of capability at all before PackageKit started. Everyone knew what was needed to be written and Richard was the guy that jumped in and got it started. Also Richard wasn’t working at Red Hat when he started PackageKit and has worked with every distro he can on this. Jason, stop the Stop Energy. Update:
I though I might jump in and say a bit more on this problem: It really comes down to the question of whether a backend should ask questions of the user. Richard thinks that they shouldn’t, mainly because every time he’s seen backends ask questions they aren’t ones he knows the answer to and so, by inference, most people don’t know the answer to. These questions shouldn’t be asked in a user-friendly system.
However ‘These questions’ are actually multiple classes of problems and simplistically dismissing these is really just asking for failure in solving the problems correctly. Before I go any further, let me note that debconf has multiple levels of verbosity that it can ask questions at. Most Debian based distros just ask the highest priority questions. It should be noted that a PackageKit backend should allow a central administrator to set default values for any of these setting however. Lets break down some of the kind of questions asked though debconf:

• Configuration file overwrites
• License agreements (cf suns jdk packages, flashplugin-nonfree, etc)
• Technical questions, like whether to start a daemon or not
• Lots of other things?…

Some packages also use stdin/out to really make sure you know what the hell you’re doing, like kernel packages, but i think that’s somewhat outside of this scope of this problem. Those kind of things should just fail unless you’re doing leet-super-admin work So the question really comes down to asking the user sensible questions that they a) know how to answer and b) care about. The point I made to Richard on IRC is that this is actually a difficult and multi-faceted problem and just hiding these problems won’t help in solving them well, so my take is that PackageKit should allow asking of questions, probably via a dbus interface, have a debconf frontend that channels questions by this channel, and then let the Ubuntu and Debian guys get on the case of forming projects and policy to help fix the problem at source. Update 2:Richard pointed me to this FAQ entry which explains why even handling debconf questions is hard.

This is the third plugin I have been working on for Rails - It's the one that still needs most work to be fully usable (for what I originally envisioned it), but is almost there - I have not touched it (nor the other two I recently presented here, acts_as_catalog and Real FK because real-life has demanded my time on various other fronts.
Anyway, this is IMHO the most interesting of the three plugins I've written so far.
So, following what I did with the other plugins: You can go to acts_as_magic_model's main page, or jump straight to its SVN repo. And the basic description follows:
Rails plugin to allow for extensible models, where inter-model relations are inferred from the database's structure, and not necessarily from explicit declarations in the models.
This means, when one of your models acts_as_magic_model, this plugin will try to infer all the basic relations (has_many, belongs_to and has_and_belongs_to_many) its base table has with other tables in the database, adapting the model correspondingly. Using the plugin In order to use this plugin, you only have to declare it in your model. As an example, say you have the proverbial project-management system, where you have projects (each of which can be of several different types) and people, and a HABTM relation between people and projects. So, you have the following tables (expressed as migrations here):

    create_table :people, :force => true do  t 
      t.column :name, :string
    end
    create_table :project_types, :force => true do  t 
      t.column :name, :string
    end
    create_table :projects, :force => true do  t 
      t.column :name, :string
      t.column :project_type_id, :integer
    end
    create_table :people_projects, :force => true, :id => false do  t 
      t.column :person_id, :integer
      t.column :project_id, :integer
    end

Using acts_as_magic_model, you can skip declaring the relations in your models, like this: (of course, each of the classes still has to be declared in its own file)

    class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
      acts_as_magic_model
    end
    class Project < ActiveRecord::Base
      acts_as_magic_model
    end
    class ProjectType < ActiveRecord::Base
      acts_as_magic_model
    end

And the gaps will be filled in for you - that is, you can go on and ask for Project.find(:first).people, ProjectType.find(:first).projects.size, Person.find(:first).projects.map pr pr.project_type , and whatever you fancy.
In future versions of the plugin, I expect even to get rid to explicitly declare the class declarations.
Of course, you should be warned: Initializing a model using this plugin is quite database-intensive. It will clutter your logs, and it might be unbearable if you use it in development mode. Still, its convenience is very often worth it.
Its main uses should be when prototyping and when designing a system that needs to be flexible to the data models themselves - If you don't expect your system's data structures to be highly malleable, you should probably use acts_as_magic_model only as a prototyping aid.

So here's the latest update on how I'm doing:

* Got the stomach flu this week. After 3 days of being ill, went to the doctors and got anti-nausea, anti-diarrhea medication, and 400ccs of Saline by IV for the dehydration. Joy. I'm going to try to go off the anti-nausea drugs tomorrow to see if I'm keeping things down now.

* Leif swam for the first time. I didn't get video, but opted for some nice stills. I *will* actually upload the last 5 months of pictures sometime soon. Really.

* Found an accountant who knows what to do for Canadians who just moved here. Yay! US Taxes will get done!

* The incision has no redness around it at all anymore, which is way cool. On Tuesday, I go in for my 6-week checkup. I asked at the 4-week mark whether I could go in the hottub, and was told that they'd probably OK it at the 6-week mark. I start 6 weeks of physiotherapy the day after that.

* My stamina for walking seems largely back. I can walk to Safeway at a decent pace (I still have to rest when I'm there). I can get to the mailbox and back without a break now. The part that causes me grief still is the muscles on my left shoulders. I'll ask Angie which one it is. It's been more sore than the others since the beginning, but hopefully it's something the physio can help me sort out. If it weren't for that, I'd be cutting back the pain killers already. I still might do that when I know I have a 6-hour stretch of low activity.

* For lack of anything better to do, I've been playing with Eclipse. I rediscovered eclipse a year ago when I was working on the ConnectUU site. The PHP mode was surprisingly good and helpful, and I was quite productive in it. I tried shortly after that to use PyDev, and it did horrible things to eclipse. I've tried it again, and I'm enjoying doing a bit of Java coding (homework), and Python coding in it now. I may finally have found an environment in which I can be more productive than I was in vi.

* Ernie (Angie's dad) and Janet (his wife / one of Leif's Grandmothers) have been here for the weekend helping us clean up. Janet is an absolute whiz at organising things, and the kitchen is way more usable then it has been since we got here in November. I need to make sure that I send out thank-you cards to everyone who's come and helped us. Kit was here a couple of weekends ago. Heather was here last weekend. Leslie, Grant, Jim/Sarah, and Andrew/Sarah have each brought us food. Jamu and Sandy each came for longer periods right after the surgery. Having people come and help has made a huge difference to us keeping things together. Without outside help, I don't know how we would've managed.

I'm a day and a bit off of 6-weeks post-surgery. I'm feeling good.

Today I happened to see a bio-fuel petrol station! I decided to check it out (even though I was traveling by tram in a part of town that I don’t normally visit so there was no possibility of any real purchase). The station is Conservo [1]. Their main products are E10 petrol (10% Ethanol and 90% Petrol), B20 bio-Diesel (20% bio-Diesel and 80% Petroleum based fuel oil), and B100 (100% bio-Diesel). All the fuel that they sell has a biological based component. The prices for the fuel seemed a little lower than is charged by other petrol stations, but it’s difficult to tell as fuel prices can change rapidly. I spoke to one customer who had just filled up his 4WD with bio-Diesel about his experiences. He said that he sometimes used B20 and sometimes B100. He had found no down-side to using such fuels but had noticed that when under hard acceleration the bio-Diesel fuel seemed to cause less dark smoke (IE less soot). All the fuels that they sell are produced in Australia. There are issues with imported bio-fuels which are sometimes produced with slash and burn agriculture and often increase the prices for essential food items (such as corn in South America). As the fuel is produced in Australia such issues should not apply. According to a brochure they have facilities to allow people to deposit used vegetable oil which can then be converted to bio-Diesel. Inside the store they sell a variety of organic foods and drinks, I bought a bottle of carbonated organic apple juice which was quite nice and at $3 was not outside the price range that I expect from a petrol station (which do tend to charge high rates for refreshments). It was not an unreasonably high price for an organic drink. In the store they sell and promote a range of producthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_points that are positive for the environment. They have a display about using algae to produce bio-Diesel fuel which has some interesting information but unfortunately didn’t list the productivity of algae fields in terms of the number of tons per hectare per year (or month or other time period). One really interesting point I read on their web site concerns the flash point [2] of fuel. The flash-point is the temperature which allows enough of the flammable substance to evaporate to produce an ignitable mixture. Petrol is listed as less than -40C, fossil-Diesel fuel is greater than 62C according to Wikipedia (greater than 55C according to Conservo) while Conservo list the flash point of bio-Diesel as greater than 110C. Wikipedia lists the flash point of canola (rape seed) oil as 327C. This is described as being a benefit of bio-Diesel. While it’s obvious that this is a disadvantage for Petrol, I find it difficult to imagine a situation where a fuel tank could reach a temperature greater than 55C but less than 110C. In their Good for the Environment [3] page they claim that the exhaust from burning bio-Diesel is less harmful to human health than that from burning fossil fuels. My previous post about Vegie Cars [4] is getting some comments suggesting otherwise. So far I haven’t found good references either way, but the discussion has raised some really good issues. Update: Petrol’s flash-point is less than -40C not +40C.

• [1] http://www.conservo.com.au/


• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_point


• [3] http://www.conservo.com.au/node/26


• [4] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/04/11/vegie-cars/

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Jeez, I wasn't involved in the nomination process this year, so I completely missed the fact that Wikitravel is a nominee for the Webby Awards this year. I'm now a part of IADAS so there's a conflict-of-interest for me, but I'd recommend checking out the People's Voice Webby Voting. tags: wiki wikitravel webbyawards

Sign your mail I find it a little mind-boggling how many people complain about problems of email identity, like spam, e-mail spoofing and phishing, yet don't do anything on their own side to encourage strong identity on email. Everybody should use digital signatures on their email as a matter of course. It is absurdly easy to set up a GnuPG key for your email address. It takes only a few minutes. And you can sign up for an S/MIME key, too -- about $20/year, and supported even more widely by email clients. And organizations should send out email with signatures, too. Welcome email, password updates, and the like should all be signed. Phishing gets a lot harder when consumers are used to digitally-signed mail. If we're really serious about email abuse, we need to take the extra step at the client level. tags: email pgp gnupg smime phishing spam

I’ve read a lot about running Diesel vehicles on plant oil, but one thing that was never clear was why some people claim that you need special chemical additives. The article about converting vehicles to vegetable oil on the VegieCars.com [1] site explains all this. It seems that if you want to produce fuel which can be used in unmodified vehicles then you need to add a mixture of methanol caustic soda. This is going to be difficult, dangerous, have some expense, and probably not be that good for the environment. The other option (which they recommend) is to modify the vehicle to accept straight vegetable oil. This means pre-heating the oil before it enters the engine (to lower it’s viscosity and make it vaporise more easily) and to filter the oil to remove solid objects and water. A possibility is to have two separate fuel tanks so that you can switch between plant oil and petroleum based Diesel fuel. This is an option if driving in a cold climate (probably not an issue in Australia apart from a few mountains) and if you are concerned about the quality of your plant oil (a bad batch could clog the filters and force you to use petroleum based fuel). They also have an interesting cost-comparison page to show you how much money you might save by using plant oil [2]. Their site is very interesting and has some good technical information, even if you never plan to drive a Diesel vehicle it’s worth reading if you are interested in cars.

• [1] http://vegiecars.com/converting/


• [2] http://vegiecars.com/Cost_Comparison/

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My cousin Greg Coker has created an eBay auction for Football cards with the proceeds going to a charity that protects animal welfare (I can’t remember the name - I’ll update this post later). He also has a bunch of other eBay auctions of football cards going which are not for charity. The charity auction is held in association with SEN (Sports Entertainment Network - a sports talk-back AM radio station) [1]. This afternoon Greg was interviewed on SEN about football cards in general. He gave a good talk, he could probably do some professional radio work if he was interested. Greg’s cards are from the VFL (Victorian Football League) before it became the AFL (Australian Football League) [2]. The cards used to be sold in “milk bars” (small stores that sold a variety of junk food and some essential food items including milk - most such stores are closed now as they have been replaced by petrol stations and supermarkets) and each pack of ~5 cards had some crewing gum included (which Greg often discarded because he didn’t like it - he should have given it to me, I was not so fussy). The back side of the cards had a jigsaw picture which I have never seen anyone complete (I expect that Greg has assembled at least one jigsaw as he has some sets). Probably the way the cards were collected, traded, etc is very similar to sports based cards from other countries (such as baseball cards in the US). On the animal front, I’ve had a mother cat and four kittens move into the shed in my back-yard. The mother cat has no collar and is not known by anyone in the area so she appears to have been dumped by her owner when she got pregnant. There are four kittens, one is ginger, one is black, and two are mottled part black and part ginger. They are all healthy and friendly and the kittens are all really cute. The kittens have become used to being patted and handled by humans so it will be easy to make them household pets. If an owner is not found for them then they will probably all end up being put to sleep (unfortunately I can’t keep them so I’ll have to deliver them to the local council). If anyone in Melbourne, Australia wants some free cats then I would be happy to deliver them. I’ll supply as many cats as desired. I can’t give away the mother until the kittens have been given away, so if you want the mother cat (dark coloured) then you may have to wait for a while. Judging by the date that I first noticed them (when they were walking around, had their eyes open, and ate solid food) the kittens would have to be at least 7 weeks old. It’s recommended that kittens not be given away before they are 8 weeks old and given that it will probably take a week to organise anything I expect that anyone who reads I don’t think that there is any risk of giving them away too early. Please let me know by email or a comment if you are in the vicinity of Melbourne, Australia and want a new pet (or several new pets).

• [1] http://www.sen.com.au/


• [2] http://www.afl.com.au/

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Having recently been through the process, I've managed to come out the other-side with some some advice for anyone taking this on.

• To start out, the link for making appointments at the Australian Consulate is VisaPoint. I found it was remarkably well hidden.
• Upon entering the country, it's quite likely the immigration officer won't be that familiar with the E3 Visa. I'd recommend you watch them and very politely correct anything you think wrong, in my case my Visa was incorrectly entered as E3-Dependent along with my wife (proving that the system doesn't actually keep referential integrity between an E3 and an E3D holders).
• You can not get paid before receiving a social security number. You can not apply for a social security number within about 10 days of entering the country, as there is a lag between immigration and social security systems. Once you apply it will take a few weeks for the card, but you can probably go back to the office with sufficient ID within two days and receive a print-out of the number. You can call the office you filed with first and they can tell you if it's worth coming in to try it. In the absolute worst case, if things screw-up, you could be in for a long wait. Your company may be able to loan you money if things get desperate.

If anything really stuffs up you'll have to enter the US immigration services, which is no fun. If this happens to you in the Bay Area go straight to the San Francisco office; the San Jose office doesn't have deferred inspections so you'll probably just have to go there anyway.

Your dependent on the E3D Visa will need to fill out an I-765 work authorisation form. This will take up to 3 months to process; you can find out the approximate queue time here. The form doesn't appear to have been updated for E3D; I would strongly recommend getting a lawyer to file it for you so you don't stuff it up. Budget about $400. After this has been processed, the dependent will then need to file for a SSN before they can be paid.

Tax is a black-art. In California expect to pay something like 20-25% federal, 10% state and up to 7% more for Medicare and social security. Expect another $80/month for health insurance.

You can get a bank account without a SSN easily. A good way to transfer money is OzForex, but watch out for fees on the US side (you may have to do wire-transfers which cost about $10 a go, though some banks have bill-pay). The country still runs on cheques for some reason.

You can rent without a SSN, but it will cost you. Budget for 2 months extra rent as deposits and paying ahead.

A car lease is probably a good way to go. Finance will usually look at your visa and only give you a two-year loan, and with no credit that will be at a very high interest rate. In California you can get a 2 year lease on a base model new car (sticker price ~$17,000) drive-away for a down-payment of about $2500 and then $250/month plus taxes. Insurance will be about $120/month on-top of that. The beauty is you just give it back when you go home. For long holiday trips SUV rental may contribute to global warming, but is a very comfortable way to see the country.

In California you'll need to book in for a driving test to get a license; you can't do this in a rental car but some local driving schools offer a short introduction course and then let you use their car for the test.

If you're living in temporary accommodation without great facilities Dream Dinners is a good way to easily get some meals together.

In the Bay Area, Yelp is an awesome resource.

Comcast make Telstra look like a well-run, efficient and customer focused organisation!

Feel free to drop me a line if you're thinking of taking an opportunity and have any questions.