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Last October I finally cracked and got an iphone 3Gs.

Part of the reason for this was my ageing palm pilot wouldn’t sync with Window 7. I also needed a new phone. I decided against an Android based phone as I just wasn’t convinced that it would be as user friendly, it also seemed to have a less healthy developer ecosystem than the iPhone.

The iPhone ticked the following boxes:

• Personal organiser - calender, notes, TODO, contacts, syncing up to the web
• Tethering -plug into the laptop for net access on the go
• iPod -I didn’t have one, was thinking of getting one
• Internet device - for net and email access anywhere
• Phone -
• App Store - if it doesn’t have it out of the box I can probably write or buy something to do it

Having owned it for ~6 months I’m still enthused by it. I think this has done more than any other single tech purchase to make me more optimistic about new technology. It it quite simply one of the best hardware software combinations I’ve ever come across.

I think the best illustration of the ease of use is three anecdotes. I gave the phone to someone who had never used one with no instructions while driving so they could provide directions. They could used it immediately. While out at dinner one night I saw one 70 year old showing another 70 year old photos on her iphone. I wouldn’t have called 70 year old ladies a great market for high technology. Lastly, in the 6 months I’ve had it I’ve only opening a manual one and that was to find out how to undo (as it turns out shake).

Out of the box it is a great, add the app store and you have something really special. I found the note taking app pretty anemic, particularly as it couldn’t sync to the web, so I picked up Simple Note. The lack of a todo list was rectified by Toodledo. I even found the Good Food Guide was available as an app. And then there were all the games…

I think the app store is one of the best examples of what can happen when you create a great platform (the iPhone) and make development relatively friendly. I also thing the walled garden aspect of the app store is a net positive for consumers as it helps filter out a lot of noise.

Apologies for the site being offline for ~5 weeks. It is a long story which I will fill in later, but the short version is that is the last 2 months I’ve moved jobs and moved house. The moving house part involved taking me offline, which meant taking various servers offline including this one.

Vic and I just got back from a great trip to New Zealand.

We had a lovely time there and took a lot of photos.

So, someone might have noticed that my site has been down for a little while.

First my mail/web server died hard, complete hard drive failure. It was about this point that I discovered that my backup scripts were somewhat lacking. It was about this time that my file server died.

Everything backs up to the fileserver, which then backs up to a machine offsite and occasionally to a local desktop. However this doesn’t occur as regularly as it should. Piecing together the files remaining on my fileserver, the files from the offsite backup and the onsite backup got me most of my data back.

I almost lost 6 months of email, but managed to restore this from local stores of email.

All this has taken some time to get things back together, but I’m back online now.

Unfortunately I lost all the photos hosted here. I still have the actual photos, but the resized images and html pages are gone. And I’m somewhat disinclined to bring most of them back, given the work involved. So I’m going to have to delete most of the posts related to that.

I recently bought a LeadTek DVT1000T TV tuner. While installing it I ran into a plethora of problems.

Which CD

The card ships with 4 CD and DVDs. None are labelled as driver CDs. After a process of guessing, trial and error and finally reading the manual I found the correct CD. Of course the name wasn’t the same as the one in the manual but it was kinda close.

CD broken

At this point I found I couldn’t read the driver CD. At the time I was blaming LeadTek, but it turns out that my DVD drive was broken. I went to download the drivers.

Downloading drivers

Fortunately the drivers had been made available on the website. It may have taken 5 minutes to load the page but they were definitely there. It took me a mere half hour to download the 180K and 25Mb files. I’m on upwards of 2Mbit download. In addition I using a tool to download the files broken into 3 parts from 3 different servers, without that I could have expected to wait around 3 times as long. Buy some bandwidth Leadtek.

Installation fun

Having installed the drivers, which went surprisingly smoothly, I thought I might install some of the other stuff that came with the card. Normally I tend to avoid this kind of rubbish (and generally it is rubbish), however I thought I might give it a try. First CD contained something called orb, which gave me my choice of language including Birtish English.

Being the sporting kind of chap I chose that. The installation also opened up a window to service.orb.com.tw. I’d love to know what was there because it was still loading 45 minutes later. I assume it was important but it’s hard to tell.

Using the software

The software to record TV seemed to work just fine, however I ran into some issues with movie maker (OEM with the card) to burn a DVD of some recorded TV. Editing the movie was fine, however when I burnt the movie (encoding + burning took hours), the audio was out of sync. This got worse with time, about half an hour in the sound was lagging a few seconds behind the video.

Thinking it might have been the process of burning it, I tried to save the file as an ISO. That crashed about 10% of the way in (same the second time through).

All in all a very smooth user experience.

Vic and I just got back from a lovely long weekend in the Blue Mountains. I took a few photos while we were away.

Thursday

We left a little late and got to Leura for lunch. After pottering around Leura for a couple of hours (Leura has some lovely shops), we checked into the place we were staying. This was Secrets Hideaway, a number of small studio apartments set is beautiful gardens. The couple running the place were lovely, great for advice for what was happening in the region. It was set in a gorgeous garden. There was quite a good kitchenette too, which was great for self-catering.

When we checked in a number of walks were recommended, so we charged out to get some fresh mountain air. At this point Vic’s memory and mine diverge: I remember being told that the walk would take 3 hours, Vic remembers 1 hour. We parked our car at Neates Glen lookout and walked down the road to the Grand Canyon lookout. From there we started down on the loop back to the car through the grand canyon.

By the time we had parked the car it was 4:25, with sunset at about 6pm. The walk was lovely, until about an hour into the walk. At this point Vic pointed out it would get dark in about half an hour. You don’t want to get stuck in a canyon (dark and cold) in the blue mountains after dark. Fortunately it was just starting to get really dark by the time we got back to the car. I was about half an hour away from calling emergency services.

Friday

We went for a walk in the morning to Anvil lookout, Perry’s lookdown and Dockers lookout. Some of the tracks there were closed as a result of the fires last summer. One of the problems with the fires is that trees continue to drop long after the fires, hence the closed tracks.

The fires had gone right through this area last summer and it was amazing to see the new growth. Fires are just part of the cycle of bush life in Australia. Some plants (eg the banksia) will only release their seeds in a fire.

We went to Leura to have lunch at Solitary Kiosk. There is a lovely view, the food was excellent and it has a great atmosphere. Originally we were going to try to have lunch at the restaurant but there was a wedding booked on the day we wanted to go.

After lunch we went back to the cottage and curled up with a book, in my case On War - Carl von Clausewitz.

Saturday

On Saturday we went to the Three sisters at Katoomba. In a moment of rash enthusiasm we started walking down the grand staircase to the bottom of the cliffs. Half way down we realised we would need to walk back to the top, so we turned around and came back.

Once again after lunch we went for the boring option of staying back and reading.

For dinner we went out to a local Indian restaurant.

Sunday

After checking out we went out to Jenolan Caves. There are quite a few different tours you can go on, we went on a self guided tour and the River Cave tour. The place is just awesome. The scale is just beyond what you imagine, even driving through the grand archway is amazing.

It was really hard to take anything close to good photos. I’m sure that with the right equipment you could get better pictures, even so I imagine it would be hard. If I used the flash, it tended to light things unevenly and also made things look reddish. Without the flash the aperture needed to stay open for quite a while, which tended to result in shaky photographs.

Today is our 1 year anniversary! The year has gone past so quickly.

Vic gave me some gorgeous hand-made origami, it must have taken her hours to make.

We went to Doyles for lunch and had a lovely meal, complimented by a fantastic Petaluma Riesling (2006). There was a lovely view from the restaurant, we were sitting right above the beach.

Of course nothing is ever completely normal when Vic and I go out. This time a bunch of water police turned up in rather impressive boats. Apparently they were there to “pick someone up” according to the water police officer I asked. Later on a convoy went past consisting of 5 or 6 government cars and 4 vans preceded by 4 motorcycle police and followed by another couple of motorcycle police and a police car. I guess that was the someone.

We also went for a walk out to the gap. That was made more interesting by a tourist deciding to go over the boundary fence. As the nice policeman was explaining to him when we went past, that automatically means 15 police get and a police helicopter called out. Nice.

At this point the storm was rolling in so we came home.

Vic and I have just got back from a holiday where we went to Thredbo and Canberra with my parents. Like most holidays not everything went according to plan but we all had a lot of fun. I took some photos of the holiday.

Sunday

We left Sydney after church and drove to Canberra. We went to see the Egyptian Exhibition, which was fantastic, at the Art Gallery.

Monday

In the morning we visited the Australia Museum. The museum seemed to have an over representation of minorities and minority view points, however it was still very interesting and the presentation was excellent. After stopping at Cooma to buy supplies we pushed on to Thredbo.

Tuesday

We wanted to start with a gentle walk so we took the chair to Crackenback and walked down the Merrits track. It took us a little while to find the track. After we got back Victoria and I went for a swim at the leisure centre.

Wednesday

We planned to walk to Mt Kosciuszko however the chairs were closed due to fires (some 40km away). So we hired a tennis court and played for an hour. At this point the chairlifts were still closed. By 1pm we got a call from Thredbo village management that all non-residents were being evacuated from Thredbo due to the fires. This put rather a damper on the holiday but we arranged accommodation in Canberra. There were a lot of helicopters flying overhead, including a skylift helicopter.

Thursday

We hired some bikes for a ride around the lake in Canberra. With me in the lead, we carefully rode around the lake, going off track at regular intervals. The worst excursion was when we missed the turn off to the Kings bridge and went for a tour of the wetlands. After retracing our steps and crossing the bridge we got back to the bike hire place about 45 minutes late. We were all rather tired, I managed to get my left hand sunburnt and it didn’t feel like my legs would support my weight.

We went back to the hotel and Vic and I went for a swim, hoping that might ease sore muscles.

Friday

Gluttons for punishment, we went back to the lake for another ride. This went more smoothly and we got back in good time, also going for another swim. In the afternoon we went to Old Parliament house. The guide for the tour was Sir David Smith, an interesting person in himself. The tour was fascinating with a lot to see.

Saturday

On Saturday morning my father and I went to the War Memorial while Vic and my mother went to the Art Gallery. The War Memorial was rather interesting, I took a few photos.

CSS stands for Counter Strike Source, an addictive multi-player First Person Shooter (FPS). When you first play CSS it might seem a bewildering game, however with my guide you will be a top notch CSS player in no time.

Definitions
noob/newbie/n00b - someone who is new to the game. Generally n00b is considered a harsher term than noob
skillz - like skills but cooler
HAX - short for Hacks, refers to tools that make playing the game easier for the player eg by saving them the trouble of aiming
flash - short for flashbang, a type of grenade that stuns and blinds players
camping - staying in one spot, often hidden

Rules
1. Everyone else who plays CSS is a n00b by definition and should be treated as such. Even if this is the first time you have played CSS, your skillz ensure that you are a much better player. Lord it over them.
2. Every time someone kills you, make sure you yell HAX!!!!11. Following on from Rule 1, anyone who kills you must be hacking, because they are a n00b and are no match for your mad skillz.

How to be popular in CSS
- Use flashes liberally, particularly around team mates, they love the challenge
- Make sure you stop at choke points, blocking your team mates from getting past
- Follow your team mates extremely closely to make sure that they don’t chicken out and retreat
- If you have a microphone, use it as much as possible, singing is especially appreciated
- Everyone loves a sniper
- When you join the game make sure you are joining the winning side, nobody likes a loser
- At all costs, protect yourself even at the expense of the team, you aren’t much use to them if you are dead
- camping is a great way to show off those skillz

Every now and again I see comments from people saying that it is only the dumb criminals who get caught. The implication of this is that there is this vast group of “super” criminals who are too smart to get caught, people who make their living from a life of crime.

There are several problems with this view. One of the major problems is that it is just not provable. A criminal who is smart enough not to get caught is someone who is smart enough not to get detected. If they can’t be detected, there is no way to prove that they exist.

The other major problem with this is that it assumes that people can commit crimes that either go unnoticed or that people do care about the crime that was committed. What is more the impact of the crimes we associated with “super” criminals would tend to be higher (massive heists etc).

Suppose you are a “super” criminal whose sole means of income is their life of crime. You will want enough money to live on comfortably. You will also need money to run your crime business, funding research and equipment for future crimes, bribes for police, paying helpers. At this point we are talking in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The impact of your crimes could be a multiple of that hundreds of thousands of dollars each year if you were stealing anything other than cash (e.g. paintings, jewels). The amount you can get from the stolen items would be less than the true value or the owner’s value. Stealing a jewel ‘worth’ $1 million means an impact of $1 million for the owner, even if the fence will only give you $200K for it. Equally, even when stealing cash, it may need to be laundered.

There are two ways to try to get that kind of income:
1. Infrequent big crimes
2. Frequent small crimes

Both methods have problems. The bigger crimes attract more attention and higher penalties. On the other hand the smaller crimes have to be frequent, which means that you are more likely to get caught though the penalties are smaller.

Either way, the reality is that there are no ’super’ criminals. Anyone who is a professional criminal will have enough of an impact on society, leaving enough traces of their activity to get caught.