Blog Date: Wednesday, August 15, 2007OzBif I'm in Sydney! How did I get here? Well an element of luck, a desire to change my current situation (get out of a rut that I'd been residing in) and being the right person to ask the right questions at the right time. All that culminates into me being on a 6 month secondment with a client out here in Oz.And pretty fantastic it all is too. Those of you that know of me and my travels will already know that I've spent about 5 months in Australia before - so being out here isn't too scary. In fact it's all strangely familiar. I would posted something here earlier, but the stupid apart-hotel thing I'm staying at is charging me a small fortune to access the internet. So I'm trying to limit my internet to when I'm at work only. Other than that things are good. Flight was long and gave me a bad back but not too bad. Still recovering from jetlag really. Reckon I should be OK by the end of the weekend though. The first weekend was a bit of a blur. The day I landed (03/08/07) I went into work to say "hello" and meet the team (who are OK if quiet and a little boring) then went out in the evening to a free bar with a friend where I drunk too much wine. This plus the fact that I hadn't really slept since Tuesday pretty much wiped out Saturday. Sunday I managed to get out for a trip to visit a friend in Coogee (which was as cool as I remember it). We had a few jugs of beer in the CBH (an old haunt of mine) in the sunshine (22 DegC - clear blue skies - winter? Pah!) and then I left to go out with someone else for dinner and a few drinks in Bondi. Monday (06/08/07)I also had off as it was a bank holiday (bizarrely, only for banks). I used then to pootle around town buying stuff I'd forgotten (trainers) and getting some food in. Oh and popped into Darling Harbour to visit the Sydney international boat show. Since then I have been working and not socialising too much. I really could do with finding a mid-week beer buddy I think. In the absence of one I've been out running quite a bit in the evenings and trying to cook for myself as opposed to buying food in. This weekend I'm on the guest list for the opening of a new club night and, on Saturday, going to Bondi to watch the end of the 'City to Surf' 14k charity running event. With any luck I should get a pass to get free access to one of the beer tents. I'm expecting lots of sweaty fit women who need their legs massaged. Work here is odd. Feel very cut off from my usual sources of information and time delays in getting hold of any are really frustrating. The work itself is not too taxing yet, but then I haven't really started anything much yet. However, I do notice how cloistered my technical thinking has been by the formulaic nature of ETP. Even things that I thought would be simple and familiar are quite different. Nothing horrific, just different. Sydney as a whole is still a fantastic, beautiful city. Where I'm living though is a bit like the City in London. Namely dead after about 8pm and at the weekends. It is convenient for work, transport and shopping, but the bars are all poncy and expensive (not that I've actually been in one in the centre yet). The flat is OK. It's like the NY ones we have both had, but a bit bigger and much more up-to-date. However, it's all a bit Hotel-like which is something I don't really get on with. I like my own place/space without fear of being bothered by someone who want to change the towels or check my minibar (which I've now had removed). I am considering asking those that pay the bills out here for a percentage of the money and trying to find myself a more homely place to live in out near a beach in the Eastern Suburbs. Then I'm going to learn how to kite surf ;-) Winter has been good to the snow fields out here in Sydney. Better, in fact, than the season in NZ. So I'm considering a little long weekend break to squeeze in some boarding before the end of the month which was unexpected. Anyway. I'll post stuff here and/or on facebook when I get the chance. Blog Date: Friday, February 02, 20072007 - First post It's already February! I haven't posted anything this new year yet, so I thought I'd try to string a few sentences together and give you all an update.First off Happy New Year! Hope you all had a fab Xmas and that you are starting to shed the excesses of the festive period by adhering all those well intended new-years resolutions. Myself - I've started attending the local gym and have surprised myself by quite enjoying it. The reason I started it was to try and build up some stamina so that I could last longer than a couple of days snowboarding without needing a vat of deep heat and a massage every evening (though that would have been quite nice). So I put in a month before the holiday and I think it had quite a discernable effect. I didn't ache anywhere near as much as the last time I went. So.... Snowboarding. Well it had been five years since I last went (pictures) and I have been meaning to go again ever since. But, due to a lack of others to go with, a desire to save money and general laziness on my part, I hadn't sorted it out. This time someone else did all the organising (thanks Helen) and all I had to do was pay and turn up. So glad I did. Forgotten how much I enjoyed the mountains and the snow and the barely controlled downhill hurtling. Had a great time (evidence). In fact I had so much fun that I'm going again in March. Other than that I feel that the Chrimbo period and the holiday have provided a good break from the intense work schedule of late 2006. Too much work make Bif a dull boy. Hopefully 2007 will address the balance. Once final thing - backup BACKUP BACKUP! Had a hard drive crunch to a halt a couple of weeks ago. I had most data backed up up to a few weeks prior so it wasn't an unmitigated disaster, but I have still had to spend a good 20-25 hours getting my system back up and running to a pre-crash state. Formatting, partitioning, installing windows, finding and installing applications, restoring data. Realising I had lost all my saved games and all the music I had written was a blow. but I think I'm over it now. Just in the process of buying a huge external drive to store a full back up onto. Remember. Once it's gone, it's gone. Lesson learned. Blog Date: Monday, November 27, 2006BWT ReMix Over 5 years ago now, I returned from a year of backpacking around the globe. Upon my return I set myself the task of documenting the trip in a website. It was both an attempt at creating a sort of journal, but also was my first foray into website design and programming.Initially the HTML and JavaScript the site used was created using just a text editor. Then I started using Dreamweaver for the final composition of the site. The end result was a bit of a mess of styles, but it hung together (so long as you only used Internet Explorer). The end result was the initial smifetrbifter.com. The site combined images, maps and text that detailed my journey. However it was never really finished. Although the structure was there I never finished the content. Many of the places I visited were only described through emails that I sent home at the time, and did not get a full rewrite from entries I made in my (paper based) travel journal. It is still unfinished in terms of content, but now I have abandoned the clunky old website and have brought it all into the new-form smifterbifter.com that was launched a couple of years ago. It can be found using the "bifter's world tour" which now will take you to the new site as opposed to the old one. One day I may get around to finishing the content and write up the journal entries. But that might be another 5 years away yet. TBH I can't believe it was over 5 years ago that I returned. Such a long time. Maybe it's time for another little break from the rat race.... Blog Date: Monday, October 30, 2006Pipex? Shmipex. Not happy. Not one little bit. The company that hosts this website cocked up big-style the evening of Friday 27th Oct. They were supposed to be upgrading/replacing a disk, but managed to screw that up, wiping it clean of all its data (including this website). Then, in what I can only see as a moment of utter professional stupidity, let the tape backup run on the newly blanked disk. Thus removing the chance of restoring anything!I noticed this on Saturday whilst trying to log onto the site. I was getting a "404 Not Found", so I investigated to discover the complete and utter lack of a website on the hosting server. I called the tech dept who informed me of their error by way of pointing me to wards this status page. I doubt the text will stay there long so here it is in full: ... During the replacement of the drive the server suffered a systems failure which resulted in the loss of virtually all web site data from this server. The emails and database files remained intact. While we have backups for disaster recover, at this exact moment the backup service started running and overwrote the backups with blank data.Idiots! I work in a hosted server environment and the one thing you always make sure of when something goes wrong, is that you have your backups secured and out of danger. And TBH, you should always have multiple backups. I'm lucky in that I had a complete site back up on my PC and burnt onto DVD so I didn't loose any data, but I bet there a a bunch of folks out there who aren't so lucky or cautious. Nonetheless, I still had to spend most of today restoring this website over a standard broadband slow upload connection. The entire 650MBs took around 7hrs. A fine way to spend my weekend. What annoys me most is that they seemed prepared to let me discover their mess on my own. No email was sent nor was my hosted server status changed to inform me if the issue. I'll be calling the customer services department on Monday to have a shout at someone and see what they can offer me for my inconvenience. If nothing, then I'll be voting with my feet. Grrrr. Blog Date: Sunday, March 26, 2006photo slide headerBored. Decided to revamp the header on smifterbifter.com (the thing at the top of this page). I have been taking pictures of all sorts of things over the years and I wanted to display some of those and incorporate some (albeit limited) interactivity. What I have come up with is a bit of a work-in-progress, but I'm quite pleased nonetheless.It's all glued together using Flash. First off, created the smifterbifter.com logo using mouseover effects and a bit of actionscript. More work to be done here to make it do stuff without requiring interaction with the mouse... another day. The images were all cropped and normalised in Fireworks. To make them fit in with the site, I desaturated each image, then applied a blueish tint. These images were then stung together with another bit of actionscript to crossfade from image to image at random. The crossfade is very efficient (not my code I'm afraid - see whatdoiknow for the source) and the entire swf file weighs in at only 3k. This is only possible as the images are loaded dynamically on demand. Anyway. That's all really. As I said: A bit bored today. Blog Date: Monday, January 23, 2006GeekNews: Hardware Upgrade Although many of you will find this an unutterably boring post, some of the geekier elements amongst you may be interested to know that I have just completed the build of my new PC.It's been almost 6 years since I last bought a PC and, although my old P3 based Dell is still going strong, it was time to move on. I decided that this time I should build it myself, as I reckoned I could save a few quid and get a machine with all the components that I actually wanted, rather than the compromise that you usually have to make when purchasing a pre-built system from vendor. So with a month of painstaking research behind me I plumped for the following components (all from Overclockers): CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4400+ (Socket 939) Motherboard: Asus A8N-SLi Premium nForce4 SLi (Socket 939) PCI-Express RAM: GeIL 1GB (2x512MB) PC3200 Ultra Platinum CAS2 Hard Drive: Western Digital Caviar Special Edition 250GB 2500KS SATA-II 16MB Cache Graphics Card: XFX GeForce 7800GT Extreme LED Edition 256MB GDDR3 PCI-Express Monitor: Viewsonic VP930 19" LCD Power Supply: Tagan TG530-U15 530W ATX2.01 Easycon SLi Compliant Modular Silent PSU Case: Thermaltake VB1000BNS Soprano SuperMidi Tower (Black) DVD-RW: Pioneer DVR-110DBK 16 x 16 DVD±RW Dual Layer ReWriter (Black) Keyboard/Mouse: Logitech Cordless Desktop S 510 - Black/Silver This is a pretty high spec system, but not the highest, and I have been careful to allow for a decent upgrade path. This, I hope, will me a decent price/performance/futureproofing ratio. I'm no stranger to the inside of a PC case and,althoughh I haven't built a PC from scratch before, I wasn't expecting too much trouble. However, it was more complicated and took longer than I had imagined (5 hours for the hardware, 1 for the OS install). In my defence this was mostly down to poor documentation on the part of the motherboard and PSU manufacturers. For example; My motherboard has a 24-pin molex power, though the power supply (supposedly designed to have enough connectors to make it a 'universal' PSU, catering for all motherboard formats) comes with a 20pin molex plus a million other connectors and adapters. Judicious scouring of various forums showed that it's possible to use only 20 pins of a 24pin molex, but neither the motherboard or PSU manual stated this. The PSU manual did (briefly) mention being able to combine two of the connectors together and this would 'make' a 24pin one, but various other parts of the manual kept stating how this should only be done in certain circumstances and gave dire warnings about getting it wrong. Back to the forums it seemed that the extra 4 pins are for supplying additional power to SLI configured PCI-Express interfaces. But to confuse matters even more, there was another 4pin (EZ Plug) molex elsewhere on the mobo which is also for providing more power in an SLI rig. Confused? You betcha. Anyway, to cut an already long story short... I plugged everything in that fitted (a 24pin (created by combining the 20+4pin) and the 4pin CPU connector, left out the EZ Plug thing). Which worked just dandy-o. Other problems were to do with which of my 8(!) SATA HDD connectors I should be using and additionally which SATA drivers (NForce or Silicon Image). Still not sure on that front, but it appears to be working OK. Might become a problem if I want to move to a RAID configuration. Finally my version of WinXP initially only recognised 131Gb of my 250Gb Hard Drive. This was down to a limitation in the way the original XP (pre-SP1) addresses ATAPI disk drives. I do have SP1 and 2 but the main install disk is pre-SP1. Found the fix online involving adding a new registry setting - EnableBigLba. So I partionied off 60GB of the drive using the XP install disk, installed windows there, added SP2, then enabled the registry setting and re-partitioned the un-partioned portion of my drive to the full capacity of the disk. Job done. Either way. It all works nicely and is incredibly fast. Only one problem remains with my monitor, which seems to be suffering some backlight bleeding issues.... Not sure what I'll do about that one yet. Might have to have a word with Viewsonic/Overclockers. Blog Date: Tuesday, December 20, 2005Bif's BackHello again. After nearly two months in The Kong, I have arrived back to the UK in time for Christmas. It was touch and go for the project I was working on for a time, but we managed to pull it all together in the end. As if there was any doubt ;-)Had a great time, even if I was working too hard to really appreciate HK. I had really hoped that I could use my location to try and visit some other South Eastern Asia country for a bit of a holiday, but the project and time conspired to deny me the opportunity. Shame, but that's the way it goes. Maybe next time.... Will there be a next time? Hmmmm. Not sure on that one. Depends on a lot of things. I'm sure I could spend some more time out there. I really think I could make a positive difference and I would like to give it a second chance without the pressure of a manic work schedule. For the moment I'm happy to be back, but I'm sure that I'll get itchy feet soon enough. May sound odd to some of you, but since my return I'm really enjoying the cold weather we are experiencing here in the UK right now. It's invigorating in comparison to the flat, polluted warmth of HK's weather, which, despite all the lurid decorations, just doesn't feel 'christmasy'. In my book if it ain't cold at Christmas, it ain't Christmas. Right now I'm looking forward to an extended break over the festive season. Gonna be back home for most of it so I'll catch up with all you the Brighton Folk there. Anyway. Have uploaded some of my pics from my time in HK onto the photo galleries page. Have a look if you get the chance. To all of those who I worked with in HK - Have a great Christmas. Hope to catch up with all some time in the not too distant future. Comment to this post if you want to get ahold of my personal email address. |
|
bifBlog Archives:
Recent bifBlogs:
. OzBif |