MOTORAZR V6 on Telstra Next G

I got a new phone for work yesterday, a Motorola MOTORAZR maxx V6. It seems to be a pretty good phone. Much better than I was expecting.

When I last used a Motorola several years ago, the menus were less intuitive than the Ericsson or Nokia ones. Now I feel that both of those have taken a step or two backwards, and the Motorola is no worse. The menu hierarchy is quite logical, and the keypad is very direct and responsive. It's definitely better than my Sony Ericsson Z610i, which is especially good considering it's only about 1 cm thick.

I tried to get it synchronizing my contacts and calendar with Linux. Unfortunately, it's quite a new phone, so it's not supported yet. Instead, I set up an account on ScheduleWorld and transferred my contacts over the internet using a protocol called SyncML, which most new phones seem to support. It worked well and didn't cost me anything other than the data costs.

It's on the Telstra Next G network, which offers broadband internet access, and has much better coverage than the other 3G networks. The phone and network also support HSDPA, which is supposed to offer download speeds of up to 14 megabits (14,000 kilobits) per second. So far the best I've got is 400 kilobits per second, but that's still fast enuff to do my work. I'm connecting to it as a GPRS modem over Bluetooth so I can access the internet from my laptop.

So far so good!

Update: December 31, 2007

The phone stops making and receiving phone calls after a while. A reboot makes it work again. The dealer is sending it back to Motorola to get it fixed. (It's running software version R26111VL-AS_U_96.66.74R.)

New Job

Having had my last exam on Friday, I'm now a free man!

I had two recruiters contacting me during exams trying to get me to check out some job options.

Unfortunately, my new company informs me I'm not allowed to mention their name. :-(

Anyway, they're a Melbourne-based technology company, and run hundreds of Linux servers around the world.

My job will be as a system administrator, so I'll be part of a team who has to make sure their servers keep running.

I'm taking this week off, will be doing some work helping a person with cerebral palsy next week, then start work on the 26th.

Probably the biggest downside of the job will be the on-call work. I'm supposed to be contactable 24 hours a day for a week every few weeks. It's not yet entirely clear how often!

The definite upsides, however, are better pay, a good small team, and exposure to a large-scale enterprise IT environment.

It also doesn't hurt that it's in the city. I'll be able to meet my other frends who work in the city, and of course meet some new peeple as well!

I checked out my public transport options on the Metlink web site, and I think I'll take a bus rather than the train. The train is quicker, but will be packed. I'll be able to get a seat and read a book if I take the bus.

Finally! Internet Without Line Rental!

iiNet just announced their new "Naked DSL" plans today. It's an ADSL2+ broadband connection without a landline service, meaning you don't need to pay $27 to Telstra for a phone line you never use.

The plan also comes with a VoIP service with excellent call rates, so you can buy an analog telephone adapter or a VoIP-capable router, save on phone call costs, and still keep your old number (just in case you did use the phone).

The best bit of news for me is it should (according to Whirlpool) involve minimal downtime when switching from an ADSL1 service, the main reason I haven't already got ADSL2.

LDP Tipped To Win NSW Senate Seat

There's a new party in Australia called the Liberty and Democracy Party. They are calling for lower taxes and more personal freedom, and their senate candidate in New South Wales has a good chance of winning on preferences.

I'm supporting the LDP this election because I like the Greens and Democrats on issues like gay marriage and civil liberties, but the Liberals on issues like economic management. With the LDP I get both!

If you can help out, please do. Most important is talking to your friends and family to help raise the party's profile. You could also help on election day or donate.

Changing Your Name in Australia

I changed my legal name late last year. This explains how I did it and how much it cost.

What	Who	How	How much
State Government	Births, Deaths and Marriages	by mail	$84.60
Driver Licence	VicRoads	in person	free
Bank	(confidential)	in person	free
University	Monash University	in person	$60.00
Voting	Australian Electoral Commission	by mail	free
Mobile Phone	3 Mobile	in person	free
Internet	iiNet	internet	free
Phone	Telstra	by mail	free
Roadside Assistance	RACV	in person	free
Car Insurance	AAMI	in person	free
House Insurance	RACV	in person	free
Health Insurance	Australian Unity	by fax	free
Passport	Passports Australia	in person	$200.00 (passport) + $12.00 (photos)
Superannuation	Colonial First State	by mail	free
Total			$356.60

It was great that VicRoads, the banks, and RACV let me change my details and issued new cards free of charge.

This was more than countered by needing a new passport, and by uni charging a ridiculous fee of $60 for a "replacement card", which I needed to attend exams.

Of course, I also had to update my details with my magazines, charities, political organizations, and various web sites.

PayPal in particular was annoying. Despite faxing my change of name form three times, and calling them and emailing them several times over the course of six months, they did not update my account. An email to their complaints department also went unanswered. I ended up signing up for a new account. My previous donations are shown under my old name.

Also note that most companies require a certified copy of a change of name certificate, even those who never required proof of identity when first signing up! (Logically, those were things like phone accounts where a change of name without proof of identity could be used to transfer debt to another person.)

Most automatic credit card payments continued to work under my old name. I've updated them just in case.

So if memory serves correctly, it cost $356 and lots of time.

All in all, it's only worth it if you really care enuff to change your name!

(It's probably not fair to include the full $200 for the passport, since my new passport is valid for the next ten years, but my old one was only valid for about three, so the effective cost was about $60, bringing the total down to about $210.)

Name Change

I changed my name legally from Michael Wardle to Mikel Ward late last year. This blog tells you why.

I've long had an interest in spelling.

At primary school, there were three Michaels in my class. Two were spelled the conventional way, and the other was spelled Micheal. Often peeple would spell my name Micheal, indeed it happened just today! I used to be angry, but I realized the spelling was strange, and it's understandable for peeple to get it wrong.

When I was 14, I went to Austria on a student exchange. I learned German, and was enamored by the spelling, which seemed much easier and more logical than English spelling.

In German you can read a word and know how it's said. To understand English spelling, you either need to learn English, French, German, and a heap of exceptions, or you just learn the pronunciation and spelling of each word as a symbol in isolation, more like Chinese. Words like Wednesday, comb, indict, friend, tongue, through, and business aren't said the way they're spelled. Proper names are even worse. Leicester, Edinburgh, Thames, and indeed Michael are totally confusing!

When I came back, I started experimenting with different spellings of my name in private. The one spelling I was particularly fond of was Mīkl (the bar, properly called a macron, above the i means it's a long "igh", rather than a short "i"). Since that letter doesn't appear on most computers, I wrote it Miikl or Mykl. I tried this on my name badge when helping mum and dad out in their first Subway store. It didn't go down too well! They thought customers wouldn't know how to pronounce it, so I should just write "Michael".

In my current job, I spend a considerable amount of time on the phone. When I spelt my name and email address over the phone, most people knew how to spell Michael, but most peeple couldn't figure out Wardle.

This is also understandable, since a literal spelling would be Wordl. Indeed, my ex-girlfrend's mum Pam spelled it something like that (I think she spelled it Wordle).

First, the "ar" in "war" should rhyme with "car", but it doesn't. There's a rule nobody knows about that the sound of an "a" changes if it follows a "w".

Second, the "le" has a silent "e" on the end, since words ending in an "l" sound used to be spelled with a silent "e" (like in candle).

(Did you know that no word ends in "v"? The same thing happened: historically the Norman English added an "e" because they didn't like the look of a word ending in "v", which is the reason for "love" and "live" rather than "luv" and "liv".)

I discussed this with my auntie Christine who said she often gives her surname as "Ward" over the phone to avoid having to spell it.

I discussed it with my family, who said some other family members had changed the spelling of the family name, but usually to "Wardell".

I read up on our family history, and apparently the name "Wardle" came from either "Wardhill" in Lancashire in England's North West, meaning person who looks after the hill, or "Weardale" from Tyneside and Wearside in England's North East, meaning [from the] valley of the river Wear. I reasoned that since "Wardle" was a contraction of either of those, and essentially a corruption by those too lazy to spell their name in full, and since "Wardell" was still likely to be confused and misspelled, I would go one step further and make it "Ward", which surely most peeple knew how to spell!

I read several books on spelling reform. The one that made most sense was Valerie Yule's paper called "International English Spelling", that showed that English spelling could be made shorter and simpler, yet still quite familiar, by using accented vowels, for instance "indict" would become "indìt", unambiguously showing the "i" is long. That would make the spelling of my name "Mìkl". The main problem with this proposal was the accented letters were hard to type. (I've since developed a keyboard layout for Windows that lets you press right Alt and a vowel to get an accute accent, e.g. í. I find this very handy.)

Another idea is the cut spelling proposal, which basically says you just drop silent letters. I tossed up the idea "Mical", and started using it informally. I used that spelling when entering a competition to win tickets to the soccer World Cup and ended up winning! Not a bad omen if you believe in that sort of thing. :-)

In Germany, I stayed with several distant relatives (second uncles and third cousins). The first family I stayed with was the Lepple family. They were great hosts. One night, I asked them to draw a family tree for me. They wrote my name as "Mikel". I loved the idea.

When I got back, I discussed the idea with frends, who also mostly suggested "Mikel", the logic being it's like "Mike" with an "l" at the end. (Ben suggested "Mycal"!) I tried a few different computer tools to figure out how peeple thought it would be pronounced, and most programs thought "Mikel" would be said "Mike-l", but "Mical" would be said "Mick-l". Another point in favor of Mikel.

I was also somewhat vain. I wanted my own .com address, and both michaelwardle.com and michaelward.com were taken. A whois search showed that mikelward.com was available, so I thought "why not!?".

I bought mikelward.com, and lodged a change of name application with the Victorian births, deaths, and marriages registrar.

My next post will explain the steps I had to take to change my name.

Noisy New PC

I finally "bit the bullet" and bought a new PC last month.

I had been planning to buy a new home computer for the past two or so years, but I had never been able to justify it to myself. The last computer I bought was the Athlon XP system that I bought in late 2003, and it was still running fine, but my parents said they wanted me to have a new computer for my last semester of uni. How could I say no!?

About a year ago I had decided my system would be based on an Athlon 64 3600+. It was dual-core, much newer so presumably faster than my current system, and was supposed to have a very low power consumption (I think it was 45 watts, which is less than most light bulbs!).

The other question was Windows XP or Windows Vista. I had read several articles about Windows Vista, particularly on Paul Thurrot's SuperSite, and the general agreement was that Vista was OK, but that you should get the 32-bit version rather than the 64-bit version to ensure driver compatibility. (Some peeple had also advised waiting until service pack 1. I would have done that and put off my purchase until about November, but I was cashed up and wanted a computer now!)

When I went to buy the computer, the Athlon 3600 was practically impossible to get, and the 3800 was under $100. I also discovered that the current Athlons all consumed at least 65 watts, so I went for the 4000 as the best value for money option at $79. (More info about Athlon power consumption at the Athlon 64 Wikipedia entry)

I bought the computer from CPL in Melbourne, who had very good prices and had assured me that all the parts I wanted were in stock. On arriving there, I was told my preferred case, the Antec NSK 6500 was out of stock. I had wanted this model as it was the cheapest good-looking case that also had front audio and USB ports. As well as this, Antec are known for making good quality low-noise cases. The salesman advised that I should get an ASUS TA 88 instead.

ASUS TA 88

This turned out to be a bad choice. The system was terribly noisy. I traced it to three things: the extra rear fan, the power supply, and the disk drive bays.

As the first obvious things to do, I removed any unnecessary clamps and ensured the drive screws were firm, and unplugged the rear fan. This helped a little, but the system was still quite noisy. I decided to tolerate it until it was clear what to do.

Otherwise, the system ran well, and Vista turned out to be fine on balance (no issues with drivers or software compatibility), but it's not much faster than my four-year-old computer. I guess each core runs about as fast as my old computer, so my new computer will only shine when running two intensive applications at the same time, or when more applications are multi-threaded (Firefox is the worst culprit). It gets 4.8 on the Windows Vista performance tool, with the processor being the slowest component. Given my time again, I would buy a faster processor, perhaps something like an Athlon 64 4800 after checking out the benchmarks.

Today, I thought I had discovered a solution to my noise issues. I found out Antec had released a new affordable, quiet, energy efficient power supply in Australia called the Antec EarthWatts 380. After reading some favorable reviews at Silent PC Review and Overclockers Australia, I decided to go out and buy one.

My system is now barely audible, except for the minor rattle of the disk drives. The Antec NSK 6500 also had rubber drive grommets, so ideally I would have waited and bought that one instead, but oh well.

Item	Price
Athlon 64 X2 4000+ CPU	$89
ASUS M2A-VM mainboard	$99
Corsair 2 GB PC 5300 DDR 2 RAM	$128
Seagate 80 GB SATA hard disk	N/A
Lite-On DVD reader/writer	N/A
ASUS TA 881 case	$69
Antec EarthWatts 380 power supply	$79
ASUS GeForce 8600 GT SILENT video card	$187
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit	$159
Total	$810

Going Back to Uni

A few weeks ago Katie asked me if there was any way to finish uni this semester.

I thought I had to do five units, with the usual full-time load being four. Knowing I had to do two of the most difficult units, programming languages and project, I figured it would be better to not overload. This would have meant I would graduate at the end of 2008 if I went part-time or by the middle of 2008 if I went full-time.

I contacted uni to confirm this, who advised I only needed to complete four units, meaning I could finish by the end of this year if I went full-time. As I'd been studying part-time since 2000 (first the Certificate of Software Engineering at Melbourne University, then the Bachelor of Computer Science at Monash), it felt well and truly time to finish it off.

I discussed it with Eileen at work who said I could take leave without pay.

I asked uni which electives I could take, and discovered some of the subjects I'd originally planned to take were no longer allowed. Those included data communications (CSE3318) and computer architecture (CSE3324). I would also have been interested to take LISP programming (CSE3394), but that hasn't been offered for a few years.

I enrolled in programming languages (CSE3322), computer industry (CSE3323), computer graphics (CSE3313) and project (CSE3301) as the only realistic way to finish my studies at the end of this year. It seemed like the options would only be less if I waited until next year (in which case my main subject choices were image processing and project, but the faculty couldn't guarantee those subjects would be offered next year). It was a bit disappointing considering they were part of my course plan when I enrolled in 2004, but I guess that's the downside of doing uni part-time.

My time table looks like being Monday thru Thursday. I'll try to sign up to volunteer at Wholefoods when I have a free hour or two over lunch on one of those days.

As for work, I've been told I'll be able to work on projects when I get back, rather than the support work I've mostly been doing since going part-time at the start of this year. Hopefully it will work out and I'll find something challenging and interesting, but that will depend on whether they find somebody to replace me doing the support work.

I've already purchased my text books (the main one being "Elements of ML Programming" by Ullman and "Compilers" by Aho) and can't wait for the social life!

Goodbye iiNet, Hello Internode!

The saga of my home ADSL connection.

• No ADSL2 for you!
• Choosing a new plan
• The waiting game
• Modem setup
• Success!

No ADSL2 for you! (a.k.a. Internet in Australia sucks)

When I first moved to Elsternwick in November 2005, one of my important decisions was which internet service provider to use. I had previously been with iiNet, then Internode. Their ADSL plans were both quite reliable, which was essential, since I run my web site (including this blog) over my ADSL connection. The main factors in my decision were price and speed.

Around this time, iiNet said on their ADSL2+ coverage page that they were planning to install the required equipment (an ADSL2+ capable DSLAM) in my exchange in November/December. Their prices were very good (in fact, cheaper than most of their slower ADSL1 products), and the speeds should have been excellent. (According to Whereis, I'm 1.43 km from the Elsternwick exchange, and this graph of ADSL2+ speeds suggests I could get up to 20 Mb/s at that distance.) iiNet also don't block ports and allow using the connection to run servers, so it seemed like a no-brainer.

I applied for the service at the beginning of November.

About a week later, I had an ADSL1 service.

That was fine, since I knew they hadn't installed their DSLAM in Elsternwick yet, so I would be connected to a Telstra DSLAM, who at the time only offered ADSL1.

At the end of November, I received an email from iiNet saying "Congratulations, your exchange has been selected for a Broadband upgrade". This was great, and was what I was waiting to hear!

The date came and went, and I was still on ADSL1. Apparently the upgrade had been postponed.

I received another message in January 2006 telling me the same thing. Some time around the beginning of February, they actually installed their DSLAM and started migrating customers to ADSL2+. Unfortunately I wasn't one of them.

I contacted iiNet, and was told that I wasn't migrated because iiNet has to submit the list of customers to migrate to Telstra well in advance of the migration, and they had done so in October, before I was even a customer. I was told to wait for the "next migration".

Every few months, I contacted iiNet to ask when the migration would be. I was told they only performed bulk migrations (at least twenty customers at a time), and there were no plans to do such a bulk migration (presumably because I was one of the few customers who didn't get migrated in February).

In mid-2006, there were discussions of a single-port migration process, probably starting in September. Telstra called this a "single service migration" or a "single service transfer", depending on whether you were staying with the same ISP or changing to another one.

Several deadlines for single-service migration slipped, then it sounded like it might really happen in February 2007.

It did, but not for iiNet. For some reason, Internode and some other ISPs supported the process, but since Internode only had ADSL1, I had to wait for iiNet to get on board if I wanted ADSL2+.

Last month, it seemed like iiNet were joining the migration process, but I contacted them and they advised I still couldn't transfer. I would have to do a full disconnect, wait for about two weeks for the "lines codes" to be removed, then apply as a new customer and pay the full $200 connection fee. Since I rely on this connection for my web site and email, I can't accept a two-week outage.

The final straw was trying to watch a low-bandwidth video on YouTube the other day, and the playback kept stopping because my connection wasn't fast enuff.

Choosing a new ISP (a.k.a. which plan sucks the least)

I checked out the plans on Broadband Choice. Internode were cost competitive (they're all too expensive and slow, but Internode isn't much more expensive than the other options for my usage), and they're known to be a very reliable company. Indeed, they're ranked #1 by the users on Broadband Choice. They also allow me to run servers and have a local mirror site where I can get my Linux downloads fast and free. I looked at some of the other, newer ADSL2 providers such as Spin, hoping they would support single-service transfers, but they also had a long contract period and higher set-up cost, which my house mates weren't happy with, so Internode it was!

The churn process (a.k.a. I can't live without Internet)

To complicate things, Internode don't provide phone services like iiNet do, and Telstra (Australia's near-monopoly telco) requires we have an active landline phone service to get ADSL. The only real option was Telstra, who provide a $20 a month plan called HomeLine Budget, but they don't let you sign up for that if you want to use another company for ADSL. Instead I would have to go with their next-least-expensive plan, HomeLine Complete, which costs $27 a month.

I read the forums on the Whirlpool broadband user group web site to figure out whether it would be better to change the phone to Telstra or the internet to Internode first, in order to minimize downtime. I came to the conclusion that I could get my faster internet sooner if I changed my internet provider first, and that there were no downsides to doing it that way. In Australia, the process of changing an existing ADSL connection from one ISP to another ISP is called "churning" (however most Telstra documentation calls it a "rapid transfer").

I signed up for the Internode HOME-1500-Power-10 plan, a 1.5 Mb/s plan for $49.95 a month, and heard back from them within a couple of days. They sent an email detailing the new plan and the process for transferring to them. It included a PDF telling me that I should not change phone providers once my Internode plan went active, as this could remove the "ADSL line codes", causing an outage of a few days.

I immediately called Internode to confirm this, then ended up having to cancel the process.

I had to go to plan B: changing my phone provider to Telstra first, so I called Telstra to do so. I was told this would take a few weeks. It did, and in the mean time, Internode changed the price on the plan I wanted from $49.95 to $54.95. I decided to go ahead with it anyway, since it would now cost the same as the old arrangements with iiNet ($33.36 + $49.95 versus $26.95 + $54.95).

Two weeks later, and finally my phone was with Telstra. I called Internode to re-apply, accepting the new plan price.

Last night, I got an SMS telling me that the ADSL service was provisioned, i.e. was now ready to use!

Setting up my new connection (a.k.a. why doesn't my Internet work?)

I left work around 6.15pm, eager to set up the new connection.

I set the DNS of my web site to my backup server (on a frend's ADSL connection), pointed my Debian PPP configuration to the Internode "dsl-provider" account details, restarted PPP and crossed my fingers. Of course, it didn't work.

I learned two things:

• On Debian, you need to change three files, /etc/ppp/dsl-provider, /etc/ppp/provider, and /etc/network/interfaces
• My D-Link DSL-300 modem is really strange to configure in bridge mode

The first is because there are three sets of PPP initialization scripts.

ppp_on_boot (dsl-provider)

I think this used to be called from a script in /etc/init.d. It used dsl-provider, but is no longer referenced.

pon/off (provider)

This is used by pon and poff, the old dial-up ("dip",) scripts that allow privileged users to start and stop the PPP connection.

ifup (interfaces)

PPP devices can now be configured along with Ethernet devices in the standard Debian interfaces file. The provider is named in that file.

In all cases, the script for each provider is stored in /etc/ppp/peers, for example /etc/ppp/peers/internode.

The second is weirder, since there is no documentation (I never got a manual, and there's nothing helpful on the D-Link web site), so it's more a matter of trial-and-error.

I was receiving the familiar "Timeout waiting for PADO packets" message (note that it's PADO with the letter O, not PAD0 with the number 0) which I've seen numerous times before with there were connection problems.

The first thing I did was to add an account on the ADSL modem to test whether my iiNet or Internode account was active, and whether the username and password were correct. I determined that my Internode account was indeed working.

I then enabled debug mode in pppd, and noticed some other messages before the PADO timeout message, in particular "LCP: timeout sending Config-Requests". I figured the problem would have to be that pppd couldn't set up the connection on the modem, so wondered whether the modem was in bridge mode (which it needed to be to allow my Debian server to override the address configuration and provide other services such as address translation that allow me to share the connection between multiple computers).

Account Configuration Page

I checked the main "account configuration" page and ensured there was no username and password entered, that on-demand connection was disabled, and that the connection was disconnected. When I clicked OK, I let it save its settings to Flash memory and reboot. Still nothing.

Next, I tried setting the connection type to "RFC1483 Bridge" mode. It still didn't work.

Finally, I played the old game I learned from years of using Microsoft products: go thru every menu and see what settings are where they shouldn't be. (At least with this modem, there aren't too many settings to get lost in!)

I went to the accounts management page, and noticed there was an entry for some account. The fields didn't give much information, but I figured the best idea was to make sure there was as little configuration on the modem itself. (Besides, the current setup wasn't working, why not give it a try!)

Accounts Management Page

After deleting the entry it still didn't work, but after powering the modem off and on, my "pon" script worked, and I had an internet connection!

Success! (a.k.a. this Internet connection sucks less!)

I made sure my server settings were correct, redirected my web site to my new connection, and sent a test message thru the new Internode email server. All went well!

The very next thing I did was enter youtube.com in my browser. I clicked on the first link it showed me to some dodgy party with beer movie. It played without pausing!

Mission accomplished!

Microsoft Remix 2007

I spent the past two days at Remix 2007, a Microsoft web development conference.

My main motivation was to see what Microsoft's web development tools were like, particularly for designing and building a web site using graphical tools. At the moment, I build my web sites by hand, writing my own HTML and CSS. In theory, Microsoft's development tools such as Visual Studio should be able to create similar results much more quickly. Remix 07 seemed like a good way to find out about the latest tools and trends.

The event was held at the Crown Promenade Hotel, which is a hotel hidden just behind the main Crown Casino on Southbank.

According the registration email, attendees would receive a free copy of Expression Web, Microsoft's new web site development tool. When I arrived there around 9am, there was a booth handing out 60-day evaluation versions, but nothing else. Time to pick up a program and head in for the first session.

The event started with a keynote address about Silverlight and Expression. Silverlight is Microsoft's answer to Adobe's Flex. It's supposed to allow developers to write more interactive web sites. Unlike Flex, however, there didn't seem to be any real push to use Silverlight for desktop applications.

The first interesting session was by Lee Brimelow. He's a geek with a multimedia bent, somebody with a lot of Flash experience and the author of The Flash Blog. His session on Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) showed a lot of interesting multimedia techniques implemented using Microsoft's latest graphics framework, such as rotating shapes, 3D audio visualizations, and some photo browsing applications using the Flickr API. His talk was from the perspective of somebody familiar with Flash trying to do similar and interesting things with Microsoft's new stuff. It gave the impression of something very interesting to multimedia and design peeple, but not much that couldn't be achieved using existing technologies. That said, it was interesting from a developer's perspective.

The next talk was from Laurence Moroney about "Building Rich Web Experiences with Silverlight and JavaScript". It was a fairly basic talk about Microsoft's XAML mark-up language. If you've seen HTML and SVG or perhaps Mozilla's XUL, as I have, you would have been totally bored. Maybe it was useful for the designers.

After lunch there was a talk by Steve Marx provocatively titled "PHP and Microsoft". He said that Microsoft's IIS web server had recently become pretty good at running PHP. The rest of the talk was about using a library he'd written to provide a better user experience using Microsoft's AJAX library on your PHP-based web sites. It got me thinking about a few places I could use AJAX to dynamically update parts of a web page, and introduced me to Microsoft's SourceForge equivalent, CodePlex.

At 3.15, a Kiwi named John-Daniel Trask gave a talk. If I remember rightly it showed ways of providing web site content in other formats, such as RSS and XML. It was heavily based on an ASP.NET web site and used a lot of features of Visual Studio. The code itself wasn't particularly memorable.

The formalities for the first day finished with a talk about "Orcas", the version of Visual Studio that will be released as Visual Studio 2008. The main things it proved were that Visual Studio now has some good tools for web development including a split source/page view that reminded me of Firebug for Firefox and that Visual Studio 2008 was still buggy and a long way from being ready for release!

The end of the day was really good. Most of us went to an event down the road at Galactic Circus, involving ten-pin bowling, laser force, arcade games, and free beer. You can guess which one I focussed on. ;-)

Day two started with lots of marketing presentations and a demo of a state-of-the-art web site that Guy Gadney's team had developed for the Discovery Channel. The content and technology themselves weren't very interesting, but what was, was that it had only taken his team a few weeks to build the web site in question. The site showed off the Silverlight video streaming capabilities.

The mid-morning talk was by Russ Weakley, and was the kind of material I was used to and hoping to hear more of. It was also good to see and meet the main guy behind Max Design and the Web Standards Group. Unfortunately, it was mostly old news for me. His talk was about using different CSS hacks to target rules to different browsers. They weren't traditional hacks like the Holly Hack or Voice Hack, but rather import hacks that used the different ways that each browser parses the style sheet include code to hide some code from older or less standards compilant browsers. I had already used these techniques a few months ago, probably from reading Max Design's "Links for Light Reading", so credit where credit's due, and good that more peeple are being encouraged to use the technique (rather than using hacks or tables), but nothing new to me as a regular reader. At the end of his talk, I mentioned a script by Dean Edwards called "IE7", since I've found it greatly reduces the number of hacks I need to use when making my CSS work in Internet Explorer.

The last session of the morning was another one from John-Daniel Trask. He advocated designing with standards in mind, and reminded us of accessibility (primarily thru the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). Again, not too much new for me, but refreshing to hear it being discussed at a Microsoft conference.

After lunch was a panel about "Web 2.0". It was a bit silly, with everybody talking around the topic rather than about it, talking about startups, trends, and trying to look cool.

Mid-afternoon was another talk from Steve Marx from Microsoft. It was technically rather light, since Visual Studio was doing much of the work, but it demoed using Visual Studio to AJAX enable a web site, and was made much more interesting by making the whole talk about juggling ("Asynchronous Juggling and XML" rather than the traditional "Asynchronous JavaScript and XML"). You can see how peeple like Linus Torvalds win the crowd over by being self-deprecating. :-)

The last session was another panel, discussing the differences between developers and designers. The host asked the audience to guess which of the panelists were developers, and which designers. It was fairly obvious: the designers had sunglasses, bad shirts and sideburns, while the developers had free polo shirts advertising technology companies and otherwise no fashion sense whatsoever. It was basically a wrap-up wishing that developers and designers worked more closely together, and reminding us to purchase their Expression software suite.

During the whole event, one recurring thought was that this new technology was largely futile, since nobody has the Silverlight runtime on their computer. Flash sites are only now coming into their own, and that's with an installed base of over 95%, it's hard to see how Microsoft would overtake Flash and Flex. Perhaps the one niche Silverlight might find is for intranet applications where the developers can specify a standard operating enviroment and target only one platform. For anything that has to be usable by everyone, HTML and JavaScript or Flash still seem like the only real options. (It was interesting to meet some peeple who were doing some marketing work for Microsoft who were attending. They, like many designers, were familiar with Adobe/Macromedia's tool suite, but were trying to move to Microsoft's products since they figured they had better use their client's own stuff.)

Otherwise, I'm left with a mildly positive impression. It was more informative than Sun or IBM events I've attended in the past, quite frank about what Microsoft could help you do while also acknowledging weaknesses, and rather more focussed on the developer.

After handing in my evaluation form, I was rather pleased to get a free copy of Expression Web!

Telstra FTTN Proposal

I was in a waiting room the other day, so I picked up the newspaper. Telstra had a full-page ad comparing their fibre-to-the-node broadband proposal against the G9 proposal (a consortium made up of Australia's other major internet service providers, including Optus, AAPT, iiNet and Internode). Telstra's side had tick marks next to each point, while G9 had crosses. I guess that's the end of the debate then!

There were two particular points that got my attention:
1) G9 is "foreign owned"
2) Telstra's prices are "guaranteed for 14 years"

The first point is only partially true: AAPT is owned by Telecom New Zealand, Optus is owned by SingTel, and Primus is based in the US. The other members are all Australian. They include iiNet, Internode, Macquarie Telecom, PowerTel, Soul, and TransACT. In any case, the major criteria should be speed, reliability, and price.

The second point is true, but you wouldn't want it to be. Telstra haven't released their full wholesale pricing, but they did let slip that their basic 512 kb/s service will cost $59.

Compare that to the G9 pricing, where the slowest service will be three times faster (1.5 Mb/s) and will cost just $14.23. Even their fastest plan will cost just $35.38.

It's one thing for Telstra to be more expensive. We expect that. What's not acceptable is their proposal would cause prices to be higher than they are now for the same product. That would reduce broadband adoption, reduce business competitiveness, and cripple new services such as Internet TV and movies on demand.

For instance, I currently pay $26.95 for a home phone service and $54.95 for a 1.5 Mb/s ADSL service, which makes $81.90 together. ADSL pricing is based on a $22 fee to access Telstra's copper phone line, plus the ISP's costs and margin, which make up the remaining $32.95. Assuming the phone access component of the wholesale price in Telstra's proposal is $26.95 (it's likely to be less, since that the retail price rather than the wholesale price), the internet component would be $59 - $26.95 = $32.05, $10.05 more than the current wholesale price, for a service that's three times slower!

At this point, Telstra have failed to make a case for their proposal. The average consumer would be better off if they did nothing.

Safari for Windows

Apple have just released their famous Safari web browser for Windows. Probably not everybody has heard of it, but it's famous in geek circles for being the first web browser to pass the Acid test, meaning it supports the latest web standards, and should be a good browser for web developers to test on.

Of course, being from Apple, it should also provide a really good user experience. I downloaded it this morning to take a look.

Safari on Windows

The first thing you notice is it uses the familiar Apple brushed metal look. This is expected, but it doesn't fit in very well with the rest of the system. That said, I tend to run my browser full screen, so it's not so important that it look identical to every other application, only that it behave like them.

Unfortunately, this first release for Windows doesn't do that very well either. I counted fifteen annoying differences.

The worst ones:

• the default fonts are very dark
  
• the address gets messed up if you press Ctrl+L and try to type a new address while the home page is loading
  (the same thing happens in Internet Explorer and is the #1 reason I don't use it)
  
• the Windows task bar can't be accessed if it's in auto-hide mode
  (Safari doesn't leave a 1 or 2 pixel buffer at the bottom so you can move your mouse to the bottom of the screen and see what other programs are open)
  
• new windows aren't the same size as the current one
  
• many keyboard shortcuts don't work on Blogger
  (I couldn't use Ctrl+C, Left, Shift+Home, or my Alt Gr key)
  
• no shortcut to switch between two most recent tabs
  (like Ctrl+Tab in Firefox when using the LastTab extension)
  
• many menu items appear in the Edit menu (where they would be on Mac) rather than a Tools or Options menu (where they should be on Windows)
  
• you have to hold down the mouse button while selecting an item from a drop-down list
  
• no proxy support (meaning I can't use Safari at work)
  
• no way to fix any of this! (I reported these as bugs, but who knows how long they'll take to fix; Safari isn't open source and isn't extensible like Firefox)
  

Bug: Pressing Ctrl+L then typing too quickly

Some of these are problems with the browser itself, some with particular web sites, and others with the user interface toolkit Apple use to make their Mac applications run on Windows. It would also be nice if it offered to migrate my passwords from Firefox. There's no way I'm typing in my passwords again for all the sites I go to.

On the upside, it has some nice features such as highlighting the active text field on a form with a clearly visible blue border, and showing the page loading progress using a nifty blue bar that takes up the whole address bar (this feature inspired the Fission addon for Firefox). It's also nice that my web site looks fine!

My web site in Safari

On the whole, the browser is quite usable, and hasn't crashed on me yet, it's just lacking several features that I want before making it my default web browser.

Update: June 28, 2007

I just tried Safari 3.0.2 at work behind an authenticating proxy, and it works fine. It's just the proxy settings button is grayed out. Apparently it uses the operating system settings (Control Panel->Internet Options).

Update: November 20, 2007

Safari 3.0.4 was released today. It seems to fix the taskbar hiding bug, and new windows are now the right size. There's now a Ctrl+Tab shortcut. It doesn't work the way I want, but at least it's there. Blogger also seems to work, but it crashed the first time I tried. The Ctrl+L bug isn't fixed, and sometimes Ctrl+L doesn't do anything.

Software Engineering Exam

I had my Software Engineering (CSE3308) exam this morning.

I left around 8.30am to ensure I got there on time. Ended up parking a few blocks away from the racecourse on Balaclava Road as I figured a walk would be a good idea to relax and clear my mind. It also helped that parking there was free, while the uni were charging $6 to park at the exam venue.

The exam was easier than expected. There was a fairly standard question on object-oriented design, one on data-flow diagrams, one on entity-relationship diagrams, one on process specifications, and a few on various aspects quality. The only thing that surprised me was there was no question about user interfaces. Still, that was fine, since that part of the course focussed too much on regurgitating words from lecture slides (e.g. sovereign versus transient versus parisitic) rather than designing a good user interface (a la Joel Spolsky and Jakob Nielsen).

I finished all the questions in about two hours, so I had an hour to spare. I went over my answers, but decided I couldn't add any more, so I left early.

I decided to treat myself and get the keyboard I had been wanting for a while. A Yamaha PSR-E303. It's a fairly cheap portable electronic piano keyboard ($280 Australian) that's touch sensitive (i.e. the harder you press, the louder the notes are) and sounds like a piano.

When I go shopping for music (which isn't nearly as often as I'd like), I usually go to Allan's Music in Kew. Since my brother Chris lives nearby in Hawthorn, I decided to drop in on him first.

We had a chat about life, love, the universe, and everything, and went to get lunch at Grill'd, a gourmet hamburger shop on Glenferrie Road. I had the Garden Vegetable burger, which tasted great. Chris had the Hot Mama! Mmm...

Ended up at Allan's around 4.30pm. Had a quick look at a Casio for the same price, but decided to get the Yamaha because it sounded more like a piano. Including a stand and a power adapter, it cost $350.

I got home around 5.15 and had a bit of a play. The main music I'd been wanting to play was some Whitlams song books I bought at their gig a few months back at the Corner Hotel. Most peeple know their songs from Eternal Nightcap, such as No Aphrodisiac, but I think their stuff off Torch the Moon (Royal in the Afternoon, I Will Not Go Quietly, Ease of the Midnight Visit) is even better piano music. Had a bit of a play and realized I desperately needed practice!

Jodie noticed the keyboard and decided she needed to lend me her headphones. Don't think I was playing too loudly, but she's studying for her pilot's license, and it's only fair to try not to bother her.

Megan also noticed the keyboard. I expect it won't be too long until we're fighting over who gets to play it! :-)

Free Fonts

My interest in fonts began a few years ago when I discovered Lucida Sans. It was embedded in a paper about Plan 9, an operating system by the creators of UNIX. It's a nice, easy-to-read font without serifs (the ornaments on fonts like Times New Roman) that isn't as boring as Arial or Helvetica.

I was trying to find out how I could get the font on my computer, when I discovered that the Sun Java package includes the original Lucida Sans fonts. I now make a point of installing Java on all of my computers, then copying the fonts from the lib/fonts folder into my system fonts folder.

Lucida Grande

There's a similar font that comes with Mac OS X called Lucida Grande. If you're running Windows, you can get it by installing the Safari web browser public beta and copying the TTF files from the Safari.resources folder.

Microsoft Windows also comes with a version of Lucida Sans called Lucida Sans Unicode. On some systems (e.g. Windows 2000 without ClearType) this doesn't look very good and it doesn't differentiate between normal and bold, so I only use this as a fall back if the other two aren't available.

I use these three fonts as the default fonts on my web site. Since at least one of these is included in recent Windows and Mac systems, most peeple should see a Lucida Sans variant.

It also turns out there's a number of other good fonts available for free download, starting with the Microsoft Windows Core Fonts, including Andale Mono, Arial, MS Comic Sans, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Tahoma, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, Webdings, and Verdana. Most peeple will be familiar with these fonts, but I'd like to point out Andale Mono as it's a really good font for programming and much better looking than Courier New. They can be downloaded from the SourceForge Core Fonts Project Page.

Andale Mono

Other worthwhile downloads are the Windows ClearType Fonts, including Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia, and Corbel. They are all included in a standard install of Windows Vista or Microsoft Office 2007, but you can also get them in the Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 Viewer package. Calibri is the definite highlight. It's the default font in Word 2007, so you're certain to see it more in future.

The Microsoft Office Fonts includes some classics, particularly Century Schoolbook, Gill Sans MT, and Lucida Sans. You can get them with most versions of Microsoft Office, but you can also get them in the freely available Microsoft Publisher 98 Euro Fonts Update. Run PubUpd.exe /c /t:c:\temp, then copy the TTF files from c:\temp into c:\windows\fonts.

I discovered today that Adobe Reader version 8 includes Myriad Pro. It's an attractive humanist font similar to Lucida Sans. It's the font used in Apple ads. You can download it here. Install it and then copy the OTF files from the Resource/Font folder into the system fonts folder.

Myriad Pro

Another set of good fonts that deserve more attention is the Bitstream Vera family. They are included as the default fonts in many recent Linux distributions, and can be downloaded from the GNOME Fonts web page. They can be used as pretty good replacements for Verdana, Georgia, and Andale Mono.

Thanks to GearedBull for releasing his excellent Wikipedia font previews into the public domain.

New Web Site Design

A number of peeple told me that my site looked boring.

I had been wanting to come up with a radical new style, having been inspired by sites like Modern Life and an excellent list of 50 beautiful sites on Smashing Magazine.

After many battles with CSS to get exactly the right results in all browsers, and realizing that it would take forever if I wanted something unusual, I decided to try something simple yesterday. The result is now the default theme on my web site.

New Home Page

The main focus is the new banner, which is a bright "cornflower" blue (probably my favorite color, even if it does remind me of Fight Club). At the bottom of the banner are simple white all caps words that are links to each section of the site.

I decided to remove the page titles and the crumbs. I'm going to leave them out to reduce any clutter until I'm sure they're necessary.

New-Look Blog

The other major change is to specify a font size. In the past, all my sites have respected the browsers's preferred font size. Unfortunately, the default font size on Windows systems is quite large, and a lot of peeple don't know how to change it. The new theme specifies a default size of 10 points small, which should make fonts somewhat smaller than in the past, matching most peeple's expectations, making the site look better with default browser settings, while allowing peeple to make the fonts smaller or larger using their browser's text size or zoom feature.

There's also an improved "page not found" page. If you mistype an address, you are shown a list of similar pages if there are any, and a list of popular pages if there aren't any.

As always, the site should work on all platforms.

Let me know what you think!

Easter in Adelaide

I went to Adelaide for Easter this year. Flew out Friday lunch time with Virgin Blue. Was able to offset my carbon emissions for about $1.50 for the return trip, which sounded suspiciously low.

The flight was great. Nan came to pick me up at the airport in her new Kia. Her Pulsar had been recently stolen, and she bought a Kia Cerato with the insurance payout.

We went back to her place in Parafield Gardens, had a bit of a chat, caut up with my cousin Jamie and Nan's boyfrend Tony. Rod, an old workmate and frend from Wodonga came around for dinner.

On Saturday, I went to see Linda and her boyfrend Okke for lunch at Sushi Train near the Adelaide Central Markets. After lunch, we went shopping. I bought some Lindt dark chocolates and Coopers Extra Dark Stout.

Linda and Okke

We went back to Linda's place in Gilberton (just to the North of North Adelaide), met Okke properly, then discussed past events, relationships, and the meaning of life. :-)

That night, Linda and Okke took me to a frend's party in the East End of Adelaide. Drank too much, stayed up too late! Had a great time! It was revealed that Okke and his mates were card-carrying Adelaide United members, so we arranged to travel to each other's home matches. Apparently they've got a blow-up doll of Kevin Muscat, but I'm sure it's all in good sport... :-/

Beehive Corner, Rundle Mall

On Sunday, we went to see the Egyptian exhibit from the Louvre at the Art Gallery. It was a little bit interesting, but I always find myself wanting to know more than the signs tell. They also used some weird terminology, possibly due to the translation from French, and called the Sun God "Re" rather than the familiar "Ra".

We went back to Linda's place. I saw the first half of the Western Bulldogs getting convincingly beaten (again!), then we went out for dinner to an Indian restaurant on Melbourne Street.

After dinner, we went to see The Host at Palace Cinema. Kinda fortunately for me, it wasn't on. I had been really wanting to see The Lives of Others, and that was on in about 15 minutes, so we did that instead.

The movie turned out to be really good. A bit of a Schindler's List type of movie in that the circumstances are those of oppression and control of a war-like regime, and that it focussed on a small group of peeple to show its effects. The story was great and was made very emotive by the direction and cinematography. I felt really worried and concerned for the characters. The ending was good, and really helped show that it's the peeple of the regime that make up the regime. It was also rather ironic, considering one of the main undertones of the movie was suicide. It lead to some interesting discussions afterwards.

Got back to Nan's place a bit after midnight, and flew out the next morning.

Felt quite sick by the Monday night. Ended up in bed for most of the week with tonsillitis.

(I didn't kiss anyone Katie, honest!) ;-)

Hit and Run

When I got back home tonight, there were a number of people gathered outside, and Megan's silver Ford Telstar was looking very unhappy.

Apparently somebody had been driving up Clarence Street, lost control, and careened into the right side of her parked car. Apparently they didn't think it was a good idea to stop and leave their details.




A passing motorist stopped to help give details while our neighbors called the police, but unfortunately they only got half the number plate details, which might not be enuff to determine the offending car or its owner.

The police were quite helpful, calling the tow truck and providing advice on what to do.

I was somewhat fortunate that I was out for the night, because her car was parked where mine would usually be!

Voluntary Vegetarianism

I started back at Monash Uni last week.

On Wensday, there was an orientation carnival, with most of the clubs and societies setting up stalls.

I signed up for several language and political clubs, including the German Club, the Spanish and Latin American Club, the Labor Club, and the Amnesty Club. (The Monash IT Society and The Monash Greens were noticeably absent.)

There was also a stall for a vegetarian restaurant on campus called Wholefoods. The idea is to volunteer in the kitchen for an hour and get a free meal. This was a revelation to me, as I'd been at Monash for two years, and never knew about Wholefoods. (It's upstairs in the campus centre.)

As I'd scored 3.5 planets on the Ecological Footprint Calculator, eating more vegetarian meals seemed like a good idea, so I signed up and went along to the training session later that day. Knowing I'd be at uni on Mondays, I signed up to do lunch on Mondays.

This week I helped out in the kitchen for two hours. When I started at 12 o'clock, there was already a long line of people waiting for us to start serving. I started serving people, but soon some more staff appeared, so I spent most of the time going back and forth between the kitchen and the front counter topping up the bain-maries.

I met some really great people, including Jay and Lance, who had been working at Wholefoods for ten years. Also met Ollie Bennett, who I knew from The Greens back in 2001, and served Jeremy and Alia who I met on the training.

When I did serve meals, it was really good. The people I served were all quite frendly, and I got a couple of big smiles and compliments. I think we must have served nearly 200 people! :-)

The other highlight was trying the food. I stopped around two o'clock to grab lunch, and had a bit of the spaghetti napolitana and a bit of the dahl. The spaghetti was nice, rather like spaghetti bolognese without the meat, but the dahl was surprisingly good.

I am now looking for any good dahl recipes, so if you know any, please let me know!

Types of Melbourne Trains

There was an article in today's Age about Melbourne trains. It mentioned some problems with the newer Siemens trains, which got me to thinking about the different kinds of trains on the network.

I went on my first train on a visit to Melbourne when I about 12. It was a big silver train with cloth seats covered in graffiti and had green and yellow stripes down the side.

When I moved to Melbourne in 2003, I was surprised they were still in use. They are really noisy, and smell of burned metal.

The article says that these original trains are not supposed to be in use anymore, but there are problems with the brakes in the newer ones, so they had to bring the old ones back.

What was of interest to me was the names and the history of the trains. I discovered that the old smelly silver ones are called Hitachi trains and were first introduced in 1972.

Hitachi "silver" train leaving Gardenvale station

The next trains were Comeng trains. They were bought to replace the last wooden trains in 1981. They are quite similar to the ones in Adelaide.

After the network was privatised in 1999, it was broken up into Hillside (which became Connex) and Bayside (which became M>Train).

Connex bought 58 Alstom X'Trapolis trains from France. They're the ones with the small face plate and two headlights on each side.

M>Train bought 72 Siemens MOMO trains. They have long face plates and a single head light on each side. They were rebranded as Connex trains in 2004 when Connex bought out M>Train.

39° - Thankfully this Siemens train is air-conditioned!

I live on the Sandringham line, which used to be run by M>Train, which explains why I've been seeing the Hitachi trains again lately.

There's a heap more information about the Melbourne network here and here but I'm just glad I finally know what to call the old trains!