How aar ya?

It's taken a few embarrasing conversations to realise that when the Ausies ask "How aar ya?", it's a rhetorical question - they don't really want to know how you are. It's more of a greeting like the Poms when they say "awright?"

We've reached another milestone having moved into our new place in Balgowlah. Unfortunately our furniture from SA only arrives towards the end of July, however we've rented some beds, linen, couches, kitchen stuff etc. from a company over here that rents out these things for a month at a time. So we're OK for the meantime! Holly has her first play date tomorrow afternoon with her friend Laura from Tasmania, who started on the same day as her - very excited! Holly's also got her first party invite coming up next week. Assimilation is inevitable - resistance is futile. Phoebe's busy learning letters 'P' and 'B' at school (don't ask me why these two letters - I was too scared to ask in-case they thought I was stupid) and practicing counting to 20 - very cute with her funny pronunciation. Spent a great afternoon with Geoff and Val last weekend - really good catching up again. We're off to their house on Sunday for Val's pork roast - looking forward to it. Tracey is busy working off her bi-annual bout of tonsillitis so had to take a few days off this week after her retail conference, which went quite well. I still haven't found any work yet but I did have an interview with an agency today and I've been put forward for another position by another, so I'm keeping fingers crossed. Tomorrow I'm off to see another South African who I met at the last Sydney Linux User Group meeting to checkout his Ubuntu setup.

All in all things seem to be moving slowly in the right direction!

Captains log, star date whatever.

We've been here for just over a month now and first impressions are great. We're staying in Manly, opposite the ferry. Very handy for getting to town and also on the main bus route. Manly forms the north head of the Sydney harbour area separating the bay and the ocean with about an 800m wide strip of land, so we're in easy walking distance of both the bay and the ocean. The strip that separates the bay and the ocean is called The Corso and has a whole lot of shops, restaurants bars, coffee houses etc. One thing that I have to give the Ausies is that they probably make the best cappuccino I've ever tasted. The weather's been good enough to go for a few swims despite it being winter, our favourite swimming spots are Manly surf beach and the Manly tidal pool. Phoebe has started school at Ecopreschool in Balgowlah and Holly has started school at Balgowlah Heights Public school. School fees are diabolical but both schools are great and Holly and Phoebe are really happy, so all-in-all we're very pleased with the schooling. We start our new lease on a property in Balgowlah on 3rd July, however it seems (at present) that our stuff from home will only be arriving in the middle of July. Not too sure how we're going to be handling that - we'll play it by ear. We've been doing a little bit of casual sight seeing, so far we've been to Taronga zoo twice (once with James and Cherie), the Sydney aquarium, the Manly aquarium, Sydney WildlifeWorld, Luna Park and the Powerhouse museum. We're planning on getting together with Geoff and Val soon at the North Ryde RSL. Tracey is already fully into the swing of things at work and has already popped over to Singapore for a week on business. I've been sending out my CV to a few places every day but so far no takers. At present I'm thinking of continuing to send my CV, but doubling the number of copies for each day that I don't get a response until I wear the bastards down.

I'm twittering on www.twitter.com/mohudu for those who are TRULY starved - for WHAT I'm not sure.
To check out a map of my places click here

Map of the Silvermine MTB route in Tokai Forest

A map of my favourite route in the forest. I try go every weekend - sometimes I get it right

Learning new tools

Having sat down earlier tonight with the express intention of further developing my new drupal based website, I've once again made the classic mistake of first checking out my mail. Needless to say, a couple of hours later, I'm still checking out blog entries on Steve Yegge's site at http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/blog-rants. Not that it's been a waste of time mind you - I've thoroughly enjoyed what I've read so far and I recommend that anyone with an interest in programming check out his site. I ended up on Steve's site by following a link from the clug.org mailing list, which is another group of really knowledgeable people who maintain a well disciplined mailing list and have imparted a wealth of absolute gems in terms of Linux knowledge. The relevance of all this is that something that I read this evening made me decide that I should perhaps consider changing the way that I utilize skills that I've gained or tools that I've mastered. Generally once I'm au fait with a new tool, I tend to stick with it as there's a lot of comfort in the familiar. Going forward, I'm thinking that once I've mastered a new skill in the future, I should immediately put it aside and start using a different tool for the same job. As an example, I've recently had to learn vi in order to edit files on my new server, which doesn't have X installed. Having become quite comfortable with vi (albeit reluctantly at first) I had decided that from now on I'd use vi exclusively as my text editor of choice. However, if I were to apply my latest train of thought, now that I'm comfortable with vi, I should immediately stop using it and instead start using something new (to me anyway) like emacs instead. This way I get experience with a wider toolset and I'm in a better position to judge which tools are best for a particular situation.

Not exactly an earth shattering idea but I'll give it a bash anyway .

I can't believe that almost two months after the release of Intrepid Ibex, the issue of wireless cards not working remains unresolved! Bollocks to the open source community whose endless rhetoric would have us believe that they respond rapidly to address pressing needs.

On the whole, the upgrade from Hardy to Intrepid has been absolutely abysmal. Problems experienced immediately:

• Wireless no longer works
• KDE 4 crashes with regular abandon
• During shutdown, system hangs while unloading ALSA
• Sound not working due to the problem with ALSA

After using KDE as my preferred desktop environment for the past few years, I've had to remove it and revert to GNOME, just to continue working without interruption. I STILL can't use my wireless on the 2.6.27* kernel and have to reboot with the 2.6.24* kernel when I have no alternative but to use wireless. Thankfully I hadn't upgraded my servers and these remain on Hardy - looks like I'll go the LTS option with these then! As for my laptop, I'm not a happy camper. I sincerely hope that this experience is a once-off and not an indication of what we'll be getting from Linux\Ubuntu in the future!

Time on my hands

So my studies have finished and work's up to date and I can start configuring my network to how I've actually wanted it for a year or so! Busy installing Hardy Heron on the server and will be creating a DMZ with my two routers and installing squid proxy and dansgaurdian to limit access to undesirable web sites. I'll be getting to grips with iptables too, to apply firewall rules.

Who said life has to be boring!