Meredith Music Festival 2007 Photos

Thanks to a last minute ticket from Marcus, I ended up going to my first Meredith Music Festival last weekend. I have been to a lot of festival's in my time, but they are almost always of the electronic variety. It was great to head up with a different circle of friends and see how the other half lives :)



My Personal highlights was Crystal Castles and Goyte and Cut Copy.

Personal lowlight was the DJ's on Saturday night...lame.... who the hell plays Blue Monday, only to cut out before it kicks off with into another (lame) track.. doh... least i picked it was going to happen sitting in Camp....

I was asked about how i found Meredith compared to Doof's.... Meredith had a much more relaxed vibe ( the dancefloor was covered in chairs and lounges ), I only got my exercise by "searching for friends to a sound track" as Mimmo said. Overall it was a lot of fun, but I am really looking forward to my next doof!



On a side note to The Age.... there is more visually interesting photos of Meredith Festival than just a crowd surfing pic (yawn) and a butt shot from the Meredith Gift.... But hey I was expecting that.. I have been shooting mostly wide angle with my 10-22mm recently, partly due to my 17-85mm being placed in a very safe place at some point.. very safe...where???

(Some) Americans are NOT stupid - WITH SUBTITLES

Flash 9 HD and a new look Adobe.com

Ok, Adobe releases some cool new HD stuff with Flash Player 9 and their website has been given a make over....

but it's so 1990's.. who the hell designs a website these days which is only 800 pixels wide.... every one has at least 1024 now and from the stats i've seen, 1280 is becoming the norm... The front page is wider, but the product pages are all 800px...

sigh, time for a Coopers Red

New N95 Firmware! with N-GAGE

Just backed and and loaded the new v20 firmware on my N95 phone. The thing does feel a lot more snappy... (one of those days).. Even the backup and restore seems to of worked better than last update I did, and it did just work.

The last update v12 didn't include the new version of maps for my region (EUROPE-1) but this one does.... now if only the current cell tower location was always on the screen... The new search function looks good if not better than the Inbox for browsing messages.

N-GAGE has been added to the phone, with 2 demo's... they are going to release more soon, nothing available yet... the car racing game feels on par with the old sega rally / daytona if not a bit better



over on the N95blog i found this link for this really nice theme, Dark Teal

XP just got faster...

Not sure why, but this late morning my laptop started to feel a whole lot snappier....

Was it today's Windows Update Patches or installing Wireshark with WinPcap?

Who knows? either way I'm happy bout it :)

Great Comparison of different SQL implementations

There's a discussion going on CFAUSSIE about the limitations on using the CF8 embedded apache Derby db and how to handle select a page of results from a database using limits... kinda juicy discussion going on there...

anyway Geoff posted a link to a JIRA task for Derby which contained this gem of a link in the comments, Comparision between major SQL implementations

CF Debug copy - Firefox Addon for CF SQL

Just read about a new tool over on dopefly written in .NET for copying CF's great debug output back into unbound SQL.

Then Sami Hoda commented about a Firefox add-on which does this automatically on copy :) It's called CF Debug Copy for Firefox

I personally prefer the second option, as it's one less tool in the chain, but ultimately best answer here is to embed some code into your one of your debug output code script in CF which can be found here "C:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\WEB-INF\debug". I have seen other examples out there to do this..

Gmail select unread emails feature request

When you select all messages on a page in Gmail, it will then give you the option to select all messages under that label. Neat :)



A little pet hate is that unread mail count inbox(2), and empty inbox gives a nice false sense of being organised :)

I just want to select them all and either read, delete, whatever just to clean things out, but searching for "is:unread in:inbox" feels pretty damn wrong and is way to geek for most people. (gmail search commands)

When i click on the unread link, i would love to see an option like the "select all 2834 conversations" above : "click here to select all 2 unread conversations in inbox"

BatLeb by Merrick and Rosso

thanks mish for the link

Gmail just added color labels

Just was sitting looking at the volumes of email going thru my gmail today and i thought my eye's were going a bit wonky coz the labels looked strange.

Turns out there is now a little square next to the labels which you can set a color for each label.... nifty....the bold background bold colors seem best...

I would like to see the New Features link appear everytime they add something tho...

Swedish Self-Cleaning Toilet

Earthcore 2007 Photos

Best Earthcore in years, with Funktion One sound systems on all floors, on a weekend when John Howard became a victim of Workchoices it was great to be out in a crater dancing and having fun with some great music.

I remember forgetting about the election and then sitting in my tent with a few friends around 9ish and thinking, hey, what's going on? I switched on my phone and it started to peep....


Landslide! Mark Nolen

Labour doing well.. Major national region in qld swinging right.. Bennalong & Eden-monaro in canberra alp lead.. Will keep u updated :) Frances Ozturk

Oh Spitz, you missed Kezza o'briens freudian slip when if referred to 'a swing to the ABC' ! The aides outside the studios was HUGE! Gold. Mischa Long

Far fucking out! Johnny might lose his own seat. That'd be so sweet! Happy election night x
Sally McPhee


A week later and it feels very much like post Jeff Kennett in Victoria back in the 90's. Kyoto is in, The Libs are in disarray, John Howard doesn't even have a seat in parliament anymore, Costello ain't smirking, Troops out of Iraq by mid 2008... it's all great stuff...

In the end it was all expected

ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException with CFMX and oracle thin jdbc

I hit the error below in my ongoing saga with switching over to use the Oracle Thin driver with CF8.

There are a few references to this error around the web, with some notes on metalink about websphere and the IBM JDK. Oracle calls this a vendor issue.

The statement is an insert with 19 parameters, including a spatial sdo_geometry column via CFQUERY. I am using oracle 10.2.0.3 (+ October patch) and ojdbc6.jar.

Removing some extraneous new lines from the query resolved the issue.

java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 19
at oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleSql.computeBasicInfo(OracleSql.java:950)
at oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleSql.getSqlKind(OracleSql.java:623)
at oracle.jdbc.driver.OraclePreparedStatement.(OraclePreparedStatement.java:1212)
at oracle.jdbc.driver.T4CPreparedStatement.(T4CPreparedStatement.java:28)
at oracle.jdbc.driver.T4CDriverExtension.allocatePreparedStatement(T4CDriverExtension.java:68)
at oracle.jdbc.driver.PhysicalConnection.prepareStatement(PhysicalConnection.java:3059)
at oracle.jdbc.driver.PhysicalConnection.prepareStatement(PhysicalConnection.java:2961)
at oracle.jdbc.driver.PhysicalConnection.prepareStatement(PhysicalConnection.java:5808)
at coldfusion.server.j2ee.sql.JRunConnection.prepareStatement(JRunConnection.java:786)

Looking forward to the next CFCAMP

I went along to CFCAMP Melbourne today, it was a really good event, very relevant and interesting stuff. Peter Bell's talk on code generation was my highlight, I enjoyed chatting about it with him over lunch... then to have the nice suprise of finding three of my dad's work mates were sitting at the same table...

I raised the idea of having an open CF Bug Tracker (Jira being my preferred option as always) and the Adobe team were quite open to the idea. Even having an (semi) open bug tracker can reduce your support calls. Livedocs comments are the closest thing at the moment.

CF8's new Flex support showed strongly, as did the PDF forms, CFInterface, Ajax support (lets hope updater 1 updates the various js libraries)

The whole CF8 package is pretty incredible when you delve inside what you can do with it, as Jason explained on CFInsider recently, it's a lot cheaper than the sum of it's parts

I sat down with some of the Adobe team and discussed my issue with my Oracle JDBC problem and after showing them my test cases they forwarded it on to the CF team. Really nice group of people the CF crowd :) I might of been a bit harsh in my initial blog entry ... sorry guys

As a guide for anyone wanting to submit a CF Bug Report, it's a bit hidden under the Feature Request link from the Coldfusion Support homepage. Tho you can't attach files which kinda sucks.

Just remember, when you reduce your test case (bug example) down to very simple code (or steps to reproduce) that clearly demonstrates the problem, it's more likely to get attention.

That's good advice for everyone, developers and users !! hehe

Star Wars - The Election Edition

Now this is perhaps the best election youtube entry i have seen yet.

---snip spoiler deleted! --- i don't want to spoil your fun

ABC Election News mobile application

The ABC has an election app for your mobile phone, i just downloaded it and it looks snappy.

I blog later after playing round with it, will be good for someone out in the bush

Why does my N95 always report installation size as being double the real size?

Optus Network Status - more info

<RANT MODE="ON">
So today a lot of my net connections didn't work.

So I checked whirlpool yep there are problems, then I looked at the optus network status page.. no problems

So I spend 20 mins on the phone to optus and get told it's an upstream problem, nothing to do with optus.....

But because it's upstream they don't put anything on their network status page...

DUMB OPTUS DUMB!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Save your helpdesk queues and staff being overloaded and your customers time.....

Just Post a bloody note to the Network Status Page

</RANT MODE="OFF" KEEPALIVE="TRUE">

Aboriginal choreography of Zorba The Greek

I first saw this on the ABC..... it's a wonderful interpretation of the contemporary greek classic

Kyoto News Flash - It's time, Australia will Ratify

Attention the rest of the world: There is an exciting development in Climate Change politics (it's such a wrong term, a bushism from memory.)

John Howard is most likely going to lose the Australian Federal Election next week. His opponent Kevin Rudd has declared his first task as a new Prime Minister will be to ratify the Kyoto protocol. This is the team with Peter Garrett (of Midnight Oil fame) as (shadow) Environment Minister.

The added bonus is that it looks quite certain that the Australian Greens will hold the balance of power in the Senate. Kevin Rudd or Kevin as he's known these days has led the polls for 10 months since he got the leadership.

Garrett and The Greens are good news for the world, as is Kevin Rudd. If the Greens get the balance, they can negotiate an even better outcome for Environment Policy.

The Liberals (Howard's party) have been attacking Kevin's lack of experience for a long time. I woke up yesterday to hear Julia Guillard (Deputy Labour Leader) on the radio, sounding relaxed, comfortable and like a Leader. The Age wrote yesterday about what a shocking campaign the Liberals have run this time round.

Experience when your on the nose doesn't really help.

Next Saturday, if all goes well, (everyone here is cautious despite the consistent opinion polls favoring Labour with a 10 point lead) Australian's will once again start to have something to be proud about. Add to the list pulling out of Iraq, the end of Workchoices ( the IR policy they dare not mention any more by name ) and the return to decency when it comes to Immigration and Refugees...

Noice

My little Gmail 2 Wish list for Contacts

I just read about "5 little-known Gmail features you may not yet know about".

I like having you mail history working with the browser forward and back buttons. The keyboard history in your browser is usually Alt-left and Alt-right, great for flying thru you history. Control-tab flicks between tabs... the mouse is slowwww... anyway...

So here's my Number 6 little known hopefully awaited new feature.

What i am still extremely frustrated with is the new contacts. It's a bit better than the old one, but there are some simple things to make it a whole lot better.

My mate John just sent out an email saying his old age email address doesn't work anymore as he's now freelance, so i thought ok, lets clean up my contacts... eeeyyuuu......my response

Zac's Improved Gmail Contact Management Hitlist

1. Show both the contact's name and email address in the second column, like composing.. otherwise it's becomes very confusing
2. Get rid of the edit button! if i click on a contact in contacts, i am most likely going to want to see more detail.
3. Drag and drop contact merge, Auto Merge ?? "Are these the same person?"
4. Email Domain auto generated Filters like groups
5. There are two icons for adding users and groups. I didn't naturally get that one the first time i used it. Gmail has a text based ui. Every other button has a text annotation... come on.. there's enuff space
6. The group button, when no contact is selected, should still allow adding a new group

The Ministry of rich old white guys

This satire of the Liberal 70% unions add campaign ( circa $8 Million spent so far, why? ) is so on the mark it's brilliant!

On a lighter note

It's summer in Melbourne, it was nice to hit the beach down at Half Moon Bay, Black Rock last weekend

WMI Performance Adapter Event Log Spam

If your running oracle 10.2.0.3 on Windows, you may find the the System Event log being filled with Start Stop messages for the WMI Performance Adapter ... every few minutes or even more often...

Event ID:7036 The WMI Performance Adapter service entered the running state.
Event ID:7035 The WMI Performance Adapter service was successfully sent a start control.
Event ID:7036 The WMI Performance Adapter service entered the stopped state.


I hate Event Log Spam, then again, I find the event log very 1990's :)


Turns out it's due to an old NT4 dll, pdh.dll in the %ORACLE_HOME%\bin directory.

The fix is easy, stop your dbconsole service(s), rename the file and restart the dbconsole service(s).

The metalink docid is 454987.1

This feels like a much better solution than the autostart option for the service which has been mentioned around the web.

Why didn't the latest critical update for oracle (oct 07) include this, I consider this to be very critical as it obscures important the event log entries...hmmm

Side Note: The McAfee McShield service entered the running state is a bug in the version 8.50i of viruscan :(

Picasa Backup to disk is nifty(tm)

Ever used Picasa's built in backup feature under Tools -> backup?

There is a disk to disk backup option so you can use your external hard disk for backups. Burning to DVD is not environmentally friendly.

You should ideally have three copies of everything. IE your laptop/desktop, your regular external hard disk and a backup which is kept separate and not always on and hidden. That way if you get burgled you still have your data. Online backups are also pretty good.

These newer larger 100Gb laptop hard disks are not that reliable, be prepared for them to die, trust me, mine did, a mate's did.

I read about this on the picasa help site. The disk to disk was disabled when i first opened the backup tool, so you need to create a new backup set and then you can select a (pre-existing) folder.

Did Adobe cripple the Oracle Thin Driver in Cold Fusion

Adobe bundles the Data Direct drivers with the developer and enterprise versions of Cold Fusion. The oracle version works really well, but somehow it doesn't justify paying $10k just to have working oracle support.

Now this has been this way for a long time historically speaking, but it does support JDBC. Sooooooo you can use the oracle thin drivers (ojdbc4.jar, ojdbc5.jar and ojdbc6.jar the last two being the 11g versions for java 1.5 and 1.6).

But some basic things it just don't work.

for example
"INSERT INTO zac.test (REGIONS_R_id)
select REGIONS_R_id FROM zac.test"

works in sqlplus, via plain old java, via the data direct drivers but don't via JDBC thru Cold fusion 8.

This is a simple un-bound query, but it fails with

java.sql.SQLSyntaxErrorException: ORA-00933: SQL command not properly ended

oracle.jdbc.driver.SQLStateMapping.newSQLException(SQLStateMapping.java :91)
oracle.jdbc.driver.DatabaseError.newSQLException(DatabaseError.java:112)
oracle.jdbc.driver.DatabaseError.throwSqlException(DatabaseError.java:173)
at oracle.jdbc.driver.T4CTTIoer.processError (T4CTTIoer.java:455)
oracle.jdbc.driver.T4CTTIoer.processError(T4CTTIoer.java:413)
oracle.jdbc.driver.T4C8Oall.receive(T4C8Oall.java:1030)
oracle.jdbc.driver.T4CStatement.doOall8(T4CStatement.java :183)
oracle.jdbc.driver.T4CStatement.executeForRows(T4CStatement.java:936)
oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleStatement.doExecuteWithTimeout(OracleStatement.java:1222)
oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleStatement.executeInternal (OracleStatement.java:1770)
oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleStatement.execute(OracleStatement.java:4975)
oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleStatementWrapper.execute(OracleStatementWrapper.java:314)
coldfusion.server.j2ee.sql.JRunStatement.execute (JRunStatement.java:348)

No I know that there are some subtle differences in the way Oracle's JDBC works, but this is a plain old query.

Pass SQL to the driver, prepare the statement and execute. Of course the sheer beauty of CF is that this is all handled beneath the covers. It should just work :(

UPDATE: I have passed on basic jdbc and cf test cases to Adam from Adobe at CFCAMP Melbourne and they are going to have a look. The Coldfsion Wishlist apparently is a channel to send cf bug reports

Kevin 007 - The Man With The Golden Jaw

I love seeing Mr John Howard as Dr No!

KEVIN 07 - Rejected Advertising Angle

Jira Permissions Revisted

Just some quick notes on how i configure Jira.

1. Create a project role called Client (Administration-> Project Role Browser), I do this because I allow clients to play an active role in JIRA and they don't quite fit the Jira Users Role.

2. Assign Permissions to the Client Role (Administration -> Project Role Browser). For example, I often like to be able to assign work (issues) to clients, you want to add the client role anywhere you see the User Role.

3. On a per project basis, assign your appropriate Client User Group to the Client Role . ( Administration-> Project, Project Team, Project Roles -> View Members)

Easy!

Ben Forta coming to Melbourne for CF8!!!

Ben forta just blogged that he's coming to Australia for a CF8 tour


He will be in November 22nd: Melbourne November 22... mark your calenders

Keating make's fun of Costello's use of his legacy

Keating savages 'indolent' Costello, The Age
Attack on unions despicable: Keating ABC News





I would loved to see the whole speech (pause, ok, the abc had the video), the last 7 minutes (13 all up) are classic Keating, he seemed more relevant than ever, tho a little older.

He destroyed Howard and Costello's position on economic's and IR, putting the last 11 years in historical context, taking claim for the the Accord's ongoing effect. You get the feel this is going to be sweet revenge for 1996.

Having watched Howard & Costello build their economic reputation off his legacy, Keating explains it as only he can... classic stuff

New mobile gmail version

Gmail mobile is the best email app i have seen on a phone and it just got better.

Now when is my gmail imap coming? Grounds to use thunderbird again!

SATA external storage solution

Enhance make a number of external storage solutions. The E8 - ML in particular looks rather interesting.

Has anyone used it?

Bennelong Time

Thank you the ABC and the 7:30 Report

Faster Inserts and updates with CFTRANSACTION

If you are ever doing lots of inserts of updates, you can speed up the processing
by a substantial factor by wrapping up lots of individual records ( ie loop over and update a dataset ) in a CFTRANSACTION statement.

This actually applies to any programming language and any decent DB .

Why? Each query when it is finished will be explicitly committed (talking CF specifically here, btw).

In oracle that means write to disk (generally the same for other databases). So for 1000's updates that's a 1000 disk writes where oracle is writing the changes out to disk. That's a lot of overhead.

When you wrap things up in a transaction, that disk activity is postponed until a commit occurs, either explicitly <cftransaction action="COMMIT"> or when it's finished </cftransaction>

Depending on how your DB is configured in terms of REDO logs etc, what your inserting or updating, the optimal size of a transaction differs.

How to know how many rows to process before issuing <cftransaction action="COMMIT">? It's a bit of a black art :)

There are some cool tricks in Oracle like Asynchronous Commits which effectively says to Oracle, you know better than me, you decide when to commit.

Speed up your XP keyboard

Keyboard King is a great little utility i found which extends the range of speed up setting available for your keyboard response settings.

Great when your scanning thru long documents or lots of source code. Don't set them to high or your keyboard starts to feel a little skitterish. It's good being able to change the speed for different sets of keys

ORA-1000 maximum open cursors exceeded

i wrote a while back about a bug i was hitting with cached metadata and cfqueryparam

Tonight I hit the old ORA-1000 bug because i was still using CFQUERYPARAM which means there is an open cursor for each query.

What I was doing a row count and inserting a different table name into the SQL. The problem was for each different table name (plus the random value i was inserting to avoid caching) was generating a cursor in oracle.

Solution? Sometimes you shouldn't use bind parameters!

Just be sure to validate your variables to avoid sql injection.

Console2 seems mess with focus on file downloads

console2 seems to steak focus from file dialogs in firefox.

when i try and download a file, i often seem to lose the focus on the file dialog when i have the error console open with always on top set.

waiting on a bugzilla email to file a bug

I also would love an option to exclude the window from the alt-tab list, or could fire fox finally get different icons for windows?

10 Year Winamp 5.5 is a new classic

Just downloaded the new version of winamp and i have to say it's one of the best releases yet.

The new skin and built in three column media library aka iTunes is great. Looks a little noisy, but it makes better use of a 1600x1050 screen than any other media player i have tried and liked.

Tip: click the icon under the mini playlist in the top right hand corner and have a full window height playlist. much better than the tiny box it defaults to

Using WMS TileCache on Apache Win32 with Mod Python

TileCache is a cool tool for caching WMS titles. Using it with Openlayers which is a great javascript library for using with WMS Servers

I had a few issues installing it on Windows using Apache 2.0.61, Python 2.5 and mod_python

This configuration worked for me nicely, the PythonPath directive fixes the "ImportError: No module named TileCache.Service" error

<Directory "c:/inetpub/wwwroot/TileCache/">
    AddHandler python-program .py
    PythonHandler TileCache.Service 
    PythonOption TileCacheConfig "c:/inetpub/wwwroot/TileCache/tilecache.cfg"
    PythonPath "['c:\inetpub\wwwroot\TileCache'] + sys.path"
    PythonDebug On
</Directory>

Mapguide refresh the King.Oracle schema cache trick

I hit an issue today with mapguide, i was creating a table and then creating a layer to view it.

GetClassDefinition kept crashing with "The specified class was not found." Turns out for performance reasons King Oracle caches the SDO_GEOM_METADATA for the class list and there is no simple API way to fix this.

I swapped a few emails with Harris and then as a last attempt I updated the FeatureSource XML with a simple save, which turns out to cause Mapguide to refresh King Oracle and read in the new SDO_GEOM_METADATA.

I didn't hit this so often when i was doing dev, because there is a 10 minute timeout for FDO providers.

Oracle Import Trick

If you ever need to import a select list of tables from a large export file, a good trick is to do a import with rows=n which will just create the tables without data

imp scott/tiger@orcl file=export.dmp rows=n

then you can simply delete the tables you wish to import from the schema and then run the import normally. Oracle will simply throw a create error and skip the table

you can get funky if you can access the orginal schema and do things like this (note the dblink)

select  'drop table ' || table_name ||';' drop_sql
from  dba_tables 
where  owner ='SCOTT' 
  and secondary = 'N'
  and table_name in 
   (select table_name 
   from  dba_tables@srcdb_link
   where  owner ='SCOTT' 
     and secondary = 'N')
order by 1 

which is useful if you have a big export which you only want to import a subset of the tables because you have dropped them already in the src database

XP Hardisk Activity Monitor

Glint is a great XP Harddisk Activity Monitor, it basically reads windows counters and displays them.
Nice to be able to monitor physical hard disk activity at a glance.

I added physical counters for each cpu and each harddisk R & W



Good for watching disk load as you back up stuff and exporting databases before a system restore as my machine is BSOD ing too much...

Updated Varscoper.cfc CFSCRIPT Support

Here's an updated version of my varscoper mods. Dan Wilson found a bug with the way I was handling the // comments.

The code will now strip all // comments and will also correctly handle code with Unix line endings (I convert windows style CRLF to LF and process the code based only on LF)

Mike Schierberl, the author of Varscoper replied and said he will add my code to the code base on Riaforge when he finds some time!

<cfset var variableCFScriptDelim=" #chr(13)##chr(9)##chr(8)#">
<cfset var variableCFScriptStart = ""/>
<cfset var variableCFScriptEND = ""/>

<cfset var variableCFScriptText = ""/>
<cfset var variableCFScriptTextTmp = ""/>
<cfset var variableCFScriptCmd = ""/>
<cfset var variableCFcommentSTART = "" />

<cfset var variableCFcommentEND =""/>
<!--- Now start looping over all cfscript statements to identify variables that are being set --->

<cfset currentPositionVariableFind = 1 />
<cfset variableCFScriptStart = FindNoCase("<CFS"&"CRIPT>",functionInnerText,currentPositionVariableFind)/>

<cfloop condition="variableCFScriptStart NEQ 0">

 <!--- Identify the cfscript statement --->
 <cfset variableCFScriptEND = FindNoCase("</CFS"&"CRIPT>",functionInnerText, variableCFScriptStart+1)/>
 
 
 <cfif variableCFScriptEND neq 0>
  <cfset variableCFScriptText=""/>
  
  <cfset variableCFScriptTextTmp =mid(functionInnerText, variableCFScriptSTART + len('<cfs'&'cript>'), 
     variableCFScriptEND-variableCFScriptSTART- len('<cfsc'&'ript>') )/>

     
  <!--- change to use unix style lines endings --->   
  <cfset variableCFScriptTextTmp =Replace(variableCFScriptTextTmp,"#chr(13)##chr(10)#",chr(13),"ALL")/>
     
  <!--- strip line // comments as they don't end in a ;  --->
  <cfset variableCFcommentSTART=find("//",variableCFScriptTextTmp,1)>

  <cfloop condition="variableCFcommentSTART neq 0">
   <cfset variableCFcommentEND=find("#chr(13)#",variableCFScriptTextTmp,variableCFcommentSTART+2)>
   <cfif variableCFcommentEND gt 0>
    <cfset variableCFScriptTextTmp=
     Mid(variableCFScriptTextTmp,1,variableCFcommentSTART-2) & chr(13)
     & Mid(variableCFScriptTextTmp,variableCFcommentEND+2,len(variableCFScriptTextTmp) )/>

   </cfif>
   <cfset variableCFcommentSTART=find("//",variableCFScriptTextTmp,variableCFcommentSTART+2)>
  </cfloop>
  
  <!--- strip out /* type comments */ --->
  <cfset variableCFcommentSTART=find("/*",variableCFScriptTextTmp,1)>

  <cfloop condition="variableCFcommentSTART neq 0">
   <cfset variableCFcommentEND=find("*/",variableCFScriptTextTmp,variableCFcommentSTART+2)>
   <cfif variableCFcommentEND gt 0>
    <cfset variableCFScriptTextTmp=
     Mid(variableCFScriptTextTmp,1,variableCFcommentSTART-2) 
     & Mid(variableCFScriptTextTmp,variableCFcommentEND+2,len(variableCFScriptTextTmp) )/>

   </cfif>
   <cfset variableCFcommentSTART=find("/*",variableCFScriptTextTmp,variableCFcommentSTART+2)>
  </cfloop>
       
  <cfloop index="variableCFScriptCmd" list="#variableCFScriptTextTmp#" delimiters=";">

   <cfset variableCFScriptCmd=ListFirst(ListChangeDelims(variableCFScriptCmd," ",variableCFScriptDelim),"=")/>
   <cfset variableCFScriptCmd=trim(variableCFScriptCmd)>
   <cfif ListFirst(trim(variableCFScriptCmd), " ") eq "var">
    <cfset VariableNameCfset=mid(variableCFScriptCmd,3,len(variableCFScriptCmd))/>

    <cfset VariableNameCfset=trim(ListGetAt(variableCFScriptCmd,2, " "))/>
    <!--- Update the var-ed struct to note that we are using this var --->
    <cfset tempVaredStruct["#VariableNameCfset#"] = "not used">
   </cfif>

  </cfloop>
  <!--- Update the current parsing position to start from the end of the cfset statement --->
  <cfset currentPositionVariableFind = variableCFScriptEND>
  <cfset variableCFScriptStart = FindNoCase("<CFS"&"CRIPT>",functionInnerText,currentPositionVariableFind)>
 <cfelse> 
  <cfset variableCFScriptStart=variableCFScriptStart+len("<CFS"&"CRIPT>")>

 </cfif>
</cfloop>

<cfset currentPositionVariableFind = arguments.positionToStart />

Windows XP: Stop: 0x000000D1 KB925922

The computer restarts unexpectedly, or you receive an error message in Windows XP: "Stop: 0x000000D1"

Been getting lots a Blue Screens of Death (BSOD) Today... and my computer takes a good 10 minutes to boot... time for a rebuild, but no time to do it... argghhh

and why can't i just download the hotfix.. i mean i like the 8 hour turn around guarantee but really.... sigh.. arghhh.. ah well

UPDATE received the hotfix email an hour and a half later, installed, rebooted.. lets see what happens

Radiohead bypasses the record labels

Just head on the Radio (JJJ) that Radiohead doesn't have a record company for their new album "In Rainbows" and are offering direct digital downloads!!!!

The price? Simple, you decide! Yep, minimum price is 1 Pound, or a couple of Aussie bucks... sweet....

money for the artists, instead of the RIAA lawyers

This has the potential to really screw over the record labels, finally!!!!!!

Windows Messenger delete's MP3's transfers

How stupid is a program that accepts a 100MB download, only to delete it because the file name is on a watch list, AFTER it's downloaded. There's a good entry on this i found on google

There is a solution via A-patch which fixes this any other 'design' decision problems with Windows Live Messenger. (try it out at your own risk of course)

Warranty Expiry Reminder

Your John Howard license is about to expire in less than 2 Months,
The license is non-transferrable or renewable

Please vote him out on the 24 of November.

Varscoper.cfc CFSCRIPT support

UPDATE: Updated code posted here

Is your code Thread Safe? How do you know?

that inspired me to do a bit of hacking as i use a lot of CFSCRIPT which the original doesn't support yet, it's a friday afternoon job, but it worked for me

add this code into the top of the findCFsetVariables function in varscoper.cfc

it will find any var scoped cfscript statements to reduce the false positives

 
   <cfset var variableCFScriptDelim=" #chr(13)##chr(9)##chr(8)#">
   <cfset var variableCFScriptStart = ""/>
   <cfset var variableCFScriptEND = ""/>
   <cfset var variableCFScriptText = ""/>

   <cfset var variableCFScriptTextTmp = ""/>
   <cfset var variableCFScriptCmd = ""/>
   <cfset var variableCFcommentSTART = "" />
   <cfset var variableCFcommentEND =""/>

   <!--- Now start looping over all cfscript statements to identify variables that are being set --->
   
   <cfset currentPositionVariableFind = 1 />
   <cfset variableCFScriptStart = FindNoCase("<CFS"&"CRIPT>",functionInnerText,currentPositionVariableFind)/>
   
   <cfloop condition="variableCFScriptStart NEQ 0">
    <!--- Identify the cfscript statement --->

    <cfset variableCFScriptEND = FindNoCase("</CFS"&"CRIPT>",functionInnerText, variableCFScriptStart+1)/>
    
    
    <cfif variableCFScriptEND neq 0>
     <cfset variableCFScriptText=""/>
     
     <cfset variableCFScriptTextTmp =mid(functionInnerText, variableCFScriptSTART + len('<cfs'&'cript>'), 
        variableCFScriptEND-variableCFScriptSTART- len('<cfsc'&'ript>') )/>

        
     <!--- strip line // comments as they don't end in a ; --->
     <cfloop index="variableCFScriptCmd" 
       list="#variableCFScriptTextTmp#" 
       delimiters="#chr(13)##chr(10)#">
      <cfif NOT (left(trim(variableCFScriptCmd),2) eq "//")>

       <cfset variableCFScriptText=variableCFScriptText&"#chr(13)##chr(10)#"&variableCFScriptCmd/>
      </cfif>
     </cfloop>
     
     <cfset variableCFScriptTextTmp=variableCFScriptText>
     
     <!--- strip out /* type comments */ --->

     <cfset variableCFcommentSTART=find("/*",variableCFScriptTextTmp,1)>
     
     <cfloop condition="variableCFcommentSTART neq 0">
      <cfset variableCFcommentEND=find("*/",variableCFScriptTextTmp,variableCFcommentSTART+2)>
      <cfif variableCFcommentEND gt 0>

       <cfset variableCFScriptTextTmp=
        Mid(variableCFScriptTextTmp,1,variableCFcommentSTART-2) 
        & Mid(variableCFScriptTextTmp,variableCFcommentEND+2,len(variableCFScriptTextTmp) )/>
      </cfif>
      <cfset variableCFcommentSTART=find("/*",variableCFScriptTextTmp,variableCFcommentSTART+2)>
     </cfloop>
     
     <cfloop index="variableCFScriptCmd" list="#variableCFScriptTextTmp#" delimiters=";">

      <cfset variableCFScriptCmd=ListFirst(ListChangeDelims(variableCFScriptCmd," ",variableCFScriptDelim),"=")/>
      <cfset variableCFScriptCmd=trim(variableCFScriptCmd)>
      <cfif ListFirst(trim(variableCFScriptCmd), " ") eq "var">
       <cfset VariableNameCfset=mid(variableCFScriptCmd,3,len(variableCFScriptCmd))/>

       <cfset VariableNameCfset=trim(ListGetAt(variableCFScriptCmd,2, " "))/>
       <!--- Update the var-ed struct to note that we are using this var --->
       <cfset tempVaredStruct["#VariableNameCfset#"] = "not used">
      </cfif>

     </cfloop>
     <!--- Update the current parsing position to start from the end of the cfset statement --->
     <cfset currentPositionVariableFind = variableCFScriptEND>
     <cfset variableCFScriptStart = FindNoCase("<CFS"&"CRIPT>",functionInnerText,currentPositionVariableFind)>
    <cfelse> 
     <cfset variableCFScriptStart=variableCFScriptStart+len("<CFS"&"CRIPT>")>

    </cfif>
   </cfloop>
 
   
   <cfset currentPositionVariableFind = arguments.positionToStart />
 

Must GetUp: Climate Clever

Put Our Climate Ad on at the AFL Grand Final

John Howard's Citizenship test

The Outsiders hit TripleJ

My old friends Chris and Marcus have been working for a couple of years on their band The Outsiders and this morning were played on Australia's National Radio station JJJ.



The song is called the "The Way We Live" and your can here them online on demand @ http://www.triplejunearthed.com/Outsiders
or Listen to JJJ

CF Documentation Madness

CFquickdocs is really slow..... AJAX can be annoying, this site is not quick.... Personally i find this really annoying.. Not to mention that it changes the url (in firefox at least) so you can't reload the page.. doh!

CFEclipse integrates this site and i hate it.... The integrated help in Homesite just works quick.. not like adobe live docs either, which is even worse...

Programmers help should be fast!!!! when your cutting code, it's good to be able to jump to a quick reference... having to wait 5-10 seconds is painful and distracting...

Connex's New Timetable LCD's

"New Passenger Information Displays in the form of 100cm LCD TV screens are appearing at Flinders Street Station as we roll out a $4.3 million Passenger "


So, how about some feedback Connex? It would be really good to include time information other than the scheduled time..... yep, 4.3 Million and all it shows is the time of the next train, no clock, no 5 minutes till departure.... sigh... it's not that hard... the old system had it

and we still let these jokers run our transport system?

and not providing email feedback is a great way of stopping people providing it...

Vuuv 2007 Photos

Hmm, always seem to wearing the same clothes!!! ahh the joy of back packing round the world. The german summer was pretty average this year, but the Vuuv had brilliant weather. Saturday was super cold at night, a classic rave like morning



Nicole, Oli, Diana, Steve and Wolfgang. I called Wolfgang on the way from Berlin and organised to camped with him, he had a mate Steve from LA there who I ended up staying with when I was in LA... plus a whole crew from Hamburg



Like a lot of German open-airs, there was a lot of corn around the festival site.



Diana's is looking as beautiful as ever on her 23rd birthday




Misha rocked up on Saturday and was looking extremely fresh, especially after the huge friday night the rest of us had





Jules and I decided to go tropo and head out into the cornfield for some chill out time... it's very green and geometric in there.. all these summer photos have a lot of skin....a bit of contrast ist gut... hehe

More photos in my Vuuv 2007 Album

Ozorafest Hungary 2007 Photos

What a great festival, Jules convinced me to go on Tuesday at Vuuv, so i changed my plans and it was Time to drive to Ozora, the site of the Solipse Festival in 1999.

We drove in Marie's bus the 14 hours via Prague and then down to Hungary, a few border crossing, so Jules and I got lots of stamps being Aussies, the rest of the crew being european's didn't. I love the reaction of the border guys when they see Jules and ask, "your Australian? Eh?"

Quite a interesting refernce point in my life to go back there after 8 years, I had only be travelling for a few months back then, I only spoke a smattering of German and i was 8 years younger.... lets just say I'm trained up these days. I also met a lot more people at this festival.... nice to have a sizeable berlin crew along too!



this thing was the money! so much fun... playing with G-forces...

A big musical highlight was Atmos, he was booked to play two hours, one hour classic which took me back years... wow... Silicon Sounds was pretty special... I remember having a sleep and then waking up, looking at my phone and grinning that I hadn't missed their set.

Of course having the festival washed out on Saturday night made things even more special as people just hung out in beer tents banging bottles on tables and dancing...or wading thru the market knee deep in warm muddy water with bales of straw all over the place. It made the festival and was a nice change of pace.



My flash died in the flood, but my tent survived better than some other ppl! Jules learnt the important rule never set your tent up with the door facing uphill, kinda asking for trouble.. espcially when there is a 6 inch river of water coming down the hill

Dad's family is Hungarian so it's always nice to visit, don't really have any connections there any more but it was really interesting to see people who looked like my relatives.



The hot mineral springs at Heviz were the prefect after party relaxation with 27C water!


There's more photo's in the Ozorafest Hungary 2007 album on picasa

Burning Man 2007 Photos

This is the crew i headed up to the Burn with, completely random group of people which clicked really really well :) Hat's of to Duff for organising everything! I was a real small world experience to ctach up with Radha after all these years. Driving the 32" RV into the bestival was a highlight on the road trip, I have seen so many desert roads in my life on TV and movies it was fun to do it myself.



The Space Elevator dancefloor at 10 - H, brilliant banging psy-trance... best music i heard this year... and what a crew! nice to get some monster dancing in



The mornings looked pretty sci-fi filmish :)



This looked odd during the day, but at night it was stunning...
Steve told me it was a prototype for some 3D TV stuff



Lots of interesting art all over the place... It was an adventure play ground!

I did lose some photos somehow somewhere on my PC

When the amazing double rainbow happened after the sandstorm / white out with 4m visibility i didn't have my camera with me.... the wide angle would of been perfect ... ah well some memories just will live on in my memory. Ya had to be there!

there's more photos on my picasa web album Burning Man 2007

Windows Firewalls

So I have been on a journey thru firewalls..... I just un-installed Sunbelt Kerio Firewall coz i had a blue screen of death with khips.sys which was the last straw. I also found that it seemed to be mis-reporting which applications were making connections, or my machine is sick... probably a bit of both..

i was getting some wierd http corrupution with bad verbs and requests getting sent to the wrong server.. dunno if that was kerio on windows

Kerio does have the best reporting interface for seeing which application is using what bandwidth... call me crazy, but that is the most important feature on a firewall for me...



Sygate 5.6 was nice, but it lacked the above features and is no longer maintained. Comodo is a resource hog (why is the favicon an IE logo?) and lacks the decent bandwidth reporting... I hate the interface for Zone alarm, it's to simple aka user friendly but I haven't looked at it in a while either

So today i have downloaded Outpost Free edition. Which then updated itself to Outpost Pro, which then updated it self again. Three bloody reboots later and its working nice..... but they could make thing simpler.... I disabled all the content blocking stuff....

So we will see how it goes...

Create or rebuilding an oracle spatial index in another schema

If you ever want to create or rebuild an oracle spatial index in another schema, you need to make sure that the target user has CREATE TABLE and CREATE SEQUENCE granted.

select privilege
from DBA_SYS_PRIVS
where privilege in ('CREATE TABLE', 'CREATE SEQUENCE' )
and grantee = 'TARGET_SCHEMA'

and if they don't have it

grant CREATE TABLE to target_schema;
grant CREATE SEQUENCE to target_schema;

otherwise you will get these errors, hope this helps someone :)

ORA-29855: error occurred in the execution of ODCIINDEXCREATE routine
ORA-13249: internal error in Spatial index: [mdidxrbd]
ORA-13249: Error in Spatial index: index build failed
ORA-13249: Error in R-tree: [mdrcrtscrt]
ORA-13231: failed to create index table [MDRT_11CBE$] during R-tree creation
ORA-13249: Stmt-Execute Failure: CREATE TABLE -----snip-----
ORA-29400: data cartridge error
ORA-01031: insufficient privileges ORA-06512: at ""MDSYS.SDO_INDEX_METHOD_10I"", line 10 "

Show your blog entries on Facebook

Under the Notes Application on Facebook you can import the RSS / Atom feed from your blog and automatically have it show up in your stream of facebookness.. nice

California, next stop Burning Man

I arrived yesterday in LA, was an early start after a nice dinner in NY with my Noel and Jenny, Jack and my Brother and his girlfriend.

Headed down to Venice Beach with Steve (whom i met thru Wolfgang at the Vuuv) and his girlfriend Topanga.

It's amazing how much of this town is familiar from TV and movies.

I had a mission to find some google for Burning Man which was easily solved, plus a pair of aviator glasses, i had tried in NY but wasn't so lucky.... So i got shoes and sunnies now... my 'bowling shoes' finally died in Ozora, Hungary...

Venice beach was really nice, i even saw the canal out back behind the beach hence the name. No one was swimming or even on the beach, except for the drumming circle on the sand. Not many photos taken coz I left my camera at Steve's.

My mission now is to find a way to get to Burning Man, my original plan to join Alex (Berlin) fell thru, so i'm chasing down options at the moment.

Just changed my flight to leave LA on the 9th, so i'm back in Melbourne, Australia on morning of the Tuesday 11th September.

I have a few thousand photo's on my laptop to sort thru before i post them and some retro-spective blog entries as well.. all in good time, probably after the 11th!

ORA-01003: no statement parsed

I hit this error whilst playing round with some major dynamically generated sql with Oracle on CFMX 7.

googling around wasn't much help, i didn't find much useful stuff on metalink, but i did find this on the cf-talk archives

Getting ORA-01003 error while executing a query from coldfusion

i did see something about JDBC or CFMX caching the sql metadata or something with prepared statements, but i can't find the link now...

My solution: i just added a static column with a random value which cleared up the problem.. no exactly sexy, but i could keep on mucking around.. not good for a high volume site, but it did solve the problem

UPDATED: keep this in mind

The Age Website redesign sucks

The Age has just recently redesigned their website.

Personally I find there is too much white on the page and I find it very uncomfortable to look at. The previous design had a nice blue page header and naturally guided the eye towards the content.

The content pages aren't quite so bad, but front page for one of the top websites in Australia is a joke

The new design feels like a 13 year pubescent boy walking backstage at a fashion parade for lingerie, you just don't know were to look!

Some of the font sizes are too small and i always get the feeling I am going to miss some interesting story.

I watched Media Watch on the ABC website last night, (which incidentally I find to be a really nice Web 2.0 ish (sic) style site) and they were talking about the amount of fluff stories being run instead of news.... Who cares if a dwarf got his penis stuck in a vacuum cleaner??? (I'm not going to justify it with a link either) and article was badly written too...

The ABC site is a good contrast to The Age, my eye falls nicely on the content and they make good use of tags and inline video content.

Why on earth the Age persists with spanning stories over mulitple pages I will never know... I would like to see the stats on how many people click on the single page link.... it's just so 1990's!!!!

ok, enuff ranting!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What is your light switch like?

One of the interesting things about travelling is the subtle little differences.

In Germany, light switches are big fat buttons which cover the whole panel.

In Australia, the are usually little buttons like 18mm sq.

Here in NY in my brothers flat, the switches are the reverse of Australia, flicking the swtich up is turning it on, whereas in Oz here you switch it down to turn on the light..

New York!

So after a bit over two months in Europe, I arrived last night in New York. My brother Jono met me at the airport and we headed straight to the Eight Mile Creek pub. So nice to have a Coopers, Boags and some nice Aussie white wine!



Of course there are no photos of my brother or his fiancée Chithra, I did ask if i could take one nice shot for our folks, but alas no, They are planning on being back in Oz for Christmas, so Mum and Dad that's your chance then to see what they look like.

It's been about 3 years since i last saw them, I'm back on my travel weight, aka very slim and tanned. SO much that as Jono is much stockier than me, that people thought i was taller!!

Here's a view on the NY Skyline from Brooklyn, this is about five minutes from their house. I'll probably have another stab at these photos as i was awake for about 30 hours by this point and had just a few drinks under my belt. I only really realised how knackered and drunk I was when I tried to download the photos last night and my laptop didn't recognise my camera for some reason....

Just had eggs and bacon for breakfast, which i have been craving for a long time!

I got lots of photos to post from Fullmoon, Vuuv and the Ozorafest but that will take a while for me to sort thru the 2000+ photos....

My time in Europe was amazing, great to catch up with nearly everyone I wanted to, alas, Katja was working the whole time and my spur of the moment decision to go to Hungary meant I missed my one chance to see her, which really sucks.. ah well...

Had a nice going away in Kreuzburg at Marienplatz... Nice to see Oli, Nicole, Diana, Anke, Kyra, Fish, Andy, Julia and Mischa all at the same timwe...

Distracted == new blog layout

just got distracted by blogging and ended up resigning my blog's layout and colors!
and then i started geo-tagging photos in picasa.. course the places i went where not on the map...

problem: google maps with picasa doesn't know Olympos Turkey?
Solution: google, answer in the search listings
Wikipedia...:Coordinates: 36°24?10?N, 30°28?28?E easy

things which rapidly start to suck time...

so I'm back in berlin, after being in greece for the wedding (next post, me lazy),

Next up the Fullmoon Festival this weekend, Jules might be at the Voov, i mean VuuV!

in other news, just got the final approval for a big project which i really like :)

Next big flight, is to New York on the 14th of August,

also maybe http://www.ozorafest.hu/ ?

BTW: the photo on the left is from Soulclipse in turkey

IE Javascript error: document.getElementById()

hit this javascript error last night testing a Firefox developed code base for bugs in IE

"object doesn't support this property or method"

I think it was because i had this pattern going:

f_name=document.getElementById('f_name');

Adding a var fixed the problem IE.

var f_name=document.getElementById('f_name');

(IE, remember that app with the blue e?, I only used it for Testing & Support these days, boy is it a chore to debug javascript with IE compared to Firefox!)

anyway, here's a solution which worked for me.

Always on top Error Console for Firefox

This is a pretty neat extension, especially when your writing and debugging javascript!

"Console² replaces the JavaScript Console with what could be the next generation Error Console."

my favourite feature is having the Error console "Always on top" available under options .

http://console2.mozdev.org/index.html

Canon 400D Impressions

So i bit the bullet and bought a canon 400d. I now have a spare 350D!

• I love the big lcd screen
• The auto lcd black out when something is near the eye piece is cool
• The LCD screen needs an auto light level option, i am sick of switching down the intensity at night and then upping it the next morning!
• The buttons on the side aren't as nice as the 350d, but that could just be habit.
• The default profile on the 400d is darker in terms of contrast etc than the 350d by default.
• It's very light!!!!

Just found this page reviewing the len's i have, which i highly recommend

* Canon EF-S 17 - 85 mm IS USM
* Canon EF-S 10 - 22 mm USM

Attention Google: RSS search results sucks

I have getting increasing annoyed by google's indexing and returning of RSS in the results. It's web search and web means HTML, not XML!!!!!!!!

I prefer seeing a page on the original website than using google reader or igoogle.

Please give me options
* Hide RSS/XML from search results
* On the open with Google Reader or iGoogle page, give me the option to go to the original page

Observations on the Nokia N95

So i have had my N95 for a while now... i used to have a sony w800i which are both based on the symbian OS...

The new Firmware v12 is meant to of improved the maps,

A couple of annoying things with the N95
* No date and time on messages in the inbox or the message display (on a big screen and all!)
* Cell info only flashes up for a second when you unlock the phone
* why can't i read a file info the clipboard
* why is the clipboard size limited?
* Menu view as list should have a small text option
* I always hit the bloody gallery button when using the arrows
* The camera is slow to start!
* No flash light (there are apps which can turn on the red camera light tho)
* The ridiculous price of the navigation add on, per country!!
* I know it's probably a USB thing, but why do i need to select which mode the usb connection is in? that's so 1990's

Things i really like
* Cut and paste on a using the edit key :)
* the arrows are better than the w800i joystick which always breaks!
* having a GPS!
* The new version of map loader is much faster!

ORA-00919: invalid function

Just got this error message playing with some sql...

What caused it?

I had a "." instead of a "," between the list of values for an insert statement, which makes sense when i think about it.. haha

Fusion Festival 2007 Photos

Fusion was a lot of fun, it was cold wet and over 30,000 people which made finding people a challenge... still I managed to catchup with pretty much everyone i wanted to.

My personal music highlight was on sunday afternoon, Atmos with heaps of the berlin crew. It's always nice to know exactly where to be to catch up with long lost friends!

Course i still find the new Atmos music a little to soft, but it's still beautiful music (not at the headcleaner level, but better than anything since).

Which was in stark contrast to a lot of the music at the fusion, the main techno stage could hardly be called a dancefloor, standing floor would be more appropriate!

Good to see Thoma dancing like old times! Having Dan and John along was super! I will never forget the moment john brought the bogan element to fusion. Geli, I'm glad to know the old berlin v hamburg politik hasn't changed!

Kombinat (spelling??) was also a lot of fun to, almost moshing in a big group of familiar faces is great fun.....

Fusion Festival 2007 - Germany

If there's two things i've learnt since starting travelling two weeks ago is that

1. Air France really sucks
2. Fusion is going to be one hell of a reunion in amongst 30,000 people!

I have realised that I am to a degree on my physical IM world tour catchup (MSN,GTALK,SKYPE) ex-pats too! Still it's very nice to be naive in a brand new city and feel challenged by not knowing the local language!

I'm currently in an occupied house in Barcelona, just under the hill with the crosses on top below 'Parc Guell' which makes following the recommendation of all my friends who have been here before to go there very easy to follow!

For the poor souls in Melbourne freezing in the cold, yes it's warm humid and i am trying to make the beers cold enuff!

The Apple iRack

glumbert.com

my camera is making strange noises

small hickups when your travelling! on the way out to a techno party in Bernau i noticed my Canon 350d started to make a wierd whirrrrrr noise when i took a photo.

Of course, Germany is a terrible place in the world for service, 10-15 days to get it fixed and i need the original receipt which is in my bed side drawer in Melbourne... sigh

Time to upgrade, no time to mess around!

none of the big cheap stores here seem to carry the Canon EOS 400d body, the german prices aren't too bad compared to Melbourne prices, but i have no time, as i'm off to barcelona tomorrow.

turns out canon are having a 25 year celebration in spain with a 80 euro cash back offer! price before cash back is between 615-635 Euro...

cool, looks like i'm going camera shopping with Basti in Barcelona! cool :)

The great thing is that the 350d and 400d use the same batteries, everything else for the EOS series are compatible... only the batteries are sometimes different (the 300d batteries are bigger)

Oli and Nicole are Married!

I had the pleasure on the weekend of being the best man at a wedding of two very good old friends of mine here in Berlin. I met Oli and Nicole whilst travelling in and out of Berlin in 99. I have known them ever since and was there the day they got together as boyfriend and girlfriend.

From oli and nicol...

With Diana and myself as the 'traumsauger' (the maid of honor and best man ) at the Palais der Festungsgraben in Mitte in berlin, near the Spree river and Humbolt University, on a hot Berlin day, they both said 'Ja' and a new chapter in their live began.



Before the ceremony it was wonderful to catch up with a lot of old friends, all a wee bit older and wiser than last time i saw them.

Diana and I headed into the wedding with Wolfgang in his Porsche, which almost went terribly wrong as we took the wrong exit off the autobahn and ended up in the Grunewald which is a very long way from Mitte. Thankfully, I had a GPS in my phone and i managed to get us back on track and 42Km later we made it in time. Gotta love the geek toys!

The reception at Oli's parent's place was lovely in the backyard under the pine trees. Oli and Nicole didn't think we need to bring music, but Wolfgang said we should so my laptop became the sound system for the party. Great idea Wolfgang :)

I had played some Andromeda the night before to Wolfgang, who lay back described it as 'Kunst', so we kicked off our music with some beautiful tracks. Jan then took over Dj'ing and later on we had a great retro set with tracks from Atmos, Element, Shiva Chandra , 2raumwohnung and many more old tracks.




The food and wine was fanatastic and I even learnt some greek dancing. I am going to get some more dancing lessons from Oli before the Greek wedding.



All in all a beautiful wedding!

German Prepaid Sim Card recommendations

ok, optus roaming charges suck, time to get a local sim card

ALDI have a nice cheap german sim card

Everland Festival, Spain

BuzzT is playing here, looking very tempting, there may of been a bit of easyjet booking on my part yesterday.

Barcelona, hear i come on the 19th of June :)

i bought a n95

i bought a n95 last week, optus kindly upgraded my phone 6 moths before my contract was up. I had lotsa dramas with getting it delivered, but it all worked out in the end.

I have re-flashed my phone three times, as the default aussie profile has only english, inodnesian and polynesian... Stupid Optus, use the EURO-1 profile please...

the nokia software is ok, if a little non-standard (flash i/f). I miss some of the features from my w800i, the little things make life easier. But it's nice to be able to txt easily, as my old w800i joystick was very very sick.

maps are good on the n95, still two hard to load them tho. why does the phone have multiple modes? PC Suite should expose the phone a a drive... is that so hard to make work?

anyway, life's good :)

i also have a skype in number for melbourne.... no caller id which sucks, but it's good value for 10 pounds..

back in berrrrlin!

after over four years i'm back in berlin (long rrr in their for the english speakers)

memories are flooding back, we went out to olli's parents place yesterday and helped setup for the wedding. I heard all then plans for the wedding, my family becomes part of their family as i am the best man :)

which means i am a unmarried cousin of olli's which means i can play a role in the greek wedding, which is going to be a mix of old traditionals.

been chatting with basti in barcelona online of course (good when your in the same timezone too) Talked the Micha before, he sounds really good. Wolfgang is coming to berlin a day early to catch up, it was nice to ring him and surprise him yesterday. Katja is busy setting up two markets stalls which have to be moved coz their in the wrong spot, so she's flat chat busy. Nicole just came back from the dry cleaners which haven't yet cleaned her wedding dress... hope they do a 1 hour dry cleaning.. some of those services you take for granted in oz aren't so common here.

it's lovely weather here :)

Psynema does RIO!

I love the way the world works, sitting on my pc, I noticed basti( buzzT) has a new video on his skype comments.

I was sitting here @ my PC with Wastl, who made a suprise arrival unnannounced back from Alice Springs to catch up before i head to berlin. Anyway we were watching the video and suprise, Basti pops up on MSN asking about Olli and Nicole's wedding.....

Tis a small and beautiful world

Berlin here i come!

My flight is booked, i'll be in Berlin, ready for summer next Thursday :)

An interesting project

My friend Klara has made a video called wonder.

A scientific thought and artistic curiosity meet in wonder.

mega coding stint underway

i've been MIA to the world since last friday and the results are beginning to show.

been working on a mapguide 'workbench' using cfmx and mapguide open source via the java api. lots of oracle spatial, cfc's, some java, php, javascript, xml has been going on.

having jira and subversion makes life easy.

i've filed a lot of bugs with mapguide over the last week, now that it's an open source project it's nice to file bugs. before it became an open source project it was a very frustrating experience.

i have been enjoying a few programming journeys this week, hitting bugs in old data requiring SDO_MIGRATE.TO_CURRENT to be added under the hood inside the application, finding an memory issue with mapguide and the open source oracle fdo driver, niggling little things for developers and how mature the javascript world is :)

I find myself using cfabort a lot still with model glue. I am looking forward to the next (coldbox release 2.0.1) with the event tracing for requests. then i am going to migrate this code over to coldbox.

still i'm comfortable with model glue these days, i quite like it. even found wacking a bean in an enjoyable quick (as in the fastest way) solution.. finding i'm starting to enjoy software patterns and be really productive with them.

Pretty XML formatting using XSLT and Coldfusion

Code generated XML can be pretty ugly, i spent a little while googling trying to find an simple answer on how to pretty up xml with CFMX.

The answer? XSLT

Grab this XSLT script Pretty Print XML using XSLT, and load it into a variable like xlst_pretty_print.

Then using the xmltransform function #xmlTransform(xml_str,xlst_pretty_print)# you can get get nice formatted xml out.

hopefully this saves someone else a little time :)

Better feedback for long running tasks

I have been writing some data loading software at the moment which involves gigs and gigs of data. It can take hours to load. I spent time writing a progress monitor to allow monitoring.

I realised that what was much better than just saying 4 hours to go (and not the cute microsoft minutes remaining estimation either) it's really good to say,

5 Hours, 21 minutes remaining, Estimated finish time 4:32 PM

Giving a clock time is so much more human friendly.

Mapguide 1.20 beta 2 is showing promise

The new mapguide beta has been posted on the mapguide website.

A cool new feature in the latest beat is the schema report which allows you to preview a featuresource (aka datasource) via some php pages.

It works great with SHP but there is an issue with the FDO King.Oracle provider which uses tilda's in the FDO class name.. not so pretty and it doesn't work so well in XML land which is used a lot with Mapguide open source.

I did some digging and i have filed a bug report about the schema report xml conversion problem.

I have also filed a bug about trying to get the oracle fdo included in base release

Is separating organic rubbish out bad?

I just made a coffee and put the grounds into the box for the compost heap.

Is that bad for the environment?

Having organic rubbish in landfill is surely going to allow microbes to flourish and over a longer time accelerate the decomposition of all the rubbish.

I know some rubbish will takes 1,000s ++++ of years to breakdown, but I would imagine the process would be helped along if the mix of rubbish contained more organics than less...

interesting...

The Monthly is so refreshing!

I had heard about The Monthly a few times in the media over the last few months.

The fact they picked up an article by Eric Ellis which Fairfax had commissioned and then dumped profiling Wendi Deng, Rupert Murdoch's wife finally led me to purchase the May Edition.

I was on the way into RMIT for a photo shoot (I'll post more later on that) and I had a tram ride ahead of me and wanted some brain fodder.

The articles were long, well written and interesting.

Covering topics like the history of federal politics in Australia, the outrageous state of logging and political corruption in Tasmania with regards to Gunns Ltd and a background article on Raimond Gaita, subject of the film Romulus, My Father

$6.95 is a steal for such great writing, get into it!

When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel of Obsession

My dad put me onto this book, it's another one of my all time favourites.

Written by Irvin D. Yalom, M.D a psychotherapist, this is his first book. A work of fiction, it's places Josef Breuer, Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche together in Vienna in 1882.

This book like all his subsequent books is simply fantastic. Irvin draws upon his insights into therapy and constructs a journey into the mind of both patient and therapist.

I am loathe to talk too much about the content of this book as it simply has to be read. Towards the end of the book, there is a chapter that is simply the most insightful exploration of the male psyche and obsession that I have ever read.

Amazon link - When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel of Obsession

The Cosmic Serpent - DNA and the Origins of Knowledge

This is a great book which was given to me for my birthday a few years ago by Wolfgang Kundris.

It's a book by Jeremy Narby who is an anthropologist who was in South America and visited a Sharman and experienced what he described as Forest Television.

Being a scientist, he then undertook a 7 year journey through the history and cultures of the world to find a scientific explanation of what he experienced.

It's a fantastic read, good food for thought. Good for the scientifically minded and the not so scientifically minded alike.

The way Jeremy draws the link between the Australian Aboriginal's cave paintings of the Rainbow Serpent with chromosomes and the DNA's spiral helix of DNA was suprising.

As a white Australian who loves science, I had seen this image throughout my life and had never seen what is such an obvious connection.

Here's the amazon link - The Cosmic Serpent

Telstra asks and doesn't like the answer!

Telstra, Australia's main telco has a PR spin website called nowwearetalking (and no-ones listening)

This is the company responsible for the woeful broadband in Australia, hey, they even charge you for uploads.

They launched a campaign trying to shift the blame elsewhere, the government, the regulator (ACCC) anyone else but telstra.

They ran a poll which they took down off the aforementioned website asking who was too blame. over 13,000 people responded with 97.1% blaming telstra.

It's still visible on the poll archive page, here's a screenshot as i'm am sure they will take it down pretty quick... it's a PR site after all



found on theinquirer

moral of the story: Don't ask a question if you don't like the answer!

AMD's Borat Video

Securing Apache when checking out with Subversion

adding the following to your apache.conf will stop people browsing your .svn folders which contain information about things like you subversion server address.

<FilesMatch "^.svn">
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
</FilesMatch>

the same would go for .cvs folders

JIRA Permissions for Groups

I love JIRA, but sometimes i get a little confused.. doesn't take long to work it out tho..

If you create a group you might need to assign is permissions, like jira-users if you want users in the group to be able to login in.

Look under global permissions in the admin menu and then at the bottom of the screen

Nice Apache Win32 Subversion HOWTO

HOWTO: Subversion for Windows with Apache server - a beginner's guide [version 0.4]

How to setup a SSH Server on windows

How to install OpenSSH sshd server and sftp server on a Windows 2000 or Windows XP

then you can use two of the great programs available to access the server...

one is WinSCP which is a Free SFTP, FTP and SCP client for Windows. Whats nice about this tool is you can remotely mount the enitre remote filesystem within this tool... works with linux and other unix type servers as well..

I quite like the ctrl-c which compares the local and remote directory and selects the modified files.

the other is of course Putty which is like telnet on steroids... not that you should ever be using telnet these days... it's way to insecure... use SSH!

CF Frameworks for CFEclipse and Coldbox

CFEclipse has a new xml driven framework explorer, CF Frameworks plugin

now coldbox doesn't have xml.. mmm... it should be possible to generate an xml description of a coldbox application ..

Luis, the author of Coldbox has commented on my previous entry that The request context snapshot is now integrated in the debugger and will be due for 2.0.1 due probably next week. So your wish is my command!! JEJE. actually it turned out to be an awesome little feature. I believe you will like it. You actually see the state of the request context as its manipulated and traversed throught events. Very very useful.

i hear thousands of cfabort and cfdump tags screaming and whithering in pain at the thought.

I hope there's a requestContextTrace() for use within an event handler :)