TOCPCs – The Elite Geeks Blog

In all the segments of TV and radio, containing Tony Abbott, he doesn’t seem very confident.

What have the Liberal party hoped to achieve by having Tony Abbott as their ‘leader’ ? He lacks the confidence in his answers to simple questions, and as is typical, dodges many of them.

Julia on the other hand is a very confident speaker. Ask her any question and she’s pretty well on the ball with a response, no buzz words, no ‘umm’ or ‘ahh’, just clear responses that address the question.

This is far from a +1 to Julia, it is simply pointing out that Mr. Abbott is a crappy public speaker, could use a bit of confidence and a bit more understanding in the issues he is apparently supplying answers to.

Watching ABC last night, the question was put to him on the thoughts of why does he not approve of the NBN fibre network, when it would deliver faster speeds, far into the future?

His answer was far from addressing the question, he did indicate the investment should be done by commercial entities and the government should be plugging the gaps, but that’s not what the issue being addressed was that it would deliver faster speeds far into the future.

Think of buying a fleet of 2011 cars in December, and replacing them in June because they have 10000ks on the clock. That’s what I expect will happen with wireless in the future, demand will increase, inevitably into the future, the internet is far from being torn down, demand is far from reducing. Growth is inevitable.

Provisioning a network for that is perfect, we won’t have to put much into fibre investment in the future if we put it together now – but he seemed to not capture that point. NBN carries with it many other good points of use to our government.

As the speeds are faster, more and more people can get what they need done without taking the daily commute to the office – this causes less traffic congestion (in theory), and less carbon emissions – saving our Kyoto dollar.

As the speeds are faster, more medicine can reach more places, faster – it is possible for doctors to be doing more remotely for example.

Education – the obvious. Students today already have internet access at a very young age – the internet was still barely breaking in when I was at school – now, it’s pretty much everywhere. There’s masses of content out on the internet, and it’s useful to people of various ages, including students of age 6 to students of age 26. They all have varying interests, all of those can be explored online – with the world as the limiting factor.

To educate future proof Australians they are going to need content that is ‘from the future’ the best way to get that is to get our kids content straight off the world stage, and the best way to do that is via the internet – no postage needed.

I’m sure there are many niche areas of education for example, that can’t easily be met at your local university either – the internet addresses these, this can prompt advances in medicine and innovation.

Tony just didn’t seem to get the concept during the segment of TV – if private sectors do it, they might be more efficient, they might have the better budgeting, but they won’t be looking for the benefits the government gains noted above. They’ll be looking at the almighty dollar. The targets who could benefit won’t get it (price), and those who can get it, won’t benefit from it.

He also dodged an answer surrounding economics, surprise, surprise. He was asked where the funds for paying the debt would be coming from, his answer did not address it – it was phrased to him in different ways.

I’m tired of the political ads. Scare campaigns. I’m more worried though at the ability of people to express their reasons behind their votes. Tony won’t win if you asked me – Julia is likely because of the popular vote surrounding ‘first female PM’. It’ll be amusing to see her as the first PM, be voted out months after. But I doubt it’ll happen.

It’ll be even more amusing if we see Bob Brown were to be our PM! Then again, he does share similar facial characteristics to former PM, Paul Keating. I did Google Image search it to be sure!

Even if the dumb fools are wrong, for a business to survive, grow and demonstrate a customer commitment, they have to hold even the most difficult of customers highly. The customers, ultimately pay the bills.

One thing I learnt many years ago, is just how strong word of mouth can be. The influence of viral marketing is still not as great as simple word of mouth. Word Of Mouth is the single best form of marketing out there.

I’ve had a negative experience recently, and I’ve tried very, very, very hard to resolve that with them. They have ignored many emails and fax requests to them to address simple issues about something we purchased.

They read the emails – we’ve got read receipts confirming that – and we’ve even got emails showing the hand off of the issue, however, it gets ignored.

I won’t go into the details of it, because it’s now the target of a Fair Trading complaint – they had ample warning that it was going to go there if they failed to respond, they didn’t. To be exact, I indicated to them that the alternative to responding and resolving the complaint would involve ‘more than 3 specific actions’ – and I’m committed to it.

The Fair Trading complaint is just the beginning of resolving this issue, once that’s resolved. The company involved also has broken certain regulatory aspects of another body they are a member of, we’ll get to that after. I’m going to set about a few other items that should in theory, see the issue gain the right attention.

Word Of Mouth is the best form of marketing. I can only tell so many people about the negative experiences. But that’s OK, I have other, more interesting, concepts that I’ll use to compliment word of mouth.

I’ll even collect enough data on it, and once complete, publish it. The even more amusing bit is, the resource used, is actually advertised by the company involved.

If I were the responsible party of that business, I’ll have definitely addressed the issues raised, it’s not like they were overly difficult to address either – it’s a case of looking at what we have in writing from them, comparing that to what actually happened and proposing a resolution. All up, maybe 30 minutes of time. Piece of piss.

Even if it were to take far longer than 30 minutes, a simple “We are looking into this” would give them some credit, and probably have averted the complaint to Fair Trading and reduced my desire to research and determine other methods of resolving the issue – I would have simply waited!

There are businesses out there that do care about customers, I have to say though, the best service comes from sole traders, they own and run the business, you quickly get an idea of the person, whether they know their shit or not, you get a fair dinkum price, and if there are issues, they’ll probably take the time to sort it out, rather than ignore you and try to hide behind the company.

Some companies though, do have complaints teams in operation. I’ve seen this in banking and telecommunications. I know Australia Post has one but it’s not very effective!

Resolving customer complaints is rarely difficult, it’s a case of looking at what the customer is having issues with, thinking about whether they are right, or wrong, and in either case, proposing something that quells the complaint – be it a small gesture of good will, to canceling the entire transaction. Costs of doing business really.

And I’ve got no idea who is worthy of my ‘valuable’ vote.

Personally, I’d make voting a lot of user participation. Then, it’ll become a mess for the politicians to try and convince people that:
A) They are worthy of voting for.
B) That they are also worthy of enrolling / committing to vote for.

This way, people aren’t forced to donkey vote.

It doesn’t stop the issue of populist crap, like the old Kevin 07 garbage that encouraged voters purely due to a catch phrase.

The Chasers War On Everything did a “.. and this person voted” peice in many of their episodes which spot on described the issue. People vote, but that may not necessarily mean they have the intellectual capacity to exercise their democratic right.

I’m also tired of the scare campaigns. WorkChoices was and is one of the most commonly used scare campaigns deployed by political parties.

When you look at the ‘overview’ of what WorkChoices was about, it wasn’t exactly bad. It put the negotiations of wage, conditions, in the hands of employer and employee, under a binding agreement – the way it should be!

We all buy services and products from various organisations, many of which form a contract, even if no physical contract is signed. It shouldn’t be any different in a workplace level.

The argument against this is where larger corporations or immature management are involved, such as Telstra for example, who may not be so willing to negotiate a rate with a singular worker, as an example. But, if that’s the case, surely it wouldn’t be far fetched to have no one signing agreements with that company, forcing the required changes for them to adapt.

That wouldn’t happen though, too many people depend on the nanny state that this country has already become to push them through the most basic things in life..

I’ve looked so far at the Labor and Greens policies, some good, some not so good, some aren’t really policies at all. As I was going through though, I took the view that anything I thought was crap would take them from a 0, to a negative number. Nothing was to ever be so good to get them past 0.

Therefore, the negatives only were counted – this way the stuff that either didn’t matter, or was good, didn’t form part. ALP scored -3, Greens -2.

The vote-o-matic (without seeing any of it’s logic), gave the decision for me, to: Australian Greens, Socialist Alliance, and Australian Labor Party.

Strangely, that did reflect my views upon reading their websites. Socialist Alliance is too pie-in-the-sky to become reality. Australian Greens could get the vote, but on a national scale, it won’t matter much. Australian Labor Party – makes sense to what I’ve heard for policies, but that’s because Abbott, to me, has kept his mouth shut – a lot.

The campaign for Liberal has mostly been (at least in my view), “End the wasteful spending”, and then attacks on Labor. What I want to know – and all I want to know – is what spending will they do ? Where will they invest for our national future? Julia – is at the very least, giving us that in the advertising.

The Liberal website was down for considerable time so didn’t get a chance for a review.

On the note of the election too – Locally, we see very little campaigning by the local members – they have their faces now plastered up around all the streets locally. Some of them on the back streets, but then, I see their faces and wonder – what have they done ? Not enough.

… so the ancient Charles Babbage once authored.

Data Validation is a very, very, very important aspect of any user facing application, be it a website, be it a program, be it a simple calculator. The data must be validated to ensure it conforms to the expected input, prior to being used for logic processes and resultant output.

So, when I recently went through some data and saw such elementary and simple things like postcodes not being checked against ‘states’ and suburbs spelt incorrectly, I was immediately thinking – who the heck gets paid to write such garbage..

Unfortunately, that is the case, and as is the reality in many workplaces, one which isn’t easily overcome.

I’ve always held the view that a user, be it malicious, incompetent or just plain lazy, can and often will supply applications (website pages, actual programs, scripts, anything) with garbage data.

The responsibility for testing the validity of that data lies wholly with the application author, and where they fail to do that, they’ve failed in the development of that application.

.. Another reminder of the complete incompetence of some of the people who somehow manage to hold jobs in Australian workplaces for so long.

Yesterday, I noted the solar system was producing around 1000W maximum, today was different.

The clouds were out in full force today, as the drips show, and the peaks were not ~1000W, but rather, 1500 then 500, as the clouds blocked and unblocked the sunlight.

Hot Water on the other hand is largely not impacted by clouds, because it relies on heat, of which a colorbond roof typically gets plenty of from the Sun (heats up quick, cools down quick).

Winter isn’t the best time to be checking performance, but I’d like for a few more cloud free days like yesterday, to figure out why Solar Power doesn’t reach its peak on cloud free days.

My temperature sensors arrived today, so will try and get those on the Arduino tonight (after getting the new motherboard up and Ubuntu installed on the server), and run a test of having it and the piezo transducer on at the same time.

I pondered earlier today, how it would be nice to have an endless budget and lots of land. Reminds me of a property we noticed on eBay some time back, in a bushland setting – it was tempting, if it weren’t for the location and lack of work such a location would involve.

Today was the best day I’ve seen for our solar system in a while, it’s cloud free, the temperature is moderate – not excessive.

We broke 5kWH instead of the more desired, 6 – 7 I anticipated based on the design of the system and the figures we were provided. We’ve had pretty much cloudy days and rain for a while.

Our Solar Hot Water system is showing better signs of life today too, having previously exhausted all the hot water when our granny flat resident assumingly sucked it all down in one day last week.

I’ve been playing with an Arduino, and some DS18s20 sensors to capture temperature data, but, in the process have caused two sensors to break, so waiting on the replacements to redo that – the plan will be to check the accuracy of the sensors of the hot water system, and gather an idea (using temperature sensors and piezo transducers) of consumption of house and of the flat over time.

I’ve had a CurrentCost CC128 (and a plug for Grant at Smart Now for his fantastic service) in for a good while now (about a month I think), because part of switching to solar meant time of use metering from Energy Australia. The Current Cost meter gives us amazing power over our consumption in that sources of waste are very easily identified. The general rule is: If you aren’t enjoying the consumption / it isn’t necessary, off it goes. The server is getting an upgrade to a Intel D510 atom setup as a result – 10W compared to the 100W base it has now has got to be good.

Time of use penalizes high usage during the 2pm – 8pm period weekdays, while gives us a good off peak rate for our usage in the 10pm – 7am time frame, which is just a matter of adjusting to – Don’t bother using washing machine, or oven til later at night – works well!

We consulted Energy Australia for a quote on the metering for the flat, I was hoping to have that seperate so we could get a solid idea of our own consumption, and not so much as billing for the flat seperate, just an idea of our own relative to the bill.

They wanted close to $600 for it – stuff that.

The clamps are easy to install behind the panel, but I won’t detail that here for obvious idiot prevention reasons (and it’s actually illegal, apparently, for someone not licensed in NSW to go behind a panel – meh). I’ve got a house clamp – covers two house circuits, lights and stove, a clamp around the flat (which has a 400V fuse..), and one on the Off Peak feed to the hot water system.

The device captures data transmitted to it wirelessly (using the 433Mhz range) and the other end attaches to my server (which is always on) so I can graph and monitor it using rrdtool and the bash script I put together, shouting the data over the broadcast address of the network, along with a gnome, python applet in Ubuntu.

The Aurora Inverter has RS485 attached to it, with Cat5e cable attaching to an RS485 to RS232 adapter, and responds to queries of it’s usage / generation.

At this time, 5.16kW out to the grid and as the graph below shows, unaffected by cloud cover today. The result could have been better, the peak should have been closer to 1.52kw, but barely broke 1.0 for some unexplained reason. The graph shows input to the Aurora Inverter, so output is of course, less.

The Hot Water is also of interest because of the rain performance issues. The temperature on the roof was peaking at 70oC today, and the tank (measured at the bottom, not the top, was 58oC.

The thermostat is set to 65oC, so there should be very little work by the electric element required, and therefore a reduced amount consumed (in theory – I will check).

The purpose of the monitoring of the hot water is to determine how it responds to temperature changes, and that will allow appropriate configuration.

It’s not unheard of for installers of solar products to get it wrong – in the case of the Apricus systems, putting too much compound on the roof or tank temperature sensors, meaning it thinks it’s colder than it actually is. I plan to test that theory by the return pipe, as it should get as hot as the water flowing through it (which I will test by the tempering valve, set at a poor 45oC – so I can check the pipe in relation to that!).

Update, our hot water normally heats up at 10.20pm, it did today (after the house has all had showers, etc), and it finished at 10.55pm (assumption here is that the temperature is spot on, and a less amount of energy used – cause the Sun heated the water). Our tenant in the flat isn’t exactly a conservative person, it would seem.

I had an issue recently where I wanted some data to get to all machines, all at the same time. The data would not be requested – I needed the data as it came in – from my CurrentCost meter – for purposes of testing around the house on the laptop.

The solution was to setup the bash script to echo the data it was collecting (for MRTG purposes), to go out as a UDP broadcast packet to the network.

It was annoying to setup, because current versions of netcat differ to those I was using originally, and eventually found the need for a timeout wait on the netcat command.

It works great tho, and spawned the next idea of an Applet to monitor the Aurora output, the CC128 consumption, and anything else I want to spit out on any part of our local network.

It’d work great as a file copy mechanism too – base64 encode each file, and send that way. Each machine on a network typically receives broadcast packets, and so it’s no issue to spread the same data to all machines at the same time (instead of sending it to one machine at a time).

I like the idea of it – and am amazed I didn’t come across that before. It gives me the data on as many machines as I care to have listening for it – and is relatively reliable (if I wanted guaranteed, I’d not be using wireless..).

I last wrote about the front yard’s large wet hole, I’ve since proceeded further with that, and now we have the treated pine posts in.

4 posts, standing upright in concrete that set pretty quickly. I did that about two weeks ago.

Last weekend I got very little done, that’s because I spent some time putting together some temperature sensors I got and set about testing them out. I’m keen to determine the difference in how the house responds and the room temperature over time.

The sleepers and besser blocks have been cluttering the front yard for some time, I plan to reuse the besser blocks as mini planters for the kids – who will love to grow some small plants in them.

The sleepers are to be cut to size, and bolted to the posts in the ground, where we’ll then get some more treated pine (or perhaps a hybrid of some sort ) and get that setup as our stairs.

Then, the front yard needs some color – so we’ll need to eventually look at some plants for that to tidy that up. Before or after the fencing tho..

There are many various languages about, and which one to use for a particular purpose is a decision in itself.

I’ve got many choices when it comes to putting something together for a particular purpose, for example, recently, I’ve been using bash to handle simple tasks.

PHP was my previous language of choice for anything, complex or simple – it’s a great scripting language of course, and more capable then a bash shell script. It’s mostly used as a web server scripting language, but that never stopped me making several monitoring scripts, and some asterisk AGI scripts using it. I’ve also used it for other purposes like any shell – working a list of 200 domain names at one point for a specific task – wasn’t worth writing a file.

Then there is Perl, another good language. I’ve dealt with it before, and could still create with it. I haven’t used it recently, because of a lack of purpose, I don’t have a need for it – but much of what I’ve done in PHP could be replicated in Perl, and likely better. I do have a perl based IRC trivia bot that is reasonably solid – I’ve hacked on some MySQL concepts to it as well.

I’ve also worked with Visual Basic and VBScript – Microsoft specific languages, incompatible with Linux without resorting to Wine is a serious negative – but on the other hand, it’s a very readable language.

Java and Javascript – I’ve not dealt with Java before, and have no plans to, however Javascript, has always been a must to know, and with the introduction of AJAX and other similar web browser interactive concepts, it remains a very relevant language.

We have .Net (the reinvention of visual basic, introduction of C#). I have no idea why anyone would desire .NET, it’s not cross platform, it’s another language to learn that could have an expiry date any day now (just look at the original Visual Basic.. ), and closed source. I’m certain people have developped some great applications with it – I’ve used it once, for a payments page, the IDE was nice, the code read well – but I’d have rathered PHP – which is cross platform  and doesn’t seem to have a use-by date.

Then, I’ve now recently come across Python, and it’s a fantastic language, it’s cross platform. In just this week I’ve managed to make a simple application listen for UDP packets on broadcast, and send out libnotify alerts on my ubuntu machine. I use it so I don’t need to run netcat and monitor it there!

I’ve dipped into C/C++ before – it’s a far more proven language, being around for a much longer time and still in wide use (oh, and it’s cross platform). It’s not very readable, but I’ve heard around circles that if you can learn C / C++ you can learn Java. The structure of the code is very similar.

There are many different languages out there, from my view, I’d have thought you’d need to be multilingual.

I now ponder, for those who seek to start a true career in programming, what language do they master – why would they?

For me, I’ve got no problems picking up languages, but to master one is to commit to it for a longer term – and to me, Python is there, Perl is there, PHP is there, Bash will be there. .Net certainly will not be there – it’s too much of a risk.

With open source languages, and the fact they work cross platform (meaning I can load up PHP on a windows server, and a Linux server), there’s no reason to doubt the viability of  the language.

There’s not many ways one can set about mastering any particular language however, most industries I can think of will be using a combination of many – and we can’t all master all those languages – only to have them replaced.

The besser block steps were never going to work out, so I want to start doing something that will work – the besser blocks reassigned to the kids for planter boxes.

I’ve been playing with some different methods of putting the steps in, but am ensuring they comply with the BCA, which sets standards for risers, goings and slope relationship.

The new idea – chuck in some treated pine steps, which should be relatively easy – supported by concrete in the ground, posts come up, bolt to the stringers, to which the treads fill the middle.

Some oil to change the look from treated pine to merbau hardwood (or similar, to match our threshold), and it’ll look really good (so I figure).

The holes for the posts were dug, 30cm down,  but I’m putting the posts down 15cm, as that should be plenty, and leaves me enough to do it out of one 2.4m length.

After I dug the holes out, I went back to the first one, there was water sitting in there – but it hasn’t been raining, so I see the water is seeping downhill, which matches the tiny slope that our block has. The holes filled with water wouldn’t be ideal to set the concrete in, so I’ve had to call it a day.

I took the sleepers which were to serve as the stringers, and put them over the holes. Put the current besser blocks on top of them.

The concrete slabs that were the original treads, placed in front of it, and a sign, “Beware, Large Wet Hole” currently sits on that with bricks holding it in place to ensure no one is dumb enough to fall into the wet hole.

Hopefully, next weekend, the hole will be dry, and we can then set about inserting concrete (quick set!), and levelling the posts, ready to later, determine how long and how to cut the stringers, and later, chisel them out for the possibly, treated pine sleepers – less we find hardwood, to go in between and coachscrews hold it into place.

My partner finds some sort of issue with the sign.. Maybe it’s due to it being made of paper, and so won’t hold up to the rain.

I had spent the last week in Sydney for work.

The best part of it is what can actually get progressed by simply being there, with the appropriate suppliers..

The worst part – CityRail’s time table is poor, it takes around 1 hour, 45 minutes to get there, and that means waking up early, and getting home relatively late.

The train trip is through several tunnels, and so FM radio reception cuts in and out. The Vodafone coverage across aspects of the journey, for example, Artarmon station, is non-existent.
The boredom associated with little to do but watch night turn into day, and then day into night makes the trip ever more tiresome.

Then, you have the patches where the train isn’t moving at all, for example, Friday, we spent about 5 minutes of the trip waiting for a train to clear a platform at Hornsby. These trains run on timetables, yet everyday, they can’t have a clear platform ready for a train..

I’d suggest a faster service – since much of the area the train travels through is isolated, it wouldn’t be too far fetched to increase the speed of travel, resulting in faster trips. Not just an extra 10ks either, I’m thinking more along the lines of Bullet Train, 200+ – that’ll make the trip much faster.

And as for possible trains already at a platform? Easily solved by adding another line purely for express services which would help avoid the regular services that stop at each station – as if catch that train, it’d be a very slow week!

For some reason, the face to face approach leaves me more confident in things getting fixed. It almost certainly helped that we went in armed with examples of the issues to correct, and discovering what the cause of most of the issues were made many of the solutions far more simple (if only this was done last time… ).

It seems to get further then an email, carefully constructed to convey the seriousness of the issues. I’d have thought the email would get a better response, but face to face tops the list of ‘how to get *it done’.

I’m not surprised by my team ‘mate’, who as expected as far from improved, remaining the same old, same old, asking many questions, and for some reason, lacking the ability to just do it. There’s an issue that took 4 weeks in his hands, knocked out in just 10 minutes with a phone call by me.

Then I still have the international issues, but I think we can solve many of those, I’ll stop being helpful to much of the staff who request it, and allow them to think on their own. I liken much of my tasks to similar to a wiki page, you are reading it, you get familiar with it, you find a minor issue, you click edit and correct it. I do that, except, go further and fix it. I’ll take away that ‘fix it’ bit and leave the issue for them to figure out. It’s not easy to do – ignoring an obvious issue, and leaving it there, because you know it’s not going to get better. Oh well.

I’ll look forward to monitoring, I’m hopeful of improvements from the changes put forward, many of which should (and would if it was just my choosing), improve experiences all round, and reduce the numbers and duration. It’ll be good (like, waiting in suspense good), to see the results.

Back at home now, I’ve got a curtain to fix up, the front steps need fixing, a wireless sensor to finish building, and come Monday, find out when the heck our meters are getting installed – it’s been ‘within 2 weeks’ for 6 weeks now – a disappointing result from the company involved.

I’ve always thought that anyone who claims something is possible is simply wrong. I’ve seen the same thought used as a quote later on, by someone else:
“Anyone who claims something is impossible is too lazy to find a way”.

I think that summarises the thought clearly, and I get reminded of it each time when my 5 year old wants something.

“Can we do X?”
“No, I’m working at the moment.”
“Oh, get mum to work then.”

“Can you play ‘what’s the time Mr Wolf”
“Not at the moment, I’m helping <the 1 year old>”
“To which he will reply, “put her down then”".

He doesn’t see something as impossible, he sees an alternative solution to the problem.

Recently, we were down at the lake, the water level has risen, and covers a timber jetty, enough that the jetty is covered, but not too deep. And as a result of dredging activities, the water is dark and isn’t ‘clear’.

The thought at the time was, you could walk on water – it’s not impossible, you just need the right circumstances. Of course, that was only a random thought.

The rate of technology advancement is incredible. So incredible, that if something is impossible, it won’t be for long.

I’m thinking at the moment, as I sit here on a Acer TravelMate 4670, with a CPU that runs at around 1Ghz – and wireless of 54Mbps. What are we looking at for our kids when they are 25?

I’m fairly sure whatever they are using, will be mobile, very mobile, small, wireless, very long battery life. Speeds that exceed today’s super computers.

What exact challenges will they be solving (considering the point that nothing is impossible)?

It’s all very unclear, we can look at our history and see that the world as we know it will be vastly different when they are older. And as always, those who don’t adapt, will be left behind.

I’m happy that he doesn’t immediately see something as impossible, that he can adequately find solutions to problems presented to him. Even if that still means that he can’t have his desired resolution. The mere suggested resolution (as opposed to accepting whatever X excuse) shows he can really think on his feet.

I took the time this weekend to start fixing the front steps, with very little planning to work with, I decided I’d at the very least get the continue the path to the house, so that at least there is something there to support the previous besser block attempt.

The problems with the besser block attempt are in the soil below the blocks, they sink when the soil gets wet, making the step collapse which then requires rebuilding, and causes the overall level of the step to decrease – so it’s a rocky mountain climb to get inside.

I had initially thought the area would easily be covered with half or at most, 1 bag of ready mix concrete. I was wrong, it covers 0.2m2, and the area I have is 68cm x 52cm. But, I did buy two bags in the knowledge my attempt would probably fail.

I mixed up the first bag with water, there’s no exact measurement on the bag, but it did state to mix the whole bag with water, so it was done. I mixed the bag with ample water, and it was pretty thick – I added a bit more, and we had a slurry going.

“Too much water” my partner said, as she was reading Google whilst I stuck into it. She was probably right.

So, I mixed up the second bag, ensuring I used less water and I really thought that it did not meet the consistency of concrete, it looked like a very dry cake, breaking up as I was picking it up.

I proceeded anyway, and as I shoveled it into the pieces of timber I had cut to form the area for it to set, the aggregate sunk, the concrete remained on top.

I was surprised at this, but worked with it, the result by about 12pm today was fairly wet on top. As the afternoon progressed, it got a fair bit dry, it started to look like beach sand after the water has ran away from it.

I wrote my name in it, and this confirmed it wasn’t as dry as I thought it was. Much disagreement came from the opposing force, so I covered up my name, and it settled to form a flat-ish surface.

I’m not sure how the edging will turn out, it’ll be covered anyway, so it’s leaning towards the couldn’t care less pile, but if I can neaten it up, it might be a bit of handy knowledge to have when we finally get around to tackling some plant life in the barren desert land that is our front yard.

On the plus side though, I figured out to dig up some pesky plants that we litterally slaughtered with the shovel last time (but they came back). I watered down the soil really well – far more water in the soil then I used for the concrete task – and then got the shovel in behind it and wedged out most of the root system.

I did that to both of them, and then got the roundup out, and sprayed the roots that remained and could not be dug out.

Hopefully, we don’t see them again, and once we get the budget back on track, we’ll get some plant life in, and see it grow. The other idea is probably to run a small front covered entrance area out from the sunroom/office. But that might not happen – I’m adverse to it, because, who entertains at the front of their house? I could be wrong, have been.

The bag quoted curing time of 7 days, so by next Sunday, we should be able to restore the besser blocks and place the steps on them again. It’ll look awful, but that’s not what I’m trying to solve.

We’ll know more in 7 days, hopefully it doesn’t crack or break away (and also dries..).

There are other thoughts in my mind at the moment, a new concrete area at the black of the granny flat, which we would extend a ‘bedroom’ for it onto. But I’m not going to do that, council approvals and all.

I’m still focusing on my wireless temperature sensor concept, waiting on the wireless kit from China, some resistors from Hong Kong, and some diodes from Tasmania, oh, and the full concept of how it all goes together.

Babies, and babies and more babies.

I’m actually referring to Linux and my continual abuse of root for tasks that don’t belong to root.

Recently, at work I’ve been working on a few minor tasks, however, because the system is locked down, I’ve ran into issues – for example, recently, I hit an issue with trying to copy files from one directory to another. They are owned by seperate users, and so I couldn’t read from one to the other.

On my own setup, I’d have already been root, because that’s how I’ve done things for the last several years. This abuse of the root login has the consequence that sure, I can piece software together, and get things to work, but take away the root login, and all of a sudden the security that was always bypassed gets in the way.

I’m progressively avoiding the root login altogether, and using one of my own, it’s easier to avoid since root is no longer allowed to login, but it’s still the permissions issues that will get in the way doing their job.

I’ve previously abused cron for much of my tasks, but a few weeks back when I wrote mysql_monitor, I wrote that and it is started using an init script, instead of cron.

I’ll keep at it, and hopefully it’s not so much of a huge issue to pick up on the issues that were always avoided using root.

I’m also lazy though, so will likely resort to using root when something gets difficult for the normal user. One thing I did learn is that the execute permission, is needed for other users to list a directory, nuts to that (execute a directory.. wtf?)

The painter spent the last few days finishing off painting the house. He did a great job on it, and even went further than he had to / quoted.

For testing colours, I figured, I would paint the front of the back fibro shed, which can be seen from the street (which meant our testing would not be wasted).

For the shed though, there was a bit of timber and a lot of old silicon from the awning they had there that the building report marked as unsafe. It was ripped down prior to us moving in, so it was a non issue  – else I would have ripped it down already anyway.

The painter though, painted the front of it himself, so that saved me doing it, which kinda removed something for me to do – a bad thing, I get bored easily.

The brick work at the front is probably the next thing to tackle, it needs a coat of render and painting – the painter having already tidied up the brickwork on the side (and again, it wasn’t quoted work).

The colours – took 5 sample pots, and a good 15 or so colour cards to decide, and the colour we pick is no less than “Self Destruct” – a great name for a house that’s nearing 60 years of age.

So, our colour scheme is: Roof, Downpipes, Doors, Frames, and Fascia – Colourbond Deep Ocean. Eaves – White On White. Wall cladding and concrete stumps are all Self Destruct.

The sand / beach effect is there in that colour on the walls, as well, as a colour that is nearing some sort of coffee, is what my partner has claimed. It need not matter, I’m happy it wasn’t the green the colour looked like during the testing.

The exterior is mostly complete, we are having a break for now I think, pay for it all, and then finally, we’ll go on to a much larger interior change. Of note (but expected), is the exterior looks about 15 times better than the interior does, the paint on the interior is all marked and scratched, espiecially in the second bedroom.

I’ve been toying with the solar hot water system lately, the install doesn’t seem to be trapping as much heat, there was one day there where it was fine, yet the off peak was doing most of the work (so the meter reading led us to believe).

The solution (so far), was to leave the solar collector in the sun for longer. The system works like below.

The collector sits in the sun (on the roof), and gets hot as the sun hits it, there is a temperature sensor on the collector, and one on the inlet of the tank (the bottom).

When the temperature at the collector reaches 12oC hotter than the tank inlet valve, the water is pumped up, circulating through the tubes, and arriving back at the tank.

Hot water rises, leaving cold at the bottom, so as the hot water is returned, it’s released into the bottom, heating up the rest of the water as it goes up.

The pump cuts off when the collector is 6oC hotter than the tank, allowing the collector to remain hotter, and get even hotter faster, because we aren’t taking away much of the heat.

The temperature settings that were set by the installers (or perhaps arrived to the installer), was 2oC for pump cut off, and 6oC for pump on.

I looked up the programming mode, and find that I probably should have moved it off off peak, because the tank need only reach 60oC every 3 days to prevent biological contamination, and can be set to heat the water if it drops below 45oC – this would mean it would run much less, as the off peak kicking in always heats up to 60oC, and it will do that daily.

The other short coming of it is there is no tank temperature, only inlet, it’s a short coming because the tank could be at 50oC and the bottom could be at 30. If that were the case, I wouldn’t honestly care, because the water would still be hot. This would mean it would not need to turn on the heating element thus saving power – but it doesn’t know, and it doesn’t have control over off peak power, and I’d rather have both hot water, and no biological contamination, so we are stuck with leaving it on.

Of interest is Energy Australia’s relay control kicks in after 9am, and not in the night like one might expect, we’ve seen it spinning away.

As a test today, I flicked off the off peak switch this morning, I wanted to see if the collector performed the same, or if it was pumping hot water up as a result of the off peak heating kicking in (pumping hot water up there would have a cooling effect).

It was raining today, the off peak switch was off, and it peaked at 45oC, which was pretty good. I’m waiting on tomorrow, hopefully no rain, and we’ll kill the off peak switch again tomorrow.

Today, I turned it back on at 3pm, and it roared into action, consuming 1kWH in the space of about 15-20 minutes. I suspect had we not, the water may have gone a little cold.

I’m still now spending a lot of time researching two concepts, a wireless thermometer logging data to the PC, and wirelessly capturing data from the inverter.

The 2 problems with the inverter will be one, how do I torque the side panel screws down to 1.5Nm, keeping the inverter safe from water / etc, and two, the inverter possibly uses a protocol by Aurora, which isn’t available for review – but I’ll see what I find, if anything, else the windows software can fetch the data manually.

The wireless transceivers will prove useful in some way, I’m sure.

I spent much of yesterday afternoon and night trying to locate a RS232 or RS485 to bluetooth circuit that needed to be, cheaper than $50 (the cost of running the cable myself), could be powered by a 9V battery or a combination of AA batteries, and the result at the other end had to be serial.

The idea being that the inverter I have can output RS485 which gives us details about how much it’s putting out, the temperature, and we can then measure efficiency and make any further adjustments to it to improve efficiency.

I’m not installing anything yet, as I’m still waiting on the gross meter to be installed (been a bit of time actually, getting impatient). The company contracted to do it claimed 2 weeks last week, so hopefully in the next 7 days we are grid connected.

Back to the serial idea though, I can take RS485, use an RS232 converter and that gives us the ability to get the data to the PC. A wireless transmitter and receiver is what would be needed, and Bluetooth being the most common, used in industrial applications for monitoring / controlling various machinery.

I’ve found a few candidates in my search yesterday:

This PS110W Wi-Fi Serial Device Server – 1 Port offers much of what is needed, including RJ45 if we later abandon wireless. Not sure on price though.

I then looked into the LTC100 which seems a better device. Pricing internationally puts it at about $50 AUD, but I’ve asked RF modules if they can provide a price and then I might get it via them.

The advantages of the LTC100 are that it can be port powered, which means I can supply it 9V via the serial port. Getting the data from it should be relatively easy, I’d need a bluetooth adapter, paired to it, and then using the SPP (Serial Port Profile) to create a virtual serial port. Attach that to my Virtual Server 2005 or VirtualBox virtual machine, and then probe the serial port in the virtual machine for the data.

Then, place that data into RRD Graphs and use that for comparison of day and seasonal changes, and to detect performance issues. Think MRTG Threshold alerts – “Your Solar System is performing worse than a drained AA battery”.

The hardware isn’t going to be IP65 rated like the inverter is, so I’ll pick up a IP65 enclosure from Jaycar, use that to hide the Cat6 cabling from the inverter, the bluetooth adapter. Whilst I’m getting the enclosure, I’ll get a battery terminal so that the wires don’t get damaged from replacing the battery.

I’ll have to figure out how much power it uses, considering the continual probes – although.. it won’t be continual if we shut it down after 9pm and wake it up around 5am, so that’ll save some of the battery.

I’m half tempted to get a Linutop or similar low powered PC to replace the current server, but the offerings out there so far are from $400 to $700 for something very low powered (1Ghz). Due to the virtual machine, it’d need two to be effective – which makes a new server all of a sudden worth while (extra computing power for the same price).

I decided to use some of today to resolve an issue with MySQL Slave setup, where statements fail for various reasons.

I could ignore the statements that fail – but that could be potentially dangerous – leaving with no slave backup at all.

The next best option to ensure the database is up to date is simple, monitor mysql for slave errors, which is what I do now – on my home server, I have it querying the 4 services, and checking if the two “Yes” options are ever “No”.

I created the script to run in bash, I usually heavily use PHP for all sorts of tasks (yep, many years ago, I did a PHP script for simple ping monitoring, and just stuck with it).

Using bash doesn’t require as many resources (not that PHP is resource intensive).

The script is probably pretty simple, but it was a bit of a learning curve for me (with my minimal bash experience).

/usr/sbin/mysql_monitor:

#!/bin/bash
EMAIL=”admin@email.address”
HOSTS=”192.168.x.x 192.168.x.x x.x.x.x x.x.x.x”
while :
do
for host in $HOSTS;
do
result=`mysql -h $host -u root –password=x –execute=”SHOW SLAVE STATUS\G” 2>&1`
slave_result=`printf “%s\n” “$result” | grep -i running`
connect_result=`printf “%s\n” “$result” | grep -i Error`
if [[ $slave_result == *No* ]]
then
echo “$host – $result” | mail -s “SLAVE OUT OF SYNC”  “$EMAIL”
fi

if [[ $connect_result == *connect* ]]
then
echo “$host – $result” | mail -s “MySQL Connection Issue” “$EMAIL”
fi
done
sleep 1800
done

HOSTS is a variable which contains the IPs of the hosts to be monitored.  EMAIL is self explanatory.

The script sleeps for 30 minutes so that it’s not hammering, yet will check more often then my random every so often, sometimes weeks between follow up.

It’s added bonus is it’ll also tell me if a MySQL instance isn’t running by chance to ensure I am alerted to that.

I created an init script too to make sure it runs on startup on my home CentOS box.

/etc/init.d/mysql_monitor:

#!/bin/sh
# chkconfig: 2345 95 20
# description: MySQL Monitor
# Monitors MySQL Slave Status
# processname: mysql_monitor
APP=/usr/sbin/mysql_monitor
PIDFILE=/tmp/mysql_monitor.pid
case “$1″ in
start)
echo -n “Starting $APP: ”
$APP & pid=$!
echo $pid > $PIDFILE
echo “Done.”
;;
stop)
echo -n “Stopping $APP: ”
PID=`cat $PIDFILE`
kill -9 $PID
rm -f $PIDFILE
echo “Done.”
;;
restart)
echo -n “Restarting $APP: ”
PID=`cat $PIDFILE`
kill -9 $PID
rm -f $PIDFILE
sleep 1
$APP & pid=$!
echo $pid > $PIDFILE
echo “Done.”
;;
esac
exit 0

I’ll have to make more of my monitoring tools run using init scripts and rely less on cron.

I use “Twinkle” on my Ubuntu PC, for receiving and making VoIP calls.

After testing Linphone, Wengo, and several others, Twinkle seemed to be the one which seemed to be pretty robust.

I like to have music going when I’m not on the phone, but that proves to be quiet the distraction during a voice call, as well, I ran into problems with having the headphones in, and the speakers turned on at the same time (microphone feedback, for example).

Twinkle has the ability to run scripts on call incoming, call answered, call hang up, call missed, etc.  I put that to good use and created some scripts.

callincoming.sh

#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/amixer set “Front” 100%
/usr/bin/amixer set “Side” 100%
/usr/bin/amixer set “Master” 75%

That script would turn the main speakers up, and the headphones (which I’ve got into the “side” speaker plug in the back), to 100% – so we can hear the ringing if I’m away from the keyboard.

The Master is also turned up to 75% which is where I find it’s ‘loud enough’ to be heard, but not deafening that the kids would get significantly disturbed if they were having a day time sleep.

The script can be expanded to kill the radio, or rhythmbox. I’d love to be able to stop the music streaming online, but I can’t get application control that the Sound Preferences offers just yet.

callanswered.sh

#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/amixer set “Front” 0%
/usr/bin/amixer set “Side” 100%
/usr/bin/amixer set “Mic” 48%
/usr/bin/amixer set “Mic Boost” 0%
/usr/bin/amixer set “Front Mic” 0%
/usr/bin/amixer set “Master” 60%
/usr/bin/amixer set “Input Source”,0 “Mic”

What this script does is turn the “Front” speakers (my primary ones) off – so the caller / callee doesn’t hear themselves. Turns the headphones up to 100% (it’s actually got a control on the cord to the PC, that I turn it down and leave it). Turns the mic to 48% – this is a good level that doesn’t give the kids in the background into the call, but allows good level of voice, without echo.

Mic Boost – this was awful, picture a poorly mixed MP3, like 64k, turned right up, with emphasis on bass, it ‘crackles’ and ‘distorts’ heavily.  So, I kill that because I believe amixer resets after a reboot and setting it down is desired.

Front Mic is not used, but gets turned up to 100% for some reason, so I leave that off! Finally, I set the Input Source to “Mic” to ensure it doesn’t capture from the radio card for example.

callend.sh

#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/amixer set “Front” 100%
/usr/bin/amixer set “Mic” 0%
/usr/bin/amixer set “Side” 0%
/usr/bin/amixer set “Front Mic” 0%
/usr/bin/amixer set “Mic Boost” 0%
/usr/bin/amixer set “Master” 75%

This script resets the music back to a usable level, kills the mic to stop that awful feedback through the speakers. As the others, can be expanded to start the radio, or rhythmbox for example.

This ability is also useful if we later want to expand the sound to other sound sources – like to the TV for MP3s in the lounge room!

After the scripts are created, chmod them a+x so that they are executable.

Adding the scripts to Twinkle was as easy as opening User Settings, going to “Scripts” and pointing “Outgoing Call, Outgoing Call Answered, Incoming Call Answered” to “callanswered.sh”. Set Incoming Call to “callincoming.sh”, and the call ended options and call failed options to callended.sh.

When we installed our solar hot water power, we replaced the leaky, useless electric hot water system on the granny flat with a pipe from the house to the granny flat.

We dug the trench and paid the plumber $550 to run the pipe – a bit of a premium perhaps, but if you look at the savings of being rid of that electric hot water system, it’s a significant saving.

However, one of the issues has been the water at the tap during wet rainy weather, is barely warm. I was attributing that to two things:
a) the ground being wet.
b) the 45oC tempering valve they installed – a safety measure.

The better solution would have been to give the granny flat hot water before the tempering valve, but that might be an issue for the plumber since it’s installed.

So, I was under the house today, trying to get some measurements to price Expol underfloor insulation whilst I was at Bunnings, when I noticed the pipe actually travels under the house along the floor, then down, and then past a toilet pipe and out the brickwork to under the ground – where the pipe goes diagonally for about 7m to a joint on the granny flat.

When I was fixing the taps out there, I noticed it was warm, so today at Bunnings, I bought some pipe insulation. It comes in a ‘tube’ rubber type form – I don’t have the ability to cut the pipe and rejoin it, so I came up with a better idea.

Cut the tube, wrap it around the pipe, and use cable ties to hold it to the pipe.

It’s annoying in the dark spot under there to feed a small cable tie and get it locked around a relatively similar sized pipe (note, next time, get the longer cable ties). However, I managed to get the pipe covered right all around – with just a small gap in areas where it wasn’t going to get much better.

I went and tested the water – a remarkable improvement, it feels ‘hot’ but not real hot.

I then went to the Kitchen tap, and tested there too – and it’s actually about the same, maybe slightly less at the granny flat Kitchen – which in the scheme of things is the ‘end of the line’ for the pipe work, so it might have temperature losses in the granny flat walls and the plumbing out to the back where the old electric system used to be.

It seemed ‘much better’ to me compared to what it was during our wet weather. I’ve asked our tenant to let me know if they think it’s worse or better – however, as with any thing you ask of a person, they probably won’t disappoint you if it is actually ‘worse’. I believe it’s better compared to what I noted our there previously a few weeks back when repairing the taps (which was barely warm!), so I’ll go with the insulation has improved the temperature out there remarkably.

But as with any long pipe, it does take time to get hot, so it’s not a very water efficient pipe – but it’s energy efficient!!

A second post, I figure I might as well update on the “House” ideas.

Sitting in bed one night this week, I was thinking about how else we could make our desired house plan, but a bit more functional.

I’m no plan of having the loungeroom near the kitchen with all it’s associated noises, steam, heat, dishes, rubbish, etc.  The idea of having heat condensate on my TV is already sounding a bad idea.

The back deck needs close access to the Kitchen for when BBQ season runs up on us. So, it came to me after there. We don’t need to move the bathroom and have that as the ‘entry’. We don’t need to have the house finish where it does at the moment either.

The idea that I had was to add an L shape extension to the house, allowing 5m back. Move the Kitchen to where we were going to move it, have the resulting empty space near the Kitchen open, and the deck area, off the sides of the “L” shape, giving outside access from both areas, and a nice enclosed Lounge / Cinema type area for TV about 1 – 2m short of the granny flat.

I’m waiting on my partner to put that in a visual floor plan still, but it’s sounding really good. I also considered the Kids, and the idea of a second living area, and the ability to see them in the backyard from the Kitchen, and the ability to watch TV while watching the Kids, and.. it’s a very good idea for a functional point of view.

We now have selected a painter, we’ve had some strange quotes. 3 of which came in at around the same price of $2500, and one who ruled themselves out at $3600, and advised he wouldn’t be able to email it to us.

The quotes were considered, as follows:

- $3600. He wasn’t going to email us a quote, so we got the questions out of him that mattered in the consideration, whether he would be high pressure washing it – No, just a hose, and whether there was a written guarantee – No, and his lead time – 2 weeks.

He ruled himself out on price, but eliminated himself when he wasn’t going to email us a quote to attempt to justify the price difference.

- $2500. He was a painter, no preference for paint. He asked us a strange question, “How many coats do you want”. When I was told of this, I started to doubt if he was a painter, because he should be advising us. He did have paint on his clothes, but not much of a method of getting work really! His price, noted on the back of the card didn’t give us anything to consider, so we dumped that one there.

- $2700. He wasn’t going to high pressure clean, he was Dulux Accredited, but no written guarantee, and whilst his detailed email quote was keeping within expectations, his slightly higher price, and lack of high pressure clean were the only shortcomings.

- $2500. He was the first, he got here in the rain at that, took a look around, gave us a price, detailed quote, pulled the whole Dulux over Nippon sales speil, is Dulux Accredited, high pressure clean, written guarantee on his work.

And it was he who we chose, seems to have good work history, and he has a website (if we were to start ruling out because of the lack of one, which is nonsense in painting work – local businesses are generally sought after for their location only).

We now have to decide on colours. We’ve got “Solar Half” and “Shell Haven Half” by Dulux in mind, but like many decisions, this is sure to change anywhere between 1 and 50 times before we buy sample pots tomorrow to come to a complete decision.

I’ve still got many plans before we finish up too, I’ve recently thought of Expol underfloor insulation, sounds good in theory as that’s what we currently notice the cold the most).

The fences are probably more important, but they can wait until we get our heads above water a bit more – speaking of which, Banks. Argh – Banks. After today, I’m not sure which is the worst at customer service, Telcos, or Banks.

The bank fixed the fraud issue within the week, but they also disappointed me with the timing to resolve a personal loan issue (funds not showing in redraw!). Add to that the insult from the front line staff to go into the branch and learn how to use Netbank (as transactions no longer appear for our credit card because of the fraud issue, so we can’t dispute anything)!!

A boo-boo! (See the end, I found a solution).

I was testing an upgrade for MySQL, from 5.0 to 5.1, to gain Row Based Replication instead of Statement based replication (as statements are a cause of SBR breaking, and it doesn’t proceed til I tell it to).

So, in my usual lazy, just do it, manner, installed MySQL Server 5.1, pointed the datadir at the old so that I’d have my data pretty quickly up and running.

And the installation worked, until I started MySQL.

I use hMailserver for email on my box, this uses MySQL for it’s settings and database storage (which is good actually, a config file is inflexible for multi domain environments).

The database used by hMailserver is InnoDB, most of my needs are well serviced with MyISAM.

In my rush, I didn’t do a backup. I didn’t copy the data folders, just went right over it, started, and got an error:

100610 22:15:32  InnoDB: Database was not shut down normally!
InnoDB: Starting crash recovery.
InnoDB: Reading tablespace information from the .ibd files…
InnoDB: Restoring possible half-written data pages from the doublewrite
InnoDB: buffer…
100610 22:15:32  InnoDB: Starting log scan based on checkpoint at
InnoDB: log sequence number 0 1204538731.
InnoDB: Doing recovery: scanned up to log sequence number 0 1204538731
InnoDB: Page directory corruption: supremum not pointed to

It was shut down normally – using the Windows Service, the issue is that the MySQL database won’t work with the log files from the previous database for some weird reason.

I’m still yet to determine if any recovery can be done on the log files, making them usable again, however I have doubts.

I reinstalled my mailserver and did a quick setup on it today to get us operational again. And learnt a lesson – always backup.

Actually, I should have had a database backup of recent, I don’t. I have no database backup – I only have the datafiles as they are.

That instance of MySQL is rarely used, it’s most usage would be the mailserver, followed shortly by the replication I get it to do from the server in Newcastle. It is my home windows test server, I also have a linux one that I planned similar for – except that does much, much more and data loss there would very much annoy me.

So, I ask myself – why is there no backup of it then? Because, there isn’t.

I MUST use this weekend (which thankfully is a long one), to:
A) Figure out if that log is recoverable, and move back to it, then onward to MySQL 5.1 using a mysqldump.
B) Upgrade To MySQL 5.1 for the windows and Linux box here, and the box in Newcastle.
C) Setup replication using Row Based Replication for those databases I have that need it.
D) Design a regular backup script which backs up the databases locally, something like weekly (With email reporting).
E) Update regularly. 5.0 is really old now.

Reconsider using hMailserver is also on the cards, it’s not it’s fault, in fact, it has the ability to use it’s own seperate instance of MySQL (and does by default, and that’s what I currently have in Newcastle).  But, I want the ability to access that data – later for user purposes, greylisting statistics and so forth.

UPDATE: I found the issue! It turns out the ibdata1 file I needed, was in C:\MySQL Datafiles. In the Program Files folder was a 10MB ibdata1 file, which is why the error messages were occurring.

The Database came right back to life the very moment I shut it down. Copied the file from C:\MySQL Datafiles to the version 5.0 program files folder, and started the version 5.0.45 MySQL server with that file, and the log files intact.

Remember to remove the innodb_force_recovery option if it was added, and it can help to change default-storage-engine=INNODB to default-storage-engine=MyISAM – so that the server starts with MyISAM instead of INNODB.

This will not work if you don’t have consistent logfiles and data files – but otherwise, it’s a save!

Now, the plan is to dump all that data using mysqldump, and then go forth and better my lazy processes for database server management.

I managed to get the shed door painted last weekend, to match our scheme for our house.

Then it rained all week, starting Monday.

The steps I took to do it were largely based off having a look around at what others have done to do it. Admittedly, a powder coating finish would be far better than the acrylic paint, brushed on.

First, I used a wire brush to scrub the surface of the door clean, and create a suitable surface for coating.

Second, I washed it down, Sugar Soap is good.

I waited til the door was dry, which took about 30 minutes in the sun of that day, and then applied the first coat. The paint we used was Nippon Solareflect, in the Colorbond Deep Ocean colour, Gloss finish.

So, I painted the door using a brush, starting at the bottom, working my way across in even strokes, through to the top, and then doing what I could to get to the back roll as well (to avoid seeing white when ‘looking up’).

I waited 2 hours, and then began a second coat, and also made sure that the coat was complete – making sure we had full coverage involved covering anything that looked lighter.

My thinking during the first coat was to get it on as much as possible, it need not be complete, so long as it wasn’t a thick coat. The second coat would ensure complete coverage.

I let it dry after 4pm, but began looking outside to the grey, rain look that was in the sky – thankfully, it didn’t rain til overnight / the next morning.

After seeing it now, I think it’d still be better if it was powder coated to the right color, and also, it has many dints in it (but otherwise in good condition) – the dints make themselves pretty visible.

It’s like many things of beauty, it looks good – from a distance. Since the shed isn’t at the front, it matters little, it can be seen from the front, which is why I did paint it, because the dilapidated timber fence is going, and we’ll put up a new fence on the council boundary in the future.

This week, we had the Invisigard mesh and Invisiscape screens go in. The reason why we chose to have the fixed screens on the fixed windows in simple – there’s no point protecting the opening, if you can just smash the glass next to it.

The screen doors are still to come, problems with a guillotine have meant the company can’t cut the mesh.

The fixing of the screens to the windows is done by screwing them down – in order to remove them, you would need a specialty drill bit, which the installers tell me you must be registered for.

But, considering the screen would also protect the glass from breakage, it’s unlikely you’d need to ever remove them, and the added benefit – no costs in monitoring, like you would with an alarm system.

There now is an issue with the front steps again, my besser block fix proved poor, rain has caused the ground below it to soften I think, and so the blocks have sunk into the dirt. We’ll have to figure out what the long term goal is for that, and plan.

Then again, that door could be removed, and we could turn the bathroom into our entry, off the side. It’d make a very different (but workable) floor plan

As if to tease me, we had a fairly sunny day yesterday.

If it weren’t for work, I might have been able to coat the front door, and even get a second coat on.

Today, we have more rain, and the forecast for tomorrow? Rain. Another weekend wasted.

I suppose for some people the rain is even worse, for example, lawn mowing – can’t cut the lawns in the rain, so no work. Construction – can’t put a roof on a house in the rain.

The rain would be useful, if we got a water tank, but back to it, our consumption is so low it wouldn’t make it worthwhile. It would be useful, for example, the other night, we had no water, because of a broken pipe somewhere, and then you get the follow on brown water for some time after the repair. A water tank would at least allow you to flush the toilet.

I’m disappointed at the inability to do anything because of the rain. I’d much like to be painting or arranging the exterior paint job, or many of the other items I’d like to get done.

Unrelated, but still worth considering, is, we were looking at sites like AV Jennings, for example, who build houses on your land. I was amazed to see they knock up a 3 bedroom house for around $115k. It seems largely finished, except for curtains, garden landscaping, etc – $115k, in comparison to $27k (cladding), $17k (roofing), and $8k (security screens), seems to be a near option worth considering (as we’ve still got a good $30k or so on the interior – and that’s without the extension idea).

If we make it ‘comparable’ to the AV Jennings house we looked at, we’d arrive at $102k worth of work done. Add about $20k for demolition though and the renovation still looks cheaper.

The internal work was ‘estimated’ (very loosely), as $25 – 40k by the builder, which is fair, so if we take his loose estimate as gospel, then to reach our current desired completion (it’ll probably change), we’d have spent $86k.

I’ve excluded the security screens for example, and the solar hot water, and solar power, as these wouldn’t be included in the knock down rebuild anyway.

The benefit of a rebuild though, would be that you get less compromises (for example, the rear of our house is 40mm sunk in the right, barely noticeable, but there none the less).

There are only good two aspects to the last week of rain, the first is builders generate a lot of wood chips – rain washes them away onto the grass. The second is we don’t have our gross meter installed, so we aren’t losing any generation at the moment (the last step, now that the inverter is finally installed).

The negatives of the recent rain, are we can’t paint the garage door, the front door, back door, or anything. Which delays anything else we want to get done. Also, the rain means our pipe out to the granny flat keeps the ground cold, and that means by the time the hot water gets through the tempering valve, out the pipe, through the ground, into the granny flat, it’s flat out pushing a temp of about 40. That’s got to suck for the person living out there – but they are yet to complain.

The front door needs a coat of paint, it’s previously demonstrated that it will bow if it’s not painted, but with all this rain, it’s hard to get it painted!

If we had a water tank, it’d be great to have rain, but town water is too cheap, and water restrictions manageable for a tank to be desirable or feasible.

We have someone new in the granny flat – the daughter of a friend. It’s amazing the difference between different layouts. If you asked me 3 months ago, I’d have said the granny flat is a cramped, useless space, only fit for someone who really has no life outside a single bed and 34 cm TV.

The layout she has done is awesome, and the place looks much more spacious than I’d have expected. Add to this the place looks overly tidy and I’m surprised this person is a young person, capable of maintaining a space  in that fashion. I suspect part of it is because they’ve just moved in and work a fair distance away – but a surprising effort.

We still have to locate a painter, the interior will need some blinds and curtains. The steps still need a final repair, the front brickwork still might need to be rendered, the gardens at the front remain a pile of dirt – don’t really want to plant with the risk of paint falling into it!

As I look at the clouds outside, I wonder what today’s birthday party is going to turn out like, and what present to get a 5 year old, who proclaimed he wants ‘a real truck, a real car and I don’t know’.

Our builders have finished with the cladding, and the changes are very noticeable.

Some of the existing bits and peices just look out of place, for example, the drive way gate is a rotted brown painted timber fence, collapsing under it’s own weight (the building inspection recommended it’s immediate repair last year). It looks out of place.

The front steps aren’t a desired colour, they fell over when I was removing the plants prior to the work beginning. I sorted that out today with a few besser blocks, placing the concrete slab on top of them, until we can sort out a more permanent solution (to what ever it is we are going to do there). It is surely a redneck solution, sure, but it’s a good one!

The windows are very much different, it’s no longer a chore to open one to get some air, and with the vertical blinds gone, the amount of light that can get in is massive. We plan to sort out the northern windows soon with some Sunscreen Roller Blinds, and some blockout curtains for night.

The idea being, you can see from the sky down, in the day (with privacy from outside in), and at night, you merely pull the curtains closed and you have complete privacy.

The change in windows has forced some internal work (I wanted it all to be completely exterior), because of the architraves, and now, the window blinds / curtains – for now, my partner has invented blanket curtains – cheap blankets from K-mart, tacked behind the architraves, providing blockout from the northern sun in the office. They actually work great.  I know this, because I was literally blinded by the sunlight trying to work out there when the windows were replaced.

The builders were over budget, only due to unforseen expenses though, I imagine the original quote was thought through with ample room for profit. The items that pushed it over were:
- Insulation, because the people who were doing the asbestos removal changed mind on insulation install (all that electrical stuff).
- Sarking, as above, the asbestos removal people were meant to get it to here.
- Locks, the budget was exceeded for locks on the back.
- Rubbish Removal, I requested they take some old concrete, doors that remained from the hot water pipe to the granny flat, and many of the internal cavity doors I ripped out to prevent the kids knocking them out and over.

It was over by $1400.

We are still waiting on the rebates from the Hot Water setup, but they should be coming hopefully soon, to offset some of the expense we’ve gone to.

Painting is still being arranged, we have one unskilled quote of $15 an hour (relative of my partner’s), and another ‘in the works’ with someone else I know. I would get a few others, but we aren’t in the correct situation to address those now.

I’ve had a look at painting the shed roller door (it’s at the back, but visible from street), and it seems pretty easily done. We’ve got 10L of paint ready, for front, back, and shed roller doors, and the fascia boards (which are the worst of orange/brown at the moment). The fascia boards look like shit under the colourbond roof, with the cladding unpainted as well.

I tried to make a start on the shed roller door today, but it was already 2pm by the time I got the sugar soap to it, so decided that by the time I’ve coated it, we’d be getting too dark for the paint to truly dry – and lucky I did, it rained at 4pm.

The solar system was installed, but we aren’t generating anything yet. The panels in use won’t fit on the north roof apparently, so we have 4 on the north roof, 4 on the west.

The Hot Water system is not too far past the solar panels, and the west roof has about 3 panels of room left on it.

We are still waiting on an inverter to be swapped over (for some reason, some people, in some areas just can’t do anything right!!). I had doubts about going with the company we did (Nu Energy), but stuck with it.

Considering the payback period is around 3 years, it is a no brainer, solar systems will advance in that time too, making better use of the seemingly limited roof space.

The correct inverter should be done by next Friday apparently, I’m staying on them about it. Then, we have the gross feed in meter, which we can get at 385 through a local Level 2 EA approved ASP. The meter board needs a new meter for Time of use, and the gross meter for the solar system output. The price quoted by the installer for the meter change was 295 (for their guy to do it). I already put the wheels in motion with the other mob, and the bad taste that Nu Energy leaves, with the significant disappointments, means I declined it – (I was more inclined to say “Get stuffed!”).

The installer of the system was also keen to get away from the job, i.e. we had the builders finishing the eaves off that day, there is a corner strip that goes between the eave and wall, he was going to ‘come back next week’, to finish the install because of that.I told him to simply come ahead of where that would be – and so the system was installed, but as we later see, the correct inverter still isn’t installed.

We are way, way, off completion of the house though, with many things outstanding prior to the house actually being ‘completed’:

- A 3rd bedroom needs to be formed out of the current lounge room, requiring a wall to be moved.
- The kitchen / dining split needs to be removed, such that it’s an open area.
- The kitchen needs to be relocated to the east window in that new area.
- The lounge needs to be relocated to the west side of that area, next to the second bedroom.
- The back decking area, and bi-fold doors from the dining area out, need to go in.
- Fencing on the townhouse side, and along the front need to be replaced.
- Internal gates at the backyard need replacing, to split off front from back (and keep the kids at the back til they are older).
- The gardens, front and back need to be sorted.

There is always a bottle neck though, but where we are now (once painted), should be a stable enough point to sit back and then go forth with the rest of the work, when the timing will be a match anyway.

At the moment, the 3rd bedroom would be largely unused (as the baby isn’t old enough for it), the other internal work isn’t critical, and can be done at anytime in the future, so timing it with when the 3rd bedroom will be needed, and the dollars being there, and the interest rate rises ‘fully exposed’, we’ll be able to push on.

I’ll add there are always many different possibilities, just today at Bunnings we ran off the beaten track and looked at flooring – but that has to wait – we just need to finish what we’ve started first!

.. but getting it to drink, is definitely the most difficult thing.

And I use that same logic in my thinking about another situation. There are only so many times you can go over the basics, and train someone, something, they should already know.

Basic customer service is one thing, troubleshooting and resolving issues is another. I don’t mind training in the technical aspects, but teaching someone to be nice, polite, professional to the clients that call in ? Seriously, that’s just common fucking sense. It’s common knowledge to me, that the person involved has no common sense.

In fact, it’s questionable as to why they bother clocking on each day, when it’s self evident that they have no desire to complete the appointed tasks in the desired manner, to the desired standard (and the standard is a minimum one).

The more troubling thought is that when asked to explain logic behind actions, or the issues they have in resolving an issue, the response is packed with what is loaded bullshit.

I’ve thought about this extensively, and it just doesn’t make sense, how they can be tought the technology, many times, by two different companies to top it off, and still fail in some of the most fundamental ways, years into the same role.

It’s a job requiring the work of the BOFH, a faulty elevator and a few loose floor tiles. Problem would then be solved, guaranteed.

In just one day, massive amounts of progress occurred.

We had the demolition people out to remove all the fibro and eaves, they took a good 5 hours. They did a good job of it, there remains some flakes and the like around the grass – unavoidable with fragile sheeting.

The insulation was put in, that took about 2 hours. If I had thought of how they did it, I probably would have done it myself – the only issue was how to work around power points – you don’t insulate them at all (i.e. you leave a good space in the wall around them with no insulation).

Then the builders put the sarking on in a matter of an hour or so, and tidied up the edges and the like ready for the cladding to arrive later that afternoon.

The same day, we finally get a call back from Nu Energy, and the advice was that it was going to take another month (that is, we’ve waited 120 days, from their quoted 60 – 90 day turnaround time, and they were going to day 150 days). I wasn’t happy with that.

The next day, we get a call from the local contractor ready to book the install in for Wednesday. To me, Nu Energy seem arse about tit. If I had the choice, I’d have gone elsewhere. I remember when we put the deposit in, I was a bit hesitant. I should start listening to myself (some of the time).

It’s raining right now, but if we have a fine day Tuesday, and the builders are ready to rock on cladding the wall, they should be right to proceed on Wednesday with panels on the roof, inverter on the wall. Then we’ll have to get the meter installed.

Yesterday, I had to smash out all the rock work from the gardens (so the builders can actually hammer the Weathertex in place). We trashed all the plants, smashed out much of the rocks, but a lot of it is stuck in place with brick surrounds in the ground as well. So, I finished it off by clearing the affected areas only, then at a later time we’ll clear it all out, level it off, and plant some new plants.

Another decision to make – what plants will we have! My partner is keen on low maintenance, that’s little concern to me, I just don’t want the plants I had to spend a good 30 minutes each ripping out yesterday.

We should focus on those that can survive with little water, but also look OK when they don’t flower.

We are currently waiting on the builder to commence work – he seems to be delayed by a week so far, but we are hopeful of contact in the coming days to finalise some insulation paperwork, and then hopefully in the days following, we’ll see some movement.

I’m annoyed at Nu Energy at the moment. We paid a deposit on a promise of a 60 day install time. This overshot to April, which we found acceptable, because as above, work hasn’t even started on the house yet. But, we were advised we’d have an install in Mid April, with contact of that 2 weeks prior.

We are still waiting on that contact, and my most recent follow ups haven’t taken me anywhere. I’m OK with a bit of a delay, but I want the installer ready to rock after the cladding is done, so we can get our place in the queue for the metering to go ahead.

Whilst we’ve been waiting, I’ve had a few random thoughts, as I always do. Like, we could have done the bathroom instead of recladding, for about 5k. Or put our internal plans into action, for about the same price, but we’d get more use out of that as opposed to the cladding.

I’ve had the meter readings compared for our Solar Hot Water – which shows we’ve used 35kWH over 30 days. Not too bad a result – the rest of the water being provided freely from the sun. I was curious as to whether we would have hot water if we flicked the off peak switch off, but then the discomfort of not having hot water would really get to me – so leaving it on for ~$2.50 a month is a pretty reasonable compromise.

I’m surprised with regard to work lately though, for some reason, the issues that continued to repeat themselves have moved away – it’s incredibly silent.

Many of the complex issues that are coming, are actually issues, so I need to be a tad more careful to not apply the standard rule of reject, then accept to them, else we’ll start annoying some people.

I now need to consider where this new found intelligence was sourced from – the same people (some notable exceptions), are somehow doing things better than before.

Could my chosen stance of reject any and all errors / incompetence with no exceptions have kick started the neurons in the heads of some people and they started thinking? I dunno.

The job over the last week and a bit has gone from the job that I love to hate, to .. getting things done, and finding other tasks to kill the bits of time that aren’t interrupted with ‘what does that mean’..

Time will tell if they run out of the precious fuel that seems to presently be firing on all cylinders.

I have a lot of ideas I want to proceed with, but when it comes time to approach them, there’s some sort of bottleneck in the way of them.

It’s usually not money that is the bottleneck, but time.

Take for example, I wanted to make my combination, GPS, Internet Browsing, Gaming, Media playing, 15″ screen ‘personal navigation device’ some time ago. Thus far I’ve got the GPS device, and I’ve tested it’s ability to get the data – and it works.

The slow down? Time to prepare the system for that, fit the car with something to mount the 15″ laptop onto and fit a car charger. Sure, 15″ in a car is overkill for a GPS, but hardly a 42″ LCD when it comes to playing media.

I have other stuff I’d like to progress on too, like the OzVoIPStatus website updates – it’s still sitting there on the home server with code from 2007 and before. Hmm. I was going to do something with Perl for it too – haven’t done it.

Oh, and I was going to have OzVoIPstatus monitoring from two locations, with database updates to both sites, and traffic routed at each. Still not done.

I also want to get my PC moved over to Fedora, after Ubuntu’s latest releases still continue to cause my PC issues with random spikes in CPU load.

The enemy, is time. The enemy is work. It’s the biggest consumer of my time – 40 hours a week. But there’s 168 hours in a week you say? Yep. I spend about 50 of those sleeping, 30 hours with the kids, or out doing other miscellaneous things – food, etc. The remainder is pretty much spent with me (where I break that into writing my blog, investigating my Ubuntu issue, thinking about the future, or twiddling my thumbs).

So, there needs to be more time, for me to get what I want to do done. From the above, I can’t get rid of the enemy – it’s funding is vital. Sleep? Can probably get rid of that, but that would affect the performance the enemy gets, and therefore cause the enemy to launch an offensive, which could only be retaliated against. Not worth it. Kids need the other time they get, because the full-time babysitter will cease providing food, etc. Plus, I get to watch some TV – shows like Timmy Time and Special Agent Oso, top rated TV! Now, where did I put that South Park DVD…

That leaves my time – which is pretty much spent.

If I could turn what I want to do – that is, web application development / systems administration, or similar into a full time job, and be paid for it, that removes the enemy.

I’m putting 40 hours a week into something that I don’t really enjoy, aside from monetary reward, I get little other benefit from it, and those 40 hours, finish with me wanting to launch a few surface to air missiles at a certain set of co-ordinates.

Isn’t that where you go to work, do the same thing, day in, day out – and finish the day achieving absolutely nothing? (or the nearest equivalent).

That’s the realisation for me, where I am at now, is too boring. Each day, it’s generally the same story, someone did something, or didn’t do something, and that’s caused the issue, the fix is generally doing what someone should have done already, and making that happen.

If, on the other hand, I was solving issues of a different nature, such as a website not working, due to a scripting bug, or adding a new web application, or extending a current application with a new feature, or upgrading server software – it’d be far more interesting.

The other part, ‘dead-end’, is because there is no apparent room for advancing into anything remotely more interesting, less boring. It’s a dead end. It leads nowhere.

I finished Friday, the same way every Friday ends, annoyed that the week effectively resulted in very little improvement, the same issues from the weeks prior ongoing, annoyed at many of the staff.

I’m certain there is a pattern with just about anything that has a dead-end. You reach the dead-end and stay there, or take a different turn, and end up reaching the highway.

This logic can apply to driving, jobs, problems, pretty much anything. If you reach a dead-end, then you either diversify, and extend the options, or you go back and take a different road.

I can diversify, by extending to those other avenues, and when they liven up, keep those in priority 1, or I can go a different road, when the “Road Closed” signs are removed.

For me, the Road Closed signs are the long transport times to get to another position. The only way they will be removed, is if a business advertises locally for a role that I believe I can fulfill, and end up accepting, or if they are willing to accept a work-at-home applicant.

The other avenues, would be creating the business myself, and making it viable. This sounds like too hard a task for someone like me. I have minimal time after work and the kids to put into it, to make it succeed. Add to this, the marketplace is unique and can be competitive.

Back to ‘dead-end’ – this leaves me no direction to decide if I want to get CCNA, which could lead to CCVP – but no point getting either of them if the career prospects at the end remain as they are now.

I could go through and get MCSE (lame, I know), Linux+, or many other industry certs, each of them specific to a target job – and if the target job isn’t reached, the certificate is effectively wasted (CCNA has a life of 3 years as an example).

VoIP is an interesting path, but I have no career prospects where I am.

Do I cave in, take a job in Sydney and sit on the F3 day in, day out? My thoughts on that is No!.

Where I am right now, isn’t ideal, but travelling to Sydney each day – that’s no better (and possibly be no worse). Work from Home wins over travel, purely because there’s more time for ‘me’.

Back to ‘boring, dead-end job’, it is very easy to see why the work for customer service is off shored. If it were me, I’d keep Australians on it, and be very careful about the aptitude of the people being employed – you want intelligent, attentive, bright individuals – not the dumb shits that frequent the ACT.