Author Archives: The Elite Geek

A week in Sydney

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 … Continue reading

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Nothing Is Impossible

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”. … Continue reading

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Concrete attempt

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 … Continue reading

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The consequences of root

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 … Continue reading

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Painting is completed!

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 … Continue reading

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Serial over wireless

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 … Continue reading

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MySQL Monitor bash script

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 … Continue reading

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Controlling ALSA’s output

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 … Continue reading

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Granny Flat Hot Water Pipe

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 … Continue reading

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A Painter Is Chosen

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 … Continue reading

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MySQL Upgrade 5.0 to 5.1

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 … Continue reading

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Painting the shed door

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 … Continue reading

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Rain, rain, rain.

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 … Continue reading

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Damned Rain!

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, … Continue reading

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Builders are done.

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 … Continue reading

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You can lead a horse to water..

.. 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, … Continue reading

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Progress

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 … Continue reading

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Waiting, waiting, waiting..

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 … Continue reading

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Time is the enemy

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 … Continue reading

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A boring, dead-end job?

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. … Continue reading

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We have Windows!

No, I didn’t just rush out in a last minute rush to buy Windows – Ubuntu can be annoying, but it *works*. Our new windows arrived, and so we are inching closer to the builder booting up, clicking his start … Continue reading

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Resignation time?

I got sick of it recently, tired of the incompetence, tired of the repetitive screw ups. Sick of issues that aren’t my problem, tired of management doing nothing to fix the errors. Tired of the accounts department. Developers who should … Continue reading

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What were they thinking?

We now have our solar hot water system in, so far so good, first night it used 6kW of off peak, and nothing since. We are still keeping tabs on it to be sure (as I’d rather spend 40c heating … Continue reading

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Diggin’ a hole

Today, we dug out the trench for the new pipe to go to the cabin at the back for the new solar hot water system. We managed to get the trench dug out, I thought it’d take most of the … Continue reading

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Builder’s Contract signed!

Now we are committed to the work. The price jumped from our expectations by another 7500 for the Invisigard security screens we decided we’d stick on. They seem to be worth the money, rivalling Crimsafe products at a cheaper price, … Continue reading

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GreaseMonkey and Cross Domain Cookies

I hit a small problem tonight, I wanted to make it possible for a GreaseMonkey Javascript running on one domain, to publish data to another site using GM_xmlHttpRequest. The problem was cookies. In order to recognise the person posting, the … Continue reading

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Progress!

I love a good day, when everything falls into place, there’s no real problems / difficulties. And, after previously deciding to tell CBA to shove it, I’ve since changed my mind and took up a Personal Loan with them for … Continue reading

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Personal Loan, Home Loan

We have some funds in redraw we can put towards the renovations. The new mortgage paperwork arrived today, and I’ve thought about it in detail after seeing the final figures and having some questions raised. I contacted our Loans rep … Continue reading

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F#$king Gubment

What lunatics do we have elected in our federal governing body? I’ve had a look at the Environment Minister’s website tonight after hearing a news article about the Insulation / Hot Water rebate being scrapped. Immediate disappointment struck as our … Continue reading

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RTP Audio

When you create a VoIP call, you invite the remote peer, who accepts or rejects, and there is a “SIP” session initiated. A SIP session is valid for pretty much anything, text, voice, audio, video, images, data – anything. SIP … Continue reading

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