• Planet

Planet Interface aggregates blog posts from past and present Interface members. As such the views and opinions represented here are those of their authors only, and do not represent Interface's position in any way.

Planet Interface

February 11, 2011

Thoughts of a geek

Visiting New Zealand

Hello readers!
For those of you (if there are any) who have not already heard via Twitter or Facebook, I am going to be spending 3 weeks back in NZ fairly soon. I will be flying to Singapore first, getting there on Sunday 13th March and probably spending most of the week in Malaysia or perhaps visiting somewhere else nearby, then flying on to Wellington on Friday 18th March to arrive on Saturday 19th March. All going to plan I will then spend 3 weeks in NZ, mostly in Wellington but perhaps visiting a few other places for weekends, before flying out again very early on Sunday 10th April.

I will be working from home for most of my time in Wellington, but will have evenings and weekends free, and perhaps short breaks during the day, and would love to catch up with everyone. Perhaps some picnics, beach trips, dinner parties, dancing, walking, or just talking? I will probably take a few days off too. If you have not already done so then please let me know if you are keen, especially if you live out of Wellington. I might be able to arrange a visit to Auckland, Christchurch or Palmerston North if there are people there to see. (-:

I hope to see you soon!

by qwandor at February 11, 2011 08:15 PM

January 20, 2011

Thoughts of a geek

Winter bits and pieces

Hello readers!

I figured it was time for another post of various bits and pieces about what I have been up to lately. No big trips this time, but I am sure there has been some stuff happening since my last post, let me see…

I spent Christmas in Billesdon, Leicestershire. Caroline and Kelvin, a couple I know from church back in Wellington, were over here for a while and staying at Caroline’s parents’ house, and invited me to spend Christmas with them, which was nice. They used to live in Nottingham but moved to Wellington about 18 months ago. I went up after work on Christmas Eve, stayed the weekend, and caught the train back down on the Monday. The train back was very crowded, especially towards the end of the journey when it ended up packed full of people all down the aisle with crowds of people at the stations unable to get on. It was also delayed by about an hour due to some overrun maintenance work on the track, so we had to wait at various points in and out of stations. I must say that it did not feel all that much like Christmas, despite the tree and such. I guess it was due partly to the lack of much buildup beforehand, the cold wintry weather, and not being with my family. It was not actually snowing during the Christmas weekend, but there was a fair bit of snow on the ground up in Leicestershire It was a nice weekend though, and I was very grateful to have people to spend it with rather than being all by myself, which had been looking likely earlier.

I went to the fireworks on New Year’s Eve with a few other people, and frankly would not recommend it. I left my flat at 6:30 pm, met a couple of people at Waterloo Station at 7:00 pm, and we crossed over the river and found ourselves a decent spot, not too far away from the front of the crowd, by about 7:30 pm. We then waited as the crowd got more and more crowded, to the point where we could not move anywhere at all, as half a million or so people gathered to get a view. There was some mediocre music until the fireworks started at midnight. The fireworks themselves were very good, and we had a decent view, but the hours of waiting hardly seemed worthwhile for 10 minutes of fireworks. We then slowly made our way back the way we had come, getting stuck in the massive crowds and various road closures, and I had to get back to my bike. Unfortunately the area where I had left it by the station had been closed off behind police barriers, so after finally making it around the long way I had to ask one of the policemen to let me through the barrier to get it and come back out, which fortunately he let me do. After wheeling it through all the broken class and rubbish on the street and then making my way home, I finally got back to my flat sometime around 2:00 am. All in all, over 7 hours for a 10 minute show.

The New Year’s Day parade was much better, both less crowded and more interesting. The only downside was the weather, which was cold and at times rainy. I took a few photos, but have not yet got around to organising and captioning them all to upload. The front of the parade reached our viewing spot partway along the route at about 12:15 pm, and it kept on going past for just over 3 hours with only a few gaps. It included, among other things, various dignitaries and societies, floats from some of the London boroughs (although quite a few of them never showed up, despite being on the programme!), vintage cars, Minis, motorbikes, giant inflatable cartoon characters, cheerleaders, morris dancers, miniature steam engines, clowns, buses, an excellent country dance group from Texas, and — for some reason — 23 different marching bands from various high schools across the USA. All in all quite a show, though unfortunately many of them did not stop in front of where we were watching. I really should get around to sorting out those photos sometime soon.

Other than that, I guess I have just had my usual routine of life and work and everything. I have been going to swing dancing classes on Wednesday nights, which have been fun and interesting. I recommend it! If you are in London, check out Swing Patrol (I go to the Camberwell class), otherwise I am sure you can find somewhere nearby. I am still going to a few ceilidhs too, which can be fun sometimes. The hiking Meetup group I have been hiking with a few times are having their first hike of the year this Saturday, which I am looking forward too.

I am moving flats at the end of February, moving into a room in a place in Balham. It is just across the road from Tooting Bec Common, which could be nice. It seems like a nice house. I will be living with 3 other people there, all in their late 20s or early 30: one American woman who just started working at Google and two policemen. The two I have met so far both seem nice. Unfortunately the flat is a bit more than twice as far from work as my current flat, which is a pity. I imagine it will take me about half an hour to bike to and from work each day. It is also a fair bit further away from my church. Such is life, London is a big place. The other issue is that what will be my bedroom is significantly smaller than my current one and (like all furnished flats here, apparently) has a (small) double bed, so I will not be able to fit a desk or table to work at. Hopefully that will not be too much of a problem. It does not seem like it should be too noisy a flat.

Well that is all I can think of for now… comment and tell me what else you want to hear about!

by qwandor at January 20, 2011 10:54 PM

January 07, 2011

Thoughts of a geek

Germany

I went for a holiday in Germany for a week last month, from the 4th until the 11th of December. It was quite cold and there was lots of snow both on the ground and falling, though fortunately it was not snowing the whole time I was there.

I flew from London to Berlin, where I spent my first 3 nights. I met up with a friend, Thi, who had been living in Poland for a few months and took the train across to Berlin for the first couple of days I was there. I arrived in the evening, so was not able to see all that much on the first day, but we did walk down to the east city centre (Mitte) to see the Reichstag, Brandenburger Tor, Checkpoint Charlie and a few other landmarks in the dark.

Berlin — Saturday night: Brandenburger Tor

On Sunday morning we had a quick look around the west city centre, but almost everything seemed to be closed. We then joined a walking tour group, on which we were shown around the Mitte area some more. Our tour guide, named Ice, grew up in Auckland but moved to Berlin some years ago. We saw part of the Berlin Wall, a number of city squares (Gendarmenmarkt and Bebelplatz), and various nice churches and other buildings. After the tour we spent about 2.5 hours wandering around the German History Museum. They had an exhibit about Hitler and the rise of the Nazi party, a bunch of statues and paintings from around Germany, and a great big exhibit all about the history of Germany over the last millennium or so, with all sorts of paintings, armour, books, furniture, tapestries, and even a pinball machine.

Berlin — City tour: Berliner Dom, outside which the tour ended

After the museum we headed to the Christmas market at Alexanderplatz, which had been recommended to us, but not before stopping briefly at another Christmas market on the way. We spent quite a while wandering around the Christmas market, snacking on currywurst and chocolate covered banana and looking at the various ornaments, clothing and other trinkets for sale. There was a colourfully lit ice-skating rink in the middle, and a large ferris wheel at one end. We had a proper German meal at a pub nearby, which was predictably large.

Berlin — Christmas markets and miscellaneous wandering: The ferris wheel and ice-skating rink at Alexanderplatz

On Monday Thi had to catch her train home so we had a quick walk around the Tiergarten before she headed off, after failing to find some flea market. We even made a small snowman. I then headed out a bit further east than I had made it before, to Frankfurter Tor and from there wandered — with a few short U-Bahn journeys in the middle ­— around Boxhagenerplatz, the East Side Gallery (a 1.3 km section of the Berlin Wall still standing and covered in about 106 large paintings by various artists from around the world), Michaelkirchplatz, Orianienplatz, Böcklerpark, Mehringplatz, Mehringdamm and the corner of Viktoriapark, Leipzigerplatz and Potsdamerplatz (including another Christmas market, which had an artificial snow hill down which people could pay to slide on large tire tubes), and finally the area around Wittenbergplatz and Savignyplatz including yet another Christmas market.

Berlin — Christmas markets and miscellaneous wandering: One wall panel of the East Side Gallery

On Tuesday I spent a couple of hours at the Bode Museum, looking at their enormous collection of statues, paintings, crucifixes, carvings, coins, and so on. It was quite overwhelming, as museums sometimes are.

Berlin — Bode Museum: Statues over the staircases

I then caught my train to Gießen, or rather, two trains. Unfortunately the first train was slow and arrived about 30 minutes late, which meant that I missed the second train and had the slight drama of having to explain this to the lady at the ticket counter, who spoke about as much English as I speak German (or only slightly more), so as to get a replacement ticket for the next train in that direction. I got there in the end, though, and successfully found my friend Melanie who was to show me around the city. She had arranged for me to stay with some friends of hers, a flat of 11 German guys, 9 of whom were studying theology and the other 2 other subjects I cannot remember. It was an interesting flat — one floor of a small office building, converted into an enormous flat. There was certainly plenty of room for everyone, though I only ever saw perhaps half of the guys living there. We bought a few things from the supermarket and then cooked dinner for ourselves and one or two of the guys who were around, which was nice after having spent the last 3 in a hostel and eating out all the time. Cooking in someone else’s kitchen is always a slightly strange experience, especially when they are not even around at the time as was the case on the second night there. And of course the herbs and spices had German names which were not always recognisable. I taught some of the guys how to play Euchre, as 500 seemed a bit ambitious for the time we had available.

On Wednesday we went to see Wilhelm Konrad Röntgen’s grave, then I went to the Mathematikum for just under an hour. It was quite cool, but I wish that I had had more than an hour to spend there and that it had not been overrun by schoolkids. I recommend it should you ever find yourself in Gießen. We then walked up a hill called Schiffenberg, and had a look at a small art gallery in what used to be a monastery at the top.

Gießen: At the Mathematikum

On Thursday after breakfast I headed to the train station and caught my train on to Munich. My first night in Munich I wandered around the Tollwood festival Christmas Market and got a few things to eat, then wandered around a little of the city before heading to bed. On Friday I went on a walking tour, which was alright but not as interesting as the one in Berlin. We did not actually go all that far from Marienplatz where we started. I had lunch with some people from the tour, then spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around by myself. I walked through the corner of the Englischer Garten, which was nice. At the south end of the Englischer Garten a river which flows through the garden comes out from under a road, and the channel happens to be arranged in such a way as to create a standing wave. I had heard that surfers like to surf on this standing wave, and indeed even then in the middle of winter there were about 6 surfers wearing heavy wetsuits and taking turns to surf on the wave. It is quite a sight, and you can get a good view from the footpath alongside the road.

Munich — Wandering: Surfers in the Englischer Garten

There were a bunch of kids with toboggans playing on a small hill a bit further in. There was also another Christmas market in the gardens, of course. I walked back through the city in the dark. Part way back, I passed some people walking along in the opposite direction to me and carrying flaming torches. As I continued walking I passed more in more, all walking in the same direction but clumped together a bit. Occasionally someone might leave a torch behind standing in the snow, as pictured below. It was not at all clear where they were going or why. I followed them back a bit to find the end of the line, and they seemed to have come out of one of several buildings near the road. If you do have any idea what they might have been doing, do post a comment.

Munich — Wandering: A torch left behind

After getting back to the hostel and grabbing some dinner nearby I did not do much else that evening. On Saturday morning I checked out of my hostel and went to the Deutsches Museum, which was really good, the highlight of my time in Munich. It is a huge museum all about science, technology and industries, with great exhibits about everything from oil mining to lasers, nanotechnology to aeronautics, atomic physics, optics, musical instruments, photography, robotics, and many many more things. I only got to see less than half of the exhibits, and some of them in a rush at that. I spent about 6 hours there, but could easily have spent at least twice that long just looking around at everything. They also have various demonstrations throughout the day, but I did not get to any. Should you ever find yourself in Munich, I highly recommend that you go.

Munich — Deutsches Museum: Software guessing my mood and demographics from video in real time. It was fairly impressive.

I went straight from the museum to the airport and flew back to London. I was glad to be back in my own bed, but it was an interesting week and I am glad I went. For more about my trip, have a look through the various albums of photos I have uploaded. The descriptions on the albums and photos tell a few more stories, not to mention the photos themselves.

by qwandor at January 07, 2011 10:05 PM

December 02, 2010

Thoughts of a geek

An update

Wow, I have not written anything here for rather a while. I have still been uploading photos of some of the things I have been up to, but perhaps a summary of the last couple of months is in order. Hmm, let us see, since the beginning of October…

On the 3rd of October, there was a fairly substantial flood on the street my flat is on and the surrounding streets, meaning I had to wade through water about 30 cm deep (deeper in parts) to get to my flat when I got home at around midnight. I went back out and took some photos, of course. Fortunately it was all fine by the morning.

Silverthorne Road flood: there was quite a lot of water

On the 11th October, I went to Zürich for a day and a half for a conference for work. I had to get up at something like 4:00 am to get out to the airport for my flight out there, then it was straight from the airport to the hotel and into the conference, so there was not a whole lot of time for sightseeing. I did get out a bit on the Monday night, when there were a number of organised activities to chose from. I walked up Üetliberg with a few other Googlers, and we cooked Pörkölt for dinner over a bonfire in the dark. I had a bit of difficulty finding my hotel room but it worked out in the end. The Tuesday was another full day of talks and workshops and such, then we headed from that back to the airport and back to London. Unfortunately our flight was delayed due to the strikes in France, but we got back in the end.

Zurich for GEEK: Zürich at night from Üetliberg

Back to London, I joined a hiking Meetup group that started at the beginning of October, and have been on 3 hikes with them so far, each on a Saturday and separated by 3 weeks: to Box Hill, part of the Ridgeway track near Tring past the Ivinghoe Beacon and Bridgewater Monument, and most recently in Guildford and along the River Wey. None of them were especially long walks (each about 14 km and fairly flat, this being England), but by the time we take the train out to wherever we are walking, wait for everyone to turn up, walk, stop for lunch, stop to look at the view along the way and have dinner at a pub at the end before taking the train back to London, it ends up being a fairly full Saturday. It has been a fairly international group, with often quite a few Americans, some Irish, a Turkish guy, some French people, Greeks, South Africans, various other Europeans, and on the most recent hike an Australian and another Kiwi. It seems that the English tend to be less interested in getting out to do and see things and meet new people. Perhaps they are more likely already to have an established group of friends and weekly routine.

Ridgeway hike: The English countryside

On the most recent hike, in Guildford, we stopped for lunch at a church which was built in 1087 AD, and still open. Admittedly some parts of it had been rebuilt since then, but some remained. And even before the 1087 church there had been an earlier Saxon church on the same site, apparently. History here is on quite a different order of magnitude than in New Zealand.

I saw two fireworks displays for Guy Fawkes: one on Guy Fawkes day itself (though people here call it Bonfire Night instead), and one on the day after. On the Friday I went down to Wimbledon to see the show at Wimbledon Park, and took lots of photos. The fireworks were not all that impressive — similar to the show in Wellington, but not as good — but the bonfires were cool to see, as that is not something I have seen for Guy Fawkes before. They also had all sorts of fairground rides for kids and others.

From Guy Fawkes at Wimbledon Park: Some fireworks

On the Saturday, one of the women in my church homegroup had a bunch of people over for a bit of the party and to watch the Battersea Park fireworks. She has a fifth floor apartment with an excellent view out over London, so we stood out on the balcony to watch the display, then headed back into the warm for lots of good food.

On Saturday 13th November I went to see the Lord Mayor’s Show with a few people. We waited across the road from the Royal Courts of Justice, where the first half of the parade ended. There were many different groups of people, floats, military vehicles and so on, as you can see in my photos, and it went past us for a little bit more than an hour. Afterwards we went to St. Paul’s Cathedral, and went up to the Whispering Gallery and the Stone Gallery around the outside. I had not been up there before, but it turns out that the Stone Gallery is a pretty good spot for taking some nice panoramas of the view out across London, so I did.

Lord Mayor's Show and more: A view from the Stone Gallery. Click a few times and look at it full size, there is plenty to see.

After St. Paul’s we had Dim Sum for lunch, then headed south to see the fireworks over the Thames as part of the Lord Mayor’s Show. Unfortunately the viewing spot we picked turned out not to have much of a view at all, so we spent most of the show running along the bank trying to get far enough along to see the fireworks without trees and buildings in the way. About a minute after we finally found a good view, the fireworks finished. They were good fireworks, much more interesting than either of the Guy Fawkes shows I saw, but only lasted about 10 minutes. After that we listened to a couple of free jazz concerts at the Southbank Centre as part of the London Jazz Festival, both of which were good.

Other than that, I have been going to some swing dancing classes on Wednesday nights, mostly in Camberwell, which have been interesting. The first time I went to the Camberwell class was the second week it ran, and I have been for the 4 classes there since. One week in the middle it was cancelled so I went to a different class in Dalston instead, run by the same organisation but with different people. The Camberwell class usually has around 12 people; the Dalston one had 44 on only its second week running. It made for a rather crowded room.

This most recent weekend, on Saturday 27th November, I made it out to the Horniman Museum, which was nice. Among quite a range of other exhibits they have a good aquarium, and the jellyfish were amazing — and rather mesmerising — to watch.

This Saturday, 4th December, I head to Germany for a week’s holiday. I am spending 3 nights in Berlin, 2 in Gießen and 2 in Munich. I hear the Christmas markets are well worth a visit, and other than that I guess there will be plenty of museums and historical sights to see. Recommendations are most welcome, if you know what is worth seeing and doing.

by qwandor at December 02, 2010 09:16 PM

October 03, 2010

Thoughts of a geek

More requests

Continuing on from my last post, here are some more topics people requested me to write about.

xyzzy and Craig both want me to write about working at Google. Hmm. Well it is a fairly good place to work. We get free breakfast, lunch and dinner in the office, Monday–Friday, plus there are microkitchens around the place with snacks and drinks. The food is pretty good too. Typically at lunch in the main cafeteria there will be 2 or 3 choices of meat (at various times we have had roast duck, roast beef or lamb, lamb cutlets, beef steak, various kinds of sausages, sausages wrapped in bacon, chicken, turkey, I think there was even kangaroo steak one time), some choice of fish or other seafood, vegetarian dishes, roast and/or boiled potatoes, rice, a range of cooked vegetables, various salads, sushi, a couple of flavours of soup, bread of various sorts, crackers and cheeses, a hot pudding, cakes or cupcakes or other cold desserts, fruit, and a range of drinks. There is a machine to squeeze oranges into juice which is fun to watch. There is not nearly so much selection for dinner unfortunately, and not so many people stay for it. Breakfast is pretty good though. If you happen to be in London, come for lunch! We get to have up to two social guests to eat at the office each month.

Food aside, the work has been fairly decent. It does take a while to get used to all the systems and technologies, as Google have a lot of internally-developed tools and systems that nobody else uses, and have had to put a lot of work into making everything scale bigger than pretty much anyone else. Writing a web application that could cope with being used by everyone on the Internet, many simultaneously, from all over the world, does pose some challenges over just designing something for a few hundred people. I still have a lot to learn. Unfortunately nothing I have worked on so far has been launched yet, and it is unlikely that any substantial part of it will be launched publicly until sometime next year.

Working at a global company with tens of thousands of employees is certainly rather different to working at a small place with between 10 and 20. The ratio of actual developers to support roles (legal, HR, recruitment, management, sales, facilities, and probably many others that I do not even know about) seems to be quite a bit lower. I am not too sure what differences can be attributed to differences between England and NZ as I have only worked at the one company over here. I guess there are more big companies over here though, being a bigger country. I do find that there is not so much chance to chat with my colleagues about anything outside work, though that may be at least partly due to the fact that I knew about half of the guys at Innaworks already before I started working there, though university and Interface.

As for what skills I use from my studies, the data structures, algorithms and complexity stuff was certainly important in passing the interviews and getting the job, though so far at least it has not been all that important day to day.

I think that answers most of Craig’s questions. xyzzy also wanted to know about “some project you’ve embarked upon in your spare time! your take on what really matters in life!”. Unfortunately I have not been working on any terribly exciting projects in my spare time since I moved here. I did just recently order a Bus Pirate, in the hopes of hooking some sort of I2C devices up to my computer and having a play. That has not yet arrived yet though. It is also not clear whether there are proper drivers for it to let it work with the usual Linux I2C infrastructure, or just userland stuff.

I have made a number of updates to theQuotebook in the last month or so, most notably finally getting the new style ready to launch. I am working on a new feature to allow quotes to be added by email, and Twitter support may also follow if I can work out a good way to design it and find a suitable Twitter username that is not already taken.

I also did some work on a web-based client for Fridge a while ago. It is implemented using GWT, and talks directly to the XML-RPC API that the other clients use, so it supports all the same features, including Interfridge. You can try it out if you have an account on the Memphis fridge or any peered fridge.

So what really matters in life? Probably not Slayer. God, I think, though I am not sure quite how. People seem to be fairly important. I wish I got to spend more time interacting with people constructively, perhaps sociably as well. Finding good community and good friends is hard. Knowledge is also important I think. Do more maths, people. And some science if you like.

Before I stop for the now, Richard asked me (twice!) to write about Slayer, so I guess I should do that. Richard seems to be a little bit obsessed with Slayer, though I am sure he would assure you it is purely in an ironic way. I am afraid I do not now much at all about them, so I will be looking up what I can. last.fm informs me that Slayer are “a thrash metal band from US, formed in 1981 … credited as one of the ‘Big Four’ thrash metal bands, along with Metallica, Anthrax, and Megadeth”. They seem to choose deliberately controversial topics for their songs, which is not uncommon among such bands. I am pretty sure Metallica are better. Perhaps you can tell us more, Richard?

I think that will do for today. Next up: books, culture and language if I can think of anything to write about them, and probably not a vat of hot chocolate.

by qwandor at October 03, 2010 02:34 PM

October 01, 2010

Thoughts of a geek

Requests

Hello there!
It has been rather a while since I blogged. Not a lot has happened that I could think of much to write about, or perhaps it is just that I have not been able to find motivation to do so. Anyway, I thought it was really about time I wrote something, so I asked the usual social networks, and there were a few suggestions. Mostly from Twitter. I will see what I can do, here goes…

yomcat thinks that I should write about stalking tactics. Hmm. Not sure what I can say about that one. Perhaps he should be the one writing about this topic?

fibby thinks I should write about VAT. I do not know much at all about VAT; in fact, it seems she knows rather more about it than I do. She had heard that there was no VAT charged on shoes. A little research on the web suggests that this is not quite the case. Young children’s footwear and clothing is, however, exempt from VAT. In particular, items of clothing or footwear which are not made of fur and are designed for and only suitable for children under 14 years old. Fur lined boots and articles only trimmed with fur are allowed though. There are some interesting corner cases; for example, alterations which do not alter the ‘essential nature’ of an article (the examples given are altering sleeve length, repairing, or embroidering a school badge) are charged VAT, but alterations which do change the ‘essential nature’ are exempt. The example given in this case is changing a blazer into a waistcoat. So hey, there you go! You can get a blazer turned into a waistcoat only suitable for a child under 14 and not pay VAT on the work! Sleeping bags are only eligible to be exempted from VAT if they have arm and leg holes. Rain covers for pushchairs are only exempt if they can also be worn as rain capes by babies.

Other than that, you can read a list of categories of goods and services exempt from VAT or charged a lower rate of VAT.

fibby also wanted to know what it is like to live in a country with 20% sales tax. As far as I can see the standard (and highest) rate of VAT is 17.5%, so I would not know. In general, though, I think the exact amount of sales tax is not really a great worry. Some things are certainly a lot more expensive here, though some are cheaper. Accommodation costs around twice as much as in Wellington, perhaps a bit more. Fresh fruit, vegetables and meat are generally a fair bit more expensive than in Wellington and not as nice, though there are some exceptions (bananas are relatively cheap and good, for example). On the other hand, most processed or preserved food (stuff in cans or boxes or bags) is significantly cheaper in the supermarkets here. CDs are also cheaper here, and I hear books are too. I think in general there is a wider range of prices: for things like clothes, and food for that matter, the bottom end of the range is significantly cheaper than can be found in NZ, but there are many more expensive choices. But I digress. Perhaps I should discuss this further some other time.

Hmm, well I was planning to include more requests in this post, but I got distracted and now it is getting late, so I think I will leave it at that for now and continue another day in another post. Meanwhile, more requests are welcome!

by qwandor at October 01, 2010 10:47 PM

July 17, 2010

Thoughts of a geek

London, part 2

Continuing on from my last blog post, I summarise the last month and a bit over here. As usual photo albums are linked along the way.

While waiting to hear back from Google about whether they would offer me a job, I got offers from two other companies. Google was my first preference, so fortunately I was able to persuade both the others to wait for a few weeks until I got an answer from Google.

Nottingham: Despite the rain we managed to have a look around. I thought this was a pretty cool fountain.

In the meantime, I went up to Nottingham to visit some friends of friends and see the place. A couple whom I know from my church back in Wellington, Kelvin and Caroline, used to live in Nottingham. They moved to Wellington almost a year ago now. Before I left Wellington some of their friends from Nottingham came to visit and they had been very thoughtful to introduce me to Pui, Claire and Guy. So I was able to go up to visit the three of them last month. I took the train up on Wednesday 9th June and stayed with Pui and Claire at first and then Guy later on. We went to see the Nottingham caves (or at least, the small part of them that is open to tourists), the Galleries of Justice (an old prison turned into a tourist attraction, with guides acting as jailers and such), the outside of Nottingham Castle (it did not seem worth paying to go inside), and several pubs. One of them, the Trip to Jerusalem, claims to be the oldest in the country, though it is one of about 20 pubs to make such a claim. Nonetheless it is a cool building, with parts of it being caves carved into the hillside. It has a nice relaxed atmosphere, kind of maze-like. We also went to Sherwood Forest, and saw the Major Oak, which is reputed to have been the hiding place of Robin Hood and his Merry Men. There are quite a few statues of him around the place. Other places I went include Attenborough Nature Reserve (in the rain), Wollaton Park, and the campus of the University of Nottingham. It is a lovely campus, with a large lake and beautiful grounds and buildings. It must be a nice place to study. Guy’s birthday was on Sunday, so he had a small party on the Saturday before. I took the train back to London on the morning of Sunday 13th June. The photos tell a better story than I do, so check them out.

The following Monday I got to catch up with Frith, an acquaintance from Wellington who had been on exchange studying up at Leeds and was on her way back to New Zealand. We went to the Science Museum and had a bit of a look around. That week I also begun my search for a more permanent flat, as I needed to be out of the Peckham flat by the end of June. I contacted various different places and ended up looked at a couple on the Wednesday and Thursday nights. On Thursday I heard back from Google that they would like to offer me a job, which I accepted pretty much immediately. On Friday afternoon I got to catch up with another friend from Wellington, Teresa, who had been in Canada studying for the past year and was also on her way back (indirectly, via Bangladesh and Syria) to NZ. She and her friend came over for what ended up being rather a late lunch. It was great to catch up and to have some company, though a bit hurried due to the limitations of public transport. That Sunday All Saints Peckham had a big combined service with another church focussing on the effects of gang violence in the area and paths to peace, which was interesting.

The following week I had lunch at Google on the Thursday to meet some of my colleagues-to-be and discuss a bit about what I would be working on. I also went three more times to one of the flats I had looked at the previous week, in Earl’s Court, to meet each of the people currently living there, as they were not all available at the same time. It was the landlord who had shown me around the first time, as none of them were around. They seemed quite keen on me, and when I asked they said that they did not have anyone else looking at the flat. They promised to let me know by that Friday, 25th June, whether they would have me in the flat. It was looking fairly likely, and I had very little time left to find somewhere before I had to move out of my first flat. Unfortunately they did not get back to me on Friday, or Saturday, and I could not get in touch with any of them. I finally got a call on Sunday to say that they had found someone else, which was frustrating after the delay and having had to take the time to go all the way there and back 4 times to see the place and talk to them. I immediately set to looking for other flats, and found two potential places, one in Wandsworth and one in Battersea. The Battersea one looked like it might be a better place to live and was also cheaper, but the guy living there was away and so I would not be able to view it until Friday 2nd July at the earliest.

My first day of work was Monday 28th June. I looked at the Wandsworth flat that evening, and it looked like a decent place and certainly in good condition, though quite expensive. I heard back the following Wednesday (I think) that the landlord would have me, so I decided to go for it as I was rather desperate by this stage to find somewhere to live. Fortunately Tracy and Andrew were very kind again to put me up between flats, so I made two trips walking, busing and Tubing with all my luggage out to Colliers Wood on the Wednesday night after work, and managed to carry everything in one trip back to Wandsworth on the Saturday to move in. Straight after moving in and going through the inventory and so on with my landlord I headed out to Kew Gardens to join Tracy and Andrew and a couple of their friends for a picnic. They are nice gardens, but £13.50 does seem like a lot to pay just to visit some botanic gardens. Unfortunately I did not think to bring my proper camera so I only got a few photos with my phone camera.

Kew Gardens: They have a New Zealand section in one of the glasshouses.

So I now have a flat for a little while. I signed a 6 month contract here. My landlord was planning to go back to France for a couple of months for work, and then to somewhere in the USA for 4 months or so, so wanted a couple of people to rent out the place while he is away. A few days after I moved in I was joined by a guy called Jiri who is here from the Czech Republic for a couple of months over the summer to do an internship and work. He seems like a nice guy. Our landlord has been living here as well, I think his plans have changed somewhat though I am not sure quite what is happening as I have not been able to talk to him lately.

London flats: My bedroom in the Wandsworth flat, where I sit writing this.

Last Sunday I went to the evening service at Holy Trinity Clapham, which is fairly close. They have something of a claim to fame as having been the church of William Wilberforce and his Clapham Sect friends, who are well known for their work in abolishing slavery in Britain, among many other things. It seems like a nice friendly church, though the service was rather short and a bit lacking in people around my age. I might go back tomorrow anyway.

I fly to New York on Monday week, rather early in the morning.

by qwandor at July 17, 2010 08:30 PM

July 07, 2010

Thoughts of a geek

London, part 1

I did say that I was going to write a blog post about London at some point, so here it finally is. I will just try to briefly sum up what I have done here so far. Photos are linked along the way.

First day exploring London: Musical plants at the Tate Modern

I arrived here on Saturday 15th May, flying into London Heathrow airport at around 7:00 pm BST. Tracy and Andrew, who are friends of my dad and moved here several years ago, very kindly picked me up from the airport and let me stay in their spare bedroom for my first week in the country. During that week I was kept fairly busy with interviews at youDevise, Maxeler and Future Platforms on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. I also looked online for a short term flat in which to stay while I was looking for work, and was fortunate to find a place in which I stayed for a little over a month while looking for a job. I also managed to fit in a little bit of touristy stuff. On the first Sunday, the day after I arrived, I saw the Tower of London (from the outside), wandered around the South Bank and visited the Tate Modern, then crossed north again to see some nice buildings. On the Wednesday of that first week, having a day free of job interviews, I wandered around Westminster and saw Trafalgar Square, the Horse Guard, St. James’s Park, Buckingham Palace, Green Park, the Wellington Arch, Hyde Park, Westminster Abbey, the Palace of Westminster, and more in that area. I also had the chance to spend a couple of hours looking around Brighton while down there for the interview at Future Platforms on Friday.

Westminster and surrounds: Trafalgar Square

Brighton: Interesting graffiti

On my second Sunday in London, having settled into my flat, I visited Holy Trinity Brompton for one of their morning services (they have 8 services each day, split between two locations). Afterwards I went to the Natural History Museum for a bit. I found their enormous collection of precious stones and minerals especially interesting. The have a large hall full of perhaps a hundred or so display cabinets, each of them full of all sorts of samples. It is overwhelming, like a lot of things here. It is just so big! The following work I had a couple more interviews: a telephone interview with Google on the Monday, and my second interview at youDevise on the Tuesday. Other than that it was not a particularly eventful week. I did a bit of baking. On Saturday I bought a bike, as cycling seemed like a good way to get around. Unfortunatly I was not able to ride it immediately as I did not get a helmet and lock until the following week.

Natural History Museum: It is a lovely building, like so many here.

That Sunday, the 30th of May, I went to one of the services at All Souls Langham Place in the morning, and then went to another church near my flat called All Saints Peckham in the evening. All Saints was a lot smaller and a lot friendlier than the other two I had visited, so I decided to keep going there at least while I was in the area.

On Tuesday I had my third and longest interview at youDevise, which was about 5 hours long including lunch. After that I visited the British Museum, which was interesting. They have the Rosetta Stone, which was cool to see. They also have a New Zealand collection, which amused me. It is interesting to see how other people see your country.

British Museum: Māori artifacts

The following day I had my in-person interview at Google. They have Douglas Adams’s bath in their foyer, along with a couple of towels. I also enjoyed sampling the food — they serve breakfast, lunch and dinner free for all employees every day. Afterwards I visited the Science Museum, which was (and still is) my favourite so far of the museums I have visited in London. I have been there several more times since, and still want to go at least once more as I have not yet seen everything there.

The next few days were fairly uneventful apart from lots of phone calls to and from my recruiter at Google discussing various details. That takes me up to about a month ago from today, so I think that it is best for me to continue from then in another blog post rather than delay any longer in posting this. I started writing this post several weeks ago, so it really is time that I finished it.

by qwandor at July 07, 2010 09:26 PM

June 10, 2010

Thoughts of a geek

Penang

Well, here goes my third and final post about Malaysia. Maybe soon I will be able to catch up to what I am actually doing now, in London!

My bus ride from Kuala Lumpur to Penang on the Monday was not quite ideal. I had asked when buying the tickets whether it was a non-stop trip, and whether it went to Georgetown. I was assured that it was both, but it turned out to be neither. There was a stop of about 45 minutes in the middle, as well as another stop along the way to drop of some passengers. Several of the other (local) passengers were complaining to each other that the bus was driving a lot more slowly than usual, and stopped for too long. One guy was apparently missing a meeting he was supposed to be at. It eventually arrived in Bayan Lepas, and I shared a taxi with 3 others to get to Georgetown, where I was staying at the Old Penang Guesthouse. After checking in I had a bit of a look around some of the city, and had Egg Briyani for dinner at a nearby foodcourt. It is a rice dish served in a clay pot, which was nice, and well-presented. I took plenty of photos as I went along, so check out my general Penang photos and follow along if you like, along with the other albums I have linked further on.

Penang: Claypot Egg Briyani.

On Tuesday morning while eating breakfast I met a couple of others staying at the guesthouse – a German and an American, Ann and Annessa – who were planning to go up Penang Hill that morning. I decided to join them. Unfortunately we did not make it up Penang Hill, but we did go to see Kek Lok Si temple, which was fairly impressive. It is up a slight hill, and near the top there is a tower called the Pagoda of Ten Thousand Buddhas. We went up to nearly the top of this, where there is a balcony around the outside, and it was interesting to note that the air was noticeably cooler than at ground level, even at this slight elevation. Perhaps this was partly because there was a bit more wind. I took plenty of photos of Kek Lok Si temple, so have a look at those for more details. Afterwards we had lunch, then took the bus back to Georgetown.

I had a look around the city by myself, visiting Fort Cornwallis, one of the clan jetties, various churches, temples, mosques and more. It was slightly surprising to see bananas growing on trees in the middle of a public park. The clan jetties are cool. They are long jetties, with lots houses and shops all along, built out over the sea by Chinese clans. Nearby, I saw a blacksmith at work, which was also interesting to watch. For dinner I had a different variety of satay steamboat from a hawker stand on the road near my guesthouse. At this one you cook the satay sticks in boiling water first, then dip them in your choice of sauce.

Penang: signs on the clan jetty.

On Wednesday I and the same two girls went to the Butterfly Farm and Tropical Fruit Farm. We had to take two buses to get there, the second of which we had to wait ages out in the heat for. They were both a bit expensive by local standards, but worth the visit I think. At the Tropical Fruit Farm we had a guided tour with a group of other visitors, followed by a fruit buffet where we could try some of the fruit grown there. Our guide did a good job, telling us all sorts of funny and informative stories along the way. The fruit buffet was nice, though we were disappointed that it did not include durian. Again, see the photos linked above for more about each. One of the owners of the Tropical Fruit Farm gave us and some other visitors a lift back part of the way to town, as the bus that goes that way only comes every couple of hours and is not very reliable. Afterwards the three of us had dinner at the Esplanade Foodcourt down by the sea, watching the lightning in the distance as we ate. There was a hawker stall near our guesthouse which sells mini pancakes, which were very nice. I tried the banana and coconut flavours; they also offered a sweetcorn flavour. I also finally tried Ais Krem Goreng (fried icecream) for dessert later in the night, which was nice and cold, but not as awesome as the name suggests. It was just a small amount of icecream wrapped in thick pastry, from a packet, briefly deep-fried.

On Thursday we had a brief look around the Botanic Gardens, hoping to have another try getting up Penang Hill. On the bus we going out there we met an Indian couple who we had seen the previous day at the Tropical Fruit Farm. There were quite a few monkeys around, which expect to be fed by tourists. After a look around the Gardens I decided to try walking up a track I had seen, hoping to get to the nearby waterfall. There were a lot of steps, heading straight up the hill, and so I was sweating very heavily. There were a number of forks in the track, and I asked some locals for directions, and eventually ended up at a rest stop where there were pots of tea and water, as well and shelter and seats. I talked there to a local Malaysian-Chinese guy, who told me about his son who is busy finishing his PhD somewhere in Australia. He told me that I was about halfway up Penang Hill, and that to get to the waterfall I had to go down a different way and turn left where I could hear water. I went the way he said, and did indeed hear water in the distance, but shortly after heading that way saying that access further along the track was forbidden, so I had to turn around and head on down. I am not sure whether or not the waterfall actually was that way, but I never did see it. That said, I and my clothes were all dripping with enough sweat that it felt like I had been under a hot waterfall in a sauna. I was very glad to have a cold drink when I got back to the Botanic Gardens, and I had a shower as soon as I got back to the guesthouse. That afternoon I had a look around the museum, then had both barbecued satay and mee goreng for dinner, followed by more banana and coconut pancakes (mmm).

Penang: a monkey at the Botanic Gardens.

Friday was my last day in Penang, and I did not have enough time to do much. After a bit of lunch I spent an hour on the bus down to the airport at the other end of the island, checked in and eventually caught my flight back to Singapore. Penang Airport has free WiFi, which was handy. For some reason the plane circled for quite a while before landing in Singapore; quite a few passengers were wondering what was going on, but it was never explained. I had a rather hot curry for dinner, then spent one more night at the same backpackers’ as last time before heading to the airport in the morning for my flight to London. This time I slept in the other building which is part of the same hostel. They have two buildings, the main one with reception, common area and kitchen, bathrooms and bedrooms, then another building a few blocks away with just bunkrooms and bathrooms that they use when the main building is full.

by qwandor at June 10, 2010 05:24 PM

June 06, 2010

Thoughts of a geek

Kuala Lumpur

I finished my last post with the bus trip from Melaka to Kuala Lumpur. It was a fairly uneventful ride on the whole, but one thing I did notice and found amusing was the frequent motorbike shelters along the highway. Every so often we would drive past a sign with a picture of a motorbike and an umbrella, pointing to a small track off the side of the highway, often under an overpass. After a while I came to assume that these were places where motorbike riders could stop and shelter during the tropical downpours which tend to occur fairly often in Malaysia. The rain is very heavy, but generally goes away as quickly as it started. There are a lot of motorbikes on the roads, so I guess these shelters must get a fair bit of use.

I arrived in KL at a temporary bus terminal at a different place to the usual one, as the bus terminal is currently being rebuilt. A large part of my reason for going to KL was to catch up with my friends Weekian and Shirley, two Malaysians who came to Wellington to study at VUW for a few years, then went back to their home country to work and study (respectively). I actually know rather a few Malaysians, but most of them have stayed in New Zealand, so Weekian and Shirley are the only two I know who are actually in Malaysia. Anyway, after I had had some nice cold mango juice to help brave the heat, Shirley turned up to greet me and show me around. We caught the monorail into town so that I could dump some of my stuff at the guesthouse, then had a look around for a while. We had a look around the central area of the city, took some photos of nice buildings and fountains around Merdeka Square, and visited several shopping malls. Malaysia, and especially KL, has a lot of enormous shopping malls. It sounds like a lot of Malaysians spend most of their spare time at the mall, which may be partly because they have air conditioning. Have a look at my photos to get some idea of the scale, but it feels even bigger when you are actually there. One of the malls we visited — Berjaya Times Square — had a theme park complete with roller coasters and various other rides in one section.

We met Weekian at KLCC for dinner in the foodcourt there, and had some good conversations catching up with each other. There is a nice little park outside with a pond and fountians where we waited for Weekian. Afterwards we had a bit of a look along Bintang Walk, which is the main nightlife area, just watching people and fountains.

Weekian was busy working on Saturday, so Shirley and I went around town a bit more. We went to the Bukit Nanas forest reserve, which is a small forest area in the middle of the city, for a short walk. It was all pretty tame, and even Shirley was amused that the path was all paved with tiles. There were a bunch of schoolkids camping there and playing games. I was able to help Shirley to use her camera better, which was fun. Unfortunately on the monorail on the way back it was very crowded and I got pickpocketed. The thief took about MYR 90 that I had in my wallet, but left the NZ and Singapore coins that I also had in there, along with my ez-link card for the Singapore MRT and receipts and so on, and dumped it outside some shop. As soon as I noticed that my wallet was missing we went back to the guesthouse, who had just had a call from someone who found my wallet on the street and saw the receipt from the guesthouse. We went and picked it up from them. The whole process took rather a while, but at least it was only money that I lost. I was very worried for a while that I had also lost my money belt, but fortunately I had just left it back at the guesthouse. After finally getting that sorted out we continued on to the KL Lake Gardens. It was raining, which did have the advantage of making it a little bit cooler and probably less crowded than usual. We found more fountains to photograph, and looked around the ASEAN Sculpture Garden. Again, see my photos, I took plenty. We also went to the National Monument, just up a small hill from the Sculpture Garden, and spent some more time playing with our cameras to capture the water in different ways.

In the early evening, before dinner I think it was, we went to a cultural performance which the tourism centre puts on several times a week. It featured 16 dancers, 8 male and 8 female, performing a range of traditional dances from Malaysia’s various cultures. It was well done. In one part one of the guys climbed up to the top of a pole held upright by several others, and perched up there while blowing a dart out of a long tube held in his hands. Again, I took lots of photos, so have a look at them for more details.

We took more photos of fountains along Bintang Walk in the evening after dinner, and I also tried durian for the first time. I was surprised to find that it did not smell nearly as much as I had been led to believe. I was able to eat a bit but did not finish it; I was not that keen on the taste or texture. Shirley enjoys it much more.

I joined Shirley at her church in the morning, a large Methodist church called DUMC. I think there were about 1500 or so people at the English-speaking service that we went to. We had a brief lunch at a nearby foodcourt with some of her friends afterwards, then met up with Weekian again to have a bit of a look around one of the universities, then Weekian drove us out to the Batu Caves. These are some big caves in a mountain, which have been turned into Hindu temples. There is an enormous statue outside, and 272 steps up to the caves. Have a look at my photos of the caves and other things around the area. There were also monkeys all over the place, climbing up and around the stairs and making a nuisance of themselves. This was the first time I had seen wild monkeys, so I did take a fair few photos of them too. There was water dripping everywhere in the caves, and a loud bell that they kept on ringing. The three of us shared some coconut water afterwards, which I did not like all that much, then headed back and decided to go to the Botanic Gardens (Taman Botani) in Putrajaya, which is a little bit out of the central area of KL. It was again helpful that Weekian has a car (thanks Weekian!). More photos were taken, of course. Apparently Shirley particularly likes reflections and leaves. Unfortunately part of the gardens was closed, but we still had enough to see in the time that we had before they closed for the evening. We had dinner together again. It was really helpful having Weekian and Shirley to explain what the various dishes were. After dinner Weekian dropped me back to the guesthouse, and we said our goodbyes hurriedly as he could not find a proper place to park.

I stayed my last night at the guesthouse, then caught a bus up to Penang on the Monday. I was not all that impressed with the guesthouse where I stayed in KL. It cost twice as much as the one in Melaka (which was largely due to it being in a bigger city, but it was a bit more expensive than some in KL, so I had hoped that it would be better), did not include breakfast, and was not nearly so comfortable or welcoming. Oh, and they did not provide any top sheet for the bed. Anyway, the guesthouse in Penang was nicer. I will describe Penang soon in another post.

by qwandor at June 06, 2010 05:10 PM

May 31, 2010

Thoughts of a geek

Melaka

It has been rather a while now, but finally, here is a bit about what I did in Malaysia.

Melaka was my first stop in Malaysia, after crossing the border from Singapore to Johor Bahru and taking a bus up on the Wednesday. Busing between cities in Malaysia is actually quite convenient, you can just go to the bus station and buy tickets for the next bus then and there, and there seem to be buses leaving for major centres every half hour or so. My bus fare from JB to Melaka was only MYR 19 and it seemed a nice comfortable ride. Unfortunately I got a bit ripped off by a taxi driver in JB after getting a bit confused about how to get to the Larkin terminal (from which the intercity buses depart), but apart from that it was fine. Once I got to Melaka, the plan was to catch a local bus from Melaka Sentral to my guesthouse. I got myself some food and a local SIM card at Melaka Sentral, and then found and got on the local bus. It was rather old and rickety, and had no air conditioning, which made it really hot. It was bearable while we were moving and there was air blowing through the windows, but whenever we stopped at traffic lights it got really hot. The bus was also really full. Unfortunately I completely missed the stop for my guesthouse. I had been trying to keep an eye on street names in an attempt to match them up to the map I had printed from the guesthouse’s website, but nothing looked familiar. Unfortunately I had not managed to get the data connection for my phone working by this point, so I could not look up maps on that. We ended up on a highway towards Muar, by which point I realised that I must have missed the stop. The driver confirmed that I had indeed, and told me to wait for a bus on the other side of the road. (At least, I think that is what he was saying. He did not speak much English.) I duly crossed the road and waited for a bus back towards my destination, but after waiting for about an hour with only two different-looking buses passing, neither of which would stop for me, I was getting a bit worried, and it was getting on in the evening and starting to rain. I was glad that I had had something to eat before leaving Melaka Sentral. I was very grateful when a taxi stopped for me, and managed to work out where I wanted to go. I was very glad to pay the MYR 15 fare back to my guesthouse.

I stayed at Old Town guesthouse, which I recommend to anyone else visiting Melaka. It is quite quiet and fairly small, but the owner is nice and friendly. It was nice having plenty of space, after the crowdedness of Singapore. They have an unusual system where there is a little notebook for each guest, where they note how many nights you are staying, and then whenever you want something that they sell (they have a various cold drinks, and some basics like toothpaste and so on) you note it in the book. You then pay for everything when you leave. There was no booking deposit or key deposit required either.

Anyway, after settling in to the guesthouse, I met a Canadian girl who was also staying there (she had previously been living in Australia, I think she said), and on the recommendation of the guesthouse owner we went to the nearby Capitol Satay Celup restaurant. Apparently rather popular and somewhat famous; we had to wait for a little while before a table was available for us. It is rather expensive by local standards — we paid MYR 10.20 each for the meal — but well worth it for the experience. Each table has a bowl in a hole in the middle full of satay sauce, with a burner underneath hooked up to a gas bottle to keep it boiling. You pick your choice of satay sticks from a large selection available on the side of the room, then bring them back to your table on a tray and put a few at a time into the boiling sauce to cook for a short time (ranging from a few seconds to several minutes depending on what they are), then eat them freshing cooked. Check out someone else’s review of the place, or just have a look at my photos. On hearing that I was from New Zealand the owner of the place proudly showed me photos on the wall of some All Black who had eaten there once. After dinner we had a look at some of the nice buildings nearby in the Dutch area, all painted red, before heading back to the guesthouse. My photos of the Dutch area at night are also online.

On Thursday I spent pretty much the whole day just wandering around town, visiting various museums, art galleries, ruins, churches, mosques, temples, and a shopping mall. I tried Cendol but did not like it. I also bought quite a few icecreams and glasses of cold fruit juice throughout the day. I took plenty of photos so those are probably the best description of what I saw.

I had a curry for late lunch (well, it was about 5:30 pm, but I had not eaten anything since breakfast at the guesthouse that morning) from an Indian stall at a small foodcourt by the roadside. It was cheap (MYR 3.50 for the food, plus MYR 0.30 for water), and the owner, although he did not speak much English, was really friendly. He was asking me about where I was from, and talking about how NZ was in the World Cup this year, and he kept on giving me more food and water — he gave me a different sort of curry to try which he thought I might like more, then some more vegetables, and more water to drink. The Malaysians I met generally seemed more friendly than the Singaporeans, especially in the smaller cities.

There were a few more people at the guesthouse that night, including an American man who had spent the last 16 years lecturing at universities in Japan, an Irish girl who lived in Scotland, and a girl from Sydney who had spent the last 2 years in London. They seemed to get along well with each other. One of them had had the same problem as me in missing the bus stop, and also ended up somewhere in the middle of nowhere just like I did. She ended up finding a store, where one of the other customers called the guesthouse for her, and the owner came and picked her up.

I had duck rice for dinner that night at a restaurant next door to the guesthouse, which was nice. The restaurant also seemed a lot cleaner and generalyl nicer than some of the places that I had eaten, though they did not have menus so I just had to ask what they had.

The next morning I had a quick look at the memorial and graveyard at Bukit Cina, right near my guesthouse, then caught a bus back to Melaka Sentral to find a bus to KL. The local bus was much nicer this time, in better condition and with air conditioning. See my next post for a bit about happenings in KL.

by qwandor at May 31, 2010 07:57 PM

May 13, 2010

Thoughts of a geek

Exploring Singapore

Like the previous post, I wrote this while on the bus up to Melaka, on Wednesday.

After arriving in Singapore on Monday night, I just checked into my backpackers’ hostel, tried to call a friend of a friend who lives in Singapore, then had a bit of a look around Little India (where my hostel was). Even at 10:00 pm there were lots of people around, and lots of shops still open. There were stalls spilling out into the street selling all sorts of fruit and vegetables, crowded department stores selling electronics, whiteware, clothes and more, stores selling Indian music and movies, with a few others thrown in at random, clothes and jewellery stores, computer repair shops, places selling cellphones, and of course lots of food vendors, bars and clubs. By 11:00 some of the stores had closed, leaving the food and drink vendors and some others.

After not much sleep on Monday night (the mattress was not very comfortable, people were coming and going from the dorm at all sorts of times, and I was missing a sheet so was — ironically — too cold), I decided to head out to Singapore Zoo. I wandered around a bit first, through another nearby street market, then took the MRT out towards the zoo. I had planned to catch a bus from the MRT station to the Zoo, but someone convinced me to take a ‘free’ minibus instead. The deal with this was that you had to buy your zoo tickets from the people operating the minibus, and you had to buy the $23 ticket including both zoo entrance and tram rides around the zoo, rather than just the $18 standard ticket. I think I would have been better catching the bus, as I had to wait on the minibus for 15 minutes or so while they found other people to go along for the trip, and I did not ride the tram at the zoo much. The bus would have cost less than $1, I think.

Anyway, once I finally made it out to the zoo it was quite nice, though really hot wandering around in the sun. I went to a show at the zoo called “The Rainforest Fights Back”, which was alright. It was about half an hour long, not great for plot or acting, but with quite a few animals trained to take various parts which was cool. There was also an opportunity to the end to have one’s photo taken with a snake, which I did not go for as the queue was quite long and I was tired and hot.

Heading back from the zoo, at the bus stop and on the bus I talked to a friendly Vietnamese lady, from Ho Chi Minh City, who was in Singapore visiting her niece. I had found Singapore’s roads a little bit crazy, but apparently compared to Ho Chi Minh City it is very orderly. Her English was not that great, but we managed to communicate well enough. I was amused that she asked whether I spoke French; apparently her French was better than her English.

After the zoo I took the MRT to Chinatown to have a look around and buy some food. It was about 4:00 pm by this stage, and I had not really had lunch, so after a bit of a wander round I just bought 6 beef satay sticks for $4.80, which were nice. The price of water varies quite a lot. At one place in Little India I had earlier got a 500 mL (I think) bottle for $0.50; here it was $1.30. I also bought some chopsticks and a t-shirt in Chinatown, as souvineers.

Heading back to my hostel, I had just enough time to sort myself out before going on a free scooter tour organised by the hostel, which I had signed up for that morning. The 12 of us plus our guide left the hostel at 6:00 pm on our scooters, and imitated the bikes I mentioned earlier in going the wrong way up one-way streets, on the wrong side of the road, and ringing our bells lots. We also went on footpaths and other paths in areas where they were available. We started off going through the Thieves Market near our hostel, then shortly visited the Arab area where our guide had us introduce ourselves to each other (name, where we were from, where we were going next after Singapore, whether we were single), took photos of a mosque, and visited a shop selling antique toys, where we were encouraged by the owner to take lots of photos.

After a few hours touring around, we stopped at the museum. Apparently during the day it costs to get in, but in the evenings four of the exhibits (food, photography, fashion and movies) are open for free. We had a quick look around these and took some photos, then toured around on our scooters a bit more, and took some group photos down by the river with the Merlion. Eventually we headed to an enormous food court for dinner, which we were quite ready for at around 9:00 pm. From memory it was divided into about 10 streets with over 100 stalls in total, and a live band playing in the middle on top of a circle of shops selling drinks and desserts.

Have a look at photos of the trip to Singapore, miscellany around Singapore, Singapore Zoo and the scooter tour.

by qwandor at May 13, 2010 05:48 AM

May 08, 2010

Thoughts of a geek

Singapore — First impressions

I wrote this blog post while on the bus from Singapore (well, actually Johor Bahru in Malaysia) to Melaka on Wednesday, but was unable to get my laptop online in Melaka so am posting it now.

The MRT system in Singapore is very well run. I had to get a standard ticket for the trip from the airport to my hostel, but after that I got a stored-value card for $15 ($5 for the card + $10 initial credit) which lasted the rest of my time there, quite a few trips. Trains come every 5 minutes or so during the day; some of them are very full but the terminals let masses of people get through very quickly so there is hardly any waiting. There are many parallel gates to get into and out of the terminal, and it only takes a couple of seconds per person to scan your card. You just scan it once at the beginning of your journey, then again when leaving the final station; there is no need to do anything when getting onto or off the train or transferring. The same stored-value card works on all the buses in Singapore, too. The cards can be topped up, and standard tickets purchased, from machines at every station. There are screens and automated announcements on the train saying what the next stop is, maps of the MRT system and surrounding city at each station, and screens at each platform saying when the next train will arrive.

After the air-conditioned airport terminal and MRT, stepping out into the open air was a shock, even at 8:00 pm or so. It is just so hot and humid, sauna-like, even in the shade or at night. Despite knowing to expect this I still found it rather overwhelming at first. Getting from the MRT station to the hostel with all my bags was rather tiring, even though it was only a 5-10 minute walk. The footpaths did not help. On many roads, especially around Little India, the footpaths are narrow, often blocked by various things from shops, or sometimes non-existent. Without a big suitcase to carry it is fine, you just keep your eyes open and walk on the road as necessary. Cars (and motorbikes, bicycles and other forms of transport) do sometimes drive quite fast down the narrow streets, but they seem to be fairly observant.

Another thing that I noticed about the streets is that there are a lot of one-way streets, but this does not seem to apply to bikes. Bikes often would ride up streets the wrong way on either side (even on four lane roads!), or on the wrong side of two-way streets. This was important to beware of when trying to cross the road.

At pedestrian crossings in Singapore, when the time to cross the road is almost up, the green man flashes (rather than the red man as in New Zealand). This confused me the first couple of times. I guess either way makes just as much sense, but I was not expecting it. At some crossings there is also a countdown of how many seconds are left to cross, which can be helpful.

Speaking of walking on the street, people walking or on public transport in Singapore do not smile! In New Zealand, if you smile at somebody as you walk past them, or sitting on a bus or somewhere, there is a good chance that they will smile back. In Singapore it seems that the only time people will smile at a stranger is if they are also a tourist visiting from somewhere else, or if they are trying to sell you something. The street vendors are often very pushy, if you walk past or look in their direction they will say “Hello sir! Where are you from? Come, we tailor suit for you.”, or hand you a menu and tell you to sit down “Sit, sit, sit here. You like noodles? Rice?”.

by qwandor at May 08, 2010 03:12 PM

April 24, 2010

Thoughts of a geek

Plans for Malaysia

Well! My plans progress. Further to my last post about travelling, I have now mostly decided on what I will be doing (or at least, where I will be going and when) in Singapore and Malaysia.

I arrive in Singapore on the evening of Monday 3rd May, at 7:00 pm SST as previously stated. I suspect I will be quite tired by then, having been travelling all day, so will probably just find my hostel, have some dinner and not do too much. The next day I will hopefully be meeting up with Isaac Ng and having a look around Singapore, perhaps going to Jurong Bird Park and/or the Night Safari, or whatever else there is to do in Singapore. I am told that the airport has free telephones for calling Singapore landlines and cellphones, which should be handy.

After a second night in Singapore, I will be catching a bus across the border to Malaysia and up to Melaka. It sounds like I will have to take one bus just across the border to Johor Bahru, and another up from there to Melaka. And I guess then a local bus to my hostel in Melaka.

Accommodation in Malaysia is cheap! The backpackers hostel type place I am staying at in Melaka (thanks for the recommendation, Melanie!) costs MYR 30 (about NZ$13) / night for an air-conditioned single room, including WiFi, linen and a basic breakfast. Kuala Lumpur is a bit more expensive — the place I am staying there is MYR 60 / night, again for an air-conditioned single room — but the equivalent in London would be about £60 / night, which at current exchange rates is about NZ$130. 10 times the price!

Anyway. I stay two nights in Melaka. Apparently there are interesting historical buildings and such to look at. Recommendations of what to do are welcome. The other thing I need to do in Melaka is buy a SIM card for my phone, so that I can use it during my time in Malaysia without paying exorbitant roaming charges.

After that, I take the bus up to Kuala Lumpur on Friday 7th May, to catch up with Shirley and hopefully Weekian, and have a look around. I stay in KL for 3 nights, then head up to Penang on the Monday. I have not booked accommodation in Penang yet as I may be staying with a friend’s uncle (thanks Ying-Hui!), but my current plan is to stay there for 4 nights, have a look around and probably spend some time on the beach, then fly back down to Singapore for one more night there before I fly on to London on Saturday 15th May.

Recommendations of things to see and do in all these places are still very welcome. As are people to say hello to. (-:

by qwandor at April 24, 2010 12:44 AM

April 17, 2010

Thoughts of a geek

Recipes

I have posted a number of recipes on this blog before, but as I have recently had a few people ask for copies of various recipes I thought it might be worth making a post with a number of my favourite recipes all together in one place. So, here are a few recipes which I make fairly often and recommend. I have provided each recipe in PDF format for easy viewing or Krecipes format for importing into that software. If you would like a copy in a different format just let me know by posting a comment below.

First up is a basic banana cake. It is fairly quick and easy to make, hard to go wrong with, and only needs one mixing bowl. Download: PDF, Krecipes

Apple Scotch is a dessert that I often make to take if I am invited to visit somebody for dinner, as it is fairly quick to prepare with a food processor, I can carry it without too much trouble, and it can sit in the fridge for a while then be cooked quickly in the microwave just before we are ready to eat it. It is especially nice served with vanilla or chocolate icecream. Download: PDF, Krecipes

Another dessert that I often take to people’s places is a microwave steamed pudding. It is also quick to prepare, and takes only 3 minutes to cook. When I am bringing it for dinner at someone’s place, I mix and microwave the wet ingredients in a large jam jar, mix the dry ingredients in a plastic pottle, then bring them, my ring tin and some golden syrup in my backpack. It then takes just a few minutes at my destination to finish the preparations by mixing the two and putting everything into the ring tin, then I can just microwave it and have it ready to eat in very little time. It is even better served with fresh hot custard. Download: PDF, Krecipes

Another good dessert, less portable but easily scaled up to feed lots of people (I made it for 40 once), is this chocolate fudge pudding I got from a chocolate cookbook I have. It is a little bit different to most chocolate self-saucing puddings, with a more fudgey texture that I prefer. Download: PDF, Krecipes

Moving on from desserts, I will leave you with a few favourite muffin recipes.
Orange muffins: PDF, Krecipes
Double chocolate muffins: PDF, Krecipes

I think that will do for now. Feedback is welcome, as always.

by qwandor at April 17, 2010 10:37 AM

March 14, 2010

Thoughts of a geek

More travel plans

I just bought my tickets. They would have been about $100 cheaper if I had bought them a few days earlier. Oops.

I suppose I should back up a bit. To start with, I went in to STA travel and asked what fares they had one-way to London. The lady there was going to email me through some options, but never did. When I emailed them somebody else replied to me, giving only one option (some flights via Korea, with an unspecified carrier). Looking online on STA Travel’s website the cheapest flight was with Singapore Airlines, via Singapore. House of Travel had similar prices, with Singapore Airlines also the cheapest. Trying Singapore Airlines’ website directly, I found it easier to use than the travel agents’ sites, and the fares were about $200 cheaper. I also noticed that I could stop over in Singapore for no extra charge, so I figured I might as well stay for 3 or 4 days and see the place. Great!

I asked a friend for advice on what to do in Singapore and how long to stay, and he suggested that I should visit Malaysia while I was in the area, and pointed out that there were cheap flights or a bus available. Well, this opened up even more possibilities, resulting in me delaying even further in booking flights while I tried to decide how long to stay in Singapore and Malaysia. I am still not sure what I will be doing or quite where I will go, but I have finally bought my flights (the major ones, not yet any flights from Singapore to Malaysia). I will leave Wellington on 2010-05-03 at 9:30 am NZST, fly to Auckland and then Singapore to arrive at 7:00 pm SST. I leave Singapore on 2010-05-15 at 12:45 pm SST, and arrive in London at 7:00 pm, ready to have fun navigating the public transport system with all my luggage.

My current (rough) plan is to stay at a backpacker’s hostel for 2 or 3 nights in Singapore, then either fly to Kuala Lumpar or take the bus across the border and up to Melaka and perhaps on to KL from there. Or perhaps I might take the bus up and then fly back. I am not looked much yet into what there is do see and do.

So, if you have suggestions of what I should do, or know anyone in Singapore or Malaysia whom I should meet or even stay with, let me know!

(Oh, and thanks to everybody who has already given me advice! It is much appreciated.)

by qwandor at March 14, 2010 04:27 AM

February 18, 2010

Thoughts of a geek

Your fare is Mifare

Or rather, your student ID.

I recently bought a Snapper Feeder to have a play with, as I had heard that they were supported by libnfc under all the major operating systems and could talk to a variety of contactless smartcards. I tried any cards I could get my hands on, and other than the Snapper card itself I found that our building access cards were not compatible (using a different frequency, perhaps?) but the Vic student ID cards were recognised. Furthermore, it turns out that these ID cards are MIFARE Classic 4k cards.

Now, this is interesting because encryption scheme used by the Mifare Classic was broken and research published explaining the vulnerabilities as early as 2007, and this is even acknowledged by the manufacturer. Anyway, being the curious sort I am, I went about trying to see what I could see about the Vic student ID cards. I have not yet been able to replicate the card-only crack to recover the keys, but I have had a bit of a look at how the cards are formatted.

Firstly, a bit of background. The Mifare Classic 4k has 40 sectors, each of which has 2 48-bit encryption keys (called A and B) and 12 configuration bits which control which of the keys allow read and write access to the sector’s data and configuration. Each sector is broken down into a number of 16 byte blocks. The first 32 sectors have 4 such blocks (64 bytes total), while the last 8 sectors each have 16 blocks (256 bytes per sector). The last block of each sector is called the sector trailer and contains the encryption keys and configuration bits previously mentioned. Note that the configuration and keys for each sector is independent of all the other sectors. Reading from and writing to the card is done on a block by block basis. Accessing a block is a two step process. First you must authenticate to the sector with either the A or the B key, then you can read or write one of the blocks in that sector.

With this in mind, here is what I have found so far about Vic’s student ID cards. I used the micmd tool, which provides a fairly simple interface to access Mifare Classic cards using libnfc, and a few other bits and pieces. Authentication to all sectors except sector 15 worked using FFFFFFFFFFFF (a common default key) as either key A or key B. However, despite the successful authentication, I was only able to read the blocks of sector 0. (Admittedly I did not try all of the other sectors, but all that I did try failed to read.) This may indicate that these sectors are configured to not to be accessible by either key, as a way of permanently disabling them, or it may be a problem with my reader. The reason I suspect my reader is that it would often lock up after certain operations, not responding at all until I unplugged it and plugged it back in again. I am not sure what is causing this; if anyone has any ideas do say.

Sector 15 appears to be using a proper key, and is probably where the real data of the card is stored.

Sector 0, the one sector I did manage to successfully read, does not appear to hold much of interest. On one card, with a UID of D4 EE 01 6E, the four blocks were

0: D4EE016E55980200648E565165603905
1: 800F0000000000000000000000000000
2: 00000000000000000000000000001248
3: 000000000000787788C1000000000000

Block 0 of sector 0 apparently holds read-only data set by the manufacturer, so is not that exciting. It appears that the first 4 bytes are the UID of the card. The 5^th byte also seems to vary between cards (on the 3 cards I tried the values were 0×55, 0x5F and 0×61). The remaining 11 bytes of block 0 were the same on all 3 cards I tried. Blocks 1, 2 and 3 (the trailer block) were also the same on all 3 cards, which suggests that they are unlikely to be interesting.

I did attempt to use the nested authentication attach (I believe) as implemented by mfoc and MFCUK to recover the keys for sector 15, but for some reason both implementations failed, possibly due to the reader ceasing to respond part-way through as mentioned above. Any suggestions on how to get past this are welcomed.

Does anyone have any other interesting smartcards?

by qwandor at February 18, 2010 09:22 AM

January 31, 2010

Thoughts of a geek

Leaving (Earth)

My contract at Innaworks ends at the end of March this year. I am planning after that to move to London, try to find a job there and hopefully find time to travel around a bit while I am at it. I will most likely leave in April or May, depending on airfares, how long it takes to get a visa, and a few other things. I have just now paid the visa application fee and filled in the first part of the form. It is quite a process.

If any of you have any advice about travelling in general, London in particular, finding work, or contacts in London or elsewhere in the UK then I would be happy to hear from you. I would also like to catch up with everyone here in New Zealand before I go, so if you want to catch up or hang out sometime let me know.

I also need to get rid of my bed, lounge suite, and possibly other furniture (chest of drawers, desk). If you might be interested in buying these off me or borrowing them while I am away, let me know and I can give you more details.

Song: Code 64 — Leaving Earth

by qwandor at January 31, 2010 05:11 AM

November 04, 2009

Thoughts of a geek

Rubgy, a safe technical topic, and baking

Continuing on from my last post taking suggestions from Twitter, today I will be blogging about topics suggested by people on Facebook.

Allan Chesswas: Rugby

Here in New Zealand, and elsewhere I hear, some people like to run around a field jumping on each other and chasing an oddly-shaped ball. This activity seems to be more popular among boys than girls. Many other people like to watch them do so. Several of my flatmates are in the latter set, and one in the former. I have never seen the attraction of either activity. The running around does at least provide decent exercise, but at significant risk of injury. Watching seems even more pointless, and frequently people do so (via television) instead of partaking in more interesting and productive pastimes such as good conversation, programming, baking, listening to music or even reading. This can be something of a frustration.

Donald Gordon: Safe technical topics which no one will be offended by.

Well. Most of my ‘recreational’ programming of late has been on Fridge. Fridge is a co-operative honesty system for snackfood which originated in Memphis. The Memphis Fridge is something of an open secret, used by graduate students and their friends. The basic idea is that certain people buy pre-packaged food and drink in bulk. Everyone who uses fridge has an prepay account which they can put money into by putting cash in a drawer and crediting their account, and then they can use this balance to buy the food and drink. The software keeps track of users, money, the various items stocked, markups to make up for lost or damaged stock, various statistics, and so on.

I have made a few minor contributions to the Fridge software in the past (such as adding a QIF export feature to allow users to import their transaction history into their personal accounting software), but my substantial work on it now began with interfridge. Interfridge was an idea that I and others had some time ago, last year I think, to allow users on one fridge to use that account on another fridge. This was motivated by the fact that both Memphis and Innaworks (where I currently work) run the Fridge software, and several of us use both fridges from time to time. The idea of interfridge was that I could visit Memphis, login to their fridge with my Innaworks fridge account, and purchase items from Memphis just like any Memphis user.

At some point Donald wrote some notes on his ideas of how interfridge should be designed. I finally got around to implementing this (the server side in PHP as part of fridgeweb, the client side integrated into the Java fridge client) using a protocol on top of HTTP. After much discussion with lorne, Chris Andreae and Stephen Nelson and several iterations changing the protocol to fix potential security holes pointed out, we came up with the interfridge protocol that is now in use between Memphis and Innaworks.

However, we realised along the way that fridge really could do with being improved in other respects. Currently, the Java client talks directly to a PostgreSQL database which holds all the user, stock and transaction data. This means that the client must include the database password, which is really not a good thing to be giving out to all and sundry. A much better design would be to have a trusted fridge server which talks to the database, and then have the client perform all operations via the server. With an appropriately-designed protocol, this means that the client need not be trusted, and so anyone can write their own client to use with the fridge. I have thus begun to design and implement a fridge protocol based on the interfridge protocol (it can do everything the interfridge protocol can do and more, so will replace it when it is done). For this I scrapped the custom RPC protocol which I had been implementing for myself on top of HTTP, and went with XMLRPC to take care of all the details of procedure calls, encoding and decoding in a standard way. There are various implementation of XMLRPC available for many programming languages. I should note that the documentation linked above does not include all of the API currently implemented in the code, though it will eventually. I am currently still in the middle of designing it, implementing and documenting it at the same time.

As it currently stands, the fridge server has methods to login, check a user’s balance, transfer an amount to a local or remote (i.e. interfridge) user, make a purchase at the local fridge (I still have not yet decided the best way to handle interfridge purchases in the new scheme), list the current stock, and list other fridges with which the fridge is peered. I am writing a client library and simple command-line client in Ruby to test this as I go. The command-line client implements all the features just mentioned. I have not yet done much on the Java client, but that will come at some point. lorne has just started work on an iPhone client, which should be cool.

Felix Shi: You can always blog about cooking weird and wonderful dishes

Weird and wonderful? Not sure about that. I made a batch of muesli and a chocolate cake on Sunday, as I mentioned. The weekend before I baked two batches of muffins (apple and sultana for the Skyline walk on Saturday, banana chocolate chip or something for a picnic on Labour Day with gringer, ja and xyzzy).

I am afraid my cooking of late has not been terribly interesting. Suggestions are welcomed, as are visitors interested in consuming baking. As always.

by qwandor at November 04, 2009 10:35 AM

November 03, 2009

Thoughts of a geek

Fixing VMware mouse grab bug on Ubuntu Karmic

I just upgraded my work machine from Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) to 9.10 (Karmic) and came across a couple of problems with VMware Player (version 2.5.3 build-185404). It seemed wise to document the fixes I found here so that other people experiencing the same problems might find these solutions when they Google for it.

The first was an error when it tried to launch my VM complaining that the virtualisation extensions of my CPU were already in use, saying “The virtualization capability of your processor is already in use. Disable any other running hypervisors before running VMware Player.” and then a number of other errors. This was fixed by removing the KVM kernel modules:
$ rmmod kvm_intel kvm

The second problem was that the VMware window would lose its mouse capture whenever I moved the mouse pointer outside the top-left of the VM screen (apparently a 640×480 region), unless I had a mouse button held down. This made it impossible to actually use the VM. This was eventually fixed by adding the following line to /etc/vmware/bootstrap:
export VMWARE_USE_SHIPPED_GTK=yes
This forces VMware Player to use its own version of the GTK library rather than the Ubuntu one, which apparently avoids the mouse grab bug.

by qwandor at November 03, 2009 09:23 PM

November 01, 2009

Thoughts of a geek

Walks, muesli and sheep

Well I asked the Twittersphere for suggestions of what I should blog about, and sure enough the Twittersphere obliged. So here goes.

fibby17: some of your more interesting recent walks?

Well, let me see. The most recent walk to speak of was the Skyline walkway. This is a walk I had been meaning to do ever since a group of us walked up to Mount Kaukau early last year and some passer-by pointed out and recommended to us the Skyline Walkway. I finally organised it for Saturday 24^th October 2009.

Charlotte, Frith, Chris Nimmo and Hannah came. I was hoping to have more people, but they were otherwise occupied or pulled out or did not turn up. We (except Chris) took the train out to Johnsonville to start the walk, except that the train was really a bus. We were amused when the driver offered a lady a free ride near the end of the route and she asked him how the buses were that day, to which he replied something along the lines of “Good, but I am a train today.” Chris was to meet us at the start of the track but after looking up his cellphone number on Facebook and a few SMSes and calls back and forth he said that he would meet us up Mount Kaukau instead. We made a start, with a little initial confusion about where the track actually went.

After a little while we made it up Mount Kaukau but found no sign of Chris, and he was not responding to SMSes or phone calls. We waited and ate a little, and finally made contact with Chris and he turned up about an hour after we got there, with wet hair and shoes and a number of scratches. Apparently he had somehow taken a wrong turn and decided that the best solution would be to bush-bash his way up another side, via much gorse and a stream. After a little while longer for him to recover we raced onwards down the other side, shortly to detour off the track to climb a little rocky knoll, admire the view and take photos. We came across a full possum trap beside the fence, into which Hannah insisted on looking, only to be predictably disgusted at the possum’s head inside. There was also another older dead possum to the left. The detour completed we continued on along the proper track, talking a little about possum shooting for fun and profit.

At around 1:00 pm we stopped for lunch (people’s own packed lunches plus the apple muffins I made, chips and scroggin brought by Charlotte and Frith respectively). Lunch was followed by a lovely lie down in the sun, enjoying the view and watching two people bike past in opposite directions. I did not envy them.

By and by we continued on, narrowly avoiding the wide road down to a certain suburb (Or was that before lunch? My memory fails.), and taking turns to flick the track markers as we passed them. We later stopped at the remains (just a chimney) of an old house, and discussed windfarms. After a while more walking we reached the end of the track at Makara Hill Road, and headed down to Karori Park to lie in the sun and rest for a little while. Our plans to play in the playground were thwarted by the large number of small children already doing so. Children really should be banned from playgrounds, it seems quite unfair to the rest of us. We wandered back along Karori Road, some buying icecreams and such, and people went their separate ways one by one.

All in all, good fun and good company. The weather turned out really well too, overcast to start with and sunny later, but a nice breeze so as not to be too hot. Photos can be found on Facebook.

There are more walks I could talk about, less recent. Walking around the outside of the Karori Sancuary in the rain comes to mind. Oh, I guess the Interface geocaching trip could count too. Those were both a while ago though. There have not been enough walks lately. Come walking with me!

Anyway, it is late and I should attempt to sleep, so I will not say more about these walks just now. If you want to hear, talk to me. Not that I expect to sleep much even when I do try; sleep has proven particularly hand to find lately. This is most unsatisfactory.

yomcat: Burnt Muesli.

Yesterday afternoon I baked a cake for my flatmate Stevie (who turns old today), and also some muesli for myself. As the cake was on the middle of the oven I put the muesli on a shelf below it, almost at the bottom of the oven. I normally cook the muesli on the middle shelf. I was surprised to find that the muesli seemed to get more burnt on the top than usual (not badly, but noticeably); I had expected that it might get burnt on the bottom, being closer to the bottom element and all. A little discussion on Facebook ensued:

Matthew Kiernan: is there an element near the bottom?
Andrew Walbran: Yes. But I would expect it to get burnt on the bottom if it is near the bottom, not on the top.
Matthew Kiernan: maybe the tray isn’t absorbing heat very well, and convection is carrying the hot air over the top of the tray.
Andrew Walbran: It still surprises me; I would expect the radiant heat to be more of a factor in burning the top, and that would surely be stronger when it is higher up in the oven.
Matthew Kiernan: sounds right, I suppose it would depend on the oven setting – grill vs bake, and I suppose fan forced air is always a factor
Andrew Walbran: Yeah, it was on fan bake. I should also note that it is an electric oven.

Clearly I have an exciting life.

simon_w: sheep.

Well, there were no sheep on the walk mentioned earlier in this post, but there were some cows. We walked right past a couple of them. Oh, my flatmates were watching TV a short time ago and there was an advertisement for sheep. For this place I think, a (live)stock market. Apparently wild venison mince is marginally cheaper (or was it marginally more expensive?) at Moore Wilsons than lamb. Richard is planning to make us some venison burgers sometime soon. I hope that it will be on a night when I am home for dinner (hint hint). Oh, and electric sheep is a very cool screensaver. If somewhat addictive. It is named after the Philip K. Dick novella, of course. I do not think I have read it, though I have seen Blade Runner. Perhaps I should get back into reading books. shoeshine was recommending a certain novel to me the other day (I do not have the name in front of me on this machine yet, and it escapes my mind; apparently character-driven sci-fi set in some sort of post-apocalyptic future from memory).

Tibi placet?

by qwandor at November 01, 2009 11:12 AM

September 20, 2009

Thoughts of a geek

Faith, God and all that jazz

I have been meaning to write this post for quite some time now, a couple of months I guess, following a few conversations with a couple of people.

I guess I will start off with where I stand. I consider myself a Christian. Certainly I have all the obvious trappings: I go to church every Sunday, read the bible daily, go to a bible study with people from church most weeks, try to pray. I try to live my life, make decisions, from a Christian worldview. I try to be open to discussing my beliefs, ‘faith’ if you will, with others, as this is interesting, worthwhile and indeed a vital part of a Christian life (I Peter 3:15, Mark 16:15).

However, I do find it difficult to explain, and I think this largely comes down to not having a very clear idea in my own mind. On that note I would like to post a few questions, and list (my interpretations of) some people’s answers to them so far. I also include my own in some cases.

I would be interested to hear your thoughts (different answers to the questions, comments on the existing answers) and discuss further, either here or — better — in person. I have been particularly frustrated over these things over the last two or three months, and have found it difficult to talk to people, so this is an attempt to get some of my thoughts out in the hope of being able discuss them further. This is mainly aimed at Christians, but extends to anyone.

What is faith?

• Blind belief, in the absence of evidence — obviously, I find this an unsatisfactory definition. There needs to be some way to discriminate between things in which you should have faith and things in which you should not.
• Belief that something is a certain way, or that something will happen, based on past experience and testimony (direct or indirect) of people whom I trust. ‘Faith’ then is very closely related to ‘trust’, perhaps even the same thing. This is my current working definition, but some people I have talked to find it unsatisfactory. I do not really understand why; apparently it is insufficient in some way?

What is the basis of Christian faith?

• The Bible — this requires first an argument for the historical accuracy of the bible, and then trust in the people whose witness is recorded in it (for example in the gospels). This is difficult due to the lack of a personal relationship, so it becomes a rather indirect thing.
• Other people’s testimony — friends, family. Again this comes down to accepting what people say based on personal trust in them, which in turn comes from knowing them, observing their words and actions and judging their trustworthiness from that.
• Supernatural experience — some sort of experience beyond the usual which provokes or confirms a belief in the God conceived by Christianity and described in the Bible. Some people certainly describe such an experience, to greater or lesser extent, or even it being a regular thing.

How does God talk to you?

• The written word of the Bible is God talking to you — but, it is hardly personal then.
• While reading the Bible — how?
• Through other people — He sends people to say things to you, and so what they say is in a sense God talking to you. But then, how does He tell them what to say?
• Just talking directly to you — again, how? What does this mean, how is it experienced?

How do you know that God is talking to you, and how do you know what He is saying?

• You hear distinct words
• It is more of a general feeling of some sort — but then how do you know that it is from God?
• A ‘prompting’, you just think of doing something — but we often think of doing things. How is this ‘prompt’ different? ‘Prompting’ is a vague term. Perhaps this is the same as or similar to the previous answer.

What does it mean to ‘believe’?

• A belief is a theorem (in the sense used in mathematics). That is, a statement is ‘believed’ if it there is a proof for it. I know that Peirce’s law holds in classical logic because I can write a proof using only the axioms of that logic, so I can say “I believe that Peirce’s law holds in classical logic”. Nothing can be believed beyond what can be proven, so belief is limited to the formalisms of mathematics. This does not include any of the sciences, as even physics is just a matter of attempting to find a consistent model which fits observed phenomena; no proof is possible as physical laws are only guesses which happen to match reality in a few observations.
• A belief is a working assumption. I ‘believe’ that the sun will rise tomorrow insofar as I assume it will based on past experience, and so I base my decisions and plans on that assumption. Beliefs then are not certain, cannot be proven, but are necessary for decision-making and, well, life.

Note that the first and last questions are of definition, so it is more a matter of how you choose to define faith and belief than any intrinsic reality. Consistent and agreed-upon definitions are, however, vital to any meaningful communication.

by qwandor at September 20, 2009 11:12 AM

August 22, 2009

Thoughts of a geek

Beard no more

11 people voted. Of males not in my family, 2 voted each way; of females not in my family, 1 each way; and of people in my family (male or female), 1 voted for me to keep the beard and 4 to shave it off. So, I did so yesterday afternoon. I now have nothing to tug on or through which to run my fingers.

by qwandor at August 22, 2009 12:02 PM

August 17, 2009

Thoughts of a geek

An interesting tale of filehandles

I just found an interesting bug, so I thought it might be worthwhile to share it with these intertubes to prevent other people from making the same mistake.

I was just transferring some more music onto my iPhone with Amarok while at the same time listening to music. I wanted to listen to a particular track (from a Moby album I bought recently), so stopped and switched to that, but Amarok would not play it and complained about the sound device being busy. This seemed rather odd as it had just been playing fine until I tried to change tracks. Wanting to get to the bottom of this, I checked who had what open:

andrew@rata:~$ sudo lsof /dev/snd/*
lsof: WARNING: can't stat() fuse.sshfs file system /media/iphone
Output information may be incomplete.
COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE NODE NAME
timidity 4162 root 6u CHR 116,1 4973 /dev/snd/seq
kmix 4511 andrew 10u CHR 116,0 5260 /dev/snd/controlC0
ssh 5605 andrew 16u CHR 116,0 5260 /dev/snd/controlC0
ssh 5605 andrew 33r CHR 116,33 4954 /dev/snd/timer
ssh 5605 andrew 39u CHR 116,16 5236 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p
ssh 5605 andrew 41u CHR 116,0 5260 /dev/snd/controlC0
sshfs 5609 andrew 16u CHR 116,0 5260 /dev/snd/controlC0
sshfs 5609 andrew 33r CHR 116,33 4954 /dev/snd/timer
sshfs 5609 andrew 39u CHR 116,16 5236 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p
sshfs 5609 andrew 41u CHR 116,0 5260 /dev/snd/controlC0

I should point out at this point that the way I get Amarok to sync music to my (jailbroken) iPhone is to FUSE-mount the iPhone via SFTP over the network, so that is why SSH was running. But on with the story.

SSH had my sound device open‽ What? That seemed very odd. I wondered whether perhaps there was some new SSH feature I had not heard about to forward sound over the network connection (as it can do for GUI applications using X11), but there I could find no mention of such a feature in the manpage or via Google, nor any possible reason why it might want to open a sound device. I asked lorne, and he was equally confused, but suggested a few things to check.

After a bit of poking around I discovered that I could not replicate this behaviour by mounting the filesystem myself, only when Amarok did it. This prompted a realisation of what must be happening: when Amarok launches sshfs to mount the iPhone filesystem, it presumably does a fork and exec to start the new process. But when you do this, the new process inherits all the open file handles of the parent process. Amarok of course had the sound device open to play the music I was listening to originally, so sshfs and subsequently ssh ended up with the same device file open. Amarok must then have closed it and tried to reopen it when I switched tracks, and this failed because the other processes it had launched still had it open. Of course.

So, lesson of the day: when you fork, remember to close any excess files before you exec. Especially if they are device files or other special files.

I should probably file a bug report for Amarok, but I am not sure that I can be bothered.

by qwandor at August 17, 2009 10:25 AM

August 14, 2009

Thoughts of a geek

Things I should do

I have been a bit slack lately about getting much done. I keep thinking of things which I should do, but mostly do not get around to doing them. In the hope of improving this I list here some things which I should do:

• Implement mDNS abstraction layer for stereo using Avahi DBUS bindings, sort out ant script, and get stereo head to a usable state on Linux. (Or, bug Stephen to do it.)
• Write various blog posts I have been thinking about (last.fm client, friends, childhood memories, more to life, questions).
• Work on theQuotebook, maybe look into Facebook integration.
• Do more baking.
• Catch up with various people I have not seen for ages.
• Work out what to do for a chassis for the robot I am building, add the remaining wires for the motor controller, and filter capacitors.
• Talk more to people about conceptions of God (relationship, hearing from God, basis of faith…), and maybe blog some thoughts and questions.
• Organise a group of people to do the Skyline Walkway some Saturday.
• Work out what I am doing with my life, what I want to do and what God wants me to do, where I am going in the mid- to long-term, what to do next year…

Feel free to bug me about doing any of these things. Or maybe other things.

by qwandor at August 14, 2009 10:59 AM

August 13, 2009

Thoughts of a geek

Beard or not

I have had a beard for quite a few years now, and I am wondering whether to keep it or get rid of it. So, I thought I would take a poll of your opinions, dear readers. Which do you prefer: Andrew with beard, or Andrew without beard? To illustrate:

Please vote by commenting here (on the original post please, not on Facebook, so as to keep everything in one place), and I may or may not pay attention to what you have to say.

(And back to your regularly scheduled programme…)

by qwandor at August 13, 2009 09:39 AM

August 10, 2009

Thoughts of a geek

Tweet your quotes

by qwandor at August 10, 2009 06:48 AM

August 08, 2009

Thoughts of a geek

What is this?

by qwandor at August 08, 2009 03:21 AM

July 30, 2009

Thoughts of a geek

Juvenile humour

by qwandor at July 30, 2009 09:32 AM

July 24, 2009

Thoughts of a geek

Microwave mug steamed pudding

by qwandor at July 24, 2009 10:03 AM

21/100

by qwandor at July 24, 2009 09:45 AM

July 09, 2009

Thoughts of a geek

On my mind

by qwandor at July 09, 2009 10:48 AM

July 08, 2009

Thoughts of a geek

Updates to theQuotebook

by qwandor at July 08, 2009 09:46 AM

July 06, 2009

fiasco

Destination: Manila

How I ended up deciding to hang around in a slum for two weeks

When I first became aware of the opportunity to go on this trip, I was excited and thought this would be great. Friends encouraged me. I got an application form and everything. Then ... I sort of forgot about it.

Then I went to church camp; our major focus was talking about how we could/should be doing something explicitly missional. There was a lot of discussion about overseas mission. What really struck a chord for me was the mention of how it can be transformative to the people who go.

Again ... I sort of forgot about it. Until I saw one of the Urban Vision people on Twitter talking about how they'd just got cheap tickets to Manila, and realised that I hadn't sent the form in and needed to do something, now. I decided on the spot that of course I was going and called up the guy organising it and sent some money for the tickets and stuff -- thankfully he had some idea I was keen so this wasn't completely out of the blue.

This sort of mirrors how I ended up joining Urban Vision myself; initial excitement, then trepidation, then it slipping to the back of my mind, then being asked and saying yes of course how could I do anything else?

What the trip is

It's billed as a "Slum Retreat". We're each placed with a family in the squatter community -- to live with them, see the routines of daily life, the struggles, the hard things, the easy things, the normal, mundane everyday things, even the boredom when there's nothing to do.

We're deliberately trying to avoid fitting the role that Westerners on mission trips are expected to take. We're there to learn, not to teach. There to live like they do, not stay in a hotel and put a roof on a school. There to have our hearts changed, not just our film exposed.

What I expect to get out of this

I don't know exactly how I'll react. I expect to feel stress, homesickness, boredom, confusion. But I'm hoping for a few things:

• hoping to experience a way of life and a level of poverty that is completely out of my field of experience and pretty far out of my comfort zone
• hoping to, as a result of being moved far far away from our western affluent consumer culture, to find Jesus in a new and meaningful way -- to see Christ in what Matthew 25:40 calls "the least of these"
• hoping this will better inform my activities as a member of Urban Vision, to continue to develop a relationship with the poor and marginalised that is based on humility and servanthood

Oh, and I won't be answering my phone

No phone. No laptop. No email. For the first week, no camera. I'm not going in order to twitter "look at me I'm in a slum" every 45 seconds. You'll all just have to cope without me for a couple of weeks. I'm sure you'll manage.

Up and atom!

Fly out early this Thursday morning. Back on Sunday the 26th of July. Your thoughts and prayers will be most appreciated.

July 06, 2009 10:51 PM

July 05, 2009

fiasco

The Quest for the Perfect Custard Square: Thorndon New World

Acting on a tip received from a friend at church, I travelled to Thorndon New World in search of custard, in square form, sandwiched between pastry and icing.

With remarkable success. Supermarket baking is usually a bit meh, but Thorndon New World's custard squares are almost exactly like the ones from my high school's tuckshop. The icing isn't chocolate coloured (don't think the taste is actually very different) but apart from that: the custard is just the right consistency, as is the pastry. A custard square you can eat without covering yourself with custard!

On a related note, I finished my two-and-a-half year time at Innaworks a week ago. My adoring colleagues took the opportunity to go in search of custard squares to present to me. They brought 13, from many different bakeries, and then stared at me, waiting for the pile to be consumed.

It was not to be, I only managed about 1⅔ squares before I began feeling slightly sick. Alas. But they were much appreciated.

July 05, 2009 03:21 PM

June 29, 2009

Thoughts of a geek

Mug cake

by qwandor at June 29, 2009 08:33 AM

June 21, 2009

fiasco

The Quest for the Perfect Custard Square: Hataitai Hot Bread Shop

A friend suggested that maybe the Hot Bread Shop in Hataitai would have custard squares. This sounded promising: I thought the only place hot bread shops had survived was Westport, along with service stations that put the petrol in your car for you (!) and give you useful advice on how to get to out-of-the-way places.

The shop looked promising: a low-end bakery with filled rolls, slices, pies ... and custard squares. I selected two items: a custard square, and a custard twist.

This is where things get disappointing. The custard in the square was insufficiently firm, although better than that from Mr Bun. And the pastry was overcooked, so it was too flakey and too hard. With better pastry, it would have been a halfway-decent custard square ... but it was not to be.

The custard twist, however, provided a welcome change: dough, raisins, custard and icing combined in a delicious if rather sugary treat. It didn't survive the clean-hands test due to the icing, but with plump raisins and the always-welcome taste of custard, it was a baked good worth eating.

Next time: a chance for supermarket baking to redeem itself?

June 21, 2009 05:00 PM

June 18, 2009

fiasco

Office antics

June 18, 2009 02:48 PM

June 15, 2009

fiasco

The Quest for the Perfect Custard Square: Mr Bun

In the before-time, when I was but a lowly high-school student, the tuckshop at my high school sold Custard Squares. They were delicious: the icing was just right, the pastry was of the correct consistency, and the custard was at the optimum point between liquid and rock. They wobbled as you held them, and it was possible to eat one without having to wipe custard off yourself afterwards.

Many years later, the supply of custard squares in Wellington is at an all-time low. Most bakeries don't sell them, and when you can find one it's often a poor example of the cuisine. The squares that are available tend to have awful pastry, icing, or custard -- and usually, at least two of them are wrong. Therefore I have taken it upon myself to go forth and find the perfect custard sqaure.

We start our journey at the closest place I could find to work that sells them: Mr Bun in Cuba St. The closer Mr Bun on the corner of Taranaki St and Manners St didn't have any. But the array of high sugar foods at Cuba St was vast. I could combine my custard square with a chocolate fudge ball and some lemon meringue pie. Casting my fears of the quality of this food aside, I made my order, and took this banquet back to my office for consumption.

Unfortunately my fears were realised. The lemon meringue pie was awful, the fudge ball was too doughy. And the custard in the custard square was insufficiently firm. Any pressure on the pastry pieces caused it to squeeze out, which tends to coat any item near the square with custard. Unfortunately, to eat a custard square you must apply pressure to the pastry sheets -- and then the custard goes everywhere. Also the custard itself tasted really awful -- I don't know how they managed it.

So Mr Bun wins on location, but loses on custard square. I'm going to have to look further afield.

June 15, 2009 02:01 PM

June 14, 2009

Thoughts of a geek

Glad

by qwandor at June 14, 2009 05:31 AM

June 13, 2009

fiasco

Computer history

I've had a computer since I was eight. Started with a ZX Spectrum, which I taught myself to program in BASIC. Eventually got a PC, an XT with 640K of RAM, and a flakey hard disk drive. Upgraded to a 286, and then a 386. Around this time more computers appeared at home, and we got a LAN, initially running Compex ReadyLink, then upgrading to Netware Lite. Our server was a 286 with 60MB of disk. Windows 95 came out, and I managed to make it work with Netware Lite.

Then I discovered Linux. Ended up convincing Dad to let us switch our network server to it, initially running mars_nwe, which faked the IPX Netware protocol, allowing us to access the server from our DOS or Windows 95 machines.

In 1999 we got a cable internet connection via Saturn and Paradise net. We could download our 512MB month's quota at a whopping 512 kilobits per second. And upload at 128k. We had a static IP. And I started messing around with running a webserver and mailserver on our network server, by now a 486 DX4/100 with 2.5GB of disk. I'd taught myself HTML a few years prior, now I learnt perl and built some simple CGI scripts.

The computers multiplied, and I began acquiring more, installing Linux and setting up an extra LAN in my room, routed back to the house's 10base2 backbone network. I ran an extra mail sever, and extra web servers, and experimented with Java servlets, Roxen, Courier and Cyrus.

I became involved with the VUW computer club, Interface in 2002. They had a PC they'd mean to use as a webserver but it had never gotten a home or a network connection. I arranged these through the university, and set up the machine with some other students. We acquired more hardware, and in 2003 I set up what I believe was the first wireless network in an NZ tertiary education institute that was usable by students, SWANS. Originally our access points were discarded machines (old PowerMacs running Linux, or old 486 laptops) with wireless cards in them that could be coaxed into access point mode with a special driver. We had coverage of the undergraduate computer science labs, and the university Quad via a laptop perched on an office window.

The computing empire grew at VUW. I finished my BSc Hons year, and embarked upon an MSc, which meant I got an office. A research project provided me with my own cupboard to house machines, and the Donald/Interface computing empire at VUW grew.

I left home to flat in Karori with friends (including a former Interface president) in early 2005. The computers came with us. The garage housed a table covered with them. I hosted several for friends who didn't have space or decent internet. We unsuccessfully tried to start a wireless community network, NZWired.

Around this time, the price of renting dedicated servers in the US was dropping, and a group of friends got together and rented a box in the US, partitioning it with UML. Eventually we switched to Xen. We outgrew the first box, and switched to a larger box at a different provider, and I took over paying the bills. I found someone who would rent me a cheap box in the US at the then ludicrously low price of USD20/mo, and so ended up with two machines in the US.

Eventually I finished (well, handed in my thesis, anyway) my MSc, and started at Innaworks. The computers at VUW were handed over to other students, and I discovered that full-time work left me with less energy to spend on sysadminning toy machines. The box shared with others in the US suffered from neglect, both sysadmin-wise and billing-wise, and cheap VPSes (virtual private servers) became cheaper. The shared server got shut down. I ended up getting a cheap VPS to host my mail and began to look at the pile of machines in the garage a bit more seriously. I consolidated my servers in the garage down to one machine, and there things sat for a while.

In the mean time my desktop PC was getting a bit old and proved incapable of driving the new 24" LCD I'd got. I discovered that the Asus EeeBox was capable of driving it, and also would mount nicely to the back of the screen. It wasn't too fast, but my needs weren't that great. I was now down to three computers that I regularly used at home: a server, the EeeBox, and a laptop.

In early 2009 I ended up joining Urban Vision, and moved into a flat over the road from the Arlington council flats in Mt Cook. The computers came along but most stayed off. The servers that I ran at home had had their functions transferred to a virtual server in the US; important things (mail) went first, less important things (this blog) took a few months to come back. Gradually I got rid of the more saleable ones. I finally got around to getting rid of most of the virtual servers in the US that I wasn't really using much anyway in the last week. I'm now down to two. And one laptop (on loan), two Eee PCs (anyone want an Eee 701?), and the EeeBox desktop. I haven't worked out what to do with my old file server and its couple of terabytes of data, and I've got an old Athlon XP 2600+ desktop machine that I really should find another home for. And there's a menagerie of wireless routers and other embedded Linux devices. And a pile of hard disks. But I'm (almost) all better now. Next step: getting rid of the remaining unused PCs, and trying to find something to do with my accumulated cache of computer parts and cables.

June 13, 2009 02:45 PM

June 11, 2009

fiasco

Blog back up!

I moved in early February (more on that later), and the server hosting this blog came along with me, and it's spent most of its time at the new place turned off. But finally (!) it's been moved to a server in the US. So once again you can all read of my exciting exploits, as relayed infrequently in blog form. Revel in the wonders of the search for the perfect custard square! Be amazed by tales of living in a Manila slum! (well, after it's happened, anyway) Marvel at my exciting new job! Be dumbfounded that I actually get around to blogging about any of it! Wonder if this paragraph will ever end, and if I can ever write a sentence that doesn't end in an exclamation mark!

The last few months of my life have been ... interesting. In a good way. I'll have to tell you lot about it some time.

June 11, 2009 10:08 PM

June 06, 2009

Thoughts of a geek

Local music

by qwandor at June 06, 2009 02:14 AM

May 31, 2009

Thoughts of a geek

Happiness

by qwandor at May 31, 2009 12:45 PM

May 29, 2009

Thoughts of a geek

Bob

by qwandor at May 29, 2009 07:32 AM

May 28, 2009

Thoughts of a geek

Swing swing

by qwandor at May 28, 2009 11:30 AM

May 17, 2009

Thoughts of a geek

Free stuff

by qwandor at May 17, 2009 05:56 AM

May 10, 2009

Thoughts of a geek

Music and me

by qwandor at May 10, 2009 03:52 AM

May 07, 2009

Thoughts of a geek

In which the author lists his preferred Firefox extensions (part three)

by qwandor at May 07, 2009 09:18 AM

May 01, 2009

Thoughts of a geek

Things

by qwandor at May 01, 2009 08:58 AM

April 12, 2009

Thoughts of a geek

New computer (soon)

by qwandor at April 12, 2009 08:03 AM

April 06, 2009

Thoughts of a geek

Walking

by qwandor at April 06, 2009 11:57 AM

March 08, 2009

Thoughts of a geek

Walk through my old flat

by qwandor at March 08, 2009 05:24 AM

March 01, 2009

Thoughts of a geek

Pear and cinnamon muffins

by qwandor at March 01, 2009 08:51 AM

February 25, 2009

blog.cons.org.nz

FlickrTidy

Some photos on Flickr have nothing but “awards” in the comments. These “awards” are little more than thinly veiled spam and there are few things more irritating than spam. Here’s an example.

While the best solution would be for these comments to be deleted, I suspect other people do not sympathize with me on this.

Another related problem is a photo associated with a large number of pools, often resulting from the “awards”. This requires a large amount of scrolling to see the tags and photo properties.

I propose a workaround using GreaseMonkey, and I shall call it “FlickrTidy”.

• Comment Hider
• Pools Last

by admin at February 25, 2009 10:15 AM

February 24, 2009

Thoughts of a geek

Facebook quiz

by qwandor at February 24, 2009 11:00 AM

February 22, 2009

blog.cons.org.nz

Backtick on iPhone!

Keyboard layout that includes a backtick!

by lorne at February 22, 2009 01:07 AM

February 18, 2009

Thoughts of a geek

S92a ranting

by qwandor at February 18, 2009 10:33 AM

February 13, 2009

Clari.net.nz

0x15

Dear Friend :

I don’t know who you are, nor do you know who I am, yet I still believe that we are bound to meet one another someday. We have always wondered if it is even possible for us to meet our significant other in this tedious journey of life. It is true that fate enjoys playing cruel tricks on unsuspecting people, who knows who’ll be the next victim? We can only learn to value the things we once cared for by losing them, only then we realise how important it is to us. I am truly thankful for all of the things I have both gained and lost in life, from those memories I have grown, changed, undergone many metamorphosises and ultimately – sculpting myself to my own perfection.

My friend, I am far from perfect. I once pursued absolute perfection in life. Many restrictions and rules were set upon me by myself in an attempt to shape myself to perfection. At the end of the day I came out scarred and fatigued, then I have realised that all restrictions upon oneself goes out of the window when it comes to reality, the ideal I have created was a mere fantasy, like a shining moon on a cloudless night – it illuminates the darkness of the night that surrounds me, yet at the same time it is unreachable for the rest of eternity. It is obvious that such lifestyle does not necessarily lead to happiness.

Who knows what is going to happen in the future? The future is unwritten, and what happens in the future ultimately depends on what I do today, I better start now…

-F

by 0x15 at February 13, 2009 03:39 PM

February 06, 2009

Thoughts of a geek

Quote website

by qwandor at February 06, 2009 11:35 PM

---

To add your blog, contact AndrewWalbran.