erikarn

The Girl in the Fireplace

2008-07-11T14:56:52Z

I've been ill this week and have been filling in the episodes of Dr Who (new series) I haven't seen. My favourite episode in the first four seasons is "The Girl in the Fireplace".

No, not the clockwork androids.

I wanted to say what it was I liked about the episode. Its hard to pin down.

Being in a funk..

2008-06-24T08:44:49Z

I've been in a strange funk over the last few weeks. I seemed to study fine right up to the end of semester but I just couldn't focus on anything for the three weeks after that. I tried everything I could think of (besides drugs, which I quite honestly gave a little thought to - yes, the medicated type, no not the illicit type) but I just couldn't focus on study. I could focus on coding, fine; I could focus on work (and got through lots of paperwork and sorting that had built up during the semester) but I just couldn't focus on anything related to my studies. I had no motivation or energy to stare at any of my university work and I simply couldn't keep my mind focused on it when I did.

This finished about Thursday last week, at which point I realised I had to grab hold of the opportunity whilst it presented itself and begin studying.

PSYC2203 was a complete loss - I didn't even bother sitting the exam. Not only couldn't I focus on revision and the laboratory writeups, I couldn't get a hold of the course adviser to talk to him about overdue items due during my BSDCan trip (and I honestly have no idea where the hell I've put them since). That was Monday last week - whilst I was still in this weird "funk".

The funk broke that Thursday, as I said.

PSYC2205 (Behavioural Neuroscience) was on Monday. I spent Thursday -> Monday morning just focusing on PSYC2205. I _think_ I covered the questions in enough detail but in true Adrian form they certainly weren't phrased as essays. We'll see how well I do.

LING3305 (Semantics) is this Thursday. Now, Semantics is a bit annoying - its a 12 point unit and there's a lot to study between now and then. I'm quite confident that I _do_ understand everything but I'm not sure if two days is enough revision time. I guess I'll see.

The up-shot of this is that I should still be in the right mood to do studious activities after my exams are over. This is great for my general academic interest in "stuff" but completely worthless for my undergraduate degree.

One positive thing, however, is that the pre-exam panic only set in the night before the exam rather than abject terror setting roughly a week beforehand. The kind of terror which keeps you from sleeping (just making it worse); makes you feel nauseated and worn out; dreading the mere sight of an exam paper. PSYC2205 wasn't at all as bad as I thought it was going to be but those thoughts only kicked in late the night before. I was quite surprised.

This begs the question: what the hell is wrong with me? Do people get this kind of "funk" going on? I thought I was feeling burnt out (which is certainly common amongst university students) but I don't think this was the case - I was certainly interested in it, I was quite able to focus on -other- things quite intensely and I was able to get other "stuff" done. I just couldn't bring myself to do any study. It certainly isn't the first time this has occured - this cyclic rhythm of mine is erratic at best but does cycle over the course of months. Anyone who has worked with me has seen my slightly manic mode of work - I can and do alternate between being very productive and just being unable to focus on the task at hand.

I almost wonder if I do actually have some low lying kind of psychological pathology which I should probably get treated. What do (reasonably qualified) people think?

Hello from Sydney

2008-05-29T23:44:36Z

Ah, thankyou Three mobile broadband, making my trip through Sydney airport quite a bit less painful.

The AC33 flight from Vancouver to Sydney was 15 and a chunk hours. Three of those flying through turbulence at 35,000 feet. I was quite pissed off. Sleep achieved - 0.5 hours.

One five hour flight to Perth left.

On that note, thankyou SYD airport for having -showers- that are easily accessible. I now feel less .. crap.

Hm, Sydney

2008-05-29T05:54:38Z

What am I going to do in Sydney for five hours?

I'm going to try and sleep; we'll see how well that goes down.

All Good Things Must End .. meh

2008-05-28T19:11:45Z

I'm sitting here in Ottawa airport waiting for my first flight taking me away from this whole experience.

For those playing at home, I'm travelling Ottawa -> Toronto -> Vancouver -> Sydney -> Perth. I'll be back Friday at around 3pm.

I'm moving. Fuck it, I've had enough of Perth.

Random updates

2008-05-21T02:47:26Z

BSDCan was great. Sorry - the bits of BSDCan I went to were great; the rest were spent doing lectures and reading in my dormitory room.

I'm in New York now. I cried when flying into Philadelphia. That was strange.

Alex (who has shouted me his apartment for the week) threw a party in my honour and took us out for karaoke. Yes, I've now done karaoke.

I took some time off studying to wander around the financial area of downtown manhattan. I walked by the NY Stock Exchange; I can see Trinity Church from where I'm staying; the Smithsonian is around the corner from here (and thus I'll be going there tomorrow morning, university studies be damned); I walked down to Battery Park and stared at the Statue of Liberty in the distance, slightly obscured by the overcast weather.

I don't really want to leave. I'm not looking forward to coming back to Perth. I've done a lot of bitching about how much I dislike being there and I may end up occasionally breaking into bouts of crying/anger upon my arrival.

This semester is basically fucked. I should accept that I'm a really, really poor student.

Travel!

2008-05-11T15:35:25Z

So, the travel is over.

* Flight PER-SYD - 4 hours
* Flight SYD-YVR (Vancouver) - 14.5 hours
* Flight YVR - YOW (Ottawa) - 4.5 hours
* Train YOR - MTL (Montreal) - 2 hours

I had an hour stopover in Sydney; my 2 hour stopover in Vancouver involved immigration, baggage collection, baggage check-in and then walking across the whole airport to get to the domestic terminal took me the whole two hours. I was the last person to check-in to the YVR-YOW flight.

The highlight of -that- flight was sitting next to someone who turned out to be a pilot on the SYD-YVR flight. We had a fun discussion about turbulence (Yes, I know its just like water, and my frontal lobes -know- it'll be fine, but my old brain just can't handle it for some reason! Even though I can handle the sea fine!), stuff about trans-pacific plane navigation and some interesting information about a text-based communication scheme the pilots use now when communicating to the tower (and vice versa.) Data channels over HF, how cool.

I'm now in a hostel in montreal ("Globetrotter Hostel"). A couple of FreeBSD guys and I are hanging out here until Tuesday; we'll then drive to Ottawa for the conference on Tuesday.

The Jetlag has been owned - I woke up at 5am after falling asleep at midnight; I forced myself to sleep until about 9:30am and now I'm happy. I -did- sleep on a top bunk of a bunk bed - a new experience for me - and I almost squished someone in the next bed as I tried climbing out the first time.

I'll be acting as a tourist today and catching up with a friend from Achaea (A MUD I sometimes play); she'll help us as a sort of tourist guide. :)

I'd forgotten what "real cities" were like. God, someone has to remind me to come back to Perth; I might forget..

erikarn @ 2008-05-08T00:38:00

2008-05-07T16:39:05Z

Even when I try to be more organised, I fail.

2008-05-04T11:07:37Z

Its Sunday night. I paniced this week, thinking I needed to have a 2400 word topic report done for this literature review streaming in my Neuropsychology unit and having spent the weekend I had planned to write it fixing a completely dead EECE, I spent this last week dumping a whole lot of reading I've been doing into said 2400 word topic report.

Which, it turns out, I got backwards.

The 2400 word literature review, which is effectively what I wrote, is due late May.

What was due just gone? An 800 word topic article, aimed at a general audience.

Even when I try to be more organised about university, I fail.

Syncing CVS to SVN! Why is it so painful!

2008-04-16T07:52:05Z

I've used cvs2svn to import a Squid-2 CVS repository into SVN. That worked fine. I've created a branch off trunk to work from. That works fine. But now I'd like to keep the Squid-maintained trunk/branches up to date in SVN and then merge those changes into my private branches.

I understand that there will be "oddities" in sync'ing from CVS to SVN. There are tools that will generate a repository (tailor, cvs2svn) and tools which will keep a repository branch somewhat synched (eg tailor) but nothing that'll let me just bloody push changes from CVS to SVN without much, much messing around.

So what I have thus far:

* I can extract "patchsets" out of CVS (using cvsps) which conceptually reflect atomic changes to the CVS codebase; and the debian/freebsd patched cvsps seems to do a right fantastic job doing this;
* I know how to override the SVN log, author and date properties, so I can synthesize a historic commit;

What I need to figure out:

* I want to just submit diffs to the SVN server without having to checkout and modify a local copy. I'm reasonably sure this happens over the wire and I'd like to do this please. I'd really like the SVN server to then tell me to bugger off if the diff doesn't apply cleanly. I may end up having to check out individual files, diff, and recommit - but argh, seems like so much effort.
* I'd like to be able to sync all branches, not just one (this is where tailor falls over). cvsps gives me changeset files which contain the branch / tag info, so thats also easy to synthesize!
* Although the ubuntu version of cvs2svn seems to have broken out the monolithic script into python libraries, its not immediately obvious how to hook in to feed it parsed changesets.
* Almost nothing is modular (see above); there's massive code duplication between cvs2svn, tailor, cvsps, cvs2cl, etc.

Oh God, I'm Going To Fail.

2008-04-08T11:06:02Z

Fern has bought "Stargate: The Ark or Truth." I'm watching it right now.

They've changed the damned introduction tune enough for my brain to pick up on the subtle changes.

Meh

2008-04-06T19:14:24Z

Insomnia and intermittent sharp chest pain. Occasional sharp head pain. What a great way to finish this weekend.

Life, the Universe, and Politics (of the software kind)

2008-03-28T04:21:27Z

University has started again for the semester, and I'm already struggling to keep up. I'm at least doing the required work, but contracts with large companies which should've been completed months ago (through no fault of mine!) have been eating away at my alloted study time. Sigh. At least I'll (eventually!) get paid once all these are done, but, again, argh.

I have a lot of pending and in-progress contract work which I have earmarked as funds to raise for proxy development. I don't say Squid development here because, quite frankly, I'm at a loss with how such a well-known piece of software can be so mis-managed by the people who drove its initial development. Instead of integrating IPv6 and ICAP support into Squid-2 a number of years ago - when there were -patches- available for it - stuff languished while "Squid 3" was being developed. The Squid team seems to want to push Squid-3 forward with the small amount of interest and resources they have, rather than commercialising the large amount of Squid-2 interest thats out there, building up commercial interest and cashflow, using the cashflow to devote more resources to Squid-3 development so it reaches a critical mass. The Squid-3 developers seem to not want to discuss architectural issues except when required by an immediate project, so there's no long term development planning going on.

I started pushing along Xenion so I could monetize Squid development, bring in commercial interest and start dedicating resources to properly developing it. The Squid-3 developers want me to do this with Squid-3; they don't want to see Squid-2 development which isn't echo'ed in Squid-3. I understand this, but I don't have faith in Squid-3 and thus I don't like the idea of suggesting Squid-3 in any future development work.

Argh, why am I sticking with this when its obviously not fun?

Presenting at BSDCan this year!

2008-03-06T04:32:55Z

I'm presenting at BSDCan in Ottawa, Canada this year!

http://www.bsdcan.org/2008/schedule/events/72.en.html

Wikileaks.org domain shut down thanks to a court order by an off-shore bank.

2008-02-18T11:51:10Z

In summary - a large cayman bank obtained a court order to quench wikileaks.org ; the domain registrar switched off the domain name ; all because Wikileaks has a number of documents alledging massive tax evasion by said bank.

http://wikileaks.org.uk/wiki/Wikileaks.org_under_injunction

All I can say is holy. crap. Please spread the word; I'm sure the wikileaks groups would love everyone to know as much about this as they can.

XO Laptop

2008-02-09T16:40:45Z

Fern learnt "Turtle Draw" on the XO in about 30 minutes. She drew me a pretty red flower, and then proceeded to teach herself all about loops and variables. Program #2 was a psychadelic changing set of concentric circles.

Impressed!

Not a bad concert

2008-02-09T14:14:02Z

The Cat Empire concert tonight was actually rather cool. I'm sitting here now waiting for the masses to leave before I try to leave.

(Yes, I'm actually online. From the concert. After the concert, though. I'm not -that- much of a nerd, and I bet if I got online -during- the concert I'd have had water dropped on it.)

.. aand Xenion Pty Ltd t/as the Chadd Family Trust is Alive.

2008-01-31T15:49:38Z

As a few of you may know, I've gone and created a company as a vehicle to continue my hosting services and begin pushing for more support and development services.

In a nutshell, I've put together a basic contract portfolio for Squid support and development services and a roadmap for the next twelve months of Squid-2 development. I've had half a dozen bites so far, with one signed support contract.

Now I have to get the word out. I've got a basic business plan and I have some revenue targets to meet so I can start pushing forward with Squid improvements across the board.

Ah, this'll be fun.

Squid speed improvements!

2008-01-22T15:11:00Z

Meh University

2007-12-08T11:00:02Z

I passed (just) the two psych units - pass and credit. I got 0 for the Field Linguistics unit.

I'll re-enrol on Monday in the last second level units I need to do (two psych and one linguistics.) Gah, why is it I keep losing focus and learning all this stuff which is irrelevant to the task at hand?

How does Google mess up HTTP standards?

2007-11-16T13:43:27Z

Whats wrong with this picture? There's at least ~~two~~ three things wrong here.

GET /get_video?video_id=HrLFb47QHi0&origin=dal-v37.dal.youtube.com HTTP/1.0
If-Modified-Since: Mon, 29 Oct 2007 22:48:13 GMT
If-None-Match: "-351398792"
Host: 74.125.15.19
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.1.9) Gecko/20071025 Firefox/2.0.0.9
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Via: 1.1 violet.local:3128 (squid/2.HEAD-CVS)
X-Forwarded-For: 127.0.0.1
Cache-Control: max-age=0
Connection: keep-alive

And I receive:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: video/flv
Accept-Ranges: bytes
ETag: "-351398792"
Last-Modified: Mon, 29 Oct 2007 22:48:13 GMT
Content-Length: 2232747
Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2007 21:36:28 GMT
Server: lighttpd/1.4.18
Connection: close

(and the entire file comes down here.)

Terror case thrown out of court; ASIO accused of kidnapping

2007-11-12T23:49:43Z

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/11/12/1194766545813.html

"A high profile terror case was abandoned before it got to trial today after a judge found that two ASIO officers had kidnapped and falsely imprisoned a young medical student, Izhar ul-Haque."

Heading off to Sydney

2007-11-04T23:47:41Z

I've got some stuff to do in Sydney next week from the 14th to the 17th of November. Let me know if you're in Sydney and would like to grab a drink.

Cue: chest infection

2007-10-25T19:16:36Z

Aaaand I'm now coming down with another trademark cold which will translate into a chest and ear infection in roughly seven days. Which is when my exams start and my linguistics stuff is due. I'm not going to be in any condition to do either. Again.

I guess I'll go see the doctor again and so the fact I'm coming down with this shit is again legitimate and then go see the faculty about it. Again.

University

2007-10-17T15:47:15Z

I am, again, not ready for the end of semester. I'm not comfortable I know enough specifically to pass the exams, I've still not remotely caught up with Field Linguistics and all in all I've completely lost focus in what I'm meant to be doing. I have absolutely no desire to continue my studies anymore. To top it off, the constant question in the back of my mind as to why I'm bothering is still there. I'm not doing this because I actually want to. I began trying again because my -family- thinks its the best thing for me, and all I fucking ever am is miserable.

I guess I'll keep trying to pass this semester then.