Jonathan Oxer
[Blog]
>> What I did in the holidays, part 2
Sun, Dec 31st 11:18pm 2006 >> DIY
Installed a window in the laundry
The new laundry is right at the back of the house and very elevated but it doesn't take advantage of the location by having a window overlooking the back yard, so when we ordered windows for the new bathroom we also got one for the laundry.
Installing a window into an existing wall is actually an interesting exercise. The window needs a support frame around the window frame itself, and when building a new house the support frame is just constructed as part of the wall structure then covered with plasterboard. With an existing wall the options are either to rip off the plasterboard and replace it afterwards or do a "ship in a bottle" exercise and build the frame inside the wall cavity without removing either the plasterboard or any weatherboards.
The photo shows the job not quite finished. The plaster still needs patching, there's no architrave fitted and the frame isn't painted. What's interesting though is it shows some of the cuts that had to be made through the plaster to remove the center of an existing stud and remove some noggins. Cutting the hole in the plaster was a simple job of a few minutes, then the stud had to be cut 45mm *lower* than the bottom of the hole so a horizontal brace could sit on top of it. So how do you cut a stud inside a cavity only 90mm wide? Easy, just use a circular saw to cut the stud directly through the plaster from one side and through the weatherboards from the other side. Kinda like keyhole surgery, because the stud inside the wall is cut through but externally it leaves only a small slot which can then be easily patched. Yeah, I know, it's probably an obvious solution to everyone else in the world but I thought it was neat.
Then I built the side frames by attaching spacers to the studs on either side, which meant lots of hammering in a space barely wider than my arm but eventually resulted in a sturdy frame that ended up just barely proud of the hole. Sliding the window assemby into place and attaching it to the support frame was a piece of cake and voila, one new window!
Installed a window in the laundry
The new laundry is right at the back of the house and very elevated but it doesn't take advantage of the location by having a window overlooking the back yard, so when we ordered windows for the new bathroom we also got one for the laundry.Installing a window into an existing wall is actually an interesting exercise. The window needs a support frame around the window frame itself, and when building a new house the support frame is just constructed as part of the wall structure then covered with plasterboard. With an existing wall the options are either to rip off the plasterboard and replace it afterwards or do a "ship in a bottle" exercise and build the frame inside the wall cavity without removing either the plasterboard or any weatherboards.
The photo shows the job not quite finished. The plaster still needs patching, there's no architrave fitted and the frame isn't painted. What's interesting though is it shows some of the cuts that had to be made through the plaster to remove the center of an existing stud and remove some noggins. Cutting the hole in the plaster was a simple job of a few minutes, then the stud had to be cut 45mm *lower* than the bottom of the hole so a horizontal brace could sit on top of it. So how do you cut a stud inside a cavity only 90mm wide? Easy, just use a circular saw to cut the stud directly through the plaster from one side and through the weatherboards from the other side. Kinda like keyhole surgery, because the stud inside the wall is cut through but externally it leaves only a small slot which can then be easily patched. Yeah, I know, it's probably an obvious solution to everyone else in the world but I thought it was neat.
Then I built the side frames by attaching spacers to the studs on either side, which meant lots of hammering in a space barely wider than my arm but eventually resulted in a sturdy frame that ended up just barely proud of the hole. Sliding the window assemby into place and attaching it to the support frame was a piece of cake and voila, one new window!
>> What I did in the holidays, part 1
Sun, Dec 31st 10:49pm 2006 >> DIY
Converted an antique dresser base into a vanity
We're doing some renovations at home at the moment including converting the bathroom in the flat into a combined laundry / toilet (since the old laundry has been subsumed by the new bathroom, but that's another installment!) and we needed a vanity for it. Ann found a dresser base in an antique shop but it was too high so yesterday my Dad and I did a bit of plastic surgery: we removed the top and the surrounding frame, cut down the body to remove the top row of drawers, and reattached the top. What you can see is the post-surgery version: originally it had three full-width drawers and a pair of half-width drawers. That actually would have made it the perfect height for me, but the rest of the family would need a chair to wash their hands!
Ann managed to get hold of the very last stock in Australia of a certain rare Kohler vessel basin and we've mounted it in the top but none of the plumbing has been done yet. I still need to modify the top drawer by partitioning it and cutting a section out of the rear center to clear the waste outlet from the basin, then the plumber can come in and fit the taps, outlet and waste.
Converted an antique dresser base into a vanity
We're doing some renovations at home at the moment including converting the bathroom in the flat into a combined laundry / toilet (since the old laundry has been subsumed by the new bathroom, but that's another installment!) and we needed a vanity for it. Ann found a dresser base in an antique shop but it was too high so yesterday my Dad and I did a bit of plastic surgery: we removed the top and the surrounding frame, cut down the body to remove the top row of drawers, and reattached the top. What you can see is the post-surgery version: originally it had three full-width drawers and a pair of half-width drawers. That actually would have made it the perfect height for me, but the rest of the family would need a chair to wash their hands!Ann managed to get hold of the very last stock in Australia of a certain rare Kohler vessel basin and we've mounted it in the top but none of the plumbing has been done yet. I still need to modify the top drawer by partitioning it and cutting a section out of the rear center to clear the waste outlet from the basin, then the plumber can come in and fit the taps, outlet and waste.
>> My Nokia E61 sucks
Tue, Dec 26th 10:18pm 2006 >> Tech Toys
Frustration! On paper the E61 looks absolutely perfect for what I want, but in reality it's driving me nuts. Every single thing I want to do with the phone is broken in some annoying way.
* WiFi. This is the one clincher feature that made me choose the E61 over a Treo. Great in theory: almost all my time in spent either at work or at home, so with an access point in each location I'd have buckets of cheap bandwidth whenever I want it and without running up big bills on my mobile account. And it kinda works: it even has some nice features like "access point groups" so you can do things like define a group encompassing your home and work APs, then set policy that the inbuilt email client will only connect via APs in that group. But WiFi *only* works if the network is left totally open and unencrypted. The E61 supposedly supports WEP (64 and 128 bit) and WPA, and I was determined to make it work but after about 5 hours of trying I gave up. Not once could I make it connect to anything but a wide-open AP.
* Network instability. Even while connected successfully to a wide-open AP with full signal strength it ocassionally just goes off into never-never land, with connection failures reported (both web and mail).
* VoIP client. We have an Asterisk server at work with VoIP phones on all the desks so the idea of a cellphone with built-in VoIP client is a dream: I could do away with my desk phone entirely, use the cellphone in a cradle with a bluetooth headset and WiFi connection to the Asterisk box, and just use the same phone everywhere I go. VoIP at home and work, cell on the move. Perfect. Except that after about 2 hours of trying I couldn't get it to register with the Asterisk server.
* SyncML. The phone supports SyncML which seems to be pretty much the standard way to keep calendars and contacts in sync nowadays, and I got it to successfully sync with the free GSMSync service (which is very cool, by the way) but sync with Evolution? No way. Another 3 hours or so down the drain trying to make the %$&%# thing do what should have been up and running in 3 minutes.
* Keyboard layout. I read on a blog somewhere that applying the latest firmware update to the phone (44MB! but then it's probably the entire OS) fixes some network instability problems so I installed it, but now my keyboard layout is messed up. All the punctuation keys have shifted to new locations so I have to remember where they are or do a lucky-dip and be prepared to delete a lot. And in the original firmware I could do an "insert special character" operation to get to the extended character set, but that seems to have disappeared after the update meaning I can no longer type "<" and ">" characters at all.
* SSH. Another of the killer features - in theory. One of the first things I did after getting the phone was install Putty, and it's truly a remarkable thing to be able to SSH to servers or my desktop and drive them from my phone. And before the firmware update it worked beautifully, but now it doesn't seem to handle remote updates asynchronously. What I mean is that if I type a command and hit "enter" it gets sent to the server and I see the response, but if a process running on the remote end sends output I don't see it until I hit enter, and then there's a spurious enter sent through. For example if I run "top" remotely it fails to update the display every 2 seconds as usual unless I keep sending through keypresses. With "top" it's not too much of a problem, but if you're interacting with something that's prompting for input it can be a killer: you can't see the prompts without sending a keypress, but the keypress can then be interpreted as your response to the prompt. Perfect if you're accustomed to working by ESP, painful otherwise.
* No touch screen. Actually I wasn't even aware of this when I bought the phone: I just assumed it had a touch screen, and when I opened the box at work one of the guys asked where the stylus was. At first I didn't care, but the more I use it for browsing the more I'm feeling the lack of it.
* Slooooooow. I've heard from people that Symbian devices are much snappier than WinCE-powered phones, but I find that hard to believe. If it's really true then WinCE must be not just a three-legged dog but more like a one-legged dog, because Symbian often spends so long thinking about doing things that I start wondering if I even pressed the button properly. I'll select a couple of emails, click "delete", and maybe 15 or 20 seconds later it will come up with the "Deleting messages" dialog. A few seconds later the operation completes and the dialog goes away. Frustrating, but not a real user-experience-killer unless you happen to be multitasking at the time such as talking to somebody while deleting messages. Click delete, look away for 10 or 15 seconds while talking, look back at the phone and have no visual feedback that anything has happened, is happening or is about to happen, and start navigating down the message list only to have the "Deleting messages" dialog pop up unexpectedly. After that little sequence has happened to you a few times it's hard to resist the urge to throw the phone across the room. "Sluggish" just seems to sum up the whole experience.
There are other problems but I'll whinge more another time. The overall experience of this phone has been to make me feel like a totally clueless newbie who couldn't find the "on" switch for a TV if it was 10cm wide and flashing red. Every single thing I try with the phone is a total wash-out. Maybe if I could get just *one* thing working properly I'd have some sense that I'm not a total idiot. Please, Nokia, throw me a bone!
Frustration! On paper the E61 looks absolutely perfect for what I want, but in reality it's driving me nuts. Every single thing I want to do with the phone is broken in some annoying way.
* WiFi. This is the one clincher feature that made me choose the E61 over a Treo. Great in theory: almost all my time in spent either at work or at home, so with an access point in each location I'd have buckets of cheap bandwidth whenever I want it and without running up big bills on my mobile account. And it kinda works: it even has some nice features like "access point groups" so you can do things like define a group encompassing your home and work APs, then set policy that the inbuilt email client will only connect via APs in that group. But WiFi *only* works if the network is left totally open and unencrypted. The E61 supposedly supports WEP (64 and 128 bit) and WPA, and I was determined to make it work but after about 5 hours of trying I gave up. Not once could I make it connect to anything but a wide-open AP.
* Network instability. Even while connected successfully to a wide-open AP with full signal strength it ocassionally just goes off into never-never land, with connection failures reported (both web and mail).
* VoIP client. We have an Asterisk server at work with VoIP phones on all the desks so the idea of a cellphone with built-in VoIP client is a dream: I could do away with my desk phone entirely, use the cellphone in a cradle with a bluetooth headset and WiFi connection to the Asterisk box, and just use the same phone everywhere I go. VoIP at home and work, cell on the move. Perfect. Except that after about 2 hours of trying I couldn't get it to register with the Asterisk server.
* SyncML. The phone supports SyncML which seems to be pretty much the standard way to keep calendars and contacts in sync nowadays, and I got it to successfully sync with the free GSMSync service (which is very cool, by the way) but sync with Evolution? No way. Another 3 hours or so down the drain trying to make the %$&%# thing do what should have been up and running in 3 minutes.
* Keyboard layout. I read on a blog somewhere that applying the latest firmware update to the phone (44MB! but then it's probably the entire OS) fixes some network instability problems so I installed it, but now my keyboard layout is messed up. All the punctuation keys have shifted to new locations so I have to remember where they are or do a lucky-dip and be prepared to delete a lot. And in the original firmware I could do an "insert special character" operation to get to the extended character set, but that seems to have disappeared after the update meaning I can no longer type "<" and ">" characters at all.
* SSH. Another of the killer features - in theory. One of the first things I did after getting the phone was install Putty, and it's truly a remarkable thing to be able to SSH to servers or my desktop and drive them from my phone. And before the firmware update it worked beautifully, but now it doesn't seem to handle remote updates asynchronously. What I mean is that if I type a command and hit "enter" it gets sent to the server and I see the response, but if a process running on the remote end sends output I don't see it until I hit enter, and then there's a spurious enter sent through. For example if I run "top" remotely it fails to update the display every 2 seconds as usual unless I keep sending through keypresses. With "top" it's not too much of a problem, but if you're interacting with something that's prompting for input it can be a killer: you can't see the prompts without sending a keypress, but the keypress can then be interpreted as your response to the prompt. Perfect if you're accustomed to working by ESP, painful otherwise.
* No touch screen. Actually I wasn't even aware of this when I bought the phone: I just assumed it had a touch screen, and when I opened the box at work one of the guys asked where the stylus was. At first I didn't care, but the more I use it for browsing the more I'm feeling the lack of it.
* Slooooooow. I've heard from people that Symbian devices are much snappier than WinCE-powered phones, but I find that hard to believe. If it's really true then WinCE must be not just a three-legged dog but more like a one-legged dog, because Symbian often spends so long thinking about doing things that I start wondering if I even pressed the button properly. I'll select a couple of emails, click "delete", and maybe 15 or 20 seconds later it will come up with the "Deleting messages" dialog. A few seconds later the operation completes and the dialog goes away. Frustrating, but not a real user-experience-killer unless you happen to be multitasking at the time such as talking to somebody while deleting messages. Click delete, look away for 10 or 15 seconds while talking, look back at the phone and have no visual feedback that anything has happened, is happening or is about to happen, and start navigating down the message list only to have the "Deleting messages" dialog pop up unexpectedly. After that little sequence has happened to you a few times it's hard to resist the urge to throw the phone across the room. "Sluggish" just seems to sum up the whole experience.
There are other problems but I'll whinge more another time. The overall experience of this phone has been to make me feel like a totally clueless newbie who couldn't find the "on" switch for a TV if it was 10cm wide and flashing red. Every single thing I try with the phone is a total wash-out. Maybe if I could get just *one* thing working properly I'd have some sense that I'm not a total idiot. Please, Nokia, throw me a bone!
>> White Christmas in Melbourne
Tue, Dec 26th 9:37pm 2006 >> Family
It was only a couple of days ago while the temperature was somewhere in the high 30's that Ann and I were talking about how nice it would be to have a white Christmas. Or maybe we were just trying to justify a trip to England ;-)
So it was pretty bizarre to turn up at my mum's place for Christmas lunch and find hail so thick on the ground that it looked like snow! Amelia and I scooped some up and put it in our drinks which she thought was pretty funny.
It was only a couple of days ago while the temperature was somewhere in the high 30's that Ann and I were talking about how nice it would be to have a white Christmas. Or maybe we were just trying to justify a trip to England ;-)
So it was pretty bizarre to turn up at my mum's place for Christmas lunch and find hail so thick on the ground that it looked like snow! Amelia and I scooped some up and put it in our drinks which she thought was pretty funny.
>> The phone arrives!
Mon, Dec 18th 9:41pm 2006 >> Tech Toys
I seriously had no expectation that I would ever see this phone (or the $475 I'd sent off for it) but here I am blogging from Opera Mini on a Nokia E61!
I'm still not sure if the seller was a scammer or not. Despite being told the phone was shipping from Tasmania (for a seller supposedly in Melbourne) but the package showed it had come from Hong Kong. At the very least the seller blatantly lied to me about several things and I suspect they're an "opportunistic scammer" who probably wouldn't have shipped the item if I hadn't kicked up such a massive fuss.
But in the end I have the phone so I'm happy :-)
I seriously had no expectation that I would ever see this phone (or the $475 I'd sent off for it) but here I am blogging from Opera Mini on a Nokia E61!
I'm still not sure if the seller was a scammer or not. Despite being told the phone was shipping from Tasmania (for a seller supposedly in Melbourne) but the package showed it had come from Hong Kong. At the very least the seller blatantly lied to me about several things and I suspect they're an "opportunistic scammer" who probably wouldn't have shipped the item if I hadn't kicked up such a massive fuss.
But in the end I have the phone so I'm happy :-)
>> Cranius Painius
Sat, Dec 16th 10:05pm 2006 >> Misc
I've had a headache since Wednesday morning.
I know that's not quite in the same league as Leon Brooks whose head has suffered rather more severe problems than a headache for pretty much the entire year, but it's still not exactly fun. It's kinda faded and returned continuously for days now, until last night when I was in the office and all of a sudden it felt like I'd been smacked just over my left eye with a lump of wood. I've never felt anything like it: no gradual pain build up, just *blam* and it's there. I actually fell over as if I'd been clobbered and just knelt on the floor holding my head for a minute or two wondering if I was going to die. I lost vision in my left eye briefly, then after a while I got myself out to the kitchen and took some Solprin and lay down on the couch like an invalid. After a while the pain eased off so I went to bed - not much else you can do in that situation.
The headache is still there but it's much improved today. Hopefully gone entirely tomorrow.
I've had a headache since Wednesday morning.
I know that's not quite in the same league as Leon Brooks whose head has suffered rather more severe problems than a headache for pretty much the entire year, but it's still not exactly fun. It's kinda faded and returned continuously for days now, until last night when I was in the office and all of a sudden it felt like I'd been smacked just over my left eye with a lump of wood. I've never felt anything like it: no gradual pain build up, just *blam* and it's there. I actually fell over as if I'd been clobbered and just knelt on the floor holding my head for a minute or two wondering if I was going to die. I lost vision in my left eye briefly, then after a while I got myself out to the kitchen and took some Solprin and lay down on the couch like an invalid. After a while the pain eased off so I went to bed - not much else you can do in that situation.
The headache is still there but it's much improved today. Hopefully gone entirely tomorrow.
>> I've just been eBay-scammed
Wed, Dec 13th 8:41pm 2006 >> Bad People
Scumsucking parasite. I won an auction for a Nokia e61 a few days ago and after the auction I got in touch to arrange payment. The item was listed in Melbourne so I said I could collect it personally, but they said it ships from their store in Tasmania so it would have to be posted.
Warning sign #1, which I ignored.
So I transferred funds to them (yes, I'm an idiot) and haven't heard a single thing since. They've stopped replying to email entirely.
Warning sign #2. At least I'd started to figure something was up by this point.
Tonight I logged in to eBay to see if anything had changed and noticed the user ("bonny_4_life") is now listed as "no longer a registered user".
Oh crap.
So I started digging deeper, and in retrospect the user's feedback profile is *really* suspicious. The user has only been registered for 2 weeks, but even more odd is that there are 12 feedback entries and many of them are from duplicate users. For example, user "$1clearance" left them 5 feedback entries for different items and 3 of them were in the same minute, but with quite different text in each. If those had been real transactions then $1clearance would probably have just written the same thing in for each item. Just submitting 3 feedback items with different text in 60 seconds wouldn't be easy: you'd need to have canned responses ready to copy-n-paste, which indicates this is a well organised scam involving multiple people (or multiple accounts controlled by one person) which artificially boost feedback ratings with fake entries.
Which means that eBay users "$1clearance" and "zacandcorey" are probably scammers as well, if not actually the same person as "bonny_4_life".
The email address that bonny_4_life used to contact me was "pieman@iburst.chilli.net.au". It looks like Chilli has iBurst coverage in most Australian capital cities, so I can't narrow their actual location down much further. The originating machine that sent me the email was 124.109.65.80 and identified itself to smtp.chilli.net.au as "leecompter1", but tracing back ends in Sydney at the link from alter.net to Chilli.
Are they really located in Sydney? Or Melbourne? Or Tasmania? Only Chilli's billing records know for sure.
Scumsucking parasite. I won an auction for a Nokia e61 a few days ago and after the auction I got in touch to arrange payment. The item was listed in Melbourne so I said I could collect it personally, but they said it ships from their store in Tasmania so it would have to be posted.
Warning sign #1, which I ignored.
So I transferred funds to them (yes, I'm an idiot) and haven't heard a single thing since. They've stopped replying to email entirely.
Warning sign #2. At least I'd started to figure something was up by this point.
Tonight I logged in to eBay to see if anything had changed and noticed the user ("bonny_4_life") is now listed as "no longer a registered user".
Oh crap.
So I started digging deeper, and in retrospect the user's feedback profile is *really* suspicious. The user has only been registered for 2 weeks, but even more odd is that there are 12 feedback entries and many of them are from duplicate users. For example, user "$1clearance" left them 5 feedback entries for different items and 3 of them were in the same minute, but with quite different text in each. If those had been real transactions then $1clearance would probably have just written the same thing in for each item. Just submitting 3 feedback items with different text in 60 seconds wouldn't be easy: you'd need to have canned responses ready to copy-n-paste, which indicates this is a well organised scam involving multiple people (or multiple accounts controlled by one person) which artificially boost feedback ratings with fake entries.
Which means that eBay users "$1clearance" and "zacandcorey" are probably scammers as well, if not actually the same person as "bonny_4_life".
The email address that bonny_4_life used to contact me was "pieman@iburst.chilli.net.au". It looks like Chilli has iBurst coverage in most Australian capital cities, so I can't narrow their actual location down much further. The originating machine that sent me the email was 124.109.65.80 and identified itself to smtp.chilli.net.au as "leecompter1", but tracing back ends in Sydney at the link from alter.net to Chilli.
Are they really located in Sydney? Or Melbourne? Or Tasmania? Only Chilli's billing records know for sure.
>> linux.conf.au selling out soon?
Wed, Dec 13th 1:31pm 2006 >> Linux
It just keeps growing! Even with the "think big" approach of Team Seven booking the biggest venue that LCA has ever used it looks like it'll be another sellout year.
It's weird though: some people just don't seem to understand what they're missing out on. If you're into Linux (or FOSS in general on any platform) go and register right now. You won't regret it.
Unless you don't move fast enough and miss out on a ticket entirely.
It just keeps growing! Even with the "think big" approach of Team Seven booking the biggest venue that LCA has ever used it looks like it'll be another sellout year.
It's weird though: some people just don't seem to understand what they're missing out on. If you're into Linux (or FOSS in general on any platform) go and register right now. You won't regret it.
Unless you don't move fast enough and miss out on a ticket entirely.
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