frase.id.au archives

Warning: date() [function.date]: It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'Australia/ACT' for 'EST/10.0/no DST' instead in /store/1/www/frase.id.au/common/functions.php on line 76

Warning: date() [function.date]: It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'Australia/ACT' for 'EST/10.0/no DST' instead in /store/1/www/frase.id.au/common/functions.php on line 77

Warning: date() [function.date]: It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'Australia/ACT' for 'EST/10.0/no DST' instead in /store/1/www/frase.id.au/common/functions.php on line 78

Warning: date() [function.date]: It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'Australia/ACT' for 'EST/10.0/no DST' instead in /store/1/www/frase.id.au/common/functions.php on line 78

Warning: date() [function.date]: It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'Australia/ACT' for 'EST/10.0/no DST' instead in /store/1/www/frase.id.au/common/functions.php on line 80

Wednesday 31-08-2005

50 minutes to go!

comments (4) »

Posted by frase @ 23:09 on 31-08-2005

My chocolate fast is nearly over! A whole month without chocolate! No chocolate or chocolate containing products have been consumed for nearly a whole month!

And crikey, it wasn't easy! But it was definitely worth it. I wonder what I'll give up during August next year...? ALL confectionary? Fast food? The internet?

The mind boggles...

t

Tuesday 30-08-2005

ODD-less

comments (2) »

Posted by frase @ 22:22 on 30-08-2005

and it's taking its toll. some many CDs to listen so. so few CD drives to play them in (none actually).

Sif have the motor burn out on you. and sif rtm. geez, I hope it doesn't take too much longer.

sob.

In other news, Baj has THE LONGEST EYELASHES I'VE EVER SEEN!!! They're seriously like... 2cm long!!! I only noticed today. I said "Hey Baj, you have really long eyelashes" and he just rolled his eyes as if to say "yeah, noone's ever told me that before" in a most sarcastic tone. It was funny.

yeah...

t

Saturday 27-08-2005

friday night retrospective

comments (0) »

Posted by frase @ 22:13 on 27-08-2005

hmmmm...

yes, so last night I headed into town with Manda to see Nick Skitz at the Family. They wouldn't let us in. No idea why. Pretty cut. I even scrubbed up for the occasion. Yep, you can call me a waaambulance now any time you like. I won't be over this for a little while longer.

Anyhoo, went to the Waterloo instead and saw Butterfingers, which was okay but more expensive and nowhere near as good as Nick Skitz would have been. Still, better than nothing, that is for sure. And it was rather enjoyable, and some of Manda's friends were there so it was all good.

After that, we headed out to the casino and generally just spend the next few hours strolling around town catching up, talking to drunken strangers and wondering why we don't catch up more often. Not so much luck at the casino as last time, unfortunately. Life does go on.

We headed back to Manda's and met up with Claire and her sk8er boi Dan and crashed. Oooh that reminds me, speaking of crashes we also witnessed some moron in a lowrider doing some high speed fishtailing in Adelaide Street, losing control and smashing up his rear end on one of those big fat ram raid stopper poles. Amazingly, it was knocked clean out of the ground, and the bitumen was all torn up around it. We were about 10m away at the time. All very interesting.

Yeah, so anyway, crashed at 3 or so. Got up at 8, bummed around the joint for a while and headed home. Top night all up - certainly can't complain. Wait... yes I can. DAMNIT!!! Soooo annoyed! Sifn't let me in. Pathetic excuses from the bouncer... rubbish along the lines of "your shoes aren't streetwear enough". Well, I beg to differ. My Globes scream "street wear!" (figuratively speaking... although a screaming pair of shoes would be rather interesting). Hmmm... I'll start building that bridge now.

HAHAHA. AAah yes, the japanese version of 'Kiss Me' just came on. Aaah I'm feeling better already.

'night all then. t out.

human zoo... riiiight

comments (0) »

Posted by frase @ 17:48 on 27-08-2005

a big wtf goes out to this one. I worry about the people who come up with stuff like this :/

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20050825/wl_uk_afp/britainoffbeatzoo

t

Thursday 25-08-2005

we won!

comments (2) »

Posted by frase @ 23:48 on 25-08-2005

hurrah! we won netball tonight! our first win (finally!); we thrashed the opposition (who were, by the look of them, a somewhat organised team with players who know the rules, unlike ourselves) 28-7.

Go Team Bagurk!

(yes, that's what we're really called, and yes, I play netball. Stop laughing.)

In other news, binary safe data transfer in java is a bitch!

EOB

t

Monday 22-08-2005

qcs shout out

comments (0) »

Posted by frase @ 21:19 on 22-08-2005

to all my year 12 homies and homiettes, including, but not limited to:

Scuba, Seeley, Ali, Adam, Davo, Mel, Nessa, Zoe, P-Nut, Don, Dan, Caroline

Keep it real home boys and girls. Don't stress. You'll all be fine :) It's not as important as everyone says it is.

GOOD LUCK!!! EAT A HEARTY BREAKFAST!!!

t

Do not want

comments (0) »

Posted by frase @ 00:37 on 22-08-2005

HOLY CRAP!!!

This has got to be one of the funniest things I have ever seen. The English->Chinese->English translation of episode three.

I won't spoil it for you but you HAVE to check out the last one (and all of them, but the last one is best!).

Ah man my belly hurts from laughing.

http://www.winterson.com/2005/06/episode-iii-backstroke-of-west.html

Cheers to Scuba for the headsup. And yes, I'm actually going to bed now :)

G'night

t

Sunday 21-08-2005

sunday night blog

comments (0) »

Posted by frase @ 23:55 on 21-08-2005

well, some of you may have noticed, others may not have, but we were down for 32 hours or so... all of yesterday and half of today. As was every other site I host on fortune. The reason? Failed DNS update. Of course... given that she sits about 1m behind where I'm sitting now, in front of my computer, I was none the wiser, but the good man Seeley alerted me to the fact that something was wrong.

I'm thinking of writing some sort of program to fetch the DNS record from some DNS server (presumably one of the TPG servers) and matching it against Jericho's red IP, and alerting me when there's a mismatch... but it doesn't happen all that often so meh... I probably won't bother. Heck, there's probably already some program that does it... but of course I like to do things the hard way.

Anyhow, dreamtime2, the dev box, is running supremely well and I'm ready to cut sick on it with some hardcore coding of assorted things (yay firmware! yay software! yay kernel hacking!). Development of blogurk! will be accelerated (but still rather slow given the uni load).

Hmm what else is there to say? Had an interesting mosquito inhaling experience on friday night. A word of advice to anyone living in a mosquito inhabited area - if you can ever possibly avoid it, don't inhale a mosquito.

Anyhoo, I'm calling it a night. OH YEAH JUST REMEMBERED.

Toasted TV. Tomorrow morning. Some ungodly hour. Dan Sweetman.

ciao then,

t

Thursday 18-08-2005

fsck

comments (5) »

Posted by frase @ 00:49 on 18-08-2005

arrg.

So, upon deciding that it really was time I had myself a dedicated dev box, I recomissionned (sp, I know, don't care, can't think straight) one of my dedicated folders to be just that - codename dreamtime. Having buggerised around for much of the last two days setting it up. I tried DesktopBSD, found that didn't really cut it due to various reasons, moved off to Ubuntu but (and I'm somewhat thankful for this) the install CD failed to work at all (even though I've used it before... strange), decided to give PC-BSD a go.

And boy oh boy, I have mucho praiseo to the team behind that little number. But I'll save that for another day. On with the story.

Well, turns out that the 500MHz, 4GB system I recommissioned didn't quite cut it (not surprising really - 500MHz was fairly sluggish but nothing unbearable... it was the drive space the ruined it - sif I even could have dreamed of compiling jdk with only 300MB of leftover drivespace), so, I did a very strange and unexpected (some may even say horrifying) thing.

I hereby announce that 55|srcds has been decommissioned and born again (plus or minus a component or two) as dreamtime2.

And that all happened earlier this evening. Or late yesterday evening, since it's now thursday.

So anyhow, all was travelling along swimmingly and I've compiled and/or installed all the essentials, and got the whole thing set up just nicely, and so I do the next sensible thing and that is of course to get on with it and compile jdk (Java Development Kit, 1.4.2 for those of you playing at home).

And about 5 minutes in, something goes horribly wrong and the system crashes. Very, very ungracefully. And fails to reboot.

After a few minutes of panic and venting of frustration, I decide to do the sensible thing and boot the thing in safe mode; sure enough I've got mount/unmount problems and desynched inodes all over the place. Thanks to the amazing wonder that is fsck, however, I'm now back in business, at a less-likely-to-crash clockspeed (the system was overclocked somewhat), and after a some buggerising around cleaning up what was left of the botched compile, everythings back to normal :)

And I think I should hit the sack now. This has taken up too much of my time and I need sleep and I have a meeting tomorrow and lots of things to do before them (yay for gantt charts and unfinished circuit diagrams).

Sorry if you didn't understand a word of what I just said. Actually, I'm not :P Apologies for the lack of updates. Not that I'm especially sorry about that either; just soooo damn busy with uni. It's kicking my arse.

Ciao for now,

t

Saturday 13-08-2005

can't think of a title

comments (2) »

Posted by frase @ 23:25 on 13-08-2005

well, it has been a few days since I wrote anything, so I suppose I'll use this free moment now to let you all know what's been happening.

frankly, I've had an absolute horror week at uni. it started on tuesday with the team project movements and didn't get much better from then on. I've spent more time in labs this week than I'd like to admit but unfortunately my CRT-tan gives it all away... that and the fact that I can't think straight due to lack of sleep and too much time thinking in hex.

Worked all day today, which was okay; although I was very out of it most of the day and all the other staff were probably thinking 'what the hell is up with frase'?

Anyhoo, all that aside, I've just watched the Cat Empire DVD - "On The Attack", which I must say was jolly good and well worth the money and the extra trip to JB to pick up another one since the first one I ended up with didn't actually come with a DVD :/

I'm listening to the Bonus CD right now, which is also very good; live tracks and rarities, including their cover of Hotel California which is sung in French (now that's something different!). And a recording of Two Shoes from the UK in 2002. Et cetera.

Well, I'm gonna wrap this up now. I'm on team in the morning and I need to get some zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

G'night

t

Tuesday 09-08-2005

so nerdy it's cool

comments (4) »

Posted by frase @ 23:42 on 09-08-2005

apparantly this is the sort of thing Scuba gets up to in his afternoons:

http://frase.homeip.net/files/saber.wmv (1.35MB)

Hahah it's actually pretty cool. He used some program to do it (really...) but I forget what it's called. But yeah. They used to have to do that rotoscoping thing by hand, you know.

The future is now... or something.

t

Discovery lands safely

comments (0) »

Posted by frase @ 23:18 on 09-08-2005

yay. this is a Good Thing(tm).

space shuttles are cool...

http://www.nasa.gov/returntoflight/main/?skipIntro=1

t

not cool

comments (0) »

Posted by frase @ 18:26 on 09-08-2005

So, after a very late night last night reading datasheets and setting out the digital systems for Team Project, I wake only to find (upon checking my email) that Tim, our firmware guy, has been swapped with someone from another team.

...which messes up the works a bit, but hey, no biggie. We'll work around it. Besides, the new guy Joel was a bit of a champ anyhoo, so after a bit of discussion we decided that although it was quite an annoyance, it was no great hindrance to the project, so on we pressed.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!

So I'm down here in the unix labs all by myself, attempting to ssh into my home network with no luck (obviously some sort of port or protocol block on the UQ end), and I decide to check my email. 7 new. Something is up.

And now, I'm down in team 10. Not cool. Very not cool. And especially not cool because poor old team 9 is left with only three people. Sorry guys. But yes, now I'm with a new team, which is not so bad except for the fact that WE'RE FREAKIN TWO WEEKS INTO THE PROJECT AND MEETINGS ARE STARTING AND REPORTS ARE DUE AND EVERYTHING WE'VE DONE IS BASICALLY WASTED.

Geez I'm pissed! Patronising crap like:

"Fraser,

You are one of team project's scarce resource......and as a result of one student dropping out of ENGG3800 today..."

...doesn't really make me feel much better about it. So what if I'm special because I'm one of "the seven" (although I think there are only six of us now). It's not like we haven't all done mostly the same subjects anyway! Swapping people around this late into the project is only SCREWING PEOPLE OVER!

</rant>

t

Monday 08-08-2005

racq man

comments (2) »

Posted by frase @ 23:36 on 08-08-2005

teh funneh

http://www.rilstix.com/racqman.html

EDIT - whoa! apparantly one of Scuba's teachers is in this band. Well actually, I'm not all that amazed. Baj knows the guy who made the flash. Or Brooke does...

t

Sunday 07-08-2005

ocau pancake meet

comments (0) »

Posted by frase @ 17:12 on 07-08-2005

last night was the OCAU meet at pancake manor. even though I've posted a total of 7 times on OCAU and I don't even really like the joint that much, Jess convinced me to go (well... it probably wasn't all that hard) and so I did.

The only people I knew were Jessica and Ratticus (an ex-Atomican), but that was okay, because we all had a rad time and I met a bunch of cool people too (although I've forgotten most of their names), and of course Rat Jnr was there as well, breaking it down and generally being the life of the party, as expected.

So we headed to the Pancake Manor (which I don't really like all that much but one can get a decent feed there and everyone else loves it so meh) and spent quite some time there (there were about 50 people at the meet) before heading over to the casino.

I quadrupled my money and headed home in the early hours of the morning. Good night, 'twas.

EOB

t

Thursday 04-08-2005

August 4 Birthday Rounds

comments (3) »

Posted by frase @ 22:25 on 04-08-2005

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!

- Stephen (Scuba) Montgomery; 17 today!
- Mordy; the big 18. Way to go dude!
- The Old Man. 56 years young.

I even went out of my way and did something special for Daddy on his special day. I got... A HAIRCUT!!! (gasp!)

Yes, the afro-mullet is no more; same with all the complaining from assorted family members.

Happy birthday, Old :)

t

arooooooooooooo

Wednesday 03-08-2005

happy birthday Johno

comments (0) »

Posted by frase @ 23:22 on 03-08-2005

Before I forget, and before the day has passed, a big shout out to Johno U'P:

HAPPY BOITHDAY U LEH!!!

hope you had a good one :D

t

arg!

comments (0) »

Posted by frase @ 14:00 on 03-08-2005

In a moment of stupidity, I overwrote all of the function integration work I'd done for the new backend. In fact, I don't even know if this will work, since I've just recoded what took me several days to last time, in about one hour. It probalby won't.

EDIT - Seems that it worked. That's nice.

t

Tuesday 02-08-2005

Audioscrobbler

comments (0) »

Posted by frase @ 19:07 on 02-08-2005

I now Audioscrobble. Audioscrobber is a fancy little thingummy that records information about what music you're listening to, and displays various statistics, as well as calculates your musical 'neighbours' (people with similar taste in music).

It is rad.

Find out more or check out my user page.

EDIT - Audioscrobber has EVOLVED into Last.fm (which was its sister-site - they have now been fused into one). But it's still the same thing :) Links updated

t

MZ makes Top 100

comments (0) »

Posted by frase @ 09:47 on 02-08-2005

Well, folks - it has finally happened. MozillaZine folding team has, at long last, reached the top 100; and we're showing no signs of stopping!

For those who don't know, Folding@Home is a distributed computing project in which people can use the idle cycles on their home computers to carry out important simulations for Stanford University reseachers. The aim of the research is to gain a greater knowledge of protein folding, and learn ways to prevent misfolding related disease, such as Alzheimer's, BSE and possibly some kinds of cancer.

YOU can help - go to http://folding.stanford.edu/download.html to download the client. MZ is team number 39340.

I have also quite recently made it into the Top 10 in MZ, so it's milestones aplenty at the moment.

FOLD FOLD FOLD!!!

t

Go little MozillaZine! Fly! Go little MozillaZine! Fly!

Monday 01-08-2005

site news

comments (0) »

Posted by frase @ 14:49 on 01-08-2005

I've done a bit of work over the past few days; a few bugfixes and whatnot. The site is now largely Triple-A compliant, so I'm thinking of adding a little widget to reflect this some time.

Most importantly, I've changed a few things with the comments system. Now it will remember what you've already put in so that if you get the captcha sequence wrong, or leave out a required field, you no longer have to start from scratch. Perhaps I'll also cookie it up (just with the name and url field) but that's not a priority or anything... it's not like it's much hassle for you to type your name!

I've also made some security-minded enhancements and, in case you didn't notice, the background is now a delightful sky blue :)

t