Bus Ride

This morning it was raining for the first time in, I don’t know how long, and it made for a very surreal bus ride into work. My random play on the iPod seemed to be reading my mood and the images as they flashed by.


Windows fogged and streaked distort the world into surreal images.
Constant stops past surburban streets, turned into a linear kalidoscope,
with the “Transfer” waiting for the Savages to come [1].
Savages becoming clear people and losing mushroom tops as they enter the bus,
dripping with the moisture of the day.
Multi-coloured boxes pass the window as cars overtake the bus,
shapes distorted in the blurs,
striking colours in blues, reds and yellow.
Round the round-about, over the hill,
leaving my local area with the “Straits” praising the hero [2].
Background noise softened to a hiss and a whir,
as the bus leaves the last stop before the express trip to work.
The crash barriers become a white fence
keeping out the looming, dark and ominous shapes of the trees.
The trees give way to the dark linear band of barriers
and “Kitaro” is promising a rising sun [3].

Drops streaked across my vision as the bus got up to speed,
distorted, blurred images flew past.
Light played and flashed but did not resolve into shapes or patterns.
Slowing down images of towers emerged from the blur
and “Betty” [4] did not care what the weather was.
Traffic and traffic lights again, stop, start whine and hum.
Tower blocks, people and cars were distinguishable from the haze.
My stop came and I went, agreeing with “Kate”, Wow! [5].


  1. “10 minutes till the Savages Come” – The Manhatten Transfer
  2. “Local hero/Wild Theme” – Dire Straits
  3. “Dawn/Rising Sun” – Kitaro
  4. “Come Rain or Come Shine” – Betty Roche
  5. “Wow (Amazing)” – Kate Bush

Injured

Well I have injured myself. Silly really 😳 .

My son had his athletics today, and after his races (in which he put in lots of effort) it was the parents time. So I dutifully lined up for a 50 metre dash. They sent the ladies off a few seconds before us men, well I must admit I got carried away. About 5 metres from the end I was not coming last and doing fine, then… pop! A really not nice noise came from the back of my left leg.

Well I made it over the line… but I think I have torn my hamstring. I am now working from home felling embarrassed and sore.

Will let you know what the doctor says later today.

Update: Well it is not my Hamstring (thankfully, since that would mean an operation) but just a torn muscle. One week of rest and painkillers.

26 things the photographic scavenger hunt

Ok sh1ft.org has created a scavenger hunt with a difference. You have to take 26 photos, one in each category.

As I upload the photos I will create links above.

Happy Hunting!

Update
Someone has sugested that I don’t post the pictures till the closure date so as to not influence other people. So I am removing the thumbs but you can see the full versions by clicking on the word.

Just
Well I made it, just.

Site Updates

Ok just a few more changes. I have added “Grins” and “Style Switcher” from Alex King’s site. These are very cool.

So now you can change the style (all but the Asian one are from Alex’s site) and the site will remember and I have smilies on the comments.

Enjoy.

New Style

Ok as you can see I have done some basic changes to the style here. I am working on a style switcher extention for WordPress (if I can’t find one) so you will be able to pick the one you like.

Haiku the new BeOS

Haiku Logo
I love this operating system and cannot wait until the first release of Haiku is available. BeOS was/is one of the most responsive and usable operating systems I have ever used. It has features that even current systems do not yet come with, for a history lesson have a look at this OSNews article. It is hard to explain all of the virtues of BeOS unless you have actually used it, but I will give it a go.

File System

BeOS had a powerful journelled 64bit file system. This allowed a maximum file size of 18 million gigabytes (just a tad larger than current hard disks) and full recovery in the event of system outages.

It also had the concept of extended and custom attributes. Examples of file attributes include Size, Name, modified date etc, however BeOS took it one step further. Each file in the filesystem had a MimeType attribute, this dictated (via a standard notation) the type of file. Unlike Windows that relies on file extension this attribute a file in BeOS can be called anything an this attribute dictates what it is.

The next thing it does is allow custom attributes based on the file type. This allowed file information to be stored outside the file in an indexed area allowing for fast searches. An example is images, they had custom attributes of width, height and colour depth. This means you can search for images that are no larger than 120 pixels wide and greater than 16 bit colour depth. Now lets extend that to emails, all of the standard headers are exposed in attributes, meaning you can search on sender, send date and any other you can think of. Now the really interesting upshot of this is that BeOS does not come with a mail client. It does have a little program for reading, editing and creating individual mails but the standard file manager is used as the mail client.

Data Translators

If you have ever played with image editing tools in any operating system you know that each one has its own mechanisms for reading and writing image formats. Photoshop, Paintbrush, GIMP etc all have their own code and options for image formats they handle. I have heard of people editing images in one tool, just to open them in another to save them as a JPEG, because the second tool has better optimisations for compressing and saving JPEG’s. Well in BeOS no image editing program knows how to read and write any image format, they only understand the underlying bitmap format that is used to render onto the screen. Yep you read that right, no program written for BeOS know how to read and write an image of the disk.

The BeOS engineers realising that all this duplicated code was a waste, they implemented the Data Translator mechanism. What this means is you decide what translators you want to install and the programs just call up the list and let you select. This means that you can save and open all formats in all programs, that support images. This was also extended to documents, and via central codecs, videos and sounds.

Resources

Now a version of BeOS was released free for use, so looking up the following resources you will find a copy if you want. Be warned however this is an older operating system and may not work on the newest hardware.

Gay Marriage follow-up

I sent an email of to my local member and the shadow attorny general. To my surprise I got fast responses from both, on in email and the other in writing.

Okay I will start with the oppositions response via email. Nicola Roxon who is our shadow attorney general (ie she would be the head law maker if her party was in power) for the Labor Party.

… The Labor Party will not oppose the PM’s measures to confirm in the Marriage Act the common law understanding that marriage is “a union between a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others”. Consistent with this, Labor will also not oppose a prohibition on recognising foreign same sex marriages.
more importantly, Labor restates its commitment to remove discriminatory provisions from Commonwealth legislation on the basis of sexuality, following a full audit of existing laws.

When complete, this will give same sex couples the rights and recognition of heterosexual de facto couples.

So if they get elected then same sex couples will have the same recognition as unmarried heterosexual couples. This is good, however why then the restriction on marriage. The only reason is the current “common law” interpretation of the current act.

Now my local member Gary Hardgrave belongs to the ruling Liberal Party which introduced the bill to reword the marriage act.

… The Government condemns discrimination in all its forms. However, the Government also believes that it is clearly in the best interests of children for them to have, all other things being equal, the care and affection of both a mother and a father.


These [new] words represent the current as well as the historical legal understanding of marriage in Australian Law.


marriages entered into under the law of another country are recognised as valid under Australian Law. The Government proposes to amend the Marriage Act to ensure that marriages between people of the same sex entered into under the law of another country are not recognised in Australia.

Ok so as it stands they say this is for the children, because they “believe” it is in the best interest of the child. I would like to see the advice or studies they have based that on.

Comments Welcome..

Australia Outlaws Gay Marriage

Well our government has done it, little Johnny Howard has to do what George W does.

The Australian government is making changes to the family act to set in law that marriage can only be a union between a man and a woman. The opposition here also agrees so they will pass the changes.

Well more closed minds doing more strange things.

I am getting out my pen and paper and writing to my local member today.