Category: Random observations

Anna has passed me the music meme. I duly oblige by completing the survey below.

1. Total volume of music files on my computer?
   [ricky@neo]$ du –block-size=1g –summarize /media/music/
   9 /media/music/
2. The last CD I bought was…
   … probably Essential Bach, and that was over a year ago.
3. (a) The last song I listened to before writing this was…
   Golden Brown by The Stranglers.
   (b)Song playing right now:
   Aicha by Khaled.
4. Five songs I listen to a lot or that mean a lot to me.
   Besides the two above, I reckon the following five get a lot of play time in XMMS.
   1. A Day in the Life by The Beatles
   2. I Don’t Want to Wait by Paula Cole. (And as if to prove it, it started playing while I typed C-o-l-e! Not for the first time I’m left wondering whether I have some sort of psychic connection with this song.)
   3. Karma Police by Radiohead
   4. Four Seasons – Winter by Vivaldi
   5. Amazing by Alex Lloyd.

   Of course, there are so many more.

5. Which 5 people are you passing this baton to, and why?
   
   • Nigel
   • Ben
   • Michael L
   • James
   • Rhys

   No particular reason (except in the case of Rhys, who needs some encouragement to start a blog; I’m not holding my breath).

Karen and I returned to Brisbane this evening. The trip was awesome. No hiccups whatsoever. I even managed to drive on the correct side of the road! I’ll post some photos once we’ve sorted through them all.

I start at my new workplace on Tuesday. Should be interesting!

I’ve had a paper accepted to mBusiness 2005. The paper is about the context-sensitive aspects of my service discovery protocol framed within a hypothetical business application. The conference takes place in Sydney at the Crowne Plaza Darling Harbour in mid-July. Luckily there are a few relevant international conferences that happen to be taking place in Australia this year; my Ph.D. travel bank won’t stretch to overseas trips. In fact, I’m not even sure if I’m still allowed to draw upon travel bank money having submitted my thesis.

Karen and I are leaving for France at 3pm today (right now it’s just after midnight on Saturday morning). I’m almost packed (I think). I can’t wait!

Everything has come together at just the right time: thesis submitted, holiday accommodation and transport arrangements all sorted out and a new job waiting for me when I get back. I accepted an offer of employment with a business in Toowong. But wait; it’s probably not what you’re thinking. Their name does not start with ‘M’, and they don’t do content-based routing. More on that when I get back from Europe.

Up until now I haven’t been able to print to the HP PSC 1210 printer connected to a Windows box in another room of the house. I would send a job to the printer from my Linux box, it would get there, but then the printer would just hang after making a few noises. It turned out that all I needed to do was find the little check box in the printer configuration on the Windows machine that says “Enable bidirectional support” and un-check it. It’s all working beautifully now.

For what it’s worth, if you’re looking for a cheap printer of decent quality, you can’t go past the PSC 1210. ZDNet says that Photo printing likewise was of decent quality for a printer in this price range. My eyes can’t tell the difference between a print from the photo lab and a print from the PSC 1210 at the highest quality setting on photo paper. Of course, it’s also a scanner and a copier, so it’s a bargain for the $300 price tag that ZDNet quoted in March 2003. I’m pretty sure we picked ours up for less than $200 (new) in 2004. I think this model has probably been superseded by now.

On the way back from lunch today, the elevator in GP South got stuck somewhere near the third floor. It jolted to a halt, and the recorded voice told us, in a very soothing tone, that You are experiencing minor technical difficulties. Actually, I thought, it’s you who’s experiencing minor technical difficulties – we’re just stuck. After the control software rebooted, or whatever it is it does to right itself, we were soon on our way again. Thank goodness for that, because with seven people in the elevator, it could soon have gotten very uncomfortable!

Below are the temperature forecasts for the places we’ll be visiting in France, Belgium and Holland. Each forecast is for the first day on which we’ll be in a particular city/province. The temperatures, except for those of Paris, are the average temperatures for the relevant day of the year. Given that temperatures this year appear to be about five or six degrees below average, I think some of these figures need to be adjusted downwards. I have warm clothes, but I think I’m going to need even warmer ones!

The current temperature in Paris is 3°C with an overnight low of -3°C. It is forecast to snow.

For some tasks, it is easiest to revert to Microsoft software. I have found MS Powerpoint to be the easiest way to create nice looking diagrams and figures. The trouble is, if you are writing in Latex, you need some way to convert those figures to EPS format. The way I used to do this was to save my figures in Powerpoint as an uncompressed image type (say BMP), and then use the GIMP to convert to EPS. The problem is, this results in grubby images. I tried using ImageMagick instead, but the EPS it outputs cannot be interpreted by the Latex tools or eps2eps. So, what to do?

In producing her thesis, Karen figured out that the best way to generate EPS files from graphics generated on the Windows platform is to save your images as WMF (Windows Metafiles) and then use WMF2EPS to convert to EPS. WMF2EPS is a shareware Windows utility. The EPS files it produces are several orders of magnitude clearer and crisper than any other method I’ve tried. One method I didn’t try, which might produce similarly crisp images, is to print the image to a file and then use the ps2epsi Linux utility. Another option is to create PDF images and then use pdflatex instead of the regular Latex and DVI tools. I will continue to experiment with these alternatives in the future.

I submitted my thesis at 5pm yesterday afternoon, in keeping with the long-established tradition of submitting in the final hour of the working week. So it’s done, at last. Now I just have to wait for the examiners’ comments, which could take anywhere from two months to a year to arrive.

Bill Gates has received an honorary knighthood from the Queen for his sizeable charity donations and the work that his and Melinda Gate’s charity, The Gates Foundation, has done towards reducing poverty and developing a vaccine for HIV.

Ben has changed his blog template again, this time opting for an understated look.