Category: Random observations

Had a very relaxing weekend, most of which was spent down at the Gold Coast. Pacific Fair provided much of Saturday’s entertainment. Japanese food for lunch. Wandered around Surfers Paradise looking for a nice place to eat. Decided on a nice little Thai restaurant. I don’t understand karaoke videos.

Sunday was Dad’s birthday and Mum’s and Dad’s anniversary. Sat on the beach for an hour or so, before heading back to Brisbane. Arrived home after more shopping at Garden City. We all went to dinner at a lovely little modern Italian cafe in Coorparoo. I think it’s called Embers. Definitely worth going to again. Mum and Dad enjoyed their day. Dad says he was looking forward to this birthday probably more than any other.

So basically, my weekend was spent relaxing and eating way too much. Enjoyed every moment of it!

Nigel scored a job as a games programmer with THQ! This is his dream job! Congratulations Nige! He’ll be writing games for the Playstation 2, the Game Cube and the XBox. Apparently the first game he’ll be working on is Spongebob Squarepants. I won’t confess to having watched a couple of episodes of that cartoon. ;) This is fantastic news!

I’m going to be in trouble for staying up so late. I just know it.

The final new feature, which I have neglected to mention so far, is the addition of permalinks for each post. You can go to the permanent page for any post by clicking the time in the bottom right hand corner of the post.

Oh, and now my posts can have titles!

My blog has slightly different behaviour than before. Instead of the default page displaying the current month and refreshing at the beginning of every month, my blog displays all the posts from the last 30 days. If I haven’t made any posts during the last 30 days, the default page will be empty. You can always browse through the archives, which I’ve arranged by month. I know some people are quite particular about the way blogs should update. The behaviour is customisable so let me know if you think it should work differently.

After a lot of procrastination and a bit of stuffing around, my new blogging software is up and running. To look at, nothing much has changed. But my blog now supports customisable templates, so that users have lots of flexibility over the way their blog looks. You’ve seen the way my blog looks. Here is Nigel’s blog. The next improvement to be made is to provide an RSS feed.

I’ve added a few more photos here.

Troy was pretty much what I expected it to be: a Brad Pitt body-fest. But there were some good things in the movie too. Warning: there might be spoilers here. Eric Bana was not bad as Hector. I found myself wanting Hector to live. In fact I was hoping he’d give Achilles a right whipping. But this Hollywood blockbuster stayed pretty faithful to Homer’s Iliad, complete with the bit where Achilles drags Hector’s body around behind a chariot. Lovely. Although they were referred to quite a bit, the gods did not feature in the movie at all. This, in my opinion, was a good thing. Gods quarrelling amongst themselves is not my idea of entertainment, unless the script has been written by Douglas Adams, in which case the proceedings might be very entertaining indeed. In short, I wouldn’t start a war over Diane Kruger (who played Helen), and RGW assures me I am not alone in this view.

SRL and I finished off the paper we were writing on bridging service discovery protocols. We’re submitting it to a workshop in Lancaster. It is SRL’s first paper, so hopefully it gets accepted.

Lunch in the Valley on Saturday was kind of interesting. I had Honey King Prawns for the first time in who knows how long. I’d sort of forgotten about them.

Still reading Rebel Without a Crew and probably will be for some while.

Ye gods, it is not twenty past midnight!

Much of this week was spent paper writing and constructing an Ant build file to build and package all the bits of my service discovery protocol. The build file ended up being quite huge, but now building the protocol or any component of it, generating documentation and packaging it all up is very easy. I’m using the set of add-on Ant tasks available in the antenna package, which makes building J2ME components easier than it otherwise would be.

Tomorrow I’m having lunch in the Valley with a few friends. It ought to be good.

Mum’s gone to Melbourne for a few days for my uncle’s housewarming. She left on Thursday and will be back on Sunday evening.

I’m still reading Rebel Without a Crew. It’s quite interesting, but progress has been slow.

I’ve changed my sendmail setup to relay all mail (except for mail bound for an address at zion.dnsalias.net) to the Bigpond SMTP server. Everything works like a charm.

Mum has fumigated the whole house by cooking her chilli paste. It’s like a nerve gas agent. All of us were coughing uncontrollably through dinner. I’m still coughing!

So I’ve finished marking the third COMP4301 assignment (MS message queues). Wasn’t too painful, thank goodness, though I might have to deduct a few more marks from 19 or so submissions, depending on the lecturer’s verdict.

Nigel’s idea of being able to add entries to blogs is proving to be a good one. However, Bigpond’s new policy of blocking mail originating from an unknown MTA within its network means that confirmation e-mails are being blocked. So how does one make sendmail appear as though it is a user agent rather than an MTA?