Scott flew back from Vanuatu on Fridayish, and headed down to Canberra to pay us all a visit.

Saturday night saw us at Gus’ for a bit to eat and a few beers. We bumped into Jeremy & Jess and hoped to follow them to the Hippo bar, but were denied due to Scott and my “smart-tropical” dress style. Teva-wearers of the world rise up!

We ended up at King O’Malley’s for a few more, sitting outside thank Christ.

On Sunday Scott and I decided to head out for a bike ride. That meant Scott riding Dad’s old 10-speed racer which is, well a little old. It went well to begin with, we made it all the way to Questacon without incident.

As it happened Questacon was almost exactly the furthest point from my house on our whole ride, so of course it was there that the bearings fell out of the front wheel. If you think that sounds bad you’re right, it means the wheel stops spinning in a circle and starts to sort of wobble and click a lot.

If it had just been the bearings we’d have survived, but not more than 2 minutes later the back tyre exploded. The bike was dead.

Scott was due to meet people at All Bar Nun for drinks at 4:30, in 20 minutes time. So I gave him my bike to get there on time, while I walked Dad’s bike back to Dickson. It’s only a 2 hour walk if you’re wondering.

ps. The last two sunset shots are from Monday night on the way home from bouldering at the library.

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Last night Scott, “miss Lishka” (???) and I went and saw the Motorcycle Diaries at Lecky Shads.

It’s the true story of Che Guevara and his friend Mial as they travel across South America by motorbike. Well at least until they crash it into a cow.

I read the diaries as a teenager, and I remember being captivated by the story, it was like a Boys own Adventure or something, but true. The film was a little rushed in comparison, understandably, but still did an excellent job of telling the story.

I was worried it was going to be some sort of middle class pseudo-socialist Che Guevara fan club piece. But to it’s credit it dealt very elgantly and subtley with Che’s growing political awareness, and his sense of injustice. You also get a real glimpse of his character, what made him tick, and importantly why people would have been drawn to him as a leader, he had charisma.

If I ever get the time, sure thing, I’d love to read the diaries again, but in the meantime the film was a nice substitute.

Last week we were visited at Ozlabs and then treated to a seminar at the ANU by Nick Nethercote, one of the principal authors of Valgrind. I haven’t had much to do with Valgrind myself, and although I had a general idea of what it did, it was great to have it explained by Nick.

Ben decided that his “Christmas hacking project” would be to add a coverage analyser “skin” to Valgrind. With an hour or so to myself on Saturday I thought I’d have a quick poke around, and see if I could come up with anything. I was pleasantly surprised.

With 80 lines of C I could to a quick and dirty coverage analysis of a program’s execution. With another 65 lines of python I could take the coverage info and use it to markup the source into HTML:

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    if (argc > 3) {
        printf("argc was greater than 3\n");
    } else {
        printf("argc was less than 3\n");
    }
    printf("argc was something\n");

    return 0;
}

There’s a bug in that the return 0 is supposedly never executed, and a real coverage tool will have to do a lot more, but it was still nice for a morning’s work. My only gripe is all the VG_(foo) business, but I guess every codebase has it’s quirks.

The other day, while Debian unstable was being just a bit more unstable than I would like, I ordered a bunch of free Ubuntu CDs. I figured maybe I could move back a little further from the bleeding edge, afterall I’ve given up running KDE from cvs.

Problem is that Ubuntu’s basically a GNOME fan boy distro. That is it only has GNOME, if you want KDE you have to apt-get it from Debian unstable. Hrm. It’ll be a cold day in hell when I run Evolution, Nautilus or whatever-browser-gnome-uses, but I thought maybe I could handle using the GNOME desktop itself, and run my KDE apps on top.

So as a trial run I logged onto the nearest G5 which happend to be running GNOME and had a fiddle. Chaos ensued.

The first thing I wanted to do on my new GNOME desktop was bind a shortcut key to open a terminal, that’s something I do a lot. For a while I played dumb, I clicked on the “Start Here” icon, which lead me nowhere other than into an infuriating mass of Nautilus windows.

But then I got serious, no really I want to bind this shortcut key. After a bit of searching through the menus, not too much though, I found the shortcut keys configuration. Easy huh? Nope – although I can bind a shortcut key to “Take Screenshot” ?!? I can’t bind one to start a terminal, or anything other than about 10 predefined options. You’re kidding.

At that point Jeremy popped by, and hoping to make me look silly, set to work installing this stinkin’ shortcut. He was stumped too, thankfully.

Eventually we had to google for it. And in case you care it’s this easy:

• Run gconf-editor (from a terminal!) to start editing the GNOME registry.
• Go to the key called “apps/metacity/HKEY_LOCALMACHINE/global_keybindings/run_command1″.
• Stop.
• Open the damn terminal by clicking the button and type ‘apt-get install kde’.

At least I have a nice set of Ubuntu coasters.

Last night Ben and I rode over to the ANU for an STR film night. They were showing a documentary titled “The End of Suburbia”.

The film takes the view, backed by some number of the world’s oil experts, that global oil production either has peaked, or will peak in the next 10-20 years. And what that means is that oil, and all the products derived from it, like say lettuce, will never be as cheap as they are now.

The second premise is that there is no technology, or combination of technologies, that will ever be able to provide us with as much energy at such a low cost. This I agree with, no matter how good our “alternative” energy technologies get, I don’t see how they can compete with simply diggin’ stuff up and burnin’ it. There is no plan B.

One of the possibilities put forward by the film, is that the American people, incapable or unwilling to change their way of life, will elect anyone who tells them it’s gonna be OK, and that they can keep driving their SUVs. Those American presidents will be faced with only one option if they want to hold office, which is take control of other nation’s oil supply by force. Imagine that?

The title of the film comes from the idea that it may become simply impossible for many people to continue living in suburbia. This is simply because suburbs in America (and Australia) are 100% designed for the car. Although that sounds a little far-fetched to those of use writing blog-entries on our laptops, there’s surely plenty of families in the ‘burbs who’d really feel it if the price of petrol doubled. And if it increased 10-fold? Who knows.

Overall it was an incredibly thought-provoking film, and if you’re thinking about consuming a single joule of energy in the next few decades I think you should see it.

Enough with the rain!

Haha, yeah really funny. It’s a drought for 4 years and then it pelts down for weeks, and probably too late for summer crops anyway right?!

The garden’s looking fine, the farmers are being flooded already, and it’s all just gonna dry out and burn in a few months anyway.

I wanna ride my damn bike!

On Saturday we moved house! Well we did the big stuff anyway. I started moving boxes and small furniture on Wednesday night, and Thursday night, and Friday night. But Saturday Nick, James and I did all the solid stuff. Beds, couches, cupboards. And the fridge.

It’s all a little ramshackle at the moment, but with time it’ll look lovely.

To celebrate we left some beer in the freezer and waited for it to explode! What fun!

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Thanks to Martin I’ve discovered the brilliantly talented Damien Rice and his album ‘O’.

It’s just a guy and a guitar, and sometimes a girl and a cello, but basically pretty stripped back simple stuff. And yet it’s just spine tingling. Soft and lovely at times, soaring and noisy at others. Every now and then you’re listening to it and you just feel like smiling, sometimes you want to cry.

It’s another album, there’s been only a few over the years, that has restored my faith in music’s incredible inexplicable ability to make you think and feel things. Just a bit of vibrating air, but boy it’s cool.