I finally got my act together and bought a new lec’y guitar. It’s a corker. “Sime” at Better Music calls it a “Epi Studio Lesa”, but if you’re googling you might want to try “Epiphone Les Paul Studio”. Basically it’s a cheaper Gibson.

It’s got a set-neck, not bolted on, and it’s made from pretty solid timber, feels nice and heavy when you’ve got it on. Pickups are bright and chirpy, almost too bright with new strings on, and it sounds grouse both clean and distorted.

I’m not much of a haggler, I generally dislike shopping around, rather be doing something else. But I did a bit of ringing around to check my prices and get some idea of how badly I was getting ripped off.

I ended up paying $720 for the guitar, a nice Epi hard case, and a reasonably decent Fender lead. Retail for the three is about $1090, so I think I did alright.

Although if you pay retail for a guitar you’re a complete goose, so it’s not really a fair comparison. His first price was $850 without the lead ($30 worth), so I’m not complaining. Regardless, I was happy to pay $720 for it, and buying it from Better Music means I can take it back there in person if there’s any problems (as opposed to getting one shipped from Sydney).

Headed round to Keith’s tonight to do a few guitar overdubs for Martin and Kelly’s OLS paper, and had a bit of a play. Sounded great through Keith’s bass amp, nice and loud, ballsy. I’ll have to start looking for a school boy uniform.

These GUI mockups by some guys working on the “Symphony OS” (which is just a Linux distro it seems) are really cool.

Although I love KDE, I really don’t think you can argue that the default desktop layout is optimal or even well thought out. It looks like Windows, which might be useful for some people, but there’s lots of lost oportunities to actually do better than Windows.

The default GNOME layout is a bit better, it makes better use of Fitt’s Law by putting the task bar along the bottom of the screen. Although I still can’t get my head around spatial Nautilus.

The SymphonyOS mockups make a lot of sense. Using the corners as targets is so obviously a good thing.

I don’t think the Trash is worth an entire corner, I’d put it under documents, and use that corner for something more useful.

I also don’t think Logout and Shutdown should be in the Computer section. It lures inexperienced users into a corner they otherwise might best avoid.

It’d also be interesting to see how well it all scales, ie. how does it look when you’ve got 15 windows open. But if they can get half of it implemented I’ll be very interested.

My subtle mention of Jess’ research skills in my post the other day had the desired effect, ie. that she went and did some more googling for me.

So this by way of Jess:

“The true incidence of snakebite in Australia is unknown. Estimates suggest that there may be several thousand cases of snakebite in Australia each year. Of these perhaps 300 require treatment with antivenom.

Surveys over recent years suggest a death rate of around 1-2 cases per year on average, although it is likely that the actual number of deaths is somewhat higher than this, due to unrecognised snakebite deaths.

The most recent published survey of deaths from snakebite in Australia found a slightly higher death rate of around 3.2 deaths per year, although the significance of this is not clear as yet.

Prior to the development of specific antivenom therapy and improved supportive care, snakebite was associated with a high case fatality rate.

Most bites occur during the warmer months, when snakes are more active and people are more likely to venture outdoors and into the bush.

Australian studies of snakebite incidence demonstrate a preponderance of males among the victims, possibly related to risk taking behaviour or to occupational exposure.

It is also of note that several cases of snakebite death have been associated with alcohol intoxication.

Half (six) of the deaths reported in the 1992-4 survey were due to bites from brown snakes, including several sudden or unexpected deaths (within one hour).

Tiger snake was the second most common cause of snakebite death, involved in four fatalities.”

My emphasis.

From:
http://www.avru.unimelb.edu.au/avruweb/snakebi.htm#About%20Australian%20Snakebite

vs Bears:

“Statistics on bear attacks are difficult to compile. Many happen in remote wilderness and go unreported. Herrero, author of ‘Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance,’ estimated that on average, bears kill three people and seriously injure five to 15 a year in North America.

“Overall, the injury rates are very low considering the millions of interactions that occur each year,” he said.

But in August, Herrero told the Calgary Herald that the number of bear attacks this year is among the highest since biologists began keeping records 28 years ago. Specific numbers were unavailable.”

From: http://www.bears.org/pipermail/bearfolks/2000-October/000447.html

Warning: the story at the front of this article is pretty intense

So your chance of being killed by a bear in North America is slightly higher than that of being bitten by a snake in Australia.
But, that’s not a fair comparison, because there’s a lot more people in North America, and so I’d guess a lot more interactions with bears going on, and therefore the number of deaths per person in the wilderness is much lower. If you believe that logic, it means it’s actually safer to go outdoors in North America than in Australia.

But don’t let me catch you using that as an excuse to sit on the couch and watch crap tv!

Spent the weekend walking in Namadgi with Tom.

We started at the Yankee hat car park, or as far south as you can drive on the Old Boboyan road if you know it.

From there we headed south west through the old pine plantation, and then did a bit of minor bush bashing to get up the ridge and over Gudgenby saddle. From there we dropped down into the next valley, and camped the night.

It was cold, everything froze. We had ice on the inside of the fly, which was nasty in the morning when it started falling on us. And the water we’d left outside had about 5mm of ice on top of it, brrrr. That’s what you get for camping in a frost hollow.

Once the sun popped up it was lovely again though, just like Saturday had been.

After breaky we headed off down the valley to join the Old Boboyan road again, and then head back to the car.

It was good to bump into a family on Mountain bikes who were riding around checking things out, nice see some other people out there enjoying the scenery. They made good time too, a lot faster than us.

On the way back to the car we popped over to check out Frank and Jack’s hut. It’s still looking good, no obvious damage from the fires. The surrounds aren’t in such good nick. Although that seems to be part of the regeneration program, which has removed the pines that were there and replaced them with natives. About time too, it’s been planned since 1986!

If you’re in the area be warned there is very little water around. We found a bit in Naas creek, but only towards the head of the valley where it’s not swampy, or where the track crosses it where it’s pretty dirty and horrible.

All up a brilliant way to spend a couple of days, even if it was a chilly night. We tramped about 25km all up, and I don’t feel too bad given it was my first real hike since being sick.

Looking forward to doing it all again in a couple of weeks!

View the photos »

I just stumbled across Benjamin Carlyle’s piece titled Hungarian Notation Revisited. He’s replying to a reply to a blah blah of an article by Joel on (among other things) differentiating “safe” and “unsafe” strings in web apps.

I absolutely agree with his point that Hungarian notation is broken because it asks the programmer to do the compiler’s job. I also think it makes code much harder to read, because you’re constantly tripping over details that are (usually) irrelevant to the underlying algorithm.

He goes on to suggest that Python isn’t suitable for “real work” because of its “lack of ability to state the expectations of a particular function”. His premise is wrong, and I also believe his conclusion is wrong, but I leave that as matter of religion opinion.

Strict typing in Python is not the default, but it is painless:

class SafeString(str):
    def __init__(self, value):
        # check value is 'safe' here, then call super class constructor
        str.__init__(self, value)

def only_print_safe_string(s):
    assert isinstance(s, SafeString)
    print s

s = SafeString('This is a safe string')

only_print_safe_string(s)
only_print_safe_string('This will not get printed')

Coming from C or C++ that probably seems a bit weird. “I have to add an assertion just to get type checking?”

But if you think about it, in a dynamic language, that’s all type checking is, an assertion at the function entry point. Python gives you the flexibility to do it when you need to, but only then.

I would also argue that strict typing on its own, is rarely enough to do proper Design by Contract. In most cases the prerequisites for a function can not be expressed simply by the types of the arguments, you need to assert something about their values. And in those cases, even in C and C++, what you end up with is assert.

For the record more than anything, I think I’ve told most people … it turns out I never had Lyme disease after all, because Australian ticks don’t carry it.

I found this out the other week when I finally got to see the Infectious Diseases specialist at the Canberra Hospital. What I might have had was Queensland Tick Typhus, the first Google hit for which happens to be on www.wrongdiagnosis.com, coincidence?

Luckily my GP still gave me the right treatment, which was a course of weapon’s grade Anti-biotics. So all the little bacteria should be dead by now, hopefully. Unfortunately all the good bacteria in me are dead too, it was a real slaughter.

I had a blood test to confirm that I really did have QTT, which should be back soonish. Hopefully I won’t be browing www.wrongdiagnosisagain.com in a few weeks.

Can someone with too much time and money please register www.just#######wikipediait.com?

In the same vein as www.just#######googleit.com

Blame Tom for the title.

Headed down to Tilley’s tonight to organise a hike for the weekend with Tom. Jess happened to be there, as did Aunty Sue – nice to see she has good taste in Cafés.

At some point we got to talking about hiking in Canada and Tom reckoned he wasn’t keen because of the Bears. But Jess and I thought it probably wasn’t a big issue, and might be similar to some foreigners attitude to snakes here. That is, that it’s insane to hike in the Australian bush because there’s snakes everywhere chasing people down in packs. Er, packs of snakes that is.

I couldn’t find any really good stats on Bear attacks, although I haven’t tried very hard, Jess is much better at it. The problem is that most pages don’t make any distinction betweek hikers, hunters or just people in their yards.

I did find this page which mentions half way down:

Over 62 million people visited Yellowstone National Park (YNP) during the 23 year period from 1980 through 2002. These visitors spent over 15.4 million use nights camping in developed area campgrounds and over 956,000 use nights camping in backcountry areas within the park. … During the 1980-2002 time period, 32 people were injured by bears within YNP, an average of only 1.4 bear-inflicted human injuries per year.

And that’s injuries not deaths, although either would suck. I’d be interested to find some more comprehnsive stats, but as a start it sounds like the risk is pretty reasonable.

While I’m on my box of soap, I’ll just point out that you’re six times more likely to be killed this year by a bee than a snake. So avoid gardens and get out into the bush, it’s safer!