Taken from right about here looking West.

So they’ve actually left us, the bastards. All that talk about blah de blah blah Micronesia blah de blah was actually for real, not just some bullshit. Who would have thought they’d actually do it, seriously out of character.

Anyway, not that I’m bitter cough tropical paradise cough, at least they have a blog that they’re keeping nicely updated, better than mine I might say.

Check it out sometime: benandjoinmicro.blogspot.com

Hang on, it’s just another way to rub in the fact that they’re living on Gilligan’s island and I’m not!

This post isn’t going to make much sense to a lot of you .. But when you spend most of your day staring at source code, having a really nice font can make a big difference. It needs to be readable, to save your eyes, it needs to have unambiguous characters, 1 vs l vs | etc., and it needs to look nice.

Today I decided I needed a new font, and in the process stumbled across the very cool Monospace/Fixed Width Programmer’s Fonts page.

I quite like Monaco, and Anonymous is nice too. They’re monospace, but they don’t look quite as old skool as your usual monospace font.

Linux types just need to download the .ttf files and drop them in ~/.fonts.

Ok back to work now!

So I’ve known for a while that decibels are the way you measure noise, at least I think that’s what the Police officer was telling me as I tried to turn down my guitar amp all those years ago.

Anyway, I just stumbled across this really nice table, which lists decibel levels and correlates them with things that you can relate to. For example, apparently 20db is the sound of a whisper, whereas 115db is loud rock music, 60db is a noisy office etc.

Way back at the start of November, Mum, Dad, Ange and I headed out for a hike. The plan was two “easy” days of 10km, starting at the Wyanbee caves, walking down to the Deua river, and then back again.

We did look at the map, but it’s fair to say we probably should have looked a bit closer at the map. From the car park we had to climb a good 100-200m vertically to get through the caves, the track no where to be found, and then 800m drop to the river. 800m drop isn’t so bad, but the 800m up on the Sunday was pretty killer.

A slight navigational error in the car, meant we didn’t start walking until about 1pm, which was a little late. That had us arriving at the camping spot just before dark, only to find that the nice patch of grassy river bank we’d eyed-off was just outside the National Park boundary, and sported a lovely “No Trespassing” sign. A little bush bashing got us to a spot just inside the park boundary, but still on the river bank, finally we could sit down.

It was a gorgeous campsite, although we were all a bit too tired to really enjoy it. It’d be a great spot to spend a few days in summer, just sitting by the river, reading books and swimming.

Sunday was the main event – the 800m of climbing took us most of the day, it was pretty hot climbing the ridge, although it could have been worse. Later in the day the wind came up and it looked like it might storm for a little while, but faded away.

Although we couldn’t find the track up through the caves, we figured on the way back we might have more luck, but no. So to end our long hot day we had a few more kms of bush bashing – with all the off-track walking we did I was suprised we didn’t meet any long slim natives.

In hindsight a great walk, just be wary of the hills!

Update: I’ve created a GoogleEarth overlay with the route of the hike.
You can view it in GoogleEarth here, or in Google maps here.

And here’s a graph of elevation vs distance:

ps. Half the photos are from Ange’s camera, and half from Mum and Dad’s, so they’re out of order – all of Mum and Dad’s first, then all of Ange’s.

View the photos »

It seems a pack of Wikipedia goons have set their sights on the OzLabs page, and have marked it as up for deletion, in fact it’s already been deleted and resurrected once.

Apparently OzLabs isn’t notable or interesting.

I guess I’m biased, but as an Aussie I think it’s pretty remarkable that we’ve produced so many well respected Open Source hackers, and to have several of them colocated in my home town is pretty awesome.

Anyway, in case the page is deleted I thought I’d archive the important bits here:

OzLabs was a Free Software research and development group started by US-based Linuxcare in Canberra, Australia. The group was formed around Andrew Tridgell, and grew to a dozen Free Software developers, drawing members from the Australian National University and around the country.

OzLabs is notable for being one of the first commercial labs setup to work on Linux and Linux support, and also as being the largest and most respected collection of Free Software developers in Australia.

Several members of OzLabs appeared as guest lecturers at the Australian National University over the years, adding weight to the ANUs already strong UNIX and Linux curriculum.

Prior to the widespread uptake of broadband internet in Canberra, OzLabs provided a Linux CD downloading and burning service, which gave students and members of the public access to Linux distributions such as Debian, Mandrake and Red Hat, without the tedium of sneaker netting thousands of floppy disks. The CDs were provided in exchange for biscuits, Tim Tams were generally favoured and were sometimes used in late night Tim Tam Slam binges.

Upon Linuxcare’s withdrawal from Australia, the group splintered among several employers. The majority began working for IBM at a newly setup lab in Canberra, also known as OzLabs. The members of IBM OzLabs mostly turned to developing Linux on PowerPC and related areas, in conjunction with other IBM developers in Austin, Texas and Rochester, Minnesota.

Text licensed under the GFDL, © Wikipedia

© wendyfairy (flickr)

While reading the latest pseudo-scientific bunk about climate change, from some arts-degree toting, petrol-company funded hack, I stumbled across a comment from someone saying they wished they could just “download the models and do the science themselves”.

Even though that’s probably a bit rich, I think there’s maybe more to it than an afternoon of modelling involved, it turns out you actually can download a model and play with it.

It’s called EdGCM, Education Global Climate Modelling, from Columbia University.

Unfortunately, it’s only available for Windows or Mac. Neither of which I have. But, Linux nerds take note, they have a poll on their home page asking what platform users run EdGCM on, or would like to, including Linux.

So go and vote and get those climate monkeys coding on the Linux version!

If you haven’t been reading xkcd, then you’re probably less confused than those of us who have.

But amongst the slightly odd, strangely humorous and just plain weird comics, there’s the odd gems.

Two of my favourites are this one, not just because of the pretty mountain, and this one which really struck a chord:

© xkcd.com