Oops. I just realised I’ve been pushing the wrong photos onto the web in some instances, eg. when I edit a photo it’s been publishing the original version, not the editted one, crud!

Anyway, so if you’ve ever looked at any of my photos, now you have to look at them all again, because now they’re better.

A couple of weekends ago we spent a sunny Sunday morning out at the Cotter catchment planting trees. It was organised by the mountaineering club, and run by Greening Australia – it was sponsored, at least in part I think, by Snowgum, so we got 10% off vouchers for our efforts.

The Greening Australia guys picked out a slightly trickier than usual site for us, seeing as they figured we had all climbed Everest and all. So we were planting the side of hill, an area of old pine plantation that had been burnt out by the fires.

They kitted us out with picks and shovels, buckets of trees, a bit of water crystals and fertiliser – and little white wind guards for every second tree. We had to dig the holes, although there’d been some sort of earth ripper thing through a few months back which had dug small furrows where we dug – so it was pretty easy going.

All in all we planted somewhere around 700 trees in about three hours or so, that was with 25 odd people. Not a bad effort. And to top it all of they cooked us sausages, just about the best sausages I’ve ever eaten I reckon.

There’s plenty more trees to be planted, so hopefully we’ll find time to get out there again, if you get the chance I highly reccomend it.

View the photos »

Spent last Saturday night hanging out with The Panics at the ANU refec. They were awesome, their live sound is superb. They played a bunch of songs off the new album, as well as a few old favourites. Still with 50 odd songs just on their three albums and a few EPs, they could play all night and I would still be listening.

Both supports were really quite good – although neither did a good job of clearly stating their names – which makes it hard to plug them! It seems they were called Oh Mercy and Little Red.

We’ll see you there next time they’re in town!

(photo is copyright kairin, some rights reserved)

I won’t try and recreate any of his jokes, promise, you had to be there. There was the Canberra Theatre last weekish, and it was an excellent show. The man is damn funny, even if he would be locked up in some countries.

I particularly liked it when he called a bunch of giggling girls just near us “a pack of sluts” – not knowing they were sitting there with their mothers – at which point the crowd broke into laughter which then immediately turned into hushed mutters of disapproval. So fickle.

(photo is copyright ollyfarrell, some rights reserved)

If you’re wondering what all this subprime business is about, don’t miss the subprime primer. Probably not safe for work .. if you work at a bank or a finance company anyway.

If you haven’t seen it already, check out this amazing graphic of U.S inflation.

You can see what all the little sections are by hovering your mouse, or you can zoom right in.

It has lots of interesting little comparisons, although they’re all about the “average” person so I guess they might be lies, dam lies and statistics.

For example the average spending on new and used vehicles is 4.6% + 1.8% = 6.4%, whereas spending on car running costs, maintenance etc. is ~9%. For some reason I would have thought new cars would be a greater share of spending, but I guess running costs add up, and a lot of people drive old cars.

It just struck me that the download pages for Linux & Solaris might reveal a certain something about the projects they promote. Or maybe not, just a thought .. really I’m not trying to start a flame war.

From kernel.org:

“The latest stable version of the Linux kernel is:  2.6.25.1“

And www.opensolaris.com/get:

Code without compromise
Our fully functional desktop environment promises extreme data integrity, so you can code on the edge and never compromise your work.

…

Download, burn, boot, and launch.
From dorm room to boardroom. OpenSolaris has everything you need to take your brilliant idea, build a prototype, test it, deploy it, and run it on production servers—out of a loft, or across your enterprise.  …  OpenSolaris is industrial strength and built to scale from the get go. … OpenSolaris is the OS of choice for those who prefer to live on the cutting edge of innovation. Naturally fast, free and easy to download …

A while back I spent quite a bit of time writing Korn Shell scripts, but it was a while back. The last few years it’s been all Bash for me, in fact these days I try to write everything in Python.

Anyway that means that just now trying to write a POSIX Shell script has proved a little challenging.

The manual is rather long and wordy, although it seems like it’s all there. There’s the Shell Command Language, although things you think of as being part of the shell don’t seem to be – ie. “test”, which implements the “[” in “if [ x = y ]”, that’s separate.

Despite a bit of googling I couldn’t find a good list of bashisms and their POSIX replacements, there’s a few mentioned here. I did find the next better thing, a script that checks for you, “checkbashisms”, it’s in the Debian devscripts package.

And if you’re running Ubuntu you can switch to using /bin/dash for your script temporarily, if it runs under dash it’s probably pretty safe. Let’s be honest most people use bash anyway 🙂

If anyone does have a good list of bashisms I’d love to see it.

Amazing video of Chris Sharma, via the allclimbing blog.

Some of you will know I love heel hooks, don’t miss the series of them at about the four minute mark 🙂

They may be a bunch of nut balls, but I can’t help loving the new album from The Mars Volta.

If you haven’t got it, it’s called The Bedlam in Goliath – I have no idea why – but it’s awesome.