Those two or three people who actually visit this website may have noticed that I haven't done much with it lately. I think it's time to declare it over and done with - though I'll leave the archives here indefinitely should anybody wish to see the timeline of happenings. 

Blogging is so 2002. Social nets are so 2004. I'm tired of it all. Seems the world has tired of my writings as well (or more accurately it's just another channel of stuff amongst the 200+ million channels of stuff to choose from on the web). Thanks to the RSS fiasco and a host of other factors (e.g. search behaviour, PageRank changes, my use of a 'non-standard' community platform, etc.), traffic has plummeted way beyond rock bottom. We're now down to 3 visitors a day on average, down from 100,000 back in October and even the 20-30,000 around Christmas.

There's no point anymore writing into space - as I mentioned a few weeks back. The photo albums for friends and family are largely unseen. Except for two of you, friends and family are too intimidated by online spaces to touch the place.

The community site has been a dismal failure - a lot of hard work wasted. 

It's coming up on one year since I arrived in Australia, and so much has changed. Work and family consumes my time, as it should (at least family). Work is what it is. Blogging and social nets are a thing of the past, and tremendous time-wasters at that.

It was fun. Now onto the next chapter - of a book which probably won't be written online.

I'm pretty much ranted out.

I mentioned in an earlier rant that CNN is now figuring out where you are in the world, and expressed some concern that they would eventually use this to limit or control what news you view based on where you came from.

That day arrived. If you're outside the U.S. and now go to CNN.com you are now redirected to 'edition.cnn.com', which is titled 'CNN.com international'. You see something totally different from the default U.S. page - which if you're looking for it, can now be found at 'us.cnn.com'.

...Though one could legitimately question whether either site will have newsworthy content, regardless of where you're at. 

After a continuing feud between Intel Corp and the One Laptop Per Child organization, Intel finally walked out with a huff.

OLPC has been trying hard to get cheap computers into the world's poorest countries. But in order to keep the price down, these have AMD chips instead of the higher-priced Intel processors, and use open source operating systems rather than the also pricier Windows.

Intel joined the organization a while back, seeing that it was a huge market opportunity. But they used their insider knowledge to get their own Wintel machines into the running for the purchase orders, at almost twice the cost. Then they put their biggest sales reps into the field to make sure that they got all the orders. 

OLPC cried foul. Intel responded by leaving the organization (presumably taking their support money with them).

Some rough weather over in California...

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Fierce winds toppled trucks on a major Bay Area bridge and knocked out power to more than 100,000 people in Sacramento as wicked winter weather moved into California on Friday.

Tsering Gyurmey snapped this image of an overturned truck on the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge Friday.

Forecasters said the Pacific storms could dump more than 10 feet of snow on California mountains by Sunday.

Winds in the mountains could gust to 145 mph, forecasters said, the strength of a Category 4 hurricane. A Category 4 can inflict extreme damage.

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Yowza! 10 feet of snow! 145mph! That's a serious storm. Hope you folks make it through OK.

Let me put this into perspective. I was in 100mph winds once in Colorado. There were full trash dumpsters rolling down the street, and I could barely stand up. Walking was a process of planting one foot ahead of you, wait and regain your balance, then plant the other foot. Several folks lost the roof of their house, which just blew right off.  And what they're predicting is half again more powerful than that. 

Scientists believe a patch of ground disturbed by the vehicle shows evidence of a past environment that would have been perfect for microbial life.

The deposits were probably produced when hot spring water or steam came into contact with volcanic rocks.

On Earth, these are locations that tend to teem with bacteria, said rover chief scientist Steve Squyres.

link to entire article, on BBC News. 

A bit of monsoon rains off an on for the last few days (no I'm not complaining - it's actually reasonably warm outside). This morning we got a little over an inch in about 20 minutes - or about 1cm/hour. The morning drive was a nightmare. With the wipers on full speed they couldn't brush the rain away fast enough to actually see anything over a couple of meters away. Everybody was crawling along at 20km/hr on Highway 1. It was a bit flooded near the Princes Highway - about a foot deep in places. (The Princes Highway is very much like El Camino Real back in California - it's the old highway; lined with business establishments, whereas the coast highway [highway 1 or the F6] is the newer freeway.)

Amanda arrived at the stables yesterday to come face-to-face with a parent's worst nightmare. A four-year old boy had gotten wedged under the wheels of a moving horse float.

Amanda drove the boy and his mum to the nearest hospital (Bowral, 15km away) as fast as humanly possible, but  the damage had already been done.

He didn't make it.

Things can change in the blink of an eye.

I woke up this morning with the solution to the Unified Field Theory. I'm quite serious. It was absurdly simple, not any more complicated than the infamous E=MC². I thought about it during the drive in to work and it was going to be my first post of the day. Like hey guys (and gals) - here is the answer to one of the most challenging problems of the last century. I mean matter (that which has mass) and energy are intimately intertwined - to the point that they are just different perspectives of each other. To say that there are four kinds of energy which aren't at all related is absurd, because that means there would have to be four kinds of mass which likewise are totally unrelated. 

Then I arrived at work and found the main staff file+mail server was in a catatonic state. Spent the rest of the day rebuilding the operating system and restoring files from backup. By mid afternoon, my brain was total mush from manually editing hundreds of obscure configuration files which had to be syntactically perfect for everything to work correctly. The whole chain of matter and energy calculations completely dissolved.

Sigh, looks like I won't be getting the Nobel Prize today.

I'm not exactly thinking about Thanksgiving. It isn't celebrated here. Even less than Halloween. A non-event. But everybody has been pushing Christmas here since about six weeks ago. However, it's hard to think about Christmas in the middle of summer. It just doesn't seem natural to be looking at Christmas decorations and beach towels at the same time. The university is preparing for graduation next week, about the time y'all are gonna' be carving turkeys. Today we went to the Frensham Iris Festival. Frensham is a private girl's school and this is their spring/summer event. Hotter than blazes. 

I've managed to code up some radical changes to the newsfeed system - which I believe will allow us to provide some (very limited) functionality w/r/t reading news without causing any legal issues and without subjecting any site members to liability just for the crime of looking at published newsfeeds. I'll be enabling some of this in the next several days as I get any remaining kinks worked out.

The ability to import articles into the CMS from newsfeeds will not be included. I could of course take the common approach and let y'all take legal responsibility for your own imported content, but that's hardly the kind of thing that a reputable web service would do to its members. Granted that's what some supposedly reputable web services do, but I don't necessarily agree that it's the right thing to do.

You probably should be cautious in any articles you publish to this site that any citations you might provide from elsewhere are free and clear - as we're under a bit of extra legal scrutiny at the moment. It's generally OK to include a snippet of an external article and add comment to it. Don't include the entire source article; and ensure that you have provided additional content/commentary written in your own words.  

5.6 quake 5 miles north-northeast of Alum Rock - (near San Jose, CA) and 7 miles east of Milpitas. From my maps, this looks like the bottom end of the Hayward Fault before it fragments into several smaller faults near the Evergreen area, though I won't rule out the Calaveras Fault which also passes nearby.

So far looks like friends and family are OK. Believe this is the largest quake to hit the bay area since at least the early 90's and perhaps since Loma Prieta (Oct. 89).

Just noticed a search hit landing on my website for 'crossroads BBS'. Wow. I'm impressed. That was about 25 years ago. Somebody obviously remembered and came looking and passed by all the links for a Crossroads BBS from Melbourne in the '90s so they must've known what they were looking for.

Howdy. 

We did have a fun little online community back then, although it was just ASCII text at 300/1200 baud. Joe remembers...

Hey computer! Who called today?

Read my mail, from Joe, since yesterday.  

Oh, and make me some coffee, wouldja' please?

Sometimes I wonder if we've moved forward at all... 

I really don't even want to talk about it, but you can see the remnants all over my website. Had some heated debate about intellectual property and specifically how it relates to RSS/Atom newsfeeds. Seems a large number of people think that it's really bad to show a newsfeed to a third party (goes by the term 'republish') - although I fail to see where one could possibly draw a line. A feed is a feed. So for the present time until I can figure out how to make everybody happy, I've disallowed the viewing of news items by non-members; and culled from the ranks of our esteemed collection of eclectic news sources any information provider with less than 1000 viewers/day.

This means to see news articles which didn't originate on this site you will have to login. It also means you can't share these news articles with non-members. And it also means you won't be seeing Junk Drawer, Frog and Goat, Fragments from Floyd, or any of your other favorite small blogs here anymore, unless you import them yourself for your own personal viewing. Please contact me if you have any troubles working out the feed settings. If I import them and allow you to read them it is considered republishing, and that's really bad.

I'm keeping the larger newsfeeds at the present time because these are primarily professionals who have no issue publishing or re-publishing their content assuming full attribution is provided.

The place to apply controls is in the feed itself and anybody who's been around the syndication space for a while knows that. Many novices don't understand that they control their own destiny and can include anything, everything, or nothing in their published syndication feed. If you include everything but object to how it is used by third parties, it's kinda' like taking your clothes off in the middle of the street and then complaining because somebody saw you naked.   

Tomorrow is Daylight Savings. Remember 'Spring forward, fall back'? That's right - tomorrow we move it forward, no matter how odd that may seem. It's October, but it's spring.

At least the Australian government hasn't been mucking with and tweaking DST as it did before the 2000 Olympics. The software engineers need time to code in the changes - I think that a lot of the world now has Sydney time right.

Well that would be anybody using the Olsen timezone databases. I know personally about thirty web services which just give you a choice of 'GMT+10' - and these are all going to be wrong tomorrow. On the bright side, I really don't care if they get it wrong. I'm not using any of them for anything globally time sensitive. It always makes my head hurt trying to figure out how many hours I'm going to be away from GMT with all the conversions and tweaks in effect. I suppose it'll probably be GMT+11. One hour forward. But wait, we'll then be one hour closer to Greenwhich, England as the earth spins. Not further from it. So maybe it's GMT+9. Silicon Valley will be... Uh, I give up. It's in negative GMT and the time is going back. So is it forward or backward? I'll have to figure it out on paper to work out the difference between LA (where this server is) and Sydney (close enough to where I am).  

But this will also give a good test of my own daylight savings and timezone functions (which use Olsen tables). The U.S. is going one hour back and we're going one hour forward. I might be poring over the code tomorrow if something gets askew.  

And I thought American politics was amusing. Australia does things a bit different, and with even more transparency and hilarity. Seems that there isn't a fixed day for when elections are held. The sitting prime minister gets to pick the day within some range. The range was starting to run out, and Mr. Howard has been promising for weeks that he's going to set an election 'soon'. Yesterday was the day he called it. For November 24 - or about five weeks from now. Contrast this to the U.S. where they're fighting over an election that's a year away.

So although we know the opposition is Kevin Rudd - a guy who looks a lot like John Denver, and have known it for some time, the campaign has only just begun - and in five weeks it will be over.

Now John Howard has been taking a beating in the polls, mostly for not standing up to and disagreeing with 'the idiot'. So day one of the campaign starts off with a (drum roll please....) tax cut. If you can't beat 'em in the polls, and don't have a credible strategy, bribe the voters. You may laugh, but this tactic has been working for thousands of years.

I can hardly wait for day two. This promises to be quite an interesting election.

perhaps cigarettes was a poor choice to use, concerning the unhealthy aspects of Chinese manufacturing. So here's another bit on a product more mundane, drinking water. I only point out these issues because it is interesting to see a new economy expanding rapidly, as the American economy did decades ago, and to observe a similar 'learning curve' take place. How soon before there is a Chinese FDA that will regulate traditional herbal medicines there? Of course we'd not be hearing about any of this, were it not for the fact that we are now at risk by their lack of oversight. But so much of what American consumers purchase today comes from this (relatively) unregulated system, we need to be concerned. The May 24, 2007 Newsweek magazine included an article about American companies that have outsourced work to China, and now are opposing labor reform there. Would they also oppose greater governmental oversight of their product safety? One would hope not, but anything that potentially hits the bottom line, like ensuring product safety, may be fair game. So until the Chinese have an FDA like ours, don't buy their bottled water:

Counterfeit Barreled Water Halves Beijing Market - Beijing Times

Posted by Michael Zhao :: 2007-07-09, 05:20 AM :: Society

Another sort of water crisis, this time maybe not deadly though. Translated from Beijing Times via sina.com (photo: see which is fake? answer in the end of story):

Beijing's bottled water professionals spill the secret that half of Beijing's bottled water is counterfeit, numbering more than 100 million barrels a year, worth 1 billion yuan. The big four brands, Wahaha, Robust, Nestle and Yanjing, with a combined annual sales of 25-30 million bottles, are the major targets of counterfeiting.

The bottled water market started up in 1997 and by 2002 the counterfeit products, also knonwn as No. 2 water, accounted for only 20%. In five years, counterfeits sweep half of Beijing. A Guangdong water firm tried to make in to Beijing but only learned it was impossible: over 1,000 water stations it approached to work with tried to teach its employees how to counterfeit. [left glass is fake, middle is tap water and right is genuine bottled water. Not much of a difference huh?]

Google is legendary for their brain-teaser technical interviews that weed out anybody who is less than Mensa. Mine went extremely poorly. I don't think they're going to be calling me back. But it's too bad, because it wasn't my fault. 

First of all I don't understand the logic in having a phone interview between Australia and Mountain View California USA. I guess nobody in Sydney is qualified to ask technical questions. Oh well.

But here's the first question:

Given several points in 2-d space, construct a line between them.

OK, this isn't hard, but first I have to know the goal of the line. So I ask her. What's the goal of this line? And is there a vector or direction preference? 

She answers - what do you mean a 'goal'? She sounds annoyed. It's just a line. How do you construct it?

So I start probing. OK, well you can just connect the dots. I doubt that's what you're after; but at least I may be able to further ascertain the goal you have in mind. She rejects connect the dots outright - even though it satisfies the problem criteria; and without providing any more input.

So I have to answer that I cannot solve this problem. I don't have enough information. She then goes on and says OK, forget it. Now instead of points you've got lines. Same question. Construct a line between them.

I've still got the same problem. There isn't enough information. I cannot answer it. I start by finding the midpoint of the lines, maybe we should draw through them all? BZZZZT! Wrong answer. She starts to question how you would find out if two lines overlap. So clearly she has another goal in mind, but for the dickens I can't tease it out of her. It starts to look like she had a scatter plot in mind. You know - you've got a bunch of random data points, find the mean. But even here, you need a further goal. Are you going against the x or the y axis?  It's still unsolvable. I'm starting to show my exhasperation - so is she. 

But there's no place for me to go. No way out. Let's imagine some possibilities. Connect the dots in the Y direction. Find the mean in the Y direction. Solve for x instead. What if the points describe the circumference of a circle? Am I to draw the circle, draw a line through it, or draw something looking like the AT&T logo on these points? All of these solve the first problem. When you turn it into lines, am I finding the mean, or constructing segments? What if I've got multiple sets of parallel lines that look like the I Ching? What kind of line am I expected to draw?

But she cannot even envision these possibilities. She's looking for some simple answer to a problem that she hasn't been able to convey - and so I am unable to answer it.

Let's move on. Question two. You've got an array of integers. Sort them, in 1/n time or better. We know the min and max.

Maybe this can be done - but I'm just not seeing it. I tell her so. I also spend a few moments looking at possible ways to do it, but they all lead to dead ends. She stresses again, we know the min and max, as though to say that this is an important fact to consider. Well yeah, but it doesn't help. Best you can do is 2(1/n). But she's given up on me and the phone call is coming to an end. I am guessing she was looking for something like - construct an array with (max-min) elements. go through your original array and drop each element into its index in the second array. You're done.

But you're not. What if you've got holes in the destination array? You've got to make a second pass and prune all the holes.  Or you sort into a linked list in the first place, which means that min and max aren't helping you; and this takes log time so it doesn't fit the solution set. I then turn my brain into a CPU and drop into assembly language. Let's see, take the first number and stick it into a register... load the next, branch if greater... I'm visualizing how to solve this the best way.

She's almost scolding me by now. What's a register? What does that have to do with the problem? I don't have time to explain the inner workings of a microprocessor and it wouldn't help anyway - our conversation was finished. Too bad, I thought I was getting somewhere with the assembler sort; but totally lost the train of thought when she asked me what the hell I was doing.  

So anyway - for any of you thinking of joining Google, best of luck. It doesn't matter if you're clever. What would probably help is if you get an interviewer that has actually had to solve real world problems rather than theoretical questions from a cheat sheet. Or - if you're clairvoyant.