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.  

Somebody broke a water pipe in our building, so I trudged across campus for a cup of coffee this morning. Ended up at the student lounge. Now the lounge has a cafeteria, and a large stage (with an impressive sound system) where all manner of folks get up and play music.

I got in line next to the espresso machine, which oddly wasn't staffed - even though it's still morning. It was a rather long line though. What are all these people buying? Scones?

Nope. Beer. They've got beer taps with about fifteen handles. All pumping wildly at 11AM. This is something you don't see in the states. People buying shots of tequila and schooners of beer before afternoon exams - and all apparently sanctioned by the university.

Interesting. I made a note of this; however it is unlikely I'll be spending a lot of time over there in the early mornings as the students are doing. If only because I didn't really care for the beer selection... 

The fire season is off to a roaring start. There's currently a big blaze in the bush just a few kilometers away. Can't actually see it because the wind is blowing the other way, but there's a bit of a smell of burning eucalyptus in the air - along with the steady thunder of helicopters as they head south to fill their water buckets.

It's interesting to track though, because the bushland extends all the way to the university - with only a few houses in between, and these are under heavy foliage.  

But all of this is just a distraction as the main event is trying to shut down a hack attack on one of the school websites I'm responsible for.

Summer is here.  

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.

After a couple of beers I was contemplating this whole global warming thing and potential business opportunities. What are we going to need a few years from now?

Around here, most folks have a big water storage tank next to the house. I'd be getting these manufacturers ramped up for export. In the states, a few enviro-conscious folks have water barrels to catch rain. But I'm talking tanks - as in thousands of liters, up to millions of liters. We've got 'em. Just have to start shipping them out of the country.

Other product trends to invest in: hip waders, paddleboats. 

A car was pulled off to the side of the pass this morning. Not in a picnic area - but in a generally inconvenient place to stop. I knew right away he was in trouble.

Little did I know... As I got closer I could see two gentlemen peering into the boot (that's a 'trunk' for my American friends) and they did not look very happy.

I've mentioned on other occasions that the MacQuarie Pass is at least as good a roller coaster ride as Disneyland's Matterhorn.  

So I edged by them, looking to see if I could ascertain what difficulty they were in. Just as I drew near, one man lifts up a flat of eggs from inside the boot (trunk). And it's dripping with sticky yucky goo. Took a turn too fast and the groceries rolled around in the boot (trunk), and the eggs got smooshed. I can only imagine the mess these two blokes (dudes) were looking at in the boot (trunk). Glad it wasn't me.

There are occasions when having IP location checking is a good thing. For instance Google notices that I'm in Australia (by mapping my IP address), and gives me the option to search for something in 'Australia only', or 'Search the web'.

I've noticed more and more software that is location aware. For instance a lot of the large electronic manufacturers do this to quickly point you to products for your local supply voltage and also to direct you to the nearest retailer that stocks their products. Software download sites often use it to choose 'mirrors' of the software that you can download without your data packets traversing multiple continents and oceans. 

Technically, it's not hard. I've done it myself. You just need to link to a Geo <-> IP database.

Sometime in the last 48 hours, it looks as if CNN became location aware. This is enough to make me protest. I'm presented with a new header bar that gives me Sydney weather info, so I know what's going on.  What I fear, is that I'll no longer be able to get U.S. news - which is my only reason for visiting CNN. Not that CNN is the best distributor of information. But it's the principal of the thing. Now that I know that they know where I am in the world, I cannot shake the feeling that I'll never know if the news page that I'm presented with represents actual US news, or some localized version of the news that was molded and massaged to suit the political and social leanings of the local population. You know why they do this of course. China. Now they can honor the Chinese government requests to subdue information that is ultimately going to China. So I feel like a Chinese dissident. In order to get American news - from America; I'm going to have to connect anonymously via a proxy server somewhere in the continental U.S. 

This is yet another informational post to save somebody a lot of headaches. It's about trying to convert a Digitech guitar effects board to work on native (220-240V 50hz) power.

In this case the model is a Digitech RP-12, which isn't made anymore, however this applies to most of the large pedal boards that Digitech has made in the last ten years. The actual power supply is a separate component that likewise isn't made anymore. They do offer a replacement (the PSS3), with an adapter (PS4BC) to fit the non-standard DIN power socket on the pedal board. These run about $110 AUD. Yikes. It's really a $20 power supply, and there's plenty of profit selling them for $20. I refuse to pay over a hundred. It's a freaking hobby transformer, fercrysakes.

It turns out there are reasons they charge so much. Nothing else seems to work. The ratings as specified are 9VAC, 2.1A. Simple enough. I can do this - yes? 

Not quite. The commercial 9VAC wall-warts usually stop at 1 amp. A couple of months ago I tried to get around this by purchasing an adequate transformer and building a box for it. After much effort, I finally plugged it in and tried it. HUM and BUZZ. Loud and nasty. Not something you want for studio recording. I scratched my head a while and went back to using the original (110V/60hz mains) unit through a step-down transformer. No hum. So clearly it's not the 50hz that's causing me grief. I brought the original supply into work and put it on an oscilloscope to see what was special about the Digitech branded supply. Couldn't find anything obvious, except that it was a cheap transformer with a lot of inductance artifacts and the waveform was skewed a bit - pointy instead of pure sinusoidal. 

So I took one of my 9VAC 1A wall-warts (that I have several of to power other equipment) and tried it briefly - maybe there was something wrong with my wiring. The 1 amp unit likewise gave me nasty HUM and BUZZ. I didn't leave it plugged in long enough to cook it.

There's no ground and no shielding in the Digitech supply, but I even tried grounding and shielding the lines to reduce the hum - no luck. I tried phase reversing both the primary and secondary (one at a time) in case it was phase sensitive. Nope. There's something obviously different about the Digitech supply.

Hmmm. Back to the drawing board. OK, looks like I just have to use the original 110V supply through a step-down transformer. It's the only thing that makes it work. I gave up on the project and that got me by for the last month or two.

Then last weekend, I turned everything on and the pedal board was dead. Defunct. After some probing it looks like the Digitech transformer just decided it was time to die. Open primary. This gave me an excuse to open the hermetically sealed enclosure to find out what was magic about the Digitech unit. 

Absolutely nothing. It's got a transformer and a fuse. Period. (And the fuse was still good.) OK. So I pulled out my homebrew transformer again. It's only a transformer. What's wrong here? Why is my solution so darned noisy? Why is a generic 9VAC supply so noisy? How do I get rid of the noise?

I tried to order a new 110V supply from the states (to save $50), but nobody will sell me one (even with the huge profit they get). They are forbidden from sending new Digitech products overseas. Even if it's a just a wall-wart that I need to make my old pedal work.  

So getting desperate, I tried a 9VDC supply. The logic boards work and the display lights up, but there's no audio signal at all. So obviously the audio circuitry requires AC. That's weird and I can't imagine what the engineers were smoking when they made that decision, but it doesn't matter - that's just the way it is.  

So I started trying different voltage taps on my homebrew transformer box. I went down to 3V. Nothing worked anymore. Not enough voltage to drive the logic boards. 6V, logic boards work, but the noise is back. 8.5V, noise. 9V, noise. 9.5V, noise. But now it's getting dangerous. Too much voltage can cook something. However, I've got nothing to lose. Right now it's all just an expensive paper weight. The absolute worst that could happen is that I'd be forced to buy a new pedal board, which wouldn't be horrible but the good ones run about $1000 here. Yeah, a new PodXT Live would be ok, as would a GNX4. But maybe, just maybe - my old board just needs a little bit more umph than they claim it does.  

So anyway I cringed (as one normally does when doing something that could end up being a thousand dollar mistake) and tapped into 10.5V. Bingo. Everything works, no noise, no hum. I breathed a sigh of relief. I finally found the issue. They lied. It doesn't take 9VAC, 2.1A. It requires something above 9.5, and probably about 10V for everything to work properly.

So that's the bottom line. If you need a replacement Digitech power unit, ignore the 9V rating. It won't work worth a darn. Get 10.5V (to be sure, since I don't have a variac handy to figure out exactly where it starts working). 

The continuing spread of equine influenza (horse flu) has resulted in the government declaring a 'buffer zone' at Bowral - about 15 minutes from us. The quarantine region has spread to Hill Top, about 30 minutes away. They are vaccinating all the horses in the buffer zone. I call it a Maginot Line. The flu can and has already jumped such small buffer areas. This is a big deal, because although horse flu has already been around the globe, Australia was isolated from it until now. Infection rates among non-vaccinated horses (as they all are here) are roughly 100%. 

In related news, we finally got our horse out of the quarantine station, where he was sitting at the beginning (aka ground zero) of the outbreak.  Except we couldn't move him anywhere close to us since he's been exposed (although vaccinated in America). So we had to move him into a 'purple zone', or somewhere the flu is already raging. You can see the pictures of his arrival here.

Imagine trying to get somebody to put up a horse that was at ground zero during the outbreak. Amanda made a lot of calls - and finally found one that would take him. It's on the other side of Sydney, about 2 1/2 hours away. But at least he's finally 'free' of the government station. He moved there over the weekend, and now we just have to wait until it's safe to bring him home finally - which could be another six months.

The government is asking us to put up roughly $90/day for the month or more that he was quarantined, plus daily vet checks. We haven't got the final bill yet, but it could be astronomical. Since he's a 'pleasure horse' (aka 'pet') and not a thoroughbred race horse, we don't qualify for all the government assistance that they provide to 'the industry'. This is a bit unfair, since they already have write-offs, and concessions, and insurance against such things. And to top it off, our horse wasn't part of the problem. He was vaccinated (as all horses coming into the country are supposed to be) and didn't get the flu even after a month around other infected horses. We're just caught in the middle of this fiasco and may have to pay through the nose for it.  

Of course if the Maginot Line doesn't hold, we'll be sitting in a purple zone in the next few weeks and might be able to bring him home once the flu hits here - which it probably will.