The school's weather station webpage seems to have stuffed it sometime around Thanksgiving. Today somebody finally noticed and alerted the support staff.

My boss asks "where's the documentation?".

Right.  There is none. This system has been in place for ten years or more and fails occasionally.  When that happens we go in and fix it.

Start with the webpage that actually displays the data. It's pulling the data from a file that is supposed to be automagically updated. Except we don't believe in magic. The file didn't get updated. Now to find out why.

Since this is a scheduled event, cron has to be involved. Let's have a look at the crontab file. Hmmm. It's pulling the changes from another file that is supposed to be automagically updated. That one hasn't been changing either. What changes that file? It isn't cron. Or is it? That file is symlinked to a file on another computer. Let's go have a look at the other computer. Ah, I see. There's a crontab running there which generates the contents of the update file from a data file via a collection of python scripts. Let's have a look at those. 

As I suspected, they are pulling data from yet another file that is automagically updated. Right. It hasn't changed since November either. What changes this file? Time to scan the logs. Nothing.

OK, it's time to start from the other direction. The weather station is connected to a PC in the corner of a lab. Let's have a look there. It's hung and totally unresponsive. OK, maybe that's the problem. I reboot it. Then go back to the webpage. Nope. Nothing has changed.

OK, somehow the data has to get from the weather station computer to the other computer where the python scripts can munge it. Let's have a look at the logs.

The logs say everything is fine, but it isn't fine. Nothing. It's not happening. Well this is interesting. I check connectivity and network connections. They're OK. We've got an IP addess and pings work just fine. A closer look reveals that there's a Windows task scheduler which occasionally FTP's the weather files across the net to the second Unix box. The logs don't show any errors. Hmmm. The files aren't being FTP'd though. They aren't making it. Then I see a notice at the bottom of the screen. Updates were applied some time since the computer was last powered on - six months ago. OK, what updates? Windows firewall. Right. So I have a look, and sure enough the computer's FTP connection has been firewalled because of an automatic update. The FTP's are silently failing - and indicating success. This is pure evil. After several minutes I'm able to get in with an administrator account that can fix the firewall and do so. 

Then have another look. Still nothing happening. What could be the problem now? Ah, on reboot FTP is automatically disabled on the weather station software - again without any warnings. The logs again say everything is working and files are being transferred. More evil. What's the use of having log files if they lie to you? I turn on the FTP. Bingo - now the files get through. Now back to the second computer to manually process the files and dump them into the directory where the third computer can pick them up. Then back to the third computer to manually update the processed files.

Yay! It works.

Back to the documentation. How would somebody document stuff like this? There's just too much that can go wrong. I could use up a tree or two writing it all down. This is why we've got systems folks. 

Still trying to figure out cricket. It's not as easy as one might let you think. For instance, here's the intro on wikipedia:

--- 

The bowler, a player from the fielding team, bowls a hard, fist-sized cricket ball from the vicinity of one wicket towards the other. The ball usually bounces once before reaching the batsman, a player from the opposing team. In defence of the wicket, the batsman plays the ball with a wooden cricket bat. Meanwhile, the other members of the bowler's team stand in various positions around the field as fielders, players who retrieve the ball in an effort to stop the batsman scoring runs, and if possible to get him or her out. The batsman — if he or she does not get out — may run between the wickets, exchanging ends with a second batsman (the "non-striker"), who has been waiting near the bowler's wicket. Each completed exchange of ends scores one run. Runs are also scored if the batsman hits the ball to the boundary of the playing area. The match is won by the team that scores more runs.

---

Sounds pretty easy doesn't it? Well keep reading:

---

The aim of the bowler's team is to get each batsman out (this is called a "taking a wicket", or a "dismissal").^[3] Dismissals are achieved in a variety of ways. The most direct way is for the bowler to bowl the ball so that the batsman misses it and it hits the stumps, dislodging a bail. While the batsmen are attempting a run, the fielders may dismiss either batsman by using the ball to knock the bails off the set of stumps to which the batsman is closest before he has grounded himself or his bat in the crease. Other ways for the fielding side to dismiss a batsman include catching the ball off the bat before it touches the ground, or having the batsman adjudged "leg before wicket" (abbreviated "L.B.W." or "lbw") if the ball strikes the batsman's body and would have gone on to hit the wicket.^[4] Once the batsmen are not attempting to score any more runs, the ball is "dead", and is bowled again (each attempt at bowling the ball is referred to as a "ball" or a "delivery").^[5]

The game is divided into overs of six (legal) balls. At the end of an over another bowler from the fielding side bowls from the opposite end of the pitch. The two umpires also change positions between overs (the umpire previously at square-leg becomes the bowler's umpire at what is now the bowling end, and vice versa). The fielders also usually change positions between overs.

Once out, a batsman is replaced by the next batsman in the team's line-up. (The batting side can reorder their line-up at any time, but no batsman may bat twice in one innings.) The innings (singular) of the batting team ends when the tenth batsman is given out, leaving one batsman not out but without a partner. When this happens, the team is said to be "all out". (In limited overs cricket the innings ends either when the batting team is all out or a predetermined number of overs has been bowled.) At the end of an innings, the two teams exchange roles, and the side that has been fielding bats.

A team's score is reported in terms of the number of runs scored and the number of batsmen that have been dismissed. For example, if five batsmen are out and the team has scored 224 runs, they are said to have scored 224 for the loss of 5 wickets (commonly shortened to "224 for five" and written 224/5 or, in Australia, "five for 224" and 5/224).

---

Meanwhile, Russia shows off their new military uniform.

Interesting to see what this does to their next military campaign. Opposing forces will be lining up outside the Kremlin to surrender - especially if the Russians promise to torture their captives.    

Strange that the recent decision to pull Australian troops out of Iraq received hardly a mention down under. Nor on the U.S. news sites. It's obviously not good news for the Bush coalition. But I fail to understand why they aren't talking about it here either. 'Let's just slip away quietly' seems to be the message.

Finally found a reference, on a website in India. 

This morning on talk radio they were discussing the power grid selloff - and one of the callers mentioned seeing on a website the 'California perspective', wherein it was claimed that prices would almost certainly rise. Hmmm. Wonder if that was my website...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A large U.S. spy satellite has lost power and propulsion and could hit the Earth in late February or March, government officials said Saturday.

The satellite, which no longer can be controlled, could contain hazardous materials, and it is unknown where on the planet it might come down, they said.

----

Hmmm. Hazardous materials. Highly unlikely. What would be likely is if this claim were being made to keep 'visitors' away from the crash site until any secrets can be secured. Wonder if it's one of the Keyholes? That would certainly be a prize to any foreign government. It'll be a race to see who gets there first in any case.

I didn't used to care about these things - living largely outside the normal orbit trajectories, but that may not be true anymore. Skylab rained down over Western Australia, and I'm certain the U.S. government would classify anything outside Sydney as 'sparsely populated'.    

The French have detained one Jerome Kerviel for losing somewhere around 8 billion dollars (4B euros and change). I'm very skeptical that we've heard anything resembling truth.

How does a junior employee get the permission to take positions with 8 billion dollars of company money? The officials are claiming that he hid these positions. Look, have you ever tried to hide a few billion dollars? Have you ever tried to disguise the fact that you're holding several billion? You would tend to be the elephant in the room. And in fact, this is only the amount of loss. The actual portfolio must have been larger. Even if it were futures and derivatives, one needs assets to cover these things. All a long way of saying that some company official had to have signed some place. 

But the real crime was committed this week when the company 'discovered' this hidden portfolio. They cashed it out, in a down market at great loss. If you recall from Trading 101, a loss isn't a loss until you lock it in. It was the company who locked it in.

Think I'll file this under 'Stories that Smell Really Bad'.   

Happy Australia Day - celebrating the landing of the first group of European colonists (actually convicts that the British were trying to get rid of) at Sydney Cove in 1788.

Wherein we ingest large quantities of alcoholic substances and roast all manner of meat products on the BBQ.  

Care for a kanga steak, mate? No? That's OK, we've got bangers and burgers too.  

Coulda' sworn I saw a notorious hotel heiress in the foyer this morning. But then reality set in and I discovered it was somebody else - of course. You see, sometime in the last several months it seems that Ms. Hilton magically went from 'small and perky' to about a 38DD (dinner for 6) cup size; likely requiring an entirely new wardrobe as she would've literally busted out of any of her old rags.

Dang. Must be about 5 kilos of silicon in those things. Surprised she doesn't fall over.

The girl I saw was a dead ringer except for a) the distinct lack of bling, and b) the lack of such extreme cleavage.

Though I should note: One of the more pleasant aspects of living in Australia is that 'small and perky' is as alien a concept as American football.  

Yesterday I was walking on the path between buildings and a lady walking nearby stopped me.

"Watch out for the spider!"

Yikes. Yes, I do want to watch out. Where is it?

"Look right there, you can see the web..."

Yes. I see a web. Thanks for letting me know. Little did I know that I was now hopelessly caught in her web.

"It's one of those Asian spiders ... jibber jabber ... they were responsible for the burning of 7 million witches in the middle ages ... jibber jabber ... of course the Catholic church knew what was really going on ... jibber jabber ... Carl Sagan warned about what would happen if the DNA sequence was leaked ... jibber jabber ... Now the aliens have our DNA and they're using it to ... jibber jabber ... Prime Minister Rudd  met secretly with the church and they're ... jibber jabber ... You're an American, aren't you? Bush has had secret meetings with the aliens ... jibber jabber ..."

Finally I could take it no more and politely told the lady that it was fascinating listening to her talk non-stop, but I really had work to be doing.

"Oh, I understand. I hope you learned something and it sunk into your sub-concious... jibber jabber ..."

No. I've really got to go. Yes, I learned something. Bush has secret meetings with aliens who stole our DNA from the catholic church and it was all because of those darn spiders and the witches.

Thanks.

"Don't mention it."

How can I not mention it? This is all fascinating. It explains a whole lot of things.   

If you're a techie and are ever really bored, here's something you can do for amusement...

Assume you're running on some flavour of Windows. First create a virtual machine running Linux. 

Now in your virtual machine, let's fire up a CP/M emulator. A machine running in a machine running in a machine.

Now wasn't that fun?

Now let's take it one step further...

In your virtual machine, run a windows emulator. Now run some cygwin tools.  Maybe ssh (from within a Bourne shell) out to a Mac and do something there.

So now you've got Mac stuff running under Linuxy stuff running under Windows running under Linux running under Windows.

Like I said, you need to be really bored to do stuff like this. And don't even think about trying to explain to anybody why it's even amusing.  

Drove to work this morning with the sound of Greg Douglass' guitar echoing off the escarpment walls. The new (Lost Masters) CD is awesome. The canyons of the Illawarra never heard rock-n-roll like this before... In comparison to the FreeFlyte release which had a British invasion flavour to it, this one was a step back to the days when guitar heroes ruled the earth. If anybody wants a copy, you'll have to look up Brian (Kilcourse) and ask him. I think these were duplicated on his home PC.

Thanks to Joe for letting me know - Haight-Ashbury Music in Sunnyvale seems to be the latest victim of the music industry fallout, closing today. That's funny in a twisted kind of way. It was almost exactly two years ago that I shut down Sonica Music for good. You can't run a viable business when you've got no customers. It's easy to say that both of these businesses failed to compete and deserved to die; but what you're seeing isn't isolated. It's more an indictment of the industry behind it; with their arrogant licensing terms - which had as much involvement in the death of these institutions as the changing tastes of the customers. 

Lots has happened in those two years, but the guys at Sunnyvale Music World (what Haight-Ashbury used to be called) were all friends, even if we were competitors for several years. Sad to see them go. It's only a matter of time before it all hits here in Australia. You can see the local music stores slowly dying, both of them. It's the same story all over again. There's just nothing anybody can do about it. One guy who had a NSW music shop almost begged me - you ran a music store? Please buy my store from me. You know you want to. I'll give you good terms.

Funny thing though, I don't want to. Watching a music store die is not enjoyable for anybody concerned.

Coincidentally, Intel also closed down its last Silicon Valley fab plant.

Unless you've been watching closely, this announcement was easy to miss. Sun Microsystems is acquiring MySQL. This has ramifications both good and bad.

This will likely affect a huge number of people who are currently using open source web applications; a majority of which are being stored on MySQL databases. Their future viability is now questionable. It all depends on the license and revenue models Sun chooses to adopt.

I would also try to steer clear of the pending 6.0 release as it is likely to involve significant re-structuring of the code to suit Sun's business requirements. It may be a year or three before it stabilises again. Sun is legendary for introducing layers of bureaucracy into development projects.  

While Sun may make public announcements of their intent to continue to provide the product for free [and it should be noted that there was no such announcement in the press release], it is difficult to imagine the corporate bean counters not making a recommendation to derive as much revenue stream as possible from the acquisition.

You can read the announcement here. 

Also of potential interest is this (dated) history of MySQL 

The latest headlines over here mostly revolve around one Corey Worthington; an otherwise unknown 16-year old boy in Victoria. 

His parents went away and left him alone for the weekend. What do you expect happened next?  

Well, duh! The kid threw a party and invited all his friends. Then they invited friends. Before you know it, there are 500 teenagers doing what teenagers do when the 'rents are away. Par-tee!

The police were called in due to alcohol, vandalism, and I presume noise complaints. The kid is now facing not only criminal charges, but a $20,000 fine for the excess police that were needed to clear things up. I guess he can forget about wiping up the spilt beer and keeping it a secret from his parents.

They found out on ABC news.  

Just turned on my 'Related Articles' plugin. I've been having some fun with it. Click on 'Random Article' or view any individual article (not a page full) to seed the process. Then down on the left hand side of the page (way down) is the list of related articles. I noticed lots of interesting brain warps and rants over the years that actually do follow some strange twist or turn of logic. 

A bit of drama out on the F6 (Highway 1) this morning. A car smacked a cyclist near Kembla Grange. The authorities closed the freeway just about 1km north of me. This turned out to be a rather unfortunate place to be. In order to get off the freeway, the entire freeway behind me had to be emptied out, so that myself and the cars ahead could turn around and get back to the nearest off ramp. This took about an hour.

Once turned around, everything was diverted to surface streets to go around the accident. This of course choked them up as well.

But the real drama was just beginning to unfold. I was moving in a corridor of traffic along the Princes at 2km/hour (it certainly beats 0km), when it became apparent that my bladder couldn't hold out much longer. But there were no turnoffs, no place to go, because doing so would involve getting back into the slowly moving chain. The only option was to hold and grit teeth.

Finally was able to pull off in Figtree (another hour later) and found a Wooly's. I stepped up to the customer service desk shifting quickly from one leg to the other and clenching my teeth. The girl was busy finding a discount coupon for the older fellow ahead of me. After several minutes of this I finally went over to the nearest checkstand, interrupting the transaction in progress and proclaimed that there was going to be a rather embarrassing moment ahead if I didn't find a toilet very quickly.

Luckily she was sympathetic and fumbled around for a key and pointed me towards the toilets.

Just barely made it.

Finally arrived at work almost 2.5 hours late, to confront a panic in the server room. What a day!

I felt a bit nostalgic about Bayshore freeway traffic; though this same situation probably wouldn't have unfolded there. In the states, it is common practice in situations of death on the road to take a few pictures and roll the body off to the side. It is much more important to keep the freeway open than it is to investigate the accident. Sure, one or two people's lives have been severely disrupted, but contrast that with shutting down an entire regional economy for a few hours. Yes, I'm being a bit overly dramatic now... but it's not too far from the truth. 

Sir Edmund Hillary, who was the first person to set foot on the top of Mt. Everest, died. He is arguably the most famous kiwi that ever lived and I believe put the phrase 'Because it's there' into the social vocabulary. It's hard to imagine that only 50+ years ago Mt. Everest had never been conquered by anybody. One of the last parts of the earth to be touched by humans. Nowadays it seems every aspiring mountaineer has left candy bar wrappers (and sometimes their bodies) on the trail to the top. 

The summer has brought out all manner of strange creatures I've never encountered before. Huge black nasty bugs that look like they bite, and they try incessantly. Worse than the flies, and they look downright dangerous. One thing you learn quickly here is that anything that looks dangerous - probably is. 

Curl worms - we've found a bunch of these in the yard. It's a grub, but these things are monstrous, half an inch thick and three-four inches long. Similar to the tomato bugs you'd find on occasion in the states. I hear the aborigines eat these when there's nothing else in the bush to live off of.

Think I'll pass.

Next, I think they're called 'cicadas' (sp?)  - which are the loudest cricket like things I've ever heard. If you wander through a grove of trees, the sound level can approach the threshold of pain. You can't sleep if one of these decides to sit outside your bedroom window.

I've already described the 'R2D2 bird'.  But the summer has brought even stranger noises. There's a 'crying baby' bird that sounds like a newborn kid with soiled britches. And now - all day I've been hearing the sound of a 56k modem connecting and establishing sync. It's coming from outside the window. Walking around the campus, it turns out that it's coming from the treetops, not from an office window. I'm just gonna' call it a 'modem bird' until I figure out a better name...

Looks like I got sidetracked from my original mission to use this website as an xml playground to explore and develop new communications technologies, and instead wrote a social portal that hardly anybody cares about. That was a few years ago now. Well, I haven't given up. It just took a while to reach the state where I can get beyond the user-interface plumbing and get back to the machine interfaces which is where the fun is.  

Feeds have improved a lot. I'm using Atom paging now. Still holding off on atom-thread for comments since I can do it so much easier embedding into the articles - though I note that the latest Firefox parses atom-thread just fine. No use forcing it on the public until a few more feedreaders have jumped on board. The code has been working for a year or two, but I'm just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up before I turn it back on.

I've been playing with a weblog export tool that's basically an Atom feed, but replaces images and attachments with inline data: URL's. Have had a few glitches - including a PHP bug in the regular expression library that I need to report. But this in theory can let you take an entire weblog and move it elsewhere as one gigantic XML file. Everything. Images, attachments, comments, categories, the whole nine yards. 

I've also got Atom Publishing Protocol support in a very primitive state (but not yet ready for prime time). This is a big effort and I don't expect to be finished for a few months. I've got a suitable framework, but this site works a bit differently than the model used by the atom publishing spec. It will take a while to resolve all the differences so it plays nicely. This would for instance allow you to import your entire weblog from elsewhere in the world - especially one that used data: URLs to bring in images and attachments. Otherwise if I use the default model, I've got to package everything into a workspace for export, and this takes more than one file to represent all the structures completely. But that's the big picture - on a smaller scale, you should soon be able to publish weblog posts from your cell phone, or sync new articles with another weblog you may have. I 'm also not bothering with the xml-rpc remote mechanisms for publishing. They're primitive now, the api's too fragmented, and pretty much dead.

Oh yeah, and we've got trackbacks now - for any weblog that allows non-member comments. This is a flavor of xml-rpc. It isn't a big deal, but a few folks have requested it. You can find the trackback URL in the 'more actions' menu of articles - that is for any member weblogs that allow them. Mine does.  

Oh, and photo albums can now be exported as zip files. That has nothing to do with XML...

China has moved to ban ultra-thin plastic bags as a packaging material, citing environmental concerns.

This move on the surface sounds laudable. However I note that here in Australia, the skinniest plastic bags are sought out by consumers as opposed to the more durable bags and wraps manufactured overseas.

I was informed it was because those manufactured here, especially the micro-thickness bags - are in fact bio-degradable. Perhaps they're cellulose instead of poly-eth or poly-prop. I haven't researched it enough to know. But perhaps there might be potential for a booming export market in bio-degradable containment materials.

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).

So would you buy a used car from this woman?

Some rough weather over in California...

---

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.

---

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. 

I've been working with some dynamic text/font resizing tools recently. Some visitors over the last few days may have seen some of these efforts in progress, but I've just turned them off again until I get it all sorted.

In order to change the text size on a page after it's loaded, and without re-loading, one has to walk the DOM tree and re-calculate every font size on the page. There are actually a few open-source packages which will do the dirty work, but there are still a lot of issues. Almost all of these center around MSIE (why am I not surprised?). Additionally, it takes some work to get them to play nicely with sifr - the modern day equivalent of webfonts; which was abandoned around the turn of the millennium as being too infected with DRM controls to ever mass deploy.

Anyway, if you're interested in doing dynamic font scaling, I'd like to point you to JS magnifier, which is a pretty cool little app for walking the DOM and changing all the sizes. I had a bit of trouble with it on web forms, because it listens for key events, and if you type -,+,<,or > anywhere it changes the page size - even if you were typing these into a text field. Rather than modify the event listener to determine if it was a form and check the current focus, I just commented out the event listener and used JS links to activate the functions. 

But then on IE, everything was screwed up. First of all, even with a setting of '0' (no change), the page always goes through a resize cycle after you load it, and a lot of inherited sizes got messed up and set to something obscenely small. You can fix these by declaring them '!important', but you'll likely end up with over half your size tags set to !important in order to render your original page anywhere close to what it was designed to look like. 

The real trouble began however doing the DOM walk. IE does some real funny stuff to their DOM (this shouldn't be a surprise to anybody either). If you've got an embedded video, and there are any troubles loading the video, the entire DOM tree from that point forward seems to get rebuilt (resulting in the font size reverting for part of the page). The same thing happens if you've got AJAX-updated content on the page - every time there's an update, everything from that div to the end of the page reverts.

Looks like I'm back to square one. Think I'll go back to my original plan which I never quite finished implementing, but basically use proportional (em) fonts everywhere [this I do already], and then dynamically change the main body font declaration on the fly as the CSS page goes down the wire. This is hardly dynamic - it results in the need for a page reload to render everything correctly. At least it's portable and doesn't require javascript or depend on anybody's screwy DOM implementation. Oh well, live and learn I guess.  

Now this is cool. I got an email from Brian Kilcourse, who played in a rock band called Mistress with Greg Douglass (Hot Tuna, Country Weather, Van Morrison, Steve Miller, Greg Kihn, yada, yada) some years back. Before the microprocessor, folks. They made one album and disbanded. "I noticed that you were one of the folks who bought FreeFlyte". (Yeah I did - This was a demo CD that popped up on an obscure German label [Taxim] about 4-5 years ago). "We just found some more unreleased Mistress studio masters and wondered if you'd be interested in a CD". What is interesting is that I bought the FreeFlyte CD through an internet distributor in Oregon - so how my name showed up on any purchaser list that Brian has is beyond me - but hey this is the age of data collection. 

Unreleased Greg Douglass you say? Absolutely! Sign me up.  

The FBI is re-opening the DB Cooper case to try and figure out if anybody is willing to talk after 30+ years of mystery. 

For those too young to remember, a man known as Dan Cooper hijacked a plane in the Pacific Northwest (U.S.A.) in 1971 and demanded $200,000 cash (a large fortune in those days) and a parachute or the plane would be blown up. The ransom was paid, the plane flew towards Mexico and Mr. Cooper bailed out - possibly somewhere near the Oregon/Washington border.

He (and the money) vanished without a trace, although a kid found a few thousand in tattered $20 bills in the woods several years later that presumably came from the ransom loot. Whether he lived or died after the jump has long been the subject of speculation. 

Mr. Cooper - if you're out there,  hope you're doing well; and a toast - "You took the money and ran". Cheers mate.

I think that the Sydney Harbor fireworks display takes the cake as being the world's best. What is interesting is that they manage to maintain the title year after year and leave the competition in the dust - when you would think that at some point somebody would start to catch up. Apparently the way to stay on top is to double the amount of explosives every year. Last night's display was totally awesome. 

What you would think of as an awesome grand finale anywhere else in the world is just the background display here. What's more, that's what's happening on just one barge in the bay. Now imagine taking your most awesome spectacle, and having it happen simultaneously on five or six barges in a line down the harbor, all of them completely synchronized - to each other and to the background music. 

Then if that weren't enough, you've got the display on the harbor bridge itself - the centerpiece. The spectacle here is completely over the top.  Some of us were surprised to still see the bridge standing at the end. Wave after wave of synchronized streams of light shooting into the sky along the length of the bridge.   

part 1

part2

...One has to wonder if the U.S./Baghdad campaign might have turned out differently had the Sydney pyros been put in charge of the 'shock-and-awe' part.