I've got a 3-day weekend. They told me it's because of Labor Day or something like that.  I'm used to Labor Day being the first week of September, but I'll take any holidays they give me.

Somebody find this girl an orthodontist... by the way, that's Bridgette Bardot. She's currently about 73 years old. The teeth obviously didn't hurt her career very much.

The dollar continues to slide. 

My friends in the northern hemisphere may not have heard the news yet, but last week the Canadian Dollar (aka the Loony) reached parity with the venerable US Dollar for the first time in memory (perhaps the first time in recorded history).

The Australian Dollar isn't too far behind. Unless something radical happens, I figure we'll be at parity before Christmas.

A few years ago, my (then) U.S. dollars would get me roughly $2 Australian. When I arrived here in April, it was about $1.25. The last few days it's been creeping down to $1.10.  On the bright side, U.S. goods will only get cheaper - and by extension, Chinese goods, since they're artificially tied to the USD. (Won't be long before the Chinese wise up to how much money they're losing by doing this). 

On the downside, my 401K is still sitting overseas - losing value every day; and there's not much I can do about it. There's a stiff penalty for early withdrawal, and I don't believe they recognize the Australian superannuation (aka 'super') system as a valid rollover choice. By the time I can touch it without penalty in about ten years, it will probably be worth a few cents. 

The evening commute turned into chaos. Total meltdown. Everybody at a standstill.

What could've caused this catastrophe? Major smashup? Police action? Toxic spill on the road? No.

Four baby ducks. 

Classes haven't yet started for the day. I'm walking down the hall and there's a 20-something long-haired guy sprawled out across the floor in the middle of the hallway.

He's breathing. That's a good sign.  He lifts his head as I get closer. Gives me a strange look as if to say "You're probably wondering what I'm doing here..." or "you probably think I'm weird", but doesn't even shift his position - which is completely blocking the hallway.   

Nope. Not at all. I step over him and continue to the bathroom.  

As an American import, the first time I actually saw a kangaroo in the wild was novel and interesting. Even the second time. Then they started showing up as roadkill. Now the novelty has begun to wear off. Just another roo. No big deal. Just like the wombats before that.

But there's a lot of novelty and interesting stuff left in this land. The weather is warming up. Time for the snakes to come out...  

Imagine my surprise when I took a little walk amongst the bramble off the beaten path and found myself surrounded by a five-pointed leafy plant that is illegal to possess. They're growing everywhere - totally uncultivated and wild. I had always heard that such places existed, but had never actually encountered one before.

In California forests, if you encounter said plants, you're advised to quickly depart and not make any noise. People have been killed for stumbling onto somebody's private plantation. In this case, they're just weeds - growing on the side of the road.

I was recently reflecting on job satisfaction and how it seems to directly correlate with the standard 'code challenge' - a quiz given to prospective software engineers to ascertain their level of expertise.

I mentioned previously the 'Google Interview' where I was asked to construct a line between arbitrary points going nowhere and for no purpose. Over the last couple of years I've been through dozens of these quizzes - and most of them have no relation to either real-world challenges and more specifically to the specific job that was applied for.

Most of the interview questions relate to low-level database architecture, as this is one of the most challenging of software problems - and in fact people write their PhD theses on aspects of this problem. But in all of these cases I was being asked to design web pages, against an existing database that wasn't even written by the company to who I was applying for work. So what's the point?

I recall my code challenge at Netscape several years back. Write a function in 'C' that reverses a string. This was fun, and the interviewer and I talked about several novel approaches to the problem. It was more of a dialog than a test.

At Symantec, I wasn't asked anything about building web pages or security. It was more of the same old sort an array in two dimensions without getting log(n) behavior.

Yahoo! asked me several questions about PHP and web design. (Such as what does a triple equal operator do? and how do you deal with different box models?) And in fact they made me an offer, but I went to Symantec basically for more money; and this was the right move at the time since I was only looking for temporary work. Yahoo! would have likely been higher job satisfaction.

One company (Six Apart) asked me to write a rounded-corner menu in JavaScript. They obviously didn't like it when I declared that it was ridiculous to do this (after performing the exercise six different ways). Every way of doing this prior to the pending CSS3 adoption is just a hack on top of a hack. If you waste all your engineering resources making rounded corners on thirty-six different browsers, you're gonna' be late to the party. 

Anyway, the recent university challenge was anything if practical. Ten questions about real-world problems relating to the job at hand. I'll mention a couple for example -

1) You look at the systems logs for the student home page server (running RAID) and notice some low-level disk controller messages. What do you do? (Multiple choice with essay). The answers ranged from replace the disk, attempt to recover data, then replace the disk, etc.

2) You find that a machine has been compromised, seriously. What do you do? Isolate the entire subnet, isolate just the machine, reformat and rebuild the operating system, etc.

Back in the day, it was 'what editor do you prefer and why?' - or 'describe how to add modems to a Unix system'.

But the point I'm leading to is that job satisfaction has in all cases been exemplary when asked to answer questions directly related to the job, and when asked to solve unrelated problems, the job satisfaction went down - or as was usually the case, the interview was my last dealing with the company.  

This had me pulling my hair out yesterday, so I thought I'd share the experience with enough key terms that the next person pulling their hair out will find it.

I was installing my CMS software on a work machine. I'll likely be doing additional development on it, and the university is the best place to do this. But that's neither here nor there. My software is designed around 'clean URLs'; which means what you see in the URL bar isn't (usually) littered with code and operating system artifacts. So for instance to post to my weblog, I go to the URL /post/weblog, not something like post.php?op=weblog.

To accomplish this, I use an Apache webserver module called 'mod_rewrite', which takes care of the nitty details of this process. Mod_rewrite is not without its faults, but that's the subject of another article. It does the job. The biggest thing it does is let you leave out the '.php', except I'm letting it do a whole lot more.

Anyway I'll cut to the chase. My software was horribly broken after installing it yesterday. It took hours to figure out why. Something else was trying to provide clean URLs and strip '.php' from places where I actually needed to have it in order for things to work. Well that's not technically correct either. It was actually executing PHP files by URL without the extension. Except that these were 'include files'. They weren't meant to be executed directly. They were meant to be included in something else, and the something else was managed by mod_rewrite. The something else was never getting called. 

This was inconceivable. Nothing in any of the system release notes said anything about some magic new clean URL ability. This was on Debian (edge). Apache, PHP, MySQL. I tried all the sites. I googled for everything I could think of. Clean URL debian. Clean url apache. '.php not needed'. mod_rewrite. strip file extension. ForceType. (ForceType also lets you execute files without providing a filename extension). I scoured the last several months of Apache release notes, to no avail.

Finally after several hours I happened upon a little gem of a snippet on an obscure website. 'Turn on Multiviews instead of ForceType'. Debian has multiviews turned on by default, but this is the first I'd heard of it. I had assumed (never do this of course) that it was yet another fancy mod_dir option or something I didn't care about.

No. Multiviews is a slick trick for Apache that takes any pathname, and if it thinks it can find a page to return, it returns it. It uses the basename of the file in the URL and if there's no file, it looks for the filename with an extension. Any extension. Then it sends the file back. So it gives you a clean URL. You type in 'index' and it will send back 'index.htm' or 'index.html' or 'index.php' or 'index.pl' or 'index.shtml'. You get the idea. You can test this on any site that has multiviews turned on by asking for 'index' and see if you actually get a page. Normally you wouldn't. 

If the URL is 'post' and there's a file in the directory called 'post.php' it will send that file back even if you don't want it to. So I'll let you research it further if multiviews is what you want. It's actually pretty cool. In my case I had to disable it.

Options -Multiviews in the .htaccess did the trick and made everything work again.  

There are 20-something world leaders converging on Sydney this week for the APEC conference. But if you watch the nightly news here, there is only one that they care about - the idiot. The idiot lands, the idiot has dinner, the idiot takes a boat trip, you get the picture.

The CBD in Sydney is almost closed down due to security considerations, and last night they shut down the Sydney Harbor bridge for an hour so that the idiot could travel across it. This almost caused an international incident, as this bridge is quite important to the daily commute.

In fact downtown Sydney is almost a ghost town this week (except for SWAT teams and US Secret Service agents), as anybody who has a real life has escaped to the suburbs so that they can carry on. 

My daily drive to work takes me down (and back up) the MacQuarie Pass. That's pronounced 'McQuarry', not 'Mackerie'.

This takes you down the edge of the Illawarra Escarpment, through the rain forest, and finally opens into pasture land at the bottom - about 15km further. You're literally driving down the side of a cliff. At the top it's about 1.5 lanes wide with only an occasional metal post between you and a plunge straight over the edge - full of blind curves and hairpin loopbacks like the one shown above.  It's a wild roller coaster ride, and always full of surprises. This morning there was a tree in the middle of the road. Not a branch, a tree. Last night on the way home, there was a kangaroo in the middle of the road. Couple weeks back there was an 18-wheeler truck straddling the dirt spot where the red car is in the above picture. Stuck. Last week it was fog so thick you could cut it with a knife. I was about where the truck is on the left of the picture going uphill, and there was some maniac going downhill about where the white car is on the left. Doing about 80km/h (~50MPH) in a 15km (~9MPH) zone. Passing another car. Next to a cliff. On a blind curve, next to a hairpin loop. In zero visibility fog. There's barely enough room to pass oncoming traffic here without scraping each other's mirrors.

It starts to be entertaining to try and predict what will be thrown at me on the next time up/down the road. But that's the fun of the MacQuarie. It's always unpredictable.

Just another day.

The neighbor backed into my car yesterday. Smashed up both doors on the driver side a bit. (That would be the right side). It's still drivable. Took out her tail light. 

It was just outside the front window, which I was sitting in front of, but I didn't hear a thing. My ears were occupied. Finally got the bulk of the studio wiring in place and I was busy adjusting the digital delay units for the virtual drummer - and otherwise going through system tests to make sure all the gear was cooperating after being relocated on the other side of the earth.

This setup had been delayed by a lack of suitable speakers. Speakers here cost a fortune, as does everything else. Professional recording gear has always been one of those maximum gouge industries and it's no different here. The difference is that it's a captive market. To buy this stuff overseas you'll end up with the wrong power supply - or in the case of speakers, a hefty bill for shipping. A pair of Yamaha monitors that I can get on eBay for $100 costs about $800 on this side of the pond.

So I did a lot of comparison shopping and found a pair of Chinese 12" wedge monitors for about $125 each. That's quite affordable so I ordered a pair. The speakers themselves are crap, but it's the boxes I was after. Someday I'll find a used pair of JBL or Eminence drivers I can drop in and bring them up to my standards, but they'll work for now. I can smooth out any shortcomings with the equalizer. It will be a lot cheaper in freight costs to import a couple of better transducers than it is to import a couple of quite hefty wooden boxes. I've been down this road many times before. I know what it takes to get just the equipment I require within a reasonable budget. You can't hang out waiting for the best, or you'll spend your life waiting and not doing. During the dot-com boom I could buy the best (and did). Now my planning is once again like my starving student days, except that I've still got a bit of good gear to work with. 

Anyway, the speakers finally arrived this week and I picked them up yesterday morning (the weekend). The other thing I've been waiting on for the studio setup is furniture. We sold all of it - remember? So off to Bunnings (that's the local equivalent of Orchard Supply Hardware) and I came home with three folding utility tables.  The ones that cost about $30 at Home Depot. I paid about $55 each.

But it was the last piece of the puzzle that I needed to get everything setup and working. So now I can finally get that jumble of cables off the floor of the living room and make Amanda happy (and myself, since I'll be using them for their intended purpose). Glad I didn't leave any of those behind. Each cable runs between $20 and $50 here. And I need a few hundred before all is said and done. 64 RCA cables for patch buses, 16 MIDI cables, 24 XLR's, and 24 1/4 inch cables, 7 or 8 mini (PC sound card) to twin RCA for starters; you do the math. It starts adding up real fast. $40 for a MIDI cable. And that's for a single one meter cable. Ouch. Luckily I've got enough of all this stuff that I don't need to do the math.

I find it amazing that Australian musicians can ever get to the world stage. They would need a lot of capital. 

Oh yeah, Happy Father's Day! (They observe it in September here). Also yesterday was the first day of spring. I don't completely understand, since it has nothing to do with the equinox, but then I never understood how it worked in the states either (for instance they call the equinox the 'first' day of summer, winter, whatever). But the equinox isn't the beginning or end of a weather trend. It's smack dab in the middle. Oh well. I've argued the point 'til I'm blue in the face already. The declaration of seasonal endpoints as occurring during the equinox is logically incorrect but it isn't going to change anything. Just like it doesn't change the fact that Australia celebrates the coming of spring on September 1, which has nothing to do with anything. Happy spring anyway and a toast to the end of an extremely long winter.