Richard BF

Most civilized countries have now abandoned whaling

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 05:06:46 GMT

While sitting in the Sydney Childrens' Hospital recovery waiting room, I found an old encyclopedia "The World and its Peoples" from 1978 which I actually owned as a kid, and I found the following quote under a photo (which I will spare you from seeing) in the entry for Antarctica.

Slain whale on the deck of a factory ship. Such vessels can take aboard whole carcasses and process them very quickly. Whaling in the Antarctic has declined rapidly with the near extinction of most humpback whales, caused by indiscriminate slaughter; most civilized countries have now abandoned whaling.

Another month with shitty MYOB... (part 3)

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 05:02:30 GMT

Continuing on with melee with MYOB.

It would be nice to be able to paste dollar values into MYOB fields and have MYOB remove any leading $ symbols. Apart from some users accidentally hitting $ before the value, its a right pain to copy and paste dollar values from say a spreadsheet or PDF invoice. You can copy, because most applications support that, but MYOB just ignores the paste because the $ symbol.

Sure, not a bug, but something annoying none the less. Again, make it simple, make easy to get the job done.

Move from Pro Tools to Logic Pro, there's no longer a reason not to

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 14:08:44 GMT

I've been a Pro Tools fan for years, since around 1997 or so, but as each successive version came out, the user interface never really got any better, and the restrictions on hardware were never lifted. I'd search Google for possible replacements every time I had to pay for yet another upgrade, but stuck with it because I didn't believe that another product would be as good. Finally, at Pro Tools 8, my hand has been forced, because this version no longer supports some of my DigiDesign hardware. I've finally moved to Logic Pro.

If you read the web, most opinion considers Pro Tools best for audio editing and recording, and Logic Pro best for MIDI, and I kept on believing that, version after version. However, since Apple bought Logic, they've been greatly improving Logic Pro into an awesome editing tool, which is most of what I do. Don't believe what it says on the web, Logic Pro is now at least as good as ProTools in this area, and while the user interface is more complex at first, you do get used to it.

But the kicker was the hardware restriction. Pro Tools 8 removes support for my audio interface, which is also made by DigiDesign, so they've removed support for their own equipment. That's just braindead, considering that Logic Pro 9 on the other hand, not only still supports my DigiDesign hardware, but when I decide to get something new, I can get pretty much anything from any company and it will work.

Its taken a few hours to figure out my Logic Pro workflow, but after a few short projects, and changing a bunch of the keyboard command to match Pro Tools, I'm almost as productive as I was before, and I can see it being way more useful and productive than Pro Tools in the long run.

Its sad saying goodbye to an old friend, but I've never really liked Avid, who bought DigiDesign a few years back, so adios Avid!

Most dads are losers, Mums less so

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 12:50:07 GMT

We went to Darling Harbour for Australia Day, so Molly could see Jay Laga'aia and friends on the kids' stage. Well, the first song was "If you're happy and you know it clap your hands...", followed by "stamp your feet", "yell ya hoo!" and then all three. I was amazed at the number of sad sack fathers that just didn't join in. They were happy to watch their kids do it, but sing along, clap, stamp and yell? Nope.

The old adage rings true, kids laugh around 400 times per day, and adults around 15. What happens to these disgruntled parents that makes them want to have kids but only from a distance? Two many hours couped up in corporate offices to think about having fun?

Regardles whether the parents enjoy it or not, the show is still for kids, their kids, and I'd have thought that by joining in they'd make their kids' experience more fun. Jay was a slow starter and the crowd wasn't exactly responding that well to his call and response, so even more reason to join in, to make it better for everyone.

I used to say this before I was a parent, and my opinion hasn't changed, most people are just plain selfish by having kids, and shouldn't be allowed to take on the most important roll we can have in life: bringing up a child.

Panasonic support sucks

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 04:09:52 GMT

I usually buy Panasonic phones and domestic video gear (DVD, VCR, TV), so I visited the Panasonic web site today, to look for a headset for my Pansonic office phone. Strangely, they don't have any on the site. Although if you search for "headset", a page of search results appears with one being a generic headset, and if you click it, it just does the whole search again.

I did a interwebs search and found dozens of Panasonic headsets available.

So I called Panasonic and spoke to what sounded like 16 year old boy in support:

RBF: I'm looking for a headset for my office phone, model xyz.

Panasonic support: I'm sorry, that phone doesn't support a headset.

RBF: Hmm... then why is there a headset jack on the side, with a picture of a headset, complete with microphone?

Panasonic support: I don't know sir, but my documentation here says that it doesn't support a headset.

RBF: What, the phone doesn't actually support a headset, or you don't make a headset for it?

Panasonic support: It doesn't support a headset, so you could try a third party one, but I wouldn't recommend it.

So I called Simply Headsets, who not only had a Panasonic headset for the phone, but a bunch of other providers of professional headsets for it as well. I bought a Plantronics noise cancelling one. (I always buy Plantronic headsets for the computer, and Sennheiser headphones for my pro audio work)

You can buy Panasonic, just don't expect support to know what they're talking about.

Leave out the fuck

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 22:58:44 GMT

My Dad passed away in hospital last week, and we had the funeral yesterday. I think it was worthy of him, although I did unfortunately accidentally say the f word in the middle of it.

Dad requested that my sister and I speak, and she didn't feel she could, so sure I'll speak for both of us, and Mum as well. During the arrangements there was talk of a celebrant MCing, and I'm not sure how it happened, but I ended up saying sure, I get up in front of hundreds of people each week and make stuff up without a script, wouldn't it be better if I did it instead of someone Dad didn't know. How hard could it be?

So then we got to the music. Oh, I had to do the soundtrack, based on Dad's wishes, and in consultation with Mum and my sister. Oh, and we need a program, because the funeral directors don't do that, and the few I'd seen looked like some school kid had done them in Word, pretty amateur, so sure, I'll professionally do the program as well, nothing but high production quality for Dad.

And you know what, I may as well do the running order and Stage Manage it, considering most of the detail of that was in my hands anyway. Pre-show, intros, cue sheets, it felt like a show. We were running a show, and I would make Dad proud.

So somewhere in there I managed to write my speech as well, not as good as I'd like, I ran out of time, but pretty good I reckon.

I'm not sure what the tradition is, but people were saying afterwards how different the service was, in a good way. I figured it was the obvious to be honest. Four special speakers requested by Dad, including myself, and then intersperse it with fragments of my speech, tailored to also serve as introductions to each speaker. The narrative turned out well, and I think the pace was good.

I think Dad would have smiled, laughed, teared up a little, and said "Good job mate. Probably could have left out the fuck." He's right, I could have left out the fuck.

MYOB - WTF is interaction design again? Part two

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:07:29 GMT

A little over six months ago I wrote a post titled MYOB - WTF is interaction design again?, in response to the frustration I was feeling over my ongoing battle with MYOB for Windows.

While that battle has continued, with neither of us giving way, I was very impressed that the MYOB team took the time, within 3 days, to find my post and respond. OK, it was just "call us", but still. And I never called anyway, so I only have myself to blame for the ongoing problems right? No, because as I said in that post, these are really obvious problems that any developer or tester worth their pay would discover. Which makes me wonder if MYOB are so under staffed technically that they've had to live with a really high level of acknowledged defects, but I don't buy that, because they'd have to be rolling in cash, seriously.

I don't want to call MYOB and have them show me workarounds for my problems, or promise that they're going to fix them. Just fix them!

Which brings me to my latest bunch of MYOB issues.

The built in forms are crap. I don't know any other technical way to describe them other than just plain old crap. If one of my developers delivered these to me, I'd be questioning them whether they have any problems at home at the moment, or whether they have a medical condition at all. Here's a tip for MYOB: hire a contract form designer for two weeks, and have them provide some usable forms.
The form designer is crap. For form design, its worse than Windows Paint is for graphic design. Here's just a few of its problems:
- There's no way to pin an axis when moving an object. One of the key things with form layout, is lining up of objects on an axis, but in MYOB, you click to select and drag the mouse, and you've just got to hope it looks alright when you let go. You can then double click the object to see its left axis offset, close it, then double click the other object and type in the same left axis offset, but try doing that with a whole bunch of fields. Tip: add a simple shift key lock to the axis that isn't moved first by the mouse. This is how all layout programs work.
- When you double click on an object, you can't select a position or size value and copy it to the clipboard. Likewise, you can't paste from the clipboard. Considering all the values are of the form xy.abc, its a pain in the arse to have to remember 4 or 5 digits, close a dialog and then double click open another one and then have to type them value in manually from memory. If you want to copy the left axis and the width, then good luck remembering both. Tip: make the clipboard work in EVERY text field in MYOB. And I do mean EVERY field, because it doesn't work in about half of them.
- If you add a jpeg with the picture object, don't add any white, because white prints as cream. Which means that any logo with a white background will end up printing a cream coloured box around the image, instead of blending with the page. Also, nowhere in the documentation does it say which graphic objects are supported. From my testing, jpeg is OK, but has the lossy cream background issue, tif is OK for black and white but it completely mangles colours.
- The print preview doesn't. i.e. what you see in the print previous is completely different line up wise to what's in the form designer!
- The printing of a form with real data also bears no resemblence to either the form designer's view or it's print preview.
- The customise forms window is modal, which means if you want to change a form, probably because you're tweaking the form and printing with real data is the only way to be sure, then you have to close and leave the form designer in order to get back into MYOB. This makes small tweaks to form painfully slow.
- There's no way to line up objects other than by entering the position of the top left corner of an object, which means if your text field is right aligned, then you can't line up your objects without doing a mental calculation of xy.abc + de.fgh, where xy.abc is the left axis offset, and de.fgh is the object width. You then have to calulate the other object as well, and compare them, then subtract the difference from the object you wish to move, and enter that into the dialog. That's seriously insane! The workaround is to make both fields exactly the same width, and then put them at the same left offset, manually typing each. The problem with both of these methods is that you then can't line up the position of the first character in a right aligned text field, with the start of a left aligned field, which you definitely want to do if you're pinning fields to the left margin. Well, when I say left margin, I mean your manually chosen left indent, because the form designer doesn't show or support print margins, it doesn't even suggest that you leave margins.
The process payroll screen shows an initial Select Pay Period panel, and none of the five vertically displayed fields are horizontally aligned, except for the two radio buttons which are on top of each other. The text field next to one of the checkboxes isn't vertically aligned either. But that's not the most annoying thing, its more the fact that: the pay leave in advance checkbox has a colon after it, which gives the impression that the pay start and end period is to do with paying leave in advance; and again the pay leave in advance checkbox only being enabled when you select to pay all employees and not just one. I should be able to leave in advance for an individual.

Here's one more tip: hire a contractor who knows how build user interfaces, and give them a month to just go over the line up and layout of all the various screens, and do mock ups for the refactoring of some of the more braindead wizard dialogs. The next build will just pick up the new layours, and the developers can then recode the wizards at a later date, based on the mock ups.

Having said that, here's a couple of the changes in the most recent version of MYOB:

You can now record leave information when you process the payroll. Well, they don't say that you can only do that if you're paying by the hour, not a salary.
New tax table validity tests. In other words, when MYOB supply you with new tax tables, they now validate that data to make sure its valid. Umm... I'd probably want it fixed at the source, but maybe that's just me.

I'm still seeking an adequate replacement for MYOB, preferably for the Mac, but I'll survive with a Windows application if the developers are professionals. If you know of such a replacement, then please let me know.

Converting, transferring Outlook and Thunderbird Windows mbox email to Apple Mac Mail emlx

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:58:03 GMT

Talk about Google keyword overloading. Anyway, the problem at hand.

There's a lot of information out there on how to convert Outlook to Apple Mail, with some Thunderbird along the way, but most are old enough to be out of date, but not old enough that people realise this.

The upshot is, just follow the steps documented at Migrate Mail Messages (Mac Thunderbird to Apple Mail version 4).

Now for the detail.

Apple's Mail application used to store messages using the popular mbox format, which is pretty much the most widely used mailbox format, except for in Outlook, which uses Microsoft's proprietary .pst format.

But around Mac OS X 10.4, Mail was changed to instead use the .elmx format. The different is namely that mbox files are pretty much an entire file full of the raw headers and text from every email in that mail folder; but .elmx uses parent mbox for each mail folder, but individual .emlx files for each message. Apparently in support of Spotlight, but I'm not sure.

This means that any import of mbox data may not work for OS X 10.4 and above.

On the Outlook side, .pst files are proprietary, and as far as I'm aware there are no non-Microsoft applications that can successfully parse these files. This will change, because Microsoft are currently working on documenting and open up the file format, as part of there open source promise. So the main (only?) way to export from Outlook is to write a program that asks Outlook directly for each email, and manually build mbox files. This is handled through the Windows MAPI interface, and requires Outlook to be running at the time so it can respond to the events being asked of it. Most programs that you buy for converting Outlook files, require you to have Outlook running at the time. They don't really parse .pst files, they convert them by asking Outlook to hand over its message objects.

How to convert Outlook to Mail 4.0

Thankfully, Thunderbird provides its own MAPI import of Outlook files, so launch Outlook first, then download and run Thunderbird, and select import from the file menu. This should leave you with Thunderbird containing all of your Outlook mail.

Next you need to copy the Thunderbird mailbox files over to the Mac, because unsurprisingly enough, the Mac version of Thunderbird uses the same file format, a slightly modified mbox format. Just copy all the files in c:\Users\[username]\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\ over to the Mac and put it in /Users/[username]/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/.

You could now run Thunderbird for Mac if you wanted, but you don't need to if you're importing into Apple's Mail application.

Next step is to clean up the files so that Mail can correctly import them. If you import them as is, using Mail's File/Import... function, you'll end up with all the correct folders, but most of them will be empty. To clean them, you need to run the free Eudora Mailbox Cleanup. Don't be fooled by the name, it also cleans Thunderbird files and imports them into Mail. You can download it from here: http://homepage.mac.com/aamann/files/EudoraMailboxCleaner.dmg.

It's compiled for PowerPC only, so if you run it from Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6), then it will prompt you to install "Rosetta", the PowerPC emulator for Intel Macs. Let Finder install Rosetta, and then copy the Eudora Mailbox Cleaner application from the .dmg image onto the desktop, as you need to run it from a read/write disk..

Eudora Mailbox Cleaner is a drop application, so you need to drag the parent directory that you copied from the Windows version of Thunderbird, and drop it into the Eudora Mailbox Cleaner application icon. You'll get a prompt for the mailbox format, so select Mozilla/Thunderbird and click OK. It should then start converting all your mailbox data.

Once done, just run the Mail application and all your mailboxes will magically appear under your other mailboxes. If you click on them, most won't have any messages, so select each folder in turn and select Mailbox/Rebuild from the Mail menu. Your messages should now appear correctly.

You'd think that Apple would have this all sorted by now.

Age is an odd thing, as are the things people don't know about us

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:06:14 GMT

Age is an odd thing, especially in this day and age. With information flowing at a staggering pace, it is now possible to live many different unconnected lives and experiences in quite a short amount of time. Contrast this with youth today who only think that they've lived it all. But old timers have been saying that since age was discovered I guess.

I don't think I've done as much as a lot of people in my lifetime, but I have done quite a lot of really interesting and fun things, including quite a few unrelated community ecosystems, which are worlds unto themselves and an entire blog in the making.

In the late 80s I took up guitar again and wrote a lot of music. I also spent a lot of time in recording studios in the early 90s and hacking away on 4 track recorders at home throughout much of the 90s. Its really interesting looking back on some of those songs, revisiting moments in history, because I'm so in a different place right now.

Here's a couple of things I was listening to tonight. I was in the combined schools choir in school in the upper registers, but fell in love with punk and spent the next 30 years trying to sing badly, something that's unfortunately set me back in recent years, but that's another story. Strangely my music usually wasn't punk.

I wrote Out to you (3.4MB) at a time when my world seemed to be crumbling around me, I still don't know why, but I still remember who. Never really one for lyrical subtext, this was written for my best friend at the time, and who has been ever since. It must have been written around 1994 or so, but this is a dodgey 2 track from 22nd June 1996, strangely using a Radio Shack PZM.

Rigor mortis (3.8MB) was written in 1991 while learning my way around Cubase. The vox samples are from the Australian film Bodywork. The instruments are all from a couple of Yamaha and AKAI samplers, I can't remember which.

I'll find our way home (3.4MB) is another dodgey 2 track with PZM, coincidentally recorded on the 23rd June 1996, but written probably around 1987-1988 or so. It's my favourite of all my songs, mainly because it had the most emotional impact at the time. Yes, it was for a girl. I don't really have a good recording of it unfortunately. The guitar is an old 12 string with only 6 strings and rattling tuning pegs. I still have the guitar, I don't have the girl.

Giddy was written and recorded on 11th February 1997 as a one off attempt to do a Gerling song. That was before they stopped being a rock band. Not particularly successful, but I like the recording.

And finally No place (3MB) is a silly little sampler piece from 2007. I was trying out Apple's GarageBand software to see how easy it was to use. It didn't seem that much easier than a professional sequencer, but not bad for 30 minutes of hacking around.

Apart from the last one, they all seem a lifetime away, almost unreal. Almost like I simply manufactured the memories. I guess because it wasn't really me, it was a different me, the angst ridden me.

My Sydney long form dilemma

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:29:48 GMT

I'm an improv nut. For the last five years on average, I've played in two shows a week. I went to other peoples' shows when I could, some multiple times, and much of the time just out of support, not because they're great shows or anything. I've also put on (directed, produced, whatever) more shows/seasons than I can remember, and yet, I still can't get people along to see my most innovative shows.

You could say, "well maybe you're just shit." I'm not, but there's an old improv saying "you're only as good as the last show I saw you in", so maybe the last time people saw me was many many years ago? Still, some of my friends don't even come, even the players who I've played with recently, so its not like they're over seeing Richard do yet another improv show. Its like they consciously just don't want to come and see something new that I'm in.

Initially I thought it might be because they weren't cast in the show, maybe they're just jealous they're not in it, so they refuse to come. That can't be the case, because I don't believe my friends, or even players, would be that petty. And anyway, its just one show of many, so big deal. When I first started, I would go and see every show I could, even the ones I wasn't interested in. Some of these I would have liked to be in, but that's just life, even if you're the best improvisor in town, the group mind is more important in a cast than how skilled you are. Successful shows, even if you're not in them, mean more shows to play in, and that's just good for everyone.

Then I thought maybe its the "well, you didn't come and see mine", but that's also petty. If I didn't see their show, then its probably because I was just plain couldn't make it, and I usually try to apologise for that anyway.

Maybe players just don't want to see different types of improv beyond Sydney's formulaic short form. I can understand that from some, that's all they play. But there are a lot of Sydney people who've recently got the long form bug, yet few of those come to my shows either.

So finally I figure maybe its just that I'm not good at publicity. I'm not a professional publicist, and my shows are pretty niche so can't cost justify one, but I know for sure that with the publicity we do that the Sydney improv community well and truly know when my shows are on.

I don't know. It makes you want to stop doing shows, both innovating and playing. It would be so easy to just revert back to playing in regular Theatresports shows and be done with it. In fact its probably easier to just move away altogether and back into film and radio.

Improv is all about making others look good, being supportive, and not having an ego. Maybe a lot of Sydney players need to learn a thing or two. Or maybe I just need to play better short form.

Or maybe not.

Its just weird, I can't figure it out...

Microsoft Word for the iPhone

Tue, 05 May 2009 12:47:12 GMT

I had the amusing experience of connecting my iPhone to a Windows box today. Windows is so user friendly that it prompted me for which iPhone application it should run.

MYOB - WTF is interaction design again?

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 15:44:42 GMT

This is just a mini rant about MYOB. I hate MYOB. I hate it with a passion.

I remember seeing a demo of the original version of MYOB back in the late 1980s at the Apple Users' Group in Sydney. I remember clearly the guy saying that he'd written it himself, although a quick refresher course on Wikipedia seems to suggest otherwise. Being a hard core Apple IIer at the time, my mates and I thought strange name, but its still Mac shit as we rather affectionately called it.

I didn't realise that 20 years later I'd be using it myself. My first mistake was actually choosing MYOB to do my accounts. I was thinking that its been around a long time, so its probably the Microsoft Word of the accounting world. Wrong. My second mistake was buying the Windows version, assuming that the Windows version would be better than the Mac version, due to how many Windows MYOB users are out there. Wrong again.

MYOB has been around for around 20 years now, yet the user interface (of the Windows version) is almost unusable. I've been struggling with it for four years now, and every six months when an update comes out I think to myself "ahh, this will be the update where they refactor the UI".

For those who don't use MYOB, here's a few of the stupid braindead things that it does. The developers should be ashamed of themselves letting a bad quality interface like this out the door.

You cannot open more than one transaction at a time. I can't remember invoice details off the top of my head, so I just copy the information from the previous invoice. Things like the item title, the purchase order number, and regular monthly invoice totals that never change. In MYOB you cannot open an old one and edit a new one at the same time. It's impossible. You have to open the old one, write the details down on paper, then close that and create a new transaction, and hand enter what's written on the paper. Unbelievable. There is absolutely no reason why I shouldn't be able to do this.
Window content in many windows is fixed size with scroll bars. If you make the window larger, the scrolling pane inside the window stays the same size. So you end up with a scrolling list and hundreds of pixel of blank padding between it and the window edge. Why allow me to resize it if its not going to make any difference. There's absolutely no reaon why the window shouldn't resize its content. That's what a window is for!
If you're creating a transaction and you click on account number cell, the first cell you edit in a new transaction, then it will not let you leave that cell unless you enter a valid account number. You cannot hit Esc to exit, Delete to clear it and exit or anything else. You have to enter a valid dashed account number to get past it, and this gives you a new line in your transaction which you don't want. Hitting tab at the end of an item line also starts a new item and puts the cursor in the account number cell, causing the same problem when all you did is accidentally tab off the end of a line. And once the new unwanted entry is created, the only way to delete it is to erase the entire transaction.
Key presses seem to be randomly assigned across the application. Its as if different people wrote different parts of the interface, and they all had their own master interaction style guide, which was different to anyone elses.
Finding anything is impossible. There are so many menus which give no indication of whats inside them, and finding a particular function is very difficult when there could arguably be a half dozen different menu items where it might be hiding.
The BAS tool is just plain buggy. It runs outside of MYOB, which is braindead considering it is the only really mandatory accounting task for every Australian business. Once you've entered your data, you can save it, but it only saves some information. It doesn't save your name, phone number and business name for example, things that don't change from BAS to BAS. So if you open up the current BAS from the saved version, it won't print or validate, because your name and phone number, of all things, are missing!

I've had it, I really have. I understand its a Windows application, so my expectations are already pretty low, but they don't even meet that. I understand that Windows developer are on the whole pretty stupid and ignorant, and that Windows developers can get away with not knowing what interaction design is. But if their millions of Windows users aren't complaining about their shit UI, then surely their test team complain every time they have to jump through hooops just to enter test data for each release?

Using MYOB is like pulling teeth. Every month I sit down and wrestle with something that hasn't even been designed properly for its primary audience: small businesses who need to do their accounts, quickly and easily, so they can get on any do things they do better, like building their business and satisfying their customers. The most basic requirement of MYOB I would have thought, aside from it actually doing accounts. And after 20 years, these idiots still can't get it right.

I need to change, but I don't know what to change to. I'd prefer a Mac app, which is what I should have done from the start, but are there any good ones for Australian accounting standards?

Ticketmaster sucks

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 02:43:25 GMT

Today I joined a most prestigious club, Ticketmaster haters who have also been fucked over by them. You can read more about Ticketmaster's monopolistic practices on Wikipedia.

I rarely go to big concert events/shows. I'm not into mainstream entertainment, and large venues aren't the best way to enjoy a performance. But once in a while, an artist visits us who for whatever reason can only do those big venues.

And so it was that yesterday I found out that French & Saunders, whose show I loved back in the 80s, were coming to Sydney at last to play the Capital Theatre, and as a farewell tour.

Worried that I'd only just found out, I went to the Capital Theatre web site (which subsequently tells you that it is designed for Internet Explorer 5, like who uses that these days?). Amazed that web sites still use "Enter site" links, I clicked and ended up on their internal home page. Strangely enough, there's no link to buy tickets, weird considering that this is their core business.

So I click on the Shows menu link, and suddenly a second level menu appears for every menu item, in really small type. Reading through all the menu items, none of them mention purchasing tickets. The Shows menu strangely has two second level links Current show and Previous shows, as if for some reason people visiting their site would be more interested in shows that are no longer on, than ones that are coming up.

Under the Box office menu, there's a Booking details link, so I click on that and are presented with information about the box office, such as when it is open, special needs information and a quite large and useless photo. At the bottom, finally, is a section titled Ticket sales, and then a link to the Ticketmaster site.

Before heading over to Ticketmaster, I notice that the Links links at the bottom of the page, is just a page anchor link to... the line above it, which is... a link to their disclaimer and privacy statement. Brain dead.

So on to Ticketmaster, who you would presume are in the business of selling tickets, and thus their primary concern would be the happiness of their customers for potential return business. Their monopolistic practices may well compensate for the fact that they don't really care after all.

The first thing you notice about the Ticketmaster web site, is that there's no phone number on the home page. Their business is selling tickets, so we can assume that what they're hoping to do is push people towards web purchasing, so they bring their bricks and motar costs down. Problem is, most people would like to speak to a person in order to get the seats they prefer. Everyone is different, and an automated system is never going to be able to suggest the best seats for everyone, instead everyone gets the seats that they aren't perfectly happy with.

Without continuing the long narrative, basically you have to click on the Help menu item. Then a page of about 30 links appears. Under Ordering Tickets, you click on Ticket FAQ's, which gives you a long scrollable page of FAQ questions. Right at the bottom, under a heading unhelpfully titled Contact Centre, is the text "Find your local Contact Centre number to order by telephone". So click on the Contact Centre link, and a page of Order by Phone information is displayed. The first phone number listed is General Events/Enquires, and that's the phone number to call. You'd think customers would be happier if the number was on the home page and titled Buy tickets by phone.

Once you navigate the phone menus, for French & Saunders there's a choice between Premiere seating, Reserve A seating, and Reserve B seating. In this case they'd actually got the costs for each around the wrong way, with Premiere seating as the cheapest, and Reserve B the most expensive. If of course you knew what each kind of seating was. The phone menus don't tell you, the web site booking doesn't, and the Capitol Theatre doesn't. Here's some news for you Ticketmaster, we don't all work in the ticketing industry, so how about explaining some of these obscure terms to us?

The next problem, after hanging up because the phone pricing was all wrong, was that most of the shows had already been sold out. Not because they'd been on sale for a while, but because Ticketmaster have this great facility whereby Mastercard subscribers are given two weeks free run at tickets before anyone else. Remember that Ticketmaster is supposed to be providing customers with the tickets they want. Instead, they're giving people who read their latest Mastercard junk mailout and thought to themselves "Dawn French, wasn't she in Vicar of Dibley?" all the good seats. And then anyone who is s member of the My Ticketmaster program gets a week of booking tickets ahead of the general public.

So by the time normal people get to buy tickets, all the good seats have gone. That's just plain fucked, and the only people to blame are Ticketmaster.

I don't have a Mastercard because my bank supports VISA, so that's what I have, a VISA. It's completely fucked up that I can't buy good seats to a British comedy duo because of the deal that my bank has with a credit provider. That's insane!

Ticketmaster should be selling tickets to everyone at the same time. Sure, they'll lose a probably large sponsorship from Mastercard, but they'll end up keeping more return business. I've never bought tickets from Ticketmaster before, because of their bad reputation. This has just reinforced that, and I will now never buy tickets from them. And may the artists who support Ticketmaster, have really bad audiences whose only real interest is what other shows they might be interested in because they own a Mastercard.

Ticketmaster have a lot to learn about customer satisfaction. As do French & Saunders' management.

Bzzz bzzz bzzz, cute little bee

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 03:24:23 GMT

I'm sitting here with Molly playing with her toys. Well she's doing the playing, I'm just telling her fictitious stories about all the stuffed animals.

We have a bee on an elastic cord that bounces around like a, well, like a bee really, which is a nice educational touch, because bee in fact do buzz around in the air. So of course like a good parent, I grab the bee and go "bzzz bzzz bzzz". But the reality for most parents is probably more like "bzzz bzzz bzzz, go away bee, or I'll get the insect spray and kill you by squirting poison into your face", which while technically still educational, is still not as preferable as the lie of the good old buzzing bee. "Look at the cute little bee, bzzz bzzz bzzz, look how it sits on your nose and doesn't sting you, bzzz bzzz bzzz".

Molly's favourite though is an animal mobile, a little mirrored carousel with a cuddly pig, chicken and cow hanging from it by coloured threads. Molly loves to kick the animals around, and although she's still a little uncoordinated at this point, she's often able to grab one of the animals and put them in her mouth. Again, definitely educational, if not slightly inaccurate. While we do hang them up, we usually do this with the carcass once we've brutally killed them. I guess Molly's just skipping the cooking bit.

So when is a good time to tell her than the bee isn't really cute and can be a pest, and that the only things pigs, chickens and cows are good for are killing, cooking and eating? Or is it better to just say all this from the start, so that when told later on she doesn't accuse you of lying? No wonder children are so good at lying, they learn it from their parents.

Who's going to bail out the morse code operators?

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 22:50:05 GMT

With the global financial crisis, there's been talk about saving companies and industries simply because a large number of people work in them. In Australia, Captain Planet (AKA Kevin Rudd) is bailing out the car industry, and one of the biggest reasons is the number of Australians that work in our automotive industries. This reminds me of a quote from Jeremy Clarkson in Top Gear a few years back:

I didn't even know Australia made cars!

Society moves on. If we were to protect every industry that supported working families, then we'd still have a thriving horse and buggy industry. Technology and knowledge have always dictated the industries we need and don't need, and like thousands of years of not caring which animals become extinct, we should simply leave it to technological evolution to decide who survives and who doesn't. Do we really need to subsidise all those hard working morse code operators into the 21st century? I think not.

Sure, there's argument for subsidising skill transition programs, but transition usually means delaying the inevitable for another generation, which just brings us back to subsidies.

Now I'm a socialist at heart, I stand just to the left of the most left learning person you can think of, so I'd nationalize everything I could if I had the chance, and I care a lot about the plight of families and the blue collar worker, but a career change isn't the end of the world, and in many cases with outdated industries, the change to a more modern industry can mean improved life style, improved wages, and improved working conditions.

The money should instead be put into education and training for skills in modern industries, and not propping up industries in their death throws who have no way to, or no intention of, paying it back.

But what it really comes down to is, it's the car industry. These are the people who ultimately provide the planet's biggest source of pollution, the industry that has a habbit of killing off technology that will bring the end of the internal combustion engine (see orbital engine or Who killed the electric car?). Do we really need to prop them up any longer?

Organised gambling -- people just don't get it

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 13:06:00 GMT

I've always been against organised gambling, companies whose only business is to make money off people with poor risk perception.

Gamblers are always the last to know, or they just don't care, that the industry is designed so that the company wins and the gambler loses. Poker machines for example, have adjustable odds and payout percentage, so that the machine will only payout a certain percentage of what is put in. In most cases this is between 75% and 80%, so put in $1000 over a day, and you'll end up with $750 by the end. Poker machines are configured so that you will lose.

Let's move on to Lotto and lotteries. I've written about the odds of winning Lotto before, but let's just reiterate the point. The NSW Lotto site states that odds of winning are about 8 million to one. The odds of being struck by lightning in a given year, are about seven hundred thousand to one, for example. I don't know about you, but I don't know anyone who's been struck by lightning, let alone the 4-5 times it would take to equal winning Lotto.

How about casino games that have a tactical component then, like card games? Well there's a few elements at work here. Firstly, casino games are set up so that the player has a short term advantage, but a long term disadvantage. So the longer you play, the more chance that you will lose. Remember, casinos are in it to make money by you losing money. Secondly, they do this by taking a cut of each bet or win, reducing the payout below what would be dictated by the actual odds. Bookmakers work the same way, so say a horse wins at 10:1, then the payout won't reflect 10:1, because the bookmaker needs to take a cut. You'll get something more like 9:1 or 8:1 instead.

So not only are the odds against you, but they're against you AND not paying you the correct dues.

Most governments, including our NSW state government, say that gambling is a problem, yet they're usually the biggest takers of gambling profits. They say they want to help problem gamblers on the one hand, yet they're continually inventing new ways to optimise their gambling take on the other.

Each year the Melbourne Cup stops Australia. A horse race stops an entire nation. And it's not a particularly good race to bet on either, most professional gamblers don't bet much on the Cup, because it's too unpredictable. Yet generations of Australians are brought up on horse racing as a national sport.

For the past week, since the Melbourne Cup, the NSW TAB have been set up in the middle of Martin Place in Sydney. For the Melbourne Cup you'd probably say yeah OK, while it's gambling, it's now a national tradition. Yet since Melbourne Cup day, they've remained there to serve all the problem gamblers for the rest of the Spring Racing Carnival.

Even schools stop for the Melbourne Cup now. We're teaching our children that gambling on the horses is a fun thing. It's ridiculous.

And yet gambling isn't our biggest social problem. Tobacco and alcohol are bigger. So why not have two extra special days a year for each of those? We can have Melbourne Cup day for the gamblers, National Smoko Day to publicise smoking, and of course National Piss Up Day, to promote irresponsible drinking. All three days could be pushed in schools, although most schools already have a National Piss Up Day, otherwise known as muck up day.

Organised gambling. It's completely rigged so that you lose. When will people get it? All it would take is some government funded TV adverts, medicare funded councelling for problem gamers, and restrictions on how much you can bet in a day, and the problem would virtually disappear.

elseif code commenting conventions

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 01:12:34 GMT

I tend to be pretty passionate about programming language coding conventions, and communicating best practice can be difficult at times when there's a plethora of bad conventions out on the interwebs. And if universities are actually teaching conventions, then they're not teaching them particularly well, or perhaps by lecturers with limited real world experience.

Consider this code fragment:

// check for aaaa. We need to use bbbb because cccc doesn't dddd
if (condition1) {
   // optional comment on code
   ..code goes here
} elseif (condition2) {
   // optional comment on code
   ..code goes here
}

All good so far, but what if we need to comment on condition2? Not a comment for the code contained within, but the condition itself. If code is a narrative (as the analogy goes), then logically the code should look like this:

// check for aaaa. We need to use bbbb because cccc doesn't dddd
if (condition1) {
   // optional comment on code
   ..code goes here
// check eeee next, because ffff
} elseif (condition2) {
   // optional comment on code
   ..code goes here
}

The code reads linearly, which is what we want, but the new comment in column 1 breaks the readability. So how about indenting it?

// check for aaaa. We need to use bbbb because cccc doesn't dddd
if (condition1) {
   // optional comment on code
   ..code goes here
   // check eeee next, because ffff
} elseif (condition2) {
   // optional comment on code
   ..code goes here
}

It reads better now from condition to condition, but our condition2 comment is now slightly out of scope and our peripheral reading. The alternative would be to put the comment inside the code block:

// check for aaaa. We need to use bbbb because cccc doesn't dddd
if (condition1) {
   // optional comment on code
   ..code goes here
} elseif (condition2) {
   // check eeee next, because ffff
   // optional comment on code
   ..code goes here
}

Now the code isn't that readable because we get to condition2 and there's no explanation of it. Sure we could drop inside the condition to read it, but it's still outside the context of the if/else block, plus it now runs into any comments for the code in the block, which would mean either an intervening newline, or a combined comment that wouldn't read as clearly.

Remember that condition2 isn't just a simple condition, we said that it needed to be documented, probably because it needs to call a function or perform some logic that's not immediately obvious.

This is a good argument for using newlined elses:

// check for aaaa. We need to use bbbb because cccc doesn't dddd
if (condition1) {
   // optional comment on code
   ..code goes here
}
// check eeee next, because ffff
elseif (condition2) {
   // optional comment on code
   ..code goes here
}

But again, the code's starting to split apart into illegibility, and there's a dozen reasons why newlined conditions are bad anyway.

One argument would be that the code needs to be rewritten so that it's simpler. If possible, all the comments could be pulled up into a single pre-if comment, but the further the else is from the if, the less readable that's going to be. If it could be split into a switch (depending on the language), then that would be an option.

Most switch conventions I've seen allow case condition comments to be above and flush with the case statement, so that would seem to be an argument for allowing pre-elseif comments, but indented or not?

I could only find two references to this if/else comment case on the web. The first was on Dave Hyatt's Surfin' Safari blog (for WebKit), in a post by Maciej Stachowiak:

http://webkit.org/blog/25/webkit-coding-style-guidelines/

It shows a comment above an else if condition, however, the code isn't clear whether the "comment on else case" (sic) is a comment on the condition, or on the code within the else. It would seem to imply the code inside the else, and so isn't useful to us.

The only other reference I could find was on in the Adobe ActionScript in Flash CS3 documentation:

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/9.0/main/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhe lp.htm?context=LiveDocs_Parts&file=00000705.html

The example code shows exactly what we're talking about, and shows the case that I've always used these past 30 years, an indented comment above the else/elseif.

So assuming that the convention is that all conditionals have blocks and that block openings must be on the same line as the condition, which convention do or would you use?

Babies and TiVo. Poo, your way.

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 16:03:33 GMT

It's amazing, but this blog has actually ruined Louise's social network. Lots of Louise's friends are reading my blog, which is great. (Where were you 7 years ago when I first started?) But many of my Molly news posts are full of more information and personal thoughts than I've even shared with Louise at times. So whenever Louise speaks to someone on the phone, not only have they heard all the news, but sometimes they're telling Louise additional things about her life. Louise still hasn't read my blog since going into hospital, so it's all pretty surreal to her.

Molly's doing really well. At times she seems to smile, and sometimes even acknowledge that we exist. Not really, but almost. And she's still not crying much, except when she's doing a number twos. Very similar to her Daddy in fact.

We're still pretty sleep deprived, as she's still on 4th hourly feeds, but we're dealing with it quite well, and are starting to get into a rhythm. The Olympics on in the background helps, but that just reminds me of how much a hate our free to air TV stations. Insert Channel 7 TiVo rant here.

So finally TiVo is about to be officially released in Australia. And the TV ad for it is attempting to pull the heart strings of any Australian watching the Olympics. Average Aussie householders walking down the street extolling the virtues of TiVo, with the tag line:

We're Australian and we're taking control. Join the revolution. TiVo. TV your way.

In case the advert isn't clear enough, TiVo is being brought to Australia as a Channel 7 joint venture with the U.S. based TiVo company. TiVo of course is a U.S. product that's been around for almost ten years now, and while it's easy for people watching the ad to think that Channel 7 and TiVo care about us the viewers and just want to bring this great product into our lounge rooms, the truth is fact much much different.

Ten years of TiVo in the U.S., but not here. Could it be TiVo not wishing to enter the Australian market until now? Could it be some technical innovation that's only now allowed Australian PAL televisions to work with TiVo? Or is that there's never really been a market here? None of these in fact.

The only reason we've not had TiVo in Australia, is because the free to air broadcasters, especially channel 7 and channel 9, have been preventing TiVo from entering the market for almost ten years, because one of TiVo's main features, is the ability to skip over ads in recorded programs. Ads of course are the televisions stations' primary income, so the threat of TiVo to our local broadcasters was and still is, huge.

Yet TiVo went to market in the U.S., so how come it was prevented from doing so here? Well, Channels 7 and 9 found a nice arguably dodgey loophole in our copyright laws. Because their program schedules were devised by them, they apparently thought that they held the copyright to them. And as with most people who don't understand what copyright is actually designed to do (protect an artist's right to income), Channel 7 and 9 used their copyright over their program guides (or EPG, Electronic Program Guide) to prevent TiVo from using them.

And of course without a program guide, TiVo can't be programmed to record anything, and would be dead in the water in the Australian market.

Third parties have in the past set up their own EPGs on web sites, by manually typing in program schedules as they're published in the newspapers, or by screen scraping web sites which display limited program schedules, such as the television station web sites themselves, but 7 and 9 have shut each of them down as they appeared. In fact 9 are still in court with IceTV, who were selling an EPG with a web site which would act like a VCR for you.

TiVo have been in Australia unofficially for years though. A friend of mine has several, and has been using them successfully for about five years now. Local hackers reprogrammed the TiVo software many years ago, and several web sites have published EPGs for it at various times before being shut down. But it's not like taking a box home and just plugging it in and it works.

Enter Foxtel's new iQ box, which basically does the same thing as the TiVo, but only if you have Foxtel. Consolidated Media Holdings (CMH), a Packer company, owns 25% of Foxtel, so of course Channel 9's EPG is available on the iQ, but Channel 7 and Channel 10 refused to provide theirs to Foxtel, or at least didn't initially, I'm not sure of the situation now.

So in response, after ten years of aggressively preventing companies like TiVo from entering the Australian market, Channel 7 did a deal to bring them in as a Channel 7 branded product. To 7's credit, they've left in the ad skipping, and it's going to be a one off purchase for the TiVo itself, although there are rumours that you'll have to subscribe to the EPG for a small fee. From devil to angel in a single business deal.

And so it is amusing in so many ways, the tag line used in the Channel 7 TiVo commercial. Yes we are Australian and are taking control, but only after Channel 7 had run out of ways to prevent us from doing so. You couldn't really call it a revolution, and you couldn't really call the last ten years TV our way. But TiVo is finally here, and that's not a bad thing. It's just a shame that Channel 7 is now considered the TiVo champion, when fact they were until very recently, it's biggest opposition.

NBC roots the IOC

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 02:25:41 GMT

After so many years of embracing independent media, if you think that big media's stranglehold on the world is loosening, then you'd be wrong, and the Olympics are a primary example.

Time zones are always a problem when reporting world wide news events, but most of the world understand this and just deal with it. Something broadcast from Australia, say APEC or some such, gets broadcast on Australian time, and if this means evening in Europe, the middle of the night for the U.S., or daytime for Asia, then so be it. The current conflict in Georgia? During the day in Europe and Asia, but middle of the night for the U.S.

The rest of world recognises that time zones exist, and that sometimes they work for you and sometimes they don't. Sometimes they fall during television's prime time, and sometimes they don't. Unless of course you're U.S. broadcaster NBC, in which case you can simply pay to make sure world events, in this case the Olympics, happen in U.S. television prime time.

Let's just put this into perspective. A television broadcaster has paid money so that a news event will take place in prime time.

Traditionally, at a swim meet, the heats are run during the day, and the finals are held at night. That's the way it's always been, regardless of where they're held, and regardless of where they're broadcast. Yet NBC has the power to change the Olympics so that the finals are held during the day, and the heats are held at night, so that they sync up with U.S. time of heats during the day and finals at night. And they've done the same with a whole range of events, including the gymnastics and the marathons.

In Australia, we're only a few hours ahead of Bejing time, so the traditional timing for the swimming would have been perfect, heats during the day, and then finals at night. But with the U.S. pandering in place, we now have the finals being run at lunch time Australian time.

For us, the swimming is where we excel, it's what we do, and we generally have a passion for swimming more than any other sport. It's a tradition for us, especially when we usually beat the U.S. swimmers.

But not this time. On one of those rare occasions when a world wide event actually occurs in a good time zone for us, we're now stuck with most of our population not actually being able to see the swim finals because they're being held at lunch time.

NBC Sports Chairman Dick Ebersol is one of the key people to blame. In an interview with The Guardian, he said:

In the first conversation that I had with the new head of the IOC, Jacques Rogge, I told him that it would be almost impossible for an American network bidding on the games in the future ... not to have some way to have 'live' happen. ... I emphasised from the beginning that it was important to us, if possible, to have swimming and gymnastics work this way.

But it's not just NBC who's to blame. Obviously it was the IOC, traditionally as bent and corrupt as the drug cheats they keep ranting about, that had to agree to the change, because the Chinese certainly don't need the money. Co-incidentally of course, the change in schedule means that the swim finals will now broadcast in Europe in the late afternoon and early evening, not such a bad compromise for them.

Now the swimmers themselves aren't particularly impressed with the situation either. All their competitive lives they've been used to swimming heats in the day and finals at night, and now that's been completely flipped on it's head. So much so that swimmers are saying they rarely reach their peek until the night, and so world records won't tumble as much as they usually do under the new schedule. Yet obviously NBC don't care if the performances are watered down, so long as it's watered down in prime time.

Big media is still in charge, they've integrated citizen media into their model, and they still control everyone who counts. Meanwhile the world keeps on spinning, and still the world's news events just happen to occur more often than not in U.S. prime time. Their demise cannot come too soon.

With the U.S. credibility around the world at it's lowest point ever, and their financial markets completely crumbling, when will big U.S. media lose its stranglehold on what world events happen outside U.S. borders?

Due day

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 13:48:26 GMT

Today is Molly's due day, 8/8/8, and it's also the opening of the Olympics.

When Molly was born on 1st July, all the nurses were saying how it was a great date to be born on. Well, sort of, because our due date was even better!

Just before the opening ceremony started, we had a little birthday cake for Molly. It was actually a pavlova, but who's counting. Speaking of which, how many candles do you put on for a 0th birthday? We decided to have one candle, which I had to blow out, because Molly was asleep. Louise and I then ate the pavlova, which was lucky, because it wouldn't have gone three ways.

One of the big changes for us is the lack of time to do anything but eat, sleep, work (for me) and look after Molly. And even the work is just the ones that I'm contractually bound to. Other work? Film and stage project? Nah, no time. I even had to miss Scriptless last night because I had a massive headache from exhaustion. Louise is doing pretty well though, considering she's doing 4 to 5 of the 6 daily cares Molly needs.

At this point it's tempting to go off about how offensive some of the open ceremony was, but... there's not enough time, aside from saying I wasn't amused at the children of all the countries China has invaded carrying the Chinese flag, and seriously does anyone believe the whole "will the birds ever come back, we need to look after the environment" when they're the most polluted country on the planet? I said I wouldn't do a rant didn't I... Did I mention the big white dove, the great symbol of hypocrisy?

Molly's yet to reach that constant crying period, and we're starting to think she mightn't actually be a crying baby. We had a visit today from the community nurse (courtesy of the awesome RPAH), who said we'd start to see some changes now that she's officially reached her due date. No idea what that means, but more normal sleep and feeding patterns were mentioned, so we'll see how that turns out over the next few weeks.

Subversion server (svnserve) on Mac OS X

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 17:14:56 GMT

There's an absence of information on how to get a Subversion server running on Mac OS X, and what information there is on the web gives the impression that it's difficult. It's not.

I used to run an application called Mac SVN Server - MAS, a standalone app with Apache and a Subversion server all built in, by Uli Kusterer. You just run it and you have an instant web based svn server. But it's all packaged up, meaning it's not that easy to upgrade to new versions of svn, and is pretty heavy weight considering it's an entire Apache 2 web server.

Instead, contrary to what most web sites seem to say, you can just run svnserve, the Subversion custom server component with Mac OS X. Here's how I did it:

Download the Subversion package from Martin Ott's .mac page and install it on the Mac running 10.5 (Leopard) or later, that you're going to use as your Subversion server. This includes the svn client and the server. It's a standard Mac package installer, so just run it and you're done. All the binaries will end up in /usr/local/bin.
Create a new user called "svnuser".
Create a directory for your repository. Use mkdir /Users/svnuser/svn, or if you need to, use sudo mkdir /Users/svnuser/svn.
Create your repository. Use sudo svnadmin create /Users/svnuser/svn. Check the directory to make sure it has correct ownership for svnuser, and if not do a sudo chown -R /Users/svnuser/svn to set it correctly.
If you have a repository from another Subversion server then you can simply copy it over the top of the new directory, and it will work fine, so long as the repository version is supported. For Subversion 1.5, it will also support a 1.4 repository. I copied my old 1.4 repository from MAS, and it's worked perfectly. You may need to do another chown to make sure the ownership is correct.

The server is now installed. To run it, simply log in as svnuser and run the server with svnserve -d -r /Users/svnuser/svn. You can now access it from any client (1.4 is built into Mac OS X 10.5 so no need to install the client anywhere) by doing a standard svn check out: svn co svn://ipaddress-of-svnmac/repositorypath

But instead of running it manually, we can run it automatically when the server Mac starts up by using launchd. You can read up on Getting Started with launchd, but basically it's the new startup process in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). So, to start svnserve automatically, create the file /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.tigris.subversion.svnserve.plist, and put the following in it:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
    <dict>
        <key>Disabled</key>
        <false/>
        <key>Label</key>
        <string>org.tigris.subversion.svnserve</string>
        <key>UserName</key>
        <string>svnuser</string>
        <key>ProgramArguments</key>
        <array>
            <string>/usr/local/bin/svnserve</string>
            <string>--inetd</string>
            <string>--root=/Users/svnuser/svn</string>
        </array>
        <key>ServiceDescription</key>
        <string>Subversion Standalone Server</string>
        <key>Sockets</key>
        <dict>
            <key>Listeners</key>
            <array>
                <dict>
                    <key>SockFamily</key>
                    <string>IPv4</string>
                    <key>SockServiceName</key>
                    <string>svn</string>
                    <key>SockType</key>
                    <string>stream</string>
                </dict>
                <dict>
                    <key>SockFamily</key>
                    <string>IPv6</string>
                    <key>SockServiceName</key>
                    <string>svn</string>
                    <key>SockType</key>
                    <string>stream</string>
                </dict>
            </array>
        </dict>
        <key>inetdCompatibility</key>
        <dict>
            <key>Wait</key>
            <false/>
        </dict>
    </dict>
</plist>

This automatically starts the server when it boots. It also switches it from a standalone daemon to running under inetd, but it makes no real difference. There are a lot of different versions of this plist out there, but this is the only one I got to work. Unfortunately I can't remember the site I borrowed it from. Email me if it's you.

You're done.

Note that the UserName property defines the user to runs svnserve as, but launchd only allows this property when it is running as root. There are two launchds on the system, one running as root (process 1), and one running as each user. The one running as root loads its plists from /Library/LaunchDaemons.

Updated from comments over time.

Someone needs to invent a better bottle

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 13:52:47 GMT

I mean seriously, someone needs to invent a better baby bottle. Surely it's not that difficult you know, milk goes in the bottle, bottle goes into baby's mouth, baby provides a seal around the bottle, and you just pour the shit down baby's throat. What could be simpler?

The most popular bottle brands in Sydney today are Avent and Pigeon. They're nicely sculptured in clear plastic, with a slightly thinning bit in the middle to make it easier to grasp. Inset is a photo of an Avent bottle, now owned by Philips.

All these bottles have one thing in common, unless you tip them up to about 80 degrees, a few mls of milk will remain in the bottle, because there's an internal lip that prevents it running out. You can see it in the Avent ones pictured, but they seem to be like this in all bottles. On top of this, the standard teats you buy are fitted to these bottles in a way that actually creates a second internal lip, that you guessed it, prevents another few mls of milk from leaving the bottle.

At first I thought this may be so that any sediment will fall into the lip and not into baby's mouth, but I doubt it. It's just plain badly designed.

We've put men on the moon, worked out how to incinerate hundreds of thousands of people in an instant, and we've invented the hot and cold thermos, surely after feeding babies for hundreds of thousands of years, the practice of feeding a baby properly is within our grasp?

What a crazy year, part 40

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 12:11:51 GMT

Today Molly shat three times in the middle of a nappy change.

We've been changing Molly in her bassinet since she came home last Thursday, and my back has been starting to hurt because it's too low down, so we finally bit the bullet and bought a change table. My Mum and Dad did the research over the weekend, and I went and picked one up today. The plan was that Louise, Molly and I would go, but the severe thunderstorms put paid to that. We also had another visit from the community nurse today, all part of the awesome service they provide for pre-term babies at RPA. Did I mention RPA rock, and you'd be either an idiot, or a Packer, or both, if you went anywhere else?

So it was my turn for cares this evening, but it was the first time we'd be using the new change table, so I managed to con Louise into helping, in what ended up being the triple poo incident. I had a run of eight cares in a row at the hospital when Molly would wee on the new nappy in the middle of the change and cause us to change the entire bed and all her clothes, but I'd been fairly lucky in the last few days. Not so now. Three nappies, eight wipes, two towels, a singlet and a jump suit all soiled.

Sunday, yesterday, was going to be a big day. We were supposed to have visits from two of Louise's brothers, then one of her sister in laws, then a friend of mine to help empty the house of a bunch of old computer crap that's been taking up valuable Molly space, and then Louise's sister. In the end, none of it happened, which as you know is normal for our scheduled plans. Except for her brothers, who popped in while I was out doing even more shopping for necessities, like antibacterial hand wash, bottom wipes and chocolate, not necessarily in that order.

We're starting to get more sleep now, and patterns with the cares are starting to emerge. I usually do the late night ones solo, and Louise does the early morning ones solo, and we share during the day. Although today Louise did most of them, as a rehearsal for the next three days when I'm at a client in town. This may not last that long, as they're trying to get me security access so that I can work from home, which would make things oh so much easier, and I'd actually get more work done as well. But it would mean more poo disasters.

I was going to make this part 40 blog post the final in this series, but I kept remembering cool stuff to mention throughout the day, so I think I'll continue on. Although I forgot them again by the time I got to writing this, so I need to get out my old reminder notebook out again. Louise and I both get calls and emails from people who are reading this blog, not just family and friends, but also distant friends and acquaintances. I'm not sure whether it's an interesting read, or whether it just brings back memories of them going through the same thing, but either way, that's gotta be a good thing.

Right now it's 10pm, and time for a feed and cares. Louise is asleep on the lounge, and Phoebe is asleep on her lap, with Molly upstairs asleep in her bassinet. How come everyone is sleeping except for me? Time to wake them all up...

Again, if you're not into my personal stuff, then please consider customising your RSS feed so that it doesn't contain the personal stuff. Either way, I still figure there's either a book, a stage show or a stand up routine in all this, which I'll probably work on when I get some free time... some free time... some free time...

What a crazy year, part 39

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 11:27:31 GMT

When people say that you don't get any sleep in the first few months of baby being at home, you think OK, I've had some pretty bad nights in my time, sure it's going to be bad, but how hard can it be?

Last night was difficult, getting up every few hours for feeding and cares. At 3am I couldn't take it anymore and ended up sleeping for most of the night, with Louise doing every shift and then sleeping a few hours this morning on the lounge.

We were both sleep deprived before Louise went into hospital, trying to finish up all our projects before the baby was born. Then Louise went into hospital early, which just made the sleep deprivation worse, because she wasn't really sleeping, and I was trying to run the house as well as finish projects off. Then Molly arrived and went into the high dependency unit, which sucked up even more of our time, and Louise got discharged, which took up even more. Most peoples' sleep deprivation begins on the day of the birth, usually with a long labour, and then a few days later when everyone goes home to 4th hourly cares. Our lives were screwed before we got anywhere near getting back home.

But we're surviving. We had a community nurse come and visit for several hours today, giving advice to Louise and I, and a check up to Molly. Then we took her out in the car for her first outdoors pram ride, to the Bonds seconds factory to get a few extra necessary clothes, and then to good ol' Marrickville Metro to get some extra cleaning products, and of course a cone.

On top of all that, I think we're in the honeymoon period, as she rarely cries, and she pretty much feeds on schedule. I must say however that Louise's sister's lasagne was awesome.

What a crazy year, part 38

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 12:52:43 GMT

Molly came home yesterday (Thursday) at around 2pm. Yay!

We had about 4-5 hours sleep the night before, getting up around 8am. We didn't get the bottles and other bits and pieces on the Wednesday, and typically for us, we actually bought the wrong food. I mean, it's not like we bought chicken chunks in jelly, when she prefers tuna strips in brine, no, we bought the formula the hospital uses, but for full terms, not preterms. So knowing we'd have to feed her around 3pm, we had to exchange the formula and buy the bottles before we got to the hospital.

The formula exchange went fine. But when we got to the chemist... they were out of bottles. Great, we were about to be the primary care givers for a newborn, and we had no way to feed her. There's something to be said about having a spare rubber device or two around the home, because you never know when it might come in handy. The chemist said they'd be getting more bottles in around midday, so that meant we could probably pick up Molly and then pick up the bottles from Marrickville Metro on the way home. Assuming of course that the bottles would arrive when they said they would.

We turned up at the hospital at 10:45am. The only thing we'd heard so far was that one "she may be able to go home tomorrow", so I tried not to get too committed to the idea until it actually happened. Louise was more convinced, and none of my "let's just see what happens, no expectations" type lines would sway her, she just knew Molly was coming home.

When we walked in, everything fell into place. The nurses all assumed she was going home, and had already done most of the work required to make that happen. They'd also done the 11am cares for some reason, which was a shame, because we were looking forward to doing the last one, but no matter.

By midday we were pretty much ready to go. The doctor came around for the final discharge check up, which Molly pretty much slept through because it was under the nice warm bath lights. The final step consists of the doctor shining a light into her eyes and checking for a reaction. Well, Molly wasn't having any of that, and kept her eyes firmly closed. Then the doctor got paged, and said if she didn't open her eyes in the next minute, she'd have to leave and Molly would have to stay until later in the day. The three us rubbed hands, her legs, her tummy, her cheeks, nothing worked... then finally humming Moby Dick by Led Zeppelin saved the day, and she open each eye slightly to see where daddy was. Eat that Teddy Bears, John Bonham moonlights as a doctors assistant.

We had to return all the hospital clothes and linen, so we dressed her in a pink singlet from Louise's mum, a cute little white with pink spots jump suit, the only clothes we own that fit her, from one of my aunties, and wrapped in the same wrap that my grandmother knitted for me when I came home from the hospital. The latest lot of photos show everything off.

We wheeled her cot out into the main part of RPA, and then outside for the very first time, in the RPA emergency drop off, we'd parked the car.

It was a little embarrassing, because I didn't know how to properly use the car seat, or even if it was OK for a premmie, but the nurse was great and knew hot to strap her in. Originally we thought we'd have to pick her up in the pram, so it was sitting in the boot, waiting for for dad who knows nothing about prams or strollers, to have to pull it out and somehow nonchalantly expand it (from it's portable collapsed state) into an actual stroller. Luckily we didn't actually need it.

So we finally left the hospital, and stopped off at Metro on the way home. I'd love to say we left her in the car while we went shopping, but some of the family may not see the funny side. No, I sat with Molly with a window slightly down, while Louise went and got the bottles, a final cone, and strangely enough, a pie with sauce. Molly's mum is a bit of a nut job at times. I hope she's getting most of it from me.

As I write this, we've had our first 32 hours at home, and this the first moment I've had to blog. I'll hopefully cover those initial 24 hours tomorrow, once I've had a little sleep. Or does this just go on for 18 years now?

What a crazy year, part 37

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:00:48 GMT

I was in town today working with a client. I'd just reached a major project milestone around lunchtime, when I got a call from Louise at the hospital. She was there to do the 11am cares, as previously mentioned in What a crazy year, part 35, and she said "they're saying she might go home tomorrow".

Like everything that's happened in this long saga, nothing ever comes with a warning. Events always seem to sneak up on you unawares, and then when you least expect them, bam, something happens.

And so here we are, in no fit state to support a baby at home, yet like it or not, she's probably on her way tomorrow (Thursday) morning. While the nurses all usually tow the the same line, every now and again you get varying opinions, so I ask who actually said she might be going going home. "Oh, one of the doctors came over to us with the nursery registrar". Hmm... OK, that's probably fairly accurate then.

I still have to get my car registered, so this morning I got up early to take it in for a service and rego. But first I had to drive it from up the street down to my house, in order to put the fourth wheel back on. It was parked too close to the curb to do it, hence I had to move it. Unfortunately though, the battery was flat, because I hadn't used in the three and a half weeks since the tyre was slashed. So, I had to drive Louise's car up to mine, in order to jump start it. This meant blocking the entire street, which is the main sneaky connector street between Newtown and Marrickville that everyone uses in the morning to bypass King St. I annoyed quite a few people, but they could all see that I wasn't to be messed with at this point in the birth of my child, so I didn't get any crap from people. I then parked Louise's car, drove mine to our house, and switched the dickie wheel for the real one, all with the engine running so it would charge the battery. Don't do this at home folks.

Meanwhile, back to lunchtime and Louise's phone call, we agreed that we'd both head home and then run through the plan for the day. We both got home around 2pm, which left us a few hours of shopping time to get the following necessities that we so far didn't have: nappies, towels, singlets, a new matress for the bassinet, a matress protector, wraps, and some clothes. Any clothes.

The other big thing we hadn't done, is fit the car capsule, or in our case, the car seat. It's the law, so if we didn't get it fitted in time, the she wouldn't be coming home. We'd booked in a fitting for Friday, because that was the soonest the people we preferred could do it, and we figured there's no way she'd be out by then. And of course we just may have found some time to go through the container of gear to find the seat by then as well. Instead, I had to drag it out this afternoon, and call around for someone to install it. We found someone. It took them 5 minutes. Our biggest concern, sorted on the spot in 5 minutes. Nice one. I enjoy life when things turn out better than expected.

We also have to get her from the hospital nursery to the car, so instead of just wheeling her out in the hospital cot, we figured that her own pram would be the way to go. So tonight was spent putting the pram together (from the container load) and assembling the bassinet so she can sleep (also from the container load). The pram was one of those ever extensible types, where you can keep adding extras until it resembles a space ship or an out of control Katamari. It actually came already extended, with an additional toddler seat attached to it, for a nice two level baby effect. Unfortunately I didn't realise this at first, and couldn't work out how this vertical tandem contraption unfolded correctly to form a simple pram. I eventually worked it out by downloading the manuals of several prams in the company's line and working from those. For some reason our parm hasn't got a manual available on their site. No matter, I eventually worked it all out.

Now it's 3am, and I need to get sleep before Louise gets up to express, and we go to pick up Molly at 11am. I still haven't talked about industrial chemist man and his foolproof breast feed volume measuring system, but that will have to wait until another day.

What a crazy year, part 36

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 14:21:44 GMT

People have been asking why I haven't been videoblogging this, and I agree that it would make a fantastic disaster movie. Well, we are videoing lots of things, and in vlogging style, but the two main reasons they're not here on the site are: a) I just don't have the time to log, edit, render and upload, which is annoying because a few years ago I was hoping this problem would have been solved by now, and b) because I'm protecting the privacy of Molly. Regular readers will know my predictions on privacy, but that doesn't mean I wish to accelerate it's ultimate downfall. Video and photos of Molly this young aren't for public viewing, but friends and family can see them if they ask for the password. So stick that in your videoblogging manifesto.

What a crazy year, part 35

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 14:15:15 GMT

The last few days have been pretty routine. The hospital want parents to do most of the work, which while exhausting, is best for everyone so the parents are well rehearsed by the time baby is out of hospital. So our days now revolve around 4th hourly cares and feeds, 24x7.

On days I'm not working at a client, Louise is up at 6am to express, and I'm up at 9am to check in on urgent work emails. We're at the hospital by 11am and we do cares (temperature and nappy change) and a breastfeed, followed by Louise doing an express and me giving Molly a bottle top up. Molly and I then hum, sing songs, and burp a lot, while waiting for Louise to return. Molly's won most of the burpathons, but I must admit I've cracked a few corkers over the course of the week.

Then we head home to do mandatory home chores, I have a few hours sleep and Louise does an express and catches up on emails and other stuff. I'm awake again by 6pm, just after Louise has done yet another express, and we're at the hospital by 7pm to do exactly the same thing we did at 11am. We're out by 9pm and head home to have dinner, and lunch as well if we haven't had it. I catch up on any urgent work stuff, and spend a few hours on stuff that's been waiting since before this whole thing happened a month ago, such as bills, invoices or projects, and this blog on the odd occasion I finished things early, and Louise catches some sleep on the lounge. Around 1am or 2am I'm off to bed, and Louise wakes up to express, and then comes to bed as well. That's a normal day for us, and there's no relaxing time, it's all work.

On the days when I have paid work during the day at a client, I simply miss out on everything up until 6pm, and then have to shoe horn everything into the few hours I have left before I go to bed. Also, every second day is Molly's bath day, so that gets factored in as well. They never said it would be this hard in parenting class, it was just all about the pros and cons of epidurals vs. gas, and how to breath. They didn't say what to do if you don't actually have time to stop and breath.

For the last week I've been humming to Molly at feed time, while Louise is off expressing. Moby Dick by Led Zeppelin is a favourite, but tonight we also did Deep Purple's Smoke on the Water, and Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven.

When Louise turns up, she usually pulls out the old boring standards, like Miss Polly and Her Dolly, or The Teddy Bear's picnic. I tried the The Teddy Bear's picnic tonight and Molly started to cry, I don't blame her. When I switched back to Stairway ("if there's a bussle in your hedgerow, don't be alarmed now"), she started smiling and having fun again. She really enjoys lead breaks, whether it be guitar or drums, but that just may be my delivery.

But Louise is insistent, so we haven't heard the last of those childish Teddy Bears. Louise has also promised to learn the actual words at some point, so that's certainly worth looking forward to.

The photos are continuing to be updated every few days. The most recent ones are with Molly in the pram on her very first trip outside of the nursery.

Today the container load turned up. Hooray! We've yet to go through it, but it's calmed us down a little. Also today, Louise heard the lactation consultant say "she should be allowed home soon" or words to that effect, which just scared the shit out of us again.

Did I mention Led Zeppelin at all? "Your head is humming and it won't go, in case you don't know, the piper's calling you to join him..." Classic.

What a crazy year, part 34

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 12:32:02 GMT

Today went to plan. Give or take. We had our very first family perambulation, form the nursery to the local cafe in the hospital, effectionately known by some of the staff as Hepatitus Harry's. Molly slept through the entire thing, and didn't actually see anything outside the nursery. The nursery and the operating theatre are all behind a pass coded security door, so it was a big deal for Louise and I to take her beyond that for the first time in the almost three weeks she's been out. It's a pity she didn't feel the same way. :-)

Tonight we had a really good breast feed, the best yet by far, followed by a bottle top up. The nurses are now saying she needs to have done 48 hours of breast or bottle feeds before she can go home. At the moment she's only doing two out of the six she has each day, so we have a while to go yet. We're now betting on next weekend, so around the 26th/27th July, before she can come home.

The DIY instant baby car container kit is now locked in for Tuesday at 11am, which is thankfully well before Molly will be getting out. Tuesday is also Louise's next check up, when hopefully they'll reduce her medication again.

So this week will most likely be a slow week, with nothing much happening.

What a crazy year, part 33

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 00:15:02 GMT

We'd planned the weekend. Even though it is only Sunday morning, dear reader you should have already guessed the rest of the story.

Saturday (yesterday) morning we did a little breast feed, and Louise's brother, sister in law, nephew and niece all came to see Molly. Special Care has a bunch of rules that we need to follow, such as: not allowing more than three people at a time to visit, including parents; not looking at any other babies in the ward; no long sleeves; scrubbing hands and arms up to the elbow; and no children allowed unless they're actually siblings of the baby. So unfortunately Louise's niece couldn't see Molly, but that's OK, she'll have a special treat once Molly is home, to help make amends.

So with Louise bottle feeding Molly, I brought them all in one at a time. Most people are used to dropping a baby, having it in the mother's hospital room for a few days and then heading home, so the RPA nursery can be a bit of a shock to parent who've done it the easy way. It's effectively an emergency ward for babies, which makes sense considering Molly is now roughly 36 and a half weeks old, and in theory still having about 3 weeks before she's supposed to be born. Even though she's now coming up to her 3rd week birthday.

We had a sleep in the afternoon and came back to do a quick breast feed in the evening. She's still not doing full feeds, she needs a 40ml bottle top up after the breast feed, and she's still having only two of those a day, with the other five feeds still going in via the IG (feeding tube).

So around 7pm we did a breast feed and a bottle top up, and Louise went off to express some milk while I held Molly. We sang a few songs ("Moby Dick" by Led Zeppelin was a favourite, so maybe she'll be a drummer), and played hi-5 a lot, until Louise came back 30 minutes later. As I stood up, I noticed an extra yellow patch on my Scared Scriptless tshirt, which for a second looked just part of the tshirt, until I noticed it was... poo.. lots of it. Then we noticed the poo all up her legs and arms, now all over the cot, and even inside her identification bands.

Molly is notorious for peeing during nappy changes, and a few days ago I got to eight nappy changes in a row where this was the case. But this was the first time she'd pooed so much that it all came out the sides.

In the ward there's four disposal bags. One each for baby clothes, towels and linen, soiled (to be destroyed) waste (pooey things), and normal waste. I was cleaning my tshirt off, because I had nothing else to wear, not knowing whether I should be cleaning it over their sink or not, and I ended up with completely soaked clothes, but still a slight poo stain. Meanwhile, we'd planned to have a lovely Sunday having a bath day, so we decided with the nurses to move that forward, and do an emergency poo bath.

After some quizzing from the nurses, we realised that Molly had probably just experienced her first cajun spicy chicken, which Louise had eaten the night before. Start them early I reckon. Louise has been trying all sorts of things she hasn't been allowed to eat for the last nine months, so who knows what delights Molly will experience over the next few weeks. Louise had just had curry chicken for lunch, so the next few days should be interesting.

Meanwhile at the bath, she was completely covered in poo, from arm to toe, which was a wonderful experience. But as the nurses keep saying, a few weeks in Special Care can be a blessing in disguise, because while most parents are left to fend or themselves from the get go, Louise and I will have several weeks of learning the ropes with the experts. We're already completely comfortable with all her regular maintenance and cares, and know a whole bunch of tricks and techniques, and we haven't even gotten her home yet.

So we got her all cleaned up and tucked in and headed home to sleep. I of course still had my own cleaning to do once I'd gotten home, after producing our very first piece of soiled clothing.

They said we can now take her outside for an hour in a hospital pram, to either the hospital cafe, or the McCafe up the road, so that's a our focus for today, a family pram expedition, most likely just to the hospital cafe for lunch. Whether Mum decides to have another curry is another story altogether.