Steve Mactaggart's Blog

Today we move one step closer to finishing off our A/V system with the purchase of a new  entertainment unit.  Its a low line unit with enough space to fit in the center speaker, dvd player, HD set top box and A/V receiver.

There are 4 speakers still missing from the final solution, but this was one of the hardest pieces to find.  I wanted somthing low and flat to highlight the widescreen tv while still having enough storage space for all the equipment. I’m looking at getting free standing floor speaker boxes for the fronts leaving all of the units space open for other stuff. Then run some cables around the other end of the room to some wall mounted rear speakers.

With the new speakers in place the entire system will be complete, but it’s still a few weeks away until we have the spare cash to afford to grab them.  I was going to head to JB today to price the 4 speakers, cables and mounts but ran out of time waiting for this to get delivered then getting all the stuff in it.

We’re very happy with it, and also the fact that the colour matches nearly exactly the other box type thing that was already in the loungroom.

Thanks to Sharkey for the help cutting out the extra holes needed to run all the cabling.  If I get a chance I’ll pull the unit out and show off all the cabling and such thats hanging around behind it.

Posted by at 6:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was not able to convince sharkey to actually go to the game today, so given that he has Optus cable he conceeded to watch the Collingwood V Hawthorn game at his place.  The game started out well with us kicking away in the first quarter holding a sizeable lead and looking to blast the game open.

But in the second and third quarters Hawthorn hit back and were only 2 points behind heading into the final quarter.  As we did against West Coast last week we came home with a solid performance kicking 5 goals to 2 in the last quarter to run out 28 point winners.

And boy was Sharkey pissed… I think the Hawks kicked 6 or 7 unanswered goals at one stage looking like stealing the game away, but it was the determination of the pies in the last quarter, along with the hawks running out of legs that let us take the game back and run out winners.

It was good to see Blake and Didak play a great game dominating the forward line kicking 5 and 4 goals respectivly.

Posted by at 6:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Call me silly, but its taken me months to find out what these Working Sets things are in Eclipse..  I’ve introduced some guys at work to Eclipse and in discussing with them I noted that the only thing that I didn’t like was that I had to have all of my projects open in one view.

Given that I have about 25–30 sets of project code, this was annoying..  My first solution was to use Workspaces to divide up the projects. But this caused all settings and configuration to be stored with a specific set of projects.  Things like User Libraries, editor preferences and even things to plugin configurations needed to be applied to all of my workspaces to keep my development consistent.

It was during this chat to a bloke at work that I thought, hang on.. I know there are these things call Working Sets, and have pretty much dismissed their function, but they are probably what i’m looking for…  And guess what!!  They are.

Now I can import all of my projects to one workspace and divide them up using working sets..  It just shows that sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees.

So back to eclipse I go, waiting for the 3.1 final to be released and the WTP 1.0..  That said the milestone builds of both are excellent, and I would highly recommend to everyone (especially those doing jsp/html/xml work) to upgrade to the latest milestones of both Eclipse and WTP to get all the new goodies.

Posted by at 5:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

 Red Dragon Torch Kit

You’d never belive it, but this guy is actually gardening…  This is his way to kill weeds…  and I thought I was slack!

Posted by at 4:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Its only the second time this year that I’ve been able to scream the theme song at the end of a Collingwood game, but this was one to savor in its full.  We set out to tackle the West Coast Eagles who were undefeated after 8 rounds….  But now they are defeated, and beaten by the team on the bottom of the ladder.

What a great day, beautiful weather in Melbourne for football.  The new stand at the MCG is in the last stages of completion and is looking excellent.

Went to the game today with Puss and we thought that it was going to be a long one when the eagles kicked the first 3 straight.  But we fought back well kicking the next couple finishing out the quarter only 2 goals down, 3.1 to 5.1..

The next quarter we came out blazing, anchored by the back line of Prestie, Wakes and Jimmy-James we launched many attacks with solid running through the center with pinpoint delivery into the forward line..  Dominating play we kicked 7 goals to the eagles 2 to lead 9.3 to 7.2 at half time.

After the long break we came out with gusto, but the eagles had turned it up a notch and reversed the form of the second quarter kicking 6 to our 2 goals.

So at three quarter time it was 11.7 (coll) to 13.3 (wce).  But the final term showed that we did want to win and were willing to run and push to make it happen.. We dominated play again as we did in the second quarter kicking 7 goals 3 to the eagles 2 goals 2.

Final score Pies 18.10 118 to Eagles 15.5 95…

Was great to see the dependency of the solid back line didn’t back down again, and this week our midfield decided to play the game and actually run the ball through the midfield, find space, back themselves and deliver with accuracy.

If there was one stat that showed how we won it was the tackle count. At the end of the game it was 52 tackles to the pies and only 29 to the eagles.. That is a total reflection of how much we wanted the ball, and were willing to put in to get it.

Go the Pies….

Posted by at 7:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Albert has been playing up a fair bit, so much so that he keeps freezing for no reason and he forced me to move all the important information off him over the last week or so.

Sometimes while booting the primary HDD would not detect, or it would then make clunking noises and freeze during the first 10 minuites of use.

So the plan was to boot up, copy some stuff let it freeze then repeat the process the next day. The HDD was so temperamental that it seemed to only successully boot up once a day… go figure?

So eventually had most of what I considered the important stuff off and decided to check out the HDD and see if there was any visible issues.  But when I took it out you could hear the platters squeeking, and so I shook the drive and the squeeking got worse..  Dead drive…

Or so I thought……

Being interested in seeing if the disk would still work after that squeeky noise, I returned the HDD to Albert and booted it up..  And you’ll never guess what, no clicking, detected straight up and booted..  So I waited for it to freeze, 5 mins… 10 mins… 15 mins.. still good…

So to test the drive I decided to copy off all of the other semi-important data, 1 hr later it was all off and Albert was still running fine.. Return of the Harddrive.

At this point I have a now fully functional computer, but with no real purpose or content.. So whats a guy to do with a spare machine but to build a new Linux Box and configure it as a MythTV box..  And so the hunt for my TV Tuner card began.. and is still continuing as I still havn’t found it.

But back to Myth… decided to install it even tho I don’t have my card, just wanted to see the process and configuration.  Installing was a breeze, followed the instructions on the MythTV site and its all running fine.

I now have a rebuilt machine with HDD that has been playing at being dead for the last few weeks, which is now a MythTV computer without a Tuner card.. Somehow that all makes sense.

Posted by at 12:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Headed out last night to restart our Tuesday night Squash effort..  and an effort it was..  Sharkey and I play Squash on tuesday nights during the darker months, and last night was the opening to the season.

Theres no real competition except between us, and as he has a lot more co-ordination and skill then me there is usually no competition at all..

That said being rusty is a good equaliser as it was pretty close with him winning 3–2 in games.  But am I sore today… yes I am..  Before warming up properly I was wacking the ball hard and felt light I twisted a bit weird. After cooling down I noticed that my upper back was a bit stiff and sore.

Didn’t sleep well on it last night, and its just as bad today.  Hopefully it will fix itself (doubt that) or it will be a trip off to get it put back in place..  It feels like I moved somthing in my back that needs to be put back in place.

We’ll see.

Posted by at 1:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Headed out for a quick ride with Sharkey and Katherine today. They came over here and we set off about 10:20 heading towards the Eastern Freeway track.

We made pretty good time, having some great weather..  Although it was a bit cold and still very foggy till around 11, there was little to no wind to speak of and so made good time heading city bound on the path.

We arrived at the Bulleen hill and decided to take a different track, once down the hill we found the yarra trail branch that heads back up to Templestowe and so decided that we’d head along that for a while.  Sharkey and I have ridden this part before as we have done the circut around through heidleburg and back down this trail.

Didn’t get far up the track till we ran out of time and had to head home..  I wanted to be back by 12:30 so as to have time to get ready to head off to the football.

The timing was perfect, got back about 12:20 after 31.57Km.  Was great to have Katherine back for a ride and hope to do another next week.

Posted by at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Garth has just finished building a MythTV box for a pilot program at work, and I have gotta say that I want one…

Given that we are in Australia, and things like TIVO are not available here we need to find our own alternatives..  I’ve been toying with the idea of making my own DVR for a while now, but hardware costs were high and finding good software was hard. 

Insert MythTV.

Not only is it a pretty funky application to use as a tuner for your tv, but it has all the cool features that you want from a DVR.  Plus all the things you want from a computer.  The number of Myth plugins seems never ending, music library, RSS reader, weather, tv guide, email client, movie manager, and the list goes on.

If I do go ahead with this, I think i’ll be looking at 2 digital TV tuners along with 2–3 200Gb disks so that I can watch and record all the shows that I currently miss.

Any suggestions on hardware?

Posted by at 9:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Played indoor soccer with the boys again last night, my first game back this season.  Had pretty much our strongest team in and this week we all seemed to click right. 

Playing what I guess is a fairly new team in G-Unit, it seemed in the first half that it was going to be a close game, with us only scoring our second goal just before the half, taking our half time score to 2–1.

But that was because Kev was in goals, he left Phil to be goalie for the second half and in doing unleashed a goal scoring machine.  Kev kicked 4 second half goals, and along with Garth, Brett and Kenny we kicked a total of 7 second half goals.

Phils great work as keeper kept out a few chances, but it was probably Garths defence that made it a lot easier for him.

In the end we ran out victorious 9–1.  Brett has the results and fixutre over at the Rebels website, run over and check out the result and all of the previous games

Posted by at 9:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Joel has updated his site with a post about Hungarian Notation, not only is it an interesting read as usual, but his example talks about Cross Site Scripting.

Being a webdeveloper for a few years now, its interesting to see XSS mentioned in such a simple fashion.  We have had solutions for this since day one, but I don’t think that I have ever actually know the true definition of Cross Site Scripting.

On the Hungarian Notation side of the article, I can see what he means to use prefixing to highlight subtypes of data, but i’m sure that that sort of notation needs to be controlled so as to not fly way off into complex land.

As usual the article is a great read, well written and puts forward smart and sensible points.  Thanks Joel.

Posted by at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Time for a few more random simpsons trivia questions.

1. When Mr Burns is running for office and hes over at the Simpsons for dinner, what happens to destroy his campaign?
2. It is found out that Homer is actually very intelligent, but somthing happend when he was young to cause his stupidity, what was it?
3. Mr Burns has a series of clothing but is missing 1 piece, what is it? and what is it to be made from?
4. When the Power Plant softball team is replaced with Big League stars, who replaces Homer in the outfield?
5. In the episode that Homer joins a secret society, who is the guest star that plays the charactor of Number 1.

Just a few short ones, will work on more for the next set. Read on for the answers

1. He spat out the 3 eyed fish.
2. He has a crayon lodged up his nose.
3. A Vest, made from dogs fur.
4. Daryl Strawberrie
5. Patrick Stewart

Posted by at 10:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’m about to release a new beta version of my DCAF and WAF java librarys, but in doing so I want to have a system on my website that allows me to create a release, add notes and a series of files to download.

I’ve been hunting around, but its hard to find a term to google for this type of product.  Words like release, software, version are all very popular terms on the internet and so how to find the actual product amongst all of the other pages.

So any suggestions as to a software package that can do this?

I’d love this product to have the following features:

• Ability to create a new release that contains files and release notes
• Be able to manage different product streams
• Be able to track the number of times the files are downloaded
• Be able to have private products that require a valid login to download

I think thats about it…  I’ll keep hunting for a while and see what I can find, it probably doesn’t matter what technology the application is developed in, just that it works.

Posted by at 9:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here is some good news for all us content consumers, it seems that the battle about the Broadcast Flag has hit a hicup.

 Cory reported on BoingBoing and Ernest Miller described

(found via Blogarithms » Broadcast Flag 0; Good Guys 1)

the DC Circuit of the US Court of Appeals struck down the loathsome Broadcast Flag, ruling that the FCC does not have the jurisdiction to regulate what people do with TV shows after they’ve received them

Posted by at 2:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Saturday we spent the day loading and unloading gear in the “Move the Purcells”-a-thon…  We started semi-early and they were pretty well organised…  Took about 3 hrs to load the truck and then an hour or so to head up Kilmore way.

They arn’t actually moving into the house for 3 weeks so that they have time to do some renovations, already pulled up all of the carpet and planning the sanding/staining of the boards.  So the plan was to dump the stuff in storage in Wallan for a few weeks until the main reno work is done.

Congrats to them, and hope all of their plans don’t run too expensive and long.

Posted by at 11:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An onward moves the Googlebot… Now they are using the power of Google to speed up internet access. If you do plan to instal the Accelerator, then make sure to check out the FAQ for more details of how it runs.

From the FAQ Google states:

How does using Google Web Accelerator affect my privacy?

Google Web Accelerator receives much of the same kind of information you currently send to your ISP when you surf the Web:

• Google will receive your requests for unencrypted pages (those with "HTTP:", not "HTTPS:", at the beginning of the URL), along with information such as the date and time of the request, your IP address, and computer and connection information
• If you enter personally identifiable information (such as an email address) onto a form on an unencrypted web page, some sites may send this information through Google. Whenever your computer sends cookies with browsing or prefetching page requests for unencrypted sites, we temporarily cache these cookies in order to improve performance
• In order to speed up the display of pages generally, Google Web Accelerator may store copies of web pages, including prefetched pages that you did not visit, in the Google Web Accelerator cache on your machine. This is separate from your browser's cache, which only identifies pages that you actually visited. You can empty your Google Web Accelerator cache at any time by following these instructions.

Its interesting in that it seesm that google is offering to be a really large proxy server..  Does the future hold that Google will be the central point for all information??  Imagine if Microsoft said they would offer this, we’d all be asking How they are modifying the pages I request? and What are they doing with the parameters I use to request specific sites?

I think that my link is fast enough as it is, and I don’t really feel safe/secure/happy with the thought that all my communication that used to be point-to-point would now be stopping off on the Google servers for a tuneup.

This is one of the Google items that I won’t be installing in the near future..

Google Web Accelerator Download

Google Web Accelerator works with your browser to help web pages show up in a snap.

Posted by at 2:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This has got to be one of the best uses of a blog that I have ever seen, this guy is super serious about being Darth Vader…  This entire blog is a running diary of Vader’s life and thoughts about the events behind the scenes.  It follows the Star Wars stories that we all know but adds some depth that makes Vader seem like a real person again.

The Darth Side: Memoirs of a Monster: It's Christmas On Hoth

Admiral Ozzol took the fleet out of hyerspace too close to Hoth, and the Rebel Alliance were -- you guessed it -- alerted to our approach. The cornerstone of Ozzel's arrogance is his insistence that rebel technology is so vastly inferior to Imperial technology that we need broker no caution.

Posted by at 9:44 PM | Permalink

This morning I checked out of my room at The Grace in the CBD of Sydney, and headed to North Sydney to work for the day.  During today I needed to find another place to stay for the next 3 nights until I get to fly home on Friday night.

So I asked around the office, and no-one had any real good ideas, so the suggestion was again back to wotif.com for help in finding somewhere. The plan was to stay somewhere in North Sydney to be closer to work but it seemed that there were not many places that had rooms for the time I'll be here.  The only one that seemed to fit the bill was the Glenferrie Lodge.

So here I am, sitting in a room 3x4, a bed, tv and fridge…. Thats it.

Can you guess which room is which?

That said, I have nothing against the room, its just a bit of a culture shock coming from a 11th floor “Heritage” room in the CBD, to a 1st floor box in the backstreets under the bridge.. 

But the 1 super saving grace is that we have a WIRELESS BROADBAND network here, where at the Grace it was a pay-for service and I had to plug a network cable in..  How 2003 is that?

Posted by at 9:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’ve been slack in giving the answers to the quiz from the other week (Java Quiz: Acronym Soup) so here they are:

1. JMS (Java Messaging Service)
2. JDBC (Java Database Connectivity)
3. JCP (Java Community Process)
4. JSP (Java Server Page)
5. JTA (Java Transaction API)
6. UDDI (Universal Data Discovery Intergace)
7. JSWDK (Java Server Web Development Kit)
8. BMP (Bean Managed Persistance)
9. JAXP (Java API for XML Parsing)
10. JAF (Java Activation Framework)

What a preliferation of Java’s….

Posted by at 8:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It seems that WS had a bit of outage over this weekend, not sure if it was a power issue at home or what but the website has been uncontactable.

That said the website has been the furtherest from our minds as we have had a super great weekend starting with meeting Katy and Brett for drinks Friday night.

Rach and I headed down to the King St Wharf for dinner about 6:30, and after a great dinner headed back up the wharf to the aquarium to wait for Katy and Brett to arrive. We got to the dock where they were to come in on a Taxi boat about 5 mins before the docked. They didn’t see us sitting there, but Brett knew we were to meet them and was looking around for us.  Ridd was in her own world on the phone and didn’t see us approach until we were only 3 meters from her, then she screamed “Steve and Rach are here”, and she was crying…  I said hi to Brettly and Katy ran over to give Rach a hug, then she said…  “We just got engaged…”. 

It seems that this was the end to an elaborate plan that Brett had devised to propose.  Ofcourse she said yes and when we met them she was on the phone to her mum telling her of the good news.

So that started of a super weekend, we ended up heading out for drinks with them till about 1:00, then back to our room for another bottle of red then to bed.. ~3:00ish we eventually got to sleep.

The next day (Saturday) we were a bit seedy, and didn’t crawl out of bed until about 11:00 and so missed breakfast at the room. We wandered off down the road in search of somthing to eat. Found a little cafe where we got a toasted sandie and a coffee.  That seemed to get us going so we decided to head back to the room, pack a bag and head off to Circula Quey for a bit of an explore..

We wandered down King St and found the little market down in The Rocks, had a look around there then headed down to the water..  Wandered around down there a bit, then headed towards the bridge…

From there we decided to head back around to the Opera House to have a look when we ran into Katy and Brett again.. They had just had lunch with Dougie and his girlfreind.  They were about to turn around and catch a ferry around to Darling Harbour and head to the aquarium so we joined them on the trip.

So we made it around to Darling Harbour and on into the Aquarium.

So then after having a late night, and being on our feet all day it was a tired 4 that tried to find somewhere to get somthing to eat and a seat.  We wandered down King St Wharf and found that most places didnt start dinner service until about 5:30 or 6:00 and it was only 5:00..  Ridd was eager to get somthing to eat, so we found a place that served atg 5:30, sat down for a drink then dinner. KnB had a 30th to head off to so after dinner we walked back towards our rooms and said goodbye to them on the way.

We headed back to the room where I was exhausted and fell into bed being asleep by 11. 

Today we took it much easier getting up in time for breakfast, then heading out for a walk.. Headed up Martin Place and saw the Channel 7 studio where they do Sunrise.. Then just wandered around, and ended up at Hyde Park, given today was Mayday there was a march by the unions around the city and we just happened to be at hyde park just as it started.

Then through Hyde park to the Anzac memorial, down the hill for a coffee and then onto the monorail for a quick trip around sydney.  Its only about a 12min round trip for those playing at home. Silly me didn’t charge the batterys in the camera last night and so there are no photos from today..  Once off the monorail we wandered window shopping till we headed back to the Grace and had some late lunch. Back to the room for a while and to finish packing rach’s bag, then it was time to see her off in a Taxi to catch the plane back to Melbourne.

So thats the wrap of our big Sydney weekend, and HUGE congrats to Brett and Katy.. We were very honoured and lucky to get to spend the night with you guys and I hope that you had as much fun as we do…  YAY another wedding to look forward to..

Posted by at 5:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)